But Isis wasn’t listening. She had run off to join Odin and Leo.
‘Honey,’ Sealink began, ‘I don’t think—’
Too late.
Everything hung for an instant on the edge of disaster, then toppled over.
Isis called out to her brother and sister. Hearing her voice but unable to see her, Odin and Leo abandoned the lee of the white tiger and ran about aimlessly through the wrack.
‘I’ll have them all now,’ the vortex told itself.
Isis froze, one forepaw lifted. She glanced desperately this way and that.
At the last minute, as the whirlwind bent towards her, Mercurius Realtime DeNeuve reared up between them, offering his iron claws—
Deprived of shelter by this manoeuvre, the remaining cats scattered and went to ground in shallow scoops and pockets in the exposed pink granite bedrock. There, they hung on grimly. They would have to endure, they supposed. They tried, as cats do when things have gone too far, to hunch down inside themselves and persist.
Sealink, watching in a kind of paralysis, unable to think of anything at all to do to help her old friends, imagined for a moment she could see a tortoiseshell tom among them. Her heart leapt: but it was only the dustbin fox after all, his coat mottled with dirt. Who else might be there was hard to tell, though she thought she saw Ragnar Gustaffson, trying with some success to shelter his Queen.
‘Steady, girl,’ she warned herself. ‘No use folding now. This is an extreme situation—’
Locked in a strange uneven struggle, the air around them distorted and full of mirages, tiger and whirlwind staggered together around the remains of the oceanarium. Their groans and roars went twenty miles out to sea, like some experimental warning to sailors – a hint of risks less easy to comprehend than the rocks, shoals, and lee-shore fogs of ordinary nautical life. At the same time, bizarre odours enveloped the hilltop: hot brass, chemicals and incense tars, dispersed by the smell of a wind that had passed recently over a thousand miles of ice—
The kittens called out to one another as they ran, in voices plaintive yet somehow harsh and penetrating, as if designed for just this eventuality. Each time Sealink caught a glimpse of them, through curtains of suspended earth, their cries had brought them closer together. They seemed larger than before. They moved purposefully, bringing to the brutalized hilltop a whiff of the burnt sand and dry savannah that lie in the history of every cat. Above them in the sky, the triangular symbol pulsed and brightened ecstatically as if to welcome them, then faded for ever; and it was as three points of a triangle that they finally converged. What began then, no-one could be sure.
At first they greeted one another like kittens, bounding around, rubbing heads, exchanging playful cuffs, rolling on the scoured rock. At length this behaviour was replaced by something more measured and formal. They sat straight and tall, perfectly motionless, and regarded one another in silence.
Then Odin’s head went up. He began to stalk the wind.
He sniffed. He crouched. He waggled his haunches then sprang. After that, he leapt straight up into the air from a standing start, turning and elongating his body as he went, and snapped his jaws together like a trap. Landing with careless precision, he made one of those intent, scuffling runs you are sometimes forced into if the prey is lucky enough to take off before you have arrived. He shrugged. ‘It is ugly but it is a technique,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘like any other. The cat never gives up, or how will it eat?’ He stopped and stared at his sisters until he was sure they were watching. ‘And this is how I do it when they hide in the long grass. See? More height in the jump, and bring your weight down behind your front paws. Like this!’
They observed this demonstration gravely.
They exchanged a long confidential glance, as if to say, ‘Yes, that is how to hunt. But now this. Look! Listen!’
Then Leonora Whitstand Merril began to dance, and Isis began to sing, and the hunt and the dance and the song wove a kind of pattern into the air around them. It was long and intricate, and the threads in it were made of gold and blood and all the things cats have ever done. And this is some of the meaning of it (because it is still being sung):
Eat, bear kittens, sing the song of the cat in the night. This is a grasshopper, this is a mouse, but this only a bit of grass in a dry wind. These are the leaves of the trees and the birds among them (which also sing). This is how to change direction at full speed – you may need that trick sooner than you think. Hush! That is a kitten, lost in the dark; and this is the sound the lark makes as she rises through the morning (never eat her feet). This is how we were in Nubia, and then in Egypt. Men welcomed us. The Nile comforted us. Her pigeons were in our mouths—
It was less a song, or a dance, or a practice for the hunt, than a tapestry, the tapetum lucidum of the felidae. The task of weaving it brought the kittens closer and closer together until they were facing one another from the points of a triangle again. A ripple seemed to pass through them. A shaft of light struck down from above. Their images were progressively overlaid, shimmering like cats seen through heat haze on a summer morning. Suddenly, they had slipped into one another, and a single animal stood where three had been. It looked back at its parents, then turned and loped away into its own dance and vanished.
Only the bright tapestry remained, intricating itself across the hilltop, febrile and tenuous, as if the very air were gilded with the life of cats.
Sealink looked up.
Ragnar and Pertelot looked up from their shallow refuge in the granite.
Cy the tabby blinked and looked up—
‘Wow!’ she told the fox, and he looked up too.
A hush spread over the hilltop, and down to the waiting town and its harbour beneath.
The sky began to brighten in the east.
‘I ain’t never seen anything like this,’ said Sealink.
*
Still himself and yet half Mousebreath – or was he still Mousebreath and yet half himself? He was too excited to be certain – Animal X watched the day infuse the horizontal clouds with colour, layer by layer. At first it was a gold on the edge of green, transparent as a thin wash on alabaster, deepening as it spread until it was the colour of light falling through hot foliage in some country no cat has ever seen but which all cats remember. ‘I always loved the dawn,’ he thought. He held his breath. He knew what was going to happen! Slowly, very slowly, the tapestry the Golden Cat had made reached up. Slowly, the dawn reached down. They touched. There was a sound which was no sound at all. Suddenly, green light was everywhere, running over every surface – the sea, the harbour mole, the palms and bus shelters, the deserted Beach-O-Mat! It quivered in the shop windows (which, in response, boomed faintly, as if they had been touched), it ran up the cobbled hill, it fizzed and crackled across the roofs of the cottages and leapt the gap to the oceanarium steps!
Animal X shivered.
Light was on every barren inch of that hill like flames, a green dream like a lighted fuse, like soft laughter. It was laughter. It gathered and sparked. It held back for a moment, and he felt his own heart beat in the heart of it. Then the dawn broke, and the birds were singing. Every bird in the world was singing, and there was nothing left but light, and the thing that came out of the light, and everything was changed for ever.
*
Who can see the Great Cat as She is?
We know how Animal X saw her. Since his experience in the laboratory, She had rushed in upon him day by day as a green fire, and taken him in the jaws of love.
But the dustbin fox said he saw this: shapes perhaps not even animal, but moving with the fluid violence of leopards, glorious unassuaged green forms like archangels, flowing through the world determined to change it. Was it the Great Cat herself, or only her servants? Who knows? he asked himself: She is the world. It made him remember why he had thrown in his lot with the Old Majicou, so many years ago. ‘In that moment I remembered,’ he was to say later, ‘what we were trying to accomplish. But I still wept for Francine, wasted in someone else’s war.’
As for Cy the tabby: no-one ever knew what she saw.
‘I mean,’ she tried to explain later, ‘now you see it, now you don’t. You know? It’s hidden in the shapes of things. It’s crouched in the bus shelter. It lies in wait in the curve of the bay. What’s familiar, you see it new. Over and out, Ace: is that enough for you? Anything you look at’s true!’
And what Ragnar and Pertelot saw was this:
A great triangle of light – the signature of their children, made to bring forth something even stranger than themselves – and, dawning at its apex, a light the colour of peach and amber. Inside that light, curled in the vast sleep of time yet wakeful as the day, the Great Cat herself, the Mother of everything, the green dream that beats like a heart at the heart of the world. They knew her by her body, which is hill and bleak mountain, jungle and forest, and at the same time home and hearth. They knew her by that endless rumbling purr which is the sound of the world, the deep engines of the weather, the wind and the wave and the ocean the wave plays upon, and everything under the ocean, even to the deep halls of the fish. They knew her by her fur, which is a transforming fire, green on the edge of gold. They knew her by her seasons, which come and go. They knew her by her delight in every kitten, every scuttling mouse, every fallen leaf: and She knew them.
She opened her silver eye.
She opened her golden eye.
She woke to Herself.
She woke to the Little Mother and Father.
‘I waited so long for you,’ She said.
Her voice sang in the very atoms of things. It sang inside Ragnar and Pertelot. When She stepped into the world, She emerged from inside them, She emerged from the light that surrounded them, She emerged from every grain of dust beneath their paws. She emerged from everything at once.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ She said.
Why should they be? Weren’t they cats too?
They sat straight and tall and threw out their chests and purred and purred and purred.
‘When we were kittens,’ they heard themselves say, ‘you calmed us in the dark. Later we saw you in the noon heat, when life had us by the nape.’
And Ragnar added, ‘I saw you in a picture, not so long ago.’
She was the world. At the same time She was a cat like them, if very much larger. She had brought Egypt with her as a kind of backdrop, because She thought it might reassure them; also because She had once woken there for what seemed to her a brief instant (though, to the humans of the Missing Dynasty who had worshipped her, it had been a thousand years) and fallen in love with it. Palm and lemon flourished, and insects hummed across walled gardens barred with dull gold sunshine, and the Ancestors played in the damp soft evening airs, the grey-feathered airs of every dawn. She had brought the trickle of irrigation, the lift of the egret’s wing, the hidden pulse of the Nile. Behind her you could see the groves of trees like receding columns: music spooled between them. All about her paws the Ancestors were dancing too! Queens and kittens, grave old toms with greying ears, they tumbled and purred, perhaps for her (but more likely for themselves). But when She saw that they needed none of this, She let the music die away. With a sound like a single drop of water falling into a pool, everything was subsumed under the great argument of time, the millennial dream.
Only the Great Cat remained. Green as jade, gold as the sun, She left the King and Queen, and flickered like flames across the hilltop and wove her way into the heart of the storm, where She sat down suddenly and began to clean her paws. The air boomed and pulsed around her. Long streamers of cobalt-coloured detritus were pulled out between earth and sky, twisting and interleaving themselves. Blue lightning flared and banged, and out to sea the wind ripped the grey waves to spray. The ground shook. The whirlwind loomed up—
‘Be still now,’ She commanded.
She said, ‘Come to me now, both of you, and be still.’
But the whirlwind would not obey. The two beings inside it raged across the hilltop, out to sea and back again. They would not even answer. They wanted nothing She could offer. They were the Opposites, the sibling rivals, the dynamo of a vanishing age. They only wanted the struggle. After three hundred years, they had forgotten almost everything else.
The Great Cat laughed.
‘The wild and the tame are only names for the same thing,’ She chided them.
‘Will you come to me?’ She said gently.
They would not. Why should they humble themselves in that way? (Though each would like to humble the other.) They tore up the bedrock and threw it about.
‘It has been a long time, I know,’ She said.
She said, ‘Aren’t you tired?’
At this, the winds died so suddenly that the world ached with silence. They were tired. They were old. As they wavered, so did the vortex. Its rate of spin decreased, a shudder passed through it. It toppled and lost coherence. There was a long pause. Then the air breathed a sigh of relief, and began to clarify itself, like liquid in a glass. Everything which had been suspended, from mica dust to roofing slates, from cigarette packs to old car tyres, was released. The sky filled with objects, caught in a reluctant, dreamy, slow-motion fall.
‘I absolve you,’ said the Great Cat.
She said, ‘I resolve you.’
For a second, they reared up, separate and huge. But She was the Mother, always larger, always patient and determined; and that was the last time they were ever Majicou the one-eyed pet-shop cat, and the Alchemist, his erstwhile enemy. The cat’s tail lashed. The old man’s rags fluttered in the onshore wind. Then the Great Cat sprang upon them both without mercy or favour, and stripped them bare in the jaws of love, and they cried out in their pain.
At last She released them.
The boy’s name was Isaac. He was tall for his age, and rather awkward in his movements; he wore sailcloth knee-breeches and a full white linen shirt somewhat scruffy about the neck. His face was alive with curiosity, and he had a high opinion of himself. The cat had a high opinion of itself too. It was a black barn-cat the size, as the boy would often boast, of a horse. He had called it Hobbe because it was the very devil with a rat. It was still in possession of both its eyes, the unearthly green tapetum lucidum of which had already given him an interesting idea or two about light. They were an intelligent pair, inseparable and full of trouble.
‘There!’ laughed the Great Cat.
‘At the foot of this hill,’ She said, ‘you will find a harbour, and a new day dawning.’ She said, ‘Go and see what you can find. Boats for one and fish for the other!’
Hobbe ran out ahead with his tail up.
*
‘And now, little Father and Mother,’ said the Great Cat, ‘you have been patient long enough.’ She had drawn Egypt about her again like a mantle. They could hear white doves flutter in her voice. ‘Like your ancestors before you, you accepted a hard task. You accepted it out of faith and goodwill, not even knowing that it was a task. It was a life, and you lived it, and much will come of that.’
Despite the spell of the Mother’s voice, Pertelot stared around wildly. Where had her children gone?
‘Did you think,’ the Great Cat went on, ‘that, having asked this of you, I would steal your kittens too?’ She laughed. ‘Well, perhaps I would,’ She said. ‘They’re perfect enough—’
‘I have always thought so,’ agreed the King of Cats complacently.
‘Rags!’ his wife admonished him.
‘—but watch!’ finished the Great Cat.
There was a curious twist of light in the air beside her. Out of it to stand by her side, deep-chested and lithe, its legs impossibly thin and elegant, its strange long back curving away from high pointed shoulder to rangy haunch, came the Golden Cat. Its eyes were unearthly.
‘Here they are,’ She said. ‘I give them back to you, three kittens in one. Odin the hunter, with his dance of death. Isis, who stands for resurrection, protection, reincarnation, and song enough to wake the dead. Impetuous Leonora, whose joy is in the moment: she dances the dance of life. This is your child and mine,’ She told the King and Queen. ‘It is the child of the time to come. The birth of this cat was planned long before the white ship landed your forbears at Tintagel. See how it will run, through all the next age of the world. Look!’ She said. ‘Oh, look!’ A highway was opened before them, and the Golden Cat ran away down it with long, graceful, tireless strides. At the same time, it was somehow running towards them, shifting and changing into Odin and Isis and Leonora Whitstand Merril as it came.
‘Mother!’ cried Leonora. ‘Tell Odin I was right! They were down there all the time!’
‘This is the problem with daughters,’ said Ragnar Gustaffson. ‘They always have to quibble.’
‘I have no answer to that,’ the Great Cat told him. ‘I was a daughter myself.’ And She began to fade away into her own dream. ‘Your lives were broken, but now they are mended,’ She told them. ‘Run!’ She said. ‘I will always be with you now. Run and eat!’ She said, ‘You are all Golden Cats.’
And then, when only her voice was left in the jasmine-scented air, barely distinguishable from the soft sound of water in the hidden gardens of the Nile, She advised them gravely, ‘Go to your beautiful friend. He looked after you well, and now you must look after him.’
*
They found him a little way away, half in and half out of a puddle of rainwater in a hollow in the bedrock. He was stretched out less like a cat than the long white pelt of one, unmarked but for a little blood around each nostril, and a tarry deposit at the corner of each eye, for all the world as if he had been crying. His mouth was open on a tired snarl – or perhaps it was only a sigh of regret. Mercurius Realtime DeNeuve, an accidental prince from a pet shop in the city, had fought the whirlwind once too often and burned out his great Burmilla heart. The dustbin fox sat by him, looking angrily out to sea, and would not speak when the King and Queen approached; while the distraught Cy walked up and down, up and down, repeating, ‘This is no good. Jack. It’s just no good.’
Then Ragnar Gustaffson Coeur de Lion stepped forward. The New Black King had fought a storm or two in his life, and, though his reputation rested elsewhere, he knew how it felt. But more: he never allowed another cat to be sickly for long. It was a point of honour with him.
‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘What’s this?’
And, with the rough care of a mother with kittens, he began to clean Tag’s face. He cleaned the nose. He cleaned the tear-streaks below the eyes. Then he began to pass his tongue in long, powerful sweeps across the whole head and down the silver fur. A drowsy calm filled the watching animals. That tongue had eased away every kind of injury, spread warmth into young pains and old bones. The New Black King had halted sepsis and brought forth hale kittens from breech births. He could feel along the most elusive line of life, and follow it as he followed the wildest of roads. He was the King! He could find the most benighted of souls and lead it home. Ragnar could heal the sick.
But though he licked and licked he could not wake the dead.
He raised his head exhaustedly.
‘I cannot understand you,’ he told his old friend. ‘I don’t know where you’ve gone.’
The tabby pushed her way between them.
‘You let me down!’ she cried. ‘You let me down!’ It wasn’t clear which one of them she meant. She touched the side of Tag’s face gently with one paw. ‘Come back!’ she said. ‘You come back now!’ For the twentieth time since she had found him, she shut her eyes, put her mouth close to his nose, and exhaled sharply into his nostrils.
Nothing.
‘This stuff is broke,’ she said, looking up at Ragnar and Pertelot as if it was their fault. ‘I was woke by it myself enough times before. Now it just don’t work, when I know it should!’
‘Nothing works,’ the fox said.
Without turning round, he added, ‘Life can be very remote. It can hide somewhere very deep inside. But a fox can always smell it.’
‘We know this,’ said the Queen.
‘I cannot smell any life in him. I’m sorry.’
‘You should be ashamed to say that,’ the Queen told him. ‘You shouldn’t give up. He is your friend.’
‘I’ve lost other friends,’ the fox responded darkly.
Pertelot didn’t know how to argue against this. ‘The world is new!’ was all she could think to say. ‘Why is this happening, when the world is new!’ She looked around rather desperately, as if she expected the Great Cat to come back and help them.
‘I think the world is us,’ said her husband gently.
‘Oh Ragnar, Ragnar!’
During this exchange, Cy the tabby had been prowling restlessly up and down, stopping every so often to knead the bleak ground by Tag’s head, while she purred in a confused way.
Now she whispered, ‘Don’t die, Ace. I got something so good to tell you. Don’t be dead.’
The fox got up and tried to comfort her, and all four of them stood looking down at Tag for a long time. ‘I remember when he was a kitten,’ Loves A Dustbin said. ‘He was in trouble the moment he left the house. But he never stopped loving the world.’ At last, they became uncomfortable and embarrassed, as animals often do in the presence of death, and began to walk away. Even the tabby appeared to forget why she had come.
‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’ said a familiar voice from behind them.
They turned back in astonishment.
For an instant, they seemed to see a kind of fluttering transparency in the air around him, like very fine gold leaf applied to a window, so that the light shines through it. Here and there, as it wrapped him round, the shapes of cats seemed to coalesce for a split second – a tail, a muzzle, the tilt of a long tufted ear – only to vanish again. If they were cats, they were moving too fast to see: and it was clear that only a moment ago they had been moving even faster. The Golden Cat! As they watched it faded and vanished – with a flicker of laughter which might have been Leonora’s – and suddenly three large gold-furred kittens had appeared, separating moment by moment from each other; and between them was Tag, yawning and shaking himself, examining in surprise his sodden underfur. No cat likes to wake up in a puddle. If he seemed a little frail – well, he had faced the storm, and reached inside for the last ounce of himself and given it away, and a cat is going to be tested by that. If he seemed a little vague, it sat well with his new demeanour. For, as his friends were quick to see, something more had happened to him while he was the White Tiger, the cat within the cat: Tag the kitten, still lost, still yearning for his old home, had slipped quietly away for ever. In his place stood the Majicou, forceful, dignified, full of hope and authority.
‘Don’t you want to know what it all meant?’
They gathered round him on the hilltop, and this is how he explained the things that happened to them—
*
‘It began with the defeat of the Alchemist,’ he said. ‘Something ended there: yet nothing was resolved. The Majicou and his enemy sank beneath Tintagel Head, where their struggles spun them like a huge dynamo in the darkness of the earth and the deep sea. There they remained. The weeks went by. The kittens thrived. Leonora Whitstand Merril insisted, “I hear them down there at night.” If we had listened to her then, and asked ourselves what to do, would things have been any different? Who can tell? What is certain is that neither of them could get the upper hand. Neither of them dared relinquish the struggle for more than a second or two. Yet both were preoccupied by their own thoughts. The Alchemist, who, in the instant of his downfall, had at last understood the meaning of what he had done, began to wonder how he might locate and destroy the Golden Cat. Majicou, while he had known all along that, for his old enemy, the moment of success would be the moment of defeat, had not expected to share it. Now, both of them realized that while the kittens remained alive, the Alchemist was not safe.
‘In that moment, it all began again.
‘Within the vortex, they began to use the wild roads, each in his way. They sent out proxies to do their work for them.
‘The Alchemist worked through human beings and animals – Kater Murr was one of his proxies, and there will have been others in every city in the world. Majicou was less successful at this, though, as he and his opponent spun and boiled along the bottom of the sea, he was able to enlist the services of Ray the fish, who subsequently befriended Cy. Hoping in his impatience and despair to speak more directly to us, he began to send us a message: the Triangular Sign…
‘Could they keep their thoughts and intentions from one another, those implacable enemies, as they struggled within the vortex? We can’t know. Item by item, they renewed their connection with the world above. It was a connection tenuous, intermittent, hard to control. Their plans could be blown awry by a strong wind. Only one thing remained hard and certain: where one went, the other must inevitably follow. What one tried to make, the other tried to undo. That was how things stood the day the first of the kittens disappeared.’
Tag was silent for a time, ordering his thoughts.
‘Even then,’ he went on, ‘I knew that something was wrong with the wild roads. That was how I put it, and how my proxies put it to me: “something wrong”.’
He laughed softly.
‘The scale of the disaster had already proved beyond me,’ he admitted. ‘In their effort to maintain themselves, Majicou and the Alchemist had begun to destroy the object of their original dispute. Day by day, the Old Changing Way was leached of its power. Soon, instead of giving, it began to take. Cats were dying. Roads led nowhere. The world shrank. At the same time, the Alchemist’s message – “Find and kill three golden kittens!” – was blurring fatally along the chain of proxies. Chaos and anger spread out like ripples. Men killed any cat they found; soon cats were killing cats. It was in this climate of terror that human proxies took Odin, returning a few nights later for his sister.
‘The rest we know.’
There was a silence among the animals.
Then Ragnar Gustaffson spoke up.
‘We may know what happened,’ he said. ‘But we do not know the meaning of it. The Sign, for instance. And as for the animal called Kater Murr—’
‘Ah,’ said Tag, ‘the unfortunate Kater Murr! Driven by his hatred of Uroum Bashou, he taught himself to read, and reading entrapped him. Long before Leonora and I first visited Uroum Bashou’s domain, Kater Murr had been lured to the room beneath the copper dome. There he became the Alchemist’s proxy. All his powers came from that direction, and in the end they burned him up. That cat was never more than misled. In a way I am indebted to him. My eyes were opened by our encounter in the Alchemist’s house. But Kater Murr was never more than a doorkeeper.’
‘Twice he could have killed Leonora,’ objected the King.
‘The first time he was too busy boasting to her,’ said Tag. ‘Just as, later, he was too busy killing his old master out of spite.’ His voice turned cold and hard. ‘Kater Murr was only a cat that tried to walk like a man.’
There was silence.
‘And the Triangular Sign?’ Tag prompted himself softly. ‘You should be proud to wear that, Ragnar. It is the Sign of Three.’ He considered this for a time. Then he went on. ‘Imagine yourself in the dark – beneath the earth or under the sea. You cannot speak. You dare not stop struggling. You are locked forever in the coils of your own duality. Your enemy is you. You are your enemy. Your sole means of speech is through a fisherman; or a fish. The Majicou could only try to tell us what he had always known. None of Pertelot’s kittens was the one the Alchemist sought. This wasn’t some small piece of magic: to change the world for ever, all three would be needed. That is what the Sign meant: three sides for three kittens and the three different qualities, the three interwoven dances, which would bring down the Great Cat – that great rising sun at the apex of the pyramid. What seems so obvious to us as we stand here now, he was trying to tell us all along. The fish took you to Egypt so that you could read the old story, how Atum-Ra and Isis were beloved of the Great Cat. Majicou hoped that, of all of us, you two had the best chance of understanding. He may have tried to be there to talk to you himself: if so, he brought the whirlwind down on you instead. He was yoked to it: so how could he not?’
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I shall miss the Majicou. He taught me as well as he could in the time he had left to him. He fought a long hard fight for cats, and I don’t believe he foresaw – though he foresaw a great deal – how he would suffer before She released him from his task.’
Pertelot Fitzwilliam shivered.
‘The Great Cat was behind it all,’ she said.
Tag relied, ‘The Great Cat is always behind it all.’
‘It is over now, though.’
‘It is.’
‘Things are made anew.’
‘They are.’
‘You looked after us well, Mercury.’
‘We looked after each other, Pertelot Fitzwilliam.’
*
Even as this exchange took place, the green dream was settling into the world. Sometimes it was visible, sometimes it was not. One moment, the hilltop was bare. The next it had been clothed with soil, and the soil put forth shoots like flames, and the shoots put forth flowers as you looked. The coats of the cats shone with health. The fox looked like a beacon in the morning. He was so full of his own foxy life that sailors could smell him out to sea.
The dream coiled down through the waking village. Pelargoniums ran riot in their pots as it passed, and the steep little lanes were full of the smells of sea lavender and thyme. It glittered in the fish-scales on the harbour wall, and laughed to find the tubby coloured boats. It flowed in and out of the chip shop, and across the sea front to the sand. It gathered at the tideline, then hurled itself across the sea!
Everything it touched was changed, even the air. Everything it touched was healed. In New Orleans, Eponine Lafeet felt the green dream in the air and smiled. It had come at last, as she had foreseen. Green world. Ripples went out, out, out, and touched it all. They touched the Last Free Cats of the French Quarter, who were delighted to find human hands outstretched to them once more in alley and restaurant, and crawfish back on the menu. Red and Téophine rolled in the sunlight and in that moment knew the kittens of their future. They touched Shine the Mule – fragrant grass sprang up in the Elysian Fields around her. They shyly touched the body of Uroum Bashou – the old hero was plush and velvet among his books in green dawn light! They touched the Winfield Farm laboratory, where a riot of jungle vegetation had already grown over the examination table and choked the rusting cages, and dangerous new feline shadows stood guard motionlessly in the arboreal gloom to make sure human beings never took it back. The same ripples touched Cottonreel and the beautiful Amelie, looking out hopefully across the water-meadows for what would come. They touched the chicken hutch where a fat tabby called Stilton turned comfortably in his sleep and whispered, ‘You get a lot if you’re a cat.’
The green dream touched all these things, and passed on round the world.
*
Now the King and Queen – followed in stately, measured procession by Cy and Tag, while the dustbin fox brought up the rear, his pink tongue flapping like a yard of ribbon as he stared about in amazement at the new morning – made their way down to the ruins of the oceanarium. The fish-tank had survived against all odds, and was now laced with grape ivy and convolvulus. Down through the water struck shafts of sunshine so massy and palpable that the fishes seemed to turn like dancers between the columns of a temple. Honeysuckle and clematis wound the treads of the spiral stair. Ragnar and Pertelot trod and purred and kneaded. They felt that they had survived against the odds too. To mark this event, and give it its proper weight, they circled the fish-tank three times; and the Golden Cat twined itself between them as they went. Now it had three selves, now it had one. Isis, Odin and Leonora Whitstand Merril merged and flickered into a single tall lean unfocused shape which wound back and forth between the King and Queen like living gilded banner.
*
All this time, Sealink and Mousebreath had been rather shyly standing to one side, each eyeing the other but making no overtures. They were both so changed by their experiences they hardly recognized one another. He could not believe how tired she looked, or how different she smelled. She couldn’t quite get to grips with the Animal X in him. It had been long hard roads for both of them, and there were many stories left to be told, and neither of them understood just yet the things that had happened. So they stood around on opposite edges of the celebration, full of awkwardness, separated by death and adventure and perhaps pride; and she was a little angry with him for not coming forward and making things easy, and he was a little angry with her for the same reason; and both of them were a little afraid.
‘Won’t you come and talk to him?’ suggested Tag to the calico.
‘Tell you the truth, honey, I can’t quite believe he’s there,’ said Sealink, in rather too loud a voice. ‘Last time I hear anything, he’s dead. Now he comes back with a split personality.’
She washed her tail energetically.
‘These tomcats. They can’t never make up their minds.’
‘At least come and talk to him.’
*
‘Won’t you come and talk to her?’ the Queen begged Mousebreath. ‘She’s missed you so.’
‘I’m a bit shy, to tell the truth,’ said Mousebreath. ‘Thing is,’ he added, after some thought, ‘I bin someone else for so long. It changes you.’
‘At least come and talk to her.’
*
In the event, the calico boxed his ears.
‘You had no call to die on me like that!’ she said. ‘No call at all.’
Mousebreath studied her speculatively, a glint of amusement in his blue eye.
‘I didn’t have no option,’ he said. ‘At the time.’
And, rather to the surprise of everyone, he stood up on his hind legs and gave her a couple of good cuffs in return. She hissed and narrowed her eyes and backed away an inch or two.
‘You were never any good for anything but the two Fs anyway,’ she accused him.
‘I never heard you complain about that.’
She thought it over.
‘But honey, how could you? I mean just die on me?’ she said.
‘Well,’ he conceded, ‘it was a bit sudden, I suppose.’
‘But you won’t do it again?’
‘Come here,’ suggested Mousebreath. ‘No, come here close an’ listen.’
‘What?’
‘This might come as a surprise, but I feel I got to tell you. I always loved you when you was angry.’
Sealink gave him an oblique look.
‘Why, you ain’t changed a bit, you ol’ bastard,’ she laughed. ‘Oh hon, I missed you so!’ She looked out over the sea, remembering Louisiana, and the old life – with all its disappointments and splendours – she had closed the doors on back there. ‘I got a thousand things to tell you,’ she sighed.
Mousebreath winked his unreliable eye.
‘I got one or two things to tell you, too,’ he admitted, thinking of Amelie.
And they fell to rubbing heads, and rolling about like kittens in the sun and the smell of the sea. After that, they walked off together for a while, talking ten to the dozen, down through the village towards the harbour. Their tails were straight up and tip-curled. Her great furry haunches rolled like a ship at sea; he gave them an appreciative look. The sidelong glances she cast him when she thought he wasn’t looking would change your views on love. His mismatched eyes caught every one of them; and you could hear him say:
‘It’s nice ter come back from the dead. I might do it more often.’
‘You’ll get the chance, if you ain’t true.’
*
The Dog had watched all these events with puzzlement. There had been some bad weather in the night. You couldn’t deny that. Cats had made a lot of fuss about the weather and run about shouting at one another: you couldn’t deny that, either. There is never any sense in courting trouble: the Dog had done the sensible thing and waited it all out in a doorway in the village. Even so, it had got wet. Now it waited again until Sealink and Mousebreath were safely out of sight, then set itself to limp slowly to the top of the hill. There it cast about. If its eyes were no longer good, its nose was still reliable.
‘A dog can take its time about things,’ it thought as it went. ‘That is another thing about a dog.’
After several false casts it found Tag, and stood there panting a little in front of him, the smell of its coarse damp coat overpowering the odours of honeysuckle and convolvulus. Its body rocked backwards and forwards.
‘You are the New Majicou,’ it said.
‘I am.’
‘I do not know the names of all these other cats.’
‘No.’
‘They look like cats to me, whatever you want to call them. One cat looks very much like another.’
‘Cats are cats and dogs are dogs.’
‘True,’ acknowledged the Dog. It sighed. ‘At Cutting Lane you asked for news of two golden kittens,’ it said.
‘That was a long time ago.’
The Dog ignored him.
‘Well there are two golden kittens here,’ it said. ‘In fact there are three.’
Tag stared.
‘I knew that already,’ he said.
‘Nevertheless I found them,’ the Dog pointed out. ‘For a long time,’ it added for the sake of accuracy, ‘there was only one.’
‘You might say,’ said Tag, also for the sake of accuracy, ‘that there was only one here now.’
The Dog stood for a long moment, shifting its weight about between its three tired old legs. Then it said, ‘A dog is an animal you can rely on. I was asked to find two golden kittens, and I did. You said I would have a reward.’ It had borne the events of a long life with stoicism, asking itself at every turn, ‘What can you do about the weather?’ and answering, ‘You can’t do anything about the weather.’ Now it told itself, ‘A dog is an animal that can grow old and still present a plausible face to things. A dog endures, rain or shine – that is one thing about a dog. A dog deserves its reward. That is one of the other things.’
‘You promised me,’ it said.
Tag had no idea what to say. He looked at the Dog. The Dog looked back.
‘I don’t know what to give you,’ said Tag.
‘The Old Majicou fulfilled his promises,’ commented the Dog.
At that moment, there was a disturbance in the oceanarium tank. Between the skeins of ivy and masses of white convolvulus flowers, shoals of mackerel and herring could be seen darting this way and that in unsynchronized panic. Suddenly the water had turned the colour of ocean-floor mud, through the greyish swirls and coils of which could be discerned an eye as big as an orange and as expressionless as a black beard; a white wing-tip upcurved; and gill-slits the size of intakes on a jumbo jet (as Sealink might have put it). Something large had arrived.
‘It’s Ray!’ cried Cy the tabby. ‘He’s back!’
To the bemused Dog she confided, ‘When Ray gets here, that’s when the party really begins.’ She added, ‘He’s a fish, but he’s, like, also my friend.’ And she ran up the spiral stairs to welcome him.
Below, a curious silence prevailed. The Dog continued to stare expectantly at Tag. The King and Queen stared puzzledly at the Dog. Then the Dog seemed to become aware of the fox. It studied him as closely as it could. It said, ‘This is not a cat. But it is not a dog, either.’
Loves A Dustbin hung his tongue out amusedly.
‘Don’t get trapped in simple oppositions,’ he advised, ‘if you intend to enjoy life’s rewards.’
Hearing only the word ‘reward’, the Dog forgot him instantly and turned its attention back to Tag. Just then, Cy came down the stairs. In five minutes, all the joy had gone out of her.
‘What is it?’ said Tag.
‘Oh, I love that Ray-guy, but sometimes he’s just so irritating. I ask him to the wedding, but no, he wants to go on somewhere else. I say, “Where’s that?” He says, “Just down the road.” I say, “Oh yes?” And he says, “It’s the stars. Little Warm Sister. It’s out among the stars!” I go, “What? What’s out there?” Tag, he can’t even say what! So I go, “No way, Ray, I never liked it much the first time.” There’s nothing out there but cold and like that.’
She shook her head.
‘These fish!’ she said.
‘I would have stayed here anyway,’ she told Tag. ‘Even without the special reasons I got now.’ Nevertheless, she seemed bereft. ‘I’ll miss that Ray, when he goes swimming back to the stars for kicks. I never had a fish for a friend before. I just ate them.’
‘He’ll come back,’ Tag reassured her.
‘Oh yes, in another thousand years.’
Suddenly Tag had an idea.
‘Ask him not to leave for a moment,’ he told her.
To the Dog, he said, ‘I am the Majicou.’
‘You are the New Majicou,’ the Dog corrected him. ‘I liked the old one better.’
Tag heard Loves A Dustbin laughing quietly.
‘I promised you a reward,’ he went on, ‘and this is it. You can go to the stars with the big fish.’
‘I would like something to eat, too.’
There was a silence.
‘Ah,’ said Tag.
Pertelot Fitzwilliam stepped forward. ‘Mercury,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure you should be sending this animal to the stars at all. You certainly cannot send it unfed. Remember that the world is made anew.’
Tag stared at her.
‘I don’t think we’ve got anything to give him,’ he said. ‘Wait, Ace!’ said Cy the tabby, ‘I got this idea!’ And she began to burrow through the dense vegetation at the base of the oceanarium, wriggling into the space between the tank and the concrete floor until only her bottom showed. After some excited scrabbling about, she backed carefully out of the convolvulus, dragging a single bicycle spoke.
The Dog studied this item without much hope.
‘Look at that!’ encouraged Cy.
But the Dog concluded, ‘A dog does not eat bicycle spokes.’
‘More fool you,’ said the tabby; and she was back under the tank like a shot. In quick succession, she brought out one condensed-milk can (empty); one plastic clothes-peg; and two small fragile white shells. After some thought she added an empty crisp packet from the floor of an arcade, ancient breadcrusts she had won off a herring-gull. She pulled out a square of disintegrating linoleum, and part of a broken picture-frame glimmering with gold and cinnabar paint. She brought out a deflated tennis-ball, one white piano key, and a bunch of plastic anemones. The Dog examined each of these items as it appeared, giving them full and proper attention. But in all honesty it could only shake its head, and say, ‘Dogs don’t eat that.’
‘Neither do cats,’ said Tag, in a heartfelt way which made everyone look at him.
‘I don’t know what people have got against my food,’ said Cy angrily. ‘Well, there’s one more thing, Ace—’ here she gave Tag a significant look ‘—then the cupboard’s closed.’ And she drew forth her chef-d’oeuvre: two squares of milk chocolate still in their blue foil wrapper.
‘This is all we have,’ said the Queen to the Dog, with the generosity of the very royal.
The Dog sniffed the chocolate.
‘Mm,’ it said. ‘That’s nice.’
With its great blunt claws and yellow teeth, it stripped off the silver paper, its muzzle creasing up, its lips wrinkling. Then it ate the chocolate. It ate very slowly and carefully, so as to prolong the sensation as long as it could, looking up at the cats every so often and chewing with its mouth open. Then, with equal care, it licked the ground where the chocolate had been, relishing every crumb. Its energetic tongue propelled the silver paper into the air, where, caught by a breeze from the sea, it seemed to turn into a small butterfly with blue wing-tips. Cy chased off after it, clapping her paws in the air. She looked like a kitten again. The Dog watched her with something like appreciation on its face.
‘Well?’ asked Tag. ‘Was that good?’
The Dog considered.
‘It was. It was good. One thing about a dog – a dog knows about chocolate. Now,’ it said, ‘for the stars.’
It got itself turned about in an almost lively way on its three legs, and stared up the spiral steps. Its gaze carried on past the rusty viewing platform and into the sky.
‘This is a good reward,’ it said to Tag. ‘Anything could be out there.’ It lowered its voice. ‘I would never admit this to any cat but you: but it can get boring, being so dependable.’
With great effort, blunt claws clicking and scraping, it made its way up the spiral staircase to the viewing platform. There it stood panting for a moment, looking around as if it might change its mind. Then it seemed to shrug. There was a flash brighter than the sun. The oceanarium water thickened to pearl. When it cleared again, fish and dog had gone.
*
After that, things were quiet. Later there would be stories to compare, boasts to be made, tales to be told. Everyone would catch up. Everything would be put in perspective, so that it could be narrated to kittens as the story of the Golden Cat. For now, though, they all seemed quite tired.
Sealink and Mousebreath, returning from the harbour, argued desultorily about the places they would visit when they started travelling again. The fox scratched himself in the warm sun, thinking that if he found the right vixen he could still settle down and have cubs.
‘I’m not too old,’ he thought. ‘I would have a lot to pass on, especially about Chinese food – what to eat and what not to eat, and so on.’
And the King and Queen of Cats, about whom the whole world had pivoted for a while, had simply curled up together and gone to sleep. (Their children never slept. It was their delight to weave the bright tapestry. But that is another story.)
As for Tag, he was tired too. He looked at his friends with love. ‘We’re all just cats in the sun now,’ he thought. He remembered himself as a kitten. ‘All the way from a cloth mouse under the Welsh dresser,’ he thought, ‘to this.’ He sat with Cy, washing her ears companionably, and after a while he said, ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’
She purred and rubbed her cheek against his.
‘You got to guess, Ace,’ she said.
A white gull swept over the harbour and sped away inland.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
The next book in the Wild Road series is available now
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