The Cat Who Knew How to Cry

10. HIS HIGHNESS AND HER HOLINESS (part 3)

Anar was face to face with a strange Alae female with black hair and blue eyes. She wore an austere light-colored dress with a wide skirt ornamented about the hem with bright-red cat's paw prints. Sitting next to her, in an identical round wicker chair, was a lean Alae of the "pedigree" sort, dressed with deliberate care. Both of them were gazing somewhere behind Anar – she with great sadness, he with a hint of annoyance.

Concentrating, Anar forced himself to "turn around." The concave golden wall of a grand hall floated before him, covered with seemingly endless recesses of different sizes, all stuffed with withered cat corpses. A particularly motley crew was seated on black-and-white stone pedestals that ran along it. Anar, who was used to the uniform sculptural beauty of his tribe, feasted his eyes on Alae with skin the color of sacred milk and the color of hatty. There were chubby Alae and lean Alae, even bug-eyed Alae resembling bizarre-looking fish; athletic Alae with flat noses and powerful necks; Alae like fine statues with frighteningly thin frames, orange hair and fuzzy tufts of fur on their translucent ears. Some had tails that were shaved smooth; others, on the contrary, sported long, spiraling rings of fur, and still others cut patterns on their "fifth limb," turning the fur into raised velvet. One busty lady in the front row had turned her ears inside out, wisps of fur protruding from them like stamens from a calla lily (if calla lilies had stamens, that is). There was something shamelessly seductive about it, Anar couldn't help but admired her. Her pudgy neighbor's richly fuzzy ears bent forward, their tips strung with a brass fish skeleton. Wrapped in a coat of mouse skins, her enormous green eyes – elongated by the arrows of fine lines – squinted with suspicion.

This entire variegated assembly was looking at an elderly, finely dressed man with the same dissatisfied expression. The man was brandishing a massive rod and shouting something angrily at a pair of Alae who were seated in armchairs. Though obviously not speaking Alae, after a few minutes Anar was surprised to realize that he understood him.

"It would be better for you all if you sold everything you owned and left Cahnerali this very day!"

"Why in the world would we do that?" a voice from the peanut gallery ventured.

"Because it might be confiscated tomorrow," the man stated, "as compensation for all the harm you've caused Cahnerali."

"Harm?" the lady with the calla lily ears blinked with surprise.

"Master ambassador, I don't think it would be too immodest of me in this situation to remind you of the role our people have played in the formation of your government. It was we who saved you from Hellyn's wrath, we who for many years ensured your... sovereignty. But now that you're more or less standing on your own two feet, we've suddenly changed into evil occupiers? Is that what you're saying?" said the Alae of seemingly highest pedigree, standing up from his armchair. He spoke in the soft, mildly exhausted tone of a priest-veterinarian, constantly having to extract the pendants of censers from the bellies of foolish temple cats who'd swallowed them.

"That's exactly right," the ambassador nodded, recovering himself. "I assure you, without your so-called help we would have gotten our footing much, much sooner. No, no one is denying the merits of the Alae in organizing the Exodus, but your subsequent actions, the way you shamelessly took advantage of our plight, negates all previous good you may have furnished. Your culture of permissiveness, your... ideology are alien to us. We are a separate, self-sufficient people; we've paid for our freedom with blood, and Ellis' Note guarantees us the right to remain so. We will not allow anyone to turn us into some sorry colony!"

"A colony? Master ambassador, I cannot recall even one instance in which Briaellar interfered in Cahnerali's internal affairs or attempted to influence its foreign policy."