Today I’m going to share my first excerpt from The Chronicles of Alsantia, the series that began with Protect the Prince earlier this year. This is the third chapter from the third novel, which is currently untitled.
Some things to know: Alsantia is like a Third World Narnia. There were no interloping witches or Telmarine invaders in Alsantia to blame for the dark turns their world took, and the Alsantians are not only responsible for their own history, but many times, the agents of destruction in Alsantia.
Oji is the rightful crown prince of the talking animals, and in this chapter, he is in the captivity of Queen Suvani, the teenage tyrant of Alsantia.
While the first novel in this series is Urban Fantasy, novels two and three are more of a straight fantasy with some quasi-steampunk (i.e. Gaslamp Fantasy) elements, as this is a Many Worlds Fantasy and the heroes of the first novel–raised on Earth–have passed into Alsantia. The fourth book should mark a return to Urban Fantasy, although with another subgenre shift.
It was fun to write the dialogue for the sphinx and the griffin.
Untitled Third Alsantia Novel, Chapter Three
When he awoke, he was crammed into the corner of the cage, so that the dangling square was tilted into a diamond, and somehow, perhaps through yawning, unconsciously batting dream birds, or thrashes of his tail, it had built up some considerable swaying momentum, so that he swung back and forth like a pendulum. As he gripped the brass wires, his claws extended by instinct, and he stupidly hissed at the ground, as if he in that bleary-eyed moment of absent consciousness, he actually expected it to mosey off and leave him suspended in space.
“Don’t move. You’ll die of fright if you don’t stop, kitten.” The laconic voice was so deep that at first Oji thought a storm was stirring up above. Through the tiny brass wires he could see the iron bars crossing overhead, and through that he could see many cottony clouds, but none that were scrawled dark with rain. Hearing no threat in the voice, but rather a curious but amused note of thoughtfulness, Oji settled back into his haunches, feeling like his eyes, heart, and lungs were all swirling into one hot cup of nausea.
The cage whistled near, but not as high, as its last arc, and swerved back and forth nine more times before the chain’s energy was spent, and the cage twirled in a tight circle until Oji clambered up onto the rocking wires. When this imparted a gentle spin to the cage, the cat prince received a panoramic tour of his neighbors in that split second. Not that Oji hadn’t already scoped out the surrounding beasts, having had a number of opportunities the previous night due not only to the queasiness of his footing which kept him on his toes until very late, but also because of his restlessness to be gone and find justice. But now the light of sunrise was glinting on the steel bars above, the bizarre leaves looking like so many orangish-green triangles pressed together here into parallelograms, there hexagons, there octagons, and there a kind of siamese diamond conjoined at two tips, and on the long-thorned bushes that seemed to crouch, admiring their own cruel claws that waited for passersby to be caressed by their wicked scratch, but also on the rarest of Alsantian beasts. Hanging in an identical cage next to him, no doubt intended for mockery, was a puddlegulp, that species of animated river clay whose living purpose was in mockery and spiteful mimickry. Now it aped Oji perfectly, down to the last detail, with the only revision being that he imitated Oji in death, not in life, showing the limbs at freakish angles and his eyes glazed, a deathly jest upon him. Alsantian scholars often wondered whether to classify the puddlegulp as alive or undead, for the clay beast could imitate both states perfectly, and not only escaped true death at times by miming it, but would disconcert its prey and predators alike by mocking the image of the other’s dead body. In choosing to do this to Oji now, of course, there could only be spiteful cruelty in its enchanted heart, and Oji wondered how Suvani had put the speechless, thoughtless beast up to such hard-hearted theater.
There were the unicorns, a male and female cruelly stabled in separate cages, so that their ceaseless passions would struggle forever to join despite the bars interceding. The Earth people had unicorns all wrong, having neglected, slain, and forgotten their own long ago, for the unicorns were only pure in instinct, being single-minded beasts driven only by one thing at a time. While the keepers had installed a black curtain between the stallion and the mare to curb their restless desires, in Suvani’s last passage through she had left it raised, whether as purposeful torment or unmindful indolence, Oji knew not. Oji supposed it might do the poor beasts some good, as restrained from all but a handful of their natural impulses, they had become great gluttons, and had waddles under their necks and gigantic bellies.
Other than the unicorns, Oji noted a theme in the menagerie. Every other creature in captivity was a cat, or a creature with a partially feline appearance, or part of the human mythology pertaining to cats. She had long labored to prepare this elaborate practical joke for Oji. It infuriated him, but more for the fact that she was so certain of his capture that she had not feared the expenditure.
Most offensive of all was the cage-city of talking mice constructed in the shape of a titanic scratching post, the top of which towered just near Oji’s cage, and with which his cage had nearly collided that morning at the top of its arc. As the mice were kind, respectful, and gregarious, and moreover, a constantly circulating village, he kept his displeasure at the insult to himself so that he might continue to enjoy their countless tiny personalities. As they sent a different representative every day to inquire as to his needs—needs that they could never gratify in deed, being too many inches separated by their bars and his—Oji knew their excessive respect stemmed as much from fear as awe at his rank and celebrity.
The beast who had spoken was the sphinx. Native to Ephremia, the winged lion had a woman’s head but a man’s voice, with which it had an irritating tendency to loudly and pompously declaim all matters of common sense as if it had just then committed them to holy writ. Sphinxes were terrifying and terrible creatures that, unfortunately for them, had an easily manipulable soft spot in their unwavering sense of honor and good gamesmanship. When Suvani proposed a riddle game to the creature with the stakes being his freedom and her life, she won so handily that it was rumored that she was half sphinx herself, a rumor that evolved every day, with the spiteful and foolhardy adding such extra ingredients as siren, dragon, and harpy.
Oji liked the griffin the best of them all, for his pleasantries seemed the most honest, as the beast was apathetic and listless, and waiting for the end, when its novelty fizzled out and its head and paws on a wall would satisfy Suvani’s pride. While sentient, griffins had no interest in humanity, other than as the subject for their comic poems. Most times, their wit was more ripping than their claws, but the spiritless griffin was disinclined to tell what words had incurred the wrath of Queen Suvani. While the griffin was hard to understand through its constant trill, which made the beast sound like its voice was passing through an Earth electrical fan, Oji had reason to be patient in his current predicament, and he smiled on the griffin as he laboriously chopped up a twelve syllable sentence into about thirty with his lilting buzz. What was more difficult to forgive was the griffin’s unfortunate tendency to speak in verse. To be honest, it wasn’t a tendency, it was a certainty. And while griffins were compelled to speak in verse, Oji was not accustomed to thinking that way, so it might take him a moment longer than normal to compose a reply. Naturally meditative, this was not difficult for the cat prince, but it was about twice as annoying as when Njal had accidentally squeaked the chalk on the chalkboard in Worlds class.
One creature that so baffled Oji that he could not form an opinion was the perfectly ordinary cat hanging in the cage next to his in an indifferent contrast to the prince’s, for that resident was so accustomed to its captivity that as it slept long hours proper to a cat, neither the cage nor the chain ever quivered. That it could not be a talking cat Oji had decided due to its waking absorption in everything the mice did, so that its eyes were either squeezed shut in catnaps or wide open in predatorial interest and naked appetite.
“Thank you.” Oji’s purr was pure scorn. “But I had already come to the idea myself, and I will thank you not to call me kitten, but your highness.”
“If you wish.” The sphinx’s voice was clear and proud. “I thought it might remind you of that which you shall never have.”
“What is that, pray tell?”
“Your majesty.” The sphinx looked at Oji with such cruel regard that while he thought of pretending not to know what the monster meant, he simply settled on his haunches and tried to immitate the calm composure of the cat next door. Suvani would only keep Oji captive for so long before a public execution to lay to rest any lingering doubt of the number of crowns in Alsantia. As he would never be ‘your majesty,’ the sphinx thought it cruel to dub him ‘your highness.’
“Thank you for your thoughtfulness,” Oji said with as much caustic sarcasm as he could muster, feeling as he did a troublesome swell in his throat, “but I am a prince. My duty is both my people and my life, and I would honor neither by pretending. So long as I have breath, I will remain worthy of the noble pelt.” At this, the puddlegulp splashed into another image of corpse Oji, this one with blue lips and ears and bulging eyes, as if to show that it had achieved a state of perfect and deathly breathlessness.
“Have you not learned to ignore that creature?” spat the sphinx with contempt. “It is only a jester, and one that jests only by instinct.”
Oji thought of saying mildly that a riddling instinct trapped the sphinx in its current predicament, but having, indeed, not learned the trick of ignoring the puddlegulp, he was too preoccupied by the image of his own death to do other than turn his head and sigh.
You speak well,” said the sphinx. “You shall have my fealty, your highness. As you say, you deserve your fate.”
“An elegantly feathered red-lettered hate
condemns the soft-spoken prince’s fate.”
“Speaking of jesters,” muttered the sphinx. While the sphinx was good at giving others imponderables to stop their tongues, only the griffin seemed to have the power to do the same to the sphinx, and the griffin indulged his own wit mercilessly, taking advantage of the mighty cages that prevented it from becoming a physical contest between a gigantic winged monster with many good points at the end of its claws and beak, and an even larger winged monster with one less good point, due to its weak human chin and neck.
“An eloquent boor
has a mouth full of spoor,
a brain chomping riddles
and slop in its middles.
Wanting Suvani,
now you’re her pony…”
The sphinx turned at this with rage sizzling in her eyes, but stopped just short of the bars, which it would no doubt have burst into a rattling pile of steel. It seethed as it glared at the griffin. “What’s half a lion short of courage and half an eagle short of nobility?”
“A perplexed poser poses for its own leisure,
the surplus loser is swatted by its own teaser.”
Oji realized that the griffin was no longer playing to him, but the sphinx, as the complexity of its rhyme had increased with the addition of a riddle-like structure. Oji thought the griffin meant that the sphinx’s riddle could just as easily apply to her, but he couldn’t be sure. As the argument continued, Oji was of the opinion that the sphinx’s riddles were becoming embedded in the griffin’s wide-ranging verse, but again, he wasn’t certain. It was too exhausting for him. Maybe he was just a kitten, he sulked glumly, and as he turned to the other side of his cage, it swung a foot towards the tower of mice, which had him again scrambling to find a balance.
“How can I help you, your highness?” came the tiny squeak. It was one of the mice that they kept stationed in the top cage. While these guardians always had respectful faces, with ears that didn’t shake, whiskers that didn’t quiver, and eyes that stared unblinking, he knew they were there to keep an eye on their cat problem, to make sure it didn’t become a cage collision.
“Are you good at wishing?” asked Oji. When the unblinking mouse sentry blinked once, but did not reply, Oji continued. “Wish me out of this cage, and yourself too, why don’t you.”
“As you wish, your highness,” said the grave sentry with only a hint of levity.
“What’s your name, soldier?”
“Chep, your highness.”
“Chep, you’re terrible at wishing. I’m still here.”
“As am I, your highness,” said the sentry. “If we must be caged, my prince…”
“Chep, if you’re going into a redux of your usual song and dance about how proud and unworthy you are, my tolerance for tacky and insincere oxymorons is at an all time low, although I’m sure that you’re an incomparable yes man where you come from.”
“Would that not make me a yes mouse,” said Chep gravely. “Your highness.”
“Of course it would. Chep, I’ve been living among humans for more than ten years. No offense, but if a mouse of your caliber is correcting me, my brain must be more cheese than cat.”
“With all due respect, your highness,” said the mouse, his tiny hackles rising into most catlike points, “the mice are an ancient and noble race.”
“I know it,” sighed Oji. “I’ve heard all the myths, Chep. All of them. We did nothing but learn myths some days. If I smile less to you and yours than I do to silent mice, it’s only that mouthfuls are more appealing than backtalk.”
“Your highness!” Chep’s impassive face became slack as his jaw hung agape, his ears drooped, and his whiskers sagged. “I would not admit to eating unspeaking cats.”
“You wouldn’t admit? Then you have eaten a cat?”
“Your highness!”
“You sound like my advisers, Chep. Things don’t become moral when they’re discreet—they simply become secrets. If I carry my deeds close to my chest in an egg carton, they’ll all crack when I fall, and the rotten will get mixed up with the good.”
“What’s an egg carton, your highness?” Chep’s face was again frozen, this time mid-blink.
Having shivered his cage to a stop, Oji gingerly curled up facing away from the mice tower. “It’s nothing like a nest, except that it holds eggs. Good night.”
“It’s only morning, your highness.”
Oji did not answer, and mimed such an exaggerated snore that his chest puffed out like a football. When Chep tried to continue conversation, Oji went on ignoring him.
At the clatter of the menagerie gate, all the beasts turned to fix a sullen stare on the small and lumpish figure that entered. While she had a most distinctive appearance, with a nose so downturned and crooked that it seemed to curl, hair so pale that it seemed more glass than gray, and a shape that blurred somewhere between her belly and knees, so that she seemed to be some kind of occult toadstool topped with a knobby head. Each hand balanced a heaping bushel of food, one on its wartish head and the other on its lumpen stomach, so that after the creature had stepped inside, it was a few moments in unlimbering its baskets before locking the door.
“Grub, my kitties!” cackled the old woman.
To be fair, Oji reasoned, Gandra may not be old. He had no clue as to her real age. If she was indeed a very yoing woman, but burdened with these appearances of decrepitude, she had been short-changed at the turnstile of creation. Young or old, Gandra always looked like she was falling apart, and at the present looked like a trash pile heaped up ceiling-high, a doddering wreck staggering as she picked back up one of the baskets with a hunchbacked stoop and began doling out its contents to the beasts. As she was not unintelligent, and started from the biggest creature and worked her way down to the mice, so as to relieve herself of the largest helpings first, as she proceeded, she walked straighter and taller.
“What looks like turf, tastes like paper, and smells like sawdust?” riddled the sphinx mournfully as she picked at her dry mound of meat. While raw red meat was supposed to be moist, this was clumped and crumbly, like a square of reddish sod. Despite himself, Oji’s heart went out to the waspish beast.
“My meal is grown from the same bone garden,
Under the dry eye of our queenly warden.”
The griffin sniffed at its helping of the shriveled meat, then seemed to deflate on the spot, lolling on the grass and its nose tapped to the bar of its cage. At the end of its dramatic and indolent descent, the griffin was so relaxed that it looked like it was mimicing the still-dead puddlegulp. As the griffin’s exaggerated pose continued, Oji began to see a resemblance to the heap of meat, although the griffin seemed much more relaxed than the meat
With full troughs, the unicorns turned from their bars and forgot their mates as they choked back the fodder. The puddlegulp’s head swelled to the size of the sphinx and leaned up from its body–still dead, and still in the image of the diminuitive ginger prince–to chomp its food in one bite, then shrunk back to Oji’s tiny death’s head.
When Oji felt the contempt bubble up, he raised himself slowly onto his haunches and allowed the indignation to wash over as he looked again at the unicorns’ troughs. “You know that you shouldn’t give unicorns meat.” While Oji stated it as fact, he inflected it lightly as if he was questioning the woman. When he moved his eyes from the vile meat to the woman, it seemed that his revulsion increased, not for her slovenly appearance–she was, after all, human–but for a moral ignorance that was repulsive to a point beyond the pale.
“While I haven’t been barred from speaking with you, ginger, I’m not to call you–not to think of is what she said, actually–prince or your highness.”
“She permitted you to speak to me? I’m not surprised.” Oji’s ears flattened in displeasure, as he was certain Suvani saw this vile keeper as a subtler torture than the dangling cage.
“She did, but in a way she didn’t, as my tongue is tied from not knowing what to call you.”
“I don’t mind if you do your job quietly.” Oji shrugged. “I’m sure we’d all prefer it. But I’m not above you calling me cat, as it’s what I am.”
“I’ve worked around the queen long enough to know that was a slight, cat. You’re insinuating that you don’t want to hear your name come out of my mouth.”
“I’m sorry,” said Oji. “That was rude; I shouldn’t leave you hagning like that, so I’ll not insinuate any longer. Here’s my request, clear and unequivocal: don’t say my name. You can call me Oji when you stop putting meat in the unicorn troughs.”
“You want me to starve them?”
“You know what I mean.”
“My mistress is also clear and unequivocal, cat. She orders it thus, and calls it science.”
As the rain fell, the smell of earthworms and dirt mingled with the sorely dated meat, curdling Oji’s already acidic stomach. “Science stinks, then.”
“I’m no scientist. Not even a scholar, cat.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Gandra. Perhaps by some transitive property—for if science stinks, and you stink, then perhaps you are a scientist, and simply don’t know it, just as the most reeking culprits don’t know their own stink.”
Gandra threw a wad of meat at his cage, thus not only spreading the moldering stink of the flaky, gamy meat throughout Oji’s fur and clinging to the bars of the cage, but rocking the cage three times: first, from the spattering impact; second, from his confined pounce, which recoiled along all four walls and made the cage jump up a few inches; leading to the third shiver, when the chain snapped back with a shuddering swing. As meat fibers slid down the bars, and Oji gripped the greasy cage, and watched with irked anxiety as the mice again scrambled up and down their cage city in fearsome anticipation, and the ponderous heads of the griffin and the sphinx turned their heads.
As Gandra laughed, her belly jiggled and the basket sprinkled meat flakes, which the unicorns, having already gorged themselves on their troughs, strained at the bars to get, so that their heads seemed half-gagged by their gluttony, and the rest of the way gagged by the bars, which admitted their heads, but not their shoulders, as if Suvani had incorporated the possibility of strangling them in her wicked design, just as she had inconvenienced every beast in the menagerie. Oji was only now beginning to feel on top of the learning curve of his own cruel confinement, so that if he was fully awake, which he now was, he could bring the swaying box to a near stop in under a minute.
“Your attitude isn’t very princely, cat, but it sure is rich.”
“Aren’t you going to sweep that up?”
“Not my job,” sniffed Gandra. “I’m no maid or stablehand, but the keeper of the menagerie.”
“They’ll choke themselves!”
“Maybe they will. If they do, I’m not to interfere.”
“Those are rare beasts, keeper! There can’t be more than a hundred unicorns in all of Alsantia.”
“Where did you get that number, cat?”
Oji creased his brow and scowled. Gandra may not be a scientist, but that was a properly skeptical question for which he had no ready answer.
“Cat got your tongue?” Gandra snickered.
Oji hated that idiom. It had been particularly annoying that, despite a conspicuous absence of talking cats on Earth, the idiom nonetheless had currency there. He hated it even more than ‘cats always land on their feet,’ for that particular bit of wisdom was at least right more than half the time.
When none of the others interceded in his behalf, Oji was not surprised, and nor did he blame them, for Gandra was vindictive and spiteful to an extreme, and had been known to embed splinters in the griffin’s or the sphinx’s meals after hearing a verse or a riddle which she found offensive for being so thorny as to be unbreakable.
Having finished portioning the first basket, she lifted the second, and came to stand just under Oji’s cage. He thought about venting a yellow stream of his annoyance on the ugly-hearted woman, but held his bladder and otherwise contained himself as she slid his meal through the slots for that purpose. While he was by instinct delighted to find that his share was moister and more appetizing than the other’s, he restrained that impulse as he saw the envied looks of the neighboring cat, the sphinx, and the griffin, and then the puddleglum, which for an instant was aflutter with naked outrage before becoming a mirror to his worry.
“What wounds by lack, breaks on the selfless, and is wielded by giving?” While the sphinx also seemed ruffled by the prince’s tasty meat, she settled into a meditative squat and eyed him coolly.
The answer came to Oji unbidden, as if it was passing from the sphinx’s eyes through his own to splash up from some deep abyss in his unknowing brain: resentment. Oji saw at once that either Suvani or Gandra sought to torment all the denizens of the menagerie at once with one princely meal. When he next realized that the staring sphinx expected him to spill his dainty treat onto the ground, he felt the resentment spill into his heart and stomach, filling him with a sour regret, a consuming desire to taste the delicacy, and a dread for the hunger that would be sure to fall, for they were only fed once per day.
Oji sighed. For fear of enraging the ugly zookeeper even further, he waited for her to see to the needs of the neighboring cat, then tipped out the meal.
When it clattered to the ground, Gandra chortled without turning. “We thought you might do that, Oji, and decided you should at least see such a good meal enjoyed.”
Oji’s nostrils flared on the rich aroma of the meal she now slid into the cage of the neighboring cat. This flavorful scent—a melange of tuna and chicken, as well as some gamy morsel which undoubtedly only accented the dish with its pungency—was then doubled when she tipped another helping into the puddlegulp’s cage, so that the cat prince seemed to see a double image of himself bending to the meaty dainties. The puddlegulp no longer pantomimed a dead cat prince, but reflected something much more untrue: the image of Oji possessed by an exaggerated relish for the savory meat, a wild passion which Oji had never exhibited in his life.
Oji scowled. If they had meant to break his spirit with this scene, watching the animal submission of the beasts, compounded by the patently false show of the puddlegulp, only strengthened his resolve.
If the unicorns were striving to reach the old meat, they were clamoring at the bars of their cages to reach the fresh, wet meat, their horns clattering against the steel in the violence of their frustrated gluttony; if the sphinx and the griffin sunk into a sullen funk at the sight of Oji’s special meal, their resentment now beamed from their faces through wide eyes, bared fangs, and clicking beak. His denial of his meal had not made any difference, as through the petty schemes of Suvani or Gandra, his image was still at center, and regardless of how well-bred the beasts were, they might not be able to keep themselves from holding this against Oji.
“What is a fool thrice over?” muttered the sphinx, although she avoided his eyes as she settled back into her squatting position and laid her head on her front paws. Oji wondered how she did the mind-reading trick—was he simply that easy to read?
“When meat is jealous of meat, the worm is most proud;
when we measure pleasure by heartbeats loud
and strong, we love and hate our hearts;
we live and die in parts.” The griffin’s sympathy seemed more honest, but then he never seemed excited by his meal, as if he was waiting on the end by starving himself to death.
Gandra unlocked the gate, then bowed over her armful of stacked baskets before backing out into the garden, where the aromas of roses and tulips wafted in over the loamy scent of turned earth. Topping her sloppy curtsy was a sneer that wrecked all pretense toward meeting the needs of the confined beasts, that said that she had served misery in their bellies and rancor in their hearts and was glad.
When she closed and locked the gate, Oji settled into his long and hungry day. Usually he liked to wait until the other beasts were napping to void his bowels into the sandy patch below him, but there didn’t seem any point in postpoing his humiliation today, as they were already looking at him with contempt both involuntary and deliberate, for how dare he merit a better meal even if he scorned it? So after doing his reeking business into the litter, he set about the even more unpleasant task of cleaning his coat. While he was a talking animal, he nonetheless had the instincts and capacities of a cat, and though it was revolting to pick out the flaky meat from his coat, he had to do it. As a shapeshifter that might bolt the instant they lifted the latch of his cage door, the chance of him getting a bath, even a quick dunk, was uncertain at best. As he tasted the flung meat, he squinted, then closed his eyes, and wondered what the good cuts tasted like.
The neighboring ginger fell asleep first, and the puddlegulp flopped down into a perfect imitation of the gently purring cat. Then the sphinx grudgingly ate her share, occasionally flicking a glance upward either to see if Oji was looking, or—more likely, if she was telepathic—she wanted him to know that his darting peeks were indeed detected. When the griffin oozed upwards out of his limp and drowsy funk to scarf down his portion, it slunk back into its original position with not a hair or feather out of place, as if it was some sort of apathetic elastic. When the only shreds of food remaining were the dumped food in front of the unicorns and the tatters clinging to Oji’s cage, the beasts became restful, and fell into their mid-morning nap, until the only noises were snores, purrs, titters, and the chuffing and puffing of the unicorns, until they too fell into a depleted exhaustion.
Only Oji was still awake. He had only been there a few days, so his imprisonment was still fresh in his mind, and moreover, he was so enraged at his tormentors that he could think of nothing else.
“Was she here before she left?”
Oji’s heart skipped a beat. Not only was it Suvani’s voice, but as he lifted his head from his paws—his whiskers still drooping in a most feline sulk—it was Suvani from head to toe, dressed in a violet halter, black slacks, and polished black boots with golden buckles. To complete the effect of a queen deigning to work her own gardens, she wore a white half-apron around her waist, which, most hypocritically, was not marked with even the slightest speck of dirt. Waiting dutifully behind the queen and leaning their gardening implements a few inches to the right as if they were pikemen at parade rest, were a half-dozen gardeners, and two armed guards—with real pikes—at their backs.
“I’m not in the mood for your jokes, Suvani.”
A grimace slashed the queen’s eerily wide smile downward, and seizing a servant’s hoe, she rang Oji’s cage with the implement, so that for the fourth time that day, Oji felt the surge of fear as the world swung and spin.
“Haven’t you learned the consequences of running your little mouth?”
If Oji felt sorry, it was only because the rest of him could not run as fast and as far as his mouth at present. If his feet were free to run where they will, then his mouth could escape conseuqnces along with the whole cat.
“Will you be so courteous as to answer?”
“Forgive me, Queen Suvani.” Oji could not bring himself to address her as majesty, and he hoped she would not mind this stiff form of address. “My rattled brain has already forgotten your question.”
“Was she here?”
“Gandra?”
Suvani swung the hoe over her head, then slashed downard again, but stopped just short of striking the wobbly cage. Perhaps she had realized that this was a perfectly natural assumption, given that Gandra had arrived, then left shortly thereafter, and therefore seemed a fitting answer to her question. Perhaps she had taken pity on Oji, who had just reasserted his footing in the shaking cage. Or more likely, Oji reasoned, she simply had lost interest in tormenting Oji, who had so far refused to give her even the smallest satisfaction, never crying out and only presenting expressions that were sarcastic and scornful of the queen. “Not Gandra, you twit—Isola.”
Oji thought back. “You mean your serving girl? Why would you give her a key to your griffin and your sphinx, both of whom hate you almost as much as she does? That girl wants to kill you. I can see it plain as day.” Realizing he might be setting himself up to be struck by the hoe again, Oji forced himself to be diplomatic, dredging up what little charm remained in his bedraggled fur.“If she does come by, what should I tell her?”
“She’s gone, that beastly little girl. I’ve given her so much, but she’s still an ungrateful rebel. She’s like you, I suppose. Though I could kill you whenever I like, or order the death of every talking animal in my kingdom, you choose to defy your queen.”
Privately, Oji thought it would be good riddance for all of the filthy collaborators who were getting fat on the bones of the poor talking animals that wouldn’t pay Suvani’s tribute and swell her armies. Since he wasn’t sure whether the griffins or the sphinxes had sided with Suvani, and because he didn’t want to get struck by the rake again, he kept his opinions to himself. “You have something else you want to tell me, Queen Suvani.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Even now, I could go either way.”
“On what?”
“I had hoped you might bond with this poor beast”; here, Suvani gestured to the ginger cat dangling in a cage identical to Oji’s; “but now I see that’s unlikely to happen. He’s lost whatever you may have once identified with, you see.”
“What does that mean?”
“For shame, Prince Oji.” Suvani’s smile twitched. “Don’t you know your own subject?”
Oji was confused; while it was ancient dogma that talking animal royalty also held sway over dumb animals, even if they would never be able to speak to that fact, Suvani seemed much too happy to have only caught Oji in a pedantic political point. Glancing over, Oji saw nothing special about the ginger. If he was a little rangy, his hair was sleek, and his coloration was good. If his thumbs…Oji stopped. Only talking animals had thumbs. How had he never noticed that before?
“Forgive me, good beast.” Oji bowed his head respectfully. “I had thought you mute. What is your name? Fear not to speak to your prince.” When he darted a wary look at Suvani to check on the effect of this pronouncement, he saw her gleeful eyes, and one hand struggling to suppress a laugh.
Not only was Oji not amused, he was full of regret for ignoring his poor subject, who no doubt thought his prince haughty and self-absorbed. In his defense, the ginger had acted like a normal cat—even now, avoiding not only Suvani’s stare, but his own eyes, as he licked himself clean, then went on to roll onto his back, and wiggle gently along the bottom bars of the cage in a most undignified manner.
When Suvani’s laughter belted out loud and long, he stared at her angrily, and she only whooped louder, only stopping to catch her breath, after which she hooted some more. During this humiliating tirade of mirth, the cat acted so blissfully unaware that Oji began to suspect that he was not unmindful, but as insensible as a normal cat.
“Ha ha,” he snorted scornfully. “Very funny. Though I’ve observed its animal habits these past few days, you had me going, and I thought it might speak at any moment. How did you give it hands?”
While Suvani tried to match this very serious statement with a sober look of her own,
instead she tittered some more, then howled with laughter, only stopping to squeal. “he thinks he’s in on the joke!” In acting out their own exaggerated mirth, her servants and guards dropped their hoes, rakes, and pikes.
Oji felt a sinking feeling as he again scrutinized the neighboring ginger. Aside from the hands, this seemed a perfectly ordinary cat, graced neither by speech nor intelligence; while speaking animals were, as a general rule, bigger, the other ginger’s size was tough to gauge from one dangling cage to another, and even if he was somewhat small, Oji was also on the small size for a talking cat. Hands notwithstanding, its feral behaviors screamed ordinary cat. But it couldn’t be, Oji reasoned, not when Suvani was screaming with laughter.
“You didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?” Suvani eyed Oji. “Just what do you accuse your queen of doing, rebel? You had best be clear if you mean to foment rebellion.”
“You know what you did.”
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I don’t. You’re a speaking animal, Oji. Use it or lose it—and as you can see, I have the power to enforce that.”
Oji quailed inside. “You took his power of speech.”
“That would only be torture, cat, it wouldn’t be just. I simply made him as nature intended him—as a dumb animal, subservient to humanity.”
Oji couldn’t have opened his eyes wider, and when his whiskers sagged and his tail drooped, he struggled to pull them back into proud alignment. As he lifted them by force of will, he became animated by a righteous rage, so that he felt as light as a feather and electrically charged, as if his whiskers and tails were wires channeling wrath from the heavens.
Suvani continued, either oblivious or unimpressed by this reacion in Oji. “As you can see, he doesn’t know any better. There’s no torment to his new life, other than wanting to roam free, which I may allow him to do, once I forgive his past life. I think you’ll agree that this is not the same legal entity as the rebel that I captured. If I wasn’t so spiteful, I would have already relented. Then, of course, there was his value as a lesson for you, ‘my prince.’”
“You mutilated him!”
Suvani scoffed. “I did nothing of the sort. He still has his hands, his feet, and his tail. You can count his whiskers if you’d like. It’s only his mind that I removed. My theory is that animals minds are only vestigial, anyway.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re going to lose them anyway in a generation or two.”
“That’s ludicrous.”
“So say many of the eminent sages, and while the ones that I’ve collected have published retractions, there are a few still running free that disseminate abominable little tracts that accuse me of adapting the facts to fit my vision, as if any great philosopher or wizard doesn’t do just as she likes.”
“It sounds like they’ve convinced you.”
“Motivated, perhaps, to help my theory to its fulfillment. If talking animals are so truculent that they won’t serve the interests of science, then science—and Suvani—will give them a tweak.”
“They’ll fight back, Suvani.”
“They’ve already started, although they’re such a rabble, ranging through my kingdom in packs like the beasts they are rather than uniting in a proper army that I could crush decisively.” Suvani looked at him with a coy smile which seemed to conceal another wicked joke. “Actually, you could help me with that.”
“I would never help you, Suvani. But if you call leading an army against you help, I’m game.”
“Hear the rebel speak,” Suvani said with some venom, pacing around his cage. “Then we have an accord, because I’m willing to set you free.”
Oji could not believe his ears. Was she that egotistical? “I don’t believe you. Can we just cut to the part where you sneer, cackle, slam the cage door, and leave me to my nap?”
“But I’m deadly serious. All you have to do is eat all the mice.”
Oji rolled his eyes. “That will never happen. I told you that you were joking.”
Suvani stepped up to the mouse tower, which now seemed to be aquiver with squeals of frightened mice and the shiver of running mouse feet. “That is a tall order, isn’t it? There must be hundreds in there. You’d be here for weeks, then leave a fat little ginger, no longer fit to lead the beasts against my armies.” While Suvani seemed to mull it over, Oji laid his head on his paws and rolled his eyes in digust at the overacting queen.
Suvani turned back to Oji. “How about three mice? Just to show me that you’re motivated enough to be my loyal opposition and put up a good enough fight to cement my reign in the history books? Call it a kingly test?”
“You’re not serious, and I don’t believe you, so why don’t you just whack my cage again and leave me be?”
“Of course I’m serious.”
“If this isn’t a joke, then why are you asking me to eat my subjects? That’s ridiculous.”
“But cats do eat mice, Oji. Besides, I don’t need them anymore. They’ve served their purpose, or rather, they haven’t, as they were intended to annoy you, not befriend you.”
“Kings don’t have friends.”
“Then you’ll do it?” Suvani’s wicked smile spread like a disease, first widening from one ear to another, and then spiking up by way of the dimples to the points of wicked mirth in her eyes.
Oji pondered only for a moment. While he had been tempted by the constant presence of the mice, if he did not answer her in less than a few heartbeats, the uneasiness of the mice would became distrust, and distrust was a verminous thing that spread by rumor and might eventually corrupt his reign before it started.
“Since you won’t go away unless I answer your question, how does ‘no’ strike you?”
While Suvani did not seem displeased or surprised, her smile died a little, descending from its grotesque leer to a smirk of contentment. “I should have liked to see you eat the mice. I had hoped to see you eat a dozen of them before passing out, then starting fresh tomorrow.”
“If wishes were fishes and so forth…” muttered Oji.
“Wishes: nine parts prideful and vicious,
one part insightful, in whole delicious.”
When the griffin spoke, Suvani’s eyes flicked over to it, and her smile faded. “Could you stomach a griffin, Oji?” When the cat only shrugged, and did not otherwise dignify that question with a response, she continued. “This beast is more like you than you know, Oji. Because it thinks itself unbreakable, I must exhaust my invention in various torments, both slight and huge. I wonder if it might eat a mouse for freedom?” When the swatting of the idle griffin’s tail stopped with one final flick against the ground, and the griffin’s wobbly eyes fixed upon the queen, she snickered, and said, “only a hypothetical question, mind you.” Suvani smacked herself on the forehead. “I have just the thing, Oji! While your conceit is that you’re the prince of the talking animals, surely you don’t have any sovereignity over a monster like this.”
Bringing her feet together and raising her arms wide, so that she took the rough shape of a wineglass, Suvani intoned dark gibberish, and as the verse went on, her hands swirled, and a black fire crept along the fingertips. With each verse, her voice ascended to a crescendo, until she reached a resounding exclamation point, at which point her arms whipped down and a cascade of the eldritch energies consumed the griffin.
The flung fire produced neither smoke nor more flame, but immediately seemed to dwindle with the diminishing form of the griffin, until it puffed away into nothingness, leaving a mouse in its place.
“What about this faker, Oji?” Suvani reached between the bars, seized the stunned mouse, and gripped it so cruelly in her hand that its tiny head turned blue.
“Please don’t kill him,” said Oji.
“Of course not! You’re going to kill him, Oji.”
“I would never!”
“Not only is he not a real mouse, he’s not your subject, either. You get to satisfy my peculiar request, I get to satisfy my wicked desire to see the rebel prince eat a thinking beast, and we both get the righteous battle that we crave. It’s perfect, Oji. Eat him!” Picking up Oji’s food tray from the ground, Suvani wiped the moist meat onto the grass, then used it to slide the griffin-turned-mouse into Oji’s cage.
If Oji was frightened before, it was nothing compared to the terror he felt now, seeing the queen’s power. While Oji himself had mastered the shapes of both cat and human, Suvani’s magic was so mighty that she had perfect transformation, able to shift not only her own form, but that of any other, and even take a fabled beast like the griffin and dissolve it into a measly mouse.
But even louder than his heart-pounding terror was his revulsion for Suvani, who was less interested in magical transformations than in moral transformations; while flesh was clay to her spells, she wasn’t happy unless her grasping spite was wet with moral clay. She hoped to bend Oji into a cannibal, a monster that ate another thinking being. Even if he knew that the griffin had eaten talking animals and humans when it could get them, he still would be loath to devour another thinking being, no matter how crude the personality. And somehow he doubted that a beast who denied himself food for so long, who thought nothing of hunger so long as it was enslaved, would have ever eaten another person.
“Have you had your fun?” Oji asked. “I’m not hungry. Moreover, I’m not evil. Go away.”
“Not hungry. Not evil. You’re not even a cat! Not for long.” While Suvani smiled, it seemed only her plastic default, for her eyes were burning, and when she pointed her finger at Oji, it was so hyperextended that it nearly bent double, and with its cruelly sharp red nail at its tip, looked like a tiny bloodied scimitar. As the spell bubbled out of her mouth and fizzed around Oji, he absurdly tried to shake his fur, as if he could scatter the transforming fire like rain, but it was to no avail.
As he shrunk and contracted, the bars became like rails, and greased as they were with Gandra’s meat missile, when his mouse feet straddled them, he worried that he might slide right through them to the ground. He had heard that mice can survive much higher falls, but did not want to test that theory, not when Suvani was so dead set on proving her own vile theories.
When the Alsantian queen’s gigantic head came under the cage, her nostrils gaped into snaky depths, and her gigantic mouth was twisted in pleasure. Pinching him between forefinger and thumb, she plucked him from between the bars so quckly that he felt their clench drag at his legs and ribs.
“As I said—art value aside—I have no use for mice.” Suvani plucked the other mouse, which shuddered with terror notwithstanding that until minutes before it had the heart of an eagle, the paws of a lion, and the languishing soul of a poet. “And I’ve never taken back a gift—although, just as I like to redistribute nature’s gifts, I might regift a rudely received present.”
Reaching up to the other cat’s cage, she tipped in the squeaking mouse, which was received with the lazy relish that you might expect from a recently fed cat. When the squeaks became pinched, pitiful whistles, Suvani’s smile dried up at once into a grim satisfaction. “He knows how to enjoy a gift. He’ll play with that one for a while, I think.”
When Oji squirmed in her grasp, her smile again blossomed like a snaky, ghastly weed, and she leered down at him pinned to her palm under her nails. Gagging on the odor of her resinous violet nail polish, which mingled with her palm scent, some sickeningly sweet lotion redolent with lilacs, and the mousy smell of his own fur—an odor still appetizing to his feline memory, and churning up saliva and an urge to chew—Oji the mouse felt his gorge rise with each wriggle of his body. “Don’t fret, mouse prince. You’re much too rich a gift for such a plain tabby.”
Taking Oji to the cage door of the scratching post tower, she unlocked it, flicked it open, and cast Oji inside. “Don’t think of it as home, Oji. I certainly didn’t intend to lodge these vermin on their own account. Without a cat prince as the centerpiece for my exhibition, I see it as more of a dustbin, and these rodents might as well be dust mice for all I care. But for the sake of the cat that you used to be—who, no longer with us in the flesh, is more ghost than memory—I’ll let the dust settle before the trash fire. So settle in, my prince. It won’t be long.” Suvani locked the mouse tower and stepped toward the menagerie gate.
“What bites with pleasure, circles like a vulture, and screeches like a harpy?” Although the tragedy thus far had passed in miniature before the sphinx, with one noble frienemy under the paw of a merciless and mindless cat, and her newest neighbor swept in with the verminous crumbs, her face now loomed up in large before the queen. If murder was a measuring cup filled with brooding, the sphinx’s glowering poured in a half-cup at one glare.
“What gusts like wind, speaks its catty mind, and is locked in with a riddle?” Suvani cackled at last, making Oji a prophet but no less a rodent tumbling down the neck of a tube of meshed cages, deeper and deeper into the upcoming stage for the queen’s mouse inferno.
shoreless seas and stars uncounted 