“Umrrow!” said Magnificat and Begum simultaneously.
“Oh, all right!” said Umrrow, managing to convey that she was sulking even though her image was, like Begum’s, a little blurred at the edges, as was normal for sendings.
“As Umrrow said (before she started mewing on and on about her endless litters), the Sender hasn’t yet joined our circle,” said Begum. “And while Beraal—you know her, don’t you, Magnificat?—has trained her not to send to the world at large when she’s awake, Mara’s whiskers are completely out of control when she’s asleep.”
The white cat’s tail swished, tapping to the beat of the rain on the tiles.
“You’re telling me that Delhi has a Sender of such immense power that her whiskers can bring her all the way here? In her sleep?” said Magnificat. “And she has no idea that she can do this?”
They had no trouble understanding her meaning. The long-whiskered ones were special. A cat who was not a Sender was confined to the limits of its clan’s territory: their whiskers would not go further than the boundaries they marked with their scents. But even for the long-whiskered, there were limits to how far they could travel.
Begum could send to all of the cats in Delhi, but her whiskers would not reach beyond the city’s outskirts without the help of the other Senders. Magnificat was Goa’s most celebrated Sender, and at her most intense, she could send her image dancing in the skies along a fair distance—ten, perhaps twenty villages. But unless the Senders were linking with one another, letting their whiskers carry them longer distances, no cat could travel so far on her own.
Only a few cats were Senders; in any clan, only a handful would have the ability to transmit their thoughts—and their very selves—so strongly that they could cross space with ease. Their abilities travelled from mother to daughter. Though Senders often produced litter after litter of perfectly normal kittens, every once in a while, a Sender would give birth to a kitten with longer whiskers than usual and know that her daughter was just like her. There was never more than one Sender in any clan, often fewer than four or five in any generation of cats in a large territory. None of the Senders Magnificat had met would have been able to travel from Delhi to Goa on their own. This one, untrained, just two winters old, had made the journey in her sleep.
Begum caught the drift of Magnificat’s thoughts. “She has travelled further,” said the calico. “She startled the monastery cats the other night; the Rimpuss was shaken out of her usual equanimity and had to take an extra meditation session. We think we should be able to reach her very soon. She has had a long kittenhood, and unlike the rest of us, she had no Sender to train her—Tigris, the last Sender of Nizamuddin, died shortly after this one was born.”
A savage gust from the storm sent the cobra’s body rolling down to the edge of the roof, where it stayed, limply wedged. The Sender of Paolim looked out into the rain, her eyes straying towards the river.
“You’ll have to find a way to contact her soon,” said Magnificat. ‘We can’t have a rogue Sender roaming the seven skies. You must train her, or else her whiskers must be trimmed.” Begum’s whiskers bristled. The orange stranger’s sendings seemed effortless, compared to the steady concentration it took Delhi’s entire Circle of Senders before she and Umrrow Jaan could make the difficult journeys to Goa and other places as they followed Mara’s erratic wake.
She spoke with finality, washing the last specks of mud and cobra skin off her tail. Begum and Umrrow Jaan made their farewells, and shimmered out of view. Begum thought, just before they pulled back from the clouds and sped away across the emerald fields, skimming the beaches and the palm trees on their way back to Delhi, that the Sender of Paolim was right. They would have to do something about Delhi’s rogue Sender before she became a threat to them all.
The fog dropped swiftly across the river, and in the rays of the late evening sun, it brought a fleeting beauty to the black sludge of the canal. The grey winter mist rode through the bylanes of the dargah, the ancient shrine at the centre of the neighbourhood, rising towards the high rooftops of the forbidding new buildings in Nizamuddin proper, creeping around the frozen iron bars of the gates that blocked off many of the colony’s roads.
Under the canal, the pigs huddled together for warmth, their bristled coats inadequate protection against the chill. The smallest of the piglets squirmed her way into the centre of the drove, seeking comfort and warmth from her elders. She didn’t ask for food; she already knew her mother’s teats had run dry, and that the last potato skin and lauki peel had been scavenged from the canal banks. At less than a month old, the piglet did not know what it felt like to have a full stomach. She was tiny, and she rarely squealed, though two of the adults grunted as she pushed her way through. One stepped on another’s trotter, and he cried out. The high complaining wail cut through the strains of the evening call to worship from the dargah.
Southpaw paused when he heard the squeal, his ears flicking to attention, but then he placed it: one of the canal pigs, not a cat or a kitten. He padded alongside the second-floor balcony railing, turning his attention back to the Bigfeet, hoping they wouldn’t notice him. He didn’t think they would. Though he was in his third winter, he was small for his size, and the last few seasons had pared the brown tomcat down to muscle and gristle. He made a thin shadow, invisible in the fog to all but the most sharp-eyed of predators.
When he heard the Bigfeet, he flattened himself, his fur pressed close to the rough bricks of the roof. They came out of the kitchen, talking loudly among themselves, and passed so near the cat that Southpaw could feel his whiskers tingle. He heard them clatter down the stairs.
The cat unfurled his whiskers, listening. But there seemed to be no other Bigfeet, and Southpaw padded into the kitchen. The scents from inside burst over him in warm waves—meat of some kind. Soaring above the smell of the meat, the clean singing freshwater aroma of fish made his teeth chatter in involuntary excitement. He almost missed his leap, because the scent had also made him weak, considering he hadn’t eaten in a while.
The fish was a large one, a whole carp, not yet sauced, on a blue china platter. Its scales gleamed encouragingly at Southpaw, and its red gills murmured to him of the taste of blood and the sea, firm, juicy flesh. The cat’s nostrils flared as he smelled the fish at close quarters, and felt once again how painfully empty his stomach was. He hesitated. The plan had been to grab as much of the fish as he could in his mouth and run for it before the Bigfeet came back. But he would have to tear the fish into a small enough portion to carry, which might take precious moments.
When he sank his sharp incisors into its silver skin, he knew he was in trouble. The juices from its tender white flesh spurted into his mouth, and Southpaw forgot the possibility of danger, forgot the need to carry food back to the waiting cats. He didn’t realize he was making urgent mewing sounds as he tore into the fish, almost inhaling his first proper meal in three days. Four bites, and he had severed the tail and belly. The smell of the fish made his pink nose twitch as he gobbled.
“Out of there NOW, Southpaw! Katar told you not to raid the Bigfeet kitchens!”
Mara’s indignant mew rang in his ears, so clear that she might almost have been there, perched on the shelf of spices, perhaps, above his head. But it was just a sending, and though Southpaw pawed at the fish with some urgency, trying to cut through the last flap of silver skin that held the tail attached to the body, he ignored the Sender. It was exasperating enough to know that Mara’s whiskers let her travel around Nizamuddin without actually having to leave her Bigfeet’s house but it was far worse when she decided to spy on him. Because she left no virtual scent, he never knew when she was on one of her prowls, and the tomcat found this aggravating.
“I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” he mumbled through a last hasty mouthful. His belly felt pleasantly full, and he picked up the tail carefully, hooking his incisors through the piece for extra security.
“Right behind you,” growled Mara, and Southpaw’s fur bristled unp
leasantly when he heard the tension in her voice. From the stairs, he could hear the thumping of the Bigfeet as they came up, yammering at each other as they always did, just as though they were kittens who hadn’t learned to use whiskers and scent, only mews and yowls. But that, he realized, wasn’t what Mara had meant.
There was a Bigfoot in the doorway, staring at him.
“Idiot,” said Mara. He could see her now, or at any rate, he could see the Sender’s image; an orange cat, bobbing along behind the Bigfeet’s head, her green eyes flaring crossly.
The Bigfoot stepped into the kitchen and grabbed a towel off the wooden pegs on the wall. He started shouting just as Southpaw darted to the left, in the direction of the kitchen sink. The Bigfoot followed him, moving faster than the cat had thought he would.
“Not that way, you’ll be trapped!” Mara was mewing, and fear had replaced the anger in her voice. Southpaw wanted to tell her he knew what he was doing, but he’d have had to raise his whiskers or open his mouth, and then he might drop the fish. Instead, he watched as the Bigfoot hurtled towards him, as he had hoped, leaving the door unguarded, and then the cat skidded around, using his front paws to propel himself across the sink, across the stone shelves, through the Bigfoot’s legs, streaking out of the door. Trapped indeed, he grumbled to himself, as if he would be trapped by one of those dumb Bigfeet, after all these months of being a hunter.
“See?” said Mara, and Southpaw realized she hadn’t been talking about the kitchen at all. The other Bigfeet had come up the stairs. Three of them stood in a semicircle outside the door; two stood by the roof, blocking off the approach to the ladder over which he had intended to make his escape. “Mmmmfff!” Southpaw said indistinctly through his mouthful of fish, and skidded for the second time as he did a complete turn.
“Stay away from the kitchen door, he’s got something in his hands!” Mara said urgently. “Circle wider, yes, wider…Southpaw, run!”
Southpaw heard the stomping of the Bigfoot in the kitchen, but he had his back to him, his eyes fixed on the other side of the roof and the long parapet that he knew ran just beneath. His teeth chattered, not just from the numbing cold and the fog, but in fear; his whiskers and fur stood up despite the damp. He didn’t see the Bigfoot make his throw. It was only when his back paws seized in terrible pain and he heard the clang of the vessel bouncing on the roof that he realized he’d been hit. He locked his mouth harder onto the fish, refusing to cry out. His left paw had received the brunt of the blow, and he could feel it dragging behind him. But there was the roof at last; behind him, the Bigfeet sounded close, too close, their cries dangerously loud in his ears. He let his front paws do the work as he limped across the roof, turning for a moment to face the Bigfeet.
The cat made the leap to the parapet just before the Bigfoot threw the kitchen tongs at him, ducking and weaving so that it went past, harmlessly. He could feel a hot, sticky dampness on his back paw, and the smell of his own blood rose higher than the warm smell of blood from the fish he carried.
“You’ll have to make the jump into the flame tree,” Mara said in his ear. He could tell she was holding her voice steady, but it carried a sharpness that revealed her worry. As he crouched on the edge of the parapet, the flame tree seemed far way. He couldn’t rely on his back paws to propel him into the leap. The cat looked down, and the distance made even his brave heart quail. He was three floors up; the fall would be hard.
Above his head, the Bigfeet yells were getting louder. Southpaw risked a quick glance upwards, and saw one of them lean down towards the parapet, wielding a broom that looked ominously prickly—not the soft kind made from dried grasses, but the stick brooms that could cause serious injuries. He measured the distance between him and the nearest branch. He wasn’t going to make it, he thought.
“You have to,” said Mara. She had changed her position, and her worried green eyes assessed him from the tree. “Drop the fish, Southpaw, it’s not that important, and then you can use your whiskers for balance!”
He looked at her and knew she was giving him good advice, but his brown eyes said no.
“You stubborn brat!”
His whiskers twitched a little—yes, they said amicably, he agreed with her. The swoosh of the broom startled him; he hadn’t realized how close the Bigfeet were. One of them was climbing down onto the parapet.
Southpaw stayed crouched at the edge, measuring the gap. In the flame tree, the squirrels, woken out of their sleep, gaped at him, chittering as they ran down to the lower branches, well away from the crazy brown cat who thought he could make an impossible jump. The broom thumped down behind him again. The pain in his left paw was intense; it felt like the paw was on fire even as he felt his phalanges crush and the tendon tear. Southpaw blinked, and then he stared deliberately into Mara’s green eyes, putting the pain away.
He leapt just as the broom came down, missing his tail by a whisker. The Bigfeet yelled and cursed, but Southpaw kept his focus on the branch. For a moment, he thought he’d reach it easily—and then one of his paws missed, and he found himself hanging on with just the other.
“Drop the fish!” Mara pleaded.
He wouldn’t. The cat felt a claw tear, as the bark began to give way. His ribs hurt. The pain was travelling up his left back paw, so brutal after the leap that he could feel his eyes watering. But he kept his mouth clamped over the fish. He had to get down the tree before the Bigfeet managed to get to him.
“Southpaw, if you drop it now, you have a better chance! Please!” His brown eyes met Mara’s, and he managed to raise his whiskers jauntily in her direction. He felt the muscles in his shoulder bulge and tense as he made a tremendous effort, forcing his paw up, hooking it over the branch. For a moment, he hung from a branch, eye-to-eye with the hard brown seedpods that dotted the tree. Then he pulled his back paw up, the uninjured one, letting the wounded paw drag behind him, and he slipped into the maze of its branches, moving deftly from the flame tree to the friendly saptaparni evergreen next to it.
“Just wait till you come and see me next, Southpaw, this isn’t over,” said Mara. “Rats. I have to go, my Chief Bigfoot will soon be here—but you’re not off the hook, you hear?” He blinked at her, agreeably. The sounds of the Bigfeet were fading behind him, and as he set off through the freezing night, the squirrels watched him sleepily, their grey tails draggled from the mist. They agreed that he had a swagger in his step, but most of them thought he’d earned it. The only one of the rodents who disagreed was a small brown mouse; Jethro Tail’s bright black eyes filled with concern as he noted Southpaw’s limp. He had hurt his own paw in a daring raid involving the liberation of some chicken tikkas from their Bigfoot stall owner, and, in the cold, it had taken a long time to heal. He knew the young brown cat, and hoped that Southpaw wasn’t as badly hurt as he seemed to be.
Mara would have followed Southpaw back with a last indignant mew, just to keep him in his place, but there wasn’t the time. Though she sent a parting curse in the errant tomcat’s direction, she switched her attention back to her own house once she knew that he was safe.
Her whiskers trembled, telling her that she was just in time. The most important Bigfoot in the world was almost at the door. The Sender scrambled down from the windowsill. She shot across the carpet, almost overturning the fancy three-legged table with which she had a series of ongoing skirmishes, and reached the door just as the bell went.
In the past, Mara had tried very hard to use her whiskers to open the door herself, but she had never succeeded. All that had happened was that she’d sent herself to the other side of the door, and sometimes all the way down the stairs, which was not what she wanted at all. The Sender had learned to wait until one of her own Bigfeet arrived.
Her Bigfoot opened the door for the Chief Bigfoot, and Mara forgot that she was a dignified Sender who had seen two winters come and go. She lay on her back, wriggling in greeting, her paws cycling, and then she got to her paws and purred, rubbing her head against the ankles
of the most important Bigfoot in the world.
“There, there,” said the Chief Bigfoot. “Anyone would think that you hadn’t seen me for a week, instead of this morning. All right, here’s your cuddle. Okay, you want your chin scratched, too? You want more food? Finished everything in your bowl?”
Mara still didn’t understand Bigfeet, but she had picked up a few words here and there, and her ears rose at the mention of cuddles and food. Her own Bigfeet were good at both of these but in an absent-minded sort of way despite all her attempts to train them, and tended to drift off mid-cuddle. The Chief Bigfoot was not like that at all. Mara led the way to the kitchen, purring, her beautiful, fluffy tail waving like a flag.
She held the Chief Bigfoot in high esteem. Compared to her other two Bigfeet, the Chief Bigfoot had far more freedom—she came into the house only twice a day, in the morning and the evening. Her Bigfeet did very boring things around the house, ironing clothes with a large and scary iron whose surface had scorched Mara’s paw once, moving books and paper here and there, and generally getting in the Sender’s way. The only interesting activity they did was cooking, and much to her indignation, she was barred from the kitchen at those times.
The Chief Bigfoot, on the other hand, was the official wielder of all the items and implements that had fascinated Mara in her kittenhood: the magnificent broom made of soft grasses, the mesmerizing floor swabbing rag that she had loved to chase, all the dusters that she adored pouncing on, especially the feather duster. (The feather duster had come to a messy end, unfortunately.)
Besides, she had never committed the dastardly deed of luring Mara into a small, interesting object that had appeared to be a feline sanctum, but had turned out to be a fiendish form of transportation to the vet’s office. The kitten had been too stunned the first time she’d met the vet to do more than express her gratitude to her Bigfeet for bringing her back home, but when they did this again and again, she was seriously upset.
The Hundred Names of Darkness Page 2