He awoke crammed into the corner of the cage. Perhaps by yawning, batting dream birds, or thrashing his tail, he had built up considerable swaying momentum in the dangling square, which clocked back and forth like a pendulum, then tilted into a diamond, with him wedged into its bottom point. As he gripped the brass wires, his claws extended by instinct, and he stupidly hissed at the ground, as if in that bleary-eyed moment of absent consciousness, he expected it to mosey off and leave him suspended in space.
"Don't move. You'll die of fright if you don't stop, kitten." The laconic voice was so deep that at first Oji thought a storm was stirring. Through the brass wires he could see iron bars crossing overhead, and cottony clouds through that, but none scrawled dark with rain. Hearing no threat in the voice, but rather a curious but amused note of thoughtfulness, Oji flattened to the cage floor, his eyes, heart, and lungs swirling in one hot cup of nausea.
While the cage whistled not so high as its last arc, it swerved nine more times before the chain was spent, at which point the cage twirled in a tight circle until Oji clambered to his feet, imparting a gentle spin to the cage which gave the cat prince a kind of panoramic tour. Not that Oji hadn't already scoped out the surrounding beasts, having had a number of opportunities the previous night not only due to the queasy footing which kept him on his toes until very late, but to his restlessness to escape and find justice.
Sunrise glinted on the barred canopy and the bizarre trees that scraped it. While they were called Lovefoil, Oji thought less of valentines than of origami dragons, for their leaves were orangish-green triangles, here pressed into parallelograms, there hexagons, there octagons, and there a conjoined siamese diamond. Long-thorned bushes seemed to crouch, admiring their own cruel claws as they waited for passersby to be caressed by their wicked scratch. But even these eerie plants were peasants compared to Suvani's menagerie of Alsantian beasts.
Hanging in an identical cage beside him was a puddlegulp, that species of animated river clay which survived by mimickry, lived for mockery, and now aped the prince to the last spiteful detail, its only revision being that he mirrored not life, but the likeness of death, its limbs at freakish angles and its eyes glazed, to cast a deathly jest upon Oji.
Alsantian scholars wondered whether to classify the puddlegulp as alive or undead, for the clay beast imitated both states perfectly, often escaped true death by miming it, and could disconcert prey and predators alike by spoofing the other with a freakshow image of their dead body. While there was nothing but spiteful cruelty in its enchanted heart, Oji wondered how Suvani had put the speechless, thoughtless beast up to such hard-hearted theater. He had to admit that it was impressive. Queen Suvani had provided the pretender to the talking animal kingdom with his own private parody.
There were the unicorns, a male and female cruelly stabled in separate cages, so that their ceaseless passions struggled against the interceding bars. Earth people had unicorns all wrong, having slain, neglected, and forgotten their own, for unicorns were only pure in instinct, being single-minded beasts driven by one desire at a time. While the keepers installed a black curtain between the stallion and the mare to curb their restless desires, in Suvani's last visit she left it raised, whether as purposeful torment or unmindful indolence, Oji knew not; perhaps it was to do the poor beasts some good, as restrained from all but a handful of their natural impulses, they had become gluttons, with waddles under their necks and gigantic bellies.
Other than the unicorns, Oji noted a theme. Every other captive was a cat, a partially feline creature, or part of the human mythology pertaining to cats. That Suvani had labored long on such an elaborate practical joke infuriated Oji, but more for the fact that she was so certain of his capture that she had not feared the expenditure.
Most offensive of all was the cage-city of talking mice constructed in the shape of a titanic scratching post, the top of which towered so near Oji's cage that he had nearly collided with it that morning at the top of his arc. As the mice were kind, respectful, and gregarious, and moreover, a constantly circulating village, he kept his displeasure to himself so that he might enjoy their countless tiny personalities. As they sent a different representative every day to inquire as to his needs—needs they could never gratify in deed, being too many inches separated by their bars and his—Oji knew their excessive respect stemmed as much from fear as awe at his rank and celebrity.
The Ephremian sphinx was a winged lion with a woman's head, a man's voice, and the irritating trait of declaiming loudly and pompously all matters of common sense as if reading holy writ. While Sphinxes were terrifying and terrible creatures, their unwavering honor and good gamesmanship was their Achilles' heel, and when Suvani proposed a riddle game for the stakes of his freedom and her life, she won so handily that she was rumored half sphinx herself, when the spiteful and foolhardy weren't further diluting her formula by suggesting such extra ingredients as siren, dragon, and harpy.
While the griffin's pleasantries seemed the most honest, the apathetic and listless beast waited for the end, when its novelty fizzled out and its head and paws, mounted on a plaque, would satisfy Suvani's pride. Playing to his captor's vanity never occurred to the beast, for griffins had little interest in humanity other than as the subject for their comic poems, and having already gotten her goat, he little cared that she had got his whole griffin, nose to tail. While it was a known fact that griffin wit was more ripping than griffin claws, the spiritless creature was disinclined to say which words had incurred the wrath of Queen Suvani.
While the griffin's constant trill made the beast sound like it spoke through an Earth electrical fan, Oji smiled knowingly as the griffin laboriously chopped up a twelve syllable sentence into thirty with his lilting buzz.
What was more difficult to forgive was the griffin's unfortunate tendency to speak in verse. To be honest, it wasn't a tendency, but a certainty. While griffins were compelled to speak in verse, Oji was not accustomed to thinking that way, so it took a moment longer than normal to compose a reply. Meditative by nature, this was not difficult for the cat prince, but it was more annoying than squeaking mice, if not so annoying as the squeaking chalk that shredded his catnaps in Worlds class.
The most baffling prisoner dangled in a neighboring cage. While its fur mirrored the prince's ginger, otherwise the cat seemed ordinary--perfectly ordinary--with only a drowsy indifference to distinguish him, at first glance, from Oji. That resident was so accustomed to captivity that it slept long hours proper to a cat, and neither cage nor chain ever quivered. That it could not be a talking cat Oji decided due to its waking absorption in the village of fawning mice, so that its eyes were either squeezed shut in catnaps or wide open in predatorial interest and naked appetite.
Oji's purr was pure scorn. "I have already arrived at that idea myself, and I will thank you not to call me kitten, but your highness."
"If you wish." The sphinx's voice was clear and proud, like a presidential candidate. "Will it not remind you of what you shall never have?"
Another riddle. Oji sighed. "What is that, pray tell?"
"Your majesty." The sphinx looked down her beak with such cruel pity that while Oji thought of pretending not to know what she meant, it was easier to settle on his haunches and imitate the brainless composure of the cat next door. Suvani would only keep Oji captive so long before a public execution lay to rest any lingering doubt of the number of crowns in Alsantia. As he would never be 'your majesty,' the sphinx thought it malicious to dub him 'your highness.'
"I appreciate your thoughtfulness." Though Oji said it with as much caustic sarcasm as he could muster, a troublesome swell in his throat felt like it was on the verge of gushing at any moment. "But I am a prince. As my duties are my people and my life, I would honor neither by pretending. So long as I have breath, I will remain worthy of the noble pelt." At this, the puddlegulp splashed into another image of corpse Oji, this time with blue lips and ears and bulging eyes, as if to mirror a deathly state of perfect breathlessness.
"Have you not learned to ignore that creature?" spat the sphinx with contempt. "That jester only japes by instinct, like a glutton delighting in their appetite."
Oji thought of saying mildly that a riddling instinct trapped the sphinx in its current predicament, but since the sphinx was right that he had not yet learned the trick of ignoring the puddlegulp, he was too preoccupied by the image of his own death to do other than turn his head, sigh, and mutter, "yes, I know. While it apes a dead ginger cat, I suspect its underlying nature is also feline, for it acts like its playing with its food."
The sphinx directed a disapproving look at Oji. "Your Earth education is lacking. It would be just as logical to say that, despite mimicking a prince, its underlying nature is royal due to its face, which has turned royal blue and imperial purple. That said, you speak well, and you have my fealty, your highness. As you say, you deserve your fate."
"An elegantly feathered red-lettered hate
condemns the soft-spoken prince's fate."
"Speaking of jesters," muttered the sphinx. While the sphinx was good at stopping tongues with imponderables and blocking brains with posers, only the griffin had the power to do the same to the sphinx, and the griffin indulged his wit mercilessly, taking advantage of the mighty cages that prevented a physical contest between one gigantic winged monster with many good points on its claws and beak, and an even larger winged monster with one less good point, due to its weak human chin and neck.
"An eloquent boor
has a mouth full of spoor,
a brain chomping riddles
and slop in its middles.
Wanting Suvani,
now you're her pony..."
While rage sizzled in her eyes, the looming sphinx drew herself up just short of the bars, which it could no doubt have burst into a rattling pile of steel. It seethed as it stared down the griffin. "What's half a lion short of courage and half an eagle short of nobility?"
"A perplexed poser poses for its own leisure,
the surplus loser is swatted by its own teaser."
Having mimicked a riddle and increased the complexity of rhyme, the griffin no longer played to Oji, but the sphinx. Did the griffin mean the sphinx's riddle could just as easily apply to her? As the argument continued, the griffin appeared to get the better of the sphinx, whose riddles seemed embedded in the griffin's wide-ranging verse, but again, he couldn't be certain, as following their form was too exhausting. Maybe he was just a kitten. As he sulked, he turned to the other side of his cage, and it swung a foot towards the tower of mice, sending him scrambling to find a balance.
"How can I help you, your highness?" This squeak was one of the mousy soldiers that the mice stationed in the top cage. While these guardians had respectful faces, ears that didn't shake, whiskers that didn't quiver, and eyes that stared unblinking, Oji knew they were there to keep an eye on their cat problem and make sure it didn't become a cage collision.
"Are you good at wishing?" asked Oji. When the unblinking mouse sentry blinked once, but did not reply, Oji continued. "Wish me out of this cage, and yourself too."
"As you wish, your highness," said the grave sentry with only a hint of levity.
"What's your name, soldier?"
"Chep, your highness."
"Chep, you're terrible at wishing. I'm still here."
"As am I, your highness. If we must be caged..."
"Chep, if this is a redux of your song and dance about how proud and unworthy you are, my tolerance for tacky and insincere oxymorons is at an all time low, although I'm sure you're an incomparable yes man in Mouse Land."
"Would that not make me a yes mouse," said Chep gravely. "Your highness."
"My ten years on Earth have made me slow," sighed Oji. "Chep, no offense, but when a mouse of your caliber corrects me, my brain must be more cheese than cat."
"With all due respect, your highness," said the mouse, his tiny hackles rising into catlike points, "the mice are an ancient and noble race."
"I know it," sighed Oji. "I've heard the myths, Chep. All of them. We did nothing but learn myths some days. If I smile less to you and yours than to silent mice, it's only that mouthfuls are more appealing than backtalk."
"Your highness!" Chep's impassive face slacked as his jaw hung agape, his ears drooped, and his whiskers sagged. "I would not admit to eating wordless cats."
"You wouldn't admit? Then you have eaten a cat?"
"Your highness!"
"You sound like my advisers, Chep. Covering bad deeds doesn't make good, it makes secrets. And if I carry my deeds close to my chest in an egg carton, they'll crack when I fall, and the rotten will get mixed with the good."
"What's an egg carton, your highness?" This time Chep's face froze mid-blink.
His cage having shivered to a stop, Oji gingerly curled up facing away from the mice tower. "It's nothing like a nest, except it holds eggs. Good night."
"It's only morning, your highness."
When Chep persisted in trying to continue their conversation, Oji mimed such exaggerated snores that his chest puffed like a frog.
At the clatter of the menagerie gate, the beasts fixed a sullen stare on the small, lumpish figure that entered. As each hand balanced a heaping bushel, one on its wartish head and the other on its lumpen stomach, it was a few moments in unlimbering its baskets before locking the door. While Oji dreaded her daily appearance, he was more fascinated than repelled by this loathsome minion, for she was mesmerizingly ugly: a nose so downturned and crooked that its curl doubled back, like a pointed shoe; hair so pale it looked more glass than gray; and, a shape that blurred somewhere between her belly and knees, like an occult toadstool topped with a knobby head.
"Grub, my kitties!" cackled the old woman.
To be fair, Oji reasoned, Gandra may not be old. He had no clue as to her real age. If she was indeed a young woman burdened with the appearance of decrepitude, she was short-changed at the turnstile of creation. Young or old, as Gandra doddered under one of the baskets with a hunchbacked stoop and began doling out its contents to the beasts, she looked like a teetering trash pile heaped up ceiling-high.
As she was not unintelligent, Gandra relieved herself of the monstrous helpings first, then worked her way down to the mice, so that as she proceeded, she walked straighter and taller.
"What looks like turf, tastes like paper, and smells like sawdust?" riddled the sphinx as she picked mournfully at her dry mound of meat. While raw red meat was moist, this was clumped and crumbly, like a square of reddish sod. Despite himself, Oji's heart went out to the waspish beast.
"My meal is grown from the same bone garden,
Under the dry eye of our queenly warden."
The griffin sniffed at its helping of shriveled meat, then seemed to deflate, lolling on the grass to tap its nose to the bar of its cage. At the end of its dramatic and indolent descent, the griffin was so relaxed that it mirrored the still-dead puddlegulp. In the griffin's exaggerated pose, Oji saw a resemblance to the heap of meat, although the griffin was much more relaxed than the meat.
With full troughs, the unicorns turned from their bars, forgot their mates, and choked back the fodder. The puddlegulp's head swelled to the size of the sphinx and leaned up from its body--otherwise still a dead ginger housecat--to chomp its food in one bite, then shrunk back to Oji's tiny death's head.
As contempt bubbled up, Oji raised himself onto his haunches and allowed the indignation to wash over him as he glared at the unicorns' troughs. "You gave the unicorns meat." While Oji stated it as fact, he inflected it lightly as if questioning the woman. When his eyes darted from the vile meat to the woman, his revulsion increased, not for her slovenly appearance--she was, after all, human--but for her moral loathsomeness, which was repulsive to a point beyond the pale.
"While I haven't been barred from speaking with you, ginger, I'm not to call you--she said not to think of, actually--prince or highness."
"I'm not surprised she permitted you to speak to me." Oji's ears flattened in displeasure, as Suvani no doubt saw this vile keeper as a subtler torture than the dangling cage.
"Not that she made it easy for me. My tongue is tied from not knowing what to call you."
"I don't mind if you do your job quietly." Oji shrugged. "I'm sure we'd all prefer it. But I'm not above you calling me cat, as it's what I am."
"I've worked around the queen long enough to know that was a slight, cat. You're insinuating you don't want your name in my mouth."
"That was rude," said Oji. "As I shouldn't leave you hanging, I'll not insinuate any longer. Here's my clear and unequivocal request: don't say my name. When you stop putting meat in unicorn troughs, you can call me Oji."
"Should they starve?"
"You know what I mean."
"My mistress is also clear and unequivocal, cat. She orders it thus, and calls it science."
As the rain fell, the smell of earthworms and dirt mingled with the sorely dated meat, curdling Oji's already acidic stomach. "Science stinks, then."
"I'm no scientist. Not even a scholar, cat."
"Don't sell yourself short, Gandra. Perhaps by some transitive property—for if science stinks, and you stink, then perhaps you are a scientist, and simply don't know it, just as the most reeking culprits don't know their own stink."
When the wad of meat smacked his cage, it not only spread the moldering stink of the flaky, gamy meat throughout Oji's fur and clung to the bars of the cage, it rocked the cage three times: first, from the spattering impact; second, from his confined pounce, which recoiled along the cage walls and jangled the lurching chain; leading to the third shiver, when the chain snapped back with a shuddering swing.
As meat fibers slid down the bars, Oji gripped the greasy cage, and watched with irked anxiety as the mice again scrambled up and down their cage city in fearsome anticipation, and the griffin and the sphinx turned their ponderous heads.
When Gandra laughed, her belly jiggled, and the basket sprinkled meat flakes, which the unicorns, having already gorged themselves on their troughs, strained at the bars to get, so that their heads were half-gagged by gluttony, and choked the rest of the way by the bars, which admitted their blue heads, but not their pinched shoulders, as if Suvani had anticipated the possibility of strangling them in her wicked design, just as she had thoughtfully inconvenienced every beast in the menagerie.
While Oji had only begun to climb the learning curve of his own cruel confinement, when fully alert he could brake the swaying box in under a minute, which he now did.
"Your attitude isn't princely, cat, but it sure is rich."
"Aren't you going to sweep that up?"
"Not my job," sniffed Gandra. "I'm no maid or stablehand, but the keeper of the menagerie."
"They'll choke themselves!"
"If they do, I'm not to interfere."
"Those are rare beasts, keeper! There can't be more than a hundred unicorns in all of Alsantia."
"Where did you get that number, cat?"
Oji creased his brow and scowled. Gandra may not be a scientist, but that was a properly skeptical question for which he had no ready answer.
"Cat got your tongue?" Gandra snickered.
Oji hated that idiom. It had been particularly annoying on Earth that, despite a conspicuous absence of talking cats, the idiom nonetheless had currency. He hated it even more than 'cats always land on their feet,' for that folksy proverb was at least right more than half the time.
When no one interceded on his behalf, Oji was not surprised; nor did he blame them, for Gandra was vindictive and spiteful to an extreme, and known to embed splinters in the griffin's or the sphinx's meals after her ears were pricked by a thorny verse, or her mind was plugged by an unbreakable riddle.
Having finished portioning the first basket, Gandra heaved the second, and lurched just under Oji's cage. He thought about venting a yellow stream of his annoyance on the ugly-hearted woman, but held his bladder and otherwise contained himself as she jammed his meal through the slot to crack on the rear bars of the cage, so that if he had not lifted his forefeet, she might have struck his ankles.
While by instinct delighted that his share was moister and more appetizing, Oji restrained that impulse at the envied looks of the neighboring cat, the sphinx, the griffin, and the puddleglum, which for an instant was aflutter with naked outrage before becoming a funhouse mirror of Oji's worry.
"What wounds by lack, breaks on the selfless, and is wielded by giving?" While the sphinx also seemed ruffled by the prince's tasty meat, she settled into a meditative squat and eyed him coolly.
The answer came unbidden, as if passed from the sphinx's eyes through his own to splash in some deep abyss of his brain: resentment. Oji saw at once that Suvani sought to torment all the menagerie at once with one princely meal. When he next realized that the staring sphinx expected him to spill his dainty treat onto the ground, the resentment spilled into his heart and stomach, filling him with a sour regret, a consuming desire to taste the delicacy, and a dread for the hunger that would soon fall, for they were only fed once per day.
Oji sighed. For fear of enraging the ugly zookeeper even further, he waited for her to see to the needs of the neighboring cat, then tipped out the meal.
When it clattered to the ground, Gandra chortled without turning. "Thinking you might do that, we decided you should see such a good meal enjoyed."
Oji's nostrils flared on the rich aroma of the meal slid into the neighboring cat's cage. This flavorful melange of tuna, chicken, and some gamy morsel accenting the dish with its pungency, was then doubled when she tipped another helping into the puddlegulp's cage, so that the cat prince saw his doubled image bending to the meaty dainties. No longer pantomiming death, the puddlegulp reflected something more untrue: the image of Oji possessed by exaggerated relish for the savory meat, a wild passion which Oji had never exhibited in his life.
Oji scowled. If they meant to break his spirit, the cat's unstaged submission, compounded by the puddlegulp's phony skit, only strengthened his resolve.
While the unicorns had striven to reach the old meat, they clamored againstt their bars to reach the fresh, wet meat, their horns ringing the black metal in the violence of their frustrated gluttony; if the sphinx and griffin sunk into a sullen funk on seeing Oji's special meal, their resentment now beamed through wide eyes and dripped from bared fangs and clicking beak. Denying his meal had not made a difference, as through Suvani's petty schemes, his image was still at center, so that even the well-bred beasts might hold this against Oji.
"What is a fool thrice over?" muttered the sphinx, avoiding his eyes as she settled back into her squat and laid her head on her paws. Did she really read minds? Or was he that easy to read?
"When meat is jealous of meat, the worm is most proud;
when we measure pleasure by heartbeats loud
and strong, we love and hate our hearts;
we live and die in parts." While the griffin's sympathy seemed more honest, he never seemed excited by his meal, as if he was waiting on the end and starving himself to death.
Gandra unlocked the gate, bowed over her armful of stacked baskets, then backed into the garden, where the aromas of roses and tulips wafted in over the loamy scent of turned earth. Topping her sloppy curtsy was a sneer that wrecked all pretense of meeting the needs of the confined beasts, that said she had served misery in their bellies, rancor in their hearts, and gladness in her twinkling eyes.
When she locked the gate, Oji settled into a long hunger. Usually he waited until the others napped to void his bowels into the sandy patch below, but there wasn't any point in postpoing this daily humiliation when they already glared with contempt both involuntary and deliberate. How dare he merit a better meal, then scorn it?
After doing his reeking business into the litter, Oji set about the even more unpleasant task of cleaning his coat. While he was a talking animal, he nonetheless had a cat's instincts, and though it was revolting to pick the flaky meat from his coat, he had to do it. As a shapeshifter that might bolt the instant they lifted his latch, the chance of them trusting him to take a bath, even a quick dunk, was uncertain at best. Squinting over his nasty mouthful of flung meat, he wondered what the good cuts tasted like.
After the neighboring ginger fell asleep, the puddlegulp flopped into a perfect copy of the purring cat. As the sphinx grudgingly ate her share, she flicked a glance upward, either to see if Oji was looking, or to let him know that his darting peeks were telepathically detected. When the griffin oozed from his limp and drowsy funk to scarf down his portion, it slunk into its original position with not a hair or feather out of place, as if not a creature of flesh and blood, but apathetic elastic.
When the only shreds remaining were those dumped in front of the unicorns and the tatters clinging to Oji's cage, the beasts became restful, and fell into their mid-morning nap, until the only noises were snores, purrs, titters, and the chuffing and puffing of the unicorns, until they too fell into a depleted exhaustion.
Only Oji was still awake. Having only been there a few days, his imprisonment was still fresh in his mind, and moreover, he was so enraged at his tormentors that he was preoccupied with suppressing vengeful thoughts unworthy of a cat prince.
"Did she come here before she left?"
Oji's heart skipped a beat. Not only was it Suvani's voice, but as he lifted his drooping whiskers from his paws, it was Suvani from head to toe, dressed in a violet halter, black slacks, and polished black boots with golden buckles. To complete the effect of a queen deigning to work her own gardens, a blindingly white half-apron, void of the slightest speck of dirt, was cinched around her waist.
Waiting dutifully behind the queen and leaning their gardening implements to the right like pikemen at parade rest, were a half-dozen gardeners, and two armed guards—with real pikes—at their backs.
"I'm not in the mood for your jokes, Suvani."
A grimace slashed the queen's eerily wide smile in a downward gash, and seizing a hoe from her gawking servant, she rang Oji's cage, so that for the fourth time that day, fear surged and the world twirled.
"Haven't you learned the consequences of running your little mouth?"
If Oji felt sorry, it was only because the rest of him could not run as fast and far as his mouth. If his feet were free to run where they will, his mouth could escape consequences, along with the whole cat.
"Will you be so courteous as to answer?"
"Forgive me, Queen Suvani." Oji could not bring himself to address her as majesty and hoped she would not mind this stiff form of address. "My rattled brain has forgotten your question."
"Was she here?"
"Gandra?"
When Suvani swung the hoe aloft, then slashed downard, this time she stopped short of striking the wobbly cage. Perhaps she realized this was a perfectly natural assumption, and a fitting answer to her quesion, given that Gandra had left shortly beforehand. Perhaps she took pity on Oji, who had just reasserted his footing in the shaking cage. Or more likely, Oji reasoned, she simply lost interest in tormenting Oji, who had so far refused to give her the smallest satisfaction, never crying out and only presenting expressions that were sarcastic and scornful of the queen. "Not Gandra, you twit—Isola."
Oji thought back. "Your serving girl? Why would she have the key to your griffin and sphinx, both of whom hate you as much as she does? That girl wants to kill you. I smelled it plain as day." Fearing he set himself up to be rung by the hoe, Oji dredged up what little charm remained in his bedraggled fur."If she does come by, what should I tell her?"
"That beastly little girl! I've given her so much, but she's still an ungrateful rebel.
She's just like you. Though I could kill you both whenever I like, or order the death of everything that talks back, you choose to defy your queen."
Privately, Oji thought the Queen killing her talking animals would mean good riddance to the filthy collaborators getting fat on the bones of those that wouldn't pay tribute or swell her armies. Since he was uncertain whether the griffins or sphinxes had sided with Suvani, but mainly because he didn't want to get struck by the rake, he kept these opinions to himself. "You have something else you want to tell me, Queen Suvani."
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. I could go either way."
"On what?"
"I had hoped you might bond with this poor beast"; here, Suvani gestured to the ginger dangling in the cage next to Oji's; "but now I see that's unlikely to happen. He's lost what you once identified with, you see."
"What does that mean?"
"For shame, Prince Oji." Suvani's smile twitched. "Don't you know your own subject?"
Oji was confused; while ancient dogma said that talking animal royalty also held sway over dumb animals, even if they could never speak to that fact, Suvani was much too happy to have only caught Oji in this pedantic political point. Glancing over, Oji saw nothing special about the ginger. If a little rangy, his hair was sleek, and his coloration was good. If his thumbs...Oji stopped. Only talking animals had thumbs. How had he never noticed that before?
"Forgive me, good beast. I thought you mute." When Oji bowed his head, he darted a wary look at Suvani, whose gleeful eyes twinkled above one hand covering a laugh. "What is your name? Fear not to speak to your prince."
Not only was Oji not amused, he was full of regret for ignoring his subject, who no doubt thought his prince haughty and self-absorbed. In Oji's defense, the ginger behaved like a normal cat—avoiding both the prince's entreaty and Suvani's stare as he licked himself clean, rolled on his back, and wiggled gently along the bottom bars in a most undignified manner.
When Suvani's laughter belted loud and long, Oji could no longer suppress a glare, and she whooped louder, stopping only to catch her breath, then hoot some more. During this humiliating tirade of mirth, the cat groomed itself in such blissful ignorance that Oji began to suspect he was not unmindful, but as insensible as a normal cat.
"Ha ha," he snorted scornfully. "Very funny. Though I've observed its animal habits, you had me going; I thought it might speak any moment. How did you give it hands?"
When Suvani mirrored his grave contempt with a sober look of her own, her face cracked as she tittered, then howled, only stopping to squeal, "he thinks he's in on the joke!" Her servants dropped their hoes, rakes, and pikes in aping her exaggerated mirth.
Oji felt a sinking feeling as he scrutinized the neighboring ginger. Aside from the hands, this seemed a perfectly ordinary cat, graced neither by speech nor intelligence; while talking animals were, as a rule, bigger, the ginger's size was tough to gauge from one dangling cage to another, and Oji was also on the small size for a talking cat. Hands notwithstanding, its feral behavior screamed ordinary cat. But it couldn't be, Oji reasoned, for Suvani shook with screaming laughter.
"You didn't."
"Didn't what?" Suvani eyed Oji. "Just what do you accuse your queen of doing, rebel? If you mean to foment rebellion, you had best be clear."
"You know what you did."
"For the sake of argument, let's say I don't. You're a talking animal, Oji. Use it or lose it—and as you can see, I have the power to enforce that."
Oji quailed inside. "You took his power of speech."
"That would only be torture, cat, it wouldn't be just. I simply made him as nature intended—a dumb animal, subservient to humanity."
Oji couldn't have opened his eyes wider, and when his whiskers sagged and his tail drooped, he struggled to pull them back into proud alignment. As he lifted them by force of will, he became animated by righteous rage, so that he felt light as a feather and electrically charged, as if his whiskers and tail were wires channeling wrath from the heavens.
Suvani continued, either oblivious or unimpressed by Oji's reaction. "As you see, he doesn't know any better. There's no torment to his new life, other than wanting to roam free, which I'll allow once I've forgiven his past life. While this is no longer the rebel I captured, and I could have already relented, I'm spiteful to a fault, and there was also his value as an object lesson for you, 'my prince.'"
"You mutilated him!"
Suvani scoffed. "I did nothing of the sort. He still has his hands, his feet, and his tail. Count his whiskers if you'd like. I only removed his mind. As my theory is that animal minds are vestigial, he's only ahead of his time."
"What does that mean?"
"You'll lose your minds anyway in a generation or two."
"That's ludicrous--and a convenient pretext for what you're doing in Alsantia."
"So said many eminent sages, and while those I've collected published retractions before very remorseful suicides, a few run free, disseminating abominable little tracts that accuse me of adapting facts to fit my vision, as if any great philosopher wizard doesn't do just as she likes."
"It sounds like they've convinced you."
"Motivated, perhaps, to help my theory to its fulfillment. If talking animals are so truculent that they won't serve the interests of science, then science will give them a tweak."
"They'll fight back, Suvani."
"Your rabble already ranges my kingdom in packs, flocks, and herds, like the beasts they are, rather than uniting a proper army I could crush decisively." Suvani's coy smile seemed to conceal another wicked joke. "You could help me with that."
"I would never help you, Suvani. But if you call leading an army against you help, I'm game."
"Hear the rebel speak," Suvani's voice dripped with venom as she paced around his cage. "Then we have an accord."
Oji could not believe his ears. Was she so egotistical that she would set him free to settle her scientific and political arguments? "I don't believe you. Cut to the part where you sneer, cackle, slam the cage, and leave me to my nap."
"I'm deadly serious." When Suvani's gloating eyes fattened with malevolence just under his cage, he had never been so tempted to let loose. "You have only to eat all my mice."
Oji rolled his eyes. "That will never happen. I knew you were joking."
When Suvani approached the mouse tower, it was set aquiver with squeals of frightened mice and the shiver of thrumming mouse feet. "That is a tall order, isn't it? After weeks of gorging yourself, you'd leave a fat little ginger, no longer a fit hero to lead your decimated, bedraggled, and wretched rebels, who would pose a resistance too pathetic—and worse, too anticlimactic—to be historical." While the overacting queen pretended to mull it over, Oji laid his head on his paws and rolled his eyes.
Suvani turned back to Oji. "How about three mice? If you're motivated enough to be my loyal opposition and wage the war that cements my reign in the history books, then you won't object to a kingly test?"
"You're not serious. Whack my cage and leave me be."
"Of course I'm serious."
"If this isn't a joke, then why ask me to eat my subjects? That's ridiculous."
"But cats eat mice, Oji. Besides, I don't need them anymore. They've served their purpose, or rather, they haven't, as they were intended to annoy you, not befriend you."
"Kings don't have friends."
"Then you'll do it?" Suvani's wicked smile spread like a disease, first widening from one ear to the other, and then spiking through the dimples to the points of wicked mirth in her eyes.
Oji pondered for a moment only, for if he did not answer in less than a heartbeat, the uneasiness of the mice might become distrust, and distrust was a verminous thing that spread by rumor and might corrupt his reign before his coronation.
"Since you won't go unless I answer, how does 'no' strike you?"
While Suvani seemed neither displeased nor surprised, her smile died a little, descending from its grotesque leer to a smirk of contentment. "I should have liked to see you eat the mice. While I had hoped you would eat a dozen before passing out, then start fresh tomorrow, even three mice in your princely guts would have given me immense satisfaction."
"If wishes were fishes and so forth..." muttered Oji.
"Wishes: nine parts prideful and vicious,
one part insightful, in whole delicious."
When the griffin spoke, Suvani's eyes flicked over to it, and her smile faded. "Could you stomach a griffin, Oji?" When the cat shrugged, and did not otherwise dignify that question with a response, she continued. "This beast is more like you than you know, Oji. Because it thinks itself unbreakable, I exhaust my invention in torments varying from slight to huge. Would it eat a mouse for freedom?" When the idle swatting of the griffin's tail stopped after one more flick of the ground, and the griffin's wobbly eyes fixed upon the queen, she snickered. "Only a hypothetical question, mind you."
Suvani smacked herself on the forehead. "I have just the thing! If your conceit is being prince of the talking animals, then you have no sovereignity over this monster."
Bringing her feet together and raising her arms wide, so that she took the rough shape of a wineglass, Suvani intoned dark gibberish and seemed to caress the chaotic verse with the black fire creeping along her fingertips, as her voice ascended through joyful hysteria to the thunderous crescendo, when her voice deepened to a draconic bass, her arms whipped down, and a cascade of eldritch energy consumed the griffin.
The smokeless fire dwindled with the diminishing griffin, which drained away with rapid liquidity as if a plug was pulled inside the beast, until they fizzled into a few blue embers and a squirming mouse.
"What about this faker, Oji?" Suvani reached between the bars, seized the stunned mouse, and gripped it so cruelly that its tiny head bulged blue.
"Please don't kill him," said Oji.
"Of course not! You're going to."
"I would never!"
"Why? Not only is he not a real mouse, he's not your subject. You'll pass my test, I'll watch the rebel prince eat a thinking beast, and we'll both get our righteous battle. It's a perfect win/win, Oji. Eat him!" Picking up the meat and grass spattered food tray, Suvani shook it off towards Oji, then slid the griffin-turned-mouse into Oji's cage.
If Oji was frightened before, it was nothing compared to his terror of the queen's might. While Oji could slip into human skin, Suvani could dissolve a fabled griffin into a measly mouse.
But even louder than his heart-pounding terror of the queen's awesome power of perfect transformation was his revulsion for one who was less interested in magical transformations than moral transformations; while flesh was clay to Suvani's spells, she wasn't happy unless her grasping spite was wet with moral clay. She hoped to bend Oji into a cannibal, a monster that ate another thinking being.
Even if the griffin was a monstrous devourer of talking animals and humans, Oji would be loath to eat a thinking being. And a poet who denied himself food, who thought nothing of hunger if it was enslaved, would never devour another personality.
"Had your fun?" Oji asked. "I'm not hungry. Moreover, I'm not evil. Go away."
"Not hungry. Not evil. You're not even a cat!" While Suvani smiled, it was only her plastic default, for her eyes burned, and when she pointed her finger, wrath nearly bent it double. With a cruel red nail at its hyperextended tip, it resembled a tiny bloodied scimitar.
As the spell bubbled from her mouth to fizz around Oji, he absurdly shook his fur, hoping to scatter the transforming fire like rain, but it was to no avail. As the shroud of fire clung and drained, he shrunk and contracted until the bars became like rails—slick rails, still greased from Gandra's meat missile, so that his straddling mouse feet slipped as he scurried, and he feared sliding through to the ground. While he had heard that mice survive higher falls, if he put it to the test, Suvani might twist it to prove her own vile theories. No matter his outward appearance, it was not only untrue, but unjust, for one born a cat to play the mouse.
When the queen's gigantic head came under the cage, her nostrils gaped into snaky depths, and her gigantic mouth twisted in pleasure. When she pinched Oji between forefinger and thumb and plucked him through the bars, their clench dragged at his legs and ribs.
"As I said—art value aside—I have no use for mice." When Suvani nabbed the other mouse, it shuddered with terror, notwithstanding that minutes ago the former griffin had the heart of an eagle, the paws of a lion, and the languishing soul of a poet. "And while I've never taken back a gift, I might regift a rudely received present, just as it's poetic to redistribute nature's gifts."
When she tipped the squeaking mouse into the other dangling cage, it was received with the lazy relish you would expect from a recently fed cat. When the squeaks became pinched, pitiful whistles, Suvani's smile dried up at once into grim satisfaction. "He knows how to enjoy a gift. He'll play with that one a while, I think."
Suvani's smile flourished like a snaky, ghastly weed as Oji squirmed on her moist palm, pinned by her long, violet nails. Gagging on the odor of resinous nail polish mingling with a sickeningly sweet hand lotion redolent with lilacs, and the mousy smell of his fur—an odor still appetizing to his feline memory, and churning up saliva and an urge to chew—Oji's gorge rose with each mouse wriggle.
"Don't fret, mouse prince. You're much too rich a gift for such a plain tabby."Suvani unlocked the mouth of the cage tower with the jangling keys. "Don't think of it as home, Oji, as I would never lodge vermin on their own account. Without a cat prince for the centerpiece of this exhibition, this exhibit is a dustbin, and these rodents are dust mice for all I care. But for the sake of the cat you used to be—no longer with us in the flesh,
and more ghost than memory—I'll let the dust settle before the trash fire. Settle in, my prince. It won't be long." Flicking open the gate, Suvani cast Oji inside, locked the mouse tower, then stepped toward the menagerie gate.
"What bites with pleasure, circles like a vulture, and screeches like a harpy?" As the tragedy passed in miniature before the sphinx, with one noble frienemy under the paw of a merciless and mindless cat, and her newest neighbor swept in with the verminous crumbs, her face now loomed large before the queen. If murder was a measuring cup filled with brooding, the sphinx's glowering poured a half-cup in one glare.
"What gusts like wind, speaks its catty mind, and is locked in with a riddle?"Suvani cackled, making Oji a prophet but no less a rodent tumbling down the neck of meshed cages, deeper and deeper into the queen's scratching post, and soon-to-be mouse inferno.