Firebirds Soaring

by Sharyn November

  Ratha felt herself being lifted by gentle paws and mouths, then being laid across the two big herders. Other paws steadied her as the pair began to move off. Many more touched her, giving comfort as the Named bore their leader back to clan ground.

  It took more days than Ratha expected to recover. The mental and physical violence done to her wouldn’t easily be shaken off. Her wounds healed, but the pain inside lingered. Who was the imposter? She didn’t know anyone like him, did she? What had she done to make him hate her so?

  She wondered if he might be an UnNamed one who had barely escaped the clan’s attack with fire and had vowed revenge. Or could he possibly be a cub whose parents were killed or driven out by the Named? Or even, somehow, one of True-of-voice’s people?

  Then the last possibility entered her mind. Bonechewer had sired four cubs, not just Thistle-chaser. Could this possibly be one of Thistle’s brothers? Ratha remembered how Thistle had once hated her and tried to slay her on the wave-swept rocks beyond the shore. She had to come to terms with her daughter. Was there another cub that had been stunned and angered by her rejection and desertion of her first litter?

  She nearly groaned aloud at the thought. Would she have to go through with a male cub what she had gone through with Thistle? Even worse, there were three brothers in the litter. Was there now a small pack on her trail, seeking revenge?

  The thought was so wretched that it was almost funny, but her jaws and face still hurt too much to loll her tongue out in a wry Named laugh.

  Then she grew somber, thinking that the false Bonechewer had accomplished one of his goals. But in this he was right. Never again would she have the foolish dreams and ideals that led her down the path to suffering. That set her up to be vulnerable to such schemes and attacks. She would look after herself and her people. The UnNamed would have to do without her.

  It was many days closer to winter. This evening, Ratha had invited Thakur, Thistle-chaser, and Quiet Hunter to join her at the evening fire. She still did not sit as close as she once had, relying more on the warmth of Thistle-chaser and Quiet Hunter curled up against her to shield her from the night’s wind. She hadn’t mentioned either the false Bonechewer or the attack since they had happened. Thakur lay a short distance apart from Ratha. She also found it very hard to respond to him, since she wondered deep down if he hated her as much as the false Bonechewer did. He had asked her not to trample on his feelings and she had run all over them, without thinking. When the mating season came, he would probably go away again, as he had always done, but this time, it would not be just for fear of siring witless cubs.

  Now he kept apart and silent before the evening fire, letting Thistle and Quiet Hunter do most of the talking. She didn’t say much either. She listened to the young couple, wishing she were their age again, with the path before her open and promising.

  Thistle nudged her gently. “Haven’t heard you talk much, Ratha-mother.”

  “There isn’t much for me to talk about,” Ratha said softly.

  “Miss you talking about . . . idea you had once. That clan could help UnNamed ones, not hurt them.”

  “That is a stupid, foolish idea. Forget it, Thistle.”

  “No, not stupid. Not foolish. Already did it a little with me, Quiet Hunter, and True-of-voice.”

  “I won’t ever think of doing it again,” Ratha growled.

  “Because he—”

  “He was right.”

  “But he wasn’t . . . my father.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He showed me that ideas like mine just bring trouble. If I hadn’t been chasing them so hard, I wouldn’t have been such easy prey.”

  “That dream,” said Thistle. “Made you more. Don’t chase it away.”

  Ratha fell silent.

  “Ratha,” said Thakur’s voice, startling her because he had been so quiet lately. “Fessran and I found out something today. Do you remember the smell the stranger left? How strong it was?”

  “I don’t want to remember, but yes, I do. It wasn’t a body smell. It was more like the fleabane plant.”

  “We found the source. It is a plant. Fessran crushed some and sniffed it.”

  “What happened?” Ratha asked, curious despite herself.

  “I’ll have to tell you since she won’t. She’s too embarrassed.

  She was sillier than I was the time I ate fermented fruit.” Thakur paused. “He used it on you, Ratha, to lure and confuse you. You have no reason for the shame I smell in your scent. He used a strong medicine plant, not to heal, but to harm.”

  Slowly Ratha blinked. “Then it wasn’t . . . all me?”

  “No,” Thakur answered.

  “Only a little?”

  “Enough so that you believed it was Bonechewer.”

  “I thought you were hurt. I thought you were angry and hated me.”

  “How could I? ” Thakur moved nearer. “You didn’t disguise yourself by rolling in colored clay. You didn’t rub yourself with a mind-twisting scent. You didn’t bring enemies to attack. Stop wounding yourself, yearling. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “But I turned away from you . . . to him. How can you forgive me?”

  Thakur lifted up her drooping head with his nose. “Because I know how much you cared for the real Bonechewer. And I know how much you care for me.”

  Ratha raised her head, her feelings again in confusion, but this time the whirling in her mind was centered on hope.

  “Who was he, Thakur? How did he know me so well? He spoke . . . just like Bonechewer.”

  “If we ever find him, we’ll know. And I think we’ll find him someday. It doesn’t matter now. He wasn’t Bonechewer. Thistle screamed out the truth. Bonechewer would have never done such a cruel thing to you. He wasn’t Bonechewer, so whatever he said doesn’t matter.”

  “I will try,” Ratha said slowly.

  “I know. When you have been harmed like that, it takes many days, even seasons, to recover.”

  “Why did he hate me enough to . . .”

  Thakur soothed her. “Whatever his reason, he saw things as wrong and twisted. He hated something in his own mind. Not you. Not the real Ratha that I see.”

  Then Thistle spoke. “Hated something in my own mind too. Attacked you. Now know better. Know you better.” She paused. “You haven’t lost Bonechewer, Ratha-mother. Have him still. Inside.”

  And you have given him back to me, Ratha thought. She bent her head and licked Thistle’s nape, catching in Thistle’s fur an echo of Bonechewer’s scent. The real Bonechewer. I have him still. In you.

  She knew then that she had started to heal.

  “Do one thing for me and Thistle,” said Thakur.

  Ratha cocked her head at him.

  “Don’t chase away your dreams.”

  “Why not? They’re foolish and they get me in trouble.”

  “Difficult, perhaps. Trouble, maybe. But not foolish.”

  “I don’t know. . . .” She faltered. “Part of me doesn’t want to give them up. But part of me is still afraid.”

  “Then he wins,” said Thistle simply. “Or he will.”

  Ratha’s growl was very low. “No, he won’t. Whoever he is.”

  She felt Thakur beside her. Even though he didn’t speak, she heard her thoughts in his voice.

  Ratha, you wouldn’t be who you are without your ideals and your dreams. Someday they’ll happen and I’ll be there to help. Don’t let angry minds and empty hearts pull you from this trail. Be careful, but be strong.

  “Thank you, Thakur,” she said aloud.

  He looked at her knowingly. “I knew you’d come back, clan leader.”

  They all fell asleep against each other in the warmth from the fire.

  CLARE BELL was born in England and raised in the United States. She is best known as the author of the Books of the Named, about a prehistoric clan of self-aware intelligent big cats who herd their former prey. (Before and while writing, she worked in such diverse fields as mudflat ecology, test engineering
, and electric vehicles.) The first four titles—Ratha’s Creature, Clan Ground, Ratha and Thistle-chaser, and Ratha’s Challenge, were reissued by Firebird in 2007. E-Reads (www.ereads.com) has published the fifth book in the series, Ratha’s Courage; it is available in paperback from Imaginator Press (www.imaginatorpress.com).

  Visit Clare Bell’s Web site at www.rathascourage.com.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This first Ratha short story took me onto new ground. I had done short fiction in Catfantastic and Witch World, but all the Ratha tales were novels. The first element of “Bonechewer’s Legacy” was Bonechewer, from Ratha’s Creature. I’d always regretted his death. With his mix of irreverence and wisdom, he was my best character.

  Second came the theme of the idealist who is manipulated by those who exploit or use her passion. This comes from my work as an electric car engineer and journalist; I ultimately left the field after too many bad experiences with certain companies. Not surprisingly, this second theme is strong in my mind.

  Ratha is becoming an idealist. Urged by her daughter, Thistle-chaser, Ratha has extended understanding and friendship outside the clan (Ratha’s Challenge). Along with Thakur, she envisions helping the struggling UnNamed. This new idealism leaves Ratha vulnerable when a strange cat uses her dreams and her memory of Bonechewer to attack her. He even makes her believe that she deserves this cruelty.

  The “legacy” is Thistle-chaser’s true memory of Bonechewer. She realizes that the strange cat is not her father; in fact, he is her brother, one of Ratha’s other children with Bonechewer. With a similar voice and physique, he can convincingly re-create his father, and use that presence to hurt his mother. Thistle-chaser’s passionate intervention exposes the fraud and saves Ratha—not just from the attack, but from her own self-condemnation—and helps Thakur heal the damage.

  Elizabeth E. Wein

  SOMETHING WORTH DOING

  “You feel like Henry the Fifth in armour and

  Joan of Arc tied to the stake at the same time.”

  —anonymous Spitfire pilot

  Theo lost her younger brother in the spring of 1940. Kim died a month shy of his eighteenth birthday. He was knocked over by a van loaded with infantrymen not much older than himself, bound for France, as he cycled through the lanes on his way home from the grammar school in Canterbury, which he would have finished with in less than a month.

  “What a waste. What a tragic waste of a young life,” the parishioners kept telling their bereaved vicar, Kim and Theo’s father. It made Theo want to smash their sorrowful faces in. It was so nearly what the policeman had said when he brought Kim home the day after Kim and his friends had tried to drink a pint in each of the ten pubs along the seafront at Share, or what Kim’s headmaster had said when Kim had not turned up for his exams last year. Everyone made Kim’s death sound like one more failure to live up to expectations. It had not been Kim’s fault he had been hit by a van, had it? All of Europe was at war. Wasn’t the vanload of soldiers on their way to the front a tragic waste of young life, too?

  Theo’s own record was about as third-rate as her brother’s. The pressure to set a good example for the wayward Kim had only made Theo want to join him in his escapades. She liked reflecting the glow of his artless magnetism and being counted one of his crowd. The threat of war had caused her parents to pull her out of a Swiss finishing school the previous spring, very unfinished, and Theo had flatly refused to start in an English girls’ school halfway through her final year. So Theo had spent most of the last year hanging about at the Manor stables, wheedling her brother into going riding with her when he should have been in class, or getting Kim to bring his twelve-bore out to the churchyard so they could take potshots at pigeons.

  There had only been a year and a half between Theo and her younger brother. They had both watched with horror as throughout 1939 the Axis powers plunged the world into deeper and deeper darkness. Theo was more informed about it than Kim, because she often had nothing better to do than spend the afternoon in the village library with a stack of newspapers, but it was Kim who had come up with the idea of joining the war effort.

  “Because this is really something worth doing,” he had said.

  Kim and Theo had gone together to enlist in the Royal Air Force and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, respectively. Theo’s application had been turned down, to her great shame and embarrassment, because she had not finished school. Kim’s application had been accepted, providing he managed to make passing marks on his final exams at the Canterbury Grammar.

  Theo had enjoyed her year of conspiratorial truancy with her younger brother, who seemed like her twin in age and temperament. She had dreaded the abyss the approaching war would open between them, but Kim’s ironic early death was a blow Theo had not been prepared for.

  She tried to find comfort in the fading echoes of her brother’s existence. She bicycled to his school to pick up his cricket things, some of his books, and his examination papers. The headmaster gave her tea. His secretary brought it in; she dropped a plate of buttered toast on the carpet when she saw Theo sitting there, boyish and tall and big boned, not very tidily dressed, wearing jodhpurs and a lumpy dark green pullover she had knitted herself.

  “Miss Lyons, I beg your pardon. How like your brother you are!”

  “All Kim’s friends know me right away,” Theo said. “Even if they’ve never met me.”

  “You gave me a start. I can’t get used to the idea of never seeing him again.”

  “Nor I,” Theo answered, willing herself not to cry, unconsciously sticking out her lower jaw in her determination. This, too, had been characteristic of her brother.

  “He was such a charmer,” said the secretary.

  “Pity he never applied himself to anything,” Theo said waspishly, beating them to it.

  The headmaster and his secretary both nodded in sympathy, gazing at her with a kind of spellbound doubt, as though they were watching a ghost.

  Theo did not know what to do with Kim’s books and papers. She went home and began to file things in the pigeonholes of his desk, as though he might come looking for them soon. Lying open beneath a lump of flint shaped like a dove’s head, which Kim had found on the beach at St. Catherine’s Bay and used as a paperweight, was the letter from the RAF explaining the details of where and when he was to report for his initial training.

  It was her own name that drew her eye to the letter: T. Kimball Lyons. She and her brother had shared Kimball as a second name because it was their mother’s maiden name. No one had ever called Kim by his biblical Christian name, Titus, for obvious reasons.

  I’ve got Kim’s name as well as his face, Theo thought suddenly. If I turned up with this letter at the Flight Training School by Little Cherwell, would anyone know the difference? Kim’s already been through the selection board and the medical. And he passed his exams.

  She thought, maybe Kim can apply himself to something after all.

  Theo made a quiet cull of her brother’s wardrobe, and skimmed off his mail when it arrived. She unearthed her brother’s birth certificate and took possession of it. She told her parents: “I’m going to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. I said I’d do it, and I will. I start in May.”

  Theo had not told her parents about being turned down by the WAAF. Only Kim had known that.

  Theo said good-bye a day before Kim’s training was to begin and spent the night in an inn in the village of Little Cherwell, five miles from the airfield. It was May now: the night was warm, and the whole village smelled of lilac. Theo stood in front of a narrow, tilted dressing table mirror in her very small guestroom and surveyed her profile critically. She was tall and broad-shouldered and, taped tidily into a roller bandage and hidden by a sleeveless undershirt, flat-chested. The riding and horse work of the past year had tightened the muscles across her arms into strings and knots. She had hacked her dark brown hair convincingly short.

  She looked so much like Kim at seventeen that it made her c
ollapse in tears. She sat on the worn cushion of the vanity stool with her head in her hands, pulling at her short hair with tense fingers, and sobbed for a long time.

  The Chief Ground Instructor frowned over Kim’s exam results. “You’ve done the reading, I suppose?”

  “Yes, sir.” Theo had never worked so hard at anything in her life. To be kicked out because she was carrying on an insane masquerade was one thing, but she could not redeem Kim’s memory if she was kicked out for failure.

  “Well, you’ll be tested again, anyway. Never mind. Lyons, is it? Eighteen on the eighteenth?”

  Theo hesitated. She would be twenty in November.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ll have you solo before your birthday.”

  Theo kept her head down. She forced herself awake half an hour before any of the other cadets, before the sun rose, and managed to keep out of their way in the bathrooms. They were housed in the dormitories of a school that had been requisitioned because it was so close to the airfield; Theo had a scared-looking roommate with whom she exchanged polite remarks about the weather and the work. Two young men came in once while she was taking a bath, and Theo sat bent over in the water, her knees drawn up to her ears, studiously rinsing her hair while her messmates brushed their teeth.

  “Nice place, isn’t it?” said one, conversationally. “I sure didn’t expect the luxury of Edwardian bathtubs during training.”

  “Very nice,” Theo muttered. The boys left. Theo let out her breath slowly and continued to rinse her hair. She did not even jump when one of them came back for his toothbrush. But she learned to dress and undress with demonic speed.

  It was worth it. To hear her brother’s name and see it in the rosters, to wear her brother’s familiar jacket and tie when they dressed for dinner, to see Kim’s reflection in the mirror, gave her the faint illusion that he was still alive. It did not occur to her that if she were found out she might be thrown into prison or accused of being a German spy. She only knew that she could not bear the world to tell her again, definitively, that her brother had died senselessly at seventeen with nothing done and nothing to be remembered for. For two days Theo lived cautiously from hour to hour, paying deep attention to the lectures, being outfitted with flying suit and goggles, playing by the rules, and quietly keeping her mournful, peculiar secret safe.