The string structure snapped away to nothing.“Au,I’m glad there are gates,” Saash said, and flopped down on her side. “Who’d want to do that every time you wanted to go any distance? It’s bad enough for ten blocks.”
“That’s why Iau gave us feet,” Rhiow said. “Urruah? You okay?”
He sat down, blinking.“I will be after I eat something.”
He’s fine,Rhiow thought, amused.“Now let’s see about this one—” She peered at the kitling. Under the grime, most of which Saash had gotten off, he was white with irregular black patches on back and flanks and face: one splotch sat on his upper lip, creating an effect like Carl’s mustache. Ear-tips, tail-tips, and feet were black.Hu-rhiwwas the Ailurin name for this kind of pattern: day-and-night. He lay there breathing hard, ears back, eyes squeezed shut.
Conscious,Rhiow thought,but unwilling to accept what’s been happening to him. And why wouldn’t he be?For not all People believed in wizards. Many who did believe were suspicious of them, thinking they somehow desired to dominate other People, or else they mocked wizards as unnecessary or ineffective, saying that they’d never seen a wizard do anything useful.Well, that’s the whole point,Rhiow thought,to do as much good as possible, as quietly as possible. What the Lone One doesn’t have brought to Its attention. It can’t ruin.But the generally dismissive attitude of other People was something you got used to and learned to work around. After all, the situation could have been much worse … like that of theehhifwizards. Rhiow often wondered how they got anything done, since hardly any of their kind knew they existed or believed in them at all, and preserving that status quo was part of their mandate.
That little body still lay curled tense; Rhiow caught a flicker of eyelid.Conscious, all right. We’ll have some explaining to do, but it can wait. “Saash,” she said, “would you feel inclined to give him a bit more of a wash? He’ll wake.”
“Certainly.” Saash too had seen that betraying flicker. She curled closer to the youngster and began enthusiastically washing inside one ear. Only the most unconscious cat could resist that for long.
The youngster’s eyes flew open, and he sneezed: possibly from the washing, or the smell that still lingered about him. He tried to get up, but Saash put a paw firmly over his midsection and held him down.
“Lemme go!”
“You’ve had a bad morning, kit,” Rhiow said mildly. “I’d lie still awhile.”
“Don’t call me kit,” he said in a yowl meant to be threatening. “I’m a tom!”
Urruah gave him an amused glance.“Oh. Then we can fight now, can we?”
“Uhh…” The kit looked up at Urruah—taking in the size of him, the brawny shoulders and huge paws, and, where the tips of the forefangs stuck out so undemurely, the massive teeth. “Uh, maybe I don’t feel well enough.”
“Well, then,” Urruah said, “at your convenience.” He sat down and began to wash. Rhiow ducked her head briefly to hide a smile. It was, of course, an excuse that the rituals of tom-combat permitted: most of those rituals were about allowing the other party to escape a fight and still save face.
“You have reason not to feel well,” Saash said, pausing in her washing. “About fifty rats took bites out of you. You lie still, and we’ll work on that.”
“Why should you care?” the kit said bitterly.
“We have our reasons,” Rhiow said. “What’s your name, youngster?”
His eyes narrowed, a suspicious look, but after a moment he said,“Arhu.”
“Where’s your dam?” Saash said.
“I don’t know.” This by itself was nothing unusual. City-living cats might routinely live in-pride, even toms sometimes staying with their mother and littermates; or they might go their own way at adolescence to run with different prides, or stay completely unaligned.
“Are you inhhau’fih?”Saash used the word that meant any group relationship in general, rather thanrrai’fih,a pride-relationship implying possible blood ties.
“No. I walk alone.”
Rhiow and Saash exchanged glances. He was very young to be nonaligned, but that happened in the city, too, by accident or design.
“There’ll be time for those details later,” Rhiow said. “Arhu, how did you come to be down there where we found you, in the tunnel?”
“Someone said I should go there. They laughed at me. They said,I dare you…”Arhu yawned, both weariness and bravado.“You have to take dares…”
“What was the dare?”
“She said,Walk down here, and take the adventure that comes to you—”
Rhiow’s eyes went wide. “ ‘She.’ What did she say to you first?”
“When?”
“Before that.”
A sudden coolness in Arhu’s voice, in his eyes. “Nothing.”
“Fwau,”Rhiow said; a bit roughly, for her, but she thought it necessary.“Something else has to have been said first.” She thought she knew what, but she didn’t dare lead him…
Arhu stared at her. Rhiow thought she had never seen such a cold and suspicious look from a kit so young. Pity rose up in her; she wanted to cry,Who hurt you so badly that you’ve lost your kittenhood entire? What’s been done to you?But Rhiow held her peace. She thought Arhu was going to give her no answer at alclass="underline" he laid his head down sideways on the concrete again. But he did not close his eyes, staring out instead into the dimness of the garage.
Come on,Rhiow thought.Tell me.
“I was in the alley,” Arhu said. “The food’s good there: they throw stuff out of that grocery store on the other side of it, the Gristede’s. But the pride there, Hrau and Eiff and Ihwin and them, they caught me and beat me again. They said they’d kill me, next time; and I couldn’t move afterward, so I just lay where they left me. No one else came for a good while… Then she must have come along while I was hurting. I couldn’t see her: I didn’t look, it hurt to move. She said,You could be powerful. The day could come when you could do all kinds of good things, when you could do anything, almost, with the strength I can give you… if you lived through the… test, the… hard time…” Arhu made an uncertain face, as if not sure how to render what had been said to him. “She said,If you take what I give you, and live through the trouble that follows—and it will follow—then you’ll be strong forever. Strong for all your lives.”His voice was going matter-of-fact now, like someone repeating a milk-story heard long ago against his dam’s belly wanted that. To be strong. I said,What could happen to me that would be worse than what’s already happened? Do it. Give it to me.She said,Are you sure? Really sure?I said,Yes, hurry up, I want it now.She said,Then listen to what I’m going to say to you now, and if you believe in it, then say it yourself, out loud.And I said it, though some of it was pretty stupid. And it was quiet then.”
“Hmm. Where was this alley, exactly?” said Urruah.
“Ru, shut up. You can check the Gristede’s later. Arhu,” Rhiow said, “say what she told you to.”
A little silence, and then he began to speak, and a shiver went down Rhiow from nose to taiclass="underline" for the voice was his, but the tone, the meaning and knowledge held in it, was another’s. “In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, I assert that I will employ the Art that is Its gift in Life’s service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way: nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fit to do so—looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded…”
No hesitation, no uncertainty; as if it had been burned into his bones. Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all looked at one another.