of Judah desolate, and a den of dragons.' '
'Uh-huh.' Deborah smoothed back a lock of hair and stared reflectively at the ceiling. 'You said those cards are supposed to bring visions? The ones she gave Jeremy?'
'That's right.'
'Do they really work?'
Sarr nodded, still facing the corner. 'Of course they do. All magic works.'
'Maybe we ought to tell Jeremy.'
There was a pause. 'I don't think the Lord means us to interfere. Consider it a part of his spiritual education.'
'I wouldn't say-'
Sarr glanced impatiently over his shoulder. 'Come on, Deb, let's get on with this.'
'All right. Just one more.' She leafed blindly through the pages. Her finger stabbed toward the words. 'Five thirty.'
' 'A wonderful and-' Wait a minute, we just did that.'
Deborah peered at the words. 'My Lord, you're right! That's funny.' She turned to another passage and looked toward the ceiling, her finger poised above the page.
At that moment a staccato drumming echoed from somewhere above them. The sound seemed to start at one corner of the room and, like Freirs' footsteps earlier that night, to pass above their heads and beyond the farther wall. The cats looked up and growled, tails lashing.
'Oh, no!' groaned Deborah, laying aside the Bible. 'Not again.'
They'd been hearing it for the past few nights: the sound of tiny feet magnified by the reverberation of the wooden boards. Mice were up there, young ones, born just this spring and thriving in the past month's unseasonably warm temperatures; but as they ran across the attic floor, feet thumping on the floorboards, they sounded huge as weasels.
Sarr, still on his knees, was gazing toward the ceiling. He shook his head. 'We'll have to let the cats get at them. There's nothing else to do.'
'Oh, no, honey. I'll not have it! I'll not have them killing things.'
Protectively with her hands she reined in Dinah and Toby, drawing them toward her, but both continued to look longingly at the ceiling, making little sounds of eagerness and hunger deep in their throats.
Sarr got to his feet and came over to the bed. 'Look,' he said gently, 'you don't want those creatures to keep you awake all night, do you? They'll just multiply, you know.'
'Then you and I can go up there and put them out – give them a way to get outside, where they'll have more to eat. I'll not have any murdering in my house.'
She closed the Bible and laid it back on the table, then settled down in bed, face turned toward the wall. Clearly this was to be her last word on the subject. Sarr, sighing, climbed in beside her and blew out the light just as another series of footsteps rattled overhead.
Soon, despite the occasional noise, both he and Deborah were sleeping soundly, chests rising and falling in a common rhythm. But all night long the seven cats looked up toward the ceiling, eyes wide, and growled.
Rosie came to see her that night. He seemed positively cherubic, all chuckles, winks, and smiles. It almost made her forget about what she'd seen in the restaurant the evening before.
'I just dropped by to see if they'd gotten that awful gas under control,' he said, shaking his little head. 'Frankly, young lady, I was worried about you.'
He had brought her a gift in a large, flat cardboard box – it’s some kind of clothing, thought Carol eagerly – but he wouldn't let her open it till after they'd talked. 'First,' he said, 'I want to see those summaries you've been doing for me,' waggling his plump finger with mock-schoolmasterly concern; but when she handed him her notes on the Cherokees and the aborigines he barely seemed to glance at them.
'Excellent, excellent,' he said distractedly, shoving the papers into a folder and withdrawing a slim grey book. 'It's clear to me now that you're ready to go deeper, young lady. High time I started giving you some language lessons.'
Ghe'el… ghavoola… ghae'teine…
He gave her the lesson in her bedroom, Carol having invited him in; somehow the living room held bad associations for her now, and
Rosie himself seemed just as happy to escape it. The two of them sat sipping iced tea, Carol on her bed and Rosie propped like an animated rag doll in the high-backed chair.
For more than an hour he read to her from the book he'd brought, an old, flimsily bound language text entitled Some Notes on Agon di-Gatuan or 'The Old Tongue,' With Particular Respect to Its Suppression in the Malay Subcontinent. Appendiced with a Chian Song Cycle and Primer. It had been privately printed in London in 1892, and the binding was now held together with black electrical tape. Rosie, face half buried in the book, would read a string of words aloud in a strange high singsong voice, and Carol was expected to repeat them with the same accent and intonation.
Riyamigdl'eth… riyamoghu…
'It's actually the only way to learn a language,' he assured her. 'The way a baby does – by imitation and constant repetition.'
He seemed convinced that he was right, and surely he knew what he was talking about. But the words she repeated were meaningless to her, like catechisms in an alien religion; for the life of her she couldn't remember a single one only seconds after repeating it, and she couldn't understand how familiarizing herself with some obscure phrases from a long-dead native dialect was supposed to help her in her reading. What possible good was all this going to do her? What was this Old Language, anyway?
'It's rather special,' Rosie explained, looking up from the book. 'It's the language people speak when they speak in tongues.'
This didn't sound right at all, but she didn't have the heart to argue with him. 'I don't think I understand,' she said, hoping he wouldn't lose patience with her. 'What do the words mean?'
Rosie smiled. 'It's a song about angels,' he said. 'One of the Dhol Chants.'
'Dhol?' The word was somehow familiar.
'Yes, like in the Dynnod. You remember.'
'But I thought that was Welsh,' she said, thoroughly confused now, and already weary of it all. Maybe it was the heat; the iced tea didn't seem to be helping much. 'How can something be Welsh and also Malayan and also be spoken in tongues if it's not-'
'Carol,' he said gently, shaking his head, 'the important thing is simply that you memorize this little rhyme.' He returned to the book.
Miggke'el ghae'teine moghwvoola…
Carol struggled to say the words. They seemed formed for other mouths than hers, other tongues. Yet somehow Rosie didn't seem to mind; he just kept nodding and smiling and watching her with satisfaction in his eyes. The alien sounds reverberated in the room, as if every word she'd uttered were hanging in the air, filling the space around her like incense, softening the edges of things and making her so dizzy she couldn't think straight. Later she recalled Rosie patiently explaining something about 'who the Vodies are,' and wondered if she'd heard right; and there'd been something he'd said about 'things hidden behind the clouds' – had she been dreaming? – and she vaguely recalled his promising to teach her the rules for ancient games, contests, dances, and she herself thinking how this, at least, would have a bearing on her work, maybe she could teach them to the children in the library…
'And next time,' he added, 'I'll teach you something special, the real names for the days of the week.'
She wanted to ask him what he meant, why he was filling her head with such strange impossible things that made no sense at all, but he had gotten to his feet and was already opening the box on the night table.
'Because you've been such a good pupil,' he said, eyes twinkling. He sliced the ribbon with a surprisingly sharp fingernail and lifted the lid. Inside, something pale lay covered by tissue paper. He reached down and withdrew a white silk short-sleeved dress that glimmered in the light.
She heard herself gasp. 'Oh,' she said, 'how beautiful!'
She got up from the bed and felt the cloth; it ran like water in her hand. There was, she saw, no label in the back, or else it had been removed; maybe Rosie was embarrassed about where he'd bought it, or maybe he was
