There was a cat at the gate. He was no ordinary cat. He was a mackerel tabby with a blaze of white across his nose and two horns of stiffened hairs spiraling up from the top of his head. When the wind blew from the south his words reached human ears.
“I’m making up for time not yet lost,” he said.
And I understood.
We walked together into the garden. The trees lifted their limbs in a wave of emerald and turquoise, and the grass sighed beneath our feet, and the puzzled shadows of dawn made faces as they retreated. The distant cry of a hunting horn rose on the air and I lifted my nose, but smelt only the perfume of lilacs and oranges. We were alone.
My companion matched my long-legged pace, his striped tail held high, until we reached the glimmering depths of a pool. He curled his tail around his toes and looked down at his reflection, an imperfect image of shimmering white that spread like spilled milk. “This is where she’ll walk,” he said. “On a summer day. In the rain, with lilies between her fingers.”
I took a breath, filling my mouth with air that tasted of sprung sap and overturned earth. I nodded.
We walked on, over the rounded backs of pebbles and the brittle remains of last year’s leaves, under the bridge made by twin trees felled by their own embrace, and up a steep bank littered with the empty shells of mollusks. I pulled myself up by way of a gnarled root. The cat leapt the distance in one smooth arc, his horns thrust forward like the rack of a stag.
He paused to drag his tongue over his back, a flash of pink in the murky gloom of the wood. I waited. We had left the garden and I no longer knew the way.
I followed the cat as he slunk between ferny plumes crisscrossed by the glistening trails of slugs. His shoulder blades lifted and fell beneath his fur. His ears swiveled behind his horns. When he halted, I halted too.
I heard nothing beyond the distant whisper of falling water. The trees had grown thicker, each one slouching amid a carpet of its own progeny, each one marred by boles and broken limbs and weeping sores infested with beetle larvae. Sawdust lodged like blown snow inside their craggy hides. Below lay piles of larvae plucked from the wood by birds who couldn’t resist their fattened bodies but couldn’t abide their bitter taste.
A second trumpet blew from the hunting horn, closer this time. My heart constricted. “They’ll find us,” I said, though I hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “We have so little time.”
The wind was from the east, and so my companion made no reply. He walked on, his back low, his padded feet silent on the mossy undergrowth. I lost sight of him as he crept through the tangled remains of a holly bush, its branches still showing white wounds, the earth torn in short furrows of three.
I climbed over and found him on the other side, his gaze fixed with a cat’s indifference on the empty hollow left behind by the shrub’s uprooting. “This is where she’ll be brought to bay,” he said. “On a winter’s night, with the moon as her witness.”
“Ah,” I said, an exhalation of grief sharpened by revelation. I hadn’t known and wouldn’t now forget. “She will die here.”
“No.”
I looked down at the cat, but he had resumed his grooming, his head bent to his splayed toes, his eyes half-lidded. “Then where?” I said. I couldn’t keep the weight of my heart from my words, so I didn’t try. “You must take me there.”
“It’s not a place for those such as you.”
“It’s not for her either,” I said. I held my breath, listening for the horn. But I heard only the gurgle of water I couldn’t see. “She was once mortal.” And could be again, I didn’t add.
He met my gaze as if he’d heard. His alien eyes held neither pity nor compassion. He stretched his pliant limbs and trotted into the underbrush. His pace was quicker this time, his back low, his ears flattened behind his horns. I kept up only at the cost of snapping twigs and whispering leaves, but he didn’t slow, and above the ruckus of my own passage the horn blasted its strident call a third time, so close it crept like an unwanted caress against my skin.
Down once more, into a gully. I slid and stumbled where the cat ran and leapt. I fell once, twice, my knees bruised by unyielding rock, my hands scratched by the sharp edges of torn grass. Shapes had been pressed into the sandy mud, the shallow impress of a human hand — larger than my own — the deeper gouge of a hoof. Crushed leaves still wept, strung with crystal droplets. A tuft of coarse hair, layered from white to gray to black, had caught on a splintered branch, only to float away a moment later, lifted into the air by a sudden gust of wind.
“Hurry.” The cat’s voice rang out like a bell. He looked back at me, his eyes wide. He turned away, his hindquarters bunched, and he sprang up into the arching branches of a willow.
I hesitated. She couldn’t have–
“Hurry!”
I grabbed a branch and pulled myself up into its shelter. I couldn’t see beyond the drooping curtain of leaves and only followed the cat as he climbed higher and higher, his claws leaving marks in the trunk, my soft hands and feet searching ineffectually for handholds and footholds. “Wait,” I said. “Please, wait.”
His shape hovered above me, a black shadow, his horns growing and retreating as he lifted and lowered his head. “We’re almost there.”
I caught up with him at the crown, a lofty break in the foliage. I sighed as the sky opened above me in pearlescent hues, laced with clouds, gilded by the watery light of two suns. It was a sky I didn’t know, but remembered. “This is where she was born,” I said. I swallowed. I wouldn’t weep.
“Look.” The cat’s voice drifted, drawn into a deep whisper by the errant wind. “There.”
I followed his gaze. Down, down below us, in a spiraling haze of smoke, an orange flame licked white branches, and once more the peal of the hunting horn rang out, a triumphant note, satisfied, merciless. My throat opened in a wild cry. “I can’t reach her.” I clutched at my eyes. “I can’t help her.”
“That was never in your power.” The cat had stretched himself along a heavy branch, anchored by his claws. “You would only have been destroyed.”
I lunged at him, but he sprang away. I slipped, landed hard on my shins, and caught myself before I could fall. “I hate you.” I wanted to let go. I could let go. “You’re unkind. You’re cruel.”
The cat blinked, slowly. Unmoved. He canted his head to one side in an unfeline gesture. “I don’t hate you,” he said, as if he’d mistaken my meaning. “It was an act of love.”
“What do you know of love.” I leaned back against the bulwark of the tree. I wrapped my arms around my ankles, no longer caring if I fell. “Everything she ever was, everything she could ever be, ends here.”
“She made her choice.” His lifted his eyes to the sky. The blaze on his nose picked up a brilliant highlight in the dual glow of the suns. “You still need to make yours.”
“What choice?” He hadn’t lied to me. They cannot lie.
“Let her go.”
“No.” I breathed around the knot in my chest. “I can’t.”
“You can.”
I closed my eyes. “I could just let go,” I said. “I’d fall for a long time before the end came.”
“You could.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“That’s up to you.”
Tears burned from beneath my lids. “She was never mine,” I said. “So I cannot hold her.”
A sigh shivered up from the leaves below, a susurration like a watery breath. When the wind shifted from east to south, the sigh was echoed in the voice of the cat. “She was much loved,” he said. “So I shall go in your stead.”
I squinted against the dazzle of the suns. My companion sat with his head bowed, his horns lowered, his figure indistinct, suffused with a clouded brilliance. I lifted a hand, though I couldn’t reach him. “Who are you?”
He laughed, a tinkling as of tiny bells, like falling water. The wind shifted, taking his words, and he leapt in one smooth motion, to land on his feet at the end of the branch. “Will you find me?”
“I will.” I didn’t know where, but I knew I would, in time.
“Then I will be content.” He tilted his head once more, in that uncatlike gesture — and leapt. Down. Down. His voice came on the wind. “Find me.”
And I did.
July 20, 2016
