‘You aren’t going anywhere without me, Althalus. Get used to the idea that I’m going to be with you for the rest of your life – and you’re going to live for a very, very long time. You’ve been chosen to do some things and I’ve been chosen to make sure you do them right. Your life’s going to be much easier once you accept that.’
‘How did we get chosen – and who did the choosing?’
She reached up and patted his cheek with one soft paw. ‘We’ll get to that later’, she assured him. ‘You might have a little trouble accepting it right at first. Now then, why don’t we get started?’ She hopped down from the bed, crossed to the table, and without any seeming effort leaped up and sat on the polished surface. ‘Time to go to work, pet,’ she said. ‘Come over here and sit down while I teach you how to read.’
The ‘reading’ involved the translation of stylized pictures, much as it had in Ghend’s Book. The pictures represented words. That came rather easily with concrete words such as ‘tree’, or ‘rock’, or ‘pig’. The pictures that represented concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, or ‘honesty’, were more difficult.
Althalus was adaptable – a thief almost has to be – but the situation here took some getting used to. Food simply appeared on the table whenever he grew hungry. It startled him the first few times it happened, but after a while, he didn’t even pay attention to it any more. Even miracles become commonplace if they happen often enough.
Winter arrived at the edge of the world, and as it settled in, the sun went away and perpetual night arrived. The cat patiently explained it, but Althalus only dimly understood her explanation. He could accept it intellectually, but it still seemed to him that the sun moved around the earth instead of the other way around. With the coming of that endless night, he lost all track of days. When you get right down to it, he reasoned, there simply weren’t any days any more. He stopped looking out the windows altogether. It was almost always snowing anyway, and snow depressed him.
He was making some progress with his reading. After he’d come across one of the pictures often enough, he automatically recognized it. Words became the center of his attention.
‘You weren’t always a cat, were you?’ he asked his companion once when the two of them were lying on the fur-covered bed after they’d eaten.
‘I thought I’d already told you that,’ she said.
‘What were you before?’
She gave him a long, steady look with her glowing green eyes. ‘You aren’t quite ready for that information yet, Althalus. You’re fairly well settled down now. I don’t want you to start bouncing off the walls the way you did when you first arrived.’
‘Did you have a name – before you became a cat, I mean?’
‘Yes. You probably wouldn’t be able to pronounce it, though. Why do you ask?’
‘It just doesn’t seem right for me to keep calling you “cat”. That’s like saying “donkey” or “chicken”. Would it upset you if I gave you a name?’
‘Not if it’s a nice name. I’ve heard some of the words you use when you think I’m asleep. I wouldn’t like one of those.’
‘I sort of like “Emerald”, because of your eyes.’
‘I could live with that, yes. I had a very nice emerald once – before I came here. I used to hold it up in the sunlight to watch it glow.’
‘Then you had arms before you became a cat, and hands as well,’ he said shrewdly.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. Now would you like to make some guesses about how many and where they were attached to me?’ She gave him an arch look. ‘Stop fishing, Althalus. Someday you’ll find out who I really am, and it might surprise you, but you don’t need to know that right now.’
‘Maybe I don’t,’ he said slyly, ‘but every now and then, you make a slip, and I keep track of those slips. It won’t be too long before I know pretty much what you used to be.’
‘Not until I’m ready for you to know, you won’t,’ she told him. ‘You need to concentrate right now, Althalus, and if I used my real form here in the House, you wouldn’t be able to do that.’
‘That bad?’
She snuggled up against him and started to purr. ‘You’ll see, pet,’ she said. ‘You’ll see.’
Despite her rather superior attitude – which Althalus strongly suspected had been a part of her original nature – Emerald was an affectionate creature who always wanted to be in close physical contact with him. He slept on the thickly furred bison robes on the stone bed, and she always snuggled up to him, purring contentedly. Right at first he didn’t care for that, so he made a practice of covering himself with his wool cloak and holding it tightly around his neck. Emerald would sit quite calmly at the foot of the bed watching him. Then, as he started to drift off to sleep and his grip relaxed, she would silently creep up the bed until she was just behind his head. Then she would skillfully touch her cold, wet nose to the back of his neck, and Althalus would automatically flinch away from that surprising touch. That was all she needed to burrow down under the cloak, and she would settle down against his back and purr. Her purring was really very soothing, so he didn’t mind having her there. She seemed to get a great deal of entertainment out of the game, though, so Althalus continued to clench his cloak up around his neck so that she could surprise him in the same way each time they slept. It didn’t really cost him anything, and as long as it amused her . . .
She had one habit, though, that he really wished she’d get over. Every so often, Emerald seemed to develop an overpowering urge to bathe his face – usually when he was sound asleep. His eyes would suddenly pop open, and he’d realize that she had her paws firmly wrapped half-way around his head to hold him in place while she licked him from chin to forehead with her rough, wet tongue. He tried to jerk away from her the first few times, but as soon as he started to move, she’d flex her paws slightly, and her claws would come out. He got the point almost immediately. He didn’t really care for those impromptu baths, but he learned to endure them. There are always adjustments to be made when two creatures set up housekeeping together, and – aside from a few bad habits – Emerald wasn’t really all that hard to get along with.
Although the permanent night which blanketed the far north had taken away anything he could really call ‘day’, Althalus was fairly sure that the routine they followed probably coincided rather closely with the rising and setting of the sun farther to the south. He had no real reason for that belief and no way to verify it, but it seemed to him that it made more sense to think of it that way.
His ‘days’ were spent at the table with the Book open before him and with Emerald seated beside the Book, watching. Their conversations were largely limited to his pointing at an unfamiliar symbol and asking, ‘What’s this one mean?’ She would tell him, and he’d stumble along until he came to another unintelligible picture. The parchment sheets were loose inside the white leather box, and Emerald became very upset if he got them back in the wrong order. ‘It doesn’t make any sense if you mix them up like that,’ she’d scold him.
‘A lot of it doesn’t make sense anyway.’
‘Put them back the way you found them.’
‘All right, all right. Don’t tie your tail in a knot.’ That remark always seemed to trigger one of their little mock tussles. Emerald would lay her ears back, crouch low over her front paws and, with her bottom raised up and swinging back and forth ominously, her tail swished. Then she’d leap on his hand and mouth it. She’d never extend her claws and, though she growled terribly, she never actually bit him.
His best response to that was to take his other hand and thoroughly stir up her fur. She seemed to hate that, since it took her quite a while to comb everything back in place with her tongue.
Since Emerald was a cat – at least for right