“Cats are obligate carnivores,” Rachel replied. “That means they have to eat, every day. And they have to have protein, every day. If they don’t, they get sick. Something about fat buildups on their liver. It can kill them.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Rachel, but I don’t see any rabbits coming up to be killed.”
“Kudzi fruits before anything else,” Rachel said. “And they stay in fruit as long as the vines are green. That means that there’s going to be something coming up to eat it besides us. We probably scared some things away when we came up. Possums, raccoons, deer, something. If we just stay here a while and let Azure hunt…”
“Tell it to your mother,” Herzer replied. He had taken off Daneh’s rucksack and was filling it with the fruit, hoping that it wouldn’t release too much juice and ruin the inside of the bag.
“I will,” she said determinedly, and stalked over to where her mother was resting under the tree.
Herzer observed the exchange from afar but could more or less tell how it was going. First Rachel handed Daneh some of the fruit. Then she gestured around at the large field. Next she pointed out the cat, which was poking in every possible hole in the vines looking for something edible to a feline. The argument clearly weighed on Daneh but she shook her head and said her piece. The Rachel said hers with more force. Then Daneh’s face set and she gestured to the south, forcefully. Then Rachel’s voice could be heard from halfway across the open area. Then she stormed off.
“I have never known a more pig-headed, stupid…” she muttered as she passed Herzer.
As she passed, Herzer heard a scurrying in the vines and a field rat ran right in front of him. He had been carrying his staff with the knapsack in his left hand and he quickly dropped the bag, switched hands and then lashed out with the staff. The first blow missed but it turned the rat and the second blow hit.
He called to the cat and tossed the rat towards him as he thought about the implications.
“Rachel, is there some way you can get Azure to sort of… station himself on one side of the vines?”
“I… don’t know, why?” she asked, taking a bite out of a fresh fruit. They had been starving, but the fruit had taken the edge off and now it was already starting to pall.
“If he did we could walk along and sort of push stuff that is in the vines towards him. Things are running in front of us all the time; we’d just sort of have it run in front of us towards him.”
With a little persuasion on Herzer’s part it was done. Daneh continued to sit it out while the two younger members of the group walked back and forth across the vines. Azure quickly became aware of the nature of the game and waited patiently at the edge of the open area as the game was driven to him. In less than an hour he had bagged several field rats and a small rabbit. For Herzer’s part, that was an hour that Daneh wasn’t driving herself to keep going. She had simply sat out of the rain and eaten kudzi fruit until she was near to bursting. All in all it had been a very successful exercise in tact and diplomacy.
“And what is that you’re eating?” Chansa asked, appearing out of the air.
As usual Celine was in her workroom, which was filled with a cacophony of whining, bleating and croaking calls. He glanced at one of the cages along the wall and shuddered at the strange octopus-looking creature in the water-filled interior. The door had a sturdy lock but the creature was pushing at every opening with every appearance of intelligence. It saw him looking at it and came to the front, its skin going through a variety of color changes.
“Jelly babies,” Celine replied, lifting one of the squirming creatures that very much resembled small human children and popping it in her mouth. “Try one?”
Chansa shook his head and turned from the octopus to look at the writhing mass of faintly whining creatures. They were colored various shades and squirmed most unpleasantly.
“Avatars do not eat, Celine,” he reminded her.
“Yeah, that’s why I don’t use avatars,” Celine responded, popping a couple more in her mouth. “Uhmm, lemon.”
“Celine, we need to talk,” Chansa said, making a moue.
“Hmmmr?” she rumbled, her mouth full.
“Have you noticed Paul getting… strange?”
“You mean bug-house nuts?” she asked. “Yeah.”
“I’m not sure he’s quite what we need in the way of leadership,” Chansa said, carefully.
“See yourself in that position?” she asked, standing up and going over to one of the cages along the wall.
“No…” he answered carefully, watching as she extracted another one of her little monsters. This one looked like a fairly normal hamster for a change. He wondered what it was food for. “I was actually wondering if you would consider the position. You have seniority on the Council after Paul.”
“Hah! No thank you. I like it right where I’m at.” She lifted the hamster and cooed at it, bringing it up to a cage that held a weird creature the size of Chansa’s massive hand. The beast might have been a spider or a scorpion; it had features of both. The scorpion’s stinger and pincers coupled were fronted by a spider’s mandibles, and the body, overall, had a very spiderish look to it with long, black legs that ended in sharp points. Celine waved aside the force screen at the top of the cage and dropped the hamster in, waving the field closed as she did.
The spider/scorpion had turned and reared up as the hamster was dropped in and it pounced immediately towards the prey. But as it did the hamster made a flip in midair and, using one paw, bounced off of a branch in the cage. Before the monstrosity in the cage could shift its ground, the hamster was on its back, drawing back its lips to reveal long, fanglike teeth. The fangs punctured the carapace of the spider/scorpion and as the hamster locked its claws into the back of the beast its body visibly shuddered as it sucked out the juices from the interior. The scorpion tail had been jabbing into the little monster repeatedly but it seemed utterly unaffected by the poison.
“No, Chansa, I do not choose to oppose Paul,” she said. “The first reason is that a touch of madness is quite amusing. The second is that you never know how dangerous a simple-looking thing can be.”
As they came down the slope of the Ridge, Rachel paused and looked around.
“Is this Raven’s Mill?” she asked, incredulously.
“That it is,” Tom replied. He had caught up to them just south of the Via Appalia. Too late to help rescue Daneh, for which he had been almost embarrassingly apologetic, and clearly unsure about Herzer’s place in things. He had accepted Daneh’s toneless statement that Herzer had also arrived too late to prevent it, but he didn’t pretend that he liked it. He had wanted to ride back down the trail after the band but Daneh convinced him that it was not worth the danger.
Now he was leading the horse that held Daneh and he, too, stopped to look at the scene of activity. “But it’s changed even since I left.”
Rachel had been to the Raven’s Mill Renn Faire on numerous occasions. The bowl of the valley was broken up into, effectively, four different quadrants. The southeast quadrant was “Edmund’s.” It was there, on the east side of Raven’s Creek, that he had his house and a small open area, “cleared fields of fire” was how he put it, around it. Myron also had two or three fields in that sector that he used in rotation.
The “southwest” sector was mostly Myron’s, a large area of cleared fields, some fenced, with a large orchard and vineyard on the hills to the southwest. Up in the hills to the south, behind the two original “owners” of the area, was the mill that had given the town its name. It drew its power from Raven’s Creek and there was a millpond, and dam, up in the hills.