The creature bounded to its feet, and it threw its head back, exposing the ring of fur around its throat, which was the size of a tree trunk.
“I have drunk almost all of the blood spilled from your wounds,” it cried. “Wait, let me clean the trail.” And it bounded rapidly down the mountainside, licking as it went, until it had licked up every last drop of blood that had fallen from the cat’s flank and paws.
“It tastes so good,” it said, running back up, its paws making the mountainside shake. “You will taste better, because your blood, even old, spilled blood, tastes good, little cat.”
The cat felt the strength drain out of her flanks, and for a moment, she thought she would not guess any more names. It would be better to put an end to it. The creature had settled, licking her blood off its paws, and then it yawned, and its teeth gleamed black and yellow in the shifting light of the moon.
The creature stood up. “And now I must sharpen my teeth,” it said, shambling towards the cat.
The cat wanted to flee, but the blood from her wounds had congealed, and her paws were stuck to the rock. She hissed and arched her back, but there was nothing else she could do.
The clouds rumbled in the distance, and juddered across the sky, covering the moon.
It was by her side; there would be no escape. She felt a claw, bigger than she had expected, sharper, too, rake her fur lightly, and then not so lightly. She turned her head, and far off, she saw a tiny gleam of light reflected from the black, glassy rocks on the next mountainside. The last of the visible stars winked at her from high above, and as the winds rushed down the mountains once again, shrieking in sorrow, the cat felt a pang of sadness: she had not met the cat who lived on the other side of the night, after all.
The creature raised its paws to the skies, and she felt its breath rasp across her whiskers.
“Wait,” she called. “I have one last name for you.”
The creature laughed, a rusted, tumbling sound, like bones being clanked together.
“Go on, go on,” it said genially. “I am of the night, as you so cleverly guessed, little cat, but you will not find my name among the names of night.”
She raised her whiskers up as high as she could, forgetting the ache in her flanks, the pain in her paws, the pain yet to come.
“That is true,” she said. “Your name is not one of the hundred names of darkness, including Darkness itself.”
“Is that all you have to say?” said the creature. “Hurry up, you must guess fast. The morning will be upon us soon, and I would rather eat before dawn.”
The cat made an immense effort, and freed first one of her paws, then the other, then the rest, from the dried blood.
“What are you doing?” said the creature uneasily as she limped in its direction.
The cat brushed her head against its awful, tangled, matted fur, and then she gently licked its paw.
“Stop that!” the creature said.
“It is part of the naming,” she said, purring so deeply, so warmly, that the winds stopped their howling.
“No!” said the creature. “I have no name! I always win this game, because I have no name at all!”
“You have a name,” she said, and she purred harder, and she rubbed her bloody, wounded flank along its rough, filthy fur, and she washed its paws as the moon sank and the first glimmer of the sun began to lighten the night sky.
“I don’t!” said the creature.
“You do, friend,” said the cat.
“Friend?” said the creature, as the sun started to come up from behind the mountains.
“Friend,” said the cat. “I have named you my friend.”
The creature raised its shaggy head in bewilderment, and then the sun rose above the black mountains. And as its rays touched the great misshapen creature, it shook and shook and shook, until it had shaken its fur and its skin and its fangs off.
The creature’s pelt lay on the ground like an abandoned shell, and then the skin shook once more, and a sleek black cat stepped out of it, preening his whiskers and shaking his paws out.
He sat down next to the tortoiseshell, and he purred over her wounded paws until the pads healed; he touched his whiskers lightly to her poor, battered flanks and the fur sprang back again, over the newly healed pink skin. Gently, his tail reached for hers, and joyously, her tail entwined itself around his.
“So you were what was on the other side of the night,” she said in wonder, and the two cats sat together, on the highest ridge of the mountain. Their tails stayed entwined, as they watched the dawn come up and as the birds sang in the sweet, green valley below.
EVEN THE BATS HAD fallen silent. They stopped their chirruping when Beraal reached the part about the egrets and the four winds, so that they could listen to the story. When she finished, they rustled their leathery wings like velvet curtains, to indicate their thanks for the tale.
The kittens were both asleep, curled up against their mother’s stomach with their paws hooked into her fur for comfort.
Beraal had smelled Mara’s absorption, felt the Sender’s whiskers go taut in apprehension as the creature followed the cat up the black mountain. She could feel Mara’s breath ease as the story reached its ending, and smelled the young queen’s relief.
“Sleep well, little one,” she said in a soft mew to Mara. “See, the dark has lifted.” It was not yet light, but the hour of the dawn was almost upon them.
Mara folded her whiskers down, stretching her back before she curled herself into a heap. “It was a good story,” she said, her mew growing heavy. “Will the sun be up soon, Beraal?”
“Yes, it will,” said Beraal. “And then Hulo can take you back home, to your Bigfeet. He knows the house.”
“I would like that,” said Mara, in a sleepy mew, and then she yawned, her pink tongue curling outwards. And then there was no sound in Beraal’s snug makeshift home except for the occasional purring of the kittens, as they were washed by their mother. The Sender’s long day had come to an end. She dropped into sleep as a stone drops into a deep well, knowing in her fur and her bones that all would be set right in the morning.
Beraal’s kittens played hide-and-seek in the shade of the pile of bricks and sand that had replaced the long park at the back of Nizamuddin, near the canal. The black-and-white huntress lay sleepily in the silver sand, keeping her ears alert for any signs of Bigfeet activity. She ignored the cheels overhead, only checking from time to time to make sure that no strangers had joined Nizamuddin’s flying squadrons. Ruff and Tumble had been introduced to Tooth, Claw, Slash and the other Wing Commanders when Beraal shifted her quarters to the comparative safety of this spot near the canal.
The squadrons would leave the kittens in peace, unless one was foolish enough to venture out on his or her own, in which case, their unofficial truce would no longer stand. The raptors made allowances for the kittens and birds they knew, but any young creature found alone would be considered legitimate prey.
The whisker link crackled to life, and for a moment, Beraal felt her fur rise in hope. “Sorry, Beraal,” said Hulo, pre-empting her questions. “The dargah cats haven’t seen him, and there’s no sign of him down at the shelter either. I only linked to let you know that I’ll stop here for a bite with Qawwali, didn’t want you to spend the morning waiting for me and Katar to report back from daily patrol.”
Beraal sent her thanks back to him, but she knew that the tomcat would catch and understand the disappointment that travelled from her whiskers along the link. A moon had come and gone, winter’s severe cold had given way to this early, burning summer heat, and there had been no news of Southpaw. The first few visits to the vet had gone so well, she thought, her tail twitching in sad remembrance. The Bigfeet had nursed him patiently, Mara had sat by his side night and day, keeping vigil after her return to the house. Beraal had gone to visit the young tom, and even Katar and Hulo had ventured up the staircase; Katar, indeed, was on cautiously friendly terms with the Bigfeet.
And then the Bigfeet had come back with an empty cage. “The door had a faulty latch,” the Sender had told them later. “I didn’t know, but then Southpaw’s heavier than me. From the scents in the cage, all I can tell is that he was startled by something, and he sprang at the door. It must have opened. Perhaps the Bigfeet’s car had stopped somewhere; I can’t smell that bit very clearly. I’ve tried and tried to reach him, but he can’t send, and he wouldn’t be able to link at all once he’d left Nizamuddin. But I know that wherever he is, he’s safe. He’ll be back some day.”
“How do you know he’s safe, Sender?” Katar had said, the harshness of his mew betraying his anguish. “How do you know he hasn’t come to any harm?”
The Sender had flicked her whiskers gravely, considering the question in all seriousness. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t reach him, or tell where he is. But if he were dead—that is what you’re afraid of, Katar—my whiskers would know. If I hadn’t been so frightened when I fled my home, I would have felt his illness before. He is alive, even if I can’t locate him.”
For the first few days, they had hoped and watched the boundaries of Nizamuddin, expecting to see Southpaw’s cheerful form, his jaunty tail, sail forth from some unexpected corner. But the days had tumbled along, like the brown leaves that fell from the trees, and gradually, Beraal had grown less and less sure that she would see the young tom again.
Her nose caught a familiar scent, and she sat up, greeting Katar with a friendly nuzzle. The grey tom flopped down beside her, glad of the coolness of the sand. The heat had made matters worse for the clan in one worrying respect: the Bigfeet had built over so many of the parks and green patches in the colony that the animals who lived there had fewer water sources this year than ever before. The canal water was not safe. Even the pigs wouldn’t drink it, for fear of the many illnesses whose greedy mouths lay in wait for the unwary under its black surface. The Bigfeet had taps scattered around the colony, but only the bravest of the stray dogs would dare to lap at the water that pooled on the stones underneath.
The Bigfeet’s guards would thrash any animal they saw drinking at the taps without mercy, and one of Motu’s gang, an evil-tempered creature, had been beaten so hard he had whimpered for days afterwards. They had to steal water from the birdbaths, which meant more risk at the hands of the Bigfeet, or to shift their shelters so that they were closer to the few remaining gardens and could drink from those hoses. Hulo and some of the dargah cats were strong enough, and daring enough, to balance precariously on the slippery surface of the fat concrete pipes that ran alongside the canal, carrying drinking water to the Bigfeet; they would drink from the many leaks in the pipe to their hearts’ content. But the canal’s sluggish waters were treacherously deep, and those who lost their footing were seldom seen again.
“I was about to link to ask Hulo if he’d heard anything from the dargah,” said Katar. “But he had the same luck as me—nothing from Jangpura, Beraal. I’ll wait till my fur cools down, do another patrol along the market areas, and then I’ll link to let the dargah cats know.”
Beraal understood that the tom didn’t expect to hear better news.
“If the cheels haven’t spotted him yet on their sorties, if Jethro and his band of mice haven’t heard anything, then we aren’t likely to pick up his scent,” said Katar, his whiskers exuding tiredness. “If it wasn’t for the Sender…”
He didn’t finish his mew, nor did he need to.
“Mara says he’s alive; she can feel it on her whiskers,” said Beraal quietly. “And if any cat can use up his nine lives and still have nine left, it’s our Southpaw. Sometimes there is nothing we can do except fold our paws and wait…Ruff, stop biting Tumble’s tail, you know she’ll smack you back and then you’ll come meeping to me!”
“What on earth is that?” said Katar, staring in the direction of the banks of the canal.
The cheel squadrons filled the skies, as they usually did at this time of the day, like a fleet of black ships set against the brilliant blue. The cheels flew in precisely judged manoeuvres, not in arrowhead formation, but in a more loose if distinct set of patterns. Their flight paths often ran parallel to one another, and the speed at which they crossed each other’s tracks in the air made Beraal blink to see it, but they almost never crashed. They wheeled and turned, creating a skein of patterns in the sky, as though they wove the air into nets that could be thrown across the mottled brick rooftops of the dargah.
Far below the daring acrobatics and complex sorties of the cheel squadrons, a small brown shape hopped along the canal’s concrete rim. It seemed to shoot into the air every so often, but it came down awkwardly, landing in a waddle rather than in a graceful dive.
“Oh, that’s only Hatch,” said Beraal, deciding to end the argument between Ruff and Tumble (the kittens were spitting at each other) by cuffing the brother and nipping the sister. “He’s learning to fly. That’s Tooth circling overhead, trying to get him to rise into the sky.”
Katar stared at the fledgling, who was almost fully grown. He was a handsome bird, his plumage a rich brown flecked with gold, his plumes slightly longer at the back of his pileum, lending him a pleasantly rakish manner. But there he was, hopping along the parapet, like a mynah, taking those gawky flights in the manner of a duck, not a cheel.
“Shouldn’t he be part of a squadron?” he asked. “Mach’s a Squadron Leader already, isn’t she?”
Beraal had started grooming Ruff, over his increasingly vociferous protests, so she answered with the barest twitch of her whiskers.
“Yes, but he doesn’t want to fly,” she said. “It’s driving Tooth mad. Look, he’s circling us.”
Katar felt the sudden coolness on his fur as the raptor passed overhead, the cheel’s shadow falling briefly on the cats. Tooth drew closer, but changed tack, dipping his wings and veering off towards the canal. He hovered for a few moments behind his son. Hatch took off in another awkward burst, skimmed the parapet, and returned to his hopping.
Tooth didn’t alight near Hatch, and Katar guessed that the fledgling hadn’t seen his father. The cheel banked left, flying over the canal’s waters over the Bigfeet of Jangpura, who were out sunning themselves on their charpais in the bustling lanes of the colony across from Nizamuddin. He took a long wide loop down the length of the canal, and it was a while before Katar heard the steady flapping of the raptor’s wings overhead.
Tooth perched on the top of the pile of bricks, spreading his feathers out so that they caught the sun.
“No word of your runaway,” he said. “I flew as far as the overpass on the roads outside the dargah, but the cheels who live in Khusro Park hadn’t seen a tom with brown stripes. They speak politely enough, that lot, but they have forgotten how to be cheels. They forage like rats in the Bigfeet’s garbage; few of them hunt any more, as though we were made to use our claws for nothing better than picking up leftovers!”
He ruffled his feathers, shaking the upsetting encounter with the scavenger-cheels off them.
“Should we stop sending out patrols for Southpaw, then?” said Katar.
“No,” said Beraal. “The Sender says…”
“The Sender says, the Sender says! For all her confident mews, she doesn’t know where he is, does she?” Katar’s fur was almost as ruffled as Tooth’s feathers. He hadn’t expected to hear news of Southpaw, but as the days padded by, the tom missed the younger cat more and more sharply, and sometimes his whiskers were heavy with the ache of it. Southpaw’s hunting skills had been much needed, in these lean seasons. More than once, Katar had raised his whiskers to summon the brown tom, sent an absent-minded message to Southpaw through a quick spray at the fence that they used as their regular meeting place in the park, only to be reminded that the youngster was missing.
That morning, when Tooth had risen into the skies, Katar had sat on a rooftop, watching the cheel until he was lost in the glare of the sun, and allowed hope to seep through his fur. Perhaps Southpaw was on his way back
home; perhaps the cats they didn’t know that well, the ones who lived on the Golf Course or the fat cats who made their sleek progress through Sujan Singh Park and Khan Market, would have caught his scent. He hadn’t realized how confident he had been that the cheel would come back with some sort of encouragement; his fur bristled with disappointment.
“Southpaw’s whiskers are not a Sender’s whiskers,” said Beraal, calmly washing Tumble back to sleep. “He cannot link to us or to the Sender once he’s crossed the scent boundaries in Nizamuddin, but I trust Mara when she says he’s all right. I trained her, and her whiskers reach much further than ours ever could. You, of all the hunters of Nizamuddin, should be able to keep your paws still and wait—you were always the most patient of us, Katar, except when it came to Southpaw. It’s because you miss him so much that your whiskers can’t stop twitching now.”
“But it’s hard when it’s your fledgling in trouble,” said Tooth unexpectedly. “I smelled your fur that day when you asked me to help carry Southpaw, and you smelled like an anxious father, Katar.”
Katar gave his whiskers a tiny twitch, suddenly amused at a thought. “Most of the Nizamuddin kittens are trained by the queens,” he said. “Miao used to take us all on our first hunts, Beraal teaches the younger kittens the art of the brawl. But from the time Hulo found him, Southpaw was brought up by him and me as much as by Miao and Beraal. I suppose we are his fathers, our whiskers are closely linked.”
“You feel it in your feathers, from your barbs down to your quills, if something goes wrong with them,” said Tooth, and they saw how his pinions drooped.
Beraal watched the cheel intently. “Some kittens take a long time to use their claws, to step into the world,” she said gently. “It does not mean that there is anything wrong with them. They learn at a different pace, that’s all.”
Tooth raised his head, and they saw that his keen eyes were following the squadrons circling overhead.
The Hundred Names of Darkness Page 18