Six Lives of Fankle the Cat (11 page)

The Emperor looked long into the indignant eyes of his wife. Then he went out of the room.

The black cat stretched himself on the silken stool.

Next morning the wicked governor, who had of course returned to the capital at the first stirring of revolt, was executed in the city square. An embassy, carrying a cage of doves, was sent into the mountains. Words were spoken across a torrent. That night the mountains rang with joy and loyalty.

More than a year later the Emperor entered his wife's chamber; a star of astonishment had exploded across his forehead.

“Barbarians!” he said. “Out of the west, in the strangest ship you ever saw! How can such a ship sail at all? It is so clumsy it should sink. But it has come ten thousand miles. Such ugly men too. Their faces are as lumpy and white as dough. The gods only know what kind of gibberish they speak. Their eyes are blue as ice, and they stick out. They walk like bears. They showed me what passes for a book with them. Queer, incomprehensible letters, and the pictures crude and garish – nothing like the work of our artists, with their delicacy and endless suggestiveness. I think we cannot have such creatures in our land. I never saw such naked greed on faces – it frightened me! – when they stared at our golden statues and fountains. Obviously they want to trade with us, across thousands of miles of sea and desert. How their greedy eyes opened wide when the bales of silk were spread out before them! We don't need, or desire, the produce of barbarians. I think the best thing to do, in the circumstances, is cut off their ugly ears and tell them to turn round and go.”

The black cat cried out once.

“That cat of yours startled me then,” said the Emperor. “It was like a cry of warning.”

“Listen carefully, my dear,” said the Empress. “This is the gravest moment of your entire reign. I agree with you. Send these men back the way they came. Here our government and our way of life are exquisitely balanced. It is attuned to the mountains and seas and stars and grains of dust that have shaped and nourished our people for thousands of years. Now the stranger has his foot among us. This is no isolated coming. He is the first of thousands and tens of thousands. They will overthrow everything that we hold to be precious and good. Give them a gift, to show that we entertain no evil against them, then let them go.”

The black cat was stalking from wall to wall in a very agitated manner.

“Of course you are right, as always,” said the Emperor. “The Europeans will be sent away at once.”

“It is not so simple as that, alas,” said the Empress. “We like to think that we are alone under heaven, a great and powerful and wise people, very favoured by the gods. But there are other peoples. We have seen a man from India and a man from the islands in the south. They have their own wisdom, which is different from ours, but equally precious to them. There are thousands of such nations over the broad rich cloth of earth and sea. Can we shut our gates against them forever? We cannot. We are all children of the sun. It is our nature to seek each other out. It is desirable that we seek each other out, and try to understand each other. It could be that in the end, in this way, all the world will be one. Think of the richness and happiness and peace then, when all the diverse cultures of the world meet and mingle! Then we will be that much nearer the serenity and wisdom that the gods desire for us. Bid the strangers come in. Accept their gifts. Prepare rooms for them. It may be the greatest day of your entire reign.”

The black cat huddled, a shape of misery, in the furthest corner of the room.

The Emperor went out to see to the silver trumpets of reception.

The Europeans stayed for many years in the houses that the Emperor gave them. The people in time got used to their ugliness and uncouthness; also to the graceless inquisitiveness with which they pried into every object and circumstance. They had hardly more knowledge of ceremony than baboons. They wanted to experience everything at once, like ignorant children in a cake shop.

Suddenly one morning they said they wanted now to return home. They were growing old, they said. They wished to die in peace in their own lands.

Gravely, and with many gifts, they were bidden farewell.

“That is the last of them,” said the Emperor. “I got rather to like them in the end, in spite of all their barbarous ways. You see, my dear, it wasn't really important at all, the coming of the Europeans. It neither helped us nor harmed us. It simply stirred our curiosity a little. They won't come again.”

The Empress sighed. The black cat growled in her lap.

They grew old together, the Imperial pair. Never had the Empire known such happiness and prosperity. “The gods bless our wise Emperor and Empress!” the people sang outside the gate on each anniversary of their wedding.

Troubles and difficulties came, of course. Whenever he was distracted by the jargon and vacillation and sheer stupidity of his council, the Emperor brought his beating pulses and flushed face to his wife's chamber; and there, into that wise and patient ear, he poured everything. Then, when he came back an hour or so later, she had the cure ready – the only possible solution in the circumstances.

And always the black cat lay curled on his patterned silk stool, as if nothing mattered in the world.

***

One day, when the Emperor was fishing in the artificial lake in the high garden, the Empress gave secret orders to the chief ostler. Within an hour a very plain-looking coach was standing at the main gate, harnessed to a pair of strong horses, one black and one white. When at last the Empress climbed aboard the coach, she was very plainly clad, almost as if she was the wife of the tenth secretary's underclerk. The black cat cried out of a bamboo basket. The Empress whispered orders into the coachman's ear; then she put a map into his hand.

With a cry and a whip-crack the carriage moved off.

The Emperor dozed at the lake-side and was aware of nothing. (When he went in for his supper, of course, he found a letter under his plate on the table.)

That coach journey lasted a full week. The horses had to be changed at this staging-post and that. The black cat
hated
travelling of all kinds. He complained often out of his bamboo prison. The Empress often bent down and whispered loving words through the bars.

Night after night they stayed at ordinary inns, where sometimes they were received courteously and sometimes with indifference and coldness. At the hospitable inns the black cat always obliged by catching the rat that was the bane of the cook's life.

On the seventh day, at noon, the Empress began to take a great interest in her surroundings. “That little hill with the one tree,” she cried, “I remember it.” Then, later, “The pool in the river where the children bathed – how beautiful. There's a boy wading in it now!” She tapped the coachman on the shoulder with her fan. “Turn left at the first crossroads. A village is down there, along the river bank.”

The coach stopped in the village square. The Empress got out. The black cat trotted at her heels. The coachman sat in the coach and chewed leaves. He thought, “What a poor uninteresting place!”

All the men and women of the village were fishing that day, out of sight behind the river-bend. Only old villagers were left, sitting at their doorsteps in the sun. The children were playing along the river bank, sailing paper boats, bathing, fishing tiddlers with jars. The old men and women looked up, bright-eyed, at the stranger.

The black cat strolled down to the splashing, laughing, weeping, echoing river bank.

An old woman said, “You're too early. If you want to buy a fish come back at sunset. The boats won't be home till sunset.”

The Empress said that she would like to buy a fish. She was sorry she was too early. Perhaps she could wait.

“What's your man, a lawyer?” said the old woman whose hand was like a bird's claw. “Prosperous ladies like you don't usually come down to the fish market. They send one of their hoity-toity servants.”

The Empress said the village and the river were so beautiful, she was glad she had come.

All the old ones of the village laughed, some like frogs, some like reeds, some like gurgling water.

“Oh dear,” said the old woman, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand. “That's the first time anybody has said
that
! Beautiful, indeed – what could be more plain and ordinary than this village?”

An old man wheezed, “You're a strange person, right enough. But there's something familiar about you, I can't just put my finger on it ...”

Down at the river shore, all was suddenly silent. The children were gathered round the black cat, some kneeling, some crouching, some dancing on one foot.

The Empress said, “Are the people of this village happy? Apart from a bad fishing season now and then, are they contented?”

She was answered by a chorus of cries, so confused that she could make nothing of it; all she knew was that it was a harsh music ... At last the old woman spoke for everyone.

“Happy?” she shrilled in her thin cracked voice. “We old ones happy? Who cares about us? Nobody. We can't work any longer. We're useless. When the young ones come in with their baskets of fish, they might throw us a head or a tail. Well, we don't blame them. They must do the work, they must keep the village going. They have to eat and be strong. But, lady, everybody here would be well content if it wasn't for the officials and the tax collectors. They come in their boats twice a year and they bleed us dry. They knock at every door with their parchments and purses. And all to keep the Emperor and that filthy woman, his wife, in luxury, somewhere far in the north.
They
don't have to worry. Their silks and goblets of wine and harps make old age pleasant for them ... But even so, stranger, it might be a happy village, imperial taxes or not, if it weren't for the warlords who come and go with their armed bandits, leaving ruin and smoking houses behind them. This is happening all over the land. It happened here six years ago. Lady, why are you crying? This has nothing to do with you.”

The children at the river bank were all suddenly looking up at the steps where the Empress and the old village ones were holding their dialogue.

The Empress couldn't speak for a long time. She covered her face with her hands. But the tears oozed out between her fingers.

The old man said, “She's the strangest lady I ever came across. And yet, I don't know, there's something about her. Her voice – she has the river-sounds in her voice. She doesn't come from some posh quarter of the city, that's sure.”

The Empress said, “I think I don't have time to wait for the fishing boats. But I'd like to buy something in the village. Have you any of your little grass cages for sale, where people used to keep butterflies and grasshoppers?”

The old villagers shook their heads.

The old woman said, “No grass cages have been made here for a long long time. There was only one person who could make them properly anyway, and her name was Bat-ye. After Bat-ye died, there were no more beautiful grass cages.”

The eyes of a few old men shone like boys' eyes. One old man said, “Bat-ye. Bat-ye was the sweetest girl who ever lived in this village. I loved Bat-ye. I can say it now. My old woman died last winter.”

“Bat-ye was more beautiful than any flower,” said another old man. “Her hands were like lotus blossoms.”

A third old man said, “We might have known we couldn't keep Bat-ye. She was too rare and beautiful for a poor village like this.”

“What happened to Bat-ye in the end?” said the Empress.

“She was drowned one day in the river,” said the old woman. “She was reaching down for a strong reed when the water covered her face. The river floated her out to sea. Her body was never found.”

“Not a day has passed,” said an old man, “that I haven't thought of the beautiful hands of Bat-ye.”

“No, she wasn't drowned,” said another old man. “The bandits took her away to their cave in the mountains. A peasant saw her being forced on to a horse's back, bound and weeping. I shudder to think what those wicked men did to our Bat-ye.”

“I think,” said the old woman, “the truth is simpler. Bat-ye got tired of this poor place. One day she left everything and went away to the city. I'd have done the same but I hadn't the courage. What Bat-ye did in the city I don't know. Someone like her might have opened a prosperous silk shop. I expect she's dead now. She never came back to the river, at all events, and I don't blame her.”

The children, the black cat among them, were coming: through the reeds and the rocks towards the village. The children had eyes only for the strange woman standing at the steps. The eyes of the children were round, as though they had heard a wonderful fairy tale. Two of the children were lustrous from the river water.

“Bat-ye, Bat-ye,” said an old man, and smiled like a boy.

“That's what happens to the poor river people,” said the old woman. “They're hungry most of the time, they grow old, the salt of taxation is rubbed again and again into their sores. If a villager chances to be beautiful she is either dragged away, or she goes of her own accord to the city to better herself.”

The children stood around the group of old ones in a wide ring. “The Empress,” breathed a little boy. “Why is she not wearing gold and ivory?” “The Empress,” said a girl whose hand was full of river-flowers.

“So, stranger,” said the old woman, “we can't oblige you today, either in the way of a tasty fish or a grass cage for butterflies. Thank you, all the same, for stirring up such fragrant memories in us. Our hearts have been dead stems for a good few winters past.”

The old ones smiled all around the Empress.

The children murmured, “Empress”... “Em-press” ... A boy blew melodious air out of a reed.

“Get back to the river, you children!” cried an old man.