Tad Williams - Tailchaser’s Song

Now Fritti sat with his two closest friends, and was suddenly tired of leave-taking. Sniffing Roofshadow's cheek, he rubbed his face against her warm, soft fur and said nothing.

"I will not say I hope to see you, because I know I will," said Pouncequick. With all his newfound insight, still the little cat looked forlorn. Tailchaser relented and nuzzled him for a moment.

"I'm sure I will see you both," he said calmly. "Nre'fa-o. I’ve two friends."

Fencewalker was bellowing final instructions to the assembled Folk: there was a great murmuring. Tailchaser turned away and walked back toward Ratleaf Forest and the resumption of his own journey. The cold breeze rattled the branches.

Beyond the fringes of the now-dwindling thaw, Ratleaf was still winter-deep in cold. A solitary figure in the endless whiteness of the forest, Tailchaser wondered about the transfiguration of his small friend Pounce-quick. His thoughts were accompanied only by the soft plishing of his pads denting the snow mantle.

Pouncequick had changed. Although he could still caper and play as a youngling was expected to, and although he certainly hadn't lost his kittenish appetite, still there was a quality of innocence no longer present. Several times while watching little Pounce-quick talk like a grizzled elder, his tiny body foreshortened by the length of a tail, Fritti felt a wave of deep, inexplicable sadness.

The lost tail did not seem to bother Pouncequick as much as it did Fritti. The idea of his small friend being mauled and torn by Scratchnail disturbed him greatly, and he worried the thought like a slow-healing wound.

"It's very strange, Tailchaser," Pounce had told him, "but it feels as though it's still there. I don't miss it. I can feel it right this moment curling behind me-I can even feel the wind on it!" Tailchaser had not known what to say, and the youngling continued: "In some ways, it's better now. What I mean is… well, since I can't see it, and nothing can happen to it, it's perfect: pure. And it always will be, too. Can you sense what I mean?"

Fritti had not been able to that day. But now, padding quietly through the great forest, he began to understand.

Days passed with the sameness of one tree to another as Fritti moved Vez'an-ward through Ratleaf. The words of the Firstborn led him on.

"Follow your nose to your heart's desire," Firefoot had told him in their last moment in the mound, "through the great forest with the sun-birth in your eyes. Your way will lead you out, finally, and across the Pawdab Marshes, to arrive at last on the shores of Qu'cef-the Bigwater. You will follow the shore until you see a strange hill that shines at night… it rises from the waters themselves. This is the place that the M'an calls Villa-on-Mar, and there you will find what you seek."

Now the cycles of day and night, traveling and sleeping, all the other hunt-marks of the world above-ground came back to Tailchaser. He had only himself to hunt for, and only himself to be responsible for. Like the silver pril fish that leaped and splashed upstream in the heights of the Caterwaul, so the suns of Fritti's journey bounded across the sky, one following closely upon the other. In this way he journeyed through Ratleaf.

The old forest was slowly coming back to life. The cave-sleeping Garrin came grumbling up from their rest. The graceful Tesri, bucks and does and a few stilting fawns, ran delicately on the drifts. Tailchaser felt his affinity for this world come flowing back; the horrors of the mound began to recede. He was one of the earth's children, and even the long season below the ground could not destroy his knowledge of the dance. He reveled in every sign of fading winter, and of the return of life to once-haunted Ratleaf.

Twenty suns had risen and set since he had left his friends when Tailchaser at last found himself approaching the far edge of the forest. The last two days' journeying had brought him to a place where the land began to slope gently downward, and the air beneath the great trees had a strange tang. Every breath was filled with moisture-not hot, like the great Flume, but cool as stone, salty as blood. He had never scented anything like it. Every inhalation quickened his heart.

Coming down the last highlands of Ratleaf one morning, Fritti became aware of a great, slow sound. Like the contented purring of the Allmother, it rose up through the vegetation below him, vast and dignified. As he paused for a moment along the spare trees of the Ratleaf fence, he could see something gleaming before him. A second sun, a twin to the herald of Smaller Shadows which hung low in the sky, seemed to shine up at him through a gap in the uneven tooth of the forest fringe.

Abandoning his grooming, Fritti climbed to his feet and padded farther down, tail waving in the slight breeze like a willow limb. As he neared the gap he saw that it was not another sun, but a reflection- impossibly huge. He stood between two ancient redwoods and gazed out across the swiftly dropping slope, across the beginning of the marshes. He caught his breath.

The Bigwater, burnished like wind-polished rock, stretched away to the horizon. Mighty Qu'cef, as red-golden as Fencewalker, held and returned the burning reflection of the sun like a glowing mote in the eye of the Harar. Qu'cef's sounding call-patient and hugely calm-floated up to the promontory where he stood transfixed.

He watched all morning as the eye of the sun rose into the sky, and the Bigwater became in turn golden, then green, and finally at Smaller Shadows took on the deep blue of a nighttime sky. Then, with Qu'cef s unanswerable voice still filling his ears and thoughts, he resumed his descent down into the marshes.

The Pawdab Marshes stretched from the shores of Qu'cef southward, flanking Ratleaf Forest on her Vez'an edge until they ended at last on the banks of the Caterwaul. The marshes were flat and chill, and the wet, spongy ground sank beneath Tailchaser's paws as he walked. Never, from the time that he entered Pawdab until he finally left it again, were his paws dry.

For days on end the salt-scent of the Bigwater was in his nose, and its voice in his ears. Like the sound of his mother's purr when he had been a nursling, the call of Qu'cef was the first thing he heard when he woke up; the roaring of the waves lulled him to sleep at night, coming to him across the great marsh as he lay curled in a bed of reeds.

The marshes, too, had sensed the loosening grip of winter. Fritti was able to make many a meal on marsh-mouse and mudrat, and other, stranger creatures that proved nonetheless good to eat. Often at his approach unfamiliar birds would start up screaming from their nests hidden in the weeds, but Fritti- hunger sated-would only stand and watch them fly, marveling at their bright colors.

At the end of a fading afternoon, a successful hunt behind him, Fritti found himself walking beside a large, still pond that lay in the midst of the marshland, hemmed all about by tall grasses and reeds. The failing sun had turned the Qu'cef golden in the distance, and the pond itself seemed a pool of still fire.

Crouching down, Tailchaser scented the water. It smelled of salt; he did not drink. Fresh water was scarce on the Pawdab. Although he was well fed, he was often thirsty.

Now, leaning over the pond, he saw a strange thing: a cat, dark-furred, but with a star-mark like his own, looked up at him from underneath the water. Surprised, he leaped back-as he did, the water-cat took fright also, and disappeared. When he moved slowly back, the other peered cautiously up at him through the still waters. His hackles standing, Tailchaser hissed at the stranger-who did likewise-but as he crouched, a rock, dislodged by his paw, fell into the pond. Where it struck, circular ripples marred the surface of the pondwater in an ever-widening ring. Before his eyes the water-cat fell to pieces, floating shards, and was gone. Only when the face of the stranger re-formed, wearing a look of astonishment matching his own, did Fritti realize that it was no real beast, but a spirit or watershadow that mimicked his every movement.