by Gabriel King
Tag put his face in her fur. It was still warm and smelly. He heard her say, ‘Hi! I’m Cy. Cy for Sign Here!’ He saw her playing with a butterfly in two lanes of rush-hour traffic. He saw her scampering awkwardly toward him, dragging a piece of deteriorating linoleum.
The other cats had gathered around to look down at her. Puzzled and disoriented, as animals often are by death, they purred and rubbed their faces against her, against Tag. ‘She never washed!’ he told them, as if that explained anything. ‘I don’t want her to be dead,’ he said. He could hardly make the words come. He looked from Mousebreath to Sealink, Ragnar to the Mau. He appealed, ‘What can we do?’
They looked away from him.
‘Tell me!’ he demanded.
At this the fox stepped out of the shadows. ‘Let me look,’ he said gently.
But Mousebreath stood in his way.
‘You’re a dog, mate,’ he said. ‘What can dogs do – raise the dead?’
‘You know I’m not a dog,’ said Loves a Dustbin, ‘but I’ve got something a dog has.’
‘Have you? How convenient.’
The fox brushed past him with a kind of angry patience, approached the dead tabby, and lowered his head until he seemed almost to touch his nose to hers. Then he was very still and quiet. When at last he raised his sharp triangular mask, the flames from the burning warehouse laid red light across his eyes, so that he looked a very equivocal creature indeed.
‘I’ve got a good nose,’ he told Mousebreath, ‘which is more than any cat ever had.’ He turned to Tag. ‘She’s not dead yet,’ he said. ‘I can smell the life in her.’
Mousebreath laughed bitterly. ‘What’s that mean?’ he demanded.
The fox ignored him and said to Tag, ‘She may recover, she may not. In any case you should move her. There’s no shelter here. I can hear fire sirens in the distance, and the Alchemist may come back.’ Minute by minute, the heat was forcing them farther away from the building. Puddles were drying on the pavement. Up on the top floor, things sagged and broke and fell farther into the fire. The fox looked around. ‘You can’t stay here much longer.’
In his misery, Mousebreath wouldn’t give up. ‘What’s that mean, then, smell it in her?’ he said. Something dangerous and unpredictable swam slowly from the blue eye to the orange. ‘What’s that mean, mate?’
All this time, Sealink had been nipping cinders and tangles of burned hair out of her coat, eyeing covertly the King, the Queen, and – especially – the fox. Now she stood up, stretched, rearranged herself with a kind of gargantuan grace, and sat down again. ‘You come over here with me, honey,’ she advised her consort, ‘and leave kind Mr Fox alone.’ When Mousebreath went, he went reluctantly.
Loves a Dustbin stared at them. ‘Cats!’ he said.
The calico returned him stare for stare. ‘Honey,’ she told him, ‘I ain’t never had truck with a fox before, though I been downwind of them in fourteen countries.’ She resumed her toilette. ‘Can we-all not quarrel, and give some thought to what to do?’
They locked eyes one moment more, then Loves a Dustbin turned away and walked slowly over the road toward the warehouse. There, he sat as close to the double doors as the fire allowed. His head hung down. The heat made him pant. Once or twice he looked up at the top story, as if he were thinking of going back in. Tag went over to join him.
‘I’m sorry they don’t like you,’ he said.
‘Who?’ said the fox. ‘Oh, them. They don’t have to like me.’ Then he asked, ‘You didn’t see the magpie get out, did you? I waited as long as I could, but he was slow to wake up and it was already an inferno.’ He shivered. ‘And who could face that thing in there?’ he asked himself. ‘Not me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Tag. ‘The bird of fire was a magpie? In that light it hardly looked like a bird at all. What a brave creature!’
He said, ‘I know a magpie. He’s called One for Sorrow.’
The fox stared blankly at him. ‘I wonder about you, Tag,’ he said. ‘The bird up there – that was One for Sorrow. Who did you think it was?’ He chuckled suddenly. ‘‘Bird of fire!’ He’d have loved that.’ He got to his feet, bent himself around so that his long whippy spine made a complete circle, and began to root pensively about with his teeth in the fur of one haunch. ‘I told him he’d break his neck.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Tag miserably.
‘It was him,’ said the fox. ‘Take it from me.’
‘No,’ said Tag. ‘I mean I don’t understand how you knew each other.’
The fox’s sad laugh came back. ‘We know each other very well, all we creatures of Majicou,’ he said. ‘One for Sorrow and I, we knew each other very well.’
And he would add no more.
*
They took the fox’s advice and left the warehouse burning like a beacon. It was a slow, dreary retreat. Rain fell in every gust of wind, always against the lie of their fur. Every street was a blind alley that brought them up against the river.
Mousebreath would allow no one else to carry Cy. The fox observed his struggles with unconcealed irony. Sealink picked arguments with the fox: ‘Oh, excuse me, sir. Ain’t no need to sniff like that. I’m sure I didn’t see you there!’ And Ragnar and Pertelot dawdled shyly along, always a hundred yards behind, living in their own world, a world composed of memory and pain.
‘They’re none too friendly, hon,’ complained Sealink to Tag.
‘Can you blame them?’ jeered the fox. ‘You saw what waits for them.’
‘Pardon me for speaking, I declare.’
‘They want to be friendly,’ said Tag, ‘but you frighten them. Both of you.’
*
Seven animals spent the rest of an uncomfortable night in a partly finished development about a half mile upriver. It was to be called, a builder’s board informed the reading world. Piper’s Quay. There at Piper’s Quay, the moon shone down through unglazed windows. Pale dust blew across the floor on drafts that smelled of cement, mastic, cheap raw new wood. The fox sat down watchfully in one corner, Sealink and Mousebreath in another, the King and the Queen in a third. Cy lay motionless wherever she was put; if life stayed somewhere in her heart, if her breath continued to go in and out, only the fox could detect it. Mousebreath huddled close to her. No one wanted to say anything. No one slept. Tag was angry with them all. They were supposed to be his friends. It was Ragnar who broke the silence. After about a half hour, he stood up and announced in his show-bench voice, ‘Pleased to meet you all. From the South of England, grand champion three times Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion here. Norsk Skogkatt, if you know what that is! Also I might introduce you to Champion Pertelot Fitzwilliam of Hi-Fashion, first in class at many shows: Egyptian Mau. Very old breed. Excuse me, we are quite tired. After this battle.’
There was a silence.
‘Well, well,’ said Mousebreath eventually, ‘it’s the Queen of Sheba. And look here! As if that’s not enough, he’s brought his missus with him.’
Ragnar, who had understood not a single word of this, looked at him uncertainly. It was Pertelot Fitzwilliam who answered. ‘It isn’t our fault your little friend is ill,’ she told Mousebreath. ‘We want to help her as much as you do. You feel contempt for us, but by what right? I cannot help being who I am, any more than you can. I did not choose to be born with this blood.’
She stood up, drew muscle and fur about her as if her soul were cold, and laughed sadly. ‘Look what it has brought me to,’ she whispered. ‘He pursues me without let!’ She shuddered. ‘I would like to be an ordinary cat. I would like to sit close to Cy in the night. I would like to comfort her. I want to do the things every cat does, before he catches me and it is all over. Mousebreath, won’t you help me? Your eyes see two worlds,’ she told him. ‘One orange, one blue. Can’t you see that I love her too? No one has a monopoly on compassion.’
The room was quiet. Mousebreath looked away. ‘When you put it like that,’ he said gruffly.
She st
epped forward and rubbed her face against his to thank him.
‘They’re beautiful eyes,’ she said.
A loud, rough purr filled the air.
The Queen now went on. ‘Ragnar Gustaffson wanted to say thank you for helping us. We must leave soon. My breeder, whom you call the Alchemist, will not give up. He will not let me go. He calls me the Mother. He will kill anyone, human or animal, who gets in his way. Centuries ago, he came upon a prophecy as old as the Nile – a prophecy that foretold the breeding of a Golden Cat, a cat he believes will bring him enormous power and knowledge.’
The Queen shuddered.
‘“The blood is a book,”’ she said. She laughed dully. ‘Raggy, come and stand by me. I don’t feel well. ‘The blood is a book,’ that is what he says.’ She looked up and continued. ‘I understand little more of this than you. He believes he will breed the Golden Cat from me. If the blood is a book, mine is old, and it is a text he has read over and again. All his experiments point this way: one more birth is necessary if he is to get what he wants. Three hundred years’ work – so many generations of my forebears lived and died in his laboratories! I am the last of them. He believes he is close to the end, and he won’t give up until he has taken me back. Even as I speak, I feel him near. If he finds you with me, he will kill you all! You are in terrible danger while we stay with you. We’ll be gone from here by morning.’
Loves a Dustbin, who had been pretending to ignore the entire exchange, sprang to his feet. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘You must not leave!’
He looked angry, defeated, and anxious all at once.
‘Who are you to tell her what to do?’ inquired Mousebreath. ‘You’re just a dog.’
The fox snarled. ‘If you had an ounce of intelligence…’
Amusement swam gently out of Mousebreath’s blue eye and into the orange one. There it settled and after a moment hardened like cement. His big broad head went down, his ears furled back. ‘Ain’t no use for anything but the two F’s,’ Sealink had once said of him.
‘Tell me about it,’ he said quietly.
‘I think I will,’ the fox said. ‘I think it’s time I—’
‘Stop!’ cried Pertelot Fitzwilliam.
The fox, who, with his hackles rising and his black lips pulled back off his teeth in a cunning bony rictus, had been slipping across a puddle of moonlight to flank Mousebreath on his blue-eyed side, swung to face her.
‘Be careful!’ he warned.
She backed away, then stood her ground. She was half his height, and his smell was stronger than she was. Her long curved limbs and exotic profile glowed in the angular moonlight. The signature of the sacred beetle stood out on her forehead, a letter in a forgotten alphabet. Her eyes shone like reflections off satin. When he realized who he was looking at – how afraid she was, and how brave – the fox seemed to return to himself.
‘That wasn’t very well done,’ he admitted.
To Mousebreath he said, ‘This will keep.’
‘Only if I say so.’
‘Then I’ll persuade you,’ the fox said. ‘What happens here is as important for the tabby as it is for anyone else. Her fate is tied up with theirs.’
‘You say that.’
‘I say that.’
Mousebreath stared at him for some time. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Later, then.’
‘Oh yes,’ the fox promised him quietly. ‘You can depend on it.’ And he turned his attention to the Mau. ‘Pertelot Fitzwilliam,’ he said, ‘so much is at stake here! You will have to forgive me…’ He didn’t seem to know how to continue. When he spoke again it was to try and persuade her. ‘We are your friends here. If we frighten you, I’m sorry. We’re a rough lot, but we do have your interests at heart. The Alchemist frightens us, but we are not without resources. We won’t let him take you, I promise.’
And then, without warning and rather awkwardly, he knelt down in front of her.
Sealink had been watching these events with a certain relish. ‘I’ve seen it all now,’ she said. She heaved herself to her feet. ‘Honey,’ she told the Queen, ‘you just rest yourself where you are and let me give you a real wash.’ While to the fox, with a grudging respect, she said, ‘I never knew an animal stand up to Mousebreath before. Plus, it ain’t often you hear a fox promise to look after a cat. So you’re okay right now. But come morning someone’d better be able to explain this-all to me.’
They made such a tableau in the moonlight. In the center sat Pertelot Fitzwilliam, as close as she could get to the unconscious Cy. The fox knelt in front of her, in his gaze a strange mixture of calculation and reverence. Sealink, left of center, washed the Mau’s tired eyes like the mother of all cats while Ragnar Gustaffson and Mousebreath stood still as bookends at either side. Without thinking, Mousebreath had taken on Ragnar’s characteristic square tall stance. It looked odd but rather fine, Sealink said, on a street tom with mismatched eyes. ‘Some show cat, huh?’
Tag stared at his friends.
At least they were talking to one another.
*
One by one they all slept.
Tag dreamed that a black cat came to him and said, ‘Tag, listen to me.’
It said, ‘I am Majicou.’
It was the cat it had always been in his dreams, although now it was his own size. A proper cat, not quite the monster he remembered, one-eyed and perhaps a little old but still filled with life. Its coat was good. Its movements were graceful and economic. Its eye was – He couldn’t place the color of its eye. But it was an eye dancing with wisdom one moment, thoughtful and strange the next, with the personality in it barely present – or at least seeming to arrive from a great distance.
‘Are you the Alchemist?’ asked Tag fearlessly.
Everything went dark. Tag had the impression of something enormous looming above him, ablaze with malice and intelligence, so that even its breath was like hot smoke. ‘Never doubt me!’ it warned him. ‘Never doubt me!’ Then everything came back again, and Majicou sat before him, blinking amusedly.
‘Do you think you would be alive if I was?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tag.
When he looked around him in his dream he saw that he and the black cat were standing just outside Piper’s Quay, on a wall above the river. The moon plated the water with silver, picked out the warehouses on the opposite bank, and made the pink halogen lamps seem dim.
‘What do you see?’ the old cat asked Tag.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You see a highway. If you could travel it, you would. Tag, wake up.’
Tag woke up and found that he had walked in his sleep and now stood just outside Piper’s Quay on a wall above the river, under a white moon like an arc of tinfoil. A damp breeze blew up from the eastern reach, ruffled his fur the wrong way. Beside him was a one-eyed black cat. He was old but still filled with life. ‘Waking or dreaming I am always with you,’ he promised. ‘Do you see?’ He wasn’t a big cat, but his soul seemed huge and it overflowed, so that he filled up more space than any cat should.
‘Come with me, Tag,’ he suggested. ‘Come for a walk with me.’
‘I won’t come.’
But his feet came despite him.
*
A walk with Majicou was not like a walk with any other cat. Majicou walked in a measured way, giving every step its full weight. Nevertheless, he covered considerable ground. Majicou took note of everything that passed, and his one eye saw more clearly than another cat’s two. Majicou talked as he went. Talking with Majicou was not like talking to any other cat.
‘What is a highway?’ he asked. Then before Tag could respond, ‘If I heard the answer, A convenient line between two points, I would be talking to a human being. Are you a human being?’
‘No!’ said Tag, rather shocked.
One eye caught the moonlight. It was no color, all colors. A ghost of laughter hung in the air. ‘How does an animal answer, then?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tag said truthfully.
He walked in a contented silence for a while. ‘Very well,’ he continued, almost as if talking to himself. ‘How does a cat answer?’
‘I don’t know that, either.’
‘Good!’ said Majicou. ‘Do you know anything at all?’
Tag stared at him. ‘Eat when you’re hungry, sleep where it’s dry. No one is ever what they seem.’
‘Hm,’ the old cat said, not altogether approvingly; and when he began again, it was on a different note. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what am I to tell you, Tag?
‘That if, as the pretty myth has it, cats are allotted nine lives, I have lived out eight of mine? It would be true to say that. That I am as old as the highways I care for and that sustain me in return? That cats once got up on their hind legs at night and held not just a parliament but a just parliament with human beings? Ridiculous. No cat has ever wanted to walk like a man. Yet it’s a pity we can’t talk to them, Tag.’
‘I thought you hated human beings,’ Tag said.
Majicou stopped walking. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Here we are.’
He had led Tag back to the warehouse.
*
It was a very different sight now. The fire was out. The roof was blackened rafters. The walls leaned in on one another for support. Smoke rose thinly from a gutted shell. Two or three huge red machines were still gathered in a shudder of flashing blue light in the street outside. Men shuttled to and fro between them, dirty and smelling of charred wood. Inside they were busy damping the embers down with hoses. Water swilled from the double doors of the building and into the gutters. The hoses wove patterns like writing in the road. The pump engines vibrated.
Majicou looked up. His eye gleamed. ‘As a young cat,’ he said, ‘I loved a fire.’ Then he added, ‘You did well in there.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Ah.’
‘We did do well,’ said Tag proudly.
Majicou was walking about unconcernedly among the firemen. Somehow they didn’t see him. He wove, like the hoses, in and out of their feet. But they were always looking in another direction. Tag followed him. ‘How are we doing this?’ he said, delighted. ‘Are we invisible…?’