The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Six

Morning came up clear but not at all cool, and Rhiow was awakened early by Hhuha complaining as she got dressed. “Must be eighty out there already,” she was saying to Iaehh. “And the damn air conditioner at the office is on the bunk again. I swear, a company that makes profits every year that could be mistaken for the GNP of a small country, but they’ll let the staff sit there and swelter for two weeks in a row before they get someone in to fix the thing so it doesn’t produce heat in August…” “Sue, you should quit,” Iaehh said. Rhiow got up and stretched and went over to where Hhuha leaned against one of the counters in the kitchen. “Here he goes again,” she said under her breath, rubbing against Hhuha’s legs, and then went to the food bowl. This argument was one that happened about once a month, these days. Hhuha was a salaried consultant for one of the larger computer companies with offices in the city; but before this job, she had been “freelance”—nonaligned, Rhiow thought this meant—and had worked for whom she pleased. Iaehh— who was presently still wrapped in only his bathrobe and was leaning against the other counter, facing Hhuha— thought Hhuha should be freelance again, even though it meant less certainty about how much they would have to eat each week or (sometimes) whether they would eat at all.

“I wish. Damn contract,” Hhuha said, pouring milk in her coffee.

“Some of that down here, please?” Rhiow said loudly.

“So don’t sign it the next time.”

“Don’t tempt me…”

“I am tempting you. Don’t commit yourself to them again. Go independent and let them pay twice what they’re paying now if they want your services. Otherwise, let someone else pay twice what they’re paying.”

Hhuha put the milk away, sighing. “I don’t know … I’ve gotten kind of used to the steady paycheck…”

“I know you have.”

“Excuse me? Milk?” Rhiow said, standing up on her hind legs and patting the bottom of Hhuha’s skirt. “Oh, sweet Iau, but I wish just once I could say it so you would understand. Hello? Hhuha?!”

Hhuha looked at Rhiow, bent down and stroked her. “More cat food, honey? Sure. I don’t know, though, Mike… There’s so much competition out there … and so much uncertainty. In your job, too. You and I can starve. But someone else wouldn’t understand if the food ran out…”

She straightened up and started to open another can of cat food. “Don’t blame it on me,” Rhiow said. “You should do what makes you happy… Oh, gods, not the tuna again! —Look, Hhuha! Saucer! Empty! Milk!!”

“Wow, she really likes that stuff,” Iaehh said. “Better get some more.”

“I’ll stop by the store on the way home.”

“But, hon, you really should think about it. The hours there are wearing you out. You keep having to bring work home. They’re not giving you the support they promised. They can’t even keep the air conditioners working, as you say. You’re not happy there…”

Rhiow sighed, hating to look ungrateful, and went over to the ffrihh, stood up on her hind legs against it, and patted the handle, looking mournfully at Hhuha.

“What?” Hhuha said.

“You put the milk away without offering her any,” Iaehh said.

“Why can’t more toms have brains like yours?” Rhiow said, and went straight to him and rubbed his legs, too, while Hhuha opened the ffrihh and got the milk out again. “What a clever ehhif you are.”

“Won’t be any left for your coffee,” Hhuha said.

“Never mind, give it to her,” Iaehh said. “I’m running late as it is. I’ll have something at the office.”

“You wouldn’t be running late if you’d gotten up when the alarm clock rang.”

And they were off again about another favorite subject: the routine ignoring and silencing of the dreadful little bedside ra’hio that spouted news reports at them all hours of the day and night, but especially in the morning, when it began its recitation with a particularly foul and repetitive little buzzer. Rhiow was always glad when they turned it off… though this morning she had to admit she had been pleased enough, while it was still on, to hear it fail to mention anything terrible happening in Grand Central overnight. “Oh, thank you,” she said, and purred, as Hhuha bent down and poured the milk.

“Hey, don’t bump the hand that feeds you, my puss; the milk’s going to go all over the floor.”

“I’ll take care of that, don’t you worry,” Rhiow said, and drank.

Hhuha and Iaehh went back toward the bedroom, still arguing genially. It was barely argument, really: more like what People called fhia-sau, or “tussle,” where any blows struck were affectionate, the claws were carefully kept in, teeth did not break skin, and the disagreement, if it really was one, was replayed more as a pastime than anything else. They really are so like us, some ways, Rhiow thought, finishing the milk and sitting up to wash her face. I wonder if you could teach them Ailurin, given enough time? Repeating one word enough times, in the right context, until they got it…

“Bye, honey,” Hhuha said, and as she passed through the living room, “bye, puss, have a nice day…”

“From your mouth to the Queen’s ear,” Rhiow said as the front door closed behind her, and meaning it most fervently.

She was still washing when Iaehh came out of the bedroom in his “formal” sweats, with his office clothes and his briefcase over his shoulder in a backpack. “Byebye, plumptious one,” he said, heading for the door. “Don’t eat all that food at once, it’s got to last you…”

Rhiow threw a meaningful look at the bowl full of reeking tuna, but it was lost on Iaehh: he was halfway out the door already. It clicked shut, and one after another came more clicks as he locked the other locks.

“Plumptious” again. Is he trying to say I’m putting on weight? Hmm.

Rhiow sighed, finished her wash, and went out her own door, into the warm, ozony air, heading for the rooftops.

Half an hour later she caught up with Urruah at the Bear Gate to Central Park. There were actually two sets of statues there—one of three bears, one of three deer—but from the predator’s point of view, it was naturally the bears that mattered.

“ ’Luck,” Rhiow said, as they breathed one another’s breath. “Oh, Urruah, not more MhHonalh’s!”

He wrinkled his face a little, an annoyed expression. “I thought I got all the tartar sauce off that fish thing first.”

“All this fried food … it’s going to catch up with you one day.”

“You should talk. What kind of oil are they packing that tuna cat food in? Smells like it comes out of somebody’s crankcase.”

Rhiow thought privately that, for all she knew, he was right… They walked into the park, heading southward along the broad paved expanse of its roadway loop, staying well to one side to miss the ehhif on Rollerblades and the ehhif with strollers. “You sleep well last night?”

“Considering where we’re going today?” Urruah said. “What do you think? … I kept hearing Saash dreaming all night. Her nerves are in shreds.”

Rhiow sighed. “I missed that. Guess my little chat with the Whisperer tired me out.”

“Well, I had one, too.” Urruah sighed. “I’m well enough stocked with spells: right up against the limit, I’d say. My head feels twice its normal size.”

Rhiow waved her tail in agreement. “We’ll have to spend a little time coordinating before we head down … make sure none of us are carrying duplicates.”

They made good time down through the park, heading to a level about even with the streets in the upper Sixties. There, a huge stage had been erected at the southern end of the big green space that city People called somewhat ironically Eiuev, the Veldt, and which ehhif called the Sheep Meadow. It wasn’t sheep milling around in it now, though, but what looked like about five hundred ehhif dealing with the technical and logistical end of preparing for a meeting of many thousands: cables and conduits being laid and shielded, scaffolding secured, sound systems tested. The squawks and hisses and feedback-howls of mispositioned speakers and other equipment had been echoing for blocks from the park since fairly early in the morning, making it sound as if a herd of large, clumsy, and very broken-voiced beasts were staggering around the place and banging into things. “They’re doing sound checks now, though,” Urruah said.

“Sound,” Rhiow said, wincing slightly at yet another yowl, “wouldn’t seem to be a problem.”

“No, that was accidental. It’ll be voices they’re checking, soon. Come on.”

They slipped close, behind one of the larger trees that stood at the bottom border of the meadow, and which was behind the security cordons still being erected, a maze of orange nylon webbing stretched from tree to tree. There were plenty of small openings in it so that Rhiow and Urruah had no trouble stepping through and making their way close to the stage, under one of the big scaffolding towers.

A great crowd of ehhif, in T-shirts and shirtsleeves, were already sitting around tuning their instruments, making a scraping and hooting cacophony that made Rhiow shake her head once or twice. “It’s the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra, without the first chairs,” Urruah said.

Rhiow blinked, since all the chairs seemed to be there. “Smart of them to start early,” she said. “They’ll miss the heat.”

Urruah sighed. “I wish I could,” he said. In hot weather, the thickness of his coat often bothered him.

“So do a little wizardry,” Rhiow said. “Cool some of this wind down: keep a pocket of it for yourself.”

“Naah,” Urruah said. “Why waste the energy?… Look, it’s starting—”

Rhiow craned her neck as the musicians quieted down a little. The ehhif who appeared was not the one in the poster, though, but a short, round, curly-haired tom, who came to stand in front of the orchestra with a small stick or wand in his hand. Rhiow peered at that. “He’s not one of us, is he?”

Urruah stared at him. “The conductor? Not that I know.” He cocked his head to one side, briefly listening to the Whisperer, and then said, “No, she says not. —Here he comes!”

On the stage above the musicians, a big burly figure appeared, also in a shortsleeved shirt and dark pants. Rhiow supposed that as ehhif went, he was handsome enough; he had a surprising amount of facial fur. He stepped up to the front of the stage, exchanged a few words with the small round ehhif: there was some subdued shuffling and tapping of bows on strings among the musicians.

The small round ehhif made a suggestion, and the larger ehhif nodded, stepped back to find his right position on the stage. For a few moments there was more howling and crackling of the sound system; then quiet The conductor-ehhif raised his wand.

Music started. It sounded strange to Rhiow, but then most ehhif music did. Urruah, though, had all his attention fixed on the big ehhif, who suddenly began to sing.

The volume was surprising, even without mechanical assistance: Urruah had been right about that, at least. Rhiow listened to about a minute’s worth of it, then said to Urruah, low, “So tell me: what’s he yowling about?”

“The song’s called ‘Nessun dorma.’ It means that no one’s going to sleep.”

“With that noise,” Rhiow said, “I could understand why not…”

“Oh, come on, Rhi,” said Urruah, “give it a chance. Listen to it.”

Rhiow sighed, and did. The harmonies were strange to feline ears and didn’t seem to want to resolve correctly; she suspected no amount of listening was likely to change that perception soon, for her anyway. But at least her knowledge of the Speech made meaning available to her, if nothing else, as the man stood and sang with passion approaching a tom’s of his hope and desire, alone here under the starlight…When the stars’ light faded and the dawn rose up, he sang, then he would conquer… though at the moment, who or what would be conquered wasn’t quite clear: the song itself hadn’t yet provided much context. Perhaps some other tom? There did seem to be a she-ehhif involved, to whom this tom sang—though there was no sign of her at the moment, she being out of sight in the story, or the reality, or both. That at least was tomlike enough: an empty place, the lonely silent night to fill with song, whether or not there was any chance of fulfillment. Or perhaps, Rhiow thought as he sang, it’s the she herself, the one he woos, that he’s intending to conquer. If there was more intended to the conquest than just sex, though, the thought made Rhiow smile a little. Toms who tried domination or other such maneuvers with their mates too soon after the act itself got nothing but ragged ears and aching heads for their trouble.

It was a little odd, actually, to hear such power and passion come from someone standing still on a bare stage, holding, not a she, but only a piece of cloth in one hand, which he kept using to wipe his face. He paused a moment, and behind him the recorded voices of some other ehhif sang sweetly but mournfully that he and they might all very well be dead in the morning if he didn’t conquer… Yet the tom-ehhif sang on with assurance and power, answering them fearlessly; his last note, amplified rather beyond need, made Rhiow put her ears down flat for the loudness of it rather than the tone, which was blindingly true, and went on for longer than seemed possible with even such a big chest’s breath. Rhiow was almost unwillingly held still by the long, cried note at the end of the conquer-word, vinceeeeeeeerrro! as if by teeth in her scruff; alien as the sound was, any cat-tom who had a voice of such power would rightly have had his choice of shes.

The ehhif let the note go. The last chords of accompaniment crashed to an end, and the technical staff responded, some of them, with a chorus of good-natured hoots and applause. After that torrent and slam of sound, the hoots of boms and the city’s rush seemed a little muted.

The ehhif spoke a few words to the short round curly-haired ehhif conducting the musicians, then waved the cloth casually at the technical people and retreated to the back of the stage to have a long drink from a bottle of water. The ehhif conducting the musicians turned to talk to them now, and Rhiow looked a little sidewise at Urruah, a feline gesture of reluctant agreement. “It reminds me a little,” she said, “of the part in the Argument when the Old Tom sings. Innocent, though he’s all scars: and hopeful, though he knows whose teeth will be in his throat shortly.”

Urruah nodded. “That’s one connection I’ve thought of, yes…”

“I can see why they’ll need all these fences,” Rhiow said as they got up and strolled away. “The she-ehhif would be all over him afterward, I’d think. Probably wear him out for any more singing.”

“They don’t, though. It’s not meant personally.”

“That’s the strangest part of it, for me,” Rhiow said. “I don’t understand how he can sing like that and have it not be personal. That was real fighting stuff, that last note. He should have had his claws in someone’s guts, or his teeth in someone else’s scruff, afterward.”

Urruah shook his own head as well. “They’re not us. But later on in the story, there’s a fight.”

“Another tom?”

“No, in the story this tom fights with the queen. She has this problem, see…”

Rhiow half-closed her eyes in good-natured exasperation, for he was off and running again. Like most toms, Urruah had trouble grasping how, for queens, the fascination with song in any of its forms was strictly seasonal. When you were in heat, a tom’s voice was, admittedly, riveting, and the song it sang spoke directly to your most immediate need. Out of heat, though, the tendency was to try to get away from the noise before you burst out laughing at the desperate, impassioned cacophony of it—a reaction not at all appreciated by the toms near a queen in heat, all deep in the throes of competitive artistic and erotic self-expression.

Most of Urruah’s explanation now went over Rhiow’s head, as they walked back uptown, but at least he had something to keep his mind off what the rest of the day’s work was going to involve. He finished with the tale of the tom fighting with the queen—after which the queen apparently surrendered herself to the tom (What a crazy fantasy, Rhiow thought)—and started in on some other story, many times more complicated, that seemed to involve a river, and a piece of some kind of metal. “And when you take this piece of metal and make it into a hring, it makes you master of the universe…”

Rhiow had to laugh at that. “Ehhif? Run the universe? Let alone the world… What a dream! They can’t even run the parts of it they think they do run. Or at least none of them who aren’t wizards seem able to. Look at them! Half of the ehhif on the planet go to bed with empty stomachs: the other half of them die of eating themselves sick…” She gave Urruah a cockeyed look. “And what about your great ehhif-tom there? No way he’s that size naturally. What does he mean by smothering a wonderful voice like that with ten fur coats’ worth of fat? Whichever ehhif-god is in charge of mistreating one’s gifts should have a word with him. Probably will, too, if he doesn’t get off his great tail and do something about it pretty soon.”

Urruah began muttering something vague about the artistic temperament. Rhiow immediately perceived that this was something Urruah had noticed, and it bothered him, too. “Well, look,” she said. “Maybe he’ll get himself straightened out. Meanwhile, we’re almost at the Met. They’ll be on the steps, if I know Saash. Anything you need to tell me about today’s work before we meet up with them?”

He stopped, looked at her. “Rhi…”

She let him find his words.

“How do you cope?” he said finally. “My memory’s not clouded about last time. We almost died, all three of us. Now we’re going to have to go down there again—and it may even be the same place this time. Am I wrong?”

“No,” Rhiow said, “I don’t think so. It could well be the same spot: the gate we’re servicing this time has its roots in the same catenary.”

“It could be an ambush,” he said. “Another sabotage, better planned than the last. Certainly the problem’s more serious. If someone caused it on purpose, they’d know a service team would have to be down there very quickly. Not like the last tune, where there was enough slack in the schedule that we might have come down any time during the space of a week or two. Half the lizards in Downside could be waiting there for us.”

“It’s a thought I’ve considered,” Rhiow said. “Though the Whisperer didn’t seem to indicate it was going to be quite that dangerous. She usually gives you a hint…”

“… If she knows,” Urruah said.

There was that too. Even the gods were sometimes caught by surprise… “Ruah,” Rhiow said, “I’m as well prepared as I can be. So are you. Saash will be, as well.”

“That leaves only Arhu,” Urruah muttered. “And what he might do, I’ll bet the gods don’t know, either. Irh’s balls, but I wish we could dump him somewhere.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Rhiow said. “He may save your skin yet.”

Urruah laughed. They looked at each other for a moment more, then made their way around to the steps of the Met.

Saash and Arhu were waiting for them in the sunshine, or rather, Saash was sitting scratching herself and putting her fur in order, alternately, and Arhu was tearing back and forth across the steps, sidled, trying to trip the ehhif going up and down. Fortunately, he was falling down the steps as often as running successfully along them, so the ehhif, by and large, weren’t doing more than stumble occasionally. As they walked over to Saash, and Rhiow breathed breaths with her and wished her hunt’s luck, Urruah looked over at Arhu, who, seeing Rhiow, was now running toward them. “You sure you want to stop with just the Met?” Urruah said, loudly enough to be heard. “I’d take him across the park, afterward. Natural History. Some skeletons there he ought to see—”

“No,” Rhiow said, a touch angrily. “He’s going to have to make up his own mind about what we see. Don’t prejudice his opinions … and whatever it is he’s going to be good for, don’t make him less effective at it.”

Urruah grumbled, but said nothing further. Arhu looked from Urruah to Rhiow, a little puzzled, and said, “What are we supposed to do?”

“Courtesy first,” Rhiow said. “Hunt’s luck to you, Arhu.”

“I had some,” he said, very proud. “I caught a mouse.”

Rhiow looked at Saash: Saash flicked an ear in agreement. “It got into the garage this morning,” she said. “Out of someone’s car: I think it had been eating some fast food crumbs or something. He did it right in front of Zhorzh, too. Very clever.” She threw him a look that was half-amused, half-annoyed, and Rhiow put her whiskers forward in slight amusement.

“Well, good for you,” Rhiow said. “Nicely done. Let’s go in, then, and see the gods. We have a busy day ahead of us, and we want to be out of here before lunchtime.” So that you won’t be tempted to start stealing sandwiches out of ehhif hands…

Sidled, they slipped in through a door that some poor tom-ehhif found himself holding open for about seven ehhif-queens, one after another. Ehhif were gathering at the turnstiles where people made contributions to the museum; Rhiow and her team went around them to one side and went on up the white marble steps to the next floor. Rhiow led them sharply to the right, then right again along the colonnade next to the stairs, then left to pass through the Great Hall, and toward the wide doorway over which a sign said, in ehhif English, egyptian art.

The right was dimmer, cooler, here. The walls were done in a shade of deep blue-gray; through the skylights above, the sun fell pale, as if coming through a great depth of time. Against the walls, and on pedestals and in glass cases in the middle of the great room, were ancient sculptures and tombs and other things, great and small, belonging to ehhif who had lived in a very different time.

Arhu lagged a little behind the others, looking in (for once) undisguised astonishment at the huge solemn figures, which gazed out cool-eyed at the ehhif strolling among them. Rhiow paused a moment to look back at Arhu, then turned to join him as he looked at the nearest of the sculptures, a massive sarcophagus in polished black basalt, standing on end against a wall. Nearly three feet wide, not counting the carven wig surrounding it, the serene, lordly ehhif face gazed at, or past, or through them, with the imperturbability of massive age.

“It’s big,” Arhu said, almost in a whisper.

Rhiow wondered if what he was really thinking about was size. “And old,” she said, “and strange. These ehhif used to keep their dead in containers like this; it was to keep their bodies safe.”

“Safe how?”

“I know,” Rhiow said, “after a body dies, the further processes of death tend not to have any trouble finding it. But these ehhif did their best to give it difficulty. I’m afraid it was from something we told them, or rather our ancestors did. About our lives—”

They walked along a little. “You get nine,” Arhu said, looking around at the everyday things in the glass cases: a glass cup here, rainbowed with age and exposure; a shoe there, the linen upper and leather sole still intact; a little farther on, a crockery pot shaped like a chicken, intended to magically produce more chicken in the afterlife.

“We do,” Rhiow said, “but it seems that ehhif don’t. Or if they do, there’s no way to tell because they don’t remember anything from the last life, as we do—none of the useful memories or the highlights, the People you knew or loved … anyway, ehhif don’t think they come back. But when People back then told them how we did, and told them about the Living Ones, the ehhif got confused, and they thought we meant that they were going to do something similar.…”

They caught up with Saash and Urruah, who were standing in front of a massive granite sphinx. “What’s a ‘Living One’?” Arhu said. “Is that another kind of god?”

Rhiow smiled slightly. Should an uninstructed young wizard see such a being going about its business, he could be forgiven for mistaking it for a god. “Not quite so elevated,” Urruah said. “But close.”

“After your ninth life,” Saash said, “well, no one’s really sure what happens… but there’s a story. That, if in nine lives you’ve done more good than evil, then you get a tenth.”

“With a mind that won’t get tired,” Urruah said, “and a body that won’t wear out, too fast and tough for even Death to claw at… so you can go on to hunting your great desire, right past the boundaries of physical reality, they say, past world’s end and in toward the heart of things…”

“If you ever see a Living One, you’ll know it,” Rhiow said. “They pass through, sometimes, on Iau’s business.…”

“Have you ever seen one?” Arhu said, skeptical again.

“As it happens, yes.”

“What did it look like?”

Rhiow threw an amused glance at the sphinx. “Not like that,” she said, remembering the glimpse she had once caught, very early in the morning, of a feline shape walking casually by the East River in the upper Seventies. To the superficial glance, ehhif’s or People’s, it would have appeared to be just another cat, a dowdy tabby. But the second glance showed how insubstantial, almost paltry, mere concretely physical things looked when seen with it, at the same time. Shortly thereafter the cat shape had paused, then jumped down onto the East River, and walked off across it, with a slightly distracted air, straight along the glittering path laid along the water by the rising sun and out of sight.

“Well, I sure hope not,” Arhu said, somewhat scornfully. “Half the stuff in here is just lion-bodies with ehhif-heads on them.”

“The ehhif did that because they were trying to say that they knew these beings the People were describing to them were intelligent… but essentially feline in nature. Ehhif can’t help being anthropomorphic—as far as they’re concerned, they’re the only intelligent species on the planet.”

“Oh please!” Arhu said, laughing.

“Yes, well, it does have its humorous aspects…” Saash said. “We enjoy them the best we can. Meanwhile, here’s their picture of someone who is one of our Gods.”

They walked on a little to where a long papyrus was spread out upright in a case against the wall. “It all starts with her,” Saash said, first indicating the nearest statue. In more of the polished black basalt, a regal figure stood: ehhif-bodied, with the nobly sculpted head of one of the People— a long straight nose, wide, slightly slanted eyes, large graceful ears set very straight and alert. Various other carvings here wore one kind or another of the odd Egyptian headwear, but this figure, looking thoughtfully ahead of her, was crowned with the Sun: and on her breast, the single, open Eye.

“Iau,” Urruah said. “The Queen, the Creatress and Dam. ‘… In the first evening of the worlds, Iau Hauhai’h walked in the Silences, hearing and seeing, so that what She heard became real, and what She saw was so. She was the Fire at the Heart; and of that Fire She grew quick, and from it She kittened. Those children were four, and grew swiftly to stand with their queen.’ ”

“It’s the oldest song our people know,” Saash said to Arhu. “Any of us can hear it: the Whisperer taught it to us first, and the wizards who heard it taught it to everybody else. And everybody else taught it to the ehhif… though they got mixed up about some of the details—”

“You’re good at this, Saash,” Rhiow said, “you do the honors… I need to check those palimpsests that Ehef mentioned. Or Herself, rather.” Rhiow glanced over at a third statue, farther down the hall.

“You go ahead,” Saash said. Rhiow strolled off toward the papyrus cases in the back of the hall as the others went on to pause before another statue, nearly nine feet tall, standing by itself. Rhiow glanced at her in passing, too: she was not easy to go by without taking some kind of notice. Lioness-headed, holding the lightning in her hands, this tall straight figure was crowned again with the Sun, but a homed Sun that looked somehow more aggressive and dangerous; and the Eye she wore glared. Her face was not as kindly as the Queen’s. The lips were wrinkled, fierce; teeth showed. But the eyes were relentlessly intelligent: this Power’s rages would not be blind ones.

“ ‘Aaurh the Mighty,’ ” Saash said, “the Destroyer by Flame, who came first, burning like a star, and armed with the First Fire. She was Her Dam’s messenger and warrior, and went where she was sent swift as light, making and ending as Iau taught her…”

Rhiow went back to the glass cases ranked against the wall, jumped up on the first one she came to, and started walking along the line of them. She visited here as often as she could, liking the reminder of the People/ehhif joint heritage, of this time when they had been a little closer, before their languages became so widely parted. As a result of all the visiting, there was little of this material with which Rhiow was not familiar, but every now and then something new came out of storage and was put out for public view.

The palimpsests were such material. They were not true palimpsests—recycled parchment used for writing, the old writing having been scraped off with knives—but an equivalent Paper made from the papyrus reed was mounted on long linen rolls to make books, and the paper scraped clean of the old soot-based inks when the book was wanted for something else.

Rhiow peered down at the first palimpsest she found in the case she was standing on, turning her head from side to side to get the best angle on it. The ehhif of that period had had two different ways of writing: the hieratic writing, all pictograms, and the demotic, a graceful curled and swirled language, as often written vertically as horizontally, which shared some structural attributes with the present written form of the Speech. True to their names, these palimpsests had no visible writing left and were here mostly as examples of how papyrus was recycled (so Rhiow read from the museum’s explanatory notes inside the case). But for one of the People, and a wizard, used to seeing the invisible, such paperwork was more revealing. Rhiow squinted a little at the first palimpsest, doing her best to make out the dim remnants of the characters there. Of barley, eight measures, she read, and of water, twenty measures, and of the day’s bread-make, a lump of a fist’s size: let all be set in the sun for nine days, and when the mixture smelleth fair and the life in it hath quietened, let all be strained and poured into larger vessels so that twenty measures more of water may be added—

Rhiow snickered. A beer recipe… The ehhif of that time liked their beer, having invented it, and were constantly leaving jars of it out for the gods. That it always vanished afterward struck the ehhif of that time as proof of deity’s existence; it was evidence of their youth and innocence as a species that they rarely noticed how drunk the neighbors were the next morning.

Rhiow glanced up, looked over her shoulder at the others. They were in front of yet another statue, in a light gray stone mis time. This figure was seated, with a roll of papyrus in her lap; again her head was that of one of the People, but wearing a more reflective look than that of Iau the Queen, and a much milder one than her sister. “ ‘Then came Hrau’f the Tamer,’ ” said Urruah, “who calmed the fires Aaurh set, and put things in order: the Lady of the Hearth, who burns low, and learns wisdom, and teaches it. In every still warm place she may be found, in every heart that seeks. She speaks the Silent Knowledge to the ears of those who can hear…’ ”

Rhiow twitched her tail meditatively and stepped along the top of the glass case to look at the next palimpsest, puzzling over the faintly visible characters. This one had been more thoroughly scraped off than the last, but she could still read the earlier writings. A long column of the demotic script ran down the side of the ordered page full of hieratic characters, stick-figures of birds and upheld hands and feathers and snakes, eyes and chairs and wiggly lines. At the top of the scripture, the hieratic writing was easier to read, though Rhiow still had to squint. —he performeth this by means of the mighty words of power that proceed from his mouth, and in this region of the Underworld he inflicteth with the knife wounds upon Aapep, whose place is in heaven—

An odd phrase. Rhiow knew that Aapep was one of the many ehhif names for the Lone Power in Its aspect of Old Serpent. She twitched her tail in bemusement, kept reading. —Ye are the tears of my Eye, and Iau in Her name of Mai-t the Great Queen-Cat and Sekhet the Lioness shall redeem the souls of men; She shall pour flame upon thy darkness, and the River of Flame down into thy depths; from the lake the depths of which are like fire shall the Five arise; atru-sheh-en-nesert-f-em-shet—

The rhythm changed abruptly, and Rhiow’s tail lashed. It was the Speech, written crudely as ehhif had done in those days when trying to work the multiple compound feline vowels into their own orthography: two out of every three vowels were dropped out here. Part of a spell? she thought Something jotted down by some human wizard of that time? For it was just a fragment: the circular structure familiar to wizards everywhere was absent.

Rhiow looked up for a moment, and saw Saash and Urruah eyeing each other with a slightly dubious expression, as if to say, And what about… the other one? Do we mention …?

Saash looked up at the next glass case close to them, instead. “And over here—” she started to say.

But Arhu was staring at the floor. Saash and Urruah glanced down at the spot he was staring at: Rhiow did, too, half-expecting to see a bug there. Arhu, though, said, very slowly, “ ‘…Then after her came sa’Rrahh, the Unmastered Fire … burning both dark and bright, the Tearer, the Huntress; she who kills unmindfully, in rage, and without warning, and as unreasonably raises up again.’ ” He swallowed, his tongue going in and out, mat nervous gesture again. His voice was dry and remote. “ ‘It is she who is strongest after Aaurh the firstborn, knowing no bounds in her power, yet desiring to find those bounds: the Dreadful, the Lady of stillbirths and the birth that kills the queen, but also of the Tenth Life: the Power who is called Lone, for she would hear no wisdom, and her Dam would not have her, driving her out in her wildness until she might learn better.’ ” Arhu gulped again, but his voice still kept that remote, narrative quality, as if someone else were speaking through him. “ ‘In every empty place and in all darknesses she may be found, seeking, and angry, for still she knows not what she seeks.’ ”

He looked up, openly scared now.

“Yes,” Saash said. “Well, you plainly know now what the Whisperer’s voice sounds like. If she goes out of her way to warn you about her sister…”

Rhiow flicked one ear forward and back. Well, madam, you’re taking proper care of him. But what about me? What am I supposed to make of this? It makes no sense whatever— She moved a little farther down to look at the rest of the scraped-off papyrus. —semit-her-abt-uaa-s; mhetchet-nebt-Tuatiu ash-hrau khesef-haa-heseq—

Rhiow stopped, feeling something suddenly shift in the back of her mind. In the darkness there, light moved, reshaped itself, recognizing something that belonged to it.

The words were winged: they flew, fluttered in the darkness inside her, lodged among the other scrawls and curves of light. A moment’s shifting, shuffling, as things resettled themselves. Then quiet again … but it was an unsettling sort of silence.

In that darkness in the back of her mind, though, there was no dramatic change: absolutely nothing was happening. Rhiow looked up, licking her nose uneasily. The others had moved on again. “Here’s what the story’s all about,” Urruah said. “The first battle…”

They went to look at the glass case. Near the head of the long rolled-out papyrus was a picture of a huge Tree, under which stood a slightly disreputable looking tabby-tom, holding a great curved knife or sword in one hand, and using it to chop a large snake into ample chunks, the way someone in a hurry might cut up salami. The furious snake glared at the Cat, the impression being that simply being cut in pieces was not going to slow it down permanently.

Rhiow, her tail still lashing with bemusement, jumped down from the case and went to join them. “The Cat who stood under the Great Tree on the night the enemies of Iau, the agents of evil, were destroyed,” said Saash.

“Urrua,” Rhiow said. “He who Scars, the Lightning-Clawed—”

Arhu, who had been recovering a little, looked up at Urruah and started to grin. Urruah grimaced. “It was a pun,” Urruah said, very annoyed. “My mother loved puns.” For in Ailurin, adding the terminal aspirant to the Great Tom’s name turned it into urruah, “flat-nose,” a joke-name for someone who’d acquired so much scar tissue there that he could hardly breathe.

Rhiow smiled slightly, seeing Arhu getting ready to start teasing again. Saash said, “It says, ‘There dropped from the Queen one last child, and he Burned dark and tore Her in his passing. And still His children tear Hers as He tore, when queen and tom come together.’ ” Urruah rolled his eyes slightly, as he tended to when this part of the full litany was recited. “ ‘Murderer of the young is He, sly Trickster, silent-roaming sire of all dangers that abide our people: but sudden Savior also, one-eyed Wanderer in the dark, midnight Lover, lone Singer, He Who Scars and is Scarred: Urrua, Whom the Queen bore last, the Afterthought, Her gift to Herself.’ ”

At the phrase “murderer of the young,” Arhu looked suddenly at Urruah, who at least had the grace not to smile. When Rhiow finished, Arhu sat, looked down the hall and up again at the papyrus, and said, “So when was this big fight?”

“A couple million years ago,” Saash said.

“The beginning of time,” said Urruah.

“Now,” said Rhiow.

Arhu looked from one to another of them, baffled.

“Well,” Rhiow said, “all three are true, really. This universe was barely cooling down from the fireball of its birth when the fight started. It’s been refought many times since, though some battles stand out. And…” she sighed, looked down at Arhu, “we’re going out to fight it again, this afternoon. And you’re coming with us.”

He stared at her…

…then leapt up and yowled with joy.

People all around the big room stared, didn’t see anything, went back to looking at the exhibits. “This is great!” Arhu yelled. “We’re going to have a fight! This is going to be terrific! When can we leave? Let’s go now!”

More heads were turning all around. Rhiow looked at Urruah. Not even you, she said silently, could have been this excited about the prospect of going into a fight that could possibly get you killed.

I don’t know, Urruah said, seriously seeming to consider it. Maybe I was.

Rhiow sighed again. “Let’s get you out of here,” she said to Arhu, “before security shows up.” She glanced over Arhu’s head at the others. “We need to confer and eliminate any duplicate spells you’re carrying … and then we’ve got to get down to the Terminal. Our backup will be waiting.”

They headed out. As they went, Rhiow threw one last look over her shoulder at the statue of the Queen. What am I looking for? she asked herself a moment later. Poor rude rendering of another species’ mystery that it was, done by creatures who couldn’t ever quite get clear on the concept— But even so, sometimes it was consoling to have a concrete image to look at, however misleading one knew the concreteness to be, or the image of a regard that might actually fix on you.

The stone Queen, however, looked thoughtfully out into the dim blue space of the Egyptian Collection, apparently thinking her own thoughts. It was an expression that suggested to the viewer, What are you looking at Me for? Go work out your own salvation.

It was, of course, the only kind of look most People would accept from their Maker. But Rhiow, at this moment, found herself thinking:

Maybe I’ve been with ehhif too long…

She went after the other three.

Did you get what you came for? Saash said.

Rhiow shivered. I think a little bit more, she said.