The Golden Cat

by Gabriel King

  Cy had vanished.

  The King and Queen were nowhere to be found.

  Worst of all, Leo was still out there somewhere on the Old Changing Way, lost, puzzled, in need of help.

  He remembered how, in the days of his own apprenticeship, he had run off by himself and got lost. That’s the trouble with being the Majicou,’ he thought. ‘Your trainee is always going missing.’

  Even as he was thinking, something happened to the light above the aquarium. It faltered and went out, and when it came back on it had shifted from its customary pale green colour to a kind of metallic blue-grey. It began to flicker on and off rapidly with a dreary buzzing noise which seemed to get inside Tag’s bones. Then he saw something quite huge hurtling towards him inside the fish-tank – something so big he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t displaced every drop of water – so big that, if it continued to loom into the world like that, it must simply burst the glass and wash him away among all the wriggling, struggling fish which had lived such calm lives there. He hissed and jumped back quickly and banged his head on the oceanarium wall. In the tank the light roiled like disturbed pelagic ooze. A line of gill-slits the size of dustbins seemed to brush against the glass. A single dull black eye stared emptily out at the air-breathing world. In a moment it was gone.

  By then, so was Tag. He arrived in the street outside, crouched and wary, tail lashing, heart pounding, without much idea how he had got there. A few drops of rain fell on him. The night wind ruffled his fur the wrong way. His skin twitched. OCEANARIUM, said the electric sign above the door. It blinked and fizzed. Intense hyacinthine light flared from the windows, dying across the spectrum to wine red and then black. After nothing had happened for some time, Tag gathered his courage into his paws, crept back up the steps and stuck his nose into the gap beneath the door. Everything was back to normal inside, though the floor seemed a little damp. In a dry patch at the bottom of the spiral stair, grooming themselves unconcernedly, sat the King and Queen of Cats. The King’s eyes were bright with excitement. Loosely tied round his neck like a royal sash was a bit of dirty blue cloth which smelled strongly of petrol, fish and nutmeg. There was sand in Pertelot Fitzwilliam’s rose-grey fur. As she occupied herself about her toilette, it sifted down silently and grew into a little yellow pile on the floor around them both.

  ‘Tag, my friend!’ exclaimed Ragnar. ‘Amazing things! Things you will never believe!’

  While the Queen murmured, ‘Oh, do come in, Mercury. Nothing can harm you here.’

  He crept forward cautiously and sniffed his friends. Suddenly they seemed strange to him. A curious, baked warmth clung to them, as if they had brought back not just the smells but the climate of another country. They were rich with adventures he had not shared.

  ‘Hush,’ they reassured him. ‘Tag, we’re the same cats you knew. But listen.’

  And this was what they told him—

  That evening, while Tag and Leonora were still travelling the wild roads, the King and the Queen had eaten a fish supper with Cy outside the amusement arcade. Afterwards, the three of them had strolled along the sea front in the dark so Pertelot could stare at the lights of the fishing-boats on the edge of the bay and whisper, ‘Oh Rags, what a perfect night!’ To please the tabby, the Queen had even put her perfect nose round the door of the Beach-O-Mat (though to Cy’s disappointment she could not be persuaded to go in and watch the human washing spin round). Back at the oceanarium she and the King had slept soundly, only to be woken by a disturbance. The light had changed. There were noises above. Behind the glass, shoals of frightened mackerel waved goodbye like a thousand human fingers.

  ‘It was as if something had broken the surface of the water in the tank,’ Pertelot Fitzwilliam told Tag. ‘My first thought was that something had arrived there. That was how I put it to myself, Mercury: that something had arrived there.’ She shivered. ‘I always hated that water.’

  ‘Her second thought,’ said Ragnar, ‘was of Cy.’ He paused for effect. ‘I am afraid to say, my friend, that she was gone.’

  ‘I woke Rags. Together we searched the building.’ The Queen looked around ironically. ‘It didn’t take long. Cy was nowhere to be found. Had she fallen in the tank? We had to know!’

  Step by step, their bodies elongated by caution, each paw placed in a furious silence, they had crept up the spiral stairs to look down into the water in its blaze of electric light—

  Nothing.

  ‘She was here, I’m sure.’

  ‘Has she fallen in?’

  ‘Those sharks. Oh Rags, the sharks!’

  The iron platform at the top of the stair seemed to be suspended in emptiness. Beyond the light it felt like black space stretching away to nowhere. Suddenly the water became opaque as milk and lurched towards them, as if something huge were displacing it. Tottering and disoriented, they peered down at the object that had almost surfaced.

  ‘Look!’

  ‘Eyes! Look at its eyes!’

  ‘Rags, what is it?’

  They turned to flee, but it was too late. The light died to blue, flared white again. The world twisted and flickered. Though it remained quite level, the little platform seemed to tilt beneath them. They scrabbled momentarily at the lip. They tumbled through the hot bright air onto the back of the creature that filled the tank. There they found Cy the tabby waiting for them.

  ‘Hi!’ she said, purring and kneading happily. ‘This is my friend. I call him Ray, but I think his own guys have another name for him. These fish,’ she added, in an aside to the Queen, ‘who knows what they call each other?’

  Generally, though, she seemed rather proud of him. Ray was less a fish than a place. It was a mystery how he fitted into the oceanarium at all. ‘Some days, you know, he looks so small.’ Yet you might stand on his sinewy, shifting back and never know he had edges – until perhaps you caught a quick glimpse of them, furling and unfurling in the distance, out of the corner of your eye. He was the colour of a whitewashed wall in bright seaside sunshine. His spine stretched away in electrifying perspective, like a kerbstone at the side of some road, until suddenly it was a spine no longer but a narrow white tail. His elegant triangular fins curved away right and left, neither sails nor wings but something which antedated both. If you listened hard, claimed Cy, you could hear the ancient Silurian thoughts pursuing their slow, sure passage through his fish consciousness—

  ‘Whatever that is,’ said Cy. ‘He tells me stuff about that but I just don’t pay attention. Listen, it’s lucky I fell in, because today this fish comes with a message for you. Around and about in the ocean by Tintagel Head he’s met some guys. They aren’t fish, he says. They don’t breathe water. They shouldn’t even be down there! But he’s been told to fetch you and take you to some old place he knows. Maybe you’ll find Odin and Isis there, Ray’s not clear on that. Anyway, you got to go with him.’

  She lowered her voice.

  ‘Under the water,’ she said.

  ‘Never,’ said Pertelot. ‘Let me up!’

  But, even as she spoke, the great fish began to sink. His passengers were submerged instantly.

  ‘Ragnar Gustaffson!’ called the Queen, darting this way and that in panic. ‘How dare you let this happen!’ There was no escape. All she could do was stand and tremble. ‘Rags,’ she whispered in despair. ‘Oh Rags.’ But Ragnar stood as straight and tall as he could beside her, and that reminded her who she was: and they soon found to their astonishment that they were still dry. They could breathe. They were beneath the water but somehow not in it. The oceanarium was already gone, replaced by a huge, dim, ribbed architecture. They were in something like an infinite gloomy hallway under the sea. Endless lugubrious echoes rolled away down it. Shoals of tiny fish-souls ran everywhere, like two-dimensional silver streams. Vast shadowy forms boomed and groaned past, fish so large they made Ray seem like a mote settling in a glass of water.

  Ragnar laughed suddenly.

  ‘This is what I call an adventure,’ he sa
id.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ said Pertelot. ‘I’m dreaming this.’

  ‘See?’ said Cy excitedly. ‘What I’m trying to say: fishes have their secrets in this wide world too! They got things we don’t know about, such as that tank is an entrance to some long-ago Fish Road of their choice!’

  Those roads are as difficult as any. They are travelled on a notion, an idea inside. For what seemed like hours, the ray manoeuvred and sideslipped through the enormous space as he sought clues to the cold salt currents that would guide him to his destination. He banked and turned restlessly. He fell like a leaf. He hung in a huge cathedral silence like a compass needle; and then at last, finding the answer in his own fishy heart, shot forward and down. Eyes wild and bright, fur rippling back in the slipstream, his passengers fastened their claws unashamedly into his leathery skin and hung on tight.

  *

  ‘And so,’ the Queen told Tag, ‘we were whirled away along the Fish Road—’

  ‘—to be carried at last to Egypt,’ Tag finished for her.

  Love knows everything. The Queen turned her carved little head towards him and stared. He looked away shyly. It was like being studied by some stone goddess. Her eyes were lambent, full of life and death and the cycles and mysteries of the stars.

  ‘I was carried at last to Egypt,’ she agreed.

  *

  Dawn in the Nile Valley, one morning some weeks after Shamm an-Nasim. A tender grey light suffused the mist that curled along the river-banks. Egrets picked about in the reedy shallows like fastidious girls. A single felucca, recently repainted pure white with a red and gold eye at the bow, drifted upon its own reflection in the glassy water. What trade this little boat might be engaged in was not clear. Its sail remained tightly furled in the dead-still air. Behind it, the village of Qebar lay, still asleep amid its palmeries, against a sky washed with lilac. Immediately above the village, on the raw stony terraces at the base of hills whose almond-coloured flanks were still furrowed with night, loomed a complex of tombs and temples of the Missing Dynasty. The buildings glowed like a softly illuminated model from a centuries-old chaos of spoil and eroded rock, their blank rose-grey walls softened for once by the morning light.

  The day seemed suspended, unable to develop. Everything hung as if it was in a dream. A smell of onions and kerosene rose from the drifting felucca. The young man yawning in its stern – he was barely more than a boy – wore the turban of a barge-captain, to which he seemed entitled only by ambition. He was half-asleep when the ray called Ray, monstrous with journeys and still moving at the speed of the Fish Road, erupted from the water off his starboard bow, cut a steep, whistling, iridescent arc north to south against the sky, and plunged back into the river again. The felucca rocked and staggered. Displaced water raced outwards in huge ripples which, rebounding elastically from bank to bank, churned the surface of the river into spray. Egrets burst up from the reeds; doves panicked into the sky from the whitewashed dove-castle in the village, their wings clapping urgently. The young man leapt to his feet and clung to the mast of his boat for support, rubbing his eyes in astonishment. Perched like a pilot on the back of the giant fish, just behind its strange flat head, he had glimpsed a small tabby cat with white bib and paws.

  More cats, turning over and over, fell out of the air into the roiling water a few yards distant. This was too much for him. He shrugged.

  ‘It can only be the will of God,’ he said.

  *

  Green water closed over the Mau and she sank, all bubbles and frantic legs, and the splendour and mystery of her ride on the great fish evaporated to nothing. Water is water, wherever you try to breathe it. The Nile was warmer than the canal at Piper’s Quay, but no easier to negotiate with. Soon, she couldn’t even remember when she was drowning, then or now. There was a high, singing noise inside her head. ‘Oh Rags,’ she thought. ‘I do hate this. And I can’t even see you.’ Once, she thought she could feel him near, locked in his own lonely struggle, and she tried to move towards him. Then that feeling was gone, and anyway there was nothing much left of Pertelot Fitzwilliam to feel it. For a while she was just a grim argument, carried on in the clutch of the Nile (whose meaning, partially glimpsed in her dreams of Egypt, she now saw clear and stark: the gift of water is not security but constant transformation, not rest but movement, not victory over the desert but fecundity in spite of it), between her life and her death. ‘The kittens!’ she thought in despair. ‘The kittens!’ But she had closed herself instinctively around the last of her breath: and, in its own time, as breath will, it carried her into the light. Up out of the ancient river she burst, choking and hissing, and found chaos everywhere. The horizon lurched. The river-banks were collapsing into the river in a slurry of mud and gravel. Something was bearing down on her through agitated water and prismatic spray. Then human hands gathered her in, and before she could sink again she was suspended by her scruff, as dripping and undignified as only a wet cat can be, against the Egyptian sky. The day had begun. The sun was already hot. There was warm human breath on her face. Warm human laughter in her ears. Its eyes were dark and amused, and its skin was like polished rosewood in the sun. It smelled of nutmeg and laundered cotton and the pure generosity of the young. It made an inviting noise with its tongue like, ‘Tch, tch, tch.’

  It said, ‘The Nile is not for you, little Mother! Up you come!’

  It said, ‘Let Nagib take care of you now.’

  ‘Never!’ swore Pertelot.

  She hissed and spat. She twisted and squirmed. She fastened herself onto the boy’s forearm with all four legs, and sank her teeth into the soft part between its thumb and first finger. When it only laughed and said, ‘Maleesh, maleesh little Mother,’ and patiently detached her, she bit it again. She was angry with her rescuer, she was angry with the river, she was angry with herself. She was angry with Cy and the fish for going off like that. She was angry, for no reason at all, with Ragnar. At the same time she was so confused she had begun to purr. With the whole of her heart she begged the boy to understand, ‘Now Rags! Help Rags now! Put me down and help Rags!’

  She had never asked a human being for anything before.

  *

  In the event, Ragnar Gustaffson, seventeen pounds of Nordic tomcat and ten pounds of waterlogged fur coat, arranged his own rescue. ‘I am not, how would you put it, impressed by the taste of this Nile,’ he told anyone who would listen as he thugged his way over the stern of the felucca. ‘It is some rank stuff, as Tag would say.’ He shook himself like a dog, squinted up into the sunlight, and, discovering his beloved Mau in the grip of Nagib the boatman, nipped forward smartly and bit the boy in the ankle. At exactly the same moment, the felucca, accelerating in the current and unguided except by God, ran heavily into the east bank. Nagib fell over. Pertelot cried, ‘Ragnar Gustaffson, don’t you dare let anything like this happen to me again!’ Tearing out further gravel and mud, which fell softly into the Nile like wet brown sugar in a saucer of tea, the boat ground along the bank.

  As soon as it came to rest, the two cats jumped nimbly ashore.

  *

  They fled through the palm and lemon groves, where insects were already droning in pools of hot greenish light, along the beaten paths, up towards the village, which, partly shadowed by the dark terraces above it, still lay asleep. Cool air moved in the narrow crooked lanes between the houses, whose lower walls remained in a lavender shade even as the sun struck like running gold across their roofs. Goats chewed thoughtfully in a rising side street, where the earth was cracked and dry and strewn with dung: Pertelot hurried, apparently unremarked, between their delicate hooves, while Ragnar begged her to slow down and think. ‘There’s no need to run now!’ But, when she stopped, she only caught the smell of the human being on her coat and panicked again. Towards the edge of the village, the desert wind blew feathery skeins of sand across the lanes. Suddenly, the damp river airs had evaporated, the ground rose steeply away from the houses. It was the end of vegetatio
n. Terrace succeeded stony terrace. Entering the ancient quarries of the tomb-builders, Pertelot began to call, ‘Isis! Odin!’ She disappeared suddenly against heaps of spoil the exact colour of her coat. ‘Wait!’ called Rags when he next saw her, rose-grey against the shadows. She looked back at him for a second, her tail agitated with nerves or impatience, and vanished again. Rags found her delicate trail in the dust, and was soon less concerned. He didn’t need to see her. He could follow her pawprints. He could follow her smell. Cinnamon. Aniseed. Raisins! ‘I would know that smell anywhere,’ he congratulated himself. He emerged onto the upper terrace to find the sun scouring it unmercifully. His coat dried out in an instant. The light made him blink and sneeze. He paused briefly to study the Nile, curving away in the valley far beneath. Then he looked across the rosy stone apron of the site, towards the tombs and rock temples of the Missing Dynasty.

  It was baking hot, and the dry wind had swept it of dust. There were no footprints to be seen. The Mau was gone.

  *

  Silence.

  Faint echoes of paws on stone.

  The floor sloped gently downwards. A massive internal architecture began to make itself felt – ramps and stairways and rooms higher than any human being could use. Pertelot Fitzwilliam of Hi-Fashion, a slip of life in the place of the dead, scampered beneath rows of vast red sandstone kings carved into high relief along the walls.