The Book of Night With Moon (61 page)

"I had a feeling you'd be sorry you showed him that one," Urruah said. "Ith, don't let him talk
you
into trying it. You'll make the papers."

" 'Papers'?"

Rhiow gave Urruah a look. "Come on, 'Ruah, let's leave them to it, and go do the rounds."

Rhiow and Urruah strolled off across their territory, weaving casually among the
ehhif
, up the cream marble of the Vanderbilt Avenue stairs, and out of the sight of wizards, and People, and anyone else who could see. No one noticed them, which was just as it should have been; and life in the city went on….

ON HAUISSH

This occupation of the People, described only briefly in the literature by
ehhif
writers (the most reliable and perceptive is Pratchett
*
) has occasionally been called a pastime— but such a characterization is similar to calling soccer, baseball, and American-style football "pastimes"— for which human beings have sometimes wagered and won or lost fortunes, ignored almost all the other important aspects of their lives, and occasionally died under circumstances both comic and tragic.

An exhaustive analysis of
hauissh
would be far beyond the scope of this work, but it seems useful to include at least a summary explanation.

ITS ORIGINS

Hauissh
is of such antiquity that it almost certainly predates the time at which felinity became self-aware. Its most basic structure implies a conflict over hunting territory between two prides, and most authorities agree that it evolved from this strictly survival-oriented behavior to a more structured but still violent dominance game between individual members of a single pride or (later) extended pride-community, with the loser usually being run off the pride's territory, or killed. (Even now the biggest predators tend to play
hauissh
in this mode, considering the refinements of later millennia to be oversophisticated or effete).

It would be as difficult to determine exactly when feline self-awareness arose as it would to fix a time at which
hauissh
began to develop beyond concerns of food, territory, and power into the more intellectual and entertainment-oriented version now played by cats the world over. All the families of the People seem to have at least some knowledge of the basic concepts of the game on an instinctive level. But the demands and challenges of the modern form of
hauissh
require a great deal more of the player than instinct alone will provide.

THE RULES

There is no mandated maximum number of players of
hauissh,
though games involving more than thirty or so players in one session are likely to be considered "inelegant." Most play involves no more than ten or twelve players, though, since some level of personal relationship is considered desirable among a majority of those playing.

Hauissh
started out as a rough-and-ready, territorial-control game among the big cats, with the loser usually being run off the territory or killed.

Hauissh
involves controlling a space— yard, sidewalk, field— with one's presence. This presence, called
aahfaui,
is not a constant, but is in turn affected by the space one is trying to control.

"Control" is defined by
eius'hss,
"being alone." The minute a player can see another cat, the control is diminished slightly, but not in such a way as to lower one's score. Control
is
diminished more if the other cat can in turn see the first player, and the first player's score suffers.

A successful position is one in which a cat can see several others, without himself being seen. The beginner would immediately think that this could be easily achieved by being down a hole but able to see several other cats, but such concealment is not considered gameplay in the rules, and a cat retreating to such a position, having previously been in play, is then considered out of it until once again exposed.

There are many other variables that affect play. Most important of these is
eiu'heff,
a variable expressing a combination of the nature and size of the space being controlled. Nearly as important is
hruiss'aessa,
the location of the "center" of the game, the (usually invisible) spot around which the game revolves, representing (in more abstruse thought about
hauissh
) the Tree under which the Great Cat took his stance against the Serpent on the night of the Battle for the World, the battle by the River of Fire. The ultimate point of the game is not necessarily to reach or occupy this spot, but to dominate or master it, while also dominating as many of the other players as possible. Feline nature being what it is, individual People tend to resist domination, even for the best of reasons; so it can easily be seen that any given bout of the Game will be prolonged and fairly stressful. Most play in
hauissh
is individual, "team" play being considered too difficult to maintain for long periods, and likely to cause what People call, in Ailurin,
laeu'rh-sseihhah,
an unhealthy shift in one's nature toward a "foreign" style of being (
cf.
the German word
überfremdung,
"overalienation")— "teamwork" being conceived as a distasteful kind of "pack" behavior better left to other less advanced species, such as
houiff.

Play begins when a quorum of players are determined to have arrived and to be ready to start. It ends when one player is deemed to have successfully "dominated" the
hruiss'aessa
and a majority of other players. A single such sequence is a "passage," roughly equal to an inning in baseball. Passages are grouped together in larger groups called "sequences," but there are no fixed numbers of passages-per-sequence, or sequences-per-game. Consensus usually determines when another passage is required to fill out a sequence (and it almost always is).

A detailed or exact description of how scoring is done is beyond the scope of this work. Scoring
hauissh
fairly and to all players' satisfaction is difficult work, filled with imponderables, and much more an art than a science. It is nowhere near as clearcut as scoring in any sport with which humans are familiar (and frankly, if it were, cats would probably lose interest in the game almost immediately). There are so many rules and variables influencing score— for example, weather, local conditions such as traffic or the passage of
ehhif
or other species through play, physical condition of the players, and total time of play compared against time actually spent making moves, to name just a very few— and so many of the variables and requirements are mutually contradictory that scoring a bout at the end of a round or "passage" more closely resembles a discussion among Talmudic scholars than an umpire yelling "Yer out!"

To speak of how one "wins" at
hauissh
is probably a misnomer born of looking at the pastime through the human mindset: it is nearly as erroneous as speaking of "winning" at cricket— the human game that comes closest to
hauissh
in its (unspoken) expression of the idea that gameplay for its own sake is much more important than a result, of whatever kind. Like cricket, a bout of
hauissh
can go on for days or weeks, can be called on account of bad light (i.e., atmospheric conditions so bad that not even cats can see each other: rare), will often stop (repeatedly) for meals, and can run up extravagant scores that sound really impressive when you talk about them afterward, but which are actually indicative of neither group really being able to get the better of the other, no matter how long the process continues. The record duration for a single bout of
hauissh
was set in 1716 (the actual date being either in January or February, but uncertainty involved with the Gregorian calendar shift and its coordination with the People's timekeeping makes a definite date unavailable). Six cats located in the town of Albstadt-Ebingen, then in the duchy of Württemberg and now in southern Germany, began a bout that lasted until 1738, and was completed by five of their great-grandchildren. The bout was forced to end in a draw because of a local outbreak of the plague, which killed what was judged a "threshold" number of the competitors.

The game (to People interested in it) naturally has profound philosophical and even mystical meaning. One saying is that "Rhoua plays best," the indication being that the Queen, in Her aspect of "Winking" Rhoua, can by definition see all People without being seen Herself, and that the Game is therefore a metaphor for life… which is (come to think of it) exactly what
ehhif
say about baseball, and soccer, and nearly every other sport down to tiddledywinks.

ON OTHER MATTERS

The nonwizardly aspects of the New York Public Library's CATNYP online cataloguing system can be found on the World Wide Web at

http://catnyp.nypl.org/

Please do not query the librarians about the Online "MoonBook" Project, as all but a few of the staff have no knowledge that it exists, and those staff who
do
know are required to deny its existence.

Readers interested in more information about wizardry might like to look at the following books by the same author:

So You Want to Be a Wizard

Deep Wizardry

High Wizardry

A Wizard Abroad

And for more information about new developments in the "Wizards' " universe, as well as for pictures of cats who looks suspiciously like some of the principals in this book, curious readers with Web access may wish to visit the following site:

http://www.ibmpcug.co.uk/~owls/homeward.html

*in
The Unadulterated Cat
(Gollancz, 1989)

A

aahfaui
(n) the "presence" quality in hauissh

Aaurh (pr n) another of the feline pantheon: the "Michael" power, the Warrior; female