The Wild Road, Page 4

  It stared almost puzzledly back and forth, from Tag’s reflection to Tag himself. ‘Is there,’ it asked itself, in such a low voice that Tag was never to be certain what he had heard it say, ‘a Great Cat in there somewhere?’ It cocked its head. ‘Majicou must have his reasons.’ And then, louder, ‘A good deal more than you think. But I suppose you’ll have to find that out for yourself.’

  Tag felt weary and depressed. He had eaten a bad worm, and he was bruised all over, and he wasn’t going to have any help after all.

  ‘I’m sick of this Majicou,’ he said, ‘and the nightmares he sends me. I had a nice life in a house, and I want to go back to it. I had somewhere to sleep and dulls who fed me.’

  Suddenly the fox yawned. ‘The fact is,’ it said, ‘I’m not very interested in human beings. Who cares about them? If you want to make something of yourself in this world – forget it, if you only want to eat in this world – you’ve got to make it as yourself. Not as someone else’s property.’

  ‘I—’ Tag began.

  But the fox was already trotting off.

  ‘Do you understand me, little cat?’ it called back. ‘Yourself!’

  ‘My name is Tag,’ Tag said, ‘not Little Cat.’

  The fox, which had got as far as the edge of the lawn, paused and looked back.

  ‘That’s a start,’ it admitted.

  Then it was gone.

  ‘Tag,’ said Tag.

  Then he realized he was alone again.

  Unsure what to do with himself now, Tag curled up on the threshold of the summerhouse and looked out across the lawn. It was a good garden. Down one side of it ran a high stone wall. Along this grew the gnarled golden-brown trunk of an old wisteria. Some light mist lay on the lawn, so that it looked like a lake.

  Genuine desperado, he thought. He remembered how his mirror image had looked out at him, tough and self-possessed. ‘A real tearaway, me.’

  And he fell asleep.

  He dreamed of a highway.

  Though he was looking into it from outside, it seemed to stretch away in all directions at once. A cold wind blew, lonely and comfortless, down the elongated perspectives.

  After some time, a single black cat came into view, distant at first, then closer, bounding along on some urgent errand. Soon it was so close Tag could smell the musk and sweat of it. Its energy seemed ferocious in that unfeeling emptiness. Long muscles stretched and flexed, stretched and flexed. Huge paws thudded soft and rhythmic on the cold dusty ground. Light spilled off shiny black fur. Heat poured into the withering air, effort shed with a kind of profligate contempt for distance, weariness, hunger. Days passed like this. The great cat’s stride never varied. It was steady. It was like slow motion. Then suddenly it stopped. Tag watched with a sense of dread as its huge head turned, and it stared out of the highway at him.

  One eye! One eye!

  ‘TAG!’ it roared, and its voice seemed to echo toward him from a million miles away. ‘TAG!’

  Then it was off again, and Tag was inside the dream with it, bounding along on oiled limbs, burning the magic fuels that young animals are given to burn so that nothing seems an effort to them and the one long day of their lives goes on and on forever.

  ‘Tag!’ commanded the one-eyed cat, in that huge and hollow voice. ‘Jump and eat! Jump and eat forever!’

  They ran on.

  In slow motion – in the slowest of motion, so that fluid movement failed and was broken into a chain of distinct instants – a bird flew up in front of them. Tag had never seen such a bird. It had a crest like a scarlet crown and a tail like a train of sparks. Its feathers were the colors of turquoise and brass. Its beak strained wide with a long and liquid song, the unrepeating song of the bird’s life. The notes of this song were gold. They issued visibly from its mouth.

  ‘Tag!’ said the black cat. ‘I am Majicou. The highway is yours. Embrace your life!’

  And he leapt into the air and caught the bird in his mouth. Turquoise feathers scattered and dulled. The golden song arched and died. The bird lay still across Majicou’s mouth like a strip of blue and yellow cloth. One pale, stem eye observed Tag from above it.

  ‘Even this,’ said Majicou.

  ‘I won’t!’ said Tag. ‘I won’t!’

  ‘Tag, you must. The wild road is your heritage. Comfort is behind you. Duty lies before. Time to understand the truth about yourself. You are no longer a kitten.’

  Perhaps not, but he felt like one. No matter how he struggled or tried to bite, he was stuck in the dream, pinned down as securely as if a huge black paw lay across his neck.

  ‘It’s time you learned your true name,’ Majicou told him. ‘It’s time you understood the real nature of the world! Do you want to live in a house all your life and be pampered and meaningless?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tag. ‘I do.’

  ‘You do not!’ growled Majicou.

  ‘I will never eat something so beautiful as that bird,’ Tag burst out angrily. ‘I can tell you that. I would rather die.’ Majicou laughed. ‘And yet,’ he said, with infinite contempt, ‘you eat insects. When you aren’t fighting squirrels for a lump of damp bread, you eat snails.’ He paused. ‘You ate the mouse under the cupboard,’ he pointed out, more gently.

  Outraged, Tag cried, ‘That was only a dream!’

  A great hollow laugh rolled away to the edges of everything. ‘This is only a dream.’

  Tag could hardly deny that. Instead he writhed abruptly, caught the black cat a lucky bang on the nose, and wrenched himself awake. For a moment he was nowhere at all. He was barely himself. He was a toppling atom of perception in a dark, oppressive, accordion-pleated void. The thoughts that passed through his mind were unpleasant. Panic enfolded him. Then he woke, limbs flailing, in the summerhouse. He was free! But even as his eyes opened, he thought he saw the shadow of a bird, beak gaping in misery and despair, flutter across the wall. Somewhere the dream was still unrolling. It lay in wait behind his eyes; and he knew he must not go back to sleep. To keep himself awake he sat thinking about the dulls, and remembering all the different things they had given him to eat.

  Tuna fish in oil.

  Tuna fish in brine.

  Tuna fish mayonnaise.

  Tuna fish salad with crispy bacon.

  Tins of things:

  chicken and game casserole,

  fish and liver dinner.

  It was a long list. Every time he drifted toward sleep, Tag repeated it to himself. More often than not he thought of a new item. ‘Mackerel pâté!’ he remembered toward dawn, ‘always very good.’ But his eyes were closing; the dream was ready to capture him again; and his own feet were carrying him onward whatever he did, toward the inevitable.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes, Tag. Yes!’

  Somehow, the mackerel pate of memory had escaped its wrapper, skipped its kitchen dish, and turned into a flickering silver shoal, darting and twisting in terror against an empty darkness. Through the shoal danced Majicou, lunging and pouncing, jumping and cuffing. Living silver fishes! Yet each one the black cat touched was transformed – into a bird, a butterfly, a scut-tering mouse! ‘Life, Tag!’ invited the great cat. ‘Your life!’ And suddenly, despite himself, Tag was compelled to rush and dance and hunt, too, until they were both tired and sated and Majicou sat down as suddenly as a kitten, licked his huge jaws, and stared at Tag from one shining eye.

  ‘You see?’ he said.

  ‘I see,’ said Tag.

  They sat companionably for a while. Then Tag asked, ‘Why have you shown me this?’

  ‘For many reasons. It is your birthright, for one. For another, you were named, you were marked out long ago. But mainly, I admit, because at the moment I need your help. There is something only you can do.’ He considered this. ‘How can I explain? Tag, these highways are the most important thing in the world.’

  ‘For cats?’ said Tag. He leaned forward excitedly. ‘I see cats on them every night!’

  ‘Not just for cats. For everyon
e. The highways—’ Majicou began, then stopped. Sometimes, he did look like a very old cat, gray around the muzzle, curved in the spine. ‘This is important and there is so little time to explain – The wild roads, Tag, carry the natural energies of the world. If they are not cared for, all is chaos and disaster. A long time ago I came to be their caretaker. I have kept them well, and in return they have given me long life and power.’ He shook his head regretfully to and fro. ‘That was a two-edged blessing,’ he said. ‘Now I am so old, I can’t live away from them. Here, I hunt and jump like you – Better! I am the Majicou, after all! – but in the world, just at the moment of the world’s gravest danger, I find myself as feeble as a kitten. I must use proxies, like the fox and the magpie. The world needs me, Tag, and I have let it down. I have lost the King and Queen, and only another cat can bring them back to me.’

  ‘Can’t your fox do it?’

  ‘Tag, they won’t go with a fox. Cats hate foxes—’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Tag.

  ‘And they eat birds. Why was I sent such a dull apprentice?’ Tag, rather stung by this, found himself saying, ‘All right. I’ll find them for you.’

  ‘Good,’ said Majicou. ‘Go, go now.’

  Tag shivered suddenly. He had the feeling that he had committed his whole life to someone else’s cause. He would need a new kind of life now. He would need to be a new kind of cat.

  *

  He walked all night through the gardens, and in the morning decided that the first act of his new life would be to get rid of his collar. If he was to take on the great task before him it would not be as someone else’s property.

  The collar – a six-inch strip of felted material half an inch wide with an elastic insert, a tinny little bell, and a dusting of blue, red, and green sequins, an object of which he had once been rather proud – had been fastened around his neck by the dulls the day they bought him from the pet shop. It had spread a reek of chemicals to his fur. Weeks of wear in the gardens, weeks of the outdoor life, had dulled its smell, rubbed off the sequins, and reduced it to a blackened thong, greasy with impregnated dirt. It was always getting caught on things. Worse, the bell warned off his lunch.

  Tag trotted along in the sunshine until he found the tools he needed. A fence of lapped boards green with lichen, the top of which fell in pretty curves like suspended chain. At the end of that, a square wooden gatepost with a wrought-iron spike on top. Tag leapt onto the fence, teetered a little, then turned carefully and ran along the top of it. He had learned how to do this by chasing squirrels. When he reached the gatepost he rubbed his face against the spike, as if he were saying hello to it. After a moment the spike slipped neatly under his collar. Now all he had to do was back away along the fence, and the spike would drag the collar over his head. It was a good plan. The collar would be left empty on the spike. People would wonder how it came to be there.

  More than clever, thought Tag.

  He backed away. The collar slid forward, reached his ears, and stuck. He pulled harder. No good. He tried lowering his head and pulling. He tried raising it. Nothing. The problem was that his paws had to stay all in a line on the fence. He couldn’t spread them to pull.

  ‘Waugh.’

  In the end, he steadied himself as best he could and gave a vast tug. His feet slipped straight off the fence. Before he knew it he was hanging by the neck. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move his head. All he could see was the top corner of a house and a bit of blue sky. He was so shocked he couldn’t think what to do. His back legs tucked themselves up of their own accord and scraped wildly at the collar. He tried to get one front paw under it. Somehow, that became trapped too. Up came his back legs again and scraped until he was exhausted. He hung there with black patches coming and going in front of his eyes. Every few seconds he felt himself struggle and thrash, then go limp.

  Damn, he thought. He felt a fool.

  After a short time the black patches were replaced by lapses of concentration. During these he seemed to see or hear things from his kittenhood. Sometimes he even did them. He raced about after the soap bubbles. He heard them burst. He had been very happy that day. He tried to think. Chase the bubbles! But then he was looking at the corner of the house again. There was the same belvedere window in its dressing of ivy. There was the same patch of blue sky. Then, after a particularly long lapse – during which he lived a whole day from breakfast to supper – he heard a derisive squawking noise.

  ‘Raaargh! Call yourself a cat?’

  Into his limited field of view, at a strange angle and full of vitriolic amusement, had been inserted a black, streamlined, beady-eyed face tapering to a monolithic black beak. It belonged to the magpie One for Sorrow.

  ‘Hello,’ the magpie said. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Please go away,’ said Tag. ‘I’m trying to look at that house.’

  ‘Raaargh,’ said One for Sorrow.

  It chuckled.

  It winked, and its head was slowly withdrawn. After that, there was a silence, broken only by the furtive dry rattling sound of scaly feet somewhere on the fence behind him as the magpie assessed the situation. ‘Mm,’ it muttered quietly. ‘Raa.’ More rattling. Suddenly, Tag felt it take off and flap energetically about just above him, fanning him with stale air from beneath its wings. Then, with a triumphant shout, it had fastened its claws savagely into the loose skin behind his head, and its beak was driving down toward him.

  ‘Raargh! Haraargh!’

  Hey! Tag tried to shout.

  The pressure of the collar on his neck increased until the black spots danced madly in front of his eyes and covered everything, and suddenly he wasn’t there anymore. A long falling sensation followed. Black accordion pleats. A cold wind. A distant voice, ‘Tintagel… the equinox—’

  When he woke, he was falling.

  ‘Waugh!’

  He took in a huge breath, only to have it knocked out of him again by the ground. There he lay, in the shadow of the fence, his throat bruised, his ribs battered, the air going in and out of him in one continuous desperate wheeze, while he slowly became aware of the magpie dancing about in front of him, rendered almost as helpless as he was by a sense of its own importance, fluttering its wings and squawking, ‘Yes! Yes!’

  ‘You bit me!’ accused Tag.

  The bird strode to and fro. It preened.

  ‘I bit your collar, you ridiculous cat! I set you free. But don’t thank me. Just remember that Majicou might be impressed with you but I’m not.’

  Without thinking, Tag dragged himself up and sprang. He was slow; but this time the magpie, stuffed up with its own ego like a chicken full of sage and onion, was slower. Trying to take off, it lost its balance and fell down. Its feet scrabbled for purchase. It was a ball of undignified feathers, its wings clutching panically at the air. Too late. To his astonishment, Tag had caught it. Feathers filled his mouth with a dry, musty, not very pleasant taste. The bird struggled furiously, beating its wings in his face and making outraged noises into his ear. Tag hung on grimly, thinking, I got you, I got you! He was elated. Then he remembered that the bird was One for Sorrow. Aghast, he dropped it. The magpie, still squawking and struggling as if it were in his mouth, rolled violently a little way away, then got up in surprise.

  ‘I can’t eat you!’ Tag said in horror.

  The magpie settled its feathers.

  ‘More fool you,’ it said, and flew off.

  Tag laughed.

  ‘You can’t eat your friends!’ he called after it.

  He looked around. He felt better. The day was going to be a good one. The sun had spilled itself in a kind of golden, rosy-orange shimmer across the blue of the sky. He thought, I’m Tag. After all that – I’m Tag. Suddenly he was happier than he had been since he chased the soap bubbles.

  He set out upon his task.

  The First Life of Cats

  Before the first life of the Felidae there was nothing hut darkness and silence. The darkness was complete, and nothing stirr
ed within it. But the silence was the silence of stillness before turmoil. Inside the silence there waited a sound, but nothing stirred in the darkness, for that which was the darkness and the silence had not yet woken. Nothing felt the vast breath of the void.

  Air moved in darkness.

  Eons came and went.

  At last, the first sound broke the silence. Rhythmic and insistent, charged and vital. Every corner was filled with awe and comfort, comfort and awe.

  But there were no cats yet to know the glory that was the first purr.

  Breath braided now like rivers; warmer, faster, warmer and faster. Something stirred, as from a deep sleep. Two vast shafts of light illuminated the void. One shaft was of silver, the other of gold. At the center of each lay a vast circle of dark. This is how light spilled into the world – with darkness at its heart – and the world was light; and a great sigh hung in the air of the world.

  The Cat of the World, the Great Cat, had woken to Herself.

  Now She blinks her eyes – darkness and void for an instant! – and when they open again, motes dance in the gold and silver beams, motes whirl and leap and grow and differentiate themselves. They come together, they break apart, they dance the dance of life. Motes spiral and swim and spin to the rumble and spark of the endless purr – a bright tapestry of movement – a retinal measure, a tapetum lucidum of created things.

  Birds soared in the Great Cat’s eyes; fish swam, and insects swarmed. Mice and rabbits bolted and scurried toward the light. Out they leapt! Out leapt the frog with its slick and virid skin. Out leapt the magpie, cawing and croaking. Out leapt the bank vole and stopped to groom its whiskers. Out leapt fleas and fledglings, hedge mice and velvet moles. Out leapt tufted duck and corncrake, shrike and shrew and stoat! Down they tumbled, into the fur of the Great Cat. And behind them came the Felidae, already hunting.

  In the pupil of the gold eye burned two sudden green, determined specks. A blunt, proud head and a shaggy ruff pushed out, then in a rush the paws and talons of a brand-new trade, and at last the plumed tail. Down it jumped with a flicker of feet and a back arched like a question mark, its striped coat gleaming in the golden light. The First Male!