The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (87 page)

“No,” we heard her shout. “It’s not instinct. You can choose not to eat other people!”

The Cat roared and groaned. “Sometimes there is nothing else to eat! Do you want us to let our children die?”

Leveza roared back. “Why take my baby then? There was no . . .” She whinnied loud in horror, and snorted in fury. “There was no meat on him!”

The Cat groaned. She was talking, but we couldn’t hear what she said. Leveza went silent, plodding on alone, listening to the Cat. She fell far behind even the rear guard of
afriradors
who were supposed to protect stragglers. Already it was slightly as though she did not exist.

The light settled low and orange, the shadows grew long. I kept craning behind us but by then I could neither see nor hear Leveza.

“They’ll attack her! She’ll be taken!” I nickered constantly to Grama.

She laid her head on my neck as we walked. “If anyone can stand alone against Cats, it’s her.”

We found no outcropping. On top of a hill with a good view all around, Fortchee lifted himself up and trod the air, whinnying. The men in the carts turned left and circled. “Windbreaks!” called the Head Man. We all began to unload windbreak timbers, to slot down the sides of the carts, to make a fortress. I kept looking back for Leveza.

Finally she appeared in the smoky dusk hauling the Cat. Froth had dried on her neck. She looked exhausted; her head dipped as if chastened.

Fortchee stepped in front of her. “You can’t come into the circle with that cart.”

She halted. Burrs and bracken had got tangled in her mane. She stared at the ground. “She’s tied up. She’s very weak.”

Fortchee snorted in anger and pawed the dirt. “Do you think anybody could sleep with a Cat stinking up the inside of the circle?”

She paused, blinked. “She says the other Cats will kill her.”

“Let them!” said Fortchee.

Without answering, Leveza turned and hauled the cart away from the camp. Fortchee froze, looked at her, and then said, “Akwa, see to your groom-mate.”

Something in that made Grama snort, and she came with me. As we walked toward the carts, we pressed together the whole length of our bodies from shoulder to haunch for comfort.

Grama said, “She’s reliving what happened to Grassa.”

“Grassa?”

“Her mother. She saw her eaten, remember?”

“Oh yes, sorry.” I did the giggle, the giggle you give to excuse forgetting, the forgetting of the dead out of embarrassment and the need to keep things light “Anyway,” I said, “you made things hard enough for her when she was young.”

Grama hung her head. “I know.” Grama had tried to bully Leveza until she’d head-butted her, though two years younger.

It’s not good to remember.

Leveza had already climbed up into the cart, without having watered or grazed. Her eyes flicked back and forth between me and Grama. “Grama, of course, how sensible. Here.” She threw something at me and without thinking I caught it in my mouth. It was a bullet, thick with Cat blood and I spat it out.

“Fortchee wouldn’t thank you for that. He’s always telling us to save metal. Grama, love, do you think you could bring us bark-water, painkillers, thread?”

Grama’s hide twitched, but she said, “Yes, of course.”

Leveza reached around and tossed her a gun. “Watch yourself. I’ll keep my gun ready too.”

Grama picked up the bullet, then trotted back through the dusk. I felt undefended but I could not get up into the wagon with that thing. Leveza stood on hindquarters, scanning the camp, her gun leveled. As Grama came back with a pack, Leveza’s nostrils moved as if about to speak.

“They’re here,” she said.

Grama clambered up into the cart. I couldn’t see the Cat behind the sideboards, but I could see Grama’s eyes flare open, her mane bristle. Even so, she settled on her rear haunches and began to work, dabbing the wounds. I could hear the Cat groan, deep enough to shake the timber of the cart.

Leveza’s tail began to flick. I could smell it now: Cat all around us, scent blowing up the hillside like ribbons. The sunset was full of fire, clouds the colour of flowers. Calmly Grama sewed the wound. Leveza eased herself down, eyes still on the pasture, to feel if Grama’s gun was loaded.

“Her name’s Mai, by the way,” said Leveza. Mai meant Mother in both tongues.

The Cat made a noise like
Rergurduh
, Rigadoo. Thanks.

Leveza nickered a gentle safety call to me. I jumped forward, and then stopped. The smell of Cat was a wall.

“Get up into the cart,” said Leveza in a slow mothering voice.

It was the Terrible Time, when we can’t see. Milklight fills the night, but when the sky blazes and the earth is black, the contrast means we can see nothing. Leveza reached down, bit my neck to help haul me up.

I was only halfway into the cart when out of that darkness a deep rumble formed words. “We will make the Horses eat you first.”

Leveza let me go to shriek out the danger call, to tell the others. I tried to kick my way into the cart.

“Then while you cry we will take their delicious legs.”

I felt claws rake the back of my calves. I screamed and scrambled. A blast right by my ears deafened me; I pulled myself in; I smelt dust in the air.

Leveza. How could she see? How could she walk upright all day?

She touched a tar lamp, opened its vent, and it gave light. “Aim for eyes,” she said.

We saw yellow eyes, narrow and glowing, pure evil, hypnotizing. Ten, fifteen, how many were there, trying to scramble into the wagon?

Grama shot. Leveza shot. I had no gun and yearned to run so stamped my feet and cried for help. Some of the eyes closed and spun away. I looked at Mother Cat. She had folded up, eyes closed, but I was maddened and began to kick her as if she threatened my child. The sun sank.

Finally we heard a battle cry and a thundering of hooves from the circle. Leveza bit my neck and threw me to the floor of the cart. My nostrils were pushed into a pool of Cat juices. I heard shots and metal singing through the air. Our mares were firing wildly at anything. Why couldn’t they see?

“Put that lamp out!” shouted Fortchee. Leveza stretched forward and flicked it shut. Then in milklight, our
afriradors
took more careful aim. I felt rather than heard a kind of thumping rustle, bullets in flesh, feet through grass. I peered out over the sides of the wagon and in milklight, I saw the Cats pulling back, slipping up and over rocks, crouching behind them. I lay back down and looked at Mother Cat. She shivered, her eyes screwed shut. A Cat felt fear?

We could still smell them, we could still hear them.

Fortchee said, “All of you, back into the circle. You too, Leveza.”

She snuffled from weariness. “Can’t!”

I cried, “Leveza! Those are real Cats, they will come back! What you care about her?”

“I did this to her,” Leveza said.

Fortchee asked, “Why do other Cats want to kill her?”

A deep voice next to me purred through broken teeth. “Dissh-honour.”

Chilled, everyone fell silent.

“Alsho, I talk too much,” said Mother Cat. Did she chuckle?

I pleaded. “Choova misses you; she wants her groom-mummy; I miss you; please, Leveza, come back!” Fortchee ordered the men to give her a third gun and some ammo.

Grama looked at me with a question in her eyes I didn’t want to see. As far as I was concerned, Fortchee had told us to pull back. I was shaking inside. Grama wasn’t the one who had felt claws on her haunches.

All the way back, Grama bit the back of my neck as if carrying me like a mother.

We nestled down under a wagon behind the windbreak walls. Choova worked her way between us. None of us could sleep even the two hours. We paced and pawed. I stood up and looked out, and saw Leveza standing on watch, unfaltering.

At dawnsky when she would have most difficulty seeing, I heard shots, repeated. I fought my way out from under the wagon, and jerked my head over the windbreak between the carts where there are only timbers.

Blank whiteness, blank darkness, and in the middle a lamp glowing like a second sunrise. I could see nothing except swirling smoke and yellow dust and Leveza hunching behind the sides of the wagon, suddenly nipping up to shoot. Someone else glowed orange in that light, firing from the other side.

Leveza had given a gun to the Cat.

I saw leaping arms fanning what looked like knives. Everything spiraled in complete silence. The Cats made no sound at all. I was still rearing up my head over the windbreak to look, when suddenly, in complete silence, a Cat’s head launched itself at my face. All I saw was snout, yellow eyes, fangs in a blur jammed up close to me. I leapt back behind the windbreak; the thing roared, a paralyzing sound that froze me. I could feel it make me go numb. The numbness takes away the pain as they eat you.

I couldn’t think for a long time after that. I stood there shaking, gradually becoming aware of my pounding heart. Others were up, had begun to work; the sun was high; dawnsky was over. I heard Choova call me, but I couldn’t answer. She galloped out to me, crying and weeping. Grama followed, looked concerned, and then began to trot.

It showed in my face. “Did one of them get in here?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer, just shook my head, no. Choova cried, frightened for me. “It climbed the wall,” I said and realized I’d been holding my breath.

“Leveza’s not in the wagon,” said Grama. We reared up to look over the wall. The slope was grassy, wide, the day bright. The wagon stood alone, with nothing visible in it. Grama looked at me.

Maybe she’d gone to graze? I scanned the fields, and caught motion from the slopes behind me, turned and my heart shivered with relief. There was Leveza slowly climbing toward us.

“What’s she doing down there, that’s where the Cats are!”

She held something in her mouth. For a moment I thought she’d gone back again for Kaway. Then I saw feathers. Birds? As she lowered herself, they swayed limply.

“She’s been hunting,” said Grama.

“She’s gone mad,” I said.

“I fear so.”

We told Choova to stay where she was and Grama and I trotted out to meet her. “Is that what I think it is? Is it?” I shouted at her. I was weepier than I would normally be, shaken.

Leveza reared up and took the dead quail out of her mouth. “She needs to eat something,” said Leveza. She was in one of her hearty, blustering moods, cheerful about everything and unstoppable. She strode on two legs. She’d braided her mane and then held it on top of her head with plastic combs, out of her eyes.

Grama sighed. “We don’t take life, Leveza. We value it.”

She looked merry. She shook the quail. “I value thought. These things can’t think.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say!”

She swept past us. “You’d rather she ate us, I suppose. Or maybe you want her to die. How does that show you value life?”

She trooped on toward the cart.

Grama had an answer. “I’d rather the Cat hunted for herself.”

“Good. I’ll give her a gun then.”

I was furious. “She had a gun last night!”

“Oh. Yes. Well. She was a welcome addition to our resources.” Leveza smiled. “Since I was otherwise on my own.” She looked at me dead in the eye and her meaning was plain enough.

“If they value life so much, why did they take Kaway then?” I was sorry the instant I said it. I meant that I’d heard her ask the Cat that and I wanted to know the answer too, just like she did.

“Because I broke the bargain,” she said, so calmly that I was almost frightened.

I wanted to show her that I was outraged at what they’d done. “What bargain?”

She lost some kind of patience. “Oh come on, Akwa, you’re not a child. The bargain! The one where they don’t take children so they grow up nice and fat for them to eat later and we let them take our old and sick. They get to eat, and we get rid of people whose only use is that they are experienced and wise, something Horses can’t use, because of course we know everything already. So we don’t shoot Cats except to scare them off, and they don’t shoot us.” Her eyes looked like the Cats’ reflecting our lamps. “
That
bargain.”

“I . . . I’m sorry.”

“I shot them when they took the old. They saw I was the leader so I was the target.”

Grama and I looked at each other. Grama said, with just a hint of a smile, “You . . . ?”

“Yes me. The Cats can see it even if you can’t.”

Grama pulled back her lips as if to say, oops, pushed her too far that time. As we followed her Grama butted me gently with her head.
It’s just Leveza fabricating
.

Leveza strode ahead of us, as if she didn’t need us, and it was uncomfortably like she didn’t.

Once at the cart, Leveza took out a knife and began to butcher the quail. I cried and turned away. She pushed the meat toward the Cat, who opened her eyes but did not move. The creature had had to relieve herself in the cart so the stink was worse than ever.

Leveza dropped onto all fours and trotted to the neck of the cart. “Help me into the yoke?”

“You’ve not asked me about Choova.”

“How is she?” She picked up the yoke by herself.

“Terrified and miserable. She saw the empty cart and thought you were dead.”

Grama helped settle the yoke, slipping in the pin. At once Leveza started to drag the cart forward

“You’re going now?” The camp was not even being dismantled.

“Stragglers get taken. Today I intend to be in front. We start going downhill.”

“Let’s go!” I said to Grama, furious, but she shook her head and walked on beside the cart. “I’ve got a gun,” she said. “We should guard her.”

I should have gone back to take care of Choova, but it felt wrong somehow to leave someone else guarding my groom-mate. I shouted to Choova as we passed the camp. “Groom-mummy is fine, darling; we’re just going with her to make sure she’s safe.”

So all of us walked together, the cart jostling and thunking over rocks.

“So tell them, Mai. Why does the world need predators?”

I looked into the wagon, and saw that the Cat had clenched about herself like fingers curled up inside a hoof. I could sense waves of illness coming off her. I saw the horrible meat. She hadn’t touched it. She looked at me with dead eyes.