by Gabriel King
At first they greeted one another like kittens, bounding around, rubbing heads, exchanging playful cuffs, rolling on the scoured rock. At length this behaviour was replaced by something more measured and formal. They sat straight and tall, perfectly motionless, and regarded one another in silence.
Then Odin’s head went up. He began to stalk the wind.
He sniffed. He crouched. He waggled his haunches then sprang. After that, he leapt straight up into the air from a standing start, turning and elongating his body as he went, and snapped his jaws together like a trap. Landing with careless precision, he made one of those intent, scuffling runs you are sometimes forced into if the prey is lucky enough to take off before you have arrived. He shrugged. ‘It is ugly but it is a technique,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘like any other. The cat never gives up, or how will it eat?’ He stopped and stared at his sisters until he was sure they were watching. ‘And this is how I do it when they hide in the long grass. See? More height in the jump, and bring your weight down behind your front paws. Like this!’
They observed this demonstration gravely.
They exchanged a long confidential glance, as if to say, ‘Yes, that is how to hunt. But now this. Look! Listen!’
Then Leonora Whitstand Merril began to dance, and Isis began to sing, and the hunt and the dance and the song wove a kind of pattern into the air around them. It was long and intricate, and the threads in it were made of gold and blood and all the things cats have ever done. And this is some of the meaning of it (because it is still being sung):
Eat, bear kittens, sing the song of the cat in the night. This is a grasshopper, this is a mouse, but this only a bit of grass in a dry wind. These are the leaves of the trees and the birds among them (which also sing). This is how to change direction at full speed – you may need that trick sooner than you think. Hush! That is a kitten, lost in the dark; and this is the sound the lark makes as she rises through the morning (never eat her feet). This is how we were in Nubia, and then in Egypt. Men welcomed us. The Nile comforted us. Her pigeons were in our mouths—
It was less a song, or a dance, or a practice for the hunt, than a tapestry, the tapetum lucidum of the felidae. The task of weaving it brought the kittens closer and closer together until they were facing one another from the points of a triangle again. A ripple seemed to pass through them. A shaft of light struck down from above. Their images were progressively overlaid, shimmering like cats seen through heat haze on a summer morning. Suddenly, they had slipped into one another, and a single animal stood where three had been. It looked back at its parents, then turned and loped away into its own dance and vanished.
Only the bright tapestry remained, intricating itself across the hilltop, febrile and tenuous, as if the very air were gilded with the life of cats.
Sealink looked up.
Ragnar and Pertelot looked up from their shallow refuge in the granite.
Cy the tabby blinked and looked up—
‘Wow!’ she told the fox, and he looked up too.
A hush spread over the hilltop, and down to the waiting town and its harbour beneath.
The sky began to brighten in the east.
‘I ain’t never seen anything like this,’ said Sealink.
*
Still himself and yet half Mousebreath – or was he still Mousebreath and yet half himself? He was too excited to be certain – Animal X watched the day infuse the horizontal clouds with colour, layer by layer. At first it was a gold on the edge of green, transparent as a thin wash on alabaster, deepening as it spread until it was the colour of light falling through hot foliage in some country no cat has ever seen but which all cats remember. ‘I always loved the dawn,’ he thought. He held his breath. He knew what was going to happen! Slowly, very slowly, the tapestry the Golden Cat had made reached up. Slowly, the dawn reached down. They touched. There was a sound which was no sound at all. Suddenly, green light was everywhere, running over every surface – the sea, the harbour mole, the palms and bus shelters, the deserted Beach-O-Mat! It quivered in the shop windows (which, in response, boomed faintly, as if they had been touched), it ran up the cobbled hill, it fizzed and crackled across the roofs of the cottages and leapt the gap to the oceanarium steps!
Animal X shivered.
Light was on every barren inch of that hill like flames, a green dream like a lighted fuse, like soft laughter. It was laughter. It gathered and sparked. It held back for a moment, and he felt his own heart beat in the heart of it. Then the dawn broke, and the birds were singing. Every bird in the world was singing, and there was nothing left but light, and the thing that came out of the light, and everything was changed for ever.
*
Who can see the Great Cat as She is?
We know how Animal X saw her. Since his experience in the laboratory, She had rushed in upon him day by day as a green fire, and taken him in the jaws of love.
But the dustbin fox said he saw this: shapes perhaps not even animal, but moving with the fluid violence of leopards, glorious unassuaged green forms like archangels, flowing through the world determined to change it. Was it the Great Cat herself, or only her servants? Who knows? he asked himself: She is the world. It made him remember why he had thrown in his lot with the Old Majicou, so many years ago. ‘In that moment I remembered,’ he was to say later, ‘what we were trying to accomplish. But I still wept for Francine, wasted in someone else’s war.’
As for Cy the tabby: no-one ever knew what she saw.
‘I mean,’ she tried to explain later, ‘now you see it, now you don’t. You know? It’s hidden in the shapes of things. It’s crouched in the bus shelter. It lies in wait in the curve of the bay. What’s familiar, you see it new. Over and out, Ace: is that enough for you? Anything you look at’s true!’
And what Ragnar and Pertelot saw was this:
A great triangle of light – the signature of their children, made to bring forth something even stranger than themselves – and, dawning at its apex, a light the colour of peach and amber. Inside that light, curled in the vast sleep of time yet wakeful as the day, the Great Cat herself, the Mother of everything, the green dream that beats like a heart at the heart of the world. They knew her by her body, which is hill and bleak mountain, jungle and forest, and at the same time home and hearth. They knew her by that endless rumbling purr which is the sound of the world, the deep engines of the weather, the wind and the wave and the ocean the wave plays upon, and everything under the ocean, even to the deep halls of the fish. They knew her by her fur, which is a transforming fire, green on the edge of gold. They knew her by her seasons, which come and go. They knew her by her delight in every kitten, every scuttling mouse, every fallen leaf: and She knew them.
She opened her silver eye.
She opened her golden eye.
She woke to Herself.
She woke to the Little Mother and Father.
‘I waited so long for you,’ She said.
Her voice sang in the very atoms of things. It sang inside Ragnar and Pertelot. When She stepped into the world, She emerged from inside them, She emerged from the light that surrounded them, She emerged from every grain of dust beneath their paws. She emerged from everything at once.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ She said.
Why should they be? Weren’t they cats too?
They sat straight and tall and threw out their chests and purred and purred and purred.
‘When we were kittens,’ they heard themselves say, ‘you calmed us in the dark. Later we saw you in the noon heat, when life had us by the nape.’
And Ragnar added, ‘I saw you in a picture, not so long ago.’
She was the world. At the same time She was a cat like them, if very much larger. She had brought Egypt with her as a kind of backdrop, because She thought it might reassure them; also because She had once woken there for what seemed to her a brief instant (though, to the humans of the Missing Dynasty who had worshipped her, it had been a thousand years) and fallen in love
with it. Palm and lemon flourished, and insects hummed across walled gardens barred with dull gold sunshine, and the Ancestors played in the damp soft evening airs, the grey-feathered airs of every dawn. She had brought the trickle of irrigation, the lift of the egret’s wing, the hidden pulse of the Nile. Behind her you could see the groves of trees like receding columns: music spooled between them. All about her paws the Ancestors were dancing too! Queens and kittens, grave old toms with greying ears, they tumbled and purred, perhaps for her (but more likely for themselves). But when She saw that they needed none of this, She let the music die away. With a sound like a single drop of water falling into a pool, everything was subsumed under the great argument of time, the millennial dream.
Only the Great Cat remained. Green as jade, gold as the sun, She left the King and Queen, and flickered like flames across the hilltop and wove her way into the heart of the storm, where She sat down suddenly and began to clean her paws. The air boomed and pulsed around her. Long streamers of cobalt-coloured detritus were pulled out between earth and sky, twisting and interleaving themselves. Blue lightning flared and banged, and out to sea the wind ripped the grey waves to spray. The ground shook. The whirlwind loomed up—
‘Be still now,’ She commanded.
She said, ‘Come to me now, both of you, and be still.’
But the whirlwind would not obey. The two beings inside it raged across the hilltop, out to sea and back again. They would not even answer. They wanted nothing She could offer. They were the Opposites, the sibling rivals, the dynamo of a vanishing age. They only wanted the struggle. After three hundred years, they had forgotten almost everything else.
The Great Cat laughed.
‘The wild and the tame are only names for the same thing,’ She chided them.
‘Will you come to me?’ She said gently.
They would not. Why should they humble themselves in that way? (Though each would like to humble the other.) They tore up the bedrock and threw it about.
‘It has been a long time, I know,’ She said.
She said, ‘Aren’t you tired?’
At this, the winds died so suddenly that the world ached with silence. They were tired. They were old. As they wavered, so did the vortex. Its rate of spin decreased, a shudder passed through it. It toppled and lost coherence. There was a long pause. Then the air breathed a sigh of relief, and began to clarify itself, like liquid in a glass. Everything which had been suspended, from mica dust to roofing slates, from cigarette packs to old car tyres, was released. The sky filled with objects, caught in a reluctant, dreamy, slow-motion fall.
‘I absolve you,’ said the Great Cat.
She said, ‘I resolve you.’
For a second, they reared up, separate and huge. But She was the Mother, always larger, always patient and determined; and that was the last time they were ever Majicou the one-eyed pet-shop cat, and the Alchemist, his erstwhile enemy. The cat’s tail lashed. The old man’s rags fluttered in the onshore wind. Then the Great Cat sprang upon them both without mercy or favour, and stripped them bare in the jaws of love, and they cried out in their pain.
At last She released them.
The boy’s name was Isaac. He was tall for his age, and rather awkward in his movements; he wore sailcloth knee-breeches and a full white linen shirt somewhat scruffy about the neck. His face was alive with curiosity, and he had a high opinion of himself. The cat had a high opinion of itself too. It was a black barn-cat the size, as the boy would often boast, of a horse. He had called it Hobbe because it was the very devil with a rat. It was still in possession of both its eyes, the unearthly green tapetum lucidum of which had already given him an interesting idea or two about light. They were an intelligent pair, inseparable and full of trouble.
‘There!’ laughed the Great Cat.
‘At the foot of this hill,’ She said, ‘you will find a harbour, and a new day dawning.’ She said, ‘Go and see what you can find. Boats for one and fish for the other!’
Hobbe ran out ahead with his tail up.
*
‘And now, little Father and Mother,’ said the Great Cat, ‘you have been patient long enough.’ She had drawn Egypt about her again like a mantle. They could hear white doves flutter in her voice. ‘Like your ancestors before you, you accepted a hard task. You accepted it out of faith and goodwill, not even knowing that it was a task. It was a life, and you lived it, and much will come of that.’
Despite the spell of the Mother’s voice, Pertelot stared around wildly. Where had her children gone?
‘Did you think,’ the Great Cat went on, ‘that, having asked this of you, I would steal your kittens too?’ She laughed. ‘Well, perhaps I would,’ She said. ‘They’re perfect enough—’
‘I have always thought so,’ agreed the King of Cats complacently.
‘Rags!’ his wife admonished him.
‘—but watch!’ finished the Great Cat.
There was a curious twist of light in the air beside her. Out of it to stand by her side, deep-chested and lithe, its legs impossibly thin and elegant, its strange long back curving away from high pointed shoulder to rangy haunch, came the Golden Cat. Its eyes were unearthly.
‘Here they are,’ She said. ‘I give them back to you, three kittens in one. Odin the hunter, with his dance of death. Isis, who stands for resurrection, protection, reincarnation, and song enough to wake the dead. Impetuous Leonora, whose joy is in the moment: she dances the dance of life. This is your child and mine,’ She told the King and Queen. ‘It is the child of the time to come. The birth of this cat was planned long before the white ship landed your forbears at Tintagel. See how it will run, through all the next age of the world. Look!’ She said. ‘Oh, look!’ A highway was opened before them, and the Golden Cat ran away down it with long, graceful, tireless strides. At the same time, it was somehow running towards them, shifting and changing into Odin and Isis and Leonora Whitstand Merril as it came.
‘Mother!’ cried Leonora. ‘Tell Odin I was right! They were down there all the time!’
‘This is the problem with daughters,’ said Ragnar Gustaffson. ‘They always have to quibble.’
‘I have no answer to that,’ the Great Cat told him. ‘I was a daughter myself.’ And She began to fade away into her own dream. ‘Your lives were broken, but now they are mended,’ She told them. ‘Run!’ She said. ‘I will always be with you now. Run and eat!’ She said, ‘You are all Golden Cats.’
And then, when only her voice was left in the jasmine-scented air, barely distinguishable from the soft sound of water in the hidden gardens of the Nile, She advised them gravely, ‘Go to your beautiful friend. He looked after you well, and now you must look after him.’
*
They found him a little way away, half in and half out of a puddle of rainwater in a hollow in the bedrock. He was stretched out less like a cat than the long white pelt of one, unmarked but for a little blood around each nostril, and a tarry deposit at the corner of each eye, for all the world as if he had been crying. His mouth was open on a tired snarl – or perhaps it was only a sigh of regret. Mercurius Realtime DeNeuve, an accidental prince from a pet shop in the city, had fought the whirlwind once too often and burned out his great Burmilla heart. The dustbin fox sat by him, looking angrily out to sea, and would not speak when the King and Queen approached; while the distraught Cy walked up and down, up and down, repeating, ‘This is no good. Jack. It’s just no good.’
Then Ragnar Gustaffson Coeur de Lion stepped forward. The New Black King had fought a storm or two in his life, and, though his reputation rested elsewhere, he knew how it felt. But more: he never allowed another cat to be sickly for long. It was a point of honour with him.
‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘What’s this?’
And, with the rough care of a mother with kittens, he began to clean Tag’s face. He cleaned the nose. He cleaned the tear-streaks below the eyes. Then he began to pass his tongue in long, powerful sweeps across the whole head and down the silv
er fur. A drowsy calm filled the watching animals. That tongue had eased away every kind of injury, spread warmth into young pains and old bones. The New Black King had halted sepsis and brought forth hale kittens from breech births. He could feel along the most elusive line of life, and follow it as he followed the wildest of roads. He was the King! He could find the most benighted of souls and lead it home. Ragnar could heal the sick.
But though he licked and licked he could not wake the dead.
He raised his head exhaustedly.
‘I cannot understand you,’ he told his old friend. ‘I don’t know where you’ve gone.’
The tabby pushed her way between them.
‘You let me down!’ she cried. ‘You let me down!’ It wasn’t clear which one of them she meant. She touched the side of Tag’s face gently with one paw. ‘Come back!’ she said. ‘You come back now!’ For the twentieth time since she had found him, she shut her eyes, put her mouth close to his nose, and exhaled sharply into his nostrils.
Nothing.
‘This stuff is broke,’ she said, looking up at Ragnar and Pertelot as if it was their fault. ‘I was woke by it myself enough times before. Now it just don’t work, when I know it should!’
‘Nothing works,’ the fox said.
Without turning round, he added, ‘Life can be very remote. It can hide somewhere very deep inside. But a fox can always smell it.’
‘We know this,’ said the Queen.
‘I cannot smell any life in him. I’m sorry.’