Miss Harte simply dropped Rhiow. Rhiow was ready for this, indeed grateful for it, and landed on her feet in a state of wicked amusement as the toms, trying not to look like they were hurrying too much, went around Rhiow on either side and headed for Helen. Elwin Dagenham, meanwhile, materialized from out of the middle of the crowd and went hurriedly to greet her. Helen strolled over to him, put out a gracious hand and began complimenting him on the beauty of his house. Toms from elsewhere in the room started to gather around the first group, beauty rather obviously on their minds as well.
“Helen,” Urruah said, having come unsidled again and strolling back in and around her, “is that a little of your head-fur sticking up back there…?”
Whack!“Oww!”
“So perverse,” Siffha’h said, wandering back past Urruah and off through the center of the room, where approximately three-quarters of the guests had abruptly lost interest in the People, the buffet and the bar, the males apparently out of admiration and many of the females out of sheer pique.
“I was kidding!”
“Yeah, sure,” Arhu said, going after his siste, who was heading through a door opposite to the ballroom entrance. “If he’s not careful, somebody’s going to get born an ehhif in his next life, and is it ever going to be messy!”
“Never mind them, Helen,” Urruah said, after shaking his ears back into kilter again: Siffha’h’s southpaw clout was one of Arhu’s chief complaints about life. “Which designer did you trade a wizardry to for that?”
Helen smiled as a glass of wine was put into her hands by one of the crowd of toms she’d suddenly acquired. It’s an Elie Saab from a few years ago, my time, she said silently as she toasted her admirer and had a sip, but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.
Pr?t-a-porter?
Oh, come on,‘Ruah, like I can afford couture on my salary! But I did have a word with the material.
“The right one, I’d say,” Rhiow said: the toms were third-day-of-heat thick around Helen. If there are any secrets worth hearing in this place, I suspect she’ll be the one who gets told them…She glanced around. “Now where’s Miss Harte gone?”
“Wouldn’t think you cared, fishy-breath ‘boy,’” Urruah said, putting his whiskers forward. “Or would have thought you would have been ready with some suggestions.”
“Please,” Rhiow said. “The Queen would have words with me if I’d done what I was thinking of doing.” She glanced around. “It’s too much to hope for that she’d have left. No, there she is, back with the Silent Man and his friends again.”
“Or trying to be,” Urruah said, for no one at the table of senior toms was giving Miss Harte so much as a glance, though she hung over them and chatted about what she saw on the Silent Man’s writing pad and otherwise tried to look as if she was welcome with them. “Never mind her: she’s just salving her wounded ego by ‘playing’ with the old toms instead of the young ones. They’ll soon see her off if they get tired of her eavesdropping.” He stood up, glanced over his shoulder at Helen, who had drifted off toward the buffet with her sudden entourage, and looked to be as much indanger of being fed by hand as Rhiow and the other People had been. “She’s got their tails under her paw; let’s leave her to get on with business. I’ll go see what the youngsters are up to.”
“You do that,” Rhiow said, and stood there watching Urruah, for a wonder, actually walk away from food. Then she flicked an ear at her own sarcasm, possibly something left over from the annoyance of being half-squashed against Anya Harte’s peculiar-smelling chest.
Enough, Rhiow said to herself: that doesn’t have to happen again. If she tries it, I’ll inflict on her a wardrobe malfunction the likes of which these people have never seen. For the moment, I’ll have a wander.
The wander went on for quite a while. Rhiow went out through the back doors of the ballroom, and found that the house seemed to have three wings reaching out from behind the curved fa?ade, and the two outer ones had upstairs levels as well. Then behind it all was a terrace and a pool, and past that a smaller structure, a poolhouse, from which Rhiow could hear the voices of People carrying across the water. One of them was the queen that Sheba had called “Maiwi”; Rhiow could actually smell her all the way from the other end of the pool. No, she thought, I’m not going down there. She eyed the plantings up behind the pool, which went for a little way up the hillside before the native manzanita scrub asserted itself. The two stuccoed outer wings of the house reached right to the hillside, each vanishing under the shade of peppertrees down at that end.
From the darkness, a shadow materialized beside her.“Not going down to visit with our social betters?” Hwaith said.
Rhiow snorted.“Please! I prefer it here with the peasantry. Hwaith, what in Her name’s the matter with Maiwi? Doesn’t she groom? How does she bear herself?”
He waved his tail in an“I don’t know” gesture. “Sheba once told me she thought she might be sick somehow,” Hwaith said. “But what way, I’m not sure. Maybe physically. Maybe in the mind. I don’t understand for myself how someone can get so lazy they won’t walk to their own foodbowl, or can’t be bothered to get up to make siss somewhere away from themselves….”
Rhiow breathed out.“Ah well,” she said, “we’ve got enough problems in our own foodbowls at the moment: can’t solve all the world’s troubles in the flick of a tail.” She glanced around. “Where did the youngsters go? Did you see?”
“They’re inside someplace. But this place has a lot of inside…” He looked over his shoulder. “I’ll go look for them, if you like.”
“No hurry,” Rhiow said. “If Arhu’s using the Eye on something, it’s best not to disturb him. He’ll let me know, or Sif will, if they find anything germane.”
“All right,” Hwaith said, and headed off toward the plantings up at the far end of the pool.
Rhiow watched him go, then padded over to the side of the terrace. In the shadows over there, along with some lounge chairs and planting boxes, there was a birdbath, not nearly high enough to protect any unfortunate bird from a Person. But at this time of night, it wasn’t birds she was interested in: it was water. There had been plenty of things for the ehhif at the buffet to drink, but not much for People: and Rhiow knew better than to drink pool water. Besides the chemicals, she thought, Iau only knows what the ehhif have been doing in there…
She tensed, leapt, balanced on the rim of the birdbath. There was indeed water in it, and there in the shadows she crouched carefully and drank. I could drink this whole thing, Rhiow thought; I had no idea I was this thirsty. Still, better to leave some for somebody else—
“ – not sure I want to be involved,” said an ehhif-queen’s soft voice from over by the ballroom doors. “You know how some people are if they get word that anyone’s trying to upset the status quo.”
“But this wouldn’t be like that,” said another voice, a tom’s. “Dolores, it’s just not fair to you. You see how you keep getting passed over just because you wouldn’t – “
“It’s not that, Ray. It’s the methods. Just because they’re being unfair to me doesn’t mean it’s right for me to be unfair to them.”
There was something about the pain in the queen-ehhif’s voice that brought Rhiow’s head up, held her where she was. The woman was short, slight, wearing a long pale gown; her hair was dark and short, her face in shadow and hard to make out in this light. The man was tall, slim, wearing a tuxedo as many of the ehhif-toms were this evening; his hair and brows were dark, but there was little else that even a Person’s eyes could make out with bright light behind him and his face turned away toward the pool and the hillside. “Dolores,” he said. “This ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ stuff, you’ve got to let it go. It’s doing you no good. What point is being the only principled actress at the studio when you’re also the only one whose contract isn’t going to get picked up?”