The Earl smiled faintly; he didn't want to disappoint the old man. Besides, his nose was bleeding. It really was rather funny. Curious about these people: they had almost no sense of pain. Trice, seeing the smile, hit himself again and again, and feeling the blood, he smeared it over his face in fantastic curlicues. The Earl closed his eyes again, and Trice caught the eye of the clerk, a young man who had come from Normandy. He was sneering. The Lady Godwina was singing a little tune to herself, and paid no attention.
The old jester shrugged, and turned towards the archway to the kitchens and offices. Better have supper and go to bed--his head ached and his nose hurt badly, although the bleeding had stopped. Next to a wooden stool he caught sight of his cat, Tybalt, staring at him fixedly. Tybalt. His only friend! he thought to himself. But as he passed him, the cat, instead of following him out with tail erect to share the jester's wretched supper, backed cringing under the stool and turned his head as he went by, keeping his staring eyes on him. Most unusual. Very un-catlike.
"Here! Tybalt!" Trice said, but the cat backed further away.
Just before he realized what had happened to him, Dax recognized that the big wooden thing that loomed over him was a stool.
Maybe it was this realization--and the sight of his own paws--that gave him an idea of his size, and on looking back at the rest of himself he knew that he was a cat. Something had gone wrong. The flashback and subsequent rebound must have taken him far into the dim mammalian past, but for what duration he could not tell. The transition had been unconscious. At least he did not remember it. But to judge by the style of the round stone arches of the hall he was now in--and the stonework looked brand new--the ultimate effect had been according to plan, and this was the early Middle Ages.
A movement caught his eye and he saw it was the cavorting of an enormous man, dressed in gigantic tattered motley.
No. He wasn't enormous; it was just the unfamiliar scale of things. The man was saying something in a booming voice, and Dax began to recognize it as a form of transitional early English--but with an admixture of Norman French and some pure Anglo-Saxon phrases. And what an accent! If this man was typical, how wrong modern research and learned speculation were! He would have some interesting things to tell the experts--particularly his tutor--when he got back.