While he worked, the Patriarch called for a snack of vatach. Servants released the little animals in the lair and the Patriarch sicked Lismichi on them. She chased them down with clever pounces and swivels, skidding on rugs and overturning a few chairs. She brought her first catch to the Patriarch in her teeth and dumped it upon his golden plate, where he ripped it apart, devouring the tidbit, bones and all, before licking his chin and licking his fur where the blood had spattered. The next delicacy came to the admiral, who was not as neat. Lismichi licked him clean.
Then after a frantic chase, she brought to Grraf-Nig the last vatach, squealing unharmed in her teeth. Gently she crushed its skull with her jaws before she laid it carefully on his plate. He was too excited to be hungry. He scratched her head, and put the plate on the floor for her. She thanked him with a whack of her hips against his leg, pushed aside a rug so that she wouldn’t bloody it, and devoured her catch on the floor, daintily getting no blood on her fur.
“She’s so well trained,” marveled the ex-slave-trainer, who could appreciate such niceties.
“For a female,” bellowed the Patriarch.
When Grraf-Nig followed his kdatlyno guide back to his quarters with his new wife on a leash, he saw none of the marvels of the Palace. His mind was racing over his new duties. He was the Hssin barbarian who held the fate of the Patriarchy in his decisions. Where would it go? Another war for sure, with W’kkai and Kzin fighting over the territory recovered from the ephemeral man-beasts.
In his room Lismichi sniffed about her unfamiliar surroundings. He called up a map of Kzin on the flatplate, zooming in on the design daedal that was to be his new home, Power and responsibility and respect like he’d never known. It frightened him to the point where he could hardly think.
I’m too old to be afraid, he thought.
He took his wife by the scruff of the neck and threw her on the bed which had once seemed too large and now seemed too small. After those horrible months in that conundrum cell with only liquid meal and a water hose to keep him alive and a stone floor to sleep on, having a kzinrett again, and such a pleasant one, was a real pleasure. No use trying to sex with her. She wasn’t in estrus and wouldn’t be in the mood. It was always more exciting when they had that delicious smell about them and were full of desire. A Hero really needed five wives with their periods properly staggered to enjoy life.
He dimmed the lights and took one last look at the ruins of the old palace against the mountainside, undressed, and brought his great body down on the bed to snuggle with his petite wife. What an honor to be given a kzinrett from the Patriarch harem! He would cherish her. She was licking his face affectionately and he had to dodge out of the way of her tongue. The pleasures of life! He nibbled at her huge floppy ears! He didn’t deserve such a beauty.
She went to sleep in his arms, still smelling slightly of wood smoke. He didn’t sleep. He had too much to ponder. He was remembering the desperate loneliness of space. I was mad then. He had his malfunctioning hypershunt motor, and his slaves, and a mangled world to remind him of the deadly beasts from Man-sun. Cuddling with Lismichi nostalgically reminded him of his days with the Nora-beast in that dimly remembered palazzo of the nightmare Hssin.
She had been under control then, the memory of her past gone, her language capability gone, no longer a fearsome warrior who had killed the entire crew of a kzin warship and had nearly killed her Trainer-of-Slaves. Peaceful. She was like a young kzinrett curiously learning about her unknown world, learning how to hiss, to get angry, to groom her fur, to beg for food and affection. In many ways like a young kzinrett with a fierce loyally to her children—but not like a kzinrett. Different. Odd the way one grew fond of slaves.
He had slept with her all that time, cuddling like he was cuddling with Lismichi now in the dark. A strange relationship. There had never been any sex—sex between man-beast and kzin was impossible, as much as sex was impossible between kzin and Jotok. She never went into estrus and she smelled wrong so he had never desired her. She had the ugliest ears of any beast he had ever seen. But he had needed her. He loved to stroke her soft fur. She needed him, growing up fresh in a dangerous world surrounded by poisonous gases. When she began to learn to speak again, with the limited language apparatus he had left her, her first words in broken patois were, “My Hero.” The Nora-beast had followed him everywhere as loyal and naive as only a slave can be.
He thought about killing slaves. Lying on his bed in this sacred place where Jotoki had once ruthlessly killed their enslaved kzinti, he tried to imagine being a slave who was being killed by his master. It was impossible. As impossible as to imagine being an animal. Many a kzin killed his slave. Jotoki were delicious. Kdatlyno hide made the finest couch leather. Once on Kzin, Hwass-Hwasschoaw had immediately located a source of human slaves who had long ago been imported from Wunderland as exotic luxuries—and he would skin them to make masks for the rituals of supplication to his Only God. Expensive masks, but that was his taste.
There was no moral reason not to kill a slave.
Yet, Grraf-Nig had been very fond of his Nora-beast. Even on W’kkai she had spent hours taking the burrs out of his fur. Her Monkeyshine was probably the only son he’d ever have, a warrior in his liver. A kzin could miss not having sons. He could be enraged when another kzin murdered his helpless sons as if they were no more than slaves. Some of his best friends had carried the ears of other friends on their belt. The Nora-beast was a kzin killer and she terrified him to the point where he might have eaten grass for her. Her son was a warrior. He had been conceited as a youth to suppose that he was such an expert at training slaves. It would take ten generations of culling to make a human slave whose docility would breed true. It would be done—but not in Grraf-Nig’s lifetime.
An image came to him of Monkeyshine charging him across the grass. He caressed his sleeping kzinrett. Maybe he would have other sons. He was pleased that he had substituted carbon dioxide for the nerve gas in the suppositories. He told himself that he had only done it because Hwass’s plan had been stupid to the end. Capturing a hyperdrive ship at the boundaries of Kzinsun by perfidious treachery would have bought a million warriors twice the size of Monkeyshine raging down upon Kzin at a time when the Patriarchy was weak.
Grraf-Nig was a coward.
Chapter 21
The ship was in hyperspace. Major Clandeboye’s pilots were in command and beaming like kids in a drag race. Somehow the three of them had finagled the exchange. Nora and the children remained with them. All were safe from the two terrorizing kzin—giving them a spare room behind the cabin. Still, Yankee had a sense of foreboding. Hwass would never cool his hatred so easily. There could be a lethal joker somewhere. And if there was a joker, he had to find it—now.
Nora’s life-monitors read out their signals-green. The kids’ monitors were in the green. Everyone was breathing in slow motion. The air was good, a little high in carbon dioxide but it always was on such a small ship. It was a little high on kzin body odor, too. It was the hibernation that worried him even though it did not involve freezing. This was a kzin technology and who knew how well it had been adapted to the human metabolism?
He had to see Nora conscious. It was an obsession. And so he began revival procedures, slowly, carefully. Her temperature went up. Her heart rate gradually increased. Her breathing became deeper, less sluggish. All exactly as the yellow kzin had predicted. His claim was that humans couldn’t go under as deeply as kzin, and so revived more quickly. If the mechanical muscle toners were used, no physiotherapy would be needed. The mind drugs duplicated the refreshing functions of sleep but stabilized memory. They would wake up, disoriented, because of the time discontinuity but clear of the normal dulling load of saturated multitasking. At revival, colors would be bright, senses strong, mind ready to focus on the first problem that presented itself.