by Gabriel King
‘And who are you to take responsibility?’
Tag looked as directly as he could into the fox’s yellow eyes. ‘I’m Majicou’s apprentice,’ he said.
Loves a Dustbin shrugged and turned away. ‘You are indeed,’ he was forced to agree. ‘We should stay off the highway,’ he added. ‘That will make things harder for them.’
So they walked.
It was a slower way to travel, but Tag rather enjoyed the change. It was important to get the fox well and to decide what to do with Cy. Her internal weather raged. Bouts of delirium alternated with a kind of unconscious panic in which, rigid as a length of wood, she would cry out, ‘It’s all white tiles. Jack! It’s all white! Oh! No wires! Not the wires!’ If you looked into her eyes during these episodes, Mousebreath claimed, whatever she was seeing left you in terror too. But for the most part she remained unconscious. They took turns to carry her, and this time the fox helped too. She was heavy and inert. They walked mainly in the dark, a few miles at a time, heading west on their natural compass, resting up at dawn.
Mousebreath fed them.
He had discovered a talent for fishing that he demonstrated one morning by taking ounce-roach out of a deep little stream under some willows. He looked awkward, leaning precariously out from the muddy bank, up to his armpit in water. But his blunt, cobby paws were quick and surprisingly deft. He seemed to hypnotize the fish with them before he struck. Then – flip! – there was an arc of living, wriggling silver in the air, almost as if the water itself had turned into food.
‘Learnt it on goalfish—’ he explained. Whenever he talked to the fox he thickened his accent until no one could follow what he said. ‘—in a garen ponged.’
‘Ponged?’ said the fox.
‘Yeah. You know. Farntin and all. Ponged in a lorn. Goal-fish. Very tasty.’
‘These taste of mud,’ said the fox.
‘Don’t eatem then,’ advised Mousebreath gently. ‘More for us.’ He added quietly, ‘Ponce.’
But he must have regretted this, because a few minutes later, when he thought Tag was asleep, he strolled over to where the fox was sitting glumly in some wet grass, eyeing the dinner he didn’t know how to eat. They sat there for a minute refusing to acknowledge each other, and they really looked rather alike – the battered old feral, odd-eyed survivor of a thousand turf wars and the dustbin fox with his bony undependable grin and patches of bare black hide. After a moment, Mousebreatli rummaged about in the slime and innards of the half-chewed roach. ‘Dam eat this,’ he suggested, as if he were teaching a kitten. ‘See? Or this. Try the rest. Go on.’
‘This?’
‘Go on, try it!’
Tag listened for a moment or two, then curled up tighter and went to sleep. It was a bitter morning, but he felt warm for a change.
*
The fox did well. His injuries healed, though he still limped, especially at the end of the day. He got on better with Mouse-breath. But he never felt less than uncomfortable in this traditional habitat of foxes, where fields were muddy, nights were frosty, food ran away from him, and journeys were long.
One evening, they rested on a tall hill before their night’s march. On three sides, mile after mile of farmland spread away into the shadow of the rolling westward hills, above which a long winter sunset streaked the eggshell sky with layers of thick red, dirty orange, and gently fluorescent green. On the fourth side, immediately below, sprawled a town. Streetlights and shop lights switched themselves on in groups as the animals watched. The lights of houses sprang on only to be dimmed immediately as curtains were drawn. The air darkened imperceptibly; the streets were revealed as a great lacy wing of light under the dulling smoky colors of the sunset. Tag, who had been carrying Cy, put her tenderly down. He licked the top of her head. Today she smelled of mint; tomorrow it would be an old bus shelter in the rain. For a long time none of the animals spoke.
‘Lot of people in the world,’ said the fox at last. ‘Aren’t there? Do you know what I miss most when I think about the city?’
‘What?’ Tag asked.
‘I miss the lights.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Tag said. ‘The streetlamps, the neon, the great advertisements flashing up against the night…’
The fox stared carefully at Tag for a moment, as if he thought Tag were mad.
‘I miss the traffic lights,’ he said.
‘Oh.’
‘How else do you know when to cross a road?’
‘Ah.’
There was a long pause. Then Mousebreath gave a slow, rich chuckle.
‘Had you there,’ he said to Tag.
The animals continued to stare. Three counties were visible. Moor, pasture, long gently rolling slopes of plowland, black copses and hedges, misty distances out of which stood a single farm or a hawthorn tree, and above it all that strange sunset, which had evolved strong delicate greens and a blue-gold afterglow high up. In deep black silhouette, Loves a Dustbin curled himself down and around so that he could first lick the base of his tail, then scratch vigorously under his chin with one back leg. He shook himself. Tag, full of a sudden happiness, saw the tawny hairs fly up in the last of the light. A strong smell of fox filled the cool still air. ‘Yes,’ said Loves a Dustbin, after a pause. ‘I miss those lights.’
‘Had you there all right,’ said Mousebreath. ‘Got you dead to rights there.’
*
On the Ridgeway, though the snow had melted, the weather was still wintry and undependable. Tag would have avoided it for that reason if no other. He felt safer in the lanes, where it was wanner and easier to hide. Eventually, though, sick of being balked by the rivers in the winding valley bottoms, he led his party above the spring line again.
At midnight the moon was a slippery illumination behind tissues of high white cloud. An hour later, the wind was still light, flirting either side of west, never quite in their faces. The air remained dry and a degree above freezing. But by two in the morning the wind had veered north and become squally. Periods of harsh moonlight – in which the shadows shifted and jumped, razoring the nerves of the two cats and putting the fox into a poor temper – now alternated with heavy cloud. The air was damp and raw and full of electricity. Suddenly, from the north, came the first growl of thunder.
The fox sniffed the air.
‘Not good! Not good!’ he told himself. He hung out his tongue – as if he could taste the danger – and panted. ‘We should go down!’ he advised Tag. He hated the ridge anyway. ‘It’s like walking in front of an audience!’
‘Make your play, partner,’ said Cy indistinctly from Tag’s mouth. She laughed.
Tag put her down and examined her.
Nothing.
He looked around.
The Ridgeway had turned south. Further along, he could see the path descending between earth banks and straggling, wind-eroded hedges. Here, though, they were seven hundred feet up on the bare ridge. There was nothing but sky between them and the next county.
He opened his mouth to reassure the fox, ‘We’ll take shelter as soon as we can.’ But before he could close it again the moon went out like a popped lightbulb and the storm roared up from the slopes under the summit as if it had lain in ambush for them there all along. Black water filled the air. With a long, tearing hiss and a hot bang, the world lit up white. Sparks fizzed and splattered. Something picked Tag up and dropped him four yards away among stones. As he got shakily to his feet, he saw the unconscious tabby bowling past like a wet rag mop. The fox was struggling after her, his body canted at a strange angle to the wind.
‘We’ve got to go down!’
‘I can’t hear you!’
‘We’ve got to go down!’
‘I can’t hear you! We must go down!’
‘I said, We’ve got to go down!’
For a minute or two they could only run aimlessly about in terror of the lightning, crouching and ducking and trying to slink away under the thin cover of tangled couch and thistle. Then Mo
usebreath narrowed his eyes. He set his scarred face into the storm. ‘Come on!’ he said, and began to shoulder his way down the hill. Tucked in behind him came the fox, with Cy dangling from his jaws. Tag followed, hindquarters close to the ground. Their eyes were wide and scared. But Mousebreath leaned into the wind and broke a trail for them like some great old horse, until, five hundred yards on and fifty yards north of the track, a bleak earth prominence came into sight.
In the constant flicker of the lightning, white chalk paths made their way around a ring of eroded stones, itself surrounded by tall beech trees in a circle. Rain hissed off the ancient structure that could be seen within: more stones, tumbled about, a long grassy mound with a dark and massively linteled doorway about the height of a human child. Tag and the fox stood nervously outside the ring of beeches in the raw wind while Mousebreath jumped up on a section of drystone wall between two pillars.
‘It seems to go straight down into the ground,’ he said. ‘But I can’t quite see—’ He had a closer look. ‘It’s not my idea of home,’ he reported.
But Tag said, ‘It’s what we’ve got.’
The fox shuddered. ‘I won’t go in,’ he said. ‘My death awaits me there.’
‘No it doesn’t,’ Tag told him. ‘Your death awaits you out here.’
Mousebreath laughed. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘He got you there,’ he told the fox, ‘and no mistake. Now, will you bring Cy,’ he asked Tag, ‘or shall I? And who’s going first?’
‘You are.’
They left Cy and the fox sheltering among the contorted roots of a beech tree, and entered the ring of stones. Cold, musty air came up out of the mound like ancient breath to meet them. Mousebreath stuck his head across the threshold – chalk, compacted by a million human feet, slimy and puddled and scattered with flints – and entered an inch at a time, while Tag stood by uncomfortably in the flare and bang of the storm. Rain dripped from the lintel onto them both.
Mousebreath vanished. There was a silence. Then he said, ‘Seems all right. A bit dank.’ He wasn’t far inside, but his voice already sounded distant and echoey. ‘I’ll just go abit farther—’
‘Be careful,’ Tag reminded him.
‘It does go down,’ Mousebreath said. ‘Wait, I can see something—’ His voice changed. ‘Out!’ he called. ‘Something’s in here! Let me out!’
Too late.
There was a noise like the wind gathering itself across miles of moorland before it bursts upon a lonely village. A long pulse of bitter white light poured out of the mound, projecting Mousebreath’s shadow across the ring of beeches and onto the clouds in the sky beyond. Then it picked him up and – with the soft contemptuous ‘pah!’ of expelled breath – hurled him backward, his limbs extended rigidly and every hair of his coat raised as if he had been electrocuted.
Tag ran away. Then he ran back again and stared into the mound.
‘Struck!’ he shouted. ‘We’ve been struck!’
But he saw immediately that they hadn’t.
Lightning comes and goes in an instant. This light took forever, passing from station to station of the spectrum until it was the color of old blood, and only then winking out. Tag trembled. Something had arrived in the mound. Silhouetted by the dying light in the doorway in front of him, as black and massy as any of the sarsen stones in the rain, was the figure of an animal. It sat alertly, head raised and proud. It was five feet tall.
It was laughing at him.
‘Hello, little cat,’ it said.
It opened its mouth. Roared. Dwindled, and became Majicou.
*
The storm raged on. Cloud boiled over the ridge. With every flash of lightning, the trunks of the beech trees seemed to glitter and shift. Raindrops danced and splashed like fish in the standing puddles between the root systems, among which Tag and Majicou found Mousebreath. He was half conscious, muttering indistinctly to himself. Majicou picked him up and carried him into the mound. Once recovered, he seemed pleased with his adventure.
‘Look at that!’ he kept boasting. ‘Not a mark on me! Eh? Not a mark!’
Tag was impressed. But Majicou only said, ‘You were lucky.’ By way of explanation, he added, ‘A small highway emerges here. When I arrived, some of its energy found a way out of the chamber.’
This must have seemed like an understatement to Mouse-breath, who responded, ‘Well, we could do with some fire here!’
‘You couldn’t do with this fire,’ Loves a Dustbin assured him. ‘A little more and you would have died of it.’
Mousebreath was right, though. It wasn’t much warmer inside the mound than out, or much drier. Air circulated in the largest of the three chambers they had found; but the other two were as musty as caves, their walls velvet with damp. In all three, human visitors had left tributes of flowers. Some they had placed carefully in little vases; most were wilting on the worn earth floor. Among these curious out-of-season garlands – bright red, blue, and yellow – Cy lay with her eyes filmed and her mouth open. Majicou paced the chamber, his tail lashing, while the fox hung out his tongue and with tawny eyes followed his master’s every movement. Tag watched them all and shivered, but not with cold. This was his life now.
‘What was that?’ he demanded. ‘I thought we’d been struck! What was that fire, Majicou?’
But the black cat wouldn’t answer. He took the fox to the other end of the chamber, where they were soon deep in talk.
Tag felt left out. ‘What a laugh!’ he said loudly to Mouse-breath. ‘Eh, Mousebreath? I thought you’d had it then!’ Mouse-breath was dozing, though, and only chuckled. Tag went and sat as far away from Majicou and Loves a Dustbin as he could. Curling his front paws up under him and his tail around him, he stared hard at the seeping wall. He was so tired he fell asleep immediately.
At that point, the tabby had not stirred.
Snatches of talk wove themselves through Tag’s dreams as Majicou and the fox argued away the rest of the night, then-voices heavy with anxiety.
‘No way forward.’
‘But if we—’
‘Impossible!’ And then, ‘All avenues closed, the highways undependable and dangerous.’
‘You cannot know that!’
‘Danger—’
‘You are at risk every minute you remain away from Cutting Lane!’
‘Did he always know more than we assumed?’
‘Danger.’
‘In a froth of fire, highways cracking like whips. My death awaits me there—’
‘Danger!’
There was a lot of this. Drifting in and out of sleep, Tag seemed to miss the crux of every sentence. Then he heard Cy’s name, and a little later the fox exclaimed, ‘But she is a proxy, Majicou!’
‘Even so.’
‘But, Majicou—’
‘You do not know everything.’
‘Then it won’t be my fault if everything goes to ruin!’ returned the fox angrily.
‘Sleep now,’ Majicou told him. ‘You have a long way to go in the morning.’
‘Majicou—’
‘Sleep now.’
*
Tag was never quite sure which of Majicou’s eyes was the sighted one. It was no ordinary eye. It had the prismatic quality of the bar of light you see on the bevel of a mirror. He knew that. But whether it was the right or the left eye he had never been able to decide. He woke an hour before dawn, determined to find out. Everyone else was asleep. He could hear the fox’s restive yips and moans; Mousebreath’s catarrhal snores; the deep, even breath of Majicou. He crept across to the old cat and stood looking down at him. Both eyes were closed, and nothing was revealed. Even in sleep, Majicou’s face looked tired and anxious. Even in sleep, it kept his secrets.
I’ll probably never know, thought Tag.
Just then the eye opened and stared at him. Tag jumped back in alarm. When nothing happened, he came close again and leaned over. Was the eye aware? Was Majicou awake? He gave no sign of it. Slowly, the eye closed. Tag crept guil
tily away. He had got as far as the center of the chamber when Majicou said clearly, ‘Come back, Tag.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tag. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
Majicou sighed. ‘Why not?’ he said gently.
Tag looked around the chamber, then at Majicou. His mentor’s eye blinked back at him. Tag couldn’t admit that he was jealous of the fox or that curiosity had got the better of him. So he said, ‘This is such an old place.’
Majicou lashed his tail contemptuously.
‘Nothing human beings have built is old. The world is old. Cats are old.’ He brooded on that. ‘Constructed things were new in Egypt, perhaps a little before. By then, cats were already ancient.’ He gazed into the shadows, as if he could see them there, those ancient cats – the pale sandy cats of the desert, the sleek domestic cats of the Lower Nile: small gods. The cats of Egypt! ‘‘They slept by the water without fear,’ he went on eventually in a low, wondering voice, ‘and at dawn watched the pelicans rise pink-breasted in the new light. In the afternoon their mouths were full of the soft white doves of the Nile. At dusk they looked about them. They heard the hyenas bark from the night villages. Moonlight had entered their eyes forever.’
He seemed to shiver and come back to himself.
‘Human beings? We know their dreams. Feeble and self-defeating. Look around you in the world, Tag. What do you see? Time for a new dream; time for an old dream. Human beings have done enough dreaming for now.’
‘Am I still your apprentice, Majicou?’
‘Go back to sleep.’
Tag could do nothing else. He returned to his corner and curled up. Which eye had it been? He had forgotten again. Just as he was dropping off, an amused voice advised him, ‘You are not quite ready to see as I see.’
*
A little time later, the tabby woke.
Delighted by the flowers, she sat for some minutes among them and washed her face like any cat, dreamily licking her paws and wiping her ears.
During this process she touched the plug in her head. A little tremor went through her. It was as if she had woken up again. This time she was more alert. She stopped washing, one paw held up. She raised her head. She seemed to listen. Her gaze went from one sleeping form to the next: Mousebreath, Tag, Loves a Dustbin – on whom she dwelt a moment, as if trying to remember something. When she came to Majicou, her mouth gaped open and a few pale motes trickled out of it to fill the chamber with a faint sticky radiance.
