The Big Meow

Urruah and Hwaith looked behind them, too, and were surprised. “Where’d she go?” Urruah said. “Did she sidle?”

“We’d have felt it,” Hwaith said. He was right: you usually could feel someone else sidling in the immediate vicinity. But none of them had felt anything – nor, as they looked around, did it seem that she’d used any of the other methods for invisibility available to wizards.

“Boy,” Urruah said, “she really does walk softly. One of those tribal talents, I guess.”

“Well, she knows where to meet us,” Rhiow said. “Come on, let’s get where we’re going…”

The track below them abruptly ceased to be gravel and pine needles and bark chippings, and turned into the place where, on both sides of the sudden, capped-off road, the sidewalk began. To a city Person, this was a strange contrast, eloquent of the difference between city and country. But overhead the live oaks and the peppertrees leaned in over the path, along with the occasional ragged escapee palm up the hillside; and from their quiet predawn murmurings, Rhiow could tell that the road that started where the sidewalk did meant nothing in particular to them. As far as the trees were concerned, these were the hills eternal, as they had been since the Ice retreated, and a little concrete more or less on the ground hardly mattered at all. The Ice had broken it before, and would again: and afterwards, in the fullness of time, the Trees would still be there.

Once the road began, no wider than a Manhattan side street, the houses started too. They were relatively small at first, widely separated bungalows and two-storey houses mostly done in white stucco and tiled roofs. Some of their gardens looked a little ragged, overgrown with wiry-looking ground cover, pachysandra and pinched-looking ice plant. Here and there the ground under the hundred-foot royal palms was untidy with spiky, frayed heaps of their long shed olive-green frond; and scattered palm-fruits, like fat fluorescent-orange marbles, lay squashed on the sidewalks and in the road. Rhiow paused by one palm tree, sniffing. “Rats?” she said. “Up in the trees?”

“Palm rats.” Hwaith cocked an eye up toward the crown of one of the king palms. From up there Rhiow could hear a strange scratchy noise, like her ehhif’s old mechanical alarm clock trying to ring when it wasn’t properly wound up.

“Any sport in those?” Urruah said.

“When they come down, sure,” Hwaith said. “Unless you feel like going up after them. They have a little bit of an advantage up there…”

“But if you skywalked…”

“Yeah, but is that sport?”

Rhiow smiled to herself as they headed further down the canyon, and the sidewalk became wider and cleaner, and the houses bigger, and the driveways broader. It was as if the further down you got from the clear air and the hills’ height, the more important it became to let other ehhif know how important you were – mostly by the size of what you “owned”. This was a behavior Rhiow knew all too well from Manhattan – knowing also how the Earth itself laughed at the concept of ownership, as hilarious to the semi-sentience indwelling in the ancient bedrock as the idea of ehhif selling each other virtual artifacts and “unreal estate” in computer games. In New York, anyway, the Earth had not for many centuries done what it might so easily do – just shrug, and then bear the brief glass-splinter itch as things fell down and smashed. Here, though, that’s just what it’s been doing. And indeed she could see, as they walked downhill through wisps of morning mist, the occasional upthrust slabs in the sidewalk and cracks in the stucco and plaster of the houses they passed: the shed tiles that no one had noticed or picked up, the slow rilling trickle from someone’s ultramodern lawn-watering system where a pipe had cracked, and the trickling leak was spinning palm pollen and pine needles down into the gutter. Worse could happen. Worse will happen. Iau, Whisperer, be with us, let us know what we need to know to keep it from happening: in the here and now, and our now and then…

They turned a switchback curve in the road. “What in the Tom’s Name,” Urruah shouted as they came around and saw a huge mist-glamoured vehicle crouching by the curb outside one oversized bungalow, “is that what I think it is? It’s a Hhhu’ssenherh!”

He ran off across the street toward one of the big heavy vehicles, walking around it and staring up at it in a good imitation of awe. “Is this one of your passions too?” Rhiow said to Hwaith.

They both stopped dead as Arhu galloped unheeding past them down the middle of the road at top speed, shortly followed by Siff’hah, who was fluffed up from nose to tail and cursing her brother loudly. “Uh, not particularly,” Hwaith said, after the ruckus had gone by and vanished around the downhill curve. “I guess it’s one of those situations where you don’t really notice something until the tourists come through.” He put his whiskers forward.