Certainly it was the strangest and yet most magnificent cat the herdsman had ever seen. Jet black in color, with yellow eyes that burned like candles behind the old magnifying lenses of a battered tin lantern, it had the overall look and aspect of an enormous male lion, complete to inky black neck ruff. But the heavy, muscular body was too long and was carried on absurdly elongated legs that surely belonged to some other animal. An unnatural combination of speed and strength, its lineage was a mystery to the curious Ehomba. From having to guard his flocks against them, he knew the nature and countenance of many cats, but he had never seen the like of the great black feline form that came stumbling toward him now.
While its pedigree remained a mystery, there was no mistaking its intent. It was trying to reach the shelter of the kopje. Given the speed at which it was slowing, Ehomba saw that it was not going to make it.
Breaking into a sprint, he raced to insert himself between the faltering cat and the pursuing tempest. Once, he thought he heard Simna’s anxious cry of warning rising above the growling wind, but he could not be sure of it. As he drew near, the great cat stumbled again and nearly fell. It was not quite ready to turn and meet its apocalyptic pursuer, but from studying its face and flanks Ehomba knew it had very little strength left in those extraordinarily long legs.
Spotting the approaching human through its exhaustion, the cat followed him with its eyes, eyes that were strangely piercing and analytical, as Ehomba slowed to a halt between it and the storm. Standing tall as he could, willing himself to plant his sandaled feet immovably in the solid earth, the herdsman confronted the storm and threw up both hands.
The storm did not stop—but it paused. Not intimidated, not daunted, but curious. Curious as to what a single diminutive human was doing placing itself directly in the storm’s unstoppable path.
It towered above him, reaching into the clouds from where it drew its strength, a coiled mass of black air filled with flying grass, bits of trees that had been ripped from their roots, dead animals, soil, fish, and all manner of strange objects that were foreign to Ehomba’s experience. It was wind transformed into a collector, running riot over the landscape gathering into itself whatever was unfortunate enough to cross its path. In shape it most nearly resembled far smaller wind-cousins of itself that the herdsman had seen dancing across the desert. But those were no more dangerous than a momentary sandstorm that nicked a man’s skin and briefly rattled his posture. This was to one of those irritating dust-devils as an anaconda was to a worm.
Not surprisingly, its voice was all breathiness and barely checked thunder.
“What is this? Are you so anxious to end your life, man, that you presume to confront me? Before I suck you up and drink you like a twig, I would like to know why.” It held its position, neither advancing nor retreating, swirling in place as it glared down at Ehomba from a height of hundreds of feet.
“I do not know what sort of deviate contest you are engaged in with this poor animal.” Ehomba gestured back at the great cat, who had paused to try to gather its strength and lick at a cut on its left flank. “But it is a patently unfair one, for you have all the sky to draw upon for energy while it has only legs and muscle.”
A gust of wind blew in the herdsman’s face: a tiny gust, a mere puff of air, really—but it was enough to knock him from his stance, and make him stumble.
“I was told of the creature’s boasting,” the tornado replied, “that it claimed it could run faster than the wind. So it was he who set the challenge, and not I.”
Ehomba turned to eye the cat questioningly. Undaunted by either the herdsman’s stare or the column of frenzied air hovering behind him, it replied in a voice that was notably less barbaric than those cat-tongues with which the southerner was conversant. How and where it had learned to speak the language of man was a matter for further discussion, under less adverse climatic conditions.
“The wind demon speaks the truth. I did say that.” Yellow eyes rose past Ehomba to fixate on the column of air. “Because it’s true. I am faster than the wind.”
“There! You see!” Screaming, the storm corkscrewed violently against the Earth. “As weather goes, I am among the least patient of its constituents. How could I let such an impertinent claim go unchallenged—or unpunished?”
The calm before the storm, Ehomba queried the cat. “I mean no offense, or disrespect, but you will pardon me for saying that given the current state of affairs it does not appear to me, anyway, that you are faster than the wind.”
“I am!” Turning to face both the herdsman and the storm, the cat was spent but unbowed. “But I am only flesh and blood and cat-gut.” It glared furiously at the towering, watchful column. “I can and did outrun it, for a day and a night. It tried, but could not catch me. But, unlike it, I need to stop to feed, and to drink, while it can draw sustenance directly from the clouds themselves. Its food follows it, while mine wanders, and does its best to avoid me.”
“Sensible food,” Ehomba murmured knowingly.
The cat took a faltering but proud step in his direction. “This twisting thing refuses to accept the result of that day. Now it pursues me with murder in mind.”
“Nature does not like to be embarrassed,” Ehomba explained quietly. He turned back to confront the waiting storm. “Is what the cat says true?”
“A day, two days, a month—what does it matter? Nothing can outrun the wind!”
“Not even for a day and a night?” The herdsman cocked his head to one side and eyed the writhing tornado.
“This is not a matter for discussion!” The wind that blasted from the swirling pillar of constipated atmosphere threatened to implode Ehomba’s eardrums. “I am fastest, I am swiftest, I am eternally triumphant! And now you, man, will die too. Not because you anger me, not because you take the side of the blasphemer, but simply because you are here, and unlucky enough to be in my way. I will rip your limbs from your torso and scatter them within my body like the summer flowers that decorate the shores of distant rivers, and I will not feel it.”
“You know,” Ehomba replied as he reached back over his shoulder for a sword, “not only are you not the fastest, but you’re not even the greatest of winds. Against the greater gales you are nothing but a wisp of air, a summer zephyr, less than a child’s sneeze.”
“You are brave,” the storm told him, “or demented. Either way it makes no difference. The death of a madman is still a death. Upon the face of the Earth nothing can stand against me. I cut my own path through typhoons, and dominate storms strident with thunder or silent with snow. Tropical downpours part at my arrival, and williwaws steal in haste from my sight.” It resumed its advance, tearing up the ground before it.
Unable to run anymore, its hind legs paralyzed by muscle cramps, the cat could only stand and watch as Ehomba held his ground, plunged his spear point down in the dirt, and with both hands held the dull gray sword out in front of him. The storm is right, fatigued feline thoughts ran. The man is mad.
The tornado could not laugh, and if it could, the difference between laughter and its habitual ground-shaking howl would not have been perceptible. But it did manage to convey something of amusement.
“What are you going to do, man? Cut me? Take a bite out of my air?”
“You are right, storm,” the herdsman yelled back. “Nothing can stand against you—on the face of the Earth. But anyone who looks at the night sky knows that this is not the only Earth, that there are many others out there in the great spaces between points of light. Hundreds, perhaps. I have spent many nights looking up at them and thinking about what they might be like, and have talked often about it with the wise men and women of the Naumkib.”
A glow was beginning to emerge from his sword, but it was unlike any glow the cat had ever seen. Neither yellow, nor white, nor red, it was a peculiar shade of gray, a cold metallic radiance that was traveling slowly from the tip of the weapon toward its haft. Silent now, the cat stood on tottering legs and stared, its pain and exh
austion completely forgotten. There was a wonder taking place before his eyes, and he wanted to miss none of it.
“The wise ones say that the Great Emptiness that spreads over our heads, even over yours, is not as empty as it appears at night. It is full of incomprehensible but miraculous things. Bits of forgotten worlds, the memories of long-lost peoples, energies greater than a veldt fire, beings vaster and more wise than a woman of a hundred years. All that, and more.”
“I am not impressed or dissuaded by the ravings of madmen.” The tornado inched closer, teasing the grass, toying with the lone human standing before it.
By now the gray glow had enveloped the entire sword, which was quivering like a live thing in the herdsman’s powerful grasp. Ehomba held it high, presenting its flat side to the surging column of tormented air.
“Then be impressed by this. Storm, meet your relations, your distant cousins and brothers and sisters—the winds that blow between the stars!”
XVI
HAD HE BEEN ABLE TO, A DUMBSTRUCK SIMNA WOULD HAVE shut his eyes against the blast that came out of the herdsman’s sword. But he could not. The thread of intergalactic cyclone blew his eyelids up toward his forehead and kept them there. It caused the grass for leagues in every direction to bow down away from it, and knocked the muscular black cat right off its feet as easily as if it were a house kitten. Rooted as they were in the ground from which they sprang, the very rocks of the kopje trembled and threatened to blow free, and the sky was instantly cleared of birds and clouds for a hundred miles around.
Fortuitously trapped within the rock-walled alcove like a bee in its hive, Simna found himself pinned flat back against the rocks, his arms spread out to either side of him, and knew that he was experiencing only the feeblest of side effects from the wind his friend had called forth. Knew because the strength of that wind, its full force and energy, was directed straight out from the sword, directly at the inimical advancing storm.
It was an unnatural wind not only in its strength. It brought with it an intense biting cold that threatened to freeze his skin as solid as a shallow lake in the taiga, and an odor—an odor of alien distances that clotted in his nostrils and threatened to blunt his sense of smell permanently.
Crackling with energies exotic and inexplicable, the wind from between the stars struck the tornado foursquare in the center of its boiling column—and ripped it apart. Overwhelmed by forces beyond imagining, from beyond the Earth, brought forth through the medium of a sword forged from metal that itself had been subject to the whims of the intergalactic winds, the mere column of air could not stand.
With a last outraged howl it came asunder, fell to pieces, and collapsed in upon itself. The great pillar of conflicted energy blew apart, hurling its internal collection of dead fish and broken branches and river beach sand and the limbs of the unfortunate dead flying in all directions. As the radiance from the sword faded and the unearthly wind it had called up died with it, Simna was released from his imprisonment and allowed to slump to his knees. Something smacked against the stone where his head had been pinned only moments before, and he turned to see the upper half of a carp lying on the rocks where it had fallen.
The boiling clouds from which the tornado had derived its strength shattered silently, their constituent parts dissipating into the resultant blue sky. In a little while all was as calm and peaceful as it had been before the storm’s arrival. Lizards emerged from their dens in the rocks, small dragons took wing and resumed their singing in concert with the birds, and vultures appeared as if from nowhere to feast on the widely strewn, discarded contents of the tornado’s belly.
Taking a deep breath of uncommitted air, Ehomba slipped the sky-metal sword back into the scabbard lying flat against his back and turned to reflect on the cause of all the commotion. The huge black cat was sitting on its haunches in the grass, which was only now beginning to spring back to the vertical from the effects of the deviant wind. Licking its left paw with a tongue thicker than the herdsman’s foot, it was grooming itself silently, working its way from nose back to mane.
It did not let Ehomba’s approach interrupt its labors. “You saved me.”
“You speak well in a tongue not widespread among your kind.”
“Humans presume to know too much about cats.” A paw that could easily have taken the herdsman’s head off with one swift stroke daintily combed through the long black ruff that formed the fluffy mane. Claws like daggers isolated individual hairs.
“That is certainly true. I am Etjole Ehomba, of the Naumkib.” When silence ensued, he added as he leaned on his spear, “What am I to call you?”
“Gone, as soon as I can get myself cleaned up.” The stroking paw paused and piercing yellow eyes met the herdsman’s. “I am a litah.”
“A litah,” Ehomba echoed. “A small name for so big a brute.”
“It is not a name.” The cat was mildly annoyed. “It is what I am. My father was a lion, my mother a cheetah.”
“Ah. That would explain your lines, and your legs.”
Brows drew together like black ropes thick as hawsers. “What’s wrong with my legs?”
“Nothing, not a thing,” Ehomba explained hastily. “It is just that it is unusual to see such a combination of speed and strength in one animal.”
“A lot of good it did me.” Grumbling and rumbling, the litah set to work chewing on his hindquarters.
“What did you expect?” Out of the corner of an eye, Ehomba saw Simna ibn Sind approaching, slowly and cautiously. “For the wind to play fair?”
The litah turned back to him, his tongue scouring around his snout. “Animals as well as humans always expect too much of Nature. I was truthful, but tactless. I admit I did not think the wind would take it so much to heart, if heart it can be said to have had.” Bright eyes glanced heavenward, searching the sky behind Ehomba. “You are a sorcerer.”
“See? See?” Coming up alongside the herdsman, Simna chimed in his agreement with the cat’s assertion. “I’m not the only one.”
Ehomba sighed tiredly. “I am not a sorcerer,” he told the litah. “I am only a herdsman from the south, bound by an obligation set upon me by a dying stranger to travel to the north and then to the west in hopes of helping a woman I do not know.”
The litah grunted. “Then you are right. You are no sorcerer. Any wizard, human or animal, would have better sense.”
Simna drew himself up proudly next to his friend. “He won’t admit to it, but he’s really after treasure. A great treasure, buried somewhere in the lands across the western ocean.” Beside him, Ehomba was shaking his head sadly.
“I have no use for treasure,” the litah growled softly. “I need water, and sex, and a place to sleep. And meat.” With this last, he eyed Simna thoughtfully.
“Now wait a minute, whatever your name is.” Putting his hand on the hilt of his sword, Simna took a step backward. In addition to putting a little more distance between himself and the cat, this also had the effect of placing him slightly behind the herdsman. “My friend here just saved your life.”
“Yes, curse it all.” Idly, the cat inspected the claws of his right foot, holding them up to his face as he studied the spaces between for thorns or bits of stone. “Since humans cannot talk without having names to address, and since you already know me as a litah, I suppose you may as well call me Ahlitah as anything.”
“Very well—Ahlitah.” Ehomba eyed the great black feline uncertainly. “But why ‘curse it all’? Most creatures express gratitude and not irritation when someone saves their life.”
The heavy paw descended and the brute rolled over onto his back, rubbing himself against the grass and the ground with his paws flopping loose in the air. A wary Simna was not yet reassured, and continued to keep his distance despite the kittenish display.
“I suppose it’s not in my nature. Therefore I am not especially grateful. I am, however and unfortunately, indebted. This is a legacy that both my lines are heir to, and I am sadly no differ
ent.” Concluding its scratching, the cat twisted with unnatural quickness back onto its feet and began to pad toward Ehomba. The swordsman held his ground, as did Simna—behind him.
“Easy now,” the swordsman whispered. “This Ahlitah’s idea of gratitude may be different from our own.”
“I do not think so.” The herdsman waited, hand on spear, its butt end still resting unthreateningly on the ground.
The great cat finally halted, its face less than inches away from Ehomba’s own. Its jaws parted slightly, revealing major canines more than half a foot long. From between them emerged a giant pink tongue that proceeded to slather the herdsman’s face in drool from chin to hairline. The tall southerner gritted his teeth and bore the infliction. The sensation was akin to having one’s face rubbed hard in the sand.
Taking a step backward, Ahlitah dropped to one knee and bowed his massive, maned head. “For saving my life—even though I didn’t ask you to interfere—I swear allegiance and fealty to you, Etjole Ehomba, until such time as you have successfully concluded your journey, or the one or the both of us die. This I vow on the lineage of my father and of my mother.”
“Oh now, that’s not necessary,” the herdsman responded. From behind, Simna nudged him in the ribs.
“Are you crazy?” The swordsman had to stand on tiptoes to place his lips close enough to whisper into his companion’s ear. “He’s offering his help, Etjole! Willingly! When looking for treasure, it’s always best to have as many allies as possible.”
“It is not willingly, Simna. He is doing so out of a sense of enforced obligation.”
“That’s right,” concurred the cat, who easily overheard every whispered word.
Simna stepped back. “And what’s so wrong about that? Seems to me I know someone else who’s doing something against his will in order to carry out an unsought-after obligation.”
Ehomba’s brows rose slightly as he regarded his friend. “Contrary to what many people believe, too much common sense can be bad for a man.”
Carnivores of Light and Darkness Page 16
