So it was with all the brazen opportunism of her earlier life that much later that day Sealink strolled up to a busy bait-shop in the middle of a small fishing-town and listened intently to a group of men leaning against a dusty pick-up, drinking beer as the sun went down. When the group split and two of them climbed into the truck and pulled away, bound with their haul of crawfish for the Friday market, they left with an extra load on board: a thirteen-pound calico cat, already intent on making herself at least a fourteen-pound cat by the time they arrived at their mutual destination, by availing herself of their abundant hospitality…
*
In the dream it had seemed both extraordinary and perfectly normal that the Majicou, that mystical guardian of the roads, should appear to her and speak warmly, as to a lifelong friend. When first he had shown her his face it was in his guise as old black tomcat, a little greyed and ragged, his single pale eye stern yet gleaming with vitality. Yet it was in this embodiment that she found him most awesome, for she could sense that this manifestation was in some way a display, most likely directed not at her, of his burning will and self-determination – a measure of his true power.
‘I apologize,’ the Majicou said. ‘My experiment with the Mammy and her bones was not entirely successful. I must, it seems, try something more straightforward. I can only pray I am granted the time…
‘Come with me, Sealink, trust me—’
The next moment, the black cat was gone, and Sealink found herself slipping deeper in the dream, into a more profound and wilder place by far.
And so it was that a creature four or five feet tall with shoulder-blades as sharp as knives, its fur of a savage, shiny black, dappled like woodland shade with faint tobacco-brown rosettes, came to be sitting nose to nose with a glorious tigress with paws as big as plates and teeth like scythes, the orange, black and white harlequin patches of a calico’s coat strained by packed muscle to a network of vibrant bars and stripes. The scent that rose between them was rank and untamed and their great, stony eyes rested unblinking upon each other.
Equal to equal now, Majicou opened his mind to the tigress. At once, a succession of images passed before her like beads on an abacus, shuttling past one after another as if propelled by an unseen hand.
At first there was darkness. Then, as if from a great distance, she perceived a blur of movement, whirling and dancing like a dervish. She felt wind in her fur, a cold subterranean wind, and with it came a profound rumbling that vibrated inside the chambers of her skull. Mesmerized, she found she could not look away. She felt its pull upon her, deep inside the marrow of her bones. It was a feeling at once unpleasant and addictive.
For a moment she gave herself up to it, allowed it to draw upon her, like a tick upon a sheep. Then, revolted, she pulled free.
She heard the Mammy’s voice, and behind it the deeper roar of the Majicou: The wild roads are dying…
She saw the badger, untouched but with its life sapped away. She saw the white tomcat at the Farmer’s Market, how his skin had slipped between her teeth, her own exhaustion on the roads…
And then she saw, spinning out of the vortex, something small and golden. It eddied before her in the darkness – a tiny golden triangle. She stared at it. She had seen it somewhere before. She remembered an earlier dream. Yes, she had seen it there. She remembered how the sunlight had struck off the armadillos’ bone-pile. Yes. But there was somewhere before that, somewhere important…
Concentrating hard on anything other than food was not something Sealink was used to. It made her head hurt. And, the more her head ached, the more elusive the symbol became.
All at once there was a roar in the darkness, and the golden triangle broke apart into its component lines, shivering in the air. One aspect of it spiralled deliberately in front of her for a moment, then it was gone; only to be replaced a second later by a small shape, a tiny golden creature which stared helplessly upward as if beset by something dark and formless, something which leaned over it in predatory rapture.
Sealink felt her heart thump painfully.
It was a kitten…
At once a great wave of empathy and love flowed out from her towards this helpless creature. Something in her recognized it, not only as a kitten in distress, but as a kitten she knew. Somehow – she could not imagine how, or why – one of Pertelot’s beloved kittens was in danger. She felt its presence, reaching out for her, and she felt, like a red blast in her head, its fury and its pain. The vision dissolved into night. This was followed by a flash, almost subliminal, of a city skyline, a city she knew well – then all was dark again.
Oblivious to fear in the heart of the dream, Sealink embraced her fate.
‘Majicou, help me to find this kitten!’
Silence. Silence and darkness. A rush of air.
Then she was back in the presence of the great cat. The tobacco-brown rosettes shifted and flowed beneath the oily sheen of his fur. He opened his mouth and roared, ‘There are miracles in this life, as there are in all lives. Take on this task and save the Golden Cat. Wish for the most impossible thing in the world with the wildest part of yourself and it shall be yours.’ He cocked his head. The one eye shone like a lamp. ‘Go now, Sealink, I—’
Suddenly he began to dwindle, his mouth opening and closing silently; then he started to spin away as if caught in the vortex of terrible power.
A wild thought struck the tigress, as if from another life. ‘The Fields of the Blessed!’ she called after his receding form. ‘Where can I find them?’
The Majicou made one last, desperate effort. Twisting for a moment out of the gravity that drew him down, he opened his mouth and roared. The howl of the wind carried his first words away. All that remained was this: ‘Be yourself. Never give up hope. I have great faith in you, Sealink!’
*
The truck drove through the night and Sealink dozed in the back, sated on crawfish. The stars shone down upon her, unchanged as ever. It was hard to imagine that the world could be such a terrible place when its skies looked so serene. But in the dark places of the earth, hidden from view? That was a different matter.
Sealink shivered, not just from cold.
She was alone in the world. Her friends and allies were either dead or thousands of miles away, caught in their own spirals of destiny. The task that lay before her was at once enormous and, in parts, obscure. The odds, of course, were weighted violently against her.
Some might regard her circumstances as hopeless, she conceded. But Majicou’s message to her, words like a precious cargo rescued from a shipwreck, had stiffened her resolve: ‘Be yourself. Never give up hope. I have great faith in you, Sealink.’
With the reckless abandon she had come to cherish as a true mark of her independent spirit, Sealink cast away her despair. She imagined it flying over the side, whirled off like a sacrifice to the winds of motion, to join the dust devils the truck left in its wake. Face into the wind, the calico cat smiled. The light of the dying sun struck off her teeth so that they gleamed with red; and the colours of her coat streamed like the war-pennants of an invading army.
*
It was almost dawn when the truck rattled down Highway 90, along the West Bank Expressway and over the Crescent City Connection to deliver Sealink back into New Orleans. In the east, the towers of the Central Business District lay black against the lightening sky.
She watched the buildings glide past and felt her spirits rise.
‘Move, and the world moves with you.’ So she had advised the Queen of Cats on the deck of a bobbing boat that was bearing them away from a city filled with horrors, a city on another continent entirely. ‘That’s what travelling’s for – putting distance between yourself and your past.’
And yet here she was: travelling straight back into the arms of her own.
Strangely enough, it felt right. Straightforward to the point of bluntness, Sealink was inclined to tackle matters head-on. She greatly preferred administering a sharp cuff upside the ear to the use of tact. And she was looking forward to applying a bit of that specialism to an old friend.
She had already marked Kiki La Doucette down as her first objective.
Sealink stored up her grudges with fastidious care, keeping them safely parcelled away in a quiet place in her head, only to be taken out and dealt with when the right opportunity presented itself. And some grudges were more significant than others.
She could understand why Kiki might want to surround herself with sycophantic hangers-on who brought her so much food she became gargantuan. Hell: yes. She could understand that.
Old insults and scratches traded down on the boardwalk when the Delta Queen had been coming into her sexual maturity; lovers lost and lovers stolen: nothing so terrible there.
But Kiki was a stealer of kittens.
She had stolen the kittens of the cemetery cats.
And she had stolen Sealink’s own. The calico considered for a brief moment how Kiki had, in fact, rescued the survivors, then dismissed the thought entirely. What remained was that she had left two to gasp out their last breaths on the river’s cold shoreline. She had raised another two in her own vile image. And she knew the whereabouts of the fifth.
Find her, then, and settle the score. If anyone knew the whereabouts of kittens, it was Kiki La Doucette.
*
When the pick-up came to a halt at the top of North Peters Street, Sealink was up and off before the doors were opened. Through the smoky half-light she trotted, purposeful and resolute, with one thought in her head: catch La Mère while she’s dozing and savage the truth out of her – get a hold on her throat that will have her wheezing for mercy. She imagined the sensation of thick, fat flesh in her mouth, a feeble pulse beating against her teeth, her claws sunk to their roots in the body of her enemy.
But when she arrived in the courtyard behind the tourist shops of the French Market, there was no sign of Kiki, nor any of her miserable retinue. The area was deserted. At the café du Monde, there was not even a sparrow to be found. She crossed a Decatur Street empty of traffic and entered the park through its ornate iron gate. An air of dereliction had settled upon the guano-spattered benches, the silent statues and summer-dusty trees; and the cathedral presided over the scene like a grim sentinel over a long-abandoned battlefield. Sealink quartered the square. She sniffed beneath the myrtles and banana palms. Old traces of cat, faint scents and urine markings. Nothing fresh. It was as if every French Quarter cat had vanished into the night.
She nosed around the waste-bins. No cats had called here, either. Humans had, though. She leapt onto the edge and, balancing precariously, helped herself to the day-old remains of a sausage po’boy. The mustard made her eyes sting but, cheerfully sustained by its greasy calories, she trotted out onto the spacious sidewalk where during the day caricaturists and mime artists entertained passing trade; and was suddenly assailed by a terrible stench.
Even through the aftertaste of mustard and ketchup the power of the smell was phenomenal. It hung in the air like a solid presence. Sealink’s eyes started to water, so that it was through bleary vision that she saw the source of the stink. Someone had fastened a large and rusty grate to the railings beside the park entrance. It stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, and beneath it lay a heap of cooling, blackened ashes. Little wisps of smoke still rose from the embers, and it was this smoke that hurt her eyes so. But it was less the ashes than their provenance that held Sealink in thrall: for, bound to the grate with wire, its whole body twisted up and away from where the flames must have leapt, was a skeletal shape, all clumped and charred like ancient, flaky wrought iron, the tragic remnants of its head a rictus of silent agony and outrage. In the midst of so much soot, its teeth shone white as pearls, weaponry terribly outclassed by that of its opponents.
Sealink felt her legs go from under her. She sat down on the cold, hard stone and felt shocked reaction shudder through her in waves.
Someone had burned a cat. Deliberately, and in a very public place.
Without any conscious thought, she found her feet and put them to good use. She ran and ran through the dawn-lit streets until stopped by the four-lane highway of North Rampart. On the other side of the road, the crumbling walls of the old boneyard rose up; above them, still white angels and a woman with a cross, her hand raised in greeting, or warning. Early-morning traffic rumbled past, expelling noxious fumes. Sealink breathed deeply. Even diesel oil was preferable to the stench that followed her, so she sat by the side of the road and let the exhaust smoke infuse her coat.
She sat there, motionless, in a sort of daze.
The next thing she knew, there was a screech of brakes and a shrill voice shrieking out of a car window, ‘Look – a great big one – we could get at least ten dollars for it!’
There was a din of doors opening and slamming and a clamour of voices, and Sealink ran for her life. A big tenwheeler missed her by inches, its airhorn blaring wildly. A station-wagon swerved around her; in the other direction, a truck jammed on its brakes and its tyres screeched against the tarmac. The last car came straight at her. She just had time to see a pair of hands clutching the steering-wheel with white knuckles, a manic face leaning forward, mouth open in fury or triumph, and then there was darkness. Hot metal seared the fur on her back. A fiery pain and burning fur. Vile fumes engulfed her. Sealink had time to feel a terrible, sad irony at this useless loss of life, then suddenly there was light and air again and she realized that the car had passed right over her. She stared wildly around, barely able to believe her luck, then scrambled for the sidewalk and fled through the gates of the St Louis Cemetery.
Inside the boneyard all was quiet.
Round the back of one of the tombs she sat down and inspected the damage. It really wasn’t too bad, considering. A patch of fur in the middle of her back was dark and sticky, the fibres fused together by the heat. It tasted nasty when she licked it. But the worst casualty was her tail. Sealink had always been vain about this attribute. Her tail had been the subject of a thousand compliments and admiring glances. It was a barometer of her inner climate: held high and tip-curled when she was happy; thin and lowered when, rarely, she felt depressed; and when it fizzed and dilated, a wise cat took to its heels. But now, where before she had carried a great and gorgeous plume, a strip of skin and fur had been torn right off the end, so that it ended in raw pink on one side and ragged hair on the other.
Sealink gave a little wail of despair.
‘Where y’at, sister?’
She looked up, startled. It was Hog, the big stripy neuter.
‘Hell, honey, forget me: all I lost’s my tail. Should be grateful for small mercies, huh?’
Hog dropped silently off the mausoleum to land in front of her. He inspected the wound solemnly. ‘Say you had a narrow escape there, lady. Unlike the rest of us.’
‘Hog, where is everyone?’
‘They’s mainly gone. We lost Téo, you know.’
Sealink nodded dumbly.
‘Heard the Pestmen took her.’ He regarded the calico askance. After a pause, which Sealink failed to fill, he continued, ‘Some kids took old Tulane, put him in a bag. We never seen him again. An’ Azelle, she wandered off, said she was goin’ to search for her babies.’ His eyes went blank with memory. ‘Others, they just lay down an’ died, of the sickness, y’know. They was glad to go by then. Kiki’s band stole two of our remainin’ kitties – slipped through the gates when there was no moon and carried ’em off. They laughed at us – too sick, too tired and slow to stop ’em.’ He sighed.
‘We’ve had a few new arrivals since then. Owners kicked ’em out, decided they didn’t like cats after all. Now we’re all starvin’ together—’
He stopped abruptly, for he had lost the calico’s attention. She was staring above his head, eyes round with surprise. Her whiskers trembled. Then her coral lips stretched into the most beatific of smiles.
‘My, my – fallen on hard times, have you, my angels? Seems there may be a little justice in the world after all.’
Crouched on top of the tomb above Hog, under the protective hands of a praying plaster child, were two large tabby cats, their coats a little thinner, their expressions a little less assured, their mannerisms a little less arrogant than the last time Sealink had seen them, in the dusty storeroom of the Golden Scarab bookshop.
Kiki’s helpers.
Venus and Sappho.
Sealink’s daughters.
And even as she recognized them she remembered something else, something that had evaded her all this time.
*
Life had recently dealt the erstwhile bookshop cats a number of setbacks; but the revelation of one half of their parentage left them speechless with disbelief. Sealink watched with slow, grim satisfaction as the information settled and was absorbed.
‘Well, I guess you never could accuse Kiki of behaving towards us in a motherly way,’ Sappho said eventually. ‘She’d upped and gone by the time we were thrown out. Didn’t leave any forwarding address.’
‘She can’t have gone far, not being so fat’n’all,’ said Hog. ‘But no-one’s seen her around in the last day or so.’
‘Not since the burning.’ Venus hung her head.
Sealink turned upon her. ‘What do you know about that?’
‘I heard it was a cat who crossed her was burned.’
The calico shook her head slowly. ‘None of this makes sense to me. Whole world’s gone crazy. Sure wasn’t Kiki who raised that grille and tied that poor creature up; nor who struck the match, neither.’
‘But she bin there, in the square. I bin seeing her, cher.’
A new voice had joined the group. It belonged to a colour-point with a squashed-in face that Sealink recognized vaguely from her last visit to the old cemetery.
‘Hey, there, Celeste. Where you been?’ asked Hog. ‘We been worried for you, thought you was a goner.’
The colourpoint gave him a gummy grin, revealing three ivory teeth and a furred tongue. ‘Don’t y’all worry about me, bébé. I too skinny and too wily for those humans. ’Sides, how could I stay away from my chéri?’ She rubbed her dry old cheek against his head until he purred. Sealink watched in surprise. Hog might have lost his balls, but he didn’t seem to have lost his touch.
‘Ouai, I seen Kiki, sure enough. It was after the crowds had moved on, and the light was fadin’. She was sittin’ there, watchin’ that poor dead critter, and she was smilin’. And as I watched, a little gust came out of nowhere like a little whirlwind, y’know? – and there’s des mouches – big blue flies – cornin’ out of it – like the fellas you get around trash – and they’s hummin’ and buzzin’ fit to bust. Made my head itch to hear ’em. Then all the dust and bits of garbage and the ashes from le mort gets caught up in this wind, and it’s all whirlin’ and spinnin’, and the buzzin’ gets louder and louder; and Kiki, she’s still just sittin’ there smilin’ and smilin’ with her big yellow teeth, comme ça—’ Celeste gave a hideous parody of a contented cat’s grin ‘—and her coat’s all ruffled, and her eyes go all lazy like someone’s strokin’ her; and then she starts to talk to it. Made me shiver up my spine to see her.’ She shuddered theatrically. ‘World ain’t right when a cat talks to the wind. C’est crack.’ She lowered her voice. ‘But when the wind talks back—’
The boneyard cats stared at her. ‘The wind spoke?’
The colourpoint’s skin twitched as if reliving an earlier repulsion.
Her audience stared expectantly.
‘I heard it sigh—’
She stopped suddenly.
‘What?’ cried Venus impatiently. ‘What then?’
Celeste scratched her ear. ‘I ain’t sure if I should tell you this next bit or not. Y’all t’ink I gone nuts.’
‘We won’t, I promise,’ Hog said gently. He held the colourpoint’s amber gaze for a moment or two till she carried on.
‘Eh bien – Now of all my faculties, it’s my hearin’ bin least affected, so y’all got no cause to t’ink I gone deaf or crazy, y’hear? On all that’s sacred, I heard it sigh, and then all those flies they spoke wit’ a man’s voice.’
Sealink frowned. ‘Honey, run that past me again?’
‘I know flies don’t usually talk—’
Sealink squinted at her.
‘—but I know what I heard. The wind, it sighed and it buzzed, and then it spoke with a human’s voice, and it said, quite clearly: Come here, my dear: I need your soul, too. And then there’s this other voice, deep and dark, like it’s tryin’ to drown out the first one. A cat’s voice. So then I lissen real good: and it sayin’, over and over: Save the kittens. For the sake of all cats, save the kittens… And then there’s a great roar from inside the wind, and then, well then, chers, then I took off as fast as my old legs’d carry me, and even so, I swear I could hear the buzzin’ of those flies and Madam Kiki laughin’ at me all the way.
‘There’s witchery abroad, mes chers, witchery and mayhem.’
*
Later that night the boneyard cats sat huddled together inside one of the larger tombs. There was nothing left to eat. Sealink had searched the garbage cans in the nearby projects and come away empty-pawed. She had, in fact, discovered the remains of some spicy chicken in one plastic sack and without a second’s pause had wolfed it down, and only then found herself trembling with embarrassment at her own greed; but the shame barely outlasted the taste of the spices.
In order to assuage her conscience she went out to look for more, and discovered her luck had not, after all, deserted her. Some kids, returning with take-out from a local Chinese, were fooling around on their bikes. Remembering the hunting cry from the car window, she skittered between the wheels, causing quite a stir. Shouting and pedalling furiously they had given chase; but the calico, slimmer and fitter after these lean weeks, was quicker. She nipped up and over the wall and doubled back to where they’d dropped the food, seized a fragrant carton between her substantial jaws and legged it back to the cemetery.
The noodles were messy, and eating them fast resulted in a certain amount of nose-bumping, but everyone agreed it was the best food they’d ever tasted.
Afterwards, as they groomed each other’s fur, Sealink regaled them with stories of food she’d stolen on her travels; and as she did so the eyes of her daughters grew round and admiring. She reminisced about oysters in Detroit, lasagne in Los Angeles and alligator sausage here in N’Awlins. She had eaten beef enchiladas in Guadalajara, prawn soup with lily buds in Phuket, pork and pumpkin curry in Rangoon; galbi jim in South Korea and cullen skink in South Shields—
‘—food like that,’ she concluded, as if completing an old mantra, ‘makes you proud in your flesh.’
She looked around. The cats who gazed back at her were still proud, even if their flesh hung a little loose and pendulous, and some of them were drooling. They were the last free cats of the French Quarter, and she needed their help.
‘Bad things been happening for some time,’ she said abruptly. Her voice echoed round the tomb. ‘And now we’re seeing bad things go to worse. We don’t do something to stop all this, there won’t be nothing good left.
‘I came back here from another country, an old country across the sea. While I was there I seen some real scary stuff…’
And she told them about the Alchemist, and his pursuit of the Queen of Cats, how he had subverted the wild roads, and used cats to do his bidding; how he had determined to steal her kittens, believing one of them to be the famed Golden Cat.
‘And now one of those three kittens is here, in New Orleans. And I think I had a part in delivering that very kitten to its fate.’ She regarded her two daughters steadily. ‘You might remember a certain package—?’
There was a sharp intake of breath. Venus stared at her mother, aghast.
‘Kiki’s cadeau.’ It was less a question than a statement of fact.
‘Kiki’s cadeau. The package you two offered up to me. The one I dragged through the streets of the Quarter. The one Red tried to persuade me to open. And I, stupid and uncomprehending, refused to do so; gave him a darned good bite for his pains and hurried off to present it to Madame Kiki nice and intact. And when I laid it down on the ground at her feet, it squirmed, right there in front of me! And what did I do?’ She laughed bitterly. ‘I ran away. It’s something I’ve become damn good at lately.’
‘We didn’t know it was a kitten.’ Even Sappho, the snootier of the two, looked shocked. She stared at her sister. ‘We wouldn’t have given her a kitten. Let alone a golden kitten…’
‘A golden kitten is sacred to the Great Cat…’
‘It is a powerful being…’
‘Enough of the metaphysics,’ Sealink said briskly. ‘All I know is I got a job to do, and it starts with Kiki La Doucette. I met up with her mother in the bayous—’
‘Eponine Lafeet!’ Celeste’s tail twitched rapidly.
Hog looked surprised.
‘Kiki’s the Mammy’s daughter?’
‘Chéri, you just too young to remember,’ admonished the colourpoint.
‘Honey,’ Sealink addressed herself to the big stripy cat. ‘Don’t you go strainin’ your brain none.’ She raised her voice. ‘Yep. The Mammy. She said to me, amongst a load of nonsense I can’t understand, something about seeking a sun of fire in the Fields of the Blessed. Now I don’t know what the hell that means, but it seems to me that if Kiki ain’t in any of her normal haunts, these fields is where I might find her.’
Sappho laughed. ‘Paradise? Kiki La Doucette in the Happy Land?’
Sealink looked puzzled. ‘Ain’t that a bar down on Bourbon—’
Venus giggled behind a paw.
The calico turned on her. ‘What’s so funny?’
Sappho sniffed in a superior sort of way. ‘It’s from Greek poetry. A translation of the Elysian Fields, where the blessed souls gather. I think it’s in Homer—’
Sealink stared at her daughter, unsure as to whether or not she was being mocked. She wondered how she ever came to have daughters who knew about Greek poetry. The nearest she had come to it herself was a sultry night on the beach at Kos…
‘I heard that somewhere before. Elysian Fields.’ She screwed her face up. Then her eyes brightened. ‘Shine. Shine the mule. Ain’t it where the mules go when they retire?’
Sappho curled her lip. ‘I wouldn’t know about that. I’ve never spoken to a mule.’
*
Decatur Street was quiet that night. Five cats of various colours crouched under the wheels of a dented dark blue Plymouth and watched the road. Ahead of them, stretching up towards Jackson Square, the mule-carts were lined up, waiting their turn for the passing tourist trade.
‘Stay here,’ hissed Sealink. ‘I’ll go find Shine.’
Easier said than done. She dodged in and out of the parked cars, slipped silent and apprehensive between slow feet, in and out of the colourful chassis and spoked wheels. The first two mules she checked out sniffed cautiously at her, then blew air noisily out of their nostrils. Sealink ran on. The third mule skittered sideways. The next one tried to kick her. On down the line she passed, but none of them was Shine. At the head of the queue she stopped and stared around. No further cover. She crouched beneath the mule-cart with her heart pounding.
A curious head peered between its legs at her, failed to get a proper view and tried to twist around.
‘Who are you, cat? What you want?’
Sealink shuffled closer to its head, keeping a wary eye on the human feet passing on the sidewalk.
‘I’m looking for a mule called Shine.’
The mule snorted.
‘What you want with dat old bag of bones?’
The calico persisted. ‘Do you know where I might find her?’
‘Sure, if you wants a ride in a cart that overturns. Maybe get kicked in the stomach if you’re real lucky. Besides, what’s a cat doin’ out on the streets of this city, as bold as a mutt?’
Sealink didn’t feel all that bold at the moment.
‘Don’t you know there’s a price on your head?’ the mule continued mercilessly. ‘If Shine don’t get you then the Pestmen will!’ It whinnied its amusement. ‘Humans, they don’t like cats none at the present time. Burned one down near the Cabildo yesterday. Boy, did that smell bad.’
‘Look. I’m risking my neck here. Do you know where Shine is or not?’
No reply.
‘Or the Elysian Fields?’
The mule bent its head round and gave her a hard look.
‘I ain’t speaking to you of such things. You’s a cat.’ In case Sealink hadn’t noticed. ‘But if you want Shine you might go right the way back down Decatur, by the market, where you’ll find a café servin’ Creole food. Can’t recall the name, but you’ll have no problem findin’ it. Its window gets all steamed up. That’s where Joe goes when trade’s bad, parks the cart right outside. Old Shine, she give us all a bad name, so we don’t make room for her in the queue. I hear old Joe’s going to retire her soon. Won’t be before time. No, ma’am.’
Sealink didn’t even hear this last remark: she was already haring up the street to her companions.
In the shadow of the parked car, they stared out at her, round-eyed.
‘Did you find her?’ Hog asked.
‘Follow me.’
*
Past the Margaritaville and on towards the crossroad with Barracks, the north end of Decatur street was a quiet and seedy place at this time of night. This suited Sealink’s purpose fine, since, where it was darker, there were generally less people. And, indeed, pulled up at the side of the road was a familiar sight: a black and red cart, and a mule with its ears poking through an old felt hat.
Shine the mule stood outside Enrico’s café, listening to the dull murmur of the men inside in the warm. Her breath steamed in the air. It wasn’t a cold evening, but Shine had found a way of superheating her breath so that it came out as a satisfying white vapour. If she kept her mouth shut tight and drew the air up out of her lungs very, very slowly it worked best. She blew another jet. After a while she grew bored with that and started to paw the ground, tracing patterns in the dirt with her hooves. The gaudy neon of the café lights struck off the brasses on her harness.
As the five cats approached she looked up in surprise.
‘Remember me?’ Sealink touched noses with the mule.
Shine sniffed at her, velvet muzzle twitching with sudden interest.
‘Sure I do. You were nice to me once.’
‘I came here to ask you a question,’ Sealink said without further preamble. ‘I was told by a friend of mine that you spoke of one day going to the Elysian Fields—’
The mule’s long pink lips stretched into some approximation of a smile. ‘Fields of the Blessed. Oh my. Ah, yes. Green grass there, long green grass and the shade of sweetsmelling trees.’ She blinked, long-lashed lids covering eyes of liquid night. ‘The Elysian Fields.’
‘Do you know where they are?’
The mule regarded her obliquely. ‘Honey, if I knew where they were, why do you think I’d be standin’ here, watchin’ my life ebb into the night outside Enrico’s café?’
There was no answer to that. The calico’s disappointment must have showed in her face, for after a moment or two the mule said, ‘Don’t be so downcast. Ain’t that what you advised me? Life can’t be that bad, honey, can it?’
‘I’ve kinda hit a dead end,’ Sealink said softly. She looked back over her shoulder at the four cats watching this exchange. ‘Thought I had an answer to a mystery, but it didn’t lead nowhere. That’s what you get for following your hunches.’
The mule dipped its head conspiratorially. ‘Want to go for a ride?’
‘What?’
‘Come for a ride – you and your friends. I ain’t tied up.’
Sealink hesitated, then she grinned. ‘Hell, why not? We got nothing to lose.’
And so it was that some minutes later a small black gig with a fringed canopy and wheels gaily painted in red might have been seen disappearing smartly up Esplanade, heading lakeside with a crew of five cats. As they went, the calico sat on the mule’s back, her claws buried anxiously in the leather harness, and explained their situation to Shine: how a cat called Kiki La Doucette had betrayed her own kind; how people were paying for cats to be caught and killed; how they had burned a cat at Jackson Square; and how a very special kitten – and a great deal more – was at risk.
Shine was philosophical. ‘Man is a fierce wild animal at heart,’ she opined. ‘We usually see him only in that tamed condition of restraint known as civilization, and so,’ she turned her head in order to make eye contact with the cat on her shoulder, ‘the occasional outbreaks of its true nature terrify us.’
*
Some time later they crossed a turning bounded by clapboard houses with peeling blue shutters and came upon a yellow dog sitting by the side of the road. It had no collar and its tongue lolled cheerfully out of its mouth. As they approached it looked up and did a double take. Its lower jaw hung suddenly slack.
‘Hi there, honey!’ Sealink declared cheerfully.
The dog gazed at her. ‘Oh my Lord,’ it said. ‘Do I truly see a mule-cart full of cats driving up Esplanade?’
‘You sure do, son.’ Sealink was enjoying herself.
The dog started to trot alongside. ‘May I be so bold,’ it said, keeping pace with Shine, claws tapping on the sidewalk, ‘as to enquire why that might be?’
The calico laughed, a little bitterly. ‘Honey, it’s a nice night.’
The dog cocked its head at her. The moonlight glinted off his full black eye. ‘That’s not what I’d heard.’
‘Now what can you mean, honey?’
The dog looked shifty. During the silence that followed, Sealink noticed that he was quite an old animal; that his coat was rather unkempt and that his claws were blunt with road-travel.
‘You ain’t from around here, are you?’ she asked softly.
‘No ma’am. I’m something of a traveller, myself. I’ve taken a truck ride here, a bus ride there. I’ve crossed the country from east to west and back again. I’ve been to New York and New Mexico, Old Forge and Ocean City—’
Sealink found herself grinning. ‘Ah, the journey is the life, hon. You and me must be soul mates beneath the skin!’
‘—but I’ve never been to New Orleans before,’ he continued, ignoring the calico’s interruption, ‘and I don’t think I’ll be coming back for a while.’
Sealink gave him a hard stare.
‘What I mean – what I heard,’ he said, returning the look, ‘is that it may not be such a nice night for some. Some cats, anyhow.’
‘Go on.’
‘I heard there was something going on; some kind of gathering to do with cats up on the Elysian Fields. Didn’t sound too pleasant.’
A sharp electrical current ran the length of the calico’s spine. The raw tip of her tail twitched involuntarily.
‘The Elysian Fields. Do you know where they are?’
The dog opened his mouth to answer, and, as he did so, a car came round the corner, blaring its horn as if it were a weapon.
Shine bucked, one lashing hoof catching the back bumper as the vehicle sped past. Then she started to run. Shine had never in her life run while pulling her cart, even at Joe’s insistence had barely broken into a trot, but now she took the corner at such speed that two wheels of the gig came clear off the ground. Sealink, slung sideways by the momentum, found herself flying suddenly and spectacularly through the air, arms and legs pinwheeling. She tumbled over a broken picket fence, through an untidy privet hedge and at last came to rest in a heap amongst a clutter of terracotta and pelargoniums.
With the adrenalin of outrage combating any immediate sense of physical injury, she sat up and looked around. It would be hard to pretend that ploughing through a hedge had been deliberate. Had anyone seen her ignominious descent? The yellow dog was still at the junction, his sharp muzzle turned in her direction. Sealink ducked away from his steady gaze and started to groom furiously, noticing as she did so that her head hurt and one eye was already beginning to close.
‘Hell of a day,’ she muttered.
Satisfied with the cursory licking, she shook out each leg in turn and a shower of privet twigs, dirt and geranium petals scattered from the long Maine Coon coat. Everything appeared to be in working order. Sealink nodded grimly, then clenched her teeth and leapt the fence to follow the disappearing buggy.
The yellow dog watched all this with a quizzical expression on his face. This was a crazy place. Still, that big old calico cat sure had some grit. Grinning lopsidedly he followed the strange cavalcade as it rounded the bend into the long, wide, nondescript boulevard known as the Elysian Fields.
*
‘Work: The Great Liberator’ read the proclamation in rusted wrought iron on either side of the black-barred gates. Raised after the fire that swept the city in 1794, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the building behind these gates had been in its time a mill and a cotton warehouse, stuffed with bales for export to the Old World; a slave market, a poorhouse and latterly the place where the broken-down working horses and mules of the city were sent to be despatched into the great blue beyond; or, more likely, into a thousand cans of dogfood. Down the generations, borrowing from the road on which it resided some of the sense of the original Greek, it had passed into mythology as a place of well-earned peace: the fields of the blessed.
It had not operated as a knacker’s yard for some time now.
But it still smelled of old blood.
And some more recently spilled.
*
As Shine and the buggy, containing four cats clinging to the cracked leather seat with their claws buried up to the hilt, emerged at the junction with Hope, the calico cat and the yellow dog caught up with them.
The mule hung her head. ‘I got spooked,’ she explained to Sealink. ‘Sorry. Climb aboard again, chile, and I’ll continue my tour.’ She scanned the lifeless avenue. ‘Though it ain’t exactly the scenic route.’
Sealink turned to bid farewell to the dog, but it had wandered off to nose around the base of a rusted iron gatepost further up the street. Venus shook her head. ‘Canines,’ she enunciated with disdain. ‘They just can’t resist making their own scent-mark wherever another dog has pissed.’
But the yellow dog, having completed his study of the iron post, left it unblemished and slipped through the open gates. He walked cautiously up to the flaking wooden doors of the building and started to sniff around. The hackles rose down his back like the crests of a small dinosaur. Then he recoiled as if his nose had been assaulted, and, as Sealink was wondering what could smell so awful that a dog would be repulsed, he turned and fled back to the buggy.
‘Welcome to the Fields of the Blessed,’ he announced, panting. ‘I think we found that gathering. There are humans in there. And cats. A lot of cats—’
Hog and Celeste leapt down from the cart.
‘—not all of them alive.’
Venus and Sappho stayed rooted to the seat.
‘Get back on the buggy,’ Shine ordered. ‘We’re going in!’
And so it was that a renegade mule with a spitting calico cat on her shoulder and a buggy full of ferals cannoned through the main doors of the old knacker’s yard on the Elysian Fields, straight into a scene out of nightmare.
The last time Sealink had witnessed anything similar it had been in a decommissioned warehouse in another country, a warehouse lying between Carib Dock and Pageant Stair, a warehouse that stank of terror and human sweat, smoke and friar’s balsam; where a defiant queen and her brave king had faced off the Alchemist and an army of cats with eyes as empty as glass.
She stared. There was smoke here, too: a lot of smoke. Some came from exotic incense and vast candles burning in brass dishes; but the stuff that stung her eyes came from the pyre that dominated the centre of the great stone floor. As the smoke eddied and whirled, Sealink could make out a pile of bones, higher and more newly rendered than the last she had seen, a great heap of skeletal remains spitting out flame and reeking vapour.
A bonfire.
A sun of fire.
A bone-fire.
On the top its latest victim, unrecognizable in its death-throes, rested on a dozen others whose fur still smouldered and whose glazed eyes reflected ever more dimly the leaping flames. All around moved humans in dark robes.
As the mule-cart gatecrashed into their gathering, these humans stared at the intruders, mouths open, almost comic in their surprise. Some held cats by the scruff of the neck, bodies drooping, all the fight gone out of them. Others dragged crates closer to the pyre, fiddled with hinges, clumsy in their big leather gloves. Others still poked at the fire, feeding it with a fuel that sent up unnatural-looking flames of green and blue. A smaller group knelt at the back, oblivious to the ruckus, eyes closed, chanting in a language Sealink did not understand. From somewhere in the cavernous room, echoing among the iron girders, came the sound of perverse, arrhythmic music: bells, a reed flute, small drums. A disembodied human voice said, slowly and indistinctly, as though with much effort from a great distance, ‘Bring me the kitten now. Bring her to the fire.’
Sealink had heard that voice before.
She looked wildly around the room, but the Alchemist was nowhere to be seen. How could he be? She had seen him die on the clifftops at Tintagel. There was nothing to betray any supernatural presence except for a column of milky light, illuminated from within with dark reds and blues like the arteries and veins of a whole new life-form, pulsing and straining with some horrid birth. Where the column spun close to the pyre, fragments of bone and fur were sucked into its path to join the danse macabre, and with each new arrival the light grew stronger; the voice more demanding.
‘Bring it to me NOW!’
For a moment the smoke cleared and Sealink saw on the other side of the flames a sight that made her heart stop, then beat like hammerblows in her chest.
A huge ginger cat haloed with fire.
A cat whose tabby markings swirled like a magnetic field in storms of ochre and orange and cream. A cat with an irregular patch of black which spread from ear to eye, lending him a distinctly untrustworthy air.
It was Red.
And by his side a smaller black and white cat: Téophine; bristling with fighting chemicals, her lips drawn back from gapped teeth.
Between them, a small golden shape, curled into itself like a dead insect.
Sealink’s heart felt as though it would burst.
Isis. Oh, Isis. Pertelot’s smallest kitten, lying as though dead.
The calico’s mouth opened in a wail.
‘Isis!’
At the sound of her name, the kitten’s ears twitched, once; twice. As though awoken from a long, slow dream of Egypt, she stirred.
The column seemed to become agitated. It flexed, bending from the middle to lour over the kitten. Lights went out within the milky haze.
Dapples of violet ran like fingers over the golden coat. The kitten stretched her supple backbone. Her tail flicked from side to side. Crouching on her haunches, she extended her front paws, a miniature sphinx. Then she lifted her head and opened her mouth.
An unearthly sound ripped through the air. It was not discordant. It was not harmonious. It was a sound neither natural nor synthetic; it was a sound that defied interpretation.
All at once there was pandemonium.
The mule skittered and the occupants of her cart shot out into the room with their fur on end. Humans clamped hands over ears and their eyes began to water. As if from nowhere, ruptured highways flickered into life on the edges of the room. A dozen cats burst out of these, followed by a dozen more, stolen away from whatever journeys they made on the wild roads of Louisiana. Drawn towards the nexus in the knacker’s yard they came, fur streaming in the highway winds, dwindling second by second from their great cat forms – a leopard here, a lion there: a rosette-coated jaguar; a puma; a lynx…
As if the advent of these highways had released a new energy into the room, the column of light flared up suddenly, then flew apart into two separate streams. Joined only at the base these danced like two cobras; high in the air, looming up the walls and the tall, barred windows, sending grotesque shadows flying across the floor. Voices could be heard from within, echoing vaguely as if from the depths of a well, indistinct through the kitten’s song; then there came a determined suspension of sound as the two streams fled back together in a sudden rush of air, to twine in violent struggle.
Isis opened her mouth wider still and the sound swelled. It wavered through a succession of eerie musical registers, finally resolving itself into a single powerful note.
The bone-fire collapsed as if it had imploded. Smoke and ash swelled into the air in billowing clouds. The dual streams of light went out, as though someone had thrown a switch. There was a great, dark roar, then a despairing voice could be heard fading to a vibration, like a ghost of itself, in the recesses of their skulls. In the sudden darkness humans wailed and ran out into the street, pursued by the larger cats.
Somehow, in all this, Shine had lost her cart. It lay now on one side, wheels spinning uselessly. The mule herself, unnerved by the scene she had interrupted, stood motionless at the edge of the pyre, staring into the pile of smouldering corpses.
‘Oh my. Were they alive when they came to this?’ she said softly.
‘Some of them.’
Shine swivelled round to face the speaker. A grossly fat cat had appeared behind her. ‘But some of them died of fear before they made it that far!’ It laughed so hard that spittle shot out through yellowed teeth. Jowls wobbled over a shiny collar. Behind this monstrosity stood a collection of well-muscled cats, their coats gleaming with ill-gotten health and vitality.
‘I’ve come for my cadeau,’ said Kiki La Doucette, her eyes moving past Shine to the pitiful gathering of cats on the other side of the bone-fire. ‘Now that my master has no further use for it.’ But between her and her goal stood a large calico cat and her friends from the St Louis Cemetery. Kiki curled her lip. Her followers’ whiskers bristled in anticipation.
‘My, my.’ La Mère trembled with delight. She raised her voice. ‘Why, I do believe it’s the Delta Queen.’
Sealink glared at her.
‘And look: she has located her own dear daughters. How very… touching. Kill them all.’ She waved a bored paw in their general direction.
At once a number of Kiki’s band surged forward.
The calico cat flexed her claws. She looked about her with devastating calm, assessing the odds, and gave a little satisfied smile. ‘Here’s something I understand, at last,’ she said to the little group behind her. ‘I been spoiling for a fight for some time now.’
‘Can’t wait,’ grunted Hog. He squared his wasted shoulders.
Two of the collared cats came bounding towards them.
‘Come on, then,’ Sealink growled. ‘Come and play with Momma.’
The two males – a short-haired tabby and a long-haired grey – charged at her, backs arched and fur on end. As thick as kapok wadding, the calico’s Maine Coon coat confounded tooth and claw. She hit the first one hard on the side of his ear and bowled him over. At once, Hog leapt upon him. The second, and smaller of the two, Sealink simply fell on. He went down with a soughing sigh as the air rushed out of his lungs, then lay there in a dazed state.
The next two came and Celeste hurled herself at one, burying the few teeth she had left in its throat, while Hog and Sealink dealt with the other. Fur and howls of rage flew into the air.
They came in waves after that. Sealink fought savagely. Like the feral queen she was, she bit and tore: a whirlwind of fury.
‘That’s for Mousebreath!’ she muttered grimly, raking the back of a lithe black tomcat now fleeing for its life. ‘And that’s for my lost kitten.’ A patchwork cat was bowled over. ‘You been destroying your own—’ she mumbled through a mouthful of grey fur ‘—so that’s for Azelle—’ a tortie female flew through the air. ‘And that’s for Candy—’ A big black and white cat was trampled underfoot.
Kiki had a large retinue. The promise of food and comfort in a city of starving ferals had brought her new recruits on a daily basis, cats whose morals, like their bodies, had been eroded by their hunger: cats who thought little of stealing kittens and betraying the presence of other cats to gain the favour of their queen. What did they care that the humans wished death upon others of their kind, so long as that enmity did not fall upon them? They had eaten well, these last few months: too well.
One by one Kiki’s courtiers fell to the teeth and claws of the last free cats of New Orleans, cats carried forward only by the power of their will for revenge. Many lay still, gasping on the stone floor. Many more ran away through the open doors. Shine chased them on their way, getting in a kick here, a nip there. It was still not enough.
Celeste went down at last under the weight of three of the collared cats. Hog stood over her, teeth red with his opponents’ blood; but it was impossible to withstand the tide. Before long, an exhausted Sealink found herself shoulder to shoulder with Red. Behind them, Hog and Téophine joined forces, Isis a tiny spitting bundle between them. Of Venus and Sappho there was no sign. It didn’t surprise the calico: they just hadn’t been raised right.
Some time later the waves parted and there was the yellow queen, the size of three cats, with candleflames flickering off her pale eyes.
‘Might have known you’d still be alive in the midst of this carnage,’ the calico hissed.
‘Why, cher: no need to be so unfriendly—’
Kiki rolled forward: an unnatural motion like some great hovercraft fashioned of flesh and fur. Her eyes grew round and greedy at the sight of the golden kitten. A scorched reek of grease and decay wafted in her vanguard. Sealink recoiled at the stench.
‘—I only came for what’s mine—’
Red confronted the monstrous queen. ‘Come any closer,’ he said grimly, ‘and you’ll be crapping teeth for a week.’
She roared with laughter.
‘You ain’t takin’ this kitten; not without you take me first.’ And without hesitation he lunged at her.
Kiki La Doucette raised a languid paw and raked it down his face. The ginger cat rolled in agony at her feet, blood spurting between his claws. Immediately, Sealink hurled herself to his defence.
La Mère cackled. ‘Very maternal, ma chère, very moving. Still you got a lot to make up for, leavin’ your only son to the mercies of the Pestmen!’ She started to laugh so hard that waves of fat rolled across her body and collided with one another like cross-currents in a sea. Sealink, for once in her life, was dumbstruck. Red, her son. A son. Not a sun. A son of fire. And here he was, her fifth kitten, neither in life, nor yet out of it. Kiki inched forward so that she was within a foot of the calico and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘For, bébé, this fine creature here, whose beauty I just so unfortunately marred,’ she examined a broken claw: stripped it carefully between ivory teeth, ‘this here’s the lad I dragged up from the Mississippi shoreline on that cold and misty day and fed on my own milk for you – didn’t you re – a – lize when you was hanging together? What you got for a brain, honey? A ant?’ She guffawed, then clapped a paw to her mouth. She winked at the calico. ‘I hope you didn’t – you know – get too friendly, down there on the boardwalk…’
A movement from the floor. A sudden flash of bright fur; a determined, bloodstained face. With a roar of defiance. Red launched himself at La Mère’s throat. Sealink leapt for the yellow queen’s back. Mother and son struck together.
That oily fur gave no purchase: Kiki shook them off like fleas, laughing all the while. As powerful as a tank, she shouldered past a helpless Téo and Hog and loomed over the golden kitten.
‘Good to see you awake at last, cher,’ she leered. ‘Come to Mother.’
Isis faced her resolutely, the lines of her head as accurate as an axe. With all the courage of her parentage, she lifted her chin and spat neatly into the yellow queen’s eye.
‘I am not for you,’ she said clearly. ‘Not in this, or any other, life.’
She opened her mouth, and out came the song. It soared into the iron rafters, drew to its singer the power of the deaths suffered in that room. Many, so many: too many over the years. She felt their pain, and the power of their will to live. She drew it in; harnessing, shaping. The note swelled.
Sealink fell over, with Red beneath her. Other cats fled for the doors. Téophine dropped like a stone. Hog, with a groan, closed his eyes and slid to the floor. Shine kicked up her heels and bolted out into the street. Kiki, suddenly, clutched her head.
A highway pulsed in the air above them. There was a flash of light, and, without further warning, a cat appeared twenty feet above their heads. Plummeting groundwards, it twisted in mid-air, righted itself and struck the stone floor on all fours.
It was the Mammy.
Isis sat back, panting. The song died.
Eponine Lafeet looked around her. She gazed at Isis with her milky eyes. She smiled. ‘Bonsoir, mon ange. It is a pleasure to be back in my own town. And,’ she bobbed her head, ‘it is a pleasure and a privilege to meet you.’
She walked past the golden kitten and stared with disgust at the heap of greasy fur in front of her. She extended a claw. ‘Vas t’en!’
Against all the laws of nature, the yellow queen began to levitate. Up she went, up into the mouth of broken highway from which the Mammy had issued. There was a sudden flurry of activity as Kiki returned to consciousness and realized where she was; then the highway took her into its maw, and vanished.
Eponine smiled. ‘See how she likes de bayous. Hah!’
Isis stared at the Mammy round-eyed.
‘Well!’ she said. ‘That was a good trick. Can you teach it to me?’
*
It was two days later, and the survivors had gathered in the early-morning sun down on the Moonwalk. Behind them, the Mississippi river rolled past as if nothing in the world had changed.
‘We’re going back to the old country,’ the calico explained to all present.
The golden kitten, restored to itself, blinked shyly. A Nile-green fire sparked from those elongated, oriental eyes. ‘Sealink’s taking me on a plane!’
Suddenly overcome by this idea, she hopped excitedly from foot to foot.
Sealink placed a restraining paw on Isis’s neck. ‘Take it easy, babe,’ she advised. ‘Or you’ll be travelling in the hold.’ It was ironic really, she thought: she’d come to her home town to find her own kittens: had instead found some grown cats and was leaving with one of Pertelot’s. With a purr like a pneumatic drill, she rubbed her head against Red’s unscarred cheek. ‘Take care of Téophine, won’t you?’
She felt very grown-up, bestowing her approval like this.
The pair of them, ragged and unsightly from a dozen healing wounds, grinned from ear to ear. Téo touched noses with the calico. ‘Don’t you worry none, cher. I’ll make sure he gives me plenty kittens.’ Red looked embarrassed. He wasn’t used to having a mother, let alone one in cahoots with his mate.
‘Eh bien, Rumby-Pumby: better start now, eh?’ Celeste, leaning on Hog for support, smiled lazily.
From the fencepost behind them, the Mammy surveyed the scene with satisfaction. It was good to be back in her home town, good to have some of her own to look after again. A couple of dozen ferals and a few homeless domestic cats had made their way across the city to the boardwalk. She recognized some as former members of her daughter’s retinue; but the malice had gone out of their eyes, just as the worst of the madness had gone out of the city. Two large-furred tabbies had arrived just that morning, bearing, respectively, a shrimp and a crab-claw, heads bowed; rather shamefaced. And later that day she had watched, from a safe place, as a woman she remembered as Rita came down to the Moonwalk, followed cautiously by a yellow dog, to empty cans of strong-smelling tuna-fish in the old place by the steps.
Eponine Lafeet smiled. It was a start. A good start.
She waved the calico cat and her golden charge on their way.