The Golden Cat

by Gabriel King

  ‘I hate this!’ said Leonora Whitstand Merril suddenly. ‘Why is that thing taking so long? Why is it waiting down there?’

  ‘Look!’ called Pertelot Fitzwilliam. ‘Oh, look!’

  Out of the corner of her eye, she had glimpsed something in the maze of roofs below the oceanarium. Uninterpretable at first, it was less an object than an event – a tantalizing flicker of movement between two chimney-pots in the night and the rain, a sense that something had quickly descended a slate roof and was already out of sight. But it was coming towards them, whatever it was—

  ‘Look now!’ urged Pertelot. ‘See? Rags, Mercury, can you see?’

  —and, as it came closer, its movements resolved into the distinctive body language of a hurrying cat: the steep leap up onto the wall, the quick deft padding run extended into a graceful arc, the scuttle across rain-blackened granite setts. Even so, at that distance nothing was certain except that these actions had been performed. No-one – they were all watching expectantly now – had yet seen the cat that performed them. Then the fox said, ‘There, by the base of that wall. Two of them!’ After a moment he added, ‘They know what they’re doing.’

  There they were, moving fast and agile through the gale and the flying wrack, giving a wide berth to the oceanarium, keeping to the lee of things when they could. They were outdoor cats, lean and muscular, hard as nails. They were clearly a team, but one was always a little ahead of the other, stopping and waiting briefly before running on, as if it alone knew the way.

  Larger but more lightly-built, with long and rangy legs, it had a short thick pelt which shone a kind of dull gold in the dirty light. Catching sight of the cats on the hill, and suddenly unable to contain itself any longer, it left its companion behind at last and came bounding up towards them, calling out their names. For their part, they observed with sadness its missing eye, but marked the power of its limbs, the joy and energy in every stride—

  Then Pertelot was turning in excited circles, calling, ‘Odin! It’s Odin! Oh Rags, oh everyone, look. Do look!’

  The first of the lost kittens had come home.

  *

  Some years before, an autumn storm had torn two score Welsh slates from the seaward side of the oceanarium roof. The panels of corrugated iron which had replaced them – painted first black and then a curious cheap aquamarine colour soon streaked with rust – were now trying to take flight in their turn, screeching and rattling and tearing grimly at the nails that held them. Suddenly they had got loose! One by one they flapped dizzily into the air on some counter-current or eddy, only to be sucked savagely down into the humming pit beneath. After a moment, the three-cornered symbol appeared, larger than it had ever been, floating just above the apex of the roof. It was large and bright, but something was wrong with it. Two lines were there – the base and one side – but the third, which would have completed the apex, was only implied. Closure was withheld; something more, perhaps, was necessary. In response to its appearance, however, the hum of the vortex dropped to a throbbing rumble, and the whole hill began to shake. The cats felt it through the pads of their feet, but they were too happy to notice.

  *

  The Mau, who was now about half her kitten’s size, boxed his ears until he rolled on his back in front of her, his whole body wriggling with laughter. ‘That will teach you to worry your mother!’ she said. ‘You brute of a thing.’ And she began to laugh too.

  ‘Be careful with that son,’ warned Ragnar. ‘I might never have another.’

  ‘What do males know?’ said Pertelot Fitzwilliam. She gave him a direct look. ‘You’ll have another one sooner than you think,’ she promised.

  ‘It has been mostly daughters so far.’

  ‘This one is not a daughter,’ said the Queen softly. And, overcome with tenderness, she licked and licked at Odin’s empty socket, as if she could bring back the missing eye.

  Growing impatient with this after a minute or two, the kitten shook his head and jumped to his feet, to chase first his mother and then Leonora Whitstand Merril in a circle round the concrete waste-bin, while Ragnar and the fox egged them on with vulgar yelps and yowls. The Queen was soon out of breath. She had quite lost her dignity. But brother and sister ran on, round and round like a clockwork toy. They ran with their eyes popping and their tails curled into question marks. They ran with such vigour that earth and grass flew up from their feet. In the right place, you felt, their efforts would have rolled the world along beneath them, and their joy reclaimed the bleak little night-time hilltop and made it a park.

  It was such a reunion! But the New Majicou stood apart from it all, looking puzzledly down the hill. Just outside the reach of the last good street-lamp, where the cottages petered out and the grass began, Odin’s companion waited alone, a shadowy figure blinking uncertainly in the dim light.

  ‘Won’t you come up?’ he invited.

  No answer.

  He felt a sudden dread.

  ‘It was good of you to bring the kitten home,’ he said.

  Still no answer.

  ‘He says you know us. He says you once knew Pertelot Fitzwilliam.’

  Silence.

  ‘Won’t you come up and let us thank you?’

  Only silence.

  ‘Then I’ll come down,’ said Tag.

  ‘Nah, nah,’ said a quiet voice. ‘No need for that. I was a bit shy, that’s all. I’m all right now. No need for you to come down.’

  Out of the shadows stepped a cat the colour of a shellac comb. His coat was so heavily mottled and patterned, so dark in places, as to be almost black. The fur itself was very short and coarse, with a suspicion of a curl. One of his eyes was a frank and open speedwell blue, the other was the colour of sodium light. Both were framed by the grey, ridged scar tissue of the compulsive street-fighter, and despite his numerous old wounds he still moved with a heavy, rolling grace.

  Tag stared.

  ‘You’re dead,’ he whispered.

  Mousebreath looked down at himself.

  ‘Nah mate,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

  He said, ‘It was touch an’ go for a bit though, I’ll say that.’

  He studied Tag out of his blue eye.

  ‘You don’t look a day older,’ he said. ‘Catching any mice?’

  ‘Oh, Mousebreath, Mousebreath!’

  ‘That’s me name.’

  The older fighter looked around.

  ‘Nice here,’ he said noncommittally. ‘Seaside an’ all.’ He indicated the Queen and said, ‘She’s here then, I see. Kittens turned out nice. Good little hunter that One-Eye, got a good style on him, keen as mustard, plenty of energy.’ He was silent suddenly. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you all made it through. I’m glad. I’m glad to see that.’ This admission seemed to make him thoughtful: but he soon brightened up. ‘Where’s that old calico cat, then? Where’s that old Sealink? I bet she’s got a thing or two to tell!’

  Then he whispered, in a lost and broken way, ‘How did it all work out, Tag? How did it all work out?’

  ‘Oh Mousebreath. I don’t know where to start.’

  Mousebreath looked away.

  ‘I lost so much of my life,’ he said hoarsely. ‘One way and another.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Start anywhere,’ he said, ‘so long as I know.’ Then he sighed. He gave the oceanarium the benefit of his orange eye. ‘Start with that,’ he said. ‘You can tell me about that. I might be able to help.’ He held one paw up in front of his face. Suddenly it was full of razors. ‘Well would you look at that,’ he said. He winked. ‘I got two names now,’ he said. ‘But I’m the same old cat.’

  ‘Well—’ Tag began.

  As he spoke, the oceanarium started to disintegrate.

  *

  Electricity pulsed and sang in the stonework, crackled down over the outer walls like torn lace. The vortex collapsed briefly into silence. (A dead calm set in immediately all over town. Garbage fell into the gardens. Bin-lids rolled down the street, toppled over
and were still.) Then it wound itself up again. A long pulse of bitter white light poured out of the doorway and at the same time the whole building seemed to lift a fraction and become very slightly larger than itself. Every stone was outlined in light as it separated gently from the stones around it. The noise ran rapidly up to a whine so high-pitched you could barely detect it. At the instant it snapped into inaudibility, there was a soft contemptuous ‘Pah!’ as of expelled breath, and the building blew apart. The cats were bowled over by the force of it. Stone blocks, broken slates, and bits of timber the size of railway sleepers rained down, thudding deep into the earth around them. They took shelter under a concrete bench, and found the fox already in possession.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said disgustedly.

  There was just enough light left to see the fish-tank, standing complete and undamaged on its circular concrete base. A flicker of motion here and there inside suggested that its inhabitants, though surprised, remained mobile and in their proper element.

  ‘How does that happen?’ said the fox. ‘How does a thing like that happen?’

  ‘Ask yourself what has happened to the whirlwind,’ advised the New Majicou irritably. ‘We will never be safe if all this is not brought to an end!’

  No more objects fell. One by one the animals pulled themselves out from under the bench and looked around cautiously. They looked inland. Nothing. They looked out to sea. Nothing there, either. Out in the bay a light breeze had got up and was blowing towards them. It smelled of dawn, though the eastern sky remained dark.

  ‘We are OK now, I think,’ declared Ragnar.

  The earth in front of him shook and rumbled. Out of it, with a grinding noise like ancient machinery, rose two figures.

  Vast and silent, as posed and hieratic as the stone giants in an Egyptian temple, they loomed up motionless against the sky, Majicou and the Alchemist, the wise black cat and his erstwhile master. The cat’s tail lashed. The Alchemist’s rags fluttered a little in the wind. They seemed uncertain. They had been a long time in their own domain, bound one to the other. They had been much under the earth, in the darkness, unwilling to give up. They were unfamiliar with the world. They stared down at the animals on the little hill in a kind of puzzlement: life, they seemed to be thinking, but so small. Did they remember the battle for Tintagel, in the days when they had been small life too?

  Who knew?

  The Alchemist said, in a voice that echoed over the bay and out to sea:

  ‘The kittens! I’ll have them, Hobbe. They’re mine now.’

  And the Majicou replied:

  ‘Not while I live.’

  And they lunged at one another as if for the first time, tit for tat, blow for blow, faster and faster, until, humming and groaning with all their rage and pain, they became a single entity again. The vortex roared off across the hill, ripping up the earth and throwing it about. In the attempt to escape its own duality, it flung itself into the sky and stormed across it glowing, like a meteor. It plunged into the sea in a welter of steam and rose again unquenched. Then it arrowed inland again, towards the hill and the waiting animals.

  What could they do? The winds raged round them. There was no sign of dawn. They had made up their minds not to hide in the town, and there was nowhere else to go. They stood up bravely, into a rain of dirt and stones, waiting for whatever would happen. Then Mercurius Realtime DeNeuve, the New Majicou, began to laugh.

  ‘I believe we’ve won,’ he said.

  His friends looked at him as if he was mad.

  ‘Look! In the sky!’

  And there, glowing and pulsing in the air above the oceanarium, was the triangular symbol. As they watched, its third side shimmered into existence, winked out, returned: held. The figure had completed itself. At its apex, a tremulous globe of light could be seen, so faint it was like an unremembered word on the tip of the tongue—

  ‘Behind me!’ cried Tag. ‘If you want to survive, get behind me, all of you!’

  The look he gave them was so intense they could only obey. They tucked in one by one – Rags and Pertelot, Odin and Leonora – as if they were entering a building, as if some real shelter might be had from him; and indeed the wind did seem to abate a little in the lee of his warm body. The dustbin fox gave him a strange, long, yellow-eyed look – ‘Take care, my friend!’ he warned. ‘You have done this too often already!’

  —and tucked in behind. The last to come was Cy the tabby. She rubbed her head against him and purred so loudly he could hear her above the gathering storm.

  ‘I always had faith in you, Ace,’ she said. ‘Don’t let me down now.’

  Tag laughed.

  ‘Tuck in!’ he cried. ‘And look away!’

  There was a crash of thunder and a smell of distant snow.

  *

  Arriving disoriented and irritable after her recent hometown travails, Sealink the calico regarded the scene on the hilltop with disbelief.

  She had enjoyed the flight – when had she not enjoyed a flight? – but not the grim and tiring journey from the airport, struggling like an insect in the shredded web of the Old Changing Way. Isis, preoccupied and driven and sometimes not what you would call good company, had sung them through the difficulties – an act in itself less than comforting. Her music often engaged something eerie in the world. To be frank, it set your teeth on edge. Despite all that, though, and despite the kitten’s disappointment when she found her Tintagel home abandoned, they had made it. Where they had made it to was another matter.

  ‘It looked like hell,’ she would say later. ‘And, to tell the truth, so did you guys.’

  The symbol which – from Egyptian tomb to Louisiana swamp to Tintagel cave – had presided over every turn of these events, now pulsed on and off in the pre-dawn sky like neon outside a fish-and-chip shop. Dimly and intermittently revealed by this eerie half-light, the top of the hill, with its half-buried lumps of fallen masonry, seemed like the surface of the moon; while the remains of the oceanarium resembled some recent, disputed archaeological find.

  If the sign illuminated this desolation, the whirlwind commanded it. Eighty feet high by then, a tight and graceful twist of darkness, it came and went as it pleased. Not a blade of grass nor a tuft of bilberry remained on the hilltop. The topsoil itself was being whipped up in a furious ground blizzard even as the astonished calico watched, to form a kind of veil or caul for the lower third of the vortex. Concrete benches groaned and strained: they were plucked free from their bolts in the bedrock and sucked in. The litterbin lasted a moment longer, then went spinning up to join them.

  Nothing, Sealink remarked to herself, could be left alive in the face of that nightmare. It was simply a bad place for small animals. And yet there they were, flattened to the ground, half blind, a handful of cats and one braised-looking fox, giving the world anxious glances as it broke up around them. And, interposed between them and the oncoming storm, a white snow-tiger. Iron-striped, one huge paw raised emblematically, he was fifteen feet long from nose to tail. The light now spilling off his fur had shone in Arctic summers long ago. ‘Be careful,’ the fox had warned him. Yet when you reach inside yourself there is always more. He denied the passing of things. His mouth was open on the roar of his own life – as if breath, blood and bone were in the end all you needed to prevail ten thousand years. From sabre-tooth to domestic cat, the fields of ice to the Battle of Tintagel, and now this bald, bleak little hilltop: in the face of disaster, Mercurius Realtime DeNeuve, the New Majicou, had held his ground.

  Sealink couldn’t take it in.

  ‘That’s Tag,’ she said.

  She said, ‘I’ve seen that triangle in the sky before. It was real recent, too.’

  She scanned the hilltop carefully again.

  ‘I was hoping we would get some answers here,’ she told Isis. She narrowed her eyes. ‘But I can’t seem to take any of this in. Is that a fish-tank, hon?’

  20

  Green World

  But Isis wasn’t listening. Sh
e had run off to join Odin and Leo.

  ‘Honey,’ Sealink began, ‘I don’t think—’

  Too late.

  Everything hung for an instant on the edge of disaster, then toppled over.

  Isis called out to her brother and sister. Hearing her voice but unable to see her, Odin and Leo abandoned the lee of the white tiger and ran about aimlessly through the wrack.

  ‘I’ll have them all now,’ the vortex told itself.

  Isis froze, one forepaw lifted. She glanced desperately this way and that.

  At the last minute, as the whirlwind bent towards her, Mercurius Realtime DeNeuve reared up between them, offering his iron claws—

  Deprived of shelter by this manoeuvre, the remaining cats scattered and went to ground in shallow scoops and pockets in the exposed pink granite bedrock. There, they hung on grimly. They would have to endure, they supposed. They tried, as cats do when things have gone too far, to hunch down inside themselves and persist.

  Sealink, watching in a kind of paralysis, unable to think of anything at all to do to help her old friends, imagined for a moment she could see a tortoiseshell tom among them. Her heart leapt: but it was only the dustbin fox after all, his coat mottled with dirt. Who else might be there was hard to tell, though she thought she saw Ragnar Gustaffson, trying with some success to shelter his Queen.

  ‘Steady, girl,’ she warned herself. ‘No use folding now. This is an extreme situation—’

  Locked in a strange uneven struggle, the air around them distorted and full of mirages, tiger and whirlwind staggered together around the remains of the oceanarium. Their groans and roars went twenty miles out to sea, like some experimental warning to sailors – a hint of risks less easy to comprehend than the rocks, shoals, and lee-shore fogs of ordinary nautical life. At the same time, bizarre odours enveloped the hilltop: hot brass, chemicals and incense tars, dispersed by the smell of a wind that had passed recently over a thousand miles of ice—

  The kittens called out to one another as they ran, in voices plaintive yet somehow harsh and penetrating, as if designed for just this eventuality. Each time Sealink caught a glimpse of them, through curtains of suspended earth, their cries had brought them closer together. They seemed larger than before. They moved purposefully, bringing to the brutalized hilltop a whiff of the burnt sand and dry savannah that lie in the history of every cat. Above them in the sky, the triangular symbol pulsed and brightened ecstatically as if to welcome them, then faded for ever; and it was as three points of a triangle that they finally converged. What began then, no-one could be sure.