The Big Meow

Rhiow chuckled. “Songbirds? I’d settle for chicken.” But the sudden romantic turn of phrase amused her. Sehau was a tom: Aifheh was his queen… At least that was the way the most famous of the many versions of their story went — a sung-verse variant composed by one of the greatest of the cat-bards, the one who anciently kept company with the ehhif-bard Hharo’lahn in the Isles of the West. The tale had already been old when the People first told it to the ehhif-wizards of Egypt, and thousands of subsequent generations of People retold it to any species that would listen, and to each other. Toms especially loved it, doting on its over-the-top romance and unavoidable tragedy – but then toms always tended a little toward the histrionic, as something that would increase the drama in any given song. This, though, was an opinion Rhiow knew perfectly well it was wiser to keep to herself.

They came out of the shrubbery and stood at the hilltop, and Rhiow waved her tail in astonishment as she looked across the wide broad space to a huge frontage of house, built all in shadowy gray granite. The main building was two stories high, and at least a New York short block in length – a stately procession of arcades and porticoes, terraces and peaked roofs, railed stone terraces, archways, and doors of wood and glass. “This was an ehhif den?” Rhiow said. “The pride must have been huge!”

“Not at all,” Hwaith said as they headed toward it. “Only two ehhif lived here.”

“But not any more, I take it,” Rhiow said. The whole atmosphere of the place spoke strangely of abandonment: lightless windows, overgrown grass, ragged plantings hanging over leaf-scattered garden paths.

“No, it’s still lived in,” Hwaith said, leading the way down along the frontage. “A wealthy ehhif built the place some decades ago. I mean, a really wealthy one: the founder of one of the great old industrial ehhif families that have lived here for more than a century. This was the biggest private home ever built in the city: still is.” Hwaith glanced at the building’s l long frontage of the building as they paced by it. “After the old tom-ehhif built it, he gave it to his only tom-kit. It was to be the place where the young tom and his queen would live their lives out together.”

“But it didn’t turn out that way,” Rhiow said.

At the far edge of the huge graveled space to one side of the great house, they paused, and Hwaith flirted his tail “no”. “In this town,” Hwaith said, “so many things don’t necessarily go as planned…”

Rhiow put her nose up into the air, sniffed. The scents of old growth, damp bark, shed conifer needles and peppertree leaves, mingled in the still air with scents of stale water and baked stone. But there was something else as well. “Am I crazy,” Rhiow said, “or is that – oil?”

“Not crazy at all,” Hwaith said. “Not actually on the grounds, here. But it’s close by: there’s a well down the other side of the hill. Ironic, really, since you could say this whole place was built on oil.”

Rhiow stood still and listened. Muted by the way the ground fell away, she could hear a faint, repetitive creaking noise. “Is that the well I’m hearing?” she said.

“That’s it.” Hwaith started off in the opposite direction, and Rhiow padded after him. “Anyway, down over here is where that root was trying to sink itself – “

Along the ridge of the hill, a terrace reached away from one side of the main house, stretching perhaps a hundred yards. At the terrace’s end a formal box garden began, or what remained of one. Once it had been an interlocking maze of carefully trimmed lines of shrubbery. Now it was looking ragged around the edges, even dusty. “If these ehhif are so wealthy,” Rhiow said as they paced through the maze, “it’s surprising they don’t take better care of the place.”

“It is a little strange,” Hwaith said, “but they don’t seem to be here much. Watch out for these steps – a couple of the slabs are loose.”

They made their way down a shallow stairway at the far edge of the maze, heading for a small, flat area further down the hillside, hemmed in by an incomplete circle of trees. “This is where my gate was trying to root,” Hwaith said, “at least briefly.” He stopped, his nose wrinkling. “Wait a minute. Do you smell – “

To a Person’s senses, ehhif blood had a metallic reek, instantly identifiable. Even if there had been rain to wash it away, which there had not, the scent would still have lingered in the soil for weeks, unmistakable. Now Rhiow walked slowly into the center of the ring of trees, sniffing carefully.

The scent was very old. Rhiow spent a while working her way over toward one spot in particular, near the encircling ring of trees, where once upon a time, the blood had soaked deep. But that had been a long time ago. Hwaith came up by her, put his nose down, inhaled. His tail lashed.

“Years old,” he said. “But I’d have trouble saying how many. Forensics hasn’t been my field.”