by Gabriel King
‘We’d have to help anyway, hon. It’s a cat.’
Tag barely heard. He was trying to think his way through the warehouse double doors that reared up before him huge and forbidding, grimy and gouged, ancient with red paint and flecks of fossilized white lettering.
They were firmly shut.
‘She shouldn’t be up there!’ he said. ‘How did she get up there?’
‘Calm down, hon,’ advised Sealink.
‘Little cat’s bad again,’ said Mousebreath quietly from behind them.
Cy had looked upward, caught sight of the Mau, and promptly toppled head down in the road. As they watched, her eyes widened and bulged. She rolled slowly onto her side to curl up like a dead wasp, while her mouth gaped open on a painful, unvoiced snarl. Her breath was fast and shallow. From deep inside her there issued a long, meaningless whine. Tag had time to think. That’s a sound no cat should ever make. Then awareness snapped back into the tabby’s eyes, and she began to writhe to and fro with the effort to speak.
‘Khi! The light formed by light!’ she wailed. ‘Golden cats!
‘Don’t go!’ she said to Tag. ‘The Alchemist! He’s up there! He wants his Queen!’ She pulled herself toward him. ‘Quicksilver, please don’t go. It’s – I – It’s this: I feel cold. I’m not so good.’
‘What can I do?’ said Tag. ‘I have to help Pertelot!’
‘You go,’ said Mousebreath, in a voice without expression. ‘You go to your friend now,’ he said. ‘I’ll look after this one.’ He nodded at Sealink. ‘You go, too,’ he said. ‘Look!’
He had spotted a broken pane in a lower window. It could be reached by a good jump. Tag knew how to do that.
‘Thanks!’ he said.
Mousebreath said, ‘Pay me later.’
He pronounced it pie.
Pie me lyter.
*
Tag found himself staring into a high narrow corridor, painted long ago a shiny green. It was cold and full of echoes. A sour smell drifted past him on faint currents of air. Sealink leapt up beside him.
‘Staircases at each end,’ she said. ‘Hurry, hon!’
The corridor ran the whole length of the building, past a cavernous black elevator shaft and doors painted the same color as the walls. Tag and Sealink ran down it, then dashed up stairs, the metal treads of which had first been polished by human feet, then left to tarnish twenty years in silence. As they went from story to story, skidding around corners, running out into vast empty spaces full of dust and dripping water – ‘Wrong floor! Wrong floor!’ – light filtered down the stairwell toward them, now tremulous and rose-colored, now a baleful orange. They began to hear human shouts, angry and faint at first, and the distressed wail of cats. None of this prepared them for the sight that met their eyes on the top floor.
The loft stretched away, one vast undivided space, with support pillars like old-fashioned lampposts. The air smelled of friar’s balsam and tasted like brass. Shadows jigged and flickered across the walls and between the pillars.
In the farthest corner, a column of light issued from the floor, roaring like an inverted waterfall, thrashing and twisting to exit now through the ceiling, now through the nearest wall. The shifting glare cast by this object fell on an indistinct human figure, dressed in a pale robe. Over its head was pulled a black rubber mask or helmet with yellow-tinted glass eyepieces. Its movements – mimed and excessive, as if it wasn’t quite human after all but some other species testing out a new body – made Tag remember Tintagel Court, where its hands had pinched up his flesh to insert the needle and its voice had exclaimed ‘Wrong cat! Wrong cat!’
It was Pertelot’s breeder.
It was the Alchemist.
In one hand, the Alchemist held a closed brass vessel streaming smoke, in the other, a short thick staff devised from the mummified foreleg and paw of some large black animal. Weird light flared off the eyepieces of his mask. Around him broke a tide of cats.
They seemed confused.
Tintagel Court was the last good place they had known. Many of them now had shallow unhealed wounds where patches of skin had been removed, especially about the head. Others looked sleek and well fed, a little larger than they had been, full of a rather bemused, undirected health. Some seemed to have been changed out of all recognition. Their movements were odd, uncatlike – though that was probably an effect of the light. They pooled and eddied about the feet of the Alchemist. They were completely silent, yet the air was full of their purring speech. He raised his staff: that gesture launched them like a wave. They moved as one.
Sealink watched, appalled. Then she said, ‘Tag, I ain’t never seen anything like this. Which of these cats do we want?’
‘Those!’ said Tag. ‘Pertelot! Rags! Over here! Ragnar Gustaffson! It’s me!’
Pertelot had come back through the window and now crouched on its dusty inner ledge. Five feet beneath her on the floor, Raggy confronted the Alchemist as if this were one last, awful championship. His great mane bristled. Ragnar Gustaffson – Cœur de Lion! – held himself as he had on the show bench: brave, square, and upright, but only with a terrible effort. His coat was full of broken sticks and knots. It was matted with oil. But he would not let the Mau be taken. As for her: fever-eyes, hollow ribs. You could follow every curve of her bones. All she had left was a rose-gray heart. All she had left was the will to live. She was burning and sullen with it.
‘Ragnar! Pertelot!’
They turned their heads, eyes streaming from the strange balsamic smoke.
‘Mercury!’ cried Pertelot. ‘Oh, help!’
The Alchemist flung up his arm. His cats rolled toward Tag and Sealink like a silent surf.
‘Hon,’ said Sealink, ‘I wonder what you got us into here?’
‘A fight,’ said Tag. ‘Sorry.’
It was a strange business. The eyes of the ferals were bright and empty. Their choking, musty smell was full of contradictory signals. ‘Where are we?’ it said. ‘What’s happened to us?’ None of them could answer. But they could fight well enough. Tag chopped his way grimly toward the window ledge, the calico beside him. You had to be careful near her. She sent things flying wherever she went. She was like a terrier with rats. They fought well together, cutting and ducking, leaping and bashing in the weird light. But soon the ferals closed around them, separated them, and by sheer weight of numbers began to press them toward the Alchemist. He stood and waited in the middle of the floor, his arms hanging down by his sides, a trail of vapor rising from the vessel in his hand.
‘Frankly,’ Sealink admitted to Tag, ‘things look bad for us.’
The Alchemist knelt. He whistled. He held out his arms. The great hooded head reared over them. You could smell the human sweat on him, the black rubber boots on his feet. A whiff of the canister – friar’s balsam and the taste of metal in Tag’s mouth – made things whirl dizzily. Tag caught a sudden glimpse of Sealink, her lips drawn back off her teeth in a puzzled snarl, her face a mask of bleeding cuts. Then he seemed to be on his back, looking up at the huge hands coming down toward him for the second time in his life.
As the fight moved away from her, Pertelot Fitzwilliam had abandoned the window ledge. Seeing Tag in such trouble, she and Ragnar now crept bellydown as close to the edge of things as they dared. Suddenly, Pertelot stood up tall and showed herself to her tormentor.
‘Now me!’ she sang out. ‘I’m here!’
Abandoning Tag and Sealink immediately, he whirled upon her. She dashed away across the loft. Soon he was darting here and there trying to squirt her with alchemical smoke while, spent and without further ideas, she trotted in exhausted zigzags about the open space looking for places to hide. Ragnar ran to and fro between them, yowling fiercely. The Alchemist laughed. He raised his staff. His sea of cats began to move. Pertelot shrank back. The thing in the corner roared and spat, flared up heraldic red and gold. In that light everything was changed, and you could barely say what you saw. Tag wobbled to his feet. But he was still full of the Alchemist
’s smoke, and when he ordered his body forward it only swayed unhappily about. And Sealink, who had gotten a bigger dose, was asleep on the floor.
Things would have gone hard with everybody, but at that moment one of the warehouse windows burst in. Broken glass spurted through the air like a cloud of colored steam. Inside it appeared a mysterious violent shape: a bird of fire trailing fan-tails of sparks, which plunged haphazardly across the room banging from pillar to pillar and finally slammed into the back of the Alchemist’s head – after which, spent, it skidded two or three yards across the floor like a loose Catherine wheel and seemed to burn itself out. This extraordinary attack knocked the Alchemist onto his face and dislodged his mask. He balanced for a moment, bent forward, his weight shared between his forehead and his knees. Then he fell onto his side and curled up like a dead insect. Vapors wreathed around his head from the alchemical vessel, which had fallen from his right hand.
In his left hand, though, he still clutched his staff. As Tag watched, he began to make slow, powerful clenching motions, the muscles of his forearm flexing and relaxing, its thick raised veins pulsing with blood. After a little of this, the preserved foreleg out of which the staff was made began to flex too. It was alive. It was as if the Alchemist was pumping life into it. From its mummified paw slipped five hooked claws…
‘Out!’ said a harsh voice in Tag’s ear. ‘Get up and get out!’ Tag looked up dizzily.
Standing over him was the fox Loves a Dustbin. His coat was muddy, his teeth were bared, his eyes were wild, and he smelled angry. He sank his white teeth into Tag’s scruff, dragged him upright, and set him untidily on his feet.
‘Can you hear me,’ he barked, ‘little cat?’
‘Don’t call me that,’ Tag began to say.
But the fox only interrupted, ‘Out! There isn’t time! Do you want to be here when he changes?’
‘Is he a black cat? A huge black cat?’
‘Get these animals out of here!’
Tag stared. ‘All right,’ he said.
‘Tag, honey, have I been asleep?’ said Sealink blearily from behind him.
Then she said, ‘Oh my. Is that a dog?’
*
Sealink grumbled sleepily, but she helped Tag shepherd Pertelot and Ragnar down the stairs and into the street. Unwholesome light seeped down after them. Even in the street the air felt hot and charged with electricity. They turned as one animal to stare up warily at the top floor windows. Up there, light pulsed faster and faster, flickering the whole width of the spectrum from a deep bloody red to a dazzling white glare. There was a prolonged grinding noise. And rising to challenge it was a long roar of rage from some unimaginable throat. Then – pop! – darkness and silence. After a second or so, a quiet explosion blew all the windows out of their frames. Flames leapt upward. Glass and hot cinders rained down among the cats, who scuttled backward; and the fox burst out of the building at a dead run, staring behind him with fear-whitened eyes.
*
It was a shabby-looking team that reassembled in the street. Loves a Dustbin sat silently in the shadows with his back to the warehouse, as if he didn’t want to be associated with it. Ragnar and Pertelot stood quietly shoulder to shoulder, a little shy and separate. Suddenly the Mau lay down tiredly; and Ragnar began to lick her thin, worn face. In the fierce orange and gold light, they stood out sharp and pictorial. Sealink sat and groomed determinedly, as if all she wanted now was some quiet, practical time to herself. Mousebreath – who had greeted no one, not even his calico queen – was standing stiffly and awkwardly over the tabby, who still seemed to be unconscious.
The fox made the cats nervous. The cats made the fox irritable. Everyone was dirty and exhausted and no one knew what to say.
Tag blinked up at the flames. He felt the heat on his face. Some part of him, gassed and confused, felt as if it were still in the warehouse. The things that had happened up there – the things that had happened at Tintagel Court, the voices he had heard in his dreams – tangled about themselves like threads of alchemical smoke. He shook his head to try and clear it. Then he went over to have a look at the tabby.
‘How is she?’ he asked Mousebreath.
Mousebreath looked at the fire. Then at Tag. And at last back down at the little cat.
‘She’s dead,’ he said.
The Second Life of Cats
In the beginning, the world was a very different place from the one we know now, for the Felidae roamed freely through daylight and dark.
There were the Big Cats, made in the image of the Creator, tawny and black and orange, who ranged over savannahs and mountains – which had been Her shoulders; and the striped Forest Cats who loved the dark jungle – which had been Her fur. There were the Desert Cats, sorrel and roan, or yellow as the sands, padding in the shadow of the dunes or along the bright seashores; and the White Cats who stalked tundra and snowy waste. There was prey for all and to spare; they were the lords of all they surveyed.
In those days the Felidae were afraid of nothing, and all other creatures walked in fear of them, especially the human beings.
What tale can be told about them?
They had squeezed themselves into life uninvited from out of the Great Creator’s silver eye – the eye, it is said, that looks inward upon the place of the dead and the spirits while Her golden eye looks outward upon the world – and straight away had taken themselves off into the caves. They weren’t so good at living! They could only stare out in awe and envy when the Felidae came by – so strong and quick and deadly, so proud by day, such lamp-eyed hunters by night!
How could human beings take on such qualities?
They could paint cats upon the walls of the caves, as talismans for their own hunt, but it was hard to capture the nature of creatures that moved so silently and swiftly through the darkness, and so the painted cats had eyes like bowls of silver, teeth like scythes, and claws like knives. They drew cats bringing down first antelope, then buffalo, then even elephants, as if the skill of the cats knew no bounds.
Humans!
They would imitate the movements of the cats: they danced and danced about the fires, chasing one another and feigning the death of prey. Their backbones were stiff and awkward, their two feet clumped on the clay of the beaten earth, and the springs and pounces they made were feebler than the springs and pounces of any month-old kitten! The Felidae looked on in amusement.
And then one day, one of the humans said to its fellows, ‘If I was to wear the skin of a cat upon my back, with his head upon my head, and his mouth above my mouth, with his claws upon my fingers and his tail waving behind me, would I not then be able to hunt like a cat?’
And so the next day they went out searching for the hide of a dead cat to bind upon their finest hunter. Eventually, they came upon old Pardus, curled at the foot of a tree, waiting peacefully for his spirit to walk the wild road to the other land, through the Great Cat’s silver eye. The humans watched old Pardus warily, for of all the Felidae the spotted cats were most feared for their speed and the power of their great paws and jaws.
They debated as to whether they should try to hasten him upon his journey; but good sense, which is rare among humankind, prevailed and back home they went, empty-handed.
The following day, off they went to the tree again, and this time luck was with them, for in the night Pardus’s spirit had traveled down the wild road. But maybe he was just sleeping! Three times the hunters approached, and three times they lost their nerve and ran away into the bushes; until at last the bravest took its long spear and prodded Pardus’s chest. The spotted cat’s head lolled; again they leapt away! But when he made no other movement they felt more courageous and, binding his feet to the long spear, slung him upon their shoulders and carried him back to the caves.
It was dark when the hunters returned. Flaming torches lit the air as the females and the small ones and the old ones came out of their caves. They gathered around and stared at the big cat’s carcass with great awe. To b
e so close to such a killer!
They stroked Pardus’s fine pelt and pressed the huge paws until his gleaming claws protruded; they opened his jaws and peered into his terrifying mouth. They lifted his tail and felt with reverence the weight of his balls.
And when they had done all this they found that their fear of him had somewhat diminished. Then they skinned him with their sharp flint knives and bound his hide upon their greatest hunter, so that his back was on its back, and his head was on its head, and his mouth was above its mouth, and his claws were upon its fingers, and his tail was waving behind it. Then it started to dance around the fire and as they watched its whirling and leaping it seemed to them that the human moved just like a great cat. It prowled and roared and cut the air with its new claws; and all the humans fell back in awe from the one they thought they knew. And after that night the aura of the great cat seemed still to be with that human even when it did not wear his skin upon its back. And so it became their chief and the humans walked in fear of it.
In this way, then, humans started to learn to draw our power and our magic down into themselves. They tamed the weak-willed dogs of the plain – the craven Canidae – and during the day hunted us down and killed us where we slept or nursed our young. They took our skins and bound them on their backs.
But at night, they kept to the caves, built the fires high, and watched for the flash of our eyes in the dark…
7
The One-Eyed Cat
It is bad luck to see a black cat before breakfast.
– MIDWEST SAYING
Mousebreath said loudly, so that everyone else could hear, ‘That’s how she is, mate. She’s dead.’
Tag looked down at Cy. She had uncurled in her last moments and now lay stretched out on the cracked pavement in the pose of a cat walking lightheartedly across a road on a sunny morning – legs striding out, head held high. Walking too light-heartedly, perhaps. Her mouth was still open, but her eyes were closed. Her face looked small and pained, as if to say, My life was sad but I didn’t want to leave it.