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“Have we heard something we ought not hear?” said Twigg.
“She’s too smart for that; she will have known we were quivering back here like mice,” replied Stemm. “But nobody trusts what we say anyway, so who cares?”
“Is it like that?” asked Brrr. “Is Uyodor H’aekeem so driven? So unyielding? Would he care that much if his oldest daughter renounced her obligations?”
“And do what?” asked Twigg. “Run a nursery school for malformed forest creatures? It’s inconceivable. Ivory Tigers live to thrive, and they thrive through keen military readiness. She can have no other notion for herself. It’s not allowed.”
“She’s touched in the head,” said Stemm. “Of course, don’t listen to me, I’m a dolt-bolt, what do I know?”
“Well, I know what they think,” said Twigg. “It’s all honor and tradition and how things are done. And how they’ve been done for the past twenty chieftainships. Their elegant history of independence weighs on them, their own style of yoke. Slaves to themselves. Do as well as we have always done! Don’t be the weak link in the chain of our ongoing history. What a lump of cold congealed pottage it all is, at least to me.”
“Shall I leave or shall I stay?” It seemed demeaning to ask advice of tree elves, but Brrr was caught in indecision.
“Makes no difference to us. Stay, enjoy our cooking. Leave without permission, and we have Lion stew on the menu for the evening. Your choice. It’s a free woods.”
So Brrr allowed himself to stay and be courted by Piyanta and Zibria again, though they seemed less appealing now that he’d met Muhlama. In time he asked to take a nap, and he sent them off giggling and blushing back to their enclave.
• 3 •
W AS HE a guest of the Ghullim or a prisoner? He couldn’t answer the question for himself assuredly. If a guest, eventually he’d have to leave. If a prisoner, he supposed he ought to protest his incarceration. Still, what kind of incarceration was this? Exercise, the morning run, and rock-scramble with Muhlama and her companions. Hardly a punishment.
Brrr relaxed; what else could he do? He enjoyed the meals, sometimes cooked by the tree elves, sometimes caught and served bloody raw by the Ivory Tiger hunters. (He’d abandoned vegetarianism when he’d arrived in Shiz, though he preferred the human custom of cooking the meat.) He took part in games of hide-and-seek at which he was always it, because he, alone among the Cats, couldn’t scale the bark of a tree nor hide in the foliage of its canopy. Even emaciated with hunger, he weighed twice what an adult male Ivory Tiger weighed.
Afternoons—a Lion’s laziest time—he dozed a short distance away from where Uyodor H’aekeem held court. Muhlama disappeared. He wondered whether she was conducting her ablutions, or napping in a private boudoir, or—he tried not to visualize this—pursuing a dalliance with some other creature. It was none of his business. And he would never know: in her regal demeanor, she shone, and deflected close scrutiny, too, like a shellac.
Still, the idea burned him and teased him a little.
He had never expected to appeal to anyone. He didn’t much appeal to himself. He conceded the obvious: Perhaps he was being kept around as a spot of comic interest, like the dotty maiden aunt trotted out into the family parlor to amuse the neighbors and ensure that the conversation remained innocent and droll. But so what? He was growing used to Muhlama’s manner. Her high style and her higher disdain, which sometimes flowered into impatience.
Brrr and Muhlama disagreed from time to time, and she even lashed out at him, but he took no offense. Disapproval was better than invisibility.
He’d been with the Ghullim a month, or even two, when the equilibrium was shattered. One night, after a feast of braised loin of warthog served with mushrooms, Uyodor H’aekeem awoke with a start. He claimed he had been snared in a bad dream. (It seemed that Ivory Tigers rarely dreamed, but when they did, it was a bad sign.) The truth was, though, that the raw terrain was being washed with high winds and cracking branches. The chief had probably been startled by the fall of a tree nearby.
Dreams were always warnings. But what did it mean? Unfamiliar with the conventions of dream, Uyodor called Brrr to his side.
“The dream had human men in it,” said the Ivory Tiger, pacing back and forth in the teeth of the dry gale. “You’ve lived in the world of men, you say. Tell me how I should interpret the dream. Tell me why I have had it now.”
“The storm unsettled you,” said Brrr. “With your sharp ear, you heard a cry of alarm from some pitiless creature hurled through the high winds. Give it no mind.”
“It was a dream,” Uyodor insisted. “Where did it come from?”
“Perhaps the mushrooms were off?” But this was too glib. Uyodor glared and repeated what he could of his murky midnight vision. It was less clear than ever; it had dangerous men in it. Cats, Brrr thought, could have no more revealing dreams than socks or mustard could.
But he didn’t care to make things up. “Have you considered perhaps dismissing your chefs?”
“Are you proposing poison?”
“Heavens! No.” Brrr wanted no more blood on his paws, not even the thin silly blood of tree elves. “Perhaps your palate needs a change—your indigestion a result of a kind of curiosity for something new…”
The wind snatched at one of the golden veils and flew it away.
“Perhaps you need to move camp,” said Brrr. “Maybe the dream was calling a warning to pack up and leave here before a disaster stronger than a storm should strike.”
This was more like it. The chief retired to spend the rest of the night sleepless, and Brrr crawled back into the nook he’d been designated, a cleft under a protruding slab of pinkish granite. A moon was up and the skies were clear, and Brrr could see that the tree elves had climbed into their iron pots to keep from being blown away.
At dawn Uyodor H’aekeem convened a council of elders. He gave out his orders on the legitimacy of the Lion’s advice. They would retreat to a new campsite at once, cull food from fresher sources, avoid some disaster that must be coming their way at the place they were about to abandon.
His tribe reacted with the usual politesse and immediacy. Everyone except Muhlama, who without comment disappeared into the forest.
