Treecat Wars (26 page)

He managed this nearly impossible task before he reached the grove near the river where the Landless Clan now squatted. He was relieved to learn Beautiful Mind was still alive. The females who were attending her reported that she had been very agitated at one point, so Keen Eyes suspected she already knew of her loss.

Sour Belly and some of the other elders had been lucky in their fishing that day. When Keen Eyes arrived, most of the clan were shredding their way into the tender flesh. It was an indication of their reduced circumstances that fishheads, tails, and even bones were being set aside for a later meal. Nothing even remotely edible would be wasted in these hard times.

Although Keen Eyes had returned with nothing to add to the feast, Wonder Touch, Sour Belly’s mate—a Person as sweet and nice as her mate was sour and unyielding—called out to him.

<
Welcome back, Keen Eyes. We have saved you enough dinner to put some fat back on your bones. Tiny Choir and her littermates found a lake-builder’s cache from last season, so we have some fruit as well
.>

Keen Eyes thanked her enthusiastically, then invited Tiny Choir and her siblings to tell him all about how they had found the dry fruit. They had really been quite clever, guessing that the pool near which the clan now camped had probably been the result of some lake-builders’ beginning work.

<
Probably a death fang got them
,> Tiny Choir said, her mind-voice wildly excited. <
Lake-builders usually store food, so we went looking and we found it
.>

Even as he praised the kittens, Keen Eyes could not but think how far the clan had fallen. To be glad to have these shriveled and bitter fruit when before their home had been destroyed these would have been tossed away as inedible. However, he
was
grateful. The nights were already too cold for lace-leaf to thrive. The green-needle nuts had turned to ash along with the trees that bore them. Any supplement to the thin hunting was welcome.

When he had eaten, Keen Eyes considered who he could tell about Red Cliff’s death. As much as he would have liked to keep the matter secret, there was too much risk to the clan. Already, he suspected they were in lands Trees Enfolding Clan viewed as their own. Any roving hunter might meet the same fate as Red Cliff.

Keen Eyes would have preferred to take the matter up first with the clan’s memory singers, to learn what precedents were in place for such a situation, but Wide Ears and her juniors were gone. For a moment, he considered consulting Tiny Choir, but he knew this impulse for the cowardice was. Even if Wide Ears had begun teaching the kitten, she would not have shared information about past wars between clans. Memory songs were vivid, perfectly re-creating all of the thoughts and emotions—bad, as well as good; ugly and vile as well as courageous and selfless—that the events at their heart had evoked. Songs recounting the anger and hatred, the wrenching loss of mates and kittens, the extinguishing a beloved mind-glows, were hard enough for adults to accept. They would almost certainly warp the sensibility of a growing kitten who believed that all possible problems could be resolved because shared mind-glows made misunderstandings impossible, and so they were passed only into the keeping of those made strong enough by age and experience to bear them.@

In the end, he did what he had known he must all along and reported what he had learned to all the adult members of the clan. The reaction was as bad as he had dreaded it would be.

Only respect for the young and injured kept mind-voices within their lower registers. Red Cliff’s death would have been upsetting enough, but the contempt for the entire clan shown by how his body had been dumped was enough to enrage even the most moderately tempered Person.

<
I notice something very interesting in your report
,> commented Bowl Shaper, a senior female highly respected for her work in clay. <
Twice you have spoken with this Swimmer’s Scourge. Once his nephew Nimble Fingers was also present. However, they have taken great care to stay outside of the range at which you might have tasted their mind-glows.
>

<
You are correct
,> Keen Eyes agreed. <
I think it was deliberate. My ability to taste another’s mind-glow is not as strong as it would be if I were bonded with a mate. I guess that one or both of these is stronger than I am and would be able to detect me before I detected him. It would then be a simple matter for him to speak to me. He would know that once I heard his voice, even if I could not see him, I could reply and the advantage would remain his
.>

<
This speaks of a cunning individual
,> Bowl Shaper replied.

<
Or sneaky
,> cut in Sour Belly.

<
Or both
,> a younger female, Knot Binder, said pacifically. <
Trees Enfolding Clan has chosen its border guards carefully. We should respect this and take it into consideration when we plan what to do next
.>

<
And we
will
do something
,> Sour Belly asserted. <
Red Cliff may have come from elsewhere, but he had become a valued member of this clan. His children will not grow up to learn that we did not care that their father was murdered
.>

<
I have wondered
,> Keen Eyes said, trying to share a half-formed idea that had come to him as he made his way back to the clan with news of Red Cliff’s death, <
if perhaps the Trees Enfolding Clan does not understand how dire our need is. Perhaps the one who spoke to me—Swimmer’s Scourge—was so worried about the fate of his own clan this coming winter that he could not find sympathy for strangers. The fact that he was able to stay at the very fringes of my mind-glow would have made it easier for him to think only about the needs of his own clan, to see me only as an invader, a threat
.>

<
So
?> scoffed Sour Belly. <
Would you have us go to them, force our mind-glows upon them?
>

<
Not quite
,> Keen Eyes replied, striving to project patience rather than the irritation he felt. <
What if we brought one of them close enough so that he could not ignore what our mind-glows would show him? Let them taste the fear of the kittens who have lost parents, the hunger that gnaws the bellies of all our people. Once even one Person of their clan knows how terrible things are for us, surely they would at least let us pass through their territories and seek refuge elsewhere. They might even pity us and take us in
.>

Keen Eyes was pleased to feel that many members of the clan were interested in his idea. Others still projected doubt. He turned to Knot Binder.

<
Something about my idea troubles you? Perhaps if you would explain, we could use your ideas to make a stronger plan
.>

<
I am afraid of what might happen if we brought someone here. You have said that you think Trees Enfolding is tolerating our living on this poor fringe of their territory. What happens if we force the clan as a whole to take notice? What if they decide to drive us out?
>

Keen Eyes was about to reply when Bowl Shaper surprised him by speaking with great force.

<
I share your fear, clan sister, but either Trees Enfolding will chase us out or the coming of winter will do so. This is a decent nesting place now, but what will happen when the stream freezes and even our best fishers can no longer find prey? We have already been forced to eat the leavings of lake-builders. We have scraped the stones bare of rockfur. I am no memory singer, but I recall the tales Wide Ears told of when winter stretched unreasonably long. Then hunger-maddened clans fought each other to the death over a handful of green-needle nuts. Our Landless Clan cannot avoid conflict. We can only choose whether we will make our move while we still have some strength or wait until desperation pushes us
.>

<
I understand, Bowl Shaper
.> Knot Binder shivered as if she felt the icy winds that Bowl Shaper had evoked in memory. <
I withdraw my objection
.>

<
How then
,> asked Sour Belly, <
shall we go about issuing an invitation to visit us? Somehow, I fancy that if anyone in the Trees Enfolding Clan actually cared to know us, they would have come by now
.>

Keen Eyes stroked his whiskers with one true-hand. He had thought this part out with care but had deliberately withheld the details of his plan until he knew the clan would at least consider it.

<
I have an idea
,> he said. <
Let me show you
.>

* * *

“So what did your mom have to say?”

“Um?”

Stephanie looked up from her reader. She sat crosslegged on the bench under the shading branches of the Manticoran blue-tip tree, the reader in her lap. Lionheart stretched companionably beside her with his chin propped on her thigh, and she blinked.

“I asked what your mom had to say,” Karl repeated with a smile. Stephanie in “I’m studying hard” mode had about as much situational awareness as a rock, he reflected.

“Oh.” Stephanie blinked again, then grinned crookedly, recognizing his amusement. “Sorry. I was really locked in. She said she and Dad are having a wonderful time seeing all the sights. And they darn well should, too! This is the first vacation they’ve had since we got to Sphinx.”

“I know.” Karl nodded. “They’ve worked their butts off ever since you guys got here. I’m glad they’re having a good time. Wish you could be showing them around?”

“Show them
what?
” Stephanie snorted a laugh. “Aside from the meetings with the Adair Foundation, we haven’t been off campus more than twice! They’re making out better with the standard guide package and their uni-links than anything
I
could tell them.”

“You’re probably right,” Karl agreed, and looked back down at his own reader. Despite Stephanie’s laugh, there’d been at least a little bite in her response, and from the corner of his eye he watched Lionheart’s ears twitch. He’d learned to read the ’cat’s body language almost as well as he could read another human’s, and he could tell a lot about Stephanie’s mood by reading Lionheart’s. And just that moment, she obviously wished she
could
be touring Manticore with her parents. Unfortunately, it was exam week, and even Stephanie was finding herself pushed by the pressure. Both of them carried averages which would see them successfully complete their courses even if they blew the finals pretty badly, but neither of them were interested in just scraping by. Doing the best they could would have been a point of pride with them under any circumstances, but given Ranger Shelton’s decision to expend precious slots on a couple of kids, they had a special responsibility to do him proud.

Not that there’d ever been much chance
Stephanie
wouldn’t do just that, he reflected wryly.

“You want to go back over Dr. Flouret’s discussion questions again?” Stephanie asked, as if she’d been able to read his mind, and he chuckled.

“Couldn’t hurt,” he acknowledged. “But, truth to tell, I’m more concerned about Dr. Tibbetts.” He shook his head. “I know it’s going to be open-link to the library, but I’m not as good at searching precedents as you are, Steph!”

“You’re better than you think you are,” she scolded, and Lionheart bleeked emphatically, arching his spine and stretching luxuriantly.

Karl was always putting himself down where the purely academic side of their courses were concerned, she thought. He
did
do better when it came to fieldwork, true, but he was better than three quarters of more of their classmates when it came to the more sedentary portions of the curriculum, as well.

“Doing better than I think I am wouldn’t be all that hard,” he pointed out with a chuckle. “Don’t bite my head off, Steph! I don’t think I’m going to tank the exam, you know. But the truth is, you’re a lot more comfortable with Jurisprudence than I am. And I’m not all that clear on why a ranger needs Jurisprudence 101, anyway. We’re not going to be judges or magistrates!”

“No,” she agreed. “But it does make sense for us to have at least a basic understanding of how it works. Right now, ranger field assignments are basically common sense and seat-of-the-pants, but it’s not going to be that way forever. That’s why Ranger Shelton’s trying to build up the supply of trained,
professional
rangers, and having at least some notion of what the courts are likely to do with anybody we end up dealing with in a…professional capacity, let’s say, isn’t going to hurt a thing.”

“Probably not,” he agreed. “But the truth is I’d rather take Dr. Gleason’s exam twice than take Dr. Tibbetts’ once! She always makes me think she’s going to throw me into jail somewhere if I screw up.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say!” Stephanie’s tone was severe, but her lips twitched. Dr. Emily Tibbetts—also known as Justice Tibbetts—was a senior member of the King’s Bench who taught introductory jurisprudence courses at LUM. She had a severe way about her, but Stephanie had caught something suspiciously like a twinkle in her brown eyes on more than one occasion. Besides, she’d not only decided Lionheart could accompany Stephanie to class, she obviously liked the treecat. More to the point, perhaps, Lionheart liked
her
. “Dr. Tibbetts is perfectly nice,” she continued. “And even if she weren’t, I promise I’d file a writ of
habeas corpus
as soon as her minions dragged you away.

“Gee, thanks.”

“You’re welcome. But, you know,” Stephanie went on more thoughtfully, “we could always pick Jeff’s brain. He took the same course last semester, and he’s taking Jurisprudence 102
this
semester. If anyone we know knows the kinds of questions Dr. Tibbetts is likely to ask, it’s him.”

Karl raised an eyebrow at the suggestion. Jeff Harrison was one of their classmates in Dr. Flouret’s criminology course. A native of Manticore, not Sphinx, he obviously intended to pursue a law-enforcement career on the capital planet, and he was several years older than Karl, much less Stephanie. He was also ridiculously citified in Karl’s opinion, but he was fascinated by Lionheart and he’d become one of their Manticore-born friends.