by Paul Gallico
“The gypsies came and chased us away with sticks,” Hughie Stirling concluded, “so we ran and came home. That was last night. So this morning we got together and held a meeting . . .”
Mr. MacDhui puffed at his pipe, producing a vast smoke screen. “I see. And what did you decide at your meeting?”
“That we wanted the police to go there and make them stop beating their animals and punish them.”
“That is a laudable resolution,” the veterinary admitted, “but why don’t you go to Constable MacQuarrie with it? That’s his business.”
The three exchanged glances. THE question, the one they had known all along must be answered, had been asked. Even Hughie Stirling was embarrassed. Finally he replied, “Sir, when the gypsies first came, the police said they might stay as long as they behaved themselves—”
“And what is it then you wish me to do?”
The uncomfortable hurdle taken, Hughie breathed a sigh of relief and launched into the plan: “We thought, sir, that if you were to go, on account of who you were, and knowing everything about animals, you could either make them stop, for they would be afraid of you, or if you went to the police and complained, they would listen to you, and—”
“Losh!” grunted Mr. MacDhui. “Thank you for nothing. I have no mind to be pulling police chestnuts out of the fire. Gypsies and complaints of cruelty to animals are their jurisdiction, and—”
“Oh sir,” pleaded Hughie Stirling, and MacDhui felt himself oddly wrung by the young voice, “It wouldn’t be the police chestnuts—they’re our chestnuts!”
MacDhui sat up, sucking on his pipe and gazing at the three now with keen interest. “Well, at least you’re honest,” he growled. “I don’t know that I have the time, what with Mary Ruadh so ill and—”
“Oh, one of us would stay with Mary Ruadh. And there’s Mrs. McKenzie. You see, even if we sent an anomous letter to the police, by the time they got it and did anything Geordie’s bear might be dead.”
Geordie commenced to cry again at being identified with the bear, which clever Hughie had done on purpose, and wailed, “He hit the bear with a chain and the blug squoorted out!”
Mr. MacDhui tamped down the ashes of his pipe with a forefinger long fireproofed by this habit, and sighed, as Geordie suddenly dug hard with his fists into his eyes and made a fierce effort to control himself. He succeeded and said, “I think the bear was lame. That’s why it couldn’t dance. It had a sore on its hind leg.”
Jamie Braid testified, “There was a horse struck wi’ a loaded crop, sor. It went to its knees—”
Mr. MacDhui sighed again. “It is not a pretty picture you draw,” he said.
Hughie Stirling was at him eagerly. “Then you will go, sir?”
The vet was surprised that he so much as entertained the idea, for he had enough on his plate without becoming embroiled with gypsies who in the end would merely be told by the police to move on and would then go elsewhere and continue to practice their cruelties unless witnesses could be produced to corroborate specific charges.
Besides, the boys could have been exaggerating. In the dim light of smoky gasoline flares, or lanterns, things might have looked worse than they were. True, the Ursari, the gypsy bear trainers, were not notably kindly men, but often they were savaged and mauled by their beasts.
But small Geordie McNabb and lank Jamie Braid, with their laconic sentences, had seared a vivid picture into the brain of the animal doctor, of helpless creatures brutally maltreated. And he was remembering, too, that it was Geordie who had brought him a small frog once with a broken leg and had been turned out of his office. That frog he had later encountered healed and living contentedly in an out-of-the-world house in an out-of-the-world glen. Perhaps this was one he owed both to Lori and Geordie. He said finally, “I will think about it.”
Translated by the code of the young used to dealing with adults, it meant to Hughie a firm “yes,” though actually the vet had not yet decided and meant what he had said.
The three now prepared to file out, saying their thank-yous. Only Hughie Stirling hung back for a moment after the other two had made their escape. He said, “We’ll try very hard with Mary Ruadh, sir. It was really to see her that we came, sir. I just thought we might be able to combine—as long as we were here, because of Geordie—he’s taken it very hard.”
Mr. MacDhui put his hand on the boy’s shoulder with surprising gentleness and said, “Thank you, Hughie, for telling me. Now run along.”
After the boy had gone he sat quietly smoking and thinking, and feeling, and wondering what it was that had come over him.
And if the veterinary was thinking and feeling, so was Wolf Cub Geordie McNabb. For in his code of grownups “I’ll think about it” meant forgotten. His active little mind turned to the last time he had visited Mr. MacDhui for a favor and had been refused. And so the veterinary was not the only one that morning who thought upon a green frog with a broken leg and that other place where mercy could be found for animals that were sick or injured—
2 3
Things are changed hereabouts. No one pays much attention to ME any longer, not even Lori my priestess.
Am I not then Sekhmet-Bast-Ra, cat goddess of the night, defender of the sun, devourer of the moon, who laps the milk of the stars from the bowl of the sky?
Yet here they do me no honors and say me no prayers; bring me no gifts or libations, nor bow down in my presence.
I am sad, who was once gay and proud and omnipotent. I do not prance and leap about, or run up and down the covin-tree. For sometimes I am not sure that I am God any more, or even who or what I am. I have had strange and disturbing dreams of yet another life about which I have spoken to no one, not even Wullie or McMurdock. Yet must I have lived a thousand or more lives since first my divine ka descended from the heavens to preside over the destinies of men. Who then am I now? And where? And why?
How is it to be borne—to have been God once and then be God no longer?
Could I but once more hear, “Bast, thou divine, thou ruler of the night, thou goddess of love, thou infinite, thou all, thou wise and knowing, thou god, come to my aid!” What wonders would I not work for such a supplicant.
Yet am I called only Talitha, a name the meaning of which I do not understand, but which seemed to cause Lori some secret amusement and bring the tender smile to the corners of her mouth each time she summoned me.
“Talitha Tabby, my pussie baudrons,” she would cry to me, “come here to me whilst I see if ye have picked up any ticks this day,” and she would run her fingers through my fur while I shivered with delight.
But that was not being God.
And Lori was different too. She listened less to those voices of the infinite that used to speak to her, the same, no doubt, that used to reach me in my most secret recess in my ancient temple in Bubastis. Her attention was more taken with gazing in the direction of the pathway leading from the glen to the covin-tree, and when she listened, it was for the sound of the Mercy Bell.
I well knew for whom she looked and listened and it made me the more determined to destroy the Man with the Red Beard.
Yet the doom was not so easily contrived as in the old days beneath the Egyptian sun when it seemed as though I was able to gather all the threads of human destiny in my sacred claws, hold them and shake them like the reins of the charioteers guiding their wild Nubian steeds, and drive foolish mankind whither and to what ends I would.
I worked upon his doom, mostly when Lori sat at her weaving and I lay by the hearth, my paws tucked up under me, and watched her through the doorway, for the two things are not dissimilar.
Her loom was in a bare chamber with whitewashed walls. The deep window opened to the rear of the temple looking out onto the woods and the brook, and once when she was weaving I saw a red deer come forth from the forest and thrust its head in through the window. Lori ceased her swift movements for a moment and they looked at one another with such tenderness that I was wildly jealous. I
could not bear it for Lori to love or serve anyone but me.
In the daytime, when it was bright, the sunlight poured into the room and sometimes the hanks of dyed yarn the crofters had sent to her to make them shawls and cloaks to keep them warm in the winter were reflected on the walls.
The colors shimmered and danced upon them, and in the middle, her own hair aflame, her face rapt with concentration, sat my Lori weaving, weaving, weaving the colored strands, making her fingers fly in and about and through the bed of the loom and all the while, inch by inch, the dappled cloth waxed and grew, and in like manner, I lay on the hearth, spinning and weaving the threads that would furnish the shroud of my red-bearded enemy.
For the fashioning of a proper doom is in the manner of weaving. Through the long warp of character, ambition, greed, habit, intolerance, yearning, faith, love and hatreds of the humans, the loom bed from which they cannot escape, we interlace the strands of chance, threads borrowed momentarily from the lives of others, the stranger, the friend, the innocent, the guilty, the young, the old, a chance phrase overheard, a corner turned just an instant too soon, a word spoken in anger, later regretted, a letter delayed, an article forgotten or left behind, some trifling matter overlooked, the ill-temper of another.
It was not easy. It had been four thousand years or more since I had made a doom. And there were strange influences working against me. I did not know what they were, but they seemed to be centered in the room where Lori sat. Was she weaving counter-threads to my pattern?
Her hands and fingers flew, the loom thumped rhythmically as she trod the foot pedal each time she completed the threading of the weft across the warp. I could not take my gaze from her. Sometimes it seemed as if strands I wished to use had become mingled with her colored yarns and had become a part of her design.
Once the thumping of the loom stopped. Lori, her hands gripping the frame on either side, was looking up with pain and bewilderment and she cried aloud, “What am I then? What has happened to me? What is this singing in my heart?”
I was filled then with the blackest jealousy, so violent that I lost the strand and forgot my spell. I went into the weaving room and rubbed against Lori. She let her hand fall carelessly and touched my head and back, but her look was far off and away and she did not know that I was there. I returned to the hearth and squatted there with my back to her. I was filled with rage and hatred. Beware, beware the anger of a jealous god.
The birds were stilled. Peter the Scots terrier was shivering and whining. Wullie and McMurdock went about with their tails fluffed up; Dorcas would not leave her kittens and cuffed them impatiently when they tried to wander from her side. The jackdaw sat mournfully on a branch of the covin-tree, its feathers drooping, looking down with a beady eye. The air was oppressive and the sky was heavily clouded over. Darkness would come early that night.
I walked about, proud and pleased, with my tail stiff and erect and quivering with delight. For this was MY doing, I, Bast-Ra, the Great Cat, lord of the heavens . . . This was the beginning. The air was hot and heavy, like a weight, and was filled with the foreboding of the doom that I had unleashed. Henceforth and when this black night was done, Lori would be mine, and mine alone.
At that moment in the growing gloom of cloud-laden dusk, the Mercy Bell shivered and rang once, loudly and clearly so that the echoes went shattering away endlessly up through the mountain pass above the glen, long after the metal had ceased to vibrate.
The jackdaw shrieked once, horribly, and then flew off, his wings slapping together hollowly in his panic. Peter barked hysterically and then subsided to a whine. Then in the silence that followed there was no sound but the swift drumming of Lori’s feet upon the path as she ran from the stables to the place where the bell was hung.
I, Bast-Ra, the goddess, was again filled with misgivings. For the ringing of the bell was an interference. It was no strand that I had woven. Should it be the Man with the Red Beard—
Cautiously I peered around the corner. There was no one there. As Lori stood there looking about her I came forth as did the others. There was no single, solitary soul to be seen. Then Peter began to yap and shrill and bark and make short rushes at something almost beneath Lori’s feet. We all saw it then. It was a stone and beneath it was a small piece of paper with some writing on it.
Lori sank to her knees and seized it eagerly, as eagerly as she had run thither. I saw it. The writing was a kind of scrawl on a not very clean piece of paper. In the descending gloom it was difficult for Lori to make out, and so she read it aloud, carefully as she deciphered each word.
“Dear Ma’m, Please go to the gypsy camp and make them stop. They are being cruel to all the animals. They beat the poor bear who is sick. If you do not go the bear will die. Oh please do go. Yours faithfully, Geordie.”
“P.S. I am a Wolf Cub.”
“P.S.S. I am the one who brought the frog.”
For a long while, it seemed, Lori knelt there, smoothing out the sheet of paper and studying it, reading it again and again. When she arose she stood looking down the glen in the direction of the distant valley and I could see the resolve that was filling her.
My tail bushed; my fur stood erect, crackling with rage and electricity; I was stiff with fear and horror. For this was not of my spinning and weaving. A spell gone wrong? A cantrip forgotten? Wrong demons invoked, wrong strands threaded through the pattern? Or was it that had I been shuttling my warp with the weft of hatred, while Lori was weaving with love?
“Come,” Lori cried to us. “Come all. We’ll sup now, for it is a long way I have to go after.”
I cried, “Don’t go, Lori! You will only find misery, destruction, and death there. I have pronounced and fabricated a doom. Remain here. There is nothing you can do.”
In the old days MY priestesses would have understood. The knowledge of my thoughts and commands would have penetrated to their marrows; they would have bowed and obeyed.
“Oh, miaow, miaow,” Lori said. “Are ye singing for your supper then, my Talitha puss? Come then quickly, for I must go where I am needed.”
She set us out our suppers, and as usual the dogs gobbled like pigs, but I had no appetite for mine, nor did Wullie or McMurdock, though Dorcas, of course, had the feeding of her kittens to look to.
Wullie, who would not admit I was a god but knew that I had ways of understanding Lori that he did not, asked, “What’s toward, Talitha? By my fur and whiskers, whatever it is, I’m no’ liking it.”
I explained. They listened until I was finished. Wullie said, “That’s nae good. My skin is a-crawl with the feeling of trouble.”
McMurdock asked me, “Can ye no’ stop her from going, Talitha?”
“No.”
The yellow cat sneered, “Ye’re nae much of a god then, are ye?”
I could have wept then with rage and exasperation. My glory trampled underfoot by a common yellow tomcat who would hardly have rated scraps in the outer temple court of Khufu at Bubastis where I sat upon the gold and emerald throne.
“You’ll see. You’ll see yet all of you,” was all that I could say, and both McMurdock and Wullie snorted. Wullie said, “We’ll keep watch until Lori returns.”
McMurdock said, “Aye. I’ll take the top of the covin-tree. I ken my way up in the dark.”
Wullie remarked, “I don’t mind going up onto the roof, mysel’.”
I said, “I’ll follow the path ’til I come to the Great Rock. There’ll be a view into the valley from there.”
Lori came forth from my temple. She was wrapped in a dark cloak of cloth of her own making. She carried an oil lantern that drained the color from her face and some of the redness from her hair. She saw us all assembled there like a court. The dogs were whimpering. The hedgehog had arrived and unrolled himself and was sitting up wrinkling his nose. We cats sat in dignity with our tails wrapped about us, but you could tell our unease by the set of our whiskers.
“Do not fear,” Lori said. “There is nothing to fear.
Bide you here. When I have done what must needs I will come back.” Then she added once more, “Have no fear,” and made off down the path.
The heavy cloud made it quite dark. The lantern threw a flickering yellow light at her feet. Silently I trotted after her until we came to the bend and the Great Rock, upon which I sprang and squatted in the shadows. I watched her yellow light descend until it disappeared. Far below I could see the twinkling of the town. I lay there quivering, not only for Lori, but for my beautiful doom I had placed upon the Man with the Red Beard. What would become of it now? What would become of us all if it fell upon Lori instead? How would it all end?
An owl hooted in the trees. A wind sprang up momentarily, swaying the branches, rustling the leaves and bringing snatches of music from the gypsy camp in the valley, the gypsies, the strands of whose lives I had woven into the death of the Man with the Red Beard.
When the wind dropped, the sound of the music died away too. With all my god-power I willed and commanded her to return. Yet she did not.
Total darkness set in. Far below I could see the lights of the distant town that I had never visited winking like the little stars.
A strange thing happened to me then. For a moment I was Sekhmet-Bast-Ra no longer, but who or what I was I did not know, only that I was a lost and bodiless ka in the darkness between heaven and earth. And in that ka, or soul, there was such a yearning for something or someplace below in that distant valley as was not to be endured. Had there been a body to this strayed ka, it would have been drowned in misery, lamentation, and tears.
Something caught in the mirrors of my staring eyes and the moment passed. I was Bast-Ra again, the goddess.
It began at first no more than a gleam of light where there had been darkness before in the valley, distant from those of the town, then a flicker, followed by an orange tongue of flame such as sometimes shoots from a piece of smoking coal in the fireplace. It died away and flickered anew. A moment later an orange glow was reflected from the sky in the distance.
