by Gabriel King
‘Leo, wait!’ said Tag.
Before he could move, she was gone.
‘These children,’ Ragnar sighed. ‘I think they are more impossible than their mother.’
‘You love them anyway,’ said Tag.
‘Leo?’ he called.
No reply. When he listened at the hole he thought he could hear something breathing far away.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
‘It is a very small hole.’
‘Come on, Rags.’
‘Many cats would baulk at a small hole like that.’
‘Not cats like us. We’re too determined.’
‘I feared as much.’
*
A line of slippage, an ancient fault between two folds of rock – filled by the ages with their sediment, then scoured even longer by water and moving air – ran like the pipes of some secret ear down into Tintagel Head. At first it was very narrow. Rats had polished that part of it and gone, leaving a lively, bitter stink and littered nests in chambers. As it penetrated the Head, the pipe widened, and fell away suddenly into a series of polished steps and ledges as rounded and complex as wax from a burning candle. It was a committing descent. Some of the steps were eight or ten feet high. ‘How will we climb back up?’ Tag thought. He decided not to ask Ragnar, who looked less than happy to be under the ground. Eventually, the going eased off. They found themselves in a wide, low passage, floored with crushed shells and tiny fibrous flakes of slate. A salt wind blew into their faces. A pale radiance seemed to spring from the damp, smooth walls. Leonora ran ahead, tail up, in little fits and starts, halting every so often to look back.
‘That daughter,’ grunted Ragnar. ‘Where does she get the energy?’
‘At least she’s quiet now,’ said Tag.
They listened appreciatively. Into the silence came a long, shooshing sound. Then another, like a breath.
‘The sea,’ said Ragnar.
‘I imagine so.’
Ragnar looked apprehensive.
‘Do you think the tide comes all the way in?’
‘No,’ said Tag decisively.
But he did.
The passage ended abruptly, on a ledge fifteen feet up the back of a great domed cave. Tag stared out. A smell of iodine and rot. Huge boulders, draped with fluorescent green weed which made them resemble velvet cushions in a sitting-room. They were surrounded by pools of old tide water. On the other side of the cave, so bright he could barely look into it, a slot of blue-white daylight, split into long beams by the intervening rocks. Against that light, he could just make out the lonely figure of Leonora, sitting at the entrance looking out. Her mouth was open, but all he could hear was the tide, crashing against the rocks at the base of the Head.
‘How did she get down there?’
‘Jumped, I should say.’
Tag looked at the nearest boulder. It was a long way down, and if you missed—
‘I suppose she did,’ he sighed.
‘Never mind, Tag. We are some very determined cats here.’
‘I suppose we are.’
‘You first.’
Down they jumped.
*
The cave opened onto raw ocean.
Glitter and dazzle. Grey-green swell far out. Bright blue sky. A rising tide among the massive zinc-coloured boulders just outside the cave mouth, rendered too real by sunshine so intense the eye could only wince away. The cliffs soared up on either side, the great waves roared and smashed against them, breaking into ferocious white plumes! It was a big place for a small animal. Tag was dazzled and deafened and elated all at once. Then something tiny shifted his focus and his field of view, and he saw, suddenly and quite clearly, how the spiders had strung their morning webs between the rocks, just a foot or two above the tideline. Though they trembled and were sometimes spangled with salt-water dewdrops flashing in the sun, each web remained taut and unbroken. He was filled with a sense of the triumphant frailty of life.
‘You’ve got to give it to those spiders,’ he thought. ‘They’re a very determined lot.’
Then he heard Leonora.
Sitting upright, her eyes narrowed, staring in anguish at the spray as it exploded up in front of her, she was calling out over and over again, as if her brother and sister had just that moment vanished – ‘Isis! Odin!’
Tag jumped up beside her.
‘They were brought this way!’ she cried. ‘Human beings brought them this way!’
‘We’ll find them, Leonora, don’t fret.’
Even as he spoke, she was gone.
With a despairing cry of ‘Isis!’ she had launched herself into the sea.
*
Tag stared. No kitten, not even the iron-willed Leonora Whitstand Merril, could survive that tide. He knew he could never face the Queen again, nor bear the expression on Ragnar Gustaffson’s careworn face, if his friends lost their surviving child. Besides, he had always loved and admired Leo for a confidence he did not remember in himself at that age.
‘Stay here!’ he warned Ragnar.
He drew himself together. His head dipped once, twice, as he marked the place in all that fury he’d last seen Leonora. His hindquarters fidgeted and were still. A heartbeat pause. Then he unbent himself in an arc as bright as a rainbow.
The ocean boomed and coughed upon the rocks. It rose up to meet him. It was all round him, and there was no more Tag, only struggle and chaos and fear. He thought his heart would stop from the cold. The tide dragged him into its salty recesses, where it battered him, then flung him up, up, up again and out into the air. He was up in the air in a mist of spray! He felt the sun on him, he felt himself turn slowly over. He saw rocks, blue sky, a cliff with a puff of cloud above it, then sky and green brine again. He was sucked down to where the deep stones rolled around in the draw and backlash of the water – he heard their voices grind and growl against the fixed land – and there he found Leonora. A glimpse of her in a stinging salt-grey fog – bubbles came out of her gaping mouth – then they were whirled together like two rags in a washing-machine. He got her by the scruff, then lost her again. He clutched at her with his teeth, his front legs, his heart. ‘Let me up now!’ he told the water. But it only drew him further down between the stones. He felt them roll around him in blackness, huge slow grinding forms. He thought of the spiders in their frail webs. ‘Hold on, Leonora!’ he thought. His breath was a stone in him. He held on to her. He held on. He told the water, ‘Let us up now!’ But the water had them. One of Leonora’s legs was caught between the rocks. The salt tide pulled at her. Nothing. Tag pulled at her. Nothing. Bubbles came out of her mouth. ‘Leonora!’ There was a dull booming all around: they were in the water for good, things were going from grey to black. Then a strange furled shadow fell across them. Half-conscious now Tag looked up and saw, through the grey prism of salt, a great ocean ray like a live blanket, hovering and banking over his head. Its gill-slits were cut like metal, its strange sail furled and unfurled, its tiny black eyes regarded him with unreadable emotion. The ray’s shadow descended on them. There was a great wrenching, some pain, and Leonora was free. They rushed to the surface like bubbles, exploding up in light and spray, and the tide – full of power, and a joy of its own, because to dice with life is the joy of the tide – flung them up onto the rocks again.
*
‘That was a very stupid thing to do, Leonora,’ Ragnar Gustaffson told her a few minutes later, as she and Tag – looking less like cats than bottle-brushes – sat in the sunshine, frantically washing themselves to get dry and get warm.
‘I know,’ said Leo.
She said, ‘But they went that way. I’m sure of it. They were taken away on the water.’
Ragnar considered this.
‘I can only comment, “That is no reason to jump in,”’ he decided after a moment. ‘You should remember: cats and water are not best of companions.’ He became lost in thought. Finally he added, ‘Your mother, who fell in a canal last year, has told me as much, many ti
mes.’
Tag laughed.
Then he shivered and said, ‘We weren’t alone out there. Something helped us. Did you feel that, Leo?’
But Leo only answered, ‘This tastes foul. Doesn’t it?’ And, ‘I didn’t like it in the sea.’
As soon as they felt better, Ragnar led them across the rocks at the cave mouth to show them something he had found. Not far in, there were paint scrapes on the rocks, as if something had recently been dragged ashore there. There were strong complex smells, of burnt chemicals, wet wool, human beings and their rubber boots. Even more interesting was this: on one of the larger rocks, a curious symbol had been constructed. An arrangement of pebbles, barnacle shells and bits of seaweed, it looked at first like an accident of the tide. Then you saw what it was meant to represent:
‘Ha,’ said Leo, who had regained her confidence. ‘I thought as much.’ She stood up on a boulder, stretched to her full length against the wall; and, failing to quite reach the symbol with her nose, dabbed at it with one paw. She fell off the boulder, jumped back up and tried again.
Ragnar gave her a look.
‘There are times,’ he told Tag, ‘when a daughter – how can I say this? – is less of a blessing than I have imagined. But she is right.’
Tag pushed Leo out of the way and examined the symbol. ‘The kittens may have been taken away by human agency,’ was his opinion. ‘But no human being made this. It smells of something else. It smells of –’ He shook his head, wishing for the nose of Loves A Dustbin, that organ so educated it could detect life in the dead. ‘I don’t know what it smells of,’ he concluded. ‘But humans didn’t make it.’
‘In which case,’ Ragnar said, ‘we should enquire, “If not humans, who?”’
‘Who indeed?’ the New Majicou asked himself darkly.
‘They were taken by the sea,’ Leonora insisted, in a determined effort to regain the attention of her elders.
She dropped to all fours, raised her head, and opened her mouth to allow damp, salty air across the exotic sensory organ – not quite smell, not quite taste – cats keep there. Suddenly, she was off again, this time towards the cave’s landward entrance. The back wall barely gave her pause, though it slowed the two adult cats. They shrugged; exchanged a glance of reluctance; and did their best to follow. She scampered along the slate-floored passage, turned the ‘staircase’ by a series of deft leaps to intermediate ledges, and jammed herself into the pipe that led back to St Madryn’s. There she stopped, opened her mouth again for a moment to taste the air, then, with some energetic if disconnected scraping and paddling of the back legs, compressed herself into a niche which stank of rats. Out of that, a second pipe led, via sudden constrictions and changes of direction, to the surface.
Ragnar followed his daughter, grumbling.
Tag followed Ragnar, wondering what it all meant.
‘Human beings,’ he thought.
He thought, ‘Human beings in a boat.’
Dust rained down and got into his eyes. It was the dry powdery granite earth of the headland, he knew it by its smell. Pale light appeared ahead, then suddenly the bright glare of day. When he hauled himself out, he found himself in the middle of a gorse bush. Through the stems he could see sunshine crackling off the sea. It was going to be a fine day. A little way off, the King of Cats was shoving his way out onto the turf with cheerful oaths he imagined to be Viking in origin. Bits of gorse had already embedded themselves deep in his ruff. Leonora Whitstand Merril sat waiting for Tag, smugly licking her paws.
‘I told you you’d better believe us,’ she said. ‘This is where the hand came up. This is the bush they took my brother from.’
*
‘Here’s what I think you should do,’ Tag told the King and Queen a little later that morning.
They were assembled in the warm sun on the clifftop, Tag and Cy, Pertelot and Leo and Ragnar. A warm breeze ruffled their fur. Behind them, huge white clouds sailed landward over the sea, on the streaked ultramarine surface of which could be seen the flecks of little waves and, distantly, a fishing-boat with a jaunty red hull chugging its way slowly northward across the view. If human beings could have seen them there, five cats sitting in a circle on the edge of a cliff under a bright blue sky, what would they have thought?
‘I am going to look for Isis and Odin,’ Tag went on grimly. ‘I am the Majicou now. It is my responsibility. I will be back and forth, here and there. We may not see each other so often. To be safe, you should go north and live with Cy, and be looked after by our friends the fishermen.’
‘We won’t leave here.’
‘But Pertelot—’
She gave him a look of reproach.
‘And we will never live with human beings again. Mercury, how could you ask that?’
‘Easily. Whoever took Odin and Isis will return for the third kitten. You know that. We are up to the tips of our ears in something here: I feel it.’
‘Even so.’
Tag had always found her difficult to convince. He might be the Majicou: but she was the Mau. Though she had visited it only in dreams, another land spoke through her. Ancient responsibilities ran hot and mysterious in her veins. Also: he loved her too much to argue. When she sat up straight and powerful like that, and stared at him with her eyes half closed, he could only look away. He watched the fishing-boat as, bobbing like a silly painted cork, it rounded a distant dove-grey point, a headland barring its way as lazily as a human arm outflung across the water. Suddenly he had an idea.
‘Then at least go to the oceanarium,’ he said. ‘It’s empty at night. In the day you can—’ He paused. What could they do? Then he had it. ‘In the day you can have a holiday,’ he said.
‘What’s a holiday?’ demanded Leonora.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ said Tag. ‘Human beings are doing it all the time.’
‘Are there fish on a holiday?’
‘More than you saw in your recent visit to the sea,’ said her father. ‘Don’t interrupt when your mother is thinking.’
After a moment, the Queen blinked once.
‘Very well,’ she said.
Cy the tabby stood up, stretched briefly, then turned round and round in a delighted circle, tail up, rubbing her head against their heads in turn. A purr like the clatter of a broken lawnmower filled the headland.
‘Ace to base,’ she said. ‘I’d love to have you. At my place there’s all kinds of real stuff to see.’ She paused shyly. ‘I got this fish for a friend,’ she admitted, aside, to Leonora.
Tag felt relieved.
‘Then that’s settled,’ he said.
‘But what will you do?’ the King asked him. ‘Where will you start?’
‘I am going to do what I should have done a month ago,’ said Tag. He stared out to sea. The red boat had turned the point at last, and vanished.
‘I am going to do what the spider does.’
*
He was the Majicou.
He went to the heart of his web.
From there he called in his proxies. They were reluctant, but they could not resist. Outlines shifting and warping under the pressures of magic, they came bounding, shuffling, galloping down the Old Changing Way towards him. Heat smoked up from their feet. At night, in Cutting Lane, pale lights could be seen coming and going behind the grimy windows of the old pet shop. If you had had business along that street in the early hours, you might have stopped – puzzled and a little anxious, perhaps – for a moment or two to listen to the subdued cacophony of animal noises, to catch the sudden circus reek of large creatures in a confined space, before you shivered suddenly and passed on. The black shadows of antlers moved on the walls. There was a coughing grunt. There were sudden uneasy movements in corners.
The New Majicou regarded his servants.
They shifted their feet and tried not to meet his glittering green eyes.
‘Two golden kittens,’ he said. ‘Find them.’
He said, ‘Use every strategy you know.’ He sai
d, ‘The Alchemist may be back. You know what that would mean to all of us.’ He said, ‘If I am not here you will know where to find me. You will know by the signs. Come to me wherever I am. Come to me with news.’
He paused. His gaze rested on them one by one, uncomfortable, intense.
He said again, ‘Find me the golden kittens.’
The proxies fled. Tag followed them into the night, on a search of his own. He burned like a meteor in long flat arcs down the Old Changing Way. He was looking for Loves A Dustbin, who, as the original Majicou’s lieutenant, had lived through more of the secret war against the Alchemist than anyone now alive. As he travelled, proxies came to him with their reports of nothing. Nothing to be heard. Nothing to be seen. Nothing to be found. ‘If you can’t do anything else, at least find me the dustbin fox,’ he told them. ‘Send him to me.’ But the fox, it seemed, had gone to earth. Was that significant in itself? Towards dawn, Tag stumbled across a vagus, a scrap of the Old Life, in upland oakwoods somewhere north of the city, and, after two hours of mutual stalking, ambush and debate, despatched it back into the deep communal consciousness where it belonged. Finally, he returned to Cutting Lane. There, he dozed for a while with his eyes open.
Suddenly he thought, ‘Unless it is Leonora, we have already lost the Golden Cat.’
3
The Big Easy
Sealink watched the last of the passengers and cabin crew trailing away into the airport haze, then slipped silently down the gangway onto the baking tarmac. Balmy southern sunshine struck off her brilliant harlequin coat of orange, black and white. A tail like an ostrich feather curled over her back. In her lifetime, this feature had had many admirers. For herself she called it, ‘an animal all its own, and a damn nuisance’, but never without a certain pride. Her paws were large to match the rest of her frame, and she carried herself with considerable ease for a cat that had just hitched a ride across the Atlantic Ocean, right over the water to the town they used to call the Big Easy (they had called Sealink the Big Easy, too, but rarely to her face), the air of which was like a gentle steam bath freighted with the heavy scents of better times.