Gabriel king, p.1
Gabriel King, page 1
THE GOLDEN CAT
By Gabriel King
Published by Del Rey Books:
THE WILD ROAD
THE GOLDEN CAT
Copyright © 1999 by Gabriel King
For all the cats that have died in the name of science. May they rest in peace.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks to everyone who has provided inspiration and support during the writing of The Golden Cat; but particularly to Russ Galen, Veronica Chapman, Kuo-Yu Liang, and Eleanor Lang—and to all those who care for the feral cats of America. Thanks also to Xavier for help with the Cajun French!
Summoned or not, the god will come
From the inscription carved above the door of Carl Gustav Jung’s house
Legend tells of a Golden Cat, a creature of great and mystical power, sought by humans through the age. One desperate seeker came perilously close. His name was the Alchemist.
This man pursued the Golden Cat for three hundred years, prolonging his mortal span with magic distilled from the cats he bred and discarded in his quest, until finally he managed to procure the Queen of Cats, the beautiful Pertelot Fitzwilliam, from whom the precious kitten was destined to be born.
And thus began a terrible time for catkind: for the Alchemist was determined on his course, and with his magic and his army of alchemical cats he pursued the Queen and her consort, Ragnar Gustaffson, through the wild roads and across the land. Had it not been for the courage and resourcefulness of the friends they encountered in their flight— a silver cat known simply as Tag; a brave fox and a strutting magpie; the travelling cat, Sealink, and her heroic mate, Mousebreath; and especially for the sacrifice of the Alchemist’s own cat, the wise old Majicou—the fate of all Felidae would even now hang in the balance.
But on the headland above sacred Tintagel, where the first royal cats forged the first wild roads, a momentous battle took place. At the height of that battle, the Queen’s kittens were born: but even as the Alchemist strove to take them, so the Majicou struck. Together they fell; down from the cliffs, into the depths of the ocean; then up they soared into the radiant dome of the sky. Then, in a last despairing gesture, bound together by the hatred of hundreds of years, they plunged back down to Tintagel Head, where, in an eruption of dirt and vegetation, and a hot mist of vaporized rock, they drove themselves into the earth; and the earth sealed itself over them for ever; or so it seemed…
From The Ninth Life of Cats
*
PROLOGUE
A large gate tower once controlled access to the city from the east. Its excavated remains, reduced by time to seven or eight courses of pale gray stone, lie on the north bank not far upriver from the Fantastic Bridge. They are railed off so that human beings cannot fall in and hurt themselves. People are always to be seen here, whatever the weather. They walk about with that aimless human vigor, narrowing their eyes at things and talking their dull talk. They stare down into the asymmetric mass of the old tower. They boast about its walls—so sturdy and thick, packed with chalk ballast—as if they had built them only the other day. They draw one another’s attention to the broken arrow slits, the rusty bolts, the chisel marks on the ancient stone, the doorstep clearly visible after all these years, polished by the passage of ten thousand feet.
The keep itself has a mossy, pebbled floor. Weeds infest its inner ledges, where the walls are streaked with moisture. Coins glint here and there: people have thrown them in for what they call in their dull, human way “luck.”
The children gaze down and, a little mystified by the safety rails, ask their parents, “Mommy, are there tigers in here?”
“No dear, that’s at the zoo,” the parents say. “The tigers are only at the zoo.”
One unseasonable day at the end of spring, a cat flickered briefly into existence in the ruins. He was large and muscular and had the look of an animal who lived outdoors. His coat was pale metallic gray, tipped with black and shading to pure white on his underside. It seemed to take up the dull, rainy light and give it back fourfold, so that he glowed amid the broken walls. His face, with its blunt muzzle and gently pointed ears, was decorated with patterns of a darker gray, and charcoal gray stripes broke up the outline of his forelegs. In that light his eyes were a strange, glaucous green, like old jade.
When he reappeared, it was perhaps four hundred yards away in Royal Mint Courtyard, where similar ruins were exposed beneath the brutal concrete support piers of the modern building. The air was colder here, the old stone drier, sifting down like all human history into rubble and dust.
He looked around.
Something?
Nothing.
In this way he quartered the city.
He knew how to keep himself to himself. It was an old habit. Unless he wanted them to, people rarely knew he was there. A toddler caught sight of him from a window high up in some flats. An old woman wearing too many coats and cardigans bent to offer her hand for him to sniff. “Here puss! Puss?” He was already gone. He was already looking westward from the open bell tower of a church ten miles away, across the shiny slate rooftops of a million human houses.
Was it here?
It was not.
What a place the city is, he thought, as he flickered out of the bell tower. Bad air, worse food, dirt everywhere. And noise, noise, noise. Human beings don’t care anymore. They’re tired. They daren’t admit to themselves what a mess they’ve made of things.
Now he stood in the middle of a narrow canal footbridge. From the northern bank, behind the moored barges, the sweet smell of hawthorn rolled toward him. Something moved on one of the moored barges, but it was only an ancient tabby barge cat with arthritic legs, fidgeting among the polished brass hardware under a line of damp laundry.
Was it here?
No.
He visited a burned-down warehouse in the docklands south of the river—appearing briefly at the base of a wall, nothing but a shadow, nothing but the filmy gray image of a cat caught turning away, dissolving back into the scaly old brickwork even as he arrived.
It wasn’t there, either.
He stood uncertainly in the gloom, as he always did when he came here. A few feeble rays of light fell across the blackened wooden floors. There were faint smells of dust and mice, even fainter ones of straw and animal feed; and—there!—beneath it all, the smell of a human with a broom, long ago. If he listened, he could hear the broom scrape, scrape, scrape at the rats’ nests of straw in the corners. He could smell a white sixteen-week kitten in a pen. The kitten was himself. Here he had taunted the rabbits and guinea pigs, eyed speculatively the captive finches. How they had chattered and sworn at him! He was always unsure what to feel about it all. Here his fortune had changed. Here the one-eyed black cat called Majicou had found him a home and changed his life forever. He still shivered to think of it.
“Majicou?” he whispered.
But he knew that the Majicou was long gone.
He sat down. He looked from corner to empty corner. He watched the motes dance in the rays of light. He thought hard. The color of his eyes changed slowly from jade to the lambent green of electricity.
“Something is wrong with the wild roads,” he told himself, “but I don’t know what it is.”
His name was Tag and he was the guardian of those roads. At Cutting Lane, they stretched away from him in every direction like a vibrant, sticky web. He felt them near. He felt them call his name. He got to his feet, looked around a moment longer, and shook himself suddenly. He vanished, leaving only a slight disturbance of the dust and a trail of footprints that ended in mid-stride.
Now it was dusk, the time of water. Soft rain, hushed as mist, fell on broadloom lawns sloping down to a river. Gray willows overhung the dimpled water. The cat called Tag emerged from a hook of filmy light beside the wooden boathouse. He paused for a moment to sniff cautiously the damp air, then made his way without haste through drifts of last year’s fallen leaves, across the lawns toward the great house above. It seemed to await him. He scampered across the terrace, up the broad flight of steps, halted on the worn wet flagstones to crane his neck up at the deserted iron-framed conservatories, derelict belvederes, and uncurtained windows that loomed above him, drawing his gaze all the way up to highest point of the roof, where the rain ran down a copper dome green with patina.
The great doors of the house lay open. He approached, then turned away to stare uncertainly across the twilight lawn, one paw raised. His own steps were visible as a dark meandering line in the wet glimmer of the grass. For a moment it seemed that he might retrace them, leave now, while he could…
It was an old house, and parts of it had been lived in until quite recently. Large high-ceilinged rooms, full of odds and ends and shrouded mirrors, opened off the gutted entrance hall. Tag fled in silence up the sweeping central staircase. His head appeared briefly between the mahogany banister rails of the mezzanine, as he looked back the way he had come. Up he went, until marble gave way to old dark wood, the stairwells narrowed to the width of a human torso, and the soft sounds of his progress were absorbed by swathes of cobweb stretched like rotten cheesecloth across every corner. He went up until he stood at the top of the house, at the entrance to the room below the copper dome. The door had jammed open two or three inches the last time it was used, but Tag knew he would not go in. He had tried and failed too many times before. In there, the copper dome brooded over a gathering night; in there, silence itself would bring an echo. Cold drafts flowed out even on a warm day, and the air was heavy with something that made his eyes water.
In there, the Alchemist had worked for centuries to make the Golden Cat.
Tag shivered.
He remembered Majicou again, and the events that had led, not so long before, to Majicou’s death on Tintagel Head. Nothing could be concluded from those events. While something had ended there, Tag knew, nothing had been solved. This new mystery was a part of it. If there was an answer, much of it lay before him, for the faint, cold stink of the Alchemist was draped across the room like a shroud. One day he would be forced to go in and seek it. For now, it was sufficient to be aware of that. Equally, he knew, time was not in infinite supply.
“Something is wrong with the wild roads,” he told himself again.
He turned and quickly descended all those stairs. Halfway down he thought he heard a voice calling him from a great distance. He stopped, lashed his tail, and half turned back, though he was sure the voice hadn’t come from above. It was so faint he couldn’t tell who it was, yet so familiar it almost spoke its own name.
It was full of urgency.
Part One
Things Fall Apart
Chapter One
A KINDLE OF KITTENS
The dog fox known to his friends as Loves a Dustbin lay in the late-afternoon shade of some gorse bushes on top of a Cornish headland, waiting for his old friend Sealink to make up her mind.
Long-backed, reddish, and brindled, he was strikingly handsome, until you saw that one of his flanks was completely gray, as if the fur there had somehow lost the will to retain its foxy hue. In another life, humans had shot him full of lead pellets; but for the support of his companions, his soul might have trickled away with the color of his coat. Now two of that gentle but determined company were no more, and the rest had begun to scatter. After such dangerous events, after a lifetime’s service in another specie’s cause, it was strange for him to lie here in the sunshine and be an ordinary fox again, bathed in the warmth of the returning spring, the confectionary scent of the gorse. He rested his head on his paws and settled down, prepared to wait as long as necessary. Patience was a luxury his other life had not encouraged. He intended to explore it to the full.
His mate, a vixen from the suburbs by the name of Francine, very good-looking and therefore uninclined to give and take, sighed boredly and said, “Must we stay with her?”
“I promised Tag,” he answered simply. “Anyway, she needs the company.”
After a moment he admitted, “I know she’s difficult to get on with.”
At this, the vixen sniffed primly. Loves a Dustbin contemplated her out of the corner of his eye. She really was quite fine. And the smell of her, along the cliff-top fields in the dusk or early morning! He would go anywhere for that smell.
“It’s been a long, hard road for Sealink,” he observed.
“Life’s a long, hard road for all of us,” said Francine, unaware perhaps that life had been rather kind to her so far, “with one thing or another all the way. Why should she make so much of it?” And, tawny eyes narrowed against the sun, she stared hard at the sturdy figure of Sealink, who was sitting perilously close to the edge of the cliff and looking vaguely but steadfastly out to sea. Every so often she blinked or her ears flexed as if calibrating the onshore breeze. Other than these small, precise movements, she showed no signs of life. Every line in her body spoke of deep preoccupation. This served to further irritate Francine, who said, “I have never understood your fondness for felines. Foxes have plenty to contend with in this world without having to bother themselves with cats, too.” Then she added so quietly that Loves a Dustbin thought he might have misheard her, “These cats make such a meal of it all.”
“Have a heart, Francine,” he appealed. “She’s sad, that’s all.”
A wind-rinsed sky full of wheeling gulls, sunlight glittering far out on the water, sea shooshing inexorably back and forth: the day itself seemed to be urging Sealink to forget the things she had seen and done, the things she blamed herself for and couldn’t change.
Time had passed since the battle with the Alchemist had left the grass of the cliff tops west of here scarred and scorched. More time, still, since her mate, that old bruiser, Mousebreath, had lost his own fight for life in some nameless part of the English countryside, borne down by a score of alchemical cats. Most of them had been among the deluded creatures who subsequently hurled themselves off the headland to fuel their master’s unnatural powers. But Sealink had felt no satisfaction in that—not even when days later she had looked over the cliff and seen them there, a sodden mass of fur lining the shore as the tides pressed them gently but pur- posefully into the shingle. She had only been able to think, Where was I when he needed my help? Somewhere out at sea, bobbing up and down on a boat with Pengelly and Old Smoky the fisherman. Fulfilling some damn ancient prophecy. Helping a foreign queen get to Tintagel Head and give safe and timely birth to the very kittens who were the cause of all this tragedy.
It had been difficult for her to mask her pain over these last weeks; but most of the time none of her companions had been watching her, anyway. They were all bursting with relief and optimism. They had, after all, defeated the Alchemist. A few domestic cats and a dog fox had prevailed against appalling odds. They were still alive! They had new lives to make! Tag and Cy, reunited, chased and bit each other like youngsters. Ragnar Gustaffson, King of Cats, cornered whoever would listen and described in considerable detail his adventures on the wild road. Francine the vixen rubbed her head against Loves a Dustbin and promised him a life filled with Chinese take-away and sunlit parkland.
And as for the foreign queen’s kittens…
One of them was the Golden Cat; one of them, when it grew up, would heal the whole hurt world. But who knew which of the three it was? No matter how hard she had stared at them, she hadn’t been able to tell one from another. Tiny and blind looking, they had pushed and suckled and mewed and struggled. They had all looked the same. Like any kittens she’d ever seen…
Like her own litter, in that other existence of hers, in another country, another world. I’m still alive, she thought. Perhaps they are, too. Her own kittens! In that moment, she knew that there was only one journey she could make now. The world could never be whole again; but she would damned well recover from it what she was owed. We make our lives, she thought. There ain’t no magic: just teeth-gritting, head-down, eye-watering determination. She stood up slowly, but with a new resolve, stretched her neck, her back, each leg in turn. She felt the warmth of the sun penetrate her coat.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
She turned to the two foxes. “Let’s move on, you guys,” she said. “No use waitin’ around here. Places to go, things to do. I’m goin’ home and find my kittens!”
Some way down the coast, another cat sat drowsing on a warm rock while her brood played on a sunlit headland above the sea.
Her fur was a pale rosy color. Her eyes were as deep as Nile water. Faint dapples and stripes made on her forehead a forgotten symbol. She was the Mau—a name that, in a language no longer used, means not just “cat” but “the Great Cat, or wellspring, that from which all else issues.” Only months before, she had been the pivot around which the whole world moved. Even now, when she blinked out at sea, it was as if the world was somehow peculiarly hers. The Mau’s blood was half as old as time, but she was newly a mother; and her husband, who was less in awe of her than he had been in those hectic days, called her Pertelot.
Pertelot’s kittens were named Isis, Odin, and Leonora Whitstand Merril—”Leo” for short—and after some encouragement they had run a mouse to earth in a patch of gorse that smelled like honey and cinnamon. The mouse—which, she reflected, had so far shown more acumen than all her children put together—had quietly retreated into the dense tangled stems and prepared to wait them out.
