Yet this night I dreamed.
There was a darkened room where a single lamp gave light to what lay on a table. There was a pair of hands which came out of the shadows beyond the tight focus of that lamp, handling, with delicate fingers, what the light showed very clearly. It was a manikin or a doll, and it lay in two pieces, the head snapped off at the shoulders.
It was the head which interested those hands the most. With a knife hardly thicker than a large needle, the puffy silver wig was worked loose to display the coiled hair beneath. That also yielded to the probing of the knife point, and the top of the skull, if one might deem that so, came off.
Now the knife was set aside for a pair of fine pincers such as my sister used for her most important work of setting the smallest stone. Those were inserted into the cavity of the head, to emerge holding a tiny ball which flashed like a diamond in the light. One of the hands disappeared and returned in a moment with a small metal box into which this bead was dropped and the lid clamped down with a force which seemed to say that this was a very precious thing, perhaps one to be kept secret.
Swiftly the doll head was restored to what it had been, and the hands withdrew, leaving the broken warrior lying where he was, still headless.
So strange was that dream that it remained vivid in my mind and I was surprised when I opened my eyes to find that I lay in my rude tent. What had it meant? I had nothing to do with dolls—no, those were Ravinga’s. But never had I seen among the stock she had brought into the market any such fine product as this, smashed though it was. That was no lifeless doll face which had been turned up when the hands were busy with the head-rather I might have been looking at the small figure of one who was alive, or had been so. I remembered that other dream which had been of Ravinga and her apprentice and another doll.
put my head in my hands and tried to think clearly. Certainly I was caught in that which I did not understand. The very fact that I had been able to establish a fleeting relationship with a sandcat and his mate was something I had never heard of and many strange things are always eagerly told and listened to in the marketplaces. Cats were deadly enemies—yet I no longer saw them as so. Last night I had even known something of pity for the rogue—like me he had been driven from his proper place and sought his old life again. Would I come to seek my own return after this venture? That thought I pushed sharply away as I crawled from my shelter to welcome the cool of the night and see to my charge.
I was greeted with a throaty sound from the sandcat, who was clearly awake, instantly aware of me. However, though I had expected to find her there, his mate was still missing. And I felt uneasy. Though a male might not attack a female, yet when she had carried war to the rogue, it might well be that he had turned on her and she lay somewhere on the uneven surface of the isle in pain and torment just as her mate had earlier done.
“Great One,” I had gone to my companion to examine the dressing on his wound, “is there trouble in this place which has taken your lady?” I tried to open my mind, to sense if there was any uneasiness in the male, even as I had done when I served as herdsman and had striven to seek out some disaster among the beasts for whom I was responsible.
There was nothing of tension about him. When I uncovered his now closed but still tender wound, he set to licking it after the manner of his kind when they tended their own hurts. I left him to his own treatment and once more went to the pool.
A shadow moved, took on a slinking form. No rat but the rogue, one ear half gone, a visible tear along his shoulder, was slipping down to the pool on the opposite side. I saw a lift of lips, heard a rumbling growl. Then he looked to me no more but pulled himself forward to the moist edge of the algae bed and mouthed torn masses of the stuff as if his belly was completely empty.
Looking upon him so, I knew that there was no danger to be feared from him. Clearly he had forced himself here for what succor the pool offered but he would not try to dispute it with us again, keeping to his own side.
I watched him feed and then he withdrew but no farther than a slight distance. He moved with such labor that I thought he was badly hurt. When I had climbed above again with my own gleanings I took up two of the rat bodies and passing along the edge of the rise near to where the animal now sheltered, I tossed them over. They did not fall too far from his chosen shelter. His blood-smeared head came up and he looked at me. But his eyes were empty of any expression I could read.
Once more I skinned rats and tore meat apart for the drying. The scraps I tossed down a narrow crevice in the rock for which I could see no bottom. The skins I had scraped earlier were hard-dried now and I began clumsily to stitch them across and around my boots.
As I worked so in the twilight I spoke aloud, for I felt very much the need of hearing speech in this vastness, even if it were my own.
“Great One, there is much in the world which is beyond understanding. Why has it come to me that I must be a part of something which ” I stopped the punching of holes in hide with my knife point and looked out at what lay about me.
There was a change. I slewed around, my hand going for the staff which I had laid close to hand. Another form came out of the dusk and I greeted the female.
“Lady, your lord does well.” She crouched beside her mate and first sniffed the wound I had left uncovered after sponging it off with the algae, then began to lick it.
She raised her head for an instant to gaze at me and then went back to her licking. The male was purring, the rumble of his sound attune, it seemed to me, with the peace of the night, perhaps perilous and short-lasting as that might be.
However, we perhaps had proven ourselves to be too much of a danger even to the rats. For it was not us they attacked this night; rather I heard their squeals from across the pond and the roars of the rogue doing battle.
The female was instantly on her feet and her mate struggled to stand beside her. I ran, staff and slingshot in hand, to that place from which I had tossed the meat earlier. There was still a portion of twilight and more vision of what was happening below than I had thought. I used the sling and saw two of the things fall. Then I turned to the throwing of stones.
Halfway I feared that they might turn on us at this attack, yet I could not leave that other to be savaged, enemy though he might be. A clean death by hunter’s spear or knife was one thing; to see a helpless beast eaten alive as the rats handle their prey was more than I could allow. Now I was hurling rocks with my hands and saw a third one of the attackers fall. There was movement beside me and the female went into battle, taking the descent in one great leap and landing full into the middle of that pack where she used her claws and teeth in a whirlwind of well-delivered death.
The squealing of her prey rose to a high point and through that sounded that same strange howl I had heard in the battle wherein the great rat had died.
On the ground the rogue was rolling, his jaws fastened on the scruff of a rat’s neck and surely the creature he was striving to pull down was a near match to him in size.
I lifted a rock with my two hands and, running forward to the very edge which hung nearly above that struggle, I hurled my crude weapon out and down. By some chance of fate it actually struck the rat which had just torn free from the rogue, not fair, but well enough to make the noisome creature stagger. In that instant the rogue reared up and closed his massive jaws on the neck of his enemy and gave a sharp swing of his head. I could not hear above the clamor of the pack the sound of the snapping neck but I saw the thing go limp.