by Gabriel King
‘Isis!’ she called. ‘Odin! Isis!’
Her shadow, long and oblique, preceded her, until the light that had fallen so brightly into the outer hall faded first to a kind of orange twilight, then to grey, then pitch black. Not even a cat can see in the dark. After-images fluttered before her mind’s eye like soft white doves, the wounded memories of some old dream. She turned confusedly on her haunches for a moment, then followed the temperature gradient with her nose and whiskers. Each tiny cold air current urged her, ‘This way down.’
Eventually the darkness seemed to reverse itself, and a kind of faint silvery luminescence filled the tombs, limning the edge of objects, revealing, in the silence of the dead, huge empty stone biers and caskets, the hulks of standing sarcophagi. There were faint smells of bitumen and Canopic salts. There were drifts of human dust in corners. Down here the walls were covered with painted figures, their bodies glowing softly off the cold stone in ochres and terracotta reds, Nile earths, desert earths, the black and white details as sharp as the day they were painted. They were, the Mau thought, just what you would expect from human beings. Animal-headed gods whose expressions, sidelong and uneasy despite their arrogance, soon revealed them to be men in masks. Gods who feared other gods. Gods who gathered meaningless objects to them. Gods desperate for life yet so clearly in love with death. Their postures were stiff with denial: but, however they had tried to halt it, time had parted around them and rushed on.
Out of their failure, with a secret smile and kohl-blackened eyes full of delight in the world, danced a single goddess. She wore sandals, a white tunic, necklaces of garnet and lapis lazuli. Her limbs were sensual and long, her name as forgotten as the pictographic language of the Missing Dynasty itself. In the pictures she was often shown accompanying some long-buried king, her slim hand upon his shoulder, his arm about her waist. She had gathered her followers to her: musicians and dancers and celebrants; and, all around her delicate feet, cats! The cats were dancing too, or so it seemed. Suddenly, in the next picture, the goddess was a cat, too! Huge and tawny, her eyes the deep, fecund green of the desert oases, she danced among them. They were lithe and ancient-looking. They were purring and rubbing their sleek heads against her ankles, or against each other. And two of them were depicted separately, in a sequence of cartouches, which, the Mau was quick to see, told a story—
She sat down.
She thought, ‘Well!’
The cats seemed almost to move before her eyes. She was soon so caught up in their lives she forgot her own.
A minute passed, and then another. After a third, the light in the tomb was faintly disturbed, and there was a sound like a single drop of water falling into a pool.
The cats on the wall were a male and a female, with all the simplicity and grace of the goddess herself. She was shown smiling down on them with a special favour, while they looked up at her as an equal. They played and tumbled; perhaps for her, more likely for each other. Would they accept a great task? They would. They mated, took ship, were seen crossing a flat blue sea: on deck, a beautiful boy-sailor knelt before them, eyes kohled, slim hand outstretched. A white sail, a white bird, sped them north. A high tide, a cold country. A sail like a white wing.
‘But I know that coast!’ Pertelot told herself.
Behind her in the tomb, as if in response to her excitement, the light shifted again. In one dark corner the air seemed to flex suddenly like a lens refocusing. Then it was still.
The cats debarked on a rocky shore. White birds wheeled and screamed overhead. A northern king, blond-haired, tired of face, leaned down to welcome them. He was young, dressed in black. Ghosts were seen riding the roof of his hall, whence, in all directions, great abandoned animal highways sang and roared across the empty land. The king begged. The king implored. The cats listened, heads on one side. They debated with him. Were they not a King and Queen too?
‘She’s pregnant, of course,’ said Pertelot. ‘That’s obvious to anyone.’
Disturbed, the mass of shadows in the tombs behind her fell into a new equilibrium. The air temperature dropped suddenly. Pertelot shivered. She turned from the painted wall to look around. Nothing could be seen. She sniffed. She shrugged. She felt relaxed, rational yet vague, as if the fears of the day had less receded than somehow clarified themselves within her. How silly to be afraid of a boy! Water, of course, was another thing. She gave her attention to the last cartouche, in which the cats had themselves brought to an upper chamber in the king’s house—
*
Ragnar found her there some time later. (‘I had been lost in many passages,’ he would explain when he told the story to Tag. ‘I will say only that the world has many directions in it, and sometimes there are more to choose from than would seem sensible.’) By then, anxiety had made him dangerous: but not perhaps as dangerous as the thing in the corner of the tomb.
‘Pertelot!’ Rags cried.
She was creeping towards it on her belly, her eyes quite blank and empty, while it bowed and wobbled over her like a spinning-top about to fall: a dense eccentric whirligig of human debris – the black loess of ancient organs, bits of bone, flakes of bandage and parchment – a dust-storm of mummia and old death six or seven feet broad at its top, balanced on a tiny shifting base and reaching from floor to ceiling. It was aware. It seemed to be arguing with itself. From it issued bad smells, intermittent, disconnected voices, blasts of hot and cold air, and a strange, thready music. As the Mau got closer, it sensed her presence. A shudder passed through it. Lights flickered deep inside. Suddenly it bellied towards her like smoke in the wind, breaking up into dusty smuts and cinders. There was a deep groan. Then chanting began. Someone was chanting in there. At this, Pertelot went rigid. All along her spine the fur was up on end. Stiff-legged, a pace at a time, she moved towards it. She hated the vortex but it was like a magnet to her. In response it pulsed and roared and shot up to the ceiling—
‘I think we have had enough of this,’ announced the King of Cats.
He sprang forward, got a good grip of his wife’s tail with his mouth, and yanked her backwards. Pertelot yowled and spat. He closed his eyes, and, offering up a silent apology, pulled harder. It was a grim struggle. Ragnar splayed his cobby legs and backed away, losing most of every inch he gained. Pertelot, her signals as crossed, fought both sides at once with a dour, indiscriminate passion. The whole world stank of cinders. The whirlwind staggered and wobbled over the two of them like a drunk with raised hands. ‘We’re for it now!’ thought Ragnar. But even as it fell upon them it was breaking up. There was a faint ‘pop!’ a puff of foul wind. Dust pattered on the floor of the tomb like a sudden shower of rain.
Ragnar sat down heavily as Pertelot stopped pulling away from him. The Mau shook herself; looked round puzzledly at the empty tomb; reared up on her hind legs and thoroughly boxed his ears.
‘Ragnar Gustaffson, how could you?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sure.’
They stood off and observed each other, rocking backwards and forwards and breathing angrily. There was ruffled fur between them, no denying it, especially with no common adversary in sight. After a moment, Ragnar looked away and began to ferret bits of papyrus out of his mane. The Queen sat down and tried to unkink her tail by licking it. ‘Undignified,’ she repeated several times, until Ragnar got up in a lumbering, long-suffering way and sat down facing away from her. ‘Undignified!’ After a minute or two she admitted, ‘I know you meant well.’
Ragnar Gustaffson looked at the wall-paintings.
‘I know you meant to rescue me.’
No answer.
She went and sat beside him.
‘Rags, I’m sorry.’
He hadn’t heard a word. He said excitedly, ‘Look! It’s us!’
‘Ragnar Gustaffson,’ she told him, ‘you are the most insensitive cat in the world, and I will never apologize to you again.’
About to present him with her back, she saw how his thoughts turned over and across themselves,
bent by wonder into an endless Viking knot. She forgave him instantly. She rubbed the side of her face against his, thinking that he was simple in some old, lost, worthwhile sense, and you had to love it; while he gave his attention to the pictures, every so often murmuring, ‘But this is astonishing,’ or, ‘How incredible!’ Or, ‘How do we come to be here, on a wall?’
The Queen explained.
‘This is not us,’ she said. ‘It’s the story of Atum-Ra and Isis, a version of which the Majicou told to Tag in his apprentice-dreams. Atum-Ra and Isis are the ancestors, the cats – blessed of the Great Cat, known by humans as Hathur, Goddess of Love – who brought the wild roads back to Tintagel. Look! Here they are in the king’s chamber, Discerning Invisible Things. Afterwards, imprinted in the bright tapestry of their eyes the king sees and is able to identify the ghosts that disturb his sleep. He can have peace at last! In return, he grants the cats – and their kittens, and their kittens’ kittens in perpetuity – the freedom of the land.’
‘They are us,’ Ragnar insisted. ‘We are them.’
‘Oh Rags,’ she said.
‘They are doing that quite well,’ he went on with satisfaction, after he had had another look at the picture which showed the ancestors mating. ‘But not as well as us.’
‘Rags!’
‘He is not as black as me.’
She laughed.
‘His fur is not so long.’
‘You child,’ she said.
A cold wind curled round them suddenly, lifting the dust into their eyes. Electricity unzipped the air, filled it with the taste of metal. There were stealthy sounds. A cough. A rising hum, as of a child’s top. They jumped to their feet, fur on end. Rubbish was being drawn up from all over the tomb, whirled about, sucked into a corner.
‘Run!’ called Ragnar.
Too late. The whirlwind had assembled itself again. Pace by pace, shaking with delirium, her eyes lit up from within like lamps, Pertelot was tugged towards it. For a moment its rotation seemed slow. It wobbled. Toppled. Turned a startling Nile green, then back to black. There was music from within – bells, a reed flute, small drums arrhythmic and perverse. There were movements, as of a dance or struggle. A figure, perhaps human, became dimly visible within the swirling rubbish and mummia dust. It was as simple as the painted figures on the wall. It leaned forward. It spoke.
‘I have two of your kittens,’ it said. ‘Give me the third and I will spare your lives.’ Suddenly a second figure seemed to curdle out of the dust. It dragged the first one, struggling, out of sight. A friendlier voice said, ‘The Golden Cat is not what it seems.’
Rags darted forward.
‘Soon she will have no tail left,’ he thought. ‘I loved her tail.’
But, before he could act, the vortex collapsed, with a vague sneeze and a bad smell.
‘Look!’ cried Pertelot.
A shift in the light had revealed the wall on the far side of the chamber, rearing up between two monolithic human figures into the indistinct shadows fifty or sixty feet above: a slab of rose-pink granite cracked by time and covered with one huge image:
Pertelot stared upwards.
‘The eye,’ she breathed. ‘Look at the great eye.’ She began to dart about helplessly at the base of the wall, as if looking for a door. ‘We were brought here to be shown this,’ she said. She stopped, craned her neck to examine the image again, stood up with one front paw resting on the wall. ‘And that thing,’ she added, dropping to all fours again, ‘was talking to itself.’ She shivered. ‘Is there a reason for any of this? Oh, Rags, we have come all this way for nothing. Where shall we find our children?’
Ragnar gave his attention to the shadows in the corner.
‘I think it is time to leave now,’ he suggested.
Pertelot blinked at him, and for once did as he asked. They were out of the chamber in a second, into the cold passageways, and avenues of gigantic kings, and mazes where every turning was the wrong turning and every door opened on more stone. Behind them, their nemesis reassembled itself, roared up to the ceiling, and hurtled in pursuit. It was much bigger than it had been. Hot desert air, freighted with sand like a gale at a beach, was sucked past the two cats and into its maw. The floor trembled beneath it. Broken stone pattered down out of the ceiling joints. There were deep, surprised groaning sounds somewhere in the depths, where pieces of sculpture a hundred feet high had begun to lean against one another like very old men. The whirlwind raged and howled. It grew.
‘Hurry!’
Stark shapes of darkness and light. Squinting into the gale. Rags and Pertelot teetered on the edge of a steep black ramp above a drop they could not measure. Dust boiled up and streamed off into the vortex behind them.
‘This way! Into the wind!’
They flitted across a pillared ante-room and out into the forecourt of the temple. The light was so strong they could feel it scrape the surface of their eyes. Midday. The stone sang with it. The Nile below was lost in heat-shimmer. Down through the quarries they fled, to the edge of the village, where the goats, rooting senselessly among stones, sought shade at the base of the houses. Here, where heat had emptied the lanes and even the dove-castle seemed empty, Ragnar halted suddenly.
‘Look!’ he said.
‘Rags, come on!’
‘It isn’t following us any more,’ he said. ‘Look!’
Through the heat haze, the tomb entrances could be seen like low black slots against the yellowish, crumbling slopes of the hills above. From each of them there now issued a thick, slow, sulphurous gout of dust. A low rumble reached the ears of the cats. The earth shook, as if something had settled. The dust clouds rose lazily into the hot air, a dozen coiling roseate smudges against a sky like heated brass. There was a long pause, in which Pertelot and Ragnar eyed one another uneasily. Then, with a renewed rumbling and shaking of the earth, as of gigantic forces in conflict, dust began to rise again – this time from the hills themselves. The tombs and temples of the Missing Dynasty were falling in one by one, taking an entire range of hills with them like collapsing paper bags.
*
‘After that,’ the Queen told Tag in the oceanarium, ‘it was like a long dream.’
They had made their way down through the lemon groves to the river, where the boy Nagib, having brought his felucca into the shore, invited the ‘sky cats’ aboard with grave politeness. ‘I was too tired and disappointed to resist a kind word, Tag. Besides, how else were we to get home? We had no idea where we were!’ She stared absently across the oceanarium. ‘And yet,’ she said softly, ‘that was the most beautiful journey of my life. We seemed to be days upon the river going north. We slept, or watched the banks. After two days, we changed ships. Nagib, with tears in his eyes, gave Ragnar his neckerchief. He called us Atum-Ra and Isis, his little Mother and Father. He seemed to think he was in a story. Our new pilot spoke less. He was an older man, who made a sign with his hands if I came near.’
In the river villages, in the hot afternoons or after dark, they searched for a highway to take them home. ‘But something was wrong with all those Egyptian roads. All I remember is the dead cats piled up at the entrances – perfect little cats who had done no-one any harm: oh, horrible, Mercury, horrible! – and a Sohag street tom called Akhenaten, with deep brown fur and a tongue like pink suede, who advised us, “Close your eyes as you go by. The dead do not wish to be seen. Something has come into the world that has no right to be here.” We took his advice, and passed on down the river.’
Boat gave way to boat, dawn to dawn in the soft river air. The two cats stood at the bow, their noses lifted for new smells; or lay in a hot sleep in the shadow of the sail, their dreams full of the creaking of the boat. As they drew closer to the river delta, with its blunt soft airs, the Queen’s coat took on Nile colours, dove-grey of the banks at dawn, the lilac of the distant hills. Isis and Odin were never far from her mind. Were they in the vortex? Is that what the first voice had meant? If so, how would she ever bring them out aga
in? Her eyes looked into some other distance than the distance of the river. When this mood came over her she drove the King away if he tried to sleep beside her in the night. ‘The children seemed to visit me in the long afternoons. I heard Isis sing, I saw Odin leap. I heard their voices but I could not help them. My mind was full of Nile dreams.
‘Finally we reached the sea.’
The boat lay all morning not far outside the Eastern Harbour bar at Alexandria, its sail tightly furled in the dead-still air. Behind it, against a sky darkened with clouds, the fifteenth-century fortress of Qa’it Bey stood on its low headland like an illuminated model, yellow walls soaking up the hot and stormy light. That morning, before making the inexplicable decision to take two cats out to sea and wait there for whatever happened to him, its captain had put on a freshly-laundered white djellaba. It was his birthday. He was exactly thirty-five years old when the biggest ray he had ever seen surfaced from the Mediterranean fifty yards to seaward and began to make its way towards him. It was too late to flee. Besides, perched on the back of the fish, its fur steaming in the hot sun, was a small tabby cat. Within minutes the other two cats had leapt delicately off the bow of the felucca and joined her there; the great fish had submerged; the sea was flat and calm again.
The captain rubbed his eyes.
‘In scha’Allah,’ he said, and turned towards the shore.
8
At the Sign of the Golden Scarab
Under a shady wall in a courtyard behind the tourist shops of the French Market sprawled an enormously fat yellow cat, a pile of uneaten delicacies spread before her, staring out across the café in a self-satisfied trance. Every eleventh second, she gave a languorous blink. Like some great planet, her gravitational field had attracted a large and motley collection of hangers-on; less well-fed creatures which radiated out from the yellow queen in complex little groups and huddles. Striped and spotted and particoloured, all they had in common was the focus of their attention. That and their shiny new collars, collars which threw into harsh relief barely-healed scabs and wounds and the signs of recent malnutrition.