Catfantastic II

by Andre Norton

  But Lancelot did not know the difference. Nor, for a time, did he know anything else. When at last the witch jumped from his knee to the floor, he stood, belted on his sword, and sleepwalked to the door of the royal chamber.

  The king answered. “Yes?”

  “My lord, I-” he said. I darted past him into the chamber where my lady was brushing her hair. He sneezed abruptly and said. “I suppose, my Liege, I came to bid you and Queen Guinevere bon nuit and a well-deserved rest.” But he was covering up. He had no idea why he was there.

  I got some hint the next day of what the two malefactors were scheming when I followed the beast and Mordred to the Great Hall where the knights gathered to brag about their latest good deeds. Most of the knights never quite got the hang of virtue being its own reward!-they enjoyed topping each other with stories of who was the most modest and selfless, but usually the knight talking finished, as did Sir Geraint that day, by proclaiming, “So honest and humble was I when I accepted the purse that poor clothier begged me to take for rescuing his daughter from the dragon that I’m sure God will notice my goodness and let me find the treasure first.”

  “Poppycock! The treasure will be mine! I have the most calluses on my knees from praying,” Sir Gawain said.

  “You can show them to us all if you like, sir,” Mordred said. “But I doubt you’ll have as many as Sir Lancelot, who will surely have the treasure as he has the confidence of the king and queen. He is so good, in fact, it’s a wonder he isn’t the king.”

  Normally, such disloyalty would have been overridden, but with the witch sitting on Mordred’s shoulder, waving her tail, gargling Rs, and gazing into the middle space among the knights, the louts didn’t seem to understand that anyone was being insulted.

  “In fact,” Mordred said, languidly stroking the witch’s tail where it hung down over his shoulder, “I shouldn’t be at all surprised, you know, if he didn’t try to do something about it sometime. Really, the tradition is that the strongest and most infallible should lead, you know. I wonder if anyone, even the queen, would really object. Certainly Papa-I mean, the king-doesn’t seem to guard his own reputation that zealously. He practically allows Lancelot to run things as it is. And the queen seems to agree. But then, may the best man win as they always say.”

  Someone should have said, “Nonsense, boy. The king has already won and no one could be happier than Lancelot and the queen.” Someone should have said, “How dare you sully the name of our gracious queen by even hinting that she is other than perfectly loyal to King Arthur.” Someone certainly should have said, “Who does this fool think he is anyway? Throw him in the dungeon and that bedraggled piece of fur with him. Let her try to keep the rats from nibbling him.” But no one did.

  My position as advisor and confidante of the queen has always been a more personal than a political one for the most part, but even I know treason and accusations of treason when I hear them. Mordred and his accomplice were casting a sticky net indeed to catch the three people who ruled the kingdom. My three people.

  I could not but emit a hiss of indignation at the whole scene but remembered myself in time and slunk quietly away, resisting the urge to give that mealy-mouthed Mordred such a slash across the legs he’d be hamstrung. By keeping my peace, I permitted them to underestimate me. Their mistake, of course, for it allowed me to continue my investigations.

  I skulked ever so stealthily, shadowing Morgan as she bewitched that poor noble knight, using his thwarted affection for feline-kind to lure him into her clutches (well, actually, she insinuated herself into his clutches but the effect was much the same) where she mesmerized him into performing suspicious-seeming actions while Mordred continued to use his poison tongue and his sneaky charm to pollute the minds of the knights of the Round Table.

  He pointed out that the Round Table, supposedly so democratic, made conversation with any but those right next to one very difficult-and Sir Lancelot always sat on the king’s right hand, Sir Cay to the left, so who, after all, had a chance to talk to the king and share his good ideas? No wonder Lancelot had taken virtual control of the kingdom! And the queen, he intimated, spent too much on her wardrobe and had too many relatives in high positions and wasn’t it she who had dreamed up the abysmal Round Table anyway, tables being women’s stuff, and might she not be secretly in control of the kingdom and with Lancelot to provide the brawn to her brains, what did they need poor King Arthur for? And more drivel of that ilk.

  The king remained suspicious of Mordred, but since the conversation always changed when he entered the room, he had no idea of the infamy perpetrated by his guest. Mordred took advantage of his befuddlement by fawning over him, the fawning looking very much like pity to the other knights. Meanwhile, Morgan La Chat would jump down from

  Mordred’s shoulder and go find Lancelot, who was always absent during these little character assassinating sessions, of course.

  While I watched fuming, she purred in his ear and in a moment, he would rise and walk to the royal chambers or to wherever my lady happened to be, for all the world, to suspicious eyes, as if he was conspiring treason with her. Even though, once he got there, he stammered and stuttered and seemed to have very little to say while she asked his opinion on whether to use the carmine thread or the scarlet in the latest tapestry or if Sir Cay would get the most use out of a linen shirt with wool embroidery or a wool shirt with linen embroidery for his Christmas gift.

  From my perch in the window or atop the canopy I would have tried to warn them, but even if it had not been futile, Lady Elaine, who had something of a crush on Lancelot (most unseemly since she was a good five years his elder and of much lower rank besides), would glare at me and I would set to grooming my paws as if I would not dream of approaching while Lancelot was present.

  In the same way, of course, Morgan and Mordred couldn’t truly approach while the king was present. And so, with Morgan wrapped around his neck, one day Lancelot urged the king to take a break and go hunting. He and the knights could handle any crisis that might come up.

  “Yes,” Mordred said sweetly. “You’re looking a little tired these days, sire. And of course, you needn’t worry about the queen with her champion right here to protect her.” The king didn’t see the broad wink the nasty boy directed at the Round Table in general.

  The next morning the king set out for his hunt, carefully selecting the three best hounds. He wanted to be alone. I think his instincts were telling him what his friends were keeping from him and he was very worried, without knowing precisely what worried him.

  I was worried, too. I kept close to my lady’s side all the day, sprawled across her feet when she sewed and curled up in her lap when she read. Neither Mordred nor Morgan La Chat came near us, but if one of the knights passed by, he would duck his head and look away, as if ashamed to face my lady.

  As Lady Elaine readied her for retirement, I grew restless and went in search of a flower pot so that I might ease myself without leaving the premises. My favorite was the captive palm from Palestine a foreign emissary had brought the king. It was kept near the fireplace in the Great Hall. A drunken party was in progress there, however. The king did not approve of drunken revelry and the knights, like mice, were playing in his absence. I would simply have to find somewhere else. I couldn’t go in there now without getting stepped upon. But as I fled toward the kitchen and cook’s indoor herb garden, I heard familiar hateful voices whispering.

  “I still think you should come along and put them under a bit before you go to Lancelot,” Mordred whined. “They don’t really like me, you know. They’re very snobbish about anyone who hasn’t bested them in battle at least once. I’m not sure I can convince them to play peeping torn without a little magical urging along.”

  “I made sure a potion went into the wine,” she said, and I heard the staccato beat of her tail impatiently drumming the floor. “They’ll do the highland fling from the crenellation with the slightest suggestion. Lancelot’s tougher. He is really su
ch an impossible prig. So afraid of appearances. Good thing for me he is so very fond of cats and so very unable to tolerate any others but me. I’d scare him to death in my true form, but he is so delighted with his itty bitty kitty cat he just can’t get enough of me.”

  “Hah!” Mordred commented, and swaggered off toward the Great Hall. I slunk behind Morgan La Chat and followed her to where Lancelot knelt in the chapel, praying, his sword by his side. Lately he had been troubled by his own odd behavior, going to the king’s room at odd hours and seeking out the queen’s company when in truth he had no interest in the colors of embroidery thread whatsoever.

  Most of all, I think he was troubled by the way the other knights had been avoiding him. Like most toms, he valued the goodwill and camaraderie of his brothers-in-arms more than any other sort of relationship. Little did he think that had he spent more time with them and less with that phony feline he could have continued to lead a happy life indefinitely.

  But it was not to be.

  Morgan sat,upright in front of him, staring straight into his face, her tail curled like a beckoning finger. Slowly, Lancelot rose and slowly she sidled away from him toward the door, the tail all the time beckoning. Lancelot, his sword at his side, followed.

  Why did he need his sword to be captured “conspiring” with the queen? And then I knew. He was not to conspire with my lady: he was to slay her! I bounded ahead of them back to the Royal Chamber, making use of the private entrance the carpenter had devised for me at the foot of the bolted door.

  My lady was asleep already, her golden hair fanned out across the satin pillow, her fingers curled against her cheek. I leapt onto her chest and roared my battle cry, so that she would know I required her immediate and undivided attention. Nevertheless, the effect was somewhat more dramatic than I anticipated. She sat bolt upright, flinging me away from her so that I hit the bedcurtains, where I clung to avoid tumbling off the bed.

  At that moment a loud knock thudded against the timbers of the door.

  “Good heavens,” my lady yawned, “what on earth is all this commotion about? Who on earth can that be? And what in heaven’s name can have gotten into you, Gray Jane?”

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed and I did the unforgivable, had it not been for the dire circumstances. I grabbed her feet with my front claws and would not let go until she picked me up by the scruff of the neck and flung me away again.

  “Who is it?” she called. “What’s the matter? Is the palace on fire? Is there a dragon in the courtyard? This had better not be a false alarm.”

  “C’est moi, madame la reine. C’est Lancelot. I have a matter of the utmost urgency on which I must speak to you.”

  “Oh, very well. But it had better be a matter of an invading army at the very least or I shall never forgive you.”

  I heard all this human chitchat through a bit of a daze since my lady, in her drowsy state, had tossed me against the stone wall and my head was somewhat the worse for wear. I rose on trembling paws and watched helplessly as she trudged on bleeding feet to the door and opened it. Lancelot stood there with his hand on his sword, the wretched tortoiseshell smirking on the floor beside him.

  “Oh, my. It must be at least one invading army for you to come to my chamber armed,” the queen said. “You’d better step inside to make your report.

  The tortoiseshell came in, too, glancing around the chamber. I scuttled up the bed curtains and peered down at them from the canopy.

  Lancelot drew his sword. “Madame, my regrets-” he began, and I sprang for his head, landing on his shoulder when he moved to raise the sword. He threw back his head and sneezed six times, during which the sword clattered harmlessly to the floor-harmlessly, that is, except that the heavy hilt landed on Morgan La Chat’s tail and she let out a hideous yowl and sprinted back out the cat door, her tail dragging after her in a rather dashing forked lightning shape.

  “Mon dieu!” Lancelot exclaimed. “My Lady, my apologies. The hour-my sword-what am I contemplat-Ahhhchoo!” He was breaking out in spots already and I was twining desperately around his face. The spell was well and truly broken, I was convinced, but I did not want to take any chances.

  At that moment, the door banged open and a throng of Camelot’s finest flooded in, brandishing weapons and perfuming the chamber with the stench of a cheap tavern. I jumped clear of Lancelot to let him retrieve his sword as Mordred yelled. “You see! You see! They’re conspiring.” I sprang for Mordred’s face, at great personal peril to myself, and jumped from pate to pate of the bareheaded and in some cases balding knights, giving them something to think about besides harassing innocent queens and their hapless cat-enchanted champions.

  The queen huddled against the bed curtains, but Lancelot sneezed, scratched, swelled and sneezed again, then fled to the window, gasping for air, in his pain casting only a cursory glance through red-pillowed eyes at the scene in the room. At last he was realizing that Mordred had turned his friends against him. I sprang from a shiny head, belonging, I believe, to Sir Lionel, freshly incised with a random pattern of scarlet ribbons, courtesy of my claws. In one light leap I pounced upon Lancelot’s back, giving him one more good sneeze which sent the two of us out the window and, I am sorry to say, into the moat.

  He swam manfully out and jumped onto the back of a golden horse conveniently saddled and tethered and let out into the outer paddock for grazing. I, on the other hand, had to crawl and climb, sopping wet, onto the shore and sit out in the freezing rain, hearing my lady’s indignant cries.

  After a very long interval, the drawbridge thudded down and a black and red streak ran across the bridge and stopped, no doubt wondering where that grazing horse could have gone. She was bleeding about the tail-wand and bedraggled and I was mad as-as a wet cat. I jumped on her and throttled her, giving no quarter to that injured tail, so that when she changed back into human form, she limped away from me, still kicking me off, while trying to protect her eyes and her bleeding nose while I clung to her knee.

  We had barely entered the woods when she changed into a giant raven and I crashed to the ground. She dove for me, dripping feathers and gore, but thudding hooves distracted us both and in a heartbeat, I saw the horse and rider and heard the baying of hounds.

  I jumped into the nearest tree as she flew away, and as the rider approached, I saw it was the king. With a last mad leap I landed upon his shoulders. Startled, he swore and shook himself, then I meowed plaintively in his face.

  “God’s blood, ‘tis wee Gray Jane! Whatever has happened to you, you poor puss?”

  Of course, he was to find out soon enough and even his wisdom could not convince the knights that Lancelot’s apparent treachery with the queen had all been a great misunderstanding. He was forced to try the queen in his new courts of justice, where she was found by the jury of knights to be guilty of treason. I could never tell him about Mordred’s treachery with Morgan La Chat and could do nothing but sneak into my lady’s cell to comfort her as she waited to die.

  The morning of her execution they led her outdoors into a chill and drizzling halflight, the dawn so troubled it was black and blue as a bruise and gray as cold iron.

  I followed, jumping from one muddy footprint to the other behind the former friends who were now my lady’s guards. More than once I was almost squashed or kicked by heavy boots as I looked up past robes and tunics and into grim faces, searching for allies, all the while listening for hoofbeats.

  Arthur’s face was averted and wet with more than mist and rain, his hair gone silver-white in the week since the queen’s trial, his carriage that of a broken man. Lady Elaine, in her usual useful fashion, cried and cried and cried. The knights looked both truculent and shamefaced and more than one would have called the execution off if he could have, I think. Only Mordred glowed and gloated, though without his magical accomplice, he seemed skittish as a kitten in a kennel. Like all of us, he seemed to be listening, waiting.

  My ears swiveling to the west, where Lancel
ot had ridden. I watched as they bound my lady to the stake with the cross in her hands. Mordred himself lit the pyre. It was slow to catch in the wind and damp and the first lit piece blew away. I squatted over it, warming my tail as I wet the flame into oblivion.

  The toe of Mordred’s boot caught me in the stomach and flung me onto the pyre, at my lady’s feet. Mordred poked the torch at me and I sprang for the well-loved safety of my lady’s shoulder as he set afire the straw at her soles.

  But from there I saw them, Lancelot and his men, soldiers who loved and trusted him and would believe of him no wickedness. They battled the halfhearted knights of the Round Table, who got no leadership from Arthur or from Mordred, who fled before Lancelot’s men. Lancelot rescued us with a slash of his sword that broke my Lady’s bonds and set her free to jump on behind him.

  Of course, he couldn’t ride far with us, because of me. But when he would have flung me down, my Lady cried, “No. I will not go without Jane. She would have given her life for me and I will not let her die out here to save myself.”

  “Oh, very well,” Lancelot said, dismounting. “There is a convent some eight miles away.”

  “I know,” she said. “I endowed it.”

  “You and your cat may find refuge there. I must return to my men and lead them. There will be a great battle, you know-perhaps a war, I cannot imagine how we all fell into such a muddle but it can-can-c-c-c-fare-choo!-well.”

  “Farewell, Sir Lancelot,” she cried.

  All of those tedious historians have decried the sorry end of the lovely kingdom that was our home. And it was a tragedy to be sure that all the friendship and love and good intentions were laid to waste and came to such a sad end. But the end was far better than it might have been without my vigilance and intervention.