by Diane Duane
Indeed there was nothing overt that would have led any ehhif to suspect that a game as old as felinity was going on up and down the length of the block of Seventy-first between First and Second; reputations were on the line, and from many windows eyes watched, hindered from game-play, perhaps, but not from intelligent and passionate interest.
Rhiow sidled through it all with her tail up, as did the rest of the team. So close to home, it wouldn’t have done to be visible on the street: if one of the neighbors should mention her presence there to Iaehh or Hhuha, there would be endless trouble. As it was, she needed to be sidled anyway, to avoid the many ehhif who were on the street this time of the evening.
“Hey, ffeih-wizard!” came a comment from one of the streetside terraces above. “Had a good roll on your back lately?”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward and strolled on by, not even bothering to look up, though Arhu did. Urraah and Saash wore expressions suggesting calm tolerance of idiocy. “… If she’s so terrific and powerful and all,” said the predictable second voice, “why can’t she make the kittening part grow back, and do something really useful with herself?”
Rhiow kept walking, showing no reaction to the others and schooling herself to be slightly amused. There were People in her neighborhood, as in every neighborhood where a feline wizard worked, who knew about her and found her either funny or repugnant; and who found the concept of wizardry laughable or even hateful. These People in particular—the two extremely spoiled and opinionated pedigreed Himalayans six stories up, in one of the penthouse apartments of the new building near the corner—were sure that Rhiow was living evidence of some kind of convoluted plot against their well-being: a parasite, possibly a traitor, and certainly not proper breeding material. Rhiow, for her own part, was sure that they were pitifully bored and ignorant, had nothing to do with their days but culture their spite, and had almost certainly never done a useful thing since their eyes came open. “… can’t really be much of a Person,” one of them said spitefully, meaning to be heard, “if you haven’t even made kittens once…”
“Not much point in making them if you’re not going to be able to tell what they are, my dear.”
“Ooh, meow,” Rhiow muttered, and kept walking.
“They need a nice little plague of fleas to take their minds off their ‘troubles,’ ” Urruah said under his breath, coming up alongside her.
“Please. That would be so unethical.”
“But satisfying. Just think of them scratching…”
“… and give them the satisfaction of thinking the universe really is after them? Please.” All the same…
The team paused about a third of the way down the street; Rhiow ducked into the entranceway of an apartment building and sat for a moment, peering down the sidewalk.There was a row of five brownstones across the street, their front steps still largely identical despite the renovations of the past few decades; they faced across to a large modem apartment building and two other brownstones, one on each side of it. On the first floor, far left windowsill of the left-hand brownstone, a small milk-chocolate-colored cat sat hunched up, round-backed, golden eyes half-shut, as if looking at nothing. Across the street, sitting upright, was a large, dirty white tom; he was looking intently at the top of a wall between the two brownstones directly across from him. Shadows fell across that wall, cast by a thick raggy carpet of some kind of climbing vine that scaled up the nearest wall of the adjoining building.
Rhiow stood for a moment and waited to see if any other players would reveal themselves to so cursory an analysis, but after a few seconds she gave it up. “Come on,” she said, and walked with the others over to where the white cat sat; he glanced at them as they came. It was Yafh, of course, dominating the block’s gameplay as usual. It was a good thing he was so genial about it; life with him could have become extremely annoying otherwise.
She went up the stairs toward the other two, pausing briefly beside Yafh as she came up even with him. Protocol dictated that a nonplayer await permission from players before passing or approaching their chosen stances too closely; to obstruct or intervene in a player’s field of view while another player was moving could damage not only that player’s score, but others’ scores as well.
Yafh had been sitting with eyes half-closed, watching the brown cat across the street without seeming to watch her. Now he stood, stretched fore and aft, and turned his back on the proceedings: a gesture readable to all players as indicating the intention to temporarily abandon play without loss of stance.
“Hey there, Rhiow,” he said, and stalked off to one side of his stance. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Business,” she said, and they breathed breaths companionably before she sat down. “Goodness, who gave you the fish?”
“Restaurant round the corner,” Yafh said. “Perfectly lovely fish heads, why they don’t keep them I can’t imagine. Ehhif have no taste. Urruah? How’s the hunting?”
“Not bad, not bad.”
“Saash… don’t often see you down this way. ’Luck to you. And who’s this youngster?”
“Arhu.”
“ ’Luck to you, son. Come to see how the professionals do it?”
“Nowhere better,” Urruah said, before Arhu could open his mouth. “How’s the bout going?”
“Third sequence, twenty-eighth passage,” Yafh said. “The balances have shifted.”
“You mean you’re not winning as usual?”
“ ‘Winning.’ What an ehhif word. We’ll see how the situation looks by next week.”
“You want to understand the Game,” Urruah said to Arhu, “this is the Person you come to.”
“I don’t understand it very well,” Arhu said, in a small voice.
Rhiow glanced at him, wondering briefly where this sudden and becoming modesty had come from. Or maybe he was simply impressed by all of Yafh’s scars. “Well, mat’s no surprise,” Rhiow said. “Years now I’ve been following hauissh, and I’m not sure 7 understand anything but the basics yet. Yafh is a master, though; what he doesn’t know about it isn’t worth knowing.”
“All you need to know, young tom,” Yafh said, “is that hauissh is the Fight—or the best version of it we’ve got left. Everything else is commentary.”
“But …She says life is the Fight,” Arhu said.
“ ‘She’?” Yafh said. “Oh, the One Who you wizards say Whispers to you? Well, probably she’s right. But one thing’s for sure, life is hauissh.”
“There speaks the enthusiast,” Saash said dryly. “Arhu, don’t let him fool you. Yafh eats, drinks, washes and sleeps hauissh. If it didn’t exist, he would have to invent it.”
“Don’t talk naughty,” Yafh said, settling himself down in a way that suggested he had less concern about the elegance of his position than his comfort. “Takes a god to invent something this complex, something with this kind of elegance, this subtlety. You tell me now, young tom: who do you mink’s holding down the most important stance at the moment?”
Arhu looked around him in bemusement. “Her,” he said, flirting his tail sideways to indicate the handsome chocolate-brown cat who crouched, immobile as a statue, on one of the nearby walls between two buildings.
“And you wouldn’t be too far off. Trust Hmahilh’ to hog a good spot at the earliest opportunity. But why?”
Arhu looked up and down the street. “Because she can see everybody else,” he said, “and not everybody else can see her.
“Right That’s part of it, but not all. So try this. We have six players out there: seven, counting me, as of a moment ago. I don’t officially count right now, but for this analysis, you can keep my stance in. Look at the pattern, see what you see about it. Not the People: the relationships. Take your time, don’t look too hard.”
Yafh sat washing his face, ineffectively as usual: the grime never did seem to come off, but at least he was always seen to be making the effort. Arhu looked out at the street for a few moments, and then said, “There’s�
�� Is there an empty place they’re all pointed at, in the street? Between the cab parked there and the big car?”
“A natural talent,” Yafh said, looking around at Rhiow and Urruah with approval. “Boy’s got the eye. That’s the spot,” he said to Arhu. “That’s where the Tree is: with the Serpent wound around it, gnawing at the root…”
“There’s no Tree there! That’s the middle of the street!”
“It’s there in spirit,” Yafh said. “All hauissh is anchored at the Tree. It’s all the original Fight, really; but since we can’t chuck lightningbolts at the Old Snake the way Aaurh and Urrau did, we use movement and stealth as a weapon, and seeing as the bolt we strike with, and position as influence. Anyone who sees anyone else could strike them with a lightningbolt if they had one. And the Tree is always the center.”
Arhu sat down, looking puzzled for a moment. “Maybe I do see…”
Yafh scrubbed behind one ear. “Hmahilh’ there is in one of the classic positions just now, the fouarhweh. Thousands of hours of commentary have been made about it, just in the last century; it would take you a fair amount of study to understand even a few of the major implications for play as it might progress over the next several hours or days. But she’s holding down a variant of the position the Great Tom would have held—”
“—before he dies,” Arhu said, looking at the empty spot, the life slowly starting to drain out of his voice. “For the Old Serpent rises against him and strikes him with its venom, and the Great Cat falls with a great cry, and striveth to rise but cannot; and breath and warmth swiftly go from him so that his Enemy rises over his poisoned body and leaps upon Aaurh the Mighty. Great and terrible is their struggle, so that seas leap from their beds and the earth is riven, and the tom sky rains fire—”
Yafh looked at Rhiow with mild surprise. Urruah was watching Arhu uneasily, but Arhu paid no attention at all, his whole regard being bent on the spot in the street, through which an ehhif with a houff on the leash was walking. The houff, at the sight of them sitting on the steps, started to bark, but for Arhu, it might not have been there at all. “—Yet even so Aaurh at last is lapped in the Serpent’s coils, and crushed in them, and she falls, and her power fails out of the world. Then Iau sees that the light has gone from the Moon, and the Sun is blackened with fair Aaurh’s dying; and She rises in Her majesty and says, What has become of My children ? Where is Aaurh the warrior, and sa’Rrahh the Tearer, wayward but dear to Me? And what has become of My Consort and the light of his eye, without which My own is dark? —Then Iau draws Her power about Her, and goes forth in grief and rage; and all things hear Her cry: Old Serpent, turn You and face Us, for the fight is not done—!”
“He’s been well educated, I’ll give you that,” Yafh said to Rhiow, blinking a little.
“All the best teachers,” Urruah said, dry, but still unsettled.
“That’s right, young tom,” Yafh said to Arhu, as Arhu abruptly sat up a little straighter, blinking himself. “That’s the whole pattern of the gameplay of hauissh, right there in the old words. There are endless variations on the theme, as you might well think. But the Queen raises up Her dead, though not forever, as we know; and then the Fight starts up again … and so it goes.”
“Yafh,” came a deafening and strangely pitched shout from across the street, “let’s get on with this! Are you in stance, or out?”
Everyone winced at the noise. Rhiow smiled, a little crookedly. The source was Hmahilh’. Delicate, graceful little creature though she was, with her demure semi-ehhif smile, she was also profoundly deaf: when she spoke, the noise was so alarming that Rhiow was often amazed that bricks didn’t shatter. Rhiow had tried several times, as any wizard might, to treat the deafness, but there was something about the nerve damage that resisted treatment. Rhiow half-suspected that the trouble was not the nerves, but the less educable “limbic” areas of Hmahilh’s brain, which had gotten so used to being deaf that they couldn’t understand there were other options, and so ignored or stubbornly undid any repair to the cranial nerves involved. As a result, a conversation with Hmahilh’, while enjoyable enough for her cultured and humorous qualities, otherwise tended to resemble an interview with a fire siren.
“Here, young tom,” Yafh said, “you watch this now. She’s always worth watching. All right, all right,” he yowled back at Hmahilh’, “I’m in, already.”
“What??”
With a sigh, he turned to face her, a signal she would recognize. Arhu sat watching this, seemingly fascinated, and Rhiow took the opportunity to gesture the others over to a neighboring doorstep where they could watch without being anywhere near another player’s stance.
As they went, Rhiow said to Saash, “Are you feeling all right? It’s been a busy day … but you look tireder than usual.”
“Yes, well. There were some more mice in the garage this morning. I was trying to catch them…”
“And?”
Saash flicked her ears backward and forward, a hopeless gesture. “Nothing. As usual. I’m so glad I live in the city, and have access to an ehhif with a can opener. If I were a country Person, I’d be dead of starvation by now.”
Rhiow gave Saash a sympathetic look. She had never been a hunter: it was as if there were something missing in her makeup, perhaps the essential sense of timing that told you when to jump. Either way, the situation had always struck Rhiow as a little unfortunate, or strange, in someone whose technical expertise and timing in other matters were so perfect.
“So what did you do about it, finally?”
“This morning? Nothing. I mean, I could have blown the mice up, but besides being overkill, what good would that have been? The garage ehhif would just have thought a car ran them over or something. When Arhu’s done here, I’ll ask him to see what he can do. Have to keep the ehhif impressed with our usefulness, after all: otherwise we might have to find somewhere else to stay…”
“Oh, surely not. Abha’h likes you, he wouldn’t try to get rid of you!”
’True. But he’s not the boss in the garage. I’ll be making sure George sees whatever we catch.”
Rhiow sighed. “You let me know if you need any help,” she said.
They sat on the doorstep two doors down from Yafh’s stance. “Our boy is spending more and more time in weird-vision land,” Urruah said, looking with some concern at Arhu.
“Just as well,” Rhiow said. “It’s his wizardry … He seems to see things … and then try to avoid seeing them. I’m getting concerned about the avoidance.”
“Can you blame him? I’m not sure I’d want to be sitting on a doorstep one moment and looking at the original Battle at the Dawn of Time the next!”
Saash sat straight and scratched for a moment or so, then started washing. “I think the problem might be that he hasn’t really done much wizardry yet. Spells, I mean.”
“Yes,” Rhiow said. “Everything has sort of been done to him, hasn’t it?” Rhiow cocked her ears, then; for the statement, once made, created a sort of silence around itself. When you were a wizard, you learned to pay attention to those silences: they were often diagnostic. Sometimes the Whisperer whispered very quietly indeed. “And you’re right: I haven’t really seen him do a spell. Initiate one, I mean. Well, he walked through a door or so, and in the air. And the sidling…”
“As regards the physical stuff, he’s pretty good,” Saash said. “It’s the nonphysical I’m more worried about. Nine-tenths of our work is nonphysical…”
“There are a lot of different styles of wizardry,” Urruah said. “I think we should try to cut him a little slack, here. Not everyone jumps straight in and starts doing fifty spells a day.”
“You did,” Saash and Rhiow said, practically in unison.
“Well, we can’t all be me.”
Rhiow and Saash looked at each other and gave silent praise to Ian the Queen of Everything that this was so. “But it’s not like there’s a quota,” Urruah said. “Or some kind of template for Ordeals. Everybody knows y
ou get the occasional ‘sleeper’ Ordeal that takes months or years. Or ‘second’ Ordeals, if you don’t finish your first one.”
“The universe doesn’t usually have that much time to spare for the first kind,” Rhiow said, “as you know; and the second kind is as rare as working balls on a ffeih’d tom, as you also know. His passivity just worries me a little, that’s all.”
“He’s a tom,” Urruah said, with a wink. “He’ll grow out of it.”
This time Rhiow did not bother looking physically at Saash, and didn’t have to: she could inwardly hear the small, stifled groan. “You are in, how shall I put it, unusually male mode tonight,” Rhiow said. “Got another bout of o’hra coming on?”
“Night after next. It’s the big night, the concert. I’m going to need the time off, Rhi.”
“Take it, for Aaurh’s sake,” she said, waving her tail. “Get the hormones out of your system. If that’s possible.”
Urruah smirked briefly, but then folded himself down, and after a few seconds, looked a touch more serious. “Maybe the problem is that he just hasn’t noticed how much fun wizardry is,” Urruah said. “How good it feels.”
“I would suspect not,” Saash said, with a little more tooth in her voice than usual, “since his first experience of it came immediately before being almost bitten to shreds by rats…”
“ ’Ruah,” Rhiow said, “I have to admit that Saash has a point. And pushing Arhu won’t help. Till he comes to understand that satisfaction claws-on, there’s no point in describing it. If he has what it takes to make a good wizard, he’ll know it when he feels it… no matter how he may rationalize it to himself and others as time goes on.”
“… Well, I hope he has that time. Otherwise the crunch-part of his Ordeal may come upon him and he won’t have anything useful prepared. In which case…” Urruah chattered his teeth briefly, the way a cat will when seeing a rat or a bird, anticipating the jaw spasm that will snap its neck.