by Gabriel King
She stepped in, and was caught at once in its flow. Ghostly shapes poured toward her, as if attracted by her presence; but none of them was Mousebreath. They were pale and attenuated and their eyes burned as pinpricks of light in the distant gloom. She felt their panic, cold and clear as a howl of warning: ghost cats of the ancient country, fleeing an unseen foe. They surged through her like a wave, icy and hot at the same time, and she felt the life of each one separately as they passed – an old farm cat and three of her partners; two ferals who’d lost their ninth lives on a distant road; a fine, scarred old tomcat brought down by septicemia; seven domestic cats who had traveled the highways together for a hundred years, their energies faint and fading; kittens by threes and fours – the lost, the discarded, and the dispossessed.
They were afraid for their souls. She could feel it.
As they went, dispersing onto the moor through the broken neck of the wild road to condense into the air of the world as damp gray mist, they left an image with her…
Something wrong. Something huge…
‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘Wait!’
But they were too afraid. Something had entered the wild roads.
Something dark and mad with greed.
She fled the broken highway straight toward the lake.
‘Ragnar! Pertelot!’ she cried. ‘The Alchemist is on the highways!’
The King and Queen of Cats sprang apart, fur on end.
‘Run! Now!’
The pool, spreading like a sea of tinfoil, barred their way. Ghost cats spilled around them, cold and gray. All they could do was strike out blindly through this writhing fog with its cargo of decayed messages and ebbing memories, then in clear air head north and east.
Sealink ran out in front, her tail like a pennant. Pertelot followed some way behind, her great belly swinging with each desperate stride, her breath rasping. Ragnar pounded along behind Pertelot, water spraying up around him as he ran. Every so often he turned to stare back at the broken highway.
They ran until Pertelot fell down suddenly in a puddle of peaty water, and lay, oblivious of the cold, in a distressed heap, her flanks heaving with exertion.
‘The kittens,’ she cried. Pain made her gaze unfocused and intumed. ‘I can feel them. They’re coming!’
Ragnar nosed at her uncertainly. ‘We aren’t safe here,’ he said.
‘The Eye! Oh, help me, Rags, I can feel the Eye expand!’
‘Hold fire, hon!’ said Sealink. ‘This ain’t the time or place, y’hear me? You clench those muscles and hold on real tight. We gotta be moving on from here even if Ragnar and me have to carry you.’
And she pushed at the Queen’s wet sorrel rump.
‘Stop that at once,’ commanded Pertelot.
She lifted her head and braced her forelegs. A moment’s struggle, and she was upright again. ‘I can hold on for a while, Ragnar,’ she said, with a kind of forlorn dignity. ‘But tell her to stop doing that. I hope we reach Tintagel soon.’
She gave a last look back at the ruptured highway.
‘Those poor cats,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe they’re any threat to us.’
*
The landscape unfurled itself under their paws that night and for the days that followed. Swathes of fescue and bilberry, crisscrossed with meandering tracks, rolled past craggy outcrops and ruined cottages. Acres of dead bracken were giving way to the virid curls of new shoots. The cats avoided the highways, for fear of alerting the Alchemist to their presence, but there was no further sign of him. They made good progress despite Pertelot’s condition. She rarely spoke but placed one paw in front of the other with a swaying determination, her face tight and set.
Around them the moors were strangely quiet, and food was hard to come by. The area seemed lifeless and suspended, a region of limbo. On the third day, Ragnar could stand the sight of Pertelot’s haggard face no more, and called a halt. He disappeared for an hour, leaving the two females cloistered beneath a stand of hawthorns. Pertelot at once fell into a disturbed sleep. Her paws twitched; her mouth opened and closed as if in rage or fear; but when Ragnar woke her on his return she would not speak of her dreams. There was no need to speak anyway: he had brought with him the limp corpse of a rabbit. It was thin and stringy, hardened by a winter life, but they wolfed it down in silence and soon afterward continued their journey.
*
They came down off the moors at last, and there was a scent of spring in the air. The fields were touched with an elusive dappled light. The uncanny silence and lifelessness of the uplands gave way to birdsong. If they stopped walking, they heard the scurry of tiny feet. Sealink bounced down the sides of the hedgerows, pouncing on anything that moved, until at last, by sheer luck, she stunned a vole. This she ate. ‘Oops. Sorry, hon,’ she apologized to Pertelot, under Ragnar’s owlish gaze; but Pertelot was oblivious. She slunk along, belly brushing the grass, in the lee of the hedges, starting at every sound.
For some days the Mau had been paying little attention to her traveling companions. She seemed to have retreated into some inner country, where, beset by invisible perils, she kept herself close. She spoke only to the unborn. She lagged behind or ranged distractedly ahead, growling at shadows in the hedgerow. When they stopped for a rest she would fall immediately into a heavy sleep, only to wake with a start a moment later, eyes wild, every sense alert.
‘I am disconcerted by this,’ Ragnar told Sealink.
‘You and me both, babe.’
Hills fell away below them now, green with new grass and bright splashes of color undulating to the horizon, beyond which there was the sense of immanence: a vast, open space like the promise of the future. Salt sharpened the air, so that each breath felt distinct in the lungs. Soon, there were huge white gulls wheeling and boasting overhead.
The calico sniffed happily.
‘The sea!’ she announced. ‘I can smell it!’
She thought for a moment. ‘I shall see my old man again!’ she said. ‘Wow! That ugly old bastard!’ She frisked her tail in the air and increased her pace. ‘Tell you what,’ she said to Pertelot, ‘let’s swap!’
But Pertelot would not be amused. All day long the fur had bristled along the ridge of her back and she had carried her tail and ears low. Now she scurried along in fits and starts from one piece of cover to the next, stopping every so often to howl softly and lick at her flank.
Eventually, they crested a hill from which they had a clear view of the ocean. Deep green and blue, sparkling in the early sunshine, it stretched as far as the eye could see beyond an expanse of turf dotted with pink cushions of thrift and red campions. On a round, peninsular headland, the stonework of an ancient fortification curled protectively around the cliff, lines softened by ruin and lichen, until it dropped out of sight on the seaward side. Elsewhere the dark, slaty rock outcropped at random, blocky and jagged. Turf fell away from the base of the rocks in little bumps and ridges to reveal scars of ruddy soil.
Dense stands of gorse curved landward, distorted over many generations by the sea wind. Into one of these dived the Queen. Once inside, she could be seen turning and turning like a kitten chasing its tail or washing herself in neurotic flurries of effort. Mewing sounds spilled without meaning from her mouth. She stared out distractedly. She hissed at Sealink. She hissed at her husband.
‘Go away!’ she told them. ‘Go away!’
Determined to help, Ragnar shouldered resolutely into the gorse. He was hindered by his great size and by his long coat, which snagged on the dry bracts and spines.
Reaching the Mau’s curious nest, he nuzzled at her comfortingly until she reared up with an earsplitting yowl and bit him. He leapt backward.
‘Pertelot –!’ he began.
Then he stopped and stared.
Milk had started to leak down her fur.
22
The Golden Dawn
I am the cat of cats. I am
The everlasting cat!
Cunning and old, and sleek as ja
m,
The everlasting cat!
– WILLIAM BRIGHTY RANDS
After they left the village, Tag and his companions walked three nights and part of a fourth.
It was a rocky coast, all raked inlets and thorny headlands. Landward, hill succeeded windy hill, each one crowned with its silent outcrop or ancient empty fort. In each deep hollow zawn the sea banged like a monstrous distant door. Moonlight made the lanes mysterious. Out to sea, silver glimmered on the oily violet swell.
Tag and Cy slept the first day wrapped in a sea fog and woke to find a million drops of water on the branches of the dense, wind-thickened headland vegetation. Each one held for a moment the deep red light of the ocean sunset, then quivered and fell.
‘Time to go, I think,’ said the ginger cat, coming up suddenly out of nowhere.
As soon as they left the harbor, he had developed business of his own. He was always off here and there on sly errands or holding talks with local cats. He met them in all sorts of places – in barns or on the rocky tops of cliffs, once even between the feet of some cows in rough pasture below the coast road. The cows huffed and blew placidly, their breath a warm sweet envelope for this unlikely parliament. On their part, the cats sat facing one another and didn’t seem to speak.
They were all black.
Tag watched a little anxiously, and later asked, ‘Who were they?’ He meant perhaps, Who are you?
But the tom replied, ‘Oh, just cats.’
‘They looked a rough bunch to me.’
Coppery eyes glimmered with amusement in the dark, and, ‘Just good friends,’ was all the answer Tag got to that.
Three nights on the road together – three nights, and part of a fourth. Yet Tag learned no more about their new companion than this: he was a likeable rogue. He was always as hungry as he had been that first morning in the litter bin. He was always as cheerful. He always had something to say about the weather. He played I see, I jump with Cy until she quite forgot her first impressions of him. He was good at drawing her out and at cheering her up when she got bored or lost the use of her back legs. He could always make her laugh. And where Tag caught bank voles, the ginger tom – a hunter who avoided the obvious game – offered her herring gull eggs just then in season, and a starfish from some salt-swept beach below the cliffs.
‘Try some of these,’ he would encourage her. ‘They’re good.’
‘They are!’
She loved his colored neckerchief.
‘One day,’ he promised, ‘I’ll tell you how I got it.’
He was a gypsy, he said, and you would never tie him down. He needed room to roam. Despite that, he had a ‘friend’ at every lonely home along the coast. He was a paradox.
Tag thought, I like him, this cat who wears a collar yet rejects a name. He thought, But who could trust him? And his doubts came into focus suddenly, at the end of the third afternoon, when he woke up to find the quarry they had been sleeping in full of tiny blue and scarlet birds.
Grim rock walls gleamed in a decaying western light. The little birds hovered and darted in the cold and damp of this unpromising arena, their wings trembling with color and life. There was a prolonged drowsy hum like a chord of music. At the center of it Cy and the ginger tom sat facing each other. Their eyes were shining in the eerie light. They were whispering.
‘You do one of these.’
‘No, you do one of these!’
Birds spilled from their mouths and flew up into the gathering night.
‘What’s going on?’ said Tag angrily. ‘What are you up to? Do you want him to find us?’ Rearing up on his hind legs, he boxed Cy’s ears.
‘Stop it!’ She hissed and ran off.
‘Hey,’ said the ginger tom. ‘Why the fuss?’
Tag was so angry he could hardly speak. ‘I don’t want this!’ he said.
The tom said, ‘It’s just a cat thing, Tag.’ Then he said, ‘Hey, let’s all do it!’
‘No,’ said Tag.
Cy crept up and tried to lick his ear. ‘It’s just a cat thing,’ she said.
Tag turned his back on them.
All the rest of the journey he let them walk ahead and kept as far from them as he could. In that way he came at last to Tintagel, a peninsula at the end of the wildest of roads, many months after he had first dreamed of it, a silent and fearful cat.
*
It was the place he remembered. At the same time it wasn’t.
The hours before midnight: under a new moon in a white sky the headland stretched away toward the cliff edge and the sea. There were gorse bushes, a sense of vast space, the sound of water crashing on the rocks below. This was all as it had been in the brief nightmares of a kitten who always woke happily in a dull and comforting house. It was the dreamer – with his memories of hard travel, bizarre events, and the deaths of friends he had barely come to know – who had changed. He was no longer just Tag, a cat. He was Mercurius Realtime DeNeuve, the apprentice Majicou, and he brought no answers to this site of an old dream, only questions.
What would happen to him now? What would happen to all of them?
Even as he watched and wondered, clouds rushed landward to obscure the moon. Within seconds, rain was boiling toward him in silver moire patterns. The gorse bushes thrashed in the wind. Everything seemed to vanish under a weight of darkness and blowing vapor until their fur was plastered to shivering ribs.
‘What now, then?’ shouted the gypsy.
‘Hush!’ said Tag.
He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward into the driving rain. He had the feeling that some kind of motion had stopped just as he looked. Something out there. Something in the tossing gorse. Something that would prefer to go unseen if it could.
There! Furtive gleams of light slipping to and fro between the headland rocks!
‘Who’s down there?’ he called. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello!’ echoed Cy from behind him. ‘Tango Terry callin’!’
‘Shut up. Hello?’
No answer.
‘I’m soaked to the skin,’ advised the ginger tom. For all that, he still seemed to be enjoying himself. His eyes were bright. He might have been stalking herring gulls across the tide-wracked strand. ‘Let’s at least—’ He stopped. Cocked his head to one side. ‘What’s that? Listen!’
It was only the faint cry of a gull down by the rocks and the sea. But Tag leaned forward, sniffing the wind. Suddenly, he saw them there: two pairs of cats’ eyes, huddled close. Suddenly, he knew.
‘Ragnar?’ he said. ‘Sealink?’
He rushed forward.
‘Ragnar! Sealink!’
The eyes vanished suddenly.
Then, ‘Look,’ cried a familiar voice. ‘It is our old friend Tag!’
And another voice answered, ‘No one’s my old friend, hon, till I see them up close and in good light.’
*
‘And so,’ said Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion, perhaps an hour later, ‘that is how I was changed by my experiences.’ He gave Tag a keen look in which was mixed amusement, intelligence, pride. ‘Though I have thought about it, I cannot say which of these events changed me most. I can only say, if you ask me: I am not the same cat I was.’
‘I can’t stop looking at you!’ Tag said. ‘Let me look at you!’
He couldn’t stop looking at any of them. Their coats were full of burrs and dried salt. They were tired, careworn, and sore of paw. Their eyes had the haunted look of cats who had traveled farther in a month than most cats travel in a lifetime and who had encountered on the way things cats rarely encounter.
These are my old friends, he thought, made brand-new by the stories they have to tell. This is what happens when you part and meet again. Then he thought, But if I’d looked at them at Piper’s Quay, would I have seen these other cats, tucked inside the ones I knew, already waiting their turn to be?
He didn’t care. Here was Ragnar, full of journeys, exploits, hairsbreadth escapes; a rover of the Old Changing Way, a king, and a father
of kittens! yet no less untidy about the ruff and with the same warm smell. Here was Sealink, saddened, thinner, hurt; but still that same great, generous, unrelenting heart. When the Mau came sniffing suspiciously at him from out of her nest of gorse, he saw that she had changed the least – and the most. Those lambent eyes raged with a sense of her own destiny. When the kittens moved within, you could almost see the years move with them, like patterns just beneath her taupe fur. The pregnancy had empowered her and taught her how to be in the world, and it had brought out the Ancient Cats like a procession of gods walking free in her gaze. She frightened you with a look, and then whispered, ‘Mercury, you have grown into the most attractive animal!’
Tag shivered. He was Mercury! Tintagel Court to Tintagel Head: two landscapes, one superimposed on the other less like a dream than a prophecy.
‘Let me look at you,’ he said.
They made such a strange, half-sad half-glorious sight, the three of them, huddled less for shelter than security in a kind of tunnel between the gnarled trunks of some wind thickened gorse bushes. Cy and Pertelot lay curled up in a shallow, sandy depression at the seaward end, where the tunnel was kept dry by overhanging rocks. Every so often, Cy rested her head on the Queen’s belly and talked to the kittens. ‘How was your day? I made birds!’
‘So. Now we are here,’ said Ragnar, looking happily from face to face.
Only two things had marred their meeting.
Among all the purring and scent marking and rolling about and face rubbing of old comrades, it would have been easy for a newcomer to feel left out. So Tag had stepped forward a little shyly and formally, saying, ‘This is my new friend,’ and turned to urge the ginger tom forward. Only to find he was gone.
‘Guess he’s shy, hon.’
‘Shy? I don’t think so—’
But the clouds had rolled away from the moon. Behind Tag, only deserted ground stretched landward, steadily rising in the fish-skin light. Not even the shadow of a cat remained.