The fur on her flanks stirred, and then Mara felt her whiskers rise, tingling so hard that it was almost unpleasant. There was a crackle in the air. Her paw pads gleamed with sweat, and her claws came out reflexively. The kitten’s pink tongue hung out and she grimaced and shivered all over.
Somewhere out there, a family of cats was responding to her sendings. She felt them tug on the line, insistently, with more strength than seemed possible. The air had thickened with the slow rumble of their linkings, though Mara couldn’t see them yet. The kitten’s tail switched back and forth, the hairs on its tip fluffing in alarm. It was as though her fur had been brushed hard, and she felt the presence of the strange cats as surely as though they had entered the room.
Something had gone wrong, she thought. The cats were slowly coming into focus, their faces gleamed into sharp-edged clarity, but the images were too large. The air around her felt hot, and the kitten’s whiskers trembled from the sudden strain.
On the other side of the door, Beraal sat up, her tail rising uneasily. “Mara?” she said.
The kitten’s paws curled under her flank. Mara’s tiny nostrils flared at the scent that seemed to fill the air: fire and musk. The scent padded through her head, and her fur stood up as though a predator had walked silently through the kitchen, its hot breath burning her ears and the back of her neck. She heard Beraal mew, but the hunter’s voice seemed very remote.
Mara opened her eyes briefly, but there was nothing in the park outside her home, just the high friendly chirps of the babblers. Her Bigfeet had moved to another room; she heard their voices far away. It seemed as though black and gold flames danced before her eyes and the air in the kitchen was now heavy with the carrion stink of meat and blood, underlaid by a whisper of dust and grass. Mara’s head throbbed; it felt to the kitten that the unseen predator was padding closer and closer.
A low, menacing rumble ripped through the house; Mara felt her stomach turn over in cold fear, her claws shoot out in instinctive terror. The rumble seemed to go on forever, as though the kitten had called the thunder itself down from the skies.
When the kitten opened her eyes again, she was staring at a great, red, open mouth with pointed yellow fangs, each one the size of her own face, and great white whiskers that sent out rolling waves of anger. Slowly, she looked up into a pair of huge golden eyes, the pupils tiny glowing orbs of black, ringed by fur striped in all the colours of fire. When its whiskers rose, Mara felt her own tiny whiskers tighten and tingle in fear, but she couldn’t stop sending. “Hello,” she whispered. “Who are you?”
There was silence. Mara’s fur began to unruffle itself, and her tail stopped twitching. She felt Beraal outside begin to relax, too. Just a glitch, Beraal, she sent, perhaps we’re seeing a close-up—pulling back now.
If Beraal had a response, neither cat heard it. Mara yelped and scrabbled with her paws as her whiskers went painfully taut and adrenaline jolted through her body. The great cat was standing up, and Mara watched in shock, her head tilting upwards as the golden and black fur rippled out endlessly, the tiger growing and broadening until it towered monstrously above her, its eyes never leaving her face.
Another furious rumble shook the line. Mara felt the vibrations deep in her flanks and her belly—it felt as though she had been picked up by the scruff of her neck and was being shaken from side to side.
“I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Who in hell’s name are you and what are you doing in my head?”
“I’m just me,” Mara stammered back, “just a Mara.” Instinct overrode the system of greetings Beraal had dinned into her head, and she reverted to the patterns of her earliest sendings. Sorry, just me, just small orange kitten, don’t mean any harm at all, Mara terrified, Mara shivering! Sorry, big cat. Waves of disbelief radiated back along the connection, and Mara heard the deep-throated growl as clearly as though its perpetrator was right in front of her.
“You’re a kitten? Not even a cub, a common KITTEN? And you dare consort with tigers, Justamara? You’re either very brave. Or very foolish. Or … very, very insolent.”
Mara was frozen with fear, too terrified to attempt to break the sending. The enormous red mouth equipped with long, curving, deadly teeth, opened in a deafening roar. “I want my mommy!” cried Mara. “I want Beraal! Don’t like this Ozymandiwhatever … I want to go home.”
If she’d been listening to the Nizamuddin link, Mara would have realized that she was merely echoing popular sentiment. As the tiger shimmered in the air of Nizamuddin, his great form stalking the minds of the cats, the scramble to clear the link was unseemly but swift. Beraal’s nerve broke when she saw that deadly mouth. Flattening her ears, she shot down the stairs into the park. Hulo, who’d linked furtively, unwilling to admit that he was impressed by Mara’s progress, was so taken aback that he almost fell out of his tree. Back in the dargah, Bigfeet watched in surprise as Qawwali and the two other cats who were on the link sat up sharply, yowled and then fled. Southpaw, who’d linked in his sleep, woke from what appeared to be the worst nightmare he’d had in his life.
So there was no one to witness what happened next.
IT HAD BEEN A TRYING TIME for Ozymandias. The Royal Bengal tiger liked to do his pacing in peace, and ever since the zoo had acquired another couple of great cats, space had been at a premium. The grass in his enclosure had long since dried out; in summer, the tigers stirred up clouds of dust as they walked, and Ozymandias hated the way it tickled his whiskers.
He disapproved strongly of the new feeding policy, which required all the animals in the zoo to fast once a week. Worst of all, his litterbox had been dragged out into the open, which meant he had to do his business in front of a gaggle of gawking Bigfeet—any self-respecting tiger, he felt, would have objections to this sort of thing.
So when his nap was disturbed by, of all things, an orange kitten that materialized out of thin air, levitating directly in front of his eyes (Mara hadn’t yet quite got the hang of positioning herself while sending), Ozymandias felt justified in snarling at her.
He put out a gigantic pad, unsheathed his claws magisterially and swatted at the kitten.
Mama! it howled, but infuriatingly, it remained exactly where it was.
Ozymandias furtively checked his claws just to be sure, but they appeared to be in perfect working order. He swatted at the air again. Go away! You’re mean and evil and I don’t like you one bit! sniffled the kitten; but it stubbornly refused to dematerialize.
“Ozzy, stop that at once,” commanded a velvety voice firmly. “You’re frightening the poor thing.” Ozymandias mutinously swung at the kitten again, and received a sharp smack on his ear. “Hunh!” he growled in surprise. “You didn’t have to do that, Rani.”
Scared as she was, Mara couldn’t help noticing that the white tiger who’d smacked “Ozzy” into submission was one of the most beautiful creatures she’d ever seen. Then Rani peered closely at her. “You are a common little thing, aren’t you?” she commented, and then rounded on the Royal Bengal again. “It’s just a cat, Ozzy, there’s no reason to throw a fit. I wonder what it’s doing here, though.”
From under Rani’s belly, a small, almost Mara-sized head popped out. “It said it was a Justamara, Ma,” piped a small, almost big cat-sized voice. “Hello, Justamara. What’re you doing in our cage? And why’re you in the air?”
Mara’s ears began to rise ever so slightly. She still wasn’t very sure about Rani and Ozymandias, but this was more in her league. “Hello,” she ventured uncertainly, and then Beraal’s training paid off as she recalled her manners. “I’m so sorry to … to bother you like this, I was doing a sending … uh, a range exercise. I never meant to disturb you, Ozymandias … uh, Ozzy Sir … I don’t know what to call you …”
This was a bit much for Ozymandias to take. “Call me? Call me nothing! Tigers do not talk to kittens,” he snorted, turning his back on Mara and stalking to the other side of the cage.
“Pay no attention to him,” said the s
mall tiger cub. “He’s always like this in the evenings, especially if his nap hasn’t gone off that well.” Rani licked the cub affectionately and peered at Mara again. “I suppose you two had better introduce yourselves,” she said.
The bars rattled. Ozymandias growled and stalked back. “No cub of mine is going to consort with a mere cat, Rani, and that’s fine … ouch! Aargh! Let go!” What Rani said to him next was slightly muffled, because she had his tail in her mouth, but the gist of it was that the small tiger cub had had no one to talk to in months from his own species. Ever since the leopards had been shifted to another set of cages, their cub’s only company had been a bunch of monkeys. And while she was glad he and the silver-furred langur monkey Tantara got on so well, she didn’t know why Ozzy was being such a stick-in-the-mud about cats, considering that he was one himself, if of a superior species. Besides, this young kitten appeared to have far better manners than the leopard cubs who were so terribly undisciplined, if Ozzy only cared to remember. It seemed odd to Rani that the kitten appeared to be levitating in mid-air, but she was sure an explanation would be offered in the fullness of time.
While the big cats bickered, the small tiger cub and Mara eyed each other—one from behind the bars of his cage, the other from her insubstantial post in thin air. “He’s called Ozzy because it’s short for Ozeem, which is short for Ozymandias,” said the tiger cub. “It’s a nice … it’s an impressive name,” said Mara. “And what’s your name?”
The tiger cub looked important; his whiskers sprang to attention. “I am—” he took a deep breath, “Rudra TheGreatAndPowerful, SonOfOzymandias TheKingOfKings, LookOnOur TeethYeMightyAndDespair … but you can call me Rudra for short.”
“I’d like that,” said Mara, and she whiffled happily at him. Outside Rudra’s cage, cameras whirred as Bigfeet took pictures of the cub standing so close to the bars, and in the kitchen back in Nizamuddin, the Bigfeet looked down at Mara, and smiled to see her twitching and cycling her paws in her sleep.
From the point of view of the cheels who sailed the skies above Nizamuddin, the neat residential colonies offered slender pickings. The tidy borders of the handkerchief-sized lawns, the carefully trimmed stubble of foliage and the rows of cars offered little in the way of hiding space for the small animals the birds preyed upon. Of far more interest was the last stretch of road that connected the canal and the dargah, where the houses sat in straggling lines, some almost as broken down as the ruins of the nearby baoli. Here, and on the garbage-strewn banks of the canal, good hunting was to be found, especially for those with sharp eyes, patience and strong talons.
Tooth unfurled his wings like feathery sails and hitchhiked a passing current, circling his territory like a spy satellite, taking mental snapshots of all the changes that had happened groundside since he last patrolled. The ditch contained a new traffic victim—the second mongoose to run afoul of the road in recent days, its body too decomposed to be of interest, even to him. His predator’s brain registered a rat skittering into a drain, and dismissed it almost immediately. Tooth’s stomach was full of pigeon, and pigeon eggs—rat wasn’t a tempting enough second course to warrant the effort that a SD&K—stoop, dive and kill—would take. He noticed that the sparrows who had nested in a rusting automobile had been evicted; a small, feathered corpse lay on the pavement, and he could see the thin yellow splatter patterns that the eggs had made. Tooth dipped his wingtips briefly—he had no objection to eating sparrow, despite the profusion of small bones, but he and the other cheels had conferred on the falling numbers of the birds.
“Bad, very bad,” his mate, Claw, had said, quoting the old saw. “The sparrow may be small/ But when it leaves/ So will we all.”
A flashing line of movement triggered his predator’s brain, and he automatically flexed his wings in preparation for a possible SD&K. “Target: kitten,” his mind registered. “Terrain: open, but riddled with boltholes. Prey mindset: young, inexperienced, unaware. Obstacles: cars, ledges, brickpile, foliage. Kill probability: 46 percent.”
Southpaw felt rather than saw the approach of the cheel—a momentary coolness on his fur as the shadow overhead blotted out the afternoon sun—and reacted instantaneously.
“To the hedges!” he thought, sprinting, his short paws covering the distance at surprising speed. There was more than enough time, and he risked an upward look.
The cheel was coming down fast, and even at this distance, Southpaw shivered when he saw how large its talons seemed, curved like grappling hooks. The predator was terrifying, but also mesmerizing.
He didn’t realize he’d taken his eyes off the ground entirely until he slammed into an abandoned plastic bucket. Southpaw miaowed in distress as its green edge caught him hard across the stomach, knocking the wind out of him, and then he scrambled to stand up again. The hedge that had seemed just a paw’s length away loomed up in the distance, the thorny roots of the lantana grim and forbidding. The kitten tried to run but could only limp along. Fear knotted his small stomach when he realized how close the dark and rapidly growing dot spiralling out of the sky was to him. He felt the fur on the vulnerable back of his neck stand up, and he urged his paws to move faster, but they were still shaking from the collision.
“Kill probability: 87 pe cent … 89 percent … 91 percent,” Tooth was in the last arc of his dive and sure of his kill now. He refined his aim, flexing his talons as he prepared to sink them into the spot on the kitten’s neck so helpfully defined by a band of white fur. If he got it right, the neck would break in an instant and he would take off with a limp body instead of having to cope with a wriggler on the line.
The bushes rustled; a streak of muscle and fur erupted forth and rolled Southpaw over and away. Katar was on his feet before the kitten knew what had happened; with a swipe of his sheathed paw, the tom batted the brown kitten off the ground and into a pile of dried, dusty leaves near the lantana hedge.
“Kill probability: 71 percent … 24 percent … 9 percent … PULL OUT!” signalled Tooth’s brain as he attempted to pull up, rise and avoid Katar’s scything paws simultaneously. From his vantage point, Southpaw had a brief but unforgettable view of a glaring yellow eye, a confused impression of gleaming, rushing brown-and-gold wings and polished beak; Tooth executed a neat three-point-turn in mid-air and within seconds, the predator had soared back up into the sky, a shrinking dot in the distance.
Katar stared up at the sky until he was sure that the cheel wouldn’t return. Then he nudged Southpaw roughly with his head, checking to see that the kitten hadn’t broken or bruised anything serious. When Southpaw sat up, his whiskers vibrating an abject apology, Katar cuffed him, but with his claws retracted to show that this was just a token reprimand. This was the fourth time that week he’d had to smack the kitten; Southpaw and trouble had a natural affinity.
“If you’re old enough to go exploring on your own, Southpaw, you’re old enough to know that you never look up at predators,” Katar said, watching the kitten dust bits of leaves and ants out of his light brown fur, which had chocolate stripes running through it. “Where were you off to anyway? Shouldn’t you have been learning paw-washing and whisker-cleaning with Miao today?”
“Miao was busy,” said Southpaw, reflecting that this was the truth. The Siamese had been very busy looking all over the park for him after he’d run away from the day’s lessons—it wasn’t his fault, whisker-cleaning was for the little four-weekers, not for a nearly adult kitten at the ripe old age of two months. “And I wanted to see the Shuttered House. Ow! Katar, that hurts! Ow! Ow! Stoppit! Put me down!”
Katar was growling slightly as he shook the kitten back and forth, holding Southpaw by the loose folds of skin around his neck. “The Shuttered House! Haven’t we told you it’s forbidden? Didn’t Miao and I tell you time and time again not to go there? And if you were fool enough to explore forbidden territory, why were you heading off on your own?”
“Because,” said the kitten, “you said it was forbidden, so I didn’t think it
was safe to take any of the other kittens with me.”
Katar’s tail was lashing back and forth, but hearing this, he dropped the kitten back onto the ground. “You were on your own because you didn’t think it was safe to take any of the other kittens with you,” he said slowly.
“Yes, Katar,” said Southpaw meekly.
“It didn’t occur to you that if it was unsafe to take any of the other kittens with you, it might be unsafe for you to go to the Shuttered House because—you’re still a kitten yourself, you fluff-brained idiot!”
“Yes, Katar,” said Southpaw. “Um—no, Katar. Um—yes, Katar. Anything you say, Katar.”
Katar stared at the young cat suspiciously. “I mean that, Southpaw. The Shuttered House is out of bounds for very, very good reason.”
“Yes, Katar,” said Southpaw. “Umm … what are the reasons?”
Katar exhaled—a short, exasperated sound not unlike a dog’s wuff, at the other end of the spectrum from the cat snuffle used to indicate pleasure. “It’s a fair question, Katar,” said a voice from behind his ear. “I told you he’d be the first in this year’s batch to start getting curious.”
“Well, maybe you’d like to explain, Miao,” said Katar. He’d never gotten used to the venerable Siamese cat’s ability to sneak up silently behind him, and harboured an uneasy suspicion that she did it just to keep him from getting too big for his paws. Miao left almost no scent trails behind her, unlike the other cats—it was a gift of her Siamese blood.
Miao’s eyes looked deep into Southpaw’s. “Perhaps we should show rather than tell,” said the Siamese, curling her tail out gracefully. “Follow me, Southpaw, and if Katar and I tell you to do something, do it, don’t argue with us, is that understood? Have you got all the ants out of your fur? Are your paws back to normal or are they still stinging? Can you move fast? Have you done a whisker check for dogs, or other predators? Right, then, come along.”
The Wildings Page 6
