Ratha's Courage (17 page)

More were gathering overhead, gliding down in an open spiral as Thakur and Cherfan returned from the table and took places near Ratha. The hawks on the outcrop bobbed their heads, cleaned their beaks against their talons, and mantled their wings at one another. One sailed down and landed.

Ratha felt herself grimacing in disgust. Then, as the hawk hopped and landed again on something higher so that Ratha could see its head and opening beak, the grimace turned into a snarl. Wretched carrion-birds, violating the stillness of the dead,
she thought, wanting someone to chase them away, but neither True-of-voice nor any of his tribe made a move. Her muscles tensed and she was just about to launch herself up on the table when a heavy foot slapped onto her tail and pinned it.

“No, yearling!” a voice hissed in her ear. For an instant she wanted to leap, and struggled briefly against him. Then she became still, not wanting to interrupt the hunters’ vigil. Baffled, she turned her head to Thakur, whispering, “I was just trying to help. Those carrion-eaters are going to ruin whatever True-of-voice has planned.”

In a softer whisper, Thakur replied, “Ratha, they are part of what he has planned. The dead are being given to the air. The birds of the air.”

At first Ratha refused to believe him. Instinct made her want to lunge at the raptors, driving them away as she would chase them from a kill. It went against her grain to let them land and feed on a herdbeast kill. To allow or even encourage carrion-feeders to alight on the dead of one’s own tribe was unthinkable, yet True-of-voice seemed to be doing that. It was all she could do not to whip her tail out from beneath Thakur’s paw. She felt the muscles in her haunches tremble and twitch with the instinct to attack.

Her ears twitched back, wanted to flatten. This has hideous, revolting, alien. How could True-of-voice . . . and how could Thakur understand?

“Yearling, they are doing the same as we do when we bury the ones whose spirit has left them. In some ways it is better, quicker, and the bones are left clean.”

Ratha still wasn’t convinced, but she was willing to sit still. More hawks were alighting, joined now by eagles and condors. The edge of the table hid everything but the tops of their bobbing heads from view. As for smell, the wind was at her back, bringing her only the scents of the mountain: warm rock, earth mixed with pine needles, tree bark, and leaves. The wind spared her the sounds as well, and she did not strain to see anything more of what was happening on the granite table. What she could see was enough.

To distract herself, she looked over at the hunters. They all had their heads raised, eyes closed, and noses up. Their ears pricked forward, trembling with the effort to hear, but no sound came to Ratha except those of the wind and the mountain. She looked to Thistle-chaser, who was also sitting nose-up, eyes closed.

It’s that strange “song” of theirs again,
Ratha thought. From the solemn expression on Thistle’s face, she knew it was a song of mourning. Unwanted envy crept over her. Why were she and the other clan members being excluded from this? They had played a part in it. True-of-voice had asked them to come. Why did the hunters now mourn in silence, allowing the Named no part? Why, among all the clan-born, did only Thistle-chaser have the ability to hear it?

She looked at her people. They answered her gaze with expressions of puzzlement, even irritation. Only Thakur looked calm, and even his eyes questioned.

And then, faintly, Ratha did hear something. A faint note that made her ears quiver, swiveling to catch it. So soft, but inexplicably powerful. It was coming . . . yes, from True-of-voice. The sound was not a howl, a screech, a growl, or any of the other cat-noises her kind made. It was a pure tone—low, resonating, growing. It began to waver, then to soar. It swelled with grief and then plunged to a depth almost below Ratha’s hearing. When it faded, Ratha found herself wanting it to grow again. Even when its power nearly hurt her ears, she desired only to hear more. She didn’t know whether it was mourning, raging, rejoicing, or somber, and she guessed it was all of these, or none, or more.

She was barely able to tear herself free of it for an instant, to glance at her people. Even such a brief look told her that they were as caught up in this as she was. And Thistle, eyes now wide open in amazement, was hearing both the inner and the outer manifestations of the song.

Then she heard another voice—a higher, different tone—and then a third. Other hunters opened their mouths, their voices joining. But the strange thing to Ratha was that none of the voices clashed with the leaders. All seemed to harmonize, supporting and strengthening the central theme of the song. As she listened, Ratha got the feeling that there were things missing, gaps that had opened, voices that had fallen silent. How she could tell, she didn’t know, but a part of her whispered that it was the voices of the fire-slain dead that would have filled the emptiness.

This was the way the hunters mourned the passing of their own.

A new voice entered the song, weaving its own way among the interlacing lines and subsidiary themes, but never crossing, never challenging. It was Thistle, singing as Ratha had never heard her, high, clear, with almost a piercing purity.

Even so, Ratha knew that what she could hear was only a small part of the entity that enveloped the group and now her as well. The intoxication might be coming from scent as well, and as Ratha chased that thought briefly, a flood of odors, as complex as the vocal chorus, shifting, ever-changing, but somehow unified, created a scent-song in her nose and a taste-song on her tongue. The fur on her body lifted in response to a touch-song on her skin. Colors and shapes swirled before her eyes as vision found its song as well.

In each of these sense-songs, there were gaps, voids, empty spaces, missing voices, and echoes of loss that spoke of passing, grief, and a profound wish that the song would once again be whole. But it remained flawed, the needed voices, themes, counterpoints still absent, and in that Ratha found a kind of acceptance of change, of loss, of death, of finality, that made the song even more beautiful and compelling.

The song pervaded all her senses, increasing in intensity until she thought she could no longer stand it, yet her hunger only deepened.

Abruptly it stopped, leaving a ringing void into which Ratha had to cast the sound, image, smell, taste of herself, her own individuality in order to fill it.

She blinked, opened her eyes, not sure for an instant who or what she was. Her mouth was open in a cry that faded in her ears as she continued to wake. Her eyes strained to see through the dusk about her, and she wondered if the song still had possession of her sight. Then she saw the faint glow of a lingering sunset to the west and realized that evening had come. It was almost night, and she couldn’t even remember the day passing.

The raptors were leaving. Even as she turned her head back to the granite table, the last one leaped into the air with a clap and swish of wing feathers. Then, heavily, as if laden, it flapped away. A bone rolled off the granite, landed in the gravel near her feet. It had been picked so clean that it looked stark and beautiful in the glow from a rising moon.

The air had taken what the Red Tongue had slain. What moved the forms of the hunters would now fuel the hawk’s flight, the building of nests, the hatching of chicks that would grow into young hawks that would someday again descend to this granite slab to feed. The awesome, terrible, yet essential cycle would continue, taking all who sat here now.

This was, after all, a fitting way to mark and acknowledge the transition.

Someone was putting a soft paw on Ratha’s flank. Thistle.

“You understand now?” her daughter asked.

Ratha found it hard to speak. “I am just beginning to understand.” Her jaws gaped in a yawn as weariness rushed over her. She heard the sound of other yawns as well. She wasn’t surprised. It had been a long, intense day. At last it was over and the Named could return to home ground.

“Thistle, walk beside me on the way back,” Ratha said.

“If you fall over, can hold you up,” Thistle offered.

“I appreciate that, but it’s not what I need.”

“Talk on the trail? About the birds and the dead hunters?”

“That’s closer.”

Ratha turned around, feeling her daughter turning with her, and padded down the trail leading to clan ground. Ratha let her tail swing with each step of her rear paws.

“Thistle, I’m confused. Sometimes when I’m watching True-of-voice and his tribe, I feel that they are impossibly different from us.”

“When they are held by the song,” Thistle said. “Or when they hunt face-tails so well. Or when they do hard things without practicing. Or maybe when they give their dead to carrion-birds?”

“Yes. Then I think about the way they mourned Bent Whiskers, Tooth-broke-on-a-bone, and the others, and I feel that they aren’t that different. We both feel the pain of loss, we both grieve. We both love our cubs and do all we can to care for them.” Ratha paused. “I look at you and Quiet Hunter, and I am amazed how well both of you have done in the clan. Our tribes can’t be so different inside if one who was born into a very different way of thinking and acting can make such a huge change.”

“He still talks a bit funny, like me. Like it, though.”

“I like the way you talk, Thistle. Learn more words, yes, but don’t change the way you put them together. Everyone in the clan does speak slightly differently. Listen to Fessran or Cherfan or Thakur. They don’t say things exactly the way I do.”

“Every other word not ‘dung-eater’ or ‘belly-biter,’” Thistle said with a cat-grin. “Wouldn’t have Fessran any other way, right?”

“Well, she gave me a lot of trouble once, before you came into the clan, but she’s my friend now. I’ll tell you about that later.”

“About the hunters and us . . .” Thistle began. “They are the same, but they grow up to be not the same. Instead of each one learning to think and speak, they learn to let True-of-voice think for them through the song. Instead of learning to be wide awake when they hunt, they learn to dream-stalk.”

“Do you feel that is wrong?” Ratha asked as the two paced together.

“Feelings mixed up, like you. Sometimes is better, easier not to be always thinking, to have someone or something else do it. But sometimes want to decide for me, don’t want anyone else to. Wouldn’t like True-of-voice to force me.”

“He doesn’t?”

“Not to me.”

“What about the others?” Ratha asked.

“Doesn’t force them either. Doesn’t need to. They don’t fight against him.”

“They don’t . . . arrr . . . resist? Is that the right word?”

“Resist,” said Thistle. “Yes. They don’t know that they can.”

“Doesn’t that bother you? That they don’t have a choice?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes a lot, especially when they meet something new and get stuck. Don’t like to see that. Sad.”

“I don’t like it either. But if they don’t know they have a choice, how did Quiet Hunter escape?”

Ratha saw Thistle turn her head, fixing her with that intent uncomfortable sea-green gaze. “Didn’t escape. He lost the song. Remember? Song escaped away from him, made him have to think open-eyed like us. Hurt him. Nearly killed him.”

Both padded along, tails swinging. Being smaller than Ratha, Thistle had a crisper pace, which made her tail swing faster.

“I remember. But he did it.”

“Because he was young, like me. Young ones, thinking can bend, twist, stretch. Older ones, thinking is strong, but sometimes too stiff. I could learn Named ways—Named talking and thinking—because I was still young when Thakur found me. If older, would be still limping on beach, eating sea-scraps.” Ratha detected a slight note of longing in Thistle’s voice that was reflected in her scent. She missed her seaside home, despite the hard life she had led there.

“Will go back for a visit soon. Now things are quieter here. Will take Quiet Hunter, show him sea-mare friends, teach him to swim in the waves.”

“That should be fun,” Ratha said cheerfully. “You know, though, that the clan’s mating season is coming soon.”

“Will be here for it. Will catch fish and bring back. Just a short trip.”

“Good. Even though you don’t have to be here, I’d like it if you were.”

“Want to be here. May need a little help, maybe a little scared of new feelings.”

They walked together in silence for a while.

“So you think we and the hunters aren’t that different. Do you think we can live together without fighting?”

Ratha heard Thistle take a deep breath. “Know that you may want to make them more like clan members. Also know that you know it would be wrong to try. Living together, maybe, but have to be very careful. They are they and we are us.”

“But cubs are cubs, and that’s what makes me hopeful, cub of mine,” Ratha nuzzled her daughter.

“Mothers are mothers, too, Makes me glad,” Thistle said.

Now is for blackness within. Black beyond black. Darker than this coat that eats stars. Blacker than dead coals in the canyon. So many song-hearers burned. The song itself, burned.

Thoughts tumbling like smoke. The thick-skinned prey running in fear. The hunters wanting the thick-skinned prey. These jaws, carrying the log where the burning thing lives. These paws, scraping it out into dry pine needles. Knowing that the thick-skinned prey fear it and that they will run into the claws of the hunters.

Not knowing that death would run with it and fill the canyon. Not knowing that the song would char, become terrible for the part within.

Now is for painful questions. For asking what the jaws took, what the paws loosed and why the song of all senses has turned to black, to soot, and has blown away so that these paws cannot gather it back.

This night coat that eats stars is no longer known by the true voice and that is a black deeper than pain.

Now is for bewilderment, for suffering.

Now, alone.

Chapter Thirteen

A few days later, Thistle was walking on her beloved beach at low tide, her treeling, Biaree, on her shoulder. Behind her paced her chosen partner, Quiet Hunter. She had longed to show him this place, since it had been, and still was, a treasured part of her life. Ratha had told her that things were quiet and that she should take this opportunity to go before the chaos of the mating season entered clan life. She planned to be back just before it started.