The sill stone on the east wall of a Wemaru house is warm at midnight, warm enough that a palm laid flat on it stops being comfortable after a slow count of ten. That is the only sign anyone agrees on. The rest is testimony, and three people gave me theirs. Kovash fires roof tile at the edge of Wemaru, and he says she sat on his kiln wall through a week of hard frost while the bricks never cooled. He leaves the top course of that wall unmortared, and some mornings he finds the stones turned over. He does not discuss this with the tile buyers. His neighbors lay a flat stone on the sunny side of every east wall and never move it, even when the wall is rebuilt, and no child is allowed to sit on it before noon.
A grain factor's widow at Ankavet gave the second account. The goddess came into her granary at midday with the sun at her back, she says, a woman's body in a plain linen sheath and the head of a tawny cat. A gold collar lay flat across her collarbones. The widow noticed that the left ear had a small notch in its edge, clean, as if made with a leather punch. The rats left the sacks in a line and went out under the door. The widow tasted hot copper in the air, as if she had put a struck coin on her tongue, and felt no fear at all. The goddess looked at the empty floor for a while and then was not there.
The third account is from a boy of about nine, who says she was no taller than his father and that she laughed. He describes it as a purr you feel in the back teeth, not a sound. The widow insists the goddess stood taller than the granary door, which is six feet four. I cannot settle this by asking. In the dust of the Ankavet granary floor I found one bare print, five toes spread wide, no claw marks, and measured it with a folding rule laid heel to toe: nine inches. That is a long foot for a woman and a short one for a giant, and it favors the boy by a small margin. The print had a faint warmth when I pressed two fingers beside it, hours after noon had passed.
On the sill stone in Wemaru, someone had set a single dried fig, split open, face up.
- Classification
- Cat-headed sun goddess
- Habitat
- Sunlit thresholds, granaries, kiln walls
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- Between 5 and 6.5 ft tall
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Hearth and granary lands
- Binomial
- Felis solaris bastetis
- Diet
- Rats, warm milk, split figs
- Temperament
- Calm, regal, fiercely protective of the house