If that’s possible, Urruah muttered.
No, Rhiow said. The problem’s not just Ith. I want to find out more about this “Great One.”
I don’t, Saash said. I’m sure I know exactly Who it is.
Me too, said Urruah, growling softly.
I wouldn’t be too sure, Rhiow said. Our own certainties may trip us up, down here… After all, how certain were we that there were no such things as saurian wizards? And now look…
“What will you do with me now?” Ith said.
Rhiow sighed, wishing she had the slightest idea. She could feel the weariness coming down on her more swiftly every second. “Look,” she said to the team, “if we stay still too much longer, we’re going to need to sleep, I think. I could certainly use some. Arhu, you’re sure nothing’s coming for a while?”
He got a faraway look. “A couple of hours.”
“We’ll sleep a little, then,” Rhiow said to Ith, “and try to work out what to do later.”
“Who’ll sit guard?” Saash said, lying down with a look of unutterable relief, and not even bothering to scratch. Rhiow felt extremely sorry for her; she was not really built for this kind of stress.
“I’ll take it,” Urruah said. “I’m in pretty good shape at the moment… and I’m not hungry. Unlike some.” He looked thoughtfully at Ith and settled himself upright against the wall, leaning a little on one shoulder, gazing down the long dark gallery.
Rhiow lay down and tried to relax. At least a rest, if not sleep, she thought; but neither seemed terribly likely. Her thoughts were going around in small tight circles, trying to avoid the image of Hhuha… From off to one side, already, came the sound of Saash’s tiny snore. She never has trouble sleeping, Rhiow thought with a touch of envy. She confines her anxieties and neuroses strictly to her waking hours. I wish I could manage that.
Over Saash’s little snore came the sound of Arhu and Ith talking. It got loud sometimes.
“I was hungry, too,” Arhu said. “All the time. Until I met them. Then things got better. They gave me fh’astrramhi.”
This is all we’re going to need, Urruah said. A dinosaur with a pastrami craving…
Don’t think I don’t hear your stomach growling. You’d go for it just as fast as he would, and five minutes later you’d be telling him where to find the best pastrami on the Upper West Side.
“Come on, you two,” Urruah said, “half the lizards in the place are going to come down on us if you don’t shut up. Sorry, Ith, no offense.”
They paid no particular attention. Urruah had to shush them several more times, and finally Arhu started staring at Ith in the fixed way that suggested he was trying to teach the saurian to speak silently. Rhiow wished him luck and put her head down on the stone, in the dark, and courted sleep…
It declined to be courted. She kept hearing, in her head, one part or another of the saurian version of the Oath. The Fire is at the heart: and the Fire is the heart: for its sake, all fires whatever are sacred to me… I shall ever thrust my claw into the flames.
Rhiow sighed and rolled over. It really is our idiom… and the language is very like what’s in the “Hymn to Iau,” and the “First Song.” All the references to fire and flame used the Ailurin “power” words, the auw-stems and compounds, which had passed into the Speech as specialist terminology.
But why should this child be using our words?… For any species’ Oath always has to do with the form of it originally taken by the wizards among the Mothers and Fathers of a species, after Choice. Its form is set in their bones and blood, so that wizards of that species find it impossible to forget, and it is most specific to their own kind and mode of existence, as it should be. Even nonwizards of many species know parts of their own species’ Oath in one form or another, often restated in religious or philosophical idiom.
Rhiow smiled a little at herself then. What do I mean, “this child”? Who knew just how old Ith was? Rhiow got a general feeling that he wasn’t out of latency yet, but who knew how long these saurians’ latency period was? Though there were supposedly some dinosaurs who mothered their hatchlings for years at a time. Long latency-to-lifespan ratio makes for the best wizards, Ffairh would always say.
But I still don’t get it. Why Ailurin?
She rolled over again, disturbed by the puzzle. The connection between the feline world and the reptilian world was an ancient one, easily summed up in a single word: enmity—the Great Cat with the sword in his paw, sa’Rrahh the Tearer with her fangs in the Serpent’s neck. Now Rhiow found herself thinking: Is there something else to this connection? Something that got lost? Do we have some old history together?
And how could that be? The saurians passed away long before felinity evolved into even its most archaic forms or became sentient.
Time, though, was a dangerously inconstant medium… and it was always unwise for a wizard to automatically assume mat any two events were unconnected. The structure of time was as full of holes and slides and unexpected infracausal linkages as the structure of space was full of strings and hyper-strings and wormholes—
“But why not?” Arhu suddenly said aloud.
“I can see you looking at me,” Ith said.
“Of course I’m looking at you—”
“Not that way. With the other eye.”
Rhiow flicked an ear in mild surprise.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It sees too much. It makes me see… you.” No question about it: Ith’s voice sounded actively afraid. “Your kind.”
“You scared?” Arhu’s voice was louder.
“I do not wish to see this,” Ith said. “The things—the pain my kind have, that I have, it is enough. Your pain as well—”
“I told you, do it in your heads,” Urruah said, “or I’m going to come over there and bang those heads together. You two understand me?”
Arhu and Ith—half a ton of moon-and-midnight panther, a ton and a half of patterned hide—glared at Urruah together, and then turned away with an identical eye-rolling teenagers’ look, and locked eyes again.
Rhiow sighed and lay back again, thinking with slight amusement of Arhu saying, just the other day, I don’t want to know this about them; it’ll only make it harder to kill them when the time comes.
So now you hear it from the other side. Well, probably do you good to see things from his point of view. Do us all good, I suppose, if there were more of that…
She sought back along the interrupted train of thought. The nature of the old saurian Choice … she wondered if it was less simple than the Whisperer might initially have indicated. Not just a straightforward choice between good and evil, or obedience to the Powers and disobedience … but something more difficult: perhaps multipartite. And prophecy and the serpentine kind had long been associated in various species’ myths. Did they look ahead then, Rhiow thought, during the Choice, and see their possible futures? The meteoric winter would have been part of what they saw; the Powers would have looked ahead in time and known it to be an inevitable consequence of the Lone One’s involvement with this species. And at least a couple of the fates springing from it were easy enough to imagine. One would be the fate of the saurians in Rhiow’s universe—almost all their species killed, except for a few of the most rugged survivors, who would forget their former greatness and dwindle into the modern reptilia; mere animals, shadows of what was … Another would have been this scenario: the saurians retreating down here into the darkness to save themselves, remembering what they once were, but also longing eternally for what once had been, and hating what they had become, and the Choice they had been forced to make … I wonder, Rhiow thought, whether the saurians in our universe got the better of the deal. Better to be animal than to live like this.