The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  ‘Stop!’ called Sealink. ‘Tag, stop!’

  They stood panting on the far edge of the piazza. Tag was soaked. His skin twitched and winced at every gust of wind. All he wanted was to get under cover and be warm.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Look!’

  Not twenty yards away stood a brand-new ice-white vehicle. It was tall with sliding doors, darkened windows at the rear, and a heavily ventilated roof. On its side was a smartlooking design featuring a hand cupping a flower, under which ran the words red rose laboratory supplies. It was parked directly outside the building in which the animals had spent the night. Water vapor rose from its exhaust. Faint music came from its cab. Other than that, and the mumble of its engine idling, everything was quiet. Between Tag and the van the piazza was veined like a leaf with shallow drifts of hailstones that had frozen hard.

  ‘This isn’t good,’ said Sealink.

  Tag said, ‘The others! They’re inside. They need help!’

  Sealink was deadly calm. ‘It’s too late, hon,’ she said. ‘I’ve smelled this before. Cat catchers! We go in there, they’ll take us too—’

  ‘What do you say about human beings now?’ Tag asked her bitterly. ‘I don’t think they’ve come to give us some pizza!’

  As he spoke, fierce cat yowls broke out from inside. One for Sorrow could be heard croaking with rage. Loves a Dustbin barked loudly once, then began to snarl and growl like a dog that has got something in its mouth. There was a prolonged shriek, human in origin, followed closely by curses and shouts. At this, another cat catcher got out of the van.

  Its body was broad and awkward looking, thick across the shoulders but carried with a serious grace. It moved quietly and smoothly. In the wintry light its face was hard to see. More shrieks from inside. Turning up its coat collar against the weather, it stood a moment at the door of the building, listening intently to the noises within. As soon as it was certain what was going on, it walked quickly but calmly back to the van, slid back the driver door, and took out something that looked like a short iron bar.

  ‘Help me!’

  At this cry, shrill with fear, there was a renewed outbreak of snarling from inside. Wet light licked across the piazza. Thunder rolled. The driver did something to the iron bar in its hands – click! – then with a practiced pirouette swung on its heel and barged shoulder first through the door. There was a yellow flash and a loud bang, followed by a series of high, whining yelps. Renewed yowling, in which Tag could detect the voices of Mousebreath and Ragnar, was muffled suddenly.

  Presently two dark forms appeared in the doorway, one of them half supporting the other. In its left hand the injured figure clutched a sack. Its right arm dangled uselessly at its side. Something had ripped open the sleeve of its jacket and then done rough surgery on the white forearm beneath. Blood trickled down in a steady stream, melted the hard drifts of hailstones, then drained away as diluted brownish trickles of water.

  The sack moved agitatedly. From within came a bubbling angry moan.

  The driver kicked out. Silence.

  ‘Come on,’ it encouraged its companion. ‘Not far now.’

  As they reached the vehicle, One for Sorrow exploded from the doorway to fill the air between them with mayhem, battering with his wings at their heads and shoulders, striking for their eyes with his beak. They ducked. The injured one swore and swiped at the bird so hard with the sack of cats that it lost its balance and half fell. ‘For God’s sake,’ said the other impatiently, trying to get far enough away from the bird to shoot without hitting its accomplice. ‘Keep still.’ At that, the magpie changed his tactics, perching suddenly on his victim’s head and digging in his claws until it shrieked. Then he swung his own head down savagely and buried his beak in its left ear, like a woodpecker addressing a tree.

  The cat catcher let out a scream of pain and fear. It dropped the sack. It clapped its hurt hand to its ear and screamed again at what it thought it had found there, its face shocked and chalk-white in the feeble illumination. The bird was still fastened to its head. Blood ran down into its eyes.

  ‘Oh God, it’s really hurting me!’

  ‘Right, that’s enough,’ said the driver calmly.

  It stood back and let the shotgun off again. The magpie, who knew when to quit, rocketed up into the dark air and vanished.

  ‘Oh God! Oh God! Help me!’

  The driver slid the van door open, threw the gun in, dragged the injured man around to the passenger side, and stuffed it in too.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, shut up,’ it advised.

  Then it went back for the sack, which was lying on a heap of melting hailstones soaking up black water. The sack convulsed furiously and the face of the Mau appeared, all trembling and huge green panic eyes. ‘Would you, my sweet?’ said the driver, and made a lunge for her. ‘Run off? I don’t think so.’ She was almost free when its short hard fingers clamped on her rear legs, pinning them together and immobilizing her with pain.

  ‘I can’t stand this!’ Tag told Sealink.

  He raced across the piazza and bit the driver as hard as he could in the calf. It dropped the Mau and pivoted almost delicately on one large foot so that it could kick Tag in the head with the other.

  Tag stiffened.

  He thought, But I –

  He tried to say, Sealink, help –

  Consciousness writhed away from him like a strip of white light.

  ‘Sealink, help the Mau!’

  The last thing Tag saw was Pertelot Fitzwilliam, running blindly across the cobbles in her fear and falling into the canal. The last thing Tag heard was his captor saying amusedly, ‘He’ll be well pleased to see this one again.’ The last thing Tag thought was that ‘he’ could only mean the Alchemist. How did he know we were here? thought Tag. How did he know where to send them?

  Blackness.

  Part 2

  Signs Among the Stars

  The Third Life of Cats

  I am born of the sacred She-Cat, and thus I am the son of the Sun and the daughter of the Moon, the Pupil of Ra and the Eye of Horus… I am the one, born of the She-Cat, the double-guide, walker in the ways of the living and realms of the dead: I am the Cat, the divine Cat of the Spaces of Heaven, the sacred Cat of Creation and the End of the World.

  – THE EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

  Of course, the humans came out of their caves, eventually.

  They spread out across the Great Cat’s creation, and though their litters were often tiny, their numbers swelled to fill the world.

  Most of the Felidae avoided them; but Felis cattus, known for its curiosity, drifted closer and closer to their cities. There we found rat and mouse running well fed and unchecked through the markets and the grain stores. They were up for anything, those rodents. They lugged away whole children in the evening. There were more of them than there are hairs in the Great Cat’s coat!

  So we were like a gift from the gods when we came at last: scourge of rats, death of mice! Oh, we got them running, all right, through storehouse and silo; we put the light of panic in their beady eyes! They had all but forgotten us. But we soon reminded them – with sharp tooth and razor claw!

  Were the upright ones grateful? I should say so! Those families bade us welcome, and we went into their homes of our own free will and stayed on our own terms. They treated us like deities, each cat a god in its own house – gifts and offerings, and prayers for a share in our fertility and health, for they were a sickly and superstitious lot.

  Before long, they were raising temples, drawing our image on the walls like their ancestors before them. In the new drawings we were guardians of the doors of night, guardians of the realms of the dead. We sat at the frontiers of the shadow kingdom; we watched over the spirits of the dead, to guard them in their long sleep.

  The same old fears, the same old hopes.

  Still, for a thousand years they treated us well. Too well…

  The priests and priestesses of the cult brought us more
food than we could eat. We slept on beds of linen and silk. We were pampered, perfumed, exalted, and venerated; and we enjoyed every moment of it.

  We were cats, after all.

  Soon they had devised a ceremonial day. From far and wide the upright ones traveled to worship at the great temple at Bubastis, spiritual home of the She-Cat, the Great Mau, Mistress of the Eye – ah, the heavenly Eye! It was a solemn occasion: all processions and offerings, prayers and divinations. Nice and quiet and reverential.

  Then they started to bring in any cat that had died – an offering to the favor of the Goddess. They interred them, embalmed and mummified in sacred receptacles, in the temple or – when things got crowded – its grounds. They shaved their eyebrows in mourning, and brought us thousand upon thousand of our dead kin.

  It was a popular event from the beginning. But what had started with some decorous cymbal and flute music and a few symbolic religious dances was soon an excuse for both men and women to drink potent brews, sing, and fling up their garments to expose themselves along the banks of the Nile. Cats were all but forgotten in the fun of that. By the time the celebrants finally reached the temple at Bubastis, half of them had lost the offerings they started out with.

  It wasn’t long before the priests found a way to profit from that. Cats began to go missing. One here, another there. Soon they were going down by the tens and twenties, then by the hundred. Toms and queens, brindled and sorrel, spotted and fawn: before long, the area around Bubastis was devoid even of kittens as the priests captured every cat they could lay hands upon and – with a smart tap to the neck – helped them on their journey to the other world. After which, they were hastily embalmed and swaddled in linen and sold as instant offerings in the name of Bast.

  The brighter ones among us caught on and survived. The others, I suspect sadly, did not. It was another lesson to learn about human beings: Sometimes they can love you too much.

  9

  The City at Night

  A cat bitten once by a snake will dread even a rope.

  – OLD ARABIC SAYING

  When she knew the Alchemist had found her, Pertelot Fitzwilliam put her head down and bolted. Her breath came hard and ragged. Cobbles bruised her velvet pads. Across the square she hurtled, a streak of sorrel in the indigo night, only to sail in a long, elegant arc straight off the side of the dock. For a moment her feet pedaled wildly in the chill night air, then she fell.

  There was a brief silence, a splintering sound, and she was in the water under the ice.

  Pertelot had spent most of her life in a cage, where water came small and confined in a clean metal bowl. Down here, it was some other thing. The whole world had given way beneath her paws and now this malevolent thing was wrapping itself around her and thrusting itself in through her open mouth. She choked and struggled, tired in an instant. Grimly she fought toward the surface – legs kicking, eyes shut tight in panic – only to find that she had come up under the ice. The momentum that had propelled her up drove her back down again into the choking darkness, where her feet sank instantly into the soft bed of the canal. A frantic maneuver disengaged her from the embrace of the mud. Exhausted, she hung in the water, and the bubbles streaming from her mouth spiraled to the surface like tiny silver fish. She followed their progress with a detached curiosity. Above her, the light appeared faint and impossibly far away; whatever she did would make no difference. Air now rose from her mouth in a continuous stream. She let go of herself and sank, soundless and still, like a cat in a dream of silent flight, into the waters that closed possessively around her and pulled her down.

  *

  Another time; perhaps even another place. Something heavy, pressing hard. The sound of water gushing in little rills. Darkness again, to be replaced eventually by a sense of something warm gathering itself firmly around her. Pertelot moved her head cautiously to examine her new environment. She seemed to be wrapped in a great fur blanket, of which the piazza’s lamps made a neon patchwork. It was black and white and a gorgeous, flaming orange. Each strand was precisely delineated, so that she felt for some moments as if she were enfolded in the warp and weft of the world itself. Then the blanket shifted slowly and redefined itself as another cat – large, female – the black pupils of whose eyes were outlined in amber.

  It was Sealink.

  ‘What was that stuff?’ asked Pertelot.

  The calico blinked puzzledly. ‘It was water, hon. Are you awake?’

  The Mau shuddered and retched dryly.

  ‘Ain’t nothing left to come out,’ Sealink advised after a moment or two, ‘so you may as well stop that. Didn’t no one ever tell you cats and water don’t mix? Once had me a tom called Muezza – sweet guy, Turkish Van cat – he kinda liked to swim. But this ain’t Turkey, hon, and you ain’t him.’

  ‘I didn’t get in there by choice,’ Pertelot said. ‘Do you think I did?’

  ‘And that’s to say nothing about ice. You tread real careful, but that stuff just keeps on creaking there. Whoa! Dam good job I got a long arm is all I can say, ‘Cause I surely wasn’t going to dive right on in.’

  She added, ‘Hate getting my head wet.’

  Pertelot groaned. ‘Ragnar. Where’s Ragnar?’

  ‘They’ve all gone, sugar. Don’t ask me where, ‘Cause I don’t know.’

  Pertelot’s eyes grew huge and round. In her agitation, she began kneading the calico’s foreleg, her claws, translucent and pink in the sodium light, flickering in and out.

  ‘That hurts, hon,’ said Sealink briskly.

  She extracted her punctured leg and rearranged herself around the Mau.

  ‘Ragnar’ll be just fine,’ she advised. ‘That old guy of mine wouldn’t let him come to no harm. Let’s get you warm. You’re full of canal water, and there ain’t enough flesh on your bones to make soup.’

  Pertelot closed her eyes for a moment – the piazza light explored tenderly her ancient mask of pain and fortitude – then struggled blindly upright, bracing herself against the calico’s flank.

  ‘No,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Mousebreath was hit. They hit him on the head because he was shielding the little tabby. They put both of them in a sack, and Mousebreath didn’t move. Sealink, he didn’t move! When I saw that I ran. I ran.’

  Sealink digested this, her eyes distant and unfocused.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the Queen said. ‘I had to run. There was nothing I could do.’

  When Sealink failed to respond to this she added in a forlorn singsong, ‘Nothing any of us could do.’

  The calico shook herself. ‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘he’s a strong old tom, that Mousebreath, and he’s taken a knock or two in his time.’ She stared across the piazza. ‘Skull like a stone,’ she reassured herself. ‘Always loves a fight. All the flying fur. All the hissing an’ spitting, he loves that stuff better than food, better than—’ Her voice became contemplative. ‘Well, not better than that, of course,’ she decided. She fell silent.

  ‘I hope he’s okay,’ she said eventually. ‘Sure, he’ll be okay!’

  ‘You love him,’ said the Queen.

  ‘I love ‘em all,’ said Sealink. ‘But he’s a tough old tom and he’ll be fine. So will Ragnar.’ She considered Ragnar for a moment. ‘Big, strong cat that one, hon. Hung like a lord and a real neat butt. Pity he’s spoke for.’

  ‘He is a lord,’ said Pertelot. Then, less complacently, ‘And he is spoken for.’

  Sealink gave her an amused look. ‘They got that Tag with them too,’ she said. ‘It was him saved you from the sack. I seen him bite one right in the leg. Gave you plenty of time to run off and drown yourself’ – here, the Queen looked suitably admonished – ‘at any rate. He’s got a long old road to go, Tag, but he’s one of them goes it all the way. Once he gets the idea.’

  ‘Tag isn’t his true name,’ said the Queen.

  ‘Call him what you like, hon, but he’s one of them goes all the way with it. I seen enough of them to know. Scary stuff.’ She laughed. ‘Why, the th
ree of them are scary stuff, and – bet on it! – they’re having a nicer time than us right now. You’ll see!’

  ‘When will I see?’ said Pertelot grimly.

  ‘Hush now, babe. Let’s get you warm an’ dry before we worry anymore.’

  She went about this task without speaking for a while. All that could be heard was the rasping of her rough pink tongue. Then something occurred to her, her ears pricked up, and she said, ‘You know, there’s a place where we can get some help. I know a load of cats hang out there. Anything happens in this town, they’ll know about it.’

  She transferred her attention to the back of the Queen’s ears. Pertelot allowed her eyes to close for a moment in a reflex of pleasure and submission. Then she forced them open again. ‘Will they help us find Ragnar?’

  Sealink regarded her a little wearily. ‘Sure, babe. Sure they will. Try to be calm now. And, hey, it’s a real interesting place, the Old Fish Market. Every cat should visit it once in her life!’

  With this, she wrapped her great boa of a tail around the Mau once more and waited patiently for the trembling to cease.

  *

  Midnight: Piper’s Quay. Wintry breezes drove the river into the concrete embankment with soft, rhythmic little slaps. Scraps of newspaper skittered along the cobbles. Otherwise, nothing stirred until two cats emerged from the shadows.

  The first was large and furry. She walked with a long, swinging stride and carried her tail high in the air like an ostrich feather fan over an African monarch. The second moved more sinuously and with greater caution, looking around every few paces to interrogate the darkness behind her. The moon struck her back with a silvery gleam. Not the faintest odor of mud remained. Sealink had been very thorough.

  In the dead of night they traveled deserted alley and cobbled squares in which pools of melted hail glinted dully. They crossed Jamaica Square with its rows of empty town houses and disused storage sheds. The river moved like a flow of silent lava at the end of every cross street. And as they crept through the silent front gardens, along the cracked concrete paths where the clothes dryers sagged, they encountered not a single barking dog, not a single feral tom patrolling his duchy. Windows were curtained or boarded up. Everyone was asleep or had gone elsewhere.