Rhiow stood for a moment and waited to see if any other players would reveal themselves to so cursory an analysis, but after a few seconds she gave it up. “Come on,” she said, and walked with the others over to where the white cat sat; he glanced at them as they came. It was Yafh, of course, dominating the block’s gameplay as usual. It was a good thing he was so genial about it; life with him could have become extremely annoying otherwise.
She went up the stairs toward the other two, pausing briefly beside Yafh as she came up even with him. Protocol dictated that a nonplayer await permission from players before passing or approaching their chosen stances too closely; to obstruct or intervene in a player’s field of view while another player was moving could damage not only that player’s score, but others’ scores as well.
Yafh had been sitting with eyes half-closed, watching the brown cat across the street without seeming to watch her. Now he stood, stretched fore and aft, and turned his back on the proceedings: a gesture readable to all players as indicating the intention to temporarily abandon play without loss of stance.
“Hey there, Rhiow,” he said, and stalked off to one side of his stance. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Business,” she said, and they breathed breaths companionably before she sat down. “Goodness, who gave you the fish?”
“Restaurant round the corner,” Yafh said. “Perfectly lovely fish heads, why they don’t keep them I can’t imagine. Ehhif have no taste. Urruah? How’s the hunting?”
“Not bad, not bad.”
“Saash… don’t often see you down this way. ’Luck to you. And who’s this youngster?”
“Arhu.”
“ ’Luck to you, son. Come to see how the professionals do it?”
“Nowhere better,” Urruah said, before Arhu could open his mouth. “How’s the bout going?”
“Third sequence, twenty-eighth passage,” Yafh said. “The balances have shifted.”
“You mean you’re not winning as usual?”
“ ‘Winning.’ What an ehhif word. We’ll see how the situation looks by next week.”
“You want to understand the Game,” Urruah said to Arhu, “this is the Person you come to.”
“I don’t understand it very well,” Arhu said, in a small voice.
Rhiow glanced at him, wondering briefly where this sudden and becoming modesty had come from. Or maybe he was simply impressed by all of Yafh’s scars. “Well, mat’s no surprise,” Rhiow said. “Years now I’ve been following hauissh, and I’m not sure 7 understand anything but the basics yet. Yafh is a master, though; what he doesn’t know about it isn’t worth knowing.”
“All you need to know, young tom,” Yafh said, “is that hauissh is the Fight—or the best version of it we’ve got left. Everything else is commentary.”
“But …She says life is the Fight,” Arhu said.
“ ‘She’?” Yafh said. “Oh, the One Who you wizards say Whispers to you? Well, probably she’s right. But one thing’s for sure, life is hauissh.”
“There speaks the enthusiast,” Saash said dryly. “Arhu, don’t let him fool you. Yafh eats, drinks, washes and sleeps hauissh. If it didn’t exist, he would have to invent it.”
“Don’t talk naughty,” Yafh said, settling himself down in a way that suggested he had less concern about the elegance of his position than his comfort. “Takes a god to invent something this complex, something with this kind of elegance, this subtlety. You tell me now, young tom: who do you mink’s holding down the most important stance at the moment?”
Arhu looked around him in bemusement. “Her,” he said, flirting his tail sideways to indicate the handsome chocolate-brown cat who crouched, immobile as a statue, on one of the nearby walls between two buildings.
“And you wouldn’t be too far off. Trust Hmahilh’ to hog a good spot at the earliest opportunity. But why?”
Arhu looked up and down the street. “Because she can see everybody else,” he said, “and not everybody else can see her.
“Right That’s part of it, but not all. So try this. We have six players out there: seven, counting me, as of a moment ago. I don’t officially count right now, but for this analysis, you can keep my stance in. Look at the pattern, see what you see about it. Not the People: the relationships. Take your time, don’t look too hard.”
Yafh sat washing his face, ineffectively as usuaclass="underline" the grime never did seem to come off, but at least he was always seen to be making the effort. Arhu looked out at the street for a few moments, and then said, “There’s— Is there an empty place they’re all pointed at, in the street? Between the cab parked there and the big car?”
“A natural talent,” Yafh said, looking around at Rhiow and Urruah with approval. “Boy’s got the eye. That’s the spot,” he said to Arhu. “That’s where the Tree is: with the Serpent wound around it, gnawing at the root…”
“There’s no Tree there! That’s the middle of the street!”
“It’s there in spirit,” Yafh said. “All hauissh is anchored at the Tree. It’s all the original Fight, really; but since we can’t chuck lightningbolts at the Old Snake the way Aaurh and Urrau did, we use movement and stealth as a weapon, and seeing as the bolt we strike with, and position as influence. Anyone who sees anyone else could strike them with a lightningbolt if they had one. And the Tree is always the center.”
Arhu sat down, looking puzzled for a moment. “Maybe I do see…”
Yafh scrubbed behind one ear. “Hmahilh’ there is in one of the classic positions just now, the fouarhweh. Thousands of hours of commentary have been made about it, just in the last century; it would take you a fair amount of study to understand even a few of the major implications for play as it might progress over the next several hours or days. But she’s holding down a variant of the position the Great Tom would have held—”
“—before he dies,” Arhu said, looking at the empty spot, the life slowly starting to drain out of his voice. “For the Old Serpent rises against him and strikes him with its venom, and the Great Cat falls with a great cry, and striveth to rise but cannot; and breath and warmth swiftly go from him so that his Enemy rises over his poisoned body and leaps upon Aaurh the Mighty. Great and terrible is their struggle, so that seas leap from their beds and the earth is riven, and the tom sky rains fire—”
Yafh looked at Rhiow with mild surprise. Urruah was watching Arhu uneasily, but Arhu paid no attention at all, his whole regard being bent on the spot in the street, through which an ehhif with a houff on the leash was walking. The houff, at the sight of them sitting on the steps, started to bark, but for Arhu, it might not have been there at all. “—Yet even so Aaurh at last is lapped in the Serpent’s coils, and crushed in them, and she falls, and her power fails out of the world. Then Iau sees that the light has gone from the Moon, and the Sun is blackened with fair Aaurh’s dying; and She rises in Her majesty and says, What has become of My children ? Where is Aaurh the warrior, and sa’Rrahh the Tearer, wayward but dear to Me? And what has become of My Consort and the light of his eye, without which My own is dark? —Then Iau draws Her power about Her, and goes forth in grief and rage; and all things hear Her cry: Old Serpent, turn You and face Us, for the fight is not done—!”