Tag sat on a shelf in the abandoned pet shop at Cutting Lane.
It was the end of a wet afternoon, and the light was fading to brown the other side of the dirty, rain-streaked windows. Soon, the street outside would echo briefly to the sound of hundreds of human feet. The sodium lamps would turn it orange. Then the noise would die away, and the pavements would belong to cats again. ‘The night,’ his old mentor had once advised him, ‘is always the best time for doing the work of the Majicou.’ So – though he could have done that kind of work at any time from Cutting Lane, so central was it in the web of the wild roads – Tag sat on his shelf to wait.
‘Come on, night,’ he thought.
As soon as he had finished here, he planned to visit a pie stall three streets away and eat battered scallops, white pudding. In the meantime he got up, shook himself, and was just turning round to find a more comfortable position when he heard a noise at the back of the shop.
Scrape.
It was like claws on bare wood. He heard it once and then again. ‘What’s this?’ he thought. Scrape. Click. Scrape. Like a lame animal circling quietly in the back room.
Something had come along the wild roads to him, something that owed allegiance to the original master of Cutting Lane. Tag got to his feet and backed carefully along the shelf until he was hidden behind some thick spiderwebs. With no-one to teach him how to be the Majicou, he had learned caution early. Most of the proxies were harmless. Some weren’t. He never showed himself until he was sure.
Out loud, he said, ‘No-one asked you here, but you won’t be hurt.’
Scrape.
‘Come into the light,’ he said.
A thick voice answered, ‘I saw something the Majicou would pay to see.’
‘There are no payments here.’
‘Then there is no news.’
‘Come further into the light.’
Click. Scrape.
Perhaps it had once been a dog. Perhaps it had wandered onto the Old Changing Way and something had happened to it there, and it could no longer go back to whatever life it had once enjoyed. It was very old now, as if the wild roads had kept it alive too long. It was large and shapeless, and it had a large, shapeless smell. Coarse brown and black hair with an oily look. A misshapen head which nodded up and down as it walked on its three legs. Eyes milky with cataract. There was something indeterminate about all these things. Its voice was like a voice strained through kapok. Tag had dealt with it before.
‘I know you,’ he said.
‘You are not the Majicou.’
‘Yes I am.’
‘Then come with me.’
‘Why should I?’
‘What do you know about death?’
‘Less than I could.’
‘Then come with me and learn.’
Limping and pausing, panting and dragging, it led him into the back room, where it promptly vanished into the air. Tag followed. They debouched in an alley between two buildings. There was no talk between them. In a little while they came to the river. There, as the day packed itself away into the west, the dog showed him what it had found. At low tide here, a small but well-used highway had its entrance in a filmy grey twist of light between two rotting piles. It was popular with the animals of both banks as a way across the river, and had comprehensive links to much larger roads. Tag stood in the smell of mud and stared at the heap of corpses the dog had brought him to see. There were ten or fifteen of them. They were all cats. Their fur was sodden. Their limbs were entangled as if they had fought panickily with one another at the last. Their eyes bulged so hard that the whites showed. They had died with their ears back.
‘How did this happen?’ said Tag.
The dog looked at him dully.
‘The life has been drained out of them,’ it said. ‘Something is wrong with the Old Changing Way. I don’t know what.’
‘Go away and learn more.’
‘You are not the Majicou,’ grumbled the dog.
‘I am the New Majicou. Always come to me when you find something.’
‘Yet there is no reward.’
‘Find me two golden kittens and we’ll see.’
The dog turned away with a sigh and dragged itself up the shingle towards the buildings. Something made it stop and say, ‘I am a dog. A dog has a sense of smell. If I did not know better I would say I smelled the Alchemist on that road: I would not use it if I were you.’
Too late.
The New Majicou had gingerly negotiated the heap of dead cats and stuck his head in the highway.
*
What he found there was not unusual. How can a road go in all directions at once? No-one knows the answer to that. The Old Changing Way, which will take you anywhere in hardly any time at all, is full of ghosts. Nothing more can be said. Unless you know what you are doing it is a dangerous place to be. Even at the best of times.
‘Hmm,’ thought Tag.
He thought, ‘Nothing here.’
But as soon as he pushed his way inside he knew that the old dog had been right. It was like moving through glue. He was exhausted suddenly, and his bones felt hollow. Worse, something was waiting for him. He couldn’t say how he knew. Only that when the strange, tinny echoes of that place fled away from his feet, something moved among them. It was following him. He stopped. He raised his head, and let the wind talk to his whiskers. As Leo had done in the sea-cave, he opened his mouth to taste the air.
Nothing. And yet—
‘I’ll just go to the other end,’ he thought, ‘and see what things are like there.’
It was a longer walk than he had anticipated, and with more twists and turns than was proper. He couldn’t shake his lethargy: he felt as if he had been walking all day. By the time he admitted, ‘I could have swum the river quicker than this,’ he knew that he had made a mistake. The inside of the old road was like an accordion-pleated tube of plastic, full of a brown fog you couldn’t smell, only see. It seemed to flex and shift. When you turned, you thought you felt it turn with you. Tag kept calm. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ he told himself. ‘But I’ve made mistakes before. Things always came out right in the end.’ He closed his eyes and got himself facing back the way he had come. His energy was returning, but he knew he had better not try to run. He knew what might happen to you if you panicked in there.
‘I can get out of this,’ he thought.
Then he heard the follower again.
‘Who’s there?’ he called.
When he walked, it walked. When he stopped, it stopped. It was hiding quietly and patiently in his footsteps.
‘I can get out of this,’ he told himself.
He set his ears back and ran until he thought he would burst.
In a moment, he had reached his start-point and popped back out onto the bank of the river, where he tumbled end over end among the dead cats, spitting and hissing with fear and disgust. The fur bristled along his spine. His teeth bared themselves with no help from him. He got to his feet and turned to face his pursuer, a shriek of rage building up in his throat—
It was Leonora Whitstand Merril.
‘Hello, Tag,’ she said shyly. Then she caught sight of the corpses.
*
He took her home immediately, and all the long, long way without a word spoken, so that her parents could scold her roundly in the dim green light of the oceanarium.
‘What were you thinking of?’ demanded the Mau. ‘What could you have been thinking of?’ While Ragnar Gustaffson shook his head and – conveniently forgetting his own first acquaintance with the Old Changing Way – said that in his opinion it was a very irresponsible thing, to travel wild roads as a kitten without protection or preparation.
‘A very irresponsible thing, Leonora.’
Leo looked abashed for a moment. Then her confidence returned.
‘I want my brother and sister back,’ she said.
‘We all want that,’ said the Mau tiredly. ‘You could help by not being taken in your turn.’ With a kind of puzzled distaste she looked up at the great tank, where the sharks circled relentlessly in the illuminated water. ‘We live here with these—’ for a moment she seemed lost for words ‘—these fishes, to keep you safe.’
This only made Leo angry.
‘I don’t want to be safe,’ she said.
She said, ‘No-one is doing anything!’
‘I’m doing what I can, Leo,’ said Tag. Now that his fur had settled down, he felt mainly relief that he hadn’t hurt her. Nor could he forget her expression when she saw the grotesque and pathetic heap of fur at the end of the highway. It was hard to stay angry, though Leo seemed to have no difficulty with that. ‘I might have killed you by the river,’ he added quietly. ‘I had no idea who you were.’
She looked away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. He could see that she was, but that it wouldn’t change things for now. He felt uncomfortable on her behalf – though he knew she wouldn’t thank him for that either – as she turned and stalked off towards the door.
‘Where are you going?’ demanded the Mau.
‘All these fish make me hungry,’ said Leonora. ‘I’m going to find Cy and get chips from the tourists.’
‘Leonora!’
‘It’s quite safe.’
*
When she returned in a better mood about two hours later, licking her chops and smelling strongly of hot lard and vinegar, she found Tag waiting for her on the oceanarium doorstep.
‘You’ve hurt their feelings, Leo,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ll go in and apologize.’
‘Wait,’ said Tag. ‘Sit here for a moment.’
She sat.
‘You look tired,’ she said. She began to groom herself absently; then turned her attentions to him. ‘And you’ve let your ears get dirty.’
‘Leonora, that wasn’t the first time you’d followed me, was it?’
She stopped licking him and looked away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I knew you’d guess in the end. I wanted to learn about the wild roads. They’re such a part of your life, and Ragnar’s, and Pertelot’s. I feel left out. I’m only a kitten, but I want to know things.’
‘I wish you’d asked me,’ he said.
‘Are you angry?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘In fact I’m rather relieved that it was you. Still,’ he chided her gently, ‘you should never take an adult cat by surprise like that. Your mother and father and I, we fought the Alchemist—’ How could he explain? ‘We’ve seen some awful things. We – we were toughened by it, whether we wanted to be or not. You shouldn’t surprise us. And especially not the Majicou. The Majicou can be a more dangerous animal than you imagine.’
Leonora laughed.
‘You didn’t look so dangerous when you fell over,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, now your feelings are hurt too.’
Tag blinked.
‘If you really want to learn things,’ he said, as offhandedly as he could, ‘you’d better start coming out with me.’
*
His main argument to Ragnar and Pertelot had been simple: ‘If you forbid her she’ll just keep doing it anyway.’ They had seen the force of this. They had expected him to make promises, of course. Leonora must agree to do what she was told. She must always stay by him. Once all that was sorted out, he had tried to calm their fears further by adding, ‘She’ll soon get bored when she sees how humdrum it all is.’
‘Don’t misjudge Leonora,’ the Queen had advised him grimly. Hurt feelings or not (and who could use such a phrase to describe the wells of sorrow and anger, the Egyptian deeps of the Mau’s affections?), she loved her daughter. ‘She’s an untapped soul.’
In a way, both of them turned out to be right.
*
Leonora was soon bored.
‘Love the world, Leo,’ Tag would advise her. ‘That’s the secret of success. Love the world and follow your nose.’ This axiom gave rise less to a search of the wild roads than a communion with them, less an interrogation of their denizens than a conversation. It hardly suited the Leonine temperament. True, she enjoyed learning how to find and navigate her chosen highway, how to recognize a safe or a difficult entrance, how to read the ever-changing smoky light. It was an adventure. ‘Quick now, Leonora!’ Tag would urge. ‘Follow close!’ Or, ‘Wait! Wait here and make no sound!’ She soon learned to listen for that edge in his voice, that promise of excitement and danger. And she soon fell in love with the bizarre and eccentric animals he knew – the ‘creatures of Majicou’ who had acted as agents, informants, proxies to the original guardian of the wild roads. She loved the marginal places they lived in, and the odd relationships they seemed to have with each other or with human beings. All this was rather exciting. But it was broken up by long periods at Cutting Lane, during which her teacher sat among the spiderwebs and seemed to do nothing at all.
Instead of changing his plan when it produced no discernible results, Tag only became thoughtful. On their third day along the Old Changing Way, he took her to some city gardens. There, he spent an afternoon in the sunshine, on the lawn in front of a house with weatherbeaten blue paintwork. He lay sprawled out on the warm grass, all creamy-white and silver, watching amiably the huge bees that zizzed and bumbled in long arcs through the summery air. He was silent for so long she thought he had gone to sleep.
‘Tag,’ she said, after some time, ‘why have we come here?’
‘I often come here to think.’
There was another long pause.
‘The thing is,’ he said eventually, ‘I used to live here. Or somewhere like it. Two rather dull but very generous human beings bought me from a pet shop, and I lived a good life.’ He laughed. ‘I ate some things!’ he said. ‘Tuna-fish mayonnaise. Meat-and-liver dinner. Chicken and game casserole. (Chicken and game casserole was my downfall, in the end.) I don’t suppose you’ve had any of those?’
‘No,’ said Leo.
‘Or mackerel pâté, which is like a whole shoal of fish in a tin. Silver fish in a tin: that’s something!’
‘Now you’re just teasing me,’ Leo said primly; and added, having perhaps forgotten her passion for chips, ‘Pertelot says convenience food is bad for us anyway. And if you were having such a good time, why did you leave?’
‘Well,’ Tag said, ‘I can’t say I went of my own accord. But I did leave. The Majicou saw to that. He and his magpie, they gave me no rest until I did. One thing led to another, and we sorted things out, and here I am. It was a big fight, the day you were born and the Majicou died.’
‘Was he wonderful?’
‘He was big. I never saw a bigger cat, or heard a more convincing one.’
‘You were his apprentice.’
‘I suppose I was.’
‘And did you love him?’
Tag looked puzzled.
‘I don’t know if love’s the word,’ he said. ‘He was full of anger and good advice. One of the last things he told me was this: “The wonderful place is inside you, and it goes wherever you go. Homes are made.” But you know, even though he was right, and I’ve made a new life for myself, sometimes I miss the home I had. So I come here, or go to one of the other gardens I remember, and scout about for it. I would recognize the voices of those dulls, I’m sure. Although what I’d do if I found them I’ve no idea. Does that seem odd to you?’
‘I think I’m too young to have an opinion.’
‘Ah,’ said Tag. ‘Of course.’
He turned his attention back to the house. After a while he raised his left hind foot and scratched vigorously beneath the ear on that side. Leo, meanwhile, launched herself after a passing cabbage-white butterfly, missed comprehensively, and turned the leap into a grave, complex little dance – a series of enchained steps, a spring, a turn. She loved to dance. I’ll never learn to hunt if I keep doing this, she thought. She thought, Odin is the hunter. I wonder where he is now?
‘Anyway,’ said Tag suddenly. ‘That was how it was explained to me. Home is what you make.’
Leo, who had already suspected this, continued her dance.
‘Am I your apprentice?’ she asked lightly, so that he shouldn’t see how important it was to her.
Tag yawned.
‘Time to get you home again,’ he said.
Then he added, in rather a surprised way, ‘Do you want to be?’
‘Oh, only if you would like it too.’
‘There is one thing more we could try,’ Tag told her, ‘before we go home. We could visit the Domain of Uroum Bashou, the cat they call the Elephant.’
Leo shivered.
‘Is he called Elephant because he’s very big?’
Tag stared at her.
‘To be frank, I’m not entirely sure what an elephant is,’ he said. ‘I only know—’
‘It’s something very big,’ Leo told him. ‘Don’t you know anything?’ She added matter-of-factly, ‘Mother dreams of them sometimes. She dreams almost every night.’ She thought for a moment. ‘One day,’ she said with a kind of careless hauteur, ‘I shall dream of elephants too.’
Tag continued to stare at her. He wondered if he had been as impenetrable at her age. ‘I only know that he can read,’ he finished. ‘Would you call someone Elephant because he can read?’
‘What’s reading?’
Tag wasn’t entirely certain about that, either.
‘Wait and see,’ he said.
He only knew what Uroum Bashou had told him: that human beings kept what they called ‘books’, and that the Reading Cat was able to sense the meaning of the ‘words’ these books contained by passing his paw quickly along each line of the text; or sometimes by licking it; or even by using his whiskers to sense faint changes in pressure caused by the movement of the air across the print. Uroum Bashou rarely used his eyes now that he had grown older – although of course that was how he had learned to read as a kitten, sitting on his owner’s shoulder as his owner turned the pages of some interesting volume – Birds of the Green Forest, or Small Rodents of the Northern World: Their Habits.
‘I’m tired of waiting and seeing,’ said Leonora. ‘Actually.’
For a moment, Tag looked amused.
‘Oh you actually are, are you?’ he said. He jumped to his feet with an empty-eyed suddenness that startled her, snapped at a passing bee, and went bounding across the lawn, scattering last year’s leaves as he went. ‘Then try and follow me if you can!’ he called over his shoulder; and, with that, vanished.
She caught a twist of light in the corner of her eye, dived into the highway before it closed after him. The world tipped sideways, righted itself, ghosts streamed past, the compass wind howled around her. She could see Tag in the middle distance, running tirelessly along in a kind of slow motion. Echoes flew up from his pads in the shape of small brown birds. ‘Call yourself a cat?’ he taunted. And without warning he turned at right angles into the wall of the world and vanished again. Leonora stood among the echoes, panting. ‘What now?’ she thought. ‘What now?’ the echoes said, as they fluttered round her muzzle. ‘Oh go away!’ she told them. Off she went again, and this time caught up with him a little sooner. ‘I do call myself a cat!’ she said; but he answered, ‘Do you indeed? Then you already know the way. Such a clever animal doesn’t need any lessons,’ and disappeared again. So it went, from the huge ancient highways laid down by sabre-tooths after the ice receded, to the little local mazes made by domestic cats, Tag always ahead, always allowing her to catch up, until she was thoroughly out of breath and out of temper, and they stood in the cluttered yard of an abandoned red brick house somewhere in the Midlands, where early-evening light lay in slanting gold bars against the boarded-up windows, the scuffed and sun-bleached back door.
Into the door was set an old-fashioned wooden cat flap, scratched and battered and grubby with the passage of many cats. Above that, a smaller hole had been gouged in the door itself, perhaps so that the occupants could look out without themselves being seen. Behind the door, the air was disturbed by a stealthy movement, and a rank smell. One amber eye appeared in the hole and stared out at Tag and Leo. Its surface had an oily iridescence. Its pupil was dilated.
Leo rubbed her head nervously along the side of Tag’s head. ‘Is it Uroum Bashou?’ she whispered.
‘Go away,’ said the animal behind the door.
‘No,’ said Tag to Leo. ‘It is his guardian, Kater Murr.’
‘Go away,’ said Kater Murr again. Its voice was reasonable and dangerous. Its breath was bad.
‘I am the Majicou,’ Tag said. ‘You know me, Kater Murr.’
‘I know no-one.’
The amber eye was removed suddenly. Leo had a sense of something ponderous and ill-favoured shifting its weight in the gloom.
‘Kater Murr, let us in,’ said Tag patiently.
A contemptuous laugh came from behind the door.
‘He is not seeing anyone today.’
‘Stand away from the entrance.’
There was a pause. Then the voice said, ‘Very well. I will not harm you if you come in.’
But Tag answered, ’Empty speech, Kater Murr. Empty promises. A cat like you can’t hurt the Majicou.’ Then, quietly, to Leonora, ‘Don’t follow too closely. Just in case.’ The cat flap opened – a thick, sour smell poured out, like old food and ammonia – and closed again behind him.
Silence.
Leonora waited as long as she dared, looked fearfully round the yard in case Kater Murr had associates hidden among the buddleia bushes, then pushed her way inside. It was a kitchen, almost dark, with a few lines of grey light falling across a worn tile floor and a shallow stone sink full of green mould. Human beings had stopped using it years ago. That sour, disturbing smell hung over everything: but the kitchen was empty except for Tag, licking himself unconcernedly in a dim corner. Leonora felt let down.
‘Where is he?’ she said.
‘He won’t bother us now until we leave. He is the gatekeeper of this place.’
She didn’t like the way he stressed ‘this place’.
‘It looks like a house to me,’ she said, in an attempt to appear unconcerned.
Tag raised the paw he had just washed. He eyed it with approval. ‘Then come this way,’ he invited, ‘and I’ll show you the Great Library of Uroum Bashou.’
The empty house murmured with traffic noises, as though a decade of passing cars lived in its peeling wainscots and half-open cupboards. Leo followed Tag up narrow flights of uncarpeted wooden stairs varnished years ago a sticky brown colour. Each landing was lit by a small dirty window; off the landings, doors opened into rooms empty and broken-looking – rooms with stale charred grates like open mouths – rooms which looked as if birds had taken up residence in them. ‘What is that smell?’ asked Leonora, wrinkling her nose; and when Tag advised, ‘You shouldn’t ask “what?” but “who?”’ stared over her shoulder as if the walls had quietly sprung to life behind her as she passed.
She was unprepared for the top of the house – where everything had been knocked into one huge room, now lighted by the dull gold-and-orange wash of a setting sun, which ran like hot metal through a series of skylights and onto the scene below – or for the animal who greeted them there.
Uroum Bashou had once danced and scampered in the alleys of Morocco – or so he claimed. Now he lived in some state, albeit in the cold north, and books surrounded him. Books large and small, books bound with green and brown leather or orange paper, books in drifts, books in rafts. Closed books, open books, books swooning into piles, books whose wings and backs seemed broken. Books had slipped from the walls and slithered across the floors like the moraines left behind by some strange retreating glacier from a vanished age of print. Among them, like a pasha on a cushion on a souk, sprawled the Reading Cat, a browny-black, short-haired, skinny, long-legged old thing, who nevertheless exuded the dignity of the expert, the confidence of the emeritus professor. The fur around his ears was threadbare, as if he was a toy from the little sharp head of which someone had thoughtlessly rubbed the velvet. His eyes, a dim amber, were flecked with the many things he knew. When he spoke, though, his voice was light and fluting, the voice of a eunuch like a musical instrument in a closed courtyard; and he often spoke of himself in the third person.
When he saw Leonora, he began to purr.
‘Uroum Bashou,’ he greeted her, ‘welcomes you, my dear. How can he help?’
‘We are looking for two kittens—’ Tag began.
Uroum Bashou ignored him.
‘I see,’ he said to Leonora, ‘that you are admiring the Tail of Uroum Bashou.’
She was indeed looking at it, but not perhaps with admiration. It was as skinny as he was, and there was something wrong with the tip of it.
‘Come closer. This is the story. In brief, a cat is born, a cat with a knot of tangled vertebrae at the end of its tail. Do you see? This is not a malformation, but rather the world trying to remember something. All well and good, you might think, and it is. But now things go immediately awry: because when a human hand is run lovingly down this tail, and catches in the knot instead of sliding smoothly off the end, well then, many things come to mind, and the owner thinks, “I must buy dates, or have dates bought for me.” Or it remembers, “I must have someone’s hands chopped off in the market today for thievery.” As a consequence, that cat’s first name, his given, or kitten-name, is Handkerchief.’
Uroum Bashou’s laugh was reedy and contemptuous.
‘To put it shortly, I was that kitten, and you see him before you, not much aged. That was before I learned to read, and understood my task. I am the Great Aide-Mémoire. Through me the world remembers. But what? What am I here to signify? I do not know.’
He shrugged a little.
‘That is my tragedy,’ he said.
Leo, who thought he had finished, opened her mouth to speak.
‘Oh, I know,’ he interrupted her. ‘You think me obsessed. I am. I will probably remain so.’ He brooded. ‘They called me Handkerchief, but what is that? Only the name of a kitten. So I learned to read. I read this: “Imagine a prince, handsome, gentle, black-haired; in his hand he holds the stripped and polished skull of a cat;” and this: “weasels”. I read: “smoke”, “sensuality”, “meringue”, “mystery!” I read everything I could find, and when I came into my power I called myself Uroum Bashou, the Elephant. The Elephant never forgets – I have read that.’
Leo stared at him. This time, she realized, he really had finished, and was waiting for her to say something. All she could think of was, ‘Have you seen my brother?’
At this he seemed to lose interest in her immediately, and turned to Tag.
‘What does the Majicou know?’ he asked.
‘Nothing that Uroum Bashou does not,’ Tag said. ‘The world turns—’
‘As ever.’
‘—as ever. But the wild roads… The wild roads are uncomfortable, Uroum Bashou. They have begun to take where they should give. One day they are reliable, the next day they are not. Something is out of joint.’
Uroum Bashou nodded his little threadbare head.
‘You walk wild roads,’ he acknowledged, ‘while the Elephant stays among his books: that is good. What does the Elephant know? This: there is more than one prophecy that speaks of a Golden Cat. This: the Golden Cat may not be what it seems. This: the Golden Cat may not be all of it, or the end of it. Do you see? I see that you don’t. And yet: there is a fuse burning in the world today. I do not know who lit it, or how. But something quite new is coming, and not just to us cats.’
Leonora inspected one of her front paws modestly.
‘I have often thought I might be the Golden Cat,’ she suggested.
Their heads went up, and they stared at her for a moment or two; then they went back to their talk.
‘Don’t mind me, I’m sure,’ said Leonora.
She reminded Uroum Bashou, ‘It must be one of us, you know.’
But he only said, ‘I believe all this began in Egypt, where we began the fatal relationship with men. Whatever happens will be one end of a great arc across the history of cats and human beings.’ And he urged Tag, ‘Don’t let yourself be diverted, as I believe your predecessor to have been, by simple oppositions. If the world is to be made new, the Golden Cat must be more than some simple piece of magic. To heal the world it must do more than cure the ills of cats, or settle their old scores.’ It was advice he had given before.
They spoke of such generalities for a moment, then Tag said, ‘This is no longer a matter of theory, Uroum Bashou. Now that kittens are missing, it is vital that you make the books reveal what they know.’
‘Missing kittens are never a good thing.’
‘A cat must take note of that,’ Tag suggested, ‘where he might ignore other things.’
Uroum Bashou inclined his head to show that he agreed. ‘I will interrogate the books,’ he promised. ‘On behalf of the New Majicou.’
After that there was a silence.
‘Your caretaker becomes more and more self-willed,’ said Tag eventually. In a corner of the room, away from the fierce gold light of the evening, he had noticed a pile of books which looked as if someone had recently tried to pull them to pieces. Pages were scattered about like mauled doves; there were toothmarks on some of the board covers. ‘Did he do that? You should have a care, Uroum Bashou.’
A light laugh.
‘Kater Murr? There are days when his jealousy of my work is so great that he runs amok among the volumes, compelled to earn his name. He tears them with his great yellow nails. He does not understand them, so they are his rivals. He is barely feline. But he will never leave me.’
‘Don’t underestimate him, my friend.’
‘I am quite tranquil about the whole thing,’ said Uroum Bashou.
*
Even as they spoke, Leonora Whitstand Merril was prowling the Reading Cat’s house alone. At first she felt quite bold. She heard the murmur of conversation from above, and was both reassured and irritated by it. Leo had a great appetite for the particular: for things in themselves. She liked to get her nose into them. ‘You can’t get your nose into a generality,’ she told herself, poking it instead round an open door on the floor below the Library. Nothing. In another room, strips of wallpaper hung damply off the wall. Beneath them a mummified pigeon flopped, beak wide, eyes gone, one long wing extended in the fireplace. She dashed in and had a look; dashed out again. She hung off the lip of an empty drawer: newspapers, two coins with a dull, brassy smell, a bit of string. Really, it was all quite fun: but then, lower down, the stairwells darkened and seemed too narrow, and were further narrowed by the pervasive odour of ammonia, spoilt food, pheromones, as if she were continually having to brush past some other animal. By the time she reached the stairs to the ground floor the air was rank and solid, a substance rather than a smell. Leo hesitated, and lifted her head to listen. The mutter of conversation from the Library had grown faint and comfortless; three more steps down and it faded altogether. She was alone in a brown gloom, in some sort of stone-floored hallway. When she ran she could hear the shush and patter of her own paws. She stopped. She half-turned back. She listened. Something touched her foot. She stiffened. She leapt away. It was the head of a discarded broom, as big as a cat, its bristles chewed off by time. She crept back, neck extended, to make sure it was dead. Other objects loomed in the hall: a bag of cement, half-empty; some broken floorboards; a dusty bicycle wheel propped up against the wall. An old coat on a hook looked like a human being.
Eventually she came to the kitchen. There she wandered about for some minutes, nosing into corners, pushing her head into a chipped enamel breadbin to inhale its ghosts of mice, jumping up to teeter along the rim of the old sink. She skirted a pile of old leather shoes. Until she was satisfied it was unoccupied, she kept to the margins of the room. Then she trotted into the middle of it to have a look at the kitchen table, with its ancient chequered-plastic tablecloth. The rank odour was thick and solid there. Leo looked up and saw her mistake. ‘Oh no,’ she thought. The hair went up on her back. Staring away from the table as hard as she could, she began to inch out of the room. No decision of hers was involved. She directed her eyes down and away; and, very stiffly, and slowly, and carefully, her legs began to take her towards the door. Ever since she came into the kitchen, the guardian of that place had been sitting on the table-top in the soup of his own smell, watching her.
‘And what are you?’ he said quietly. ‘What are you, I wonder?’
He was an enormous, dirty, half-maimed old marmalade tomcat, with a broad flat head and ears chewed to mere frills of flesh a dirty pink colour. One cheek had collapsed, bashed in perhaps by some hurrying car or angry human foot: snaggle-teeth protruded on that side and, viewed front-on, gave his expression a left-hand grin, widened, cannibalistic, matching in ferocity the yellow claws which would no longer retract into his huge, cobby paws. His front legs were as bowed as a bulldog’s, as if with the effort of supporting his hard-packed, muscular front end. His orange fur had once been on fire with complex, beautiful patterns – flames and bars and stripes which had curled and curved all down his flanks. As a kitten, on fire with life, he had been justifiably proud of those signatures. Now they were caked and matted, patched with pink and black where the fur had fallen out. His eyebrows, wrecked in fights, were running sores. His ears crawled with mites. His voice was a battered growl, his laughter like gravel shaken in a tin: his scent was a nickname sprayed upon a wall.
‘Hello,’ said Kater Murr.
And he jumped down off the table, his eyes a blazing, potent yellow in the gloom.
Leo backed away.
‘I’m not here alone,’ she said.
Kater Murr put his head on one side.
‘You might as well be,’ he said.
Then he said, ‘A question you might ask yourself is, “Does he care? Does Kater Murr care I’m not alone?”’ He sat down suddenly and scratched one of his ears until it bled. ‘Kater Murr lives in a house,’ he said to himself in quite a different voice. ‘His ears hurt, but he welcomes that. His bones ache, but he welcomes that. Kater Murr cares about nothing.’ Leo continued to inch away from him, only to find that on the word ‘nothing’ Kater Murr had somehow slipped to his feet, gone round behind her, and placed himself smoothly between her and the door. ‘The gatekeeper,’ he explained, ‘though powerful, is a cat of considerable subtlety. You come here,’ he went on, ‘as you say, not alone, a kitten of a barely-credible colour, with no credentials—’
Leonora drew herself up.
‘I’m a princess, actually,’ she began to inform him; but then thought better of it.
‘You’re what?’ said Kater Murr. ‘Speak up.’
‘Nothing,’ said Leonora.
The gatekeeper sat down and scratched himself again. ‘His skin itches, but he welcomes that,’ he mused. ‘His ears grow deaf, but he welcomes that. Kater Murr is a cat in a million.’ Waves of bad smell issued from him.
He studied Leo and concluded, ‘Come to Kater Murr, my dear. You’re enough to make anyone wonder.’
Leo turned her head away from him.
Somehow she had got herself against a wall.
‘Come to the gatekeeper.’
‘Empty speech, Kater Murr,’ said a voice from the hallway behind him.
‘Tag!’ called Leonora.
At that exact moment there was a flurry of violence in the kitchen, a savage hiss, a scratch and shuffle of claws on tile. Paws were splayed, teeth were bared in the gloom, aggressive postures struck then suddenly folded. Light flickered off the points and edges of things. Everything seemed confused, too quick, too real, and Leo thought she was trapped in the kitchen with two much larger animals, one made of brass and the other of silver. It was only for an instant. Kater Murr’s smell flooded sickeningly over everything – then another smell, of musk and winter, powder snow on an icy wind, washed it away. There was a distant, fading roar. Then the Majicou was standing amiably beside her and saying, ‘I think we can go now, Leonora.’
She stared at him.
‘Did you see that?’ she said.
‘See what?’
‘In here. I— Never mind. You couldn’t have seen anything from the hall.’
Tag shook himself to settle his fur.
‘Not from out there,’ he agreed.
In the yard, somewhat recovered, she asked him, ‘So: what have we learned?’
Tag considered this gravely.
‘I don’t know about you,’ he said; ‘but I’ve learned that Uroum Bashou has a more unruly servant than I imagined.’
Leonora shivered.
‘Why doesn’t he just leave?’
‘Where would he go? Who would look after him? They are locked together, those two. Without Kater Murr, the Reading Cat would have starved to death long ago. At the same time, Kater Murr is bound to Uroum Bashou by some emotional bond which drives him mad with frustration. They were kittens together. He loves the Reading Cat and hates him in one and the same breath.’
He looked sidelong at Leo.
‘That might be hard for you to understand.’
‘It’s not hard,’ she said; but she was quiet for a moment, and when she next spoke it was to change the subject.
‘How did the Reading Cat get all his books?’ she asked.
Tag considered this.
‘His memories are confused, and sometimes he will admit that he has rearranged them to his own liking. I don’t think he came from Morocco – wherever that is. Some human being brought them here long ago, books and cats together. Here the books stay. And Uroum Bashou stays with them: but not for much longer, I think. He is getting old. And Kater Murr won’t hold back for ever. One day we will come to this place and find the Reading Cat dead. Kater Murr will snuff him out in a moment of rage, and spend the rest of his life regretting it.’
‘Well I can’t say I liked either of them,’ said Leo. ‘What’s the next plan?’ Then, before Tag could answer, ‘I know, I know: “Love the world and follow your nose.”’ She sighed. ‘There must be something quicker than that.’
‘Let’s go home now.’
*
That night the wild roads were difficult to navigate, even for a cat of the Majicou’s experience. For some reason winter had come to them in full summer. It would be gone by tomorrow: but now it was like walking in a cold deserted house, down long, twisted corridors howling with ghosts. You had to have your wits about you. On the way back, Tag lost his apprentice. He couldn’t be sure when, or how. When he arrived at the oceanarium, glad to be at home in the warm seaside night again, Leonora wasn’t there.
After he had waited two hours for her, he had to admit she wasn’t coming. By then, he had other problems.
Everyone else had vanished too.
He prowled the oceanarium, or sat outside on its doorstep. He searched the lanes and rooftops round about, calling, ‘Cy! Rags! Pertelot!’ but he didn’t dare go far in case they arrived while he was gone.
‘Leonora!’ he called. ‘You bad kitten!’
While he thought, ‘It was wrong of me to tease her like that in the house of Uroum Bashou. I was just showing off.’
In the shadows by the oceanarium door, a spiral iron stairway led to the lip of the fish-tank. From there you could look down on the water, itself bathed in the greenish light of the powerful aquarium lamp. Tag climbed it and looked down on the little sharks, turning and weaving in the hallucinatory light and silent tranquillity. They reminded him of dogs, unassuagable and muscular dogs: though they had a quality of patience no land animal could ever possess.
He hated them.