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Skink snapped to life next to Bobcat and scurried through the grass to where he'd left his satchel. Bobcat sat still for a moment, the Blood Jaguar's terrible eyes sparking with dull fire at his sides. "You think so?" he asked as Skink clambered up onto Fisher's back. "You think I can do what I want? Is that what you think?"
Fisher wasn't looking at him.
With a growl, Bobcat leaped forward and grabbed her paws. "Damn you, Fisher, listen to me!" Her eyes snapped over, cold and black as river ice; Bobcat glared into them. "I don't care what you think about me, witch; I know I'm dumber'n dirt! But you aren't gonna ignore me or stare me down or make me shut up! I'm not here 'cause I believe all this crap about plagues and Curials and ev'rything! I'm here 'cause I got no choice! That Blood Jaguar of yours, she picked me out for this, left her eyes in my head so I wouldn't forget about her, and I wanna know why! So don't talk to me about saving the world, Fisher! I've got problems enough of my own!"
Skink was rustling and squeaking from his perch on Fisher's neck: "Please, Bobcat, Fisher, please don't argue! We can't afford--"
"Argue?" Fisher's voice was calm, and her eyes never left Bobcat's. "Who's arguing? I just said, 'Let's go,' and he just said, 'I'm coming.' Where's the argument there? I mean, it's not really me he's mad at." She made no move to pull her paws away. "Is it?"
Bobcat stood where he was, his breath shaking its way in and out of his throat. At last, he let Fisher's paws loose.
"Don't forget your pack," she said.
It took Bobcat another minute or so to slip into the straps; then he was following Fisher back down the Meerkat Road heading west. They wound their way over the hills, through the meadows bright with spring flowers stretching their petals into the midmorning sun, over the brooks that chattered their stony teeth at the meltwaters flowing past them, but Bobcat wasn't paying them much attention. He was wondering just who he was mad at.
Not Fisher, he had to admit, and he couldn't make himself get mad at Skink, even though the lizard and his grandma had started this whole thing up. And how could he be mad at the Curials? He didn't even believe in them.
The Blood Jaguar, then? Sure, his brain froze up every time he thought of her, but she was the one who'd thrown him into this for no reason; even the threat he felt from her fitfully glowing eyes couldn't make him deny that.
So he would be mad at her.
That settled, Bobcat let himself swing into the rhythm of the road, the heft of the pack and the sweet scent of someplace new pushing those eyes to a simmer at the back of his thoughts. It was still spring, after all, and Bobcat had spent many a worse day on the road, his paws taking him from one nowhere to another. Even if all this Plague Year stuff was true, it was still nice to have a definite thing to do. And having other folks along to share the road made a lot of difference, too.
They walked on for some hours until the sun reached the top of the sky; then Fisher turned her head back to Bobcat. "You feel like some lunch?"
Bobcat nodded. They had crested a hill and were making their way down some switchbacks into a valley with a river tumbling along the bottom. Buildings sat along each side of the river, and some sort of festival seemed to be going on among the trees off beside the Meerkat Road. Tents and booths fluttered with paper flags, and an amphitheater had been set up at the base of a big rock slumped in a field on the opposite bank. Bobcat could hear laughter and snatches of song coming up from the folk who sat at the tables and under the trees and wandered between the tents.
"That's Flatrock, isn't it?" he asked, nodding toward the town.
"Yeah," Fisher called back. "I was hoping we'd get here by noontime. We can actually buy something and not have to waste any hardtack."
Down the trail they went, drawing closer and closer to the town. Then the slope leveled out, and they were walking between fields of wheat and various sorts of vegetables. The fields fell away after a bit, and the tents and stands were all around them, mice and squirrels in colorful hats roaming about with plates of food or musical instruments, wrens and sparrows, otters and weasels, hawks and foxes and all manner of folk calling from the booths or tossing rings over posts or waiting in line for the Tilt-A-Whirl or the parachute drop, the whole place bursting and bustling under the spring sun.
Skink was peering over Fisher's shoulder. "A vernal equinox festival, no doubt. A pity we missed the invocation rituals; these rustic ceremonies can be quite moving."
Bobcat came up beside them. "You pack any money in here, Fisher? Or are we gonna volunteer to wind up the merry-go-round if they feed us?"
"Don't worry." Fisher patted her pack. "I've got some otter scrip. Let's take a look around."
The place had everything, the best spread Bobcat had seen since the last winter fair in Ree's Meadow. One whole row of booths seemed to be devoted just to food: cabbage rolls on a stick, corn on the cob, every sort of insect and fish prepared in ways Bobcat had never even considered, almond roca, fried ice cream, casseroles and cobblers made of everything from apples to peanuts to string beans.
After some discussion, the three agreed on a booth serving trout with almonds and also sauteed grasshopper. They got a bit of the local cider and had just slung off their packs in a shady spot along the river when Bobcat saw an old squirrel staring at them. The squirrel was leaning on a gnarled wooden cane, his fur gray and patchy, his face lined and weathered. A bright red and purple knit beret had somehow settled itself over one of his wrinkled ears, and it struck Bobcat that he had seen that hat before.
Bobcat chewed his fish and thought about it. He had noticed the hat, he was sure, when he'd walked into the fairgrounds, it and the old squirrel sitting on a rock, the cane across the squirrel's lap. But Bobcat had also seen the hat and the old squirrel leaning on his cane beside the trout booth, and now that same squirrel and hat were staring at him while he ate.
It wasn't very polite, and Bobcat looked pointedly at the old squirrel in the hope that he could get him and his hat to go away. But the squirrel only squinted some more, then began stumping forward, the cane making little squishing noises when it jabbed the ground. Bobcat poked Fisher, and Fisher looked up just as the old squirrel stopped beside her.
The squirrel raised his cane and shook it at each of them in turn. "Ye ain't welcome here," he rattled, "none of ye."
Bobcat just stared at him, and Skink spoke up: "But, sir, what have we--"
"Ye cain't fool a Kechetnin!" The squirrel's voice was suddenly very loud. "I knows ye! Me pappy al'ays said t' watch out fer a fisher an' a bobcat an' a skink trav'lin' togither, an' it were his pappy as tol' him, an' his pappy afore that! Yer cursed! Cursed by the Lady Squirrel to the Strangler's claw! An' ye ain't welcome here!" The squirrel raised his cane again and stabbed it down on Bobcat's paw.
It surprised more than hurt him, made him say, "Hey!" and pull his paw back. The movement wrenched the cane sideways, and the squirrel fell with a wail, the hat rolling from his head and skipping down the slope into the river.
"Help!" the old squirrel shouted. "For the love of the Lady, help!"
Bobcat held out a paw. "Sorry. Here, lemme--"
"Keep 'em away!" The squirrel was dragging himself backward, his eyes wide, fear a thick scent in the air around him. "Keep 'em away!"
Voices were rising up among the trees, and Fisher poked Bobcat in the shoulder. "Get your pack. Let's go."
"What?" Bobcat looked at her. "We didn't do anything, did we? It's not our fault this old guy starts--"
Fisher had already slipped her pack on. "This isn't our town, Bobcat, and we haven't got time to mess with whatever legal system they've got." She pointed her chin at the old squirrel. "He's all right--a little scared, but he'll get over it. Us, though, we'd better get ourselves gone."
Skink was already perched on Fisher's neck, his eyes spinning, the voices getting louder among the trees. Bobcat snorted, struggled into his pack, and took off after Fisher along the riverbank toward the bridge and the Meerkat Road ahead. He
heard the old squirrel crying after them, his voice soon joined by a tangle of others, but couldn't make out what they were saying. The three reached the road without anyone trying to stop them, sprinted across the bridge, and Bobcat just had time to notice the red and purple beret caught on some rocks below them before they were over and heading into the hills to the west.
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They kept a quick pace, Bobcat looking back every now and then to make sure they weren't being followed, till about midafternoon. The hills got flatter and flatter the farther west they went, the trees squatting closer to the ground, and by the time the sun was settling into a three-quarters position above and ahead of them, they were stopped at the base of the last hill, their packs off and leaning against each other beside a little spring the road ran past.
Bobcat stared down the road, his cheek stuffed with walnuts. Not a tree stood on the plain there; not a hill rose above it, not a single roof poking into the deep blue of the sky. The Meerkat Road was a thin black line snapped straight out into a sea of yellow-green grass, rustling like a river as the wind combed through it all the way out to the flat of the horizon. "Charming spot," he said after he'd swallowed. "I'm starting to think that squirrel might've been right."
Skink stirred in the dirt next to him. "Oh, Bobcat, we are no more cursed than anyone else. But at least we now know our course is correct, and I must admit that that fellow has proven my contention far better than I could have dreamed."
"Oh?" Fisher was filling her canteen at the spring. "Which contention is that?"
"My belief that we are truly involved in a Cyclical Myth. The warning against a fisher, a bobcat, and a skink traveling together has become local folklore connected to the Plague Year, so the one Grandmother told us of could not have been the first. This must have all happened many times before."
"Yeah," Fisher breathed out. "Every hundred years or so, we march through town, and the next thing anyone knows, folks are dropping left and right. Terrific."
Skink raised a claw. "We don't know that every time it happens, the Plague Year results. Grandmother seemed to imply that success was possible."
Fisher shook her head. "She just hoped it was, remember? 'An old story about a failure that leads to death,' she said, like no version she knew had a happy ending. And besides, it explains things so nicely." She rubbed her whiskers. "I mean, haven't you ever wondered why there're so few folk around? Compared with the size of the continent, I mean?"
Bobcat cocked his head. "Whadda you mean?"
"Well, look." Fisher slid over to her pack, took out a map, laid it on the ground, and poked at it. "On the whole east coast, the only real cities are Lai Tuan and Ngyshen. There's Madison up by the Great Lakes, Beaverpool on the River, Kazirazif in the western desert, and Cayottle up along the northwestern coast. And that's it. Even taking into account towns like Ottersgate and Flatrock, that's not a whole lot. The archaeological data say folk've been on this continent for thousands of generations, but there's still so much room, I've only ever read about such a thing as a property dispute." She looked up. "Makes you think, doesn't it?"
Skink's head was twitching from side to side, his eyes glassy. "We are killed off at regular intervals. I do not want to believe it, but...but...what if Grandmother's Plague Year was a mild one, the 50 percent dead reported by your great-great-grandfather an unusually light figure? What if we are but days away from a devastation never before known? How can such things be? How can the Curial powers--"
"Now wait a minute!" Bobcat made a referee's sign with his paws. "Time-out! Is it just me, or are we jumping to about fifteen assorted conclusions here?"
Fisher drummed her claws against her backpack. "You're the one who saw her, Bobcat. You think the Strangler was just kidding around about all this?"
"Hey, don't ask me." Bobcat shrugged. "All I know about this stuff is what you've told me and some stories I barely remember hearing as a kit. The Blood Jaguar, I've got the scars to prove she exists, and your books prove that this Plague Year happened once. Maybe all that talk Skink was blowing around proves the Curials, but I'd say let's stick to the facts till we get some idea of what's going on. Taking things step-by-step saves wear and tear on the ol' glands, I've found."
Skink lay huddled in the dirt, whisps of sound drifting from his throat, and a little smile started curling through Fisher's whiskers. Bobcat shrugged again. "So we just gonna stand here?" he asked.
"Nah." Fisher folded up the map and picked up her canteen. "We wanna be at the crossroad before dark." She poked at Skink. "Don't we?"
The lizard stirred. "We must," he whispered. "We have no time to lose." He scuttled over to his pack.
They walked out into the grasslands then and on into the afternoon. Fisher and Skink talked between themselves ahead of him, but Bobcat scarcely noticed, the rustling of the stalks around him playing tricks on his ears, the sounds drifting into his thoughts and forming pictures as fleeting as cloud patterns. It got to be a game after a while; the sounds would almost remind him of something, almost form words, almost make some sense, and Bobcat would bat at them with a paw, try to catch them, try to hold them in shape before they were gone.
But every time, he would catch nothing but the pavement, would start back as if he'd been asleep, the road and the sky and the rustling grass all leaping into sharp focus, black and blue and bright yellow-green, Fisher and Skink still talking a few paces farther on. Bobcat would look around, would see that the sun had jumped a bit closer to the horizon ahead, but otherwise, nothing would've changed. He would half-listen to the conversation in front of him, but then the rustling would start popping things into his mind again, and he would be off on another round of brain tag.
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At last, the sun licking at the horizon, the grass began to sink, the yellow in it taking over, and settle to the ground in patches on the reddish earth. Bluffs appeared ahead and off to the right, the land to the left starting to wrinkle and roll, and a sign came into view, brown and weather-beaten, by the side of the road: 'Crossroad Ahead.'
Bobcat read the words aloud and blew out a breath. "About time."
"What?" Fisher called back. "Tired already?"
About a hundred yards farther on, the strip of pavement they were walking on ran into two more, one coming straight down from the north, the other heading off to the southwest across the plains, three roads converging on a single spot. A stream gurgled along on the other side of the crossroad, its little ditch running south with the one road and passing under a stony bridge on the other. The area had been stripped clear of even the tufts of yellow grass, the earth hard-packed by generations of freight caravans pulling off the road to rest.
Bobcat had heard of minivillages appearing overnight when caravans met here, of impromptu festivals lasting for days when otters and foxes and others who plied the roads would find themselves together at the crossroad. Now, however, only a single figure lay curled against his backpack by the banks of the little stream: a graying kit fox, his canvas pack stained and frayed almost as much as he was himself. His snores sounded healthy enough, though, and Bobcat smiled, following Fisher a little ways down the southwestern road and over to the side of the stream.
Fisher glanced upstream at the kit fox. "I was hoping we'd meet somebody here. My info about the road's a few months old, and I'd rather not have too many surprises."
"I'm all for that." Bobcat crawled out from beneath his pack and flopped back against it. "We gonna let the ol' geezer sleep, or you wanna shake him down right now?"
Skink leaped from Fisher's back. "You'll do nothing of the sort, Bobcat! Why, the very idea--"
Bobcat held up a paw. "A joke. I was making a joke."
"Well, it was certainly a poor one." Skink slipped his pack off. "We who are travelers in strange lands must--"
"All right, all right, I'm sorry. I'll apologize to him when he wakes up, okay?"
Fisher rattled the pack Bobcat was lying against. "It'd be more helpful if you'd unload the gas ja
rs and the pots. There's nothing like the smell of cooking to wake up a tramp."
So Bobcat pulled a number of things from his pack, and Fisher put them together into a trail stove. She had him fill some pots at the stream while she got it lit, and as the sun disappeared behind the bluffs to the west, a stew began to bubble over the little fire.
True to Fisher's prediction, it wasn't long before the snoring stopped, and a rough voice drifted through the twilight: "Good evening to you, friends. Forgive me for not greeting you earlier, but a day's march seems longer now than even a few months ago. Would it be too much to ask for a share of your fire and your company?"
Fisher gave Bobcat a grin, then called out, "Not at all, friend, not at all! It looks like I've mixed up a bit more stew than we three can use; how would a bowl or two sound?"
"Friend," the voice answered, "how can I turn down so well put an offer?" The figure rose, shrugged on his pack, and loped across the road to the light of Fisher's fire.
The kit fox was old and gray, scars showing through his fur and standing out on his muzzle. The strands of one ear flopped down the side of his head, and the other was so torn, Bobcat couldn't figure out how it kept upright. But the Kit Fox's eyes were quick and his smile infectious as he bowed to them each in turn, let his pack to the ground, and settled against it with an audible creak. "Thank you. It gets a little lonesome on the trail sometimes. It's nice just to hear the sound of other folk's breathing."
Fisher handed out bowls of stew, and they ate in silence while the dusk deepened into night around them. The kit fox finished first, set his bowl down, and bowed his head to Fisher. "Best stuff I've had in weeks. Folks on the road call me Rag Ears, and I think it suits me. Which way you all headed from here?"
Fisher gestured with her spoon. "Down to Kazirazif. Did you come up from that way?"
The kit fox didn't answer her, just looked from one to the other and rubbed his chin. "Y'know, there's some folks might get a bit nervous seeing a fisher, a bobcat, and a skink on the road to Kazirazif. A body hears stories about things happening after folks like you pass through the Shasir gate."
The Blood Jaguar Page 6