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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
A small band of cats lives in the labyrinthine alleys and ruins of Nizamuddin, an old neighbourhood in Delhi. Miao, the clan elder, a wise, grave Siamese; Katar, a cat loved by his followers and feared by his enemies; Hulo, the great warrior tom; Beraal, the beautiful queen, swift and deadly when challenged; Southpaw, the kitten whose curiosity can always be counted on to get him into trouble... Unfettered and wild, these and the other members of the tribe fear no one, go where they will, and do as they please. Until, one day, a terrified orange-coloured kitten with monsoon green eyes and remarkable powers lands in their midst-setting off a series of extraordinary events that will change their world for ever.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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THE WILDINGS
NILANJANA ROY
PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON
For Mara, loveliest of cats; and for Devangshu, the best of Bigfeet, without whom there would have been neither cats nor book.
CONTENTS
“Dream the world the way it truly is. A world in which all cats are queens and kings of creation.”
—NEIL GAIMAN “A Dream of a Thousand Cats”
CHAPTER ONE
A New Arrival
Nizamuddin was asleep when the first sendings came, in the pitch-black hours just before dawn. They were so faint that only the bats heard them, as they swooped in their lonely arcs between the canal and the dargah, the ancient Sufi shrine around which the colony’s brick-walled homes were tightly coiled. One of the bats chittered nervously as the soft, frightened words reached him, echoing in his head: Dark. Want my mother. Why are the dogs growling? Why aren’t you saying anything? It’s so dark in here.
Then there was nothing else, and the bat soon forgot what he had heard, though when he hung upside down from the ruins near the baoli,—one of Delhi’s few stepwells still fed from the depths of an underground spring—slumbering in the pearly light of day, he dreamt of being a hunted creature in a dark, cramped space, helpless against his predators.
It was long after when the second set of sendings came, stirring the post-monsoon air and startling a pariah cheel that was making sorties over the large park in the centre of Nizamuddin West. “Mara is scared, put me down! Where did my mother go? Who are you? Where are you taking me? Don’t want to leave the drainpipe! You’re frightening Mara, you horrid Bigfoot!” Tooth’s wings dipped, taking him into a perilously low dive over the rooftops as he shook his head, trying to get rid of the sense that a cat was mewing at him in mid-air—softly, but enough to ruffle the delicate feathers that covered his inner ear. He felt unsettled until his sharp eyes spotted a bandicoot scuttling along the ground, larger and fatter than the local rats, its long snout twitching nervously as the predator’s shadow fell over the creature, and the day’s hunting began in earnest. By the time he had made his kill, the cheel had forgotten the strange encounter.
The Sender stayed silent after that. There were no cats or dogs in the area at that hour, and the only other creature in Nizamuddin to hear the second sending was a small brown mouse, who sat back on his haunches, cast a worried eye around, and seeing no cats or kittens, continued along his way.
THE DAYS PASSED PEACEFULLY. It was the happiest time of the year for the residents of Nizamuddin and Delhi’s other colonies. Summer had gone and Diwali, the annual festival of lights with its menacing fireworks and thunderstorms of noise, wouldn’t begin until the middle of autumn. Freed from the summer heat, the cats of Nizamuddin could start hunting again.
Beraal was pleased at the change in the air. She had spent most of the summer in the baoli, liking the tranquility of the disused stepwell, and in the abandoned construction lot where the cats found shelter among heaps of rubble. The heat had been intense that year, shrivelling the flame tree leaves, drying out the red flowers of the silk cotton trees, and the young cat had missed being able to go on long pilgrimages. Perhaps, she thought, stretching and yawning and shaking out her paws, it was time to make the trek to Humayun’s Tomb and see what the cats who lived in the quieter parts of its sprawling gardens, undisturbed by the crowds who visited the ancient monument, were doing.
The park was noisy, what with the neighbourhood Bigfeet boys fighting over a game of cricket, and the pariah cheels echoing their quarrel in a treetop battle far above. Beraal ambled off towards the cowshed that sat in the middle of the Bigfeet’s houses, settling on the broken brick wall to do her grooming in peace. This was more extensive than normal feline ablutions required: Beraal had long, black-and-white fur that curled silkily down to her paws when it was clean, but it was a magnet for dry leaves, dirt and other rubbish.
She was perched on top of the wall, licking industriously at a clingy spider’s web that had attached itself to her paw, when the air around her ears seemed to shimmer and part. “Woe!” said a small clear voice right into her ear, “Mara is worried! Mara is all alone with the Bigfeet! They are scary and they talk all the time, and I do not like being picked up and turned upside down!”
Beraal almost overbalanced, and had to somersault back onto the wall, an act that did nothing for her dignity. Wild-eyed, her whiskers bristling, her tail fluffing up to twice its normal size, she whirled around on the wall, searching for a cat that was nowhere to be seen. She ignored the small brown mouse who scurried out of his hole, equally startled. The quiet whisper that the mouse, whose name was Jethro, had heard almost a moon ago was much louder, far more powerful than the first time.
Beraal paid little attention to the mouse’s squeaks, twitching her silky ears. That voice had sounded so close—could it be in the neem tree? Down near the ground beside the cows? But there was nothing there, and the cat was truly stumped. She stiffened as the dry leaves on the creepers rustled, then relaxed. It was only Hulo, hopping down from the neem tree onto the wall beside her. “What the hell was that?” he asked.
“So you received it too,” she said slowly.
Hulo flicked his unkempt black tail lightly in assent. “I’ll bet every tom and queen in Nizamuddin is looking for whoever that was—my whiskers are still trembling!”
“I thought it was speaking directly to me, Hulo,” said Beraal.
“So did I,” said Hulo. “That cat transmitted louder than I can remember any animal ever doing in our territory!”
“And further,” said Beraal, as she felt her whiskers tingle. The other cats of Nizamuddin were linking—Miao, Katar, Abol and Tabol from the canal, Qawwali—and the air buzzed with questions.
Hulo’s scruffy fur rippled as he listened. “They heard her on the other side of the canal!” he said to Beraal. “Whoever it was, Mara-Shara, whatever, it’s a Sender, not an ordinary cat. And what worries me is that it’s not one of us!”
Beraal felt her fur standing up, strand by strand. The cats of Nizamuddin were used to linking across long distances, as all animals in the wild did with their own species. Mews reached only so far; scents and whisker transmissions formed an invisible, strong web around their clan of colony and dargah cats. But linking allowed them only to listen to each other. A true sending, where the Sender’s fur seemed to brush by the listener, its words and scents touching the listener’s whiskers, was rare. And only a true Sender could link with animals from other species as well as its own kind; the clan, like all clans who lacked Senders, used the mews, chirps and barks of Junglee rather than linking by whisker when they needed to speak to those from other species. From time to time, stranger cats, wayfarers and wanderers from other parts of the city, might breach the web, accidentally linking—but it had been years since the Nizamuddin clan had a Sender in its midst, or had received a sending as strong as this.
Beraal let her tail sink down as she thought about the sending: it had seemed to be coming from deep inside her head.
Hulo and she felt their whiskers crackle as Katar, the tomcat who was the clan’s most respected wilding, sent out an all-cats-bulletin across the Nizamuddin link. “Everyone heard that, I suppose,” Katar said. A running chorus of assent flickered across all their whiskers, from the bungalows in front to the park where Beraal and Hulo were, right up to the limits where the colony proper ended and the low roofs of the slums, illegal but ubiquitous, took over. “Anyone know what or who—this Mara is? Any recent sightings of strays from elsewhere? Miao, any thoughts?”
Miao was the oldest of all of the Nizamuddin wildings. “We’d have picked up news of any outsiders,” she said. “This one must be newly arrived—unusual for a stray this powerful to escape being noticed by all of us. Perhaps Qawwali and the dargah cats know more?” But Qawwali said there hadn’t been a whiff of outsiders for many moons now. Abol and Tabol said no strays had crossed the canal, nor had the market cats seen any strangers.
Beraal shared a thought that she’d been turning over in her head. “There’s something strange about the way the cat spoke,” she said. “Its transmissions didn’t just sound foreign—that entire sending was unusual.”
“That’s because it’s not one of us, Beraal,” said Hulo impatiently. “Outsiders always sound different.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Beraal. “There were very clear images, though I couldn’t make out what they were exactly.”
The link crackled with slow assent. Katar cut in: “Did you see what I did, Beraal? I thought I could see a small, orange blur, hanging in mid-air.”
“Something like that,” said Beraal. “And who was it sending to? Did it even know it was sending?”
Hulo sent an exasperated twitch along the line. “Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s a stray who’s not one of us wildings, and if it can send so strongly that it almost shook me out of the branches of my tree, I want it dead. It’s been years since any of us heard a sending as powerful as that.”
“Wait,” said Katar. “Miao, who was Nizamuddin’s last Sender?”
“You never met her, Katar,” said Miao. “Most of you wouldn’t remember Tigris, she was before your time. If you’re wondering about her descendants, she had none—Tigris had no mates that we knew of, and there haven’t been Senders in Nizamuddin since, though we keep an eye on every kitten in every new litter. And though Tigris could send with some skill, the sending we just heard is much stronger. This Sender is definitely an outsider—going by the power crackling on all of our whiskers, an experienced adult, possibly a battle veteran. There haven’t been any wildings of that description in the area—we’d have known, by scent or whisker—so it must have come in with a Bigfeet family.”
“Then perhaps we should try to find out more about this Mara,” Beraal started to say, when Katar gently overrode the link. He and Miao were the most experienced of Nizamuddin’s wildings. The colony had no leader, as was the norm with cats, but when all of the wildings had to confer, Miao or Katar would conduct the clan conclaves.
“I’m clearing the link,” he said. “Everybody should stay on alert. Look for strangers, listen for any reports of strays who may have come in across the canal, or from the animal shelter. Watch the Bigfeet homes carefully—it spoke of Bigfeet, if my memory is true. Expect to find a large fighter, probably a queen, as Miao says—this cat would have to be an adult of considerable size to have that kind of sending power.”
“Katar,” said Beraal, “what should we do when we find it?”
“Kill it,” said Katar, “if it’s not one of us, and especially if it’s living with Bigfeet. Beraal, I’ll expect you to take a special interest in the execution.”
Beraal hadn’t expected any other response. Strangers, especially those who lived with Bigfeet, were always regarded with suspicion, and an unknown Sender was even worse. Their abilities set them apart from other wildings, and this one had badly shaken the Nizamuddin clan.
If this was an inside cat, a house cat, killing it might be somewhat more difficult, but Beraal figured she would solve that problem when she got to it. Beraal was the most fierce of the queens of Nizamuddin, and could take on many of the toms. She was a fine hunter—swift, silent and precise—and her immediate concern was finding the stranger who threatened their peace.
IT WAS AN UNEASY NIGHT in Nizamuddin for the feline population. Two more calls twitched through the dark, disrupting prowlers and sleepers alike. New place smells like new miss my mother new new new, Mara lonely, Mara sad. That came in an hour after the cats of Nizamuddin had first linked, and set the whisker links twitching all over again. It had been even stronger than the first message, and the fear set all their ears back, sent their fur rippling in empathy.
As she paced restlessly around the park, keeping only the most perfunctory watch out for dogs, Beraal met Katar. The handsome grey tom touched noses in greeting and tried to prevent the small brown kitten who’d been trailing in his wake from tripping over Beraal’s paws.
“Me and young Southpaw are going down to the dargah to check the scent trails at the perimeter, just in case we’ve all missed something,” he said. “Miao and Hulo are patrolling the canal—Southpaw, quit playing with my tail or I’ll have to smack you again—I’m worried, Beraal, I don’t ever remember a Sender as strong as this or as odd. I tried communicating with it, and so did Miao, but we couldn’t connect. I don’t understand this. I don’t like it at all. It’s best if we find it and kill it soon.”
Beraal wrapped her tail around his, a small gesture of comfort but a pleasant one; she and Katar had mated once, and though neither his kitten nor any of the ones fathered by other toms had survived and they’d had other mates since, she and the grey were quite fond of each other.
“And of course Southpaw has to go along with you,” she said, her whiskers gently brushing the young kitten’s head. “Shouldn’t you be taking a nap, youngling?” Southpaw was the colony’s orphan, and so far it had taken the combined efforts of all of the Nizamuddin cats to keep him out of trouble—he had an instinct for tumbling from the antheap into the termite’s nest, as the old saying went.
“The sendings woke him up,” said Katar, “and I found him prowling the rooftops as though he was on tomcat patrol, all by himself.” He didn’t need to add that it was safer to take the kitten along. Southpaw could hear the other cats on the link, but his whiskers hadn’t grown to the stage where he could send out messages on the link without garbling them terribly. Besides, the kitten’s last attempt to patrol the roofs had ended with him tangled in a clothesline, the ropes and wet clothes muffling his mews for help.
Three hours later, the third sending came in. They had almost been expecting it, but it made no sense. It was just as loud, but less fearful. New, still new, I don’t like new—but Bigfeet are nice, Bigfeet make me feel less scared.
The rooftops of Nizamuddin had rarely seen such activity.
Caterwauling rang across the neighbourhood, causing the Bigfeet to toss and turn uneasily. Lithe ghost shapes padded along the roofs, swarmed down drainpipes and backstairs, patrolled dustbins, swooped smoothly under cars, searching for a Sender who refused to be seen. The dogs whined in their sleep, sensing the crackling of back-and-forth messages in the air; the few foolish enough to try and chase the cats they saw were taken aback to be met with blazing eyes and aggressive hissing and spitting. The cats of Nizamuddin had work to do tonight; they weren’t going to let a few curs get in their way.
Out on her third patrol of the night, Beraal sat down heavily on the front steps of one of the houses and decided that she needed to wash for a bit. As her tongue loosened her silky fur, releasing some of the tension that had been knotting her insides, she found it easier to focus on the problem. It was like untangling a very complicated ball of thread—you had to find the ends and pull them out one by one.
Rasp, rasp, her tongue went smoothly back and forth across her coat. Scared cat called Mara. But if it was a battle veteran, why would it be scared? Because it was in a new—and therefore frightening?—place? She began to tease the tangles out of her fur. The young queen coughed slightly as she swallowed a knot of loosened dirt and fur—that probably meant a hairball in the morning. Well, it couldn’t be helped.
Balancing on three paws, she spread one out carefully, and began tonguing the dirt out from between the claws. Was it with a new family? In a new house? Her tail curled around for easier reach, and she began to groom it absentmindedly. The sendings had grown clearer each time, and so had that unsettlingimage of a small orange ball of fur, whatever that was. But it didn’t make sense. Why would this powerful Sender crash into the wildings’ neighbourhood and refuse to talk to them?
As the first glimmers of dawn came up, Beraal thought she knew what she had to do. She had to find a house that Bigfeet had just moved into. Then she had to find out if there were any large cats in the house. She flattened her ears slightly: Beraal didn’t like the idea of going into a strange house inhabited by Bigfeet. And if she found the cat? And if it was the most powerful Sender any one of them had ever seen, and sensed she was there to kill it? Then, she’d see, wouldn’t she?
Beraal’s first kill had been a cunning old bandicoot rat three times her size, when she was still in her fifth month. That was just the first of many victories. The queen had never failed to make her kill yet, and didn’t think she would this time.
CHAPTER TWO
Hide and Seek
The most powerful Sender in Indian feline history took two careful steps forward, sat down on her fur-protected behind then propelled with her front paws, scooted the length of the highly polished drawing room floor, and braked with the assistance of the Persian carpet. This was a wonderful game, Mara thought. She was beginning to settle into her new home. She missed her mother, badly, but the nightmare of the drainpipe and the barking dogs was beginning to fade, and curiosity about her territory had replaced some of her fear and sadness.
The house, which for Beraal or any outside cat would have seemed a confining set of boxes cluttered with all kinds of unnecessary Bigfeet stuff, loomed large to a kitten who had spent her first month under a pile of gunny sacks near the canal, and an entire day holed up in a drainpipe, terrified of the prowling dogs.
Mara had been too scared to explore the house, but over the space of a few hours, she had relaxed. She liked her bed, which was adorned with cool, soft sheets that made the perfect scratching pad for a small kitten. She wasn’t very sure what she thought of the Bigfeet—they boomed too much, and often picked her up when she didn’t want to be picked up, and didn’t seem to understand her at all. But they were gentle, and they were excellent suppliers of fish and milk. And they didn’t always interfere with her explorations.
Her whiskers twitched a bit as she attempted to disentangle herself from the carpet, which had unaccountably wrapped itself around her. Mara’s whiskers were striking—unusually long, prematurely white unlike the black that most kittens sported, curved at their tips. She kept them pressed down to her face; the kitten had learned early, in her very first days at the canal, that extending them fully would bring the noise and clatter of the world rushing into her mind.
“You’re a Sender,” she remembered her mother telling her, the day she had opened her eyes for the first time. Mara had been curled up, a tiny comma against her mother’s warm flank, listening to the giant purr of traffic on the bridge over the canal. Her mother’s blue eyes had been wary, almost sad as the cat washed her tiny kitten’s whiskers, making them tingle.
“What is a Sender?” Mara had asked. And her mother had answered slowly: “Senders are very unusual, Mara, there’s never more than one in a clan and most of the Delhi clans haven’t seen a Sender in more than three generations. Being a Sender means you can travel without using your paws—your whiskers will take you everywhere. And you can see and hear more than most cats can.” Mara suckled contentedly, drinking her milk as she tried to imagine what she could hear and see that other cats couldn’t. “Even you?” she had asked. “Even me,” her mother had said. “I told you, Senders are rare.”
They had played patty-paws then, but later, Mara had asked her mother: “What do Senders have to do?” Her mother washed the kitten lovingly. “A lot,” she had said. “Senders guard their clans; every clan hopes they will be lucky enough to have one, especially when times are hard. But it’s not an easy life—” the mother broke off, not wanting to tell her kitten that being a Sender would mark her as different, that her clan members excepted, most other cats would fear her, envy her, challenge her. “It’s an interesting life,” she said instead. “Don’t worry about it, Mara, I’ll teach you everything you need to know.” But then there had been the dogs; and then the Bigfeet had found her, and brought her to this new place, far away from the canal.
There had been something odd about last night. What was it? Ah, yes; she’d had the strangest feeling, when she’d been at her most lonesome, that she was being … watched. Heard. That a whole heap of other cats had been listening to her.
She wriggled, trying to chase her tail and emerge from the carpet at the same time, as stray thoughts floated through her stripy head. Miao … a wise Siamese cat with gentle blue eyes … Hulo was scarred and big, and scornful … Beraal was beautiful, deep green eyes, long black-and-white fur … there were many others, but she couldn’t make them all out. Suddenly she was in mid-air, the carpet still wound round her—Mara poked her head out and stared into the eyes of the she-Bigfoot. The voice sounded scolding today, but also amused. Tentatively, still suspended, she licked the Bigfoot’s hand.
She was deposited gently on the ground, unravelled from the carpet, patted smartly on her backside—an indignity, but well, she’d probably deserved it—and then the Bigfoot settled down on the ground beside her and began to scratch the difficult spot in the centre of her forehead that she could never reach herself.
Mara forgot about other cats, strange cats whom she didn’t know; forgot about her plans to go forth on a Bold Expedition, exploring the house more thoroughly. As her Bigfoot scratched her head, she leaned forward, her body almost twanging with ecstasy, and purred, and purred, and purred. Then there was lunch—milk deliciously flavoured with fish—followed by an afternoon nap …
IT WAS QUITE LATE and very cool when Mara woke up. She’d been shifted from the cushion on the sofa to a small round upholstered basket that she liked instantly, stropping her claws on the wicker as she yawned pinkly. Where were the Bigfeet? She padded out of her basket, intending to find the big bed where she’d slept the previous night, but found that the door to that room had been closed. Time for the Bold Expedition to begin.
From her position, less than six inches off the floor, the world was a forest of interesting things. There were chair-legs and table-legs rising off the ground and becoming platforms that she would later investigate. There were soft carpets all over, and she idly tested her claws on some of them before padding on. One of the rooms smelled nice, all dusty and musty and filled with interesting cardboard boxes that she had started to rip open. And coming through the kitchen doors—oh my, what were all those smells?
Mara sat down and closed her eyes, trying to identify them: they were so rich and so strong that they swirled around her head in a thick soup, confusing the kitten till she shook her head to try and clear it. There was … the heavy, brothy odour of garbage coming from downstairs; a scent of many Bigfeet; a sharp smell of iron.
From further away, the mingled scent of dogs drifted in, making her cringe a bit, but there were also cats, and seven different kinds of earth, from gravel to thick loamy mud; and trees, and flowers, and the soapy odour of Bigfeet clothes mixed with the metallic odour of cars. And they were all coming from outside that screen.
She patted the wire mesh door, and it swung open, enough for her to go out. The world held mercifully still, though the smells shifted and changed in a constant dance. The kitten was absolutely silent, squeezing as close to the wire mesh door—the back door of the house—as possible. The perfume of rotting garbage rose up from the narrow lane between the back of the house and the park—it was a holiday for the garbage collectors’ that day, so the aroma was richer and stronger than it normally would have been. It was inviting, but Mara hesitated, her tail waving uncertainly from side to side.
This was her first real view of the world. Her memories of early kittenhood were fuzzy. Her eyes had been closed for most of the time that she had lived under the canal. She remembered her mother’s comforting flanks, and the way she would be washed until she went to sleep, and the milky scent of her mama’s skin. But there had been a frightening period where her memories blurred: the sharp tug at the skin over her neck, where her mother had carried her, the close fetid stench of the drainpipe, the hours crouched inside, her fur trembling as the dogs snarled and circled outside. The last thing she had heard was her mother’s low, defiant growl, and then she had waited for hours in the dark, but her mama never came back.
Now that Mara could see and smell the world, she liked it, but she didn’t know if she could trust it. The sense of space made her head swirl. But what if she just went out onto the stairs? The stairs were part of the house, so perhaps they were really inside, not outside. The kitten discovered that if she could pretend she believed this, the dizziness went away, and her spinning head settled down. She rested on the staircase, curling her tail comfortably around herself to use as a cushion on the cool steel steps.
CHAPTER THREE
A View to a Kill
From the branches of the mango tree, Beraal watched the tiny orange kitten who’d bounced out onto the staircase with idle interest. It seemed new to the neighbourhood, but then the Bigfeet were always bringing in parrots, puppies, babies, kittens—as though they needed to underline their large clumping size by collecting small creatures for their houses.
Beraal and Hulo had spent most of the afternoon working backwards from the cow shelter, using their whiskers to try and pinpoint where the sendings had come from. The cows, who had lived in the large yard for years after the Bigfeet had constructed a refuge for lost city cows and bulls near the local temple, watched the two cats with interest before returning to their lunch of mango peels and rice straw. Beraal had narrowed her search down to the park, but she wasn’t sure whether the Sender would still be here. “If it’s a house cat, Hulo, it’ll be somewhere in this area,” she’d told the tom.
“Perhaps,” said Hulo, his tail flicking back and forth dubiously, “but I’m going to go and see if I can find any new scents. That’s been gnawing at my mind, Beraal. If we’re talking about a tomcat or queen with these levels of aggression, there must be scent markings somewhere in the area.” His nose quivered. Just one spray, even if it were hours or days old, would tell him more about the stranger than any of the sendings had been able to. It might tell him how aggressive the other cat was, and would definitely tell him how much territory it claimed—perhaps even where the intruder was located. Hulo rubbed heads affectionately with Beraal and prowled off, careful to avoid the Bigfeet boys, who were playing a rough game of catch in the park.
Beraal used her fluffy tail to cushion her belly against the rough bark of the tree. Her ears and whiskers were tuned to pick up the smallest, tiniest hint that any of the houses surrounding the park contained the intruder. The cat settled in for a long wait, amusing herself by watching the squirrels as they ran up and down the branches, their tails like feathery sails that propelled them effortlessly along. They gave her a wide and respectful berth, sticking to the other half of the mango tree, and she yawned, her eyes narrowing to little green slits as she calculated her chances of killing at least one—very high, if she focused on the tiniest one. It would have the least meat on its bones, but it would be the most easily frightened; fear turned prey witless, causing them to freeze in their tracks, and run the wrong way.
As she waited, she watched the kitten. It was playing with the tip of its tail, and it had a very comical way of going about it that reminded Beraal of one of the kittens she had had a year ago. That one had died young, sadly, falling to a cheel’s sharp beak, but it had had a similarly solemn approach to the delicate task of catching and trapping one’s tail.
The orange kitten triumphantly pounced on its tail, fell over forwards, narrowly avoided bumping its nose and went tumbling down three stairs before it managed to use its bum as a brake. Beraal found her whiskers radiating a smile at the way in which the kitten carefully checked each paw to see if it was in working order before climbing back up and settling down again.
“That was scary!” a voice said in her head. “Mara could have gone rolling and tumbling all the way down! And now my bottom hurts!”
The voice was very loud, and Beraal felt her whiskers trembling like leaves in a storm. She stared at the kitten, and the hunter’s whiskers straightened in incredulous fury as it all began to make sense. A Sender who didn’t know she was sending, who wanted her mother, who didn’t know how to receive signals or understand a cat network—because she was just a kitten, a wet behind the whiskers brat who’d sent an entire neighbourhood of cats into a frenzy.
It was only when the squirrels chittered anxiously, flying up to the safety of the very top of the tree, that Beraal realized her claws were out, stropping the bark, and that she was growling under her breath, her teeth chattering in the prelude to the killing bite. The cat licked her lips and shifted, trying to calm herself.
“And that would have been a long, long way down,” the voice continued. “Oh look—a butterfly! Two butterflies! Maybe I can catch both if I leap up with all my paws out in the air at the same time—oh! mrraargh!—bad idea!”
Beraal felt her whiskers crackle again as the Nizamuddin link sprang to life. “Our Sender is a kitten?” Katar snarled. “Nothing but a mangy kitten?” Even though he was miles away, on the dusty road at the far end of the canal, his whiskers rang with indignation, and the other cats began to chime in.
The kitten, hopping along a stair, hesitated and looked up. Her wide green eyes, the colour of new leaves in the monsoon, stared straight at Beraal. “Shut it!” Beraal said quietly. “There’s just a chance that it might be able to hear us—Katar, I’ll get back on the link later. Keep the airwaves clear.”
The kitten had her head cocked to one side, and she was giving Beraal a considering look—surprising, thought the hunter, coming from such a little one. There was no help for it. Beraal would have preferred to avoid the risk of Bigfeet reprisal, but this was definitely the Sender.
She stared at the staircase, evaluating the possibility of a clean kill. It wouldn’t be easy. She would have to scale the wall below, make the jump on to the stairs without being noticed by either Bigfeet or the kitten. If that went off well, she would still have to make her kill, and the staircase was used quite often by Bigfeet.
Beraal gauged her escape routes; perhaps it would be best to use a paralyzing bite on the kitten’s neck and carry it up to the roof to complete the kill. If she got it right, she might even kill the kitten with the first bite. She had done that often enough. And even if she didn’t, it was best to get the body out of the way—less chance that her Bigfeet would intervene, more chance that Beraal would make a clean and safe getaway. The dappled branches of a neem tree and the friendly, yellow-flamed branches of a laburnum tree hung invitingly over the roof; it was perfect. And the kitten’s attention had wandered; its head bobbed up and down as it followed the flight of one of the butterflies.
Cautiously, since they were so close, the mango tree a distance of three leaps away from the staircase, Beraal began to pad down the branch, towards the kitten, as silently as she could. The young queen didn’t want to risk the chance that the kitten would see a strange and much bigger cat approaching her with hostile intent and run for her life. Gingerly, she stepped onto the stairs.
The kitten froze, pivoted and peered across at her. That’s done it, thought Beraal, now she’ll be inside the house in a flash and it might be days before I get a second chance.
“Rats!” she said crossly.
“Hello there!” said the kitten, scrambling to her feet.
Beraal blinked. The kitten was supposed to run for her life—that’s the way the world worked.
“You really are a cat!” the kitten said. “Oh my, your fur’s so beautiful! Isn’t it scary being in a tree? I would be scared if I was high up in a tree! My mother’s not here—she was in the drainpipe with me, of course, but then the dogs came, and then the Bigfeet came—never mind that. This is my first time outside, but I expect you’re used to it. I’m not, it makes me dizzy, and I was just going to go inside. My name is Mara, what’s yours? Do you want to come over and chat? Please come, there’s room on the stairs for both of us.”
Beraal felt her head swimming. But there were no Bigfeet on the stairs, and all of Beraal’s instincts were telling her that this was the best shot she would get at killing the kitten. She padded up the stairs, evaluating her prey.
“You’re the most beautiful cat I’ve ever seen!” said Mara. “Though honestly, I haven’t seen that many. I was born under the bridge over the canal, and then there was the drainpipe, you see. But what lovely fur you have, it looks so soft!”
Beraal decided she’d had enough, this kitten was making her head spin … She laid her ears flat, hissed once in warning and let her claws slide out, preparing to spring.
“… why are you making that face? That’s really scary! You’re frightening me! You’re a mean old ugly cat, and you were supposed to be my friend. I want my mother NOW!!!!!”
Beraal blinked, shaking her head to try and get the noise out of it. Up close, Mara’s broadcasting volume was unbelievably loud; it was as though someone had set off firecrackers in her head, and it hurt so much that she had had to stop in mid-pounce.
She became aware that she was being watched by Mara, who had backed up and was within easy reach of the kitchen doors. If Beraal moved too soon, she had little doubt that Mara would dart for safety through the doors. The only question was why she hadn’t done so already. The big cat stared at the kitten, puzzled, and found herself looking into Mara’s reproachful eyes.
“I wanted to be your friend,” said Mara. “It’s lonely out here. My Bigfeet are fine, but I don’t know any other cats. You were coming up here to talk to me, I thought, and then you started … MEAN OLD CAT! I HATE YOU! I WANT MY MOTHER NOWOWOWOWOWOW!!!!”
Beraal waited till her head cleared.
“Please,” she said to the kitten, “could you stop doing that?”
“NO! YOU SCARED ME! AND ALL I WANTED WAS A FRIEND! MARA IS SO SAD!”
Beraal sighed, as the cat network in Nizamuddin lit up all over again with exclamations and protests, the lines crackling from the dargah nearby all the way to Humayun’s Tomb on the other side of the main road. Somewhere in her head, Katar was demanding to know why she hadn’t killed the kitten already. Hulo was saying he was on his way if she wanted backup. Out on the roof, a Bigfoot head popped up and Beraal knew she’d have to get off the stairs soon, especially as Mara was continuing to yowl at the top of her lungs.
Ignoring the sense that her head had been invaded by a troupe of those infernal Bigfeet marching bands, Beraal decided she might as well take a shot at a kill. She gathered her haunches in, waggled for take-off and, her claws extended, made a powerful leap at Mara.
The kitten was sitting just inside the doorway, her mouth open as she mewed her head off. She wasn’t looking at Beraal, and wasn’t protecting herself. Beraal rose smoothly into the first arc of her pounce, just as Mara sniffed and moved to the left, to better clean her whiskers.
Beraal overshot, landed in a small puddle of water and found herself skidding in an undignified fashion into the house. She fetched up sharply against the wooden leg of a table and lay there, winded, her eyes closed.
There were noises above her head. Bigfeet voices. They came closer, and Beraal shivered, trying to move her paws, but she could do little more than twitch. From beneath the table, she saw a Bigfoot scoop Mara up, cooing at the kitten and bearing it out of the room. The other Bigfoot was fiddling with the doors, and Beraal shakily got to her feet just in time to see the kitchen doors leading to the staircase being firmly shut. She shrank back under the table as the Bigfoot passed her, and stayed there for a while, her heart hammering. Mara appeared to have stopped sending; there were no further messages, nothing to distract Beraal from the awful knowledge that she was now trapped in a house, at the mercy of two Bigfeet and a kitten she had tried and failed to kill.
