The Golden Cat

by Gabriel King

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  It squinted at her. ‘That’s not entirely charitable, if you don’t mind my saying, ma’am. When you need help you maybe shouldn’t look a gift ah – armadillo in the mouth.’

  Armadillo.

  Comprehension came with infuriating ease, along with a vivid picture of armour-plated roadkill adhering to the tarmacadam of human highways.

  She laughed. ‘Hell, what have I got to lose? Seems my sanity’s already gone tail-up over the hill. OK: see what you make of this—’ She dredged through her recent memories. ‘Danse macabre… chat noir… er… mangent le monde.’

  The armadillo looked thoughtful. ‘That sure is peculiar. What the hell did you ask her?’ Without pausing for Sealink to reply, it continued, ‘La danse macabre. Hmm. The dance of death. Often seen as an ancient symbolic representation of the Dark Lord leading folk to the boneyard which derives from medieval times. Allegorical. The dance is often seen as a way to formalize life, or the passage out of life – everyone moving in their own ritualistic patterns, steps ordained by destiny, that sort of thing.’

  He paused to make sure Sealink was listening. She looked thoroughly distrustful. Annoyed, he carried on, ‘Or maybe a dance to the death, a kind of duel… Le chat noir – well, that’s easy: don’t you speak any French at all?’

  ‘The black cat.’ Sealink surprised herself.

  ‘See: it just takes a little thought,’ the armadillo smiled patronizingly. ‘So who’s the black cat? Think about it. The bones can be a mite arcane, but they’re usually darned accurate.’

  She’d known a few black cats in her life. Cyrus and William; Earwax and Amphetamine… These were all at once obliterated by the vision of a black cat’s head, flayed and displayed in a voodoo-shop window…

  ‘The Baron,’ she breathed.

  The armadillo considered Sealink neutrally. ‘If that means something to you, sister, then that’s fine by me. He likely to eat the world?’

  Sealink stared at him.

  ‘Mange le monde. Or maybe even mangent le monde. Might be more than one of ’em.’

  The calico shrugged. ‘He had a good life in his time, the Baron, but he weren’t ever ill-intentioned. Loved life. I guess you could say he wanted to “eat the world”. But he was alone when last I saw him.’ She shivered. ‘Beyond that I don’t got the least idea.’ She wrinkled her brow and thought about the rest of the Mammy’s divinations. ‘Rues sauvages, moo— something; and a pyramid, cassé, and,’ she concentrated hard, ‘les trois sont perdus.’

  ‘Wild roads. Moo— MOO!’ A bellow that made Sealink jump. ‘Ain’t too many cattle round here!’ He cackled, Mammy-like. The calico fixed him with such a fierce glare that he felt compelled to drop his gaze and scratch nervously at his neck. He dug around for a moment in the vulnerable area where two armoured plates met, then examined his nails and sucked out the fruits of their labour. Head on one side, he considered the possibilities. ‘Moo— moolah: money. No. Can’t be. Mourir – to die, maybe. The wild roads are dying.’

  Sealink nodded slowly.

  ‘Sounds ominous.’ He steepled his fingers, then moved his hands apart. ‘Onward, onward. Pyramid cassé… trois sont perdus… hmm… Broken pyramid; and three are lost. Three. Prime number, very powerful: lots of magical things come in threes. Three wishes; three questions. Three wise men. The three holy threads of the ancient Brahmin. The Three Graces. The Three Fates. The Holy Trinity. According to Pythagoras the perfect number. But the three are lost? You got me there.’

  Sealink sighed. She had spent the greatest part of her life avoiding introversion, or indeed any sort of hard, slow thought, but clearly if anything was to be salvaged from her visit to the Mammy, it now lay largely within her own efforts. She closed her eyes and tried to think about the words with, as Eponine had instructed her, the wildest part of herself.

  The Mammy’s words circled in her head like flies above a carcass.

  Three are lost. That much was certainly true. Two of her kittens lay long ago dead on the Mississippi shoreline; and of the third she knew nothing at all. Pyramids? Well, she had once visited Egypt, Pertelot’s ancestral home, where the cat had been sacred to humans, and there were pyramids there: broken ones, too. Was her last missing kitten in Egypt? That made no sense at all. She racked her memory. The Mammy had said something about a sun of fire. Seek a sun of fire in the Fields of the Blessed. Sure, the desert was hot: the sun as fiery as hell. But there had been no fields at all – just sand as far as the eye could see.

  The harder she thought, the more tangled the images became. Giving that part up as inextricable, she moved on.

  The wild roads dying? Well, that made a kind of sense, but it still got her no nearer the cause, or a cure.

  Black cats and strange dances. In her mind’s eye she saw herself and the Baron stepping out together on the boardwalk, but, try as she might, she could find no greater significance in the scene. And yet the Baron was dead. Perhaps it had been a danse macabre. Perhaps the dance had heralded his death. Perhaps it was her fault…

  This grim thought was interrupted by the arrival of the second armadillo, whuffling with the effort of running at speed.

  ‘Come and see, Cletus, see what I done! You won’t believe it—’

  *

  Sealink and the two armadillos made their way back to the clearing, Cletus in the lead, the second guard trundling breathlessly behind him, explaining, ‘It’s the best… it’s ever been, Clete… Taller’n we ever… managed before… Y’all said… the triangle was the strongest… engineering… structure in the world… and I know I ain’t always… too bright, but I guess it… filtered through in the end… kinda came to me… in a flash—’

  This exposition came to an unceremonious halt as Cletus stopped in his tracks and his companion cannoned into him.

  In the middle of the glade the bone-pile towered, its lines cleanly and improbably geometrical, the harsh noon light transforming the white of the skeletal remains to a gold so bright it hurt the eyes.

  Sealink stared at it and felt distant echoes stir inside her head.

  A tall triangle – a pyramid – and, balanced impossibly upon its apex, making all perspectives unreliable, the Louisiana sun, blazing like a message from the entire natural world.

  *

  That night, far from the Mammy and her armadillos, far from alligators and dragonflies that talked; far from the vision of a bone-pile gleaming like a neon message, the calico cat slept, exhausted by her long trek.

  And, as she slept, she was visited by a dream.

  As dreams go, it was neither particularly horrifying, nor did it hold the sweet sensuality of the golden reveries she had experienced in her youth. Despite this, when she awoke, she found that she was shaking; but whether this reaction sprang from fear or a sudden and inexplicable optimism, or maybe from some adrenalizing combination of the two, she could not say.

  As the sun rose over the distant horizon, so did Sealink. Tail up, chin high, the calico strode purposefully down the dirt road which she knew, as cats do from their deep internal navigations, would eventually lead back to the city of her birth.

  She was Sealink, and she had a job to do.

  16

  Alchemies

  They slipped out of the oceanarium together, leaving the fox to tell his story to the King and Queen, and took the steep little cobbled streets down to the harbour, where they sat on a wall to watch for the returning fishermen.

  It was just before dawn. A breath of mud came up from the rising tide. ‘Smell that!’ said Cy. ‘Mm!’ But her own smell was compounded by crackling citrine odours Tag couldn’t identify; and, as she struggled to tell him about her adventures, it seemed as if they had made her strange to herself as well as to him.

  It was curiosity, she was quick to admit, that had caused her to fall in the fish-tank. In the middle of a conversation with the Great Ray, she had decided to see how he looked from above. ‘I ran up the stairs, but when I got
to the top I couldn’t see him.’ The viewing platform seemed to be suspended in emptiness. Disoriented by the hot blaze of electric light, she tottered on the edge. ‘I saw five hundred mackerel turn as one. But my fish wasn’t there!’ Moments later, though, he had saved her from drowning; and saved Ragnar and Pertelot too, when they fell in looking for her. ‘Which naturally led,’ Cy explained, ‘to him taking all of us on this totally real trip to Egypt! (As you already know.)’

  ‘I don’t understand why,’ said Tag.

  ‘He had a mission, that fish. He was operating on orders from below. I believe that.’

  ‘But why? What does a fish have in common with us?’

  Cy didn’t know. ‘They live in murky waters, those guys,’ she suggested. She sighed impatiently. ‘Anyway, you listen,’ she ordered. ‘Whose story is this?’

  What had followed, she claimed, wasn’t so easy to understand—

  As soon as the King and Queen were safely disembarked, the Great Ray had furled and folded himself and whirled down into the tank again, back onto the Fish Road. ‘There was no time for me to get off! I was stuck! Tag, I was so excited! He was saying things to me. We were going on the journey of a lifetime, me and that fish. That was what he promised, and it was true. Soon we’re down in the deeps of the sea, which is like some electric church where the inhabitants got their own light. Tag, these are guys that glow in the dark!’

  South went the great fish, then east and west. Each time he surfaced it was to show her something new about the world. Humid green jungles that came down to the water, releasing flocks of birds like coloured laundry. An island no more than a smoking cone, hot cinders in the air ten miles out to sea, smells that made her nose run. ‘I seen the bows of broken ships, ghostly in pale sea-bottom mud, all them long-ago captains fishbait now! And a beach where striped cats came down to swim in the huge waves – I would’ve liked to join them, but of course,’ she said with a certain regret, ‘they were bigger than me.’ Shores like deserts, shores like jewels, shores blackened with oil and scattered with towers and huge machines. ‘Oh I felt sad, Tag, some of those things I seen!’

  At last the ray turned north; and from the deepest journey of all they surfaced in a strip of benighted water like black glass. There was snow and ice as far as the eye could see. Huge pieces of this frozen landscape toppled into the sea around her while she watched. ‘It was hurling itself in, that stuff. It was the biggest sugar I ever saw. I say to Ray, “This stuff is whiter than you!” He says nothing. I thought he was nervous, you know? But it wasn’t that. He was just getting ready.’ Plumes of water rose in slow motion as the ice cliffs fell, only to subside in total silence as if she were watching through a sheet of glass. ‘Tag, even my eyes were cold. Brrr!’ All the while, her friend lay on the water, slowly revolving, like a compass needle, until, in the sky, she saw the aurora, unfolded in great unnerving wings of silent, rippling green flame.

  Light poured down.

  Then, very slowly, Ray began to float up.

  ‘Tag, you got to imagine this—’

  The tall cathedral shadows of the road, where it left the Earth between the drawn curtains of the Northern Lights. The mighty fishes which could sometimes be glimpsed, rendered tiny by distance, beating steadily against some invisible current on journeys of their own. And one small, rather frightened cat clinging on for dear life in the emptiness. It was amazing: but it was dark out there, and it was cold, and it was sometimes rather lonely on the great ray’s back. Their oceanarium conversations hadn’t prepared her for any of this, any more than she had been prepared for his size, his power, his almost stifling sense of age, the feeling she had that he knew things kept from ordinary animals.

  ‘He’s not a big talker,’ she admitted to Tag. Then she sighed again and said, ‘Still, it was like, you know, the breath of stars. We’re out of the water and far up in the air. So far up – Tag, I looked back and seen the place we live!’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘however bad things are for us right now, I think it will come out OK. Want to know why? Because when I looked back, I saw these green flames. Tag, it looked like the whole world was cupped in a safe green hand!’

  Tag greeted this vision with a silence grounded in frustration (while he thought, ‘We aren’t safe, any of us. I wish we were.’).

  She seemed not to sense this. She asked, ‘Tag, have you ever been to the moon?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t,’ said Tag rather crossly.

  ‘Well, the moon is like white gardens,’ she said. ‘Only nothing grows there. You can see to the end of everything, but there’s nothing to see. We floated about there a bit, but there was nothing to do. Nothing’s alive on the moon, Tag, no cats nor human beings nor nothing.’

  She shivered.

  ‘So we came back, as quick as we could. Oh, Ray wanted to go on somewhere else, but I said, “Take me home.” I’m keen on Ray, but sometimes it’s hard to get him to stop. That fish has got a real urge to see things. I asked him how this Road of his goes so many places, even the Moon, which he had to admit he didn’t like either. He told me, “Little Warm Sister—” because he calls me that, his Little Warm Sister “—the fishes were here before anyone else. We grew restless, and swam down to Earth before anyone else arrived.’

  She was silent for a moment.

  ‘Does that make any sense to you?’ she said.

  Tag said nothing. He couldn’t think.

  Then she jumped to her feet. ‘Look! Tag! The boats. The boats!’ And there they were, the fishing-boats returning safe home, a line of lights bobbing at the harbour mouth. And, behind them, the first green flare of the dawn. Cy broke into a great, clattering purr.

  Tag felt himself fill with love.

  ‘I’m glad you’re back,’ he said. ‘I missed you.’

  On the way back up to the oceanarium, she tried to explain how she had felt when she fell in the tank. ‘At first,’ she said, ‘I thought I’d had it. I thought I was going dancing with Davy Jones.’ But, even as she touched the water, she had felt supported, in a way she couldn’t now explain. ‘Ray wasn’t there then,’ she said. ‘It was as if something else held me up. Tag, it was like warm green hands in the water!’

  Then she asked, ‘Why does a fish make friends with a cat?’

  ‘I think that’s what I was asking you,’ said Tag.

  Cy looked up at him uncertainly.

  ‘I wonder what the end of all this will be,’ she said.

  Tag looked down at the harbour, and the gulls wheeling round the fishing-boats; then up at the oceanarium, where they would be waiting for the New Majicou to make decisions.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I only know that we are coming to it.’

  *

  An hour later he was hunting the ghost roads again, his breath like smoke in the sucking cold. He had opened a small highway down by the old lifeboat station, and from there made – jump by jump – the arterial connection. Beside him went his two old friends, calling to one another as they ran. The muscles of Ragnar Gustaffson, King of Cats, bunched and flexed beneath his thick black coat. The eyes of the fox Loves A Dustbin glittered with cunning. ‘Run!’ they told one another, remembering old fights, bitter seasons, journeys and losses from a time before. Their voices echoed along the Old Changing Way, and the echoes shed echoes of their own. ‘Run!’ they called. Those three were used to life. They had seen a lot of it one way or another. They loved it, and they knew how to spend its iron heat. Cold and fear meant nothing to them. They ran. But far out in front of them ran Leonora Whitstand Merril. She was their pathfinder all that long day – a princess among kittens and a dancer to her bones.

  ‘Come on!’ she called back. ‘Run now! We must run!’

  *

  ‘I will not let you take her,’ the Mau had said when she heard Tag’s plan.

  ‘Yet I have to go there. I can’t command the wild roads in their present state. But I have seen Leonora do it.’


  For this he received a look of contempt.

  ‘Because she can, she must. Is that it?’ said Pertelot.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It isn’t much of an argument.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She is my daughter.’ Pertelot laughed bitterly. ‘In fact at present she is my only child. Males love to run the wild roads day and night, they love to run and fight: but they can’t find two lost kittens.’

  ‘That is not fair,’ said Tag.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We are doing our best.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Leonora herself broke this deadlock. ‘Where is it you want to go?’ she asked Tag.

  ‘Be quiet, Leonora!’ ordered the Mau.

  ‘This is my life too you know,’ said Leonora.

  ‘Leonora!’

  ‘What if Odin and Isis are there?’

  ‘What if they aren’t?’ said the Mau tiredly. ‘Am I to lose you, too?’

  ‘If we falter now—’ Tag began.

  ‘—we may lose everything,’ finished the Queen. ‘I have heard that argument before.’

  But Leonora said, ‘I am not a kitten any more. I want my brother and sister back, and I want to play my part.’

  ‘Then play it,’ said Pertelot.

  And she turned her back.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ Leonora asked Tag.

  ‘For hundreds of years the Alchemist had a house outside the city. I found it after I became the Majicou. I go there now and then—’

  ‘—in case he comes back!’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I go there as I go to the pet shop in Cutting Lane. The Majicou is a caretaker, but to an extent he must intuit his own duties. I followed my nose, and the wild roads showed me that house. Ever since, though I hate the place, it has seemed to me to be part of my domain. I was there the day your brother vanished.’