Wistala sniffed the passage with the glow-crystal before reentering it. Full daylight shone outside, and there’d be men up and around. Perhaps she should sleep for a while and go back into the forest by dark. Yes. She was very tired. And the rat bites itched.
“I’m for a nap.”
“Always a good idea,” Yari-Tab agreed.
Wistala found an out-of-the-way corner with good air carrying smells from the entrance and settled down on a patch of dried mud obscuring some kind of tile artwork.
After a few tries, Yari-Tab curled up against her belly. “Your skin’s about as comfortable as a riverbed,” Yari-Tab said. “Warm belly, though.”
Together, they slept.
Chapter 10
Yari-Tab wasn’t much of a sleepmate. She got up and went off to prowl at least four times that Wistala remembered, then returned and made a production out of finding a comfortable spot.
But she did bring Wistala a dead snake a for breakfast. Wistala had no appetite, as she felt dry and sick from rat bites. Wistala wondered that the bony feline could carry the serpent, which looked fully half her weight, from wherever she’d caught it. Unfortunately, she’d have to carry the onerous weight of the coin much, much farther.
Time to be off.
“A good jump and a full belly, Talassat,” Yari-Tab said as they made their good-byes.
“A good jump and a full belly, fur-sister,” Wistala replied. The cat rubbed the side of her face against her folded griff and gave her forehead a lick.
As Wistala sniffed her way out of the ruins, she looked back at her feline friend, who found an old headless statue to sit upon and watch her leave. Wistala flicked head and tail up, and the cat raised a paw. Far off, a dog barked at the motion, and Wistala scrambled to the other side of a fallen column to put its bulk between her and the noisy dog. She looked back once more at the bottom of the hill, but Yari-Tab atop her statue was nothing but a lump against a multitude of other lumps filling the hills.
Wistala didn’t relax until she was far from the smell of burning charcoal with a forest of shadows behind her. Only then did she cast about for a meal.
She had no luck—the clanking coins atop her back sounded a warning of her approach—and she went hungry that night.
She heard the first bay from the ridgetop, her halfway-home mark, as the morning sun turned the western mountains of her birth into blood-edged teeth.
At first she guessed it to be a distant wolf cry, but when the call wasn’t answered from any quarter of the horizon, but rather taken up by other canine voices behind her—quite precisely behind her, she realized with an anxious gulp—she knew it had to be dogs.
Perhaps the dogs were after some poor stag or fox. She’d kept clear of the flocks of Tumbledown to avoid a vengeful hunt, and in all likelihood, she’d roused one anyway.
But time, she had time. Time to improvise.
Keeping to the ridge had its advantages. She could hear or see the pursuit—and it was the most direct path home. But a series of lakes to the morning side and a stream to the evening side might delay the dogs. She didn’t know much about canines except that they couldn’t smell their way across water.
Wistala trotted along until she found a sharp-sided ravine on the lake-littered side of the ridge. She let a little urine go to give it a strong dragon scent, then slid down its muddy sides. She trotted to a reed-infested pond, scattering waterfowl this way and that. She drank deep and thought for a moment—she had to get this just right.
First Wistala loosed the rest of her urine at the pond’s edge, allowing most of it to go into the water. With a little luck, it would spread and filter through the whole pond until the dogs would detect it on every bank.
She left a confusion of muddy tracks and knocked over reeds at the bank, then rolled in waterfowl droppings, smearing her sii and saa thoroughly with them. Then she backtracked and climbed the ridge to her original path at a different spot, and carefully avoided the well-marked ravine.
All the climbing made her legs weary. The heavy yoke of coins across her neck felt heavier at each step, even as her stomach felt emptier despite the water.
At the thought of the coins, her mouth flooded with the slimy drool she’d had when she first came across them. Father wouldn’t notice a mouthful or two gone—and they’d carry lighter in her stomach.
Once clear of her dog-dodge, she hurried as best as she could along the ridgetop, carrying tail high and doing her best to keep from snapping branches or trotting through muddy hollows. When her breath left her, she paused and ate a big mouthful of coin from each bag, more to take the desire out of her mind and mouth than because she actually needed it. . . .
An hour later, she came off the ridge, fixing her snout on the mountain notch that marked the source of the river gorge. If she traveled hard, she’d reach Father before nightfall. The rat bites were itching worse than ever, not quite pain, but adding to her bone-deep weariness.
She tore the loose bark off a fallen tree and managed to get a few insects, but they only made her hunger worse. Oh, for a sick porcupine or a one-winged pheasant!
A noise behind, light footfalls . . .
Wistala caught a glimpse of a hairy back, thinner than a bear’s but not much smaller. She jumped up a bank and turned into a concealing patch of milkweed.
A black dog, with foam-flecked tongue and yellow teeth, padded out of the brush. Its eyes were wide and nervous as it put its long pointed snout to the trail. It had an odd sort of fur, extremely short at its head and limbs, thick and spiked like a badger’s about the shoulders and upper back. It bore no tail that she could see. A leather collar, fixed high about its neck, and studded rings showed it to be domesticated. Even more oddly, two matching red runes were painted on its flanks. They reminded Wistala of flames or lightning bolts.
It sniffed the air and turned a nervous circle.
Wistala held her breath.
The dog trotted along her trail, nose pointed down but eyes watching the way ahead, passed her little bank upwind. The dog, like most fur-bearers, smelled like a dungheap. A faint smell of blood came from it, too.
Leap on it leap on it leap on it!
But she couldn’t. All her body seemed capable of was shivering beneath the white-yellow flowers of the milkweed.
The dog turned, obscenely bulging eyes with their evil round pupils fixing on her location. It gave one querulous bark and looked right and left, as though searching for allies among the tree trunks.
Wistala shot forth to the edge of the bank and planted her feet, extended her griff and hissed at the beast:
“Go away!”
If it understood her, it gave no sign. Instead it let loose with a deep-throated snarl and came straight at her.
Fast, so fast, it was on her in an eyeblink. They came down the bank, rolling together, the dog’s long limbs tangled with her own, teeth clattering against teeth. It yelped as she landed on its hindquarters but still sunk its teeth into her sii-shoulder joint. The upper teeth had no luck against her scales, but the lower went home.
Wistala raked it with her rear claws and felt blood and sinew. The dying dog hung on, closing its eyes to the pain. . . .
She resisted the urge to tear it free from her skin; that would do more damage. She waited until its heart stopped and then gently pried its jaws open.
Distant dog barks from the ridge told her at least one of the canine’s yelps had been heard. She nosed into the dog’s claw-torn belly and found the liver. Mother always said, if you could just eat one piece of an animal, it should always be the liver.
The body twitched as she chewed and lapped at dripping blood. It was an old dog. There were white circles about its eyes, ears, and nose. Perhaps it had become confused and broken away from the rest of the pack—
Then she licked the bite wound clean and pressed on.
Despite the meal, she’d come off worse from the engagement. Her front limb was horribly sore; she could hardly stand to move it, so she hobbled along as best as she could using the other three, now heading up into the foothills of the mountains.
She found a dry gully full of thick thorny brush and plunged into it, snaking along with half-closed eyes. The thorns rattled and snapped on her scales, red flowers above like wounds in the sky—those wretched dogs with their thin-furred muzzles would be miserable following her through it.
A tear—one of the bags had ripped open, caught on a thorny branch that had the tenacity of an iron hook. She turned and sniffed at the coins already falling from the sack.
Nothing to do but eat them.
When she came out of the thornbushes she found that her load was unbalanced, the remaining bag kept sliding over sideways—her makeshift contraption didn’t have much in the way of stabilizing straps. She ate mouthful after mouthful of coin from the other bag as she rested, greedy for each deliciously metallic swallow.
She staggered on, sick with fatigue, the coins in her gut clattering. Step after wretched step after wretched step uphill, until she thrust herself forward using only her hind legs, the front ones folded flat against her side.
The bags were too heavy; that was why her limbs gave out. She abandoned them, ate a few more coins so that they wouldn’t go to waste—maybe her last pleasure in life would be that of silver and gold rolling around in her mouth. Besides, the men would just have them anyway, and go buy themselves new mates or flocks or boots or whatever it was that men did with coin.
