The Wildings (23 page)

“But you wanted Mara dead,” said Beraal. Now that she’d spent time with the kitten, it was hard for her to imagine that she had once stalked and hunted Mara.

“If she had been an adult with an outsider’s scent, I would have ripped her throat open myself,” said Miao calmly. “But a kitten with a possible claim on us is a different matter—we have to wait and see. Though I will give you fair warning: if Mara brings harm down on the wildings in the future, one of us will kill her. No clan can let a rogue Sender stay alive.”

The Siamese saw the flash in Beraal’s eyes and curled her paws outwards, to show that her claws were held in. “It’s like culling kittens,” she added more gently. “Sometimes it has to be done, and as her teacher, you’ll see the warning signs before any of us. It’s more likely that her powers will help us some day, Beraal.”

Katar poked his head up, pausing as he cleaned between his paw pads. “Some help she’s likely to be,” he said, “that Mara of yours doesn’t know whether she’s a Bigfoot with four paws or a cat with a Bigfoot brain.”

Beraal’s eyes glittered emerald, always a warning sign with the young queen. “The tigers accept her,” she said, her whiskers reaching out to Miao as much as Katar. “She became friends with their cub—just think how unusual that is. Could she make friends with the dogs? The cheels, who speak only to Miao? The pigs from the canals? Would she try to? And if she did, what would it mean for us? What about the Bigfeet—can she understand their endless chatter?”

Katar had roamed the lanes and rooftops of Nizamuddin long enough to understand what this might mean. A complex web of alliances, temporary truces and occasional invasions and wars allowed the creatures who lived here to get on with each other, and it was understood that they all lived at the mercy of the Bigfeet’s often inexplicable whims. A Sender with Mara’s powers, and her apparent ability to make friends with other species was a rarity.

“Why doesn’t she come out?” said Katar truculently. “How can she be our Sender when we don’t know her scent?”

Beraal’s whiskers fell. She didn’t expect Katar to share her feelings for the kitten; Mara had filled the place either a mate or a litter of her own would have taken this year.

“She smells our suspicion,” she said. “And she’s lonely, despite Southpaw’s visits. The last time I went over, she was trying to make friends with a house lizard.”

Miao’s ears pricked up in curiosity. “How did that go?” she asked.

“Not very well. All it had to say was ‘girgit, girgit.’ She said it was hard to carry on a conversation,” Beraal said, her eyes half-closed. Katar’s whiskers twitched, and then the whiskers over his eyes twitched, and then his entire belly began to shake as he contemplated the frustration of Nizamuddin’s most talented Sender attempting to chat with a lizard. Beraal and Miao found their whiskers rising as they saw the funny side of it. The three cats curled into each other, glad for the warmth and the company, and slept as the rain pattered down, ignoring the murmuring of the Bigfeet who went back and forth from the shrine.

A little further away from where they slept, the rain beat down hard on the staircase outside the Shuttered House, rapping sharply on the metal rungs. The muffled thumping Katar had heard earlier started up again, but there was no one to hear it, except for a small brown mouse.

The mouse wasn’t bothered by the stench from the Shuttered House—the stink of cat litter, mildewed walls and dry rot was like a signpost indicating that he would find food here. He had often raided the house for crumbs, keeping a cautious, beady eye out for the ferals, but tonight the atmosphere was different.

When the mouse risked a peek through the door, the ground floor of the house seemed carpeted with cats. They crept around on the floor, fighting for scraps of food. Several sat on the stairs, hissing and yowling.

He sniffed the air, and his sensitive nose recoiled at the odour of sickness. It was sharp enough to cut through the clean scents of the wind and the rain; it told the mouse that the Bigfoot who lived in the Shuttered House was seriously ill. When he saw a white cat with peculiar eyes pad down the stairs, the mouse trembled and skittered away. The cat had once almost trapped him under a broken chair when he’d been on a raid, and the mouse had never forgotten the malevolence in the yellow eye.

As he scurried off, the mouse heard a terrible wailing break out, and he shivered even more in the cold. He didn’t turn to look back at the rain-darkened, windswept bulk of the Shuttered House—rich though the pickings there might be, he didn’t think he would visit the place for a while.

T
he time of night Katar loved most were the hours just before dawn. To the tomcat, these were the hours of freedom. Except for the Bigfoot night guard, who did his rounds thumping his wooden staff slowly on the ground as he walked, the Bigfeet were mostly asleep. Sometimes their noisy cars went racing by, but cats could hear the racket they made a mile off, and it was much easier to avoid them at night than during the day, when few cats except for the most intrepid veterans would risk crossing the road.

The few predators other than Bigfeet that Katar feared were asleep at this hour; even the most alert watchdogs had stopped their barking and were at rest, the canal pigs, who could be of uncertain temper, were wallowing in the stinking mud, and the cheels were slumbering on their high perches. Nizamuddin was his kingdom, then, and the tomcat enjoyed his dawn rounds.

As usual he paid little heed to the rain, but when he got to a dry patch, he was glad for the chance to shake his coat dry. The branches of the great neem and the intertwined magnolia trees blocked out a lot of the rain, and the ground under the cat’s paws was damp, but not wet, except for a few patches here and there that were easy to avoid. He felt his spirits lift.

He stopped at the magnolia tree, leaned back against the base and scratched his tail and flanks luxuriously on its bark. Then he turned around and scratched his tummy up and down. Then he stretched his front paws and his back paws and his tummy and his tail until all of the worry over bringing up Southpaw and the tiredness from his night of hunting bandicoot rats had been stretched away.

A frog hopped down the path, and checking to make sure he wasn’t being observed, Katar gave in to the kittenish urge to hop after it. Hop, went the frog; hop, went Katar, all the way down the rough path that bisected the clearing. He was glad no other cats were there to see him. The tom was very conscious of his dignity, but sometimes he missed the fun of his kittenhood.

It was only when the frog went “plop” instead of hop, into a fresh new puddle, that Katar realized he had moved out of the dargah and was almost at the grounds of the Shuttered House.

He hesitated; after Southpaw’s experience, he and the other cats had given the place a wide berth. The tom was happiest when negotiating the maze-like networks of the roofs and balconies, endlessly curious about the very different lives of the creatures who lived in the empty lot and elsewhere, beyond the confines of the park. But something about the house made him uneasy, and
set his fur to prickling at the best of times; and as he sniffed the air, his nose wrinkled. Drowning out the scent of rain was something dank and ugly—he smelled the restlessness of the cats inside and whiffled his nose at the high stink of Bigfeet illness.

Now, sounds cut through the silence of the night: in the Shuttered House, an animal was moaning, calling out in low, guttural cries. “Waooww!” it said, and then other voices joined in. “Aaaoooww!” they called. The timbre sent cold shivers down Katar’s backbone—shivering, high-pitched, evocative of deep distress. The ferals were calling in lamentation, though the tomcat didn’t understand why.

High in a tree behind the Shuttered House, a sleepy barbet raised an alarm. “Plink-plink!” it called into the night, and a startled mynah picked up the refrain: “Keek-keek-keek! Keek-keek!”

Katar began to back away from the house. He was about to link to ask Hulo or any of the other cats in the area to join him and see what was going on, when a musky, furry scent hit his nostrils. The tom swung around, and placed his paw in the path of a mouse that was scurrying away towards the hedges.

The cat turned and their gazes locked, predator and prey. But the mouse had its short, bristly fur up, and was agitated in a way that had nothing to do with being caught by Katar. “It smells wrong,” said the mouse. “Smells terrible wrong.”

The tomcat was about to respond when the night air erupted into sound. From behind the door of the Shuttered House, the cats began to moan again, the low keening sound rasping along the tomcat’s nerves. He twitched, and the mouse
used the opportunity to make a successful dash into the broad leaves of the cannas.

The wails of the cats were making the birds restless, and Katar crouched near the cannas, his tail flicking wildly back and forth now. He sent a quick, all-cats alert to the link, letting them know that something was wrong at the Shuttered House, and then he froze as Bigfeet came running through the grounds. The cat pressed himself into the safe embrace of a clump of lilies, watching as the lights went on in the house, unable to get the high-pitched keening of the ferals out of his mind.

More knots of Bigfeet were coming up the path. The Bigfeet found the path difficult going in the rain—it was disused, weed strewn and dangerously slippery—and Katar had to curl himself even deeper into the foliage when one of the Bigfeet slipped and almost fell into the lilies.

There was the creaking of rusted hinges, and Katar’s whiskers went rigid as he watched the door of the Shuttered House, closed and barred for as long as he could remember, swinging open. For a terrifying moment, the tomcat wondered whether a flood of cats would come pouring out of the stinking depths of the house, but instead, the Bigfeet went in and out. Unbidden, his whiskers brought him a brief, fleeting image of many cats sullenly shrinking back into the corners and crevices of the house, as the Bigfeet swarmed in.

There was a hiatus, and he could hear the Bigfeet chattering and exclaiming from inside the house. They seemed to be distressed, and there were now many of them stamping up and down the path. Katar wondered whether he could escape from
the back, but there were so many Bigfeet milling around that it seemed more sensible to stay where he was.

At his feet, the earth stirred a fraction, and a tiny, brown, whiskered head popped up.

“This is a terrible business,” said the mouse. “For me, for you and all of us.”

Katar was unsure of the etiquette of talking to prey—he had seldom done it in the past—but the mouse spoke in Junglee, and had addressed him directly. Besides, if he pounced on the mouse, he risked drawing Bigfeet attention to himself. The cat considered his options, and then his natural curiosity kicked in. “What’s a terrible business, mouse?” he said.

“The ruckus at the Shuttered House,” said the mouse, eyeing the cat shrewdly and keeping a judicious distance between the two of them. “I could tell you, if you were willing to consider a truce, O Cat.”

“Let there be a truce,” said Katar grandly. “Why are the Bigfeet getting their tails in a twist, mouse?”

“Himself is dead, isn’t he?” said the mouse.

“Himself?” said Katar, wondering whether this was a cat or a mouse. “Himself,” said the mouse. “The Bigfoot who lived there with the cats. Can’t you smell it? He was ill and he’s dead, and now there isn’t anyone to keep those cats inside.”

Katar could smell it now, the unmistakeable odour of death riding down to them on the back of the rain.

“Perhaps the cats will stay where they are,” he said. “They’ve never left the Shuttered House in all of their lives, mouse. What makes you think they’ll leave?”

The mouse sighed; it came out in a small squeak.

“I was born there myself,” it said. “The pickings were rich, for us mice and rats, but the cats had kittens, and more cats came, and over the years, the cats turned sour.”

Katar knew what the mouse meant; he was listening intently. “So you left?” he asked.

“I left, though many of us made sorties there for food from time to time,” said the mouse. “The ferals had nothing to do inside except play games. You might say they learned some very nasty games, O Cat.”

Katar glanced at the house. The wails had deepened into a chorus. His fur was standing up, and it had nothing to do with the cold and the rain—every time the ferals inside the house keened, he could feel a shiver in his bones. The door of the house opened again, and a sour stench gusted out. The mouse was telling the truth; the old Bigfoot who lived in the house was dead.

“I’m Katar,” he said. “Forgive me, but I don’t know your name, mouse. Tell me why you think they won’t stay inside the house. They’ve never wanted to come outside before.”

The brown mouse considered him intently, its short whiskers questioning.

“They call me Jethro,” he said. “I have never exchanged names with a cat before. I will remember your courtesy, Katar. The cats won’t stay because there’ll be no one to feed them, and because the Bigfeet will open up the Shuttered House—look, the door is already open.”