The Wildings

by Nilanjana Roy

  In one of the neighbourhoods Beraal had lived in, she had watched an apparently insignificant incident as she lazed on her owner’s balcony. The portly Bigfoot who lived downstairs was out on his morning walk, and he swung his cane at one of the local dogs, a pleasant enough fellow called Prince. Perhaps Prince was taken off guard, or perhaps he was just in a bad mood—whatever it was, he snarled at the Bigfoot and went for his ankles. He bit him gently, taking care not to harm, just giving the man a lesson.

  But the man had shouted in his rough Bigfoot tongue and muttered darkly at the dog all day, kicking the few hapless animals he found in his way on the street. And the next day, a van had drawn up. The Bigfeet who went after the dogs had a bitter, hard-edged feel to them, and the stench of fear that rose from the van was awful for the other animals to feel, as they watched their old friends from the park being driven away. “Help!” cried Prince. “Help us, they’re going to kill us!” cried the other dogs, including a sweet little golden-haired one who had been Beraal’s friend. She could smell from the Bigfeet and from the van that this was true.

  The memory of it could still make her shiver. Watching the way the Bigfeet moved around on the rooftops, Beraal wondered what the war between the ferals and the wildings would lead to.

  Her companions were silent. After the tumult of battle, the silence seemed to echo in their ears. Except for a cheep from a badly injured bird, the quiet tap-tap of the rain and the normal bustle of traffic on the canal road, the gardens were hushed in the aftermath. It seemed to Beraal that there were corpses everywhere she turned—the tiny bodies of the mice, the feathered piles of birds, dead ferals and a few luckless wildings. A cold fear touched her spine at the same time that the thought reached all of them, but Katar said it first, turning his gaze from the carnage.

  “Where is Miao?” he said. “We must find her. I don’t see her anywhere.” He had been sniffing frantically at the place where Ratsbane and the others had ambushed the Siamese. There was a deep, bloody indentation in the earth, and clumps of Miao’s black and cream fur dotted the mud. But there was no sign of the old cat who had fought so bravely.

  Then Beraal said hesitantly, her whiskers trembling from battle fatigue, “There’s a trail here.” Katar and the other cats followed her lead. Dark patches of drying blood led away from the site of the ambush. Hope rose briefly in the tom’s heart; perhaps Miao had been able to drag herself away.

  But the scents stopped abruptly at the foot of the wall; a forlorn clump of white fur stained with blood clung to a stone, and that was all. Beraal sniffed at the wall, climbing the old, slippery flagstones dexterously, ignoring her own injuries, but could pick up no scent. Katar felt his tail drop again.

  Hulo raised his battered whiskers, the blood still streaming down his front paws from open wounds. “And where is Datura? I’ve found Ratsbane’s body, but that white coward slipped away, did he?” The tomcat refused to think about Miao. That way lead to grief, and he preferred anger.

  The four searched the garden, despite their own wounds and Beraal’s fear that the Bigfeet would clump in to see what had happened, but there was no sign of either Miao or Datura. Both cats, the feral leader and the Siamese, had vanished.

  The mongoose woke with the scent of copper in her pointed nose. She sniffed the air, her beautiful eyes wide and entirely awake; Kirri always went from sleep to alertness without stopping at the frontier between the two.

  In less than a second, she was pointing her nose in the direction of the Shuttered House. Her tail was up, her claws curved. The world smelled of death, as she had feared it might when she had spoken to Southpaw that morning. Kirri was on intimate terms with both scents, but the only time Nizamuddin had smelled so strongly of butchery was when the Bigfeet had laid down poison for the rats, many years ago.

  The mongoose slid out of the gap in the pile of bricks where she had made a temporary shelter for the night, ignored the Bigfeet loitering around the lanes of the dargah, and pattered down the alleys towards the Shuttered House. Few saw her go by; Kirri was a brown-and-silver ghost who moved from shadow to shadow.

  Long before she reached the battleground, Kirri knew the story. The winds told her of the massacre of the mice and birds; the rain spoke to the mongoose of the bloodshed by the wildings and the ferals; the trails left behind by the dargah cats whispered eloquently of the hurry with which they had rushed to the aid of the Nizamuddin cats. The mongoose knew everything before she slipped through the hedges into the grounds of the Shuttered House, and yet she was unprepared for the killing fields that lay before her eyes.

  The dead creatures—the shrews, the bulbuls, the mice—didn’t tempt Kirri, though she had woken hungry. The mongoose preferred to do her own killing, and would only eat from another’s kill if she were starving. But as she surveyed the piles of tiny corpses, something in them stirred an unfamiliar shard of pity. The pity went as rapidly as it had come, but as she sniffed at the mice, and then the shrews, the sparrows, and then the bulbuls, a greater indignation began to swell in the mind of the predator. Kirri lived frugally, her love of fresh kills often making the gaps between meals longer than most animals would have been able to stand, and she couldn’t abide waste.

  The killer who had done this was profligate, careless in his slaughter. The mongoose sat up on her back paws, her tail curved to one side, and glared at the dead. The scent of blood seemed bitter and rank in her flared nostrils. And as Beraal had, she watched the Bigfeet stirring on their roofs. In her experience, Bigfeet tended to treat one animal like another. They might not draw distinctions between the combatants and the innocent.

  Kirri chittered to herself in exasperation. At her feet, a diminutive brown head popped up. “He’s gone, hasn’t he?” said a brown mouse. “Are you speaking to me?” The mongoose was taken aback. She wondered whether to attack the mouse, but it didn’t seem worth her while. She rarely killed something that small, unless she was famished. Jethro kept well out of range, making sure that he could duck behind the roots of the spiny bistendu bushes. “It seemed to me that you were looking for Datura, Madame Mongoose,” he said. “Why else would you be here, sniffing through the corpses on this bloody morning? Forgive me if I spoke out of turn.”

  “Datura,” said Kirri thoughtfully. “The kitten mentioned him too. That would be the leader of the ferals?”

  “Yes,” said the mouse. “He did this.”

  Kirri drew in her breath, looking around at the carnage. “All of this?” she said.

  “All of this,” said the mouse bitterly. “Except at the end, other cats had died. His precious friends from the Shuttered House had died. The Siamese—you wouldn’t know her—had been unfairly set upon by his acolytes; how she fought, but there were too many for her. But he survived, didn’t he? Sneaking off and hiding in the baoli the moment his side started to lose.”

  The mongoose was staring at the mouse. Her eyes were as red as burning coals.

  The mouse grew uncomfortable, his nose twitching rapidly.

  “Not that it’s any of your concern,” he said, preparing to dive back into his hole. “It was a terrible war, though.”

  “You interest me,” said Kirri said. “Did you say the Siamese? An elderly cat, but a fine hunter? With vivid blue eyes, creamy fur, a black tail, and a black patch on her face?”

  “Yes,” said Jethro, startled. “It was terrible, the way they set upon her. They gave her no room to defend herself. They fought the way dogs do, in a pack, not like cats. They fought the way the worst rats do.”

  The mongoose turned to go, her short brown and silver fur quivering, her red eyes alight with something the mouse didn’t quite understand.

  “What are you going to do?” asked the mouse.

  “Dance,” said the mongoose as she moved purposefully towards the baoli.

  ON THE HIGH, slippery stone where Miao had stood just the night before, Datura lay with his paws spread out, liking the feeling of the wet quartzite on his fur. The white cat wasn’t thi
nking of his companions—Ratsbane and Aconite, and the other ferals who had died or fled. Instead, he was thinking with some bitterness of the years he had spent in the Shuttered House, years he had thought of as rich and satisfying ones.

  But what he’d had was nothing compared to this—a world with so much prey in it, and one that was full of small pleasures like walking on wet grass and letting it tickle one’s paw pads. Nor had he known the pleasure of being able to kill animal after animal, instead of having to ration out one kill for months on end, waiting for the next unlucky creature to stray into the Shuttered House.

  Datura had decided when he was just a kitten that the world had two kinds of creatures in it: the weak and the strong. He knew which kind he was. He had thought Ratsbane was strong, but Ratsbane was dead. The dead were, by definition, weak.

  Datura had small doubt that he could continue to evade the cats of Nizamuddin. The tiger had terrified him, and the white cat had run until he reached the muddy path to the baoli. A glance at the panicked ferals told him that the tide had turned. He watched the ferals scatter, and then before the wildings could start hunting for him, Datura padded away down the road. The baoli was deserted; it seemed like a good retreat, and he settled in on the ancient steps, thinking about the wildings.

  The only one he had feared a little had been the cat with the uncomfortably clear gaze—the Siamese whose blue eyes had looked so gravely at him that the feral felt she was staring into the depths of his mind. And she was dead, her blood staining the wild marigolds, killed by Ratsbane and his creatures. There was nothing else to fear.

  Idly, he wondered if he should kill the other cats he’d seen. Datura had already marked Katar down as prey. The tom would put up a fight, but it would be a fair one. The white cat’s yellow eye had a smirk in it: to him, the only kind of fight worth getting into was the kind you won.

  If there had been so much prey in the small space of the Shuttered House’s gardens, how much prey would there be in Nizamuddin? The white cat felt his muscles relaxing at the thought of the consternation the wildings would feel when one by one, their numbers were thinned by an unseen enemy. He would slip in and out of their ranks, until he slipped in and out of their nightmares.

  Datura yawned and stretched, wondering if he should go back and snack on one of the dead mice, or if it might be fun to make a fresh set of kills while Nizamuddin was still swirling in fear. He was about to take a quick cat-nap before he decided, when something made his whiskers prickle.

  Datura turned his head to the right. A neat creature, half his size, sat quietly on the stone tier just below, observing him openly. Her brown-and-silver head was freshly combed, and her claws were sheathed.

  The cat’s yellow eye gleamed, and he felt his whiskers tingle at the prospect of a good kill.

  “Greetings to you, meat,” he said, rising, his tail at a jaunty angle.

  The creature made no response. Her eyes flashed red for a second, but otherwise she stayed where she was.

  “Would you like to run, or shall we fight?” he asked.

  There was still no reply, but now the mongoose began to dance, moving from one paw to another.

  “You haven’t asked my name,” she said, as she weaved first slowly, then rapidly, back and forth.

  The cat sneered, his whiskers radiating their disgust.

  “I never ask the name of my meat,” he said, stepping onto the stone where his intended prey danced. Datura meant to end this quickly and take his nap, after all.

  Kirri moved so fast he didn’t see the strike until her teeth had ripped across his right paw, his neck and his open throat.

  “Kirri,” she said. “They call me Kirri. You should always know the name of your killer, Datura.”

  Blood poured out of his wounds as the white cat growled in anger, but the anger was laced with fear. He had struck back, but Kirri had danced so deftly out of the way that his blow went wide. Datura licked rapidly at his neck, trying to staunch the blood, realizing that she had sliced a key vein.

  “You can dance, meat,” he said. “But can you fight?”

  The cat lunged forward, his teeth ready to flay Kirri alive. But the mongoose waited till the last second and then flattened herself; Datura’s throat was exposed to her sharp teeth and the cat screamed as she bit deep. He twisted around; with his hind legs, he raked at the mongoose, and had the satisfaction of seeing a light line of drops of blood bedew her tail.

  Kirri didn’t seem to notice. She slid out from under him, watching the blood drip down from his throat to pool and gather on the stone. Datura growled and leapt at her again.

  “You can fight, Datura,” she said. “But you can’t dance.”

  The mongoose disappeared from his view, and when he turned his head to see where she’d gone, Datura found his eyes clouding over. He staggered a little and shook his head to clear it. Instinct told the white cat the mongoose had to be behind him. He whirled around. She wasn’t there.

  The pain in his left paw when Kirri crunched it into two was unbelievable. Datura howled even as he tried to slam into the mongoose, intending to wedge her between his body and the stone. But he slipped on the algae that covered the stone steps, and had to scrabble so as not to go over the edge.

  “Try saying my name,” said the mongoose as she sunk her teeth into his right paw. “Kirri. It’s not so hard.”

  Datura howled.

  The mongoose watched him, her red eyes aflame. She raised herself high on her back paws and danced to the right of the wounded cat, who was trying to limp up to the next stone.

  “The right paw was for the mice,” she said. “The left paw was for the birds.”

  “Stop,” he said, his whiskers shivering with pain. “Stop it, meat. Wait till I get my teeth into your stinking hide.”

  His yellow eye flared, but his blue eye was watering with the hurt. Datura could barely see ahead of him; he didn’t know it, but he was bleeding out from the deep puncture wounds the mongoose had left in his throat. He snarled, and tried for the last time to take a swing at the small predator. If he could only get closer, he could bite off her head. He could bite that snout in two, if he could only see her. Where had she gone?

  When Kirri’s teeth sank into his throat, Datura screamed and rolled onto his back. “That was for the Siamese,” she said. “She was a better fighter than you, Datura. She fought for the little ones you slaughtered so rashly. And she gave me the honour of my name.”

  The cat would have scrabbled up again, but his front paws were useless, and the mongoose was sending unbearable pain shooting up his spine as she ruthlessly savaged his back paws. Datura mewed in fear—he was looking up at the sky, away from the baoli, away from the stone. It arced over him, endless and menacing. “Please,” he cried to the mongoose. “Please, I’m afraid—the sky—take it away. Kirri—please.”

  The red died out of the mongoose’s eyes, leaving them brown and a little sad. She moved up to the next stone, her eyes never leaving Datura’s; she saw that the fear was genuine. Almost gently, she leaned over the white cat, her brown and silver fur tangling with his bloody white fur, and then she bit his throat out.

  “That is more mercy,” she said to her dead opponent, “than you showed any of them.” Kirri dropped down onto all four paws, and slid out of the baoli, a brown-and-silver shadow. She didn’t look back, nor did she clean the blood off her sleek muzzle. The rain would wash it off, in time.

  Once, Miao had fallen into a river, and as she sank, all the familiar sounds of the world were cut off and reduced to faint, faraway murmurs as the blood rumbled in her long ears. As the Siamese dragged herself painfully towards the wall, that was how she felt. The sounds of the battle raging between the wildings and the ferals seemed to come from a long distance away, their cries much softer than the pounding in her ears.

  Ratsbane and his friends had taken their time; as she lay there helpless against so many, she had been reminded of dogs worrying a mouse or a kitten. Then Miao had closed her mi
nd to the pain and let her eyes wander elsewhere. She felt what they did to her, but she placed the pain into a small corner of her mind, the way Tooth’s mother, Stoop, had taught her to do many years ago.

  Stoop had been a young, proud cheel then; Miao had been a young, proud queen. “Fold up the pain until it’s the size of a fledgling, and then the size of a fledgling’s claw,” Stoop had told her the day the cheel had misjudged a spectacular dive and ripped off one of her own talons. It was good advice, Miao found, until the pain rose beyond a certain point. The Siamese had lost consciousness, sinking so deep into stasis that Ratsbane had assumed she was dead.

  It took her a long while to get across the dried leaves and twigs that littered the ground. The Siamese stopped only when she thought she might attract the attention of one of the ferals. But she was lucky; Ratsbane had chosen a spot a little further away from the battle to stage his ambush, and the way to the wall was clear. Miao drifted in and out of states of pain and weakness as she made her slow way up to the wall. Her back paws were damaged; one was broken, the other crushed. From the pain, the Siamese could tell that her spine had taken a beating. But she kept going.

  She was at the wall when the Sender shimmered into view with the tiger, and exhausted though she was, Miao felt herself react with happiness—if she had still had whiskers, she would have raised them in salute. It seemed to her that the orange kitten turned and caught her eye, and when she saw Mara move away from the tiger, she knew that she was right.

  “No,” she whispered, hoping the Sender would hear it. “Stay with the tiger. The wildings need you more than I do, Mara—yes, I know your name, we all know who you are even though we’ve never met. Stay there. Do your job.”

  The Sender hesitated, and then Ozzy roared again. Mara stayed by his side, but when she could, she turned her serious little face towards Miao again. “Beraal told me all about you,” she said directly to the Siamese, cutting out the other cats from the conversation. “I can’t talk much—bringing and holding the tiger here drains all my energy—but can’t I help you? Can’t the other cats come to you, Miao?”