“Ah, see? They are beneath you, too, brother.”
“Oi, no. Nothing’s below me. And I’m not your brother. Please don’t call me that.” Cuthbert felt a sudden surge of self-loathing, with his West Bromwich childhood on him like piss on chips. “You wouldn’t want me anyway, if you knew me. I’m not like you. I’m a Flōt sot is all. And ’a’ve a brother, and ’e’s more of a gent than me, believe you me. ’E’s really my better half, see? ’E’s the one what’s supposed to carry the Wonderments, but I couldn’t save him, see? I couldn’t. But if I can free the otters . . .”
An old, very sane bitterness was beginning to engorge his mind. “I’m the monster. I’m worse than human, as my ‘dear old dad’ used to say. I’m not even sure if I’m alive. I can’t seem to live in this country, see? How can I save a single animal? I couldn’t even save my brother.”
Cuthbert felt his heart doubling beats rapidly, and a slight numbness in his lips that always came with his worst arrhythmias. He felt angry.
He coughed. He asked, “I’m dying, cat. I’m ninety years old, and I’ve been in the wars, as they say. Why don’t you just run away and take your freedom, like your mates? I’ve come to help you. It will help me to help you, you see, if you’d only just run away. Please?”
“Gladly,” said Muezza. “But I am fated to assist you, my elder saliq. There are greater concerns than me, and even you, that await us. But you released me—that’s a bell that cannot be unrung. So I must help you. And I am also fated to devour rats. We must consume the things we can, the things that are good for us, even if they are dirty and haram to the mullahs. The rats are all looking for each other, and since they are so stupid—and they can’t even bother to address such wise creatures as you—all they usually find are miles of garden walls between themselves. Yet, let us not forget that even these dirty beasts have love for one another. They are continually trying to cross boundaries, not to write them. It is not their fault that they are disgusting sisterfuckers. And regardless of how I feel about them, they offer nourishment to cats everywhere. What could be more important?”
The cat nodded yes for several seconds, then continued: “But the Salafists and the suicide cults and the doomy ultrasonic neural-missile traders—and even your king, Henry—they—”
“Don’t cank on my king!” Cuthbert said. “You leave Harry out of your feline philosophizing.”
The cat grinned, but nervously. “Of course,” he said. “I meant some of these—other . . . leaders? I forget my place, saliq. Not the illustrious and powerful king, not His Human Highness. But his Red Watch and his bureaucracy of bullying, and all these new human princes and barons and viscounts—they cannot survive without their cruel apartness. And that is truly death, saliq, as you have found yourself. The love of death—it binds them to your Luciferian Neuters in outer space, you see. They want to control. They do not see how joined we are to one another. Fools!”
“Arr,” Cuthbert said. “For most of my life, I’ve been looking for a touch of someone or something lost long ago. I think I understand you a bit, cat.”
Muezza nodded his huge, bat-eared head—he was gesticulating with enormous melodrama. “But even with the infidels, their time of empowered apartness is ending.”
Then Muezza almost spat: “You will see, brother!” The cat began to chase his own tail. He seemed intent on creating his own tiny tornado of golden fur as he spun out of the hedge, yanking a few ivy vines with him, and dancing and tapping his paws on the walk almost brutally.
“What’s the matter with you, cat?” asked Cuthbert. He was beginning to think the cat was more than a few sultanas short of a fruitcake.
“Stop that cat dance,” he said. “Please, listen now.”
But Muezza kept spinning, and finally, as though whirling off an invisible axis, the cat fell over with dizziness. He lay there, panting hard, half-covered in ivy leaves.
“You daft muppet,” said Cuthbert. “You silly beast.”
He found it very hard to sustain ill feeling for the cat. He fought off a big urge to pet the animal’s golden hair, which nearly sparkled with luminescence.