by Gabriel King
‘Ragnar!’
‘Tag! Tag, my friend!’
Drenched and wild-looking, his fine coat disordered and dirty, Ragnar stood head down, sides heaving, filling the bus shelter with a kind of regal dejection. He was so exhausted he could barely stand. He was so anxious he could hardly speak.
‘My friend! I— Tag, quick!’
‘Ragnar, what is it?’
‘Tag, something awful has happened!’
*
Tag left Cy in the bus shelter.
‘I don’t want you lost too,’ he told her. She gave him a look, but he knew she would stay.
‘Now run!’ he said to Ragnar.
The tabby watched as they pounded over the sand and sprang one after the other into the ghost-ridden spaces of the wild road. Ten minutes later, Tag and Ragnar were stumbling around in the howling Tintagel dark.
‘Odin!’ they called as they went. ‘Odin!’
Nothing.
Shortly after the kitten’s disappearance the bottom had dropped out of the weather. A bank of cloud had slunk in from the sea on the steadily sharpening wind. Visibility had shrunk to a few yards. Now the gorse bushes thrashed as if trying to uproot themselves. Torrents of rain blustered in, huge cold silver drops suspended roiling for an instant in the turbulent air at the edge of the cliff before they were sucked away inland. Tag ducked and winced into the storm, his eyes fixed grimly on the black cat in front of him. Tintagel Head, so peaceful on a sunny day, now reminded him of the first time he had seen it – arriving, as he had done, wild-eyed and winter-boned at the end of a long and sometimes bitter journey. Today, as then, Pertelot Fitzwilliam, Queen of Cats, awaited him.
This time she was huddled in the lee of some rocks at the cliff edge with her two remaining kittens. Her face was hard and puzzled. Her eyes were dull with fatigue. Tracks like human tears blackened the taupe fur either side of her sharp, ancient muzzle. She looked like a stone sculpture, obdurate and defeated both at once. She looked like an axe-head. Nothing could be seen of the happiness she had found at Tintagel, nothing remembered of the long summer evenings in which ochre sunlight thickened the flowers of tormentil amid the sheep-cropped turf, and the golden kittens tumbled and played in safety at the court of the King, under the watchful eye of its Queen.
‘Pertelot,’ said Tag.
She could not make herself respond. When he tried to comfort her, she would only say, ‘Mercury, you must find him. If you call he’ll come to you. You know he will!’
‘Pertelot, I—’
‘He loves you so. They all do.’
From inside that pocket of quiet still air, she stared at him with hope already turning into a sort of soft reproach. Overborne by the intensity of her need, he could only look away; gutter into silence.
‘I’ll try,’ he said.
‘No!’
‘Pertelot—’
‘It’s not to try, Mercury. It’s to find him. Do you see? You must, or how can I ever forgive myself?’
‘We’ll find him,’ Tag promised.
What else could he say?
The two male cats quartered the headland, while the night battered them senseless with its cold wings. Merciless and unassuaged in the exposed corridors between the stands of gorse, the wind picked them up and threw them bodily about. Out there, they couldn’t even be sure of one another’s voices. Listen to that! A cat? A gull? The wind? Who knew? Worse, they often thought they could hear one another calling out, ‘Tag! He’s here!’ or, ‘Ragnar, Odin’s safe!’ Ghost voices, night voices, voices in the surf far below. A momentary trap for the heart, then disappointment. By sunrise they had to admit they’d found no sign – not a footprint, not a scuff-mark or a faint smell – of the missing kitten. They had combed rocks and ruins, they had teetered about on the cliff above the raging tide. They were soaked and shattered and their feet were sore.
Odin was gone.
The storm blew itself out with the dawn. The headland looked washed and emptied, all primrosey yellows and faint tawny browns. A single gull planed over the rocks at the edge of the cliff. Apologetic gusts of wind crept among the gorse stems. Later the sky would be very blue; for now, grey light like watered silk found out Pertelot Fitzwilliam, keening beneath her rock. Huge-eyed, Leo and Isis huddled close to her, but she was too distraught to comfort them. Tag and Ragnar, too tired to stand, told her what they now knew.
‘We can’t find him.’
‘Go out again, then,’ she said.
‘When the light is better,’ said Tag, ‘we’ll widen the search. When it’s properly light I’ll fetch some others.’
The Queen hissed at him.
‘We have to rest now,’ he said.
‘I cannot rest,’ said Ragnar.
‘You’re so strong,’ said Pertelot, mad with loss. She was trembling. ‘You big strong toms can’t find a kitten.’
Ragnar said, ‘I can never rest again.’
‘Go out and look then,’ said Pertelot.
She stumbled to her feet and fell down on Leo and Isis.
‘I’ll go myself,’ she said.
*
In the days that followed, the search was continued and broadened.
Sense returned to Pertelot, but she lost her interest in things, turned vague and forgetful, was preyed upon by sudden angers in the afternoon. Cy came down the coast to help Ragnar look after the remaining kittens. No-one was sure how they were taking it. Throughout, they had stuck to their story, which was this: as their brother laid siege to the mouse in the gorse bush, a human hand had reached out suddenly and dragged him in. Quizzed by Tag, they couldn’t remember exactly how it looked.
‘It was a big dull human hand, that’s all,’ explained Leonora. And Isis said, ‘There was dirt under those blunt nails they have. As if it had been digging like a dog.’
Tag shook his head.
‘I’ll have to think about this,’ he said.
‘You’d better believe us,’ Leo warned.
Then she said cautiously, as if introducing a subject to which she had given more thought than she wanted to admit, ‘Do you think the Alchemist ever would come back? When I was a very young kitten I used to believe I could still hear both of them down there underneath the headland. But now I think Odin was right – it was only the sound of the sea.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Tag. ‘Does something so important, so violent, end so suddenly like that, and never trouble the world again? We don’t know enough to know.’
Leo said, ‘You’re the New Majicou. You know everything.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said Tag.
Young animals often wander off, and are found again quite quickly. With this firmly in mind, an air of activity and cautious optimism descended on the headland.
The community there not comprising solely of the King and his family, there was plenty of help to be had. Among the ruins of the ancient castle, on the soil-creep terraces along the cliffs, in holes and under banks, lived many animals who had stayed behind after their part in the battle against the Alchemist. Foxes, badgers, urban feral cats settling down to find mates and found dynasties, even a pair of mink so angry no-one had yet dared to talk to them, now occupied the rising land eastward of the Head, or lived cheerfully in a muddle of warrens, fallen-down chicken coops and allotments at the edge of Tintagel town.
‘Come and help,’ Tag appealed.
‘It took you long enough to ask,’ they said.
Prey made peace – at least for the duration – with predator. Species that would only be seen dead with one another were spotted working the headland in teams – a rook with four young herring-gulls, the two mink with an old grey squirrel who called himself Broadsword. Cats cooperated with foxes to comb the town in case Odin had somehow made his way there and got lost. A very old racehorse named Smithfield went over the paddock fence every night just after dark and quartered the territory for twenty miles in every direction.
Nothing.
Two weeks passed, and then
a third. Depression filled them all. Even the climate collaborated in this: a heatwave set in suddenly, and burned the grass brown. June brought an upsurge of human visitors to the ruins of the castle. They came from thousands of miles away, to wave their arms, blink in the sun and talk, talk, talk. They trudged along the complex contours on the northern flank of the peninsula, charmed and exhilarated by the way the land fell away in huge windy chamfers to the tide. Talk, talk, talk. (The felidae come here, of course: but more quietly. It is a place of pilgrimage for them, too. They remember how, in the Fourth Age of Cats, Atum-Ra and his Queen – who was also called Isis – arrived here from Egypt armed only with unborn kittens and the magic of warm countries, to reopen the old wild roads.) You had to keep out of their way. Their feet polished the stone. They wore the earthen paths to trenches. The gorse, that most desiccated of shrubs, seemed to dry up further, and dust whirled about in the spaces between its gnarled stems. Meanwhile, the King exhausted himself with worry. His wife stared dully ahead of her and would not be consoled. In less than a month, Tintagel had gone from a place of promise to a wasteland.
*
Around full moon, unable to think clearly amid all this misery – and needing, besides, to attend to certain of his responsibilities as the New Majicou – Tag sent himself to the city, where he spent a night at the abandoned pet shop in Cutting Lane. There he received the usual trickle of odd visitors, gnarled old animals for the most part, who spoke in low voices, kept their eyes on the door, and remembered favourably the Old Majicou. He despatched a message or two. He watched the spiders making their webs in corners.
The web quivers, the spider lives along the line. That is how knowledge comes to you when you have eight legs. ‘The wild roads are in this,’ Tag told himself; ‘they always are.’ The wild roads are in everything. But how does a cat find out what they know?
He was loath to leave his friends alone with their great sorrow.
‘And yet—’ he thought.
You know what the wild roads know by travelling them.
He thought, ‘All this is one thing. The lost kitten, the highways out of joint, a voice I’m not even sure I heard.’
He sat all night. Vapour-light penetrated the dusty windows, fell in concise bars across the bare floorboards. Later, the moon sent in its own agents, long yellow fingers to scratch bonily from corner to corner. The spiders worked busily. Tag watched. Filmier than spiderweb, filmier than moonlight, the wild roads pulsed around him.
Tag thought, ‘I wish Loves A Dustbin was still here. That fox always knew what to do!’
*
Nothing had changed when he returned some while later, to find Cy alone on the clifftop watching the sun go down under some long black clouds.
‘Hello,’ he said.
He licked the side of her face, where each short hair was tipped and ticked with tabby gold. All cats inhabit the tabby: or anyway they have hung up their coats there at some time or another. She tasted of wine. Flowers. Yolk of egg. She tasted of Cy.
‘You’re nice,’ he said.
She seemed abstracted.
‘Hi, sky pilot,’ she said after a moment. ‘Good day at the office?’
‘I looked at spiders.’
‘Fine. But see this?’ she said. ‘This is the story so far. I nearly died here, Jack. Remember? It was nip and tuck. I was spreadeagled on the Wheel of Flame. The Alchemist had burned me to the ground, you know?’ She shivered. ‘There was fire all round. But for the big Norwegian, I was going to cash my chips.’ She shook her head. ‘Oh, Tag, he seems so down now, that New Black King. I want to help him. And the kittens – I tell ’em things, but they don’t stay to listen.’
‘They hardly know where to turn,’ said Tag. ‘They miss their brother.’
They did miss him. But while Leo was clearly downcast, she knew what she wanted, and already had the air of a cat who could make decisions. (Though she kept them to herself, which did not help later.) Isis found it harder to live with loss.
In many ways, Isis was the most puzzling of the three kittens – quiet, clever, obedient, neat in her movements, but at the same time as unknowable as air. She evaded your understanding. The moon was her planet. She was drawn to water, to twilight, to all things that changed and shifted. The circumstances of her birth had been no stranger than that of her siblings: but Isis was open to the shadows. She had a drive to the invisible. She felt, she said, the strong dead awaiting their resurrection. They were curled up in every leaf. As a tiny kitten, she could already be found sitting and blinking and staring at unseen things – for her, every object in the world seemed to have an extension or counterpart somewhere else. At four weeks old, she began to sing to them. Pertelot and Ragnar woke to inexplicable caterwauls in the night. Investigating, they found Isis, alone on the windy rocks, yowling and fluting to the reflection of the moon in the sea. ‘I was trying to make it feel better,’ she explained. Who knew what the moon thought of her song? To everyone else it seemed tortured and raucous. ‘Not even a cat could find music in a voice like that,’ was her father’s opinion. But the Mau was not so sure. Such music reminded her of her own dreams, Egypt dreams pregnant and unresolved. When Isis sang, unformed things seemed to gather in the air near her, and a shiver went down your spine.
Sometimes the Mau would assert, ‘If any of my children is the Golden Cat, it’s this one. She could sing life into a stone.’
Ragnar agreed. ‘A stone would get up and run away,’ he said, ‘when it heard that daughter sing.’
‘Ragnar!’
In the absence of Odin, Isis grieved more openly than her sister, becoming raw-boned and nervous. Her coat lost tone. She closed up. She ranged alone over the parched headland, talking quietly to herself, or to Odin who in some way still walked beside her. She acted as if she was no longer quite sure what had happened. She sniffed at the gorse stems and the scattered stones, following the mystery down into her own heart. She was like her mother in that respect, the other cats said: too much of a puzzle to herself to be happy with one. A strange, ululating wail sometimes issued from the clifftop on the offshore wind. It was Isis, singing to her vanished brother. One night she went to look for him in the little church on the headland, and disappeared in her turn.
*
She was seen several times that night – sitting alertly in the moonlight, flitting among the castle ruins, cautiously approaching some piece of human litter at the side of a path. But no animal had sight of her after midnight, when Leonora Whitstand Merril, who was energetically washing her bib at the base of the war memorial, watched her sister enter St Madryn’s by its primitive northern doorway. A wind had got up by then. The whole length of the graveyard stretched between them.
‘Isis?’ called Leo.
Isis looked round once. Her eyes flashed blank and empty. Then she was gone.
‘Isis? Wait for me!’
Three hours later, just before dawn, Tag, Ragnar and Leo stood just inside St Madryn’s – known to humans, who understand less of their own history than they think, as St Materiana’s – looking down towards the east window, which had begun to harbour a faint but growing light. The whitewashed walls were tinged with pink and gold. Above, the complex roof-beams stretched away in the echoing silence; below, it was glossy pews. The air seemed to coil on itself, as if something had just that minute left the church.
Tag raised his head and sniffed. Polished wood. Flowers. Cold old stone.
Was there something else?
‘Keep an eye open for rats,’ he warned. ‘This is just the sort of place you find them.’
‘Show me a rat,’ bragged Leo. ‘That’s all.’
She laughed.
‘I won’t treat it well,’ she promised.
‘Isis!’ she called.
‘Hush,’ said Tag.
‘Isis, I know you’re in here!’
Her name was written on the air, they could listen to it with their noses. But why had she come here, and where was she now? The two adult c
ats stood shifting their paws uncomfortably on the tiled floor of the nave. They eyed the artefacts hanging on the walls. A kind of diffidence, an embarrassment on behalf of humankind, caused them to look away from the emblems carved into the reredos – spears and nails and whipping-posts. Leo, who felt no need to understand the things humans do, marched about, bellowing, ‘Isis!’
Nothing.
Suddenly, dawn was upon them, in a soundless, unusual flash of light. The undersides of the clouds flared with pinks and greens, the whole sky seemed touched with gold. Ragnar Gustaffson looked up for a moment. He blinked. ‘We haven’t so long to search, I think,’ he said. ‘In an hour or two the tourists will—’
‘Aha!’ interrupted his remaining daughter loudly.
‘—be here.’
‘Look!’ ordered Leonora.
Behind the altar, down at floor level in the angle between the walls, not too far from the east window itself, she had found a hole in the masonry. It was irregularly shaped, large enough to squeeze through. When you put your face to it, a draught of damp salty air stirred your whiskers. Two or three long feline guard-hairs were caught on its edges. They glinted in the light. They were gold.
Leo stuck her head in.
‘Leave it to Leonora,’ she announced, already sounding distant. ‘As usual.’