The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (86 page)

At the base of the cliff, a Cat lay in a pool of blood, purring, eyes closed as if asleep. Lindalfa scream-whinnied in horror and clattered backward. The Cat rumbled but did not stir.

Muttering, fearful, we were all pushed back by Cat-stench; we twitched and began to circle just before panic.

Leveza leaned in close to stare.

“Love, come away,” I said. I picked my way forward, ready to grab her neck and pull her back if the thing lunged. I saw its face in milklight.

I’d never seen a Cat up close before.

The thing that struck me was that she was handsome. It was a finely formed face, despite the short muzzle, with a divided upper lip which seemed almost to smile, the mouthful of fangs sheathed. The Cat’s expression looked simply sad, as if she were asking Life itself one last question.

Leveza sighed and said, “Poor heart.”

The beast moaned, a low miserable sound that shook the earth. “You . . . need . . . predators.”

“Like cat-shit we do,” said Leveza, and stood up and back. “Come on!” she called to the rest of us, as if we were the ones who had been laggard.

The Cats were clever. They had pulled out far ahead of us so we had no idea when they would attack again. Our hooves slipped on the rocks. Leveza went all hearty on us. “Goats do this sort of thing. They have hooves too.”

“They’re cloven,” said one of the bucks.

“Nearly cousins,” sniffed Leveza. I think the light, the air, and the view so far above the plain exhilarated her. It depressed me. I wanted to be down there where it was flat and you could run and it was full of grass. The men hauling the wagons never stopped frothing, eyes edged white. They were trapped in yokes and that made them easy prey.

We hated being strung out along the narrow trail, and kept hanging back so we could gather together in clumps. She would stomp on ahead and stomp on back. “Come on, everyone, while it’s still dark.”

“We’re just waiting for the others,” quailed Lindalfa.

“No room for the others, love, not on this path.”

Lindalfa sounded harassed. “Well, I don’t like being exposed like this.”

“No, you’d far rather have all your friends around you to be eaten first.” It was a terrible thing to say, but absolutely true. Some of us laughed.

Sunrise came, the huge white sky contrasting too much with the silhouetted earth so that we could see nothing. We waited it out in a defensive group, carts around us. As soon as the sun rose high enough, Leveza triggered us to march. Not Fortchee. She urged us on and got us moving, and went ahead to scout. I learned something new about my groom-mate: the most loyal and loving of us was also the one who could most stand being alone.

She stalked on ahead, and I remember seeing the Lump sitting placidly on her back, about as intelligent as a cudcake.

A high wind stroked the grass in waves. Beautiful clouds were piled up overhead, full of wheeling birds, scavengers who were neither hunters nor victims. They knew nothing of ancestors or even speech.

Then we heard over the brow of a hill the snarl of Cats who have gone for the kill and no longer need stealth.

Leveza. Ahead. Alone.

“Gotcha!” they roared in thunder-voices.

We heard gunfire, just a snapping like a twig, and a Cat yelp, and then more gunfire and after that a heartfelt wail that could not have come from a Cat, a long hideous keening, more like that of a bird.

Fortchee broke into a lurching, struggling gallop. He triggered me and I jumped forward into a gallop too, slipping on rocks, heaving my way up the slope. It was like a nightmare where something keeps pulling you back. I heaved myself up onto the summit and saw Leveza, sitting on the ground, Fortchee stretching down to breathe into her ears.

She was staring ahead. Fortchee looked up at me with such sadness.

Before he could speak, Leveza turned her heavy jaws, her great snout, toward the sky and mourned, whinnying now a note for the dead.

“They got the Lump,” said the Head Man, and turned and rubbed her shoulders. Her saddle-pack was torn. The baby was gone. Leveza keened, rocking from side to side, her lips forming a circle, the sound coming from far back and down her throat.

“Leveza,” said Fortchee, looking forlornly at me.

“Leveza,” I agreed, for we knew that she would not forget Kaway soon.

The rest of us, we lose a child, we have another next year; we don’t think about it; we can’t afford to. We’re not strong enough. They die, child after child, and the old beloved aunties, or the wise old men who can no longer leap away. We can hear them being eaten. “Remember me! I love you!” they call to us, heartbroken to be leaving life and leaving us. But we have to forget them.

So we go brittle and shallow, sweet and frightened, smart but dishonest.

Not Leveza. She suddenly snarled, snatched up her rife, rocked to her feet, and galloped off, after the Cats.

“She can’t think that she can get him back!” I said.

“I don’t know what she can think,” said Fortchee.

The others joined us and we all stood haunches pressed together. None of us went to help, not even me, her beloved groom-mate. You do not chase prides of Cats to rescue anyone. You accept that they have been taken.

We heard distant shots, and the yelping of Cats. We heard hooves.

“She’s coming back,” whispered Grama and glanced at me. It was as if the hills themselves had stood up to stretch to see if things looked any different. A Horse had been hunting Cats.

Leveza appeared again at the top of the hill and for a moment I thought she had wrought a miracle, for her child dangled from her mouth.

Then I saw the way she swayed when she walked, the dragging of her hooves. She baby-carried a tiny torn head and red bones hanging together by tendons and scraps of skin. Suddenly she just sat on the ground and renewed her wailing. She arched her head round and looked down at herself in despair. Her breasts were seeping milk.

She tried to make the bones drink. She pushed the fragments of child onto her dugs. I cantered to her, lost my footing, and collapsed next to her. “Leveza. Love. Let him be.”

She shouted up into my face with unseeing eyes. “What am I supposed to do with him?”

“Oh Leveza,” I started to weep for her. “You feel things too much.”

“I’m not leaving him!”

You’re supposed to walk away. You’re supposed to leave them to the birds and then to the sun and then to the rains until they wash back into the earth.

To come again as grass. We eat our grandmothers, in the grass. It shows acceptance, good will toward the world to forget quickly.

Leveza began to tear at the thin pelt of ground that covered the rocks. She gouged at it, skinning her forefingers, broke open the sod, and peeled it back. She laid the scraps on the bare rock, and gently covered what was left of him as if with a blanket. She tucked him in and began to sing a soft milklight song to him.

It simply was not bearable. If a child dies through sickness you take it away from camp, and let the birds and insects get to it. Then later you dance on the bones, to break them up into dust to show scorn for the body and the heart to accept fate.

The Head Man came back, and bumped her with his snout. “Up, Leveza. We must keep moving.”

Leveza stroked the ground. “Good night, Kaway. Sleep, Kaway. Grow like a seed. Become beautiful Kaway grass.”

We muttered and murmured. We’d all lost people we love like that. Why should she keen and carry on, why should she be different?

“I know it’s hard,” said Lindalfa. Unspoken was the “but.”

Love can’t be that special. Love must not cost that much. You’ll learn, Leveza, I thought, like all the others. You’ll finally learn.

I was looking down at her in some kind of triumph, proved right, when Leveza stood up, and turned everything upside down again.

She shook the tears out of her eyes and then walked away from me, shouldering past Fortchee as if he were an encumbrance. Tamely we trooped after her. She went to a wagon and reloaded her gun. She started to troop back down the hill in the direction of the rock.

“That’s the wrong way, isn’t it?”

“What’s she doing?”

Fortchee called after her, and when she didn’t answer, he looked deeply at me and said, “Follow her.”

I whinnied for her to wait and started to trot down the hill.

Her determined stomp became a canter, then, explosively a kind of leaping, runaway gallop, thundering slipshod over stones and grass, threatening to break a leg. I chortled the slow-down cry but that checked her only for a moment. At the foot of the Rock she slid to a halt, raising dust.

She levelled her gun at the head of the wounded Cat. A light breeze seemed to blow her words to me up the slope. “Why do we need predators?”

The Cat groaned, her eyes still shut. “The Ancestors destroyed the world.”

I reached them. “Leveza, come away,” I nickered.

The Cat swallowed heavily. “They killed predators.” All her words seemed to start with a growl.

Leveza went very still, I flanked her, and kept saying, leave her, come away. Suddenly she pushed the gun at me. “Shoot her if she moves.”

I hated guns. I thought they would explode in my hands, or knock me backward. I knew carrying a gun made you a target. I didn’t want the gun; I wanted to get us back to safety. I whinnied in fear.

She pushed on back up the hill, “I’m coming back,” she said over her shoulder. I was alone with a Cat.

“Just kill me,” said the Cat. The air was black with her blood; everything in me buzzed and went numb. Overhead the scavengers spiralled and I was sure at any moment other Cats would come. Climb the Rock! I told myself, but I couldn’t move. I looked up at the trail.

Finally, finally Leveza came back with another gun and a coil of rope.

“Don’t you ever do that to me again!” I sobbed.

She looked ferocious, her mane bristling, teeth smiling to bite out flesh. “You want to live, you put up with this,” she said. I thought she said it to me.

“What are you fabricating now?” I hated her then, always having to surprise.

She bound the Cat’s front paws together, and then the back, and then tied all four limbs to the animal’s trunk. Leveza seized the mouth; I squealed and she began to wrap the snout round and round with rope. Blood seeped in woven patterns through the cord. The Cat groaned and rolled her eyes.

Then, oh then, Leveza sat on the ground and rolled the Cat onto her own back. She reached round and turned it so that it was folded sideways over her. Then she turned to me. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you giving me a hand?”

I said nothing. All of this was so unheard of that it triggered nothing, not even fear.

Slowly, forelegs first, Leveza stood up under the weight of the Cat. The Cat growled and dug in those great claws, but that just served to hold her in place. Burdened, Leveza began to climb the hill, her back beginning to streak with blood. I looked up. Everyone was bunched together on the brow of the ridge. I had no words, I forgot all words. I just climbed.

As we drew near, the entire herd, every last one of them including her groom-mother Alez, formed a wall of lowered heads.
Go back, get away
. I think it was for the Cat, but it felt as if it were for us. Leveza kept coming. Hides started to twitch from the smell of Cat blood carried on the wind. Leveza ignored them and plodded on. The men had also come back with the carts. Old Pronto in harness tried to move sideways in panic and couldn’t.

“Think,” she told him. “For a change.”

He whinnied and danced in place on the verge of bolting with one of our main wagons.

“Oh for heaven’s sake!” She plucked out the pin of his yoke with her teeth and he darted away, the yoke still on his shoulders. He trotted to a halt, and then stood there looking sheepish.

Leveza rolled the Cat onto the wagon, tools clanking under the body. Brisk and businesslike, she picked up pliers, and began to pull out, one by one, all of the Cat’s claws.

The poor beast groaned, roared, and shivered, rocking her head and trying to bite despite her jaws being tied shut. The Cat flexed her bloodied hands and feet but she no longer had claws. It seemed to take forever as the air whispered about us.

Undirected, all of us just stared.

When it was over, the Cat lay flat, panting. Leveza then took more rope, tied it tight round the predator’s neck, lashing the other end to the yoke fittings. She then unwound the rope from her jaws. The Cat roared and rocked in place, her huge green fangs smelling of blood. Leveza took a hammer and chisel, and began to break all the Cat’s teeth.

Fortchee stepped forward. “Leveza. Stop. This is cruel.”

“But necessary or she’ll eat us.”

“Why are you doing this? It won’t bring Kaway back.”

She turned and looked at him, the half wheel of her lower jaw swollen. “To learn from her.”

“Learn what?”

“What she knows.”

“We have to get moving,” said the Head Man.

“Exactly,” she said, with flat certainty. “That’s why she’s in the cart.”

“You’re taking her with us?” Everything on Fortchee bristled, from his mane to his handsome goatee.

She stood there, and I think I remember her smiling. “You won’t be able to stop me.”

The entire herd made a noise in unison, a kind of horrified, wondering sigh.

She turned to me with airy unconcern and asked, “Do you think you could get me the yoke?”

Pronto tossed it at her with his head. “Here, have it, demented woman!”

I started to weep. “Leveza, this won’t bring him back. Come, love, let it be, leave her alone and let’s go.”

She looked at me with pity. “Poor Akwa.”

Leveza pulled the wagon herself. Women are supposed to carry guns; men haul the wagon, two of them together if it is uphill.

I tried to walk with her. No one else could bear to go near the prickling stench of Cat. It made me weep and cough. “I can’t stay.”

“It’s all right, love,” she said. “Go to the others, you’ll feel safer.”

“You’ll be alone with that thing.”

“She’s preoccupied.”

Unable to imagine what else to do, I left.

We migrated on. All through that long day, Fortchee did not let us sleep, and we could sometimes hear Leveza behind us, tormenting the poor animal with questions.