The Big Meow

Urruah’s tail was twitching against the desk gently and rhythmically, an amused gesture. The Silent Man, for his own part, paused again in his shorthand. It gets worse now, I take it, he said.

“Lives four, five, and six,” Urruah said, “vary from version to version, depending on who’s telling it and how. But they boil down to: mid-length lives in which each has the most alluring possible lover presented to them – “

“Usually sa’Rraah herself in disguise,” Hwaith said.

“ – and they both refuse her, and die. Long lives during which both are repeatedly kept from meeting each other until they die. And then both killed in their mothers’ wombs, never even drawing a breath.”

And still they come back, looking for each other, said the Silent Man.

Rhiow bowed her head again. “By life seven,” she said, “when once again the brindle and the night-and-light pelted kittens are born, sa’Rraah isn’t even watching at the borderland, so certain is she that they won’t come back. But they do, and once again they’re born and find their way to one another, and they live their love for many years. Sa’Rraah, as you might guess, is furious. She comes to them in her full splendor – which is considerable: even a fallen daughter of God will command your attention when she turns up staring at you across your food bowl — and she offers them a bargain. She’ll kill them now – painlessly, peacefully – and renounce her vendetta against them, if they’ll renounce their oath. ‘I warn you,’ the Shadowed One says, ‘die now, and part, and be done with it. Die now and come again without your oath and I will release you from my enmity: you may live your lives apart, with other loves even, and go into the dark at last in peace, no more my prey. But come again and try to keep your oath and I will hunt you without mercy to the boundaries of life and into the darkness beyond: for you will sooner have a tenth life than you will have your love in my despite.’”

The Silent Man paused in his writing and glanced swiftly at Rhiow. Urruah put his whiskers right forward, looked away.

Rhiow flicked an ear at her colleague in amusement. “But they looked at each other,” she said, “and then to the Shadowed One’s astonishment and fury, they laughed at her. ‘We don’t fear you, Shadowed One,’ said Sehau. ‘Rather we pity you. Seven of our lives you have destroyed, yet you still don’t see that the fieldmouse’s nest always has one more mouse in it!’ And Aifheh said, ‘Daughter of the Queen, we put you another proposal. Give up your hunting of us and we’ll let you go free! For you’re the one who’s bound and in torment. You’ve made our oath your chain, just as you’ve done with your own old oath in the deeps of time, to kill the Life the Queen made. Break this chain, break that one as well, and go home to Heaven where your pride waits you by the Hearth!’”

The Silent Man nodded and pushed his pencil aside. And I think, he said, that’s probably the end of life seven.

“You think right,” Urruah said. “Sa’Rraah killed them out of hand.”

“But soon enough they came again,” Rhiow said. “And this time the Shadowed One actually missed them when they crossed into life: for now Aifheh and Sehau had grown bold, and decided that if sa’Rraah would play with them, then they would play with her. At the borders of Life they hid themselves just on the far side, where they could not be so clearly scented, and watched sa’Rraah pass to and fro in her rage, hunting them: and when they saw that for a moment or a month she was looking the other way, they slipped over the borderline and were born. Five whole ehhif years they lived in the world, raising their kittens and glad in each other’s love. And all that while sa’Rraah prowled the borders endlessly, looking and peering, scenting and searching for those who were not there. Finally it was one of her jackals, one of the small dark spirits that follow at her heels, that came running to her and told her where the lovers were.

“Sa’Rraah was enraged almost beyond the rage that drove her first from Heaven. Without a moment’s pause she flashed to where Sehau and Aifheh lived in the wild, and with her own claws stripped their souls from their bodies and flung them once more out into the dark. Yet even as she killed them, she saw their eyes meet and their oath remade.