Free Cat Tales by Alma Alexander Page B

for me to go. I had done
all I could here. Janine couldn't help being skinny and shy – but
she had had her hair streaked gold and she wore a different pair of
glasses which did far more for her than the ones she had been
saddled with when I had first seen her. I knew that she was getting
second looks in the street.
    And there was another kid down the road – a
boy who sat alone for hours on the steps leading up to his front
door, a boy who missed the dog his family had left on another
continent. Another challenge. Another day. Another family that
needed me.
    All the same – I stood in the road for ages
when I walked away from Janine's house. It was getting harder and
harder to leave every time. I Make a good home – and when I get it
just about perfect, that's when I'm called to leave, and start
again. Perhaps there will come a time when I will be allowed to
Make a home for myself – and stay sleeping by someone's fireside
during the long cold winter nights. But until then, I have work to
do.
    I am a Homemaker.

    'Hourglass' was actually
the third story I wrote about the character named Aris – the
gleeman, or singer, or travelling troubadour (call him what you
wish) whose defining characteristic was that he had the same
relationship to magic as those poor people who are allergic to cats
have with every cat in creation – the cats know their presence is
not wanted and this particular fact makes them perversely
determined to ingratiate themselves with precisely the people who
cannot endure their presence.
    Magic pursues Aris
relentlessly, never quite letting him out of its sights – and all
he has ever wanted was a perfectly decent and ordinary life. But
cats and magic – what can I say. They have minds of their own. This
story was published in Jim Baen's Universe, in February 2008 –
submitted, accepted, and published all within the space of a
handful of weeks, which is unprecedented for a sale like this. But
they liked it. And their version (you can look it up it's still
online as far as I know) had a perfectly wonderful illustration of
the cat at the heart of this tale…
    -----0-----
     

Chapter 2:
Hourglass

    I could get RICH in Ghulkit!
    Prove it…
    Aris cursed the cozy inn whose potent ale had
made him utter that boast and then have his bluff called. Wyn and
Allyc, the two fellow gleemen who had provoked his words, were at
this moment no doubt ensconced beside another warm fire in some
congenial hostelry, nursing mulled wine and laughing quietly over
Aris's stubborn insistence to honor the rash boast he had made.
    Spend a winter in Ghulkit, come back with
wealth, and he could return and spend many a satisfying evening
telling avid listeners across the length and breadth of all the
Kingdoms how one gleeman had dared to defy almost impossible odds.
He would get rich in Ghulkit, and then get rich all over again
telling stories of Ghulkit in the tame lands afterwards. No other
gleeman could compete….
    Aris allowed himself a grim smile as he
struggled through the snowdrifts on the lonely back road. Spend a
winter in Ghulkit. He should have known there was a good reason why
people did not do this. He had already found out – the hard way –
that if he was not totally focused on the road he was travelling he
could find himself mired in innocent-looking snow banks which were
hip-deep or worse. At least once he nearly lost his harp in the
drifts; and even without that, he could almost physically feel the
effects of the killing cold on the fragile instrument. Whenever he
gained some sort of sanctuary and obtained a spot to ply his trade,
he would have to thaw out the harp for half an hour or more before
he could usefully employ the instrument to assist him in the
simplest of songs.
    This day was worse than many a day before it,
because often the cold would be ameliorated by a thin and watery
kind of sunlight which would even manage, weak and etiolated as it
was, to render the muffled, frost-sparkling landscape