The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  She shook herself and closed her mouth. She washed again, attending busily to the fur beneath her chin with long, awkward movements of her tongue.

  *

  When Tag woke the next morning, the first thing he heard was a purr like a broken lawn mower. The first thing he felt was Cy, rubbing her face against his to mark him. ‘Mine. My cat.’ She smelled of thyme and old damp carpet, and her eyes were full of impudence.

  ‘Hi, Silver,’ she said. ‘I’m Cy! Cy for Cyber.’ She wriggled. ‘You know me. I’m the Bakelite Baby! I sit on your sideboard, I sleep in your seasons, I dance in your hat!’ She assumed a listening attitude. ‘Tango Delta callin’! Wow! How nice!’ She licked his face until he spluttered. She said, ‘I miss you when I’m not here. Ido!’

  ‘Get off,’ said Tag. Then, surprised, ‘You’re clean!’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted proudly, ‘I am.’

  She caught sight of Majicou. ‘Wow!’ she said. ‘A highway cat, with nerves of steel! I must see this!’ And she rushed off to examine him, pausing only to glare resentfully at her back legs, which had begun making decisions of their own. The old cat looked down. The tabby stared up. Mismatched as to size and intellect – but not, perhaps, loudness of purr – they regarded one another companionably.

  ‘I’m broken!’ boasted Cy.

  ‘So?’ said Majicou. ‘Soon you’ll be fixed again. What a life you’ll have then!’

  ‘This is madness,’ said the fox to Tag.

  He had that minute come in from the rain.

  *

  ‘Things have gone badly for me,’ admitted Majicou a little later.

  Mid-morning in the main chamber. Outside, the wind still whistled under a low cloud base. Complex weather fronts, one overlapping the next, had raced south all night to lower the temperature and bring hail where there had been rain. Thunder growled somewhere at the edge of it all, waiting to make a comeback. Distant lightning lit the chamber, where shifting gradients of humidity caused the withered flowers to give off ghostly odors of spring. The old cat’s voice echoed a little in the cold air.

  ‘While I waited all that time for my apprentice to be sent to me, the Alchemist was pursuing his ends. It was ever thus: Hobbe broods, his master acts. Now Hobbe’s old master has knotted the wild roads until they bulge like broken veins.’

  Tag, Cy, and Loves a Dustbin sat listening on the drafty floor. Mousebreath, who had elected to keep watch, could be heard shifting about uncomfortably in the mound entrance, fluffing himself up as he watched the hailstones jump like grasshoppers in the sodden beech mast and winter-bleached grasses. Meltwater dripped on him from the lintel. Every line of his body was as gloomy as the day.

  Majicou continued. ‘They wince from his approach. They become undependable. All their ghosts spill out and are lost. Ghosts that writhe and call – Oh yes, Tag, I hear them: the million voices of the dead, the rising wail of panic on the night! – then dissipate like smoke while the vagus and worse make free of the Old Changing Way. Meanwhile, I have no knowledge of the King and Queen. Where are they? I don’t know. I hear nothing from the magpie. I sit by night at Cutting Lane and hear nothing from anyone.

  ‘All is chaos,’ he concluded. ‘I have only one throw left.’ He looked up. ‘I must take the highway to Tintagel and hope that Pertelot and Ragnar will have made their own way there.’

  The fox got to his feet. He said heavily, ‘Majicou, you’re mad to do this.’

  He went to the door, sat down next to Mousebreath, and stared out.

  ‘Funny old day,’ they heard Mousebreath murmur.

  ‘I know the arguments,’ Majicou called. ‘I listened to them all night.’

  ‘Majicou, you didn’t listen to a word.’

  There was a silence in the chamber. A draft stirred, then scattered the dried flowers. The tabby chased after them with the wobbling, bandy-legged gait and short jumps of a kitten, tumbling over her own feet. That left Majicou with Tag. The old cat sighed. ‘I’m not keeping my audience today,’ he admitted. ‘Tag, the job of apprentice is still open. But you have to agree with everything I say.’

  ‘Will you tell me something, Majicou?’

  ‘Who else have I got to talk to?’

  ‘You came here on a highway, but I can’t see it.’

  ‘Then you shall see it now.’

  He led Tag into the smallest of the three chambers, which smelled strongly of chalk earth. Its walls were white with crystals of niter, streaked black where groundwater had run down through the mound above. The air here was so damp it dulled their voices when they spoke.

  ‘Look carefully,’ said Majicou.

  Tag looked. A twist of air glimmered in the angle between two walls. It was the color of watered milk, and it seemed to turn and shift like an insect’s wing dangling from a rag of spiderweb in the corner of a window frame – memory of a frozen struggle, unwelcome reminder of time passing. Yet at its heart something danced as gaily as spring morning sun in a drop of water!

  ‘Approach with caution,’ said Majicou, ‘and tell me what you see.’

  ‘A light! The outside!’

  ‘But not the outside of this place,’ said Majicou.

  ‘Majicou, look at the light!’

  ‘You and I will use this entrance when the time comes, along with Mousebreath and Cy.’

  ‘And the fox,’ said Tag.

  Majicou regarded him.

  ‘Mousebreath, Cy, and the fox,’ said Tag.

  ‘The fox has other errands,’ Majicou told him grimly. ‘He must take a different road.’

  ‘I see.’

  Back in the main chamber, Loves a Dustbin was waiting for them.

  ‘Majicou,’ he said, ‘I hate this. You know that he is watching you even now, through—’ he indicated Cy, who was still jumping about among the flowers ‘—that thing. It will tell him every step you take.’

  ‘And yet we must be there,’ said Majicou simply.

  When the fox only stared at him, yellow eyes full of impatience and love, he added, ‘She is a cat, not a thing. Look, she’s playing. Beyond that, she has no idea what she is. Do you want me to abandon her just to save myself?’ He laughed, ‘i’ll live!’ he said. ‘You know I will!’ Something in the fox’s expression made him look away. ‘Take heart. Loves a Dustbin,’ he said softly. ‘You can’t be everywhere at once.’

  The fox sighed. ‘Then I’d better leave now, Majicou,’ he said.

  The cats assembled outside the mound in the falling sleet to watch him go. He wished them all good-bye, even the tabby, who said, ‘You smell!’ and wouldn’t look at him. When he came to Mousebreath, he caught the feral’s orange eye and inquired, ‘Is there any business unfinished between us?’

  Mousebreath considered. ‘I don’t think there is,’ he said, ‘mate.’

  ‘Good,’ said the fox.

  ‘Just don’t forget howter eat fish.’

  The fox chuckled. ‘How could I?’

  He turned to Tag. ‘Well then, Tag. Don’t look so sad!’

  But Tag remembered how the fox in his pain had stared out of the rain-slashed conservatory windows, whispering bleakly, ‘I never saw it, but it follows me still. I don’t think it is a vagus. I think it is my death.’

  He wanted to say, Oh, Loves a Dustbin, will we ever see you again? He wanted to say, Don’t go! But all that came out was ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye, little cat. Take care of your friends. Remember who you are. And you too, Majicou: take care!’

  It looked as if he wanted to say more. But he turned abruptly, made his foxy way over the drystone wall and between the beech trees, and vanished from view. Soon they saw him two or three hundred yards off, quartering the ridge. He was limping a little, trotting three-leggedly about, nose to the ground among the thistles. At that distance he looked rather small, and his russet coat was already blackened with melted sleet. Then he seemed to catch a scent. His ears pricked up. He looked back. ‘Come safe to Tintagel, Majicou!’ they heard him bark. Then he
sprang forward like a greyhound. His brush streamed in the wind. His limp vanished. His coat turned from russet to shining red-gold. His body lengthened and blurred as it went, shedding strange, expanding rings of rainbow light, and suddenly he was no longer there.

  The highway closed behind him with a faint popping noise. Majicou led them back inside.

  Tag went and stared hard into the corner of the smallest chamber. A few minutes later the old cat found him there, and asked him, ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  I see spring light! Light on water!

  ‘What you see is not often what you find.’

  ‘Shall we go now, Majicou?’

  ‘No,’ said Majicou. ‘The fox’s errand couldn’t wait. I sent him into some danger. Tag. A storm will make the wild roads difficult even at the best of times. We’ll set off when the weather’s changed.’

  ‘Ah.’

  So they waited. Mousebreath and the tabby huddled together, dozing in the cold. Majicou placed himself at the entrance of the chamber, narrowed his eye, and stared off down the Ridgeway, as if that way he might follow the fortunes of his fox.

  After a while, unable to sleep, Tag asked him, ‘What have you liked best in your life?’

  The old cat thought. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said.

  ‘I liked being a kitten best.’

  ‘Did you now? And what did that entail?’

  ‘Food, mainly. And bubbles! Majicou, you must remember being a kitten!’

  No answer but a laugh.

  Tag tried to doze. It was hard.

  ‘Majicou?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Majicou, I heard you say, ‘Hobbe broods: his master acts.’ What did that mean?’

  Majicou sighed. ‘That is the trouble with being a one-eyed cat,’ he complained. ‘The apprentice won’t let you sleep.’ But he relented finally, and told Tag the story he called ‘The Seventh Life of Cats.’

  The Seventh Life of Cats

  Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, the upright ones called it. A pretty rural hamlet in the back end of nowhere. No sign there among the warm barns in which we slept and played of the horror to come.

  I recall highways full of autumn sunshine, the scent of hay and apples and bowls of warm milk. Harvest suppers when the dogs were tied up and the house was thrown open to the cats. No witch-hunts in this pleasant place, where folk understood the value of a good mouser. Thus was I born into my seventh life; though some months were to pass before I met the author of the events I was born to witness and to attempt to divert.

  I found that author in one of the outhouses. At that time it was little more than a boy, a silent lad with clever hands. It was always occupied with something to interest a kitten: bits of string, wood shavings, lenses and mirrors that threw a dancing light upon the walls.

  You might think that by now I would be more wary of the upright ones, but it is never so simple. At the beginning of a life, my past returns to me in undependable flashes, darts, dreams, patterns like light upon a wall. One minute a kitten chases the dust motes in a sunbeam; next, the Majicou, burdened by the weight of what he knows, confronts the wry harmonies of the world. I was once a cat like you.

  I was drawn to it, the boy with the clever hands. I followed it around. It named me Hobbe. It made for me an ingenious door-within-the-door that allowed me to pass at will between house and kitchen garden. It scratched the spot beneath my chin I could not lick. It watched as I stalked the mice in the barn. I used the little highways that crosshatched the barnyard. I heard it murmur, ‘Empty space cannot only be filled by material substance, but also by spiritual substance.’

  It shone a light into my eyes, and while I blinked and shied away, it wrote in a book. ‘What a wonderful work is a cat! The ancients were wise before their time.’

  Wisdom has its own time.

  It jabbed my paws with an instrument. I had a piece of meat for my pains, but became shier of its rooms.

  It said, ‘The aether is surely created by the animal spirit, the workings of brains such as these, the mystical firing of each nerve. Are not rays of light very small bodies emitted from shining substances?’

  It walked briskly around the room, wringing its hands.

  It said, ‘Surely this is the true matter of the world, the fine aether that affords and carries out into the atmosphere the solary fuel and material principle of light that feeds the very stars and planets!’

  In the spring of that year it packed its belongings – books, pots, devices, vials, and Hobbe – into a horse-drawn cart. The journey was interminable. In the city, among the roil of foot and horse traffic, the noise and the stench and the chaos, a million miles as it might be from the trees and cornfields of my home, I was to discover the true nature of my master’s calling. And with that, the nature of my own great task.

  We settled into our new quarters – a tiny house in the lanes with a tiny yard at the side leading to a foul-smelling jakes. Curiosity soon overcame my fear of the new smells and sounds; and once my master had cut my door-within-a-door I was able to patrol wall and alley or follow the tangle of highways down to the fetid, fertile river.

  My master toiled. I watched the ghost cats skeining past to wharf and rooftop meeting place. I lazed in the city heat. Young cats should seek pleasure. They should seek experience. I sought rats, which were numerous there, due to an unexplained scarcity of my own kind, and queens, who never complained. It was a pleasant way to idle away the hours between dusk and dawn. By day I slept before warm embers in the house.

  All the rooms were open to me but one.

  In there my master chanted, ‘Dissolve the volatile Green Lion in the cuprous salt to distill the animal spirit. The Blood of the Lion to be mixed with the powdered ashes, then fermented with the double white vitriol of Mercury and purified with saltpeter for the glorious Regulus that will unfold the Net!’

  It complained, ‘The Egyptians had the art. Oh, that it is lost. Perhaps some magic remains in these ancient windings…’

  And, ‘Oh, the stony serpents!’ it would cry. ‘Lord, give me the Animal Stone, give me entrance to the mysteries of the natural world!’

  None of which meant anything to me. However hard I tried to get into that room, I failed. When I looked through the keyhole, stretch up as I might, all I got was an angle of the ceiling, where colored lights played with no clue to their origin.

  It was a hot summer that year, hot and humid. The flies swarmed over the river; the fish rotted before they could be landed at the market; the fleas multiplied on the rats.

  ‘Plague!’ was the cry that filled the air.

  Soon you could hear them shrieking in the streets. Women and babies at the windows. Men mad with pain staggering down the road. They clutched the swellings in their armpits. They threw themselves from upper rooms or shot themselves in full sight of their neighbors. Many chose the river. Its fetid smell pervaded everything.

  Meanwhile, the curious or criminal wandered the streets with their heads swathed in vinegar turbans and carrying nosegays of rue. Some watched the misery of others and failed to act. Some acted, and were sick next day. King Mob ran down the alleys, stealing whatever was left to steal, murdering without let.

  Plague burned its way through lanes and alleys, single houses and entire streets, until a hundred thousand had perished. Corpses were stacked on corpses in the great stinking pits. A million rats swarmed across the common graves, and only Felidae could keep them down.

  Ordinances went up. No public gatherings. None to leave the city. Cats to be slaughtered in case they carried the disease from house to house.

  The building that backed onto my master’s was a bakery. I often sat upon its roof. The sun shone in the afternoon; sparrows came after the spoiled loaves the baker tossed out at the end of the day. I was out there one evening, tired of the scenes below, when the baker’s cat approached me.

  ‘They’ve appointed an Executioner of Cats,’ he said.

  I stared
at him.

  ‘It’s your master,’ he said. ‘The one they call the Alchemist.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘He asked for the job.’

  ‘Why should I believe that?’

  ‘And anyway, this is my roof.’

  You can be sure I showed him where his error lay. But I watched my master after that. I watched its comings and goings. One night it fixed shutters across the windows and closed up the door-within-a-door so that I could not leave the house. Brimstone, rosin, and pitch burned in the hearth with such a strong smoke that my eyes watered and I lost my sense of smell. My master went into the scullery, filled its mouth with garlic cloves until it gagged, and with a sack in its hand made for the front door. I slipped out under its feet, leapt the wall next door, and followed it down to the river. There, it hired a boat and an oarsman. The moonlight glinted serenely on the water. The boat diminished toward the opposite bank. I dozed. I slept the night away and missed the boat’s return.

  That morning, I had to break into my own home. I went straight to the door of the forbidden room and listened. Silence. Then a wail, a cry! Cats! Other cats in my house! I veered between extremes of jealousy and rage, between inquisitiveness and desire, for not only was it the cry of cats I heard…

  It was the cry of females.

  For the next few days, they called in my dreams. The imagined musk of them drove me to a frenzy. In the forbidden room of my imagination, they lay rolling on their sides or waggling their delicious rumps in the air. They were waiting for me. And so I waited too, until my master – dawdling down the corridor absorbed in a book that spoke of Democritus, Homer, and the Adeptists, of al-chemeia the Egyptian art: how a magical stone might make known the perfect nature of things – opened the forbidden door without looking down. In a flash I had scuttled in between its feet and was instantly crouched out of sight beneath a bench.