The Hundred Names of Darkness

by Nilanjana Roy

  Beraal made a soft sound back into the night, almost like the maternal chirrups she used to soothe her kittens, and to Mara’s relief, the clickings grew softer, too. The chittering of the bats had felt like quick taps that came from inside her skull. The Sender shook her head several times before it cleared. Her teeth, she realized, were bared, the fine hairs over her eyes painfully taut. She thought there were words and phrases floating through her mind, but they seemed to go by too rapidly for her to understand them. She closed her eyes, and then she bared her teeth, chattering in fright—sharp little teeth, pink tongues, bright questing eyes set in the faces of miniature wolves glared back at her.

  “Mara!” said Beraal urgently. “Could you stop sending to them please! You’re frightening the vamps, they say they can see your teeth chattering at them in vivid close-up.”

  With a start, the Sender opened her eyes. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t mean that to happen.”

  “Pola says your whiskers are on their frequency, and that you’re making her ears buzz—oh good, she thinks it’s very nice of you to apologize.”

  Mara stared at Beraal, her ears turned to the older cat questioningly.

  “Kittens squeak, bats squeak,” said Beraal. “Different species, but it’s more or less the same language. Though the bats aren’t half as demanding. They’ll chatter among themselves for a little while, but they’ll be fast asleep before dawn.”

  Mara settled back, but she was uneasy. She didn’t want to look up; the night was a strange new place, and it harboured all kinds of creatures. She felt as though she had crossed the frontier from one world into another at sundown.

  Beraal took up her tale again, and the Sender listened, her head resting on her paws, grateful for the sound of that familiar voice. It made the darkness feel a little less threatening.

  “The cat who lives on the other side of the night,” thought the tortoiseshell, and little by little, as her paws hurried her on, and her whiskers tugged at the night breezes, she felt her heart beat faster. Over her years of travelling, the cat had mated with many toms, and spent many nights in that slow circling dance of desire and battle. She had challenged a line of mountain cats, refusing to mate with any but the strongest, the one who bested her in battle; she still had the scars from a year spent in the company of a fierce seafaring cat who had been her equal in their hunts and in other ways.

  She had dropped some litters of kittens, and brought not a few up, only leaving once they had found homes, and loving hands to cuddle and feed them. But she had preferred her own company at all times, and always, no matter how loving and loud and long the calls that sang through the nights, there had come a time when her paws had sung a new song of the road, her whiskers had called, and she had bid farewell to whoever she had been with, tomcat or kitten.

  She padded up the riverghat steps, taking care to avoid the Bigfeet. Her lithe, small shape glided silently through the night as she headed North, away from the river up towards the long low line of hills; she was adept at keeping out of the moonlight. Her paws were used to the river mud and the damp grass that grew on the roads, and she used the clumps of purple-headed sarkanda for cover when she heard the scurrying thumps of a larger animal or the careless shuffle of a Bigfoot.

  The ground beneath her paws was changing; she could feel loam instead of clay on her paw pads. The night was gathering close around the little traveller. A locust played the fiddle on a blade of grass and she started, pausing with a paw raised in mid-air: she could no longer hear the familiar murmur of the river’s rushing waters.

  The moon had shone as brightly as the egrets’ snowy wings when she had started out, lighting her path and making it easy for the cat to see the pebbles, stones, thorns and other small hazards. But the winds sighed in the tortoiseshell’s ear, a mournful whisper that set the hackles rising on her fur and on the backs of her legs, and all at once, the frogs croaked in alarm, their voices breaking as they implored: “Go bac-ack-ack! Go bac-ack-ack!”

  The cat shivered, but she went on, picking her way carefully as the ground began to slope upwards. The mud gave way to stone, a hard stone that had an obsidian feel under her paws.

  A few sullen stars had appeared in the sky, one glittering a baleful red, sprinkled against the blackness of the night. The frogs stopped their pleading, and as silence fell, a cloud, as mottled and purpled as an old bruise, drifted across the surface of the moon. It was joined by another cloud, as grey as the belly of a dead fish, and another, the colour of the dank mud that lay at the bottom of the river she had left behind. The light from the moon dimmed and dimmed, and darkness fell all around her.

  The winds picked up speed, whistling around her ears, forcing her to lower her small head as she struggled up the rocky mountain. She could not see where she was placing her paws, and when she slipped, the black blades of the rock cut without mercy into her paw pads, making her mew in pain.

  Her voice echoed back at her, taken by the massive rocks and flung back into the freezing air until all she could hear was her own pain, carried by the wind, and all she could feel was the stickiness of the blood that streamed from her paws.

  The cat thought she should stop, but when she turned, she could not see what she had left behind her, any more than she could see what lay ahead. She shivered again, her whiskers trembling, her fur no protection against the sharp winds, the cold of the mountainside.

  “Perhaps,” she told herself, “I should call out to the cat who lives on the other side of the night. Who knows where the other side of the night begins or ends? Perhaps the cat who lives there is asleep; perhaps he (or she) will not know that I have passed by; it is only good manners to let her (or him) know that there is a stranger in the area. I would want to know, if a stray came into my territory.”

  She sniffed at the breeze carefully, but no whiff of predators came back; only the scent of ice, and blood, and the mothwing scent of darkness.

  The cat offered a tiny mew into the night, and then a louder one.

  “Greetings,” she miaowed. “Can anyone hear me, or smell me? I’m looking for the cat who lives on the other side of the night…”

  Her mews were caught by the rocks and flung back at her.

  Greetings, the rocks said, mockingly.

  And the echo said: Eating…eating…eating…

  The cat kept walking, though her paws felt as though they had been torn into shreds. She felt the blood run so freely that it had soaked into her paws; making them sticky and cold. But the pain was not the worst thing of all. As she walked and walked, stumbling and staggering when the slope rose too steep, what made her fur stay spiky and her bones feel cold was the silence.

  Except for the winds, which dropped and rose, howled and lapsed into absolute stillness, there were no sounds from anything at all. The locust had played its mournful fiddle a long time ago.

  Time passed, how much time she was never to know. It could have been as much time as it takes to raise your tail and stretch out fully, it might have been as many moons as it takes to whiten your whiskers. And it seemed to the cat that she was the only creature who walked under the heavy wing of this night.

  She stumbled, and this time, when she fell, she felt her claws give way on the smooth glassy surface of the rock. The cat slid to the very lip of the rock, too winded to mew, and when she rose, her flank was raw and hurting where the skin had been flayed by the sharp stone. Her courage almost gave out, then, and once again, she turned around, and once more, she saw only blackness behind, blackness ahead.

  She had forgotten about the cat who lived on the other side of the night, forgotten about the river, and the egrets, and her life under the boat. Her tongue was dry and swollen with thirst and fear. Her paws and her flank streamed blood. She wanted only to be away from the night, back under the warmth and light of the sun. Yet still, she made her paws move forward. As the winds howled and tugged greedily at her fur, the chill cutting like giant claws into her back, making her whiskers ache with
the cold, the cat kept walking.

  The silence fell around her as heavily as the darkness. But gradually, so slowly that it took her tired mind a while to believe her senses, the cat understood that there was something walking behind her.

  It was quite a distance away. She turned again, but she could see nothing. And then she caught it, carried on the back of that cold wind, a smell that made her nostrils twitch in terror, the unmistakeable stench of matted fur, flesh and dried blood that spoke of a predator.

  The paws padding along behind her seemed to quicken. The cat looked up at the night sky, but the clouds gathered so thickly around the moon that the darkness seemed to deepen, seemed to settle on her whiskers and curl into her fur, reaching its fingers all the way down into her skin and bones.

  The tread coming up the mountain was growing heavier and heavier, and the cat felt her blood go cold. She put her ears back, and she kept her tail up rather than allowing it to droop. She did her best to hurry, but the rocks were cruelly sharp.

  Behind her, she thought she felt the wind shift, the coolness lifting so suddenly, it was as though something much, much larger than her had taken a deep breath and let it out, the hot exhalation stirring the fur on her back paws.

  There was the scrape of claws on the rock, closer now…closer still.

  The cat scrabbled at the rock, but she could not run, not with her paws so badly injured, not with the blood that had streamed out of her already. She looked up, to see how high the mountain was, and though she could see nothing, it seemed endless.

  The cat’s terror grew. She feared the hot breath that would whip across her hindquarters, the paw that would lash out, severing her tendons or ripping out her guts, the teeth that might cruelly crush her bones. All that fear and terror began to rumble around in her head, until it shrieked as loudly as the wind.

  She almost mewed; and then she thought of the egrets, of their soaring flight across the blue skies, her calm and placid days by the riverside, the joy with which she had chased tiny crabs across the mud, just to see the skittering patterns they made in the clay. And slowly, the terror she felt began to shift, and began to glow, until it had become a kind of anger.

  The creature was close, its tread quickening. The cat could not see in the dark, and she could not feel anything except for the slick knives of the rock, and the heavy stickiness of her own blood. She held her fear balanced in her head for a moment, the way she had once held bird’s eggs carefully cupped in her mouth, and then she released her fear into the night’s blackness.

  She stopped walking. She turned, her eyes blazing, her back arched.

  “You who follow me up the mountain into the night, you whose fur I can smell, but whom I cannot see, why do you say nothing? Why do you not growl, or grunt, or call out? Do you mean to kill your enemy in silence?”

  The heavy tread slowed, and she felt a shift in the air, as though the winds held their breath.

  “Yes, you,” the cat called, her mew more assured. “What kind of hunt is this, where there is neither light nor level ground, where I cannot even see you or offer you a fight? If you mean to kill me, so be it. All of us must meet an end, and I have handed many over to the care of the greatest hunter of us all; but I faced my prey, and you hunt yours in silence. May I not look on your face?”

  The winds stirred uneasily. The cat raised her whiskers, questing, searching, probing; it seemed to her that something in the darkness stood, hunched, on the mountainside just beneath the rock where she was crouched. She shivered, because it seemed to her that the creature was very large.

  “May we not fight?” she said. “May I not be given one last battle, one chance to bare my teeth, to use my claws?”

  Below, something stirred, and suddenly, the air filled with the strong stink of wet fur, as though a great animal had dropped to its hind legs. The winds sighed, raising the fine hairs in the recesses of her ears; and a cloud drifted to a side, letting a dull silver gleam through the darkness. The cat could see nothing on the mountain, but even that faint light, that curved sickle sliver in the sky, was better than the implacable blackness.

  The silence stretched out between them. She could smell her own blood, and knew that the creature could smell it, too.

  “I would die fighting,” she said, wishing that her mew had come out less plaintive. “But before I die, might I know your name?”

  The winds gusted down the mountainside so furiously that she had to crouch low, her belly flat to the rock, or she would have been blown around like a ball of dust. Another cloud sailed away, and now the cat could see the baleful moon, the merest glimmer emanating from its dark-red, almost black orb. The winds moaned and howled, dancing around her ears, making her wounds throb painfully.

  She felt the creature move. The cat, lying flat against the rock, raised her head fearfully, and something made her look up as high as she could, even though she could see nothing in that darkness. Her whiskers throbbed, hurting her. She felt a harsh, hot breath scorch the fur on her face, and almost mewed in shock. She could smell meat and stale blood on the creature’s breath. The cat could not see it; but its bulk and its breathing made her flanks shiver.

  When it spoke, its voice was very quiet, but it rasped across her bones, and made the cat feel raw, as though a rough tongue had passed over her paws and her face.

  “You ask for my name?” the creature said.

  She shivered, her blood running cold. But she said, “And I offer you mine in exchange, if you wish it.”

  There was an exhalation, so harsh that it singed the cat’s whiskers. She felt the creature come closer, so close that its fur—with the stink of meat and bones on it—brushed against her side. The cat almost cried out, because the rough bristles scratched her wounds so, but though her whiskers shook, she stayed silent.

  “Names,” the creature said at last. “Yes, I have a name.”

  The winds howled again, and the blood-red moon cast its chilly light on the mountainside.

  The cat caught a flash, a glimpse of yellow teeth inside a massive, yawning mouth. There was something else too, but she quickly closed her eyes and told herself not to think about that.

  Then the creature rose, and the cat felt her tail sink, her paws curl up, as she saw how it towered into the night sky. Its face was not visible yet, but she could see the outline of its great paws, sense the gigantic tail swishing in the distance.

  “Cat, little cat, little creature of the river, small traveller who followed the moon all the way into the maw of the night,” said the creature, “you may guess my name. If you guess right, I will kill you swiftly, and if you guess wrong, I will—well, it will not be swift.” And the creature bent its massive head, and the cat held herself absolutely still as she felt that great, rough tongue dabble at the blood on the rocks—her blood, the blood that had dripped from her wounds.

  “Ah,” it said, straightening up, “that was tasty. Now start.”

  “Wait,” said the cat. “I will try to guess your name, but you offer me only death, one way or another. But I did not come this far to be killed by a creature whom I cannot see and do not know. I came to meet the cat who lives on the other side of the night. Before we start, before you kill me, O creature, tell me—how close did I get? Was I anywhere near the other side of the night?”

  The creature seemed to shake, and then it threw its head back—she saw the ugly mane form a rough halo around it—and it howled.

  “Close, and yet far,” it growled. “There, and nowhere near.”

  The creature’s howls had ripped through the night, echoing back off the rocks until they reverberated through the tortoiseshell’s body and through her head.

  “If you please,” she said, though it was painful after the creature’s howling even to attempt a mew, “could you—if you meet him or her—could you tell the cat I’d come this far?”

  “Enough!” growled the creature. “Begin!”

  The cat shifted her paws, nervously, and her tongue stuck out f
or a moment.

  “Very well, then,” she said, her whiskers assessing the animal’s bulk, thinking of the other big beasts whose habits linked them with the night. “Are you called Metoh? Lupin? Amaguk? Ursa? Parictis? Mamut? Quagga? Almas? Gigas? Pithekos?”

  The creature bent its head again, and this time, she felt its fetid breath in her whiskers, fouling her nostrils. There was the stench of something else, a dark excitement that the cat found distasteful. Its tongue rasped the ground near her paws, and she watched in horrified fascination as it drank more of her spilled blood.

  “Tastier,” it said thickly. “Soon, if you guess in this fashion, I will have fresh blood to drink.”

  The cat put her paws together, trying to ignore the smell of her blood emanating from the creature’s curved fangs. She let her whiskers reach out into the night, and she looked up into the sky, and thought.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you were named for the stars, after all.”

  The winds sighed and sobbed, but the creature squatted, looming over her.

  “Was I?” it said, in its quiet voice. “Which ones?”

  The cat named the stars, choosing the ones that made up the giant, the bear, the monster, the were-tiger, the prowler, the beast, the dog, the panther, the ghost and the hunter.

  The creature panted, its breath warming her freezing fur. It let one paw drop heavily on her flank.

  “You entertain me, cat,” it said. “I will enjoy tearing you to pieces. But go on, you have more guesses.”

  The winds sobbed and sighed, and crept through her fur.

  The cat washed her paws, and thought, and named ten kinds of shadows next. And the creature licked blood from her paws, and its hot breath made her feel sick.

  The cat named ghosts, then, and after that, she named ten kinds of fear, and when that, too, met with the creature’s mocking taunts, she named the ten birds that carry death on their wings, and the ten weapons of the gods, and then the ten guardians of the deepest rocks in the hot centre of the earth, and finally, she named the ten dark angels.