by Gabriel King
And before he could thank her for her help, she was gone.
*
He was a little bit sad as he left the town. But dawn gladdened his heart with images of a beloved if unvisited country and eased his anxious thoughts of Pertelot.
The suburbs gave way to winding lanes. The houses thinned out, became larger and more relaxed looking. Fields appeared, grew broader, sloped cheerfully into shallow valleys between ivy-choked copses of oak and holly – the valleys full of haze, the haze full of the promise of sun. Transparent winds had varnished the snow; a gliss of ice stretched away pink and gold and full of mirages in the feather dawn. A quarter of an hour, and the haze had parted like a curtain. Church towers dissolved in a blaze of light he couldn’t bear to look at. An incense of coal smoke rose into the clear blue air. Children emerged, delighted, their cries full of laughter and energy.
As for Ragnar Gustaffson…
It was one of the best days of his life. He had been given, at last, the opportunity to test every aspect of the sturdy, good-looking Norsk Skogkatt design! Comfort. Durability. Practicality. The paw tufts for warmth and grip. The ear tufts for insulation. The stylish double coat with its high-speed drying characteristics. The versatile all-leg drive he had so often tried to demonstrate to his good Mend Mousebreath.
Snow!
He chose a steepish slope; stood for a prolonged, delicious moment at the top; then charged joyfully down it, sliding, rolling, bounding, and panting until he tumbled head over heels into the fat white drift at the bottom. Snow! He wriggled about in it in a frenzy. Snow! He rolled onto his front and went through the drift like a mechanical shovel, tossing clouds of it into the air with his head and then batting out right and left at them like a kitten. Snow, snow, snow, snow, snow! Suddenly, remembering that he must also test one of the least known but perhaps most interesting features of the Troll Cat breed, he rushed into a plantation of young conifers and dashed up the trunk of the nearest tree. His heart was an engine. His powerful claws, adapted for rock and ice, gripped the resinous bark. He was a feline machine. Turning around carefully at his high point, he was easily able to descend headfirst and in a spiral. Then he leapt to his feet and sprinted – eyes bulging, ears back, tail curled over – through the plantation, his passage dislodging explosions of powder from the feathery lower branches where they swept the ground. Snow flew up into the sunbeams like spray from a torrent! Snow! He swam in snow. He breathed up snow and sneezed it out. It was Norway, larch and pine. It was –
Well, of course, it was snow.
Snow.
*
Afternoon found him tired but happy. At his own guess, he had covered ten or fifteen miles. He had been able to experience the great stamina of his breed by eating nothing. As he went, the sun reddened the snow and began imperceptibly to descend. In the great wide fields the ivy-thickened trees looked like plumes of smoke. A big male hare crouched in the open, watching him. He saw its breath, pink in the graying air. He felt its love of life – its strong blood, its dignity, its grave determination to wake the next morning – like a vibrant line drawn in the air between them.
‘Good-bye!’ he whispered when it ran off at last across the glorious blood-red smear of sun. ‘Come home safely!’
The surface of the snow would soon begin to freeze again. For now, it made difficult walking; one or another of his paws broke through the crust at every stride. ‘This could tire the patience – even of a king!’ He began to avoid the drifts and the little coppices where he could only flounder along. Pellets of ice had formed between his toes, and in the fur of his ruff and belly. While he was still dry on top, he was soaked underneath. ‘Well,’ he advised himself drolly, ‘the Norsk Skogkatt is known to love hardship and cold!’
The sun set. Lamps came on in the villages around him. A bitter frost settled in. The stars glittered in black shellac above, and he could hear the very water cracking in the ponds. The snow hardened into ruts at the junctions of the little lanes. Dozing a little on his feet, Ragnar Gustaffson turned a corner in the night and found himself in a steep graveled driveway.
Comfortably obscured by its overgrown front garden, out of which grew a single magnolia tree fine with blossoms of snow, the house was L-shaped and pebbled-dashed, with black-painted drainpipes, overhanging gable ends, and yellow-lit dormer windows in a pantile roof. Ragnar, attracted by the warmth and light, gave it a wide berth nevertheless. He wanted to leap up onto the nearest windowsill and call, ‘Let me in! Me in now!’ He wanted to roll on the doormat. He wanted to race into the house. He wanted to mb his face again and again on someone’s legs. Instead, he made his way cautiously around into the back garden.
There he found parterre flower beds cakey with snow roses, snow lavender. He was hungry, but he would wait and see. He sat for some time beneath the variegated holly a few yards from the house, studying the lighted French windows. Muffled silence reigned. Then a small icy wind scraped the black branches together; and a human being appeared from the road. Its head was a black woolen blob. Its breath steamed fiercely. It muttered to itself. It banged its hands together and stamped its feet to dislodge the snow. It went inside and forgot to shut the kitchen door. Ragnar rushed after it. Halfway down the parterre, he lost his nerve and scuttled back to his refuge; but hunger drove him out again almost immediately, and soon he was standing in the human footprints, lifting his feet uncomfortably, kneading the snow. Everything seemed quiet. He approached the back door. He nudged it. It opened inward perhaps two inches. Warmth and light poured out over him.
‘Excuse me?’ he said quietly.
No reply. Ragnar squeezed his head into the gap until his shoulders touched the edge of the door on one side and the door frame on the other. He had a look. A kitchen lay before him, equipped with white square objects that hummed. A strange, pungent smell hung about the red-tiled floor and deep yellow walls; and over by the sink, on clean sheets of newspaper, a large steel bowl of tinned food had been placed next to an equally large enamel dish of water. Ragnar stared helplessly at them. Saliva filled his mouth.
‘Excuse me!’ he said. ‘Anyone home?’
There was a roar from the rooms beyond, and a large black dog flung itself into the kitchen.
‘My house!’it said.
All Ragnar saw was a vast red mouth with yellowed teeth and a disgusting tongue; a nose like a black leather boxing glove, wrinkled up and dripping wet; eyes popping and white-rimmed with rage. He backed out of the kitchen as fast as he could. But that very action pulled the door shut on his own neck. ‘Yow!’ he said. He was wedged. The more he pulled back, the more wedged he became. The dog shook its head, close enough to spatter him with spittle, its bark a kind of endless hysterical rowrowrowrowrowrowrow, its smell enfolding him, rank, powerful, even more frightening than its teeth.
This is the end of me, thought Ragnar Gustaffson. Then he asked himself, ‘Is the Skogkatt so easily dismayed? I think not!’ He opened his mouth wide and closed it on the dog’s nose. Through clenched teeth he told the dog, ‘I am sorry to have to do this.’
The dog yelped and ran.
Ragnar’s legs began to chase it.
What am I doing? he thought, halfway across the kitchen floor.
The back door had opened itself again as soon as he moved forward. Fur up on end with panic, he skidded in a half circle, dived through the gap, and pelted off down the garden. Without being entirely certain how he had got there, he found himself in the lower branches of the holly tree. There, he bubbled and spat for some minutes. ‘Safe now! Safe!’ he assured himself. ‘No one can see me now!’
Commotion filled the house. Doors were slammed. Human voices were raised. ‘Then go and have a look, Libby,’ said one of them reasonably. ‘I’m not going out again!’
A minute or two later, a female human being issued from the kitchen, wearing a long quilted waistcoat over what looked like a woolen dressing gown. There were green rubber boots on its feet. ‘Do come on, Arthur!’ it urged, and began
to drag the reluctant dog around the snowbound garden on a lead. ‘Show some spirit, for goodness’ sake.’ It shone a torch into each bush and flower bed, then up into the holly. It shouted excitedly, ‘Oh! Eyes! Eyes! Something’s looking at me from up this tree! I think Arthur’s been bitten by a fox!’ There was a silence, during which even the dog looked confused. Less certainly, the woman called, ‘Do foxes climb trees?’
Slowly and carefully, Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion put the trunk of the holly between him and them, and climbed higher. He waited uncomfortably, with his paws on different spindly branches, until the cold drove them in again. For a long time after that, cold and exhausted, he crouched in the boughs of the holly, looking across at the warm windows of the house. He tried hard not to feel excluded. After all, he thought, I am a forest cat. A tree is good enough for me. Then – optimism being one of the breed’s great virtues – Perhaps tomorrow we shall have a lovely morning. With that, he slept.
He dreamed of snow – in the dream he was a kitten, dashing and tumbling, while his great uncle Wulf looked proudly on. He dreamed of Cottonreel and the Geminis, nosing sadly among the collars their captors had discarded on the floor of the van. In that dream, guided by the familiar smell of home, each lost cat could find its collar but never get back into it. He dreamed of Tag and Mousebreath and their little Cy. In the dream they were in some dark place, moving forward into danger because chaos lay behind them. A pale, determined light was in their eyes.
Finally he dreamed of Pertelot Fitzwilliam.
Tintagel Court. Cold light flickered on the walls of a cold room.
The Mau smelled of civet, cinnamon, and tar – bizarre spices in the night. The whole of Egypt was in her eyes. She was as soft and clever as a bird. She loved him. ‘Ragnar!’ she wailed at him over her shoulder, and raised her elegant haunches. It was deep music. Before he knew it, he had bitten her suddenly in the loose skin of her neck and mounted her. With that lurch of pleasure there went through them both the dislocation of every promise they had ever made – Never mate. We shall never mate! – and they were like two other cats there in the gloom, driven by the blood, soft and savage, delighted and fierce.
Then the light shifted and changed, and he was looking at her from far off, under a blinding white light, where she was etherized on a table, eyes gone, rosy limbs pinned down, and the wire snaking up into her brain, and he could hear her whispering over and over again, ‘If a single kitten dies, the King – If a single kitten dies, the King—’
From this nightmare he woke, cold and appalled, to find that it was almost morning and he had fallen out of the tree. He walked dazedly about on the lawn in the dark until the dog began to bark from the house.
*
With that, his days became the search for her. Ragged and hungry, he wandered the human roads of the south. He had no plan. He listened to his blood or to the voices in his head. The roads were white at first, then churned to slush. A raw wind blew from the east, to blacken the lime trunks. It brought freezing rain – and then, before the snow could melt – more snow. Ragnar trudged from one dawn to the next, carrying his ice-hung coat like a burden. The wind made his eyes water. Tears froze on his face. He avoided houses and people. He was the Troll Cat now. He had a real sense of this creature within him. It was enduring, empty, dull of mind, determined, a voice that said, ‘Go on!’ because to stop would be to die. He ate from dustbins. He ate dead animals stuck to the roads. He became so hungry that late one afternoon in the gathering dark he found himself gnawing frozen turnips in the corner of a field. He was thinking. Good! Good! and growling to himself. His coat was shaggy and knotted. At a distance, making his way slowly and patiently along some frozen stream between induviae of butterbur and willow herb, he could be mistaken for a pony in a winter field. Then he stopped and raised his head, and his eyes flashed like a signal, brilliant green.
Three or four days after he bit the dog, his instinctual drive south was balked by the broad, willow-stitched meanders of a river. Sheets of broken ice, piled up on the outside of the curves, had refrigerated the air until he could barely breathe it. Well then, he thought, at least I shall be able to go over. But halfway across he encountered a thick black channel of unfrozen water, its glossy back freighted with broken branches and huge but swanlike structures of plastic packing material. It was as muscular as a snake. He studied the powerful eddy and swirl of it. He looked over at the far bank, which was hairy with birch and alder. Then he backed carefully off the thinner ice at the brink and resumed his plod across the water meadows.
Conditions were bad, even for the Troll Cat. Snow whirled around him so thickly he couldn’t tell whether it came from the sky or the earth. His sense of direction failed. He was afraid to stop in case he started off again in the wrong line and ended up back on the ice. After a few minutes he heard muffled cries nearby. There was a tinge of color to the snowy air. Nacreous pinks and yellows – agitated like summer leaves or weed curling under water – developed to red and orange and gold. There were smells: acrid, aromatic, unfamiliar. The cries, thin and urgent, redoubled, then died. Ragnar flattened himself to the ground. He crept cautiously forward, step by partial step. Had the air grown warmer? He wasn’t sure. Snow surrounded him, opaque as fog. Then he seemed to step free of it, as if blundering out of woods into a dealing.
It had been a pleasant summer cottage of rosy-orange brick, with a weatherboarded upper story and dormer windows. Now – miles from the nearest town, isolated by winter, the water meadows, the cruel cold loops of the river – it was on fire. Long flames roared out of the dormers. Black smoke boiled off into the night. The blaze had started at the left-hand gable end. This it had already reduced to a tissue. No flames could be observed there, only an intense gold light filling the ghosts of rooms. Heat resonated through the freezing air and across the faces of the human beings standing on the lawn. They were pale and shaking. They had saved nothing from the disaster but the nightclothes they stood up in. They had given up trying to do anything.
They were watching a cat ran backward and forward between the house and the lawn.
She was an ordinary domestic black and white, and perhaps the kittens were her first. They were about eighteen days old. When Ragnar arrived, she had retrieved two of them. By the time he’d understood what was happening, she had fetched out a third. Because the fire had begun upstairs, its claim on the ground floor was, as yet, tentative. Even so, no human being could survive the heat and fumes inside. Quiet and determined, quick and clever on her feet, mining a layer of good air five inches deep, the black and white was fetching her litter. The fourth kitten took longer. She dropped it gently with the rest, and when she looked up at the human beings – calmly, as if to say, This is hard work! – Ragnar could see she was exhausted, filthy with soot, and already burned. By the fifth kitten, her ears had become a kind of blackened frill on her skull, and she had to sit down for a moment before she went back in. She was careful to sit well away from the people, in case they tried to stop her. She stared at them thoughtfully. But when the kittens mewed for her, she would not look, in case their need sapped her determination. When she came out with the sixth kitten, Ragnar had made up his mind and was waiting on the garden path.
‘Two more inside,’ she said. ‘Help me.’
The sixth kitten was dead. She put it on the pile with the others and began licking it, looking about her every so often in a puzzled, irritable fashion. It was clear to Ragnar that she could no longer see. Her eyelids had gone, along with the fur on the left side of her face.
‘They will be dead now,’ he said gently. ‘You have done enough.’
‘No,’ she said.
She lurched toward the house.
‘They will be dead,’ said Ragnar.
‘No.’
‘Then let me fetch them.’
‘All right,’ she said.
She took two steps back toward her litter and fell over on her side. ‘Thank you,’ she said indistinctly, as Ragnar wa
lked past her and into the house. ‘I don’t feel well.’ She smelt powerfully of scorched hair and worse.
Ragnar was no fonder of fire than any other cat. After the fight with the Alchemist, dread had filled him to see the flames burst from the warehouse. He stood for a moment in the doorway. Cold air rushed past him. Convection currents raged within. He could see fallen timbers at an angle across a passage, bellying brown darkness shot with carmine, and thick yellow particulate smoke. If the fire on the second story had purified itself beyond flames, something darker and less formed lived down here. He shrugged. He had said he would help her, and now he would. He ducked beneath the smoke and into the hallway. The fire welcomed him. Even in the good air he could barely breathe. Cinders bit him through his fur. His eyes ran with tears, then dried out as the tear ducts gave up. His ruff sizzled suddenly under his nose. Nuzzling the cinder out, he burned his mouth.
Room to room he went, scuttling from pocket to pocket of air, as flat to the ground as a wood louse. The tough Skogkatt coat brushed the floor. All weathers, he thought. All purpose. Room to room, alive to the noises beneath the voice of the fire, the smells inside the black breath of combustion. He was so alert he could almost see through the smoke. He was all nerves. He had never felt so alive! He found them in what had been the kitchen. She had been keeping them among the tablecloths on a shelf in the linen cupboard. Their age had prevented them from crawling off into the fire in panic, but one was already dead of smoke inhalation and the other, a piebald little thing with not much to recommend it, lay with its face on the shelf, blinking and mewling feebly.
‘I hurt,’ it said, trying to look up at Ragnar Gustaffson. ‘I hurt.’
‘Well, then,’ Ragnar Gustaffson told it. ‘We should go out of here, I think, you and I. Cheer up. As my tough friend Tag says —’You haven’t had it till you’re dead.’’
And he picked it up in his mouth.
You would have thought this was a signal. Fire flashed over in a roiling, glittering cloud a foot beneath the kitchen ceiling. The linen cupboard exploded. Ceiling beams creaked and fell. But Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion knew exactly where he was going. He reached the doorway, took a moment to look up and down the passage. ‘That way fire. This way the open air. No contest, I would say!’ He got a firmer grip on the kitten, put his head down, and ran. As he went, he cast quick glances from side to side. My, he thought, this is some story to tell!
