were kits with me, or recruits, or fighting soldiers, did so… Listen now!'
'There…!' The young kzin's ears and tail shot up.
'Yes, mechanism! You know the enemy now.'
'We must get under cover!'
'Finish your meat. It is your kill, and we have enough time. We will take the haunches to salt before the Beam's beasts and the snufflers get them.'
The sound of the vehicle grew. The kzinti slashed what remained of the gagrumpher carcass to pieces, bagging it in tough fabric. They were in deep cover, invisible, when the human car, flying low, entered the clearing.
It landed beside what was left of the gagrumpher, and the driver got out. The human examined the scattered, bloody bones, the imprints of clawed feet and of Raargh's prosthetic hand on the ground about, sniffing with a feeble, almost useless nose, then crossed the clearing toward the shade of the red Wunderland trees where the kzinti lurked. His eye lighted on some of the bagged meat. 'Anyone for chess?' he called.
The young kzin leaped from the undergrowth. His hands with sheathed claws struck the human in the chest, knocking him down. Though far less than fully grown, he already overtopped and easily outweighed the man.
'Be careful, Vaemar,' the elder admonished him in what, five years previously, would have been called the slaves' patois. 'He has not the strength of a Hero!' He made a swipe at Vaemar with his prosthetic arm. The youngster ducked and rolled away.
'There is no offense, Raargh,' the human said in the same dialect, those words in the Heroes' Tongue being couched in the Tense of Equals. He climbed to his feet and reached to scratch the top of the youngster's head. 'Young will be young.'
'Urrr. To live with you monkeys, young need be cautious. You have a board?'
'Yes.'
'Old weakling! To let youngster leap you so!'
'Many of us are old, Companion, but some of us have a trick or two yet.'
'Come to our cave.' He spoke now with the grammar of the Heroes' Tongue to this human who understood it, rather than the simplified patois. 'We have got it well set up now. Even a chair for any monkey brave enough to stick its nose in. Vaemar will cover your eyes while I make safe the defenses.'
The human held his captured chessman up to the light. 'These are nice pieces.'
'Vaemar made them. He is good with a sculpting tool.'
'From what you tell me he is good at many things. But he is fortunate to have you.'
'So what you will tell the Arrum?'
'There is no point in lying, to them or to you. So far they have asked little of me. He has the right to live as he wishes, as do you… but I think… '
'Yesss? Go on.' A hint of the Menacing Tense.
'Someday he will need more than this.'
'It is good to stalk the gagrumphers and fight the tigripards, good to look out at night upon the Fanged God's stars, or sleep under them when we range far, to scent the game in the forests under the hunters' moons or lie in the deep grass glades at noontide,' said Raargh. 'Few high nobles live so well. And unlike high nobles we have no palace intrigues to poison our livers.'
The man nodded, pinching his lower lip between thumb and index finger in a characteristic gesture of thought. 'And yet… for him it cannot be like this forever. You know as well as I he is exceptional. Your kind on this planet need leaders now, and they will need them tomorrow.'
'To lead them to what?'
'Hardly for me to say.'
'To become imitation monkeys? Apes of apes?'
'Do you really think the seed of Heroes would accept such a destiny? I think not.'
'What then? Check! Urrr.'
'You know your kind have some deadly enemies among the humans on this world. Jocelyn van der Stratt is far from the only one of her party. I think, as you do, I know, that Vaemar may be a great treasure for this planet, a natural leader for the Kzin but one who can deal with humans, too. What might we not do combined? I think even Chuut-Riit may have felt that, or something like it. It will be very slow, but perhaps on Wunderland both our kinds have been given a strange chance.
'But there are many humans who do not want kzinti leaders to emerge, who do not want the Kzin to be. Vaemar has a duty, companion mine. And so, I think, do you. Perhaps, if I may speak as soldier to soldier, a harder one than any you faced in battle.'
'You think the monkeys will attack us? There will be many more guts spilled then. There are many Heroes left on Ka'ashi!'
'I hope not. And I think I have grounds for hope. Each day that passes is a day in which humans and Kzin share the planet, a day for some memory of the war and the Occupation to be forgotten. But it is slow.'
'It does not matter if the days here pass fast or slowly,' said Raargh. 'We hunt, we watch the stars. Vaemar grows. I will not be able to play chesss with him much longer-too many easy victories for him on this little board, and my authority is undermined.'
'If he can beat you easily, Raargh, he must be a player indeed. But most kzinti who bother with the game become masters… Once when we talked, you too said the Kzin of Wunderland would have need of him.'
'He still does not get the best out of his rooks. He does not use them to smash through the front… And I am not good enough a player to be the best teacher for him-I announce checkmate in three moves, by the way. They do not have need of him yet.'
'We hold things together, I grant you, but there are a lot of hopes on that youngster.'
He comes. Let him try his rook work on you. He has been waiting for his game.'
'If you can beat me so easily, what hope have I against him?'
'I, who am old, am schooling myself to perceive things like a human. He, who is young, has only me to learn from, me, and one or other two oddities about in these unpeopled parts… You are right, he will have to go soon, though it shaves my mane and twists my liver to say it… But I warn you, he learns quickly.'
The sound of the human car died away. Raargh gazed after it for a long time. Night was falling on Wunderland, Alpha Centauri B magnificent in the purplish sky, the sky that humans now ruled. 'Finish salting and dressing the meat, Vaemar,' he said. 'I must pace and think.'
The forest made way for the kzin, though he was hardly hunting. He made a single, small kill, enough for relaxation and a clear mind.
I lost my own kit and my mate in the ramscoop raid, he thought. Must I lose Vaemar too? Perhaps not. As things had once been, a Hero did not worry over his kits, who should make their own fortune, provided only that they did not dishonor him. But ever since the human acquisition of the hyperdrive had turned the tide of battle in space, for Raargh and Vaemar ever since the day the Patriarchy's forces on Wunderland had surrendered to the victorious humans and Raargh had fled with the Royal Governor Chuut-Riit's last kit to the open country beyond the great scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein, things had been different.
They had lived wild and free, but not entirely so. Wunderland was a sparsely settled world, and during the Kzin occupation and the decades-long war its human population had been further reduced, through heavy casualties, through the poverty and chaos that spread with a destroyed infrastructure, and as a result of suddenly being denied many modern drugs and medical procedures. Birth rates had collapsed as death rates had soared. Now, with rebuilding and the UNSN present in force, and with automated farming and food-production methods being restored, the cities were draining off the human rural population from many areas.
The remaining kzin, considerably to their own surprise, had, after the chaos and fighting that followed the Liberation, been allowed a fair degree of freedom, though they had been stripped of most of the land and estates which they had taken and, except in part of the asteroid Tiamat, where they had their own community, and recently in part in the settlement at Arhus, were subject to human government and laws in major matters. But there was still much wild country. Kzin like Raargh who settled in the backwoods were largely left alone (the little matter of the stolen air-car in which he had escaped after the Kzin surrender seemed to have been forgotten, and the car was still with them). But, he knew, they were under a degree of discreet, and even frank, surveillance. It would not, he suspected, be a good idea to test the limits of their freedom. Cumpston had taken it upon himself to
