Page 101 of Blacktail

The Old Kitty Mother answered now as she had then, and was surprised a second time by the sound of her own voice. “The mind is bound by the language it knows,” she said in the field of violets, and again in the desert silence at the other end of her life. “We see only that which we can see, hear the words we can hear. The mind is bound by what it supposes to be real. The eye will see only in a certain range—to all that lays a little above or below that range we are blind.”

All heads turned to look at her on that spring morning. At the other end of her life some young dog cried out in the night.

“Yes,” answered Mother, regarding her with her unblinking eyes. “Night Dancer has found the heart of it. Take care with the words you speak, children. Each one that passes your lips will bind your thought forever after.”

“Is it so much?” asked Bird-Feather, who still had not learned. “A single word, I mean?”

That time no one had an answer. Mother turned away. “I will speak no more on it.”

Words, yes, symbols and their bindings.

By now she had learned the answer to Bird-Feather’s question. It was a fine, shining thing, one of the best answers she knew. In all of her long life the field of violets had never been far from the heart of her.

It was the field of violets where she went in those days to meditate and practice her craft. It was the field of violets where she dreamed her dreams as a kitten, where she learned to listen for that which might yet be, where she heard the first faint footfalls herald the coming of the Forest God.

It was in the field of violets that her mother had come to her and stolen her soul.

She understood from a young age that something inside her mother was dead. Whether this was a result of her ambition or the cause of it was something she never conclusively established. Sometimes—usually before a battle—the Old Kitty Mother would take the question out and examine it, probing it as you might probe a mouth wound with your tongue.

Mother came to her one night as she lay meditating, came to her and carried her away, bound her in her jaws like a kitten. Her mother was not so great a witch as Night Dancer became, but she was great enough, when the Old Kitty Mother was still young. In a few steps Mother had stolen her from the field of violets, taken her into the vast emptiness that lies between life and death and through it to the gates and walls that stood at time’s end. This was the locus of the blackest magics. Here the flow of life broke down at odd moments. Voices cried out over the walls.

Mother carried her there, bound and struggling in a web of spell-craft, and laid her down before the gates. In later days she would know a power that Mother and the rest of them could only dream of, but at that time and place she was still mostly a kitten. In her mother’s fangs she was helpless.

Mother called out a greeting to what lay behind the gates.

After a few breaths, the rheumy eye of hell cracked open, regarding her. When she saw that it recognized her, had been waiting for her, the Old Kitty Mother begged, the only time in her life she would ever do so. “Please, Mother,” she said simply, “not this. Anything but this.”

But her mother was insane. Love was dead in her. The crow, Karakaa, had bargained with hell to save his people. Her mother did this only for some favor, some greed of her own. Looking in her eyes at that moment, the Old Kitty Mother learned the central lesson of her life—the lesson she carried to the dens of the two-legs, the lesson that called her to wake a sleeping god, the lesson that made her cry out in the night.

The eye of hell opened wide. A moment later a thing slithered out of it that even now, at the height of her power, she would not allow herself to remember fully. In a few breaths it stood over her, touching her fur with claw and tentacle and chitin.

“Are thize the onze?” it asked.

“Yes,” said her mother, her voice stiff with fear. “Just as we agreed. Have you brought what I asked?”

“Oh, yeze,” it said. “A trade we will make, yeze. Fine trade.” It tickled her under her little kitten chin. “Ize thize one agreeeed? Ize it with love for you?”

“She will do as I say,” Mother answered. “She is my child.”

“Ze muzher may zpeaks for the childze,” it said, waving its tentacles in agreement. “Zhish iz zhe way of hell.” It brought its face down close to her. “We will play zweet games in my chamberze, yeze,” it said. “But, I zhink, not yetze.”

“What?” said Mother. “This was not what we—”

“Livze long, yeze. Sin many tasty sinze. Marinate in zhem, yeze. Come to me when yourze zoul is zhweet and fullz of flavorze, yeze…but rememberze alwayze…I wait. For you I wait.”

Such was the shape and name of her damnation.

She cried out then, yes, weak and kittenish. But that sound was the last show of weakness the Old Kitty Mother ever made in all her long life. She was silent then and thereafter, even when it reached inside her, even when it withdrew its prize and carried it away, lost forever behind the nictating eye of hell.

The binding spell fell away then. She lay before her mother, dazed and panting. One by one her sisters emerged from the blackness where they had watched, studying their mother at her craft. They came to her, sniffed her in fascination and revulsion and horror, wondering what had been taken from her…and what their mother had gained in return.

But Old Kitty Mother only lay still, pushing the breath in and out of her chest as she wandered among her field of violets.

She never learned what it was that her mother had bought with her soul. She did not die that night, though there were times when she wished she had. She awoke the next morning alone in the woods. Mother and her sisters had moved on.

She always assumed that they had left her for dead—that seemed in keeping with the contempt they had shown her all her life. The Old Kitty Mother saw much, even then, but it never occurred to her that perhaps their contempt had shifted somewhere along the way. On the night they offered her to hell it was mostly a false thing, used to mask the fear they felt rising in them when they looked on her. She never remembered how they stood over her in a circle, attacking her in unison, Mother even using the power she had bought with the stolen soul, never remembered that they had been unable to touch her, that she had been beyond them all, even then.

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