The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  She stood and shook herself vigorously, to dispel the image. At that moment, there was a flicker at the extreme edge of her field of vision.

  She turned and focused on it. There! Some object moving, behind the boat!

  ‘Hey!’

  She ran to the stern, stood up on the polished wooden seat, and, planting her front paws solidly on the gunwale, craned her neck.

  There was something swimming in the wake.

  Not something. Several somethings. The wake streamed out, glimmering deceptively in the last of the light. Were they fish? Maybe dolphins? She dilated her pupils.

  Not fishes or dolphins.

  ‘What?’ she said, as if they might speak.

  Then one of them breasted the waves quite close.

  It was a cat.

  Sealink opened her mouth and found that no sound would come out.

  She stared.

  ‘Hey,’ she whispered.

  Its fur was as sleek as a seal’s, its movements lithe as an otter’s; its whiskers sparkled with water droplets. But its muzzle was a cat’s muzzle, and its coat bore a discernible tabby pattern. A little way behind it swam another, and another. They streamed back with the wake, as fluid as an eddy, as elusive as a reflection. There were nine of them, and they carried a heavy burden.

  A wondering voice beside her said, Mes mî a-droucias ün pesk brâs, naw ê lostiow; but I found one great fish with nine tails…’

  It was the old sea cat.

  ‘Silkies,’ Pengelly said.

  He was enraptured.

  Then he saw their burden.

  ‘Old Smoky!’

  There he was, in the midst of them, borne up flat on his back with his head safely above water: the old fisherman, alive and well and grinning from ear to ear!

  Pengelly ran up and down the stem in delight.

  ‘Old Smoky! Old Smoky!’

  Sealink stared. ‘I thought I’d about seen everything, till I seen this! Cats hate the water! – I except my old friend Muezza, of course, but he was odd – Swimming cats! Ain’t nine swimming cats in the whole world, you ask me!’

  But Pengelly only said complacently, ‘The seas hold many mysteries, my lover,’ and seemed restored to himself.

  Pertelot, gazing over the stem, gave a soft cry of surprise.

  ‘How beautiful they are!’ she said.

  While the magpie cawed and clattered cheerfully to himself from the top of the mast.

  Now the silkies swam in close to the boat, their eyes like deep water on a moonless night, and bore up the old fisherman so that he was able to clutch the gunwale and haul himself over the side. There he lay, flopping about in his own boat, gasping on the slatted deck, while the salt sea ran out of his clothing like water from a great wet sack of fish. He had lost his boots and his sou’wester, but he looked happier than Sealink had ever seen him.

  ‘Pengelly! Pengelly, old cat!’ he called. ‘There’s no cat like you, but you nearly did me a wrong un there! What d’you think to this?’

  But Pengelly wasn’t listening.

  Suddenly he was half in and half out of the Guillemot, while Pertelot Fitzwilliam of Hi-Fashion, Queen of Cats, struggled to keep him from going farther by hanging on to his back legs as if her life depended on it.

  ‘Help me! Help me!’ she sang out.

  And then to Pengelly, ‘You can’t go with them. Pengelly, dear, you can’t!’

  The silkies trod water, their black eyes as flat and dead as any shark’s. Then eight of them turned and dived beneath the waves; and the ninth swam up to the Guillemot. Water cascaded from the close Cornish curls of her wiry fur as she reached up and touched Pengelly’s warm nose with her own bitterly cold one. They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment; then she dropped back down into the chill gray sea and with a sinuous flick of her body vanished beneath the waves.

  ‘Wriggle,’ Pengelly called softly. ‘Wriggle, come back!’

  18

  Partings

  A cat has nine lives. For three he plays. For three he strays. And for three he stays.

  – OLD PROVERB

  ‘So what did you do then?’ asked Tag.

  Majicou thought for a while.

  ‘I took the wild road to the other side of the river,’ he said eventually, ‘and I watched as the Great Fire ate the city.’

  ‘How did you feel?’

  ‘Oh, I smiled.’

  *

  It was almost dark when the storm blew away south, leaving the sky a washed-looking greeny-blue, empty but for a few fast-moving rags of cloud very high up.

  In the villages below the spring line, the wind had blown down the chimneys, the fences, and power cables. Torrential rain had flooded the lanes, leaving sand spits and moraines of gravel at every junction. There were raw scars on hillsides. Strange new shapes had arrived in copse and spinney, where chalk earth, caked in the roots of fallen trees, now made the silhouettes of wild creatures in the growing twilight. Up here none of this was visible. The world stretched away forever, colored the rosy gray of pigeons’ wings; and a single star burned above the horizon.

  ‘Time to leave,’ said Majicou at last.

  *

  Things went wrong from the start.

  The first path, by way of which he had hoped to connect with one of the Great Roads, led only to a garden in some downland village. The next turned back on itself and emptied itself six feet in the air less than two hundred yards from the point they had entered it, so that they tumbled to the ground among apple trees in an old orchard. The third sent them to a shallow valley between shoulders of woodland, along which a lane and a stream ran side by side. Mallards clucked softly from the water.

  Majicou followed the valley for an hour or two, stopping in order to examine the twist of reflected light from a broken bottle or the shadows at the edge of a spinney. Tag followed Majicou, trying to learn what to look for. A little way behind, playing I see, I jump, came Mousebreath and Cy. The stream glittered and winked at them. Moonlight licked the curve of a branch. Majicou darted into a farmyard and nudged his way under the flap of old sacking he found behind a tarred wooden shed. The farm dogs barked sleepily.

  ‘Something here?’

  The old cat raised his head so that his eye caught the moonlight, flat and green. ‘I can connect nothing to nothing,’ he admitted. It was as if the highways themselves were unwilling to go anywhere that night.

  The valley deepened, and the stream fell away from the road, and the cats followed the stream by an ash-strewn track. The water slowed and deepened, turned the color of petrol. It was fringed with elder. A single house loomed out of the night, square, stone-built, slate-roofed. Guinea fowl – making a strange penetrating squeak, like someone obsessively cleaning a window – first huddled in its shadow, then fled like shadows themselves between the lichenous gray trunks of the aging fruit trees. ‘No need to wait for me,’ Mousebreath advised, as he slipped off after them. When he caught up again half a mile later, his eyes were amused and bright, and something soft hung from his mouth, one specked gray wing trailing in the dirt. A warm iron smell was in the air.

  They rested by some abandoned workings – a tall, rusty metal bridge, served by spiral steps; a sagging chain-link fence; a few concrete tanks in pairs, surrounded by rubbish and bare stems of pussy willow – to eat the guinea fowl, crouching in a circle around a little mist of their own breaths to shear the salty, willing flesh from its flexible bones. They licked their chops busily for a minute or two in satisfaction. Then, despite the cold, they felt like sitting down and having a rest.

  ‘I love this life,’ Mousebreath said, staring at the stream and already thinking of fish.

  ‘I do too,’ said Tag.

  But it was there, under the lemony moon, that things really went wrong, and fate began to find them out. While Majicou slept and Tag discussed with Mousebreath the finer points of a life outdoors, the tabby wormed her way under the chain-link and began rummaging about between the tanks. ‘Still sharp-se
t then, the little devil!’ Mousebreath said fondly, as they watched her drag out a number of items, some of which were quite large. There were two rusty springs, something that might once have been a human garment made of white cotton, and a spoon corroded to the color of aluminum. There was a small tin lined with hardened silver paint. These items she arranged in front of her audience, as if for a demonstration, and eyed them for a while with her head on one side. When she wandered off in search of some final element. Tag and Mousebreath stopped paying attention – though they were drowsily aware of her, pottering about behind them amid the tangled stalks of last year’s growth.

  ‘Yes,’ Mousebreath concluded, after a few minutes’ quiet talk, ‘it’s the way to live, this. Uncle Tinner always said so, and he were right.’

  ‘‘Sharp-set!’ ‘‘said Tag with satisfaction. ‘Is ‘sharp-set’ one of the things your uncle Tinner used to say?’

  Behind them among the tanks, things had changed. The thin, elongated shadow of a cat moved across the white concrete walls in the moonlight.

  ‘Sharp-set’s only a manner of speaking,’ explained Mousebreath. ‘It’s to mean you’re hungry, see? If you’re hungry, it’s ‘sharp-set’ till you eat! But he knew some things, that cat.’

  A low, crooning song issued from the undergrowth. The branches of the pussy willow were suddenly thick with little white moths.

  ‘Oh, he knew some things!’

  While up between the rusty metal girders of the bridge a twist of light had appeared, to spin and dangle like a chrysalis in a hedge.

  Mousebreath said, ‘When all this is over I’ll stay out here. I won’t go back to the city. Find that old calico again, maybe, fetch her out here.’

  Tag said, ‘I might stay too!’

  Mousebreath laughed. ‘I’d ask the tabby about that,’ he said, ‘if I was you.’

  Tag meant to say, What do you mean, ‘ask the tabby’? I don’t understand! But as he opened his mouth, a cloud covered the moon. In the sudden darkness there was a sound like an empty canvas bag being unzipped, and a host of eyes – pale oval feline eyes, green and yellow like lamps in the night – poured silently over the bridge toward him. He leapt to his feet, calling, ‘Majicou! Majicou!’

  Too late. While the Majicou struggled up out of dreams, Tag could only watch in astonishment as two score alchemical cats swirled down the spiral steps like dirty water down a pipe and fell with quiet ferocity upon his friend Mousebreath.

  Mousebreath gave a monumental screech of surprise and lashed out. Soon he was rolling about at the center of a dark melee – cats’ backs, black and brown; paws spread and razored; teeth bared; eyes as pale as death; an ear laid back, extending and accentuating the curve of a feral grin. It was wet work in the night for the tortoiseshell. His assailants were not only silent; their concentration was appalling. From the start they had no interest in anyone else. Tag seemed to embarrass them. Each time he hurled himself to his friend’s aid, five or six of them would lean toward him, surround him, and use their weight to steer him away. They were big animals. Given a choice, they pushed him toward the bridge; but anywhere would do. By the time he had disentangled himself, swearing and cutting out, he was twenty yards from the fight; and by the time he got back, the rest were ready for him. Each intervention gave Mousebreath some respite; but they backed him up steadily, until he felt his tail in the stream.

  ‘Stuffing hell!’ he called. ‘What’s going on? Tag, I don’t think I—’

  ‘Majicou!’ cried Tag. ‘Help!’

  But they wouldn’t fight the one-eyed cat either; and anyway Majicou – too long away from his center of power among the highways – seemed reluctant, hard to wake, confused. When they needed him most, he had been emptied out, just as the fox had anticipated, by the effort of remaining in the world.

  ‘Mousebreath!’

  ‘Tag!’

  Mousebreath’s hind legs were in the water. There was nowhere else for him to go. Cuts had closed his blue eye; the orange one glared sullenly.

  ‘Tag! I—’

  Tag was in despair. He ran around in a circle, shouting, ‘The fox said they wouldn’t hurt us! The fox said they wouldn’t hurt us!’ Then he lost his temper with the tabby. She had been watching since she called them down, her mouth a little open, her eyes lambent but vague, as if her ‘magic’ had exhausted her intelligence. Tag stormed over and bit her ear. ‘Stop them!’ he shouted. ‘You stopped them before. Stop them now!’ She shook her head and stared at him in surprise.

  ‘Steady on, Silver,’ she said. ‘I can’t sing if it’s Wednesday. That hurt.’ She became aware of the melee. Jumped in surprise. ‘But what’s this!’ she exclaimed.

  Mousebreath was up to his belly in water. Blood ran into his good eye, streamed away on the current from wounds that had opened in his chest. Sometimes he looked down at himself puz-zledly. He had given as good as he got: cats lay here and there among the shallows in postures that suggested they would not get up again. But Mousebreath was unsteady on his feet, and they wouldn’t leave him alone. For the first time since Tag had known him he seemed lost and uncertain. The tabby scuttled and slid down the muddy bank toward him, making strange, sad little mewing noises. He heard her and looked blindly about.

  ‘Be careful, little un!’ he warned. While his attention was diverted thus, a Sphinx – eyes reddened and bulging, skin as wrinkled as a lizard’s – slunk up under his guard, sank its yellow teeth into his shoulder.

  ‘I’m here,’ whispered Cy. ‘Hang on.’

  She sat down in the mud. Her eyes rolled up into her head. Her voice rose in a strident caterwaul, demanding and eerie, edged with sounds sharp as knives. Motes poured out of her mouth and busied themselves among the alchemical cats. Up went their heads. They took uncertain steps this way and that. Mousebreath stood blinking and shivering, while the blood ran out of his fur into the stream; then he lunged clumsily forward and got his front paws on dry land.

  For a moment, it seemed as if he would make it. Then the tabby toppled forward onto her face and began to roll about. She hissed and spat. Her eyes changed color rapidly. ‘Oh no!’ she cried. ‘Wrong cat! Wrong colors!’ The strange lights floated out over the water in aimless processions and were doused. All over the bank, alchemical cats shook their heads and leapt forward again. Mousebreath went down tiredly beneath them.

  For Tag, it was like fighting air. ‘Mousebreath!’ he called. They parted in front of him. They let him reach the water’s edge. He stood there with his paws in the black mud, but he couldn’t see his friend. Only something brown and already waterlogged, all the life going out of it as it was whirled away by the stream. ‘Mousebreath!’ He thought he saw legs kick feebly. A head was raised above the water. The moonlight licked off one orange eye, fierce with the determination to live. Then the tortoiseshell sank beneath the surface.

  The alchemical cats turned as one and rushed silently away upstream, where they vanished like a cloud of smoke in the darkness.

  Cy leaned out over the water, rocking backward and forward in her misery as if she might try and follow Mousebreath wherever he had gone. Tag stared at her with such emptiness she winced away from him and hid in some brambles, crying, ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

  Majicou raced up onto the iron bridge. He called down, ‘Quickly, Tag! Do you want to be next? Follow me!’

  Tag ran after him angrily.

  After a last look at the willows, the remains of the guineafowl feathers and the hurrying stream, the tabby followed them, her eyes confused and sad.

  Everything had changed up there. A sourceless silver light now limned the iron girders. There were echoes suggestive of a tunnel. There were smells as cold as rust in January, and distant smells of lemon peel and coal. Tag said, ‘I want to know what happened here!’

  ‘Listen,’ said Majicou. ‘The Alchemist is almost ready to face us—’

  ‘I don’t care! Mousebreath—’

  ‘Tag, at Tintagel Court he had you in his h
ands. Have you ever thought why he didn’t kill you then? I’ll tell you: he didn’t think you were worth the effort. He spared you tonight for the same reason. Mousebreath seemed like a threat; but you were just some kitten I had adopted in my old age. Soon he will see his mistake!’

  ‘We can’t just leave Mousebreath.’

  ‘Mousebreath is dead. Do you want to be next in the river? If not, come on!’

  And, turning his back on Tag and Cy, Majicou addressed the highway from which the alchemical cats had issued. During the fight, it had swollen to the size of a dustbin. All its shy qualities had gone. Presenting as a hard, polished sphere in which they could see their own distorted reflections, it was like no highway Tag had ever encountered. ‘This can mean nothing good,’ Majicou told him. ‘Yet without it I don’t know how we can pass.’ He rocked back onto his haunches and jumped. The surface of the highway seemed to roil and swim like oil patterns on water. He vanished.

  ‘Follow me!’ they heard him call a moment or two later, as if from a great distance. But Tag dithered, approaching, then turning away in confusion. And the tabby refused to go near it at all. For some minutes they got nowhere. Their breath made cold patterns in the air. Their paws shuffled quietly in the tingling partial silence. Their noses twitched at the thin, persistent odors. It was easy enough to lead Cy to the edge. There, though, everything twisted away from you and at the same time pulled you in. It felt like falling. It felt like being gassed. As soon as she sensed that, the tabby would veer away, her eyes obstinate and empty, and – without appearing to have changed her plans – head off toward the spiral steps.

  Tag sighed and fetched her back. ‘Come on,’ he encouraged. ‘It can’t be so bad.’

  But she only whispered, ‘I’m not going. It’s snakes inside and all. I only want soul and beautiful things. See?’

  ‘It scares me too,’ said Tag.

  She stared stubbornly down at the stream.

  ‘Well then,’ he said suddenly, ‘I’ll have to go on my own.’

  ‘No!’ said Cy. ‘No!’

  She scuttled around in a tight circle in front of him. She pushed her face into his – Look at me! Look at me! – She was vibrating like a wire. ‘Please, Silver! It’s such bad things. I—’ Suddenly, she gave up. ‘Carry me then.’