The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Well, just remember it.’

  ‘I will.’

  Mollified, the bird prepared to fly.

  ‘Wait!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What about Sealink and the Mau?’

  One for Sorrow looked grim. ‘I’ve never seen Majicou so at a loss. But none of us can do anything until we find them.’

  ‘No sign then?’

  The bird bobbed his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  He took off in a clatter of wings and shot low over the leylandii like an errant firework, heading east.

  ‘Look after the fox!’ he called. ‘And try not to lose anybody else.’

  *

  Half an hour after the bird had gone, Mousebreath, who had been dozing on a saggy old canvas chair in the conservatory, jumped down, shook himself with a stately energy, and winked his blue country eye. ‘Have a look ‘round, perhaps,’ he said to Tag. ‘See what I can see. Eh?’ And off he wandered, across the garden and through the hedge.

  Tag watched him go, tail high, haunches confident and furry, past the birdbath in the spitting rain. Beyond the hedge the fields began. They were small and eccentrically shaped, sheltered by high untended hawthorn hedges – each field like a high-sided tank of rough grazing darkened with patches of thistle and gorse. A shaggy-coated pony stood, one leg bent, in a muddy corner, looking boredly over a gray wooden gate. Curiously tunneled and undermined hummocks of chalky soil lay among the nettles. Wood pigeons whirred overhead by day; there was a sound of owls at night. It was a small country, self-contained and welcoming despite the winter wind, and Mouse-breath had quickly made himself king of it. To start with, he had taken Tag along with him. But Tag’s coat was the wrong color for that kind of work. It wasn’t that he had no talent, or that he didn’t love the quiet disciplines the tortoiseshell had learned from his uncle Tinner. But, ‘You stick out a bit,’ Mousebreath was forced to inform him apologetically in the end. ‘That’s all, mind. I’m not saying you wouldn’t be good at it. You just stick out a bit.’

  So Tag watched him set off in the promising gray dawns and dusks – and for that matter, mornings and afternoons – and felt a little sad. This time, when Mousebreath returned, a full-grown doe rabbit hung limply from his mouth, her head lolling at one side, her back legs at the other. She was huge. Her brown eyes were sad. A little blood had leaked from her nose, but otherwise there wasn’t a mark on her.

  ‘Never try to catch anything more than a quarter your own size, eh?’ boasted Mousebreath, panting a little with the weight of her. ‘Look at this stuffier!’ And he dropped her on the conservatory floor in front of the sleeping fox. After a moment the fox’s nose twitched in a lively way, and he woke.

  ‘What on earth’s that smell?’ he said, sitting up rapidly.

  ‘Rabbit, mate,’ said Mousebreath. ‘Get some of that down you, you’ll soon be fit.’

  The fox stared at him.

  ‘I—’

  ‘Well, go on!’

  ‘Don’t you like rabbit?’ said Tag. ‘I do! I really like it!’

  The fox stared down at the doe.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ he admitted. ‘In the city—’ He shrugged defensively. ‘Well, the fact is that I’ve never eaten anything raw before.’

  Mousebreath chuckled quietly.

  ‘Have a go,’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch you something in a tin if you can’t manage it.’

  Shared out, the rabbit made more than enough for everyone, even though the fox, quickly getting the idea, ate twice his share. They crunched the bones; they cleaned themselves. Then Mousebreath boasted a little about how difficult a rabbit she had been to catch, and Tag boasted about the difficult rabbits he would catch if his color didn’t make him stick out so, and one by one they grew silent and fell into deep, satisfied dreams.

  Two or three hours later, a lean moon raised itself over the roof of the bungalow; a light wind moved in the leylandii hedge. There was a quiet scratching noise from behind the water butt, and out of the conservatory came Cy the tabby. She wandered onto the bright rustling lawn and posed by the birdbath, washing her bib. The brass plug glimmered between her ears. Every so often, she lifted her nose and smelled the night. She listened. She raised her head and stared at the moon, and the moonlight filled her eyes. One by one, the little white garden moths came to her and began to circle her face. She crooned to them. They were sparks. There was a flicker in the air near her. A soft, apologetic cough. A popping sound. A twist of grayish smoke, which grew and grew and parted suddenly with a creak like a cat jumping onto a canvas chair, parted suddenly, like a zip in the fabric of the night, and out… came cats. There were perhaps a score of them: black cats and white cats, tabbies and marmalades, longhairs and shorthairs, and two cats with no hair at all whose faces were like the little sad screwed-up faces of demons in the night. The last good place they could remember was Tintagel Court. Now, puzzled and deformed, with bumps and buds and lumps, with wires and implants, with flaking skin, eyes a funny color and legs an awkward length, they barely knew who they were. He had given them names, but they weren’t names a cat would speak. He had sheltered them, but it was not proper shelter for a cat. He had given them food, but they were dull with hunger, because it was not food a cat should eat. They were his best subjects. They had no real idea why he had sent them here, along the highways, to find the singing tabby and kill her companions. Unaware of their own wretchedness – then-own pain – all they knew was to break across the lawn like surf, part briefly around the birdbath, and pour toward the lean-to conservatory in the quiet dead of the night…

  14

  A Voyage of Discovery

  You can’t catch a fish without wetting your paws.

  – OLD SAYING

  Old Smoky’s revelation was received with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

  Sealink stared for a long moment at the Queen, her eyes blank, the top lid a flat, grim line across the pupil. Then she turned her back deliberately and without a word applied herself to one of the bowls of tinned food the old fisherman had set down on the slatted floor.

  Pengelly watched her with hooded eyes. Then he turned to Pertelot.

  ‘Ma’am, I’m delighted. May your young ‘uns be many and as handsome as their mother.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Seasick!’ he said. ‘Shows how much I know. That Old Smoky, though, eh? Observant old buzzard!’

  The Mau gave him a distracted look. Her eyes were bewildered and hurt.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  She said in a low voice, partly to herself and partly to Sealink, ‘Oh, what can be the matter now?’

  She said sadly, ‘You’re very kind, Pengelly.’

  If Sealink heard any of this she ignored it. She cornered the bowl against the wall, finished off what was left in it, and then jumped lightly up onto the galley surface. There, she positioned herself carefully, head away from the other two cats, wrapped her tail around her, and fell asleep with her paws tucked in.

  Within seconds, a rhythmic snoring filled the cabin.

  ‘Don’t you pay no attention to she,’ Pengelly said softly. ‘She’m just jealous.’

  Pertelot looked surprised. ‘But why?’

  ‘You best ask her yourself, when she’m in better odor,’ returned the Rex, cryptically. ‘It ain’t really my business, though I known her longer than some. Don’t worry about her.’ He gave the Mau a wink. ‘Look here!’ he said. ‘Old Smoky knows what I like: that’s the best turkey dinner you’ll have out of a tin, bless him. Get some of it down ‘ee.’

  Pertelot ate. Pengelly ate. Sealink snored on. The old fisherman watched them with a curious expression on his weatherbeaten face; then he went up on deck with a mug of coffee to watch the stars.

  In the quiet cabin, Pertelot watched flickering patterns of light and shadow cast by the oil lamps. Her eyes were half-closed. Her flanks rose and fell with her breathing. She looked composed, but thoughts were tumbling chaotically t
hrough her head.

  Kittens. An extraordinary, terrifying miracle. Kittens! How could she not have known? Surely, something inside her had known and made her abandon Ragnar and sent her out here where the Alchemist would never look. She missed Rags. She felt the loss of him. She missed his awkward attentiveness, his benighted, unwavering love. She missed him. But kittens! Pregnancy had her now. It swept through her in a warm tide; it was a drugged glow in her belly. Now she knew they were there, she could feel them stirring. Tiny lives were moving inside her. How could she not have known? How long was it now? Already weeks –

  She was not naïve. She was a Queen. Like the rest of them, she’d witnessed enough selective breeding in the Alchemist’s laboratory to know the cycles and patterns.

  Sixty days from coupling to birth, or thereabouts. She tried to remember. When had she and Ragnar mated? Their time in Tin-tagel Court was a daze of pain and fear, the confusing frenzy of estrus, raised temperatures, bizarre dreams, wails that Ragnar had gently tried to stifle, in case she brought the Alchemist’s proxies down on them.

  She remembered how he had fought off the feral toms attracted by her heat, her cries, the musky scent of her that filled the court. Her mind was full of images – tangled, dark, and muddled. A thread of silver, twined with one of gold: together they danced through the center of the knot, bright and elusive. She fastened on them, she drew them out and pulled them free.

  Silver. Mercury. Tag. He had come to them like a blessing, a savior, a catalyst. The food he had brought them had saved them, had made her well enough to respond with sudden abandoned delight when one afternoon Ragnar had nosed at her uncertainly, then nipped her firmly in the thick skin of her neck.

  A few days of decency and hope, before the Alchemist had found them again. Powerless, she had run from it, and left Mercury to face the madness. It was her story. She drew the Alchemist to her like a shark to the feast, then fled. Others dealt with the consequences, if anyone could.

  ‘And yet,’ she told herself, ‘I was able to run away in the first place. If I hadn’t, there would have been some kittens for me!’ Not from a mate of her own choice. Not kittens she could hope to cherish and raise away from hurt and harm. Alchemical kittens! she thought. Well, what was done was done. She had found her own mate and broken the bloodline, and in just a few weeks the kittens would be bom. There was no point in guilt or recrimination. Kittens are the important thing in the world; hers would be the most important of kittens. She would face the new future with hope not because, as Sealink said, it was fun to travel and always be someone new, but for their sake.

  At least I know my pursuer, she thought.

  What was Sealink running so hard from?

  *

  The next day was bright and bitter. Sunlight licked off the wave tops but barely warmed the chilly timbers of the deck. Pertelot watched Pengelly’s breath wreath and spiral into the air like the old fisherman’s cigarette smoke. Old Smoky knelt at the stem, hauling something over the side.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Pertelot asked Pengelly.

  ‘Pulling up the pots he set last night when we were at anchor.’

  ‘Oh.’

  A gull shrieked and wheeled overhead. Then all was quiet again.

  A bit later she remarked, ‘He seems very kind.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  More silence.

  At last she asked, ‘How did you meet?’

  Pengelly stared out to sea and said nothing.

  Pertelot dropped her gaze. Events had made her uncertain. Had she offended Pengelly now? But the old cat had only been thinking, and after a minute he turned to her and said, ‘Picked me up out of the harbor at Mevagissey, he did. Me and my sister, too.’

  ‘You have a sister?’

  ‘I did. She was drownded. I was luckier.’

  ‘Oh, Pengelly.’

  When she thought about what he had said, it became clear to her what he had meant. ‘Someone tried to drown you?’

  ‘That’s what humans do with kittens they don’t want,’ said the old cat. His tone was factual, but his expression was tight and closed. ‘No one’s taught ‘em better.’

  She stared at him. ‘But that’s so cruel.’

  ‘Aye. Still.’ Pengelly contemplated the scenery for a few moments, then seemed to come to some sort of decision. ‘Old Smoky pulled the sack out of the water with a boat hook, emptied us out onto the deck. I staggered around a bit, choking and coughing up seawater. Poor little Wriggle, she wam’t wriggling no more. Dead as a dog’s brain. Cold as clay.’

  Old Smoky, he said, had picked him up – ‘I wam’t no bigger than a mouse’ – and sat him in the palm of his hand and scrubbed the life back into him with a piece of cloth, until his strange little catch writhed and spat and sneezed with it – all the pain of feeling, all the thawing nerve ends.

  ‘I thought he were trying to rub my fur right off.’ Pengelly fixed the Mau with a wall-eyed grin. His wicked eyes looked in different directions. ‘Probably why it looks so odd now.’ Pertelot didn’t know what to say. He did have odd fur, it was true. It was curly and lay close to his skin like a dog’s.

  Sensation had overwhelmed him: fish scales, human sweat, the salt off the water, and a curious aromatic spiciness. It was all over the old fisherman’s hands and on the handkerchief he held. It clung to his huge woolen sweater. And suddenly the little Rex could smell it on his own fur.

  Tobacco!

  ‘I didn’t know what it were then,’ he confided. ‘But I loved it at once; and every time he lights up now it takes me back to that day.

  ‘I been at sea all my life with Old Smoky. No kits or mates to speak of. Old Smoky’s all the family I got, and all the family I need: he’s father and mother, brother and sister to me, and I care for he as much as I could any cat.’

  Pertelot looked out to the far horizon where today the sky met the sea in a sharply defined line. For a moment she felt the most dreadful sense of pain and loss. Then she saw how the sun winked off the surface of the water as if a handful of stars had been trapped just below it. She thought suddenly. What will my kittens make of this extraordinary, beautiful world? Stars! She looked over the edge of the boat for them. But close in like this, the light barely penetrated, and the water showed murky and opaque like some semisolid substance filled with weed and foam – darkness beneath translucence.

  Pertelot drew back hastily. She combed the deck for a secure spot and settled herself deep in the middle of a twist of ropes and netting. She thought about her near death in the canal. She thought about Pengelly’s near death in the sea. She shivered. It was a wild world – gaudy on top and deep beneath. The cold, dark sea extended away below her and her kittens, down and down and down.

  All at once Sealink’s head appeared out of the wheelhouse door, followed by the rest of her shining bulk, the sun striking orange highlights into the glamorous calico coat. She yawned and stretched languidly.

  ‘Morning, shipmates!’

  Just as if nothing had happened the night before. The Mau stared at her.

  Sealink bustled past Pengelly, trotted around the deck, rubbing her head against the old fisherman’s legs in passing, then came and settled herself next to the Queen, where she reclined casually, extended a long hind leg and proceeded to groom it with long, careful strokes of her big tongue.

  ‘Pengelly was telling me about himself,’ Pertelot said quietly. Perhaps it was better to avoid the subject of kittens for now.

  ‘I’m sure he was, hon. Let’s see now: traveling the seven seas, a queen in every port, exotic foods from the far Orient? That it, hon?’

  Pertelot was at a loss.

  ‘Well, no. He was telling me how, when he was a kitten, the fisherman saved him from drowning.’

  Sealink lifted her head. Her ears pricked up. Her tail twitched and thumped on the deck as if it had a life of its own. ‘You ain’t never told me about this,’ she accused Pengelly.

  ‘You never asked. It’s a long, long time ago now. And
don’t you always say, my lover, ‘Why, history don’t mean nothing, babe, when we make our lives anew each day’?’

  His rendering of Sealink’s honeyed southern tones was eerily exact.

  For a moment the fur along the calico’s back bristled and subsided, bristled and subsided, as if disturbed by a passing breeze. Her eyes glittered and, without turning round, she said to the Queen, ‘Why don’t you tell us about your early life, babe? We can have a real sharing time with that, I’m sure.’

  But she was really talking to Pengelly; and when Pertelot looked up, she saw that their eyes were locked in some challenge she didn’t understand. She felt their history going back away from them like a corridor closed to her.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ she said.

  ‘Now don’t be so elusive, sugar,’ Sealink chided. ‘It’s attention getting, and we love you without you need to do it.’

  The Queen hunched unhappily. She stared down at the coils of rope that surrounded her. The fibers twined and coiled intricately, hundreds of tiny threads to make a single rope; each thread delicate and fragile, yet so robust in combination. When she spoke, her voice was low and emotionless.

  ‘I was born in a laboratory. I know that now. Then, it was all I knew. I thought the smell of fear and despair, the whimpers and howls, were what it was to be alive. A normal life for a cat!’

  She laughed bitterly.

  ‘He took me from my mother before I even opened my eyes. But I felt the softness of her fur, and the rasp of her tongue… and I remember that, I do. Then, a hard white hand, huge and powerful, and the scent of another cat, her love and despair, falling away below me… Now heights make me feverish and I dream of a world that topples endlessly away…’

  She took a breath, closed her eyes.

  ‘Of course, I was the lucky one. I lived. Pampered, they said. His special one. The Mother. The others hated me. No one made me shriek with pain. But it was pain of a different sort, outliving the others. Every day, more cats, brought in, taken out. They arrived, confused, afraid, but optimistic. I could hear them, though I could see nothing but white ceiling from my cage. ‘At least,’ they would say, ‘we shall be fed. After all, that’s what humans do for cats, isn’t it? Feed us.’’