Catacombs

by Anne McCaffrey

  Suddenly the other cat bounded to a halt and crouched over the fish, her fur spiking up all along her back, her tail twice its original size.

  Fearlessly, I leaped on top of her, snarling and biting. It’s mine, you fishy thief! I growled, and she yowled as my teeth penetrated her short fur and found flesh, surprising me almost as much as it did her.

  Then something whipped down across my ears, then whacked the bridge of my nose, driving me off my enemy and my prey.

  A female human voice was screaming, Let her alone, you monster!

  I was so surprised I crouched back, spitting and hissing and crying all at the same time. No human had ever struck me or spoken to me like that, not even when I peed on the captain’s bed! Who was this crazy girl bending over the still battle-ready tawny cat, who nailed her with bared claws and growled over the fish.

  Look what you’ve done! the human cried, and struck at me again with the reed, but I dodged her and backed against a comforting pair of legs.

  “Cut it out!” Jubal hollered at her. “Don’t you dare hit my cat again or I’ll—”

  The girl’s mouth fell open and she dropped the reed. I thought she was just surprised to see a strange boy wearing a sheet and waving what had been a fishing rod at her, but she fell to her knees, staring at me horrified from black eyes with whites showing all around them. “Cat? That’s a cat?”

  Jubal knelt beside me and patted my bristling back. “Of course he’s a cat—half-grown kitten really.” Jubal was less challenging now. This was the first native human we had encountered, or native cat for that matter, if you didn’t count Pshaw-Ra.

  “Kitten? But he’s huge!”

  “His breed is large. He’s a Barque Cat, a very well-bred one too,” Jubal said proudly.

  “And he’s got so much fur!”

  “They’re like that,” Jubal agreed, continuing to stroke me. Against my inclination I started purring.

  The other cat had turned away from me and was tearing into my fish. I looked up at Jubal and meowed, as if he couldn’t understand very well that it was my fish, my first ever self-caught fish, that the creature was devouring before my very eyes. I tensed, ready to spring again, but Jubal restrained me by holding onto my ruff in a very pushy fashion.

  Hey! I protested.

  “That’s his fish your cat is eating,” Jubal told the girl. “He just caught it and she swiped it before he got a bite.”

  “She is a sacred Mau. All things Mau are hers.”

  “Then she should have caught it herself,” Jubal said. “I have a vessel full of cats bigger than Chester, hungry and stressed out from their trip.”

  “No one said you could take the fish of the Mau.”

  “Maybe not, but I’m not real impressed with your hospitality at the moment. One of your Mau, a cat named Pshaw-Ra, brought us here and said that you all loved cats—worshipped, was what he said, actually—and would help keep ours safe until we could work things out back where we came from. But he disappeared and nobody else has showed up to help us, so Chester and I figured, being near a river and all, we’d catch some fresh fish to supplement the little bit of food we were able to bring with us.”

  “Why were you not better prepared?” the girl asked. Like Jubal and Sosi, she was little more than a kitten, with wide dark eyes and a wild curly black coat of head fur, her skin two shades darker than the coat of the thieving cat eating my fish.

  “We—uh—we had to leave in a hurry, before we could provision ourselves properly. And the extra cats were what you might say emergency passengers who came with nothing but the fur they were wearing. I used to fish back home but I guess Chester just figured it out because he was hungry.”

  I growled to reinforce his argument, but it was futile. My fish was down to skeleton and the other cat was making small growling noises as she gobbled up the last bits.

  “Renpet is hungry too. She does not fish. I do not fish. Offerings had always been made to sustain her before our banishment.”

  “Banishment? What for? Did she get busted for stealing some other cat’s fish?”

  “Certainly not! Renpet is a princess among the divine ones, progeny of the queen herself.”

  “All kittens come from queens,” Jubal told her. “That’s just what you call a mama cat.”

  “Queen Tefnut is—was—ruler of the divine ones,” the girl said stiffly.

  Renpet, full of my fish, turned back to face us and began washing herself. Ummm, she purred. That was luscious. Got any more?

  I had relaxed a little under Jubal’s touch but now I narrowed my eyes, flattened my ears, and swore at her. The girl took a step so that she stood over the cheeky beast, one foot on either side of her while the fish thief licked her haunch, pausing once to look up at me and make sure I was watching.

  I wasn’t really mad anymore. No use fighting over stripped fish. But I did want to catch more and Jubal had yet to catch any. I reminded him of this.

  He took another look at the girl. By his reckoning she was on the thin and ragged side. “What was that about being banished? If your cat is royalty, how come you’re out here?”

  “I fled to save her from certain death,” the girl said. “When the queen died, Renpet’s litter sister Nefure declared herself queen and drove Renpet from the temple.”

  “You look hungry. How about you tell us what happened while I try to catch another fish for you. Have you got enough pull with Renpet to get her to lay off anything else Chester might catch?”

  “Renpet does what she will,” the girl replied with a lift of her chin.

  Renpet rubbed against her ankle and purred.

  “Cats are like that,” Jubal agreed.

  Keeping to the shade as much as possible, for by now it was stiflingly hot, especially for someone as well endowed with fur as I am, who had just been in a strenuous battle, we resumed our fishing posture. Jubal cast his line and I watched—first the water, then Renpet, who appeared to doze, though I saw her eye open a slit to spy on me. Turning my tail to her, I dipped my paw into the water as before. As before, a fish swam up to see if my cat’s paw was tasty or not and I snagged it and flipped it up on the bank.

  And—I couldn’t believe this, after all the peacemaking my boy was trying to do—that rotten Renpet pounced my fish again.

  “Hey, you had one!” I yowled, and she pounced me! She wasn’t fast enough this time—I sprang backward and into the river.

  “Chester!” Jubal cried as I went under, and waded in after me. The water wasn’t all that deep at this spot, for a human.

  He didn’t have to worry. I surfaced again without effort. It seemed I was naturally buoyant. My fur was wet but it did not soak up so much water as to weigh me down. I liked this. Though it wasn’t any cooler than cat pee, it smelled better and cooled me off.

  Fishing was easier in the water. I could chase a fish and bite it and drag it up with me. The first time I did this, I didn’t know what to do with the fish, but Jubal swam up beside me and cupped the fish in a bag he made from the bottom of his sheet.

  I had to swim away from him to catch them, and then swim back. The fish weren’t afraid of me, more fool them, but Jubal cast a longer shadow.

  When I’d caught three or four, Jubal took them back to shore and gave two to the girl, trapping the others in a netted bag he extracted from the knapsack and sinking it with a rock. “Why don’t you cook these up for us and we’ll have fish for breakfast?” he suggested.

  Nice of you to give our fish away, I said. Especially since I, who have caught all of them, have yet to do more than taste one!

  Yeah, but you know how to get more. I don’t think that fool girl even knows how to cook them. Look there, she’s just staring at them like she’s starving but doesn’t quite want to eat them raw!

  I have no interest in the female human or her wretched female cat, I told him.

  Awww, Chester. They’re hungry.

  Not that cat. She ate my first ever fishy I caught, I said. And she pushed me
in the water.

  I think that might mean she likes you, Jubal said. Dad said girls get ornery when they like you.

  Why shouldn’t she like me? I replied. I’m a source of delicious fish for her! I grabbed another of the slippery little devils.

  As long as I was in the water, I was fairly cool, but when I looked around at Jubal, the parts of him not covered by his sheet or his hat were red. The sun was two whiskers away from the middle of the sky.

  Jubal waded back to his submerged fish trap and the place where we left Renpet, the thieving “princess” cat, and her girl. They were gone.

  I suppose they took the rest of our fish, I said, cat-paddling back to shore.

  No, no, the fish are still here. I’m not sure that girl knew what to do with the ones I gave her, and two fish for that cat must have been plenty, no matter how hungry she was.

  Good, I said, and hunkered down to growl over my last catch, covering it with my body lest any passing feline royalty swoop down and snatch it.

  While I gobbled it up—the most delicious meal I had ever had including the tasty keka bugs or the mice in Jubal’s barn when I was a young kitten—Jubal cleaned and filleted our fish and tucked them into a thermal pack in his bag.

  Then we returned to the ship. I was almost comfortable for about a quarter of the trip and trotted ahead of Jubal until the sun evaporated all the water in my fur and started broiling cat meat.

  Then he tucked me under the sheet and on top of his very fishy smelling pack again. I slept. It was all I could do in the heat. I wasn’t sure if I would wake up or not and I was too miserable to care.

  CHAPTER 4

  The heat was so intense Jubal was sure the fish must be already cooked by the time he carried them into the ship. There wasn’t enough for all the cats to have much, but if he chopped it up and divided it, everyone could have a taste and maybe some of the others would go fishing with them the next time. He intended to speak to Captain Loloma about the girl and her cat—maybe they could join the Ranzo’s crew. They didn’t seem to be welcome here anymore.

  He was certainly welcome on the Ranzo, however. The minute he stepped through the hatch, he was surrounded by, almost engulfed by, cats tangling themselves in his flapping sheet and under his feet. Chester, still exhausted from his swim, slept through the chorus of hungry cat noises, chirrups, mews, meows, short yowls, rumbly purrs, and hungry growls, but Jubal was in no doubt about their meaning.

  A cat leaped up onto his shoulder and others immediately tried to climb him. Claws dug into him and he yowled. Chester woke up and looked straight into the face of the cat on Jubal’s shoulder, none other than his milk brother Bat. “Back off!” Chester hissed.

  “Cranky, aren’t we?” Bat asked.

  Jubal tried to bend over without losing Chester or the fish and smack the paws off his legs, but the cats acted as if they hadn’t eaten in months. “Help!” he yelled.

  Human help was already on the way. Beulah, Captain Loloma, and Sosi were calling the unheeding cats, and when they were close enough, began dragging cats off Jubal, whose legs and arms were bleeding freely now.

  “What’s wrong with them? Have they gone nuts?” the captain asked, and Jubal laughed.

  “It’s the fish in my pack. They want it, and they can have it but we gotta divide it up first. Take my pack and run. They’ll follow you.”

  Sosi reached for the net. “The kitties won’t hurt me.”

  Her father grabbed it instead. “I’m taller,” he said simply, and broke into a run.

  The cats abandoned Jubal and bounded after the captain. He ran pretty fast for an old guy, and of course he hadn’t been in the sun all day long either so he raced the cats to the galley and slammed the hatch in their whiskery faces.

  Die-hards scratched at the door and yowled their protests, but others among them, whose bellies were after all still filled with kibble, sat down and washed or wandered a few feet away.

  The hopeful few who tried to linger near Jubal, still smelling the remnants of the fish on him, were warned off by Chester. In the infirmary, the medical specialist cleaned and medicated his scratches and applied a couple of strategic bandages.

  “Better wash and change clothes,” Beulah suggested when he’d been treated. “Get rid of the fish smell. But Jubal—go easy on the water.”

  Jubal nodded. He had some experience with that when the well back on the farm went dry a few times. He could take a bath in half a cup of water, but here he had disinfectant soap to use as well.

  Chester had no faith in the soap or the medic and kept trying to wash Jubal’s scratches cat-fashion, with his rough tongue, and asking if the boy was okay, was he really okay? Even though the cat could tell what Jubal was thinking and feeling, he followed him anxiously, mewing aloud and inwardly asking what hurt, where it hurt, who had made this or that particular scratch.

  “It’s okay, Chester,” Jubal said aloud, finishing his washing and changing into his shipsuit again, but when he turned around, Chester wasn’t there anymore.

  Silly boy, I’m with my fish, Chester said, and through his eyes Jubal saw the interior of the mess cabin.

  The ship’s cook—a rail-thin man named, appropriately enough, Cook—chopped fish at a small table while Sosi put it onto plates. A mass of quivering fur waited with what seemed to be amazing patience, until Jubal realized that Chessie, Bat, and Sol were facing them down. Chessie’s ears were flat and she was flipping her tail in an angry way. Bat and Sol were each twice their regular size, showing their teeth and growling menacingly. Chester was under the table, gulping gobbets of fish as fast as he could.

  CHESTER: ROYAL WELCOMING COMMITTEE

  I finished gobbling my last bite and sat back to watch the fun and lick my whiskers. Jubal had come in and was watching with his mouth wide open. I walked over to him and twined around his ankles, making him flinch a little.

  “Nyow? Nyow?” the crowd asked.

  The cook finished cutting, and the girl set dishes in front of Mom, Bat, and Sol. I strolled casually in front of them and sat down, spreading my paw so my claws popped out in full array. I licked my pads and glared over my arsenal at my former cellmates.

  The humans, including Jubal, quickly began setting down plates for the others.

  The fish disappeared as if the morsels had been teleported to some distant planet, and the humans disposed of the plates while we cats, happy with the world and each other once more now that our appetites had been satisfied, stretched out or cuddled up for naps.

  Wake up, Jubal said. Pshaw-Ra must be back.

  Sure enough, outside the ship, bells tinkled, chimes chimed, rattles rattled, and drums thumped, accompanying the laughter and singing of human voices mingled with occasional feline remarks. The noise blew toward the ship on a cat-mint-scented breeze.

  A number of long white-shaded pallets borne by bronze-colored, sweaty humans barely clad in scanty white garments snaked through the desert. On each pallet sat, reclined, or stood many more cats. As they drew nearer I saw that some were tawny like Pshaw-Ra, others were black, and still others had wild looking dark spots on pale tan fur.

  An unmistakable tawny form lounged at the front of the foremost pallet. As soon as it had been borne close enough to the tent, the cat leaped down and bounded toward me, heedless of the heat.

  “Your transportation awaits you,” Pshaw-Ra told me. “You may summon the others.”

  “I expected something more airborne,” I told him.

  “Why waste expensive resources when the manpower is so pathetically grateful to serve?” he asked. “Now then, darkness will fall before we reach the city again if we don’t commence.”

  I turned to call the others but they were already emerging from the tent, investigating the commotion.

  “Pshaw-Ra is here with an escort to his city,” I explained.

  Mother took one look and backed off, saying, “I prefer to stay with the ship. How will Kibble know where to find me if I go wandering off dirtside with s
trange short-hairs?” Mother wasn’t bonded to her lifelong Cat Person, Janina Mauer, in the same way Jubal and I were bonded via the keka bugs, but she was devoted to her nonetheless. She didn’t seem to grasp that Janina would not be able to find us here. I conveyed this too, but Mother just said, “I’m staying where I’m staying and that’s the end of it.”

  “Oh no,” Pshaw-Ra told her. “As Chester’s mother, you have a place of honor among us. And I have arranged hospitality in private homes for each and every one of you. Messages to your ship can be relayed to our communications center, and I assure you, madame, you will be alerted immediately if any come for you. Your crew must also join the procession, though of course they’ll have to walk. But we will not insist that they relieve the bearers this time.”

  The rest of the group drew nearer and we were scrutinized by many pairs of copper and peridot eyes.

  From the middle pallet sounded an imperious meow, and a bearer stepped forward and reverently lifted a tawny beauty whose coat matched Pshaw-Ra’s but whose form was more finely made and whose bearing, if possible, was more arrogant. Around her neck was what at first appeared to be a broad flat collar of turquoise, red, and blue stones but proved to be some sort of coloring process applied to her fur. A multicolored tiara was painted onto the fur of her head, dipping under her ears. She regarded us with a slit-eyed look that did not bode well for future relations. So: Renpet’s sister, the self-appointed queen, had joined us.

  “You call those cats?” the queen demanded of Pshaw-Ra, her voice expressed in a low hiss. “They look like bears. Those hairy ears and huge hot coats with fur sticking out everywhere. And the size of their paws!” She gave a little shudder. “You have exceeded your authority bringing such inferior beasts among us.”

  “Majesty, they grow on you,” he answered in a calming purr. More loudly he said, “They are refugees from the corrupt system that stripped our planet of many of our ancestors and the servant class.” Lowering his tone again. “And remember what I told you about my plan.”