The Golden Cat

Book by King Gabriel

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 species'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."

And she was.
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 purposefully 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  t
his 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!"

They stared at her.
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.

"Our brother is gone!"
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!"

And Leo complained darkly, "It wasn't my fault. He just had to go in there after the stupid mouse--"
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, sp...