The Golden Cat

by Gabriel King

‘You should be ashamed to say that,’ the Queen told him. ‘You shouldn’t give up. He is your friend.’

  ‘I’ve lost other friends,’ the fox responded darkly.

  Pertelot didn’t know how to argue against this. ‘The world is new!’ was all she could think to say. ‘Why is this happening, when the world is new!’ She looked around rather desperately, as if she expected the Great Cat to come back and help them.

  ‘I think the world is us,’ said her husband gently.

  ‘Oh Ragnar, Ragnar!’

  During this exchange, Cy the tabby had been prowling restlessly up and down, stopping every so often to knead the bleak ground by Tag’s head, while she purred in a confused way.

  Now she whispered, ‘Don’t die, Ace. I got something so good to tell you. Don’t be dead.’

  The fox got up and tried to comfort her, and all four of them stood looking down at Tag for a long time. ‘I remember when he was a kitten,’ Loves A Dustbin said. ‘He was in trouble the moment he left the house. But he never stopped loving the world.’ At last, they became uncomfortable and embarrassed, as animals often do in the presence of death, and began to walk away. Even the tabby appeared to forget why she had come.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’ said a familiar voice from behind them.

  They turned back in astonishment.

  For an instant, they seemed to see a kind of fluttering transparency in the air around him, like very fine gold leaf applied to a window, so that the light shines through it. Here and there, as it wrapped him round, the shapes of cats seemed to coalesce for a split second – a tail, a muzzle, the tilt of a long tufted ear – only to vanish again. If they were cats, they were moving too fast to see: and it was clear that only a moment ago they had been moving even faster. The Golden Cat! As they watched it faded and vanished – with a flicker of laughter which might have been Leonora’s – and suddenly three large gold-furred kittens had appeared, separating moment by moment from each other; and between them was Tag, yawning and shaking himself, examining in surprise his sodden underfur. No cat likes to wake up in a puddle. If he seemed a little frail – well, he had faced the storm, and reached inside for the last ounce of himself and given it away, and a cat is going to be tested by that. If he seemed a little vague, it sat well with his new demeanour. For, as his friends were quick to see, something more had happened to him while he was the White Tiger, the cat within the cat: Tag the kitten, still lost, still yearning for his old home, had slipped quietly away for ever. In his place stood the Majicou, forceful, dignified, full of hope and authority.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it all meant?’

  They gathered round him on the hilltop, and this is how he explained the things that happened to them—

  *

  ‘It began with the defeat of the Alchemist,’ he said. ‘Something ended there: yet nothing was resolved. The Majicou and his enemy sank beneath Tintagel Head, where their struggles spun them like a huge dynamo in the darkness of the earth and the deep sea. There they remained. The weeks went by. The kittens thrived. Leonora Whitstand Merril insisted, “I hear them down there at night.” If we had listened to her then, and asked ourselves what to do, would things have been any different? Who can tell? What is certain is that neither of them could get the upper hand. Neither of them dared relinquish the struggle for more than a second or two. Yet both were preoccupied by their own thoughts. The Alchemist, who, in the instant of his downfall, had at last understood the meaning of what he had done, began to wonder how he might locate and destroy the Golden Cat. Majicou, while he had known all along that, for his old enemy, the moment of success would be the moment of defeat, had not expected to share it. Now, both of them realized that while the kittens remained alive, the Alchemist was not safe.

  ‘In that moment, it all began again.

  ‘Within the vortex, they began to use the wild roads, each in his way. They sent out proxies to do their work for them.

  ‘The Alchemist worked through human beings and animals – Kater Murr was one of his proxies, and there will have been others in every city in the world. Majicou was less successful at this, though, as he and his opponent spun and boiled along the bottom of the sea, he was able to enlist the services of Ray the fish, who subsequently befriended Cy. Hoping in his impatience and despair to speak more directly to us, he began to send us a message: the Triangular Sign…

  ‘Could they keep their thoughts and intentions from one another, those implacable enemies, as they struggled within the vortex? We can’t know. Item by item, they renewed their connection with the world above. It was a connection tenuous, intermittent, hard to control. Their plans could be blown awry by a strong wind. Only one thing remained hard and certain: where one went, the other must inevitably follow. What one tried to make, the other tried to undo. That was how things stood the day the first of the kittens disappeared.’

  Tag was silent for a time, ordering his thoughts.

  ‘Even then,’ he went on, ‘I knew that something was wrong with the wild roads. That was how I put it, and how my proxies put it to me: “something wrong”.’

  He laughed softly.

  ‘The scale of the disaster had already proved beyond me,’ he admitted. ‘In their effort to maintain themselves, Majicou and the Alchemist had begun to destroy the object of their original dispute. Day by day, the Old Changing Way was leached of its power. Soon, instead of giving, it began to take. Cats were dying. Roads led nowhere. The world shrank. At the same time, the Alchemist’s message – “Find and kill three golden kittens!” – was blurring fatally along the chain of proxies. Chaos and anger spread out like ripples. Men killed any cat they found; soon cats were killing cats. It was in this climate of terror that human proxies took Odin, returning a few nights later for his sister.

  ‘The rest we know.’

  There was a silence among the animals.

  Then Ragnar Gustaffson spoke up.

  ‘We may know what happened,’ he said. ‘But we do not know the meaning of it. The Sign, for instance. And as for the animal called Kater Murr—’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tag, ‘the unfortunate Kater Murr! Driven by his hatred of Uroum Bashou, he taught himself to read, and reading entrapped him. Long before Leonora and I first visited Uroum Bashou’s domain, Kater Murr had been lured to the room beneath the copper dome. There he became the Alchemist’s proxy. All his powers came from that direction, and in the end they burned him up. That cat was never more than misled. In a way I am indebted to him. My eyes were opened by our encounter in the Alchemist’s house. But Kater Murr was never more than a doorkeeper.’

  ‘Twice he could have killed Leonora,’ objected the King.

  ‘The first time he was too busy boasting to her,’ said Tag. ‘Just as, later, he was too busy killing his old master out of spite.’ His voice turned cold and hard. ‘Kater Murr was only a cat that tried to walk like a man.’

  There was silence.

  ‘And the Triangular Sign?’ Tag prompted himself softly. ‘You should be proud to wear that, Ragnar. It is the Sign of Three.’ He considered this for a time. Then he went on. ‘Imagine yourself in the dark – beneath the earth or under the sea. You cannot speak. You dare not stop struggling. You are locked forever in the coils of your own duality. Your enemy is you. You are your enemy. Your sole means of speech is through a fisherman; or a fish. The Majicou could only try to tell us what he had always known. None of Pertelot’s kittens was the one the Alchemist sought. This wasn’t some small piece of magic: to change the world for ever, all three would be needed. That is what the Sign meant: three sides for three kittens and the three different qualities, the three interwoven dances, which would bring down the Great Cat – that great rising sun at the apex of the pyramid. What seems so obvious to us as we stand here now, he was trying to tell us all along. The fish took you to Egypt so that you could read the old story, how Atum-Ra and Isis were beloved of the Great Cat. Majicou hoped that, of all of us, you two had the best chance
of understanding. He may have tried to be there to talk to you himself: if so, he brought the whirlwind down on you instead. He was yoked to it: so how could he not?’

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I shall miss the Majicou. He taught me as well as he could in the time he had left to him. He fought a long hard fight for cats, and I don’t believe he foresaw – though he foresaw a great deal – how he would suffer before She released him from his task.’

  Pertelot Fitzwilliam shivered.

  ‘The Great Cat was behind it all,’ she said.

  Tag relied, ‘The Great Cat is always behind it all.’

  ‘It is over now, though.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Things are made anew.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘You looked after us well, Mercury.’

  ‘We looked after each other, Pertelot Fitzwilliam.’

  *

  Even as this exchange took place, the green dream was settling into the world. Sometimes it was visible, sometimes it was not. One moment, the hilltop was bare. The next it had been clothed with soil, and the soil put forth shoots like flames, and the shoots put forth flowers as you looked. The coats of the cats shone with health. The fox looked like a beacon in the morning. He was so full of his own foxy life that sailors could smell him out to sea.

  The dream coiled down through the waking village. Pelargoniums ran riot in their pots as it passed, and the steep little lanes were full of the smells of sea lavender and thyme. It glittered in the fish-scales on the harbour wall, and laughed to find the tubby coloured boats. It flowed in and out of the chip shop, and across the sea front to the sand. It gathered at the tideline, then hurled itself across the sea!

  Everything it touched was changed, even the air. Everything it touched was healed. In New Orleans, Eponine Lafeet felt the green dream in the air and smiled. It had come at last, as she had foreseen. Green world. Ripples went out, out, out, and touched it all. They touched the Last Free Cats of the French Quarter, who were delighted to find human hands outstretched to them once more in alley and restaurant, and crawfish back on the menu. Red and Téophine rolled in the sunlight and in that moment knew the kittens of their future. They touched Shine the Mule – fragrant grass sprang up in the Elysian Fields around her. They shyly touched the body of Uroum Bashou – the old hero was plush and velvet among his books in green dawn light! They touched the Winfield Farm laboratory, where a riot of jungle vegetation had already grown over the examination table and choked the rusting cages, and dangerous new feline shadows stood guard motionlessly in the arboreal gloom to make sure human beings never took it back. The same ripples touched Cottonreel and the beautiful Amelie, looking out hopefully across the water-meadows for what would come. They touched the chicken hutch where a fat tabby called Stilton turned comfortably in his sleep and whispered, ‘You get a lot if you’re a cat.’

  The green dream touched all these things, and passed on round the world.

  *

  Now the King and Queen – followed in stately, measured procession by Cy and Tag, while the dustbin fox brought up the rear, his pink tongue flapping like a yard of ribbon as he stared about in amazement at the new morning – made their way down to the ruins of the oceanarium. The fish-tank had survived against all odds, and was now laced with grape ivy and convolvulus. Down through the water struck shafts of sunshine so massy and palpable that the fishes seemed to turn like dancers between the columns of a temple. Honeysuckle and clematis wound the treads of the spiral stair. Ragnar and Pertelot trod and purred and kneaded. They felt that they had survived against the odds too. To mark this event, and give it its proper weight, they circled the fish-tank three times; and the Golden Cat twined itself between them as they went. Now it had three selves, now it had one. Isis, Odin and Leonora Whitstand Merril merged and flickered into a single tall lean unfocused shape which wound back and forth between the King and Queen like living gilded banner.

  *

  All this time, Sealink and Mousebreath had been rather shyly standing to one side, each eyeing the other but making no overtures. They were both so changed by their experiences they hardly recognized one another. He could not believe how tired she looked, or how different she smelled. She couldn’t quite get to grips with the Animal X in him. It had been long hard roads for both of them, and there were many stories left to be told, and neither of them understood just yet the things that had happened. So they stood around on opposite edges of the celebration, full of awkwardness, separated by death and adventure and perhaps pride; and she was a little angry with him for not coming forward and making things easy, and he was a little angry with her for the same reason; and both of them were a little afraid.

  ‘Won’t you come and talk to him?’ suggested Tag to the calico.

  ‘Tell you the truth, honey, I can’t quite believe he’s there,’ said Sealink, in rather too loud a voice. ‘Last time I hear anything, he’s dead. Now he comes back with a split personality.’

  She washed her tail energetically.

  ‘These tomcats. They can’t never make up their minds.’

  ‘At least come and talk to him.’

  *

  ‘Won’t you come and talk to her?’ the Queen begged Mousebreath. ‘She’s missed you so.’

  ‘I’m a bit shy, to tell the truth,’ said Mousebreath. ‘Thing is,’ he added, after some thought, ‘I bin someone else for so long. It changes you.’

  ‘At least come and talk to her.’

  *

  In the event, the calico boxed his ears.

  ‘You had no call to die on me like that!’ she said. ‘No call at all.’

  Mousebreath studied her speculatively, a glint of amusement in his blue eye.

  ‘I didn’t have no option,’ he said. ‘At the time.’

  And, rather to the surprise of everyone, he stood up on his hind legs and gave her a couple of good cuffs in return. She hissed and narrowed her eyes and backed away an inch or two.

  ‘You were never any good for anything but the two Fs anyway,’ she accused him.

  ‘I never heard you complain about that.’

  She thought it over.

  ‘But honey, how could you? I mean just die on me?’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ he conceded, ‘it was a bit sudden, I suppose.’

  ‘But you won’t do it again?’

  ‘Come here,’ suggested Mousebreath. ‘No, come here close an’ listen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This might come as a surprise, but I feel I got to tell you. I always loved you when you was angry.’

  Sealink gave him an oblique look.

  ‘Why, you ain’t changed a bit, you ol’ bastard,’ she laughed. ‘Oh hon, I missed you so!’ She looked out over the sea, remembering Louisiana, and the old life – with all its disappointments and splendours – she had closed the doors on back there. ‘I got a thousand things to tell you,’ she sighed.

  Mousebreath winked his unreliable eye.

  ‘I got one or two things to tell you, too,’ he admitted, thinking of Amelie.

  And they fell to rubbing heads, and rolling about like kittens in the sun and the smell of the sea. After that, they walked off together for a while, talking ten to the dozen, down through the village towards the harbour. Their tails were straight up and tip-curled. Her great furry haunches rolled like a ship at sea; he gave them an appreciative look. The sidelong glances she cast him when she thought he wasn’t looking would change your views on love. His mismatched eyes caught every one of them; and you could hear him say:

  ‘It’s nice ter come back from the dead. I might do it more often.’

  ‘You’ll get the chance, if you ain’t true.’

  *

  The Dog had watched all these events with puzzlement. There had been some bad weather in the night. You couldn’t deny that. Cats had made a lot of fuss about the weather and run about shouting at one another: you couldn’t deny that, either. There is never any sense in courting trouble: t
he Dog had done the sensible thing and waited it all out in a doorway in the village. Even so, it had got wet. Now it waited again until Sealink and Mousebreath were safely out of sight, then set itself to limp slowly to the top of the hill. There it cast about. If its eyes were no longer good, its nose was still reliable.

  ‘A dog can take its time about things,’ it thought as it went. ‘That is another thing about a dog.’

  After several false casts it found Tag, and stood there panting a little in front of him, the smell of its coarse damp coat overpowering the odours of honeysuckle and convolvulus. Its body rocked backwards and forwards.

  ‘You are the New Majicou,’ it said.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I do not know the names of all these other cats.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They look like cats to me, whatever you want to call them. One cat looks very much like another.’

  ‘Cats are cats and dogs are dogs.’

  ‘True,’ acknowledged the Dog. It sighed. ‘At Cutting Lane you asked for news of two golden kittens,’ it said.

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  The Dog ignored him.

  ‘Well there are two golden kittens here,’ it said. ‘In fact there are three.’

  Tag stared.

  ‘I knew that already,’ he said.

  ‘Nevertheless I found them,’ the Dog pointed out. ‘For a long time,’ it added for the sake of accuracy, ‘there was only one.’

  ‘You might say,’ said Tag, also for the sake of accuracy, ‘that there was only one here now.’

  The Dog stood for a long moment, shifting its weight about between its three tired old legs. Then it said, ‘A dog is an animal you can rely on. I was asked to find two golden kittens, and I did. You said I would have a reward.’ It had borne the events of a long life with stoicism, asking itself at every turn, ‘What can you do about the weather?’ and answering, ‘You can’t do anything about the weather.’ Now it told itself, ‘A dog is an animal that can grow old and still present a plausible face to things. A dog endures, rain or shine – that is one thing about a dog. A dog deserves its reward. That is one of the other things.’