The Catswold Portal

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  All four were sealed tightly. At last she leaped down and slunk back to the front of the building.

  As she crouched beside a truck, huddled against its rear tire, two women came out of the diner. They were quieter than the men, and she didn’t run. They saw her white parts catching the light from the diner’s window, and they began to croon over her. She backed away from them under the truck, tensed to run. But then the women went back inside.

  She was still there when they returned, knelt down beside the porch, and pushed a paper plate under it. “Here, kitty. Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”

  She smelled the food, close enough to make her drool. She didn’t come out until the women had left.

  Then she fled underneath, and stalked the plate.

  Convinced there was no danger, she attacked the food. She gulped fried hamburger, potato skins, and spaghetti. She ate until her stomach was distended. Then she curled down beside the plate and slept.

  When she woke, the diner was silent. No noise, no lights. She stared out from under the porch at the expanse of blacktop. The shelter of parked cars was gone. She crouched in the blackness beneath the porch, watching and listening. She saw no movement, and she heard no sound to threaten her. Far in the distance thrummed the soft hoot of an owl.

  She finished the potato skins and spaghetti, then chewed the greasy paper plate to remove every last bit of goodness.

  She came out from under the stair pawing at her sore left eye and staring warily around the parking lot.

  When she was certain that nothing threatened, she sat down in the center of the blacktop and began to wash her front paws and her face. Then she sat staring toward the south. From that direction something drew her. Faint, incomprehensible images touched her. Dark spaces beckoned. In her puzzled feline thoughts, stone caverns waited, and safety.

  She rose and left the parking lot, trotting due south along the shoulder of the highway.

  When trucks passed she veered into the tall grass. She passed under an occasional oak tree, and glanced up into its branches, where instinct told her height meant safety. When she came across the fresh scent of another cat she ran. She kept moving steadily, obsessed with the sense of deep, sheltering caverns somewhere ahead.

  She traveled all night. By morning her left eye was matted and oozing, and the pads of her feet were beginning to crack. At first light, as the sky began to redden, she climbed, exhausted, into an oak tree. She curled into a concave where three branches met, and slept.

  She came down at mid-morning, hungry again. The sense of stone caverns drew her on, she kept moving and did not turn aside to hunt; she knew little about hunting; a kitten must be taught by its mother to hunt with skill.

  Late in the afternoon she approached an abandoned shack. She was very hungry. She watched the shack and listened for a quarter of an hour, then she crawled underneath it to rest. Here she stumbled on the scent of mice. Investigating, she discovered a mouse nest. She ate the six baby mice, then stalked the cobwebby darkness where the mouse smell was strongest.

  She caught a grown mouse not sufficiently wary. She killed it quickly and ate it, but she caught no more. It was that night, when she tried to catch a rat, that she learned how viciously a small beast could attack, and learned how to fight her prey.

  She had crossed a cut field through heavy stubble. In the center was a small trash dump, and as she explored the rubble for food she smelled the rat in a half-buried wooden crate. The crate smelled of celery and of spoiled meat. The rat was a big male, old and rough coated. He had survived dogs, and had killed his share of kittens. Deep inside the barrel, he had heard her coming a long way off, but he hadn’t bothered to hide himself. Now he crouched, listening to her approach, staring out at her.

  The cat circled the crate, watching the gleam of his red eyes. She moved to the entry, to block him from running out. She crouched, tensed to spring, ready for him.

  When after a moment he didn’t run, she moved in.

  She was close to the rat when he charged. She dodged and lashed at him. He swerved and clamped his teeth on her paw, biting clear through. He hung on as the cat thrashed and fought, and gnawed her paw brutally. Then before she could bite him he loosed her, dodged, and leaped at her throat, biting deep. She struck at him with her claws, then sank her teeth in his flank, trying to pull him off her throat.

  The rat had miscalculated his distance; he had only the skin of her throat, not the jugular. She managed to jerk him free, tearing a piece of skin from her throat. She shook him, swinging him, and in her terror she hit him again and again against the sides of the barrel.

  The rat went limp. She turned it loose, to lick at her wounded paw. The rat came to life, leaping straight into her face. She clawed at it and tore it away. Enraged, she grabbed it by the neck and bit and gnawed until it died.

  After it was dead she thrashed it against the crate floor, heaving and shaking it.

  She ate the rat, then licked her wounded paw. There was nothing of Melissa apparent in the little beast; she was all cat, learning to care for herself. Yet somewhere within the little calico, too deep to be sensed by animal instincts, breathed another presence. Within the little cat something waited poised, watching, learning.

  Her hunger eased, the calico left the dump and headed south.

  It took her ten days to cover the miles Vrech had covered in a few hours. The country remained open, with tall grass, occasional trees, and scattered farm houses and shacks. At first she hunted, but as her wounded paw grew painful and bloated with infection, she began to search out the easy pickings at garbage cans and dumps. Twice near dumps, half-wild farm cats attacked her. The first time, she ran. The second time, she fought the two females. She came away bitten and hurting, but she had taken her share of the garbage. Her hurting foot made it hard to run fast enough to avoid dogs, but the scattered trees gave her refuge beyond a dog’s domain. She learned to stay near the trees if she scented or heard a pack of dogs. At one promising garbage dump she faced a family of raccoons, and when the big male charged her she fled. It was the next morning that she approached a salt water inlet on the outskirts of a town.

  Houseboats and fishing boats were tied up along the banks. Somewhere a radio played music, but she had learned that this kind of sound didn’t threaten her. She smelled human waste from the houseboats, and she smelled food cooking. Beside a dock, she smelled fish offal. Very hungry, she approached the fish cleanings, prepared for a feast.

  She did not see at first the three big female cats who were already maneuvering for position over the fish, snatching at it, snarling and striking at one another. With the music playing, she didn’t hear them. One cat was heavy with kittens, the other two were in nursing condition. Left alone they would have shared the food out in their usual desperate way. Now they froze, staring at the intruder, hissing at her and threatening with low growls. But the calico, as she traveled, had grown bolder: these were only cats, not dogs. She approached them, stalking stiff-legged.

  A female’s ear twitched. A tail dropped, and all three crouched.

  The three attacked her together. They had her down, clawing and biting her when a little girl, fishing at the other end of the dock, threw a bait bucket at them.

  The three cats fled. The calico fled, too, limping, her swollen right front paw sending shooting pains up her leg. Running, she stopped often to lick the lump that had formed as each day the abscess grew larger and more painful.

  Five days after the rat bit her she came to the outskirts of a town. Her white parts were dirty now, her white chest matted with grit and road oil. And, cowed by the pain in her foot and by fear, she carried her ears and her tail low.

  She crossed the fields of a small farm, walked under its last fence and stood surveying the city street and the houses lining the opposite sidewalk. She was less afraid of houses now. Houses sometimes meant food, and she was ravenous. Her swollen paw throbbed with pain, hurting so badly that even though she kept her foot lifted and walked on th
ree paws, every movement sent jarring pain through her body.

  Now at the edge of the town she crossed the street behind two slow-moving cars. On the other side she trotted, limping, across yards until she came to an alley. Because it was narrower than the street and more sheltered, she turned into it, walking on three legs.

  She traveled the alley quickly, crossing each residential street, never faltering from her destination south. She passed houses and scattered stores, then more houses. She was halfway through the town, in a small cluster of stores, when she smelled fish and paused.

  Warily she turned into a side alley and approached the back door of a bait shop.

  She stared up at the screen door. The smell of fish was strong. Boldly she picked her way through scattered trash and up three dilapidated wooden steps.

  Crouching to run, she stared in through the screen. Inside, a man was cutting up fish. When he turned and saw her, he banged his cleaver on the table and shouted. She fled, leaping down on all fours: the pain jarred like fire through her.

  But the jolt broke the abscess. As she fled it began to drain, the pus oozing out.

  She ran for two blocks before she crouched under a car, licking and licking her hurting, oozing paw.

  Soon the pain grew less. When she left the shelter of the car she was walking on all fours.

  By nightfall she was out of the town and in an open field dotted with oaks, and she had forgotten her wound. She caught and ate three field mice, then sheltered high in an oak tree, resting, coming down once more to hunt. Her hurt eye had begun to heal, and the itching annoyed her. Several hours after dark the full moon rose. Its pull made her giddy, she lay out along a branch watching it, letting its power tease her.

  At last, filled to brimming with the moon’s madness, she leaped down out of the tree and raced the meadow, running up another tree and down, and up another. In each tree she paused to stare at the sky and out at the moon-whitened field. Then she raced on again. And if, as she ran madly, visions touched her, if she sensed underground spaces, and if mysterious voices whispered, these disembodied experiences seemed little different to her than the disembodied voices coming from radios and juke boxes.

  She left the meadow that night, traveling south beside the highway. And now as she hurried on, feeling well again, she stopped sometimes to bathe thoroughly, sleeking and fluffing her fur. And she played more. She was drawing near the place coded in her feline spirit as home.

  When on the tenth day she left Highway 101, a sense of rightness made her leap along through the marshy meadow that flanked the narrower road. With kittenish abandon she gamboled, jumping puddles. Her dodging play through the marsh grass made it dance and tremble. When she caught a mouse almost by accident, she ate it quickly then ran on swiftly toward home. Drawing near the portal, her green eyes shone. She smelled home. She stopped to stand on her hind legs, peering away over the grass toward the far hill. She smelled the garden. She galloped on, and soon she smelled a faint turpentine and oil scent caught on the breeze, speaking to her of a particular house. Wildly she fled along the edge of the highway, then crouched and sped across between cars, shaken by the cars’ wind as they passed her. On the other side she slipped into the briar tangle at the base of the hill.

  She climbed the hill beneath the briars, using a path worn by other cats and by rabbits. At the top, she came out behind the center house. Her whiskers twitched with interest at its scent, and she stood looking. But she did not approach the house. She went on past it, up through the garden, alert for the cats whose scent marked this territory as theirs. She could smell, ahead, the cup-of-gold vine and the ancient door, and she approached eagerly.

  Olive Cleaver, standing at her window looking out at the garden, glimpsed a flash of calico and white move between the bushes. Startled, she waited for the cat to emerge. Strange that a neighborhood cat would have the nerve to come into this garden, where the other cats were so possessive. Strange that it was a calico. She had never seen a calico cat near the garden or in the neighborhood. The cat soon appeared nearer her, higher up the hill. She watched it slip through a tangle of nasturtiums and disappear beneath the jasmine bush before the tool shed door. Olive put down her book, watching for it to come out.

  When the calico cat did not appear after a long time, Olive thought it must be hunting under the bushes. Maybe it was a stray and really hungry. She thought of taking some food down to it. But gooseflesh touched her because it was a calico, and she changed her mind.

  Annoyed with herself, she went into the kitchen to brew herself a cup of tea, thinking that she made too much of things, let her imagination run away with her.

  Strange, though, that a stray calico cat would appear in the garden, going directly to the tool shed, as if it knew the place.

  Chapter 25

  Riding fast, Siddonie and her two companions galloped along the Mathe-Wexten border followed by the queen’s small entourage and by two dozen warriors belonging to King Ridgen. The three monarchs had been in the saddle since dawn, inspecting caches of arms and food laid ready in spell-hidden caves. Siddonie watched King Ridgen proprietarily. She liked the way he rode, with an easy elegance. He was dark haired, sleek, with a knowing body and knowing hands, whether handling a horse or a woman. By contrast, the older king, Moriethsten, was altogether sloppy. He rode like a bag of oats. His excess weight shifted with the gelding’s movement, and his pale hair, bound in gold filigree, bounced unbecomingly in time to the horse’s canter. His face was too soft featured, matching his soft, undisciplined thoughts.

  Still, he kept the record books well enough. Since daybreak they had examined twenty caves, checking over and counting barrels of crackers and dried meat and water, and blankets and weapons and upperworld medical supplies. Other caches waited farther on where Wexten spanned beneath upperworld waters. But now, though the stores must be inspected, her mind was only half on the preparations for war.

  She was unable to dismiss her uneasiness about Melissa. She knew Vrech had set the cat adrift in the upperworld, and that should be the end of it. With luck, the cat was already conveniently dead, rotting in some field. A natural death, for which she could not by the Primal Law be blamed. Yet now when she remembered Melissa as a small child, a certain remorse touched her.

  She wondered if Melissa had already been pregnant with Efil’s child when she caught them in bed. Rage at Efil made her boot the stallion and jerk his reins. Efil had been far too bold to bed that girl. He had ruined a good many plans, and he would pay for it.

  Melissa’s death was particularly bad timing. She must be replaced now, quickly, and the chosen Catswold girl must be trained to lead a Catswold army. They would have to quickly find among the upperworld Catswold they had captured some likely half-breed girl. A girl who had inherited some latent talent for magic and could be trained to the task. The result would not be as satisfying as having Melissa, but at least an upperworld Catswold girl would be easier to handle than Melissa.

  The upperworld Catswold, strays from San Francisco’s streets, had not yet been allowed to take human form. They must first be committed totally to the Catswold queen before they learned the changing spell and learned what they really were. They must be willing to fight for, and die for, that queen.

  She moved her stallion up beside Ridgen as the trail widened. Soon, too, there would be the changeling boy to train, to teach how to behave like Prince Wylles. A boy to be turned into Prince Wylles, a healthy boy to insure her title to the throne.

  The land around them was bare here, and craggy. It would grow nothing. There was no village, not one cottage. Even the most skilled growing spells would hardly bring a green spear. When she glanced at Ridgen, the dark king gave her a slow, promising smile. Beside him, Moriethsten noticed nothing; the man was as dull as a turnip. She was pleased that the pretty young queen of Chillings would not be joining them. She hadn’t liked her, though she had thought her loyal until the girl was caught sending supplies to Zzadarray. Under the acts of w
ar, the Primal Law against killing didn’t hold. Likely the young queen’s people were busy this day burying her. Siddonie considered the choices for a new ruler. Chillings should have a king—men were easier to handle.

  Ahead, the stone sky rose abruptly, layered and ragged. Slivers of stone lay in their path where the sky had flaked and crumbled. She could see ahead, down the sloping, stony hills, the isolated inn: a dark, sprawling group of rock buildings forming the tri-border where Mathe, Wexten, and Saurthen joined. The horses began to fuss, sensing food and shelter ahead. As they came down the last expanse of stone, a dozen grooms ran out to take their reins.

  Siddonie’s soldiers dismounted and helped with the animals. They would join the grooms for ale in the inn’s cellar, to glean whatever intelligence they could.

  Soon Siddonie and the two kings were sipping spell-chilled ale in the small, intimate dining hall before the inn’s fire. Ridgen and Moriethsten, discussing troop movements, quieted when the red-faced elven innkeeper returned with their meal of rare venison and roast quail. Siddonie watched the small, square innkeeper refill her stein, keeping the pewter white-cold with a local elven charm. When the steins were full Ridgen toasted her, dark-eyed and ardent, Moriethsten joining him innocently.

  But Moriethsten was skillful in other ways, and reliable as long as she kept close check on him. Their mutual cousins staffed his palace in key positions. She had put Moriethsten on the throne after the old king was unfortunately discovered selling Wexten children into Cathenn slavery and was driven from the palace by a mob of enraged peasants. Very nicely handled, in Vrech’s usual style.

  A metallic racket began. She watched, annoyed, as three musicians strolled out from a curtained alcove with half a dozen dancing girls around them—nearly naked girls dressed in upperworld spangles. Ridgen and Moriethsten ogled them until Siddonie caused Ridgen to choke, and caused both men to find the girls dreary. Both kings turned away with bored glances and returned to their discussion of war tactics.