by Gabriel King
They were fed. For a time.
‘Then the cries… oh, the cries… I never knew what was being done to them. I never wanted to know. I crouched in my cage and tried to close my ears. Even then, I heard them in my head.’
Pengelly stared at her in horror. But Sealink’s face was hard to see.
‘Time went by. How long was I there? I grew – I could see that much. But the lights stayed on by day and night. I knew the difference. I’m a cat, and I could tell the night! And all the time more cats came and went. The Alchemist acquired them all over the world. Things were done to them, and they were thrown away. It used them up, I know now. It sold the coats; it sold the meat—’
She broke down.
Pengelly bore this for a moment or two. Then he slipped up among the ropes and curled himself around her.
‘Hush now, my lover. Don’t say no more.’ He stared angrily at Sealink. ‘You knew about this, didn’t you?’
Sealink turned away to groom her other side.
‘Why did you make her tell me this? Why?’
Sealink finished her toilette. She stood and arched her back.
‘Didn’t guess the details, babe: now I know. She’s the Alchemist’s pet, and she’s here with us. I never signed on for that. I got a gift for staying out of that kinda trouble.’
Pertelot gave her a bitter look. ‘How weak you are!’ she said. ‘I’m sorry you had to get involved in my life. I didn’t want you to be, if you remember. You said then that you chose to take the risk. You said I should respect your decision. Oh, how weak you are, under all that!’
Sealink looked away. ‘You kept stuff from me, hon,’ she said in a dangerously soft voice.
‘I didn’t know I was pregnant. I didn’t know!’
‘She didn’t know,’ Sealink told the boat.
‘I didn’t! I knew nothing until Old Smoky picked me up last night. The kittens moved! I didn’t know until a human being showed me!’
She said, more quietly, ‘Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion is the father of my kittens. They have nothing to do with the Alchemist. Listen.
‘In the laboratories it is like this: the male kittens are killed. The females are bred from, then disposed of. The same blood goes down and down the generations, for hundreds of years. All to find – I don’t know what. The Alchemist speaks of a Golden Cat – some magical creature that he believes will bring him the knowledge of the world through the freedom of the wild roads. He thinks the Golden Cat will come from me. It is in his calculations. And so he wants me back. I’d rather die.’
She stared out to sea, her face tight with misery.
‘Now you know the story,’ she told Sealink. ‘I am a Queen. I am a foolish cat. I am a snare and a delusion: a trap. Ragnar Gustaffson is caught in me. Pengelly and his decent fisherman are caught. You are caught. I warned you. When we put into harbor again, I will leave and make my own way to Tintagel.’
Pengelly jumped up. ‘You’ll do no such thing! I don’t care whose kittens they are. I’ll not let you nor they come to harm. Neither will Old Smoky. We ent having you jump ship at the next port, nor anywhere at all till we reach the old country.’
He glared challengingly at Sealink.
She was silent.
‘As ship’s cat,’ he said, ‘that’s my final word.’
*
For the next couple of days they occupied the Guillemot in an uneasy truce.
Sealink spent much of her time promenading tail-up around the boat, and made so much of Old Smoky that he was often heard exclaiming, ‘What a beauty you are, my handsome. A proper treat.’ He called her ‘moes fettow teag,’ his pretty little maid.
‘Well, you got one out of three right, hon,’ she congratulated him.
He crooned old Cornish songs to her as he tended the wheel.
‘Ha mî ow môs en gûn lâs
Mî a-glowas trôs an buscas mines
Mes mî a-droucias ün pesk brâs, naw ê lostiow;
Ol am bôbel en Porthîa ha Marghas Jowan
Nerva na wôr dh’ê gensenjy!’
This broke the feline stalemate, when Sealink, unable to stand it any longer, was forced to talk to Pengelly.
‘What is all this stuff?’ she asked one morning as the Guillemot chugged along through rising seas. ‘I can’t make head nor tail of it. Does he, like, make it up or what?’
Pengelly grinned slyly. ‘‘Tis a secret language – the ancient language of a secret, ancient land. Only a few old throwbacks such as me and Old Smoky use it at all anymore. It’s probably of no interest to a modem cat like you.’
Sealink, immune to ironies unless they were her own, persisted. ‘But you know I love to learn, hon. You know I love new stuff!’
The old Rex winked and reeled her in. ‘Well, let’s see. Proper old nonsense song that is. Tells of a fisherman who goes out looking for a nice big shoal, but instead of the pretty silver fish all he got was one great big one with nine tails! ‘Tis a riddle, a puzzle, a chimera. There’s plenty of mysteries in the seas around the old country and plenty more on the land, too.’
‘Tell us, Pengelly,’ said the Queen, who had appeared quietly from the cabin, where she spent her time out of sight. ‘Tell us.’
Pengelly licked his black lips gleefully. ‘Why, there’s the giant hare of Polperro, my dears, an elusive creature that runs across the cliff tops at the end of spring. Woe betide any who see it, for it foretells the death of a loved one. And there’s the knockers, one of the many races of Small People the land of Kemow has hidden for thousands of years – wicked little beggars they be. You’ll find they sheltering from the rain under the butterbur down by the rivers. Best watch they,’ he warned. ‘They’ll give a cat a nasty nip.’
Suddenly, he crouched down in a silent pantomime of stealth, then reared up again and pounced on the empty deck, leering at the two females as he did so.
‘And then,’ he said, ‘there’s the wild old Beast of the Moor, eating his way through travelers foolish enough to pass by in the night.’
The Guillemot rolled as it met a wave head-on. Somewhere in the background there was a gush and a clatter. Sealink snorted with amusement. ‘Hey, hon, you want to get hired out to mothers – keep their kittens in line.’ Her voice took on a sepulchral tone: ‘Beware the mad Beast of the Moors, with its taste for the flesh of fresh young cats. Don’t move off the path, my kit, or he’ll catch you and skin you and eat you right up!’
‘Oh, this ent no beast, really. ‘Tis but a local cat, takes the form of abig jungle cat when he goes on the wild roads. Old and mad with pain from his teeth, he is now. He can hardly remember who he is half the time. Human beings been trying to find he and shoot he for years.’ He thought. ‘Don’t suppose that improves his temper.’
During this story, little furrows of fear and puzzlement had appeared in Pertelot Fitzwilliam’s nose and forehead. By the end of it, she was staring angrily over Sealink’s shoulder. Her ears were flat to her skull and she was snarling.
‘Hey, babe, it’s only a story,’ said Sealink.
Then she saw what the Mau had seen.
‘Oh my—’
An object the size of a small cat was scuttling toward them across the deck of the Guillemot, legs clacking incongruously on the wooden slats. Legs! It had a lot of legs, and they were all moving at once. Mottled pink and umber with reddish patches and bone-white spikes, it bore down on them, two vast arms raised.
Pertelot yelped and without a second’s thought leapt on to the wheelhouse, where she slithered on the sea-wet surface, spitting and hissing. Sealink bristled, filled with fighting chemicals, stood her ground. ‘Touch me, fishbait,’ she explained, ‘and you’re history.’ The intruder never paused but, joints clicking, opened and closed two giant fingers on the empty air.
Pengelly seemed to be convulsing, lips drawn back off his fine white teeth.
‘It’s the beast!’ he cried. ‘It’s the beast! Oh, Sealink my lover, the beast’ll have ‘ee now!’
&nb
sp; Sealink turned and nipped him sharply in the head.
‘What the hell is this?’ she said.
Pengelly was laughing too much to feel anything.
‘Oh, you want to watch those claws… wicked pinch… sharp pain in the arse, my love… right through that calico fur… soon have ‘ee running… been all ‘round the world… never seen a crab!’
‘Crab?’
‘Spider crab, my handsome.’
Sealink was incensed. She skipped neatly over the bold crustacean, tapping it sharply with a forepaw as she landed. The crab scuttled under the netting, its eyestalks swiveling this way and that.
‘Crab?’ repeated Sealink incredulously. ‘Honey, I was raised on crab. Ain’t never seen anything like this!’ She thought for a moment, eyeing the creature warily. ‘Not alive anyway.’ She considered further. ‘Not whole. Hell,’ she admitted, after a pause, ‘I ain’t never seen more than the claws, and they was pink.’
Old Smoky, alarmed by this ruckus, abandoned the wheel-house – where the wheel spun wildly this way and that – assayed the situation with a curse, and staggered off around the deck to half fill a big old black bucket with seawater. Armed with this, he advanced determinedly upon the crab. It had draped itself in netting. He reached down, unwrapped it deftly, and grasping the rough shell behind the waving claws dropped it with a splash into the bucket.
‘What’s the use,’ he asked himself, ‘of a bloody dinner that walks? Bloody thing. Bloody cats.’
*
Later, he found a sheltered bay, dropped anchor, and cooked the valiant spider crab in a pot of boiling water. As he hammered it open to get at the meat, little bits flew off the worktop and scattered across the floor. The cats nosed around hopefully, drawn by the appealing stench. Sealink got part of a claw. First she chased it around the galley in some cheerfully contrived game. Then, hunting instincts appeased, she settled her body around it, gripped it tight with her forepaws, and worried at it expertly. A gobbet of white flesh popped out and into her mouth.
‘Hmm hmm.’
Sealink ate. Pertelot and Pengelly ate. Old Smoky ate. They all ate. The Guillemot rolled in majestic sympathy. Water gurgled in her bilges. Night drew on. Sealink gave a sudden, resounding purr and began to lick the scent of crab thoroughly into her fur.
‘Ain’t ate like that,’ she said, ‘since I left my own hometown.’
‘Tell us about your home,’ said Pertelot shyly, anxious to mend the friendship.
Sealink seemed brusque but amenable. ‘New Orleans, babe,’ she said. ‘Finest town in the world for a cat that enjoys cuisine. You got your crabs and crawdaddies, and the biggest, juiciest shrimp you ever tasted. You got chicken gumbo could make your eyes water. Why, I’ve ate blackened catfish that—’
‘Catfish?’ Pengelly looked alarmed. ‘You don’t want to go eating those. They’re sacred to the Great Cat. I heard of they, ‘round the coast of Kemow, sitting on the rocks, licking their fur, and howling at the moon to warn the sailors off the rocks.’
Sealink rolled her eyes. ‘Hon, it’s just a fish with whiskers – nothing divine about that ‘cept the sauce they serve it in.’ She licked her Ups.
‘Sounds too fancy for me.’ Pengelly yawned hugely and took himself off to the bunk where he promptly fell asleep with his head and front paws on the fisherman’s legs. It was a gorged sleep, a sleep benign with crab. Old Smoky grinned and reached under the bunk. ‘Well, my handsome,’ he said, ‘what next?’ He stroked the tabby once or twice, then unscrewed the top of the bottle he had found and swigged from it appreciatively.
‘Oysters,’ Sealink was saying, ‘so fine the juices spurt right down into your ruff. And the smells! Walkin’ down through the Vieux Carre at midnight you could just die of the smells!
‘I was born,’ she explained, ‘under the Mississippi boardwalk in the town of New Orleans…’
Down there, she said, safe in the sand and the marram grass, a kitten could look out across the whole wide steel-gray river at the shipyards and warehouses of Algiers, and dream. She could watch the big ships forging their slow, powerful way upriver to the docks and refineries of Baton Rouge. ‘Foreign ships, hon, flying them colored flags, flags from a hundred different countries! That’s where I learned the names – Sierra Leone and Senegal, Trinidad and the Ivory Coast. They’s all changed now.’ She could watch the garish splendor of the paddle wheelers bearing a cargo of tourists out into a steamy creole afternoon – tourists who would later wander the boardwalk as the moon came up over the city to shine benignly down on the French Quarter. And every night, whatever the weather, the human being known only as ‘Henry’ would come from his apartment in one of the shuttered and refurbished town houses on Ursulines Street to feed the cats of Moon Walk.
Those tabby toms and shellac queens, those saints and sinners and wheeler-dealers – all those wide-eyed, longhaired, crossbred products of a thousand noisy moonlight assignations who would gather along the boardwalk to receive their daily blessing of redfish heads, catfish tails, and softshell crab. ‘And, hon, they was little bitty things – all greeny-gray and succulent, two bites and a gulp; a very distant cousin to that monster this afternoon. It is surely unnatural for any crustacean to grow so large and self-determined!’
Born into this cosmopolitan community of itinerant felines, Sealink had soon discovered an appetite for three things: travel – ‘Those ships looked so fine, honey, sailing huge and proud out into the world, I just wanted to leap right up on the first one I saw and breathe the air of a different continent’; food – of which there was plenty and more; and the vagrant toms, the more glamorously scarred the better – who wandered down each day or two from the delta; who strutted up and down the boardwalk with swivel hips and narrowed eyes; who were loose and fine and on the lookout in the Big Easy, ignoring the halfhearted threats and hisses of the local lads, on the lookout for impressionable females to arouse with their tales of foreign climes and sensual delights.
‘Honey, I’m tellin’ you there was no finer place to grow up in the world. Loved those traveling cats with a passion, babe. They was—’ she sought for a word to convey their irresistible charms ‘—free…’
And so had she been: free to wander through the enticing stalls of the market; free to leap the crumbling brick walls of the Marie Laveau Cemetery and sing to the moon with a ragged band of cronies; free to range the balconied streets of the Quarter and watch the sun go down behind the towering skyline of the modem city, a distant, hazy vista glimpsed between brackets of curlicued ironwork and terra-cotta-tiled roofs. Free. Until, that is, falling prey to a weakness for catfish tails, she had been lured into a house.
‘What can I say? They was real nice to start with. The lady, she could pet you just right. You’d fall over in the street for her – I seen cats do that. Well, then it come to food, an’ food’ll get you every time. They took me in, and they fed me the best food I ever ate, before or since. Course, I was carrying at the time – couple weeks more advanced than you are now, I guess – which maybe excuses me a little.
‘So they fed me, and I got larger, and they patted themselves on the back. They’re parading me to their friends – See our fine pedigree Maine Coon, ain’t she adorable? and like that. I mean, I ask you, babe – pedigree? Me? I don’t think so. As for Mi-nouche: do I look like a Minouche? Where was I? So they start keeping me in, they get me this litter tray for my toilet – très degrading. And I go, ‘What’s going on here?’ but I’m too stupid to see the answer, until –
‘Well the next thing they know is that their cher Minouche has sprung a surprise on them, and there’s five little Minouches curled up sucking on their momma. You shoulda heard the cries, babe. Human beings can be real raucous when perturbed.’
Sealink paused in her narrative to stare emptily away into the cabin. Pengelly snored, and moved his feet in his sleep. The fisherman tilted his bottle high and drank the dregs.
‘And then what?’ prompted Pertelot anxiously. ‘Did you leave yo
ur kittens? I don’t think I could leave kittens, even to travel the world!’
Sealink’s face was closed and stiff. ‘You think I could? They took them from me.’
‘Took them? Where?’
‘How do I know? I never saw them again.’ She stared into the brown, warm fusty air with an expression that might have been puzzlement or pain. ‘Thing is, I ain’t never been able to have kittens since.’ She turned to Pertelot. ‘Can you say why that is? Can you say why that happens to someone who was no more’n a kitten herself? Hon, I was no more than a little boardwalk queen.’
‘Oh, Sealink.’
‘You don’t have to say nothing, hon.’
What could either of them say? The calico stretched and yawned. She got heavily to her feet. ‘I think I’ll go on deck. You coming?’
They made their silent way up the steps and up to the bow, where the wind ruffled their fhr. It was a sharp northerly, bearing promise of rain. The sea moved dark and uneasy, furrowed into troughs and peaks. Even in the shelter of the bay, you could feel the Guillemot rock. The moon was obscured by a mantle of cloud; away over the headland, thunder rolled ominously through the leaden sky.
‘Storm on its way, babe,’ observed Sealink. She scratched her ear.
For a time Pertelot watched the sea building its walls of water outside the bay.
When she thought of Pengelly, half-drowned in a sack, or of Sealink, rootless and solitary in the world, her heart contracted. Drops of rain fell unheeded on her coat, darkening it in streaks. She was lost in the deception of things: how bewildering they were, how complex and cruel. Then thunder crashed, nearer than before, and a brilliant streak of lightning brought her back to herself. She blinked in terror as it blazed across the sea to landward. Silver afterimages replayed themselves on her closed eyelids.
A wave caught the Guillemot broadside and sent the two cats sliding toward the companion rail. Rockets of freezing brine shot up and burst over them.
‘Sealink! Look!’
