by Dave Freer
Tom made a very handsome and muscular young cat. He stalked forward, and rubbed his jaw against her legs and said “Mwrowrwow.”
Alamaya had a fair idea what that meant, but she still picked up Tom’s robe and put it on. And because the snow leopard was stalking back towards them, she picked up Tom’s broom. It wasn’t quite what she would have chosen as a weapon, but it could certainly outrun her if she tried to flee. So she took a firm grip on the solid oak shaft and said: “Shoo!” as fiercely as she could.
It didn’t work.
Neither did Tom, stalking forward, fur fluffed to the maximum, hissing like half a dozen steam kettles.
The snow leopard kept coming, slow, measured, deadly… until it got to the fallen wooden milk bucket. Then it stopped, and began to lap the milk. And Tom… hair going down, advanced too. Sniffed — from a safe distance, and then went to join the snow leopard drinking. Alamaya almost felt left out. The snow leopard was both beautiful and terrifying. She felt a curious attraction to something that lethal, but not enough to make her stupid. She wondered about retreat into the pantry. The problem was… just where was it? Presumably not more than ten steps away — but yet the path she stood on wondered on, up the hillside.
Maybe she’d been moving faster than she realised. There were skid-marks on the trail. “We need to go back,” she said to Tom, who had finished lapping milk with his new-found girlfriend. Huh. There wasn’t as much difference between a snow-leopard and a cat as there was between humans and cats, but it did seem ambitious.
Tom stalked past her, tail in the air. The leopard did not follow. Tom walked on up the path so, with several looks back Alamaya did. The path up the ridge-line ended about a hundred yards further along at the base of a sheer cliff, where, on a rock-shelf — recognizably the same rock shelf as at the back of the pantry, sat the milk-jug.
What was behind it was rock. Impenetrable rock, at least so it seemed when she pressed on it. Tom sniffed at it. Touched it with a tentative paw, and then turned and looked at the snow leopard, which had come up silently behind them, and was lying down, watching.
Perhaps there was some form of silent communication between them, but the snow leopard stood up and began walking down the trail. Tom followed and turned his head and gave a brief ‘mworw?’ that plainly meant “Are you coming? Follow me.” So: because there didn’t seem much other alternative, Alamaya did, following the rocky path down towards the valley.
The path was steep and stony, and not kind to her bare feet. As a Princess, and even with God-mama, she hadn’t spent much time barefoot. Tom’s boots were far too big even if his robe was welcome. But… she had a broom. That would do away with the need for walking. She knew the correct spells.
She stopped and so did the cats. “Flying is easier than walking,” she informed Tom, and, she supposed, the snow leopard. She wasn’t planning to let it get on the broom, though.
As it turned out that was one of those things that she didn’t have to worry about. She recited the cantrip holding out the broom to make it hover so she could alight. She drew her hands away in the prescribed manner, and the broom fell with a thump, that startled the curious Tom. He strutted away, tail in the air, pretending he had not got a fright. With a sigh and a few of God-mama’s choicest words, she picked up the broom and walked. The path veered off the ridge and into the steep-cut gully, and scrambled its way down along the tiny mountain stream, across mossy rocks. On another day it would have been beautiful. Now her only thought was that the moss was at least soft underfoot, and the stepping stones kept her toes mostly out of the icy water.
Of course the cats, both big and little, walked ‘with’ her in the way cats always did. They weren’t actually walking with her. That would have been beneath their dignity. No they just happened to be in the same area as her. They even managed to look surprised to see her there. Having been a cat herself, Alamaya understood it a little.
It was still no comfort when both of them disappeared just as she came to the gnome village, cut into the sides of the valley, with the path now becoming a cobbled road, occupied by rather a lot of small, but broad and armoured and armed gnomes. Most of them had spears. Most of those spears were pointed at her. Yes, they were gnome sized spears, but they were still sharp looking.
The language in which she was challenged was not one she recognised, but she had a translation spell…
Which did not work.
In fact it made the yelling worse, a garble of senseless sound. The spears advanced. The gnomes were smaller than she was, but only having a broom to fight them off with did not help. She was outnumbered twenty to one, too. She considered turning a few into frogs to even the numbers out… and then realized that her spells to make the broom hover hadn’t worked, the translation spell had made things worse… magic didn’t work quite the same way here.
And the cats had, as cats will, deserted her.
As one of the gnomes finally got his courage up, something hissed down and shattered just in front of him. The gnomes backed up, bunching their spears — not looking at her, for a change. Alamaya realized it was just a roofing slate, and that had probably been Tom’s tail vanishing behind the chimney pot.
Several gnomes pointed, and even if she did not know the language, Alamaya recognised borderline panic and hysteria. Cats on the rooftops were plainly terrifying here. Spears now pointed at the roof as much as at her.
A bloodcurdling howl from the opposite side of the little row of houses broke the morale of the gnome soldiery entirely. In a scattering of dropped spears, they turned and fled.
The snow leopard stepped out from between the houses, and Tom dropped off the roof, and continued to saunter down the cobbles to the little village green.
Sometimes village greens had statues in them, for the pigeons to express local feelings about. This one had something different: It had a spiked cage, with a dejected looking person in it. The cage was little more than a fifteen foot tall ring of bars that gleamed with an oily sheen — but that seemed enough to trap the prisoner, who sat on carpet and looked at them. The person was human-sized, not gnome-size.
“Who are you?” asked Alamaya, expecting more gibberish.
The reply was however in Ambyrian. “I’m Marcenius… er, Famulus to the Wizard Hargarthius. Can you get me out of here? Please?” There was a certain hopelessness about the prisoner.
And Alamaya could see why: it could be a challenge, as the cage appeared to have no gate. “How did you get in?” she asked. Maybe a ladder would work? Or cutting or bending the bars?
“Magic. And I can’t climb them. They ooze oil from the top and they’re sharp. Oh, I can’t tell you how good it is to hear my own language.”
Looking closer Alamaya could see that they weren’t so much bars as blades.
And then… she was looking at them from the wrong side.
Obviously they had stepped into some kind of magical trap, thought Tom, looking at the bars, now they were inside the cage. It did have a small stream trickling across the cobbles, and a carpet. That was all.
Tom had, on many occasions wished for the simple joys of being a cat again. When they’d come through the wrong side of the pantry, and he’d become a cat again, he found himself wanting, desperately to be human.
For starters Alamaya was now very human. Secondly, he was very much a cat, and worse, a cat that had something no cat accepts easily: responsibility. For a third thing he was beginning to work things out and had no way of telling her. It had started with the cheese, and then the broom, and then the translation spell. And now he, Alamaya and the snow leopard were stuck inside a cage with Master Hargarthius’s former famulus — and, unless Tom was very much mistaken, the magic carpet.
Which the famulus could not make fly, but Tom could have. If he hadn’t been a cat. If he’d known the spells.
Mind you, the blade bars were not designed to keep a cat in. If it hadn’t been for that responsibility thing, Tom could have slipped away. It would have beate
n listening to the Master’s previous famulus whine as the gnomes started popping their heads out of their little houses. Tom would guess that throwing nasty stuff, if not rocks, would be next.
He walked over to the princess. It was necessary to climb up her to get her attention away from that sorry loser of a famulus, who was going on about how they should have been quicker to get him out, and how he hated cats. The snow leopard was looking outward, and by its posture, not pleased to be in the cage.
“Ow! You’re being a pain Tom. I can’t pay attention to you now.”
Tom growled at her.
To his surprise the snow leopard growled too, as she was about to try and put him down. Tom jumped down and walked over to the carpet. The poor thing did not look new after being out here with the trapped famulus. It smelled, but not as much as the famulus. Tom stood there and ‘mwrarled’ loudly, looking at her, tapping the carpet.
“Is that a magic carpet?” asked Alamaya, eyes narrowing.
“Yes. But it doesn’t work here,” said Marcenius, miserably. “Magic doesn’t work here, or it doesn’t work properly. It’s dangerous. I turned myself into a toad once.”
“Toads could escape.”
“Yes, but they caught me and put me into a bucket until I got better,” said Marcenius miserably. “And being a toad was horrible. I ate flies.”
Tom was busy turning the carpet over with his claws as she watched. She shook herself. He was not just a cat, any more than she’d been ‘just a cat’. But it was all too easy to forget that and to judge on external form. He was telling her something. So she helped and was rewarded by an appreciative loud purr.
“What are you doing?” asked Marcenius. “I don’t want that side on the dirt.”
“When you turned into a toad,” she asked, ignoring his carpet-desires and going on with the job, “Just what were you trying to do?”
He stepped forward to interfere, got a burring growl from the snow leopard, and instead answered the question. “Turn them into toads, of course. I was quite good at it.”
“Right. I get it, Tom.”
“My name is Marcenius, not Tom.”
“That’s fairly obvious. The cat is called Tom. Now, we’d all better sit on the carpet.”
“Upside down?”
“Yes, idiot. Quick, before any more gnomes — or their wizards realize what we’re doing.” The snow leopard was quicker on the uptake than this boy. It had got onto the carpet and sat down.
“Uh. You mean you can make it fly? We can’t take that monster with us. Leave him for the gnomes. They’re terrified of it.”
“Shut up, get on and say the flying spell,” said Alamaya, impatiently, wondering if she should try the broom. On the other hand there wouldn’t be room for all of them on that.
“But…” Marcenius protested.
“Do as you’re told or I’ll set the leopard on you,” hissed Alamaya.
That worked. And so did the flying carpet, rising slowly. Slower than Alamaya liked. The gnomes came running out, and were pointing and yelling. One of them, she noticed, was wearing the typical ‘this is my job’ advertising garb of a wizard — moons and stars and a sequinned hat. She wished she had something to throw at them. Or a spell that wouldn’t turn her into a frog instead of them.
“Make it fly faster!” she yelled.
He prattled out a spell… which slowed them to snail-crawl. The gnome in the wizard outfit was waving his arms around in a way that spoke of either a magic-ritual or some kind of fit. Alamaya didn’t wait to find out which. If magic worked in inverse… She risked the de-frogging spell, and the gnome wizard’s next magical word turned into ‘ribbit’ and his next gesture was a hop, as they, with glacial slowness, continued to rise.
“Tell the carpet to slow down, you fool,” said Alamaya.
Either he had never been too bright or his stay in the cage in gnomeland had weakened his wits. “But we’re already going very slowly. I can walk this fast,” protested Marcenius.
That was true, and the only redeeming feature being that they were rising steadily. They were now about four times the height of the top of the gnome roofs. Alamaya resisted the desire to slap — or better still, from the cattish side of her nature, scratch the idiot. “Spells work in inverse. So a go slower command is a go faster command. The carpet is upside-down and thinks it is going down.”
“Oh. But I never learned a go slower command.”
So they had to put up with a slow flight, but at least it was an upward one, away from the gnome village.
The downside of that, well, the two downsides, was that it grew steadily colder, and that Marcenius, having had no-one but gnomes to talk to for many months, was making up for it. He told her about trying to find his way out of the pantry and failing. He told her about blundering into gnome-land and failing to get back into the pantry. He told her what a brilliant famulus he had been. He told how the girls in the village were all over him, as the carpet drifted like a slow cloud over the riven landscape of deep valleys and knife-edged ridges.
Tom simply moved in and snuggled onto her lap, purred and went to sleep. He was at least warm. But even that was not enough. Eventually, the shivering was getting too much, and the only content soul on the carpet was the snow leopard. “We’d better go down,” said Alamaya.
“That’ll be spell for up,” said Marcenius.
“No, the spell for down. The carpet is upside-down already. I suppose you don’t know that either?”
But he did, and set them down on a rocky knoll just above one of the myriad streams of Gnome-land. It was plain that rained a lot here, and indeed, the clouds were massing on the horizon.
Alamaya was catlike enough to view getting wet as very unpleasant, although it might help the smell of Marcenius. It was understandable, but did he have to stand so close? “So. Where do we go now?” she asked. It was Tom she was asking, but Marcenius assumed it was him.
“We could fly on to search for other people, or to find a nice place for you and me to settle down. I don’t think there are any other people here. I learned enough gnome-language over time. They’d only ever seen one other giant like me. But he didn’t look like us. He had black hair and an eagle nose. They found my nose very puzzling. They had him captive years ago, but he got away.”
Alamaya’s natural hair color was jet black, and she did have a distinctly aquiline nose. She’d always envied those pert button noses, but the Royal house of Corvin had beaks. Neither looking for a place to ‘settle down’ with this idiot, nor going in search of other people (although that had to be better), were any part of her plans. She had a life to get back to, God-mama to rescue, or failing that, avenge.
And she didn’t want Tom as a lifelong cat either.
Fortunately he seemed to feel the same way about it, including sticking his claws into Marcenius’s leg.
Marcenius tried to kick Tom.
“Don’t you dare kick my cat!” snapped Alamaya. “Or I’ll set the leopard on you.”
“It scratched me,” complained Marcenius. “Look, we’ll have to get on. There might just be the two of us.”
“Then there would shortly be just one of us.”
“Mwrowr!” announced Tom, loudly getting onto the carpet, and sitting down. He turned his head to the snow leopard and addressed it with a questioning “Mwow.” And the big cat got up and joined him. The cats sat on the mat, and waited. They waited in the fashion of cats, with that peculiar combination of the infinite patience of waiting to ambush prey, and mild exasperation with human slowness to do what was expected of them.
Alamaya joined the two cats. “Well, come on.”
“But I thought we could sit together in the sun for a bit,” said Marcenius.
“Fat chance. Now let’s get this thing flying.”
“But I’m still cold.”
“That is true for me too, but I don’t want to be wet as well,” she said pointing at the clouds.
Marcenius looked gloomily at the clouds. “
You shouldn’t have come to Gnome-land then. It rains all the time here.”
“It wasn’t exactly my plan. Now, get on and let’s fly. I’d leave you here except there’s no room on my broomstick for the leopard. Tom seems to have taken a fancy to her.” She skritched behind Tom’s ears as she said this, and he contentedly snuggled into her, as if he had not a worry in the world.
Maybe he didn’t. That was what humans had to do, even cursed princesses.
This time Alamaya stopped Marcenius from trying ‘speed up’ spells. Actually the carpet was fairly zipping along towards the mountain peaks.
“Where are we going?” asked Alamaya.
“I don’t know… I told it to go that way… but it’s not listening.”
“You idiot. The opposite direction.”
“I know,” he said crossly. “But it’s not doing that either. It’s… it’s doing its own thing.”
“A homer!” said Alamaya, as it dawned on her. God-mama had talked about putting the spells on her broom for getting her home after a hard night out… but had eventually decided against it. ‘Too much chance of falling off the broom. It’s all very well if you have a carpet to lie down on. And besides I can always find a bed.’ She could. It was a way home that Alamaya needed not a bed, and she had a feeling that interdimensional spells might not work. She knew none for keeping herself in a specific dimension. “Put it down,” she said.
“What? I haven’t picked anything up.”
“The carpet.” Honestly, he was thicker than Laney’s boyfriends.
“But it is flying so well. And we don’t know where we want to go.”
“Yes we do.” She was about to say exactly where she wanted to go, when it occurred to her that he might not want to go back to his old Master. So she settled on “I know how to get us back to ordinary people. Not gnomes. Now set the carpet down.”