Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse (22 page)

‘But the Cattermune goes everywhere,’ Fanetta said. ‘That is, everywhere he can. To all the junctions. And he has spies everywhere else. Where could you go where he wouldn’t suspect you’d be?’

‘To Cattermune’s Pique,’ said Mondragon. ‘All of us.’

‘To the Pique?’ she screamed. ‘But that’s where …’

‘Exactly. That is where,’ asserted Mondragon. ‘Precisely why he won’t look for us there.’

‘You can’t throw a one,’ Fanetta objected. ‘You just can’t.’

‘They’re my dice,’ said Mondragon, fishing a particular die from his pocket. ‘I can throw anything I please. Hold on to me, please. We’re about to go elsewhere.’

The dragon soared above the forests and moors of Cattermune’s Pique holding a turquoise tortoise firmly in his left foretalon. On his shoulders sat an amethyst ape wearing a peculiar hat and holding a malachite mouse firmly on his lap. From the dragon’s rear talons dangled a gneissic gnu which had not ceased bleating since they had begun the flight.

‘Where are we going?’ asked the mouse plaintively. ‘Where are we from?’

‘Down,’ cried the ape to the dragon. ‘She doesn’t remember where we are.’

‘In a moment,’ bellowed the dragon. ‘I’ve spotted a likely lair.’ They slanted through the darkling air toward a many forked peak with a cloud of bats circling it. ‘Bats mean caves.’

‘So they do,’ said the ape. He stared at the mouse for a moment, then removed his peculiar hat and placed the mouse in it.

‘How are you managing, Marianne?’ he asked.

‘Aghrehond?’ the mouse said plaintively. ‘Is that you?’

‘I believe so,’ he said.

‘Where’s Dagma?’

‘Dangling, at the moment. As is Fanetta. I believe Makr Avehl has found us a lair.’

‘These changes of shape are unsettling,’ she complained. ‘I feel very peculiar.’

The dragon’s wings cupped the air and he settled toward a stony step beside a dark cavity in the mountain. Laden as he was, the landing was not smooth, and the ape clutched the mouse in the hat to keep her from being thrown into the chasm beside them.

‘A likely place,’ said the dragon. ‘Feels like home.’

‘Not to me,’ said the tortoise.

‘Nor me,’ bleated the gnu. ‘A nice veldt. A bit of grass. A few hundred thousand close friends. Now that would be home.’

‘Put the hat on them both,’ said the mouse. ‘They’re silly.’

The ape complied, applying Groff’s rememberer first to the gnu and then to the tortoise. Both made noises of astonishment and then settled into a meditative mood, staring down on the stretching moors from their high roost.

‘What’s going to happen now?’ asked the tortoise.

‘It will depend,’ said the dragon. ‘It will depend on how clever the Cattermune is. On how well he can put two and two together. On whether the immigration manager noticed who came into the game last.’

The mouse nodded. ‘You mean, it all depends on who they’re looking for.’

‘Exactly. It won’t take them long to figure out that one of the last players to enter the game brought the anchor – that is, the matchbox – back to Cattermune’s House. The arrival of the matchbox at Cattermune’s House is what shut down the entry port. Now, if Marianne and Dagma and you, Aghrehond, have attracted no notice whatsoever …’

‘I’m afraid she has,’ said the tortoise. ‘She was in the paper. At Frab Junction. A pig interviewed her in the Dinosaur Zoo. A lot of stuff about being pregnant. It was obvious from what she said that she hadn’t been in the game long …’

‘And there was Buttercup,’ said the mouse in a rueful voice. ‘She saw me when I left Buttercup for G’nop. Buttercup is still very early in her reign, so she’d know that it wasn’t long ago. Though by that time I had been in Buttercup for eight years.’

‘Game time,’ mused the dragon. ‘Game time hardly counts. Eight years,’ he snapped his talons. ‘No time at all. Now, the Illusion Fields, that might be a bit of time.’

‘Ten thousand years,’ said the mouse. ‘But that’s no time, either. The pig I met at the zoo had been there for a whole ten thousand, but this game has only been going for fifty!’

‘But a Forever …’ mused the gnu. ‘A Forever is a Forever, no matter what. Everyone says so. A Forever really is.’

‘That’s what the pig said, too. Ta-ta, she said. Good-bye and gone forever.’ The mouse sighed, scratching behind an ear with one hind foot. ‘Gone forever.’

‘Right,’ said the dragon. ‘I think you may safely say that a Forever is a Forever. Though at the moment I’m not sure that’s relevant to anything. Ape, do you see something over there on the causeway?’

The lands of Cattermune’s Pique were bisected by a dike, mounted high above the surrounding moors and copses, topped by a wide road. At the far end of this road, almost at the limit of their vision, there seemed to be something going on.

‘All I can see is movement,’ said the ape. ‘Your eyes should be better than mine.’

‘I would have thought so,’ said the dragon. ‘And yet, I can’t make it out with any clarity.’

‘You don’t need to make it out,’ whined the gnu. ‘You know what it is. It’s the hunt. Cattermunes out of their clothes, running naked on all fours, their teeth showing. Cattermunes and their “guests.” Queen Buttercup – she’ll be right in with the rest of them, though they’ll have to give her a wagon to ride in.’

‘What are they hunting?’ asked the dragon, sucking a fang. ‘I thought it was binkers.’

‘We’re binkers, stupid,’ cried the gnu. ‘Out here we’re whatever we are, good sport, good hunting, but when they take our carcasses back to Cattermune’s House, we’re binkers. Meat for the table and guts for the Worm Pits, that’s what we are.’ She began sobbing. ‘I should have just stayed in the walls where I was.’

‘Do you think they’ll see us up here? If we go in the cave?’

‘Cattermunes? Don’t be silly! They can smell an ant from a mile away, see a flea at the bottom of a chasm. They’ve already seen you, Dragon. And me, most likely.’

‘But they can’t know that we …’

‘Doesn’t matter do they know, don’t they know. They’re hunting. Everything that moves. Anything that lives.’

‘It does matter,’ said the mouse firmly. ‘We’ve got the matchbox, and we’ve got to keep them from getting it. Even if they get us, they mustn’t get the matchbox.’

‘True,’ the ape remarked. ‘The Cattermune would simply put it in place again, even though it would take fifty years and the blood of fifty Cattermunes to do it.’

‘Ah,’ mused the dragon. ‘I’d wondered about that.’

‘What will we do?’ cried the gnu.

‘Hide, for starters,’ said the dragon, eyes firmly fixed on the distant causeway. He could see them now, Cattermunes in their striped hided hundreds, packs of them running along the roadway on their padded feet, teeth gleaming like diamonds. Behind them rolled a light carriage with Buttercup driving a team of four matched Cattermunes, young ones, yowling as they raced after their unburdened elders.

‘No weapons,’ remarked the dragon.

‘Claws. Fangs. Speed. Strength. Endurance,’ murmured the gnu. ‘Who needs more than that.’

‘In their portraits, they all had weapons,’ said the ape. ‘I remember it distinctly.’

‘Convention,’ said the tortoise. ‘Mere convention. In order to appear civilized.’

‘All aboard,’ said the dragon. ‘Let’s get out of sight.’ He waited until the ape was seated, grasped the other two in the nearest available talons, and launched himself off the mountain peak, down into the canyon, dropping below the level of the treetops as he sailed downward.

‘It won’t do any good,’ muttered the gnu. ‘They’ll smell you.’

‘A delaying action,’ murmured the dragon through his teeth. ‘While I’m thinking.’

‘What are you thinking?’ begged the mouse.

‘Where to hide that matchbox so that Cattermune will never find it.’

‘In a Forever, obviously,’ grunted the gnu.

‘And who’s going to take it there,’ snorted the tortoise. ‘Did I hear you volunteering?’

The gnu was silent.

The dragon landed among some towering trees at one side of the canyon. ‘Explain it to me,’ he demanded of the gnu. ‘How do you get from one square to another?’

‘Concentrate on where you intend to go, then throw the right number,’ said the gnu.

‘Let’s say you intended to go to – oh – Mother’s Smithy,’ the dragon mused. ‘And you needed a six but somehow threw a four. What would happen?’

‘You’d go toward Mother’s Smithy,’ said the gnu, ‘but you’d stop two squares short. Except if you’d been on that square before, you’d skip to the next one. Unless it was a junction, of course. If it was a junction, you’d stop there.’

‘Ah,’ said the dragon.

‘Ah,’ said the mouse.

‘Um,’ said the ape.

‘I’ve caused you all a great deal of trouble,’ said the tortoise sadly. ‘We may never get out of here.’

‘True,’ said the dragon. ‘Perfectly true. Though – there may be a way.’

The sound of yowling brought their heads up. Somewhere on the slopes behind them were Cattermunes, coming closer.

‘Tell me,’ the dragon said to the ape in a conversational tone of voice while examining the talons of his left forefoot, ‘do the Cattermunes gamble?’

‘There are gaming rooms,’ the ape said in an uncertain voice. ‘I’ve seen the rooms, but never with anyone in them.’

‘Of course they gamble,’ said the gnu. ‘There’s no bad habit the Cattermunes don’t have. Can we get out of here. They’re coming very close.’

‘Does
the
Cattermune himself play dice …?’

‘He plays dice with his brothers, after dinner usually.’ The gnu shifted restlessly. ‘Those hunting Cattermunes are really coming quite close.’

‘Is
the
Cattermune hunting with the ones who are after us?’

‘He never leaves Cattermune’s House. I heard him say once that leaving Cattermune’s House was just an invitation to sedition. He likes to keep an eye on things. Ah. Oh. I just saw four Cattermunes coming over the ridge.’ The gnu sounded rather hopeless, as though she believed they were done for.

‘Just leaving,’ said the dragon, picking her up and bearing down on both wings, throwing dust in the approaching Cattermunes’ eyes.

He darted away down the canyon like a swallow, slipping behind standing pillars of stone and through tall-trunked trees, bearing toward the causeway entrance to Cattermune’s Pique. ‘I’m going to drop you all close to the border,’ he said softly, barely audible over the sound of his own wings. ‘Ape, I want you to hide Mouse, Tortoise, and yourself and stay hidden. Mouse, I will need the matchbox. Gnu, you’re coming back with me, back to Cattermune’s House.’

‘Thank Moomaw,’ bleated the gnu. ‘If I have to die, I’d rather die as Fanetta in the walls than out here like some poor beast.’

The dragon dropped to the ground and relieved himself of his passengers. ‘Quickly,’ he steamed. ‘A hiding place.’

‘Nothing much except a hollow tree here,’ suggested the ape. ‘We’d fit nicely, except that the hollow is quite visible.’

‘Give me the matchbox,’ the dragon demanded. He took it, tucking it into a corner of his mouth, behind the dagger-shaped teeth. ‘Now get yourselves in,’ and he thrust them toward the tree hollow with buffets of great wings. ‘There will be some flame out here, deodorizing, so to speak, so they don’t smell you. Then I’m going to lead them away.
You are to stay put
. I don’t care what you hear, stay where you are.’

They crawled into the tree hollow, a tall cylinder of punky brown wood with beetles crawling up and down the cracks and light slanting down on them from places where branches had rotted out. Fine dust sifted in the beams of light. Mouse sneezed. Ape sat down, putting Tortoise beside him and Mouse on his shoulder. Through a small hole she could see the dragon picking up stones and placing them in front of the hole through which they had crawled. The hollow grew dim. There was a vast roaring, as of some great furnace. Wisps of smoke crept into the hollow. Mouse sneezed again, her eyes watering. When she looked out once more the dragon was aloft and the clearing behind him was blackened by flame and veiled with smoke.

‘I can’t smell anything but burning,’ sniffed the tortoise.

‘I think that was the idea,’ said the ape. ‘He’ll let them see him and the gnu. He’ll lead them away. And then what?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said Mouse sadly. ‘I don’t know anything with any certainty except that I’m almost sure I just had a labor pain.’

‘We’d better be silent,’ said the tortoise. ‘Cattermunes will probably come to investigate the smoke.’

Which they did only moments later, in howling groups, sniffing and yowling, standing on their hind legs to claw at the trees around the hollow, jumping high to catch a glimpse of the fleeing dragon, then leaping away in the direction the dragon had gone.

‘Somehow, when they have their clothes on, they don’t look exactly like that,’ said the mouse.

‘Sweet Marianne,’ said the ape. ‘They look feral in any guise. How could I have accepted service in such a beastly hole as that?’

‘Because you didn’t remember anything,’ said the tortoise plaintively. ‘One can accept almost anything if one doesn’t remember anything. Do you suppose one remembers anything in a Forever? Or is it just day on day, with everything new.’