They slipped out of the oceanarium together, leaving the fox to tell his story to the King and Queen, and took the steep little cobbled streets down to the harbour, where they sat on a wall to watch for the returning fishermen.
It was just before dawn. A breath of mud came up from the rising tide. ‘Smell that!’ said Cy. ‘Mm!’ But her own smell was compounded by crackling citrine odours Tag couldn’t identify; and, as she struggled to tell him about her adventures, it seemed as if they had made her strange to herself as well as to him.
It was curiosity, she was quick to admit, that had caused her to fall in the fish-tank. In the middle of a conversation with the Great Ray, she had decided to see how he looked from above. ‘I ran up the stairs, but when I got to the top I couldn’t see him.’ The viewing platform seemed to be suspended in emptiness. Disoriented by the hot blaze of electric light, she tottered on the edge. ‘I saw five hundred mackerel turn as one. But my fish wasn’t there!’ Moments later, though, he had saved her from drowning; and saved Ragnar and Pertelot too, when they fell in looking for her. ‘Which naturally led,’ Cy explained, ‘to him taking all of us on this totally real trip to Egypt! (As you already know.)’
‘I don’t understand why,’ said Tag.
‘He had a mission, that fish. He was operating on orders from below. I believe that.’
‘But why? What does a fish have in common with us?’
Cy didn’t know. ‘They live in murky waters, those guys,’ she suggested. She sighed impatiently. ‘Anyway, you listen,’ she ordered. ‘Whose story is this?’
What had followed, she claimed, wasn’t so easy to understand—
As soon as the King and Queen were safely disembarked, the Great Ray had furled and folded himself and whirled down into the tank again, back onto the Fish Road. ‘There was no time for me to get off! I was stuck! Tag, I was so excited! He was saying things to me. We were going on the journey of a lifetime, me and that fish. That was what he promised, and it was true. Soon we’re down in the deeps of the sea, which is like some electric church where the inhabitants got their own light. Tag, these are guys that glow in the dark!’
South went the great fish, then east and west. Each time he surfaced it was to show her something new about the world. Humid green jungles that came down to the water, releasing flocks of birds like coloured laundry. An island no more than a smoking cone, hot cinders in the air ten miles out to sea, smells that made her nose run. ‘I seen the bows of broken ships, ghostly in pale sea-bottom mud, all them long-ago captains fishbait now! And a beach where striped cats came down to swim in the huge waves – I would’ve liked to join them, but of course,’ she said with a certain regret, ‘they were bigger than me.’ Shores like deserts, shores like jewels, shores blackened with oil and scattered with towers and huge machines. ‘Oh I felt sad, Tag, some of those things I seen!’
At last the ray turned north; and from the deepest journey of all they surfaced in a strip of benighted water like black glass. There was snow and ice as far as the eye could see. Huge pieces of this frozen landscape toppled into the sea around her while she watched. ‘It was hurling itself in, that stuff. It was the biggest sugar I ever saw. I say to Ray, “This stuff is whiter than you!” He says nothing. I thought he was nervous, you know? But it wasn’t that. He was just getting ready.’ Plumes of water rose in slow motion as the ice cliffs fell, only to subside in total silence as if she were watching through a sheet of glass. ‘Tag, even my eyes were cold. Brrr!’ All the while, her friend lay on the water, slowly revolving, like a compass needle, until, in the sky, she saw the aurora, unfolded in great unnerving wings of silent, rippling green flame.
Light poured down.
Then, very slowly, Ray began to float up.
‘Tag, you got to imagine this—’
The tall cathedral shadows of the road, where it left the Earth between the drawn curtains of the Northern Lights. The mighty fishes which could sometimes be glimpsed, rendered tiny by distance, beating steadily against some invisible current on journeys of their own. And one small, rather frightened cat clinging on for dear life in the emptiness. It was amazing: but it was dark out there, and it was cold, and it was sometimes rather lonely on the great ray’s back. Their oceanarium conversations hadn’t prepared her for any of this, any more than she had been prepared for his size, his power, his almost stifling sense of age, the feeling she had that he knew things kept from ordinary animals.
‘He’s not a big talker,’ she admitted to Tag. Then she sighed again and said, ‘Still, it was like, you know, the breath of stars. We’re out of the water and far up in the air. So far up – Tag, I looked back and seen the place we live!’
She thought for a moment.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘however bad things are for us right now, I think it will come out OK. Want to know why? Because when I looked back, I saw these green flames. Tag, it looked like the whole world was cupped in a safe green hand!’
Tag greeted this vision with a silence grounded in frustration (while he thought, ‘We aren’t safe, any of us. I wish we were.’).
She seemed not to sense this. She asked, ‘Tag, have you ever been to the moon?’
‘Of course I haven’t,’ said Tag rather crossly.
‘Well, the moon is like white gardens,’ she said. ‘Only nothing grows there. You can see to the end of everything, but there’s nothing to see. We floated about there a bit, but there was nothing to do. Nothing’s alive on the moon, Tag, no cats nor human beings nor nothing.’
She shivered.
‘So we came back, as quick as we could. Oh, Ray wanted to go on somewhere else, but I said, “Take me home.” I’m keen on Ray, but sometimes it’s hard to get him to stop. That fish has got a real urge to see things. I asked him how this Road of his goes so many places, even the Moon, which he had to admit he didn’t like either. He told me, “Little Warm Sister—” because he calls me that, his Little Warm Sister “—the fishes were here before anyone else. We grew restless, and swam down to Earth before anyone else arrived.’
She was silent for a moment.
‘Does that make any sense to you?’ she said.
Tag said nothing. He couldn’t think.
Then she jumped to her feet. ‘Look! Tag! The boats. The boats!’ And there they were, the fishing-boats returning safe home, a line of lights bobbing at the harbour mouth. And, behind them, the first green flare of the dawn. Cy broke into a great, clattering purr.
Tag felt himself fill with love.
‘I’m glad you’re back,’ he said. ‘I missed you.’
On the way back up to the oceanarium, she tried to explain how she had felt when she fell in the tank. ‘At first,’ she said, ‘I thought I’d had it. I thought I was going dancing with Davy Jones.’ But, even as she touched the water, she had felt supported, in a way she couldn’t now explain. ‘Ray wasn’t there then,’ she said. ‘It was as if something else held me up. Tag, it was like warm green hands in the water!’
Then she asked, ‘Why does a fish make friends with a cat?’
‘I think that’s what I was asking you,’ said Tag.
Cy looked up at him uncertainly.
‘I wonder what the end of all this will be,’ she said.
Tag looked down at the harbour, and the gulls wheeling round the fishing-boats; then up at the oceanarium, where they would be waiting for the New Majicou to make decisions.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I only know that we are coming to it.’
*
An hour later he was hunting the ghost roads again, his breath like smoke in the sucking cold. He had opened a small highway down by the old lifeboat station, and from there made – jump by jump – the arterial connection. Beside him went his two old friends, calling to one another as they ran. The muscles of Ragnar Gustaffson, King of Cats, bunched and flexed beneath his thick black coat. The eyes of the fox Loves A Dustbin glittered with cunning. ‘Run!’ they told one another, remembering old fights, bitter seasons, journeys and losses from a time before. Their voices echoed along the Old Changing Way, and the echoes shed echoes of their own. ‘Run!’ they called. Those three were used to life. They had seen a lot of it one way or another. They loved it, and they knew how to spend its iron heat. Cold and fear meant nothing to them. They ran. But far out in front of them ran Leonora Whitstand Merril. She was their pathfinder all that long day – a princess among kittens and a dancer to her bones.
‘Come on!’ she called back. ‘Run now! We must run!’
*
‘I will not let you take her,’ the Mau had said when she heard Tag’s plan.
‘Yet I have to go there. I can’t command the wild roads in their present state. But I have seen Leonora do it.’
For this he received a look of contempt.
‘Because she can, she must. Is that it?’ said Pertelot.
‘Yes.’
‘It isn’t much of an argument.’
‘No.’
‘She is my daughter.’ Pertelot laughed bitterly. ‘In fact at present she is my only child. Males love to run the wild roads day and night, they love to run and fight: but they can’t find two lost kittens.’
‘That is not fair,’ said Tag.
‘No.’
‘We are doing our best.’
‘Yes.’
Leonora herself broke this deadlock. ‘Where is it you want to go?’ she asked Tag.
‘Be quiet, Leonora!’ ordered the Mau.
‘This is my life too you know,’ said Leonora.
‘Leonora!’
‘What if Odin and Isis are there?’
‘What if they aren’t?’ said the Mau tiredly. ‘Am I to lose you, too?’
‘If we falter now—’ Tag began.
‘—we may lose everything,’ finished the Queen. ‘I have heard that argument before.’
But Leonora said, ‘I am not a kitten any more. I want my brother and sister back, and I want to play my part.’
‘Then play it,’ said Pertelot.
And she turned her back.
‘Where do you want to go?’ Leonora asked Tag.
‘For hundreds of years the Alchemist had a house outside the city. I found it after I became the Majicou. I go there now and then—’
‘—in case he comes back!’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I go there as I go to the pet shop in Cutting Lane. The Majicou is a caretaker, but to an extent he must intuit his own duties. I followed my nose, and the wild roads showed me that house. Ever since, though I hate the place, it has seemed to me to be part of my domain. I was there the day your brother vanished.’
Tag shook his head.
‘We might find answers there,’ he went on. ‘But the danger is obvious.’
Leonora absorbed this in a kind of awed silence.
Then she said, ‘Wow! The Alchemist! What do you want me to do?’
The Mau laughed angrily.
‘Oh, you learned plenty from your predecessor,’ she congratulated Tag. ‘That one-eyed cat always knew the right thing to say.’
*
The gardens had deteriorated since Tag’s last visit. The wooden boat-house, leaning in on itself in a tall growth of fireweed and sycamore saplings, gaped emptily. The willows were rotted to the heart. The rain poured down from a thick grey sky to shred the mottled surface of the river.
It had been a difficult journey, despite Leonora’s efforts. The cats felt weary and nervous. Across the lawn, the Alchemist’s house, with its verdigris dome, its derelict iron-framed conservatories and tall uncurtained windows, seemed to be leaching the light out of the late-evening air. They were reluctant to look at it. Instead, they sheltered just inside the boat-house, watching the fox – who didn’t care about getting wet – quarter the sloping lawns, his nose to the leaf-mould, the white patch on his hind leg the only bright item in the landscape. He came back and scratched vigorously behind one ear, showering the cats with coarse red hairs. Outdoors, he always seemed bigger than himself, energetic even when he sat down. ‘I remember this place,’ he said, ‘from the days of the Old Majicou. We kept an eye on the comings and goings.’
They waited for him to say more, but he only wandered off into the boat-house, sniffing and raising his leg like any dog.
‘This rain isn’t going to stop,’ said Leo.
‘We are only putting things off,’ agreed her father comfortably. He stared up at the house. ‘We’re a bit cautious about going in there,’ he explained. ‘But otherwise we’re some damned determined animals.’
She gave him a puzzled look.
‘Come on,’ sighed Tag.
They fled across the lawns, over the wet flagstones of the terrace, and up the steps.
*
The entrance hall lay open to the weather, which had stripped and greyed the polished wood, blistered the gilt mirrors, and flecked the ornamental banister rails with rust. Double doors banged sadly in the wind. The usual detritus had blown across the floor and piled up in corners ready to be of use to mice and rats. But a new layer of litter had been added since the day of Odin’s disappearance. Someone had built a fire in the middle of the marble floor, using lumber from the adjoining rooms. Around its ashes were scattered empty gas cylinders, fast-food trays, the rags of blankets. ‘Human beings have been living here,’ decided Tag, wrinkling his nose at the sad odours of charred wood, stale food, urine.
The fox looked up.
‘If you had a sense of smell,’ he said, ‘you would know more than that.’
He had been sniffing intently about at the bottom of the stairs. Now he trotted across the room and gazed out over the lawns. ‘And yet I didn’t notice it out there,’ he told himself thoughtfully.
‘Didn’t notice what?’ said Tag.
‘That’s the thing,’ said Loves A Dustbin. ‘I don’t know. Something else has been here recently. It wasn’t human, but it certainly wasn’t a cat.’
‘Where is Leonora?’ said Ragnar.
*
Growing bored with their investigations, his daughter had taken to the stairs: by the time they thought to look for her, she was already two or three floors up.
There, gilt and marble gave way to fumed-oak panelling. The landings were narrower, the windows smaller and less well-proportioned. Cobwebs stretched in tight curves, dusty muslin set across every corner as if to trap the twilight. Underfoot was a gritty loess compounded of house-dust, fallen plaster, ash and soot expelled from ancient hearths. Small cold draughts crept forth to brush away Leonora’s footprints as she passed. The stairwell closed in above her. She stopped in a ray of light from the last west-facing window – looked up, one paw raised – ran on. It was almost dark when she reached the room below the copper dome, and found its door jammed open.
‘I didn’t feel frightened,’ she would insist later. ‘Not frightened, not at first.’
It was a tall room with a ceiling shaped like an inverted tulip, braced by a tangle of old wooden beams. The walls had once been distempered white. Along them ran scarred workbenches topped with planished zinc, above which were mounted long glass-fronted cabinets, bookshelves and sample-cases. The cabinets were crowded with strangely-shaped glassware, retorts and alembics glinting in the last of the light. There were rows of containers on shelves; medical tools on hooks; liquids, cloudy or clear, plain or coloured, in which objects seemed to float. Crumpled in a corner – as if it had been thrown down yesterday in a fit of elation or disappointment, or just at the end of a long day’s work – lay a worn leather apron covered in burns and cuts.
‘The Alchemist!’ she whispered. Tangled up in that castoff garment she might discover the mystery of her own birth, find herself at the heart of it all. ‘The Alchemist!’
The cold air, heavy with an odour at once visceral and corrosive, made her eyes water. Up under the ceiling, night gathered. Leonora could hear the faint distant susurration of the rain on the copper dome; but the room itself was so quiet, she thought, that silence itself would bring an echo there. She went about cautiously, sniffing one item, patting another in case it was alive, standing up on her hind legs to examine a third and instead catching sight of her own distorted reflection in the shiny retorts and beakers set out on a table. Papers. Hundreds of open books, their pages curled and blanched. Something unpleasant in a jar – she quickly looked away. She was reminded of the Reading Cat’s domain, of a life so intensely focused it seemed to open on a vast illusory inner freedom. ‘No wonder he was defeated in the end,’ she whispered.
Then she realized there was no dust on the books.
The sound of the rain diminished. The silence was like an object, there in the room with her. Leonora began to back carefully towards the door.
Someone had been here before her. It was easy to see now which cabinets had been closed for years and which had been opened yesterday. It was easy to see which books had been flung down in impatience, which glassware knocked over, barely an hour ago, in clumsiness or rage. It was easy to see how the dust had been disturbed, but less easy to interpret the fresh scuff-marks on the tiled floor.
Leonora had almost reached the door when the air in the centre of the room began to fluoresce faintly. A few whitish sparks formed about a foot above the floor and drifted to and fro, first attracted to then repulsed by a strange, smoky twist of light. The light was breathing. Leonora could hear it. Sparks went in and out. Then, after a moment or two, a small convulsion like a sneeze took place, and a current of warm air was expelled into the room. Sparks whirled up now, as if from a bonfire. She heard faint music. There was a popping sound, an apologetic cough. Leonora could not move. There was a flaw in the solid world, a discontinuity which grew and grew, then parted like rubbery human lips in the fabric of that nightmare place, onto a darkness which curdled and took shape before her—
*
Ragnar Gustaffson and Loves A Dustbin reached the top of the house just in time to hear Leonora’s shriek of anger. When they burst into the room beneath the dome, it was full of brown shadows, disconnected movements, something that looked like smoke. Ragnar Gustaffson stood there confusedly for a moment, his eyes watering in the chemical reek, convinced the house was on fire.
‘Leonora!’ he called.
‘I can’t see her!’ yelped the fox. ‘I can’t see her!’
‘Leonora!’ they called together. ‘Leonora!’
But the New Majicou, arriving a little later, and entering the room with a curious mixture of calm and reluctance, narrowed his eyes and said nothing at all.
Leonora had backed deep into the gap between two wooden cupboards, and now – wedged fast, bubbling and spitting as much with loss of dignity as fear – faced the danger with bared claws. Above her, pacing angrily to and fro like a tiger in a cage, loomed a thing half cat, half man, the two halves shifting and roiling one into the other, one moment joined, the next separate, never quite properly connected, like shapes in a dream. It was bigger than any real human being. It was there, but it wasn’t there. It was like a drawing made on smoke, yet under its onslaught the cupboards splintered and shook, and a single cumbersome sweep of one upper limb – neither arm nor leg, hand nor paw – was enough to clear cabinets and glassware off the wall and onto the floor. All the while it was groaning and roaring, and in its queer, grunting voice there was as much pain as rage.
The New Majicou watched it for a moment.
Then: ‘Be quiet,’ he told Ragnar and the fox. ‘This is for me to deal with.’
‘But—’ began the fox.
‘Do nothing unless I ask it of you.’
With that, the New Majicou stepped into the centre of the room. What happened next was unclear.
‘Look away from me!’ he ordered.
There was a ripping sound, like the one that sometimes precedes a peal of thunder; and an extraordinary flare of light, which died quickly down through the spectrum to black. A cold, invigorating wind seemed to fill the space below the dome. There was a smell of snow. For an instant, Ragnar and Loves A Dustbin were confused enough to hallucinate a second huge figure in the room, a white tiger of the ice, cold green eyes in a charcoal-striped mask, teeth bared in a roar that shook the air in their lungs. Leonora’s assailant, seeing it too, turned and ran straight into the nearest wall. There was a quick flicker or ripple, and it was gone. Immediately, the cold wind died, and Tag was only Tag again, a silver-grey domestic cat standing rather tiredly in the centre of the room under the appalled gaze of his friends. ‘You’re safe now,’ he said, and went to sit by himself near the door. He seemed preoccupied, as if the encounter itself had been less interesting than the possibilities it suggested.
Ragnar Gustaffson stared up at the wall into which the apparition had vanished. ‘That is a trick,’ he said. ‘If you can do it.’ Then he set about coaxing his errant daughter out from between the cupboards. Loves A Dustbin, meanwhile, approached Tag and stared intently into his eyes. What he saw there didn’t seem to reassure him.
‘Take care,’ he advised.
‘I can only do what I can do.’
‘Yet you mustn’t exhaust yourself.’
‘What do you expect from me?’ said the New Majicou impatiently.
The fox looked away.
‘I saw your mentor burn himself to nothing, doing too often what you have just done,’ he warned. It seemed as if he would say more – then he appeared to shrug, and went on instead, with a kind of morose satisfaction, ‘I knew something was wrong as soon as we arrived. I could smell it.’ He looked around disgustedly. ‘Any smell up here has been masked by these chemicals.’
‘I’m trying to think, actually,’ said Tag. ‘Would you mind leaving me alone?’
*
A little later, when he seemed in a better temper, Leonora went to thank him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘So you should be, Leo. It would have killed you.’
Leonora shivered.
‘What was it?’ she said. ‘The Alchemist?’
‘No,’ said Tag. ‘It wasn’t.’
But she could see that something about the question had made him think.
“‘No cat has ever wanted to walk like a man,”’ he whispered to himself. ‘Majicou used to say that. No cat has ever wanted to walk like a man. Unless—’
‘What?’ said Leo.
‘I don’t know,’ Tag said.
But he was on his feet now, and quartering the room as if by will-power alone he could force things to give tip their secrets. ‘Come on, Leo!’ he urged. Ragnar and the fox, who had been sitting in a corner talking to one another in low voices, raised their heads to watch him. He studied the contents of splintered cabinets, eyed drifts of broken glass as if they might speak. He sniffed and coughed over the bitter spilled liquids of the alchemical trade. He took a moment to look up into the roof. Everywhere he went, books were piled in disarray, their covers stripped, their pages like broken white wings in the gathering darkness. It was the books which brought him to a halt.
‘Look at this, Leo,’ he said.
He said, ‘My pride is to blame for this.’
He laughed.
‘What we have just seen here was a sideshow,’ he told himself. ‘Not the main event. I saw that plainly, yet—’
His tail lashed from side to side.
‘I have been a complete fool!’ he cried.
‘Ragnar! Loves A Dustbin! Think back,’ he asked them, ‘to the battle with the Alchemist. We were scattered in disarray across Tintagel Head. He loomed above us like death. Everything was lost, until the birth of the kittens! The Alchemist stared down at them, cried out something like dismay, and faltered. In that moment, we had him. But we never asked ourselves why! We never asked what he had seen, what he had guessed, or why he lost his nerve so completely.
‘Once I had recognized and accepted what happened in that moment,’ he told them, ‘so much of what has been hidden was made clear to me! There was no Golden Cat in the Mau’s litter – only three odd but delightful kittens, each with a clear and recognizable quality of its own. We have asked ourselves again and again which of them might wear the mantle – Leo the dancer, full of subtlety and life; Isis the singer, whose voice speaks to the unseen, the way between the worlds; Odin the hunter, closer of the circle. None of them has yet turned out to be what the Alchemist was seeking – the magic animal whose creation he had worked towards for three hundred years—’
‘Yet the Golden Cat has been with us since the moment Pertelot gave birth.
‘Oh, it is a paradox, I admit, but I should have resolved it sooner. It is a tangled skein, but that is no excuse. Still—’ here he stared grimly round. ‘—I am the Majicou, and I believe we are still in time to retrieve the situation. Leo, stay close: without you they can do nothing. Hurry! We must get back to the oceanarium!’
Racing to keep up, his friends followed him back down the stairs, across the sodden lawn and into the highway by the boat-house.