Richard Wolkomir & Joyce Rogers Wolkomir

(Opening scene of a Fantasy Novel in the Works)
by
Richard Wolkomir
© 2010 Richard Wolkomir


“Come,” said the cat.

She licked a paw.

He did not know what to say to a cat. And so he slouched in his chair, scowling at her.

“It is time,” the cat told him.

She yawned, unpleasantly, showing tiny, pointed teeth.

He said nothing.

She was not a village cat. He knew them all, and all the dogs, and all the other village beasts, tame or wild. She had come from the forest. He knew that. She had come through the open window into his hut. And now she sat on his table, beside the apple he had been eating for supper. She looked at him with faintly malevolent blue eyes. She was a black cat, with white whiskers, this cat of the forest.

She licked a different paw.

“They summon you,” the cat said. “Come.”

“No,” he said.

Anyone looking through the window of the hut, seeing the two sitting in the lamplight, the cat and the youth, would have seen nothing peculiar, such as a conversation between a young man and an animal. No lips moved. Only minds moved.

He had never heard an animal speak like this. Since childhood, in his mind, he had heard their whisperings. And as he grew, they became louder, those whispered voices, clearer. But mostly they spoke of seeds, rich in good oils, or of sunshine on fur, making you sleepy. Some, ascending the village’s oaks, expressed joy in high-branch leaping. They spoke of such simple pleasures, and of fear, anger, hunger, satiation, contentment, desire. But this cat spoke as a person might speak, almost.

“It is time,” she said.

He felt her interest dwindle.

She had done as bade. This lanky young man meant nothing to her, with his long hay-colored hair, so needful of licking, and his ragged mustache. Her tail thrashed irritably across the table. He glimpsed her thought, of peering into the darkness under forest trees, for squeakers. A paw flashes out, snatches.

She was gone.

Out the window. Back into the forest.

“They summon you,” she had said.

Who those summoners might be, he guessed.

And he said, “No.”


After the cat left, Wil Deft sat slumped in his chair, frowning, yellow mustache curled down. Abruptly, he shuddered. He grabbed his leather jacket, where it lay on the floor, and hurried out, shaking his head as if to erase what was in it.

He found his way through Fishtown’s dark streets by slivers of lantern light shining through shutter chinks. But mostly he remembered how the cobblestones felt underfoot, worn here, broken there, and then two missing, marking where he must turn down stone steps to the wharf. There he untied his battered skiff. Long ago he had spotted it floating down the river, probably loosed by some upstream storm, and he swam out to claim it. It was all he owned, besides his hut, inherited from his fisherman foster father and washerwoman foster mother, and his ragged clothes, and two fishlines and five hooks. Sometimes, when he needed a few easy coins, he rowed the skiff out to catch mudfish to sell to the smokehouses. But he mostly used the skiff as he used it tonight, to get to Horse Skull Island.

Only starlight’s silver glimmer on the water showed him the river. But he needed little light. He could navigate with his nose. Here by the docks, the river smelled of decaying wood pilings and waterweed and the shoreline smokehouses, where fish lay drying on pole racks. But as Wil oared the skiff out into the current, the river’s aroma freshened, deep water mixing with cool night air, touched with Fishtown’s hearth-fire smoke. Here the great river ran deep, and stretched nearly a mile across. Horse Skull Island lay midway, and already he smelled ale. He rowed toward the island’s southern tip.

Beyond the island, the far shore’s black hillside seemed sprinkled with yellow stars. It was lantern light, squeezing through cracks in the shuttered windows of Breming, a village a bit larger than Fishtown. As he rowed, Wil recited to himself a rhyme every Fishtown child could chant: “Breming men dig in bogs. Breming men smell like hogs.” Breming’s men did mostly dig peat, to ship downriver to the imperial city. Wil had been to Breming just once, as a child. To travel between villages, except on imperial business, was forbidden. But other children had dared him and his friend, Kobar, to go to Breming. And so they had rowed over in the night and walked along the wharves and a little up the central street. But then they fled, because the town’s strangeness made them uneasy, although they had difficulty explaining to the others, when they returned, exactly how Breming differed much from their own Fishtown.

Wil stopped rowing, to stare.

Breming’s lights, on its southern edge, winked out. More lights darkened. Now all Breming stood black.

And then he saw why.

A dark mass floated before him. Its bulk hid Breming and the far shore. After a while, in the starlight, he made it out: a great ship. It lay silent in the water, its lanterns cloaked. Every so often, its banked oars swept, steadying the ship against the current.

High above him, on the ship’s stern, iron struck flint. Tinder flared—a man firing his pipe.

In that flash Wil saw the ship’s flag: it depicted the imperial fist, clenching a sword, pointed up. Above the sword’s tip floated a disk, glowing white. All knew that emblem: the Starstone.

And the man lighting his pipe wore the yellow cape and red jerkin—an imperial constable.

Now the tinder flickered out. Darkness returned. And in that darkness, Wil sat as if stone.

END OF OPENING SCENE

(c)Richard Wolkomir 2010