The Wildings (33 page)

Qawwali watched the tiger nervously as it roared, its magnificent head thrown back, the great yellow eyes alive and brilliant. Then the dargah cat passed his greetings to the Sender over the link, and flicked his ears.

“For Nizamuddin and glory!” yowled Qawwali, raising his plumed tail as a battle standard, marshalling his troops to stand against the fleeing ferals. “For the clan! For the clan!” miaowed the Nizamuddin cats, who had joined Hulo and Katar on the ground.

Hulo chased Ratsbane through the bushes, until he had the other cat backed up against a tree. “Stand your ground and fight,” said the tom. Ratsbane rolled in the mud, pleading for mercy, and despite what he had done to Miao, Hulo might have let him be. But when Hulo turned his back on the feral, Ratsbane leapt on the tom, trying to bite his spine. The black tom shook the cat off easily. His yowl was deadly and savage. His claws ripped through Ratsbane’s throat, leaving the tree roots soaked in blood.

Aconite slunk along the grass, hoping to escape being noticed. The grey cat with gold eyes didn’t intend to risk her own skin; she had a great aversion to the sight of her own blood, much as she liked shedding the blood of smaller creatures. She kept a wary eye out for Katar. The tom didn’t look as fearsome as either Hulo or Datura, but he had dispatched a round dozen of the ferals, if she was any judge. As she reached the foot of the wall, the grey cat thought of the prey waiting for her on the other side—the fat mice, the lazy birds—and felt her mouth water. “Silly of them to have no one watching the wall,” she said, her eyes on the wildings who were mopping up the fight near the Shuttered House and closer to the baoli.

There was no shadow; the sun was too weak for that, and the rain was coming down steadily. But Aconite felt the rushing beat of the pariah cheel’s wings, and rose, too late, into a savage leap, hoping to rake the great bird’s underside with her claws. She missed, and Tooth’s talons fastened onto her neck. “I was watching,” he said to the wriggling cat, before he twisted his talons sharply. He let Aconite’s body fall back onto the grass. The kill had given him no pleasure, but it was necessary.

The ferals began to make a frantic retreat. Those who weren’t killed outright were chased by a posse of dargah cats right up to the front line of Bigfeet houses that faced the road. Some braved the traffic, trying to cross to the other side; many more shuddered at the cars and looked for shelter at the mouth of the filthy canal, less scared of the pigs than of the dargah’s fierce warriors.

Prowling around near the Shuttered House, Ozzy roared and roared—the only creatures that didn’t seem to hear him at all were the Bigfeet. “Best walk of my life!” he said happily. “Haven’t enjoyed myself so much since I was a cub chasing Bigfeet jeeps and sending them packing in Ranthambore! You’re looking tired, Mara—is this too much for you?”

The tiger could sense that it took all of Mara’s strength and energy to keep up the sending. The battle was almost over; most of the ferals were either dead or fleeing.

Ozzy roared again, and the Sender seemed to shimmer in the air. “Beraal,” called Mara. “I can’t hold on any longer. I’m taking Ozzy back home.” The black-and-white cat watched her student leave, remembering the tiny kitten who had interrupted their sleep with her howls. And then she was fading, the Sender of Nizamuddin who had summoned a tiger to the grounds of their greatest, bloodiest battle. The kitten bobbed tiredly ahead of the tiger, who followed like an ocean liner in the wake of a tugboat. He roared one last time, just for the fun of it, and then the air shimmered around the unlikely pair, and they were gone.

Katar limped up to Beraal, and Hulo joined them. The earth stank of blood; fear still hung in the branches of the
trees. Beraal’s mind was on the Bigfeet. She could see their heads bobbing up and down on the roofs. They wouldn’t have seen Ozzy and Mara—the Bigfeet appeared to be deaf where linking and sending were concerned—but they had certainly seen, and heard, the battle between the ferals and the wildings. They would not like this at all, and she hoped it wouldn’t be the start of bad times for the Nizamuddin cats and other strays. Bigfeet were strange creatures, given to unpredictable bouts of fear.

In one of the neighbourhoods Beraal had lived in, she had watched an apparently insignificant incident as she lazed on her owner’s balcony. The portly Bigfoot who lived downstairs was out on his morning walk, and he swung his cane at one of the local dogs, a pleasant enough fellow called Prince. Perhaps Prince was taken off guard, or perhaps he was just in a bad mood—whatever it was, he snarled at the Bigfoot and went for his ankles. He bit him gently, taking care not to harm, just giving the man a lesson.

But the man had shouted in his rough Bigfoot tongue and muttered darkly at the dog all day, kicking the few hapless animals he found in his way on the street. And the next day, a van had drawn up. The Bigfeet who went after the dogs had a bitter, hard-edged feel to them, and the stench of fear that rose from the van was awful for the other animals to feel, as they watched their old friends from the park being driven away. “Help!” cried Prince. “Help us, they’re going to kill us!” cried the other dogs, including a sweet little golden-haired one who had been Beraal’s friend. She could smell from the Bigfeet and from the van that this was true.

The memory of it could still make her shiver. Watching the way the Bigfeet moved around on the rooftops, Beraal wondered what the war between the ferals and the wildings would lead to.

Her companions were silent. After the tumult of battle, the silence seemed to echo in their ears. Except for a cheep from a badly injured bird, the quiet tap-tap of the rain and the normal bustle of traffic on the canal road, the gardens were hushed in the aftermath. It seemed to Beraal that there were corpses everywhere she turned—the tiny bodies of the mice, the feathered piles of birds, dead ferals and a few luckless wildings. A cold fear touched her spine at the same time that the thought reached all of them, but Katar said it first, turning his gaze from the carnage.

“Where is Miao?” he said. “We must find her. I don’t see her anywhere.” He had been sniffing frantically at the place where Ratsbane and the others had ambushed the Siamese. There was a deep, bloody indentation in the earth, and clumps of Miao’s black and cream fur dotted the mud. But there was no sign of the old cat who had fought so bravely.

Then Beraal said hesitantly, her whiskers trembling from battle fatigue, “There’s a trail here.” Katar and the other cats followed her lead. Dark patches of drying blood led away from the site of the ambush. Hope rose briefly in the tom’s heart; perhaps Miao had been able to drag herself away.

But the scents stopped abruptly at the foot of the wall; a forlorn clump of white fur stained with blood clung to a stone, and that was all. Beraal sniffed at the wall, climbing the old, slippery flagstones dexterously, ignoring her own injuries, but could pick up no scent. Katar felt his tail drop again.

Hulo raised his battered whiskers, the blood still streaming down his front paws from open wounds. “And where is Datura? I’ve found Ratsbane’s body, but that white coward slipped away, did he?” The tomcat refused to think about Miao. That way lead to grief, and he preferred anger.

The four searched the garden, despite their own wounds and Beraal’s fear that the Bigfeet would clump in to see what had happened, but there was no sign of either Miao or Datura. Both cats, the feral leader and the Siamese, had vanished.

T
he mongoose woke with the scent of copper in her pointed nose. She sniffed the air, her beautiful eyes wide and entirely awake; Kirri always went from sleep to alertness without stopping at the frontier between the two.

In less than a second, she was pointing her nose in the direction of the Shuttered House. Her tail was up, her claws curved. The world smelled of death, as she had feared it might when she had spoken to Southpaw that morning. Kirri was on intimate terms with both scents, but the only time Nizamuddin had smelled so strongly of butchery was when the Bigfeet had laid down poison for the rats, many years ago.

The mongoose slid out of the gap in the pile of bricks where she had made a temporary shelter for the night, ignored the Bigfeet loitering around the lanes of the dargah, and pattered down the alleys towards the Shuttered House. Few saw her go
by; Kirri was a brown-and-silver ghost who moved from shadow to shadow.

Long before she reached the battleground, Kirri knew the story. The winds told her of the massacre of the mice and birds; the rain spoke to the mongoose of the bloodshed by the wildings and the ferals; the trails left behind by the dargah cats whispered eloquently of the hurry with which they had rushed to the aid of the Nizamuddin cats. The mongoose knew everything before she slipped through the hedges into the grounds of the Shuttered House, and yet she was unprepared for the killing fields that lay before her eyes.

The dead creatures—the shrews, the bulbuls, the mice—didn’t tempt Kirri, though she had woken hungry. The mongoose preferred to do her own killing, and would only eat from another’s kill if she were starving. But as she surveyed the piles of tiny corpses, something in them stirred an unfamiliar shard of pity. The pity went as rapidly as it had come, but as she sniffed at the mice, and then the shrews, the sparrows, and then the bulbuls, a greater indignation began to swell in the mind of the predator. Kirri lived frugally, her love of fresh kills often making the gaps between meals longer than most animals would have been able to stand, and she couldn’t abide waste.

The killer who had done this was profligate, careless in his slaughter. The mongoose sat up on her back paws, her tail curved to one side, and glared at the dead. The scent of blood seemed bitter and rank in her flared nostrils. And as Beraal had, she watched the Bigfeet stirring on their roofs. In her experience, Bigfeet tended to treat one animal like another. They might not draw distinctions between the combatants and the innocent.

Kirri chittered to herself in exasperation. At her feet, a diminutive brown head popped up. “He’s gone, hasn’t he?” said a brown mouse. “Are you speaking to me?” The mongoose was taken aback. She wondered whether to attack the mouse, but it didn’t seem worth her while. She rarely killed something that small, unless she was famished. Jethro kept well out of range, making sure that he could duck behind the roots of the spiny bistendu bushes. “It seemed to me that you were looking for Datura, Madame Mongoose,” he said. “Why else would you be here, sniffing through the corpses on this bloody morning? Forgive me if I spoke out of turn.”

“Datura,” said Kirri thoughtfully. “The kitten mentioned him too. That would be the leader of the ferals?”

“Yes,” said the mouse. “He did this.”

Kirri drew in her breath, looking around at the carnage. “All of this?” she said.

“All of this,” said the mouse bitterly. “Except at the end, other cats had died. His precious friends from the Shuttered House had died. The Siamese—you wouldn’t know her—had been unfairly set upon by his acolytes; how she fought, but there were too many for her. But he survived, didn’t he? Sneaking off and hiding in the baoli the moment his side started to lose.”

The mongoose was staring at the mouse. Her eyes were as red as burning coals.

The mouse grew uncomfortable, his nose twitching rapidly.

“Not that it’s any of your concern,” he said, preparing to dive back into his hole. “It was a terrible war, though.”

“You interest me,” said Kirri said. “Did you say the Siamese?
An elderly cat, but a fine hunter? With vivid blue eyes, creamy fur, a black tail, and a black patch on her face?”

“Yes,” said Jethro, startled. “It was terrible, the way they set upon her. They gave her no room to defend herself. They fought the way dogs do, in a pack, not like cats. They fought the way the worst rats do.”

The mongoose turned to go, her short brown and silver fur quivering, her red eyes alight with something the mouse didn’t quite understand.

“What are you going to do?” asked the mouse.

“Dance,” said the mongoose as she moved purposefully towards the baoli.

ON THE HIGH
, slippery stone where Miao had stood just the night before, Datura lay with his paws spread out, liking the feeling of the wet quartzite on his fur. The white cat wasn’t thinking of his companions—Ratsbane and Aconite, and the other ferals who had died or fled. Instead, he was thinking with some bitterness of the years he had spent in the Shuttered House, years he had thought of as rich and satisfying ones.

But what he’d had was nothing compared to this—a world with so much prey in it, and one that was full of small pleasures like walking on wet grass and letting it tickle one’s paw pads. Nor had he known the pleasure of being able to kill animal after animal, instead of having to ration out one kill for months on end, waiting for the next unlucky creature to stray into the Shuttered House.

Datura had decided when he was just a kitten that the world had two kinds of creatures in it: the weak and the strong. He knew which kind he was. He had thought Ratsbane was strong, but Ratsbane was dead. The dead were, by definition, weak.