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“Go to your rest,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you tonight, so you might as well sleep. Should you have to run mighty fast in the morning, a good night’s sleep will benefit you.”
“I haven’t got what I need yet,” he said.
“You’re not going to get it now,” she answered. “I’m going to sit here a while, in the dark. I am thinking about whether to say any more to you at all. It’s possible I might. But I would like to grumble to myself a bit, and I don’t want to be overheard.”
“It’s time, Sir Brrr,” said the novice timidly.
She led him to the staircase, which dropped down a wide high stairwell. Above the polished wainscoting on the walls opened a large window with clear panes set in the center, colored borders on the sides. Brrr stood on the top step, waiting for Shadowpuppet to catch up. Brrr lengthened his spine, his neck, to look over the edge of the windowsill, over the curtain wall of the mauntery, to see if he could locate any sign of army divisions or sharpshooters. The sky came down almost to the ground—a flat geography in these parts. Nothing to see but a house or two with some lights on against the dark.
A house right in the way. Poor fools.
“Sir Brrr,” said the novice, using an aggrieved tone to chivy the Lion. He picked up the glass cat, resisting an urge to heave it at the novice’s skull, and followed her without speaking again.
The room to which the novice led the Lion was fitted with three clerestory windows. They were too high for him to leap through, should the place be attacked at night—the worries he carried with him!—and in any instance they were probably too small, too, since he’d put on something of a paunch despite the hard times.
Supper came, and it didn’t sit well, so it went the way it came. Shadowpuppet kept a distance, wrinkling its glassine nose at the stench.
He found he couldn’t sleep on the hard straw mattress, so he curled up on his coat. The stone floor was cold, and Brrr shivered enough to drive Shadowpuppet to the other side of the room, as if the small moony cat was afraid of shattering.
He tossed and twitched, avoiding the last yoke, the worst of it, but as he grew more tired his resistance thinned; and then it was upon him.
The men with their prods and harpoon guns, the net, the ignominious net. The surrender to capture, the terror in the cage, the shame. The accusations, the sentencing. The surgeon with his sedative, a needle and a plunger. Then the scissors of four or five barbers snipping around him, all at once. “Mortification is good for the maturing beast,” said a voice, the surgeon’s, someone’s. “Strip him of his honors, shave his mane, prune him down to nothing, and if he survives he will grow up stronger.”
A shorn head, the sign of a collaborationist.
He couldn’t and wouldn’t place the memory; he wouldn’t give it credit for being true, even. He couldn’t see himself either as a Lion cub or as a gentlebeast financier. The truth remained: He was a hollow in the midst of his own life. He’d never achieved a personal stature, a standard by which to guess the stature of others.
Perhaps it was a dread he had only imagined. If it really had happened, he didn’t want to remember the details. Better that day should stay dead.
Relieved of that darkest recollection, Brrr slipped into sleep at last. He dreamt, and he knew he was dreaming as it happened, which was curious in and of itself, the more so because on the whole Cats rarely dream.
The long lean form of Muhlama H’aekeem extended in his dream-thoughts, stretching elegantly, as if she’d just awakened from a nap by a jungle pool. He licked her spine as she arched it, each vertebra articulating in a sensuous fold one at a time. The goodly form of an Ivory Tigress—
In his dreams she was in estrus, and the smell was like a firecracker in his chest, creaking and ticking to detonate; the firecracker, as if it were something he’d swallowed, moved down, to burn his loins and swell his Lion’s scepter. (King of the Gillikin Forest. In his dreams.) She lashed at him with her tail lovingly, tauntingly: Mount me, mount me now. Her head turned slightly back toward him, the smile like a snarl, the snarl like a smile, and her eyes half-closed, and the rhythm of her rocking causing the obsidian opacity of her eyes to seem splashed as with sea spume, were there such a thing as a sea.
He growled and moaned in his dream, and woke himself up before the accident of release, so he was left pitiably alone. For an instant, a kind of ghost-image of the dream lingered on the inside of his eyelids: The sight of Muhlama H’aekeem prancing away across an outcrop of limestone. She was too far for him to fall asleep and catch her again, and finish his conquest. Too far for him to tell if she was hurt and bleeding—if it was that time—or if she was still the young tempestuous Cat, the runaway from her royal family.
He rolled over on his side, unwilling to look and see if Shadowpuppet had witnessed his midnight indiscretions.
Sleep did not come back. All that unintended testimony he delivered to himself, at Yackle’s canny questions, had brought Muhlama back into his catalog of defeats. He had buried so much. Like a kitten hiding his little birch-twig feces, he had dug in the sand and buried the memories of so many calamities.
Where would she be now, if she had lived?
It wasn’t that I loved her, he told himself. She never let me know enough about her to know if I could love her or not.
Neither, he whimpered to himself, neither did I let her know myself.
Old, old Brrr, crouching in a cold room. Thinking about a saucy Cat from his salad days. What a sad picture of a creature he was! Poorer in every way, except broader of imagination about the treacheries we practice upon one another.
For instance—he nearly smiled at the cleverness of it—he had grown quite capable of thinking opportunist of others. After all, perhaps Muhlama had never loved him. Perhaps she had sized him up (quite literally) and invented a strategy designed to make her ineligible to rule after her father, old what’s-his-name. Yuyodoh. Uyodor, that was it.
If her birth canal was ripped, bled out, scarred, inoperative, she could not bear young to carry on the practice of leadership of the Ghullim. She could abdicate without the tribe’s objection. She could name herself ineligible. Theirs, after all, was a matriarchy, he remembered.
Across the room, the ancient cat spit as if it could imagine what Brrr was stewing over. He had to suppress an urge to fist up his paw and smash it to shards.
He looked at the squares of blackened-turquoise sky punching into the chamber, and the paler turquoise stars twirling on their invisible stems. A moon was rising, bleaching out the stars: Thank Lurlina! He was sure he heard a clock tick, though he had seen no clock on any wall or table. He counted the steps into time that the ticks made, one at a time, until he fell asleep again and could count no longer.
This time he did not dream.
