The dargah tugged at Mara’s vibrissae so suddenly that the Sender was taken off balance—so she wasn’t that far away! A few of the Bigfeet’s roads stood in between her and Nizamuddin, but her old home was perhaps a day, perhaps two days’ journey away, as the cheel flew. Beraal’s quiet purr came back to her, one of the pieces of wisdom the warrior queen had passed on during their training lessons: “Never measure distance by the way a crow flies.” Mara, curious, had asked: “But why not? Don’t crows make long journeys?” “They do,” said Beraal, “but as for whether they’ll take the straight route or some road that twists like an earthworm in the rain, depends on the crow. Watch the cheels instead; they fly straight and true.”
The Sender’s whiskers twitched uncertainly, making a hesitant foray into the long line of trees and bushes that lay behind a monument. And then the tips of the whiskers began to vibrate as if they were reaching for something. The high red walls of the monument beckoned to Mara; acacia bushes rustled, their dry branches telling her to hurry up.
The Sender’s paws brushed against the thick, tough scrub, and led her into a world of green and grass and trees. In the branches of a white fig tree overhead, a sleeping peacock screeched once, and went back to its dreams. The Sender let her whiskers sweep past the greens, their soft velvet grass ringed by shrubbery and high trees. The moon shone down on the Golf Course, and illuminated the monuments where the bats made their homes. Something pulled her on, though she dearly wanted to explore. There were tangles of scents; owls, watchful and wary, the sinuous paths of rat snakes and keelbacks, and then black ropelike tracks she had picked up before. The Sender had a sudden flash of understanding. Bandicoot runs criss-crossed parts of the course, winding through it the way the yellow ropes of ambar bel, the strangling creeper, would sometimes cover and then choke a tree.
But her whiskers wouldn’t let her stop. They drew her on, deeper and deeper into the course, and the moon shone even more brightly, and the Sender felt something in her fur rise and prickle with sudden happiness. “Over here,” her whiskers whispered to her; and as she hovered over the roots of an ancient banyan tree, she knew why she had come so swiftly across the way. The tips of her whiskers tingled, as though they had been caressed by the brush of a head she knew so well, and had missed so much.
“I couldn’t believe my whiskers when they caught your scent. But it is you, Mara, isn’t it?” said the dear, familiar voice. She saw his shape, and Mara felt her tail rise in the air, her whiskers spread out in gladness. The brown tom, sleek, alert, a full-grown warrior, turned, and the moonlight caught his striped flanks and the scars that covered his ears and sloped down across his nose. The Sender’s cry of greeting rang out over the Golf Course, waking the baya birds and startling the owls. She had finally found Southpaw.
The white ball soared high, clearing the water hazard effortlessly, skimming the glossy canopies of the khirni trees.
“Shot!” called Thomas, the peacock’s plumes raised in approval, the eyes on each feather nodding in applause. Southpaw stared at the ball, following its descent automatically, calculating that it would reach the greens and roll within a foot of the fluttering flag where the rest of the Bigfeet stood.
Mara’s head appeared from behind Thomas’s tail. “Why are the Bigfeet hitting balls with sticks?” she asked. “The Bigfeet in Nizamuddin use their hands and feet.”
Thomas shuddered, his plumage rustling green-and-gold. “Your Bigfeet back there were probably playing something else. Volleyball, or football, or one of those games,” he said, making them sound like diseases. “This is golf. And that was a great tee shot.” The peacock craned his sinuous neck, trying to see where the ball would land.
“I see,” said Mara, her green eyes following the ball with interest. “Did the Bigfoot mean to send it into the middle of that burrow? Only it looks like he’ll have to use the other end of the stick to dig it out. It’s gone in deep.”
It had, and they watched in surprise as the soil crumbled even further. A whiskery brown snout popped up. At the edge of the green, the Bigfeet yelled, shaking their clubs at the bandicoot. But before any of them could reach the burrow, the bandicoot had fled underground, absconding with the golf ball.
Thomas’ screech must have carried from the second hole all the way down to the seventh, at the other end of the course. “That ball was in play!” he called to the bandicoot, his claws kicking up the dust as he danced in anger. “It mustn’t be moved, shifted from the lie or otherwise tampered with, you mange-ridden, rat-faced, short-whiskered thug, that’s against the rules! Don’t you know anything about golf?”
A brown tail made an insolent gesture in the peacock’s direction, before disappearing from view.
“That is the best shot I’ve seen all morning,” said Thomas, his temper showing as he opened and closed his plumes, snapping his tail around like a fan. “And that dashed beast had the infernal nerve to disrupt a possible birdie! No, an eagle! I’ve a good mind to report him to the Committee!”
Mara had been tracking the subtle bulges of the earth as the bandicoot made his escape.
“You’d never find him,” she said, her nose following the scent of the fresh-turned burrows. “That run goes deep and long, under this green and all the way beneath that hill over to the next one. They’re all over the course, aren’t they? Why haven’t you killed them yet?”
Thomas Mor’s eyes flashed as he stared at the Sender. Mara made him uneasy. First, she’d popped up over Southpaw’s ears, and settled above the branches of a tree. He found that disconcerting; he liked his cats to stay on the ground, instead of behaving like blasted bats or birds, popping out from mid-air. Then she’d physically strolled in to meet Southpaw, instead of doing that dashed sending number that made the feathers around his eyes and his crest itch madly, which was an improvement. But she had taken him and the other peacocks aback, by extending her long, fine whiskers and picking up on the lay of the land as though she’d been living here as long as the clubhouse cats.
“Your greens—where the Bigfeet play their games—are surrounded by scrub and thick forests, aren’t they?” she had asked at once. “Do the Bigfeet use all of the land, or only the parts that they’ve groomed so neatly?” And of course she was right; the Bigfeet seldom ventured into the tangled bushes that grew near the boundary walls, and they left the beautiful old ruins alone, for the most part. “Only some parts,” he had said, puzzled. “So who runs the course?” she had asked. “The peacocks, of course, but who else? The owls? The birds of prey?” Thomas had bobbed his tail indignantly. “Your kind does,” he said. “It’s the cats and us.” The Sender had been polite about it, but he’d caught the twitch of dissent on her whiskers, he wasn’t some young peachick with unfledged quills! “Indeed,” she said. “Then how is it that the thickest and most extensive scent trails belong to the bandicoots? The Mor clan’s trails are clustered in parts of the course; the scent trails of the cat clan barely show up, they’re as faint as the trails of the koels, and they run in single lines—one cat to every two of your golf holes, by the smell of it.”
He had not liked that—bad form, swaggering into someone’s territory and telling them who was the boss of what, especially when she’d got it all wrong. There had always been cats on the Golf Course; it belonged to them (and the Mors) as much as it did to the Bigfeet. Perhaps there’d been this little business of the bandicoots; his brother Henry Mor seemed to have got his feathers into a flap, squawking about how they’d overrun the place, but Henry had hated all rodents ever since he’d eaten a dodgy rat and spent three days repenting at leisure. Thomas knew his duties, though, and he’d brought it up with Colonel Bogey, back at the clubhouse.
The majestic black cat had yawned and said, his purr soothing, “Kind of you to mention it, Thomas, but really, aren’t we making a fuss about nothing? You don’t see any bandicoots showing their whiskers over here in the clubhouse, do you? They aren’t ordering the Bigfeet around, are they? Not eating up the T-shirts a
nd the tees and the golf balls in the Pro Shop, mmmm? If you ask me, they’ll hang around for a bit and get bored. Bandicoots, they’re the sort you find infesting racecourses, stables, public parks. Golf courses? They wouldn’t know their irons from their woods, my dear chap. Yes, yes, I know all about Mulligan’s unfortunate incident. But—just between my whiskers and your feathers—he’s not one of us, is he? Those Bengal cats, so excitable. The pythons—really. Whoever heard of a bunch of rodents knocking off some of the toughest snakes in the world? Did you know their ancestors came from Burma? Must have gone off for a spot of vacation, mmmm, but the idea that bandicoots got the pythons is, frankly, ridiculous. Nothing against Mulligan, such an imaginative fellow, what? Not really the clubhouse type at all, though of course he’d be welcome to drop in for a plate of fish fingers, do let him know I said so.”
That chat had made him uneasy—the Colonel was such a snob—and Mara’s query only increased his discomfort. Thomas took a half-turn around the edge of the scrub. From the tilt of Southpaw’s whiskers, he could tell that the brown tom was turning Mara’s question over too: why hadn’t the bandicoots been killed?
“We cleared a few runs out of the area that we patrol,” Thomas said. “Henry and the rest of the gang spent a day or so, but it wasn’t that hard. Odd thing, but they abandoned their runs fast enough, almost as soon as we killed the first few. I suppose they don’t like the smell of their own blood being shed.” Mara settled herself on the dry grass, watching the Bigfeet as they milled around.
“Where did they go?” the Sender asked.
“Go?” said Thomas, startled. “I have no idea, Mara, I didn’t ask them to leave me a blasted forwarding address. We told them to clear out, and they did.”
Southpaw fluffed out his whiskers, addressing the peacock. “I know where they went,” he said. “They moved into the old rat burrows near Mashie’s territory, and they built new ones.” He turned his head, displaying the scars that criss-crossed his fur. “I had to fight a bunch of them the other day. Mashie thought he’d cleared them out, but they’re cunning creatures. They waited until he’d moved on—there’s only so much territory he can patrol on his own—and they shifted back into the runs. They were startled when they caught my scent, but they grew belligerent when they realized it was only me. I rousted them out of their burrows, but I haven’t been there for the last few days. Something tells me they’re probably back in residence.”
The Sender raised her whiskers, and Thomas watched her uneasily, as the vibrissae trembled delicately. The heat touched Mara’s fur, and for a moment, her intent orange head seemed incandescent, as though flames rippled over it.
“They are,” she said. “But, you’d better see this for yourselves. Thomas, will you walk with me?”
The peacock swung his tail back and forth, but the Sender had already started off, skirting the fairway of the third hole. They were, he realized, moving crossways, towards the fifth hole. A well-dressed mynah peered at the party, startled, and continued on its afternoon saunter across the scrub.
“I haven’t been here for almost a full moon,” said Thomas, looking around with interest. The first, sixth and seventh holes were his territory, while Henry and the cousins hung out on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth holes. The clubhouse lay behind them, as they made their way up to the massive trees that lined the fairways; he heard the reassuring chatter of wagtails, and saw a few stray hoopoes.
The Sender stopped at the edge of the scrub, her whiskers indicating that he and Southpaw should look out at the course.
“Everything seems in order, Mara,” Thomas said, puzzled. The greens were undisturbed, if a little rough. The bunkers were smooth and all seven of them seemed well-raked. He wondered what the Sender wanted them to see, and then his plumes went up. Seven bunkers? Seven of them? He couldn’t remember offhand how many there had been the last time he’d come this side, but surely there couldn’t have been more than three, or four at the most?
“So this is where they’ve set up their home base,” said Southpaw. The tom scratched at the grass, staring at the expanse of sand ahead of them. He stropped his claws with the eagerness and frustration of a born warrior who knew that this wasn’t the right time to go into battle, but who had the enemy well in his sights.
Thomas turned away, and then back, but the vision that met him stayed the same. The three extra “bunkers” weren’t sand traps at all, and hadn’t been built by the Bigfeet. The white sands that heaved before their eyes had been part of the green before it was stripped of its grass, and the creatures that made the sands undulate were bandicoots. A black sea of them, their runs spreading like a blank, white gash across the greens.
The peacock called out, a despairing screech that made the few Bigfeet on the green raise their heads and listen.
“They can’t just scurry in here as if they own the place! If they’re here, and if they’re infesting the Barakhamba, the other tomb buildings, and half the courses, they’ll be at the first hole and the clubhouse soon enough!” he said. But even as he screeched, he was making calculations.
“Too many burrows,” he said, lowering his tail so that it was held parallel to the ground. “Even if Henry, me and all of the peacocks across the Golf Course tried to dig them out, we wouldn’t be able to tackle all of them. And we’d draw the Bigfeet’s attention, if we waged our battles during the day. And you don’t have enough cats to take this lot on—begging your pardon, Southpaw—but there’s not much you, Mulligan, Mashie and Niblick can do against this sort of invasion. Perhaps if the clubhouse cats joined in—but no, even assuming the Colonel decided to join us, there still wouldn’t be enough in the way of troops.”
He lapsed into silence, pecking absently at the ground, so preoccupied that he didn’t even bother to chase a grass snake that had strayed into the area. The snake checked when its tongue scented the peacock, and it fled, making wide, wriggling loops across the fairway.
“What we need to tackle this lot,” he said, “is either two extra prides of peacocks—hard to get, mind, though I suppose we could ask over at Tughlaqabad whether some of the distant cousins would care to fly down—but it’s a long way off to the forts, and I don’t know how many of the pride remains in those old ruins. Pity we don’t have a proper clan of cats, what the course used to have, way back then. Those were the days, Southpaw; you had one family to every hole, sometimes large ones, and it did my tail feathers good to see the kittens tumbling around the place. Kept the rats on their toes, they did. But there’s no point expecting Mashie and Niblick to produce a clan out of thin air, what?”
Southpaw’s brown eyes met Mara’s green ones, and they held each other’s gaze, a question passing between the two cats, asked and answered.
“We have a clan,” said Mara quietly. “They are about to lose their old homes, Thomas. They could help, but only if they would be welcome here.”
Behind them, a cat mewed in disbelief.
“You must be a Sender,” said Mulligan, stepping into their little circle. The Bengal cat was in woeful condition. He had a thin, haunted look to him; and even his proud rosettes seemed dull, his beautiful golden fur matted. “Only Senders talk like that, or have such long whiskers.”
Mara hesitated, but Southpaw came forward, offering Mulligan a friendly head-butt. “She is,” he said. “She’s the Sender of Nizamuddin, and she’s my friend. But why do you doubt her?”
Mulligan stared at the bandicoots, at the upturned earth, the ruinous mounds that made even the hoopoes and the wagtails step lightly, treating the ground with caution for fear that they would tumble into a fresh hole or an old run.
“I have heard Senders can do many things,” he said, his mew a hoarse rasp, “but long as your whiskers might be, they cannot conjure up an entire clan of cats in an instant. You might know of a clan in need of a home, we might welcome them—there is space enough, food enough, if we could wrest our homes back from these encroaching thugs—but which Sender has ever had whiskers powerful
enough to drag an entire clan across the city?”
Thomas Mor nodded his head, setting his feathers to dancing again. “Very true,” he said. “Excellent idea, but the point is—your clan is over there, somewhere, and you’re over here, whiskers and all. You have as much chance of bringing the two together as we do of diverting the Yamuna and flooding these dirty rats out of here.”
Southpaw stretched, and gave Mara a light, affectionate head rub, ruffling her whiskers gently.
“Sender,” he said, “they’re right. How do you plan to bring the Nizamuddin cats here?”
Mara yawned and arched the kinks out of her back.
“I have to go now,” she said, “my Bigfeet will worry if I’m not home for dinner. Rest well tonight, and don’t get your whiskers, or feathers, into a tangle. The Golf Course will have its clan before the full moon wanes, one way or another. Southpaw, would you like to come back with me? Just to see the new house?”
The two cats slipped easily away, moving with such lightness over the grass that the hoopoes didn’t see them or sound an alarm until Mara and Southpaw had passed by. Mulligan felt his whiskers tingle with hope, but then he happened to look at the bandicoots again.
Their runs were massive, spreading like stains across the course. Thomas Mor gave voice to the thoughts in Mulligan’s mind: “If there are so many of them here, how many runs might there be elsewhere? How long have they been planning to take over the course?”
The peacock and the Bengal cat left in silence. Much as they hoped they could believe the Sender, neither thought it was likely that a clan of cats would fall from the skies, like monsoon rain.
—
MOONCH SURVEYED HIS KINGDOM, satisfaction oiling out of every pore and whisker.
The Hundred Names of Darkness Page 29