The Big Meow

He and Siffha’h ran off northwestward again through the long pale golden grass. Rhiow and Urruah watched them go for a moment, then started after them. After the rather unnerving morning, this interlude was a relief: and as she and Urruah followed the younger wizards, Rhiow found herself less troubled by the feeling of quake-trying-to-happen in the ground beneath her, and increasingly fascinated by the sense of old overlays, the remnant energy from wizardries done in this area over centuries, even millennia. Any place where wizards worked repeatedly over time acquired such: but the ones Rhiow felt under her now as she and Urruah trotted off in the youngsters’ wake seemed to lie very light in the ground, for ehhif work– at least in contrast with the concrete-and-steel wizardly environment where Rhiow normally worked. In Manhattan, the remnants of the vigorous and aggressive ehhif wizardries of the last few centuries were more likely to have embedded themselves in concrete than in the underlying bedrock…and henceforth were susceptible over time to having been simply jackhammered up or knocked down, and carted away. Here, though, beneath the insistent buzzing of recent or soon-to-be earthquake in the ground, Rhiow was getting a sense of old earth layered deep in wizardries faded down faint, buried stratum on stratum in ground which had been continuously inhabited by the same people since the Ice withdrew, or earlier. She was reminded of the feel of the ground near the little worldgate in Chur, in the Alps, which had been there since ehhif Bronze-Age days: but those overlays had been noisy and assertive compared to these.

“It’s pretty up here,” Urruah said as he trotted along beside her, glancing off to one side, where a lone queen-ehhif in hiking boots and shorts and T-shirt could be seen wandering along the bark-chipped path to one side. “Pity we don’t have places like this in New York.”

“Oh, come on, of course we do!” Rhiow said. “Go out on the Island, into the winery country. Or out by Montauk Point. Or up to the Poconos..”

Urruah wrinkled his nose, pausing a moment to sniff at a tall leggy bush with long yellow flowers. “Those aren’t New York New York, though,” he said.

Rhiow swung her tail broadly from one side to the other, conceding the point, as they paused to look at a low slant-roofed wooden building off to one side. Arhu and Siffha’h had already run past it, unconcerned: Rhiow stopped to glance at the ehhif characters on a carved sign to one side, then shrugged her tail and went after them. “Since when are you so concerned about ehhif boundaries? And even if you are, what about Coney Island? Or the bottom of the big runway at Kennedy, where it goes into the marsh in Jamaica Bay.” She stopped a moment by a flower bed to rub her face against a downhanging stalk of some spiny, sharp-scented plant, greeting it, and got a sap-slow acknowledgement from the life inside. “But if it’s this kind of quiet you’re looking for,” Rhiow said, flirting her tail and walking on in the direction the youngsters had gone, “you know you’re still not going to find it there. Too much mental background noise from all the lives pushed so tightly together for so long. You want the Poles, or the Moon, where you can hear the planet think…”

They went past the little building along a curved, paved path and suddenly found themselves looking at something odd. In the shadow of a very small hill, out in the middle of some parched looking grass, stood a hut perhaps thirty Person’s-paces wide, built of rushes or reeds, its outer layers shingled down over one another in a series of graceful curves. In front of the hut’s single low door was a wide circle of stumps of age-silvered wood and blocks of stone of varying heights and shapes. In the center of it was another smaller circle of stones, and a further scatter of rocks in the center of it all, some fire-blackened. “At least you’re sounding a little calmer,” he said.

“Not sure I feel that way yet,” Rhiow said. She stretched her neck up a little to try to see where Arhu and Siffha’h had gone: they’d vanished into the tall grass past the hut, apparently on their way up the hillside. “I guess it’s just wizards’ syndrome. You get so used to being able to reason with everything, or at least persuade it. But this is one of the situations where sheer scale gets in the way…”

They trotted past the ring and toward the hillside. “I suppose I can see the Earth’s point,” Urruah said. “We think we’re so important. But what’re we to the world? A minor skin condition. Why should it care about us? It has its own priorities. Tides, gravity, plates sliding… And if a flea starts shouting at you to stop scratching, do you listen?”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward. “It wouldn’t be high on my list.”

“But still,” Urruah said, “we’re wizards. It’s our job to listen, isn’t it?”