Andre Norton - Gryphon in Glory

The melons rolled away as I got to my feet in an instant.

“Kerovan! But how do you know?” Then I had second thoughts. There could well be others of human kind in this land—scavengers, outlaws and the like. I could not count that this was indeed Kerovan.

My demand was met by a second silence. I waited for a painful moment or two, then was forced to accept the fact that these two furred ones would keep their own council. To strive to force any more information out of them, when they did not choose to give it, would lessen me in there opinion. It is very odd to feel that one is an impulsive child in the sight of such as these. My first reaction was anger. Still, I suspected that anger itself, within the bonds of the Waste, might be a most dangerous emotion unless controlled and used only at one’s desire, as a weapon—a feat I was certain I could not accomplish. Though the control part—that I must learn.

If this promised traveler was Kerovan on his way here, what mattered most was that I be prepared to meet him—to withstand his anger. If, indeed, he felt enough within that shell he had built about him to know hot human anger any longer. I must think carefully, plan alternate moves, each depending upon his attitude when we met. That we must resolve our difficulties—that was far more important to me now than any waking sleepers or stirring of long-dormant forces in the Waste.

I sat down on my heap of grass and worked to enwrap my eagerness, control a heart that had begun to beat faster, to appear as outwardly serene as the cats. Reaching for the nearest melon, I began the awkward business of sawing away at its rind with the sharpest edge of the belt buckle, thinking while I worked that it would be well when I had eaten this piece of fruit (not because I now really wanted or needed it, but because the very act of leisurely feasting would be the beginning of my prized control) that I search the rest of the ruins where I had not ventured earlier. There might just be in that supposedly barren interior something I could use as a weapon.

The melon was just at the proper stage of ripeness and I did feast on its rosy, juicy interior, inelegantly, having to spit out seeds into my hand and make a small heap of them to one side. Shining black they were. When i had been very small I had been given a coarse needle and a length of stout linen thread and had spent the whole of an absorbed morning making myself a brave necklace of just such seeds, which Harta the cook had saved for me.

Harta—she had not been one of those who had come together with us in the hills after the escape from Ithdale. So many had been lost! I wondered if some intelligence somewhere decided who would win through, who would never be seen again—or were their lives a blind gamble of fate?

I went to wash my face and hands at the spring, wipe them on sunwarmed grass, paying no attention—outwardly—to the cats who had apparently both gone to sleep in the sun. With a little more confidence than I had had to stiffen me during my first visit to the keep, I once more entered the great hall with those strange cat-shaped benches. This time I did not head for the corner tower—rather I took the other direction.

There, in the deepest gloom of this chamber, I found a huge fireplace, darkened on hearth and up the cavern of an interior with the signs of smoke and soot. Its presence suggested that the builders here had been at least human enough to need heat in the chill of winter and that the Waste was no more hospitable at that season than the seaward-reaching Dales.

On the wide and heavy overmantel, where a lord of the Dales would have had carven the badge of his house, there was a symbol deep wrought—one I had seen before. It was of the circular body with widespread wings. Save that here it was dull and time-stained, hardly to be distinguished in the poor light. On either side of it was set, on guard, the figure of a cat.

There were drifts of dried leaves, powdering into dust, on the hearth, but any remains of a welcoming fire long gone. I remained there for a moment, then let my eyes range about the room, trying to imagine how it had once been—who had held high feast days here, if such were known to these people who had drawn their stools and chairs closer to the flames in winter. What stories had their songsmiths wrought to keep their minds encased in wonder? Had they had songsmiths to take their heroes’ acts and make them live in song and tale?

I raised my hand high, striving to touch the symbol, and discovered that even when I stood on tiptoe it was still above my reach. At first I had thought it near invisible against the dull stone in which it was carved. Now . . . I blinked, rubbed the back of my hand across my eyes. The cats . . . they were far more easy to study—there was a glint of fire in their wide-open, staring eyes.

Was it some illusion of the dusk caught within this room, or could it be that one of those heads was slightly larger, heavier of jowl, than the other? I looked from left to right and back again, began to believe that my guess was correct. The cat heads were not in duplicate, but individual. Also I believed I had seen them before, mounted on living, breathing bodies, lying at sleepy ease out in the courtyard. Some worker in stone long ago had caught both male and female; the same animals? Even with all the tricks and talents of the Waste I could hardly accept that the two I saw outside had been those whose portraits were sculptured here. Time might stretch long for the Old Ones (and were any Old Ones animals?), but surely not to that extent. If these were not the portraits of the same cats, they must be distant forefather and foremother and the strain had held true.

I stepped into the cavernous mouth of the fireplace, kicking at the leaves, hoping against hope to turn up some piece of the metal, the fire dogs that had once supported the burning wood, some other fragment that would be promising. There was nothing left.

To my right a doorway in the inner wall led to whatever survived at the other end of the building. Deserting the fireplace with its knowing guard cats, I passed through that. The hall beyond was wide enough to be a gallery and here lay the first signs of furnishing I had seen, other than the stone cat benches. All I wanted!

With a cry, I sped forward, to snatch at the black-tarnished hilt of a sword. Only to find that what I held when I pulled it from out the litter on the floor was a jagged stub. I tried it against one finger, the metal flaked away thinly. There were other weapons lying along the wall as if they had fallen from stone pegs, which were still set there. Nothing had survived that could be used. At last in my disappointment I sent the stuff flying, with a kick that shattered it even more into a dust of rust.

There was another square room beyond, a second stair like unto the one I had found in the outlook tower. I judged that this must serve the second tower I had noted earlier—the one that supported a living tree in place of the lord’s banner. The steps appeared secure enough, as long as one crowded against the wall on the left, so I climbd.

On the second floor there was another doorway, as well as the continuation of the steps leading upward, and I judged that the doorless opening gave upon rooms that must have been built above the arms gallery. I took that way now in turn.

Another hall here but a very much narrower one, hardly more than a passage where perhaps two of my own girth could walk abreast, and, to my left, three doorways.

There had been doors here also—two of them, like the one in the courtyard, showed rotted bits of wood, the fallen debris, that had once formed barriers. But the one in the middle . . .

The wood of that looked firm and whole. I could detect no crack brought about by time, no skim of rust upon the metal fittings. There was a locking bar across it—from the outside! Had I come across such precaution on the lower floor, or in whatever cellars might be found in this place (I had no desire to go prying into such as those), I would have said this was a prison. It was perhaps a “safe” chamber such as some lords had for the protection of their more valuable belongings when they were from home, save that the bar lacked any of the ponderous locking devices usually in use on such.