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  Meow Right Now

  Contents:

  Kwirrrf

  A Cat, Frozen Solid

  Smells Worse Than Horses

  Connect with S.A. Barton

  By S.A. Barton

  Copyright 2014 S.A. Barton

  Kwirrrf woke with the distinct impression that he had overslept, which is a strange and puzzling phenomenon for a cat: it is nearly impossible for a creature that sleeps sixteen hours a day to sleep too much.  He had a throbbing headache, and the hairball that he horked up was particularly putrid.  He backed away from it, mouth open in what, while he had slept, had become known as the Flehmen reaction.

  He knew it as looking like an idiot in front of the servants.  He sat down and nonchalantly looked over his shoulder, giving the clay-fouled fur there a couple of licks to further the illusion that he wasn’t looking around at all, but was merely grooming.

  He needn’t have bothered.  There were no human beings in sight, although there were signs of them.  He was resting on some sort of table, beside an enormous curling chunk of ivory, probably the end of a mammoth tusk.  There were also an assortment of crude stone spearheads and a couple of rough rawhide garments, something like one of the northern barbarians would wear. The garments looked old and abused, flattened under something very heavy until the folds had deepened into through-and-through cracks.

  Humans had never been much for taking care of their own things, so Kwirrrf wasn’t surprised at all.

  He was in a tent, lit by a lantern that glowed with no smoke or hiss of burning oil.  A step up from the usual, Kwirrrf supposed.  The tent was especially well made, befitting a feline of his rank.  Any feline, really.

  Sitting and grooming himself—he was filthy, his fur tasted of moss and was gritty with fine particles of clay—he tried to remember what had happened the night before and came up blank.  He could only remember it had been cold, they had been traveling… somewhere.  Why?  Memory didn’t serve.  But someone would have to pay for the condition his fur was in. And for the headache as well, though it was thankfully fading.

  Conveniently, at that moment the tent flap opened and two people walked in, a male and a female.

  “Meow,” Kwirrrf said, drawing himself up to his full sitting height and fixing them with his green glare.

  The two humans stopped, but remained standing.

  “That was frozen, wasn’t it?” the male said.

  “Maybe a live one got in, following the smell of the frozen one?” the female said, and stooped down to look under the table Kwirrrf was sitting on.  “Where’s the frozen one?”

  “I have no clue.  A cat can’t eat an entire other cat in one sitting, can it?” the male one said, turning around and looking under the cot near the entrance.

  “Meow,” Kwirrrf said, his limited patience waning.  The humans kept looking under and behind other things scattered around the large tent: the other cot, behind the table he sat on, among tools standing in the corner.  The male even picked him up and looked under him, as if he could be concealing another cat beneath his feet.

  That was more than a reasonable feline could be asked to endure.

  “Stop what you’re doing and meow right now,” Kwirrrf said sharply, once he had been replaced on the tabletop by the male.  The language was unfamiliar, but he was a cat after all, and plucked understanding from the humans’ feeble minds.

  They stopped and stared at him.  Although Kwirrrf could pluck language directly from their minds along with a few other things like emotional states, he wished he could read their minds as clearly as hearing spoken words.  It galled him to have limits, but there they were.  Some things were just unfortunately beyond catly powers.

  Kwirrrf couldn’t tell exactly what they were thinking, but waves of flabbergastedness emanated from the humans as they stood frozen, staring at him, jaws dropped in their own version of the Flehmen reaction.

  “Bwuh,” the male said.

  “Fhaah,” the female said.

  They were only human, you couldn’t expect much from them.  But still, they shouldn’t be absolutely shocked just because he gave them an order.  Could they be feral?  Kwirrrf looked left and right.  The tent was as finely made as any Pharaoh’s tent and much better than any barbarian tent.  Unlikely that ferals would have goods of such quality.

  “You’re still not meowing,” Kwirrrf said, still plucking the knowledge of their language from their heads.  And then he realized the nature of the problem, an instant too late.

  “Meow,” the female said, poorly attempting to imitate a cat accent.

  “Meow?” the male echoed, uncertainly, accent even worse than hers.

  The meaning of the word had shifted, somehow.  Or... Kwirrrf had had to teach the northern barbarians what meow meant, he suddenly remembered.  He dug through the humans' minds for the correct words.

  “Kneel, I mean,” he said.  “Worship me.  Bring me offerings.  A small dish of cream, a serving of thinly sliced goat—or fresh fish will do if you think you can get all the little bones out properly—and a comb to get this damned clay out of my fur.”

  “Clay?” the female said.

  “In my fur, dolt.  Get a comb and get it out.”

  “Sandy?” the male said.

  “Yes, my fur is sandy.  Clay is just like sand, only finer.  The comb needs to have very fine teeth unless you'd rather lick it out,” Kwirrrf said with supercatly patience.  These two were taking normal human density too far.

  “Clay, do you hear it talking too?” the female said.  Again, Kwirrrf understood just an instant too late.

  “It’s explaining what kind of comb to get.  Is that what you hear, Sandy?”

  Clay and Sandy were names, not the words for what was gunking up his fur.  Although they were also words for that, too.  Kwirrrf wondered if Table and Tent and Food were about to come through the tent flap as well to gape at him.

  “I’ve had about enough of your stupidity,” Kwirrrf said, standing up.  “Bow properly, then go get what I told you to get.”  His eyes blazed green, bright enough to wash out the light of the lantern.  The two humans yelped and stumbled back, swatting at their bodies as if they had suddenly burst into completely invisible flames.  The swats were frantic, then they slowed, then turned into inquisitive plucking at their clothes and prodding various areas of their bodies with fingertips.

  Sandy stared at Kwirrrf, then bowed her head.  Kwirrrf shook his head side to side.  Sandy bowed deeper, from the waist.  Kwirrrf nodded.  Holding the bow, Sandy reached out with a hand and pulled at Clay’s belt.  He swatted her hand away absently, engrossed in closely inspecting the back of one of his hands for fire damage.  She grabbed his belt harder, and yanked.  He stumbled into her, looked over.

  “Wha?”

  “Bow,” she said.

  “Oh.”  He bowed, imitating her.

  “We’ll be right back,” Sandy said, and maintaining her grip on Clay’s belt as well as her bow, she backed out of the tent with Clay in tow.

  The tent flaps fell shut as they exited, and they straightened up.

  “What the hell was that?” Clay asked.

  “Shh!  Not in front of the cat,” Sandy said in a stage whisper, and dragged him away, hand still gripping his belt.  She walked him out of the encampment, which consisted of four tents and a slit-trench latrine dug behind a low spray of tundra brush nearby.  They walked toward the archaeological excavation a hundred yards away, a maze of stakes
and ropes forming a grid around a large central square in which a smallish mammoth had been found last summer as the tundra thawed bit by bit under the slow sure hand of climate shift.

  This summer, they were digging in hopes of finding more mammoth remains or associated artifacts.  And they had.  It had obviously been the site of an ancient encampment.  They had found charred and cracked mammoth bones, bones and garments from three or maybe four humans, a variety of stone tools, a narrow bronze axe head that seemed a bit out of place.

  And a cat, frozen solid.

  “Did we just thaw out a talking cat?” Clay asked when Sandy stopped pulling him farther from the tents.  They stood about halfway between the tents and the half dozen graduate students who were dutifully picking away at the half-thawed earth, searching for more artifacts.  Hopefully out of the hearing of both students and cat.

  “That’s impossible,” Sandy said.  “A complex organism doesn't live through being frozen, except for a few species of frogs and fish.  Talking cats are impossible.  Feeling like you’re on fire when you’re not is impossible.  And yet…”

  “Maybe our bread is infected with ergot,” Clay said.  “It’s supposed to be shelf-stable for a year, but you never know.”

  “It’s not infected with ergot,” Sandy said.  “It’s vacuum packed and irradiated, and we don’t unwrap it until we’re ready to eat it.”

  They both looked over at the graduate students.

  “Could one of them have smuggled a hallucinogen