Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (16 page)

“Oh, good! You could find it again?” Mu Mao asked hopefully, for he was sure now he knew what his first mission in this young life must be.

“Well, it must be around here somewhere!” the old one snapped. “I know I would find it only—only, now that you tell me what is happening, I have a feeling.”

“A feeling?”

“Yes, I think—I think he is still here but I don't think he will be here tomorrow. I think he needs me now. Of course, it is all his own doing that I am here but you and I both know this isn't working. I need
out.”
The “now” and the “out” were drawn out and agonized, and meant the same thing in cat as they did in English.

“Calm yourself,” Mu Mao said. “I am here to help you. First, we must release you from your cage.”

“Yes, but how?”

“Patience,” Mu Mao said. He thought about it. He could make himself small again and slip through the front of the cage, but that would not release the old cat. If he were full grown, and the cage on the lowest level, he could easily undo the latch with his teeth and paws and the cunning of thirty remembered feline lifetimes and prior lives as a holy man. But this was not the case. “Hmmm,” he said to himself and then, “Hm?” That was it. A simple mantra, a chant—a purr, done with great concentration and deep vibration.

He leaned against the lock and purred with all his might and all his energy and all of the depth of his tiny being. The lock never stood a chance. It shuddered open within moments, and Mu Mao and the old cat leaped to the floor.

Instantly all of the other cats were awake and scratching at their cages. Mu Mao's new mother was particularly vociferous. “Ungrateful spawn of a lecherous tomcat, why are you liberating that washed up old ally cat and not your own family?”

“Mother—friends, at least here you will have a warm place to sleep and food. Outside you will have nothing.”

“Except our freedom,” said the bobtail black. “And a certainty that nobody will pluck us helpless from our cages to take us to a gas chamber. I've heard about what they do in these places. Where do you think I was before I came here if not out there?”

The old cat was pawing and mewing at the door and Mu Mao turned from him to the others and back again while the old fellow went frantic trying to get out.

“Very well. There's no time to argue.” He went to the door and jumped up on the handle and said to all of the other cats. “Repeat after me:” and began the purring Mantra of Liberation once more.

Moments later two dozen cats and kittens were straggling at various speeds behind the tail of Mu Mao, who was struggling to keep up with the old cat, his face never getting further forward on the old one's body than the butterfly spirals of black stripes in the gray of his sides.

Mu Mao's mother continually lost ground as she shifted kittens and at last Mu Mao in his tiny voice told three of the other adult cats that if they wished to go in the same direction he was, they should help carry the young. Much to his surprise, they agreed. But even more surprising, the old cat turned for the only time since their escape, and scooped up Mu Mao by the nape of the neck. After that, their caravan went much more quickly.

The old cat was not lost, not was he confused. He unerringly homed in on his former home. A strong chill wind blew them along, but it was not yet raining or snowing and the night was clear, with many stars Mu Mao could not properly appreciate from his berth under the chin of the old cat.

The cortege of cats passed over and under a series of back fences, alleys and yards until they came to a small house with high grass. A light was on in a back window. The old cat dropped Mu Mao, hopped up to the sill and scratched, mewing.

Mu Mao jumped up beside him. The others started to do the same but the old cat hissed warningly at them and then modulated his tone to another plaintive meow.

Inside the room was a bed full of tumbled covers and a small, frail person. The person turned toward the window, as Mu Mao looked on. He seemed to have no attendant or helper however, and had barely the strength to raise his hand. Someone had brought him water and tidied the place recently, from the look of it however. Perhaps he had help come in during the day, or perhaps they slept elsewhere in the house, though it scarcely looked large enough for two people.

“Let me in, Fred! Let me in!” the old cat cried over and over and Fred seemed aware of him but unable to move. Finally the old fellow jumped down, narrowly missing Mu Mao's mother and two of his brothers.

“If he won't open the window, then I will take a run and break through it,” the old cat declared.

“Oh, that will be a grand surprise for your friend. A concussed unconscious if not dead cat lying cut to ribbons and bleeding all over his floor. I believe there is a better way,” Mu Mao said. “A moment please.” He began his chant of levitation, aiming at the window. It was a tricky business. Once he himself rose into the air and he had to start all over again. Another time he saw something move from the corner of his eye and looked around to see all of the other cats lifting from the ground, and once more started over. Fred lifted once, briefly too, but then Mu Mao at last chanted with the correct intonation and the window creaked, jerked, and flew open. The old cat flew through it as if he had wings, landing on the bed beside his friend and purring madly, rubbing himself so hard against the fragile body in the bed he threatened to crush it.

“Gently, old one,” Mu Mao cautioned. “His fires burn low. You wouldn't want to extinguish them entirely before you had a proper reunion.”

Just then, however, Mu Mao heard paws on the sill and turned back to the other cats. “It's a private moment,” he told them but bobtail black tom sauntered saucily forward, and had to bounce unceremoniously back to the ground to avoid losing his nose as the window flew shut again.

Mu Mao saw with surprise that the communication between the two did indeed consist only of cat noises on the one side and human murmurings on the other. It seemed to suit them fine, however, and he decided not to offer his services as a translator.

Fred was immediately enlivened by the presence of his feline friend, and gave the cat weak strokes and spoke to him while the cat purred and rubbed. Mu Mao found such extravagant affection almost distasteful, as he himself had learned to practice detachment in all things. However, in his heart he knew that love was not merely a great catalyst to many important changes and events, but the only catalyst if such things were to have Merit.

Slightly bored, nonetheless, Mu Mao looked about him while man and cat reunited. He noticed many framed photographs on the dresser. They were all of Fred and the old cat, who in some of them was a young cat, and Fred a younger man. In one of them the old fellow was a mere fluffball of a kitten and Fred himself barely dry behind the ears. Most of the photos said, “Me and Delf” although one, a portrait of Delf as a kitten, said “Delfy, seventh son of Alison Gray.” Delfy himself was very gray in that picture. The dark stripes would have come in later life.

Photographs also covered the walls but they were too high for someone of Mu Mao's diminutive stature to see. Photograph albums were piled on the table beside the bed, as if Fred had been looking at them before his caretaker tidied up. Mu Mao jumped up on the table to see if any of them were open, but none was and they were too heavy for a small kitten to manipulate. He didn't want to knock one off the table and disturb the reunion.

However, from his fresh vantage point, he saw a computer sitting on a table in one corner of the room. This was something even a kit with the right know-how could use. After all, it involved only the pushing of a few buttons and something called a mouse.

It was a small computer, and its power button responded readily to the touch of a tiny paw. Fred was not a secretive man. No password was required to see what concerns he filed on his machine. One choice said “Delfy” and Mu Mao pounced on the mouse. A number of things happened inside the computer with the result that soon there was a chronicle of Delfy's life from the time he was born until Fred became too ill to be Delfy's biographer any longer.

Man and cat had been intertwined throughout their lives to the extent that it was amazing to Mu Mao that Delfy had never learned more of Fred's language or had mistaken Fred's intention when the man sent his cat companion to find a new home. Actually, according to the sad note in Delfy's chronicle, Fred had given Delfy to a friend who promised to find him a home. Apparently the friend had simply dumped the cat at the shelter.

But from the time Delfy was born, a Gemini in the year of the Dragon, when Fred had helped Alison Gray deliver her kittens and had wiped the caul from little Delfy's face, they had been together. There were snapshots of the house Fred and Delfy lived in before and after the earthquake. Fred wrote that before the earthquake, Delfy had leapt from his arms and flown back and forth to the frame of the door, hooking his claws into Fred's pants and insisting that Fred follow him. Fred credited Delfy's instinct for survival with saving his life. There were the women friends that Delfy didn't like who eventually broke Fred's heart and the man friend that Delfy hated, who turned out to be a crook.

Fred even spoke sadly of when he first began to feel ill and Delfy began shredding a magazine that had an article about bladder cancer in it. Had he paid attention at the time Delfy did this, Fred believed the doctors could have treated it.

A Gemini in the Year of the Dragon. Well. Yes. Auspicious? Certainly.

Mu Mao gave the mouse a final, rather unenlightened bat, and jumped down from the table.

Fred's initial joyous greetings had dwindled to incomprehensible murmurings. His pets grew feebler as the joy that had flooded him with adrenaline could not sustain his strength, and his hand faltered, and lay still.

Delfy stopped in mid-purr and looked into Fred's face. His eyes, so fond and happy moments before, were now glazed and empty, though his lips still curled in a slight smile.

Delfy gave a mew that was half a whine and nosed at Fred's limp hand.

My Mao jumped up on the bed and with his tiny tongue began grooming the old cat's head. “We were just in time,” the kitten with the old soul said. “And you did a good thing for Fred. He was very glad to see you and had missed you very much, as you saw for yourself. I have read his words concerning you and it is true that he only sent you away to save you. But you didn't want to be saved so now what?”

“You who can open doors with your purrs, make yourself invisible and levitate windows ask
me
what's next?” Delfy asked in a dispirited voice.

“I do,” Mu Mao said. “We are all wild again. The others seem to wish to stay together for the time being. How about you?”

The old cat sunk his chin into his paws. He remained snuggled next to Fred's body. Mu Mao licked and licked, projecting calming and healing thoughts as he did so.

“I don't care.”

“You cannot stay here, friend. I know the ways of people. Soon they will come and take Fred away and someone new will live here. Probably you will not be welcome and will find yourself back in the place where we were. I think you and I both know you have a life with and a duty to your own kind now.”

Delfy turned away to lick Fred's ear, and tried to groom his hair.

A horrible wild yowl sounded from without and Mu Mao jumped upon the window sill in time to watch a gang of strange cats descend upon the refugees from the shelter, tearing into them with ferocity meant to kill. The fur flew, screams and spits, hisses and the sound of ripping flesh met him. For just a moment, the small feline he was in this life thought it best to stay put, but he saw a grizzled calico with one ear leap upon his mother and try to get at one of his litter mates. He levitated the window with such force that the pane rattled in its frame.

The Bobtail black tom flew into the grizzled calico and tore her from Mu Mao's mother's back. Mu Mao was levitating his small siblings to the relative safety of the window sill when Delfy sprang up beside him.

The striped cat's fur bristled until he was enormous, ten times the size of Mu Mao and his brothers and sisters. With a roar like a lion's, a roar so unlike his mewlings and purrrings to his former companion that Mu Mao could hardly believe this was the same cat (a true Gemini, he reflected with satisfaction), he stilled the furor of battle. “HEAR ME AND BE WARNED!” he snarled. His eyes were rolled back in his face, and the black spectacles around them became a spiraling infinity knot that hypnotized the cats below and quite surprised and pleased Mu Mao with the definitiveness of its declaration of Delfy's unique status.

“The King is Dead. You anarchists who would rend the kingdom apart for lack of leadership, beware. The new king is among us now. Long live Bobtail Black Tom, the only legitimate and non-neutered heir to His Former Majesty, Tom Gamble!”

The strange cats slunk away from those they were mauling, just far enough to roll onto their backs, as did the other refugee cats one by one, while Bobtail Black Tom strolled among them licking their faces or giving their bellies a warning tap with his paw. Mu Mao's mother, having made her obeisance, brought her youngsters from the sill one by one, the last being Mu Mao, who jumped down unaided.

Beside him, Delfy landed but neither of them showed their bellies to the bobtailed black king. Nonetheless, the king graciously sauntered forward, quite full of himself now, Mu Mao noticed, though he doubted the black cat had had any idea of his own royalty prior to Delfy's announcement. With great ceremony he licked Mu Mao's forehead and then lowered his own head for Delfy to lick his ears, which Delfy did in the feline equivalent of a coronation.

“Great Oracle,” the king asked when this was done, “You took your own sweet time about announcing yourself. What kept you?”

Just then Fred's caretaker, who apparently had been asleep in another room in the house and been aroused by the racket, came to the window. “I never saw so many damned cats in my life. Shut up, you lot! There's been a death in this house and—why, Delfy! You came back. Come on back inside, kitty, and we'll find you a good home. Fred wouldn't want you to be a stray.”