The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  ‘You have to imagine this,’ began the Mau. ‘Row upon row of cages under the lights…’

  Bustle and chatter. Human beings trudging down the narrow aisles, to view Siamese kittens with legs like little curved bone ornaments; big Maine Coon veterans noisily demanding food, mates, freedom; the exotic Spangles with their shy jungly eyes.

  ‘We sat. Rags and I, in our cages on opposite sides of the aisle, trying to talk without saying anything as we waited our separate turns at the show bench. But that call never came, because, in the thick of it, with the show at its height and two thousand human beings packed into the hall, our cage doors were opened!’ Down they jumped, those two – as the Mau put it, ‘like the First Cats from the Mother’s eye—’ and scampered between the milling human feet, through overpowering smells of sweat and dried food, past the concession stalls, past the show bench itself, to the doors – to find themselves in the huge and inhospitable streets of the city.

  ‘A human let you out?’ Tag asked.

  ‘No!’ said the Mau. ‘No! It was a cat who let us out.’

  ‘He knew how to open cages,’ Ragnar added, ‘perhaps simply by looking at them. I do not know. He was a very clever cat.’

  An uncomfortable story, which was trying to tell him something else. From a haunted half sleep, Tag struggled to comprehend. Then suddenly he was wide awake, and it was morning in Tintagel Court, and the extent of his error was made clear to him.

  Bloodlines of great antiquity.

  Two cats of impeccable pedigree abroad in an uncaring world.

  An animal who ‘seemed to be able to open cages just by looking at them’!

  It was the Majicou who had released Ragnar and the Mau. They were the King and the Queen. Tag had come to the wrong Tintagel only to find – against all the odds – the right cats.

  But now he had lost them again.

  *

  Afternoon at Tintagel Court. The ferals lay about, stunned with hunger, boredom, self-disgust. Bins had been inspected, territory mapped. Disputes had been settled – flattened ears, a quick pounce, a flash of razors in the morning light! What was there left to do until dark? Into the afternoon the smell of the river spoke like a voice. ‘Low tide – mud and stones. High tide – water and mud. Leave here now,’ it whispered. ‘Upriver – fields and trees. Downriver – the sea. Leave here now.’

  All day there had been a bird high in the sky above the court; but if it was a magpie, it never came down. No message from Majicou there. The fox, as good as its word, had never returned.

  There was still some daylight left. Tag had a last look around the silent courtyard.

  Then he set off to remedy his mistake.

  5

  Cy for Cypher

  The rat stops when the eyes of the cat shine.

  – MADAGASCAN PROVERB

  Guilt urged him on.

  Four o’clock: sleet driving across the gray, wind-scalloped river, dull gray light falling matter-of-factly on the tidal mud to reveal nests of blackened twigs, rusty cans, broken umbrellas. Bits of sodden newspaper blew across the little dull strip of grass in front of All Hallows Church. All Hallows was Tag’s last bet for the day. Two royal cats, lost and running blind, might easily choose it as a place to hide.

  It was colder inside than out; the air in there was still and old. Tag sniffed up and down the rows of wooden pews. Polish and dust. A chilly staircase spiraled up inside the tower. Cobwebs obscured the little slit windows in thick tom layers, like silk left to rot. He searched the empty belfry, with its sagging wooden louvers.

  Nothing.

  All Hallows had two smells he recognized – mice, stale and lively at the same time; pigeons merely stale – and a third he didn’t.

  It wasn’t in the pews. It wasn’t in the belfry. It came and went, rank and vigorous, a river smell. Mud and musk and something else, Tag couldn’t tell what. He forgot the King and Queen again the moment he smelled it. It made his nose itch. It made things itch deep inside him. He was excited. Down from the tower he came, back into the body of the church. Glimmers of warm brass. Red berries like drops of blood in the calm light. Human voices, quietly echoing: two or three women, arranging holly and yew for the Christmas services. Coming and going beneath the tall east window – its lozengy colors muted by the wet light passing through it – they seemed less dull than tranquil, less self-obsessed than simply happy to be where they were. He had never thought of human beings that way before. It soon passed.

  Toward the front of the church was a tall, hollow boxlike structure capped with a carved wooden bird – all hooked beak and varnished talons – the spread wings of which supported a book. His dulls had owned books. ‘Don’t climb on the books, Tag. Don’t sit on that book!’ Tag jumped up and stood on the bird’s back. Light poured down on him so that his fur was like ice. And as he gazed out along the rows of shiny brass plaques and leaded side windows, he heard one of the women say in a quiet voice, ‘Look! There in the pulpit! On the lectern! Isn’t he beautiful?’

  At the precise moment the women caught sight of Tag, Tag caught sight of the owner of the smell. It was scuttling busily down the aisle away from him toward the back of the church. If you counted its naked scaly tail – which he did – it was nearly half Tag’s length. Its coat, rank and brown, seemed to have been slicked down in spikes with engine oil or worse. Its eyes, set wide on a sleek pointed head, glittered like black beads. As it ran it kept close to the edge of the aisle to gain cover from the shadow of the pews. Once or twice it stopped and rose boldly on its hind legs to have a look back at the women. It was full of cheery malice and intelligence. Its feet were hands.

  It was a rat.

  ‘Waugh!’ said Tag loudly to the women. ‘See that?’ he warned them. ‘My rat!’

  And he threw himself off the pulpit and into the air.

  It was a twelve-ounce brown rat, full grown and not afraid of much. It lacked agility, as adult brown rats do, but it had plenty of gall, and what it lacked in speed it could make up for in cunning. It watched Tag hit the floor, calmly took a second or so to assess him – big but young, never caught a rat before – and, at the last moment, leapt onto the back of the nearest pew. Tag shot past, braking heavily. By the time he had changed direction, the rat was scampering away along the back of the pew. Suddenly, it jumped for the back of the next pew forward and then, with great aplomb, to the one forward of that. It was making straight for the front of the church and the flower women, who, their mouths already open in surprise, began to shriek. Tag climbed gingerly up onto the back of the first pew to give chase. The wood was shiny and rounded. He slipped off again immediately.

  ‘Come on, shipmate!’ urged the rat. It halted two or three pews ahead of him and deftly smoothed its whiskers. ‘Call yourself a cat?’ it asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tag.

  ‘A cat lies in ambush. It’s your dog that chases. Where’s your skills? Where’s your training?

  ‘Shipmate, where’s your trade?’

  Tag was furious. Too late, he understood that if he had simply crept down the aisle to the front pew and waited…

  By the time he got there, the rat had made another cool leap, landing this time on the coat collar of one of the women. She cried out in disgust and battered at it with her hands. The rat was amused. ‘Pardon me, ma’am, I’m sure!’ it said. ‘But we’re none of us here for long, are we?’ and jumped for the lectern Tag had so recently vacated. The woman staggered backward. As a result, the rat misjudged its spring and fell with a despairing squeak headfirst into the side of the pulpit. From there it cartwheeled, short arms and legs outstretched, to the cold church floor, where it lay on its back for a second, unable to think. The women began to stamp up and down on it. Tag arrived half a second later and snatched it up from under their feet.

  ‘Mine!’

  ‘Don’t kill me!’ gasped the rat. ‘I come with news, passed on to me, rat by rat along the river. Now tell me: Is it sensible to eat the messenger before you get
the message?’

  Tag sneered.

  ‘But it’s true!’ the rat insisted, its harsh voice full of desperation. ‘I was to look for a silver cat. I was to tell it this: the King and Queen! You wasn’t to meet them at Tintagel. You was to find them and take them to Tintagel. That’s how it was passed on to me! That’s what the black cat said!’

  Too late, thought Tag. ‘Eat you,’ he promised indistinctly around the rat, and shook it as hard as he could.

  ‘Ignore me then, shipmate,’ groaned the rat, ‘but I ain’t done yet.’

  It twisted in Tag’s jaws, bared its great curved yellow teeth, and bit off some of his left ear.

  ‘Waugh!’ said Tag.

  He hissed at the women in case any of them tried to take the rat. ‘Mngau,’ he added. ‘You see? Now I’ve been bitten! That was your fault!’ They stared at him, then anxiously at one another. A rat is bad enough, they seemed to be thinking in their slow human way, but now this! ‘Nguaraa,’ said Tag, in an attempt to reassure them. He turned and left All Hallows.

  Outside it was blowing rain, dark skies over the river. When Tag looked back at the big east window of the church, it was black and unwelcoming. There was a thread of peachy-green light to the west, with the Fantastic Bridge hung across it like a safety net. Tag ran round the graveyard, the rat moving more and more feebly in his jaws. He was full of excitement but unsure how to proceed. No one had ever taught him how to eat a rat. Eventually he laid it down in the shadow of a gravestone across which some long-ago sculptor had fashioned a skein of ivy.

  ‘Don’t eat me, shipmate,’ said the rat ‘Just let me rest awhile, here on the land.’ Its voice grew fainter. Afoul breath of the river came up from it. ‘I’ve had a full life,’ it said, ‘but I was never at the Ivory Coast.’

  It bared its teeth a last time.

  ‘You’ll get no luck from eating me,’ it promised. And even as it died, ‘Set your tiller west by sou’west, shipmate. The clouds is gathering. Tintagel, straight as the black-backed gull above the waves! Tintagel, in time for the equinox!’

  Tag stood up tall and straight, facing the north wind. He planted his front legs firmly and extended his haunches. His ear hurt. The side of his face was stiff with blood. But he was his own cat, and he had caught a rat, and the wind rippled the pewter fur along his powerful body so that in the dying light he looked like a real cat at last, not someone who had once passed up the chance of a live house mouse because he preferred a toy made of felt.

  In the shadow of All Hallows, he ate the rat.

  Mine! he thought.

  Everything went wrong after that.

  *

  Almost immediately, he began to feel unwell.

  It wasn’t so much the ear – though as the day’s excitement wore off, that became an ache, a throb, a bag of pain balanced on the left side of his face. It was the dizziness. Winter, and he was too hot in his fur! His head ached. His left eye blinked of its own accord. To make things worse, the Caribbean Road was all confusion at that time of day. It was too dark. It was too brightly lit. It was all traffic. It was all legs. Tag wove his way at random between them, thirsty and light-headed, looking up now and then to ask, ‘Have you seen two cats?’ And to add, ‘I mean, at least listen!’

  In this condition, he came to a place where the road broadened. Red and green lights ushered side roads in. Everything stank of rubber and chemicals, and the tarmac was filmed with black grease. They had been forced to separate the cars from one another, like wild animals, with metal barriers. Nobody with any sense would try to walk across that road. Even human beings used the reeking underpass. Down there you were safe; up here it was inimical to life. Tag stood swaying at the curb for a moment, sucked gently sideways by the airstream of a passing cab.

  He looked out across the road.

  A kitten was playing there among the traffic.

  She was tabby and longhaired, and she had found a desiccated brown leaf. As the traffic roared past, displaced air propelled the leaf gaily up into the air. Exhilarated as much by the life in herself as by the dance of the leaf, she dashed and darted. The leaf fluttered shyly. Too late! She reared up on her short, comically trousered back legs and sprang at it with velvet paws. Whack! Whack! What now? She would catch it gracefully, like this, above her own head. But it evaded her suddenly and fluttered off. The cars flashed past her. She had no fear in that place. Tag was astonished. She had no fear at all.

  He looked around. ‘Isn’t somebody going to do something?’

  Human legs, rushing along in the rain without a generous thought.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Tag.

  His own legs had walked him out into the traffic. The noise was unbearable. Rainbow plumes of dirt and spray engulfed him. Tires roared and hissed in his face. No one wanted to acknowledge him. No one was going to admit that a cat had walked out in front of them in the dark at half past five on a winter evening. No one tried to stop, though once or twice Tag saw a face pale with guilt behind a streaming windshield, and a car missed him by an inch. Homs blared, but not at Tag. They were only warning one another, ‘Don’t slow down! Don’t change direction! Don’t slow down in front of me!’

  Tag closed his eyes. Kill me, then, he thought.

  The kitten looked up. ‘Hello!’ she said delightedly.

  She rushed upon the leaf, batted it gently toward him, then backed away and sat down suddenly in the same movement. He saw with some surprise that it wasn’t a leaf at all, but a small brown butterfly with bright blue tips to its black-speckled wings! Where could she have found that in winter! Even as Tag considered this, the butterfly – so fragile as to be invincible – was swept up by the thundering slipstreams, and the last he saw of it was a strange, random, delicate flutter high in the air above the road.

  ‘Want to play?’ said the tabby. ‘Let’s play now!’

  Tag picked her up the way her mother had, and, turning himself painfully around, set out on the long slow journey back. This time the cars did pull to a halt, their open-mouthed occupants watching as a large silver cat – bedraggled, determined, hauling its kitten by the scruff of the neck – calmly negotiated the mayhem all around them. The tabby gave Tag no help. It hung down passively, bright-eyed and uncontrite, its bulk compelling him to adopt an awkward outswinging stride. Almost at the other side, he stopped to regard with satisfaction the confusion he had caused. Then, shifting his grip on the back of the kitten’s neck, he marched the last few steps to the curb.

  There he dropped his burden thankfully, crouched down, stretched out his neck, and in two or three convulsive heaves threw up the contents of his stomach.

  *

  A lot of the rat had come back up. Not all of it by any means, but quite a lot. Tag thought that perhaps he shouldn’t have eaten the fur. That was the mistake, he thought, to eat the fur. He thought, I didn’t like the eyes much, either. The rat’s image was before him. A memory of its beady intelligent eyes caused him to heave dryly a couple of times. ‘You certainly got your own back,’ he congratulated it. When he was able to look up again, he saw the tabby making her way back into the road to be killed.

  ‘Were you born yesterday?’ demanded Tag, dragging her onto the pavement again.

  She surveyed him with delight. ‘Maybe!’ she said. ‘Why do you say that?’ She said, ‘You’re beautiful!’

  She turned around suddenly, dropped her front end to the ground, presented her bottom to him, and peered at him upside down.

  Tag stared at her blankly.

  When she faced him again he realized she wasn’t a kitten at all, only a very small, sturdy, short-coupled tabby cat with white socks on each stubby front foot. Symmetrical black marks curled like flames all down her ribby sides. Her face was square. A white patch under the chin gave her a pink nose and made her head look as if it was always tilted a little to one side, listening for a voice no one else could hear. Her eyes were a tawny yellow. She was all eyes. They were direct; they were full of laughter. But there was someth
ing strange in them too. To begin with. Tag thought it was something missing. Then he wondered if it might in fact be something extra – another color, one he couldn’t quite see, some fleck in the bright tapestry of the iris.

  ‘My name’s Cy,’ she said. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘I’m Tag.’

  She looked disappointed. ‘You’re not,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not?’

  She said, ‘You’re not! I won’t have you called that!’

  A piece of silver foil bowled past them along the pavement. Without a thought, the tabby went racing after it. ‘No,’ she decided, returning to drop it at his feet. ‘You’re this. You’re fast, you’re flash, you’re Quicksilver! Quick, Silver, you’re no gray old Tag! You’re an air cat, Ace, all Hearts on Fire, all quick-step soldier and blue-sky bound!’ She was out of breath. ‘See?’ she added.

  Tag gave up. Being sick had made him feel better, but not for long. He crouched dully on the curb. His head hurt again, and he was very thirsty. Stationary objects approached and withdrew disconcertingly as he tried to focus on them. One moment he felt as if he were baking in his own skin, the next he was shivering helplessly. He thought, I’ve got to get something to drink.

  ‘Plenty of water in the river,’ said the tabby.

  Tag glared at her.

  ‘Did I speak?’ he said. ‘Look, I haven’t got time for you. I’m poisoned. I’ve lost the King and the Queen. And I can’t think why the Majicou has to send me a message in my food.’ He stared at the tabby. ‘Who is Majicou anyway? Whose side is he on?’

  ‘Kings and queens, jumping beans: nothing’s ever what it seems,’ said the tabby, cryptically, and began to chase her tail. After a while she stopped, dizzy, and sat down.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she declared.

  ‘Good. I’m off.’

  ‘I’ll come too.’

  ‘Do what you like,’ Tag said. ‘But next time you go in the road, stay there.’