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.

“Leonora,” advised the Mau quietly, “it would help if you kept still and didn’t keep rushing in like that.”

“I want to eat the mouse,” said Leonora.

“I know, dear. But you must remember that the mouse does not want to be eaten. She will not come out if she knows you are there.”

“I told you not to push in,” said Odin. “Remember what the rat told Tag: ‘It’s your dog that chases. Your cat lies in wait.’” Then, to his mother, “Tell her she’s no good at this.”

“None of you is very good at it yet.”

“She just wanted to get in first.”

“I did not.”

“You did.”

“I did not,” said Leonora. “I’m bored with the mouse now,” she decided. “It’s rather small, isn’t it?”

“You’re just no good at hunting.”

Leonora looked hurt. “I am.”

“You’re not.”

“I bite your head,” said Leonora.

The kitten Isis stood a little apart and watched her brother and sister squabble, making sure to keep one eye on the place where the mouse had disappeared. Isis had her mother’s eyes, dreamy and shrewd at the same time.

She suggested, “Perhaps if we went ‘round the back?”

The Mau blinked patiently in the sunlight. Her kittens perplexed her. They were already getting tall and leggy, quite fluid in their movements. They had no trace of their father’s Nordic boxiness; and, if the truth were told, they didn’t look much like Pertelot either. They had short dense fur a mysterious, tawny color. Every afternoon, in the long golden hours before sunset, the light seemed to concentrate in it, as if they were able to absorb the sunshine and thrive on it. “What sort of cats are they?” she asked herself. And, unconsciously echoing her old friend Sealink, “Which of them will be the Golden Cat?” As they grew, the mystery, much like their color, only deepened. Paradoxically, though, it was their less mysterious qualities that perplexed her most. The very moment of their birth had been so fraught with danger. The world had hung by a thread around them. Yet now…

Well, just look at them, thought Pertelot a shade complacently: you couldn’t ask for a healthier, more ordinary litter. Leonora, suiting actions to words, had got quite a lot of Odin’s head in her mouth. Odin, though giving as good as he received, had a chewed appearance and was losing his temper. Claws would be out soon. The Mau shook herself.

“Stop that at once,” she ordered.

She said, “Isis has had a very sensible idea.”

Leo and her brother jumped to their feet and rushed off around the gorse bush, shouting, “My mouse!”

“No, my mouse!”

Isis followed more carefully. The Mau listened to them arguing for a few seconds, then yawned and looked out to sea. In a minute or two, if she thought they had worked hard enough, she might go and catch the mouse for them. For now it was nice to rest in the warm sun. She lay down, gave a cursory lick at her left flank, and fell asleep. She dreamed as she often did, of a country she had never seen, where soft moony darkness filled the air between the palm trees along a river’s glimmering banks. At dawn, white doves flew up like handkerchiefs around the minarets; a white dove struggled in her mouth. Then suddenly it was dark again, and the bird had escaped, and she was alone. “Rags?” she called anxiously, but there was no answer. All around her whirled an indistinct violence, the darkness spinning and churning chaotically, as if the very world were tearing itself apart.

“Rags!” she called, and woke to the warm air enameled with late afternoon, to the sound of a voice not her own, also crying for help. Rounding the gorse bushes, she found the two female kittens distraught. There was no sign of the male. On one side short upland turf, luminous in the declining sun, fell gently away to the cliff at the edge of Tintagel Head. On the other, the dark mass of gorse smoked away inland, aromatic, mysterious with flowers. “Quickly now,” she ordered the kittens, “tell me what has happened!”

They stared helplessly at her. Then Isis began to run back and forth in a panic, crying, “Our brother is gone! Our brother is gone!”

Pertelot thrust her head into the gorse. “Odin!” she called into the dusty recessive twilight between the stems. “Come out at once. It’s very wrong of you to tease your sisters like this.” No answer. Nothing moved. She ran to the cliff and looked down. “Odin? Odin!” Had he tumbled over the edge? Could she see something down there? Only the water stretching away like planished silver into the declining sun. Only the sound of the waves on the rocks below.

If you had been in Tintagel town that early summer evening, you might have seen a large black cat half-asleep in a back street in a bar of sun. He was a wild-looking animal, robust and muscular, who weighed seventeen pounds in his winter coat, which had just now molted enough to reveal stout, cobby legs and devastating paws. His nose was long and wide, and in profile resembled the noseguard of a Norman helmet. His eyes were electric, his battle scars various.

He was Ragnar Gustaffson Coeur de Lion: not merely a king among cats but the King of Cats. No one went against him. His name was a legend along the wild roads for mad feats and dour persistence in the face of odds. But he was a great-hearted creature if a dangerous one. He exacted no tribute from his subjects. He gave more than he received. He was known to deal fairly and honestly with everyone he met, though his accent was a little strange.

Kittens loved him especially, and he loved them, pedigree or feral, sickly or well-set. He never allowed them to be sickly for long. One sweep of his great tongue was enough. He could heal as easily as he could maim. Toms and queens fetched their ailing children to him from all over town. There were no runts in Tintagel litters. There was barely a runny eye.

Everywhere Ragnar went, kittens followed him about with joy, imitating his rolling fighter’s walk. Dignified sixteen-week-olds led the way. Tiny excited balls of fluff, barely able to toddle, came tumbling along behind. Slowly, like a huge ship, he would come to rest, then turn and study them and muse with Scandinavian irony, “They all can learn how to be kings from Ragnar Gustaffson—even the females!”

This evening, though, he dozed alone, huge paws twitching occasionally as in his dreams he toured the wild roads, bit a dog, retraced some epic journey in the face of serious winter conditions. Suddenly, his head went up. He had heard something on the ghost roads, something Over There. Seconds later, a highway opened three feet up in the bland Tintagel air, and Pertelot Fitzwilliam of Hi-Fashion jumped out of nowhere followed closely by what remained of the royal family.

“Rags! Rags!” she was calling.

While Isis cried, “Our brother, Odin, is gone!”

For Sealink, Francine, and Loves a Dustbin, the next day started innocuously enough. They awoke to the sound of wood pigeons and the cawing of crows as the first light rose over the hill to shine through the trees like a great, splintered prism.

With a yawn, Sealink uncoiled herself from the depths of her feathery tail, and, shaking each leg out in turn, went off to find some breakfast. She was filled with a sense of anticipation, the prospect of new life, a new journey. Sealink was a traveling cat. But previously she had traveled without a goal, letting her watchword be “the journey is the life,” and going with the flow from America to Amsterdam, from Prague— which she pronounced to rhyme with vague—to Budapest, Constantinople, and the mystic East. But returning to New Orleans, place of her birth, to look for her kittens—well, that was altogether another kind of venture. It was a whole new experience, and that was just what a calico cat liked best.

Sniffing lazily around among fern and nettle, dog’s mercury and sorrel, she found herself daydreaming about Cajun shrimp and chicken gumbo, and thus it was more by luck than by judgment that she stumbled on a sleeping vole. She was just about to deliver the killing blow, when Francine the vixen woke up, saw that something nasty was going on, and raised her voice in disapproval.

The vole sat bolt upright, took one look at the hungry cat looming above it, and legged it down a convenient hole.

“Hot damn,” said Sealink.

Francine had grown up in the suburbs, where food came neither on the hoof nor out of trash cans but was reverently placed on trimmed lawns at owl light, at close of day, by children. In that well-planned zone between the wild and the tame, no one wanted to kill foxes. Where Francine had tumbled and played as a cub, the risk was less death than photography. Even though the badgers, those untamed civil engineers, were threatening it all by undermining people’s gardens and getting themselves a bad name, human beings were still out there every night with long lenses and photo-multipliers. In cubs this bred a certain sense of security, on the heels of which often followed a demanding temperament and, paradoxically, a less-than-satisfactory life. Francine knew what she wanted, and though she was aware of death, her idea of nature had never given it much room. Nature was trimmed once a week. It featured fresh rinds of bacon, orange-flavored yogurt, a little spicy sausage. It had neither the addictive jungly glitter of the city, nor the darkness of the wild. Darkness never fell in the suburbs; and everything that was there one day was there the next day, too. You had to face things, of course, but nothing could be gained by dwelling on them. A steely will gave you the illusion of control.

As a result, Francine divided the world into the wild— nasty—and the tame—nice. Wild food—live prey, the sort you caught yourself—was nasty. The scraps left out for you on lawns were nice. The people who prepared food like that were nice. People were, on the whole, Francine believed, nice. They were civilized. On the other hand, the animal roads— being wild by definition—were uncivilized and nasty. The primal state was not something Francine aspired to. What she did aspire to, Sealink suspected, was matriarchy. Francine wanted Loves a Dustbin back on familiar ground, where she could encourage him to “settle down.” She seemed an unlikely mate for him, given his dark history and adventurous life.

“I reckon he didn’t have too much choice in the matter” was Sealink’s assessment. “And once she’s given him the cubs, he’ll have even less. No more adventuring with cats.”

Particularly with cats like herself. Sealink had a distinct intuition that—as an attractive, intrepid, and unencumbered female, albeit of an entirely different species—she was herself encompassed by Francine’s definition of “nasty,” too, with plenty of room to spare.

This morning, she wasn’t disposed to be patient. She was hungry. Worse, she could hear the vole, safe underground, incapable with laughter as it boasted to its friends about her incompetence.

“Honey,” she told Francine, “I’m gonna try one more time here. Read my lips: You are frightening the damn food away.”

She lowered her voice.

“Okay?” she said sweetly.

“You call that food, do you?” said Francine unpleasantly.“Suburbanite.”

“Trollop.”

At which point, the dog fox intervened.

“Come on,” he said. “Bickering isn’t going to get you to Ponders End,” he told the vixen, “or you,” he said to Sealink, “back to your kittens. There’s a highway entrance here, and we’d better take it.”

Bitter and icy, the winds of the highways blew their fur the wrong way no matter in which direction they faced. All around, as far as the eye could see, ashen and inimical, stretched a landscape as old as time and just as forbidding. Sealink watched as Loves a Dustbin raised his long, intelligent head into the worst of the blast and listened intently. Beside him, Francine trembled, unable to accept the descent into the wild life. One moment she was an elongated, russet-coated thing with pointed muzzle and fennec ears; the next just an ordinary vixen again, full of fear, her eyes closed tight against the wind. After a moment, though, the road took her, and she gave herself up to it. She was running.

They were all running!

Powdered snow whirled and eddied around them, lit by a preternatural moon. Outside the wild roads, glimpsed briefly through the flurries, Sealink could see fragments of countryside skim past, sunlit and fragrant, the pulse of nature as slow as the heartbeat of a hibernating dormouse. Inside, shades of gray whirled and flowed, shadows upon shadows, as their muscles bunched and stretched, bunched and stretched, and they ate the ancient ground away stride by giant stride.

Sometime later—it seemed like hours, but how could you count time in a landscape without day and night, a world in which the sun shone through a haze, and the moon, shrouded by mist, hung always overhead?—Sealink could tell that they had covered a considerable distance. It was not just a sense of things shifting at speed but also a feeling of enervation, of weariness achieved by long effort. And just as she had recognized the leading edge of this fatigue, a debilitating exhaustion crashed down upon her, sweeping through her like a cold, dark wave.

The calico shook herself. She could never remember having felt so tired, particularly on the Old Changing Way, which channeled all the energy of the world. It was as if a hand had reached up through the earth and squeezed her heart. She could hardly breathe. The foxes had stopped, too.

There was a voice, too, distant yet powerful, then the stench of something fetid. The voice seemed for a moment closer, and Sealink thought she heard the words, “Got you!” Then the fabric of the wild road started to tear. Light from the ordinary world poured in like sand. The highway gave a great, galvanic convulsion, as if attempting to vomit, and suddenly Sealink and the foxes found themselves spun out of cold winds and icy plains into English woodland dappled with warm shade.

Sealink picked herself up and looked around.

“Damn! Ain’t never been spit out like that before.”

Twenty yards away the foxes stood, blinking bemusedly in the sunlight, looking down at something that appeared to have fallen out of the wild road with them.

It lay on its side at the foot of a beech tree, and it was bigger, even in death, than Sealink in life. Despite experience with the wildlife of fourteen countries, she had never before encountered its shaggy gray coat or striped face. She thought briefly of the raccoons of her native land. “Your raccoons, though,” she reminded herself, “don’t bulk up anywhere near so big. Anyhows, this thing ain’t got no tail.” Powerful claws lay drawn up under its body. Its face was a mask of terror, black lips drawn back defiantly from yellowed teeth. Its eyes were glazed. There was no sign of how it had come by its sudden demise. Black flies buzzed in lazy spirals in the air, and the exposed roots of the beech seemed to close loosely around the corpse like a human hand.

“Looks like it was good at life, this one,” Sealink said to Loves a Dustbin, who was sitting by the corpse as if he might deduce something from the angle of its head, the slack gape of its jaw.

“Yes,” he said.“So what exactly is it?”

The fox looked up at her, but before he could speak, Francine interrupted. “It’s a badger,” she told Sealink. “Haven’t you seen one before?”

“Nope.”

“Personally I never liked a badger. They’ve ruined it for everyone where I come from. I am surprised you’ve never seen one before, dear, you having traveled so far and wide—”

“Well, I’ll know him again,” Sealink promised—thinking to herself, I bet you love this. You know somethin’ I don’t—oh, I bet you love that.

“A badger, huh?”

“Just a dirty old badger,” Francine agreed complacently.

Loves a Dustbin gave her an odd look, then said, “We must have seen a dozen deaths like this since we left Tintagel.”

They had lain in the unlikeliest places, always at the outlet of their customary highways, among the trees of a peaceful copse, beside benign moorland streams—the inexplicable dead.

“What do you make of it, hon?” asked the cat.

The dog fox shook his head.

“It’s the wild roads,” he said simply. “There’s something the matter with them. I smell the hand of the Alchemist in this.”

“But the Alchemist is dead. I saw him die. Him and the Majicou, both.”

The fox shrugged. “There was always the chance that his magic would dominate the highways for a while. They’ll be cleansed by use.” But he seemed unconvinced by this explanation. He had a fox’s nose and an understanding of the Old Changing Way second only to that of his original master. Old evil has a thin, faded reek; evil newly done smells as pungent as dung. If anyone knew the difference between the two, it was Loves a Dustbin. “Perhaps it’s just some disease,” he said.

This caused Francine to step smartly away from the corpse.

The next morning promised better things. Sunlight crept down through the ghostly breaths of mist in the river valley and burned them away to a sheen on the grass. Birds called in the ash trees. The light was pale and bright, so that everything looked brand-new, as if someone had come by in the night and retouched the reeds and butterbur, the broom and the jack-in-the-green, the golden celandines and wild thyme from a fresh palette of watercolors.

They came out onto heathland among lazy bees and rabbits that bolted at the first scent of them, white scuts bobbing away over the close-bitten turf. Thwarted by the rabbits but fueled by the warmth of the sun, the foxes took to play, ambushing each other from behind trees, chasing and biting each other’s brushes.

After a while, Loves a Dustbin trotted back to the calico, his long red tongue lolling humorously out of his mouth.

“What a life, eh, Sealink? What a life!” He laughed wryly. “Bet you never expected to see me acting like this. I never expected it myself. I thought my death was waiting for me behind every tree, watching in every shadow.” He chuckled. “Ironic, isn’t it? You think your life’s over, and it’s only just beginning.”

Sealink was unprepared for the misery this evoked. A protective inner shutter slammed down. Too late. Suddenly, all she could see was the gleam of a pair of mismatched eyes—one an honest speedwell blue, one a wicked sodium orange. All she could smell was dusty tortoiseshell fur, aromatic, peppery.

The fox saw what was happening.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I—”

Sealink stared past him, her face lit with memory and pain. She swallowed hard and opened her mouth to speak. Nothing came out. Eventually she reassured him, “It’s okay, it’s okay, I—”

Suddenly, there was a high-pitched shriek from the rabbit runs behind them.

They found her lying on her back, her head thrashing from side to side. Wild with panic, her limbs waved in the air, and something appeared to be attached to her front foot. As she thrashed, this something glinted in the sun, and she wheezed with distress, tail thumping the ground in hard, rhythmic thuds. Blood oozed from a barely visible line above the ankle joint. A metallic line stretched away from the vixen’s foot to a peg hammered into the ground some distance away beneath a twist of bramble.

Sealink stared at it puzzledly.

“What’s happening here, hon?” she asked Loves a Dustbin.

“A rabbit snare,” he said angrily.

He bent to lick at Francine’s face, making strange, chirruping noises in the back of his throat.

Sealink inspected the snare. It looked far too simple to be a problem. She bent her head to it and bit down experimentally. It tasted cold and steely in her mouth. She applied her back teeth to it, an awkward maneuver, since cats have few molars, and rarely chew. Even after some minutes of concentrated biting, the wire remained unchanged except for a slightly more silvery sheen. She pulled at it until it came taut. At once, Francine emitted a thin, high wail that crawled under the skin and along the spine. Sealink leapt away from the wire in alarm.

“You do it!” she called to the dog fox. “You can dig, honey. You’re damn near a dog, after all.”

Clouds of earth flew up from the fox’s paws until at last the peg came free and the wire went slack. Francine opened pain—dulled eyes. Twitching the stricken leg, she found at last that she could flex the foot without the wire’s terrible pulling. She sat up and started to lick at the hurt place, but even though the peg was out the snare was still biting deep into her flesh, invisible beneath fur and welling blood. They stared at the wound.

“Try and stand, babe,” Sealink urged, at the same time as Loves a Dustbin suggested, “Now just lie there, and be still.”

They scowled at each other. The fox nosed at the snare. He touched it tentatively, but his nails were too big and blunt to get behind the wire. Sealink shouldered him out of the way.“Leave this to Momma: she’s got the proper equipment,” she asserted, and, bending her head to the wound, worked on it with a single razored claw until she had loosened it enough to get her teeth behind it. After that, it was like nipping a tangle out of fur: nip and lick, nip and lick, until her muzzle was a mask of red.

The wire, released at last from its bed of flesh, lay like a coiled snake on the turf, a jeweled circle of red and silver, studded with little tufts of russet fur. Once the snare was off, Francine would let neither her mate nor the calico near her or it. She snarled at them indiscriminately.

“I don’t understand,” Loves a Dustbin said tiredly. “She just won’t part with it.”

“That ain’t healthy, hon.”

The wheezing of the vixen’s breath through the night reminded Sealink of the sea breaking on a distant shingle beach. She drifted into sleep herself on this thought and dreamed of dark clouds racing across a stormy sky, the cries of seabirds like those of a cat mourning a lost child.

The next day, the flesh around the wound had swelled and Francine found it impossible to touch the foot to the ground. Loves a Dustbin made mournful figures-of-eight around her, murmuring encouragement; but it was clear that the vixen would not be traveling for some time.

Sealink sat at a distance from them and wondered what to do. It seemed disloyal to leave the foxes to their plight; but the pull of her vanished kittens grew stronger by the day. She heard them at night, though she could barely remember their voices. In her dreams she was on the old boardwalk again, dancing under a phosphor moon, when she heard them mewing like Pertelot’s litter. Whenever she thought she had found them, they were calling from somewhere else! Everything was entangled, past and present, pride and hurt and abiding loss. She had never acknowledged her real reasons for leaving New Orleans. In the middle of reveries of Mouse-breath, huge chunks of her early life had begun to come back to her, as if all that was part of one thing. Sealink had lost more than a mate: she had lost her sense of who she was. New Orleans, that Mother of Cats, might tell her. Would the foxes understand?

She sat for some time, feeling the cool breeze riffling her fur, watching clouds scud high up in the sky. In the reeds at the bottom of the hill she could hear moorhens calling, and when she stood up she could see that they were shepherding errant chicks with impossibly large feet. She looked down at her own substantial paws.

“These feet was made for walkin’,” she said, to no one in particular, “and that’s just what they’ll do … Lord knows what will have become of those youngsters of mine without their great big momma to take care of ‘em.”

Ten minutes later, Loves a Dustbin looked up from his wounded mate to see the silhouette of a large-furred cat staring down on him from the hillside above, its tail tip curled and its ears flicking minutely. He could read the signs.

“Good-bye, Sealink,” he said softly. “I hope you find what you’re looking for out there.”

Francine whimpered at his feet. He bent his head to console her, and when he looked up again, Sealink was gone.

Chapter Two

MYSTERIES OF TINTAGEL

Darkness fell in a little seaside town a few miles along the coast from Tintagel. A yellow moon hung low over the maze of fishermen’s cottages on the hill above the harbor. There were thin clouds high up and wrinkles of light on the sea. It was the hour of fish teas, coal fires. Somewhere in the mazy cobbled streets, which smelled of seaweed and orange peel, in a corona of light high up where an old wall met an older roof, a cat flickered into existence out of nowhere. One quick glance around him and he was off again, trotting up against the pitch of the roof to vanish around a chimney pot. Moments later he could be seen leaping confidently from one roof to the next, lowering himself down an old metal drainpipe, scampering across the salt-damp setts and around a corner.

Though they watched him covertly from gutter and doorway, the local toms issued no challenge. Only a few short months before, this hard-boiled toff had stumbled half-blind into the village accompanied by a mad tabby female with a spark plug in her head, and turned their lives into a long weekend of battle, disruption, and disorder. They were still trying to work out what had happened down the coast. They knew him as Mercurius Realtime DeNeuve and were careful not to catch his eye. He knew himself as Tag and he was wondering what was for tea.

He and the tabby kept no fixed abode. They loved the coast and they loved each other. They loved the windy illuminated breadth of the beach, the smells of food, the jangling music from the tourist shops and amusement arcades. They had quarters in a bus shelter or under an upturned boat. They liked it that way. They were friends to visitors and lost children. Sometimes they would spend some time with a fisherman’s family or in the steamy, scented fug of the Beach-O-Mat Laundrette, where the tabby would watch the clothes go around all day with a dreamy expression on her face. Her real name was Cy. Down at the quay, where she shamelessly courted the fishermen, they called her “Trixie.” At this hour, Tag knew, she would be waiting for him in one of her favorite spots—a round granite building near the top of the hill.

Before these two adventurers turned up, no cat had entered that place. Not that they weren’t curious—a cat is a cat, after all. Throughout the summer it was packed with human beings. They stood in lines, then shuffled in. They shuffled around inside, then shuffled out again, blinking and chattering in the sun. “What do they do in there?” the village matrons would ask each other, giving their kittens a good spruce-up. “With human beings it’s so hard to tell, my love. Don’t you find?” All a cat could say for sure was that it was a taller building than the chapel, more spacious than the lifeboat station. Its roof was home to some fat-looking gulls. Above the faded green doors an old enamel sign announced to the reading public:

OCEANARIUM.

A single octagonal glass tank filled the echoing space inside. Whole shoals of mackerel scintillated there in millions of gallons of seawater, lorded over by thornback rays and spiny sharks. The sharks were powerful, streamlined, slim, less than two feet long. They circled endlessly. They pushed their clever noses out of the water and into the hot glare of the electric lamp that hung above their domain. All the creatures of the sea were represented. There were octopuses and squids. Lobsters made their homes in the detritus on the floor of the tank. Though the room itself was kept dark, a kind of ocean light—filtered through the seawater until it became a cool pale glow—illuminated the concrete floor between the tank and the walls, where just enough room had been left for two human beings to loiter along abreast. Torn fishing nets sagged in the shadows above. The air was still, not quite warm. At night there was complete silence.

The tabby loved it. She had pushed her sturdy little head through the gap in the doors one day while Tag was out walking the wild roads, and there they were—fish, fish, fish! What cat could resist them? But here was the strange thing: even if the water had been empty, Tag believed, she would have been drawn back by the tranquil and yet penetrating quality of the aquarium light. If you looked long enough, its lucent interior depths began to seem more real than the world outside. This calmed her. Relieved of her madness by their friend the New Black King, she retained a hair-trigger awareness of unseen things. At night she whispered to the empty dark and could still be seen accompanied by a cloud of little motes like moths. She was still a puzzle to Tag. Of that, oddly enough, he was glad. Every day they met all over again, and they felt brand-new to each other.

This evening she was sitting up tall, eyes bright with reflected tank light, gazing at a large ray. Its wing tips curled and curved in lazy arcs, its eyes like jet beads as it hovered in the water so close to the glass you could see its gill slits curl and palpitate, the ray was staring back out at her. Tag shivered a little. They seemed so intent upon each other. What did they know? What could they have to say to each other? But he loved the way the light caught the set of the tabby’s head and the shape of her white bib. So he sat in the shadows and watched them, cat and fish, for a long moment before he said quietly, “You’ll never catch it.”

“Ace,” she answered patiently, “I don’t want to catch this fish. He stays in the water, I stay on the land.”

“I can see the sense of that,” agreed Tag, “given how well you swim.”

She looked at him oddly.

“But can you see the perfection of it?” she demanded.

She spun around twice, reared up, and banged her neat white front paws on the glass in front of her. Taking this to mean that their encounter was at an end, the ray pivoted slowly on its vertical axis and banked away into the depths of the tank, trailing a few bright motes and strings of matter. Cy watched it go, then turned and cuffed Tag’s ears in delight. She rubbed her head against his. She purred.

“I got you a special dinner,” she said.

His heart sank.

From a niche at the base of the tank she withdrew one condensed milk can—empty—one plastic clothes-peg, and two small fragile white shells. After some thought she added dry—roasted peanuts from the floor of an arcade, bread crusts she had won off a herring gull, and a square of milk chocolate still wrapped in blue foil. Tag thought he could probably eat the chocolate. He sorted through the rest with one paw and not much hope.

“Come on, Jack,” she encouraged. “Don’t play with it. Get it down you!”

Then, before he could answer: “If you liked that, you’ll love this.”

With some ceremony she brought out her chef d’oeuvre and dropped it in front of him. It was a cigarette butt.

“Very nice,” he said as enthusiastically as he could. “I think I’ll leave that for after.”

The tabby pretended to groom herself. Then she sat back, eyes sparkling, head to one side. He realized she had been laughing at him all along.

“All right then,” he said. “Where is it?”

She wriggled into the gap between the tank and the concrete floor until only her bottom showed; then, after some excited scrabbling about, backed out carefully and brought forth two pilchards. Their scales glittered. Their eyes goggled in the dim wash of light. They were plump and perfect, apart from the odd toothmark. They might still have been alive.

“Tag,” she said, “we got star-gazey pie!”

Though he loved her, Tag was suddenly a little tired. All the way home from the house by the river, he had felt he was being followed. In the tank a fish caught the light suddenly like sunshine on a coin, then vanished. An octopus hung high up against the glass as if pasted there, motionless but pulsing gently, waiting—even more patient and alien than the sharks—for the change in the nature of things that would permit it to take up its rightful place.

“Let’s eat at the bus shelter,” he said. “It’s nice out tonight, and sometimes this place makes me shiver.”

“I want to talk to my fish.”

“Come on,” Tag said gruffly. “You can see it again tomorrow.”

After some thought, she was willing to concede this.

“I can,” she said. “Can’t I?”

She said, “I’d forgotten that.”

The weather was turning.

The moon went down in a greenish glow on the horizon. A glutinous swell lapped the cement piles down by the lifeboat station. Out on the esplanade, rag-mop palms leant on the wind like old ladies surprised by a Sunday squall.

But the bus shelter was warm, and soon decorated with two perfect ichthyoid skeletons, sockets jolly with mortality, wiry bones like cat’s whiskers in the live fluorescent darkness of the oncoming storm. The tabby licked her lips, gave her paws a cursory wash, scratched busily beneath her chin. There was an odor of pilchard oil and electricity.

“Nice here,” she said. “Curl up tight now.”

“I hope you’re happy,” Tag said anxiously, as he watched the tide steal in, a wave at a time, across the dark beach. “Living here, I mean.”

She stared at him.

“It’s a fall-on-your-feet life, Tiger,” she replied. “It’s sunshine every morning. It’s boats and cream and, I mean, there’s even mice here. I seen this life in dreams. How can you ask? Oh, Tag, I like it fine!” She flexed her claws and purred luxuriously. “Sleep now,” she advised; so, reassured, he did. Only to dream of shoal after shoal of feathery pilchard skeletons swinging as restless as compass needles beneath the waves and to be woken unceremoniously by a single clang of thunder.

He sat bolt upright and craned his neck. Nothing landward.Then, as he turned toward the sea, there was a silent explosion over the beach, a split-second flare that faded instantly through all the colors of the spectrum to a black that was a kind of light in itself. Tag jumped to his feet. In the moment of illumination, he had seen the palms, the roiling surf, the wind whipping spray off the chop, and then a monstrous cat that burst out of the naked air and began to forge its way in a kind of eerie slow motion across the beach toward him. Sand sprayed up from pads the size of dinner plates. Heat haze boiled around it. It came spilling the fire and anger of its life, waves of silent lightning, the ungrudging broadcast of substance into some space not quite the world we know. Its eyes were yellow. Its ears were flattened. Its great teeth gleamed white against a red mouth. Decreasing in size and speeding up as it approached, this fierce apparition hurtled up the three concrete steps from the beach. By the time it burst into the bus shelter, it was an ordinary cat, if you could ever use the word “ordinary” of Ragnar Gustaffson Coeur de Lion, the New Black King.

“Ragnar!”

“Tag! Tag, my friend!”

Drenched and wild looking, his fine coat disordered and dirty, Ragnar stood head down, sides heaving, filling the bus shelter with a kind of regal dejection. He was so exhausted he could barely stand. He was so anxious he could hardly speak.

“My friend! I—Tag, quick!”

“Ragnar, what is it?”

Tag left Cy in the bus shelter.

“I don’t want you lost, too,” he told her. She gave him a look, but he knew she would stay.

“Now run!” he said to Ragnar.

The tabby watched as they pounded over the sand and sprang one after the other into the ghost-ridden spaces of the wild road. Ten minutes later, Tag and Ragnar were stumbling around in the howling Tintagel dark.

“Odin!” they called as they went. “Odin!”

Nothing. Shortly after the kitten’s disappearance the bottom had dropped out of the weather. A bank of cloud had slunk in from the sea on the steadily sharpening wind. Visibility had shrunk to a few yards. Now the gorse bushes thrashed as if trying to uproot themselves. Torrents of rain blustered in, huge cold silver drops suspended roiling for an instant in the turbulent air at the edge of the cliff before they were sucked away inland. Tag ducked and winced into the storm, his eyes fixed grimly on the black cat in front of him. Tintagel Head, so peaceful on a sunny day, now reminded him of the first time he had seen it—arriving, as he had done, wild-eyed and winter-boned at the end of a long and sometimes bitter journey. Today as then, Pertelot Fitzwilliam, Queen of Cats, awaited him.

This time she was huddled in the lee of some rocks at the cliff edge with her two remaining kittens. Her face was hard and puzzled. Her eyes were dull with fatigue. Tracks like human tears blackened the taupe fur either side of her sharp, ancient muzzle. She looked like a stone sculpture, obdurate and defeated both at once. She looked like an ax head. Nothing could be seen of the happiness she had found at Tintagel, nothing remembered of the long summer evenings in which ocher sunlight thickened the flowers of tormentil amid the sheep-cropped turf, and the golden kittens tumbled and played in safely at the court of the King, under the watchful eye of its Queen.

“Pertelot,” said Tag.

She could not make herself respond. When he tried to comfort her, she would only say, “Mercury, you must find him. If you call he’ll come to you. You know he will!”

“Pertelot, I—”

“He loves you so. They all do.”

From inside that pocket of quiet still air, she stared at him with hope already turning into a sort of soft reproach. Overborne by the intensity of her need, he could only look away, gutter into silence.

“I’ll try,” he said.

“No!”

“Pertelot—”

“It’s not to try, Mercury. It’s to find him. Do you see? You must, or how can I ever forgive myself?”

“We’ll find him,” Tag promised.

What else could he say?

The two male cats quartered the headland, while the night battered them senseless with its cold wings. Merciless and unassuaged in the exposed corridors between the stands of gorse, the wind picked them up and threw them bodily about. Out there, they couldn’t even be sure of each other’s voices. Listen to that! A cat? A gull? The wind? Who knew? Worse, they often thought they could hear each other calling out, “Tag! He’s here!” Or, “Ragnar, Odin’s safe!” Ghost voices, night voices, voices in the surf far below. A momentary trap for the heart, then disappointment. By sunrise they had to admit they’d found no sign—not a footprint, not a scuff mark or a faint smell—of the missing kitten. They had combed rocks and ruins, they had teetered about on the cliff above the raging tide. They were soaked and shattered and their feet were sore.

Odin was gone.

The storm blew itself out with the dawn. The headland looked washed and emptied, all primrosey yellows and faint tawny browns. A single gull planed over the rocks at the edge of the cliff. Apologetic gusts of wind crept among the gorse stems. Later the sky would be very blue; for now, gray light like watered silk found out Pertelot Fitzwilliam, keening beneath her rock. Huge-eyed, Leo and Isis huddled close to her, but she was too distraught to comfort them. Tag and Ragnar, too tired to stand, told her what they now knew.

“We can’t find him.”

“Go out again, then,” she said.

“When the light is better,” said Tag, “we’ll widen the search. When it’s properly light I’ll fetch some others.”

The Queen hissed at him.

“We have to rest now,” he said.

“I cannot rest,” said Ragnar.

“You’re so strong,” said Pertelot, mad with loss. She was trembling. “You big strong toms can’t find a kitten.”

Ragnar said, “I can never rest again.”

“Go out and look, then,” said Pertelot.

She stumbled to her feet and fell down on Leo and Isis.

In the days that followed, the search was continued and broadened.

Sense returned to Pertelot, but she lost her interest in things, turned vague and forgetful, was preyed upon by sudden angers in the afternoon. Cy came down the coast to help Ragnar look after the remaining kittens. No one was sure how they were taking it. Throughout, they had stuck to their story, which was this: as their brother laid siege to the mouse in the gorse bush, a human hand had reached out suddenly and dragged him in. Quizzed by Tag, they couldn’t remember exactly how it looked.

“It was a big dull human hand, that’s all,” explained Leonora.

And Isis said, “There was dirt under those blunt nails they have. As if it had been digging like a dog.”

Tag shook his head.

“I’ll have to think about this,” he said.

“You’d better believe us,” Leo warned.

Then she said cautiously, as if introducing a subject to which she had given more thought than she wanted to admit, “Do you think the Alchemist ever would come back? When I was a very young kitten I used to believe I could still hear both of them down there underneath the headland. But now I think Odin was right—it was only the sound of the sea.”

“Perhaps,” said Tag. “Does something so important, so violent, end so suddenly like that and never trouble the world again? We don’t know enough to know.”

Leo said, “You’re the new Majicou. You know everything.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Tag.

Young animals often wander off, and are found again quite quickly. With this firmly in mind, an air of activity and cautious optimism descended on the headland.

The community there not being comprised solely of the King and his family, there was plenty of help to be had. Among the ruins of the ancient castle, on the soil-creep terraces along the cliffs, in holes and under banks, lived many animals who had stayed behind after their part in the battle against the Alchemist. Foxes, badgers, urban feral cats settling down to find mates and found dynasties, even a pair of mink so angry no one had yet dared talk to them, now occupied the rising land eastward of the head or lived cheerfully in a muddle of warrens, fallen-down chicken coops, and allotments at the edge of Tintagel town.

“Come and help,” Tag appealed.

“It took you long enough to ask,” they said.

Prey made peace—at least for the duration—with predator. Species that would only be seen dead with one another were spotted working the headland in teams—a rook with four young herring gulls, the two mink with an old gray squirrel who called himself Broadsword. Cats cooperated with foxes to comb the town in case Odin had somehow made his way there and gotten lost. A very old racehorse named Smithfield went over the paddock fence every night just after dark and quartered the territory for twenty miles in every direction.

Nothing.

Two weeks passed, and then a third. Depression filled them all. Even the climate collaborated in this: a heat wave set in suddenly and burned the grass brown. June brought a sudden upsurge of human visitors to the ruins of the castle. They came from thousands of miles away, to wave their arms; blink in the sun; and talk, talk, talk. They trudged along the complex contours on the northern flank of the peninsula, charmed and exhilarated by the way the land fell away in huge windy chamfers to the tide. Talk, talk, talk.

(The Felidae come here, of course, but more quietly. It is a place of pilgrimage for them, too. They remember how, in the fourth age of cats, Atum-Ra and his Queen—who was also called Isis—arrived here from Egypt armed only with unborn kittens and the magic of warm countries, to reopen the old wild roads.)

Around full moon, unable to think clearly amid all this misery—and needing, besides, to attend to certain of his responsibilities as the new Majicou—Tag sent himself to the city, where he spent a night at the abandoned pet shop in Cutting Lane. There he received the usual trickle of odd visitors, gnarled old animals for the most part, who spoke in low voices, kept their eyes on the door, and remembered favorably the old Majicou. He dispatched a message or two. He watched the spiders making their webs in corners.

The web quivers, the spider lives along the line. That is how knowledge comes to you when you have eight legs. “The wild roads are in this,” Tag told himself. “They always are.” The wild roads are in everything. But how does a cat find out what they know?

He was loath to leave his friends alone with their great sorrow.

And yet—he thought.

You know what the wild roads know by traveling them.

He thought, All this is one thing. The lost kitten, the highways out of joint, a voice I’m not even sure I heard.

He sat all night. Vapor light penetrated the dusty windows, fell in concise bars across the bare floorboards. Later, the moon sent in its own agents, long yellow fingers to scratch bonily from corner to corner. The spiders worked busily. Tag watched. Filmier than spiderweb, filmier than moonlight, the wild roads pulsed around him.

Nothing had changed when he returned some while later, to find Cy alone on the cliff top watching the sun go down under some long black clouds.

“Hello,” he said. He licked the side of her face, where each short hair was tipped and ticked with tabby gold. All cats inhabit the tabby—or anyway they have hung up their coats there at some time or another. She tasted of wine. Flowers. Yolk of egg. She tasted of Cy.

“You’re nice,” he said.

She seemed distracted.

“Hi, Sky-pilot,” she said after a moment. “Good day at the office?”

“I looked at spiders.”

“Fine. But see this?” she said. “This is the story so far. I nearly died here, Jack. Remember? It was nip and tuck. I was spread-eagled on the Wheel of Flame. The Alchemist had burned me to the ground, you know?” She shivered. “There was fire all ‘round. But for the big Norwegian, I was going to cash in my chips.” She shook her head. “Oh, Tag, he seems so down now, that New Black King. I want to help him. And the kittens—I tell ‘em things, but they don’t stay to listen.”

“They hardly know where to turn,” said Tag. “They miss their brother.”

They did miss him. But while Leo was clearly downcast, she knew what she wanted, and already had the air of a cat who could make decisions—though she kept them to herself, which did not help later. Isis found it harder to live with loss.

In many ways, Isis was the most puzzling of the three kittens—quiet, clever, obedient, neat in her movements, but at the same time as unknowable as air. She evaded your understanding. The moon was her planet. She was drawn to water, to twilight, to all things that changed and shifted. The circumstances of her birth had been no stranger than that of her siblings, but Isis was open to the shadows. She had a drive to the invisible. She felt, she said, the strong dead awaiting their resurrection. They were curled up in every leaf. As a tiny kitten, she could already be found sitting and blinking and staring at unseen things—for her, every object in the world seemed to have an extension or counterpart somewhere else. At four weeks old, she began to sing to them. Pertelot and Ragnar woke to inexplicable caterwauls in the night. Investigating, they found Isis, alone on the windy rocks, yowling and fluting to the reflection of the moon in the sea. “I was trying to make it feel better,” she explained. Who knew what the moon thought of her song? To everyone else it seemed tortured and raucous. “Not even a cat could find music in a voice like that,” was her father’s opinion. But the Mau was not so sure. Such music reminded her of her own dreams, Egypt dreams pregnant and unresolved. When Isis sang, unformed things seemed to gather in the air near her, and a shiver went down your spine.

Sometimes the Mau would assert, “If any of my children is the Golden Cat, it’s this one. She could sing life into a stone.”

Ragnar agreed. “A stone would get up and run away,” he said, “when it heard that daughter sing.”

“Ragnar!”

She was seen several times that night—sitting alertly in the moonlight, flitting among the castle ruins, cautiously approaching some piece of human litter at the side of a path. But no animal had sight of her after midnight, when Leonora Whitstand Merril, who was energetically washing her bib at the base of the war memorial, watched her sister enter St. Madryn’s by its primitive northern doorway. A wind had got up by then. The whole length of the graveyard stretched between them.

“Isis?” called Leo.

Isis looked around once. Her eyes flashed blank and empty. Then she was gone.

“Isis? Wait for me!”

Three hours later, just before dawn, Tag, Ragnar, and Leo stood just inside St. Madryn’s—known to humans, who understand less of their own history than they think, as St. Materiana’s—looking down toward the east window, which had begun to harbor a faint but growing light. The whitewashed walls were tinged with pink and gold. Above, the complex roof beams stretched away in the echoing silence; below, it was glossy pews. The air seemed to coil on itself, as if something had just that minute left the church.

Tag raised his head and sniffed. Polished wood. Flowers. Cold old stone.

Was there something else?

“Keep an eye open for rats,” he warned. “This is just the sort of place you find them.”

“Show me a rat,” bragged Leo. “That’s all.”

She laughed.

“I won’t treat it well,” she promised.

“Isis!” she called.

“Hush,” said Tag.

“Isis, I know you’re in here!”

Her name was written on the air; they could listen to it with their noses. But why had she come here, and where was she now? The two adult cats stood shifting their paws uncomfortably on the tiled floor of the nave. They eyed the artifacts hanging on the walls. A kind of diffidence, an embarrassment on behalf of humankind, caused them to look away from the emblems carved into the reredos—spears and nails and whipping posts. Leo, who felt no need to understand the things human beings do, marched about, bellowing, “Isis!”

Nothing.

Suddenly, dawn was upon them, in a soundless, unusual flash of light. The undersides of the clouds flared with pinks and greens, the whole sky seemed touched with gold. Ragnar Gustaffson looked up for a moment. He blinked. “We haven’t so long to search, I think,” he said. “In an hour or two the tourists will—”

“Aha!” interrupted his remaining daughter loudly.

“—be here.”

“Look!” ordered Leonora.

Behind the altar, down at floor level in the angle between the walls, not too far from the east window itself, she had found a hole in the masonry. It was irregularly shaped, large enough to squeeze through. When you put your face to it, a draft of damp salty air stirred your whiskers. Two or three long feline guard hairs were caught on its edges. They glinted in the light. They were gold.

Leo stuck her head in.

“Leave it to Leonora,” she announced, already sounding distant, “as usual.”

“Leo, wait!” said Tag.

Before he could move, she was gone.

“These children.” Ragnar sighed. “I think they are more impossible than their mother.”

“You love them anyway,” said Tag.

“Leo?” he called.

No reply. When he listened at the hole he thought he could hear something breathing far away.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“It is a very small hole.”

“Come on, Rags.”

“Many cats would balk at a small hole like that.”

“Not cats like us. We’re too determined.”

A line of slippage, an ancient fault between two folds of rock—filled by the ages with their sediment, then scoured even longer by water and moving air—ran like the pipe of some secret ear down into Tintagel Head. At first it was very narrow. Rats had polished that part of it and gone, leaving a lively, bitter stink and littered nests in chambers. As it penetrated the head, the pipe widened and fell away suddenly into a series of polished steps and ledges as rounded and complex as wax from a burning candle. It was a committing descent. Some of the steps were eight or ten feet high. How will we climb back up? Tag thought. He decided not to ask Ragnar, who looked less than happy to be under the ground. Eventually, the going eased off. They found themselves in a wide, low passage, floored with crushed shells and tiny fibrous flakes of slate. A salt wind blew into their faces. A pale radiance seemed to spring from the damp, smooth walls. Leonora ran ahead, tail up, in little fits and starts, halting every so often to look back.

“That daughter,” grunted Ragnar. “Where does she get the energy?”

“At least she’s quiet now,” said Tag.

They listened appreciatively. Into the silence came a long, shooshing sound. Then another, like a breath.

“The sea,” said Ragnar.

“I imagine so.”

Ragnar looked apprehensive.

“Do you think the tide comes all the way in?”

“No,” said Tag decisively.

But he did.

The passage ended abruptly, on a ledge fifteen feet up the back of a huge domed cave. Tag stared out. A smell of iodine and rot. Huge boulders, draped with fluorescent green weed that made them resemble velvet cushions in a sitting room. They were surrounded by pools of old tidewater. On the other side of the cave, so bright he could barely look into it, a slot of blue-white daylight, split into long beams by the intervening rocks. Against that light, he could just make out the lonely figure of Leonora, sitting at the entrance looking out. Her mouth was open, but all he could hear was the tide, crashing against the rocks at the base of the head.

“How did she get down there?”

“Jumped, I should say.”

Tag looked at the nearest boulder. It was a long way down, and if you missed…

“I suppose she did.” He sighed.

“Never mind, Tag. We are some very determined cats here.”

“I suppose we are.”

“You first.”

The cave opened on to raw ocean.

Glitter and dazzle. Gray-green swell far out. Bright blue sky. A rising tide among the massive zinc-colored boulders just outside the cave mouth, rendered too real by sunshine so intense the eye could only wince away. The cliffs soared up on either side, the great waves roared and smashed against them, breaking into ferocious white plumes! It was a big place for a small animal. Tag was dazzled and deafened and elated all at once. Then something tiny shifted his focus and his field of view, and he saw, suddenly and quite clearly, how the spiders had strung their morning webs between the rocks, just a foot or two above the tide line. Though they trembled and were sometimes spangled with saltwater dewdrops flashing in the sun, each web remained taut and unbroken. He was filled with a sense of the triumphant frailty of life.

You’ve got to give it to those spiders, he thought. They’re a very determined lot.

Then he heard Leonora.

Sitting upright, her eyes narrowed, staring in anguish at the spray as it exploded up in front of her, she was calling out over and over again, as if her brother and sister had just that moment vanished.

“Isis! Odin!”

Tag jumped up beside her.

“They were brought this way!” she cried. “Human beings brought them this way!”

“We’ll find them, Leonora, don’t fret.”

Even as he spoke, she was gone.

Tag stared. No kitten, not even the iron-willed Leonora Whitstand Merril, could survive that tide. He knew he could never face the Queen again or bear the expression on Ragnar Gustaffson’s careworn face if his friends lost their surviving child. Besides, he had always loved and admired Leo for a confidence he did not remember in himself at that age.

“Stay here!” he warned Ragnar.He drew himself together. His head dipped once, twice, as he marked the place in all that fury he’d last seen Leonora. His hindquarters fidgeted and were still. A heartbeat pause. Then he unbent himself in an arc as bright as a rainbow.

The ocean boomed and coughed upon the rocks. It rose up to meet him. It was all around him, and there was no more Tag, only struggle and chaos and fear. He thought his heart would stop from the cold. The tide dragged him into its salty recesses, where it battered him, then flung him up, up, up again and out into the air. He was up in the air in a mist of spray! He felt the sun on him, he felt himself turn slowly over. He saw rocks, blue sky, a cliff with a puff of cloud above it, then sky and green brine again. He was sucked down to where the deep stones rolled around in the draw and backlash of the water—he heard their voices grind and growl against the fixed land—and there he found Leonora. A glimpse of her in a stinging salt-gray fog—bubbles came out her gaping mouth—then they were whirled together like two rags in a washing machine. He got her by the scruff, then lost her again. He clutched at her with his teeth, his front legs, his heart. “Let me up now!” he told the water. But it only drew him further down between the stones. He felt them roll around him in blackness, huge slow grinding forms. He thought of the spiders in their frail webs. Hold on, Leonora! he thought. His breath was a stone in him. He held on to her. He held on. He told the water, “Let us up now!” But the water had them. One of Leonora’s legs was caught between the rocks. The salt tide pulled at her. Nothing. Tag pulled at her. Nothing. Bubbles came out of her mouth. “Leonora!” There was a dull booming all around. They were in the water for good; things were going from gray to black. Then a strange furled shadow fell across them. Half-conscious now, Tag looked up and saw, through the gray prism of the salt, a great ocean ray like a live blanket, hovering and banking over his head. Its gill slits were cut like metal, its strange sail furled and unfurled, its tiny black eyes regarded him with unreadable emotion. The ray’s shadow descended on them. There was a great wrenching, some pain, and Leonora was free. They rushed to the surface like bubbles, exploding up in light and spray; and the tide—full of power and a joy of its own, because to dice with life is the joy of the tide—flung them up onto the rocks

“That was a very stupid thing to do, Leonora,” Ragnar Gustaffson told her a few minutes later, as she and Tag—looking less like cats than bottle brushes—sat in the sunshine, frantically washing themselves to get dry and get warm.

“I know,” said Leo. “But they went that way. I’m sure of it. They were taken away on the water.”

Ragnar considered this.

“I can only comment, ‘That is no reason to jump in,’” he decided after a moment. “You should remember: cats and water are not best of companions.” He became lost in thought. Finally he added, “Your mother, who fell in a canal last year, has told me as much, many times.”

Tag laughed.

Then he shivered and said, “We weren’t alone out there. Something helped us. Did you feel that, Leo?”

But Leo only answered, “This tastes foul. Doesn’t it?” And, “I didn’t like it in the sea.”

“Ha,” said Leo, who had regained her confidence. “I thought as much.” She stood up on a boulder, stretched to her full length against the wall, and, failing to quite reach the symbol with her nose, dabbed at it with one paw. She fell off the boulder, jumped back up, and tried again.

Ragnar gave her a look.

“There are times,” he told Tag, “when a daughter—how can I say this?—is less of a blessing than I have imagined. But she is right.”

Tag pushed Leo out of the way and examined the symbol.

“The kittens may have been taken away by human agency” was his opinion. “But no human being made this. It smells of something else. It smells of—” He shook his head, wishing for the nose of Loves a Dustbin, that organ so educated it could detect life in the dead. “I don’t know what it smells of,” he concluded, “but humans didn’t make it.”

“In which case,” Ragnar said, “we should enquire, ‘If not humans, who?’”

“Who indeed?” the new Majicou asked himself darkly.

“They were taken by sea,” Leonora insisted, in a determined effort to regain the attention of her elders.

She dropped to all fours, raised her head, and opened her mouth to allow damp, salty air across the exotic sensory organ—not quite smell, not quite taste—cats keep there. Suddenly, she was off again, this time toward the cave’s landward entrance. The back wall barely gave her pause, though it slowed the two adult cats. They shrugged, exchanged a glance of reluctance, and did their best to follow. She scampered along the slate-floored passage, turned the “staircase” by a series of deft leaps to intermediate ledges, and jammed herself into the pipe that led back to St. Madryn’s. There she stopped, opened her mouth again for a moment to taste the air, then, with some energetic if disconnected scraping and paddling of the back legs, compressed herself into a niche which stank of rats. Out of that, a second pipe led, via sudden constrictions and changes of direction, to the surface.

Ragnar followed his daughter, grumbling.

Tag followed Ragnar, wondering what it all meant.

Human beings, he thought.

He thought, Human beings in a boat.

Dust rained down and got into his eyes. It was the dry powdery granite earth of the headland, he knew it by its smell. Pale light appeared ahead, then suddenly the bright glare of day. When he hauled himself out, he found himself in the middle of a gorse bush. Through the stems he could see sunshine crackling off the sea. It was going to be a fine day. A little way off, the King of Cats was shoving his way out onto the turf with cheerful oaths he imagined to be Viking in origin. Bits of gorse had already embedded themselves deep in his ruff. Leonora Whitstand Merril sat waiting for Tag, smugly licking her paws.

“Here’s what I think you should do,” Tag told the King and Queen a little later that morning.

They were assembled in the warm sun on the cliff top—Tag and Cy, Pertelot and Leo and Ragnar. A warm breeze ruffled their fur. Behind them, huge white clouds sailed landward over the sea, on the streaked ultramarine surface of which could be seen the flecks of little waves and, distantly, a fishing boat with a jaunty red hull chugging its way slowly northward. If human beings could have seen them there, five cats sitting in a circle on the edge of a cliff under a bright blue sky, what would they have thought?

“I am going to look for Isis and Odin,” Tag went on grimly. “I am the Majicou now. It is my responsibility. I will be back and forth, here and there. We may not see each other so often. To be safe, you should go north and live with Cy, and be looked after by our friends the fishermen.”

“We won’t leave here.”

“But Pertelot—”

She gave him a look of reproach.

“And we will never live with human beings again. Mercury, how could you ask that?”

“Easily. Whoever took Odin and Isis will return for the third kitten. You know that. We are up to the tips of our ears in something here—I feel it.”

“Even so.”

Tag had always found her difficult to convince. He mightbe the Majicou, but she was the Mau. Though she had visited it only in dreams, another land spoke through her. Ancient responsibilities ran hot and mysterious in her veins. Also, he loved her too much to argue. When she sat up straight and powerful like that, and stared at him with her eyes half closed, he could only look away. He watched the fishing boat as, bobbing like a silly painted cork, it rounded a distant dove-gray point, a headland barring its way as lazily as a human arm outflung across the water. Suddenly he had an idea.

“Then at least go to the oceanarium,” he said. “It’s empty at night. In the day you can—” He paused. What could they do? Then he had it. “In the day you can have a holiday,” he said.

“What’s a holiday?” demanded Leonora.

“I’m not entirely sure,” said Tag. “Human beings are doing it all the time.”

“Are there fish on a holiday?”

“More than you saw in your recent visit to the sea,” said her father. “Don’t interrupt when your mother is thinking.”

After a moment, the Queen blinked once.

“Very well,” she said.

Cy the tabby stood up, stretched briefly, then turned around and around in a delighted circle, tail up, rubbing her head against their heads in turn. A purr like the clatter of a broken lawn mower filled the headland.

“Ace to base,” she said. “I’d love to have you. At my place there’s all kinds of real stuff to see.” She paused shyly. “I got this fish for a friend,” she admitted, aside, to Leonora.

Tag felt relieved.

“Then that’s settled,” he said.

“But what will you do?” the King asked him. “Where will you start?”

“I am going to do what I should have done a month ago,” said Tag. He stared out to sea. The red boat had turned the point at last and vanished.

He was the Majicou.

He went to the heart of his web.

From there called in his proxies. They were reluctant, butthey could not resist. Outlines shifting and warping under the pressures of magic, they came bounding, shuffling, galloping down the Old Changing Way toward him. Heat smoked up from their feet. At night, in Cutting Lane, pale lights could be seen coming and going behind the grimy windows of the old pet shop. If you had had business along that street in the early hours, you might have stopped—puzzled and a little anxious, perhaps—for a moment or two to listen to the subdued cacophony of animal noises, to catch the sudden circus reek of large creatures in a confined space, before you shivered suddenly and passed on. The black shadows of antlers moved on the walls. There was a coughing grunt. There were sudden uneasy movements in corners.

The new Majicou regarded his servants.

They shifted their feet and tried not to meet his glittering green eyes.

“Two golden kittens,” he said. “Find them.”

He said, “Use every strategy you know.” He said, “The Alchemist may be back. You know what that would mean to all of us.” He said, “If I am not here you will know where to find me. You will know by the signs. Come to me wherever I am. Come to me with news.”

He paused. His gaze rested on them one by one, uncomfortable, intense.

He said again, “Find me the golden kittens.”

The proxies fled. Tag followed them into the night, on a search of his own. He burned like a meteor in long flat arcs down the Old Changing Way. He was looking for Loves a Dustbin, who, as the original Majicou’s lieutenant, had lived through more of the secret war against the Alchemist than anyone now alive. As he traveled, proxies came to him with their reports of nothing. Nothing to be heard. Nothing to be seen. Nothing to be found. “If you can’t do anything else, at least find me the dustbin fox,” he told them. “Send him to me.” But the fox, it seemed, had gone to earth. Was that significant in itself? Toward dawn, Tag stumbled across a vagus, a scrap of the Old Life, in upland oak woods somewhere north of the city, and after two hours of mutual stalking, ambush and debate, dispatched it back into the deep communal consciousness where it belonged. Finally, he returned to Cutting Lane. There, he dozed for a while with his eyes open.

Suddenly, he thought, Unless it is Leonora, we have already lost the Golden Cat.

Chapter Three

THE BIG EASY

Sealink watched the last of the passengers and cabin crew trailing away into the airport haze, then slipped silently down the gangway onto the baking tarmac. Balmy southern sunshine struck off her brilliant harlequin coat of orange, black, and white. A tail like an ostrich feather curled over her back. In her lifetime, this feature had won her many admirers. For herself she called it “an animal all its own, and a damn nuisance,” but never without a certain pride. Her paws were large to match the rest of her frame, and she carried herself with considerable ease for a cat that had just hitched a ride across the Atlantic Ocean, right over the water to the town they used to call the Big Easy—they had called Sealink the Big Easy, too, but rarely to her face—the air of which was like a gentle steam bath freighted with the heavy scents of better times.

New Orleans! She drew in a deep breath and looked around. Crescent City, city of cats, city of food. She had set out from here to eat the world. If she was returning with a little less appetite, well that might be corrected, as soon as she had found her kittens.

In a manner of speaking, they had already found her. She had spent the Atlantic crossing imagining that they were close but unseen—trapped in the overhead lockers, zipped into carry-on bags, mewling from under every tourist-class seat. They were behind every closed door. Thirty thousand feet up and two hundred miles out from Heathrow, the cabin crew had found her scrabbling at a pressurized exit door under the impression that she heard kittens crying in the whistling blue emptiness outside the plane.

“But how’d she get here?” they’d asked each other, answering, “Just swanned right in during the stopover. A proper English lady.” And when Sealink wriggled out of their arms and applied herself to the door again: “She’s cute, but a real nervous flyer.”

She was a hit with the passengers.

“Guess you can’t throw her off now,” they told the cabin crew. “Guess she got her free ride.” They said, “Just make sure she doesn’t open that damn door!” That had them all laughing.

Sealink, meanwhile, worked obsessively at the door, even though another voice in her head urged, Get a grip, hon. She shredded the airline carpet. All the way over the gray ocean, she was a haunted cat; but curiously enough, the sense of them faded directly as the airplane touched its wheels to the Moisant International runway. Was that a good sign? Was it a bad one? She had no idea. She was on brand-new territory here with nothing to go on but instinct. Ghost kittens, memories of kittens: they frazzled her when they were there; she missed them when they weren’t. She wasn’t used to this. What if none of it worked out?

“You’ll find ‘em.”

And, setting her chin high, she resolutely made her way across the tarmac, ignoring the trucks and carts, the aircraft groaning and complaining as they taxied from place to place, the human beings distracted and panicky as they dragged their baggage about. She was careful never to run. A running cat catches the eye was a saying she recalled from her own kittenhood, though since she had no more recollection of her mother than her name—Leonora Whitstand Merril—she guessed the advice came from one of the many scarred old tomcats she had once hung out with on the Moon Walk, the wooden boardwalk that ran along the banks of the great Mississippi River.

The Moon Walk! That promenade of soft airs and gently riven dreams, whose denizens, though luckless and self-defeatingly individual, had always known how to live—how to eat, how to love, how to improve the midnight hour! “I’m back,” she told them in her heart, as she skirted the glass-walled buildings of the terminal.

If you are a cat, travel in New Orleans begins with the Grand Highway, which issues from a huge cemetery in the lakeside area of the city and sweeps down from there to the levee on which Sealink had been raised. If you are looking for something, there is no better place to start.

From the Grand Highway, paths branch, then branch again in all directions, to Greenwood and West End Park, Audubon and Armstrong, through the grounds of Loyola University, into the elegant, sunlit courtyards of the Garden District and out to the Fairgrounds Race Track. The wild roads—busiest wherever human inhabitation is at its most dense yet always beyond human view—run through the river to the suburbs of Jefferson and Gretna and Algiers and out into the bayou wilderness. Around Metairie they run in localized tangles branching off the greater highways; but south and west, toward the Garden District and the Vieux Carre, they are as bunched and knotted as rats’ tails, mapped onto the city by cats heading en masse for their favorite haunts, where they cool themselves in shady courtyards or beneath the camellias of an elegant town house or beg for scraps from the tourists at the markets, the street cafes, and hot dog stands around Jackson Square. They cross and recross the Pontchartrain Expressway, occupying the same space in a manner no human being can possibly comprehend—though some have tried. Glimpsed through the swirling, dense light of the highways, car headlights on the interstate flash past in blurry streaks, occupying another dimension entirely. Centuries before men built their raw, literalistic imitations, the wild roads were here, laid down as patiently as a geological sediment by the Louisiana panthers, the bobcats, and swamp cats. When the humans have gone and their poor artifacts have fallen into decay, the cat roads will remain. They are less a road than a way: a way of life. Give yourself to the highways and they return your investment a thousandfold.

They give you back a larger self.Thus Sealink as a kitten, years before. Jazzed, jangled, and pixillated, joined up with other runny-eyed disobedient brats—driven by the same mix of hormones and nosiness, all zest and gall and natural bristle, elated to find themselves out there unsupervised among all the scary grown-up cats—she had tumbled hourly down the curves and re-entries to burst out at some unplanned destination with a puzzled “Wha—?” and a prompt collapse into group hysteria, play-fighting, and general bad behavior.

“How’d we get here?”

“This here a church, Octave! You brung us here to pray?”

“No, I brung you here to prey.”

Young queens, propelled into the flux by drives they barely comprehend, glory in its sustaining power, which—comprising partly as it does the souls of a million queens down the ages, all glorying in their newfound power—is primal and shared. To begin with, it had delighted Sealink to make the gift of her own individuality. It was fine to be feline! To walk out, tail up and boardwalk bold, a cat among other cats, was enough. It had filled her with pride. Later she was not so sure. As her sense of self developed, her enjoyment of shared experience had declined. Was she some ordinary cat? Honey, she was not! She was the Delta Queen, good-looking, strong, daring, and—above all—unmistakable. Tomcats pursued her. Other queens were jealous; their eyes hardened when she hove into view, hips rolling like a whole shipful of sex. She laughed in their faces and passed on by.

That was how she had made an adventure of travel on the more visible surfaces of the world. Cars, boats, and planes, invited or not; on her own four feet if she had to, grinding out the miles to the next ride. How many human drivers, tired at the end of a long day, had rubbed their eyes at that ostrich feather of a tail and motored on, dismissing it as a hallucination? How many more—by truck stop and diner, not having an atom of shared language—had understood its message nevertheless: “Say, babe, you goin’ to Topeka?” Crushed-shell lots, juke joints, sleep snatched in the back of some redneck pickup rusted out to orange lace, so you woke up two hundred miles away from where you started, puzzled and hungry: it was a hard, slow road.

But what freedom! To be a cat and live in the human world! It went without saying that human beings loved her, too.

After that, what could it have been but good-bye to the Moon Walk, good-bye to the Delta? That was the paradox of Sealink’s early life, she guessed. Easy travel had kept her tied to the Deep South; hard travel had made the world her oyster. Dizzy with a sense of her own self, she had gulped it down, juice and all, the whole delicious, salty works of it.

But such freedom can be illusory. The wild roads wait—patient and real, like parents—for you to return. Still travel them suckers when you need ‘em, thought Sealink, sniffing around behind the Moriarty tomb. “Now let me see. I recall a entryway not too far from here—”

Grand white mausoleums towered up among grass passages, luxuriant trees, and shrubs. Above her the statues known as Faith, Hope, and Charity guarded the base of a sixty-foot tunnel. Faith, Hope, and Charity sinking down into a long, dark hole in the ground. Sealink tilted her head consideringly.

“Seems kinda apt,” she had to concede.

An unknowable time later, she was back in the Old Square. The highway debouched behind the Farmer’s Market, amid a chaos of boxes and crates, corn husks and garbage bags. As the buzz of the old road faded, Sealink’s nose was assailed by a thousand different smells: liquefying produce; fish in various stages of decay; the dry, musty scent of diseased pigeons; engine oil; human sweat; roasting pecans. Somewhere close by someone was deep-frying shrimp popcorn. Oddly disoriented, Sealink closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. It smelled as much like home as anything could. And yet—

Familiar ground, brand-new territory.

There was a sudden eruption from among the crates. A big white cat, his face marked by long, gummy runnels down the nose, burst from the debris, scattering chewed corn husks, sad crusts of bread, and bits of rotting tomato. His shoulders were wide and muscled, his haunches bunched ready to spring. A new pink scar showed raw against the fur of his lower belly. An onion skin hung out of his mouth. Why was he eating this crap? Sealink stared at him with a kind of puzzled distaste. On the other hand, you had to begin somewhere.

“I was looking for some kittens,” she said.

She might not have spoken. The white cat hissed. His ears—such as they were—went flat against his skull. Unsavory curses spilled out of his mouth.

“This is my food,” he said.

Sealink was disgusted. It was not what she had expected. It was not your hometown welcome back. It was not the voice of the Big Easy. “This ain’t food,” she said, treating their surroundings to a look of contempt. “It ain’t even consumer-quality garbage.” She decided on a change of tack. “Look, babe,” she went on, in the drawling contralto that had served her well in fourteen countries—a voice that had charmed camels, let alone tomcats, whose knees it had been known to turn to jelly, “let’s take it easy here—”

“This is all mine,” said the white cat. He put his head down and began to advance on her.

Okay, she told herself, so the voice didn’t work.

She thought, Time for Plan B.

Unsheathing her claws, which she kept impeccably honed, she hurled herself at the white cat. He was some pounds heavier, and his muzzle was scarred with the marks of many previous encounters. But as he lunged to meet her, Sealink leapt high in the air. With an acrobatic twist surprising to see in a cat of her size, she turned herself through 180 degrees and landed on top of him. The white cat looked appalled. His eyes rolled up in his head, trying to pinpoint this unconventional aggressor. Sealink seized the initiative. Opening her jaws as wide as they would part, she sank her teeth into the thick skin at the back of his neck. Curiously, for all his bulk, it felt flabby and wasted. Suddenly she found herself swinging around in front of him, still with his flesh clamped firmly in her mouth. Alarmed at this unexpectedly close head-on view, Sealink let go. The white cat stared at her, sparks flaring in his puzzled blue eyes. Then he turned tail and bolted.

Sealink sat down heavily, gazing after him.

Some homecoming.

“T’es culloté. You sure got a nerve. You done dusted Blanco bien.”

A neat little tortoiseshell-and-white had appeared as if from nowhere. Now she seated herself carefully among the rotting greens and, balancing with precision, began to clean between the spread toes of an elegantly extended hind leg.

Sealink turned in surprise.

“You a stranger around here, cher?”

“Kind of beginning to feel that way.” Sealink fluffed out her not inconsiderable coat. She was already three times the size of the little tortie, yet the smaller cat appeared unperturbed.

“I ain’t seen y’all before.”

“I ain’t seen you, neither.”

The little tortoiseshell cat narrowed her eyes. Her tail nicked on the ground once, twice, with irritation.

“Kiki know you here, cher ami?”

So Kiki la Doucette still maintained her position as high queen of the boardwalk cats. Sealink did not have fond memories of that yellow-coated madam, with her cold stare and seraglio of attendant males. She’d been less than tolerant of other females, especially uppity young calico queens with a roving eye. Constantly in heat, Kiki had mothered litter after litter of scrawny kittens, extending her court from the Riverwalk to Esplanade. When the moon was high over the Mississippi, the levee had echoed to her earsplitting yowls. Toms had traipsed from far and wide to visit the famous Kiki, then left the next day, scratched and sore, with a tale to tell of a wild Creole queen with a misleading name and insatiable appetite. This was probably yet another of her myriad offspring.

“Since when does any cat need Kiki la Doucette’s permission to come down the Grand Highway?”

“You not bowed your head to la Mère, you better vamos.”

Sealink was infuriated. So much for shared heritage! She’d traveled half the world for this? To be set upon by a flea-bitten torn with the manners of a hound dog was bad enough; but to be expected to pander to some raddled old yellow queen who’d once tried to scratch her eyes out? Not likely. She turned her back with calculated disdain upon the tortie-and-white, stuck her tail straight up in the air like a standard-bearer marching to war, and sway-hipped it down the alley. Without looking back, she called, “I don’t bow my head to anyone, sweetie; you go tell your mama her old friend the Delta Queen is back in town.”

Everybody who is looking for something in New Orleans is bound to end up on the boardwalk. Down there, at least, everything was much as Sealink remembered. The Mississippi stretched away gray and leaden to the distant greenery on the opposite bank. Over at the Algiers docks, cranes towered above the water like huge predatory birds. She crossed the wooden planking and jumped down onto the beach, hoping to meet a cat she knew, someone whose unbroken link to the past would enable her to start the search in earnest. All she found was a rocky shoreline littered with driftwood and indefinable bits of plastic. Mooching along this murderous strand, she passed the hollow where she had once dallied with a salty ginger-and-white fresh off a foreign cargo ship. He’d spoken oddly and his fur had smelled of oil and spice. It had been her first time. He had bitten her hard in the back of her neck, and, being a feisty youngster as yet unaware of the appropriate etiquette, she had bitten him in return. He had leapt up in affront and rushed off down the boardwalk to groom himself obsessively and attempt to regain his composure. And then there had been Ambroise and Zephirain, Bill and Trophy and Spid. Sealink smiled to herself in

So many since then. All gone and all—but one—forgotten, cast aside with the brutal negligence of youth: always somewhere new to move along to, some new temptation. And if they didn’t want to come down that road with her? Well, hell, she was Sealink, and the journey was the life. Except that the road had led her back to its beginning, another spin of the great big wheel of the world.

Everything seemed so much smaller now.

And so quiet.

Where was everybody?

There wasn’t a cat in sight. And, curiously, no humans either. In her youth it had been a wonderful place to cadge titbits off tourists: a slice of sausage here, some little delicacy from a bursting po’boy sandwich there, maybe even a piece of soft-shell crab, if you’d hooked a real sucker.

But best of all was the old wooden bench, third from the steps. For the cats of the Moon Walk it was a favorite gathering spot. Every evening just as the light began to fade from the sky, as constant and inexorable as the Mississippi tide, the old man known as Henry had come down to the boardwalk. He’d moved slowly and stiffly, and his face was seamed with lines; but every night he would miraculously produce bags full of food: fish heads and chicken skins, shrimp and crab and mudbugs. As if from nowhere cats would appear in droves, a purring, mewing entourage who would wind themselves adoringly around his feet until all the food was gone, when they would slip away in selfish bliss among the shadows or drift along the weedy shoreline to groom and doze. To Sealink, Henry had seemed perfect. He smelled wonderful—fishy and catty and hardly human at all. Other people avoided him. He never tried to pick cats up; never forced his will upon them; but arrived, uncomplaining and punctual every night to smile upon their impersonal and mercenary greed.

She rubbed her cheek against the bench. It smelled disused. There were crumbs under the seat, gone hard and stale.

She moved south toward the Toulouse Street Wharf, still on the lookout for the denizens of the levee, until struck by a scent that made her nose twitch. The farther down the boardwalk, the stronger the smell became. Sealink sniffed appreciatively. An enormous sense of well-being swept over her. There is little in life quite so fine as those moments a hungry cat experiences immediately in advance of satisfying its appetite. Her nose led her to a trash can at the end of the boardwalk. It was an undignified squeeze for a cat of her size, but was dignity at issue? It was not. Sealink squirmed her way into the trash like a furry bulldozer and emerged some seconds later with her jaws clamped around a chicken carcass that was still transmitting its irresistible signals into the humid Louisiana air. To Sealink, these were signals of love. She slipped with a grace born of many years of patient scavenging back onto the boardwalk. There, she wedged the deceased fowl against a fence post and after some awkward maneuvering, managed to insert her entire head inside it. There were bits of gizzard left!

Thus engaged, she did not notice the large ginger cat, who had been sitting silently for some time on top of the fence, slip soft footed to the ground behind her. The tabby markings of his coat swirled like a great, furry magnetic field in gorgeous, complex patterns from shoulder to tail—storms of ocher and orange and cream, marmalade and sienna converging as if drawn by some powerful force to a nexus at his neck.

The calico’s hindquarters swayed provocatively as she pursued the last remnants of meat deep inside the chicken. Her glorious tail waved in the air.

The ginger cat made himself comfortable on the warm planking and watched this show with considerable pleasure.“Well, well,” he mused aloud. “My afternoon has brought me a number of blessings: a gentle breeze on a humid day, half a boudin sausage down at the park, the remnants of a fine chili dog just by the tram stop. And now—Just as my contemplations reach the conclusion that I am a sorry no-good vagabond with whom no self-respectin’ female is ever likely to spend her time—I come down here and what do I find?” He fanned his whiskers appreciatively. “Why, a calico cat with the most entrancin’ rump that I ever did see. My day sure is lookin’ up. Tell me, honey, what brings a beautiful lady like yourself down to this sad shore?”

Deeply entrenched in the chicken, Sealink heard his words as a hollow blur. “Hold up, honey. My attention is engaged elsewhere right now,” she muttered. She got hold of a last strand of meat and wrestled to extract it. Her considerable haunches swayed and jounced. This was too much for the ginger cat. With a growl of desire he launched himself upon her, burying his teeth where the back of her neck should have been—only to meet two-day-old chicken bone and slippery sinew. Feeling his unsolicited weight and plain intentions, Sealink howled in outrage. She backed out of the carcass, and, whirling like a dervish, fastened herself to his throat. He shot skyward until gravity intervened and Sealink was detached, spitting with fury.

Down on the boardwalk again, he backed carefully away from her, a shocked expression on his strangely marked face. Sealink noted how an irregular black patch spread itself across one ear and eye, lending him a distinctly untrustworthy air.

“What d’you think you’re playing at?”

The marmalade cat stretched out his neck, cleared his bitten throat, looked shifty.

“Well, honey, it sure looked like a invitation to me.”

Sealink growled.

“How could any red-blooded male resist? What could be more alluring than the sight of such a fine, mature queen of-ferin’ herself like that?”

Sealink gave him a hard stare. He looked back at her, and the lazy eye in the middle of the black spot drooped so that fora moment Sealink thought he had winked. She felt the short fur on the top of her head bristle.

Suddenly she thought, Why, he ain’t but a boy, and laughed.

“Honey, I was eatin’! I wasn’t offerin’ myself—to you or any male. And I don’t take too kindly to bein’ called old, either.”

The tomcat, embarrassed, set about an elaborate toilette, starting with his face and front paws.

“So what’s your name?” she asked at last.

“Red.”

“Figures.” A pause. “And where do you call home, babe?” she enquired.

“This burg is where I first seen the light of day,” Red explained, “but foreign places have not been foreign to me, I confess. Though I return here every so often, home is just ‘bout anywhere I lay my head.” And indeed, despite his Southern drawl, he had a smell the calico recognized. It was the smell of docks and truck stops, cardinal points on the long, genial road to nowhere. “My story’s easy told. I’ve been places where the nights are sweet with lilac, and places not so sweet. I’m a cat you don’t meet every day, a cat of no fixed abode—” He gave her a look that had already shattered a heart or two along the road. “And I like it like that.”

Sealink smiled into her fur at this callow Delta spiel, culled from the monologues of the traveling toms Red had met on his journey: it was one she had rehearsed a time or two. She warmed toward him in consequence, and found herself saying, “I know that feelin’. I’m from just about any place myself.”

She deliberated for a moment, then, deciding that she might trust him with her difficulties, went on. “I come back here looking for kittens.”

Red treated her to his sensual, lopsided stare.

“Might still be able to help with that,” he offered.

“In your dreams, sonny. I come back looking for some kittens I already had.” Sealink appraised the territory. “I have to say I find things changed. Soon’s I leave the market highway, I get set upon by some old white mog with his skin hanging off him like a secondhand coat. Jeez, did he smell! Then this little scrawny female tells me I gotta check in with Madam Kiki ‘fore I walk the boards of this town. Now I come down here, a place known to swarm with cats, and all I find is you.”

“Guess you just got lucky, babe,” said Red. Then he shrugged. “Cats don’t pass their time here no more. Folks ain’t so friendly as they were.”

“Honey, this is the city of cats. There are darn near a million of us here—every one fed, directly or indirectly, by human bein’s. What are you tellin’ me?”

The marmalade cat regarded her askance.

“You been away too long,” he said.

Chapter Four

THE LABORATORY

The cat known only as Animal X passed his time with four other cats in a five-chambered metal cabinet that left only their heads free to move. There were other cabinets nearby— though Animal X couldn’t see them—and other cats in those cabinets. Some of them had been afraid when they were first brought here. Some of them had been angry. Now they accepted their situation. The only thing they couldn’t get used to was not having enough mobility to groom themselves. The strain of this left them dull-eyed. Their necks were chafed into sores by the enameled edge of the cabinet. In an attempt to relieve the irritation this caused, they stared outward away from one another all day while human beings came and went around them, treating them as if they weren’t there and saying things like “Hanson wants the workups as of yesterday, but he won’t say why.” Or “We can do the blood now, on its own, but it won’t show anything. Doesn’t he know that?” These people never touched the cats in the cabinets. They didn’t need to.

“Doesn’t he know that?”

Of all the things the human beings said this interested Animal X the most, because he knew so little.

He had no idea who he was. He certainly didn’t know himself by the label Animal X. The life he lived did not require anyone to call him anything. It only required him—so he supposed—to feel pain. He woke up and he was in pain; he was in pain and then he slept. Something had been done to him. He felt a fool at having to stand there in one place all day; he felt as if it was his own fault. “Somehow I got caught,” he would tell himself. He smelled his own smell suddenly, and a kind of shame went through him. He was dirty. Worse, therewas a soft place in his field of vision where whatever it was had been done to him. He didn’t remember it—that was the odd thing. Sometimes he kept very still in case it was done to him again. I want to avoid that, he thought. Thinking was difficult for Animal X. Thinking had been taken away from him with everything else. The soft place in his visual field was matched, somewhere deep in his head where thinking should have been carried on, by a kind of lesion. Some days everything was sucked into that gap or black wound and he was hardly there at all; others, at least he knew he was alive. On his best days he thought of himself, in his confused way, as a voice in a vacuum, a monologue held with the facts of a dull life. He didn’t know who he was. He barely knew he was a cat. But his body remembered, and at night, in the cabinet, where no one could see them, his weak, withered legs kicked and trembled as, in dreams of their own, they tried to

A window was set high up in the room somewhere behind Animal X’s head. He had never seen it, but he knew it was there by the parallelogram of sunlight projected onto the white-painted wall in front of him. He knew that shifting, flattened lozenge by heart. He had watched as it changed shape stealthily, hour by hour, across more days than he could count. At the end of the long afternoons the light from the window warmed each object it found, making everything, even in that place, seem friendly and familiar. The air became a rich, creamy-golden substance, less like air than pure color. You forgot the ammoniacal smell of the trapped cats around you. Light fell through the air in a single slanting bar; dust motes fell gently through the light like dandelion seeds.

Animal X thought, Dandelion seeds!

He thought, I wonder if—

He thought, No.

On a good day Animal X could just see, out of the very corner of his eye, the heads of the nearest cats to him in the cabinet. (A better view could be had by turning his head, but if he did that he was given a sharp reminder of the sore that went around his neck like a collar.) Next to him on his right was a cat so depressed it never spoke. This cat had replaced a very lively female, dimly but fondly remembered by Animal X as “Dancey.” (Dancey—Animal D—had never stopped talking. Everything she said began with the announcement, “As soon as I get out of here—”) On his left was Stilton, Animal B. He liked Stilton and the silent cat. Living so close, they were important to him. If they smelled a bit strongly, it was a smell to wake up to, a dependable smell. If there was something odd about the shape of their heads, well, something had been done to all the cats here, and perhaps there was something wrong with the shape of Animal X’s head, too.

Stilton had been in the cabinet longer than any of the others. He predated both Dancey, whose departure Animal X had witnessed, and “the Longhair,” a cat Dancey herself had often remembered fondly. Stilton had got his name because he always talked about Stilton. He would stare into space for a bit and then say, as if he was continuing a conversation that had already started, “Now, what you can get if you go to the factory shop—well, what my owners used to get anyway—is seconds. A bit overripe perhaps, you see. A bit runny. So for seventy pence you can get this great wheel, this whole cheese. It’s a lot, but they’d split it with their friends. I’d see them eat it after their supper, lumps as big as your head. Lumps that big.” But however much Stilton liked his favorite cheese, he couldn’t finish the imaginary piece he always had with him. “Look at that!” he would say in astonishment, and then offer some to Animal X. “I love Stilton, but this is just too much.” His voice was full of the regretful awe of the truly great eaters when they are forced to acknowledge defeat. “Can you imagine eating this much Stilton? It’s not often I’m stumped. I’ll say that.”

Animal X could never think how to respond to this.

“It is big,” he would try. Or “It’s certainly big.”

But what he said didn’t seem to matter anyway, and after a moment or two Stilton would go on, “Never mind. The old girl’ll come by; she’ll be along soon enough.” He nodded to himself in a satisfied way. He was always waiting for the “old girl,” who seemed to be his mate—or perhaps one of his owners. The old girl liked Stilton almost as much as he did. “She’s bound to come by. She’ll help us polish it off.”

Silence would descend for a moment before he added reminiscently, “Oh yes, I love Stilton.”

“I hate it,” said Animal X.

This exchange took place daily. Sometimes, to vary things, and so that his friend shouldn’t feel too hurt, Animal X would reply not with “I hate it,” but with “I suppose I quite like it sometimes. For a treat.”

The two cats on the far side of the cabinet rarely joined in. That was the nature of this kind of captivity: in the cabinet, two animals were always behind you. But Animal X knew they held their own conversations. He heard them talking in the night. They asked each other the same question all the cats asked: “Can you remember who you were? I mean, before the cabinet? Can you?” Neither of them could, although they tried hard enough. After all, they were cats: they knew how to persevere. They tried so hard that, in the end, they were making up stories about themselves. They tried out memories the way a human being tries on clothes, picking them up and then putting them down apparently at random.

“I was a town cat, me. Oh, yes. It was backyards every night, backyards and singing and bad sisters, out on top of the wall where everyone could see. It was one long party for us, and no regrets!” Then, after a pause: “I’ve got a bit of a funny neck now, but I’ve got no regrets.” Next night, the same cat would be claiming, “Sometimes I think I must have lived on a farm. You know? Because I remember the smell of straw and the warm breath of the cows.”

“You remember that, do you?”

“I do. Sometimes I think I do remember that.”

So their bemused dialogue droned on into the night, thoughtless and obsessive, broken by longer and longer pauses, until near dawn it petered out.

“Can you see what color I am? I’ve got this feeling I was a tortoiseshell.”

By then, though, Animal X was asleep.

One day the door opened and a human being in a white coat came in from the corridor carrying a wire cage. It walked across Animal X’s field of vision from left to right, called something to one of its colleagues, and passed out of sight. Animal X heard it talking behind him, then another door opened and closed, and it was gone. The whole transaction took place in a minute, but remained sharp and clear in the watching cat’s mind. The human had backed awkwardly in through the door, banging the cage against the doorframe. It crossed the room, its gait made awkward and lopsided by the weight and size of its burden. It exchanged a few words, then dropped the cage and left. It seemed relieved. That was that; but in those few moments, Animal X’s life had begun to change again, although he couldn’t know that.

In the cage was a creature of some kind. He caught a brief glimpse of it. It had glorious red-gold fur. Its eyes glittered a kind of hot jade color, with unlikely specks of silver. It was very agitated, turning ceaselessly back and forth in its own length, spitting and hissing, often throwing itself against the wire so hard that the man carrying it staggered sideways suddenly and swore. Animal X’s immediate thought was, It doesn’t belong in here, not with us. It’s too good to be in with us. After that his impressions were confused and contradictory. Was it a cat at all? If so, it was clearly a kitten. Yet despite its leggy, slightly unformed lines and immaturity of face, it was bigger than many a full-grown tom. He had never seen a kitten so big. Before he could decide anything, it had vanished. But he was to see more of it, almost immediately. They had difficulty getting it out of its cage. And then, while they were trying to transfer it to a cabinet, it escaped. Much of this took place behind Animal X’s head. All he heard was shouts from the human beings. “Look out, just pull it out of there, can’t you?” “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, it’s okay.” “Bugger!”—and a bubbling, ululating wail that rose suddenly into the fine mad high-pitched shriek of outrage all those confined cats remembered so well. Then the new animal streaked into view, low to the ground, ears flat, eyes bulging. It stopped for an instant in front of Animal X’s cabinet to gaze back over its shoulder at the pursuit. It was a male kitten, all anger and beauty, piss and vinegar, but Animal X could see how much fear was mingled with its rage. “Hide now,” he heard himself advise quietly. “You can get out later, when one of them opens the door.” He was immediately aware what a counsel of despair that was. Sides heaving, hindquarters dropped protectively, every muscle bunched and hard under the short, velvety coat, body rocking to the beat of its own heart, the kitten stared up at him with a kind of empty defiance. For a moment he thought it would acknowledge him, tell him contemptuously, “I’ll never be trapped like you.” Instead it spun around and rushed away, to be followed an instant later by three or four human beings, all hands and shoes and spectacles. Their huge dull faces red and sweating, they grunted and stumbled after the escapee; while, unknown to them, the cabinet cats cheered it on. “Go on,” they called. “Go on!”

That kitten had come into their lives from nowhere, and passed in half a minute from a zero to a legend. Hopes they never knew they had were invested in him. When he hid, they looked away, in case his pursuers should follow their line of sight. When he upped and ran, their feet scrabbled and scratched uselessly in the cabinet. They were trying to run on his behalf, and at the same time catch for themselves a little of his wild speed and freedom. They were filled with elation and a kind of savage pride. The kitten was undauntable. He was all energy. No cat in there had ever put up such a fight. If it looked as if the pursuit had its hands upon him, he could always find another ounce of pace. He stretched himself and ran and ran. He leaned into the corners. He was under the examination table in the blink of an eye. He was behind the cabinets. He was up and down the aisles between them in blurred figures-of-eight with his claws scraping for purchase on the slick and shiny floor. When nothing else would do, he seemed to be able to run around the very walls in defiance of gravity itself. It was then that the silent cat on Animal X’s left spoke the only words anyone in that place had ever heard him say.

“Did you see that?” he asked, in a quiet but clear voice. “He went ‘round there like the Wall of Death.” And then, much louder, to the kitten itself, “Go on, my son! Give ‘em the bloody Wall of Death!” None of the cabinet cats had any idea what he meant by this; but they took up his call—”Wall of Death! Wall of Death!”—and in the aftermath of these events, for a few days at least, Wall of Death became the nickname of the silent cat.

If the kitten heard any of this, he gave no sign. Favorite son or no, he had his own motives. He had his own life to live. Even as they egged him on, he was losing it. Animal X saw with dismay how tired he had become. He had burned himself up, and there was nowhere left to hide. His efforts became increasingly desperate. Eyes rimmed white with panic, he threw himself repeatedly against the closed door. He tried to get under the cupboard, but the gap was too small. Toward the end, trapped among the feet of the human beings, whining and bubbling angrily, he made them pay. He rocked back on his haunches. His claws shot out, his teeth flashed, drops of blood hung in the air like a spray of scarlet fuchsia. “Christ! It got me!” they shouted, backing away with nervous skips and jumps, shaking their fingers, staring at one another in astonishment. But eventually one of them went and fetched a pair of scarred leather gloves and a needle full of sleep, and after that it was soon over. The glorious savage, brought to bay in a corner by the cupboard, suddenly became silent and passive and was taken away dangling at arm’s length like the empty pelt of a cat, out of Animal X’s sight.

There was a shocked and empty pause in the cabinets.

Then someone whispered, “Did you see the eyes on him? Weird!” And someone added, “He was something to catch, that one.” And someone else said, “It’s a shame.” Suddenly, full of excitement, they all began to talk at once, shouting from cabinet to cabinet across the white room of their captivity, brought together in a way they had never been before. Animal X said nothing. He was saddened by this proof that life is, indeed, only capture, silence, and the cage: only pain.

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Animal X often woke up before the other cats in the laboratory. Despite himself he loved the dawn. He loved the deepened silence around the first chirp of a bird, the edge of silver on things. He liked to be awake then, and know that everyone else was asleep. It made him feel warm toward them. Sometimes dawn dressed the room with pinks and golds; sometimes it stole in feathery gray, and a faint prickle of rain could be heard falling on the vegetation outside the unseen window: but good weather or bad it was filled with promise. No matter how ill he was, he couldn’t stop himself from feeling optimistic. He thought he had probably loved dawns in his previous life, too.

Four or five days after the arrival of the kitten, he opened his eyes and looked around puzzledly. The room was too warm. There was a kind of hush. He shook his head. Things felt wrenched; barely awake, he already knew the day was out of shape. It had broken the wrong color, yellow on the edge of gold, increasingly tinged with a strange, hot, transparent green, like light falling through thick foliage.

“Well now,” he asked himself, “what’s this?”

The light intensified as he watched. It fizzed and crackled silently, like a burning fuse. The laboratory warmed under its touch. It was like high summer, like the light, he found himself thinking, though he had no idea where the thought came from, in some foreign land.

It was hot now. It was very hot. All around him now, the sleeping cats were bathed in light. It thawed their strained, uncomfortable attitudes. They sighed without knowing it, and relaxed, and did not wake, but for the first time in many months rested as if they had forgotten where they were. The light flickered about them, full of the power and humor of itself. Here and there it seemed to gather and spark. It glittered and crackled. It drew itself away for a heartbeat, during which Animal X held his breath. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told himself. “Never. I know I would have remembered anything like this.” Outside, every bird in the world began to sing suddenly. The fuse of the dawn burned and burned, then ignited in a great soft roar. A green flame exploded beneath the ceiling, spread rapidly, roiled down and across the laboratory floor. Everything in its path caught fire. Everything it touched was engulfed. Everything in the room began to fly apart, in complete silence. The cabinets were pulled to pieces and thrown about; equipment toppled through the burning air; the very walls tumbled outward and away, pulled and twisted as they went, into dust and detritus and falling bricks.

When he woke again, he was chilled right through. His fur was wet. The light was gray. He opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was the laboratory door. Something was wrong with it. It was hanging off one hinge, leaning into the room like a drunken man into an alley. He stared for a moment, then, not yet able to understand quite what he was seeing, let his gaze be drawn away. The laboratory had been opened up in a dozen other places. The windows had blown out; the ceiling had sagged and split. Loops of cable hung down. The floor was thick with splinters of wood and shards of glass, the air with plaster dust through which fell a fine cold rain. The examination table, site of so many indignities and so much pain, lay buckled and barely recognizable at the foot of a wall. It looked as if it had been thrown there by some enormous angry hand, which had gone on without a pause to dissect every cabinet into its component panels. Barely damaged, these lay distributed across the floor in curious, eddying patterns, like hundreds of playing cards scattered on a tabletop.

In the aftermath of the explosion, it was clear, many of the captive cats had taken their chance and fled the laboratory; but many others, too far gone to move, had been released by death. Animal X stood shivering in the wreckage. He gazed out dully over the windrows of silent animals, cats of all colors, coats clotted with neglect, patchy with eczema, sodden with the falling rain. Damp air moved over them and brought Animal X the sour simple smell of mortality. He felt an awful cry of misery and rage well up inside him, then fade away unexpressed. What would be the point? Intervention had been welcome to all these animals made old and miserable before their time. They lay in relaxed postures among the tangled wires and detached implants of their captivity, happy to accept the embrace of the green fire. Many of them had stretched out their forelegs in welcome, the way cats sometimes do when they are rolling in the sunshine.

Without the cabinet around him, Animal X felt alone and exposed. He stood shivering dully in the wreckage—his spine a bony, uncomfortable curve, his tail tucked tightly into his hindquarters—trying to make sense of it. He had been there as long as any of them. He had seen it all come and go. Why was he alive? What was he to make of that secret dawn and jungle light?

“I don’t know what’s happened,” he kept telling himself. “I don’t know what’s happened.”

Suddenly he said it out loud.

At that there was a stealthy movement in the remains of the cabinet. With considerable struggle and disconnected effort, the cat called Stilton hauled himself into view. He was coated in grayish dust. He looked down at himself in horror, made three staggering steps forward, and fell over.

“Are we dead?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” said Animal X. “All these others are.”

“Come and sit here,” said Stilton.

They curled themselves as tightly as they could around each other. Shaking fits passed through them. They tried to lick each other clean, but their bodies were so relieved to feel the touch of another cat again that they fell asleep immediately. They stayed that way for much of the morning, unwilling to leave the site of their old cabinet—though they kept a distance between themselves and the bodies of the cats they had shared it with. Animal X found himself remembering those three with more affection and less discomfort than he had expected. The Silent Cat had given up speaking because he didn’t have anything left to say about life, he thought. Death must have been a release for him. Then he reminded himself, I never knew the others, though I heard them talk. They might have been interesting cats. He thought, I would have known them better if they’d been next to me in the cabinet. His memory was already garbled and confused, so that some repeated phrase of theirs had become mixed up with the luminous dawns, the rattle of hard food in a tin tray, the flutter of paper on the corkboard by the door. It all seemed one, and surprisingly like a life.

Chapter Five

LEAVE IT TO LEONORA

Tag the cat sat on a shelf in the abandoned pet shop at Cutting Lane.

It was the end of a wet afternoon, and the light was fading to brown on the other side of the dirty, rain-streaked windows. Soon the street outside would echo briefly to the sound of hundreds of human feet. The sodium lamps would turn it orange. Then the noise would die away, and the pavements would belong to cats again. “The night,” his old mentor had once advised him, “is always the best time for doing the work of the Majicou.” So—though he could have done that kind of work at any time from Cutting Lane, so central was it in the web of the wild roads—Tag sat on his shelf to wait.

Come on, night, he thought.

As soon as he had finished here, he planned to visit a pie stall three streets away and eat battered scallops, white pudding. In the meantime he got up, shook himself, and was just turning around to find a more comfortable position when he heard a noise at the back of the shop.

Scrape.

It was like claws on bare wood. He heard it once and then again. What’s this? he thought. Scrape. Click. Scrape. Like a lame animal circling quietly in the back room.

Something had come along the wilds roads to him, something that owed allegiance to the original master of Cutting Lane. Tag got to his feet and backed carefully along the shelf until he was hidden behind some thick spiderwebs. With no one to teach him how to be the Majicou, he had learned caution early. Most of the proxies were harmless. Some weren’t. He never showed himself until he was sure. Out loud, he said, “No one asked you here, but you won’t be hurt.”

Scrape.

“Come into the light,” he said.

A thick voice answered, “I saw something the Majicou would pay to see.”

“There are no payments here.”

“Then there is no news.”

“Come further into the light.”

Click. Scrape.

Perhaps it had once been a dog. Perhaps it had wandered onto the Old Changing Way and something had happened to it there, and it could no longer go back to whatever life it had once enjoyed. It was very old now, as if the wild roads had kept it alive too long. It was large and shapeless, and it had a large, shapeless smell. Coarse brown and black hair with an oily look. A misshapen head that nodded up and down as it walked on its three legs. Eyes milky with cataracts. There was something indeterminate about all these things. Its voice was like a voice strained through kapok. Tag had dealt with it before.

“I know you,” he said.

“You are not the Majicou.”

“Yes I am.”

“Then come with me.”

“Why should I?”

“What do you know about death?”

“Less than I could.”

“Then come with me and learn.”

Limping and pausing, panting and dragging, it led him into the back room, where it promptly vanished into the air. Tag followed. They debouched in an alley between two buildings. There was no talk between them. In a little while they came to the river. There, as the day packed itself away into the west, the Dog showed him what it had found. At low tide here, a small but well-used highway had its entrance in a filmy gray twist of light between two rotting piles. It was popular with the animals of both banks as a way across the river and had comprehensive links to much larger roads. Tag stood in the smell ofmud and stared at the heap of corpses the Dog had brought him to see. There were ten or fifteen of them. They were all cats. Their fur was sodden. Their limbs were entangled as if they had fought in panic with one another at the last. Their eyes bulged so hard that the whites showed. They had died with their ears back.

“How did this happen?” said Tag.

The Dog looked at him dully.

“The life has been drained out of them,” it said. “Something is wrong with the Old Changing Way. I don’t know what.”

“Go away and learn more.”

“You are not the Majicou,” grumbled the Dog.

“I am the new Majicou. Always come to me when you find something.”

“Yet there is no reward.”

“Find me two golden kittens and we’ll see.”

The Dog turned away with a sigh and dragged itself up the shingle toward the buildings. Something made it stop and say, “I am a dog. A dog has a sense of smell. If I did not know better I would say I smelled the Alchemist on that road. I would not use it if I were you.”

Too late.

The new Majicou had gingerly negotiated the heap of dead cats and stuck his head in the highway.

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He took her home immediately, and without a word spoken, so that her parents could scold her roundly in the dim green light of the oceanarium.

“What were you thinking of?” demanded the Mau. “What could you have been thinking of?” While Ragnar Gustaffson shook his head and—conveniently forgetting his own first acquaintance with the Old Changing Way—said that in his opinion it was a very irresponsible thing to travel wild roads as a kitten without protection or preparation.

“A very irresponsible thing, Leonora.”

Leo looked abashed for a moment. Then her confidence returned. “I want my brother and sister back,” she said.

“We all want that,” said the Mau tiredly. “You could help by not being taken in your turn.” With a kind of puzzled distaste she looked up at the great tank, where the sharks circled relentlessly in the illuminated water. “We live here with these—” for a moment, she seemed lost for words “—these fishes, to keep you safe.”

This only made Leo angry. “I don’t want to be safe,” she said.

She said, “No one is doing anything!”

“I’m doing what I can, Leo,” said Tag. Now that his fur had settled down, he felt mainly relief that he hadn’t hurt her. Nor could he forget her expression when she saw the grotesque and pathetic heap of fur at the end of the highway. It was hard to stay angry, though Leo seemed to have no difficulty with that. “I might have killed you by the river,” he added quietly. “I had no idea who you were.”

She looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He could see that she was, but that it wouldn’t change things for now. He felt uncomfortable on her behalf—though he knew she wouldn’t thank him for that either—as she turned and stalked off toward the door.

“Where are you going?” demanded the Mau.

“All these fish make me hungry,” said Leonora. “I’m going to find Cy and get chips from the tourists.”

“Leonora!”

When she returned in a better mood about two hours later, licking her chops and smelling strongly of hot lard and vinegar, she found Tag waiting for her on the oceanarium doorstep.

“You’ve hurt their feelings, Leo,” he said

“I know,” she said. “I’ll go in and apologize.”

“Wait,” said Tag. “Sit here for a moment.”

She sat.

“You look tired,” she said. She began to groom herself absently, then turned her attentions to him. “And you’ve let your ears get dirty.”

“Leonora, that wasn’t the first time you’d followed me, was it?”

She stopped licking him and looked away.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I knew you’d guess in the end. I wanted to learn about the wild roads. They’re such a part of your life—and Ragnar’s and Pertelot’s. I feel left out. I’m only a kitten, but I want to know things.”

“I wish you’d asked me,” he said.

“Are you angry?”

“No,” he said. “In fact I’m rather relieved that it was you. Still,” he chided her gently, “you should never take an adult cat by surprise like that. Your mother and father and I, we fought the Alchemist—” How could he explain? “We’ve seen some awful things. We—we were toughened by it, whether we wanted to be or not. You shouldn’t surprise us. And especially not the Majicou. The Majicou can be a more dangerous animal than you imagine.”

Leonora laughed. “You didn’t look so dangerous when you fell over,” she said. “Oh dear, now your feelings are hurt, too.”

Tag blinked.

His main argument to Ragnar and Pertelot had been simple: “If you forbid her she’ll just keep doing it anyway.” They had seen the force of this. They had expected him to make promises, of course. Leonora must agree to do what she was told. She must always stay by him. Once all that was sorted out, he had tried to calm their fears further by adding, “She’ll soon get bored when she sees how humdrum it all is.”

“Don’t misjudge Leonora,” the Queen had advised him grimly. Hurt feelings or not—and who could use such a phrase to describe the wells of sorrow and anger, the Egyptian deeps of the Mau’s affections?—she loved her daughter. “She’s an untapped soul.”

Leonora was soon bored.

“Love the world, Leo,” Tag would advise her. “That’s the secret of success. Love the world and follow your nose.” This axiom gave rise less to a search of the wild roads than a communion with them, less an interrogation of their denizens than a conversation. It hardly suited the leonine temperament. True, she enjoyed learning how to find and navigate her chosen highway, how to recognize a safe or a difficult entrance, how to watch the ever-changing smoky light. It was an adventure. “Quick now, Leonora!” Tag would urge. “Follow close!” Or “Wait! Wait here and make no sound!” She soon learned to listen for that edge in his voice, that promise of excitement and danger. And she soon fell in love with the bizarre and eccentric animals he knew—the “creatures of Majicou” who had acted as agents, informants, proxies to the original guardian of the wild roads. She loved the marginal places they lived in and the odd relationships they seemed to have with one another or with human beings. All this was rather exciting. But it was broken up by long periods at Cutting Lane, during which her teacher sat among the spiderwebs and seemed to do nothing at all.

Instead of changing his plan when it produced no discernible results, Tag only became thoughtful. On their third day along the Old Changing Way, he took her to some city gardens. There, he spent an afternoon in the sunshine on the lawn in front of a house with weatherbeaten blue paintwork. He lay sprawled out on the warm grass, all creamy white and silver, watching amiably the huge bees that zizzed and bumbled in long arcs through the summery air. He was silent for so long she thought he had gone to sleep.

“Tag,” she said, after some time, “why have we come here?”

“I often come here to think.”

There was another long pause.

“The thing is,” he said eventually, “I used to live here. Or somewhere like it. Two rather dull but very generous human beings bought me from a pet shop, and I lived a good life.” He laughed. “I ate some things!” he said. “Tuna fish mayonnaise. Meat-and-liver dinner. Chicken-and-game casserole. Chicken-and-game casserole was my downfall, in the end. I don’t suppose you’ve had any of those?”

“No,” said Leo.

“Or mackerel pate, which is like a whole shoal of fish in a tin. Silver fish in a tin: that’s something!”

“Now you’re just teasing me,” Leo said primly, and added, having perhaps forgotten her passion for chips, “Pertelot says convenience food is bad for us anyway. And if you were having such a good time, why did you leave?”

“Well,” Tag said, “I can’t say I went of my own accord. But I did leave. The Majicou saw to that. He and his magpie, they gave me no rest until I did. One thing led to another, and we sorted things out, and here I am. It was a big fight, the day you were born and the Majicou died.”

“Was he wonderful?”

“He was big. I never saw a bigger cat, or heard a more convincing one.”

“You were his apprentice.”

“I suppose I was.”

“And did you love him?”

Tag looked puzzled.

“I don’t know if love’s the word,” he said. “He was full of anger and good advice. One of the last things he told me was this: ‘The wonderful place is inside you, and it goes wherever you go. Homes are made.’ But you know, even though he was right, and I’ve made a new life for myself, sometimes I still miss the home I had. So I come here, or go to one of the other gardens I remember, and scout about for it. I would recognize the voices of those dulls, I’m sure. Although what I’d do if I found them I’ve no idea. Does that seem odd to you?”

“I think I’m too young to have an opinion.”

“Ah,” said Tag. “Of course.”

He turned his attention back to the house. After a while he raised his left hind foot and scratched vigorously beneath the ear on that side. Leo, meanwhile, launched herself after a passing cabbage butterfly, missed comprehensively, and turned the leap into a grave, complex little dance—a series of enchained steps, a spring, a turn. She loved to dance. I’ll never learn to hunt if I keep doing this, she thought. She thought, Odin is the hunter. I wonder where he is now?

“Anyway,” said Tag suddenly, “that was how it was explained to me. Home is what you make.”

Leo, who had already suspected this, continued her dance.

“Am I your apprentice?” she asked lightly, so that he shouldn’t see how important is was to her.

Tag yawned.

“Time to get you home again,” he said.

Then he added, in rather a surprised way, “Do you want to be?”

“Oh, only if you would like it, too.”

“There is one thing more we could try,” Tag told her, “before we go home. We could visit the domain of Uroum Bashou, the cat they call the Elephant.”

Leo shivered.

“Is he called Elephant because he’s very big?”

Tag stared at her.

“To be frank, I’m not entirely sure what an elephant is,” he said. “I only know—”

“It’s something very big,” Leo told him. “Don’t you know anything?” She added matter-of-factly, “Mother dreams of them sometimes. She dreams almost every night.” She thought for a moment. “One day,” she said with a kind of careless hauteur, “I shall dream of elephants, too.”

Tag continued to stare at her. He wondered if he had been as impenetrable at her age. “I only know that he can read,” he finished. “Would you call someone Elephant because he can read?”

“What’s reading?”

Tag wasn’t entirely certain about that, either.

“Wait and see,” he said.

He only knew what Uroum Bashou had told him: that human beings kept what they called “books,” and that the Reading Cat was able to sense the meaning of the “words” these books contained by passing his paw quickly along each line of the text, or sometimes by licking it, and even by using his whiskers to sense faint changes in pressure caused by the movement of the air across the print. Uroum Bashou rarely used his eyes now that he had grown older—although of course that was how he had learned to read as a kitten, sitting on his owner’s shoulder as his owner turned the pages of some interesting volume—Birds of the Green Forest or Small Rodents of the Northern World: Their Habits.

“I’m tired of waiting and seeing,” said Leonora, “actually.”

For a moment, Tag looked amused.

“Oh, you actually are, are you?” he said. He jumped to his feet with an empty-eyed suddenness that startled her, snapped at a passing bee, and went bounding across the lawn, scattering last year’s leaves as he went. “Then try and follow me if you can!” he called over his shoulder and with that, vanished.

She caught a twist of light in the corner of her eye, dived into the highway before it closed after him. The world tipped sideways, righted itself, ghosts streamed past, the compass wind howled around her. She could see Tag in the middle distance, running tirelessly along in a kind of slow motion. Echoes flew up from his pads in the shape of small brown birds. “Call yourself a cat?” he taunted. And without warning he turned at right angles into the wall of the world and vanished again.

Leonora stood among the echoes, panting. What now? she thought. “What now?” the echoes said, as they fluttered around her muzzle. “Oh, go away!” she told them. Off she went again, and this time caught up with him a little sooner. “I do call myself a cat!” she said.

But he answered, “Do you indeed? Then you already know the way. Such a clever animal doesn’t need my lessons,” anddisappeared again. So it went, from the huge ancient highways laid down by saber-toothed cats after the ice receded to the little local mazes made by domestic cats, Tag always ahead, always allowing her to catch up, until she was thoroughly out of breath and out of temper, and they stood in the cluttered yard of an abandoned redbrick house somewhere in the Midlands, where early-evening light lay in slanting gold bars against the boarded-up windows, the scuffed and sun-bleached back door.

Into the door was set an old-fashioned wooden cat flap, scratched and battered and grubby with the passage of many cats. Above that, a smaller hole had been gouged in the door itself, perhaps so that the occupants could look out without themselves being seen. Behind the door, the air was disturbed by a stealthy movement, and a rank smell. One amber eye appeared in the hole and stared out at Tag and Leo. Its surface had an oily iridescence. Its pupil was dilated.

Leo rubbed her head nervously along the side of Tag’s head. “Is it Uroum Bashou?” she whispered.

“Go away,” said the animal behind the door.

“No,” said Tag to Leo. “It is his guardian, Kater Murr.”

“Go away,” said Kater Murr again. Its voice was reasonable and dangerous. Its breath was bad.

“I am the Majicou,” Tag said. “You know me, Kater Murr.”

“I know no one.”

The amber eye was removed suddenly. Leo had a sense of something ponderous and ill-favored shifting its weight in the gloom.

“Kater Murr, let us in,” said Tag patiently.

A contemptuous laugh came from behind the door.

“He is not seeing anyone today.”

“Stand away from the entrance.”

There was a pause. Then the voice said, “Very well. I will not harm you if you come in.”

But Tag answered, “Empty speech, Kater Murr. Empty promises. A cat like you can’t hurt the Majicou.” Then, quietly, to Leonora, “Don’t follow too closely, just in case.” The cat flap opened—a thick, sour smell poured out, like old food and ammonia—and closed again behind him.Silence.

Leonora waited as long as she dared, looked fearfully around the yard in case Kater Murr had associates hidden among the buddleia bushes, then pushed her way inside. It was a kitchen, almost dark, with a few lines of gray light falling across a worn tile floor and a shallow stone sink full of green mold. Human beings had stopped using it years ago. That sour, disturbing smell hung over everything; but the kitchen was empty except for Tag, licking himself unconcernedly in a dim corner. Leonora felt let down.

“Where is he?” she said.

“He won’t bother us now until we leave. He is the gatekeeper of this place.”

She didn’t like the way he stressed “this place.”

“It looks like a house to me,” she said, in an attempt to appear unconcerned.

Tag raised the paw he had just washed. He eyed it with approval. “Then come this way,” he invited, “and I’ll show you the Great Library of Uroum Bashou.”

The empty house murmured with traffic noises, as if a decade of passing cars lived in its peeling wainscots and half-open cupboards. Leo followed Tag up narrow flights of un-carpeted wooden stairs varnished years ago a sticky brown color. Each landing was lit by a small dirty window. Off the landings, doors opened into rooms empty and broken looking: rooms with stale charred grates like open mouths, rooms that looked as if birds had taken up residence in them.

“What is that smell?” asked Leonora, wrinkling her nose.

When Tag advised, “You shouldn’t ask ‘what?’ but ‘who?’ “ she stared over her shoulder as if the walls had quietly sprung to life behind her as she passed.

She was unprepared for the top of the house—where everything had been knocked into one huge room, now lighted by the dull gold-and-orange wash of a setting sun, which ran like hot metal through a series of skylights and onto the scene below—or for the animal who greeted them there.

Uroum Bashou had once danced and scampered in the alleys of Morocco—or so he claimed. Now he lived in some state, albeit in the cold north; and books surrounded him. Books large and small, books bound with green and brown leather or orange paper, books in drifts, books in rafts. Closed books, open books, books swooning into piles, books whose wings and backs seemed broken. Books had slipped from the walls and slithered across the floors like the moraines left behind by some strange retreating glacier from a vanished age of print. Among them, like a pasha on a cushion in a souk, sprawled the Reading Cat, a browny-black, short-haired, skinny, long-legged old thing, who nevertheless exuded the dignity of the expert, the confidence of the emeritus professor. The fur around his ears was threadbare, as if he were a toy from which someone had thoughtlessly rubbed the velvet of his little sharp head. His eyes, a dim amber, were flecked with the many things he knew. When he spoke, though, his voice was light and fluting, the voice of the eunuch like a musical instrument in the closed courtyard; and he often spoke of himself in the third person.

When he saw Leonora, he began to purr.

“Uroum Bashou,” he greeted her, “welcomes you, my dear. How can he help?”

“We are looking for two kittens—” Tag began.

Uroum Bashou ignored him.

“I see,” he said to Leonora, “that you are admiring the Tail of Uroum Bashou.”

She was indeed looking at it, but not perhaps with admiration. It was as skinny as he was, and there was something wrong with the tip of it.

“Come closer. This is the story. In brief, a cat is born, a cat with a knot of tangled vertebrae at the end of its tail. Do you see? This is not a malformation but rather the world trying to remember something. All well and good, you might think, and it is. But now things go immediately awry: because when a human hand is run lovingly down this tail and catches in the knot instead of sliding smoothly off the end, well then, many things come to mind, and the owner thinks, ‘I must buy dates, or have dates bought for me.’ Or it remembers, ‘I must have someone’s hands chopped off in the market today for thievery.’ As a consequence, that cat’s first name, his given, or kitten name, is Handkerchief.”

Uroum Bashou’s laugh was reedy and contemptuous.

“To put it shortly, I was that kitten, and you see him before you, not much aged. That was before I learned to read, and understood my task. I am the Great Aide-Memoiré. Through me the world remembers. But what? What am I here to signify? I do not know.”

He shrugged a little.

“That is my tragedy,” he said.

Leo, who thought he had finished, opened her mouth to speak.

“Oh, I know,” he interrupted her. “You think me obsessed. I am. I will probably remain so.” He brooded. “They called me Handkerchief, but what is that? Only the name of a kitten. So I learned to read. I read this: ‘Imagine a prince, handsome, gentle, black haired; in his hand he holds the stripped and polished skull of a cat;’ And this: ‘weasels.’ I read: ‘smoke,’ ‘sensuality,’ ‘meringue,’ ‘mystery’! I read everything I could find, and when I came into my power I called myself Uroum Bashou, the Elephant. The Elephant never forgets—I have read that.”

Leo stared at him. This time, she realized, he really had finished and was waiting for her to say something. All she could think of was “Have you seen my brother?”

At this he seemed to lose interest in her immediately, and turned to Tag.

“What does the Majicou know?” he asked.

“Nothing that Uroum Bashou does not,” Tag said. “The world turns—”

“As ever.”

“As ever. But the wild roads… The wild roads are uncomfortable, Uroum Bashou. They have begun to take where they should give. One day they are reliable; the next day they are not. Something is out of joint.”

Uroum Bashou nodded his little threadbare head.

“You walk wild roads,” he acknowledged, “while the Elephant stays among his books. That is good. What does the Elephant know? This: there is more than one prophecy that speaks of a Golden Cat. This: the Golden Cat may not be what it seems. This: the Golden Cat may not be all of it, or the end of it. Do you see? I see that you don’t. And yet, there is a fuse burning in the world today. I do not know who lit it, or how. But something quite new is coming, and not just to us cats.”

Leonora inspected one of her front paws modestly.

“I have often thought I might be the Golden Cat,” she suggested.

Their heads went up, and they stared at her for a moment or two; then they went back to their talk.

“Don’t mind me, I’m sure,” said Leonora.

She reminded Uroum Bashou, “It must be one of us, you know.”

But he only said, “I believe all this began in Egypt, where we began the fatal relationship with men. Whatever happens will be one end of a great arc across the history of cats and human beings.” And he urged Tag, “Don’t let yourself be diverted, as I believe your predecessor to have been, by simple oppositions. If the world is to be made new, the Golden Cat must be more than some simple piece of magic. To heal the world it must do more than cure the ills of cats or settle their old scores.” It was advice he had given before.

They spoke of such generalities for a moment, then Tag said, “This is no longer a matter of theory, Uroum Bashou. Now that kittens are missing, it is vital that you make the books reveal what they know.”

“Missing kittens are never a good thing.”

“A cat must take note of that,” Tag suggested, “where he might ignore other things.”

Uroum Bashou inclined his head to show that he agreed. “I will interrogate the books,” he promised, “on behalf of the new Majicou.”

After that there was a silence.

“Your caretaker becomes more and more self-willed,” said Tag eventually. In a corner of the room, away from the fierce gold light of the evening, he had noticed a pile of books that looked as if someone had recently tried to pull them to pieces. Pages were scattered about like mauled doves; there were toothmarks on some of the board covers. “Did he do that? You should have a care, Uroum Bashou.”

A light laugh. “Kater Murr? There are days when his jealousy of my work is so great that he runs amok among the volumes, compelled to earn his name. He tears them with his great yellow nails. He does not understand them, so they are his rivals. He is barely feline. But he will never leave me.”

“Don’t underestimate him, my friend.”

Even as they spoke, Leonora Whitstand Merril was prowling the Reading Cat’s house alone. At first she felt quite bold. She heard the murmur of conversation from above, and was both reassured and irritated by it. Leo had a great appetite for the particular: for things in themselves. She liked to get her nose into them. “You can’t get your nose into a generality,” she told herself, poking it instead around an open door on the floor below the library. Nothing. In another room, strips of wallpaper hung damply off the wall. Beneath them a mummified pigeon flopped, beak wide, eyes gone, one long wing extended in the fireplace. She dashed in and had a look, dashed out again. She hung off the lip of an empty drawer: newspapers; two coins with a dull, brassy smell; a bit of string. Really, it was all quite fun; but then, lower down, the stairwells darkened and seemed too narrow, and were further narrowed by the pervasive odor of ammonia, spoilt food, pheromones, as if she were continually having to brush past some other animal. By the time she reached the stairs to the ground floor the air was rank and solid, a substance rather than a smell. Leo hesitated and lifted her head to listen. The mutter of conversation from the library had grown faint and comfortless; three more steps down and it faded altogether. She was alone in a brown gloom, in some sort of stone-floored hallway. When she ran she could hear the shush and patter of her own paws. She stopped. She half turned back. She listened. Something touched her foot. She stiffened. She leapt away. It was the head of a discarded broom, as big as a cat, its bristles chewed off by time. She crept back, neck extended, to make sure it was dead. Other objects loomed in the hall: a bag of cement, half-empty; some broken floorboards; a dusty bicycle wheel propped up against the wall. An old coat on a hook looked like a human being.

Eventually she came to the kitchen. There she wandered about for some minutes, nosing into corners, pushing her head into a chipped enamel bread bin to inhale its ghosts of mice, jumping up to teeter along the rim of the old sink. She skirted a pile of old leather shoes. Until she was satisfied it was unoccupied, she kept to the margins of the room. Then she trotted into the middle of it to have a look at the kitchen table, with its ancient checkered-plastic tablecloth. The rank odor was thick and solid there. Leo looked up and saw her mistake. Oh no, she thought. The hair went up on her back. Staring away from the table as hard as she could, she began to inch out of the room. No decision of hers was involved. She directed her eyes down and away; and very stiffly, and slowly, and carefully, her legs began to take her toward the door. Ever since she came into the kitchen, the guardian of that place had been sitting on the tabletop in the soup of his own smell, watching her.

“And what are you?” he said quietly. “What are you, I wonder?”

He was an enormous, dirty, half-maimed old marmalade tomcat, with a broad flat head and ears chewed to mere frills of flesh a dirty pink color. One cheek had collapsed, bashed in perhaps by some hurrying car or angry human foot. Snaggle teeth protruded on that side and, viewed front-on, gave his expression a left-hand grin, widened, cannibalistic, matching in ferocity the yellow claws that would no longer retract into his huge, cobby paws. His front legs were as bowed as bulldog’s, as if with the effort of supporting his hard-packed, muscular front end. His orange fur had once been on fire with complex, beautiful patterns—flames and bars and stripes that had curled and curved all down his flanks. As a kitten, on fire with life, he had been justifiably proud of those signatures. Now they were caked and matted, patched with black where the fur had fallen out. His eyebrows, wrecked in fights, were running sores. His ears crawled with mites. His voice was a battered growl, his laughter like gravel shaken in a tin; his scent was a nickname sprayed upon a wall.

“Hello,” said Kater Murr.

And he jumped down off the table, his eyes a blazing, potent yellow in the gloom.

Leo backed away.

“I’m not here alone,” she said.

Kater Murr put his head on one side.

“You might as well be,” he said.

Then he said, “A question you might ask yourself is, ‘Does he care? Does Kater Murr care I’m not alone?’” He sat down suddenly and scratched one of his ears until it bled. “Kater Murr lives in a house,” he said to himself in quite a different voice. “His ears hurt, but he welcomes that. His bones ache, but he welcomes that. Kater Murr cares about nothing.” Leo continued to inch away from him, only to find that on the word “nothing” Kater Murr had somehow slipped to his feet, gone around behind her, and placed himself smoothly between her and the door. “The gatekeeper,” he explained, “though powerful, is a cat of considerable subtlety. You come here,” he went on, “as you say, not alone, a kitten of a barely credible color, with no credentials—”

Leonora drew herself up. “I’m a princess, actually,” she began to inform him; but then thought better of it.

“You’re what?” said Kater Murr. “Speak up.”

“Nothing,” said Leonora.

The gatekeeper sat down and scratched himself again. “His skin itches, but he welcomes that,” he mused. “His ears grow deaf, but he welcomes that. Kater Murr is a cat in a million.” Waves of bad smell issued from him.

He studied Leo and concluded, “Come to Kater Murr, my dear. You’re enough to make anyone wonder.”

Leo turned her head away from him.

Somehow she had got herself against a wall.

“Come to the gatekeeper.”

“Empty speech, Kater Murr,” said a voice from the hallway behind him.

“Tag!” called Leonora.At that exact moment there was a flurry of violence in the kitchen: a savage hiss, a scratch and shuffle of claws on tile. Paws were splayed, teeth were bared in the gloom, aggressive postures struck then suddenly folded. Light flickered off the points and edges of things. Everything seemed confused, too quick, too real; and Leo thought she was trapped in the kitchen with two much larger animals, one made of brass and the other of silver. It was only for an instant. Kater Murr’s smell flooded sickeningly over everything, then another smell—of musk and winter, powder snow on an icy wind—washed it away. There was a distant, fading roar. Then the Majicou was standing amiably beside her and saying, “I think we can go now, Leonora.”

She stared at him.

“Did you see that?” she said.

“See what?”

“In here. I— Never mind. You couldn’t have seen anything from the hall.”

Tag shook himself to settle his fur.

“Not from out there,” he agreed.

In the yard, somewhat recovered, she asked him, “So— what have we learned?”

Tag considered this gravely.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’ve learned that Uroum Bashou has a more unruly servant than I imagined.”

Leonora shivered.

“Why doesn’t he just leave?”

“Where would he go? Who would look after him? They are locked together, those two. Without Kater Murr, the Reading Cat would have starved to death long ago. At the same time, Kater Murr is bound to Uroum Bashou by some emotional bond that drives him mad with frustration. They were kittens together. He loves the Reading Cat and hates him in one and the same breath.”

He looked sidelong at Leo. “That might be hard for you to understand.”

“It’s not hard,” she said; but she was quiet for a moment, and when she next spoke it was to change the subject.

“How did the Reading Cat get all his books?” she asked.Tag considered this.

“His memories are confused, and sometimes he will admit that he has rearranged them to his own liking. I don’t think he came from Morocco—wherever that is. Some human being brought them here long ago, books and cats together. Here the books stay. And Uroum Bashou stays with them: but not for much longer, I think. He is getting old. And Kater Murr won’t hold back forever. One day we will come to this place and find the Reading Cat dead. Kater Murr will snuff him out in a moment of rage, and spend the rest of his life regretting it.”

“Well, I can’t say I liked either of them,” said Leo. “What’s the next plan?” Then, before Tag could answer, “I know, I know—’Love the world and follow your nose.’” She sighed. “There must be something quicker than that.”

That night the wild roads were difficult to navigate, even for a cat of the Majicou’s experience. For some reason winter had come to them in full summer. It would be gone by tomorrow; but now it was like walking in a cold deserted house, down long, twisted corridors howling with ghosts. You had to have your wits about you. On the way back, Tag lost his apprentice. He couldn’t be sure when or how. When he arrived at the oceanarium, glad to be home in the warm seaside night again, Leonora wasn’t there.

After he had waited two hours for her, he had to admit she wasn’t coming. By then, he had other problems.

Everyone else had vanished, too.

He prowled the oceanarium or sat outside on its doorstep. He searched the lanes and rooftops ‘round about, calling, “Cy! Rags! Pertelot!” but he didn’t dare go far in case they arrived while he was gone.

“Leonora!” he called. “You bad kitten!”

While he thought: It was wrong of me to tease her like that in the house of Uroum Bashou. I was just showing off.

In the shadows by the oceanarium door, a spiral iron stairway led to the lip of the fish tank. From there you could look down on the water, itself bathed in the greenish light of the powerful aquarium lamp. Tag climbed it and looked down on the little sharks, turning and weaving in the hallucinating light and silent tranquility. They reminded him of dogs, unassuageable and muscular dogs—though they had a quality of patience no land animal could ever possess. He hated them.

Chapter Six

A CHANGED WORLD

The sun limned the tiles of the turrets of the cathedral with silver light, throwing its whitewashed facade into dusky relief, so that the columned portico grew complex with shadows. Pigeons sheltered from the punishing afternoon sun in the shade of the cornices like randomly grouped mantelpiece ornaments. Among the gigantic magnolias and the banana palms, tourists sat and ate sandwiches, each family or pair facing away from the next to make their own separate space. Beyond the imposing black gates, with their twin lampposts and spiked railings, the statue of a rearing horse and rider appeared to be emerging in a heat haze from the midst of an ornate urn.

Sealink gazed around her. It all looked as benign as ever. How often had she inveigled tidbits out of the unwary in such places? She was such a bad girl when it came to food.

Farther up the sidewalk she found the Café du Monde packed with a mixture of locals and tourists consuming café au lait and beignets. Not much for a hungry cat there. The sparrows that frequented the cafe, picking their way between the tables for fallen crumbs, were on a permanent high. Hooked on confectioners’ sugar by a diet of sweet doughnuts, they bobbed around like manic toys. With barely a gram of fat on them, they weren’t worth eating; and catching them, in their oddly distracted state, was too easy for sport—a quick paw among the chrome chair legs, a swat across the old brick tiles, and it was all over. They went down with their scaly legs pointing skyward, the reflection of the ceiling fans dying slowly with the light in their eyes.

Sealink loved the Café du Monde for reasons of nostalgia, but it was in Jackson Square her real targets lay: the hot dog stands, the bars, and the trash cans from which an enterprising cat—a cat like herself—could con a meal for one… with luck, for two. This would mean crossing Decatur Street. Sealink and Red sat on the edge of the curb and stared up and down. The four-lane street was busy with traffic: a bizarre mixture of modern automobiles and mule-drawn carts, gaily painted in bright pastel colors for the tourist trade, one of which hove into view.

“I’m Joey, and this here’s my mule, Shine,” they heard the elderly carter explain to his passengers, a pair of thin Japanese youngsters, clutching cameras and guidebooks, and a large couple in matching warm-up suits they had bought in Biloxi. “Eats like a elephant and pulls like a ox, when she ain’t standing still, which is what she most prefers. She knows I don’t carry no whip, and sometimes she likes to take advantage.”

Shine stared patiently between her blinders at the ground beneath her feet. Complicated harness lines and traces looped across her back, and a bright red human’s hat was perched on top of her head. Someone had cut rough holes in the fabric, through which the mule’s ears sprouted indignantly. A curious fellow feeling stole over the calico. Other animals she’d never had much time for—there were always so many cat things to do—but something about the mule’s trammeled patience took her attention.

“Hey, hon,” Sealink said softly, walking up under Shine’s nose. “Don’t be so downcast. Sun’s out and all. Least there’s only five of them to haul.”

The mule turned its velvet muzzle to her, sniffed cautiously.

“You say that.”

“I do.”

A wicked light came into the mule’s dark eyes. “Do you know how I got my name?” she asked obliquely.

“No.”

“Jes’ take care that you watch when I gets down the street a little ways.”

By now, the carter was in the driving seat and was well into his customary spiel: “And when you go into Old Louie’s, youtell him Joey sent you and he’ll give you a whole ten percent offa your check…” The customers were nodding sagely; another piece of inside information to note carefully for future use. It was the usual old scam. The next moment, the lights had changed, the carter flicked the reins with a theatrical “Ho up, Shine!”, and the gig was off with a mighty creak and shudder.

Choosing their space between traffic, the calico and marmalade cats nipped neatly across to the opposite side and watched the cart roll ponderously down the road. Just as it reached the old brewery, there was a lurch and a shout. The carriage skewed sharply to one side and one of the tourists dropped its camera over the edge with a shriek of outrage. Within moments there were only two passengers in the cart, and Joey was handing back money and bobbing his head and apologizing for the poor behavior of his mule.

Red grinned from ear to ear. “See, she’s reduced her load again.”

Sealink thought for a moment. “Do you know how she got her name?”

Red grinned even more widely. “Poor old Joey. I only been here a coupla days, and already I know! How come humans are so slow? Heard he got her from some old guy quit the carts last year. She kept losin’ him custom. Called her ‘a shyin’ fool’—Shine for short. Figures if she keeps it up they’ll have to retire her. She says there’s a real nice place called the Elysian Fields where the old mules get to go for a rest. She reckons she keeps on misbehavin’ she’ll get there quicker.”

“From what I’ve seen of how humans treat animals they no longer find useful to them, that ain’t likely to be the way of things,” Sealink said darkly.

A flickering, split-second vision: hundreds upon hundreds of cats pouring over a darkened cliff top, down toward a booming, sucking sea…

Now where the hell had that come from? Sealink had been trying very hard not to think about any of that stuff. Hurriedly, she replaced the bad memory with a good one. Food. Of course, food. Spicy food. Boudin with chili sauce … Mcllhenny’s Tabasco. Sauce of the devil. Nothing like it in all the world. Its arsonous memory licked across her tongue, to sear dark thoughts away.

“You hungry or something?”

The big marmalade was watching her with interest. Feeling his gaze upon her, Sealink shook herself out of her reverie.

“Why you starin’ at me like that?”

“You’re droolin’.”

“Then I guess it’s time to eat.”

“Thank the Lord.”

The two cats snaked between human feet, slipped through the traffic on Decatur, and headed down St. Louis Street, past the French Market Inn toward the Napoleon House. At the junction with Chartres Street, a mule cart was stationary by the side of the road. Joey the carter was sitting on the sidewalk with his head in his hands. Shine tossed her head gently from side to side to make her bit rings jingle. She had no passengers left at all.

The two cats turned right and ran down the sidewalk, keeping close to the shadows: beneath balconies of curlicued ironwork and windows blinded by peeling shutters in the pastel colors of faded silk flowers, under cars and pickups, from one point of cover to the next.

Sealink strode out in front, trotting backward to communicate her enthusiasm face-to-face. “Babe, you’re going to love this place, I swear. Finest damned shrimp this side of the Gulf, and I should know, ‘cause I’ve been around the whole darn world and I’ve ate the best of the best. Hmm-mmm. Been eating here since you was a twinkle in your momma’s eye.”

“Sure don’t look older than a twinkle yourself.”

“Why that’s real poetic, hon,” Sealink told him. “You-all make that up yourself?”

Red pretended to study something at the end of the street.

Sealink snorted. “Aw, honey, I ain’t hurt your feelin’s, have I?”

She was developing a soft spot for him. Doubtless he reminded her of all those mistakes of her youth, with their free—and-easy swagger and sweet lying eyes. “That’s too bad.”

A hundred yards or so down the street she stopped at a restaurant doorway. Enticing smells wafted out from beneath a black-and-white rectangular sign; but the door was firmly shut, and the squares of glass in the upper part of the door bore a closed sign. Taking no notice of such hindrances, Sealink stood tall on her hind legs and raked at the woodwork until little flakes of white paint eddied to the ground. All around the brass doorplate, the frame showed gouges and scratches that bore witness to years of such abuse, though someone had recently repainted with white gloss paint, so that the marks showed ghostly beneath the sheen. The door rattled, but no one came. Sealink looked annoyed.

“Are you sure this is such a good idea?” Red looked anxiously up and down the street.

“You kidding? I’d kill for this guy’s blackened shrimp.”

“Sure, but folks have got kind of inhospitable to cats ‘round here.”

“Not with me, honey.” Sealink stood up on her hind legs again and peered between the window squares, then threw her head back and gave out an earsplitting yowl. “I always had an understanding with the chef, y’know?”

She pounded at the door again.

A few seconds later the locks rattled and a large, bearded man stuck his head out. The calico gazed upward. Blackened catfish. Chicken gumbo. She could smell it all over him. My, could he cook! A huge purr came rumbling up from the depths of her throat at all the good old memories.

The man, who had been staring vaguely across the street, looked down suddenly at his feet and found that a large black, white, and orange cat was applying herself to his ankles, purring her head off and twisting sinuously around and around in blatant sycophancy. Not far off, another cat, a marmalade with an odd eye, was staring nervously at them both.

“Hey!” said the chef. “You can’t come around here, baby.”

Sealink turned the purr up a notch, to a volume that would clean rust off a boiler.

“This gentleman and I go way, way back,” she told Red. “Pecan-coated drumfish a specialty. Oh, yes.”

So saying, she raised her head to give the bearded man the benefit of her most adoring gaze. That gaze promised volumes. It promised deep rewards for the right contender. From Ankara to Zeebrugge, that gaze had divorced humans from their cooking. It had not failed her yet.

Red looked on, somewhat at a loss.

“Now come on, honey,” the big man said again, as she fawned around his ankles one more time. “You tryin’ to bring me trouble?”

Sealink, meanwhile, was giving Red the hard stare.

“So,” she said. “You’re my pimp or something? Are you gonna earn your dinner? Or am I the only one to have to humiliate myself today?”

Red returned her gaze for a moment longer than was necessary for mere politeness, then abruptly looked away. Dipping his head, he started to bump it somewhat shamefacedly against the chef’s trousers, purring as best he might.

The chef looked pained.

“Come on, Red,” he protested. “Two against one ain’t fair.”

Red was delighted.

“Hey, he knows my name!”

Sealink sighed.

“Look at yourself a moment, babe. Was he going to call you Blackie?”

The big man glanced warily up and down the street and seemed to come to a decision.

“Hell, I can’t have you starve. Though—” he regarded Sealink askance “—it don’t look like you’re in much danger of that to me.”

He disappeared inside and returned a moment later bearing a large dish of orangey-pink shells, which smelled briny and tart. The sight of boiled crawfish so close at hand had both cats salivating furiously Little mewing noises escaped from Sealink’s mouth. She couldn’t help herself. Suddenly she was so hungry. Crawfish! She felt like rolling in them! The man put the dish down on the sidewalk a little way from the restaurant’s doors then hurried back inside. At once two furry heads were butting at one another in their eagerness to feed.

“Where’s your etiquette, boy? Don’t you know you should let your elders and betters eat first?” Red said something unintelligible. Spiky orange legs waved out of his mouth. Sealink shouldered him out of the way with gargantuan ease and applied herself to encouraging the soft parts out of the shells. A paw pressing here and the quick twist of a claw there, and out popped the succulent meat. They were so engrossed that neither of them noticed the tide that swept upon them out of the shadows.

Sealink felt cool shade fall across her back. For a second she thought nothing of it; then it was followed by a rancid smell, as of infection and sickness, that permeated even the food she was eating.

She looked up sharply.

The sidewalk was full of cats. Maybe two dozen had crept out of the alleys, the parking lots, and the construction debris around the Wildlife and Fisheries Building. Sealink blinked. Adrenaline shot her through like white light, like power in a circuit. For a moment, the newcomers reminded her so clearly of the alchemical cats that she was back in that other time, trapped in a warehouse with the Alchemist himself, while his proxies advanced on her like a tide. “Tag! Tag!” she heard herself call. “What you got us into here?” Shadows danced across nonexistent walls. Then she was back in New Orleans again, a little embarrassed, because they were only runny-eyed ferals with scabs on their faces. Fur that had once been of all different colors—tabby and tortoiseshell, black-and-white—had become so dry and dusty as to appear a uniformly faded gray. They were silent. Their eyes were dull. None of them was looking at Sealink or Red; instead their attention was fixed with horrible avidity upon the dish of crawfish.

Red had got close to the bottom of the bowl and was doggedly chasing the remaining food around with his mouth. Impatience made him clumsy. Bits of shell were pushed over the edge, where they fell with a papery whisper to the ground. There, propelled by a breath of wind, one drifted past Sealink and was at once seized upon by three of the silent cats. Ignoring the calico completely, they ragged feebly backward and forward at the shell, snarling and hissing between locked teeth.

Red looked up, saw the newcomers, and jumped backwardin horror. With a howl and a huge leap he hurled himself clear into the road and ran off.

“Thanks a bunch, hero,” Sealink muttered.

Rarely averse to a fight, the calico nevertheless considered with some anxiety the situation confronting her. She was to all intents and purposes alone: since the only thing that could now be seen of Red was the bob of an orange tail tip disappearing around the corner of Conti Street, while all around her were twenty deranged-looking cats. Not the best of odds. She’d already had one scrap since arriving back in the city of her birth. It was becoming tedious.

They crept closer, drawn by the smell from the dish. Sealink’s eyes glinted. They were in a tight bunch now, too compact a group to charge through, too many to leap over. Instead, she inserted a paw under the dish and flipped it skyward, where it spun and wobbled for a moment, showering down scraps as it went. As above, so below. Beside themselves with panic and voracity, the ferals scattered in twenty different directions, fanning out across the ground in eerie mirror image of the flying crawfish. Flakes of shell and meat rained down upon the sidewalk. In the havoc that ensued, Sealink picked her moment and wove with statuesque grace through the squabbling, empty-eyed cats out into the road.

For a moment, she looked back, puzzled, still hearing something in her head, still catching the faded echo of that other fight. “Just what is going on in this town?” she asked herself.