7,19 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
The Nizamuddin cat clan are licking their wounds, slowly recovering after their terrible battle with the ferals from The Shuttered House. But soon they find their beloved Delhi neighbourhood is changing around them, and they encounter new enemies - vicious dogs, snakes and humans. Unless Mara, a young ginger kitten, can use her powers as a Sender to help the clan find a safe haven, the small band of cats will be wiped out for good. Led by the plucky Southpaw the cats set out on a perilous journey through India's urban jungle in search of a new home, meeting many new loyal friends, and deadly foes, along the way. The Hundred Names of Darkness concludes the thrilling story that began with The Wildings.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Ähnliche
![Tintenherz [Tintenwelt-Reihe, Band 1 (Ungekürzt)] - Cornelia Funke - Hörbuch](https://legimifiles.blob.core.windows.net/images/2830629ec0fd3fd8c1f122134ba4a884/w200_u90.jpg)
PUSHKIN PRESS
PRAISE FOR
The Wildings
“A few pages into Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings, you’ll wish you had whiskers and could mew”
Daily News & Analysis
“A novel for all seasons and ages. … Roy has her readers on the edge of their seats”
India Today
“A beautiful re-visioning of Delhi, of friendship and of war. Roy has made the mind-link: her wildings hunt in my dreams”
Alissa York, author of The Naturalist
“Could well become a classic in its own time”
The Sunday Guardian
“I absolutely loved this book”
In Need of a Read
“A vivid read”
The Times of India
“Roy’s cats bring to mind the creatures of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Rikki Tikki Tavi’ and Richard Adams’ Watership Down, and like these immensely popular stories, The Wildings has a warm heartbeat. I predict that Roy will win fans from all ages with this delightful debut”
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things
“Gripping, humorous and truly immersive”
Sunday Indian
“A most impressive debut. … The Wildings is an excellent and assured first novel”
OutlookIndia.com
CONTENTS
“Somewhere, in some corner of this universe, a town is inhabited solely by the spirits of cats. Surely, it does exist.”
—HAGIWARA SAKUTARÕ,
“The Town of Cats”
Prologue
The egret dipped her wings and sheered away from the red roofs. She flew over the village every evening on her way back to the paddy fields, soaring over the tiny bakery, the football fields, the peaceful houses. The rain fell steadily, in heavy silver sheets, but the egret was used to it.
She saw the flash of movement before she saw the cat pad deftly across the slippery red tiles. The egret changed course, calling once to alert the other birds. The rain streamed through her feathers, and the massed grey clouds in the sky told her that the monsoons would take over the night.
That wasn’t going to stop the most ferocious hunter in the village of Paolim. Flying back from their evening sorties across the amber hills, the emerald green fields, the egrets stayed well away from the crumbling house with the faded blue shutters, and the ones next to it, knowing that Magnificat owned the rooftops that night.
Though her fur was the blazing white of the feathery clouds that studded the skies over the River Chorize just after each drumming downpour, Magnificat moved with such speed and ease across the roofs that it was hard to spot her. If the birds had only known it, they were safe from the cat. Goa’s most famous Sender was on the hunt, but not for birds, or even fat palm squirrels. The previous night, Magnificat had attacked and killed her second cobra of the year, taking on the powerful snake fearlessly, mindful of its venom and yet intent on making her strike. The cobra’s mate had slithered away when it saw the blood speckling Magnificat’s white-furred jaws. The cat had seen his black scales gleam as the snake sought shelter on these roofs. If she didn’t kill the snake, he might bide its time. But he would come looking for her someday, and she couldn’t take the chance of being caught off guard. It was yet another round in an ancient war. The snakes of Paolim and the cats who patrolled the fishing boats and launches of Chorize had hunted each other for generations in a deadly dance of predator and prey, where the roles could change in a second.
Magnificat paused at the edge of the roof, curling back into the shelter of the tiles and holding still when two motorcyclists roared up on their pilot bikes. They stopped at the foot of the jackfruit tree, leaning their bikes against the brick boundary wall. On the other side of the wall, damp hens huddled under a sheet of plywood, their red and black feathers soggy in the rain.
The cat knew the boys wouldn’t hurt her, but she didn’t want to be petted this evening. She loved being cuddled, especially by some of the more animal-friendly inhabitants of Paolim, but she would lose her assassin’s edge if she allowed herself to be stroked just before a hunt. She curled up, using her large, fluffy tail as a comfortable seat. Her tail never got waterlogged even in the worst monsoons; a gift from her father, who had been a Bengal swimming cat of some distinction.
The boys chatted, and soon the village priest joined them, and then the baker, the hoods of their colourful raincoats blocking out the fat raindrops. Magnificat watched the bats flutter out and whirl around the jackfruit tree. The roar of the monsoon rains played a tabla beat on the roof. The bats would not go out to dance above the old well and the paddy fields tonight; the storm was breaking over all their heads, and the last of the evening light shimmered out of the grey skies. Night hovered on the horizon, stretching black shadows towards the village.
Then the boys got on their bikes, and in the sudden light of the headlamps, Magnificat saw the cobra’s sleek head skim the stubbled green spikes of the jackfruit, his tail flicking as he shot into the upper branches. An overripe jackfruit fell with a dull thud onto the glistening road below, the fermented sweet stink rising from its innards making her pink nostrils twitch. Then there he was, faster than she’d anticipated, his hood rising out from the broken slates in the gutters.
She was up, her paws and claws digging into the red tiles, her whiskers and the long fur on her face quivering in fear. The tiles were so slick with rain that she didn’t dare risk moving downwards towards the snake. If she tried to go back up the roof, she’d be at a disadvantage, allowing the cobra first strike.
The wind picked up speed, howling in Magnificat’s ears. The cobra’s hood gleamed in the light of the street lamps; she could see only the angry spectacles, and the tiny black eyes like the pebbles at the bottom of the river, not the rest of his tail. His tongue flicked in and out nervously, and the cat realized he’d come up too fast. Snakes had poor eyesight, so it was unlikely that he had seen her on the roof. Instead, he must have planned to lie in wait along the tiles. Now he had her scent, and knew she was there. The snake hissed, rearing up, and Magnificat had to stop herself from skittering away across the slippery tiles.
Before he could rise to his full length, Magnificat screamed, letting the battle cry ring out over Paolim, and scrambled sideways, seeking the edge of the roof. The cobra had been about to strike in her direction, but he hesitated, weaving back and forth, uncertain of his next move. The Sender calculated her chances. She could make a run for it—a long leap to the balcao below, then a dash across its broken balustrades towards the palm tree. And if she did, the stalking would have to begin again, the long mornings and days of near-sleepless vigil, the nights of hunting as each of them tried to find the other one first. This was a bad place for a fight, but Magnificat had learned as a kitten that you couldn’t choose the battleground, the time of battle or even the opponent. The speed of your paws, the swiftness of your attack—only that was in the hunter’s control.
But she had let too much time go by in reflection. The cobra lowered his hood, his tongue jabbing at the air, and Magnificat’s whiskers flared up, the long fur on her face prickling despite the rain’s steady beat. She caught the snake’s jet eye, and realized that he was thinking the same thing. If he flattened himself against the roof, the cat would lose the biggest advantage she had over him: sight. Night had dropped over Paolim silently, and there was only a half-moon in the sky, the light of the street lamps lapping only at the edge of the rusted tin guttering.
The snake would use his tongue to scent the cat, and Magnificat would have to rely on her whiskers and her instincts. The white cat growled softly, her teeth baring as she considered her position—out on the very edge, she would have to hope that she sensed the cobra before he reached her.
Her whiskers bristled unpleasantly, as though an unseen bat had flown by and touched them with its leathery wings. Through the coldness of the rain, the air shimmered with sudden heat; it seemed to the hunter that the winds themselves were parting.
“… This blanket is too heavy. Curses! Will no Bigfeet rid me of this meddlesome quilt?” The mews came right out of the storm, as though a cat was riding the clouds. Magnificat, her tail fluffed, her whiskers humming with an unpleasant electricity, erected her fur and screamed defiance into the winds.
The storm dropped. The cat was trembling; the clouds had never mewed at her before in a stranger’s voice. But Magnificat was a hunter, she snapped back to the cobra—where was he? Had he already slithered up the tiles?
“That’s much better, thank you, such happiness to be able to breathe again. Ugh, there’s wool stuck in my throat, mustn’t swallow … Oops, too late! Morning hairball alert, Bigfeet!” said the voice again, making Magnificat’s paws curl up, her claws scraping at the roof.
The hunter stared as an orange cat shimmered in and out of view. It appeared to be suspended above the red tiles, rocking in a bed placed just above the roof of the old house. It was a small cat, half her size, and by the look of its ruffled fur, half asleep. Magnificat found the way its paws appeared to hover just above the tiles extremely disconcerting. She yowled, her green eyes catching the light, ready to attack the beast.
A cold fury had begun to replace Magnificat’s terror. “My roof!” she snarled. It didn’t matter how the intruder had got here, the noisy stranger was going to have to leave. She spat, viciously, and swung into attack stance. The orange cat yawned, and turned over.
But before Magnificat could do anything about her unwanted visitor, she heard the rustle on the roof. Even in the dim light, the black, curved head stood out, a sinister silhouette rearing up behind the tiles.
The cobra’s strike was precise; if she hadn’t moved just then, it would have got her on the flank. She was sliding towards the end of the roof, she would sail over it and land hard on her belly on the balcao below—she had to turn. Her claws found purchase, and Magnificat spun around, balancing on her forepaws almost entirely. She could smell the serpent’s slick scales. He was coming up fast, and instead of trying to see him, the Sender of Paolim closed her eyes, relying on scent and instinct to see her through.
The hunter hooked her left front paw onto the tiles, using them as a slider to let herself swing more to the left. She heard the snake strike again, to her right, the sound reminding her of the way the mangrove roots sprang back when she brushed through them on her long hunts. The cobra was up rapidly this time, but Magnificat had found her balance. She used her left paw as an anchor, and felt the rain beat down hard on her whiskers as she let her claws scythe out. Before the snake could sway in her direction, she had made her first strike, her paw ripping down the length of his throat. It was a bold move, and a dangerous one; it allowed the snake to make a swift strike at her paw, but she was out of danger by the time his head bobbed down.
The hunter struck again, and again, two lightning strikes with her claws, crushing his windpipe and ribs, and the snake collapsed, his tail twitching as he died. The snake opened his mouth and hissed once, the venom dripping uselessly off his fangs. “Ssssswift you were,” he said, “ssstealthy and sssstrong.” A last twitch, a death-twitch, ran through his massive length, and then he lay still.
Up in the clouds, a small snore emanated from the stranger cat. One of her paws was out, curled around her long white whiskers. The fur on it was neat and dry, her whiskers calm. She was a young queen, probably no more than two winters old, her eyes as green as the hunter’s.
“I’ll deal with you now,” said the hunter grimly, but the orange cat snored with greater intensity. Slowly, the little stranger winked out of view, fading until only the clouds were left where she had been. Magnificat, her paws glistening with blood, was left alone in the night.
THE WHITE CAT SETTLED back on the tiles, puzzled. She let the rain patter down on her; her fur was so long and so thick that it was only in the most ferocious of the Paolim storms that she felt uncomfortable. She began grooming herself, cleaning the blood off her whiskers with one practiced paw. She was fastidious, and preferred her fur to be free of mud, or blood, or any of the other detritus of the hunt.
The air grew heavier, and a familiar crackle lit up the clouds, until Magnificat felt the tug on her whiskers. The swollen rain clouds shone, and parted like gauze, to reveal the solemn, worried faces of a calico cat called Begum, and Umrrow Jaan, a half-Siamese, half-alley cat with slightly crossed eyes. Concern dripped off their fur as they peered at the Sender of Paolim, their outlines shimmering and re-forming in the sky.
“We’re so sorry, Em!” said the half-Siamese. “We didn’t dare send until the battle was over. I was so scared that if we popped up suddenly as well, you’d slip and fall on those wet tiles, plunging to a horrifying, tragic death like a splattered jackfruit, or that the cobra would weave his wicked way under your guard, plunging his venom into your poor heart …”
“Umrrow Jaan,” said the calico sternly, her whiskers managing to radiate disapproval even though she was just a formless shape in the clouds, “what did we say about not letting your paws run away with your sense of drama? Shut your whiskers for a moment, will you? Em, we’re terribly sorry. By the time she’d started sending, you were already dancing with the cobra, and we couldn’t warn you without risking your life.”
Magnificat combed her whiskers, bewildered. “I don’t understand, Begum,” she said. “Who in hell was the orange cat? And what does she have to do with the Delhi Senders? And why was she on my roof?” Her massive, fluffy tail was beating a quiet tattoo on the roof. A loose tile rapped on its fellows and went sideways, letting the rain pour into the old house through the skylight.
The calico sighed. “That orange cat,” she said, “is the new Sender of Nizamuddin. As far as we can make out, she has more power in her whiskers than all of the Senders of Delhi combined.”
“Oh yes!” said Umrrow Jaan, her ears standing up in sharp points against the clouds. “We could hear her all the way across the Yamuna river and over the dreaming spires and mansions of Old Delhi even when she was a tiny kitten! And then she made friends with the tigers, and she brought one of them onto the link, and you have no idea how panicked we were; I ran helter-skelter all the way through the Chandni Chowk street market and didn’t stop until I’d reached the Ridge, and even there, the barbets and woodshrikes were almost falling out of their trees!”
“A kitten? And a tiger?” said Magnificat, curling her fat tail around her in puzzlement. “But I saw no tigers on my roof!”
“Umrrow Jaan!” said Begum sharply, switching her tail. “Put a paw in it, do. I can see we’ll have to explain about Mara.”
“Yes, do,” said Magnificat, with a slight edge to her mew. “I thought I knew all of the Senders in this land, but until this evening, they’ve had the decency to show their whiskers only when summoned for our meetings! None of them has leapt out of the clouds, disrupted a major battle and disappeared again without so much as a basic introductory miaow! The manners of an alley cat!”
“If this was not a sending, Magnificat, you would be able to smell my regret and our apologies on our whiskers,” said Begum, shimmering among the clouds. “Indeed, we are sorry. The problem with the Sender of Nizamuddin is that she doesn’t know she’s sending.”
Another ripe jackfruit fell from the tree, and the bats swooped out, chittering to themselves. The rain was slowing now, driving in the other direction as the Sender of Paolim stared unblinkingly at the Sender of Purani Dilli and the Senders from Delhi’s other localities.
Magnificat hissed slowly. “But how is that possible?” she said.
“She of the long whiskers—the longest we’ve seen in three generations, mind you—has been sending in her sleep,” said Begum. “The worst part is that while we can hear her clearly, the Sender of Nizamuddin is very young, and despite all our efforts, we haven’t been able to reach her.”
“Except in her dreams,” said Umrrow Jaan. “But she thinks we’re nightmares and she bats us away. She looks very cute, na? With her paws cycling, just like the oldest kitten from my sixth litter … or was it my fifth? You know, the litter I had with that dashing Daryaganj tom … or was he the small striped thug from the Civil Lines enclave? It’s so hard to keep them straight, after a few litters I forget which kitten was born when, except for the first litter I ever had, remember, at the back of the hakim’s shop in …”
“Umrrow!” said Magnificat and Begum simultaneously.
“Oh, all right!” said Umrrow, managing to convey that she was sulking even though her image was, like Begum’s, a little blurred at the edges, as was normal for sendings.
“As Umrrow said (before she started mewing on and on about her endless litters), the Sender hasn’t yet joined our circle,” said Begum. “And while Beraal—you know her, don’t you, Magnificat?—has trained her not to send to the world at large when she’s awake, Mara’s whiskers are completely out of control when she’s asleep.”
The white cat’s tail swished, tapping to the beat of the rain on the tiles.
“You’re telling me that Delhi has a Sender of such immense power that her whiskers can bring her all the way here? In her sleep?” said Magnificat. “And she has no idea that she can do this?”
They had no trouble understanding her meaning. The long-whiskered ones were special. A cat who was not a Sender was confined to the limits of its clan’s territory: their whiskers would not go further than the boundaries they marked with their scents. But even for the long-whiskered, there were limits to how far they could travel.
Begum could send to all of the cats in Delhi, but her whiskers would not reach beyond the city’s outskirts without the help of the other Senders. Magnificat was Goa’s most celebrated Sender, and at her most intense, she could send her image dancing in the skies along a fair distance—ten, perhaps twenty villages. But unless the Senders were linking with one another, letting their whiskers carry them longer distances, no cat could travel so far on her own.
Only a few cats were Senders; in any clan, only a handful would have the ability to transmit their thoughts—and their very selves—so strongly that they could cross space with ease. Their abilities travelled from mother to daughter. Though Senders often produced litter after litter of perfectly normal kittens, every once in a while, a Sender would give birth to a kitten with longer whiskers than usual and know that her daughter was just like her. There was never more than one Sender in any clan, often fewer than four or five in any generation of cats in a large territory. None of the Senders Magnificat had met would have been able to travel from Delhi to Goa on their own. This one, untrained, just two winters old, had made the journey in her sleep.
Begum caught the drift of Magnificat’s thoughts. “She has travelled further,” said the calico. “She startled the monastery cats the other night; the Rimpuss was shaken out of her usual equanimity and had to take an extra meditation session. We think we should be able to reach her very soon. She has had a long kittenhood, and unlike the rest of us, she had no Sender to train her—Tigris, the last Sender of Nizamuddin, died shortly after this one was born.”
A savage gust from the storm sent the cobra’s body rolling down to the edge of the roof, where it stayed, limply wedged. The Sender of Paolim looked out into the rain, her eyes straying towards the river.
“You’ll have to find a way to contact her soon,” said Magnificat. ‘We can’t have a rogue Sender roaming the seven skies. You must train her, or else her whiskers must be trimmed.” Begum’s whiskers bristled. The orange stranger’s sendings seemed effortless, compared to the steady concentration it took Delhi’s entire Circle of Senders before she and Umrrow Jaan could make the difficult journeys to Goa and other places as they followed Mara’s erratic wake.
She spoke with finality, washing the last specks of mud and cobra skin off her tail. Begum and Umrrow Jaan made their farewells, and shimmered out of view. Begum thought, just before they pulled back from the clouds and sped away across the emerald fields, skimming the beaches and the palm trees on their way back to Delhi, that the Sender of Paolim was right. They would have to do something about Delhi’s rogue Sender before she became a threat to them all.
CHAPTER ONE
Cat Burglar
The fog dropped swiftly across the river, and in the rays of the late evening sun, it brought a fleeting beauty to the black sludge of the canal. The grey winter mist rode through the bylanes of the dargah, the ancient shrine at the centre of the neighbourhood, rising towards the high rooftops of the forbidding new buildings in Nizamuddin proper, creeping around the frozen iron bars of the gates that blocked off many of the colony’s roads.
Under the canal, the pigs huddled together for warmth, their bristled coats inadequate protection against the chill. The smallest of the piglets squirmed her way into the centre of the drove, seeking comfort and warmth from her elders. She didn’t ask for food; she already knew her mother’s teats had run dry, and that the last potato skin and lauki peel had been scavenged from the canal banks. At less than a month old, the piglet did not know what it felt like to have a full stomach. She was tiny, and she rarely squealed, though two of the adults grunted as she pushed her way through. One stepped on another’s trotter, and he cried out. The high complaining wail cut through the strains of the evening call to worship from the dargah.
Southpaw paused when he heard the squeal, his ears flicking to attention, but then he placed it: one of the canal pigs, not a cat or a kitten. He padded alongside the second-floor balcony railing, turning his attention back to the Bigfeet, hoping they wouldn’t notice him. He didn’t think they would. Though he was in his third winter, he was small for his size, and the last few seasons had pared the brown tomcat down to muscle and gristle. He made a thin shadow, invisible in the fog to all but the most sharp-eyed of predators.
When he heard the Bigfeet, he flattened himself, his fur pressed close to the rough bricks of the roof. They came out of the kitchen, talking loudly among themselves, and passed so near the cat that Southpaw could feel his whiskers tingle. He heard them clatter down the stairs.
The cat unfurled his whiskers, listening. But there seemed to be no other Bigfeet, and Southpaw padded into the kitchen. The scents from inside burst over him in warm waves—meat of some kind. Soaring above the smell of the meat, the clean singing freshwater aroma of fish made his teeth chatter in involuntary excitement. He almost missed his leap, because the scent had also made him weak, considering he hadn’t eaten in a while.
The fish was a large one, a whole carp, not yet sauced, on a blue china platter. Its scales gleamed encouragingly at Southpaw, and its red gills murmured to him of the taste of blood and the sea, firm, juicy flesh. The cat’s nostrils flared as he smelled the fish at close quarters, and felt once again how painfully empty his stomach was. He hesitated. The plan had been to grab as much of the fish as he could in his mouth and run for it before the Bigfeet came back. But he would have to tear the fish into a small enough portion to carry, which might take precious moments.
When he sank his sharp incisors into its silver skin, he knew he was in trouble. The juices from its tender white flesh spurted into his mouth, and Southpaw forgot the possibility of danger, forgot the need to carry food back to the waiting cats. He didn’t realize he was making urgent mewing sounds as he tore into the fish, almost inhaling his first proper meal in three days. Four bites, and he had severed the tail and belly. The smell of the fish made his pink nose twitch as he gobbled.
“Out of there NOW, Southpaw! Katar told you not to raid the Bigfeet kitchens!”
Mara’s indignant mew rang in his ears, so clear that she might almost have been there, perched on the shelf of spices, perhaps, above his head. But it was just a sending, and though Southpaw pawed at the fish with some urgency, trying to cut through the last flap of silver skin that held the tail attached to the body, he ignored the Sender. It was exasperating enough to know that Mara’s whiskers let her travel around Nizamuddin without actually having to leave her Bigfeet’s house but it was far worse when she decided to spy on him. Because she left no virtual scent, he never knew when she was on one of her prowls, and the tomcat found this aggravating.
“I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” he mumbled through a last hasty mouthful. His belly felt pleasantly full, and he picked up the tail carefully, hooking his incisors through the piece for extra security.
“Right behind you,” growled Mara, and Southpaw’s fur bristled unpleasantly when he heard the tension in her voice. From the stairs, he could hear the thumping of the Bigfeet as they came up, yammering at each other as they always did, just as though they were kittens who hadn’t learned to use whiskers and scent, only mews and yowls. But that, he realized, wasn’t what Mara had meant.
There was a Bigfoot in the doorway, staring at him.
“Idiot,” said Mara. He could see her now, or at any rate, he could see the Sender’s image; an orange cat, bobbing along behind the Bigfeet’s head, her green eyes flaring crossly.
The Bigfoot stepped into the kitchen and grabbed a towel off the wooden pegs on the wall. He started shouting just as Southpaw darted to the left, in the direction of the kitchen sink. The Bigfoot followed him, moving faster than the cat had thought he would.
“Not that way, you’ll be trapped!” Mara was mewing, and fear had replaced the anger in her voice. Southpaw wanted to tell her he knew what he was doing, but he’d have had to raise his whiskers or open his mouth, and then he might drop the fish. Instead, he watched as the Bigfoot hurtled towards him, as he had hoped, leaving the door unguarded, and then the cat skidded around, using his front paws to propel himself across the sink, across the stone shelves, through the Bigfoot’s legs, streaking out of the door. Trapped indeed, he grumbled to himself, as if he would be trapped by one of those dumb Bigfeet, after all these months of being a hunter.
“See?” said Mara, and Southpaw realized she hadn’t been talking about the kitchen at all. The other Bigfeet had come up the stairs. Three of them stood in a semicircle outside the door; two stood by the roof, blocking off the approach to the ladder over which he had intended to make his escape. “Mmmmfff!” Southpaw said indistinctly through his mouthful of fish, and skidded for the second time as he did a complete turn.
“Stay away from the kitchen door, he’s got something in his hands!” Mara said urgently. “Circle wider, yes, wider … Southpaw, run!”
Southpaw heard the stomping of the Bigfoot in the kitchen, but he had his back to him, his eyes fixed on the other side of the roof and the long parapet that he knew ran just beneath. His teeth chattered, not just from the numbing cold and the fog, but in fear; his whiskers and fur stood up despite the damp. He didn’t see the Bigfoot make his throw. It was only when his back paws seized in terrible pain and he heard the clang of the vessel bouncing on the roof that he realized he’d been hit. He locked his mouth harder onto the fish, refusing to cry out. His left paw had received the brunt of the blow, and he could feel it dragging behind him. But there was the roof at last; behind him, the Bigfeet sounded close, too close, their cries dangerously loud in his ears. He let his front paws do the work as he limped across the roof, turning for a moment to face the Bigfeet.
The cat made the leap to the parapet just before the Bigfoot threw the kitchen tongs at him, ducking and weaving so that it went past, harmlessly. He could feel a hot, sticky dampness on his back paw, and the smell of his own blood rose higher than the warm smell of blood from the fish he carried.
“You’ll have to make the jump into the flame tree,” Mara said in his ear. He could tell she was holding her voice steady, but it carried a sharpness that revealed her worry. As he crouched on the edge of the parapet, the flame tree seemed far way. He couldn’t rely on his back paws to propel him into the leap. The cat looked down, and the distance made even his brave heart quail. He was three floors up; the fall would be hard.
Above his head, the Bigfeet yells were getting louder. Southpaw risked a quick glance upwards, and saw one of them lean down towards the parapet, wielding a broom that looked ominously prickly—not the soft kind made from dried grasses, but the stick brooms that could cause serious injuries. He measured the distance between him and the nearest branch. He wasn’t going to make it, he thought.
“You have to,” said Mara. She had changed her position, and her worried green eyes assessed him from the tree. “Drop the fish, Southpaw, it’s not that important, and then you can use your whiskers for balance!”
He looked at her and knew she was giving him good advice, but his brown eyes said no.
“You stubborn brat!”
His whiskers twitched a little—yes, they said amicably, he agreed with her. The swoosh of the broom startled him; he hadn’t realized how close the Bigfeet were. One of them was climbing down onto the parapet.
Southpaw stayed crouched at the edge, measuring the gap. In the flame tree, the squirrels, woken out of their sleep, gaped at him, chittering as they ran down to the lower branches, well away from the crazy brown cat who thought he could make an impossible jump. The broom thumped down behind him again. The pain in his left paw was intense; it felt like the paw was on fire even as he felt his phalanges crush and the tendon tear. Southpaw blinked, and then he stared deliberately into Mara’s green eyes, putting the pain away.
He leapt just as the broom came down, missing his tail by a whisker. The Bigfeet yelled and cursed, but Southpaw kept his focus on the branch. For a moment, he thought he’d reach it easily—and then one of his paws missed, and he found himself hanging on with just the other.
“Drop the fish!” Mara pleaded.
He wouldn’t. The cat felt a claw tear, as the bark began to give way. His ribs hurt. The pain was travelling up his left back paw, so brutal after the leap that he could feel his eyes watering. But he kept his mouth clamped over the fish. He had to get down the tree before the Bigfeet managed to get to him.
“Southpaw, if you drop it now, you have a better chance! Please!” His brown eyes met Mara’s, and he managed to raise his whiskers jauntily in her direction. He felt the muscles in his shoulder bulge and tense as he made a tremendous effort, forcing his paw up, hooking it over the branch. For a moment, he hung from a branch, eye-to-eye with the hard brown seedpods that dotted the tree. Then he pulled his back paw up, the uninjured one, letting the wounded paw drag behind him, and he slipped into the maze of its branches, moving deftly from the flame tree to the friendly saptaparni evergreen next to it.
“Just wait till you come and see me next, Southpaw, this isn’t over,” said Mara. “Rats. I have to go, my Chief Bigfoot will soon be here—but you’re not off the hook, you hear?” He blinked at her, agreeably. The sounds of the Bigfeet were fading behind him, and as he set off through the freezing night, the squirrels watched him sleepily, their grey tails draggled from the mist. They agreed that he had a swagger in his step, but most of them thought he’d earned it. The only one of the rodents who disagreed was a small brown mouse; Jethro Tail’s bright black eyes filled with concern as he noted Southpaw’s limp. He had hurt his own paw in a daring raid involving the liberation of some chicken tikkas from their Bigfoot stall owner, and, in the cold, it had taken a long time to heal. He knew the young brown cat, and hoped that Southpaw wasn’t as badly hurt as he seemed to be.
CHAPTER TWO
A Circle of Senders
Mara would have followed Southpaw back with a last indignant mew, just to keep him in his place, but there wasn’t the time. Though she sent a parting curse in the errant tomcat’s direction, she switched her attention back to her own house once she knew that he was safe.
Her whiskers trembled, telling her that she was just in time. The most important Bigfoot in the world was almost at the door. The Sender scrambled down from the windowsill. She shot across the carpet, almost overturning the fancy three-legged table with which she had a series of ongoing skirmishes, and reached the door just as the bell went.
In the past, Mara had tried very hard to use her whiskers to open the door herself, but she had never succeeded. All that had happened was that she’d sent herself to the other side of the door, and sometimes all the way down the stairs, which was not what she wanted at all. The Sender had learned to wait until one of her own Bigfeet arrived.
Her Bigfoot opened the door for the Chief Bigfoot, and Mara forgot that she was a dignified Sender who had seen two winters come and go. She lay on her back, wriggling in greeting, her paws cycling, and then she got to her paws and purred, rubbing her head against the ankles of the most important Bigfoot in the world.
“There, there,” said the Chief Bigfoot. “Anyone would think that you hadn’t seen me for a week, instead of this morning. All right, here’s your cuddle. Okay, you want your chin scratched, too? You want more food? Finished everything in your bowl?”
Mara still didn’t understand Bigfeet, but she had picked up a few words here and there, and her ears rose at the mention of cuddles and food. Her own Bigfeet were good at both of these but in an absent-minded sort of way despite all her attempts to train them, and tended to drift off mid-cuddle. The Chief Bigfoot was not like that at all. Mara led the way to the kitchen, purring, her beautiful, fluffy tail waving like a flag.
She held the Chief Bigfoot in high esteem. Compared to her other two Bigfeet, the Chief Bigfoot had far more freedom—she came into the house only twice a day, in the morning and the evening. Her Bigfeet did very boring things around the house, ironing clothes with a large and scary iron whose surface had scorched Mara’s paw once, moving books and paper here and there, and generally getting in the Sender’s way. The only interesting activity they did was cooking, and much to her indignation, she was barred from the kitchen at those times.
The Chief Bigfoot, on the other hand, was the official wielder of all the items and implements that had fascinated Mara in her kittenhood: the magnificent broom made of soft grasses, the mesmerizing floor swabbing rag that she had loved to chase, all the dusters that she adored pouncing on, especially the feather duster. (The feather duster had come to a messy end, unfortunately.)
Besides, she had never committed the dastardly deed of luring Mara into a small, interesting object that had appeared to be a feline sanctum, but had turned out to be a fiendish form of transportation to the vet’s office. The kitten had been too stunned the first time she’d met the vet to do more than express her gratitude to her Bigfeet for bringing her back home, but when they did this again and again, she was seriously upset.
Mara still wasn’t talking to the she-Bigfoot, who had taken her to the healer just a few days ago, but that only made her more fond of the Chief Bigfoot, who was far too superior a human to use an unsuspecting cat’s very own catnip mouse against her as bait.
As the Chief Bigfoot poured kibble into her bowl, Mara sat there unblinking, and raised her whiskers discreetly. This was an ongoing, and so far, unsuccessful, experiment. Some moons ago, she had been lying on the bed with her Bigfeet, and had wondered what their minds were like. “Could I link to them?” she had asked herself. It seemed possible; she had linked to the minds of monkeys, tigers, dogs, bulbul songbirds, mynahs and moths in the past.
She would never in all her life forget what that first linking was like. Her whiskers had extended, brushing the she-Bigfoot’s fingers lightly, and she had tried to hitchhike her way into her human’s mind.
It was like falling from the roof and rushing at extreme speed into the swirling rapids of a turbulent river. Within seconds, Mara had been plunged into a maelstrom of Bigfeet thought. Telling Southpaw about it later, she was still indignant: “They don’t think the same thought for more than one second! Their minds jump around like the monkeys at the zoo—and it’s just as noisy. Noisier! They don’t think in smells, either, just images and words, all muddled up so that you can’t make out anything!” She had spent hours afterwards shaking her head to try and get the sense of exploding fireworks out of it.
For the last few moons, she had been trying a different tack. If she sent hard enough, could the Bigfeet hear her? Mara was dubious about this. She and Southpaw had discussed the issue, but he felt that the lack of whiskers made it impossible for them to hear cats. “No tails, no whiskers, poor creatures,” he had said. Mara hadn’t disagreed, but in her opinion, the reason the Bigfeet couldn’t hear her had nothing to do with the lack of whiskers. It was because they were so busy dealing with the incessant chatter of their own minds that nothing else could get through.
She had tried very hard to train her Bigfeet, but given up: they were too easily distracted. But the Chief Bigfoot had shown promise. She listened to Mara, for one thing, even if she did forget herself and try to mew occasionally—she had no idea that she sounded like a sick kitten. And though her mind was every bit as loud and garrulous as the minds of the other Bigfeet, Mara had hopes of getting through to her someday. She was experimenting with sending simple images, the way a mother cat might do with her kittens—milk, fish, purring, that sort of thing. So far, she hadn’t got anywhere, but Mara told herself that the Bigfeet would take longer to train than the average kitten.
Today seemed promising. She sat on her wooden stool in the kitchen and tried, patiently, to get the Chief Bigfoot to stretch out whatever Bigfeet had in place of whiskers. Mara thought it might be their ears, or perhaps their eyebrows, and she stared as hard as she could at the Chief Bigfoot’s forehead. “Hello!” she said to her. “I’m sure you can hear me. Would you like to stop playing with those dishes and the sink and play with me instead? Wouldn’t that be more fun?” The Sender waited hopefully, but there was no response. Perhaps she needed to go a little slower. Perhaps just a few basic mews, sent by whisker?
The Chief Bigfoot looked up from doing the dishes once or twice, puzzled by the cat’s intense stare. “Ei, Mara,” she said. “You’ve had your food, no?” She went to check, but everything seemed fine in that department. She finished the dishes, and started to clean out the store cupboards. The cat swivelled around on the stool, and after a while, the Chief Bigfoot caught Mara’s eye.
They stared at each other, and Mara felt a ripple of hope run along her whiskers. “Hello,” she sent patiently. “Can you hear me?” Her whiskers were trembling with the effort she was putting into sending to the Chief Bigfoot, while staying off the Nizamuddin link so as not to bother the other cats. She stared harder, trying to get the Chief Bigfoot’s eyebrows to stand up like her whiskers. “Like this,” she sent, not sure whether she had actually linked or not. “See? Watch my eyebrows.” She furrowed and unfurrowed them, hoping the Chief Bigfoot would catch on.
Success! The Chief Bigfoot’s eyebrows were trembling, and they rose slightly. Mara strained, letting her whiskers unfurl to their maximum length. If she had been sending over the link, the force of her concentration would have carried her well over the Delhi Zoo, far beyond the Yamuna river by now. Was she getting through at last? Mara didn’t realize that her small pink tongue was hanging out, or that she was making tiny distress calls from time to time. “Eyebrows,” she thought triumphantly. “That’s the secret! Focus on their eyebrows, and you have them … wait, where’s the Chief Bigfoot going?”
Mara had to swivel again, her concentration broken as the Chief Bigfoot frowned down at her and then left the kitchen. “Come back,” the Sender sent, trying to see if there was any kind of link, “I’m sorry—was it something I said?”
The Chief Bigfoot reappeared with both of Mara’s Bigfeet trotting behind. The Sender blinked. Had the Chief Bigfoot told her Bigfeet about their linking? But she hadn’t felt a response, really, just seen the eyebrows rise.
She was turning the matter over in her head when the she-Bigfoot picked her up, making soothing noises. Mara stared hard at her eyebrows, wondering if she could make them twitch, too. But the he-Bigfoot was prodding at her nose, and she squirmed. “Don’t do that!” she said. “My nose is perfectly fine. Wet, as it should be … ooh! That’s my tummy you’re poking. Stop doing that, I might cough up a hairball. Wait. The towel! You brought out the towel! Not the olive oil. I hate the olive oil. No, no, I don’t need to be dosed. Stop wrapping me up—I’ll fight! I’m a warrior, I am! Blast the towel, I can’t move my paws, you horrible Bigfeet! Won’t open my mouth, so there … quit tickling, that’s really ticklish, that spot under my chin, mmmrrraaoowwwffff!” The olive oil went down her throat, despite Mara’s laments, and the Bigfeet deposited their wriggling, protesting bundle gently on the ground, watching in concern as the cat shot off, her outrage trembling at the tips of her whiskers.
It took a long time to clean the worst of the olive oil off her fur, and Mara knew from bitter experience that it would take a while before the taste faded. The Sender’s flanks heaved as she hopped into her basket, resolving to ignore any overtures from the Bigfeet. She kept her back to the door, as a signal to the Bigfeet if they entered the room that they were no longer on speaking terms.
“The perfidy of it!” she thought bitterly. Her Bigfeet were unpredictable, and prone to misunderstanding, but Mara hadn’t expected the Chief Bigfoot to let her down so badly. The Sender washed her whiskers to calm herself down, and decided to take a short nap.
SOMETHING WAS TUGGING HARD at her whiskers, so roughly that it was painful. She was out in an open field, unsheltered from the freezing cold. The ground under her was hard, the grass rough. Some things—more than one creature—were circling around her. Whatever was yanking at her whiskers stopped, mercifully.
In her basket, Mara whimpered, turned over and went back to sleep.
The creatures were getting closer. She was lying out in the open, looking up at the wide, endless twilight sky. On the far horizon, the turrets of an old mansion stood guard, as motionless and as massive as the elephants she had seen on her visits to the zoo. The harsh questioning call of peacocks ratcheted back and forth across the great gardens, and a clan of squirrels played games of tag around the massive trunk of a tree so large that its roots lay like thick ropes in the brown and green grass. Mara could hear whispers, as though cats spoke to her in the distance. Cold winds briefly stirred the sensitive filaments inside her ears, but she couldn’t make out what the mews said.
Mara stirred, her paws warding off whatever was intruding on her dreams, but though her ears were alert, her eyes stayed closed.
The sensitive tips of her whiskers were being brushed, lightly. It felt as though many shadowy forms had crept up, forming a circle around her, and that each one came up to her in turn, nuzzling her whiskers as they passed. The cold seeped through her fur, reaching deep into her bones. The ground was damp as well as freezing. Through the mist, one of the creatures loomed closer and closer. She felt her whiskers being brushed, again, and then there was a sharp, unpleasant tug.
“What a dream!” said Mara, waking with a start. It must have been the olive oil. She yawned, and her paws shot out, stiffly. The basket was cold underneath her, and hard, and prickly.
“Finally,” said a sleek, purring voice. “That took longer than I’d expected.”
Mara opened her eyes. She was in her room, in the basket; outside the window, the cheels swooped and called, almost finished with their sorties as night came down over Nizamuddin.
And she was out in the middle of an open field, her fur damp from the chill of the spiky grass underneath. She blinked, and the unfamiliar red ramparts she had been gazing at, with their ornate curlicues and niches, wavered and vanished, revealing only the solid walls of home. She blinked again, and the air thickened.
“Hello!” said several other voices, all of them sleek, but none quite as rich as the first one. A chorus of mews rang out, like a feline call to worship, and the air around Mara filled with the shadowy shapes of a dozen cats, their flickering outlines silhouetted against the rising yellow moon. “Now that the Sender of Nizamuddin is here,” said the first voice, the rich husky one, “shall we start?”
This was no dream. Mara scrabbled, pawing the air as she swung for a sickening second between the cold earth outside, the warm blankets at home.
“Don’t fight it,” said the smooth, purring voice she’d heard first. “Make a choice, and tell your whiskers to stay where you are. I’d suggest you stay with us, because we’ll just have to summon you again if you go away. Now that we’ve figured out how to get you here, we’re not letting you go so soon.”
Mara took in her surroundings, the quiet lawns, the ancient statues, the peacocks in the distance, the birdsong drowning out the sounds of traffic far away. There seemed to be no Bigfeet about, though they had left traces of their presence. The ancient, mossy bricks of an old wall held birdseed, and some grains and nuts; flocks of crows and mynahs pecked at this banquet at one end, while the squirrels chased each other round and round, their tails fluffed into perky grey fringes against the cold. Doves added their persuasive, soothing crooning to the air, softening the brisk hammering that the woodpeckers produced as they went about their business. A hoopoe trod gingerly along the grass, its bright stripes warming the winter. Two parrots flashed by, leaving brilliant green trails in the sky as they called to each other in eloquent screeches.
“Summon me?” said Mara, wondering if that was what she’d felt—the tugs on her whiskers, the sense that she’d been forcibly lifted through the air and brought here.
“The way you did with that tiger,” said another purr, a lively, sparkling voice. “We heard all about it here in Mehrauli!”
“Enough with the chitchat,” the first voice said sternly. “Umrrow Jaan, wait for your turn to speak. Mara, stop wavering between Nizamuddin and the Garden of the Cheels, you’re making me dizzy with all that shimmering in and out. We have a lot to say to you, and about the way you’ve been sending in your sleep, but that will have to wait until after the meeting of the Circle of Senders of Delhi. Senders, raise your whiskers, where are your manners? Say hello to the Sender of Nizamuddin, it’s her first time inside the Circle.”
There were fewer of them than she’d thought—perhaps seven in all. The Speaker for the Circle of Senders was smaller than the voice had led Mara to expect. She was a neat calico, her fur combed down despite the tendrils of mist that clung to it, with sharp, deep brown eyes.
“Begum, look at her tail, curling into a question mark,” said a plump tabby, with jaunty and slightly crooked whiskers that gave her a cheerful air. “We’re so used to the Circle, but it must be strange for you, Sender of Nizamuddin.”
Before Mara could speak, Begum cut in, her whiskers brisk. “There’s nothing to it, Mara,” she said. “Each Sender comes from a different part of Delhi, and we take it in turns to share about our neighbourhood. Listen to the others, and you’ll soon catch up with us, never fear. Shall we start, Senders? We’ll go by area, starting with Chandni Chowk—Jalebi, you go first.”
Mara took a last, wistful look back at her warm blankets, and told herself to stay with the circle of cats. There was something in the voice of the Sender that made her think there was little point in leaving; the cat’s whiskers told her that she’d meant it about summoning Mara again.
“Business as usual,” Jalebi was saying. “We had some trouble with the outsiders—this year’s railway cats—and the birds, but they listened when Gulab and Jamun explained that the Bigfeet’s homes and workplaces were off limits.”
“Any incidents?” asked the Speaker.
“Yes, unfortunately,” said Jalebi. “Two of the railway cats sneaked into the Jain Bird Hospital and killed a few pigeons before we could stop them.”
