Cat Tales (21 page)

I handed over the document and he broke the seal. Murmuring the phrases as he read, he went through it carefully, poring over each syllable.

Now I took advantage of his distracted attention to lift the left edge of my cloak and let drop onto the table behind me the shadow of Creeper, the coiled mass which had traveled clinging to my doublet as I walked half across the expanse of Tardocco. Shadows, though they possess mass, are weightless, yet when I let go Creeper's umbra I felt that a burden had departed my body.

Castilio laid down the challenge missive. “How is it that Mutano delivereth not this foolhardy piece of effrontery in his own person?” he asked. “Why must he send forth a hireling?”

The truth was that Mutano, even now while I engaged the thoughts of his nemesis, was in Castilio's rooms above, searching for any receptacle that might contain his purloined voice. I sought to occupy his enemy's attention as long as possible. “I am no inconsequential menial,” I replied, “but the confidential aide to Meastro Astolfo whose name is widely known.”

“He is known as a prating, elderly thief who has narrowly escaped the gallows a score of times. I care not what title he has hung upon you, for a glance tells me you are but a furrow-slave with the mud of the turnip field still clinging to your soles — and to your soul.”

“Mutano conceived that a challenge when delivered by a third party acquires more dignity and weight.”

He rose abruptly and I knew his suspicions had been alerted. “You may tell Mutano that his challenge has been accepted in all particulars, including those of weapons choice, and field of honor and hour of combat.”

I bowed. “I will say what you have said.”

“Do so, though it may be I shall see him myself before you do.” With these words, he brushed past me and strode toward the stairs by the entrance door. I knew that he expected, perhaps hoped, to find Mutano in his rooms.

“Is that the whole of your message?”

He did not reply but only bounded to the door at the top and flung it open and rushed into the corridor. I was pleased to see that Creeper's shadow leapt down from the table behind me and glided along at a distance from Castilio's heels. The time seemed opportune for me to depart also. If Castilio found his lodging ransacked, he would be down the stair with naked blade and unpleasant demeanor. I laid down coin for the canary, went out into the dark, wet street and be-took me to the safety of Astolfo's manse. There I waited in the armchair, watching the dim orange pulse of dying embers of hearth-fire until I dozed away.

His search had proved fruitless, Mutano told Astolfo with a flurry of finger waggling. He had looked into the three small rooms of Castilio's lodging and found no place a voice might be stored away.

“No stoppered flasks or bottles?” Astolfo asked.

Mutano signed
No.

“No small boxes or casques, as for jewels or coins or gilt buckles?”

None.

“Tell us then what you did see there. Omit nothing and try to recall all.”

Mutano named articles of apparel, various handkerchiefs, a few gold eagles and lesser coins, spurs, &c. Boots beneath the bed, a woman's scarf draped over a chair back.

“Naught else?”

Mutano shrugged and signed unenthusiastically that a large, orange cat of melancholy, surly mien had watched him plundering about without so much as a tail twitch.

“This cat,” Astolfo asked, “was he not disturbed by the shadow of Creeper that you deposited in the room?”

I was surprised. I had not known that we had set two of the black one's shadows upon Castilio. This second one that Mutano let free would be a secondary, since I had brought the primary shadow into the tavern room. Whatever the purpose of this secondary, the conceit of the two shadows was clever, I thought.

Mutano signaled that the orange cat had seemed to take no notice of the shadow. In fact, it behaved, in not behaving at all, unlike any other feline he had met in his long acquaintance with the race.

“A human appurtenance, the voice of stout Mutano, has been affixed to its physiognomy,” Astolfo said. “Having thieved away your voice, Castilio has managed to lodge it in this cat, I know not how. Such an addition to its nature will change the character of the beast at its foundation. For long and long, philosophers have conjectured what a cat would say could human vocality be conferred upon it. Many of the graybeards averred that it would say nothing at all, lest it reveal some of the secrets of its mysterious race. It seemeth, in the instance of Castilio's cat, at least, that their suspicion proved true.”

“How then may its human voice be captured?” I asked.

“Oh, we have already prepared our voice-trap,” Astolfo said. “It is constructed along the pattern of Castilio's nested wooden boxes, only ours is an intricate horn of silver and ivory, in appearance like a twisted ear trumpet. There is no doubt that it will capture the utterance-essence of a voice and keep it safely.”

“I mean, how will Mutano take back his voice if the cat does not speak?”

They exchanged glances. Mutano seemed a trifle apprehensive.

“Risks must be run,” Astolfo said. “In the first place, Castilio's cat now possesses two voices, one of them proper to itself. If its own voice is dominant within it, then it will make only sounds ordinary to a cat. But if Mutano's voice has gained — so to speak — the upper hand, then it will speak out in his voice and that one will become prisoner of our trumpet-device.”

“But why should it speak at all, since its best advantage — or Castilio's — lies in keeping silent?”

“We will put to it the question that, when asked directly, every feline must answer by force of its inner nature.”

“What is this question?”

“We shall ask this Sunbolt if he be truly the King of the Cats. If he be King, he will rise hissing, all hackles and claws, and bound away in a flash, leaving behind a smell as of brimstone and burning roses. If he hath not been designated the royalty of its feline world, then he is constrained to respond,
Nay, not yet.”

“This is but an old tale to amuse children in the chimney corner,” I said. “I was no taller than a milking stool when first I heard it. Even the most unlearned of hay-foot villagers is wiser than to credit it. 'Tis a moldy stuff indeed.”

Mutano's wide grin forewarned me that I had overstepped the bounds of my knowledge.

“Apply your noddle,” Astolfo said. “When has it come about that the hay no longer graces your buskins? If every instance of the elder lore were false, the land would have been depopulated generations ago. Why do you doubt what I tell you?”

Since I had lately been reading in Lord Verulam's
Novum organon,
I ventured to speculate that this interrogation of cats must have been rarely put to the test; otherwise, there would be voluminous testimonia in the writings of the sages. “ 'Tis by making experiment that we discover truth and falsity,” I said. “There must be by our time many thousands of younglings who have put that question to their dear pusses and have received for reply only uncomprehending disregard.”

“Too easy an interpretation to offer,” said Astolfo. “How many of the felines so queried have been accoutered with a human voice?”

“Few,” I admitted.

“Do you not think it likely that cats communicate among themselves with recondite signs and significations?”

“Perhaps.”

“Would you be able to cipher out the language of a cat's ears and tail?”

“I could not.”

“Then you may ask, for all the remainder of your years, of every animal you meet whether it is King of the Cats and receive continual denials and never know of it because you lack the key to their language. Is this not so?”

“It may be so.”

“Let us hear no more of the foolishness of the old tales. We owe much of our new physic to the simples of farm wives and much of our knowledge of the skies to watchful shepherds. Since you desire to experiment, after the manner of Verulam, it shall be your duty to put the question to Castilio's cat.”

“My duty? How can that come about? Castilio knows me and will take care that I do not depart a next encounter unscathed. How am I to evade his enmity?”

“Tomorrow at the noon hour he will be engaged in a duel with Mutano in the graveyard atop Mount Windscaur in the northern precinct of the town, a good half league distant from the Haywain Inn. Then you may enter his rooms, put the question to Sunbolt, and bring away with you Mutano's voice which you shall have captured in the chambered spirals of the silver trumpet. Also you are to gather the two shadows of Creeper which ought to be present there.”

“Shall he not have suspected a design against him and have posted a confederate to guard his belongings?”

“That would present a difficulty your ingeniousness must overcome.”

“I do not comprehend why we have set upon him two shadows of Creeper,” I said. “Our plan as it stands does not require their presence.”

“It is as useful as 'tis rare to have animate shadows in one's employ,” Astolfo said. “If 'twere only to train them to an exercise, that would be value enough.”

“Well, I will perform this commission,” I said, “but I should like to exact some payment for it, some just return for my trouble, so that I can fulfill my obligations to the family Sativius, for I have formed, methinketh, an artifice that may help to resolve the affair.”

“What have you conceived?”

When I began to list my necessities — the blue mirror, the sheet of transparent glass, the vials of silver salt, &c. — I saw that Mutano looked at me with an expression of full surprise. I considered it a victory to have startled my raw-knuckle tutor who so continuously regarded me as an addlehead ploughboy. Astolfo smiled knowingly, however, and murmured an unintelligible phrase about “membraneous effusion.” He acquiesced to my requests for materials and promised that Mutano would aid me in my endeavor.

J
UST BEFORE NOON on the morrow, I placed myself around the corner across the cobbles from the Haywain so that I might see while standing concealed. In time a groom led round a black, mettlesome mare with black leathers to the front and Castilio came out. He snatched the bridle from the lad and seemed to wish to bark at him an imprecation, yet no sound issued when he opened his mouth. He was in foul temper, all out of sorts with the bright day that had followed the rainy hours. He mounted and jogged crisply away, saber flapping against his thigh as he plied more spur than necessary.

I tarried a while longer, observing all that I could, and then entered the inn and made my way unhindered to Castilio's rooms. All was just as it had been before, except that the female scarf was absent. No drawer was locked, no door bolted. The man seemed to invite inspection of his every article and, finding things thus, I went cursorily about the business, then turned my attention to matters feline.

First, I ascertained the whereabouts of the two shadows of Creeper, the primary dark one that had nestled beneath the neatly dressed bed and then the lighter secondary that crouched inside an overturned boot. In a cushioned chair by the window sat orange Sunbolt that Mutano had found here and described in detail. There was no mistaking this large tom with its subtle stripes of slightly yellow tint. It dozed, with feet tucked under and eyes almost completely shut. But the movement of its ears indicated awareness of a stranger in the vicinity.

Here now was the moment of revelation. I had always been curious to conjecture what Mutano's voice would sound like, he being so large of corpus and saturnine of temperament. Would it not boom out like a tympanum? Or might it thunder and reverberate like an empty tun rolled down a tall flight of wooden stairs? Perhaps in issuing from the voice-box of this cat, it would roar forth like some tiger of the night.

I placed myself before the animal, produced our trumpet device and turned the wide bell toward it, keeping the cork-lined round of parchment stopper in my right hand ready to seal the aperture once the sound entered into the tapering silver labyrinth. Then I put to it the question it could not evade:

“Art thou King of the Cats?”

It opened its green, agate-hard eyes and elevated its hindquarters and gave a mighty stretch with its forepaws, seeming to extend to the lengthiest every ligament and fiber of muscle in its thorax. It yawned its widest. Then it resettled itself into its former posture, turned its wedgy face upward and said:

“Nay. The hour is not yet.”

I clapped the stopper in, wondering already if I had held the device in horizontal position aright and in sufficient proximity to the cat's mouth. I had tried to make no sound that would obstruct the passage of the words through the æther or adulterate them with an extraneity.

Naught was left to do now but to gather the two shadows of Creeper into the inner folds of my shagreen cloak and march back home across Tardocco. I intended to set a leisurely pace, for there was much to think on.

Mutano's voice was not orotund and commanding, as I had supposed, but rang out a clear, lyrical treble. Astolfo had avouched that he was a musical man, but that disclosure had not prepared me for the peculiar sweetness of tone and the light, reedy vibrato that were so winning in timbre. Had the cat's vocal physiognomy altered Mutano's own, to make it so dulcet? I have endured the amorous lays of cats in the midnight hours with small patience and have found none of them seductive. Whimsically, I pictured Mutano in a form feline, slinking out under a great buttery moon and entreating his lady love in harmonious cadenza and receiving as a melodious refusal his own terse rebuttal:
“Nay, the hour is not yet.”

“T
HESE DUELS CONSUME a tiresome portion of the clock,” Astolfo said to me when I returned.

The three of us had lately formed the habit of occupying the small library. In time past we had gathered most often in the great kitchen, but the scullery staff and the two cooks complained that we were too often present when they had tasks in hand. For his part, Astolfo would rarely gainsay his chief cook; that artisan was necessary, he claimed, for the conduct of financial affairs.