The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  And then Sealink said, ‘Where’s that old Mousebreath, babe? Can’t wait to cuff his gnarly face.’

  Tag stared at her. He didn’t know what to say.

  Sealink stared back, and her eyes filmed slowly with puzzlement.

  ‘He’s not here, Sealink. He’s dead.’

  She blinked. ‘But he’s coming soon?’

  ‘Oh, Sealink, Sealink. He’s dead. Majicou’s dead too. We’re all that’s left.’

  ‘Dead?’

  Sealink looked away.

  There was a long silence. Then, ‘Mousebreath!’ she called out into the darkness. ‘Mousebreath, you bastard, answer me! How come you do that to me when I need you? Die?’

  ‘Sealink,’ said Pertelot. ‘Sealink—’

  ‘You die out there? How could you!’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Sealink rounded on her. ‘Don’t you tell me nothing. He wasn’t yours. You ain’t lost no one here!’

  ‘Please don’t quarrel,’ said Tag.

  He explained what had happened at the stream. He said, ‘We tried and tried to help him, but—’

  The calico got to her feet, suddenly at a loss. ‘I ain’t good at this,’ she said. ‘It ain’t no one’s fault.’ For a moment her eyes went empty and hard. ‘No one here,’ she said, ‘any rate.’

  Then she turned and walked off toward the edge of the cliff, her tail low, the tired, ponderous dignity of her gait only a skin over panic and loneliness.

  ‘Sealink!’ begged Tag.

  ‘Leave her,’ whispered the Queen. And she detached herself gently from the sleeping tabby and took herself and her belly awkwardly to the cliff top in the wind.

  What comfort she was able to give Sealink there, they never learned.

  *

  ‘So.’

  Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion curled his front paws beneath him and fixed Tag with eyes as green as sea-worn glass.

  The joy of that first meeting had passed; but perhaps its sorrows had passed too.

  ‘Cats,’ Ragnar maintained, ‘are most adaptable. If you ask me how I learned this, I must admit: from a blue-eyed white called Cottonreel, who also taught me how brave it is merely to live your own life. Oh, and to open a cage. Very useful, I can show you that.’

  ‘Rags, I don’t have one about me just now.’

  Midnight was not far off. Sensing that her labor was near, the Queen had retreated to her den in the gorse, with Sealink couched on one side of her and Cy on the other. Ragnar had taken Tag out along the cliff top in the darkness and rushing wind, to look at the stars. Now they crouched, partly in the lee of the old fortification, listening to the wind rush around its broken stones while they considered their situation and spoke of strategy.

  ‘So. As you say. We five are all that are left. This being so, we must decide how to act. If you look up, Tag, as Pertelot has encouraged me to do, you will see that the equinox is almost here. Tintagel waits, under a white wind, a trail of light. But for what? We have no idea. The Queen, the kittens, all of us are in danger while we stay here.’

  ‘Majicou meant us to come.’

  ‘It is a pity that we do not know why.’

  Tag was forced to agree. ‘Without Majicou, we can’t face the Alchemist,’ he said. ‘We’re only cats.’

  ‘Yet it is too late to move the Queen.’

  Tag looked out over the sea. ‘We’d better try,’ he said. ‘And soon.’

  In the teeth of the wind, he heard a voice at his side say quietly,’ ‘Only cats’? Would you give up so easily?’

  There was a silence.

  Then the voice said, ‘I am one who becomes two; I am two who become four; I am four who become eight; I am one more after that.’

  It was the voice of a cat. Or was it?

  He turned.

  It was the gypsy tom.

  And behind him were gathered his ‘friends’ from the cliff tops about Tmtagel.

  They looked no less intimidating than they had along the road – old bruisers and wiry females whose style was to be head-down into whatever the coastal weather brought them. They had fought the wind and rain – not to say dogs, foxes, and one another – all their lives. Some had scanred chops, missing ears, bald patches, and gaits stiffened by tendonitis. They had been waiting all their lives for a chance like this. Or, to put it another way: they had been waiting all their lives for this precise chance.

  ‘Who are you?’ demanded Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion of the ginger tom.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tag. ‘Who are you?’

  The coast cats closed around them, in a maneuver full of quiet menace.

  Then the ginger tom gave a resounding laugh. As it echoed away out to sea, he began to shift and change. All his hard companions began to change too.

  ‘Don’t you know me, little cat?’ he growled.

  Tag had closed his eyes. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t.’

  But he did.

  ‘I am one who becomes two; I am two who become four; I am four who become eight; I am one more after that. Tag, I am the Majicou as you well know! And these are my long-time companions, who have guarded this coast so well while they waited for—’ He laughed again. ‘Ah, for what?’

  ‘Majicou!’ said Tag. ‘Majicou! I didn’t know it was you! I didn’t! Oh, Majicou, you’re back!’

  ‘Now I have seen everything,’ said Ragnar, in a satisfied voice.

  ‘But, Majicou…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Ah, Tag: if I could tell you that.’

  ‘But—’

  No sooner had they been introduced – ‘This is Amabraxas. Here you have Ogby, Fortran, and the Widow. This scruffy old demon is Mousebreath’s uncle Tinner, and these are his grandchildren, Jack Fiddle, Mooncranker, and Fish Head Lil.’ – than the guardians of Tintagel had dispersed. Most of them had given a silent nod, although Jack Fiddle had told the King, ‘You’re all right, squire.’ His grandfather had only sniffed. In minutes they had disposed themselves with quiet efficiency across the headland or among the mins of the fortification. You could see them if you looked hard. They were like shadows. Some studied the sea, others the land.

  ‘Tag, what do you know about death?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Good. I died, i was sad, and then I was not. I was in bitter pain, and then I was not. Do you understand. Tag? I was smoke along the ghost roads. I was part of what it is to be a cat. And then—’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I have been granted a tenth life, Tag—’

  ‘So you’re back! You’re back!’

  Majicou was silent. ‘Tag,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s not a game. The highways found me a ginger tom, dying as I was dying. They poured my spirit into him and discharged their energies into me, just for a time. Tag, they have lent me just enough life that I may try to complete my task. No more.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘To be loaned a life, even for a while—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Tag—’ But Majicou never finished.

  Amabraxas stepped lightly out of the shadows and said, ‘Majicou. Some new devilry.’

  ‘Cy!’ cried Tag. ‘No!’

  Out on the headland, colored butterflies were drifting above the gorse bushes.

  They found Cy sitting on a bare patch of earth a little way in front of Pertelot’s refuge. Her neck was wrenched around so that she faced a point in the air about a foot above and to the left of her head. Her eyes were turned up into her skull. She was making a low crooning noise, and her spark plug was pulsing with white light.

  ‘Stop!’ Tag ordered her.

  But Majicou was between them suddenly. ‘Tag, no!’

  ‘She’ll bring him down on us.’

  ‘I want him here. Tag. All along, I’ve wanted him here. For good or ill, this little cat must give herself to that. This is the time and place. This is where we meet, and everything ends—’

  Cy toppled slowly over and curled up. ‘The
lee shore!’ she whimpered. ‘The lee shore! It’s a bad world. Silver.’ She drew herself into a ball and covered her eyes with her paws. ‘Silver, it’s a bad world. We’re out here in it, raw blind like day-old kits. Calling all cars! Help!’ She kicked out like a kitten in its sleep and was still.

  ‘Wait, Cy! It isn’t a bad world! Majicou, he’s hurt her—’

  Before Majicou could answer, there was a faint sound like expelled breath. It was as if someone had set fire to the gorse. And yet there were no flames: only orange embers whirled up against smoke by the wind. White sparks fountained into the air, to shower down among the assembled cats.

  Cy lay supine at the source of this conflagration with her legs spread out and her head forced forward at an odd, broken-looking angle, as if she had been pinned to a board. Her eyes were open and she was rigid with fear. From the plug in her head a fierce invisible energy seemed to issue, filling the air about her so that she shimmered like a mirage on a summer day. ‘Silver,’ she said – and her voice, deep and wrenched, seemed to come from a long way down some white bare corridor – ‘I hurt.’ Sparks poured from her in gouts – not simply from her mouth, which was stretched open as if by some laboratory device, but from her nose and ears and her round, staring eyes. ‘Silver. Help me.’

  The Alchemist had no further use for its proxy. It was using her up, burning her up to increase its own power.

  Tag raced forward. As he touched the edge of the conflagration, he was bowled over and shoved upright again in the same gesture.

  Blue lightning lit up the ocean. Out to sea, a monstrous figure inflated itself briefly, as if the skin of some huge spotted jungle cat had been animated by nothing but air – as if the air were wearing it. It floated to and fro, propelled by the wind, its dangling rags of lower limbs weighted down by marrowbones. None of the cats saw it.

  ‘Hobbe,’ it whispered to itself. ‘Hobbe.’

  It flapped lazily for a moment; then it was gone.

  But there is always another moment. When the lightning flashed again, it was like writhing blue cords, a cat catcher’s net that had been dropped over the entire headland. They were all trapped in it. The very world became entangled. Everything seemed to slow down. Tag saw Ragnar running toward Pertelot’s refuge, and Majicou running after him; he saw the guardians of Tintagel, converging from every point of the compass; he saw Sealink emerge from the gorse: all slow, slow, slow. Their shouts came to him as if through glue.

  Majicou, ‘Tag! Ragnar Gustaffson! Wait! This is not fire! No one is in danger—’

  Ragnar, over and over again, ‘Pertelot!’

  And Sealink, who, for a moment unaware of the confusion outside, announced, ‘It’s begun.’

  As she spoke, the refuge went up in silent white flames, and she plunged out into the night, staring behind her in astonishment. ‘Now, how am I gonna get back in there?’ she said disgustedly. The gorse crackled but was not consumed. The lightning crackled and failed. Things speeded up again.

  ‘Tag!’ cried Ragnar. ‘The Queen!’

  They prepared to hurl themselves into the flames.

  ‘Stop,’ ordered Majicou, ‘both of you.’ He rose menacingly up before them. ‘This is not fire. Look. Feel it. Is there any heat?’

  They stared.

  ‘Then what is it?’ demanded the King.

  ‘More than one force is at work here tonight. Your kittens are not yet born. But they’re already alive, and among them is the Golden Cat. Perhaps they have made themselves safe while we act—’

  ‘They ain’t going to remain unborn for long, hon,’ advised the calico cat.

  Majicou stared at her.

  ‘And we better act now. Look!’

  Whatever the Alchemist had turned itself into, it wasn’t a cat.

  Half-clothed in mist, it trudged painfully toward them from some lunar distance, supporting itself on a staff made from the leg of a panther.

  At the same time, it was rushing at them from every quarter of the headland: a boiling, shifting mass constantly assembling and reassembling itself out of the night, the earth, the mackerel-skin light of the sky. Now it lunged toward them in a faint halo of cobalt light from a secret discontinuity among the stones of the old fort. Now it broke out of some small coastal highway, tortured and thrashing like a broken hose.

  It was tiny. It was huge. It was everywhere at once. It was all those things and none of them. It spoke.

  ‘Hobbe,’ it said. ‘Hobbe, Hobbe, Hobbe.’

  It said, ‘You devil, I knew I’d find you here!’

  Its voice was thick and curdled. Since the fight among the sarsen stones, its road had been hard. Lost in a maze of rutured highways – burning with rage and desire down every wrenched, coppery perspective; tottering through constant darkness toward every gleam of daylight; deluded by mirror images; led astray by the very mathematics that had allowed it to penetrate the Old Changing Way; deceived, dazed, and disoriented – it had begun to disintegrate. Where cat and cat skin had once run seamlessly together, all was in rags. The alchemical fluids leaked. The machinery smoked. Vertigo roared unchecked through all its manufactured senses; while its lower limbs, yearning back toward the human, had cracked out of sheer mechanical stress, so that stillness was now beyond it, and it must dance less to dance than to keep upright.

  Bent forward from the waist so that it could barely look up, it bawled, ‘Something wrong here, old Hobbe!’

  Everything was wrong. Only the Panthera, the staff, remained. Only the staff and the dream; only the Eye of Horns opening upon the truth of the world like a flower.

  An image of a golden cat flared strong and true in the Alchemist’s dissolving visual field.

  It would repossess the Mau.

  It would –

  ‘Come to me!’

  Tag stared.

  Ragnar stared.

  Sealink stared. ‘Honey,’ she said to no one in particular, ‘that ain’t natural.’

  ‘Quick now!’ said Majicou. ‘Or we’re lost!’

  Rain blustered in suddenly from the sea. The illusory fires burned on. The Alchemist stamped over the headland, chanting and deteriorating and shaking a staff full of lightning. Awed and unnerved, the cats stalked to and fro, lashing their tails indecisively.

  ‘Wait, Majicou!’ they called.

  But the ginger cat wouldn’t listen. ‘No time!’

  And he sped out in front of them, ten, twenty, fifty yards across the headland, growing larger as he approached his ancient enemy.

  ‘Come on then!’ cried Tag.

  Suddenly they were bounding across the barren ground together, throwing up loose earth like tigers in a sand garden. Small birds woke up in the gorse bushes; seagulls took to the air left and right and wheeled above the cliffs in panic. Tag ran. With him ran a Norwegian king and a New Orleans queen. Behind those three ran the guardians in a silent, flowing wedge like a shadow on the ground – Amabraxas, Mooncranker, Fortran and the Widow, Ogby, Tinner, Jack Fiddle, and Fish Head Lil. As they ran, they shed every memory of hearth or home they might have had and every hope they ever shared with a domestic cat. Their breath was hot in the night air. Cold and hunger meant nothing to them. They shed without thought the iron heat of their lives. On and on they seemed to run until the headland became a gray blur and only movement had meaning.

  And then it was among them, bursting out of the earth at Majicou’s feet.

  ‘Hobbe!’

  It seemed as surprised as the cats by the success of this ambush. Staggering back and away, it brought the black staff around in a wide, humming sweep. The Majicou leapt over it. As Tag, in his turn, passed beneath, the air shivered, and there was a dull loud thuck.

  Amabraxas, caught in midair by the claws of the staff, made a soft sound somewhere between a mewl and a groan, and was cut nearly in two. The Alchemist turned to watch his fall.

  ‘Ha! You see? Hobbe? You see?’

  ‘I see your death,’ growled the Majicou, ‘which I have wanted for these hundr
eds of years.’

  For a time the Alchemist held them at bay with the Panthera, discharging from it long green bolts of light. Ogby, dashing in too close, fell to the first of these, with a howl and a reek of scorched fur. Mooncranker, trying to retrieve the rigid but still breathing body of his friend, fell to the next. After that, they were more careful; and soon they had their enemy ringed. This caused Sealink to admit, as she and Tag circled and dodged warily in the windy dark, light splashing up around them like neon in the rain, ‘I feel more like a dog than a cat, hon. Can that be right?’

  ‘Pay attention!’ Majicou ordered them. ‘Or you’ll die too.’

  The Alchemist laughed. ‘How well you know me, Hobbe!’

  Majicou had already been fatally distracted.

  The crucified tabby, her limbs outlined in cold flame, heard them come, but there was nothing she could do except whisper, ‘Silver. It’s – Silver, I hurt—’

  Off in the dark, beyond the ruins of the old fortification, among the rocks at the very edge of the cliff top, in a dark dry corner sheltered from the wind, a breath of air moved faintly to and fro. Ashy motes drifted listlessly about in the cold. With a faint apologetic pop, the night unzipped itself and out they poured, already lifting their heads for a sniff of their prey…

  Cats.

  Black cats, white cats; cats gray, brown, and marmalade. Longhairs, shorthairs, and Sphinx cats with no hair at all. Cats large and small, old and young, male and female and somewhere in between. From Tintagel Court – the last good place they had known – to Tintagel Head, it was one nightmare to another.

  On the way, they had lost all sense of themselves. Now, unassuaged, unhealed, silent as death, they flowed inland, and the first Tag knew of them was when they rolled him over like a kitten in the tide and he felt himself begin to drown.

  Blunt claws, bad teeth, runny eyes. Bodies pressed up to his, forelegs clasping and pulling him down, odors wet and sour in the dark.

  He came up spitting and yowling for help. But there was no help to be had. Fortran and the Widow had gone under the wave and would never rise again. Their old comrades had fallen back among the Tintagel stones and were trying to stem the flow, there in the windy dark. Majicou and the King found themselves islanded on a flat outcrop of shale, the Alchemist looming over them; while, outweighed and overborn, Tag and Sealink were pressed away landward.