Chapter 9 The Far Hill #2
“No? May I ask why? I’ll confess to being a bit confused.
” She waited, but he made no answer. “I can make you, you know.” He tried to pull back, but she reached out and held him.
He could not retreat…but bringing him forward, leaning down his head, binding his jaws to her will, even as he crushed her bones… This would be a pesky chore.
“Oh…very well.” She sighed. “We’ll sleep on it, then, hmm? Perhaps in the morning you’ll feel differently. I will be over there if you feel peckish in the night.”
“Yes,” he said, backing slowly to his pack. “Sleep.”
“Oh, and Chester?”
“Yes?”
“It would anger me greatly if you tried to sneak away.”
iii
They called her the Old Kitty Mother as a sign of respect, but no one now living even suspected her true age.
She was older than the oldest sea turtles, older, perhaps, than all but a few trees.
How many winters had she seen? Four hundred?
Six? Even she no longer remembered. Her kittenhood was dim to her now, most of it lost forever on the other side of a vast ocean of blood.
She had lived long and seen much. Death held no further terrors for her.
“But what comes after,” she whispered, “ahh, now that is something else again.” The sound of her voice carried in the night air. One of the young dogs in Raze’s pack whined at the sound of it.
He’s right to cry, she thought. If she still possessed a soul—something long in doubt—there were sins on it to damn herself and ten others like her. The roots of her tree twined around the body of god-emperor Nobununga, the good tiger of the east. Her sisters’ corpses decorated the branches.
She had stood before the gate of hell many times.
On the first occasion she was dragged, bound and screaming.
Not much later she began to go of her own free will.
Now, nearing the end of her long life, she had seen more than she cared to of what lay inside that gate.
Worse, she feared she would see the rest before long.
But the threat of hell had loosened its grip on her since the passing of men.
More and more often these days, she found her thoughts drifting over the field of violets, one of the few scraps of her kittenhood that she had clung to over her long journey of years.
It was a real place, that field—which is to say, it was a physical place.
The lands which exist solely in the mind can be as real as any, and more terrible than most.
She was called Night Dancer, then, and was counted the least of her mother’s litter.
She was sickly. She came late to speech.
By their first autumn her sisters were well along in their apprenticeship.
Mother was a great witch from a family of great witches, though getting on in age by then.
She had borne her litter not out of love, but in hopes of finding one among the kittens to take her place when she was gone.
The field of violets was one of Mother’s lessons, and the only one the Old Kitty Mother remembered fondly.
The field was a good place, the best place she had ever known.
She carried the memory of it in her heart next to that of Karakaa.
She retreated there sometimes, when her future was too dark to bear.
“Magic is like water,” Mother said as they gathered around her among the flowers.
“It is in the air always. Sometimes it will collect, like beads of morning dew. We have all seen it, yes? It is the mouse, who ducks into a bolt-hole that is not there when the shadow of the hawk falls over him. It is the little bird who wears the flesh of a demon to protect her eggs.” They all swished their tails, for they were no longer kittens.
Most had seen such things in their wanderings, or heard tell of them.
“Little magics,” said her mother on that long-ago spring morning, “like beads of morning dew. But given a channel of ways, the dew will collect and flow through it, will it not? That is the first task before you. Build in your mind a channel of ways, that the magic may flow in you.”
Among the sisters, Bird-Feather was considered the likely heir to her mother’s coven. Knowing this, she had grown arrogant. She saw fit to interrupt Mother’s lesson. “But, mistress,” she asked, “how are we to build channels in the mind? To touch the inner fleshes, even gently, is a killing blow.”
Mother’s eyes flashed. “That is a foolish question,” she said, “and the fact that you interrupted me is the least of it. Perhaps we have misjudged you, Bird-Feather. Will another of my talkative apprentices answer you, hmm? Anyone? No? Perhaps a fast will help you concentrate on your lessons. A week or so, I think—”
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.