Free Ozark Trilogy 1: Twelve Fair Kingdoms by Suzette Haden Elgin Page A

much time a person has to think in a situation like that. Time stretches itself out in front of you, and everything goes to the slowest of all motions, and we went positively stately over those boulders and under arches of trees and through an assortment of bramble thickets. I was bleeding badly, and I was pretty cross, but I didn’t intend to let either interfere with me staying alive. I relaxed, and let just enough blood fall to keep the cavecat’s nostrils contented, and sort of cuddled back into its smelly wet embrace. And waited.
    The problem was the selection of a suitable countermeasure. Common Sense magic would only get me killed—would of had me dead before this, considering the blood I ought to of been losing. The cavecat obviously did not know how frail the hides of humans were, nor that they could die from the loss of their body fluids before it had a chance to have its fun.
    Common Sense magic was not enough, nor Granny Magic. The question was, would Hifalutin Magic do it, or did I have to move clear on up to Formalisms & Transformations? ( And make up your mind quick. Responsible, things may seem slow, but this animal is covering the ground at a smart pace and its cave cannot be much farther away!) I needed to be ready the instant it set me down and stretched out to bat me around between its front paws and watch my interesting attempts to get out of its reach—that instant .
    I decided I was not expendable, and whatever firepower I had I’d best use it at its most potent. There was nobody around to see and wonder at a woman using that level of magic, and if there had been I would not have been in any mood to care. Formalisms & Transformations it would be, and all out—now which one? I was a mite short on equipment.
    The cave smelled worse than the cavecat, which I wouldn’t of thought possible in advance. Not that it was fouled—no cat does that, whatever its size—but it had lived there a long time, and it was a tom, and it had marked out all the limits of its territory with great care. It slouched in under a hole in the ground that I doubted I would of spotted as the entrance to anything, and it was suddenly darker than the inside of your head. Not a ray, not a mote , of light was there in that cave ... I had the feeling it was small; no echoes, no water dripping. Just a hole in the ground, perhaps, and not a real cave such as we had flushed these creatures out of long ago on Marktwain. Real enough to die in, however had I intended to die. Which I didn’t.
    It stretched out, long and lazy and reeking, and laid me down between its paws. And it stretched them out, hairy bladed bars on either side of me like a small cage of swords, and it gave me a gentle preliminary swipe with the right one, and batted me back the other way with the left one, to see me roll and hear me whimper
    The Thirty-third Formalism was suitable, and I used it fast, doing it rather well if I do say so myself. Lacking gailherb, I used a strip of flesh from the inside of my upper arm to guarantee Conference; lacking any elixir; I used my own blood to mark out the Structural Description and the desired Structural Change. Make do, my Granny Hazelbide always said; and I made do. It smarted. On the other hand, I would of been embarrassed, dying in a place like this at the whim of a creature with five hundred pounds of brawn and maybe four; five ounces of brain. It would not have been fitting.
    When the cavecat lay purring quietly, content with the fat white pig it now thought was what it had caught originally (assuming it thought at all), and which I had Substituted for my own skinny white form, I gathered my battered self together and crawled on my stomach back out into what passed in these parts for daylight. I found myself regretting very much that there was no way to do a single Formalism—let alone a Transformation—while being clutched to a cavecat’s bosom. Like a Mule landing, I had needed a little space, and I’d gotten