“You are truly too kind, Your Majesty!” Prince Vsevolod’s ambassador cried. He hefted his sack. Lanius was sure he knew to the farthing how much was due him, and that he could tell by the weight of the sack in his hand whether he’d gotten what he was supposed to. He seemed satisfied, as well he might have. Once he’d stowed away the sack, he went on, “We are also privileged to give you a gift, Your Majesty.”
“Thank you,” Lanius said, as impassively as he could. But he couldn’t help leaning forward a little. The gifts Avornis gave to Chernagors followed strict and ancient custom. The gifts the Chernagors brought to the city of Avornis could be anything at all, by equally strict and ancient custom. Master traders and master mariners, the Chernagors traveled widely over the world’s oceans. They came across things no one else—no one else from lands Avornis knew, anyhow—had ever seen, and sent some of those strangenesses down to the city of Avornis to amaze and delight her kings.
Bitterness surged through Lanius. I won’t be King of Avornis much longer. But stubborn honesty made him shake his head. I won’t be sole King of Avornis much longer. Grus could easily have slain him or sent him to the Maze with his mother. The commodore hadn’t. That was something. Still, Lanius found resentment easier to cultivate than acceptance.
But resentment, too, was forgotten as a pair of Yaropolk’s henchmen carried something large and bulky—but, apparently, not too heavy—and covered by a sheet of silk up to the base of the throne. Two or three royal guardsmen started to interpose themselves between the Chernagors and Lanius. He waved them back, saying, “It’s all right.” They didn’t look as though they thought it was all right, but Lepturus, who as always stood to the left of the Diamond Throne, did not contradict the king. Muttering, the guardsmen returned to their stations.
“Behold, Your Majesty,” one of the Chernagors said, and whisked away the silk to reveal a cage with gilded bars. And in the cage were…
“You’re giving me two cats?” Lanius asked in surprise of a sort altogether different from what he’d expected.
But he realized his mistake even before Yaropolk shook his head and said, “Your Majesty, these are no ordinary cats.”
“I see,” Lanius breathed. “By the gods, Your Excellency, I see.”
At first glance, they did look like plain tabbies, one grayish brown, the other reddish. Only at first glance, though; Lanius’ error had come from speaking too soon. He stared and stared. The beasts had cat faces—indeed, cat heads—but those heads were set on their necks at an angle different from that of any cats he’d ever seen. They were more upright, more erect, not quite manlike but perhaps halfway between man and beast. And their arms—and legs, too, he noted—ended not in paws but in hands with real thumbs.
Some tiny motion in the throne room made the grayish one start. It sprang off the cage floor and swung from bar to bar and from perch to perch as nimbly as a monkey. “Have you Chernagors found some wizardry way to make cats and apes breed?” Lanius asked.
Yaropolk shook his head once more. The tip of his beard whipped back and forth. “A good question, Your Majesty, but not so,” he answered. “Our traders found ’em. There’s an island chain out in the Northern Sea—just where, you’ll understand, I’d sooner not say—where they live. They aren’t as tame as your ordinary cat, but they’re not quite wild, either. The folk who live there use ’em as hunting animals, but most don’t make real friends of ’em, the way we do with cats and dogs. Still, they won’t be dangerous to anybody if you left ’em out of the cage after a bit.”
“What do you call them?” Lanius asked, entranced by the gymnastic show the gray one was putting on. The reddish one stayed on the floor of the cage. It was, he realized, a female, and its belly bulged.
“We can’t pronounce the name the natives use,” the Chernagor said. “They speak a strange language in those islands, one that… oh, never mind. In our tongue, we say obezyana-koshka.”
“That seems strange enough to me,” Lanius remarked.
“In Avornan, it would mean monkey-cat,” Yaropolk said. “Sometimes we just say koshkobez. That would be more like”— he frowned in thought—“like moncat, maybe, though I know moncat isn’t a real word.”
“Moncat.” Lanius tasted the sound of it. “It wasn’t a real word,” he said. “I think it is now, because there’s the thing it names.”
“We’ve given you a mated pair, Your Majesty, and the female’s carrying a litter. If you’re lucky and you take care of them, you’ll be able to keep the line going,” Yaropolk told him. “You can make a pretty penny, I’d bet, selling ’em to folk who have to have the latest thing.” As an ambassador, he should have been more polite, but as a merchant, he could speak freely—and practically. “They aren’t hard to care for, not really. They eat kitchen scraps and anything they can catch. There aren’t a whole lot of squirrels on those islands, I’ll tell you that.”
“I believe it.” Lanius stared at the male beast— the male moncat, he reminded himself. It stared back out of slit-pupiled eyes yellow and shiny as a gold piece. “How soon can I let them out of their cage?” he asked.
“Why, whenever you please, Your Majesty,” Yaropolk answered. “But you’ll maybe want to be careful about where you do it. You have no idea how nimble they can be. If you want to make sure you’ll see them again once you let them out, you’ll do it in a room with narrow, narrow bars across all the windows, and with no holes in the walls.” He paused, seeming to remember something else. “Oh. And once the female has her kittens, you’ll want to find another room like that for the male. Otherwise, he’ll try to kill them.”
“I understand. Thank you for the warning.” Lanius got down from the Diamond Throne and came up to the cage for a closer look at the moncats. Again, royal bodyguards started to shield him from the Chernagors. Again, he waved them back. Again, Lepturus let him get away with it.
He held his hand just outside the bars of the cage, to give the male a chance to smell him. He would have done the same when greeting an ordinary cat he hadn’t met before. The moncat stuck the tip of its nose out through the bars, till it brushed the back of his fingers. He felt the animal’s breath stir the tiny hairs growing there. The moncat sniffed interestedly; his was a smell it hadn’t known before. And it looked at him with, he thought, more attention than a common cat would have paid. After a moment’s thought, he decided that made sense. An animal that spent most of its time in trees would have to be able to see where it was going as well as sniff out prey.
Reaching into the cage with a forefinger, Lanius cautiously scratched the moncat behind the ears. “Careful, Your Majesty,” Yaropolk warned. “It may bite. Like I said, it’s not as tame as your everyday cat.”
“I know,” Lanius answered. “Even an everyday cat may bite. I don’t think the moncat’s going to, though.”
Sure enough, the animal’s eyes slid half shut—it enjoyed the attention. After a moment, it started to purr. The sound wasn’t quite the same as an ordinary cat’s purr; it was a little deeper, a little raspier. But a purr it unmistakably was. Lanius smiled. Yaropolk grinned. So did a couple of the guardsmen close enough to hear the contented buzz.