Paradise Tales (27 page)

She told him stories, and the stories went like this:

The Ancestors so loved the animals that when the world was dying, they took them into themselves. They made extra seeds for them, hidden away in their own to carry us safely inside themselves, all the animals they most loved.

The sickness came, and the only way for them to escape was to let the seeds grow. And so we flowered out of them; the sickness was strong, and they disappeared.

Leveza looked down at her little ancestral lump. Some of us would have left such a burden out on the plain for the Cats or the Dogs or the scavenging oroobos. But not Leveza. She could carry anything.

I think Leveza loved everyone. Everyone, in this devouring world. And that’s why what happened, happened.

The pampas near the camp went bald in patches, where the old and weak had overgrazed it. Without realizing, we began to prepare.

The babysquirrels gathered metal nuts. The bugs in their tummies made them from rust in the ground. The old uncles would smelt them for knives, rifle barrels, and bullets. Leveza asked them to make some rods.

She heated them and bent them backward and Grama looked at them and asked, “What kind of rifle is that going to make, one that shoots backward?”

“It’s for Kaway,” Leveza replied. She cut off her mane for fabric. I cut mine as well, and to our surprise, so did Grama.

Leveza wove a saddle for her back, so the baby could ride.

Once Grama had played the superior high-ranker, bossy and full of herself. Now it was, “Oh, Leveza, how clever. What a good idea.” And then, “I’m sorry for what I said, earlier.” She slipped Leveza’s inert mushroom of a boy into the saddle.

Grama had become kind. Grama being respectful about Leveza and Kaway set a fashion for appreciating who my groom-mate was. Nobody asked me any more why on Earth I was with her. When the Head Man Fortchee began talking regularly to her about migration defenses, a wave of gossip convulsed the herd. Could Leveza become the Head Mare? Was the Lump really Fortchee’s son?

“She’s always been so smart, so brave,” said Ventoo. “More like a man,” said Lindalfa, with a wrench of a smile.

One morning, the Head Man whinnied over and over and trod the air with his forelegs.

Triggered.

Migration.

We took down the pavilions and the windbreaks and stacked the grass-leaf panels in carts. We loaded all our tools and pipes and balls and blankets, and most precious of all, the caked and blackened foundries. The camp’s babysquirrels lined up and chattered goodbye to us, as if they really cared. Everyone nurtured the squirrels, and used them as they use us; even Cats will never eat them.

It started out a fine migration. Oats lined the length of the trail. As we ate, we scattered oat seed behind us, to replace it. Shit, oat seed, and inside the shit, flakes of plastic our bellies made, but there were no squirrels to gather it.

It did not rain, but the watering holes and rivers stayed full. It was sunny but not so hot that flies tormented us.

In bad years your hide never stops twitching because you can’t escape the stench of Cat piss left to dry on the ground. That year the ground had been washed and the air was calm and sweet.

We saw no Cats. Dogs, we saw Dogs, but fat and jolly Dogs stuffed to the brim with quail and partridge which Cats don’t eat. “Lovely weather!” the Dogs called to us, tongues hanging out, grins wide, and we whinnied back, partly in relief. We can see off Dogs, except when they come in packs.

Leveza walked upright the whole time, gun at the ready, Kaway strapped to her back.

“Leveza,” I said, “You’ll break your back! Use your palmhoofs!”

She grunted. “Any Cat comes near our babies, and it will be one sorry Cat!”

“What Cats? We’ve seen none.”

“They depend on the migrations. We’ve missed one. They will be very, very hungry.”

Our first attack came the next day. I thought it had started to rain; there was just a hissing in the grass, and I turned and I saw old Alez; I saw her eyes rimmed with white, the terror stare. I didn’t even see the four Cats that gripped her legs.

Fortchee brayed a squealing sound of panic. Whoosh, we all took off. I jumped into a gallop, I can tell you, no control or thought; I was away; all I wanted was the rush of grass under my hands.

Then I heard a shot and I turned back and I saw Leveza, all alone, standing up, rifle leveled. A Cat was spinning away from Alez, as if it were a spring-pasture caper. The other Cats stared. Leveza fired again once more and they flickered like fire and were gone. Leveza flung herself flat onto the grass just before a crackling like tindersticks came out of the long grass.

The Cats had guns, too. Running battle. “Down down!” I shouted to the foals. I galloped toward them. “Just! Get! Flat!” I jumped on top them, ramming them down into the dirt. They wailed in panic and fear. “Get off me! Get off me!” My little Choova started to cry. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

I was all teeth. “What did we tell you about an attack? You run, and when the gunfire starts you flatten. What did I say! What did I say?”

Gunsmoke drifted; the dry grass sparkled with shot, our nostrils shivered from the smell of burning.

Cats prefer to pounce first, get one of us down, and have the rest of us gallop away. They know if they fire first, they’re more likely to be shot themselves.

The fire from our women was fierce, determined, and constant. We soon realized that the only gunfire we heard was our own and that the Cats had slunk away.

The children still wailed, faces crumpled, tears streaming. Their crying just made us grumpy. Well, we all thought, it’s time they learned. “You stupid children. What did you think this was, a game?”

Grama was as hard as any granny. “Do you want to be torn to pieces and me have to watch it happen? Do you think you can say to a Cat very nicely please don’t eat me and that will stop them?”

Leveza was helping Alez to stand. Her old groom-mother’s legs kept giving way, and she was grinning a wide rictus grin. She looked idiotic.

“Come on, love, that’s it.” Leveza eased Alez toward Pronto’s cart.

“What are you doing?” Pronto said, glaring at her.

Levesa replied, “She’s in no fit state to walk.”

“You mean, I’m supposed to haul her?”

“I know you’d much rather leave her to be eaten, but no thanks, not just this once.”

Somehow, more like a Goat than a Horse, Alez nipped up into the wagon. Leveza strode back toward us, still on her hind legs.

The children shivered and sobbed. Leveza strode up to us. And then did something new.

“Aw, babies,” she said, in a stricken tone I had never heard before. She dropped down on four haunches next to them. “Oh darlings!” She caressed their backs, laying her jaw on the napes of their necks. “It shouldn’t be like this, I know. It is terrible, I know. But we are the only thing they have to eat.”

“Mummy shouted at me! She was mean.”

“That’s because Mummy was so worried and so frightened for you. She was scared because you didn’t know what it was and didn’t know what to do. Mummy was so frightened that she would lose you.”

“The Cats eat us!”

“And the crocodiles in the river. And there are Wolves, a kind of Dog. We don’t get many here, they are on the edge of the snows in the forests. Here, we get the Cats.”

Leveza pulled back their manes and breathed into their nostrils. “It shouldn’t be like this.”

Should or shouldn’t, we thought, that’s how it is. Why waste energy wishing it wasn’t?

We’d forgotten, you see, that it was a choice, a choice that in the end was ours. Not my Leveza.

The Head Man came up, and his voice was also gentle with the colts and fillies. “Come on, kids. The Cats will be back. We need to move away from here.”

He had to whinny to get us moving; he even back-kicked the reluctant Pronto. Alez sat up in the cart looking cross-eyed and beside herself with delight at being carried.

“Store and dry cud,” Fortchee told us.

Cudcakes. How I hate cudcakes. You chew them and spit them out on the carts to dry and you always think you’ll remember where yours are and you always end up eating someone else’s mash of grass and spit.

Leveza walked next to the Head Man, looking at maps, murmuring and tossing her mane toward the east. I saw them make up their minds about something.

I even felt a little tail-flick of jealousy. When she came back, I said a bit sharply. “What was that all about?”

Leveza sounded almost pleased. “Don’t tell the others. We’re being stalked.”

“What?”

“Must be slim pickings. The Cats have left their camp. They’ve got their cubs with them. They’re following us.” She sighed, her eyes on the horizon. “It’s a nuisance. They think they can herd us. There’ll be some kind of trap set ahead, so we’ve decided to change our route.”

We turned directly east. The ground started to rise, toward the hills, where an age-old trail goes through a pass. Rocks began to break through a mat of thick grasses. The slope steepened, and each of the carts needed two big men to haul it up.

The trail followed valleys between high rough humps of ground, dovetailing with small streams cut deeply into the grass. We could hear the water, like thousands of tongues lapping on stone. The most important thing on a migration is to get enough to drink. The water in the streams was delicious, cold and tasting of rocks, not mud.

My name means water, but I think I must taste of mud.

We found ourselves in a new world, looking out on waves of earth, rising and falling and going blue in the distance. On the top of distant ridge a huge rock stuck out, with a rounded dome like a skull.

Fortchee announced, “We need to make that rock by evening.” It was already early afternoon, and everyone groaned.

“Or you face the Cats out here on open ground,” he said.

“Come on, you’re wasting breath,” said Leveza and strode on.

The ground was strange; a deep rich black smelling deliciously of grass and leaves, and it thunked underfoot with a hollow sound like a drum. We grazed as we marched, tearing up the grass and pulling up with it mouthfuls of soil, good to eat but harsh, hard to digest. It made us fart, pungently, and in each others faces as we marched. “No need for firelighters!” the old women giggled.

In places the trail had been washed away, leaving tumbles of boulders that the carts would creak up and over, dropping down on the other side with a worrying crash. Leveza stomped on, still on two legs, gun ready. She would spring up rocks, heel-hooves clattering and skittering on stone. Sure-footed she wasn’t. She did not hop nimbly, but she was relentless.

“They’re still here,” she muttered to me. All of us wanted our afternoon kip, but Fortchee wouldn’t let us. The sun dropped, the shadows lengthened. Everything glowed orange. This triggered fear—low light means you must find safe camping. We snorted, and grew anxious.

Down one hill and up the other: it was sunset, the worst time for us, when we arrived at the skull rock. We don’t like stone, either.

“We sleep up there,” Fortchee said. He had a fight on his hands. We had never heard of such a thing.

“What, climb up that? We’ll split out hooves. Or tear our fingers,” said Ventoo.

“And leave everything behind in the wagons?” yelped one of the men. “It’ll be windy and cold.”

Fortchee tossed his head. “We’ll keep each other warm.”

“We’ll fall off. …”

“Don’t be a load of squirrels,” said Leveza, went to a cart, picked up a bag of tools, and started to climb.

Fortchee amplified, “Take ammo, all the guns.”

“What about the foundries?”

He sighed. “We’ll need to leave those.”

By some miracle, the dome had a worn hole in the top full of rainwater and we drank. We had our kip, but the Head Man wouldn’t let us go down to graze. It got dark and we had another sleep, two hours or more. But you can’t sleep all night.

I was woken up by a stench of Cat that seemed to shriek in my nostrils. I heard Leveza sounding annoyed. “Tuh!” she said, “Dear oh dear!” Louder than a danger call—bam!—a gun blast, followed by the yelp of a Cat. Then the other afriradors opened fire. The children whinnied in terror. Peering down into milklight I could see a heaving tide of Cat pulling back from the rock. They even made a sound like water, the scratching of claws on stone.

“What fun,” said Leveza.

I heard Grama trying not to giggle. Safety and strength came off Leveza’s hide like a scent.

She turned to Fortchee. “Do you think we should go now or wait here?”

“Well, we can’t wait until after sunrise, that’ll slow us down too much. Now.”

Leveza really was acting like Head Mare, and there had not been one of those in a while. She was climbing into the highest status. Not altogether hindered by having, if I may say so, a high-class groom-mate.

The afriradors sent out continual shots to drive back the last of the Cats. Then we skittered down the face of the rock back toward the wagons.

At the base of the cliff, a Cat lay in a pool of blood, purring, eyes closed as if asleep. Lindalfa scream-whinnied in horror and clattered backward. The Cat rumbled but did not stir.

Muttering, fearful, we were all pushed back by Cat-stench; we twitched and began to circle just before panic.

Leveza leaned in close to stare.

“Love, come away,” I said. I picked my way forward, ready to grab her neck and pull her back if the thing lunged. I saw its face in milklight.

I’d never seen a Cat up close before.

The thing that struck me was that she was handsome. It was a finely formed face, despite the short muzzle, with a divided upper lip which seemed almost to smile, the mouthful of fangs sheathed. The Cat’s expression looked simply sad, as if she were asking Life itself one last question.

Leveza sighed and said, “Poor heart.”

The beast moaned, a low miserable sound that shook the earth. “You … need … predators.”

“Like cat-shit we do,” said Leveza, and stood up and back. “Come on!” she called to the rest of us, as if we were the ones who had been laggard.