by Gabriel King
They wondered what had made this odd collection, but they did not have to speculate for long. Early one morning, Sealink raised a sleep-hazed head and stared right into a large, black, shiny eye.
‘Raaaaaark!’
She blinked. This was no magpie.
‘Out! Out of my roost!’
It was a bird three times the size of any crow, with a powerful beak, broad jet-black shoulders, and a throatful of long, pointed feathers currently fluffed out in considerable annoyance. He bobbed his wicked head, spread a pair of wings almost four feet from tip to tip, so that they filled the cave, and croaked again. ‘Out! Out!’
The inside of his mouth, including a large, muscular tongue, was as black as the outside. Though she had woken hungry, she struck him off her list of possible prey. In fact, she thought. I’ll go one further.
‘Hey, hon,’ she said. ‘Don’t eat us.’
The bird stared at her.
‘We were, you know, looking for a little shelter. But we had no idea the place was already took.’ She looked around. ‘It’s nice, but I don’t usually sleep in sticks. Y’know?’
During this exchange, the Mau had roused herself and sat up in amazement. Head on one side, the bird now regarded her swollen belly. He folded his wings down, ruffled his feathers.
‘Two Felidae,’ he told himself quietly, ‘up here in my roost. Graaa.’
He considered Pertelot’s thin ribs.
‘One pregnant with all her bones showing, and one wounded – she has a big mouth and less flesh than she’s used to. Kaaaark!’ With a rustle of feathers he sailed suddenly off the ledge, slipped sideways on a column of air, and vanished from sight. Some minutes later he was back.
‘Gak,’ he said. ‘Graaa.’
He had brought with him a still-warm starling.
‘If you’ve come to goad us,’ began Sealink. But the great bird only swooped into the cave, dropped the starling gently in a surprised Pertelot’s lap, and flew off once more.
Three times he returned, with an egg, a mouthful of worms, and the not-very-old carcass of a field mouse; all of which he presented to his visitors with a dusty hospitality – as if he knew the gesture but had not had the chance to practice it for a while. The cats, out of equal formality, of course, ate the lot.
‘Yes,’ said the bird, watching closely. ‘Graaa. Can’t have a mother starve, no matter what her species.’
Pertelot took this as an opportunity to ask the bird its name and family.
He looked offended.
‘Don’t you know Corvus corax? Raaaark!’
Sealink, of course, knew a raven when she saw one.
‘Met some of you guys at a tower, once,’ she recalled. ‘Where was that? Old. Stony. Human beings in parrot costumes. Pretty weird.’
‘Ah, the tower…’
The raven looked wistful. ‘I expect that’s where Thought went,’ he said.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘My nest mate. Thought. She went away last year.’ He nodded back to himself, looked around. ‘I like to keep the place up, just in case she comes back. Yes. I looked forward to raising chicks here.’
The Mau watched him sadly as he picked up a piece of eggshell, studied it for a moment, then flung it over the edge. ‘My name’s Memory, by the way,’ he said. ‘Thought and Memory!’
He chuckled dryly.
‘Ravens have a mythological bent.’
*
He fed them until Pertelot had gained weight and Sealink could flex her hind leg without the wound opening. He said it was a tradition of ravens. The rain poured down outside, he perched on the edge of his nest and regarded them as if they really were nestlings, and told them stories of the Moor, and the great black Beast that roams it. He seemed to know when they were ready to leave, and at the third twilight bade them farewell.
‘Keep to the high ground,’ he advised. ‘It’s cold up there, but you can see where you are. Lower down, the bogs are treacherous; and mist tends to gather in the valleys.’
He watched them go.
‘A bad winter this year, and no sign of it breaking yet. Strange things going on too. Keep an eye open at all times.’
He called, ‘Corvus corax. Don’t forget. And if you should see Thought, tell her I remember her!
‘Kaaaark!’
*
They resumed their northward trek across the ancient country, keeping the sun on their right in the early part of the day, and on their left toward evening. Progress was slow: Sealink limped, though she made no complaint. Pertelot’s belly swung low to the ground, and she began to feel the kittens inside her.
They did much better for food now. Pertelot’s encounter with her wild self – the caracal within – had released some innate ability to hunt. Toward the end of their first day, she staked out a rabbit warren in a patch of stunted gorse; surprised the doe that cropped unconcernedly downwind; and had made the killing leap, plummeting down from high above her quarry, to dispatch it with a crushing blow and a suffocating bite to the throat. It was almost half her size; but between them they ate it in a night, crunching the bones and swallowing down even the fur and feet, so that not a morsel was left.
In the days that followed Pertelot caught and killed: a shorttailed vole, two mice, a meadow pipit, a second rabbit, and a mole. She was a hammer.
‘It ain’t seemly in a Queen,’ Sealink complained. ‘I’m eatin’as fast as I can!’
When Pertelot laid the meadow pipit mournfully at Sealink’s feet she was forced to admit, ‘I didn’t even mean to kill this one. I just caught the movement as it ran through the grass. The next thing I knew, it was in my mouth.’ She stroked a paw down its soft, spotted plumage, examined its tiny, hooked feet with regret. Sealink watched her sardonically, then took its head off in a single bite.
*
The weather turned colder. Feathers of snow came twisting and tumbling out of a leaden sky, blanketing the moors with soft deception. Sealink awoke one morning from a hollow in the heather and limped delightedly about, her head turned up to the flying snow and her great, tufted paws making quiet whumping noises in the drifts.
Pertelot found it hard going. Her tiny feet sank down until she was up to her nose in it, and her belly was driven into it and she feared her kittens would be frozen inside her.
She looked like a cat in deep water.
By day, she struggled. By night, her dreams returned: full of flight and capture, torture and anguish. Sometimes she let herself dream about Ragnar and the kittens they would raise together. How could she stop? But if dreams like this visited her in the daylight, she closed herself like a shutter against them, and pushed herself into the weather. Rather drown in snow than face the pain of her loss and her fear of the future.
*
The snows melted; but the weather remained bitter. Freezing mists swept across the moors and swirled in the hollows. The water in the mosses underfoot froze so that each step crunched beneath them. No bird or animal was to be seen. The cats went hungry. Increasingly they were forced to skirt abandoned mine workings – open pits and the twisted, rusting metal of disused railway lines. They passed through ancient hut circles and tumuli without any idea of what they were. Acres of sedge and furze stretched away from them, as far as the eye could see. The sun made its daily journey, followed by the moon and her retinue of stars. Sealink’s leg remained stiff and ached in the cold. As Pertelot’s kittens grew, she became increasingly exhausted and needed more frequent rests.
One night, a curtain of fog draped itself across the entire landscape. It was impossible to see more than a body length ahead. The cats shivered and debated – could they go on? – while the fog pressed itself against them like a physical presence, dampening their fur and chilling them to the bone. Bushes poked through it like spiny, sudden, black fingers, to vanish again as they passed.
They reached the shores of a lake.
Everything was deathly still. Pertelot stopped and sat down suddenly on the quartzy sand. ‘This
is awful, Sealink. I can’t go on…’
Behind her, the calico emerged by degrees: first her great, furry head and burning amber eyes; then her ruff and forelegs. She stood there for a moment, the front half of a cat apparently detached from its hindquarters, then the mist eddied and the rest of her appeared as if by magic.
‘Come on, hon. It don’t do to despair.’
‘I’m frightened of falling or drowning, and I’m so tired…’
They sat huddled up together in the hope that the weather would change, and for a time even fell into a kind of sleep. But the fog persisted, and despite Sealink’s generous warmth, the Mau, dreaming suddenly of white birds over a green river, started to tremble. Sealink licked at the cold gray flesh beneath the rose-gray fur, and tried to warm those delicate ears. She was beginning to say, ‘I think we better walk a bit farther, babe,’ when she saw the Mau staring over her shoulder, eyes wide with terror.
‘Sealink!’
Behind them the fog was swirling and spiraling, pouring up into the air, settling back down, tom and displaced by the movement of something very large. They watched, transfixed.
An enormous black carnivorous head hung in the air above them. Its eyes were pale moonlight and its breath another fog.
They remembered the raven.
They remembered his tales.
‘Oh my,’ whispered the calico cat, and her voice cracked into a wail.
Nothing like this – nothing like this on any journey she had ever made. All that way and nothing like this.
‘It’s the Beast!’
20
Ghost Roads
For in the morning orisons, he loves the sun and the sun loves him,
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
– CHRISTOPHER SMART, JUBILATE AGNO
This soft western earth took badger prints, dog prints, the dainty prints of foxes but held them only the length of a night frost. The air was bitter one moment, warmed the next by the palest morning sun Tag ever saw. The ice was retreating from the ponds where the ruined willows leaned. Bare thorn curled into the hollows, molded by the white winds of early spring that touched the uplands like cold, anxious hands. Lapwings raced up piping from the plowland in arcs.
‘Our field,’ they were calling. ‘Our field!’
Water rose in the wide rain-dirty valleys in the darkening afternoons. There was a wiry sound of last year’s reeds rubbing together in the wind.
Tag’s head hurt on the left side, where he had been hit. In the mornings it was a quick dizzying stab that came and went, clouding his vision and causing him to misjudge the distance of things. Later in the day it settled in and became a bare, steady ache as bleak as the fields around. He grew used to it. He grew to welcome it. When it left him for a moment, he looked up, quivering suddenly as if he expected a blow. His eye on that side blinked and watered, and was often half closed. It gave him the appearance of being absentminded and irritable at the same time.
In his sleep he prowled restlessly the ghost roads, and this damaged eye gave him a new kind of sight. He had the privileges of the living and the dead. He had the privileges of motion and stillness. There, in the rushing brown shadows, where the Majicou rolled to and fro in his agony, crying out ‘The light! The light!’ Mousebreath made his good-bye a hundred times, as if his real death had only been one more rehearsal. He looked so surprised. ‘I can’t help you no more!’ he would whisper or, ‘Hey, Tag, mate, I—’ and die. Just as his ghost turned to smoke and became indistinguishable from the rest and rushed away, it sometimes stopped and turned and called, ‘Say good-bye to Sealink for me.’ They were such real dreams.
Tag followed the lanes and hedgerows in the sudden gray rains. The tabby followed Tag. Dragging along through the afternoon as it closed up like the arc of a door, hungry and fractious, her short legs unable to match his stride, she fell farther and farther behind. But she had always caught up by sunset, when Tag let himself fall where he had stopped. There was a pause, and then she came quietly out of the shadow of cedars or slipped from under a hedge fogged with old man’s beard, her bib gleaming deceptively in a streak of light enameled pink and thrush-egg blue, her long, quiet complaint lost for a moment amid the hoarse cries from some rookery.
‘I’m starved, Jack!’
‘Feed yourself. Find some rubbish. Or a nice stick.’
She regarded him mulishly. ‘I want a friend.’
‘You can’t eat your friends.’
*
Every day for a week, dawn assembled itself under cover of a thin cold mist, which lifted one morning to reveal four magpies convoked in a plowed field. They reminded Tag of something. He blinked and stopped washing, with one front paw lifted to his face. Acres of pale fawn earth swept away from him on a complex rising curve. At the top, the dark hazel coppices hung like smoke. To his watery eye everything had the slow undulating motion of weed underwater. Broken flints glittered hard and precise in each furrow. He was hungry.
The magpies hopped about silently for a time, moving away upslope. Then three of them made noises like a stick dragged along a wooden fence and took flight, flaring across the sky with their long tails as elegant as the sticks of rockets. Tag set himself to catch the fourth, slinking patiently along the deep cold furrows where the shadows lay black and precise. The wind scoured his face. He could smell the magpie on it, stale and dry. As Mousebreath had predicted, Tag didn’t make the best hunter; but he was an obstinate one, and, applying with a kind of wooden determination the lessons he had learned, he could maintain himself and the tabby. He stopped whenever the bird’s head went up. A skinny, tired-looking creature preoccupied with the effort of feeding, it never saw him coming. It eyed the ground. Stabbed. Waddled off a few yards and stabbed again. Its tail feathers were awry, and it had the oily, unpreened look of a sick pigeon. After a quarter hour, Tag was within a yard or two, forcing himself not to quiver or scold or warn anyone ‘My bird!’ He got upslope of it and waited. The bird’s back was to him. A dash and a scuffle and it was in his mouth, beating furious wings in his face and squawking with outrage in his ear. Like all birds, its feathers had a dry, musty, not very pleasant taste.
‘Raaark! Haaraaark!’
‘Shut up,’ Tag told it.
At this point one or two of his victims always managed to escape out of sheer hysteria. He was too hungry to allow that today. He shifted his grip and hung on grimly. But, indistinct though it was, his voice had been recognized. The bird began to shout, ‘It’s me! You know me!’
‘They all say that.’
‘You know me!’
It was One for Sorrow.
‘Oh it’s you,’ admitted Tag. ‘Damn.’
As soon as he got free, the magpie began to hop around in jerky, drunken circles like a broken mechanism, stumbling over the crests of the furrows with one wing trailing, his neck extended, and his beak wide open. After a moment or two, Tag’s head began to go around with him, aching and cold.
‘Can’t you keep still?’
‘I’m hurt! You’ve hurt me!’
‘I haven’t.’
One for Sorrow stopped trailing his wing. He ruffled his feathers and closed them like a dusty old fan. He approached with a kind of sideways shuffle and fixed Tag with one shiny eye. ‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff that’s happened to me,’ he said. Then, ‘Where’s the rest of them?’
‘We’re all that’s left,’ Tag said.
The magpie didn’t understand. ‘But where’s the fox?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tag. ‘Majicou sent him down the highway on an errand. He feared his death was out there waiting for him. We haven’t seen him since.’
The magpie cocked his head alertly. ‘What errand?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then I must find Majicou and ask!’
By now the ache in Tag’s head had blurred the magpie into a black-and-white wash. He stared at it blankly, wondering what he could say. In the end, all he could manage was, ‘Majicou i
s dead.’
One for Sorrow looked nonplussed. He studied Tag from the corner of one eye. ‘The Majicou will never die,’ he said.
‘We all die,’ Tag said. ‘How else would we know we’d been alive?’
And he turned and walked effortfully away. The tabby gave the magpie a contemptuous look and followed. Chirring and grating like an old rattle, One for Sorrow shot over their heads and bumped to earth in front of them.
‘Wait!’
‘You don’t look so hurt,’ said Tag.
‘Sealink and the Queen are alive!’ said the magpie excitedly. ‘The Queen’s pregnant.’ He looked from Tag to Cy and then across the long empty sweep of plowland. He cocked his head and asked puzzledly, ‘Where’s Mousebreath?’ ‘Mousebreath’s dead too.’
‘He can’t be.’
Tag walked on blindly. As he passed the magpie he repeated, ‘We’re all that’s left.’
‘Come back!’ demanded One for Sorrow. ‘Listen! I’ve talked to Sealink and the Queen. Tag, come back!’
‘No,’ said Tag. ‘You got me into this. I would have had a happy life but for you.’ He stopped and swung his head painfully toward where he thought die bird was. ‘I would have had a house,’ he said. Then he added, ‘Mousebreath was right.’
‘You don’t look so hurt,’ the tabby accused the magpie.
They left him standing there, trying to absorb the scale of the disaster. It took them a long time to traverse the field against the grain of the plow and intersect the line of the far hedge. There, two tiny figures shining in a long pale crescent of sun, they began to comb the winter grass for beetles and voles, one watching while the other hunted, always moving downhill, always moving west. One for Sorrow watched them until they had disappeared, then shook himself and flew off.
*
Later, Tag felt angry with himself. I didn’t mean to say any of those things, he thought. I used to admire that bird. And he loved Majicou. It wasn’t fair to tell him like that. All afternoon he worried about One for Sorrow and wondered where Sealink and the Mau might be. What was their story? How had they fared? He had lost his chance to ask. ‘Kittens!’ he exclaimed to himself. He couldn’t quite grasp that. ‘Kittens!’ He was too used to thinking of himself as a kitten to be able to imagine that. One for Sorrow. Sealink and Pertelot: Pertelot pregnant. How strange! Everything came back to him somehow – though it had never departed. All afternoon his mind worried and picked over in a kind of slow wonder the things that had happened to him since he left his home. He was exasperated. But he did notice that if he worried about the Mau instead of himself, his headache receded. The next morning he woke and admitted to Cy, ‘I don’t know what to do.’
