I shrugged, trying to shrug off my frustration. “Sometimes I get angry, because nobody around here understands anything.” They were the worst kind of deadheads, thinking they knew everything when really they knew nothing, didn’t even want to know. “Sometimes I say things because I can’t help it.”
“I do too.” He looked up at me, and there was someone else trapped behind his eyes. I touched that other, hidden child with my thoughts. “Sometimes I can’t help it.…” His throat worked.
I remembered what Lazuli had said … remembered that he had Charon taMing for a stepfather. I touched his shoulder lightly. “I know,” I said.
He smiled, a little uncertain. “Mother said she knew you were really a good person, because Charon hates you so much.”
It startled a laugh out of me. I didn’t say anything for a minute, while half a dozen things cancelled each other out inside my head. “Where is your mother?”
“She’s up at the Crystal Palace with Charon.” His face twisted. “Auntie says ‘Charon’ is the name of some shipper in an ancient story, who used to transport dead bodies to Hell.”
I laughed again.
“Someday I’m going to give him a dog with three heads.”
“I want to see the dog with three heads!” Talitha burst out. She scrambled down out of the pony’s saddle.
“I don’t have it now, you flit—” Jiro said. “Where’s your mother?”
I looked back at him, surprised. “She’s dead.”
His face pinched. “Where’s your father?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know where my father is, either.…” He caught Talitha and pulled her toward him, holding her close while she squirmed. “Do you think if you wish something enough, it happens?”
I shook my head, watching the river pass like time.
“Don’t let anything happen to Auntie.”
I nodded.
“I want to fly.” Talitha pulled at Jiro’s wings.
“You’re too little.” He let go of her, pushing her away, as he unlatched the harness. “Here, you can try it—” He slung the wings toward me. “It has lifters, you don’t really have to flap.”
I looked up at the sky. My head and my stomach changed places just thinking about it. “No thanks.”
He shrugged, and dumped the wings on the ground in a heap. “Okay. Let’s do something else then.”
I winced. “Jeezu. You’re going to break that.”
“Auntie’ll get me another one.” He was already stripping off his suit and helmet.
Talitha was wandering along the edge of the meadow, picking purple and white flowers, singing a formless song. I sat down under the tree, resting my back against the rough bark. Everything smelled good here. The pony snorted, still eating grass.
“You want to race? We could get more horses—” Jiro stood in front of me, in a bright red tunic and shorts.
“I don’t know how to ride.” I shrugged.
“We could race skimmers—”
“I don’t know how to do that either.”
I could feel annoyance growing like an itch under his skin. “We could go swimming—” He waved a hand at the river. “That’s easy.”
“I can’t swim.” I looked down, tracing lines in the dirt with my finger.
“Don’t you know how to have fun—?”
I glanced up at him. He was still standing in front of me with his hands on his hips, frowning. “No. I guess not.” I looked down again.
“Well I do.” He peeled off his clothes and ran down to the river shore.
I watched him wade naked into the water and dive in, watched him swim with strong, easy motions, as if he’d been born to it, like a fish. I sat where I was, feeling the echo of his thoughts, the sensations of water and motion, like a kind of mocking laughter.
“Here.” A fistful of dirt-clotted flowers shoved into my face, Talitha behind them. “These are for you. Why aren’t you swimming, like Jiro?”
“I can’t.” I took the flowers awkwardly, dropping a couple.
She picked up the strays and pushed them into my hands. “For you. And these are for Mother, and Auntie, and my pony.…” She showed me the clump in her other hand, then put them carefully on the ground beside me. “Let’s leave them here,” she said, like she was the adult and I was the four-year-old, “and we can go down to the water like Jiro. I’ll help you.” She pulled open my fist and laid my flowers on the ground beside the rest, tugging at my arm while she did it.
“I suppose you can swim too,” I said, getting up.
“Oh, no,” She shook her head. “I’m only four. When I’m a big five-year-old, then I’ll be able to swim. Maybe when you’re five, you can swim too.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” We went down to the shore. The water was clear for about a meter out from the muddy bank. I could see smooth stones and tiny darting fish lying below its surface. After that it got deep faster, shading into brown and gray, reflecting the blue-green sky further out. Talitha waded in up to her knees, splashing and squealing, scattering fish. Slowly I pulled off my boots and rolled up my pants legs, and then I went in. It was freezing cold. The cold didn’t seem to bother Talitha or Jiro. Clenching my teeth, I let her drag me after her, feeling the soft bottom squelch and shift between my toes, the edge of the deep-water current lick at me. I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not. I stopped when the cold water started slapping at my knees.
Jiro shouted and waved, Talitha giggled and splashed. Spray flew like rain. The sun felt good and hot on my back, the air was sweet, my face in the water’s shimmering mirror said I was smiling … said that this day really belonged to me. And suddenly I felt a surge of panic that took my breath away. Thief.
I backed out of the water again and sat down on the bank, breathing hard, putting distance between me and something that had more to do with watching them play in the river than with the cold water touching my skin, or the muddy bottom shifting under my feet.… The feeling I’d had when I’d entered the taMing’s castle on the cliff—that I didn’t have the right to be here; or even the right to know that places like this existed.
The heat of the sun soaked into my flesh, making me sweat. After a while I unknotted my fingers, stretched out the muscles in my arms, and pulled my shirt off. The wind breathed on my sweating skin, letting the heat inside me escape. I picked through the smooth warm stones that lay in a dark mosaic all around me. I tossed them into the cold water, one by one, watching the rings they made as they fell, watching the way the rings collided, overlapped, mingled like the patterns of separate minds converging.
Talitha came back onto the shore and sat down beside me. She began to make mud cakes. After a minute Jiro burst up out of the water like some kind of monster, making her shriek, and splashed ashore to pull on his clothes. He picked up a stone and threw it, making it dance across the water like it was massless. I threw another stone and it sank.
He squatted down beside me. “What’s the most fun you ever had?”
I glanced at him. Three more stones hit the water and sank, while I searched my mind for an answer that would mean something to him. The kind of games they played in Oldcity were the kind you learned the hard way. “You ever see a comet ball?”
“Sure. I’ve got four of them, in different colors.”
My mouth twitched. “I had one once. When I was a little older than you. It was incredible. Oldcity’s kind of like N’Yuk in a way, closed in, no sky—Quarro buried it when the new city spread out. Except it’s dark in Oldcity, even in the daytime. Your whole world’s only about ten meters high, there in the streets.…” I’d snatched the control box out of a storefront after a fire, but I didn’t say that. I hadn’t known what it was. When I’d switched it on, a huge sizzling ball of light had exploded out of the wand and gone rocketing up toward the roof of the world. “It was like trying to hold onto that—” I glanced up at the sun for a second, down again. “Like trying to reel it in on a string.…” It had bounced of
f the tangled undersides of Quarro, leaped back and forth from wall to building wall, shooting sparks, lighting up the backstreet gloom like a captive star. After a minute or so of just staring, I’d begun to realize that I could control it with the wand. I could make it do anything I wanted, leap and spiral, paint pictures on my retinas with fire. “Everyone came out into the street to watch me … to see it. They kept handing me food and brew, shouting, ‘Keep it going!’ It was the best show I’d ever seen—any of us had ever seen, maybe. I felt like kind of a hero, giving them all this free sun show.…” I remembered wishing it could go on forever.
It had lasted for about an hour, before someone who’d wondered why somebody like me had something like that had let the Corpses know about it. They’d busted me for stolen goods. I’d spent the next four months of nights in a meter-high detention coffin, the days cleaning urinals or down on my hands and knees scrubbing the lightblocks of Oldcity’s glowing pavements with a brush, wearing a monitored stun collar locked around my throat. And that had really seemed to last forever.
It hadn’t been worth it. I hadn’t even been able to stomach thinking about the memory afterwards. I hadn’t thought about it in years. It surprised me that I’d remembered it now; almost as much as it would have surprised me then to know that someday I’d be sitting here, five hundred light-years away, on this riverbank in the sun with a couple of rich kids.
“If that’s your favorite thing, you don’t look very happy about it,” Jiro said. Doubt, confusion, disappointment flickered through his thoughts like a chain reaction.
“It was a long time ago.” I shrugged, and got up. “Why is it so hot here? I thought it was almost winter.” On the distant mountainside the autumn colors were burning like a fire, but all around us in the valley it was still warm and green.
“It’s part of the system.” Jiro scrambled to his feet while I pushed my boots on. “You know—the security and everything. It never gets real hot or real cold, everybody likes it like that. It never snows down here.”
I shook my head, half smiling. If you wanted your life to be a long summer afternoon here, all you had to do was say so.… “What if you want snow?”
“You can go to the chalet.”
I didn’t bother to ask what that was.
“Let’s go to Daric’s house. Argentyne is there—”
“No thanks.” I didn’t think there was anybody in the universe who could make me want to visit Daric.
“But she’s famous! Don’t you want to meet her?”
That was all I needed. I shook my head, tying my shirt sleeves around my neck. “Come on, Talitha. I’ll take you back.” She got up, resigned, and let me set her on the pony’s back again. Jiro put his wings on, looking sullen. “You’re going to get it, Tally—look what you did.” He pointed at her muddy clothes, glanced at me as if it was my fault. Talitha pouted. Jiro ran and leaped, rising into the air like a kite. He circled us a couple of times as we plodded back across the field. Then he headed away toward Daric’s house, alone. I felt kind of sorry for him; but not sorry enough to change my mind.
I led Talitha back toward the house. Nanny got up from a garden seat like a shadow and came to take her away. She caught one look at a muddy leg. “My Lady—!” she called. Lazuli came down off of the porch into the sunlight, shielding her eyes.
“Mother! Mother!” Talitha squealed, bouncing up and down in her saddle with a grin so guiltless and wide I almost didn’t regret anything.
Lazuli looked at her, and at me, and I felt her try for anger, only finding laughter. “I guess you are an anarchist, after all,” she said to me. It was what Isplanasky had called me, yesterday. I winced. “Oh, come on, Nanny.” Lazuli looked back at the older woman. “It’s only a little bit of mud. Reality doesn’t frighten us that much around here—” The irony in her voice surprised me. Even she wasn’t sure how she meant it.
Nanny sighed heavily, and led Talitha, skipping and waving, into the house.
“Jiro is with Gentleman Daric, ma’am.” So she wouldn’t think I’d drowned him.
Lazuli turned back to me. She glanced down at the half-wilted bunch of flowers in my hand, as the pony I was somehow still holding started to eat them. I held them away from its mouth.
“Are those for me?” she asked, still half mocking, and half surprised.
“Uh … yeah.” I put them into her hands. “From Talitha.”
She took them, still looking up at me as she held them close to her face, breathing in the sweet smell. An odd disappointment tickled the back of her eyes, making her blink.
Suddenly feeling like an ass, I said, “And from me too, I guess.”
“Thank you.” She smiled then, tucking the flowers into the waistband of her flowered tunic. Her legs were bare, and perfect. She took the pony’s lead rope from my hand, her fingers touching mine. “Let me take that. You look like you want to be rid of it.… You’re very good with children, and it’s kind of you to spend time with mine.” She began to lead Bootsie away, looking at me all the while. Wanting me to follow.
I followed. “They’re nice kids,” I said, because I had to say something, and because I suddenly realized it was true. Sad kids. But I didn’t say that. I thought about them growing up into the next generation of the Centauri controlling board.
She was silent for a while, walking beside me. “I love them so much,” she said at last, the words forced out past something in her throat. “Sometimes I begin to lose my perspective about things when … things close in on me. I don’t want to turn around someday and find that I’ve lost them. When I think about that, when I even try to imagine being without them, I don’t think I could bear it.…” She was thinking about her first husband. “You look at me so strangely sometimes, Cat.” She looked back at me, quizzical and embarrassed.
I blinked and shook my head. “It’s just that sometimes you look so much like Jule … ma’am.”
“Oh, Jule…” She glanced away, stopped. Someone came toward us from the low stone outbuildings, and took the pony. “She’s married now, isn’t she?” She looked at me again, a sudden questioning look, like she wished she could read my mind. “To another psion?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I remembered that she didn’t know what I was. When she looked at me all she saw was a human face.
“Don’t call me ma’am,” she said gently, “it makes me feel old. Call me Lazuli.”
I nodded, suddenly not able to say anything at all.
She smiled again, as if she knew it. “Will you walk with me a while? It’s such a beautiful day, and no one gets enough exercise around here.”
“Except Lady Elnear,” I said.
She laughed. “I like the way your mind works.”
I wondered what she’d think of it if she really knew, the way Jule did.… “Did you know Jule very well?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Barely at all. I’ve only heard about her. Stories…” Not good ones. “Poor thing.” She was thinking her cousin must be happier now. With her own kind.
“She doesn’t need anybody’s pity,” I said.
Lazuli glanced at me. “I’m sorry. You really do care about Jule, don’t you?”
I nodded, still not quite able to call her by name.
“Did you love her … do you?”
Irritation and sudden memory spilled into each other in my mind, oil and water. “She’s my best friend.” Telling the truth. Part of it. Once I’d looked at her and wanted her body, thinking that was all love was. But then I’d shared her mind. Siebeling had taught me a lot of things, he’d given me my psi; but Jule had given me the real gift. She’d made me whole. She’d changed everything I knew about women, and men, and myself. And I’d finally realized that I didn’t love her the same way Siebeling did … that to be her friend was all I really wanted from her, all I really needed.
I felt Lazuli’s curiosity withdraw; but her hand still held onto my arm. And she was still too much like Jule when I looked at her … but not enough like he
r to keep me safe. We walked along the shadow of the high stone wall; private, discreet. “It takes a lot of … courage, to be that close to someone most people would be afraid of,” she said.
I made a sound like a laugh, that wasn’t. “She was more afraid of all of you. And she had more right to be.”
She was silent then, wondering whether she’d really understood me, or whether I was leaving too much unsaid on purpose. My bare arm under her hand was slippery with sweat; the heat of the day seemed to breathe on us. I felt a tension rising in her that had nothing to do with the conversation. I felt it rising in me, too, as I realized what it was.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, finally.
I shook my head. “I … just a headache. Comes and goes. It’s all right—”
But she led me to a wooden bench along the bright edge of the gardens, and made me sit down. The air was filled with the hum of insects. “Sometimes if you rub the temples, just here…” she murmured. I felt her fingertips against my sweating forehead, moving in slow, gentle circles.… Her face, her hair—too familiar—her lips almost touching mine, the smell of flowers and sunwarmed skin … Suddenly I couldn’t look away from her eyes, because I could see all the way through to what lay behind them. “Is that better?” she murmured. She took her hands away, and that was worse.
“Yes,” I mumbled.
One hand still hovered, touching the white line of the scar over my left eye. It dropped down to trace another jagged line along my ribs. “You have a fine body,” she said, “but you haven’t taken care of it. You should treat it more gently—it has to last for a long time.”
“I know.” My head wasn’t the only part of it that ached now.
“When you’re so young, you think that everything lasts.” She looked away.
“No,” I said. “I know it doesn’t. Lazuli—”
“Cat!”
I jerked around on the bench, looking up. I could just see Elnear standing on the balcony of her study, staring straight down at us.
“Would you come inside please?”
I pushed to my feet, the spell broken that had stopped time, stopped thought inside me. I left Lazuli there, backing away until I could make myself turn and walk looking ahead toward the house.
Catspaw Page 14
