The Big Meow

by Diane Duane

  Arhu lashed out at Hwaith fast with a forepaw. But this swept through air which Hwaith was simply no longer occupying, and from the formerly empty air behind Arhu both of Hwaith’s paws shot out and dealt him a one-two slap that left Arhu flat on the gravel of the garden path. He rolled and came right side up in a hurry, crouching down with his ears now well flattened back out of harm’s way, his tail wagging with fury like that of some demented houiff. Then he leapt at Hwaith, every claw bared. But once again Hwaith was no longer occupying the same volume of space when Arhu arrived there. The youngster sailed straight through it, coming down hard on the path, and when he tried to turn and spring again, once more Hwaith silently appeared behind Arhu, reared up and knocked him flat.

  Arhu rolled and came up crouching again, panting a little now — but this time he didn’t move, just glared. Hwaith sat down in front of him, quite casually, and cocked his head a little, waiting to see what Arhu would do.

  Rhiow blinked, astounded by the suddenness of what had just happened. Nonplussed, she glanced at Aufwi, who looked as bemused as she felt, and then over at Urruah. Far from intervening, he was presently smelling a large downhanging red rose on a nearby bush and acting as if his thoughts were entirely elsewhere. Is this some tom-style intervention you two cooked up? Rhiow said to him privately.

  Not at all, Urruah said, taking a last breath of the rose’s fragrance. Kind of wish I’d thought of it. But we’ve been so busy with work here that disciplinary issues kind of got shoved to the back of my mind. Now, though –

  He strolled over to where Arhu was crouching, and leaned down to peer at the ear by which Hwaith had briefly held Arhu still. Just a drop of blood marked the spot. “That could’ve been interesting,” he said to Hwaith.

  Hwaith gave him a casual sidewise look. “No point in half measures,” he said. “If you’re thinking about pulling someone’s ear off, make sure you’re in the right place to pull it all off…”

  Urruah merely flirted his tail in agreement. Seeing this, Arhu’s eyes went a bit less outraged and furious, a little more scared.

  Urruah bent lower. “Just because you’re useful,” Urruah said, “don’t get the idea that you’re so indispensable that you can be rude to those of us who outweigh you – in seniority, or otherwise.” The way he was looming over Arhu, in a more massive manner than the slighter Hwaith could manage, suggested that the always-loaded issues of relative weight and size were now on Urruah’s mind… or at least that he wanted Arhu to think they were. “Because if you let your hormones start talking for you, believe me, we’re going to talk back.”

  “And as for Hwaith having come to us for help,” Rhiow said, coming up beside Urruah, “you of all People have no business complaining about where errantry’s needs might lead a cousin in the Art! Or, for that matter, anyone’s ability to handle a problem with or without assistance from others. You had plenty from us, as I recall.”

  The three of them stood looking down at Arhu for a few moments more. He kept still, but Rhiow could see that some of the tension was going out of him, if only to be displaced for the moment by embarrassment. Not entirely a bad alternative under the circumstances, Rhiow thought.

  “All right,” she said at last. “For the time being, it might be smart if you busied yourself with something concrete while we start setting up our plans for this evening. Go on back to the Silent Man’s, tell Sif to take a break, and go over the structure she’s setting up for us. I’ll want a report on its strengths and weaknesses from you when we get back.”

  Arhu stood up as they all backed off to give him transport space. “It’s just makework…” he said under his breath.

  All three of them just looked at Arhu and didn’t say a word.

  Arhu looked away, the ear Hwaith had put a claw into twitching a couple of times, and he vanished.

  Rhiow and Hwaith and Urruah all looked at each other, and then practically in unison sat down to wash — as Aufwi was already doing off to one side, in the polite not-noticing mode of a Person not closely involved in a disagreement. All their whiskers were well forward in amusement, though– not just at Arhu’s discomfiture, but their own.

  “Hwaith,” Rhiow said as she licked one paw, “…thank you for saving me the trouble.”

  “Not a problem,” he said, scrubbing one of his ears vigorously: the same one in which he’d hooked Arhu, she noticed.

  “I feel for our two kits, though,” Rhiow said. “They’ve been caught up in such serious events since we all came together… yet they’ve always produced the result. Which makes me wonder if we’ve come to depend on them too much while they’re still so young.” She glanced at Urruah.

  He merely flicked his ears back and forth in a don’t-know gesture and kept on washing his face.

  “In any case, it can’t be easy having the Eye so young,” Hwaith said. “Not that the Ear’s exactly a nap on a sunny rock either…”

  “But what you said before…” Rhiow paused in mid-face scrub. “Is it hormones? Or just stress?”

  “Stress has a hormone,” Urruah said as he finished his wash. “But Rhi, it occurs to me that there may be entirely different hormonal business on Arhu’s mind.” He exchanged a glance with Hwaith.

  Rhiow blinked, as the thought genuinely hadn’t occurred to her. “Well, yes…” she said after a moment. There was no specific prohibition against sibling-Persons mating with one another when the blood or the heart moved them to it. There were even versions of the Sehau and Aifheh story in which the Lovers were occasionally born as littermates. Of course People were taught by their dams that there could be too much of a good thing in this regard if it continued over a number of generations, and this opinion was reinforced by the high mortality in the litters and dams of prides that inbred too closely or failed to insource enough new blood. Yes, this situation’s different, Rhiow thought. But there are other problems. When wizardly teammates also start thinking about becoming heatmates, a whole new level of complexity adds itself to every spell and every transaction. And if Sif should actually go into heat…

  Suddenly it all seemed just too much for Rhiow to bear. She stood up, her tail wagging as uncontrollably as Arhu’s had, even while the words of the meditation went through her head. Today I shall meet the circumstance it seems impossible to manage, the events that seem willingly to conspire against me as I do my work. These, and my own fear that I cannot manage them, I must recognize as the claws in sa’Rraah’s paw, modeled on my own for the purpose of slashing me more deeply — But the sentiment seemed far less useful today than it normally did. And here I am doing nothing –

  “I should get back,” Rhiow said. “I need to have a look and see what Sif’s set up for us – “

  “In the state you’re in?” Urruah said, sparing her tail no more than a moment’s glance and going back to scrubbing his ear. “I wouldn’t advise it.”

  Rhiow was instantly tempted to tell him what she thought of his advice… and then caught herself, somewhat in shock. I’ve been telling him he needs to start acting more like a team leader, she thought. And when he does, what’s my first impulse?…

  Rhiow didn’t move until she succeeded in quieting her tail down: and as usual, doing so paradoxically made her feel calmer. “All right,” she said, “you may have a point. Do you want to go back and look in on her first? And Arhu, naturally.”

  Urruah got up and stretched fore and aft. “I’ll do that,” he said. “Rhi, there’s no rush about anything until Ith gets back to us. Take a little self time.”

  “I’ll go too,” Aufwi said, and stood up, shaking himself once. “The Silent Man can probably use a more detailed explanation of what’s been going on.” He flirted his tail, a resigned gesture. “And why he probably shouldn’t come along tonight to help us…”

  Without more ado, they were gone. Rhiow stood there for a moment listening to the mutter of the traffic off beyond the edges of the Park, then glanced over at Hwaith. She sighed. “I begin to think,” she said, “that I
’m the one who needs a dose of the treatment you just handed Arhu.”

  He flicked an ear and headed down the path away from the museum: Rhiow fell in beside him. “I doubt that,” Hwaith said. “Just think of the pressure you’ve been under! I get a sense you’re harder on yourself than you’d ever be on your teammates.”

  Rhiow laughed under her breath as they made their way along between the rose bushes. “I guess,” she said. “But it’s hard to strike a balance, you know? Even just in normal times…” And she had to laugh again. “I’m having trouble at the moment even remembering what that feels like. Some lovely faraway time when all I had to worry about was the Grand Central gates malfunctioning again… and always in some new and interesting way that I took oh so seriously, as if the Lone One Herself was designing every malfunction just for me.” Rhiow rolled her eyes at herself. “May Queen Iau start sending me lovely problems like that again, instead of the one we’ve got at the moment!”

  Hwaith chuckled, though the sound had a dark edge to it. “Tell me about it,” he said. “Everything in my practice was going so smoothly…”

  “Until we turned up?” Rhiow said. “Well, don’t forget, it was you who came looking for us…”

  The glance he gave her at first seemed a little strange to Rhiow: but then the bronzy eyes flickered away, and Rhiow was left wondering exactly what it was that had struck her as odd. “Yes,” Hwaith said in a tone that struck Rhiow as ironic, “I suppose I’ve no one but myself to blame…”

  “For what?” Rhiow said, a touch amused. “The unfolding of causality?”

  Hwaith didn’t answer immediately, looking across the great garden toward where the traffic could just be seen moving on the park’s south side. “Well,” he said after a moment, “it’s always annoying when one’s actions disrupt others’ personal schedules.”

  That made Rhiow laugh. “It’d be novel to think that the Queen and Her daughters were overly concerned with the details of my schedule,” she said. “Mostly when you agree to wizardry, your schedule becomes something the Powers rewrite as needed.”

  “But it’s hardly a one-way agreement,” Hwaith said. “They have a responsibility to us as well. There has to be some reciprocity, some service done in return for the service we do the world….”

  “Well, of course, that’s understood,” Rhiow said, watching the spiderling land on a scrap of bark and pause there to get its bearings. It looked about it with eyes almost too small for even a sharp-eyed Person to see, then moved off under another bit of bark. “It’s not as if they ask you to go out on errantry when you’re in heat, for example, or rutting, or kittening.”

  “It wasn’t the strictly physical situations I was thinking of,” Hwaith said. “More the personal ones.”

  Rhiow flicked an ear at that as she paused in mid-stroll, having caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of one eye. From a bud-tipped stem of one of the nearby rose bushes, a minuscule grey fleck was dropping toward the rough bark-mulch covering the ground. Rhiow leaned close and saw a tiny baby spider, hardly out of the egg, busily spinning its first thread as it made its way out into the great world. “Well,” she said, “you know how it’s supposed to be. No wizardly mission is ever commissioned by Them in strict isolation, we’re told. Every intervention in the Queen’s world is meant to affect not just the problem it’s specifically devised to solve, but every ongoing situation, from the most central to the most peripheral. The ripples spread…”

  Down the spiderling went, spinning down on its delicate thread and intent on its business, apparently quite oblivious to Rhiow and her issues and the potential destruction of this world and possibly others. “And even the most broadbased missions,” Rhiow said as she watched, “are meant as much to serve the wizards enacting them as the beings or situations that need our help. ‘All is done for each…’”

  Hwaith slipped up beside her and peered at the spiderling as it spun gently down. “Even in the situation we’re in now?” Hwaith said.

  “I think we have to believe so,” Rhiow said. “The reciprocity ought to get more profound as the stakes rise, don’t you think? If They’re just. Which I think They are.”

  The tiny spider came down on a shred of bark and paused there, looking around it with eyes almost too tiny for even a Person with good eyesight to make out. After a second it shook off the thread and started out across the bit of mulch, climbing up the first of a number of shred-marks on the brown, uneven surface like a climber assailing a hill. “Yes,” Hwaith said. “I’d agree with you there. I think that’s why we’ve met now.”

  Rhiow continued watching the spiderling as it paused at a “hillcrest” and then started its descent into a valley-crease about an eighth of an inch deep. “You mean in terms of you and Helen and the Silent Man and our team all coming together to do this work –”

  “Not exactly,” Hwaith said, and licked his nose. “Rhiow, I suppose there’s never really a perfect time to broach such a subject…”

  The spiderling started climbing another “hill”. “Why,” Rhiow said, “what’s the matter? Do you have some kind of personal –”

  She had been about to say “problem”, but the look in Hwaith’s eyes, vulnerable and yet peculiarly valiant, abruptly silenced her. “Yes I do,” he said. “Well, not that way exactly.” And he licked his nose again. “Rhiow, back where you come from – when you come from – is there someone for you?”

  She completely lost interest in the tiny spider, and turned to stare at Hwaith.

  “Well then,” he said. “I just want – no, what I mean is, perhaps you should know that –” He stopped and swore under his breath, and even through her complete shock Rhiow found herself thinking how very like Arhu Hwaith looked in this mode: the same helpless embarrassment, the same uncertainty about how to handle it, whether to be angry or abashed . “Whether you would be able to consider me for that role.”

  “Hwaith,” Rhiow said. “Wait. Me?” Her ears were going back and forth in the immemorial gesture of a Person who can’t believe what she’s hearing — one which Rhiow desperately hoped didn’t make her look too much like a confused houff. “Hwaith, indeed I’m flattered, you have no idea, but, but why me?”

  He looked abashed. “I don’t know that I’d be much good at explaining the reasons for this,” Hwaith said. “Don’t know that I could explain them to the Queen Herself right now if she showed up and started demanding details.” He seemed more able to look at Rhiow now, and those bronzy eyes locked on hers. “But then She doesn’t, usually. Except in shapes that we’re already familiar with…”

  Rhiow sat down again, mostly in shock. Over the next few moments a previously unconnected set of conjectures began to fall into place in her mind, slotting together into one another in almost the way the parts of a spell did when you had all the necessary elements assembled together and were ready to proceed. The speed with which Urruah and Aufwi had taken themselves away. The thought that the “tom business” they had been executing might not have had anything to do with Arhu after all. A whole series of times when she and Hwaith had found themselves off by themselves for one reason or another. Come to think of it, his sudden appearance inside the Silent Man’s mind. Not just another wizard helping out with an intervention that was going wrong, she thought. Rather more than that –

  She couldn’t help licking her own nose. Dear Queen, this is terrible. What am I going to do about this?

  “Please don’t think I’m expecting you to give me any kind of answer,” Hwaith said hurriedly. “Naturally it’s taken you by surprise. Iau knew it took me by surprise. And we’ve got a lot to handle right now, important things to deal with, of course. But when they are handled – “

  The question of what that eventuality would even look like left Rhiow utterly dumbfounded. Assuming that we do get everything handled…! She wanted to laugh out loud at the pat way Hwaith had put it. A lot of things to handle. Yes indeed! See off a vast horrible threat from right outside our sheaf of worlds, save
the Universe, probably also save a batch of other universes as well: nothing too complicated. And after we get that all tidied up, let’s take some time and talk about having a relationship —

  “I, ah,” Rhiow said. “Hwaith, I –” She scrambled to her feet again. “I’m sorry, we really need to get back to the Silent Man’s, I have to have time to look over that spell that Sif’s working on, and there are plans still to be made, we have to work out what to do if Ith doesn’t find those tablets before it’s time to go to Dagenham’s –”

  She was babbling, and she knew it. She had rarely ever wanted more to disappear in a hurry, but she was having trouble putting the spell together in her head. And when did that last happen? Rhiow thought. “Forgive me, I’ve got to go –” she said, having trouble even looking at Hwaith now. She finally managed to remember how to assemble the transit spell, practically begging the universe to get out of her way and put her down where she needed to be, most desperately wanted to be, absolutely anywhere but here —

  Rhiow vanished – but not without catching a last glimpse of those bronze eyes, resting in hers, unnerved yet at the same time looking strangely relieved. As the rose garden vanished around her, Rhiow recognized Hwaith’s look as the expression of someone who’s finally managed to ask the most important question in his world, and now waits courteously and patiently for the answer that another simply cannot give…

  *

  A second later, when she appeared in the back yard of the Silent Man’s house, the complete quiet of the place struck Rhiow as most peculiar when compared to the tumult in her mind. She trotted hurriedly into the house and found everything almost bizarrely calm. Sheba was lying on her back in the middle of the living room couch, snoozing while the Silent Man and Helen Walks Softly sat at opposite ends with Aufwi up on the couch’s back, discussing the details of what was likely to happen that evening. They glanced at her as she came in.