Even when I was fully grown, she slept curled between my paws and demanded iron supports for her pitifully delicate bed. Together we snuck into the libraries at night, and she taught me to read from the books kept on the highest shelves, which I could reach for us, stories of lost girls and lost beasts and grotesques like us. She brought me cakes from the kitchens, covered in icing, so much thicker and richer than the mashed and rotten meat of her sister’s zoo. When she became more beautiful even than her sister, I used to sing at her window to the men who gathered there to play their flutes or harps. They scattered when faced with my superior songs, and I padded back to Hind and her black beads. I was happy. The Sun was high in the sky. Happiness, when you look back on it, seems so brief, but then, with her, my whole life seemed to pass by under the flitting cedar-shadows. Until the day she ran into our room and slammed the door behind her, her chest heaving under those black beads, her face flushed with tears. I ran to her, and she buried her head in my mane. Finally she drew back and sobbed horribly, a long, broken howl—I remember when I howled that way.
A pearl fell out of her mouth.
Hind begged me to take her away. She promised that she knew how to use the floating platforms, and we could run from Amberabad to another city, where her affliction of pearls might be of some use to us. And so the girl strung with black beads packed her cakes and some few of her precious books and climbed onto my back, proudly astride, as her father had told her over and over not to do.
Someone had poisoned her, having no business in Amberabad but to vex my friend, causing pearls to spit out of her mouth whenever she spoke. Because her father did not like her books or her cakes or her pets. And so we descended together from the city in the sky, through the branches and clouds, onto the long road, and she clung to me all the way down, her long fingers gripping my mane so as not to fall while I bounded off of the last amber plank. I faithfully kept my tail from curling tightly upward, as the recalcitrant thing is wont to do, so as not to hurt her. We stepped onto the thick grass and my friend laughed to feel it, solid ground beneath her. We went into the world, in search of another city, one which would love us and hold us close, one which would be rich and bright and richer still for our walking and singing and laughing in it.
IN CARNATION
Nancy Springer
After living in Pennsylvania for forty-six years and publishing fifty fantasy, horror and mystery novels for adults, young adults and children, Nancy Springer has moved to an unspoiled area of panhandle Florida, where she is very much enjoying the wildlife while completing The Case of the Gypsy Good-Bye: An Enola Holmes Mystery, sixth volume of her series about Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister. Two of her previous mysteries won the Edgar Allen Poe award.
Springer says of her relationship with felines, “I had no cats as a child because my father didn’t like them, and I had no cats as an adult because my husband was allergic to them. His eyes swelled like golf balls. When I wrote ‘In Carnation’ I had no cats, but perhaps we can attribute the story to some intuition or prescience, because just as soon as I was rid of the husband with the golf-eyeball problem, I acquired five cats, among the first of which was a female named Amazonian Demon Warrior Princess From the Outermost Reaches of Darkest Perdition. She is still with me, and she still rules. I know a goddess when I see one.”
She materialized, stood on her familiar padded paws and looked around at an utterly strange place. After every long sleep the world was more changed, and after every incarnation the next lifetime became more bizarre. The last time, a Norwegian peasant woman fleeing “holy” wars, she had come by a long sea voyage to what was called the New World. Now she found it so new she scarcely recognized it as Earth at all. Under her paws lay a great slab of something like stone, but with a smell that was not stone’s good ancient smell. Chariots of glass and metal whined by at untoward speeds, stinking of their own heat. Grotesque buildings towered everywhere, and in them she could sense the existence of people, more people than had ever burdened the world before, a new kind of people who jangled the air with their fears, their smallness, their suspicion of the gods and one another.
As always when she awoke from a long sleep she was very hungry, and not for food. But this was not a good place for her to go hunting. It terrified her. Running as only a cat can, like a golden streak, she fled from the chariots and their stench, from the buildings and the pettiness in their air until she found something that approximated countryside. Outside the town there was a place with trees and grass.
And on the grass were camped people whose thoughts and feelings did not hang on the air and make it heavy, but flitted and laughed like magpies. We don’t care what the world thinks, the magpies sang. Some of us are thieves and some of us are preachers, some are freaks and some are stars, some of us have three heads and some can’t even get one together, and who cares? We all get along. We are the carnival people. Whether you are a pimp or a whore or a queer or a con artist, if you are one of us you belong, and the world can go blow itself.
A cat is one who walks by herself. Still, A carnival! Yes, thought she, the golden one. This is better. I may find him here. For she was very hungry, and the smells of the carnival were good. She was, after all, a meat eater, and a carnival is made of meat. The day was turning to silver dusk, the carnival glare was starting to light the sky and the carnival blare rose like magpie cries on the air. The cat trotted in through the gate, to the midway, where already the grass was trampled into dirt.
“Come see the petrified Pygmy,” the barkers cried. “Come see the gun that killed Jesse James. Come see the Double-Jointed Woman, the Mule-Faced Girl, the Iron Man of Taipan.”
High striker, Ferris wheel, motordrome, House of Mirrors—it was all new to her, yet the feel in the air was that of something venerable and familiar: greed. Carnival was carnival and had been since lust and feasting began. French fries, sausage ends, bits of cinnamon cake had fallen to the ground, but she did not paw at them. Instead, she traversed the midway, past Dunk Bozo and bumper cars, roulette wheel and ring toss, on the lookout for a man, any man so long as he was young and virile and not ugly. Once she had seduced him and satisfied herself, she would discard him. This was her holy custom, and she would be sure she upheld it. A few times in previous lives she had been false to herself, had married and found herself at the mercy of a man who attempted to command her; she had sworn this would not happen again. Eight of her lifetimes were gone. Only one remained to her, and she was determined to live this one with no regrets.
On the hunt, she found it difficult to sort out the people she saw crowding through the carnival. Men and women alike, they wore trousers, cotton shirts, and shapeless cloth shoes. And leather jackets, and hair that was short and spiky or long and in curls. She became confused and annoyed. True, some of the people she saw were identifiable as men, and some of the men she saw were young, but they walked like apes and had a strange chemical smell about them and were not attractive to her.
“Hey there, kitten! Guess your age, your weight, your birthdate?”
The cat flinched into a crouch. Though the words of this New World language meant nothing to her, she could usually comprehend the thoughts that underlay words, and for a moment she had unreasonably felt as if the guess-man’s pitch had been directed at her. Narrow-eyed and coiled to run, she stared up at him.