Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

She half-closed her eyes, not better to hear the Whisperer – for she didn’t need Her for this – but to summon up the memory of Saash’s old intonation, which to Rhiow’s mind had always been better, both more precise and more heartfelt than her own. Why do you always hold back on this? she could remember Saash saying one night down in her old home in the parking garage. Let it run loose and give it full value, for Iau’s sake; what’s it for but to shame the Lone One? Since it’s all about old Shadowpelt having the grace to be ashamed in the first place –

She put her whiskers forward. “There was a time,” Rhiow said, “when it was afternoon in Heaven, and the Queen’s light lay long and low across the Hearth. Then as evening drew in, the dark shadow of her daughter sa’Rraah fell across that light – “

The Silent Man reached over to the bookshelf and pulled out a spare pad and a pencil. If the Queen is God, he said, this is possibly the Devil?

“Close enough,” Urruah said. “But more conflicted.”

Runyon raised his eyebrows, nodded. Okay —

Rhiow shot a glance at Urruah. Conflicted, indeed, she said. “Well. When they saw that shadow, the Queen’s other children drew aside to make room for the Shadowed one, for it’s rare that She comes home to the Pride, and all hope that someday She’ll come to stay.

“For a while sa’Rraah lay in the warmth of the Hearth, and none spoke. And finally the Whisperer, impatient of knowledge as always, said, ‘Sister, where have you been?’ ‘Out and about in the Worlds,’ said sa’Rraah, ‘seeing how the light and shadow strive, and which comes best from the strife.’ Now this is always the Shadowed One’s way, seeking victory rather than justice, and endings rather than beginnings; so most of those who lay about the Hearth turned their eyes away at hearing she was yet walking her old path as always, and tails twitched. But the Queen lay quiet, and said, “And what have you found?”

“’Life, and Life again,’ said the Lone One; ‘but never so robust that it cannot be snuffed out, or its intentions made to fail. You were unwise, O Mother, to make it so weak a prey.’

“’Perhaps it is less weak than you think,’ said Iau the Queen, ‘since despite all your efforts over the vast expanse of Time, Life yet persists.’

“Now, sa’Rraah is no fool to taunt the Queen to Her face; yet like any Person, sometimes the desire to play overcomes her. And the Queen ever sees the kitten in the Person full-grown, and will look aside and let Her tail be chewed… within reason. So each knowing this of the Other, sa’Rraah then said to the Queen, ‘Are You so sure of that that You will let me put some corner of creation to that test?’

“Hearing that, Aaurh and the Whisperer growled low in their throats. But the Queen stretched and said, ‘Daughter of mine, if you think I will let you play this play with the fabric of reality, you think wrongly. If Life is the throatball you gag at, then Life will be what bears your enmity: some small corner of it, as you say. But do not be too sure the play will go your way.’

“’And You will not interfere?’ said sa’Rraah.

“’I am in Life and cannot be separated from it,’ said the Queen. ‘But I will of Myself not act… any more than usual.’

“With this the Shadowed One had to be satisfied. Yet she growled and licked her chops. ‘And what Life shall I test?’ said sa’Rraah. ‘There is no joy in the wager unless You run some risk.’

“Risk there shall be, for you shall test People who are dearest to me,’ said the Queen. ‘And in this time that will be Sehau and Aifheh, whose time it is to be born now, and for whom I have waited long.’ And She purred so that all Heaven heard it. ‘I have wrought and intended them for each other since the deeps of time: they will express love as it will ever be best expressed among my People, and as it ought to have been before the ways were darkened and love’s time became brief.’ And just for that moment Iau opened one Eye, and its terrible light rested on sa’Rraah.

“All the Queen’s other children held utterly still, and even sa’Rraah crouched down, all dismayed: for her own work it had been that the ways of the worlds were darkened by her invention, death. Yet after a moment the Shadowed one looked up again, emboldened to spite by Iau’s forbearance. ’Queen and Mother,’ said sa’Rraah, ‘there is nothing You can make that I cannot mar.’

“The Queen merely closed her Eye again, and said, ‘That the event shall prove. Go your ways, my daughter, and do your devoir.’

“So sa’Rraah rose and stretched and padded away from the Hearth of Heaven. And in the outer circles of reality, in the world where the People dwell, Sehau was born outside a city of ehhif; and far from him, in a wild place into which her dam had been cast, Aifheh was littered.”

The Silent Man glanced up from the pad on which he’d been scribbling. What city? he said.

Rhiow looked at Hwaith, for this was a part of the story that she’d never given the slightest thought to. Hwaith shrugged his tail.

“Pittsburgh,” Urruah said.

Hwaith stared at him. Rhiow rolled her eyes. Urruah immediately tucked himself up into a more compact shape, suitable for running away suddenly if he had to: but the look in his eyes was still full of mischief.

Rhiow let out a breath. “Anyway! Sehau was a tom: Aifheh was a queen – “

But not God, said the Silent Man.

“Not God,” Rhiow said, realizing that no matter what she did, with this audience there was no hope that the telling would go smoothly. “Sehau was a brindle kitten, and Aifheh white with a black-patched pelt. Each one grew quickly, and when their kittening days were done, each did as many People do: began to roam the world, departing territories that were too full of their own kin to search for places where they could become part of new prides, and their own kits would prosper when the time came. And it was in woodland between the city and the wild that they met for the first time. Each was hungry, for they were very young, and neither was expert in the hunt as yet. Sehau had found a place in the woods where inside a little bank he could hear the fieldmice moving and speaking to each other. He meant to wait till night to catch them, when he would have the advantage: and from a hidden place in the brush he watched them go in and out of their den. But the longer he watched the less his stomach could bear it any more, nor could he wait till night. When the next fieldmouse came rustling out, he jumped on it. And from the brush behind the little bank, where Sehau could not see, Aifheh jumped on it at the same moment.

“In their shock and surprise, they fought over the mouse, and it got away. They were angry with each other: but they were so young that they soon forgot their anger, and looked at each other curiously, and exchanged names. They met again in the days that passed, and shortly they began to hunt together, because they had each been alone for so long and each missed the sound and smell and touch of other People. Soon they were friends. And before much longer Aifheh came into heat, and Sehau was ready for her; and then they were not just friends, but lovers.

“Now the Shadowed One had been watching for this; for if the loves of these two were what the Queen Herself had been awaiting them, then surely they were worth thwarting. Aifheh kindled from that first joining, and grew great with her litter: but sa’Rraah so twisted the kindling of the new life in her that the kittens all died in her womb, and their death poisoned her, so that she too was soon to die.

“Sehau was wild with fear and grief, and cried and licked Aifheh and prayed to the Queen for her life. But Aifheh said, ‘My love, this body is only the first. We are People, and there are lives to come. I will be born again, and I will await you. Make no unnatural haste to meet me, for that Queen Iau forbids. But be born again, and I will cross the world to find you, and we will have our love again: this I swear.’

“Crying with his pain, but seeing her hope, and that it was the only way, Sehau swore by the Queen that it should be so. And Aifheh died.

“Sa’Rraah laughed at her death, and if Sehau had any fears of a long life, they were vain: for the Shadowed One saw to it that while crossing ice on a frozen river that winter, the ice broke under Sehau and the water’s flow under the surface trapped him under the ice, and there he drowned. At this sa’Rraah laughed again and went off into the shadows of the world, pleased with her frustration of the Queen’s great desire, and waiting to see whether there would be any need for another move in the game.

“She was more amused than surprised when a brindle kitten was born no more than a month later in the wild, and knew her own name to be Aifheh: and Sehau was born again with a white pelt and black patches, not two months after that, in another ehhif city nearby. Sehau was thrown out of her dam’s home by some ehhif as an unwanted thing, one more kitten in a place where there were too many People for too little food, and he took to the roads alone and hungry, thought searching for something more than food. Aifheh went out into the woods very young, almost before she was full weaned, knowing there was someone she needed to meet. And there in the autumn of that year they met again as kittens, and leapt on each other, and played and rolled and laughed and wept, though the sorrow was from another life, not this one: this one so far was all joy.

“Of course sa’Rraah knew of their reunion: for the game she played was new, and she had been listening at the boundary between life and the depths within life, waiting for the scent of their returning souls as Sehau and Aifheh had once waited for the rustle of the fieldmouse to come out of the bank. ‘My Dam and Queen is yet a fool,’ thought sa’Rraah, ‘to play the same move twice.’ And this time she let Aifheh and Sehau grow older, for the amusement of watching them grow and love their small doomed love, while thinking of how she would end them, this time in some way more cruel and amusing. And this time Aifheh bore her kittens live, and raised them until their eyes were just open, and they were at their most helpless: and then in those woods under the shelter of the mountains, the wild dogs found them and her and Sehau, and tore and devoured them all. But even as they died, Aifheh and Sehau renewed their oath: and sa’Rraah went away, pleased with her sport.”

The Silent Man was scribbling away at speed now, the same shorthand he had been using at the party. Now he paused and looked at Rhiow. I am detecting a pattern, he said.

Rhiow bowed her head to him in the human gesture. “Their third life,” she said, “came a few months later: for after such trauma the soul takes longer to remember its shape. And once again a brindle kitten and a white-pelt with patches like night were born, though this time the queen was the brindle again and the tom the day-and-night. This time sa’Rraah was listening more carefully for their souls, and twisted the path between the depths of Life and the world in such a way as to cause Aifheh and Sehau to be born a thousand miles apart. Alone they grew, and alone they sought for each other through a decade’s worth of years – neither ever taking a mate, each speaking to every Person they met to find some word of the other. And a legend grew up right across a continent of the two People who each sought a mate they had never met but whom they knew intimately. Eventually they found each other: and sa’Rraah saw to it that it was not until the two old age-crippled People finally set eyes on each other, across a rainy hillside clearing no more than ten feet wide, that the earth quaked in the place where they were, and the rainsoaked land slipped away from the hill and buried them alive. But in the single look they exchanged, Sehau and Aifheh remade their oath before they died.