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 of mud 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.

 

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