Tag sat alone in the oceanarium.
Outside it was deep night, the sea under cloud, the rooftops of the village tumbling away downhill in shadowed disorder. Inside, the light fell across the side of his face: the fishes slipped and turned, or hung motionless surrounded by tiny glittering motes.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he thought.
He had looked for Cy in all her favourite places. Nothing. The Beach-O-Mat was closed. The amusement arcades were closed. The docks were deserted, the fishing-boats at sea. Rag-mop palms shook themselves uneasily in the onshore wind in the moonless dark, and the fish-and-chip papers that blew up and down the sea front were empty and cold. He had combed the steep lanes between the cottages on Mount Syon and Tinnery, to find only empty doorsteps and household cats who made off hastily when they realized who he was. In the end, driven by anxieties he could barely express, he had taken the wild road to the windy spaces of Tintagel, where he found himself patrolling the headland crying, ‘Ragnar! Pertelot!’ until his voice cracked. Nothing. Nothing but the wild gorse, the empty church.
Cy had vanished.
The King and Queen were nowhere to be found.
Worst of all, Leo was still out there somewhere on the Old Changing Way, lost, puzzled, in need of help.
He remembered how, in the days of his own apprenticeship, he had run off by himself and got lost. That’s the trouble with being the Majicou,’ he thought. ‘Your trainee is always going missing.’
Even as he was thinking, something happened to the light above the aquarium. It faltered and went out, and when it came back on it had shifted from its customary pale green colour to a kind of metallic blue-grey. It began to flicker on and off rapidly with a dreary buzzing noise which seemed to get inside Tag’s bones. Then he saw something quite huge hurtling towards him inside the fish-tank – something so big he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t displaced every drop of water – so big that, if it continued to loom into the world like that, it must simply burst the glass and wash him away among all the wriggling, struggling fish which had lived such calm lives there. He hissed and jumped back quickly and banged his head on the oceanarium wall. In the tank the light roiled like disturbed pelagic ooze. A line of gill-slits the size of dustbins seemed to brush against the glass. A single dull black eye stared emptily out at the air-breathing world. In a moment it was gone.
By then, so was Tag. He arrived in the street outside, crouched and wary, tail lashing, heart pounding, without much idea how he had got there. A few drops of rain fell on him. The night wind ruffled his fur the wrong way. His skin twitched. OCEANARIUM, said the electric sign above the door. It blinked and fizzed. Intense hyacinthine light flared from the windows, dying across the spectrum to wine red and then black. After nothing had happened for some time, Tag gathered his courage into his paws, crept back up the steps and stuck his nose into the gap beneath the door. Everything was back to normal inside, though the floor seemed a little damp. In a dry patch at the bottom of the spiral stair, grooming themselves unconcernedly, sat the King and Queen of Cats. The King’s eyes were bright with excitement. Loosely tied round his neck like a royal sash was a bit of dirty blue cloth which smelled strongly of petrol, fish and nutmeg. There was sand in Pertelot Fitzwilliam’s rose-grey fur. As she occupied herself about her toilette, it sifted down silently and grew into a little yellow pile on the floor around them both.
‘Tag, my friend!’ exclaimed Ragnar. ‘Amazing things! Things you will never believe!’
While the Queen murmured, ‘Oh, do come in, Mercury. Nothing can harm you here.’
He crept forward cautiously and sniffed his friends. Suddenly they seemed strange to him. A curious, baked warmth clung to them, as if they had brought back not just the smells but the climate of another country. They were rich with adventures he had not shared.
‘Hush,’ they reassured him. ‘Tag, we’re the same cats you knew. But listen.’
And this was what they told him—
That evening, while Tag and Leonora were still travelling the wild roads, the King and the Queen had eaten a fish supper with Cy outside the amusement arcade. Afterwards, the three of them had strolled along the sea front in the dark so Pertelot could stare at the lights of the fishing-boats on the edge of the bay and whisper, ‘Oh Rags, what a perfect night!’ To please the tabby, the Queen had even put her perfect nose round the door of the Beach-O-Mat (though to Cy’s disappointment she could not be persuaded to go in and watch the human washing spin round). Back at the oceanarium she and the King had slept soundly, only to be woken by a disturbance. The light had changed. There were noises above. Behind the glass, shoals of frightened mackerel waved goodbye like a thousand human fingers.
‘It was as if something had broken the surface of the water in the tank,’ Pertelot Fitzwilliam told Tag. ‘My first thought was that something had arrived there. That was how I put it to myself, Mercury: that something had arrived there.’ She shivered. ‘I always hated that water.’
‘Her second thought,’ said Ragnar, ‘was of Cy.’ He paused for effect. ‘I am afraid to say, my friend, that she was gone.’
‘I woke Rags. Together we searched the building.’ The Queen looked around ironically. ‘It didn’t take long. Cy was nowhere to be found. Had she fallen in the tank? We had to know!’
Step by step, their bodies elongated by caution, each paw placed in a furious silence, they had crept up the spiral stairs to look down into the water in its blaze of electric light—
Nothing.
‘She was here, I’m sure.’
‘Has she fallen in?’
‘Those sharks. Oh Rags, the sharks!’
The iron platform at the top of the stair seemed to be suspended in emptiness. Beyond the light it felt like black space stretching away to nowhere. Suddenly the water became opaque as milk and lurched towards them, as if something huge were displacing it. Tottering and disoriented, they peered down at the object that had almost surfaced.
‘Look!’
‘Eyes! Look at its eyes!’
‘Rags, what is it?’
They turned to flee, but it was too late. The light died to blue, flared white again. The world twisted and flickered. Though it remained quite level, the little platform seemed to tilt beneath them. They scrabbled momentarily at the lip. They tumbled through the hot bright air onto the back of the creature that filled the tank. There they found Cy the tabby waiting for them.
‘Hi!’ she said, purring and kneading happily. ‘This is my friend. I call him Ray, but I think his own guys have another name for him. These fish,’ she added, in an aside to the Queen, ‘who knows what they call each other?’
Generally, though, she seemed rather proud of him. Ray was less a fish than a place. It was a mystery how he fitted into the oceanarium at all. ‘Some days, you know, he looks so small.’ Yet you might stand on his sinewy, shifting back and never know he had edges – until perhaps you caught a quick glimpse of them, furling and unfurling in the distance, out of the corner of your eye. He was the colour of a whitewashed wall in bright seaside sunshine. His spine stretched away in electrifying perspective, like a kerbstone at the side of some road, until suddenly it was a spine no longer but a narrow white tail. His elegant triangular fins curved away right and left, neither sails nor wings but something which antedated both. If you listened hard, claimed Cy, you could hear the ancient Silurian thoughts pursuing their slow, sure passage through his fish consciousness—
‘Whatever that is,’ said Cy. ‘He tells me stuff about that but I just don’t pay attention. Listen, it’s lucky I fell in, because today this fish comes with a message for you. Around and about in the ocean by Tintagel Head he’s met some guys. They aren’t fish, he says. They don’t breathe water. They shouldn’t even be down there! But he’s been told to fetch you and take you to some old place he knows. Maybe you’ll find Odin and Isis there, Ray’s not clear on that. Anyway, you got to go with him.’
She lowered her voice.
‘Under the water,’ she said.
‘Never,’ said Pertelot. ‘Let me up!’
But, even as she spoke, the great fish began to sink. His passengers were submerged instantly.
‘Ragnar Gustaffson!’ called the Queen, darting this way and that in panic. ‘How dare you let this happen!’ There was no escape. All she could do was stand and tremble. ‘Rags,’ she whispered in despair. ‘Oh Rags.’ But Ragnar stood as straight and tall as he could beside her, and that reminded her who she was: and they soon found to their astonishment that they were still dry. They could breathe. They were beneath the water but somehow not in it. The oceanarium was already gone, replaced by a huge, dim, ribbed architecture. They were in something like an infinite gloomy hallway under the sea. Endless lugubrious echoes rolled away down it. Shoals of tiny fish-souls ran everywhere, like two-dimensional silver streams. Vast shadowy forms boomed and groaned past, fish so large they made Ray seem like a mote settling in a glass of water.
Ragnar laughed suddenly.
‘This is what I call an adventure,’ he said.
‘I can’t believe this,’ said Pertelot. ‘I’m dreaming this.’
‘See?’ said Cy excitedly. ‘What I’m trying to say: fishes have their secrets in this wide world too! They got things we don’t know about, such as that tank is an entrance to some long-ago Fish Road of their choice!’
Those roads are as difficult as any. They are travelled on a notion, an idea inside. For what seemed like hours, the ray manoeuvred and sideslipped through the enormous space as he sought clues to the cold salt currents that would guide him to his destination. He banked and turned restlessly. He fell like a leaf. He hung in a huge cathedral silence like a compass needle; and then at last, finding the answer in his own fishy heart, shot forward and down. Eyes wild and bright, fur rippling back in the slipstream, his passengers fastened their claws unashamedly into his leathery skin and hung on tight.
*
‘And so,’ the Queen told Tag, ‘we were whirled away along the Fish Road—’
‘—to be carried at last to Egypt,’ Tag finished for her.
Love knows everything. The Queen turned her carved little head towards him and stared. He looked away shyly. It was like being studied by some stone goddess. Her eyes were lambent, full of life and death and the cycles and mysteries of the stars.
‘I was carried at last to Egypt,’ she agreed.
*
Dawn in the Nile Valley, one morning some weeks after Shamm an-Nasim. A tender grey light suffused the mist that curled along the river-banks. Egrets picked about in the reedy shallows like fastidious girls. A single felucca, recently repainted pure white with a red and gold eye at the bow, drifted upon its own reflection in the glassy water. What trade this little boat might be engaged in was not clear. Its sail remained tightly furled in the dead-still air. Behind it, the village of Qebar lay, still asleep amid its palmeries, against a sky washed with lilac. Immediately above the village, on the raw stony terraces at the base of hills whose almond-coloured flanks were still furrowed with night, loomed a complex of tombs and temples of the Missing Dynasty. The buildings glowed like a softly illuminated model from a centuries-old chaos of spoil and eroded rock, their blank rose-grey walls softened for once by the morning light.
The day seemed suspended, unable to develop. Everything hung as if it was in a dream. A smell of onions and kerosene rose from the drifting felucca. The young man yawning in its stern – he was barely more than a boy – wore the turban of a barge-captain, to which he seemed entitled only by ambition. He was half-asleep when the ray called Ray, monstrous with journeys and still moving at the speed of the Fish Road, erupted from the water off his starboard bow, cut a steep, whistling, iridescent arc north to south against the sky, and plunged back into the river again. The felucca rocked and staggered. Displaced water raced outwards in huge ripples which, rebounding elastically from bank to bank, churned the surface of the river into spray. Egrets burst up from the reeds; doves panicked into the sky from the whitewashed dove-castle in the village, their wings clapping urgently. The young man leapt to his feet and clung to the mast of his boat for support, rubbing his eyes in astonishment. Perched like a pilot on the back of the giant fish, just behind its strange flat head, he had glimpsed a small tabby cat with white bib and paws.
More cats, turning over and over, fell out of the air into the roiling water a few yards distant. This was too much for him. He shrugged.
‘It can only be the will of God,’ he said.
*
Green water closed over the Mau and she sank, all bubbles and frantic legs, and the splendour and mystery of her ride on the great fish evaporated to nothing. Water is water, wherever you try to breathe it. The Nile was warmer than the canal at Piper’s Quay, but no easier to negotiate with. Soon, she couldn’t even remember when she was drowning, then or now. There was a high, singing noise inside her head. ‘Oh Rags,’ she thought. ‘I do hate this. And I can’t even see you.’ Once, she thought she could feel him near, locked in his own lonely struggle, and she tried to move towards him. Then that feeling was gone, and anyway there was nothing much left of Pertelot Fitzwilliam to feel it. For a while she was just a grim argument, carried on in the clutch of the Nile (whose meaning, partially glimpsed in her dreams of Egypt, she now saw clear and stark: the gift of water is not security but constant transformation, not rest but movement, not victory over the desert but fecundity in spite of it), between her life and her death. ‘The kittens!’ she thought in despair. ‘The kittens!’ But she had closed herself instinctively around the last of her breath: and, in its own time, as breath will, it carried her into the light. Up out of the ancient river she burst, choking and hissing, and found chaos everywhere. The horizon lurched. The river-banks were collapsing into the river in a slurry of mud and gravel. Something was bearing down on her through agitated water and prismatic spray. Then human hands gathered her in, and before she could sink again she was suspended by her scruff, as dripping and undignified as only a wet cat can be, against the Egyptian sky. The day had begun. The sun was already hot. There was warm human breath on her face. Warm human laughter in her ears. Its eyes were dark and amused, and its skin was like polished rosewood in the sun. It smelled of nutmeg and laundered cotton and the pure generosity of the young. It made an inviting noise with its tongue like, ‘Tch, tch, tch.’
It said, ‘The Nile is not for you, little Mother! Up you come!’
It said, ‘Let Nagib take care of you now.’
‘Never!’ swore Pertelot.
She hissed and spat. She twisted and squirmed. She fastened herself onto the boy’s forearm with all four legs, and sank her teeth into the soft part between its thumb and first finger. When it only laughed and said, ‘Maleesh, maleesh little Mother,’ and patiently detached her, she bit it again. She was angry with her rescuer, she was angry with the river, she was angry with herself. She was angry with Cy and the fish for going off like that. She was angry, for no reason at all, with Ragnar. At the same time she was so confused she had begun to purr. With the whole of her heart she begged the boy to understand, ‘Now Rags! Help Rags now! Put me down and help Rags!’
She had never asked a human being for anything before.
*
In the event, Ragnar Gustaffson, seventeen pounds of Nordic tomcat and ten pounds of waterlogged fur coat, arranged his own rescue. ‘I am not, how would you put it, impressed by the taste of this Nile,’ he told anyone who would listen as he thugged his way over the stern of the felucca. ‘It is some rank stuff, as Tag would say.’ He shook himself like a dog, squinted up into the sunlight, and, discovering his beloved Mau in the grip of Nagib the boatman, nipped forward smartly and bit the boy in the ankle. At exactly the same moment, the felucca, accelerating in the current and unguided except by God, ran heavily into the east bank. Nagib fell over. Pertelot cried, ‘Ragnar Gustaffson, don’t you dare let anything like this happen to me again!’ Tearing out further gravel and mud, which fell softly into the Nile like wet brown sugar in a saucer of tea, the boat ground along the bank.
As soon as it came to rest, the two cats jumped nimbly ashore.
*
They fled through the palm and lemon groves, where insects were already droning in pools of hot greenish light, along the beaten paths, up towards the village, which, partly shadowed by the dark terraces above it, still lay asleep. Cool air moved in the narrow crooked lanes between the houses, whose lower walls remained in a lavender shade even as the sun struck like running gold across their roofs. Goats chewed thoughtfully in a rising side street, where the earth was cracked and dry and strewn with dung: Pertelot hurried, apparently unremarked, between their delicate hooves, while Ragnar begged her to slow down and think. ‘There’s no need to run now!’ But, when she stopped, she only caught the smell of the human being on her coat and panicked again. Towards the edge of the village, the desert wind blew feathery skeins of sand across the lanes. Suddenly, the damp river airs had evaporated, the ground rose steeply away from the houses. It was the end of vegetation. Terrace succeeded stony terrace. Entering the ancient quarries of the tomb-builders, Pertelot began to call, ‘Isis! Odin!’ She disappeared suddenly against heaps of spoil the exact colour of her coat. ‘Wait!’ called Rags when he next saw her, rose-grey against the shadows. She looked back at him for a second, her tail agitated with nerves or impatience, and vanished again. Rags found her delicate trail in the dust, and was soon less concerned. He didn’t need to see her. He could follow her pawprints. He could follow her smell. Cinnamon. Aniseed. Raisins! ‘I would know that smell anywhere,’ he congratulated himself. He emerged onto the upper terrace to find the sun scouring it unmercifully. His coat dried out in an instant. The light made him blink and sneeze. He paused briefly to study the Nile, curving away in the valley far beneath. Then he looked across the rosy stone apron of the site, towards the tombs and rock temples of the Missing Dynasty.
It was baking hot, and the dry wind had swept it of dust. There were no footprints to be seen. The Mau was gone.
*
Silence.
Faint echoes of paws on stone.
The floor sloped gently downwards. A massive internal architecture began to make itself felt – ramps and stairways and rooms higher than any human being could use. Pertelot Fitzwilliam of Hi-Fashion, a slip of life in the place of the dead, scampered beneath rows of vast red sandstone kings carved into high relief along the walls.
‘Isis!’ she called. ‘Odin! Isis!’
Her shadow, long and oblique, preceded her, until the light that had fallen so brightly into the outer hall faded first to a kind of orange twilight, then to grey, then pitch black. Not even a cat can see in the dark. After-images fluttered before her mind’s eye like soft white doves, the wounded memories of some old dream. She turned confusedly on her haunches for a moment, then followed the temperature gradient with her nose and whiskers. Each tiny cold air current urged her, ‘This way down.’
Eventually the darkness seemed to reverse itself, and a kind of faint silvery luminescence filled the tombs, limning the edge of objects, revealing, in the silence of the dead, huge empty stone biers and caskets, the hulks of standing sarcophagi. There were faint smells of bitumen and Canopic salts. There were drifts of human dust in corners. Down here the walls were covered with painted figures, their bodies glowing softly off the cold stone in ochres and terracotta reds, Nile earths, desert earths, the black and white details as sharp as the day they were painted. They were, the Mau thought, just what you would expect from human beings. Animal-headed gods whose expressions, sidelong and uneasy despite their arrogance, soon revealed them to be men in masks. Gods who feared other gods. Gods who gathered meaningless objects to them. Gods desperate for life yet so clearly in love with death. Their postures were stiff with denial: but, however they had tried to halt it, time had parted around them and rushed on.
Out of their failure, with a secret smile and kohl-blackened eyes full of delight in the world, danced a single goddess. She wore sandals, a white tunic, necklaces of garnet and lapis lazuli. Her limbs were sensual and long, her name as forgotten as the pictographic language of the Missing Dynasty itself. In the pictures she was often shown accompanying some long-buried king, her slim hand upon his shoulder, his arm about her waist. She had gathered her followers to her: musicians and dancers and celebrants; and, all around her delicate feet, cats! The cats were dancing too, or so it seemed. Suddenly, in the next picture, the goddess was a cat, too! Huge and tawny, her eyes the deep, fecund green of the desert oases, she danced among them. They were lithe and ancient-looking. They were purring and rubbing their sleek heads against her ankles, or against each other. And two of them were depicted separately, in a sequence of cartouches, which, the Mau was quick to see, told a story—
She sat down.
She thought, ‘Well!’
The cats seemed almost to move before her eyes. She was soon so caught up in their lives she forgot her own.
A minute passed, and then another. After a third, the light in the tomb was faintly disturbed, and there was a sound like a single drop of water falling into a pool.
The cats on the wall were a male and a female, with all the simplicity and grace of the goddess herself. She was shown smiling down on them with a special favour, while they looked up at her as an equal. They played and tumbled; perhaps for her, more likely for each other. Would they accept a great task? They would. They mated, took ship, were seen crossing a flat blue sea: on deck, a beautiful boy-sailor knelt before them, eyes kohled, slim hand outstretched. A white sail, a white bird, sped them north. A high tide, a cold country. A sail like a white wing.
‘But I know that coast!’ Pertelot told herself.
Behind her in the tomb, as if in response to her excitement, the light shifted again. In one dark corner the air seemed to flex suddenly like a lens refocusing. Then it was still.
The cats debarked on a rocky shore. White birds wheeled and screamed overhead. A northern king, blond-haired, tired of face, leaned down to welcome them. He was young, dressed in black. Ghosts were seen riding the roof of his hall, whence, in all directions, great abandoned animal highways sang and roared across the empty land. The king begged. The king implored. The cats listened, heads on one side. They debated with him. Were they not a King and Queen too?
‘She’s pregnant, of course,’ said Pertelot. ‘That’s obvious to anyone.’
Disturbed, the mass of shadows in the tombs behind her fell into a new equilibrium. The air temperature dropped suddenly. Pertelot shivered. She turned from the painted wall to look around. Nothing could be seen. She sniffed. She shrugged. She felt relaxed, rational yet vague, as if the fears of the day had less receded than somehow clarified themselves within her. How silly to be afraid of a boy! Water, of course, was another thing. She gave her attention to the last cartouche, in which the cats had themselves brought to an upper chamber in the king’s house—
*
Ragnar found her there some time later. (‘I had been lost in many passages,’ he would explain when he told the story to Tag. ‘I will say only that the world has many directions in it, and sometimes there are more to choose from than would seem sensible.’) By then, anxiety had made him dangerous: but not perhaps as dangerous as the thing in the corner of the tomb.
‘Pertelot!’ Rags cried.
She was creeping towards it on her belly, her eyes quite blank and empty, while it bowed and wobbled over her like a spinning-top about to fall: a dense eccentric whirligig of human debris – the black loess of ancient organs, bits of bone, flakes of bandage and parchment – a dust-storm of mummia and old death six or seven feet broad at its top, balanced on a tiny shifting base and reaching from floor to ceiling. It was aware. It seemed to be arguing with itself. From it issued bad smells, intermittent, disconnected voices, blasts of hot and cold air, and a strange, thready music. As the Mau got closer, it sensed her presence. A shudder passed through it. Lights flickered deep inside. Suddenly it bellied towards her like smoke in the wind, breaking up into dusty smuts and cinders. There was a deep groan. Then chanting began. Someone was chanting in there. At this, Pertelot went rigid. All along her spine the fur was up on end. Stiff-legged, a pace at a time, she moved towards it. She hated the vortex but it was like a magnet to her. In response it pulsed and roared and shot up to the ceiling—
‘I think we have had enough of this,’ announced the King of Cats.
He sprang forward, got a good grip of his wife’s tail with his mouth, and yanked her backwards. Pertelot yowled and spat. He closed his eyes, and, offering up a silent apology, pulled harder. It was a grim struggle. Ragnar splayed his cobby legs and backed away, losing most of every inch he gained. Pertelot, her signals as crossed, fought both sides at once with a dour, indiscriminate passion. The whole world stank of cinders. The whirlwind staggered and wobbled over the two of them like a drunk with raised hands. ‘We’re for it now!’ thought Ragnar. But even as it fell upon them it was breaking up. There was a faint ‘pop!’ a puff of foul wind. Dust pattered on the floor of the tomb like a sudden shower of rain.
Ragnar sat down heavily as Pertelot stopped pulling away from him. The Mau shook herself; looked round puzzledly at the empty tomb; reared up on her hind legs and thoroughly boxed his ears.
‘Ragnar Gustaffson, how could you?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sure.’
They stood off and observed each other, rocking backwards and forwards and breathing angrily. There was ruffled fur between them, no denying it, especially with no common adversary in sight. After a moment, Ragnar looked away and began to ferret bits of papyrus out of his mane. The Queen sat down and tried to unkink her tail by licking it. ‘Undignified,’ she repeated several times, until Ragnar got up in a lumbering, long-suffering way and sat down facing away from her. ‘Undignified!’ After a minute or two she admitted, ‘I know you meant well.’
Ragnar Gustaffson looked at the wall-paintings.
‘I know you meant to rescue me.’
No answer.
She went and sat beside him.
‘Rags, I’m sorry.’
He hadn’t heard a word. He said excitedly, ‘Look! It’s us!’
‘Ragnar Gustaffson,’ she told him, ‘you are the most insensitive cat in the world, and I will never apologize to you again.’
About to present him with her back, she saw how his thoughts turned over and across themselves, bent by wonder into an endless Viking knot. She forgave him instantly. She rubbed the side of her face against his, thinking that he was simple in some old, lost, worthwhile sense, and you had to love it; while he gave his attention to the pictures, every so often murmuring, ‘But this is astonishing,’ or, ‘How incredible!’ Or, ‘How do we come to be here, on a wall?’
The Queen explained.
‘This is not us,’ she said. ‘It’s the story of Atum-Ra and Isis, a version of which the Majicou told to Tag in his apprentice-dreams. Atum-Ra and Isis are the ancestors, the cats – blessed of the Great Cat, known by humans as Hathur, Goddess of Love – who brought the wild roads back to Tintagel. Look! Here they are in the king’s chamber, Discerning Invisible Things. Afterwards, imprinted in the bright tapestry of their eyes the king sees and is able to identify the ghosts that disturb his sleep. He can have peace at last! In return, he grants the cats – and their kittens, and their kittens’ kittens in perpetuity – the freedom of the land.’
‘They are us,’ Ragnar insisted. ‘We are them.’
‘Oh Rags,’ she said.
‘They are doing that quite well,’ he went on with satisfaction, after he had had another look at the picture which showed the ancestors mating. ‘But not as well as us.’
‘Rags!’
‘He is not as black as me.’
She laughed.
‘His fur is not so long.’
‘You child,’ she said.
A cold wind curled round them suddenly, lifting the dust into their eyes. Electricity unzipped the air, filled it with the taste of metal. There were stealthy sounds. A cough. A rising hum, as of a child’s top. They jumped to their feet, fur on end. Rubbish was being drawn up from all over the tomb, whirled about, sucked into a corner.
‘Run!’ called Ragnar.
Too late. The whirlwind had assembled itself again. Pace by pace, shaking with delirium, her eyes lit up from within like lamps, Pertelot was tugged towards it. For a moment its rotation seemed slow. It wobbled. Toppled. Turned a startling Nile green, then back to black. There was music from within – bells, a reed flute, small drums arrhythmic and perverse. There were movements, as of a dance or struggle. A figure, perhaps human, became dimly visible within the swirling rubbish and mummia dust. It was as simple as the painted figures on the wall. It leaned forward. It spoke.
‘I have two of your kittens,’ it said. ‘Give me the third and I will spare your lives.’ Suddenly a second figure seemed to curdle out of the dust. It dragged the first one, struggling, out of sight. A friendlier voice said, ‘The Golden Cat is not what it seems.’
Rags darted forward.
‘Soon she will have no tail left,’ he thought. ‘I loved her tail.’
But, before he could act, the vortex collapsed, with a vague sneeze and a bad smell.
‘Look!’ cried Pertelot.
A shift in the light had revealed the wall on the far side of the chamber, rearing up between two monolithic human figures into the indistinct shadows fifty or sixty feet above: a slab of rose-pink granite cracked by time and covered with one huge image:
Pertelot stared upwards.
‘The eye,’ she breathed. ‘Look at the great eye.’ She began to dart about helplessly at the base of the wall, as if looking for a door. ‘We were brought here to be shown this,’ she said. She stopped, craned her neck to examine the image again, stood up with one front paw resting on the wall. ‘And that thing,’ she added, dropping to all fours again, ‘was talking to itself.’ She shivered. ‘Is there a reason for any of this? Oh, Rags, we have come all this way for nothing. Where shall we find our children?’
Ragnar gave his attention to the shadows in the corner.
‘I think it is time to leave now,’ he suggested.
Pertelot blinked at him, and for once did as he asked. They were out of the chamber in a second, into the cold passageways, and avenues of gigantic kings, and mazes where every turning was the wrong turning and every door opened on more stone. Behind them, their nemesis reassembled itself, roared up to the ceiling, and hurtled in pursuit. It was much bigger than it had been. Hot desert air, freighted with sand like a gale at a beach, was sucked past the two cats and into its maw. The floor trembled beneath it. Broken stone pattered down out of the ceiling joints. There were deep, surprised groaning sounds somewhere in the depths, where pieces of sculpture a hundred feet high had begun to lean against one another like very old men. The whirlwind raged and howled. It grew.
‘Hurry!’
Stark shapes of darkness and light. Squinting into the gale. Rags and Pertelot teetered on the edge of a steep black ramp above a drop they could not measure. Dust boiled up and streamed off into the vortex behind them.
‘This way! Into the wind!’
They flitted across a pillared ante-room and out into the forecourt of the temple. The light was so strong they could feel it scrape the surface of their eyes. Midday. The stone sang with it. The Nile below was lost in heat-shimmer. Down through the quarries they fled, to the edge of the village, where the goats, rooting senselessly among stones, sought shade at the base of the houses. Here, where heat had emptied the lanes and even the dove-castle seemed empty, Ragnar halted suddenly.
‘Look!’ he said.
‘Rags, come on!’
‘It isn’t following us any more,’ he said. ‘Look!’
Through the heat haze, the tomb entrances could be seen like low black slots against the yellowish, crumbling slopes of the hills above. From each of them there now issued a thick, slow, sulphurous gout of dust. A low rumble reached the ears of the cats. The earth shook, as if something had settled. The dust clouds rose lazily into the hot air, a dozen coiling roseate smudges against a sky like heated brass. There was a long pause, in which Pertelot and Ragnar eyed one another uneasily. Then, with a renewed rumbling and shaking of the earth, as of gigantic forces in conflict, dust began to rise again – this time from the hills themselves. The tombs and temples of the Missing Dynasty were falling in one by one, taking an entire range of hills with them like collapsing paper bags.
*
‘After that,’ the Queen told Tag in the oceanarium, ‘it was like a long dream.’
They had made their way down through the lemon groves to the river, where the boy Nagib, having brought his felucca into the shore, invited the ‘sky cats’ aboard with grave politeness. ‘I was too tired and disappointed to resist a kind word, Tag. Besides, how else were we to get home? We had no idea where we were!’ She stared absently across the oceanarium. ‘And yet,’ she said softly, ‘that was the most beautiful journey of my life. We seemed to be days upon the river going north. We slept, or watched the banks. After two days, we changed ships. Nagib, with tears in his eyes, gave Ragnar his neckerchief. He called us Atum-Ra and Isis, his little Mother and Father. He seemed to think he was in a story. Our new pilot spoke less. He was an older man, who made a sign with his hands if I came near.’
In the river villages, in the hot afternoons or after dark, they searched for a highway to take them home. ‘But something was wrong with all those Egyptian roads. All I remember is the dead cats piled up at the entrances – perfect little cats who had done no-one any harm: oh, horrible, Mercury, horrible! – and a Sohag street tom called Akhenaten, with deep brown fur and a tongue like pink suede, who advised us, “Close your eyes as you go by. The dead do not wish to be seen. Something has come into the world that has no right to be here.” We took his advice, and passed on down the river.’
Boat gave way to boat, dawn to dawn in the soft river air. The two cats stood at the bow, their noses lifted for new smells; or lay in a hot sleep in the shadow of the sail, their dreams full of the creaking of the boat. As they drew closer to the river delta, with its blunt soft airs, the Queen’s coat took on Nile colours, dove-grey of the banks at dawn, the lilac of the distant hills. Isis and Odin were never far from her mind. Were they in the vortex? Is that what the first voice had meant? If so, how would she ever bring them out again? Her eyes looked into some other distance than the distance of the river. When this mood came over her she drove the King away if he tried to sleep beside her in the night. ‘The children seemed to visit me in the long afternoons. I heard Isis sing, I saw Odin leap. I heard their voices but I could not help them. My mind was full of Nile dreams.
‘Finally we reached the sea.’
The boat lay all morning not far outside the Eastern Harbour bar at Alexandria, its sail tightly furled in the dead-still air. Behind it, against a sky darkened with clouds, the fifteenth-century fortress of Qa’it Bey stood on its low headland like an illuminated model, yellow walls soaking up the hot and stormy light. That morning, before making the inexplicable decision to take two cats out to sea and wait there for whatever happened to him, its captain had put on a freshly-laundered white djellaba. It was his birthday. He was exactly thirty-five years old when the biggest ray he had ever seen surfaced from the Mediterranean fifty yards to seaward and began to make its way towards him. It was too late to flee. Besides, perched on the back of the fish, its fur steaming in the hot sun, was a small tabby cat. Within minutes the other two cats had leapt delicately off the bow of the felucca and joined her there; the great fish had submerged; the sea was flat and calm again.
The captain rubbed his eyes.
‘In scha’Allah,’ he said, and turned towards the shore.