“That was my impression, too,” Flouret agreed. “I have to admit I’m a little surprised to hear you share it, though, Harvey.”
“I know.” Gleason’s eyes glinted with an unusual flicker of amusement. “Didn’t expect me to admit I did, either, did you?”
“Well, no,” Flouret admitted, using his tongs to turn the chicken breasts sizzling on the grill.
“Thought not.” Gleason took a sip from his bottle of beer, then shook his head. “I suppose I had it coming, too. But do me a favor and don’t rub it in too hard, all right?”
“I’ll try, Flouret promised with a grin. “It’ll be hard, you understand, but I will try.”
Chapter Thirteen
Keen Eyes did not try to speak to any member of his clan before he reached their current nesting place. Instead, he sat while the darkness passed, striving to gain mastery over his thoughts and emotions so that he would not give himself away when he was once again close to People. There was a remote chance Beautiful Mind had not felt her mate’s death. If so, he was not going to be the one to let her know that Red Cliff had gone further than merely out of range of their mind-voices. If she did know and somehow still kept her grasp on life, he did not wish her to know that Red Cliff’s death had been horribly unnatural, that his life had been ripped from him by the claws of another Person, that even his dead body had been rejected as anathema.
He managed this nearly impossible task before he reached the grove near the river where the Landless Clan now squatted. He was relieved to learn Beautiful Mind was still alive. The females who were attending her reported that she had been very agitated at one point, so Keen Eyes suspected she already knew of her loss.
Sour Belly and some of the other elders had been lucky in their fishing that day. When Keen Eyes arrived, most of the clan were shredding their way into the tender flesh. It was an indication of their reduced circumstances that fishheads, tails, and even bones were being set aside for a later meal. Nothing even remotely edible would be wasted in these hard times.
Although Keen Eyes had returned with nothing to add to the feast, Wonder Touch, Sour Belly’s mate—a Person as sweet and nice as her mate was sour and unyielding—called out to him.
<Welcome back, Keen Eyes. We have saved you enough dinner to put some fat back on your bones. Tiny Choir and her littermates found a lake-builder’s cache from last season, so we have some fruit as well.>
Keen Eyes thanked her enthusiastically, then invited Tiny Choir and her siblings to tell him all about how they had found the dry fruit. They had really been quite clever, guessing that the pool near which the clan now camped had probably been the result of some lake-builders’ beginning work.
<Probably a death fang got them,> Tiny Choir said, her mind-voice wildly excited. <Lake-builders usually store food, so we went looking and we found it.>
Even as he praised the kittens, Keen Eyes could not but think how far the clan had fallen. To be glad to have these shriveled and bitter fruit when before their home had been destroyed these would have been tossed away as inedible. However, he was grateful. The nights were already too cold for lace-leaf to thrive. The green-needle nuts had turned to ash along with the trees that bore them. Any supplement to the thin hunting was welcome.
When he had eaten, Keen Eyes considered who he could tell about Red Cliff’s death. As much as he would have liked to keep the matter secret, there was too much risk to the clan. Already, he suspected they were in lands Trees Enfolding Clan viewed as their own. Any roving hunter might meet the same fate as Red Cliff.
Keen Eyes would have preferred to take the matter up first with the clan’s memory singers, to learn what precedents were in place for such a situation, but Wide Ears and her juniors were gone. For a moment, he considered consulting Tiny Choir, but he knew this impulse for the cowardice was. Even if Wide Ears had begun teaching the kitten, she would not have shared information about past wars between clans. Memory songs were vivid, perfectly re-creating all of the thoughts and emotions—bad, as well as good; ugly and vile as well as courageous and selfless—that the events at their heart had evoked. Songs recounting the anger and hatred, the wrenching loss of mates and kittens, the extinguishing a beloved mind-glows, were hard enough for adults to accept. They would almost certainly warp the sensibility of a growing kitten who believed that all possible problems could be resolved because shared mind-glows made misunderstandings impossible, and so they were passed only into the keeping of those made strong enough by age and experience to bear them.@
In the end, he did what he had known he must all along and reported what he had learned to all the adult members of the clan. The reaction was as bad as he had dreaded it would be.
Only respect for the young and injured kept mind-voices within their lower registers. Red Cliff’s death would have been upsetting enough, but the contempt for the entire clan shown by how his body had been dumped was enough to enrage even the most moderately tempered Person.
<I notice something very interesting in your report,> commented Bowl Shaper, a senior female highly respected for her work in clay. <Twice you have spoken with this Swimmer’s Scourge. Once his nephew Nimble Fingers was also present. However, they have taken great care to stay outside of the range at which you might have tasted their mind-glows.>
<You are correct,> Keen Eyes agreed. <I think it was deliberate. My ability to taste another’s mind-glow is not as strong as it would be if I were bonded with a mate. I guess that one or both of these is stronger than I am and would be able to detect me before I detected him. It would then be a simple matter for him to speak to me. He would know that once I heard his voice, even if I could not see him, I could reply and the advantage would remain his.>
<This speaks of a cunning individual,> Bowl Shaper replied.
<Or sneaky,> cut in Sour Belly.
<Or both,> a younger female, Knot Binder, said pacifically. <Trees Enfolding Clan has chosen its border guards carefully. We should respect this and take it into consideration when we plan what to do next.>
<And we will do something,> Sour Belly asserted. <Red Cliff may have come from elsewhere, but he had become a valued member of this clan. His children will not grow up to learn that we did not care that their father was murdered.>
<I have wondered,> Keen Eyes said, trying to share a half-formed idea that had come to him as he made his way back to the clan with news of Red Cliff’s death, <if perhaps the Trees Enfolding Clan does not understand how dire our need is. Perhaps the one who spoke to me—Swimmer’s Scourge—was so worried about the fate of his own clan this coming winter that he could not find sympathy for strangers. The fact that he was able to stay at the very fringes of my mind-glow would have made it easier for him to think only about the needs of his own clan, to see me only as an invader, a threat.>
<So?> scoffed Sour Belly. <Would you have us go to them, force our mind-glows upon them?>
<Not quite,> Keen Eyes replied, striving to project patience rather than the irritation he felt. <What if we brought one of them close enough so that he could not ignore what our mind-glows would show him? Let them taste the fear of the kittens who have lost parents, the hunger that gnaws the bellies of all our people. Once even one Person of their clan knows how terrible things are for us, surely they would at least let us pass through their territories and seek refuge elsewhere. They might even pity us and take us in.>