The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  Instead of answering, Majicou stared quietly up at the gutted and blackened shell. ‘Hardraw Wharf!’ he mused. ‘I knew this place many years ago as Hardraw Wharf! The fastest three-masters in the world tied up here, and Norway rats – black rats, with eyes like opals – poured ashore from the straw-packed porcelain in their holds. The sweetest cat I ever knew caught Norway rats to order here, for fish heads in a bowl!’ He laughed. ‘The warehousemen had named her Blue—’

  ‘I caught a rat once,’ said Tag. ‘It was brown.’

  He thought.

  ‘Why did you send me a message by rat?’

  ‘What else was I to do? I tried to speak to you through dreams, but he had touched you, and you were too frightened and miserable to listen. Quick, Tag. In we go!’

  Majicou had gained the far pavement, jumped neatly across a shallow puddle, and was now measuring the distance to the very window Tag had used to gain entrance earlier that evening.

  ‘I’m not going in there again!’

  But Majicou had already disappeared.

  ‘You must, Tag,’ came his muffled but urgent reply. ‘You must!’

  Inside it was still warm.

  *

  A small stream swirled along the middle of the corridor, submerging the firemen’s hoses. These ran in a sheaf for a few yards from the main entrance, then branched off, one to each burned-down door. There were distant-sounding thuds and shouts. From the lamps of the working firemen a fitful yellow glow leaked back into the corridor, augmented every so often by flames as the fire flared up again. By this light, Tag saw that the stairs at each end of the corridor were choked with seared brick and shattered roof tile, supported on rafts of broken wooden beams. Nevertheless Majicou stood waiting at the bottom of the right-hand stairwell.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We go up.’

  ‘But the stairs are blocked!’

  ‘Not to us. Tag.’ A tiny twist of firelight winked in Majicou’s eye. ‘We’re too determined. Look!’

  At one side of the stairwell the rubble was less densely packed than it seemed. Various items – part of a bed frame, an enormous wooden pulley block tangled in hemp rope, a broken desk from an upper office – were wedged at odd angles. About a foot off the ground, Majicou had found an irregular hole big enough to admit a cat. Water trickled from it down the bricks, then made off, floury with suspended ash, to join the main stream in the corridor.

  ‘Come on, Tag!’

  Heat throbbed in the rubble. There was a sour, dusty smell. Tag never put a foot to the stairs. Instead he found himself squeezing his way through something that was less a tunnel than a thousand separate cramped spaces linked by his own progress. His head and shoulders squirmed in one direction around half a brick; his body above the pelvis was facing in another to negotiate a length of ten-inch earthenware pipe; meanwhile, his rear legs scrabbled for traction on a loose surface he had already passed and forgotten. Every time the rubble shifted or creaked he felt an intense rush of fear and anger. His coat was filthy again. His eyes were full of dust. The heat and effort had made him thirsty, and the only clue to his next move was the scent of the old cat on the rubble just ahead.

  ‘Why are you making me do this?’ he called.

  No answer.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later he pulled himself out of the rubble and looked around.

  It had once been a first-floor corridor. Most of it had fallen away, along with all the inner walls and the remaining two floors. He was marooned on a short, buckled gallery listing over a pit of smoking rubble. Above, through skeletal rafters, he could see the moon.

  ‘Very clever,’ he said. ‘Now what?’

  Majicou looked down into the pit. ‘Time is on no one’s side,’ he remarked to himself. Then he said, ‘Tag, how did you find your way here?’

  ‘I followed you.’

  ‘So, what is a highway?’

  ‘How would I know?’ said Tag.

  ‘Then let me show you.’

  Without so much as a second glance over the edge, Majicou jumped off.

  Tag looked down.

  Nothing.

  ‘Majicou?’

  Smoke. Dark. Heat.

  ‘Old cat?’

  No answer.

  Then something – a sound perhaps, or a smell or a movement in the corner of his eye – made Tag look outward into the space above the pit. The moonlit air trembled with heat. There was Majicou. Behind him Tag could see the distorted image of the far wall with its lampblacked brick, aimless cracks, and empty windows. He stood with his bushy tail curled back over his body in a flat S, like a cat on an Oriental vase. At first, he seemed to be floating perhaps five or six feet out from the shattered edge of the gallery. But when Tag looked more carefully, he saw under the old cat’s feet a faint, smoky surface like tinted glass.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’ said Tag.

  ‘Will you come?’

  Tag looked down into the pit. He looked across at Majicou.

  ‘It’s a long way,’ admitted Majicou.

  Tag remembered his lost home. A kitten on a windowsill in the rain.

  ‘I’ve come a long way already.’

  He gathered his powerful gray back legs under him and leapt out into whatever would happen.

  *

  ‘I brought you here,’ said Majicou, ‘because this highway is already fading. It isn’t old enough to have any real memory of itself. Situated like this it is unlikely to be found again. We will probably be the last animals to use it.’ He sighed. ‘It was a pleasant route, less a highway than a path, used by the Hardraw Wharf cats to get to and from a flat roof overlooking the river. The roof vanished when the original wooden building was rebuilt with brick. Until then, the sun had warmed it daily for a hundred years, a little while after dawn and before sunset. There the cats would lie bathed in light, watching the ships pass up and down the river. Later wharf cats used it for other day-to-day journeys. For the most part they were gentle animals. Oh, they were merciless with a rat—’

  ‘Me too,’ said Tag.

  ‘—and they would fight their eyes out over a queen. And they often died here, of one disease or another. But they were tranquil animals, and this is their tranquil little highway. Do you see?’

  ‘No,’ said Tag.

  He had taken the precaution of closing his eyes when he jumped. Now, calmed by Majicou’s voice, he opened them. He found himself neither falling, as he had half expected, into a cinder pit nor hanging unsupported in the middle of the air.

  Instead, he was standing in a narrow passage with oaken walls and floors age-bleached and knocked about by use. Sometimes the light within it shifted and changed so quickly that it couldn’t properly be described as one corridor at all. Perhaps it was the same place seen at different times, the same place flickering through its rapidly fading memories of itself. It was spring and summer all at once. It was winter sun. It was rose-gray with dawn – he heard pigeons flap up suddenly outside – then flecked with the light of an early autumn evening. A great bar of noon sun entered it at a steep angle through a single unglazed window, to plunge down through drifting motes of dust. Its air was full of strong fascinating smells, among which Tag could name tea, straw, mice, salty tidal mud – and cats…

  A hundred cats, a thousand of them!

  As he stood there, captivated, he had a sense of all those cats moving past him. Old cats sleepily ambling, young cats rushing and stalking, kittens tumbling and gawping, all hurrying toward something they wanted or needed, something not very far away, something delightful or healing or exciting –

  ‘The cats!’ whispered Tag. ‘Oh, the wonderful cats!’

  He thought of his travels with Sealink. He thought of the railway bank, of Mousebreath and Cy and their walk through the drifting dawn and how the day had opened up around them all like a flower.

  He stared at Majicou. He heard himself say, ‘A cat would answer you this: A highway is the cats that have traveled it.�
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  ‘Even so,’ said Majicou. He laughed gently. ‘Even so, little cat.’

  ‘I want to see the roof and the old ships passing up and down!’

  ‘Then walk.’

  So that was how Tag, a cat embarking on his very first life, was enabled by Majicou, a cat at the end of his last, to sun himself for a little while above quite another river, in quite another city to the one he knew. This river was fishy mud, masted ships creaking, the reek of fresh tar and sewage, gangplanks teetering on black stilts awry across the shingle. This city was barely more than a country town – meadows and creeks, a horizontal scatter of buildings stretching away to the peach and gold sky behind the dome of a distant cathedral. It was church bells. It was a quiet ripple on the water at sunset. There! Two men in tricorn hats, rowing a boat to catch the rising tide.

  They sculled slowly east and north across the golden water. Their oars stirred its surface into gentle concentric circles, soft, sucking whirlpools, eddies that broke into eddies and then into eddies of eddies.

  As he watched, the late sunshine fell mercifully on Tag’s fur, hypnotizing him, warming his aching muscles and tired limbs, penetrating deeper and deeper until it found an answering glow somewhere so deep inside him that it might have been his soul, entangled with the soul of the day and the bells and the endless water-eddies and the quiet spires of the city. He sat up with his chin high and his eyes barely open, relaxed but straight, purring as loud as he could; and he felt as though he were radiating a light of his own. The sun had touched him, and for a moment he felt as if he had become a beacon of silver that announced to passing sailors ‘Tag. Tag. Tag.’

  Suddenly, there was a cry from the water. The oars were shipped, the rowing boat slowed. The man in its stem twisted around sharply to scan the wharves, his black eyes piercing and cold. For a moment they seemed to meet Tag’s eyes. They narrowed against the light, narrowed further as he struggled to understand something. Then his gaze went blank and he turned away again, as if he had seen nothing after all.

  Slowly, Tag came back to himself.

  ‘Twenty years or a hundred,’ Majicou was explaining, ‘they rarely last long. The little paths like this shift and fade, happy or sad, useful or not. While they remain, though, they are tributaries. They serve the wild roads, which have lasted not a hundred, not a hundred thousand, but millions of years. They are the oldest things in the world. Tag, and the most dangerous. They channel the earth’s own power, and cats have used that power to travel since time began. We were here long before the earliest men. When they stumbled across our roads, they retained just enough sense of themselves as wild things in the world to recognize what they saw, but not enough to use it. They built great markers at each locus – Stonehenge, Avebury, Glastonbury, and the ancient fort at Tintagel. They could never travel the wild roads as we do; but their oldest track follows the wildest of them all, the Great Highway that cuts across the northern chalk, the track the first cats made.

  ‘The Alchemist has spent three hundred years looking for the key to the highway. He is close, Tag – so close! As soon as he is able to transform himself—’ Suddenly, he stopped. ‘Tag,’ he said, ‘do you hear that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That voice! That cat – !’

  ‘I hear nothing.’

  Majicou turned, his haunches down, one forepaw raised. He sniffed the air. ‘Something I smell,’ he said to himself. ‘What does this mean? I don’t understand this.’ He cocked his head to listen. His one eye glittered angrily; he turned and turned again until he had faced all the cardinal points but one.

  ‘Quick, Tag!’ he cried. ‘Quick! Or we’re damned!’

  *

  In a hundred yards, the highway faded around them. It had led them like a kind old ghost out of Hardraw Wharf, along a dreamy sunlit cobbled alley, and back into the moonlit streets Tag knew – a last gift of cats to cats. Tag looked back.

  ‘Good-bye,’ he whispered.

  ‘No time for that!’ the old cat said. ‘Somewhere here – Yes!’

  He darted underneath a parked car.

  Without thinking, Tag followed.

  Somewhere between the curb and the car, between the wheels and the road, in the reek of oil and rubber, the ordinary world was whirled away. He was on the highway again. It was neither day nor night. It was uniformly gray. There was no horizon. The wind howled at him from all directions at once, flinging powdered ice in his eyes. He screwed them tight shut. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘I won’t do this!’ He was a kitten again. He was before the pet shop, he was before ‘Tag,’ he was three weeks old, blind and lost, a whole carpet away from his mother. How had this happened? He flattened himself on the cold ground in panic. ‘Majicou!’ he cried, ‘Majicou!’ His voice echoed back to him as unfeeling as the wind.

  ‘Be still,’ said the old cat. ‘Be still and let me listen!’

  Nothing for a long time. Tag tried not to be there. He tried to think of kittenhood, sunshine, his time in the gardens, game casserole. But all that came to him was the memory of the wind buffeting him, and the rain beating down while he ran everywhere to avoid it. At last, Majicou said, ‘Good. Very good.

  ‘We’re safe here. He knew I was somewhere near, but the line of the old highway confused him. He could not associate me with such a powerless little road.’ Then he added, in a different voice, ‘Tag, this is a real highway, and it is yours.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ said Tag.

  But the panic was leaving him even as he spoke. He relaxed. He ceased to tremble. Calmed by the old cat’s presence and authority, his honest heart – the heart of a cat, full of curiosity and life – had taken command. His own fear had exhausted him, though, and his eyes remained tight shut.

  ‘The wind!’ he cried. ‘Old cat, the wind!’

  Majicou laughed. ‘Isn’t it fine? It’s a million-year wind, Tag, blowing east to west, dawn to dusk around the compass rose. It blows all cats on their journeys, and at one and the same time it is those cats, it is those journeys – the lives and destinies and fears and hopes of all the cats that ever walked.’

  ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘You can. You can. Tag, the souls of cats are rushing past us! This is the line of power they laid down, generation by generation! Their heritage, your birthright!’

  And again, quietly, ‘Your birthright. Tag, open your eyes now. Claim it.’

  So Tag opened his eyes and claimed it.

  He saw three things.

  The first was Majicou, sitting beside him straight and tall, his one eye gleaming with power and mystery and pleasure. The spirit wind barely ruffled his fur.

  The second thing Tag saw was the wild road.

  He shuddered. ‘What kinds of cats made this?’ he asked.

  ‘Tag,’ answered Majicou, ‘this is a dangerous place to be. The magic of the First Cats still moves within it. They lived in ice and snow. Tag. They were as big as cars, and their teeth were as long as your body. They were wild animals, and they made a savage road. When we travel it now, we partake of that. We are a little of them as well as ourselves. This is the oldest magic there is!’

  ‘I preferred the little highway,’ said Tag. ‘I preferred the sun.’

  What stretched away from him was bare, yet formed and purposeful. Lit by the same moon that shone down on the wharves – though here its light was a little harsher, perhaps, a little more direct – the great road came in from the east and immediately swung south, away from the river. Tag and Majicou stood in the crook of that wide powerful curve, in a landscape hard to interpret. There were buildings, certainly; there were trees. The river was there, though its banks were hard to place. There were gentle landforms toward the south, rising to tree-tangled chalk downs beyond. None of these things were vague; indeed the problem, perhaps, was that they were somehow too dense – as if a hundred houses occupied the space of one house, a thousand trees the space of one tree – but they were difficult to see. The wind hissed around him, full of distant, m
urmuring voices. At any moment Tag felt, if he wasn’t careful, he might hear the cat-souls as they passed. If he wasn’t careful he might see them, a strange, brownish fog flooding across the landscape as cat blurred into cat into cat into cat into cat without end – eddying and whirling, flowing and fuming like smoke in a retort, fixing itself suddenly and terrifyingly into a single instantly passing image: a tiger of the ice, huge head raised to display its saber teeth to the emptiness and send out a roar that would be heard ten thousand years! And then a more lasting private terror, which was to feel that giant stir in his own soul…

  ‘Where does this highway go?’ he whispered.

  ‘To Tintagel, Tag. To the sea!’

  The third thing Tag saw was a dead cat. It was a small tabby with dusty fur. It lay like any animal that has been knocked down by a passing car on some more ordinary road: somehow sprawled and huddled at the same time, as if it had curled into itself at the last, to eke out the spark of its passing life. At first, it looked like a cat curled up in front of a fire, then you saw how its head was thrown back and its throat exposed.

  It was Cy.

  ‘How did she get here!’ cried Tag.

  He ran to her and looked down. He weaved about, despite himself, in a desolate, mourning figure eight.

  ‘Oh, Majicou, how I hate this place!’

  The old cat said gently, ‘Tag, watch.’

  Exactly as the fox had done, he touched his nose to the tabby’s. He drew in a long, silent breath, so gentle he seemed motionless. Then he exhaled powerfully into her nostrils, and with a delighted sneeze she sat up, full of laughter, to stare at him. ‘Oh, you’re very nice,’ she said. ‘Look after this cat you’ve found!’ she advised Tag. ‘He’s beautiful, but he’s a fool. He’ll get in every kind of trouble, waking people up like that!’ She jumped up. Her feet tried to run off on their own, but she held them back long enough to call, ‘Good-bye! I had a good dream. Quicksilver! Good-bye!’ And off she went. She seemed to diminish too rapidly, as if the highway itself were moving her along. Two or three huge moths appeared, their eyes like cheap red jewels in the bluish moonlight, and fluttered around her head. She batted at them with velvet paws.