Tailchaser's Song

by Tad Williams

  Fritti sat bolt upright. On either side his companions protested sleepily. Craning his neck, he gazed up into the sable sky of the Final Dancing. “Look to the skies,” Firefoot had said. Fritti’s spirit sang with the wonder of it all.

  Above the U‘ea-ward horizon, couched like a dew-drop on the petal of a black rose, gleamed a star that Tailchaser had never seen before. It burned and shone—a white fire against the belly of Meerclar.

  Roofshadow was going back to Firsthome with Pouncequick.

  “I wish to see him safely there, at least,” she told Fritti as they took a final walk together. “Also, if any of my clan escaped the destruction of Vastnir they will return to our lands in Northern Rootwood. I wish to see if any of them yet live.”

  Fencewalker’s party was setting out for the Seat of Sunback at sun-next. The chill winds of winter had resumed; snow had begun to creep back over the cooling outskirts of the mound.

  “If I did not know already of your desire to finish your quest,” said Roofshadow, stopping to look into Fritti’s eyes, “well, then I would ask you to come with me. But I know you cannot.”

  As she spoke, Tailchaser watched her proud, fine face. Her whiskers caught the morning brightness.

  “I know that Pouncequick may be less needy of our attention than we suppose,” said Fritti kindly. “I wish I could come with you. It seems strange that our adventures should end this way.”

  Roofshadow continued to hold Tailchaser’s eye. He felt a deep love for this she-hunter who would not spare her own feelings.

  “My name is Firsa Roofshadow,” she said quietly. Surprised, Tailchaser felt his heart beat several times in the silence. She had told him her heart name!

  “Mine ... mine is Fritti Tailchaser,” he said at last. “Allmother keep you, Fritti. I will think of you often.”

  “I hope I can see you again one day ... Firsa.”

  Her heart name! He did not even know Hushpad‘s!

  All the long walk back, Tailchaser’s thoughts swirled in confusion.

  Prince Fencewalker, impatience treading close in his pawprints, walked back and forth calling out directions and suggestions.

  “Come now! Enough grooming, lads! Finish that up and bend a leg, Pawgentle. Time to take to our traveling pads!” Many Folk milled about the Prince. The long march back to Rootwood was about to begin.

  Fritti had already said his farewells to Fencewalker and the others. The Prince had given him an affectionate head-butt, saying: “Traipsing off again, are you? Traipsingest little whisker-washer I ever knew! Well, be sure to come see me at the Court. We’ll bend the ears of those sit-on-tails then!”

  Quiverclaw, who was setting out for the Thane-meet that would name the successors of those fallen in the mound, had also stopped to say a fond good-journey.

  Now Fritti sat with his two closest friends, and was suddenly tired of leave-taking. Sniffing Roofshadow’s cheek, he rubbed his face against her warm, soft fur and said nothing.

  “I will not say I hope to see you, because I know I will,” said Pouncequick. With all his newfound insight, still the little cat looked forlorn. Tailchaser relented and nuzzled him for a moment.

  “I’m sure I will see you both,” he said calmly. “Nre‘fa-o, my two friends.”

  Fencewalker was bellowing final instructions to the assembled Folk; there was a great murmuring. Tailchaser turned away and walked back toward Ratleaf Forest and the resumption of his own journey. The cold breeze rattled the branches.

  Beyond the fringes of the now-dwindling thaw, Ratleaf was still winter-deep in cold. A solitary figure in the endless whiteness of the forest, Tailchaser wondered about the transfiguration of his small friend Pouncequick. His thoughts were accompanied only by the soft plishing of his pads denting the snow mantle.

  Pouncequick had changed. Although he could still caper and play as a youngling was expected to, and although he certainly hadn’t lost his kittenish appetite, still there was a quality of innocence no longer present. Several times while watching little Pouncequick talk like a grizzled elder, his tiny body foreshortened by the length of a tail, Fritti felt a wave of deep, inexplicable sadness.

  The lost tail did not seem to bother Pouncequick as much as it did Fritti. The idea of his small friend being mauled and torn by Scratchnail disturbed him greatly, and he worried the thought like a slow-healing wound.

  “It’s very strange, Tailchaser,” Pounce had told him, “but it feels as though it’s still there. I don’t miss it. I can feel it right this moment curling behind me—I can even feel the wind on it!” Tailchaser had not known what to say, and the youngling continued : “In some ways, it’s better now. What I mean is ... well, since I can’t see it, and nothing can happen to it, it’s perfect: pure. And it always will be, too. Can you sense what I mean?”

  Fritti had not been able to that day. But now, padding quietly through the great forest, he began to understand.

  Days passed with the sameness of one tree to another as Fritti moved Vez‘an-ward through Ratleaf. The words of the Firstborn led him on.

  “Follow your nose to your heart’s desire,” Firefoot had told him in their last moment in the mound, “through the great forest with the sun-birth in your eyes. Your way will lead you out, finally, and across the Pawdab Marshes, to arrive at last on the shores of Qu‘cef—the Bigwater. You will follow the shore until you see a strange hill that shines at night. ... it rises from the waters themselves. This is the place that the M’an calls Villa-on-Mar, and there you will find what you seek.”

  Now the cycles of day and night, traveling and sleeping, all the other hunt-marks of the world aboveground came back to Tailchaser. He had only himself to hunt for, and only himself to be responsible for. Like the silver pril fish that leaped and splashed upstream in the heights of the Caterwaul, so the suns of Fritti’s journey bounded across the sky, one following closely upon the other. In this way he journeyed through Ratleaf.

  The old forest was slowly coming back to life. The cave-sleeping Garrin came grumbling up from their rest. The graceful Tesri, bucks and does and a few stilting fawns, ran delicately on the drifts. Tailchaser felt his affinity for this world come flowing back; the horrors of the mound began to recede. He was one of the earth’s children, and even the long season below the ground could riot destroy his knowledge of the dance. He reveled in every sign of fading winter, and of the return of life to once-haunted Ratleaf.

  Twenty suns had risen and set since he had left his friends when Tailchaser at last found himself approaching the far edge of the forest. The last two days’ journeying had brought him to a place where the land began to slope gently downward, and the air beneath the great trees had a strange tang. Every breath was filled with moisture—not hot, like the great Flume, but cool as stone, salty as blood. He had never scented anything like it. Every inhalation quickened his heart.

  Coming down the last highlands of Ratleaf one morning, Fritti became aware of a great, slow sound. Like the contented purring of the Allmother, it rose up through the vegetation below him, vast and dignified. As he paused for a moment along the spare trees of the Ratleaf fence, he could see something gleaming before him. A second sun, a twin to the herald of Smaller Shadows which hung low in the sky, seemed to shine up at him through a gap in the uneven tooth of the forest fringe.

  Abandoning his grooming, Fritti climbed to his feet and padded farther down, tail waving in the slight breeze like a willow limb. As he neared the gap he saw that it was not another sun, but a reflection—impossibly huge. He stood between two ancient red-woods and gazed out across the swiftly dropping slope, across the beginning of the marshes. He caught his breath.

  The Bigwater, burnished like wind-polished rock, stretched away to the horizon. Mighty Qu‘cef, as red-golden as Fencewalker, held and returned the burning reflection of the sun like a glowing mote in the eye of the Harar. Qu’cef’s sounding call—patient and hugely calm—floated up to the promontory where he stood transfixed.

  He watch
ed all morning as the eye of the sun rose into the sky, and the Bigwater became in turn golden, then green, and finally at Smaller Shadows took on the deep blue of a nighttime sky. Then, with Qu‘cefs unanswerable voice still filling his ears and thoughts, he resumed his descent down into the marshes.

  The Pawdab Marshes stretched from the shores of Qu‘cef southward, flanking Ratleaf Forest on her Vez’an edge until they ended at last on the banks of the Caterwaul. The marshes were flat and chill, and the wet, spongy ground sank beneath Tailchaser’s paws as he walked. Never, from the time that he entered Pawdab until he finally left it again, were his paws dry.

  For days on end the salt-scent of the Bigwater was in his nose, and its voice in his ears. Like the sound of his mother’s purr when he had been a nursling, the call of Qu‘cef was the first thing he heard when he woke up; the roaring of the waves lulled him to sleep at night, coming to him across the great marsh as he lay curled in a bed of reeds.

  The marshes, too, had sensed the loosening grip of winter. Fritti was able to make many a meal on marsh-mouse and mudrat, and other, stranger creatures that proved nonetheless good to eat. Often at his approach unfamiliar birds would start up screaming from their nests hidden in the weeds, but Fritti—hunger sated—would only stand and watch them fly, marveling at their bright colors.

  At the end of a fading afternoon, a successful hunt behind him, Fritti found himself walking beside a large, still pond that lay in the midst of the marsh-land, hemmed all about by tall grasses and reeds. The failing sun had turned the Qu‘cef golden in the distance, and the pond itself seemed a pool of still fire.

  Crouching down, Tailchaser scented the water. It smelled of salt; he did not drink. Fresh water was scarce on the Pawdab. Although he was well fed, he was often thirsty.

  Now, leaning over the pond, he saw a strange thing: a cat, dark-furred, but with a star-mark like his own, looked up at him from underneath the water. Surprised, he leaped back—as he did, the water-cat took fright also, and disappeared. When he moved slowly back, the other peered cautiously up at him through the still waters. His hackles standing, Tailchaser hissed at the stranger—who did likewise—but as he crouched, a rock, dislodged by his paw, fell into the pond. Where it struck, circular ripples marred the surface of the pondwater in an ever-widening ring. Before his eyes the water-cat fell to pieces, floating shards, and was gone. Only when the face of the stranger re-formed, wearing a look of astonishment matching his own, did Fritti realize that it was no real beast, but a spirit or watershadow that mimicked his every movement.

  Is this what I look like, then? he wondered. This slender youngling is me?

  He sat for a long while staring silently at the pond-Fritti, until the sun’s final disappearance blackened the surface of the pool. Meerclar’s Eye appeared above, and the air was filled with the busy chaos of flying insects.

  As if he were dreaming, he heard a sound, a low sound, above the distant murmur of the Bigwater. A voice was raised in droning song—an odd voice, deep yet small; charged with odd dissonances.

  “.. Around it goes, then up and around around ... Bugs blackly, bleakly bring the blinded, sing the sound Hope, the heart’s hearth, now harshly, hardly has heard How round it goes, goes round, goes round the word...”

  Fritti stood wondering. Who could it be, singing such a song in the wilds of Pawdab? He walked quietly through the reeds circling the edge of the pond, following the voice to its source on the far side. As he crept through the waving stalks the song rose again:

  “... Goggle, they goggle, glaring at the gleaming goad,

  As wondering a-wander, they walk a-widdershins the

  winding road ...

  Now the nameless notice how, not knowing, they had

  never heard:

  How round it goes, goes round, goes round, goes round

  the word ...”

  As the chugging voice failed again, Tailchaser approached the spot that seemed to be its source. He could smell no unusual scent, only the marsh salts and the reek of mud. He waved away a crowd of hovering water-flies with his tail and pushed through the weeds.

  Crouched at the edge of the pool was a great, green frog—throat swelling and shrinking, belly mired in the mud. As Tailchaser approached slowly from behind, the frog did not turn, but only said: “Welcome, Tailchaser. Come to sit and talk.”

  Bemused, Fritti walked around and sat on a mat of broken stems on the muddy shoal. It seemed everybody knew his name and business.

  “I heard your song,” he said. “How do you know me? Who are you?”

  “Mother Rebum am I. My people are old. I am the oldest.” As she spoke she blinked her great eyes. “Here in the marsh we Jugurum know all. Blood and water, stone and bone. My grandmother sat by this pond eating flies when dogs flew and cats swam.”

  Without changing expression or moving from her crouch, Mother Rebum—as if in imitation of her ancestor—spat out a long gray tongue and—snip! —pulled in a gnat. Swallowing, she continued.

  “Padding-paws, I have heard you in my marsh for five suns. The foolish seagulls have carried word of you as you walked up and down through the mud-fields. Flea and fly will bring back mention of you when you have passed. Nothing that treads the Burum-gurgun escapes the attention of old Mother Rebum.”

  Fritti stared at the immense frog. Silver Eye-light dappled her rough back. “What song were you singing ?” he asked.

  Mother Rebum croaked a laugh. Legs straining, she lifted herself. After turning sideways to eye Fritti, she settled back down heavily.

  “Ah,” she said. “A song of power, that was. After the Days of Fire, the Jugurum used such strong melodies to keep the ocean down in its depth and the sky hanging safely above. My song was but a small one, though, and not so ambitious. ‘Twas meant only to bring you traveler’s luck.”

  “Me?” Fritti asked. “Why me? What have I ever done for you?”

  “Why, less than nothing, my furry polliwog!” chugged the frog, amused. “I did it as a service to another, to whom I owed a favor—one older even than Mother Rebum. He who asked me to aid you even walked the earth when Jargum the Great, father of my folk, strode the marshes of the elder world—or so I am told. A powerful protector you have, little cat.”

  Tailchaser thought he could guess the meaning of her words. So, he was still beneath the guardian shadow. The thought took the cold edge from the wind that blew across the salt mere.

  “Do not think, though,” Mother Rebum continued, “to escape entirely free from obligation. Your friend told me that you have been part of the great doings to the northwest, yes?” Fritti assented. “Good, then you shall tell me your story, for the feckless gulls have brought me only snatches and shards. I cannot manage Burum-gurgun, the Marsh at the Center of the World, in a proper fashion unless I am kept informed of current events in the outlands.”

  The Marsh at the Center of the World. Fritti smiled to himself, and began his long story.

  It was almost the Hour of Deepest Quiet when he had finished. Mother Rebum had sat still throughout the entire tale, her goggle eyes watching him closely. As he ended she blinked several times, then sat silent for a moment, her throat puffing in and out.

  “Well,” she said finally, “it sounds as though there have indeed been many great splashings in the ponds of the cat-folk.” She paused to pluck a low-flying insect from the night air. “Hearteater was a force, a great force, and his fall shall birth many ripples. I see now why your spirit is troubled, little furback.”

  “Troubled? Why do you say that?”

  “Why?” Mother Rebum chugged. “Because I know it. I watched you when you saw the water-shadow. I have listened to you sing for half the night. Your heart is in confusion.”

  “It is?” Fritti was not sure he liked the turn the conversation had taken.

  “Oh, yes, my brave, questing tadpole ... but fear not. If you but take my advice you will find your way happily. Remember this one thing, Tailchaser: all your troubles, all your searchi
ng, and wandering, struggling—they are as one small bubble in the world-pool.”

  Fritti felt chastened, and a little angry. “What do you mean? Many important things have happened since I left my home. I was not responsible for most of them, but I played a part. It is even possible that things would have gone worse had it not been for me,” he finished with some pride.

  “That I will grant you. Please, don’t bristle so!” chuckled the old frog. “But answer me this: has the snow covered Vastnir?”

  “I suppose it has by now, yes. What of it? It will be spring soon.”

  “Exactly, my minnow. Now, have the birds returned to Ratleaf?”

  Tailchaser was not sure he saw the point. “Many of the flafa‘az have made their way back ... that is also true.”

  Mother Rebum smiled a green, toothless smile. “Very well, I shall ask you no more questions. I can see for myself, here in my lily-pond home, that the sun still crosses the sky each day. Do you understand yet?”

  “No,” said Fritti stubbornly.

  “It is this. By the time another winter comes, and passes into another spring, Vastnir Mound and all the works of Hearteater will have disappeared entirely—lingering only in memory. Before too many more winters have come and departed, you and I also will have disappeared, leaving behind only our bones to be the home of tiny creatures. And do you know what, brave Tailchaser? The world-dance will falter not a step for any of these passings.”

  She brought herself up heavily to her front legs. “Now, friend cat, I must away and dunk these old bones in a mud bath. I thank you for the pleasure of your company.”

  So saying, she hopped to the edge of the pond, half into the stagnant water, then turned and looked back. Her round eyes blinked sleepily.

  “Never fear!” she said. “I have woven my song well. If you need help you shall receive it—at least once. Look especially to things that move in water, for there lie most of my powers. Luck to you, Tailchaser!”