The Seeker Read Online Free

hidden from the windows by a big laurel tree, and it was my favorite place.
    The moon had risen early, and the darkening sky made it glow. An unnatural weakness coursed through me. I felt a sticky sweat break out on my forehead and thought I was going to faint. The pain in my head made me stagger to my knees.
    I tried to force the vision not to come, but it was impossible. I stared up at the moon. It had become a penetrating yellow eye. I knew that eye sought me, and I felt the panic rise within me.
    Then, abruptly, there was only the pale moon. My headache was gone, as though it had been only a painful precursor to what I had just experienced. I shivered violently and stood up. I would not let myself wonder about the vision—nor the others that had preceded it. Jes had told me long ago, when we could still talk of such things, that only Herders were permitted visions. “You must not imagine that you have them,” he had said.
    But I did not imagine them, either then or now
, I thought, and walked shakily back across the garden. Yet though I did not try to understand what they meant, a few days later the meaning forced itself on me.

3
    M ARUMAN CONFIRMED IT in the end.
    It had been a cold year overall despite the occasional muggy days that came whenever the wind blew in from the Blacklands. Most often even spring days were bitten with pale, frosted skies, which stretched away to the north and south and over the seas to the icy poles of the legends.
    Sometimes in the late afternoon, I would sit and imagine the color fading out to where there was no color at all, as if the Great White again filled the skies, its lethal radiance leaching the natural blue. But unlike that age of terror when night was banished for days on end, I fancied the Land would be permanently frozen into the white world of wintertime, the sea afloat with giant towers of ice such as those in the stories my mother had told.
    “Stories!” Maruman snorted as he came up, having overheard the last of my thoughts. I smiled at him as he joined me beside the statue of the founder. I scratched his stomach, and he rolled about and stretched with familiar abandon.
    He was not a pretty cat nor a pampered one. His wild eyes were of a fierce amber hue, and he had a battered head and a torn ear. He once told me he had fought a village dog over a bone and that the hound had cheated by biting him on the head.
    “Never can trust them pap-fed funaga lovers,” he had observed disdainfully. “Funaga” was the thought symbol he used for men and women. “And I’d no sooner trust a wild one anytime; it’d bite me in half at one go.”
    Maruman possessed a dramatic and fanciful imagination. I thought perhaps that old war injury was to blame. Occasionally his thoughts would become muddled and disturbed. During those periods, he could dream very vividly. He had undergone such a fit shortly after we had begun to communicate, only to tell me that one day the mountains would seek me. I had laughed because it was such a strange image.
    Another time he had confessed a Guanette bird had told him his destiny was twined with mine. This bird was used throughout the Land as a symbol representing an oracle-like wisdom or a preordained order of things. If there were meaning and reason behind the symbol, they were lost to me. The actual bird was said to be extinct. Yet Maruman quite often attributed his insights or notions to the direct intervention of the mythical wise bird.
    Maruman was, he often told me, his own cat. Not so much wild, he would point out, as unencumbered. He once observed that life with a master was doubtless very nice, but for all that, he preferred his own way. Having a master, he said, seemed to take the stuffing out of a beast. I reflected to myself that this was certainly true. Despite this, and with a touch of cynicism, I thought that part of Maruman’s devotion to me was because I fed him.
    There seemed little to love in this rude, unbalanced cat with an ear