“They executed me,” she reminded him and added after a moment, “Kzinrett weapons might be best. Leave it to me.” She did not elaborate. Well, women’s weapons had their uses.
He slung several logs under the airboat and left Kit stone-sharpening the long blade as he slowly tacked his way back to their ravine. Releasing the hitches was the work of a moment, thick poles thudding onto yellow-green grass, and soon he was back with Kit. By the time the sun faded, the w’tsai was biting like a handaxe and Kit had prepared them a thick grassy pallet between the cliff face and their big foundation logs. It was the coldest night Locklear had spent on Kzersatz, but Kit’s fur made it endurable. Days later, she ate the last of the kzin rations as he chewed a fishnut and sketched in the dirt with a stick. “We’ll run the shamboo plumbing out here from the kitchen,” he said, “and dig our escape tunnel out from our sleep room parallel with the cliff. We’ll need help, Kit. It’s time.” She vented a long purring sigh. “I know. Things will be different, Rockear. Not as simple as our life has been.”
He laughed at that, reminding her of the complications they had already faced, and then they resumed notching logs, raising the walls beyond window height. Their own work packed the earthen floors, but the roofing would require more hands than their own. That night, Kit kindled their first fire in the central room’s hearth, and they fell asleep while she tutored him on the ways of ancient kzin females.
Leaning against the airboat alone near the cave, Locklear felt new misgivings. Kit had argued that his presence at the awakenings would be a Bad Idea. Let them grow used to him slowly, she’d said. Stand tall, give orders gently, and above all don’t smile until they understand his show of teeth. No fear of that, he thought, shifting nervously a half-hour after Kit disappeared inside. I don’t feel like smiling.
He heard a shuffling just out of sight; realized he was being viewed covertly; threw out his chest and flexed his pectorals. Not much by kzin standards, but he’d developed a lot of sinew during the past weeks. He felt silly as hell, and those other kzinrett had not made him any promises. The w’tsai felt good at his belt.
Then Kit was striding into the open, with an expression of strained patience. Standing beside him, she muttered, “Mark me.” Then, seeing his frown: “Your cheek against my neck, Rockear. Quickly.”
He did so. She bowed before him, offering the tip of her tail in both hands, and he stroked it when she told him to. Then he saw a lithe movement of orange at the cave and raised both hands in a universal weaponless gesture as the second kzinrett emerged, watching him closely. She was much larger than Kit, with transverse stripes of darker orange and a banded tail. Close on her heels came a third, more reluctantly but staying close behind as if for protection, with facial markings that reminded Locklear of an ocelot and very dark fur at hands and feet. They were admirable creatures, but their ear umbrellas lay flat and they were not yet his friends. Kit moved to the first, urging her forward to Locklear. After a few tentative sniffs the big kzinrett said, in that curious ancient dialect, “I am (something truly unpronounceable), prret in service of Rockear.”
She bent toward him, her stance defensive, and he marked her as Kit had said he must, then stroked her tabby-banded tail. She moved away and the third kzinrett approached, and Locklear’s eyes widened as he performed the greeting ritual. She was either potbellied, or carrying a litter! Both of their names being beyond him, he dubbed the larger one Puss; the pregnant one, Boots. They accepted their new names as proof that they were members of a very different kind of household than any they had known. Both wore aprons of woven mat, Kit’s deft work, and she offered them water from bowls.
As they stood eyeing one another speculatively, Kit surprised them all.
“It is time to release the animals,” she said. “My lord Rockear-the-magician, we are excellent herders, and from your flying boat you can observe our work. The larger beasts might also distract the kzintosh, and we will soon need meat. Is it not so?”
She knew he couldn’t afford an argument now and besides, she was right.
He had no desire to try herding some of those big critters outside anyhow, and kzinti had been doing it from time immemorial. Damned clever tactic, Kit; Puss and Boots will get a chance to work off their nerves, and so will I. He swept a permissive arm outward and sat down in the airboat as the three kzin females moved into the cave.
The next two hours were a crash course in zoology for Locklear, safe at fifty meter height as he watched herds, coveys, throngs and volleys of creatures as they crawled, flapped, hopped and galumphed off across the yellow prairie. A batowl found a perch atop his mast, trading foolish blinks with him until it whispered away after another of its kind. One huge ruminant with the bulk of a rhino and murderous spikes on its thick tail sat down to watch him, raising its bull’s muzzle to issue a call like a wolf. An answering howl sent it lumbering off again, and Locklear wondered whether they were to be butchered, ridden, or simply avoided. He liked the last option best.
When at last Kit came loping out with shrill screams of false fury at the heels of a collie-sized, furry tyrannosaur, the operation was complete. He’d half expected to see a troop of more kzinti bounding outside, but Kit was as good as her word. None of them recognized any of the other stasised kzinti, and all seemed content to let the strangers stay as they were. The airboat did not have room for them all, but by now Kit could operate the polarizer levers. She sat ahead of Locklear for decorum’s sake, making a show of her pairing with him, and let Puss and Boots follow beneath as the airboat slid ahead of a good breeze toward their tacky, unfinished little manor. “They will be nicely exhausted,” she said to him, “by the time we reach home.”
Home. My God, it may be my home for the rest of my life, he thought, watching the muscular Puss bound along behind them with Boots in arrears. Three kzin courtesans for company; a sure ’nough cathouse! Is that much better than having those effing warriors to return? And if they don’t, is there any way I could get across to my own turf, to Newduvai? The gravity polarizer could get him to orbit, but he would need propulsion, and a woven sail wasn’t exactly de rigueur for travel in vacuum, and how the hell could he build an airtight cockpit anyhow? Too many questions, too few answers, and two more kzin females who might be more hindrance than help, hurtling along in the yellow sward behind him. One of them pregnant.
And kzin litters were almost all twins, one male. Like it or not, he was doomed to deal with at least one kzintosh. The notion of killing the tiny male forced itself forward. He quashed the idea instantly, and hoped it would stay quashed. Yeah, and one of these days it’ll weigh three times as much as I do, and two of these randy genial’s will be vying for mating privileges. The return of the kzin ship, he decided, might be the least of his troubles.
That being so, the least of his troubles could kill him.
Puss and Boots proved far more help than hindrance. Locklear admitted it to Kit one night, lying in their small room off the “great hall,” itself no larger than five meters by ten and already pungent with cooking smokes. “Those two hardly talk to me, but they thatch a roof like crazy. How well can they tunnel?”
This amused her. “Every pregnant kzinrett is an expert at tunneling, as you will soon see. Except that you will not see. When birthing time nears, a mother digs her secret birthing place. The father sometimes helps, but oftener not.”
“Too lazy?”
She regarded him with eyes that reflected a dim flicker from the fire dying in the next room’s hearth, and sent a shiver through him. “Too likely to eat the newborn male,” she said simply.