Believing Is Seeing (16 page)

“You should be glad I did. You'd all be in a slaveship now if I hadn't,” Orm said.

“But you weren't to know that, were you?” Terens said.

“Not to speak of risking being charged yourself,” added Lewin.

Orm leaned on his hand against Huffle, as you might against a wall. “She half killed this dragon!” he said. “That's why! All I did was ask her for a kiss, and she screams and lays into poor Huffle. My own daughter, and she tries to kill a dragon! And I thought, Right, my lady, then you're no daughter of mine anymore! And I flew Huffle's mother straight into Holmstad and laid charges. I was that angry! My own father tended dragons, and his mother before him. And my daughter tried to kill one! You wonder I was angry?”

“Nobody
told
me!” I said. I had that draining-away feeling again.

I was quite glad when Terens took hold of my elbow and said something like “Steady, steady!”

“Are you telling the truth?” Neal said.

“I'm sure he is,” Lewin said. “Your sister has his eyes.”

“Ask Timas,” said Orm. “He married your mother the year after I did. He can take being bossed about. I can't. I went back to my dragons. But I suppose there's a record of that?” he said challengingly to Lewin.

“And the divorce,” said Lewin. “Terens looked it up for me. But I expect the Slavers have destroyed it by now.”

“And she never told you?” Orm said to me. He wagged his shaggy eyebrows at me almost forgivingly. “I'll have a bone to pick with her over that,” he said.

Mother arrived just as we'd all got down into the valley. She looked very indomitable, as she always does on horseback, and all our people were with her, down to both our shepherds. They had carts of clothes and blankets and food. Mother knew the valley as well as Orm did. She used to meet Orm there when she was a girl. She set out for the Reserve as soon as she heard the broadcast about the invasion, and the dragon we sent her met them on the way. That's Mother for you. The rest of the neighbors didn't get there for some hours after that.

I didn't think Mother's face—or Timas's—could hold such a mixture of feelings as they did when they saw Neal and me and the Dragonate men all with Orm. When Orm saw Mother, he folded his arms and grinned. Huffle rested his huge chin on Orm's shoulder, looking interested.

“Here she comes,” Orm said to Huffle. “Oh, I do love a good quarrel!”

They had one. It was one of the loudest I'd ever heard. Terens took Neal and me away to help look after Lewin. He turned out to have broken some ribs when the blast hit the van, but he wouldn't let anyone look even until I ordered him to. After that Neal, Alectis, and I sat under our hay cart and talked, mostly about the irony of Fate. You see, Neal has always secretly wished Fate had given him Orm as a father, and I'm the one that's got Orm. Neal's father is Timas. Alectis says he can see the likeness. We'd both gladly swap. Then Alectis confessed that he'd been hating the Dragonate so much that he was thinking of running away, which is a serious crime. But now the Slavers have come, and there doesn't seem to be much of a Dragonate anymore, he feels quite different. He admires Lewin.

Lewin consented to rest while Terens and Mother organized everyone into a makeshift camp in the valley, but he was up and about again the next day, because he said the Slavers were bound to come the day after, when they found the holdings were deserted. The big black she-drake sat in her cave at the head of the kyle, with her infants between her forefeet, watching groups of people rushing around to do what Lewin said, and didn't seem to mind at all. Huffle said she'd been bored and bad-tempered up to then. We made life interesting. Actually that she-drake reminds me of Mother. Both of them made me give them a faithful report of the battle.

I don't think the Slavers knew about the dragons. They just knew that there was a concentration of people in here, and they came straight across the Reserve to get us. As soon as the dragons told Orm they were coming, Lewin had us all out hiding in the hills in their path, except for Mother and Timas and Inga's mother and a few more who had shotguns. They had to stay and guard the little kids in the camp. The rest of us had any weapons we could find. Neal and Alectis had bows and arrows. Inga had her airgun. Donal and most of the farmers had scythes. The shepherds all had their slingshots. I was in the front with Lewin, because I was supposed to stop the effect of the Slavers' collars. Orm was there, too, although nobody had ever admitted in so many words that Orm might be heg. All Orm did was to ask the dragons to keep back because we didn't want
them
enslaved by those collars.

And there they came, a huddle of sheeplike troops, and then another huddle, each one being driven by a cluster of kingly Slavers, with crowns and winking V-shaped collars And there again we all got that horrible guilty compulsion to come and give ourselves up. But I don't think those collars have any effect on dragons. Half of us were standing up to walk into the Slavers' arms, and I was ordering them as hard as I could not to, when the dragons smelled those golden crowns and collars: there was no holding them. They just whirred down over our heads and took those Slavers to pieces for the metal. Lewin said, “Ah!” and crumpled his face in a grin like a fiend's. He'd thought the dragons might do that. I think he may really be a genius, like they say Camerati are. But I was so sick at that, and then again at the sight of nice people like Alectis and Yan killing the sheeplike troops, that I'm not going to talk about it anymore. Terens says I'm not to go when the Slavers come next. Apparently I broadcast the way I was feeling, just as the Slavers do, and even the dragons felt queasy. The she-drake snorted at that. Mother says, “Nonsense. Take travel pills and behave as my daughter should.”

Anyway, we have found out how to beat the Slavers. We have no idea what is going on in the other of the Ten Worlds, or even in the rest of Sveridge, but there are fifty more Worm Reserves around the world, and Lewin says there must be stray Dragonate units, too, who might think of using dragons against Slavers. We want to move out and take over some of the farms again soon. The dragons are having far too much fun with the sheep. They keep flying over with woolly bundles dangling from their claws, watched by a gloomy crowd of everyone's shepherds. “Green dot,” the shepherds say. “The brutes are raiding Hightop now.” They are very annoyed with Orm because Orm just gives his mad cackle and lets the dragons go on.

Orm isn't mad at all. He's afraid of people knowing he's heg; he still won't admit he is. I think that's why he left Mother, and Mother doesn't admit she was ever married to him. Not that Mother minds. I get the feeling she and Orm understand one another rather well. But Mother married Donal, you see, after Timas. Donal, and Yan, too, have both told me that the fact that I'm heg makes no difference to them, but you should see the way they both look at me! I'm not fooled. I don't blame Orm for being scared stiff Donal would find out he was heg. But I'm not sure I shall ever like Orm, all the same.

I am putting all this down on what is left of Palino's memo block. Lewin wanted me to, in case there is still some history yet to come. He has made his official version on the recorder. I'm leaning the block on Huffle's forefoot. Huffle is my friend now. Leaning on a dragon is the best way to keep warm on a chilly evening like this, when you're forced to camp out in the Reserve. Huffle is letting Lewin lean on him, too, beyond Neal, because Lewin's ribs still pain him. There is a lot of leaning space along the side of a dragon. Orm has just stepped across Huffle's tail, into the light, chortling and rubbing his hands in his most irritating way.

“Your mother's on the warpath,” he says. “Oh, I do love a good quarrel!”

And here comes Mother, ominously upright, and with her arms folded. It's not Orm she wants. It's Lewin. “Listen, you,” she says. “What the dickens is the Dragonate thinking of, beheading hegs all these years? They can't help what they are. And they're the only people who can stand up to the Thrallers.”

Orm is cheated of his quarrel. Lewin looked up, crumpled into the most friendly smile. “I do so agree with you,” he said. “I've just said so in my report. And I'd have got your daughter off somehow, you know.”

Orm is cackling like the she-drake's young ones. Mother's mouth is open, and I really think that for once in her life she has no idea what to say.

I
am a cat. I am a cat like anything. Keep stroking me. I came in here because I knew you were good at stroking. But put your knees together so I can sit properly, front paws under. That's better. Now keep stroking, don't forget to rub my ears, and I will purr and tell.

I am going to tell you how I came to be so very old. When I was a kitten, humans dressed differently, and they had great stamping horses to pull their cars and buses. The Old Man in the house where I lived used to light a hissing gas on the wall when it got dark. He wore a long black coat. The Boy who was nice to me wore shabby breeches that only came to his knees, and he mostly went without shoes, just like me. We slept in a cupboard under the stairs, Boy and I. We kept one another warm. We kept one another fed, too, later on. The Old Man did not like cats or boys. He only kept us because we were useful.

I was more useful than Boy. I had to sit in a five-pointed star. The Boy would help Old Man mix things that smoked and made me sneeze. I had to sneeze three times. After that things happened. Sometimes big purple cloud things came and sat beside me in the star. Fur stood up on me, and I spat, but the things only went away when Old Man hit the star with his stick and told them,
“Begone!”
in a loud voice. At other times the things that came were small, real things you could hit with your paw: boxes, or strings of shiny stones no one could eat, or bright rings that fell
tink
beside me out of nowhere. I did not mind those things. The things I really hated were the third kind. Those came inside me and used my mouth to speak. They were nasty things with hateful thoughts, and they made
me
hateful. And my mouth does not like to speak. It ached afterward, and my tongue and throat were so sore that I could not wash the hatefulness off me for hours.

I so hated those inside-speaking things that I used to run away and hide when I saw Old Man drawing the star on the cellar floor. I am good at hiding. Sometimes it took Boy half the day to find me. Then Old Man would shout and curse and hit Boy and call him a fool. Boy cried at night in the cupboard afterward. I did not like that, so after a while I scratched Old Man instead. I knew none of it was Boy's fault. Boy made Old Man give me nice things to eat after I had sat in the star. He said it was the only way to get me to sit there.

Boy was clever, you see. Old Man thought he was a fool, but Boy told me—at night in the cupboard—that he only pretended to be stupid. Boy was an orphan like me. Old Man had bought him for a shilling from a baby farmer ages before I was even a kitten, because his hair was orange, like the ginger patches on me, and that is supposed to be a good color for magic. Old Man paid a whole farthing for me, for much the same reason, because I am brindled. And Boy had been with Old Man ever since, learning things. It was not only magic that Boy learned. Old Man was away quite a lot when Boy was small. Boy used to read Old Man's books in the room upstairs, and the newspapers, and anything else he could find. He told me he wanted to learn magic in order to escape from Old Man, and he learned the other things so that he could manage in the wide world when he did escape; but he had been a prisoner in the house for years now, and although he knew a great deal, he still could not break the spell Old Man had put on him to keep him inside the house. “And I really hate him,” Boy said to me, “because of the cat before you. I want to stop him doing any more magic before I leave.”

And I said—

What was that? How could Boy and I talk together? Do you think I am a stupid cat, or something? I am nearly as clever as Boy. How do you think I am telling you all this? Let me roll over. My stomach needs rubbing. Oh, you rub well! I really like you. Well— No, let me sit up again now. I think the talking must be something to do with those inside-speaking things. When I was a kitten, I could understand what people said, of course, but I couldn't do it back, not at first, until I had been lived in and been spoken through by quite a lot of Things. Boy thought they stretched my mind. And I was clever to start with, not like the cat before me.