Catfantastic II

by Andre Norton

  Three more pointed little faces peered out over the edge of the kettle in wild alarm. When Isolf stooped for a closer look, three pink mouths opened in virulent hissings and spittings. Short fuzzy tails like weasels, enormous batlike ears, legs like little sticks, and a wicked pixie-faced head set on a shapeless blob of a body that seemed more bristling fur than actual substance. When she ventured to advance one hand toward them, the three little fiends scuttled mightily and escaped from the kettle. The last view she had of them was three small shadows disappearing into the heaps of impossible clutter filling the room.

  Skrymir beckoned for a basket and managed to unsnag the other three beasties from his shoulders and beard, dropping them one by one, sputtering, into the basket.

  “I think,” he said thoughtfully, “I must have put too much spirit into such little bodies.”

  “Never mind,” said Isolf. “Perhaps the savage little monsters will be a match for the mice and rats. They don’t seem very companionable.”

  Skrymir examined a large rent in his finger and quickly healed it with a bit of dust and spit. “I don’t think they turned out very well. Not at all what I’d intended. When I catch those other three, I’ll cast out a few of the wild and malicious spirits and see what we’re left with.”

  “What are they called? All creatures must have a name.”

  “By naming them, we are claiming them,” said Skrymir with a ponderous shake of his head. “We give them a certain power over us with a Name. When you say it, they will come, and they may come whether you want them or not. No, we won’t name this creature just yet.”

  Isolf took the basket and the creatures to the scullery. Almost immediately the little beasts pushed off the lid when she wasn’t looking and scuttled across the floor in three different directions. No amount of hunting and chasing recaptured them. Having better things to do, Isolf returned to her work. As she sat plucking a young goose, she saw shadows from the corners of her eyes, slinking around the edges and dark corners of the room. Indeed, the jotun had created company for her but not the sort of company she cared for. When her back was turned, the three creatures hurled themselves upon the goose and dragged it away, off the table and toward the den they had chosen in a cleft in the wall. Isolf saved the goose but not without a great deal of high-pitched growling from the little brutes. From then on she took care to leave no meat lying about unattended; even so, she frequently saw the creatures sniffing around for it on the table top or around the bucket of leavings for the midden heap.

  It took only a few days for the other three beasts to join their fellows in the scullery. Now it seemed that everywhere she looked, Isolf saw multi-colored shadows flitting beneath the table, across the sleeping platform, or even creeping across the rafters overhead with larcenous intentions upon the meat curing there in the smoke of the fire. They snatched food straight out of the pot; if she left the lid off a moment, and if she turned her back on the table, whatever was on it immediately went careering toward the niche in the wall where the creatures had denned up. A pan of milk left for the cream to rise disappeared down six furry gullets, even if she weighted the lid down. It made no difference; the little beasts were amazingly strong and determined. Once she managed to grab one, with the idea of flinging it outside, but it twisted and lashed around like a mad thing so that no one could have held it, then shot away from her grasp like an arrow out of a bow.

  When her father Alborg came to visit every six or seven days, he brought her a joint of meat or smoked fish, which drove the little beasties wild with its smell. She only left the fish on the table a moment to close the door, but when she turned, there they were, all six of them with their sharp little teeth fastened in the package, eyes glaring with fiendish joy as they bundled it away toward their den.

  “Stop!” Isolf stamped her foot with a furious shriek. “You wicked, savage, hateful little kettlingur!”

  Kettlingur! She had no idea from when the word had come, but she had named them. They glared at her a moment, a motley patchwork of colored fur, then abandoned the fish and scampered away into their den, with their insolent tails sticking straight up to show their disdain. From the safety of their den, they all stared back at her, wide-eyed, craning their necks to see what pitiful attempt she would make to hide the fish from them.

  “Greedy little kettlingur!” she scolded them, shaking her finger in their direction. “At least I have something to call you now. I wonder which of Skrymir’s friends or demons put your name into my head.”

  Watching them suspiciously as she unwrapped the fish, she was suddenly smitten with the comical expressions of their faces. Their random stripes and patches reminded her of little wild flowers growing beside the burn. Their ears were far too large, and their sly little noses were offset on either side by a sprig of mischievous pricking whiskers. One beastie’s face was half black and half white, and one wore a mask over his eyes like a bandit.

  Feeling her heart soften unexpectedly, Isolf set out a row of six smoked mackerel and retreated to watch. The kettlingur peered out of their den in astonishment, dividing their attention between Isolf and the fish until they were all squirming with impatience and greed. The one with the bandit mask was the first to fall out of the den and tumble toward the fish in a voracious pounce. The others scuttled after him, ignoring the five other fish. After a brief, hissing, yelling fight, the other kettlingur commenced to notice their scattered feast. It mattered not if any opposition was nearby or not; each kettling clamped down the fish with one clawed paw and gnawed on the rubbery fare to the tune of ferocious growling.

  When that revolting display of greed and suspicion was over and the fish was gone, the kettlingur bathed themselves on the warm hearthstones. They not only earnestly licked their paws and rubbed their ears, they forgot their hard feelings over the mackerel and bathed each other until they all became so sleepy they could do nothing else but pile up in a helpless heap and purr themselves to sleep. With their eyes shut, they almost appeared to smile with innocence.

  Isolf also smiled, for the first time since she had come to the jotun’s hall.

  On the following day she fed the kettlingur again. In scarcely any time at all, she had tamed them completely, and they swarmed over her like long-lost and needy relatives becoming reacquainted after a long separation. A parade of kettlingur attended her footsteps, in case she let fall something edible. When she sat, all six of them struggled desperately to crowd onto her lap, fighting for the best positions. Once content, they immediately fell asleep, grinning and sagging limply off her lap like dead things.

  When Alborg and her brothers or other guests arrived, their dogs were usually relegated to the scullery. The kettlingur began to take offense at this invasion of their domain by great hairy, smelly beasts, or perhaps they were defending Isolf from imagined threat and insult. With rigid tails and spines, the six of them bristled up like cockleburrs. On stiffened legs they skittered at the dogs with explosive spittings and hissings. After a slash on its tender nose, any dog would give a frantic howl and dash for the safety of the main hall.

  It was about this time that Isolf suspected that the kettlingur were indeed getting larger. Beyond a doubt, they were getting more ferocious as far as dogs and rats were concerned. Their bunchy little bodies elongated; their legs and tails lengthened, and their ears grew somewhat more into proportion with their faces. Their scruffy baby coats turned sleek and glossy, their button eyes turned into green or golden orbs. If anything, their playful antics became more violent as they grew. Isolf often nearly lost her feet in a maniac charge of rumbustious keetlingur, chasing each other for no good reason except high spirits. When one of them dragged in a dead rat, it was played with from one end of the scullery to the other, until an unsportsmanlike kettling ended the game by eating the ball.

  Skrymir was not displeased with his furry inventions.

  “Kettlingur,” he mused, when Isolf told him what she had inadvertently named them. “Well, we can do nothing to change t
hem now.”

  “We can do nothing at all with them,” said Isolf. “They don’t behave like dogs. They might come when I call them, if they are of a mind to. They usually don’t. But they massacre rats and mice like Grimfang the warlord. If they didn’t sleep most of the time, there wouldn’t be a rat in all of Skarpsey.”

  “You are pleased with them,” said Skrymir. “I hear you laugh often now, and I see you are smiling.”

  “Yes, they are good company, and often useful,” said Isolf. “Thank you, Skrymir, for the kettlingur.”

  Other guests of Skrymir did not find the kettlingur so agreeable. One old jotun favored the form of a raggedy crow for his travels. When the kettlingur spied Hrafnbogi roosting untidily on the back of Skrymir’s chair, they crouched down, eyes glinting with rapture, jaws chattering as if they were berserkers invoking the protection of their war gods. Then they hurled themselves to the attack, shinnying right up and over Skrymir and his chair. With a startled squawk, Hrafnbogi took to the air, barely sailing out of the reach of the masked rogue Fantur, who made a heroic and doomed leap into the air, which landed him in the woodbox. The other kettlingur chased poor old Hrafnbogi around the hall until he finally managed to gasp out the words to a shape shifting spell, collapsing breathlessly into a chair just as all six kettlingur pounced upon him. Suspiciously they sniffed over him as if he might be held responsible for hiding the carking crow under his rusty old cloak. Then Fantur discovered a moth to chase, and they launched themselves off Hrafnbogi’s meager chest as if he were a springboard.

  “What are these horrible little creatures?” he panted, his eyes red and moist with passion.

  “Kettlingur,” said Skrymir. “I made them for Isolf.”

  “Do they multiply?” demanded Hrafnbogi, settling his disarrayed cloak and hood with a ruffled sputtering.

  “I fear so,” said Isolf. “Kisa, the striped one, has five little kettlingur.”

  “Then we’d better call the big ones kettir,” said Skrymir. “Now there’s eleven of the creatures.”

  “And more to follow, I’m afraid,” said Isolf. “Silki and Silfur seem awfully fat.”

  “They multiply like trolls!” Hrafnbogi patted his forehead with a fluttering kerchief. “We’re doomed! And they eat birds, don’t they?”

  “Now then, don’t be alarmed,” said Skrymir. “We’ll give them to the New People to get rid of their rats.”

  “New People! I wouldn’t do them any favors. Do you know what they call us? Giants. Giants, out of their own covetous fear and profound ignorance!” Hrafnbogi shivered his rusty shoulders, reminding Isolf more of an exasperated old rooster than an all-powerful jotun.

  “I hardly think giving them kettir and kettlingur is a favor,” said Skrymir.

  “They have no respect for the old ways. We’ll all be forgotten, derided, and turned out.” Hrafnbogi snapped his mouth shut, like a beak, and commenced to sulk.

  “At least we’ll no longer have to answer their questions and settle their feuds,” said Skrymir with a long and weary sigh. “They’ll have to manage for themselves.”

  Indeed, Skrymir was tired. Isolf had plenty of occasions to spy upon him unwittingly, and usually saw nothing more portentous than Skrymir sketching runes, burning incense, or reiterating a phrase with the aid of a knotted string. Much of the time he simply sat in his great chair and pondered, his chin upon his fist, his eyes lost beneath craggy brows. His shoulders stooped when no one was about, sagging under the weight of his immense store of knowledge, beginning far back at the start of time itself. The last remnants of the Elder People must be fairly tottering with the burgeoning Past, with no foreseeable end in sight for beings who would never taste death. Oft-times Isolf thought herself of little more consequence than an ant that lives and toils one summer and dies, when she compared herself to Skrymir’s antiquity and wisdom.

  Nor did the wisdom go uncoveted among mortal men. Isolf came to dread and resent the visits of heroes from far-flung settlements, in search of wealth and adventure.

  “What am I to feed these brutes?” Isolf asked of Skrymir, when the mountain hall was filled with twenty or thirty skin-clad power seekers. “I have only a few hens and geese and three sheep. This lot would eat that much and look around for the main course!”

  Skrymir surveyed the reeking brood with a tolerant smile, which was easy from his towering vantage point.

  “Feed them this. It is what they came from, and what they will return to, so it should nourish them well.” With one great hand he sifted a handful of dust into Isolf’s outstretched apron.

  When she returned to the scullery, she poured the dust into a large cauldron and filled it with water. One did not question a jotun’s wisdom with puny mortal objections. When she heated the kettle of dust and water, she discovered that the dust had reorganized itself into boiled fowls, fish, mutton, cabbage, spices, and other things to make a feast for their uninvited guests.

  Isolf, from then on when company came, wordlessly accepted a handful of dust and took it to the scullery, where a pinch of it in the dough trough became bread, or ale in the ale barrel, or soup in the cauldron, meat on the hook, or whatsoever she desired to place on the guest table.

  Try as she might to keep them locked up, the kettir always managed to misbehave when visitors arrived. Dogs they would not tolerate a moment, sending them howling back into the cold dark corridors. The kettir then took possession of the hearth in the main hall and the space beneath the table, where guests were always wont to throw bones and scraps when they were done with them, or liable to spill or drop something tasty. The guests laughed when the kettir fought with the dogs, laughed when their boorish laughter frightened the kettir, laughed when an impudent kettir stealthily snagged a toothsome tidbit off someone’s plate. The feasting always attracted a horde of rats, and the ferocity of the kettir in killing them never failed to excite the admiration of the travelers. Thus stuffed with food, the kettir posted themselves on the hearthstones like furry, purring hummocks of assorted colors, or showed off their amiability by climbing into the nearest cooperative lap to be petted. Frequently after a feasting, a bristling warrior crept self-consciously into the scullery to inquire if Isolf could spare a couple of kettlingur for a faraway wife or mistress. Though Isolf grieved at parting with her pretty kettlingur, she was pleased to see them carried away to far places to win fame and the admiration of mankind.

  There were some guests, however, who would as soon make a kettir into a pair of gloves as look at it. Their hatred of kettir dawned upon them at first glance, much the same as some people loathe snakes.

  Raud Airic was one of these kettir-haters, and fancied himself quite the wizard besides.

  “What horrid little beasties!” he declared furiously, after the fearless Fantur made off with a well-nigh empty bone from his plate, adroitly dodging a cup Airic threw after him. To show his disdain, Fantur stopped a moment in the middle of the table to sit down and extend one hind foot for a quick licking, as if a few deranged hairs might seriously impair his retreat to the hearth.

  “It only shows,” continued Airic slyly, as if he thought Isolf could not hear him from her lonely position on the dais at the end of the hall, “that the skill of the Ancient Ones is declining with the rise of the New People. Once they created mountains and oceans and huge beasts with rending tusks and claws. Now we get kettir, sly and slinking little thieves, able to kill nothing larger than a rat. The last gasp of a once-noble race-”

  He might have gone on, but his speech was sundered by a series of explosive sneezes. This, too, Isolf had noticed before. Kettir possessed the amazing ability to make some people sneeze and weep at the mere sight of them.

  Unfortunately, the sneezing and weeping occasioned by the kettir did nothing to discourage Airic’s visits to the mountain hall. Each time he came with more questions and insolence, bringing his warriors and apprentices with him to devour piles of food and generate a mountain of garbage.

  “I don’t know ho
w you tolerate him!” flared Isolf to Skrymir. “He comes and demands the answers to his questions and scarcely has the manners to thank you for them. And we know he doesn’t put his answers to happy uses, Wise One. Yet last time you let him have the secret for predicting the eclipses of sun and moon, as well as the mysteries of the herbs, both good and deadly. Who knows what he wants now?”

  Skrymir chuckled. “Airic doesn’t even know what it is he ought to be asking for. Herbs and astrology ought to make him feel very important for awhile. We shan’t worry about Airic until he learns the right questions.”

  To Isolf s dismay, it was not half a year before Airic returned, alone this time, and she instinctively knew that he had come with the right questions at last. His elegant wizard’s robes were ragged now, his boisterous companions forgotten, and his eye gleamed with the light of dawning meaningfulness.

  “What have you come for this time?” Skrymir’s question hung in the air, like runes etched with fire, though his voice was soft and gentle. He had not bothered to alter his form to a more impressive one; he still looked like Isolf’s grandfather, who had spent his early days as a renowned Viking and his latter days puttering about in the vegetable garden, growing useful plants that no one had ever seen before. He, too, had known the secrets of the jotun race.

  “I have come for the honey mead,” said Airic.

  “I have never been loath to share it before,” said Skrymir. “You yourself have tasted it already, many times.”

  “Yes, but not your oldest and most potent honey mead. This is where your best knowledge lies hidden. All that you have given mankind until now has been merely the stuff of survival. We have come to you seeking to become great, and you have sent us away with simple skills, and we considered them marvelous because we had not seen them before. Brewing, cheesemaking, forging of metals, all this has become ordinary to us now. I have learned, jotun, that humankind can be as great as the Elder Race-maybe greater, since we are destined to rule the world. You have held something back from us. We are entitled to all your knowledge, not just trivial scraps.”