by Gabriel King
Thus the world was changed by the curiosity of a cat.
There I sat. Everything smelt. Bottles and vials, crucibles and retorts. Chemicals, herbs, hot coals – and something else. Something smoldering in the hearth. It was fur. The fur of cats…
I looked for them, and I soon found them.
Every wall was shelved. Every shelf was stacked with books and papers, articles and instruments, untidy bundles of stale old cloth – parched yet dank and feeble with age – lenses and charts and weights and eyeballs in bottles. And below the shelves were the cages: cages full of cats. Cats of every size and age and color and shape you could imagine: tabby and tortoiseshell, silver and striped, tawny and black and orange and gray; kittens and queens; toms and thin, dry old fellows with fur scoured by mange – all thrown in together willy-nilly. And all of them were staring at me with misery drawn upon their faces, defeat and accusation in their eyes.
Every shameful thought fled me.
My master laid down its book. It opened the window to create a draft and stoked the fire, then set a pot to bubble fiercely upon the trivet. At first I thought it engaged upon making tea; but then it reached into a cage and extracted a skinny male, his brown legs pumping with the sudden strength of terror as he felt the steam from the pot scald his skin. The next moment he had been plunged into the boiling water and the air was split by a cry of the purest agony, outrage, and desperation. It was an evil sound. I recalled then, in a flash, other lives, the cries of poor Kettie in the flames.
He wailed, that small cat, for the Great Cat’s mercy, for his suffering to come swiftly to an end. He fought the cauldron, and at one point succeeded almost in clambering from it, and I saw for one terrible moment how livid was his skin, with the fur falling away in patches, his paws opening and closing in awful spasms as they clutched the rim. Then my master pressed him back into the pot with a silver stick, and all went quiet. An unearthly howl filled the chamber. It raised the hair all over my body and I found my own voice joining, involuntarily, with the lament. I watched as his lifeless body, dripping and pathetically scrawny, was hauled out of the pot. I watched as my master severed the head and burned it to ashes in a crucible. Acrid smoke filled the air, more caustic even than the unholy mixture burned in the hearth upstairs that had made my eyes water. And now, through a veil of tears, I watched as it mixed the ashes to a paste – and ate them. Then it snuffed out all the lamps and stood before the mirror, examining its face with a candle flickering before its eyes.
‘Grant me entrance to the wild roads,’ it breathed.
In that instant the knowledge and the power of my seven lives was distilled into burning rage. I knew then that my master was the worst of its kind, that I must save the Felidae from its madness.
There came a knock at the door.
‘Be damned!’
‘Please, sir, Mister Newton, ‘tis a fellow from the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge, come to ask you questions about your theory of gravity, sir…’
It was the maid. It did not like me, and I did not like it; but now I blessed it in the name of the Great Cat and prayed that it would take my master away.
And indeed away it went, cursing the failure of yet another experiment, and left me in the darkness.
The cages were not difficult to open.
Out they flooded, the cats of the city, caught by the Official Executioner, out into the room, across the floor, around the walls. Mad with unexpected freedom, they knocked everything from the shelves – pots and vials, papers, and musty old bundles of cloth. One of these bundles tumbled out in front of me and split apart, revealing what appeared at first sight to be a handful of old twigs. But when I bent my head to sniff at it, I saw clearly that it contained a tiny, well-preserved rib cage and spine covered with strips of leathery skin, four long bony legs, front paws crossed upon the chest, an exquisitely fragile skull resting on a broken vertebra, the eyes gone and the mouth drawn into a rictus; and I leapt away, for the power that shimmered from it was ancient and fine.
The chamber was now ablaze. Volatile chemicals crackled and sputtered. Papers and books and mummified remains added fuel to the conflagration. The cats were escaping through the open window, an arcing spectrum of furry color, and I lost no time in joining them. As I leapt upon the next-door roof of Thomas Faryner, the baker, I stared back at my erstwhile home. Flames were gouting out of the basement window – orange and green and blue – flames of deeply unnatural hues. Explosions within sent great billows of smoke out of the window, and then its thick panes shattered with a clang like a broken bell. The bakery, too, had caught light – so much dry timber in such close proximity, so few able-bodied humans to fight the flames.
17
In the Eye of the Wind
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then a cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
– DORIS LESSING
Gusts of wind exploded into the Guillemot’s loose canvas as she heeled and swung at anchor. Rain fell steadily in huge silver drops that penetrated directly to the skin.
‘Let’s get out of this!’ urged Sealink.
But Pertelot Fitzwilliam, wet fur pasted to her trembling muscles, stared into the landward darkness as though her whole life were out there somewhere. Little involuntary movements passed through her, tremors betrayed by a set of the head, a flexing of the toes. She wanted to run but could only remain rooted to the deck.
‘Come on, hon. Hurry!’
Lightning flashed.
Unfamiliar colors flared briefly in the bright tapestry of Pertelot’s eyes: copper and sea green, a corona of lapis and amber around a pupil like a tiger’s claw. Then the third lid slid like an ill-fitting shutter across the complex lenses, and she fell upon her side, ears flat to her skull.
She was still conscious. When Sealink tried to grasp her by the neck and drag her out of the weather, she twisted and bit. Sealink, bewildered, withdrew. Pertelot tilted back her head and howled. ‘It would make your hair stand on end,’ Sealink would say later, ‘a noise like that.’ The Mau kneaded weakly at the air in front of her, claws extended in a confused gesture of submission and resistance.
‘Light,’ she said. ‘Light. Oh, now he bears down on us, ancient and fierce, ancient and fierce from his own sky, his own north. Aiee! The old roads! The frozen stars!’ She strained up toward the darkness, then fell back.
‘Save us,’ she appealed quietly. ‘Save the kittens.’
Her cries brought Pengelly out of the cabin.
‘Whatever is it? Whatever’s going on up here?’
‘Pertelot bit me!’ said Sealink. ‘And I didn’t do nothing to her ‘cept try to get her out of the rain. She’s staring at the cliffs. Staring and staring. Can you see anything there?’
They waited, faces upturned in the dark, for the next flash of lightning. When it came, nothing was revealed but a headland bleak with rain.
‘Seems to have gone,’ said Sealink with relief.
‘What’s gone?’
‘I ain’t sure, hon. Might have been the Wild Cat of World’s End; might have been a tree.’ She sighed tiredly. ‘The light will play you tricks.’
Pengelly listened to this with his head tilted to one side. Then he began to dance.
Up and down the deck he went, whirling and pouncing in tight little circles – back paws off the floor, front paws off the floor – as if trying to catch his own tail. His paws thumped wetly, and he accompanied the dance with some odd, garbled cries, like a cat trying to talk through a mouthful of food.
Sealink stared at him.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she said. ‘Is this some Old Country thing?’
It was.
Pengelly completed his dance and stared hard at the cliffs. A rasping sound, as of hairball displacement, came from deep in his throat.
‘Begone, begone, begone,’ he said.
He spat.
Then he said, ‘The black cat has a gale of wind in its tail. We’re i
n for a proper bad blow. Black cat means the weather, see? And that’s how we calm un.’
‘I knew that,’ Sealink said.
She turned her attention to the bedraggled and by now unconscious Pertelot and, firmly grasping the scruff of her neck, hauled her into the shelter of the wheelhouse.
*
The black cat had its tail up now, and the wind was beginning to find its strength.
Armies of breakers hit the beach, each company of boiling foam hurtling up the shingle before being sucked raggedly back down the line to recoup. Gouts of spume crashed up from the seaward stacks. The bottom had dropped out of the barometer: above the bay, streams of cyclonic air whirled and collided with a crack like washing on a bad Monday. It made your head spin and your ears itch.
As above, so below.
Currents wrestled and recoiled – the Guillemot’s anchor rope creaked – she bucked and rolled. She was fretful but eager to be free.
Accustomed to such nervous displays, Old Smoky, visible now only as the bright coal of a lighted cigarette, made his tranquil way around her deck. His Wellington-booted feet were as sure as any cat’s on the slippery planking. If a stray lanyard flailed in the rigging, he caught the ends and made them fast. If canvas flapped and struggled, he furled the sails tight. The boom swung dangerously. Alert to a new movement of air, he turned as it bore down upon his head, grabbed and neatly secured it. Slowly and surely he moved around the vessel. He bade her be calm. He stowed the fishing gear, then swept Pen-gelly up in his arms.
‘What d’you think, old cat?’ he asked.
‘Wind’s northeast and proper nasty. Force six heading for seven and if we stay moored here we’m right in her path.’
He ruminated on this. ‘Night after full moon, so the tide’s running strong. Stay here, she’ll turn we over for sure. These cliffs ent tall enough to give us shelter. Out there—’ he surveyed the miles of braided troughs and foam-topped peaks, piling up now into walls of water as the wind caught them ‘—it’ll be worse. So best try to outrun her, keep in tight along the coast. Ay, Pengelly, that’s what we’ll do, eh, boy?’
He looked down into Pengelly’s grizzled face. He winked. Pengelly stared back. Then down he jumped and ran for cover.
Thunder rumbled, louder and closer. Cloud roiled overhead, hectic with electricity and moonlight. The fisherman hauled up his weed-tangled anchor.
The Guillemot plunged joyously forward.
*
In the wheelhouse, Sealink and Pengelly watched the storm nervously. Pertelot lay panting in her sleep upon the chart shelf, where Sealink – with the determination that bespeaks hybrid vigor – had dragged her, safe from the foul weather and the fisherman’s substantial rubber boots.
Now the diesel engine rumbled into life in the bowels of the boat. Old Smoky was suddenly at the wheel, water streaming from his oilskins. Rain dashed against the windshield as the Guillemot breasted the waves. She reared gallantly at every peak and trough. Her timbers creaked and flexed.
Thunder cracked overhead.
Every cloud, every wave and surge and breaker, was burnished with light, each detail distinct for miles around. They seemed to be the only living things in sight: no other boats out on a night like this, no gulls about the waves or in the air. Only the tiny vessel in the storm, a thin skin of paint and wood between life and death. Three cats and an old man, bumping across the ocean.
‘Well, hell!’ said Sealink. ‘This is what I mean! See?’
No one was listening.
Thunder and lightning were inseparable now, as if light could be sound, and sound light.
The lines on the old fisherman’s face stood out starkly. His teeth gleamed, and his hands were clever on the wheel. He stared out into the flicker and bang, the pupils of his eyes contracting and dilating to the rhythm of the storm. The Guillemot wallowed helplessly a moment, then righted herself and plowed on with the wind behind her. The dark, humped coast swelled past to starboard, barely distinguishable from a solid mass of churning air and sea. There was a kind of pause. Then the wind flung raindrops the size of pebbles into the wheel-house, the thunder cracked, and directly above them the world split apart.
Cat lightning flashed in the sky.
Out of the chaos, out of the night, out of the clouds that wreathed the waning moon, legs and heads and tails and bodies – all the lithe alchemy of argentum vivum – quicksilver cats who cavorted and capered in the dark! They leapt and sprang and twisted. They raked the clouds with fang and claw, and fire streaked from their terrible eyes. Great sky cats, electric cats at play! A smell of sulfur filled the air.
Pengelly stared, aghast.
Even Sealink, that collector of intense experience, looked disturbed. Her ears quivered. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
She was still trying hard when something outside caught her eye.
A ragged scrap of black and white was being hurled about above the waves. The storm buffeted it one way then another, lost interest, took it up again. It vanished for some moments behind a wave the size of a hill. Then it dropped like a stone out of nowhere, onto the deck of the Guillemot.
Without a thought, Sealink was out into the driving rain. The wind filled her coat like a sail, blowing her fur up the wrong way so that the sharp bones of her hocks were clearly visible. Her tail streamed in the gale, and the long hair of her ruff whipped across her face.
When she arrived back in the wheelhouse, she had something large and piebald drooping from her mouth. She deposited it gently on the slatted floor and shook herself vigorously. Pertelot Fitzwilliam woke up and gazed down from her shelf. ‘Look here, hon,’ Sealink invited her, and prodded the object with one huge paw. It remained motionless. ‘Just look what we got here.’
It was a magpie.
‘Don’t touch he!’ cried Pengelly, visibly agitated. ‘Beware the Corvidae, the byasenY’ he warned. ‘Oh. they’s birds of ill omen, particular when they come in ones.’ He lashed his tail. ‘‘Tis terrible luck that it’s landed here, terrible.’
He spat three times to avert calamity and chanted,
‘One’s sorrow, two’s mirth
Three’s a matin’, four’s a birth
Five’s a naming, six a dearth
Seven’s heaven, eight is hell
And nine’s the Devil, his own sel’.’
Sealink received this performance with a snort.
‘Pengelly,’ she told him, ‘you spend altogether too much time among human beings. This here is an acquaintance of mine, if I’m not mistaken. Though I have to say—’ she peered so closely at the still form that her nose almost touched its beak ‘—all birds do look awful similar to me.’
With a gulp and a splutter, the magpie shook itself. Its feathers rustled like dry leaves. Light glinted from the uniform blackness of one beady eye. Finding itself face-to-face with a cat, it let out an earsplitting squawk and tried to fly. Old Smoky was distracted from the wheel.
‘What the blazes!’
He lunged at the magpie, but Sealink was faster. In a moment she had grabbed her catch between her jaws and was pelting down the stairs.
‘If you kill me,’ the bird said faintly, crushed but not quite bitten, ‘you’ll never know the secret I carry.’
She set him down on the bunk, leaving a firm paw upon his chest to prevent escape. The cabin gaslight revealed a scrawny specimen, body feathers cemented to his skin, main coverts in disarray. He struggled weakly. The effort seemed to drain him.
‘Eat me then,’ he said, and closed his eyes. ‘I’m too tired to care.’
The bird Sealink remembered had been larger. Feistier too, she thought.
The bird she remembered had worn with pride his oily iridescent black and blue, in rakish contrast to the creamy white of his neck. The bird she remembered had never stopped talking.
‘Hon?’ she inquired sofdy. ‘Is that you?’
The magpie squinted up at her. The gaslight seemed to be giving him trouble.
&n
bsp; ‘Oh yes,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I give the wrong answer and you go looking for the salt and vinegar. ‘Honey, is that you?’’ he mimicked. ‘Who do you want it to be?’
The calico removed her paw.
‘It’s you all right,’ she said. ‘I wish now I’d et you.’
She thought for a moment.
‘I still could,’ she warned him.
‘You can’t eat the people you know,’ the bird said in livelier tones. He rolled over onto his front and pushed himself upright with his beak. His claws gripped the blanket. Eyeing her nervously as the boat pitched sideways, he added, ‘I hate the sea.’
At that moment, Pertelot came into the cabin.
‘One for Sorrow?’ she said. ‘Is that you?’
The magpie swiveled his head.
‘Who wants to know?’ he said. Then he gave a low chuckle. ‘Well, well, well. Who says magpies have bad luck?’ He cocked his head. ‘You fly for weeks. You fly your wings off. You call in favors from every rookery between the city and the South Coast. Never mind that,’ he told himself. ‘You call in favors from sparrows. What do you get? Nothing. Finally, you have to admit it: they can’t all have been staring in the wrong direction at the right time.’
He looked Sealink up and down and mimicked puzzlement.
‘How could they miss a cat the size of a horse?’ Suddenly invigorated by his own cleverness, he hopped from foot to foot. ‘Because she isn’t on the land!’ he crowed triumphantly. ‘And the moment you think of that, you’ve got to think of boats. I rest my case,’ he said. ‘Here she is, off on a sea cruise. Surprise, surprise: the Queen of Cats.’
His eyes shone with self-congratulation.
There was a silence, as the cats digested this. Then Pertelot asked timidly, ‘But how did you find the right boat?’
‘You might well ask,’ said the magpie. ‘Ever been in an updraft? Ever been stuffed up some godforsaken cliff in an electrical storm, with every feather stalled out and no more ideas? No? Well, I’ll tell you what you think. You think: ‘I’m alive. Starved, stalled, and struck by lightning, but at least I’m still alive!’