At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (25 page)

But it was a perfect home for cats. The stone wall around the garden kept people and dogs away. Inside, cats could find ten thousand things to do. There were trees and walls to climb, bushes to hide under, corners to sleep in.

Food was everywhere. Delicious mice skittered across the ground and crunchy crickets hopped in the grass. The stream was full of slow, fat frogs. Birds lived in the trees and occasionally a careless one came within reach.

The little cat shared the grounds with a handful of other female cats. Each adult claimed part of the gardens, where she hunted and bore her kittens alone; but the private places all met at the center like petals on a flower, in a courtyard beside the main house. The cats liked to gather here and sleep on sunny days, or to groom or watch the kittens playing. No males lived in the garden except for boy-kittens who had not gotten old enough to start their prowling, but tomcats visited and a while later there were new kittens.

The cats shared another thing: their
fudoki
. The fudoki was the collection of stories about all the cats that had lived in a place. It described what made it a home and what made the cats a family. Mothers taught their kittens the fudoki. If the mother died too soon, the other cats, the aunts and cousins, would teach the kittens. A cat with no fudoki was a cat with no family, no home and no roots. The small cat’s fudoki was many cats long and she knew them all—The Cat From The North, The Cat Born The Year The Star Fell, The Dog-Chasing Cat.

Her favorite was The Cat From The North. She had been her mother’s mother’s mother’s aunt, and her life seemed very exciting. As a kitten she lived beside a great hill to the north. She got lost when a dog chased her and tried to find her way home. She escaped many adventures. Giant oxen nearly stepped on her. Cart wheels almost crushed her. A pack of wild dogs chased her into a tree and waited an entire day for her to come down. She was insulted by a goat that lived in a park. She stole food from people. She met a boy but she ran away when he tried to pull her tail. At last she came to the garden. The cats there called her The Cat From The North and as such she became part of the little cat’s fudoki.

The ancestors and the aunts were all clever and strong and resourceful. More than anything, the little cat wanted to earn the right for her story and name to be remembered alongside theirs. And when she had kittens, she would be part of the fudoki that they would pass on to their own kittens.

The other cats had started calling her Small Cat. It wasn’t an actual name but it was a beginning. She knew she would have a story worth telling someday.

Chapter 2

The Earthquake

One day, it was beautiful and very hot. It was August, though overnight the first leaf in the garden had turned bright yellow. A duck bobbed on the lake just out of reach but the cats were too lazy to care as they dozed in the courtyard or under the shadow of the trees. A mother cat held down her kitten with one paw as she licked her ears clean, teaching her the fudoki as she did so. Small Cat wrestled, not very hard, with an orange-striped boy-kitten almost old enough to leave the garden.

A wind started. The duck on the lake burst upward with a flurry of wings, quacking with panic. Puzzled, Small Cat watched it race across the sky. There was nothing to scare the duck, so why was it so frightened?

Suddenly the ground heaved underfoot. An earthquake. Small Cat crouched to keep her balance while the ground shuddered, as though it were a giant animal stretching itself after waking up and she a flea clinging to its hide. Tree branches clashed against one another. Leaves rustled and rained down. Just beyond the garden walls, people shouted, dogs barked, horses whinnied. There was a crashing noise like a pile of pottery falling from a cart—which is exactly what it was. A temple bell rang as it tossed in its frame. And the strangest sound of all: the ground itself groaned.

The older cats had been through earthquakes before, so they crouched wherever they were and waited for it to end. Small Cat knew of earthquakes through the stories but she’d never felt one. She hissed and looked for somewhere safe to run, but everything around her rose and fell. It was wrong for the earth to move!

The old house cracked and boomed. Blue pottery tiles slid from the roof to shatter in the dirt. A wood beam in the main house broke in half with a cloud of flying splinters. The roof collapsed in on itself, and crashed into the building with a wave of white dust. The crash was too much for even the most experienced cats, and they ran in every direction.

Small Cat staggered and fell. Cones and needles rained down from a huge cedar tree. It was shaking, but trees shook all the time in the wind so maybe it would be safer up there. She bolted up the trunk. She ran through an abandoned birds’ nest tucked on a branch, the babies grown and flown away and the adults nowhere to be found. A squirrel chattered as she passed it, more upset by Small Cat than the earthquake.

Small Cat paused and looked down. The ground had stopped moving. As the dust settled, she saw most of the house and garden. The courtyard was piled with beams and branches, but there was still an open space to gather and tell stories, and new places to hunt or play hide-and-seek. It was still home.

Aunts and cousins emerged from their hiding places. Slinking or creeping or just trotting out, they were too dusty to tell who was who, except for The Cat With No Tail, who sniffed and pawed at a fallen door. Other cats hunched in the remains of the courtyard, or paced about the garden, or groomed themselves as much for comfort as to remove the dirt. She didn’t see everyone.

She fell asleep the way kittens do, suddenly and all at once and wherever they happen to be. She had been so afraid during the earthquake that she fell asleep lying flat on a broad branch with her claws sunk into the bark.

When she woke up with her whiskers twitching, the sun was lower in the sky. What had awakened her? The air had a new smell, bitter and unpleasant. She wrinkled her nose and sneezed.

She crept along a branch until she saw out past the tree’s needles and over the garden’s stone wall.

The city was on fire.

Chapter 3

The Fire

Fires in the capital were even more common than earthquakes. Buildings were made of wood with paper screens and straw mats. In August the gardens were dry, the weeds so parched that they broke like twigs. Across the city, a lamp tipped over in the earthquake. No one noticed until the fire leapt to a bamboo blind and then to a wall and from there into a garden, and by that time it couldn’t be stopped.

Smoke streamed across the city: thin white smoke where grass sizzled, thick gray plumes where some great house burned. The smoke concealed most of the fire, even though in places the flames were as tall as trees. People fled through the streets wailing or shouting, and their animals added to the din. But beneath those noises, even at this distance, the fire roared.

Should she go down? Other cats in the fudoki had survived fires—The Fire-Tailed Cat, The Cat Who Found The Jewel—but the stories didn’t say
what
she should do. Maybe one of her aunts or cousins could tell her but where were they?

Smoke drifted into the garden.

She climbed down and meowed loudly. No one answered, but a movement caught her eye. One of her aunts, The Painted Cat, trotted toward a hole in the wall, her ears pinned back and tail low. Small Cat scrambled after her. A gust of smoky wind blew into her face until she squeezed her eyes tight, coughing and gasping. When she could see again her aunt had gone.

She retreated up the tree and watched houses catch fire. At first, smoke poured from their roofs, and then flames roared up and turned each building into a pillar of fire. Each house was closer than the last. The smoke grew so thick that she could only breathe by pressing her nose into her fur and panting.

Her house caught fire just as the sky grew dark. Cinders rained on her garden. The grass beside her lake hissed as it burned like angry kittens. The fires crawled up the walls and slipped inside the doors. Smoke gushed through the broken roof. Something collapsed inside the house with a huge crash and the flames shot up, higher even than the top of Small Cat’s tree.

The air was too hot to breathe. She moved to the opposite side of the tree, and dug her claws into the bark as deep as they would go, and huddled down as small as she could get.

Fire doesn’t always burn everything in its path. It can leave an area untouched that is surrounded by nothing but smoking ruins. The house burned until it was just blackened beams and ashes. Beside it, Small Cat’s tree got charred but the highest branches stayed safe.

Small Cat stayed there all night long and by dawn the tall flames in the garden were gone and the smoke didn’t seem so thick. At first she couldn’t get her claws to let go or her muscles to carry her, but at last she managed to climb down.

Much of the house remained but it was roofless now, hollowed out and charred. Other buildings were no more than piles of smoking black wood. With their leaves burned away the trees looked like skeletons. The pretty bushes were gone. Even the ground smoked in places, too hot to touch.

There was no sound of any sort: no morning songbirds, no people going about their business on the street. No cats. All she could hear was a small fire still burning in an outbuilding. She rubbed her sticky eyes against her shoulder.

She was very thirsty. She trotted to the stream, hopping from paw to paw on the hot ground. Chalky-white with ashes, the water tasted bitter but she drank until her stomach was full. She was hungry so she ate a dead bird she found beside the stream, burnt feathers and all.

From the corner of her eye, she caught something stirring inside a storehouse. Maybe it was an aunt who had hidden during the fire or maybe The Painted Cat had come back to help her! She ran across the hot ground and into the storehouse but there was no cat. What had she seen? There, in a window, she saw the motion again. It was just an old bamboo curtain.

She searched everywhere. The only living creature she saw was a soaked rat climbing from the stream. It shook itself and ran beneath a fallen beam, leaving nothing but tiny wet paw prints.

She found no cats or any signs of what had happened to them.

Chapter 4

The Burnt Paws

Cats groom themselves when they’re upset, so Small Cat sat down to clean her fur, making a face at the taste of the ashes. For comfort she recited the stories from the fudoki: The Cat Who Ate Roots, The Three-Legged Cat, The Cat Who Hid Things, every cat all the way down to The Cat Who Swam, her youngest aunt, who had just taken her place in the fudoki.

The fudoki was more than just stories. The cats of the past had claimed the garden and made it home for those who lived there now. If the cats were gone, was this still home? Was it still her garden if nothing looked the same and it all smelled like smoke? Logs and broken roof tiles filled the courtyard. The house was a ruin. There were no frogs, no insects, no fat ducks, no mice. No cats.

Small Cat cleaned her ear with a paw, thinking hard. No, she wasn’t alone. She didn’t know where the other cats had gone, but she had seen The Painted Cat run through a hole in the wall just before the fire, so if Small Cat could find her there would be two cats. That would be better than one. The Painted Cat would know what to do.

A big fallen branch leaned against the wall just where the hole was. She inched carefully across the ground, still hot in places, twisting her face away from the fumes wherever something smoked. There was no way to follow The Painted Cat by pushing through the hole. Small Cat didn’t mind that: she had always liked sitting on top of the wall watching the outside world. She crawled up the branch.

There were people on the street carrying bundles or boxes or crying babies. Many looked lost or frightened. A wagon pulled by a single ox passed, and a cart pushed by a man and two boys that had been heaped high with possessions. A stray flock of geese were eating the fallen rice from a tipped cart. Even the dogs looked weary.

There was no sign of The Painted Cat. Small Cat climbed higher.

The branch she stood on cracked in half. She crashed to the ground and landed on her side on a hot rock. She twisted upright and jumped away from the terrible pain, but when she landed, it was with all four paws on a smoldering beam. She howled and started running. Every time she put a foot down, the agony made her run faster. She ran across the broad street and through the next garden, and the next.

Small Cat stopped running only when her exhaustion became stronger than her pain. She scarcely made it off the road before she slumped to the ground, and she was asleep immediately. People and carts and even dogs tramped past but no one bothered her, a small filthy cat lying in the open and looking dead.

When Small Cat woke up, she was surrounded by noise and tumult. Wheels rolled past her head. She jumped up, her claws out. The searing pain in her paws made her almost forget herself again but she managed to limp into a clump of weeds.

Where was she? Nothing looked or smelled familiar. She didn’t recognize the street or the buildings. She did not know that she had run nearly a mile in her panic, but she knew she would never find her way back.

She had collapsed beside an open market. Even so soon after the earthquake and fire, merchants set up new booths to sell things, rice and squashes and tea and pots. Even after a great disaster people are hungry, and broken pots always need to be replaced.