Whereas Berangere had broiled on the mesa, now she was immersed in the cool shade of monolithic buildings flanking a central plaza, where her eyes swam in the dizzying rush of people dressed so outlandishly that her soiled and waterstained vestments felt not only shabby but conservative in comparison to the silks, satins, sateens, lace, and embroidery, that costumed this crowd like Comic-Con cosplayers or extras on a movie set.
When chilled air smacked into her as if she had stepped into brisk air conditioning, she nearly fainted, and fell back into a fountain. As her flailing hands scraped the bottom of the basin, water splashed over the rim on the passersby, who scowled and muttered darkly in an unknown language.
When Berangere picked herself up, she drizzled so loudly that some of the dour pedestrians giggled, and others muttered louder at a low roar. By putting her hands on the rim, she pulled herself from the fountain, and water rained mutely onto the packed earth of the plaza road. The cold water clung to her, another wave of faintess washed over her, and she swayed under the weight of her waterlogged vestments, which squeaked between her legs as she walked.
It was morning and her shadow poured the length of the city block. It was also morning when the desert, the mesa, and her friends vanished, leaving her in this strange land. Was it the same day? The same century? Was it the same world? When the citizens of this strange city walked around Berangere, her rags felt at once to be a heavy and a ghostly burden, for while they were a substantial weight, the people treated her like an apparition, so that she could not help but worrying that she had passed not only to another world, but to the next world.
"Hilgara trukanda gama!" It was nonsense, but somehow familiar nonsense. Not that this alien tongue was warm and comforting; on the contrary, though it seemed close and personal, it was the stuff of nightmares. Unfortunately, both good and bad can get under our skin in this life, and while bad company can be not invited, nightmares and the waking world break our shells as they choose. When she turned gingerly, as if atop those creaking eggshells—her neck goosepimpled and her teeth on edge—four iron-clad burly men clad swaggered towards her, waving the most dangerous and outrageous weapons she had ever seen, like kitchen knives on a stick. While it did little to calm her sense of being plopped in the middle of chaos, it now seemed that this world no longer pretended to be acquainted with her, and felt as strange as it looked. This world had at last owned up to being another world.
When she shrieked and turned to flee, she skidded through horse manure, but kept her footing by waving her arms as she staggered.
"Gama!" they shouted. "Gama!"
While Berangere was so bookish as to wonder, even while taking to her heels, whether gama meant die or only stop, she was also tall and strong for her age, and though her drizzling vestments weighted her down, it was only a little more awkward than the guards' metal scales, and she was motivated by terror.
On a wide cobblestone thoroughfare thick with coaches, wagons, teams of horses, and milling people, she immediately turned left and moved with the crowd. If she hesitated watching the traffic, or moved too slow or too fast, their hands or their eyes would be upon her. As she weaved in and out between coaches and wagons, she stubbed her toe on a hard leather boot that might as well have been a boulder for how she almost doubled over in pain, clutching her foot. She leaned under the shade of an awning and watched the mobbing crowd, who seemed to be somwhat poorer than the richer-dressed people at the point of her arrival. Here, everyone was clothed in the coarsest of clothing, not unlike the large bags of rice and coffee shipped to the Mansion in their texture and nauseating look of scratchiness.
"Gama!" One moment, the crowded thoroughfare bustled forward briskly to jobs, homes, and taverns, but the instant the coffeebagged people faced the outcry, Berangere went from being pursued to being surrounded. Their deafening murmur was answered by a deep chord of despair that shattered Beranger's hope. Why fight back, Berangere asked herself. Escape was pointless without opportunity or safe haven. She had nowhere to go. Though she had hated the Mansion, here there was not even a library. And if she found a book, she would be unable to read it.
This gloomy thought filled her with a desperate hunger for a book, a craving to obliviate the outside world by diving into the white sea of a page, the black waves of words taking her where she willed, so long as it was written.
As if summoned by magic, she saw a great brick building crowned by ancient statuary depicting a bear, a raccoon, an eagle, a lion, a fox, and a unicorn. Through the windows were rows and rows of towering, hulking shelves crammed with bulging books, titanic tomes, and fat folios, and here and there a cat on a windowsill--including one that looked back through gold spectacles, pushed open the embrasure, and leaped down, landing on its feet.
"Follow me, your highness," said the cat. Berangere froze. While a talking cat was no longer a surprise, talking animals had proved too dangerous to trust. When she shrugged and plunged after the bespectacled cat into the library, the strange city folk moved towards the entrance, only to be blocked by the door. Though there was no one there to shut or hold the door, and the deadbolt and bar were not slid, the coarsely dressed people hammered and kicked to no avail, and the door proved as impervious as a mile of steel.
"Though we have a little time, please hurry." The calico cat's enormous orange eyes seemed even bigger under the yellow lenses of the golden spectacles.
"Hurry where?" Though she only bit off two words, they seemed a ridiculous admission that she talked with an animal.
When Berangere tread lightly after the cat, the darkness lifted as the hall passed a cold collection of books stuffed in dust gray shelves under a series of begrimed skylights. Though the titles on the spines were scrawled in an alien language, the curvilinear letters looked eerily familiar.
When they came to a staircase, the cat scampered two stairs at once, and Berangere trotted after, still panting from her escape. "How do you know my language?"
"Are you a philosopher?"
"What?"
"What could you possibly mean by that question?" the cat's nose wrinkled, and his whiskers danced agitatedly. "I've spoken it all my life. If this is some word game or joke, you must coach me with the right response." The cat shrugged its tiny shoulders.
Berangere's rebuttal stuck halfway in her mouth, for suddenly it tasted strange. What she thought was "but how can I be speaking your language," but what she was about to blurt out was, "kututra canelt inie futort ut metata." Now self-conscious of the new words, she no longer understood the alien thoughts crowding her mind.
"Yes, very strange," said the cat drolly, "nearly as strange as an Earth girl in Alsantia. Your presence here is as violent a transposition as our alphabet jammed in your skull. But not nearly as ugly as cat speech coming from an ogre."
"I'm no ogre!"
"While there are differences, your strident denial is comical to us animals, like a simaese saying she's not a cat. It's only a difference of breed. Do you have, for the most part, a hairless body?"
"That's a simple way of looking at it," huffed Berangere.
"I'll take that as a yes. Do you have not paws, but hands?"
"Yes."
"Do you walk upright, on those cornstalks you call legs?"
"You see that I do. But cornstalk is rude."
"Do you eat the flesh of thinking creatures?"
"No!"
"No flesh of any kind?"
"I was raised vegetarian."
"Really? That's wonderful! But I won't call it admirable, since you didn't choose it. Better to be lucky than good, as they say. Just because you haven't known temptation dooesn't excuse you from being a flesh-eating ogre."
"You're a cat! You eat flesh!"
"I know a thinking creature from a dumb beast. Do you?"
"You're spouting nonsense."
"In fairness, I do spout nonsense half the time."
"I'm not an ogre."
"I'm sorry to give you a hard time," said the cat.
By the top landing, Berangere's panting, punctuated by a gasping denial of ogredom, had skipped straight to wheezing, and after the cat slinked along the gallery rail to the entrance,
he waited for her to catch her breath. The double doors opened on a large study lined with bookshelves, and with a dozen oak tables and sturdy wooden chairs placed in such an irregular pattern that it looked like they had not been installed by conscious effort, but grown there.
"Though you know no ogres on Earth, they are your acknowledged cousins on Alsantia.
In a primordial age, ogres chose strength over learning, and instead of your disputable refinements, preferred to develop along beastly lines, though I fear applying that adjective to either ogres or humans is unfair to beasts."
"Let's set aside any relationship between humans and ogres for a moment. You assume the people of Earth and Alsantia are the same. What if I'm not related to those knuckle-draggers outside? While you call them human, they're as like me as you're like a housecat."
"I'll allow that you're not yourself, young lady. That seems cruel to say of those you know not at all, when they have families and homes like you do."
"Now you're the one being cruel!" While she believed herself not hurt by his offhanded remark, by the force of this retort a tear wormed free to slide down her cheek. "I have no family."
"How can that be true, your highness?"
"You mock me!"
The cat lowered to his haunches, dipped his head, then swept his paw in a kind of curtsy. "If my show of deference seems sarcastic playacting, it is not directed to you, but all human royalty, whose lineage stems from regicides, not only fratricides and parricides, but infanticides, and your bloody history is a mirror image of the ogres'. But for you, personally, your highness, I have the utmost respect."
"I am no king!"
"Of course. In addition to being a girl, you're no majesty but only a highness, Princess Berangere."
"I'm no princess!" laughed Berangere, though with tears clawed free by the cat's pushy cruelty and a melancholic mirth that snarled her smile.
"You certainly don't look the part now."
"It's no part. It's who I am. Who are you?"
"If you can pronounce it, call me Hranar."
"Ranar."
Hranar hissed. "The H isn't silent. On second thought, call me Run. We'll be doing a lot of that."
"I can't call you Run. That's ridiculous."
"What's ridiculous is you saying my name."
"Why should we run, anyway?"
"The angry mobs are a good reason."
"I didn't do anything."
"Tell them that."
"And if they're after me, why stop at the door?"
"The Dawn Agora is a sacred space in Amerida. Before you ask, Amerida was once the Alsantian capital, and though our politicians now dwell forty miles northwest in Kunla, Amerida remains a cultural center." Berangere was about to launch into another question when Hranar breathlessly continued: "save all questions for the end of the tour, which is to say when we arrive in Kunla."
"Kunla? I'm going home," said Berangere.
"There, you're an orphan; here, you're a princess."
"You can be princess! Get me back to Earth."
Hranar wheezed a catty little laugh. "The honorable Hranar, an Efremian princess. All due respect, but I have killed those who said less, your highness."
Yesterday, Berangere might have laughed at a cat's intimations of murder--after she got over the shock of a talking animal--but now she was shaken by this soft-spoken assertion. "Then help me get home."
"What's waiting for you?"
"Not a what--a who. Loren."
"Who's Loren?"
"My best friend."
"A friend wouldn't stand between you and your rightful crown. You're the heir to the Efremian throne."
"Friends are more precious than thrones."
"You've never looked down from a throne. You might like the view"
"I've looked into the eyes of a friend."
A gigantic slam resounded through the ancient library, followed by a creaking and a floor-shaking impact that set the windows quivering like cymbals, then a hooting and hollering, and the crunch of boots in the stairwell. "That will be the town guard, to try an entirely different kind of persuasion. What are you doing?"
Berangere ran up one aisle and down the other. "Why did you bring me here? There's no where to hide!"
"You may still seek refuge, or failing that, plead asylum."
"I'm not crazy!"
The cat tittered. "Not that kind of asylum. Even on Earth, pleading asylum means to beseech a foreign power for protection."
"But no one knows me here!"
"While I don't expect you to believe everything all at once, young lady, I do expect you to listen. Follow me."
When Hranar trotted down the hall, Berangere pulled her hair, gritted her teeth,
and moaned, then followed. Being a talking cat seemed such a gift that the cat should talk plainer, not delight in muddying its stream of words.
Following Hranar, however, would not make anything clear, but strike her speechless yet again. The steps wound in a rickety spiral to an iron-banded door, which opened at the ginger touch of Hranar's calico paw.
At the sight of the gigantic brass insect, Berangere shuddered, and cowered in the stairwell until Hranar's coaxing and the rising clangor in the stairwell made it inevitable. She stepped shakily onto the library roof, then closed the door.
While it wasn't a bug, but some kind of machine, it was longer than a taxicab, and the stuff of nightmares. Though its insectoid chassis was made of interlocking brass bubbles, and its hinged golden wings flickered at rest, the wheels on its eerily rigid forelegs were a dead giveaway. While its sectioned body was styled after a dragonfly, this was no monster, but a vehicle.
"This is Kiera, our Efremian junior ambassador." With her attention focused on the bizarre ship, she had missed the young woman clad in a canvas doublet and baggy pantaloons reminiscent of the flight wear she'd seen in black and white photographs. The Efremian ambassador seemed scarcely older than Berangere, a diminuitive, dark brown woman with black curls and an impassive expression that made her seem less a peacekeeper than cut stone.
When a rapid knock became belligerent ramming, the locked door rattled in the hinges.
"Your highness," said Junior Ambassador Kiera. "Please board the Zalgyne."
"That thing?"
"Thing?" Kiera looked hurt. "This is a top of the line dragonfly ornithopter."
"You're talking nonsense. I'll never get on that thing!"
"As I took an oath to protect your family, your highness, if you do not board the Zalgyne, I will tie you to the undercarriage."
"You wouldn't!"
"Why not? The view will be better."
Kiera boosted Berangere into the cockpit, crawled in the seat behind her, then closed the yellow-tinted canopy.
Hranar looked downcast, then forced a smile. "I hope to join you within the week, your highness."
Berangere said nothing, but kept such a white-lipped hold on her mouth that her lower lip stuck out and quivered. Upon a ratcheting sound from Kiera's seat, the Zalgyne shook, the shuddering wings fluttered too fast to be seen, and the ornithopter ascended into the blustery, cloudy sky. Though the guards burst onto the roof and hurtled their strange spears, the weapons clashed against the metallic underbelly, shaking Berangere so badly that she closed her eyes and stuck her fingers in her ears.
When the ornithopter thrummed, Berangere's teeth rattled until her face was numb, her knees shook, and goosebumps chilled her back. Its sudden burst of speed seemed to stretch the clouds and the moons.
Moons? thought Berangere. At first she thought she was seeing double, but as the brass dragonfly leveled off, and the sky snapped back to its normal shape, the red-gold moon lingered along the hilltops, and the silver one crowned the midnight blue.
Though she still felt Loren's absence, when the Two Brothers from Worlds class gleamed in the Alsantian sky, Berangere felt the darkest shadow of her life receding. Although she was still in the penumbra, and this was no homecoming as the talking cat and the rude woman claimed, she now held the tail of the mystery.