The Sign of the Cat

by Lynne Jonell

  “He’s leaving me,” Duncan said in disbelief. “He’s leaving me all alone out here!”

  The dark blot of the ship faded in the distance. The lights winked out.

  “Not all alone,” said Fia, and she licked his cheek with her sandpapery tongue.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lost at Sea

  THE MOON SHONE COLD AND DISTANT on the wide, dark sea. The heaving swell moved up and down as if some huge, watery animal were breathing in and out. Small and almost invisible on its vast surface floated a wooden crate, and clinging to that crate was a boy. On the boy’s head was a kitten.

  Duncan wedged his hands more firmly between the slats of the rough wooden crate. His scalp hurt. Fia’s claws were hooked into his cap, but she couldn’t seem to help digging her claws in deeper when an unexpected wave smacked into her. Still, the top of Duncan’s head was a better place for her than the half-sunken crate. At least his head was out of the water most of the time.

  The air at the water’s surface was warmer than it had been at the height of the maintop—and after the first shocking plunge, the water seemed even warmer than the air. But all the same, by the time the moon set, Duncan was chilled and shivering.

  The sea was inky black. Duncan wondered what sea creatures were below him and if any of them had teeth. He had a sudden image of something large, dark, and hungry swimming toward his legs, mouth gaping wide.

  He wrenched his mind forcibly from this thought and looked up. At least the clouds had blown away; he could see the stars, crushed across the heavens like tiny bits of broken glass. They were beautiful, but they were very far off, and somehow they made him feel even more lost. The world was a bigger and more heartless place than he had ever imagined. And he could not understand why the earl had left him to drown.

  It was a long and miserable night. Duncan did not dare to shut his eyes—what if his grip relaxed and he let go of the crate?—but he was very tired. Finally he thought of his belt. Carefully, he took it off and laced the end through the slats of the fruit crate. Then he worked the loop around his body and under both arms, so that when he buckled the belt again, he hung in a sort of sling. At last he closed his eyes, worn out from effort and cold and loss. He slept.

  He woke with a cramp in his arm, an empty feeling in his stomach, and a sensation of warmth on his cheek. He blinked. In the east the sun was rising in a blaze of pink and gold. He turned his stiff neck, scanning the horizon. Surely somewhere was an island he could swim toward.

  He squinted in all directions; he could see nothing but water. East, south, west, and north, the sea was an endless circle with him at its center. And though the warmth of the sun was welcome after his cold and shivering night, before long he wished it was not quite so warm.

  The day wore on in heat and blinding sun. Fia climbed down from his cap and into the front of his shirt, where the seawater cooled her and the cloth protected her sensitive ears and nose from sunburn. After a while Duncan took off his pants and carefully arranged them around his head like some strange, wet turban, draping the trouser legs over his cheeks and the back of his neck. He needed protection from the sun, and he could swim better in just his shorts, anyway. His shoes had fallen off long ago.

  Were he and Fia getting somewhere? Or just bobbing up and down? Duncan couldn’t tell. His eyebrows were crusted with salt, and his eyes hurt from the reflected light, yet he had to keep a sharp lookout for anything that might be an island. They were at the very southwest edge of the mapped sea, which of course meant that islands were few and far between. But he didn’t say this to Fia. He told her that the Arvidian Sea was full of islands.

  “Jammed with them,” he said. “There are so many, no one’s ever counted them all. So of course we’re bound to run into one sooner or later.”

  “Will it have water?” asked Fia faintly. “And food?”

  Duncan’s stomach growled at the thought. He had missed meals before, but never two in a row, and his stomach was letting him know it. Still, water was what he wanted more than anything. He swallowed the dryness in his throat to answer Fia’s question. “There will be mice, maybe, and birds for sure. How good are you at catching birds?”

  “I only ever practiced on mice,” said Fia a little nervously. “Birds are advanced.”

  “You’ll figure it out.” Duncan hoped so. He would be happy to eat a roasted bird—a mouse, not so much. Of course, first they had to find an island.

  The sun was more than halfway down on its journey to the west. Duncan’s thirst grew until it dominated his every thought. If only the water all around him were fresh! But the briny sea was full of salt, and he spit it out every time he happened to get a mouthful. He was not tempted to swallow, because he knew what happened to becalmed sailors who drank seawater. They went crazy.

  Fia had to be just as thirsty, if not more so. When Duncan listened, he could hear the tiny wheezing whimper that came out with each breath, as if her misery couldn’t quite be contained in her small body.

  He tried to distract her. “You know a lot of bad words, for a kitten,” he said.

  “What?” Fia lifted her small, weary face to his.

  “All those cat insults you meowed at the earl! I didn’t know there were so many ways to call someone a stupid, scabby, stinking, slobbering dog. Did you have to learn them for your kitten examinations?”

  “Not … really. I just made them up for when Tibby, Tabby, and Tuff were mean.” Fia’s meow was hoarse, and she made an obvious effort to swallow. “They were fun to use on the dog at the corner, too.”

  Duncan looked fondly at the kitten. No cat was attractive when wet, and Fia was perhaps the most limp, bedraggled-looking kitten he had ever seen. Her fur, where it wasn’t plastered to her skin, stuck out in random tufts, and her blue and green eyes looked bigger than ever atop her skinny, unfluffed body. But she still had plenty of spark, though it was a little subdued after almost a whole day afloat.

  “It’s amazing,” Duncan said, “how much you know for how young you are.”

  Fia said, “Kittens learn much faster than human babies. Human babies don’t even take their first steps until they’re maybe a whole year old, but we kittens are running around in weeks. We learn faster, we grow faster, our hearts beat faster—”

  This was true, Duncan thought as Fia rattled on; but cats died faster, too. He thought of Grizel with a pang. She was not much older than he was, in human years, but she was very old for a cat. He hoped she was helping his mother feel less lonely.

  The thought of his mother was like a knife beneath his skin. He rocked endlessly up and down in the dreamy blue waves, knowing that she would be thinking of him, crying for him. She would be blaming herself for not keeping him safe.

  If only she had told him who his father was, as she surely had meant to do one day, he would have been more careful. But if she had told him, Duncan would have scarcely been able to hold his head up for shame.

  The earl must know who he was. Why else would the earl have left him to drown? Duncan remembered that Bertram had said it would be a long voyage, with plenty of time for something to happen. It had seemed like a threat, somehow, though Duncan had not understood it.

  He understood it now. The earl had wanted to get rid of him but hadn’t wanted to get his elegant hands dirty with the stain of outright murder. Bertram and the earl had been in no hurry—they knew that on a long sea voyage, there were many opportunities for accidents to happen, without any questions being asked. They would not have wanted the sailors to suspect anything. If Duncan hadn’t helped things along by jumping off the ship himself, no doubt he would have had an accident soon—near the Rift, perhaps.

  The earl was vicious indeed, if he wanted to kill Duncan just because he was the son of his old enemy. But then, Duncan already knew he was a kitten eater, and that was pretty low.

  Duncan stroked Fia gently behind the ears, and she closed her eyes in pleasure. A quiet purr, like the rumble of a tiny engine, vibrated against his chest,
and he smoothed down the wild, damp tufts of Fia’s salt-encrusted coat. The earl must be crazy. He seemed to think that eating kittens would give him some kind of power—something to do with running the country. It didn’t make any sense.

  Meow! Meow!

  Fia’s paw was pointing. “A sail! A sail!”

  Duncan gulped. He had been so busy thinking he had forgotten to scan the horizon. There, perhaps two miles away, was a ship.

  His breath came quicker. He narrowed his eyes, squinting to see better. A ship was as distinctly different as a person and would be recognizable from this far away to anyone with a telescope.

  Duncan pressed his thumbs and forefingers together so that there was a tiny space in the center he could look through. He had learned this trick on the island of Dulle, when he used to sit on the stone throne and look out to sea. Narrowing his field of vision had the effect of sharpening it. It took him a few moments to get the ship in view, but at last he was able to take a good, long look.

  He swallowed his cruel disappointment. Number of masts, type of sails, her lines—he would have recognized her at an even greater distance. “It’s the earl’s schooner,” he said, his voice flat. “Even if a lookout saw us, and the sailing master came about just to pick us up, the earl would only try to get rid of us again.”

  Fia’s face showed uncertainty. “Maybe we’d get a drink first.” She licked the salty edges of her mouth.

  “They can’t even see us,” said Duncan.

  “But we can see them,” Fia protested.

  “That’s because it’s a whole ship—it’s huge. But us? We’re small. We don’t have any flares to set off, either. If we got closer, there might be a chance, but they’re going away from us. Look where the sun is. They’ve caught the Arvidian Current, I bet. It will take them right up next to the Rift.”

  Duncan remembered, with a pang, the map of Arvidia marked with its currents. The Arvidian Current ran west now, but then it would curve northward and back east … back home. How he longed to be there himself.

  He watched as the ship sailed sweetly on a broad reach, the wind belling her sails like some perfect picture of what a ship should be. She looked beautiful, though very far away, and he watched her until she was out of sight.

  It was growing darker. A breath of coolness blew across the surface of the water. Soon, Duncan knew, he would be shivering again. Would his thirst be less in the night? Or would it just get worse and worse until he died? He closed his eyes as if to shut out the thought. He was not dying, not yet. He would think about something else.

  An image of a tall, brimming glass of water floated into his mind.

  No. He would think about home, where the earl’s schooner would go in the end. By now, his mother would have guessed he was with the earl. Friar Gregory or Father Andrew would have told her Duncan had gone to the ship.

  It came to Duncan that since his mother had been a duchess, she would have met the earl already, many years ago. Maybe the earl had gone to one of her concerts. What had she thought when the earl came back from the royal tour telling everyone that her husband had kidnapped the princess?

  She must have believed that the earl was lying, or she never would have told Duncan that his father was good and honorable and brave. She must have thought Duncan was in danger from the earl, as well, or she wouldn’t have told him never to talk with strangers or go to the wharf when strange ships docked.

  But Sylvia McKay—no, Sylvia McKinnon—had no proof that the earl was lying, had she? Maybe she had just refused to believe that her husband was a traitor.

  Duncan wanted to believe right along with her. But there had been all those witnesses. Even Friar Gregory, trying so hard to be fair in the classroom so long ago, had agreed that a whole shipful of witnesses couldn’t be wrong.

  A gust out of nowhere blew Duncan’s eyes open and dashed cold spray in his face. The sky had grown very much darker, and a black cloud—where had that come from?—extended all the way down to the surface of the water and was moving in fast.

  It was a black squall. He had heard about these sudden storms at sea.

  “Hang on!” he shouted to Fia, above a quickly rising wind. “Here it comes!”

  The water churned around them, and the endless rocking turned into a violent bucking motion, as if the sea wanted to throw them off its back. Duncan checked the belt that was tied to the crate, gripped the wood with both arms, and hardly noticed Fia’s claws as she dug into his chest.

  The rain poured down as if someone were dumping a bucket the size of the sky. Duncan and Fia held their heads up, mouths open, but they couldn’t get much that way.

  This was stupid! Feverishly, Duncan unknotted his pants and held them up in the downpour. He wrung them out, held them up, and wrung them out again. When the water tasted almost fresh, he squeezed it into his mouth.

  “Fia! Suck on the cloth!”

  His fingers fumbled with the buckle of his cap; it would hold much more. He rinsed it, squeezed it, rinsed again, until the accumulated salt of hours was washed away. The first capful he drank had an odd chemical taste and was still a little briny—he couldn’t help getting some spray into it—but it tasted better than anything he had ever drunk in his life. He filled another capful, and another—and then the squall was gone, racing away to the northwest as fast as it had come. He buckled on his cap again over his wet hair. At least it had gotten a washing.

  The sun gleamed out from behind clouds, turning them deep orange and gold. The sea was purple, shining like metal. And there, hidden by the squall until this moment, was an island.

  Duncan stared for one paralyzed instant. He rubbed his eyes. And then he started to swim. He pushed the crate ahead of him and kicked his legs as hard as he could. He aimed to the right of the island, for if he didn’t point himself in the correct direction, the current might carry him past the land.

  Fia, now gripping the top of the crate with her claws, stood like some sort of feline figurehead, her ears pricked rigidly forward and her tail lashing. She urged him on, mewing, “Kick! Kick!” with every stroke, but Duncan didn’t have the breath to tell her she was irritating him. He was already swimming with every ounce of strength he had.

  Now that they were closer to the island, he could see breakers, white lines of surf where the sea crashed into a reef. If he didn’t find a gap in the breakers, he and Fia would be dashed to pieces.

  “Watch out!” cried Fia. “Rocks ahead!”

  Duncan was too busy kicking to answer. His face was in the water half the time, his leg muscles were on fire, and he had to breathe. He flung his head up to check his position and gasped in dismay, choking as he sucked in seawater. The offshore current was strong, going fast. Three or four miles an hour, perhaps? Too fast—he wasn’t going to be able to get to the island no matter how he tried—

  His legs felt like wisps of green straw. He kicked with feeble desperation against the inexorable current, hanging on to the crate with only one arm and using the other to windmill through the water. Maybe the current would curve around the island; maybe the tide was high and would push him right up past the rocks onto some quiet beach.… He lifted his head and saw that the island was already behind him.

  Duncan let his legs dangle limp and useless. He watched the island grow smaller until at last it disappeared.

  “It had trees,” said Fia, in a tiny meow.

  “It must have had water, then,” Duncan said dully.

  The sun slipped under the horizon. Duncan leaned his arms on the crate and put his head on them. He noticed that the crate was a little lower in the waves than before. It still buoyed them up, but for how long?

  He found he was too tired to care. And in spite of hunger and thirst, in spite of fear and longing and despair, he was weary, so weary. He closed his eyes.

  * * *

  Duncan dreamed that he was at the still center of a world that heaved up and down. He opened his eyes, confused. Water was lapping at his feet, but there was sand on his
cheek and warmth on his back.

  He blinked. In his low field of vision, he could see something that looked like a dirty white rag—Fia, half dead with exhaustion, splayed out beside him. Beyond her was the edge of a battered wooden crate. And farther away, across a stretch of pale sand, were two huge, furry paws.

  He sat up and shaded his eyes. The paws belonged to something that looked like a striped tabby cat—only ten times as large. It was an animal Duncan had seen only in pictures, but it was bigger and more fierce than he had imagined. It stared at him with head lowered and tail lashing from side to side.

  “Prepare to die,” growled the tiger.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Sea Cave

  THE TIGER’S GROWL WAS LOWER and more rumbly than a meow, but it was still recognizably Cat. Even if Duncan had not understood the tiger’s words, the whipping tail and bared fangs sent a message that was impossible to mistake.

  A tremor raced up Duncan’s spine, and his hands felt cold. His eyes darted in all directions, searching for escape. The cliffs surrounding the narrow beach were sheer and high as a castle wall, great slabs of rock impossible to climb. There was an opening in the rock face behind the tiger—its den, obviously—but that was all. The cliffs curved around the tiny beach, enclosing it in arms of stone ending in long, rocky points, and beyond the rock was the sea.

  At his feet, Fia stirred, and Duncan wondered miserably if the tiger would eat her. She wouldn’t be much more than a mouthful.

  The tiger’s ears flattened. He moved into a half crouch, rumbling in his chest.

  Fia got unsteadily to her feet. She stared at the tiger, her eyes wide.

  Duncan cast a quick glance around. There were no stones nearby to throw; there was only the crate. He wrenched at the slats with his fingers, trying to tear off a piece to use as a weapon. If only he had taken his father’s sword when he had the chance!

  The tiger moved slowly forward, his shoulder bones rising and falling in hypnotic rhythm. His intent golden gaze never left Duncan’s head.