Ratha’s Challenge (The Fourth Book of The Named) (3 page)

Perhaps if he stayed away from that, he might make some headway. With a sinking heart he realized that it was already too late. His easy acceptance and anonymity in the group were gone. Now he was the subject of attention and discussion.

“The ears don’t work,” said the female, looking at him with a grimace and turning to the male.

“The ears do work. The words are heard.”

“The song is not heard.” The female stared at Thakur with molten-gold eyes.

Without answering her stare directly, Thakur tried to get a good look into her eyes. He expected to meet a gaze that was much like his own. He felt the fur prickle up and down his tail when he could not find what he sought. The look in her eyes was neither the blank, unknowing stare of the animal-like Un-Named, nor the sharp, aware gaze of his own people. It was aware, yes, but the awareness was somehow ... different.

“The song is heard,” Thakur put in quickly, imitating the odd style of speech.

He hoped his answer would mollify the hunters, but the suspicion in the female’s face grew deeper as she stared at him. “The form is not known to True-of-voice. The eyes are not known; the voice is not known.”

What did she mean? Thakur could make no sense out of what she was saying. Perhaps True-of-voice was her name.

“True-of-voice,” he repeated. “Is that you? Is True-of-voice your name?”

He did not know if she understood him or not, but he saw he had made a major blunder. She flattened her ears and spat.

The other hunters traded looks, bristled, and growled. Thakur noticed that the misunderstanding was starting to draw attention from groups outside their own.

He decided that the time had come to withdraw and think things out before he got himself and Khushi into more trouble. With a poke he got the young herder on his feet. They both backed away from the now-hostile hunters, turned, and jogged in the direction they had come.

Though no one had noticed their initial approach, heads now lifted and eyes followed as they passed. It was as if word of the intruders had somehow spread instantly throughout the group, even though Thakur had heard no cries of alarm.

“Don’t run,” he warned Khushi, even though the muscles in his own hindquarters were twitching with the impulse to turn tail and flee.

Only when he had put the group at a distance did he and Khushi break into a bounding run. It carried them to the bushes, where Bira met them.

“What happened?” she asked.

Thakur sighed. “I said something wrong. I don’t know what.”

“So they do speak like us?”

“They use words, but not the way we do. Bira, we had better not stay here. We’re too close, and they’re angry. ”

Quickly the Firekeeper packed up the coals in an old bird’s nest filled with sand. Khushi helped, taking the resinous pine branches that served as firebrands.

Once Thakur decided they were a safe distance from the hunters, the Named made camp. Bira lit a fire from the embers she carried, and everyone drew close around it.

“I think we should give up on that bunch,” said Khushi, disgusted. “They may speak, but they are as stupid as the Un-Named. And crazy too. They kept mewling about some song. I couldn’t hear anyone singing. Could you, Thakur?”

“No,” the herding teacher confessed. He was disappointed at his failure. Khushi’s dismissal of the hunters as witless and crazy provided an easy escape from his own responsibility. For an instant he was tempted to take it. Perhaps no one could talk to these people. If so, he could not fault himself for failing.

Yet he knew the answer was not so simple. He had been close enough to look into their eyes. He had seen an alertness there, not the blank unawareness of the Un-Named. But it was directed strangely inward in a way he did not understand.

And it echoed something that he had seen and knew well, though at first he could not think what it was. Then he remembered another pair of eyes, sea-green and once shrouded by pain. Those were Thistle’s eyes when he had first found her.

He remembered how he had coaxed Thistle back outside herself, had given her not only words to speak with, but hope. How those eyes had begun to brighten and clear, showing that she was truly of the Named. Yet even now, her gaze would sometimes become opaque and she would retreat where none of the Named could follow. To Thakur it seemed as though Ratha’s daughter walked two paths, one with the Named and another in a cave world of mist and entrancement, where strange voices echoed.

Voices. The hunters had spoken, in their puzzling way, of a voice, a song that Thakur could not hear. Perhaps only they could hear it. The one name they had said was True-of-voice. In some way speech was vital to them, yet why did their grasp of it seem so limited and stilted?

It was clear that they did not walk the same path as the Named. But there was one among the Named who might be able to follow them. Thakur sensed that he would never be able to speak to these hunters by himself. He needed Thistle.

But she was not a clan member and did not have to obey Ratha or anyone else. If he sent for Thistle, the decision to come or not would be hers alone.

Was this the right thing to do? Thakur wondered. Would such a contact with the group of strange cats bring joy or disaster? The hunters could be a formidable enemy, but what if they were an allied clan who could help the Named survive?

He would send for Ratha as well as Thistle, he decided. Experienced as he was, he could not be alone in decisions that involved the future of the Named. Ratha must see these hunters for herself.

When the herding teacher came out of his reverie, he was slightly chagrined to find that Bira had banked the fire and that both she and Khushi had gone to sleep. Try as he would, Thakur could not close his eyes. He remained awake long into the night, thinking.

Chapter Two

Days later, wind was kicking up sand on a coastal beach, stinging Thistle’s eyes and nose. She felt lonely and cross, for her friend Thakur had been gone too long. The haze that had once clouded her mind came less often now, but today it was here, making her feel remote and withdrawn.

Keeping her claws fixed in the driftwood log, she pulled at her injured foreleg to make the muscles stretch, as Thakur had taught her. From a short distance away came a splintering sound. Ratha was using the same log to sharpen her claws.

Thistle could not help a glance sideways at her mother. Ratha was on top of the log, raking backward with the powerful muscles in her shoulders. Half fascinated, half resentful, Thistle watched. Ratha looked so beautiful and strong. She was all one tawny color that flowed over her head, down the bowed arch of her back, over her hindquarters, and out the long sweep of her tail.

Thistle wondered if anyone would ever watch
her
sharpening her claws and think that she was strong and beautiful. No. Even if her limp went away, she would still be small and awkward. And ugly, for her pelt was rusty black, mottled with orange.

She looked quickly away before Ratha could notice her gaze. The hard green light in her mother’s eyes burned too brightly today. Only when those eyes were half-closed or dulled by suffering or illness did Thistle dare approach and touch or lick her mother. When Ratha was strong and well, Thistle kept her inside thoughts well hidden.

Thistle gazed down at her outstretched leg. It was much stronger now. She could almost walk without a limp along short paths. Soon she hoped she would be able to walk for short distances without a limp. The leg no longer hurt either. At least most of the time. Only when ...

No. Thistle flattened her ears. She wasn’t going to think about the Dreambiter that appeared to her in nightmares. Thinking about it could too easily bring it, as if thoughts were meat laid on a trail that it prowled. But not thinking sometimes brought it, too.

Today, for some reason, it was hard to think and hard not to think. The wind and blowing sand seemed to catch everything in her mind and whirl it away. She sank her claws deeper into the gray driftwood and stretched her leg muscles until she felt the good healing hurt that promised to make that leg, once shrunken and crippled, as sound as her other limbs.

She heard a yawning sound as Ratha opened her jaws and curled her tongue upward in pleasure. Thistle saw the white sharpness of her teeth. She remembered, before she could catch herself, that the nightmare also had such sharp teeth.

And the nightmare, thus summoned, came.

The Dreambiter’s soft tread quickened, echoing along the caverns within Thistle’s mind. Thistle’s eyes and cars filled with blackness, and she felt herself being pulled deep into those caves. However she might struggle and scream and cry out, she could not break free. The sound of the Dreambiter’s feet became louder and faster.

Dimly, a voice cried out from beyond the cave, but she couldn’t understand it, for words had been lost to the rising howl of the Dreambiter. The blackness that was deeper and harder than anything outside pounced on her, green eyes flaming, mouth open, teeth bared. The upper fangs sank into her shoulder, the lower fangs into her chest, for she was suddenly small enough in the nightmare for her forequarters to fit within the Dreambiter’s mouth.

With the shock came the flooding pain that raged from her shoulder and chest to her foreleg, drawing the leg up in a cramped knot. Writhing, screaming, she clawed at the Dreambiter with her good forepaw, but her foe was made of nothingness, and her claws found no hold. Then the jaws released her, but the release was almost worse than the bite, for when the teeth pulled out, it hurt more than ever, and the hurt flamed and seared until the pain burned away everything—herself, the caves, the Dreambiter—until all were ashes.

And the ashes were picked up by the wind and swirled high into the sky. They slowly drifted down.

* * *

Ratha yanked her claws from the driftwood as soon as she saw Thistle stiffen. She was beside her daughter in an instant, seeing the milky sea-green color of her eyes swirl, closing the pupils to points. With a jerk that freed her claws from the log, Thistle staggered backward on her hind legs, overbalanced, and fell on her back.

“Fessran!” Ratha yowled her friend’s name, thanking the impulse that had drawn the Firekeeper leader to come with her on this visit to Thistle’s beach. Fessran was a short distance down the beach, looking after Mishanti, the young cub Thistle had adopted. Ratha wished Thakur were there, but he was gone on the search for the face-tailed beasts.

Thistle’s tail lashed the sand; her claws raked it. She writhed, hissed, and spat, striking with bared claws at an enemy only she could see. Then she screamed aloud with pain, and the foreleg she had been stretching pulled up against her chest and locked there, as if once again crippled and shrunken.

Ratha found her voice joining Thistle’s wordless cries, as if she could drive the nightmare from her daughter by sheer force of rage. She caught Thistle by the scruff, trying to hold her gently and tenderly as if she were a small cub. When she and her brothers were small, Ratha had carried them that way. She remembered how the wiggling bodies relaxed in her jaws, for the cubs sensed that they were safe.

Thistle only struggled harder, wrenching Ratha’s head back and forth. Ratha tried to soothe and calm her daughter with words, but her mouth was full of Thistle’s fur.

Fessran galloped up, her sandy-colored coat blackened with streaks of soot from the fires she tended. Raising her voice above Thistle’s squalling, Fessran yowled, “Quit the mother stuff, Ratha. It doesn’t work. The only thing to do is get her to the lagoon.” With her jaws she seized Thistle at the root of the tail and began hauling her toward a briny pool that lay behind the upper beach. Ratha, her mouth full of fur and her head swimming from being jerked back and forth, followed Fessran’s tugging.

Together they got Thistle over the sand and into the pool. Fearing that her daughter would drown while in the fit, Ratha held Thistle’s head up, but Fessran told her to let go.

“She’ll lift her nose to breathe. Just leave her alone. The water calms her. I don’t know why, but it works.”

Ratha knew that Fessran was right. As soon as the pool had wetted Thistle’s flank, she relaxed and stopped fighting. Now she drifted, looking like an orange-splotched brown sea otter. Ratha waited to see that she did lift her nose to take breaths and only then did she leave her daughter and wade to shore with Fessran.

She permitted herself one angry swipe at the ripples crossing the lagoon, jealous that its waters could soothe Thistle when she could not. Then she shook herself hard, sending spray flying in all directions.

“Come on,” said Fessran.

Ratha stayed silent, looking at Thistle.

Fessran nudged her. “I know you are angry. Be angry somewhere else.”

Fessran’s suggestion wasn’t the most helpful, but Ratha couldn’t think of an alternative. When they had gone a short distance from the pool, Ratha flopped down on her side. Wanting comfort, she wished she had her treeling, but she had left Ratharee safely hidden, just in case something like this should happen. Fessran sat down, curling her tail about her feet.

“She will be all right?” Ratha asked.