The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

“A colleague of ours back uptime,” Rhiow said to Hwaith, who was possibly understandably looking a little bewildered. “A surprisingly senior colleague for someone so new at the job, too. He’s Arhu’s big brother.”

Hwaith gave Rhiow a look that suggested he thought he was having his tail pulled. Rhiow had to chuckle. “It’s a long story…”

“Looks like the locals knew Ith way back when,” Urruah said to Arhu. “Or rather, they know what he’s become since you and Ith started rewriting thte Great Serpent’s story…”

Arhu moved on to the next case. “Here,” he said. “Here’s one that we have a copy of.” He paused in front of a fired clay tablet that had been broken into a number of pieces and carefully mended. Some of the gaps in the rubbing were not merely places where the characters were missing, but where they’d been actively obliterated by some ehhif with a sharp object. In other spots two or three of them were missing because the tablet itself had been broken there, and the material between either pulverized or otherwise lost.

“Okay,” Arhu said, and reared up on his hind legs to pat the glass with one paw. It went misty and indistinct, responding to yet another variant of the Mason’s Word that he’d apparently had ready. Arhu reared back on his hindquarters a little, then jumped up straight through the glass and into the case. He put a paw on the tablet and started talking quietly to it in the Speech. “It must have been awful to be hurt like that, after somebody went to all that trouble to make you. And then getting all busted up! Remember how it was when you were brand new and all in one piece? I’ll help you remember – “

Every wizard has a working style, and once more Rhiow found herself appreciating Arhu’s. What he might lack in structural sophistication when constructing a spell, he more than made up for in youthful enthusiasm and a kind of raw empathy that came across as very touching. It was no wonder that the tablet responded almost immediately. The resin binder that the museum’s restorers had used to replace the worst gaps in the tablet started fading out of sight, replaced by a clay-colored light that started settling gently into the gaps like water with silt in it. The memory of clay fired a thousand years past began rebuilding itself in the actual material: the tablet’s edges sharpened, the shapes of the carvings crisped all across the surface. Finally the effect began trembling in the pits and depressions where characters had been obliterated –

There was resistance. Arhu had stopped speaking out loud, now, and was using the Speech silently, impressing his desire on the tablet. It took more time than the general restoration had, but at last those final characters started filling themselves in. Arhu was breathing hard by the time the work was finished and the tablet sat whole and new-looking in the case.

As she and the others moved in for a closer look, though, Rhiow noticed that the reconstituted symbols seemed to be jittering a little in their places, as if they were having trouble staying restored. “Arhu,” she said —

“Yeah, I see it,” Arhu said, his voice sounding a little strained. “Whoever dug them out really wanted them gone. But I’ve copied this image to the paperwork in case the restitution gives way.”

“Nice technique there,” Hwaith said to Arhu. “Do you know which of these is next? I’ll get it ready for you.”

“Sure,” Arhu said. “It’s that one.” He indicated the first tablet, a round one, on a shelf in the next case. “And that one underneath it, next shelf down.”

“Right.”

Arhu looked back to the tablet he’d just restored. “Rhi, I really think this this is going to need a little of the Eye– “

“Do as much as you can without it,” Rhiow said.

He flicked an ear in agreement, and narrowed his eyes to see the tablet better. For some moments, though, he didn’t say anything, and Rhiow started to worry. “They’re not in some kind of code, are they?” she said, concerned. Normally for codes to be made intelligible to a wizard, at least the cultural context for them had to still be available in some living mind, or recorded in the general knowledge base of some living culture. But if it isn’t –

“No, nothing like that,” Arhu said after a moment. “It’s complicated. But the Whisperer’s helping me. These people’s calendars were really accurate, but so weird in terms of how they divided the months and stuff! They had everything from those thirteen-day cycles Helen mentioned to ones that went on for two hundred sixty days… and then much longer ones based on Venus’s orbit and Iau knows what else.” His tail twitched idly as he worked out what he was looking at. “But there’s one really long sequence called the Long Count… and this stuff has to do with that. There were shorter cycles buried in it: hundreds of years instead of hundreds of days or months. And the dates make sense now that the missing stuff’s in place.”

Arhu paused, studying the tablet. “So what we’ve got here are three sets of dates. There are these three long recurring cycles – one that’s three hundred ninety-four years, that’s a b’ak’tun, and one that’s fifty-four, and one that’s eleven. And there are three short cycles of days or months, and three that are very short, just hours or minutes. At very long intervals, all nine cycles coincide. Looks like someone way back when made a list of when the cycles were scheduled to intersect next…”

Urruah looked over at Rhiow. “The Lady in Black did mention ‘three times three times three’…”

She waved her tail at him in agreement. Arhu meanwhile sat there squinting at the characters for a few seconds more, while his off ear flicked again a couple of times as if someone was whispering in it. “Getting it now,” he said. “The years don’t just have numbers, but animal names. All of these are Years of the Black Jaguar.”

The fur stood up all over Rhiow.

“You don’t seem to get a whole lot of those,” Arhu said, laying a paw on one or another symbol to get a clearer reading. “But when you do get a Great Coincidence, it comes in a double pair with another one that’s fairly close: then they don’t repeat again for a good while. The places on the tablet where somebody came in and chipped out the characters – that’s the last time the cycles coincided.” His far ear flickered again as the Whisperer said something in it. “The way ehhif reckon time, the first coincidence started on June twelfth, nine thirty-one A.D. and ran through till that June fourteenth. Then there was another one that ran from April fifth, nine ninety-four A.D. until April seventh–“

“And the time after that?” Urruah said, his voice completely steady and unconcerned.

Arhu peered at it. “From July twenty-first to July twenty-third, nineteen forty-six…”

Rhiow gulped. From last night until tomorrow night…

“And the rest of that pair is June seventh and June ninth – “

“Of this year,” Urruah said almost inaudibly. “Our this year, uptime.”

“Yeah,” Arhu said… and only then realized what he’d said, and licked his nose several times in rapid succession.

The terror took Rhiow by the throat and squeezed. We’re too late, she thought. Whatever’s going to happen has already started happening! Yet she forced herself to calm down, for there was no proof that they were too late. In fact, the Powers prefer to intervene at the last minute. It gives the Lone One less warning of what They’re about to do, and less chance to find a defense…

“All right,” Rhiow said, working to keep her voice under control. “The question now becomes one of what exactly is supposed to happen.”

“These are ready for you,” Hwaith said from inside the next case.

Arhu paced past the tablets in the case where he’d been working and jumped across into the next one as Hwaith stepped back to make room for him. “Thanks,” he said, looking at the next tablet, which though square had a circular design in the middle and various other pictographs and signs in the corners. “Yeah, this is about the Coincidence too. ‘In this time and only this time may the Dark One become the Shadow of the great and deadly Silence that comes from outside all that is, the Devourer of Worlds: and the greater makes the lesser Its own for that time.” Arhu turned his head to follow the symbols around the curve of the circle. “Yet only by beings within the world may this identity come to be so forged, when they shed blood in rivers, denying their kinship with their own kind, willingly driving out life for death’s and power’s sake.” Now he was standing with his head practically upside down. “Then at such a time if such beings so seek their freedom as to bring about the fulfillment of their desires at the utmost price, they shall have their will, and pay that price; for even the God of gods, in wisdom or folly, has not denied them this freedom, either to preserve their worlds or destroy them…”

Arhu straightened up, and spent a moment wiggling his head around to try to get a kink out of it. “Anything more on that one?” Urruah said.

“No,” Arhu said, jumping down to the second tablet that Hwaith had reconstructed. “Those are just decorations.”

“Good,” Urruah said. He sounded terribly calm, but Rhiow could feel him managing himself as rigorously as she was doing. The last thing either of them dared to do right now was upset Arhu and possibly interfere with his ability to read clearly what he was seeing. “Got that copied too?”

“Did that first thing,” Arhu said. He now sat down in front of the third tablet, which was densely packed with the squarish pictographs, written very small.

“Wow,” he said after a moment.

Hwaith gave him a look. “Wow?”

Arhu’s tail twitched back and forth as he tried to work out what he was looking at. “Whoever wrote this didn’t believe in putting things in order,” he said. And his face wrinkled a little in distaste, like that of a Person smelling something bad. “It’s all scrambled up. The first part is something about ‘The Dark Rift’. And something comes out of it, and it’s really angry. ‘For long has it been confined in the dark, and kept from its home.’And then there’s stuff about blood, too much blood being shed…”

“I hear a theme starting to develop,” Rhiow said, not at all happy about it, and still working to keep her reaction from interfering with Arhu’s work.

Arhu was silent for a moment, his tail stil twitching. “After that it mentions the stars a few times,” he said, sounding confused. “The stars coming out. But ‘after the devouring, the stars are dark…’ Then there are some more date references: to our own time – that last set of dates. And something about the Jaguar again. ‘In the Black Jaguar’s mouth’ – that’s the dark rift again — ‘the Serpent shall be seen, and again they shall struggle. But the struggle shall not go again as it has.’”

The Serpent again, Urruah said privately to Rhiow. Are you starting to think that someone who’s not here really ought to be along on this party?

I was thinking that this morning, Rhiow said. Wait a little –

“Then,” Arhu said, “it says – “ And he stopped. “Rhi, I’ve been really good so far… but this thing’s resisting me. I have to use the Eye.”

“You’ve done brilliantly to get so much out of these as you have without it,” Rhiow said. “Go ahead.”

He leaned close to the tablet and held quite still for a few moments. Rhiow held her breath. Around them all the feel of the room altered subtly as Arhu’s vision of the tablet briefly superseded theirs. Everything else went shadowy compared to the ancient carved designs, which grew deep with uncomfortable meaning. “Now comes the Roar that bursts the earth and lets in the bitter seas, that breaks the dark and frees its dwellers to do battle with the light…”

They could see it as Arhu did – the vast shattering crash of inimical power that waited to wash across the planet, to set the crust cracking and the outraged oceans rushing into new beds as magma broke up through the old ones. The Earth tore itself apart in growing darkness, the sun vanishing in an atmosphere full of the dust and ash thrown up from the broken surface and the thousands of volcanic eruptions along the fragmenting continental plates. Soon there was no light anywhere but the smothering fire breaking up from the planet’s outraged mantle. Then even that faded.The reek of death filled heaven and earth as all life that had not already died in fire or water now began to do so in ice and darkness…

And it would not stop there, of course. The destruction would spread unimaginably far, the outflooding darkness killing every living world and smothering the stars. “Yet if the Roar is not heard,” Arhu said, as everything went dark, “then shall life be spared until the day, and the hour of the day, shall come again, and life shall again be offered the choice to live or to die forever…”

…and the Earth turned bright again under the sun, unharmed, placid.

The vision faded. Arhu took his paws away from the tablet, shaking his head, and paused to catch his breath. The others looked at each other, unnerved. “Boy,” Urruah said, “you’d really rather be somewhere else when Tepeyollotl lets out with that big meow.”

“But the runup to these events has happened at least once,” Rhiow said. “And the world’s still here. Why?”

“Something must have averted the worst of it,” Hwaith said.

“But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t still serious effects. Remember when Helen said the Mayans abandoned their cities?”

“The tenth century…” Urruah said, and licked his nose. The suggestion fit the dates too well.

Rhiow shivered all over. “We’re going to have to make sense of this as quickly as we can,” she said. In the case, Arhu was making his way down two cases to one of the remaining objects from which rubbings had been made. It was neither clay nor ceramic, but a plain smooth slab, maybe an ehhif foot wide and two feet long, of carved white jade. Temporarily restored to its pristine condition by Hwaith’s wizardry, it was extremely beautiful, even in its mended state. But it had been most comprehensively broken – shattered into six large pieces and numerous smaller fragments.

“Somebody,” Hwaith said, looking up at it, “meant for any reader to understand that this was important. In that culture, gold was all over the place… but jade was precious.”

Urruah was looking at it with great interest. “Yeah,” he said. “This isn’t just someone’s ‘keep off the grass’ sign. What I’d like to know, though, is why someone tried to hard to destroy it. Anyway — Arhu?”

“Yeah,” Arhu said, and sat down in front of the slab, once again bracing himself against it with his forepaws as he Looked at it.

If the last tablet had immediately been eloquent of utmost disaster when viewed with the Eye, this one was less instantly forthcoming – yet it also had a disquieting feel to it, as if it held hidden some secret that might be even more difficult to deal with than a universe’s destruction. “It says the Rift is the key,” Arhu said. “Xibalba Be, the Black Rift, the Dark Mouth…” Rhiow’s vision, like Arhu’s, filled with the image of a huge irregular band of darkness stretching across the otherwise bright streak of the Galaxy.