Esther M Friesner - Puss

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Puss
Esther M. Friesner
THE BOOTS WERE ONLY THE BEGINNING. I STILL FEEL his hands on
me, hard fingers driving deep into my ribs, jamming the heavy, clumsy sheaths of
scarlet leather onto my hind legs while I squalled and spat until he cuffed me silent.
"Now walk!" he bawled, drunk with the bit of wine his own coin had bought.
"Stand tall, you worthless animal! I'll make my fortune with you yet. There's fools
enough in this wretched world who'll pay good money to see a trained cat."
Where had he ever gotten them, the boots? I never doubted that the world was as
he painted it: cruel, cold as a dry tit, full of soulless shells like him who'd do anything
to hear two coins chink-chink together in their fat, hairless palms. Surely that was
how he had found the man to make them.
Oh, how they hurt me! No cat was ever born who'd willingly ask for such a
crippling. He had me under the forelegs and swung my body forward—first one
side, then the other—in imitation of human strides.
"Walk, damn you! The old fool said as you were special—pox take him. Must be
something more to it than a gaffer's babblings, or it's all up for me.
Walk
!" His sour
breath was full of curses for me and his father; his brothers, too, snug in their more
comfortable patrimonies of mill and farm. They knew nothing and cared less that the
youngest of the three now spent his night in a stable, kneeling in piles of horse-fouled
straw, torturing a cat.
I could not walk—not like that—and he was too great a fool to bide and seek my
true talents. So it seemed I should be free, soon or late. All it wanted was the taste of
blood.
I let myself hang limp in his hands, deadweight. He groaned. I could see the
self-pity bubbling up in his eyes behind the fat, ready tears of a drunkard.
"Worthless." He held me off the floor so the boots with their heavy soles and heels
pulled my hind legs down. The pain raced clear up my spine, a white fire in my
brain.
"Worthless!" This time it was a shout, and a shaking to go with it. My eyes
clouded with the red haze. Rage filled my mouth, called up the ghosts of my true
teeth— not these paltry stubbins good for reaping only mice and rats. Oh, the
hunger!
"Damn the old man." Now he was sniveling. I got another shake for his father's
imagined sin. "All those years a-dying, and Bill and Tom crowding 'round the bed,
simpering like daub-brained girls." And another shake yet for my poor, spinning
head. "Cunning bastards. One to keep deathwatch, one to stiff-arm me off, keep me
far from the old turtle so's it'd look as if I didn't care was no one there to shut his
eyes for him after. Well, it worked, blast them all to hell for it! Mill and farm gone,
 and nothing for me but
this
!"
And he swung me back and flung me hard against the stable wall.
The boots were my death. I could not twist in midair and take the fall as I should,
not with them weighing me down. I felt my ribs shatter as I hit the rough-hewn
boards, my spine come unstrung with a single snap against a jutting beam. My limbs
crumpled under me when I slipped down into the straw, all skewed. Warm, salty
blood welled over my tongue. I let my mouth hang open and the thin, red flow
trickled out, dampening the golden dust that overlay the straw. Soon, through the
death of this small, much-punished husk, the Change would come and work its
power. Soon I would be free.
But the pain was too fierce. The fury in my veins wailed impatiently for my lost
wings, for the clean, knife-bright freedom of the air. Peace alone commands the
Change, and I was too much dominated by wrath, trapped in a skin once glossy and
sleek under a loving hand's care. Now drab and dirty, matted with filth, it would be a
relief to shed it once the compact was fulfilled.
It was very hard, the dying, and long. He did his part to hurry it on, standing over
me, driving a sprung-toed shoe into my belly. Air tore out of my lungs, scraped my
throat with agony as a shallower breath forced its way back in. These mortal bodies
cling to life too strongly.
"Stupid cat. Hell have you." I heard him stagger out of the stable, still cursing.
Clouds fell across my eyes. Alone, finally left in peace, I sought the hidden power of
the blood. Now the Change must come, in solitude, with the old sea's taste fresh and
metal-tangy on my tongue.
Change
. The clouds darkened; only the savor of blood remained, the copper
bloom at the heart and core of being.
Change
. Scent and touch followed sight and sound into oblivion. I felt my self
tearing free from the blood-woven web of the world. As my soul struggled, I sensed
without seeing that the filthy stable had faded away around me. Laved by the
shapetide, my dying shell lay upon the strand that lies between time and time.
Child
? She came as I knew she must come, as she comes for all of us when the
Change is imminent. Some of my folk say she was the first to find the way to the
shore where the shapetide runs. Some call her goddess, all name her Mother. Her
voice was a tender hand upon me, dulling my failing body's pain. I felt the layers of
fur and flesh peeling away like the falling petals of a rose.
I am here
, I answered in the only true speech. With more than eyes I saw her. She
loomed above me, her great yellow eyes warming me. Their fire seared all else away,
even the bones of evil memories. My spirit sprang from my broken chest, taking
wing against the wind.
Child, you must return
. Keen as a hatchet blow, cold as a plummet into an
ice-crusted river, that sharp saying. My battered soul snapped back into its aching
vessel and my sightless eyes stared wide.
What? But the compact
—
 Is unfulfilled
. I heard the sorrow in her words.
The debt is unpaid. You owe
—
I owe nothing
! My spirit-self leaped up anew, still molded by my latest shape,
and hissed and spat defiance against her who may never be defied.
What debt have I
ever owed that wasn't paid in full through my own blood
? I gestured with a
phantom paw at my fallen form, at the blackening trail now sluggishly oozing from a
gaping, ashen mouth.
You see his handiwork, O Mother. Can you call all accounts
anything but paid? I owe him nothing but death
.
And that, I swear, was the first I ever thought about that sweet possibility.
Her sigh was summer's own breath.
The debt was never owed to the son, but to
the father. It lies over you yet, as heavy as the earth now lying over him
.
And I knew what she said was true, for there are no lies in the true speech.
I will heal you
, she said,
and you will remember your debt
.
No! No
! I did not seek memories, did not want them, would break my heart over
them if she forced them on me. But her hand was upon me, her wings over me, and
the great, scaley shelter of her body coiled around me. We are nothing in her
shadow. I felt bone grind in healing dance against bone, and as her breath penetrated
fur and flesh I was compelled to see.
Remembered firelight flickered amid the shadows in my eyes. A young man knelt
among old pillars. Few from his village knew that such a ruin stood so near the
plowland, fewer still would speak of it at all. But to come there—! And by night.
And knowing enough half-truths of us to come bringing blood.
He knelt before the great altar in the wild place and made his plea in the tongue so
few recalled. We hid among the toothed and jagged pillars, harkening, curious,
intrigued to hear our own words stumble out into the midnight air from the lips of a
mortal man. Eyes aglow we watched and listened, hungering to drink deep if only he
would make the smallest misstep, the flimsiest missaying to give himself into our
power.
Not until then, though. We are a well-ruled people.
Wizard
? my sister asked, nose wrinkling with greed.
I do not think so
, I replied.
He must be
, she maintained, mantling her wings against the autumn chill. Blue
stars danced in her eyes.
None other would have the skill or courage to find us
.
Oh, I think he has courage enough
. I licked a finger, still red from the sweet
blood of his offering. It was too long dead to be more than a stomach-stay. He had
not seen us dip hand and paw and wingtip into the pooled crimson in the brown
earthenware bowl before him. We choose who may see us, and how, as reward or
punishment. It was only goat's blood, but it was good enough
. See? He trembles
.
And you call that courage? A hero does not tremble
, my sister said with scorn.
A hero does not have brains enough to know when to be afraid. The truly brave
man knows, but goes on despite his fear
. My ears twitched. He spoke our language
 well. Wisdom as well as courage, then.
I think that this time, I will be the one
, I
said, and I did not stand on further saying, but chose my shape and stepped out of
the shadows to make him mine.
I let the wings linger only long enough for him to see them and know that it was
no common cat who had walked into his firelight's weak circle to save him. He gave
a hoarse, glad cry, as one who has gambled away his soul but reaped a prize worth
the loss, and fell full-length upon the tiles.
The compact was made. It was made in the old way, the true way, with a taste of
better blood than a slaughtered goat's. Not Change blood, though; not blood spiced
by death's proximity. The blood I took bubbled up from veins still taut with life,
good for binding my life to his will, nothing more.
From that time forward, we knew each other, and what each might ask of each.
So long as he lived, his thoughts were naked to me. So long as he laid one charge
upon me that remained unfulfilled, I was in his thrall. His wants were desperate, but
modest: a little land, a mill, the means to aid his parents in their old age. The homely
shape I chose would never betray my nature or our pact.
By wisdom and by art I gained his humble prizes, and for my pay had love and
gratitude and, better than blood, the rich feast of his mind. For my folk, immortal so
long as our bodies are not entirely destroyed, the death-seasoned thoughts and
feelings of humankind are dainty fare. He gave me no blows, seldom a harsh word
from his lips all the days of our bonded life, and only a look of bewilderment and
pain when my skills could not call his young wife's breath and blood back into her
body after that third birth.
He is all I have left of her
, I heard him say to the midwife as he gazed down upon
the infant in its cradle. It tore at me to see him so desolate. I vowed then to make this
last child of his a gift past common value, for the father's sweet sake. That night,
when the older boys had been taken to his sister's house and his wife lay shrouded
on the hearthside floor and the babe wailed in its cradle, for love of him I broke the
laws that bound me…
Who are you
? He startled me, making me spring back from the cradle before I
could take up the child. He stood in the doorway between common room and
bedchamber, eyes red from too little sleep and too much weeping. The only weapon
in the house was an old, rusty dagger of his father's, but he had found it.
Don't you know me? I
was a fool to ask. In my new shape, lawless, a Change
made boldly by a blood-drop softly stolen from her corpse—Oh, bitter!—how
could he hope to know me?
He held a rushlight high in the hand that did not clasp the dagger
. Who are you,
girl
? he repeated. The blade lowered slowly.
What are you doing here, at this hour,
with neither cloak nor dress to clothe your nakedness? And why do you hover near
my child
?
I have come for his welfare
, I said, creeping subtly nearer to the sleeping babe
once more. I laid my hand on the cradle's lovingly carved wooden canopy.
I have
 come to bring him blessing
.
He did not cross himself. Not once since that night when he sought us in the wild
place did I ever see him make the pale god's sign.
I know you, then
. His voice shook
like a candleflame.
You are one of the Old Folk, spirit. Say, by whatever honors
your word, if your blessing be blessing true
. For he had heard the old tales, and
knew how the Old Folk delight in a double-deal, and for the precious sake of his
son's life he was afraid.
Dread not
, I told him.
I am not one of the Folk you fear. They were infant
shades when my people held this earth. We we the first begotten children of the old
sea whose salt still seasons every living creature's blood, the children of Change
,
shapeshifters, the shapetide's masters. And O, my master, you do know me.
He stared. Well he might stare! For I was dark and sleek and beautiful and I wore
the shadows with more gallant grace than a princess in all her satins. Because the
blood I had stolen was cold, so cold, the Change was incomplete—a dusky down
clung like velvet to my body, and as I crouched by the cradle I could hear the
whisper of my tail flicking back and forth across the floorboards.
I could hear too how his tongue scraped over dry lips as he looked at me. He
threw the rushlight in among the banked embers and they flared. The dagger fell to
the floor at his feet and he folded to his knees beside me as if he would pray.
Wild prayer, sweet prayer, prayer to serve a power older and darker than the pale
god's teachings! Hands knotted in my hair, lips ardent at my throat, at the glowing
mounds of my breasts, a ferocious, half-starved suckling made me shudder to the
roots of my wombs. The flagstone floor pressed hard against my back until I could
bear the chill of it no more and threw him down in my place so that I might spring on
top of him as if he were my meat—a mock hunt, a feigned kill, a true feasting. White
claws still curved from my fingertips, and I used them to slash away his flimsy
muslin shirt. My mouth burned against his chest, the small and dainty bud of a nipple
teasing thrills of anticipated joy from my rough tongue. I let one fang graze over it
slowly, drawing out the moment, the full exaltation of our senses. He moaned in pain
that was no pain when my small, sharp, cunning teeth nipped his flesh the instant
before the fangs sank deep and the bright blood spilled into my mouth.
Coupled so, I needed no other coupling, but he did, and his need was my master.
He wrestled me to the floor again and burned his way inside me while the last
shimmering red drops fell in a sweet rain over my cheeks, my eyes. My whole body
shook with the force of his thrusts, my tail curled up to lace his legs, and my claws
raked him without breaking the skin, my little jest. Then he shuddered, gasped his
name for me, and fell away.
A bad fall that! An evil fall! For as he rolled from me, blind chance let his arm loll
back to drop across the still, shrouded, cold clay that shared our hard bed on the
farmhouse floor. He turned his head and saw that in our tumblings we had pulled
aside a span of shroud, leaving her face unveiled. Oh, cold! Winter's own miserly
heart laid bare and bony over lips he had once devoured as madly as mine. I felt
revulsion clutch talons around his heart, with shame to make it burn.
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