by Alex Sapegin
Darn. He did not win, but he did not lose. Andy felt that he was standing in a pool of molten stone, but for some strange reason, he did not feel the heat. Short lightning strikes shot from the tips of his fingers to the floor, and in the office, there was a heavy smell of ozone. What, Targ’s tail, what in the world was with him?
“But you did not answer my question.”
“And I will not answer….” He heard the shocked breaths of those ones their knees. I know, I’m a fool, and there’s nothing to be done about it. “The Great Mother will answer, Eldest. If she deems it necessary,” Andy added. The tip of the ruler’s tail jerked nervously. Well, he had made a mess for his new “kin,” and he felt better in his heart for it. Let Asha handle this matriarch, he’d had enough staring contests to last a lifetime. A lemon after the juicer looks better than he did now, after two phrases of conversation with the Eldest. Targ take your internal “disassembly!” Being a mouse between two hungry cats is not a very enjoyable pastime. Theater of the absurd! “I gave my word to keep quiet. I have never broken my own vows in my life and do not see any reason to now. I apologize.” He clicked his heels and bowed his head. The high double-leafed door swung open without any interference from the crooked old woman. Wow! Life, it turns out, is so beautiful!
What Asha would do with the involuntary witnesses of the “friendly” conversation was none of his business. In the cell, there is a prohibition, tongues cut, do not care. She would come up with something. She had enough imagination and would sort it out somehow. He too would have to figure out which way to go. The portal frames had been taken down as unnecessary.
“Follow me….” Illusht’s fur seems to have faded, poor thing. Actually, I can see it’s shedding in droves. Have I offended her?
“Who was that?”
“Someone who could send you to the fire!”
“Would the Great Mother not have intervened?”
“Pray to Manyfaces that she would have, but be careful. We do not need squabbles with Temple dwellers. They have become too powerful over the last few years, too powerful.” So pathetic! She’ll make an awful priestess. “Remember, do not ever embark on Arshag’s path. She is a fearsome enemy.”
Andy practically ran behind the Miur, who was taking long strides down the corridor and pondered her last words. The rapids of the inner world of the militant race of felines proved to be very dangerous; the boat of a lone rower could be smashed to bits and no one would notice. He was between a rock and a hard place. Gradually, the stream of his thoughts calmed down. The multicolored stone frescos that lined the hall formed a harmonious picture.
Not only had the Great Mother noticed the threat hanging over the feline race. The Matriarchy of the Temple dwellers and the Senior Priestess also kept abreast of things. But if the ruler’s hands were tied by ancient vows, they could not hold the priestesses back at all. Gradually a kind of opposition formed among the higher clergy, which posed real competition to the Great Mother in the struggle for power. Andy paused for a second, but he was not mistaken in his conclusions! As often happened on Earth in the past, secular and spiritual powers were sharpening each other’s teeth. The Temple dwellers could act more efficiently. Asha’s talks with the Prince of Ora’s ambassador and the sale to the Principality of the latest developments in the Miur weapons workshops were a response to internal threats. The Great Mother was frantically seeking allies. Asha had a good reason for blocking whole sections of her memory from free access. She was afraid that he would sort out the palace intrigues and would switch to the side of the servants of Manyfaces. There was no doubt that the ruler skillfully arranged the sudden arrival of the Eldest in her office and pushed him to butt heads with her. The cunning cat! Now he could not escape from her boat.
Guards stood at attention as they passed by. Andy stopped abruptly. Because of the turn of the corridor to the right, he heard familiar voices.
“Come on,” Illusht grabbed his hand.
“Wait, are there dragons here?”
“Yes. Come on.”
Andy tore his hand away and ran to the turn; the voices got louder. He formed a virtual mirror and looked around the corner. Two princesses were walking down the hall. The real one differed from the double in the rich decoration of her clothes. Behind Ilirra was her dilapidated retinue. They weren’t dragons—parrots, honestly. Ania’s copper hair could be seen in the middle of the line that accompanied the royal.
A foul hiss came right in his ear:
“Do you not have enough trouble with the church? Do you want to add the dragons to them as well?”
Andy grabbed Illusht by the cape and pulled her to him; he was tired of being pestered:
“Shut up, or should I tell you how you created the problem with the Temple dwellers for me?” The cat bore her teeth. “I have not trusted anyone for a long time and do not believe in the coincidence of such meetings. Thank the merger for the fact that I now treat you like family, but do not think of pushing me. Is that clear? Yet I am ready to be a good child if you detain Ania.”
“Who?” Illusht retreated.
“The elf with copper hair.”
“Oh, your female.” The Miur pressed her ears to her head.
“Do not dare!” Andy hissed.
“Well, you gave your word. Hide in the second niche.”
Before the “little sister,” who had caught him in the trap of promising to be a good child, could change her mind, he slipped into the second niche from the portal frame and covered himself with all possible curtains.
Illyusht fulfilled her promise and managed to separate the elf from the retinue. The detachment, led by a dozen Miur, after passing Andy, who was hidden in his dark corner, disappeared into the arch of the spatial transition.
“Ania!” he grabbed the elf by the hand. She was hurrying to catch up with the others, and he only barely managed to block a knee to the groin with his leg. Illyusht wisely remained behind the turn. “Ania, it is me!” he shouted, intercepting a narrow knife with his hand.
“Andy?! Andy, do not.” The sida closed her eyes and stopped struggling.
“Ania,” Andy said in a wheezy voice and buried his face in her hair. “Why have you closed your eyes?” he asked, glancing at his beloved’s face.
“I did what was forbidden, and I have been punished. I am no longer allowed to see you.”
“What nonsense is that?”
“It is not nonsense. The princess punished me as one who has brought shame upon them by my relation….”
“You are foolish,” Andy interrupted her. “You have not brought any shame to anyone, believe me.”
“Ilirra thinks otherwise. It is not my place to judge her. I should obey. Andy, I have to go.”
“Your Ilirra is a total idiot. She played the role of a servant and thought that no one would find her out. I do not care about her punishments or bans. Do you hear me?” He embraced Ania and kissed her on the lips passionately. The sida did not respond to the kiss. Salty tears streamed down her cheeks. “Go. I will find you, no matter where you are. My silver bloom blossoms only for you.”
He let the elf go. Ania took three steps, sobbed, and turned around, never opening her eyes.
“I love you,” she said and ran to the portal.
“You dragons really complicate things,” Illusht said from around the corner. “You hide behind guises and create unnecessary problems. If you would tell her that you are a dragon, all would be simple.”
“Ania is not a dragon.”
“Who told you?”
“Dragons smell like flowers. Everyone has a unique scent.”
“Yes, but sida who have undergone the Ritual do not smell. That is a strange characteristic, unique to them. Come on!” She pushed Andy, who was frozen in a stupor. “You did not know?”
“I did not know. I did not know, Targ!”
Illusht grabbed his hand and dragged him along. A few minutes later, they came to some room, where
she handed him over to the hands of two roihe males with the order to pick up his clothes for the official reception, and then she evaporated, promising to return for the dressed guest in half an hour. Finally, the Miur added that a squire would come bearing his sword.
The male, who called himself Richt and sported fur of an attractive brindle color, led the guest through a whole suite of rooms in which hundreds of costumes for members of different races were neatly hung, in various sizes and for all occasions.
Suddenly, Richt stopped and started talking, as Andy thought at first, to himself, but then everything was made clear. A small kitten with fawn-colored fur came out from the pouch on his belly half-way and looked around curiously.
“Hello,” Andy told the girl (it was a girl). She squeaked and dove back into the safe fold of skin. She did not hide for long. After about ten seconds, a small hand moved the edge of the pouch and stared at him with the dark beads of her eyes.
“Rio, sit still.” Richt stroked the girl on the head. She lost interest in the strange creature and pressed her lips to the nipple concealed under the fold of skin and sweetly smacked. The male, holding the baby, waved to Andy as if to say “follow me.” Andy stomped after Richt and compared the anatomy of females and males.
Roihe on average were shorter than females by about a head, much narrower in the shoulders and looked more slender. At the same time, the males had powerful leg muscles and a broad waist. This was because they had a pouch of skin on their stomachs like a kangaroo in which they carried kittens. During the merger, Andy obtained a lot of interesting information. It would seem useless cargo settled in his brain, but it helped out at the right moment.
The Miur were interesting in the very structure of their social order. The males did not dispute the matriarchy that had developed at the dawn of civilization. The females were larger and stronger; they played the role of hunters, warriors, and defenders of family, in their case prides. The slender and more delicate males, unable to fight on equal footing with even with the weakest representative of the fair sex, acted as educators of the younger generation. Why and how such conditions developed was a mystery covered in darkness and the harsh conditions of deep antiquity, but nature played a trick with the miur, rewarding them with the most complex biochemistry and the resulting relations between the sexes.
Unlike human women, whose possible sex was interrupted for natural reasons for several days a month, Miur females menstruated once every three months for three or four days. On these same days, with a sexual partner of the opposite sex, they could conceive and get pregnant. As for sex, he had seen some of the females wearing a pronounced pink color because the males only reacted to the females during the indicated three or four days a quarter. It would seem that was it, the role of the male was fulfilled, but then the cunning trick played by nature began. If during the coition the male partner was a roihe male, at the moment of conception, a biochemical mechanism triggered the growth of two lower pairs of mammary glands in the offspring, whether it was male or female. The glands in the males were hidden by a fold of skin. The hips and pelvis grew wider, and the fold of skin on the belly over thirty weeks of pregnancy turned into a real pouch. The male acquired characteristic “female” features.
Kittens, relative to the mother, were born small, from four and a half to about five and a half pounds in weight. Usually, one to four kittens were born per litter, with one male for every five or six females. Then the mothers had to decide whether to feed the offspring by themselves or to give them to the male’s pouch. In females, the two lower pairs of nipples, as in the male upper pair, remained in a rudimentary state. Most often, the choice was a refusal to feed the young and to transfer the kittens to the father. Released from her squeaking load, the females immediately rushed to take advantage of another gift of Mother Nature and licked the white drops from the nipples of the roihe, thus freeing themselves from such a painful stage as the burning of milk in their own breasts. So nature divided them into female hunters and rare males. To say that the roihe were completely defenseless would be wrong. They ran so that cheetahs could only eat their dust, but this was the sole upside of their strong leg muscles.
Rasht males were also born among the Miur, who had no skin pouches on their bellies. One rasht was born for every ten or twelve roihe. The rasht were called “big brains” for good reason—these big-headed males kept all the cats’ science. Big brains differed from females in their slightly reduced dimensions and physical strength, but larger skull size. They did not like fighting, but they were more flexible than females and on occasion, rasht became dangerous fighters. The commander of the detachment who accompanied Andy to the city was a rasht. Each big brain was valued at his weight in gold, and if the makings of a mage were discovered in him, he was truly prized. The boys were given the most first-class education by the Miur standards. The cats took full advantage of the big brains’ natural tendency towards critical thinking and system analysis. They loved solving complex problems and searching for new discoveries. One time, the rasht, with a few females, had worked in the same laboratories as dragons, but those times were long passed. During this period they gained ground in scientific and technical fields over the other races of Nelita. To the good fortune of all the others, there were not as many big brains among the Miur as they themselves wanted.
If you look at the feline society through the prism of a simplified social structure, it looked like a bee swarm or an ant colony. The Great Mother took the queen’s place, the simple females were politicians, soldiers, and workers, the roihe male played the role of the educators of the younger generation, and the rasht males were a separate superstructure that did not allow the nest to regress to a more primitive level. Often some of them got tied up in the field of politics, acting as advisers and reaching great heights. Great Mothers and females from high society took only rasht as husbands.
“Come,” Richt bowed. “Allow me to choose a ceremonial sarun for you.”
Why not? Go on, choose one. Richt bowed once more, snatched an information crystal from his pocket, inserted it into a groove in the wall, and led Andy to a white circle.
“Sir, please do not move, let the spell tie your size to the info-crystal database.”
Wow! They have almost a computer system on the magic analyzers. Andy froze. An illusion emerged over the floor showing suitable suits hanging in rows and shoes lined up beneath them. Less than ten minutes later, dressed in a new outfit, he stomped back, stepping on the stone tiles in soft boots up to his knees. A sarun turned out to be a costume remotely reminiscent of Cossack clothing: a white shirt with a deep v-neck exposing his chest, loose trousers made of weightless spider silk and tucked into the boots, and a wide belt wrapped around the waist seven times. The belt was fastened with a scabbard for the rashag.
Next, he had to be fitted with the proper props. Richt spent a long time choosing a knife and a scabbard. He mustn’t make a mistake; everyone paid attention to the rashag first of all! He must show the status of the owner and his position in society. The guest in the state “dressing room” was led there by Illusht herself, which meant a lot. Ordinary people don’t drive an heiress to the throne by the handle. What did that imply? He must belong to the upper class, therefore, the scabbard should be blue, a heavenly color. And for closeness to the Great Mother, he must attach a red ribbon to the knife handle.
Richt dug for a long time. The result of his work would be a multi-colored sheath and a bouquet of ribbons. Andy was tired of the roihe’s penchant for fashion and reminded him of the time. He limited himself to the blue scabbard and two thin ribbons of red and green on the handle of the knife.
Illusht was already waiting for them. She slapped Richt on the shoulder approvingly, appreciating his work. Having earned the gratitude of the daughter of the ruler, he literally shone with happiness.
“Why are there only two ribbons on the rashag?” she asked her one question. “Enough!” Andy cut her off.
The Miur looked him over again, pulled up the belt, straightened the knife and asked him to follow her. A young cat positioned herself behind Andy, carrying his sword on a special cushion.
* * *
The sounds of dozens of drums, large and small, some reminiscent of traditional Japanese taiko, filled the vaults of the large reception room. The roihe and the females, standing in rows, played a reassuring musical rhythm with lots of ligatures. Their glossy fur, aloof expressions and expressive movements complemented the drum sticks flickering in their hands. The wide, thin, silky sleeves of the roihes’ dressing gowns danced with the colored ribbons tied to the females’ forearms. The drums would sputter, then fall silent. The silence would immediately be broken by the sounds of the small drums from the first row. The music expressed the pitter-patter of rain, the noise of the wind, and the rustling of leaves. The pounding of hooves as a herd ran across the forest came from the second row. Heavenly thunder crashed; lightning bolts seemed to flash before their eyes; they rang giant tambourines, five feet in diameter.
Andy never would have thought that ancient musical instruments could capture the murmur of a creek and the sound of the wind, thunder, and thousands of familiar sounds. Leaning his elbows on the pillow, for the first time in a long time he really relaxed and enjoyed the virtuosic skill of the musicians. Using special brushes, some Miur voiced the waving of the wings of birds. The sticks touched the wide surface of the biggest drums weightlessly; the hum from the light touches made one’s blood run faster. It seemed that rather than a drumbeat, he heard the pulse of his heart, beating in time to the rhythm.
The young Miur sitting behind him with a pillow on which his sword lay in the scabbard, throwing off her mask of equanimity, swung her head from side to side and bounced up and down in her spot.
The last fractional chord sounded and the drumming ceased. Dancers sailed slowly into the center of the hall as if hovering above the floor. Three dozen slender and flexible Miur with fur of a gentle blue color moved with a strange intermittent step. Each movement corresponded to the crystal chime of various tambourines or bells. A wave of right hand and the bracelets tinkled harmoniously; a turn with a slight wiggle of their hips and the merry chime of the bells tied to their belts intertwined itself into the dance. It was unbelievable. Andy did not sense any magic, but moving one’s body in such a way, with such extreme control, was akin to real sorcery. It seemed incredible and inconceivable that they could ring exactly the intended bell, bracelet, or tambourine, and not some other one. Andy glanced to the right with just his eyeballs: he wasn’t the only one taken away by the performance. The princess’ retinue seated ten paces from him was also up to their ears in the music and dance pattern, the young squires with swords on their knees even more so.
