Though he was colored like his elders, his spots were more indistinct, his fur was less thick, and his feet oversized as is the case of many cublings. But he gave full promise of equaling his sire in time.
Maraya, the female, used one paw to urge him forward.
“Murri—” Her voice was hardly more than a purr. “This one is of our get, smoothskin. As is among your kind we also have a time when the young go forth to learn. Murri will be as a little brother, lifting claw and fang for you.”
She paused and again I strove with the word sounds of the furred ones.
“Great lady, do you entrust your cub to me, who am one with those who hunt you?”
The Great Cats might not laugh but there is humor in them and that colored her answer to me.
“Entrust him to you, youngling? No, rather we trust you to him.”
“But-
“It is thus, youngling,” Myrourr spoke. “In this place strange things have happened. I lay open to your knife. Yet you took no life, rather worked to save me. We fought side by side, foul things of the inner dark.”
“And the old one,” Maraya cut in. “You felt for him and did not leave him to the foul ones to worry.”
“Nor are you any longer what you were,” Myrourr continued. “For in you now is blood of our blood. To our kind you are sealed.”
I glanced at my wrist. There was a scar there but the wound had closed cleanly. I had heard traveler’s tales that some people afar signed adopted kinship so. But that any had sworn a pact with others than their own species, that had not been told.
Myrourr and Maraya exchanged a long look. If they communicated so, I could not follow. The male arose, stretched, his huge body nearly as large as that of a bull yaksen. Then he leaped, as lightly as a grain of sand upward borne by the wind, to the top of a rock spur. There he stood, facing outward over the sand beyond the isle, so still he might have been carved from this stone. His head went back and he gave voice to such a roar as might well challenge a storm in fury, once, thrice, and yet again, each time turning a little to face in another direction.
What he sought I soon learned. Across the distant sands, sometimes so much the color of the land that they could not be detected save that they moved, came sandcats in scores beyond my counting.
There were those as great in size as Myrourr, there were females coming in pride, bringing with them young. All approached the slickrock isle and made their way up it to where Myrourr and Maraya waited with the dignity of rulers among their kind. The visitors touched noses lightly with the two who waited them and then scattered out, forming small family groups, waiting—
With the coming of dusk they gave tongue. My people have a love of song—the bard is ranked high among us—but this wild music was to no pattern that I knew. Yet the longer it continued the more it sounded right to me, so that I raised my own voice, timidly at first, to join in their ululating wails. There were some who led the singing, perhaps selected the songs. Maraya was one of these and twice all other voices died away allowing hers to echo to the sky, as proud as any challenge.
Singing was only the beginning. Now they danced. First one and then another leaped upward. By some trick of breathing they were able to draw air into them. Their fur fluffed out until they looked like great soft balls as they leaped and floated for distances I would not have thought possible had I not seen it. They rolled, they twisted, as might cublings at play, in the air, as they arose above the crags of the isle.
Their exertions had another result, for the fur of the airborne ones gave off sparks of light. I watched and I longed, too, to so float in the wind. I could leap, yes, and twist somewhat, but there was no escaping the pull of the earth on my body and I could only stand, panting from my vain efforts, to watch the whirl of the dance. Now those aloft singled out one another and spun together, dipping above or below their partners. Once more they sang. I saw cublings try to climb the sky but with hardly better success than I had had. Twice Murri came to me, short club tail switching, striving to pull me into the midst of the youngsters’ wild circling on the ground.
I did what I could, for my childhood was not so far behind me that I could not remember certain tricks I had learned from entertainers in the marketplace, somersaults and leaps. My clumsy, probably foolish, efforts appeared to excite Murri and led him to more attempts at soaring, rising to the point where he could circle my ground-bound body.
Soon I was the center of a circle of cublings and they watched me with unblinking eyes as if I were some marvel. However, I was soon panting heavily and the strength drained from me so at last I seated myself just to watch.
I was not the only one tiring from that wild revel as more and more of the larger cats touched surface and settled as might kottis before a fire. Though their bush tails were too short to curl about the forefeet as did those of our home companions.
Myrourr and Maraya threaded a way through their resting kin and came to me, to stand one on either side. From Myrourr there came an order that I show this company the mask pendant.
Straightway when I pulled it into the air it took flame, as if it drew from those about the sparks of fur light. It blazed forth brave as any torch, save there was no heat in it. I held it up so it could be clearly seen.
For a moment there was complete silence, no scrape of claw on rock, no pant of breath. Then from all that company arose a hum which could be reckoned a great purring—and the sound shook me. They moved in upon me, marshaled as if they were warriors in review before a Queen. Each halted but a moment directly before me, head a little forward as if to sniff at what I bore and then at me. Even though I had shared, in my very small way, their dance and song, I found this a little daunting. To be surrounded by the cublings had been one thing, but to be encircled now by those I had been trained from childhood to consider prime enemies of my kind, awakened uncertainty within me. And still they came.
It might have been that they wished to store in memory a scent to recall again in times to come. They were accepting me as one of their own, something no one of my species had ever known— at least as far back as our bard songs went.
For three suns that company remained. The pool algae was shared by all, and there was a determined night hunting for rats. For the first time I witnessed that the sandcats would seek those out even in their burrows beneath the surface of the ground. There was a concentrated digging and runways were laid open, nests of the vermin uncovered, those within being speedily taken care of.
On the third night the first of the gathering began to drift away, followed by more and more. They made no formal farewells to their host and hostess, nor did any of them seek me out.
During the meeting the cublings had engaged in mock battles of their own with much snarling, hissing, and even flying tufts of hair. Murri rendered good account of himself in two such encounters and his trot took on something of a proud roll when he came to me afterward that I might smooth his fur and hail him as warrior.
Once the company left and the silence settled once more on the isle, I helped the family sweep the debris of the meeting into deep cracks and fissures. Again I took up scraps of rat hide, softening it from the stiffness of sun drying by pulling it back and forth across the edge of the rock.
I could delay no longer. The future I had refused to meet must now be faced squarely. Where I would head when I left the safety of this isle I had no idea. We were not too far, I believed, from that stretch of death-dealing land—the Plain of Desolation. But I still lacked any guide.
As I worked packing sun-dried pats of algae, more strips of rat meat, whatever I believed I could carry that might mean my life later on, Myrourr came to me.