The Wildings (21 page)

The kitten huffed, her tail curved around her paws. “I don’t want to,” she said.

Beraal held her ground. “You know, you’ll have to talk to the rest of us one of these days, Mara. You may live inside with the Bigfeet, but you’re the Sender, and—”

The kitten was meeping, quietly at first and then in rising wails. “I don’t want to link!” she said. “The Nizamuddin cats don’t like me, except for Southpaw, and even he thinks I’m strange, I can hear his thoughts sometimes! The only reason you come to see me is because I’m the Sender, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my sendings, and I don’t want to talk to any of you at all!”

Beraal stropped her claws in confusion, at the side of the staircase, staring at the kitten.

“The moth spoke!” Mara wailed. “And I didn’t want to kill it but I did,—and I don’t want to be the Sender and I really like living with Bigfeet—and—and—!”

The orange kitten fled up the staircase and back into the house. From inside her bedroom, eventually, Beraal heard the soft, muffled sounds of a kitten crying into a pile of blankets. She sat outside for a while, as a watery sun did its best to warm the afternoon, and she tried to link to Mara, but the kitten stayed determinedly out of reach. The queen drowsed for some time, and then she padded down the stairs and left to explore the park. She understood some of Mara’s confusion about being the Sender, but now was not the right time to try and console the kitten.

It took some time, but Mara cheered up when the Bigfeet brought her a ball of wool. Patting it and chasing it around the floor was calming. She waited for Southpaw, but there was no sign of him, and Mara assumed that he was off with Miao or Katar, or one of the other cats. When her Bigfeet left, the kitten hesitated, wondering whether she should have another catnap. But she was well rested. Mara sat on the carpet, unfringing its knots absently, and then she stretched. “Time to visit the tigers,” she said to herself. She had put it off for almost a full moon, and perhaps going to the zoo would undroop her whiskers.

She climbed a stepladder going all the way up to the top of the kitchen cupboards. Once up there, she settled in behind a jumbled heap of baskets and abandoned cardboard cartons.
Mara didn’t want her Bigfeet scooping her up, even for a cuddle, while she was out at the zoo.

WHEN OZZY SAW A TINY ORANGE BLOB
shimmer into the shape of a kitten over the small artificial pond in their enclosure, all of his great white whiskers stood up in glad greeting. It was only when he saw Mara that he realized how much he had missed the kitten; she made him laugh, and on her visits, he could briefly forget the bars that kept him penned.

Drowsing at the mouth of their cave, Rani opened her beautiful blue-green eyes a trifle as she watched her mate. Ozzy had been moody and difficult to handle all through the rains. The monsoon reminded him of the way summer yielded to better weather in dusty Ranthambore, and he had been pacing the length of the cage since the last full moon, restless, growling at the keepers and gawking visitors. As Mara hovered over the water, Rani sensed happiness ripple through her mate’s mane and was relieved.

“Brat!” Ozzy roared, letting his voice rumble through the air and rattle the branches of the leopards’ cages next door. “What took you so long? Forgot all about your old friends, did you?”

The kitten was so pleased to see Ozzy that she almost cannoned into his stripy muzzle, stopping herself in mid-tumble. She wouldn’t have been hurt, but Mara knew from experience that other animals found it disconcerting to have a kitten, however virtual, shimmer through their bodies.

“I missed you!” said the kitten, surprised to discover how true this was.

Then Ozzy did something very unusual, by his standards. He leaned over, and gently brushed Mara’s virtual whiskers with his muzzle. Mara felt a jolt run through their link, and for a second, the air around her ears bristled as she picked up on the immense, carefully contained power and strength that ran through the great tiger’s frame. Ozzy’s great golden eyes widened, too, and his whiskers trembled; it seemed to him that the Sender’s strength was greater than the kitten knew, and for the first time, the tiger wondered how far Mara’s powers extended.

“Thank you, Ozzy,” she said, still tingling from the exchange. “Hey, Rani, how’ve you been? Where’s Rudra, is he sleeping?”

Ozzy’s whiskers went flat again, and the tiger’s eyes went opaque. His massive head turned away from Mara, and he growled deep in his throat.

The white tigress kept her voice impassive, but Mara could hear the sadness in the low tones. “Rudra and Tawny have been shifted into another cage, on the other side of the zoo,” she said. “They’re old enough to breed. It’s not that bad; we link and chat every day, and Rudra’s a big boy now.”

The growl from Ozzy was so menacing that it made the ground shake, and the few visitors who had been lounging against the bars of the enclosure, on the other side of the moat, were so startled that they leapt back.

His golden eyes were furious as he spoke to Rani and Mara. “They took our cub away, Rani! Our cub! Without asking me or you, or him!”

“Ozzy,” said Rani patiently. “At least he’s still here; he’s in the zoo and you and I know he’s safe. They could have sent him
to another zoo, the way they did with the baby leopards—at least he’s not halfway across the world.”

“They had no right!” roared Ozzy. His roars were making Mara shiver, but though the kitten flattened her ears and dropped to the ground, she didn’t leave either the zoo or the link. “If we’d been in Ranthambore, he would have left to start his family, but do you think we wouldn’t have met? We would have explored the dark, cool dens together, Rani! You would have taught his cubs how to hunt and how to study the ravines and the plateaus, what prey to chase through the gorges, what prey to leave to the sand and the sun. They took my boy away without asking me!”

“Ozzy,” said Rani quietly.

“How could they?” roared the tiger. “He’s MY boy! I should have killed them all! I should have torn them limb from limb.”

“He couldn’t do that,” Rani said in an aside to Mara, “because they tranquilized him. It’s been eating him up for days.”

The great tiger was pacing up and down, and his roars were echoing across the length and breadth of the zoo now. The hyenas woke up and added their insane, laughing barks to the sound; the monkeys gibbered and far away, the elephants began trumpeting.

“We have to stop him,” said Rani, getting to her feet. “Or the Bigfeet will come in and give him the sleeping medicine again. He hates that.”

“Ozzy?” said Mara, timidly following the great cat as he marched up and down, his orange and black flanks rippling.

“THEY TOOK MY SON AWAY FROM ME!” the tiger roared. “Yes, and that can’t feel good at all,” agreed the kitten.
“VENGEANCE! BLOOD! DEATH TO THE CUB-STEALERS!” Mara’s ears flickered; she saw the keepers standing outside the cage, in urgent Bigfeet discussion. There were four of them, and two more joined the group as she watched. Ozzy would have to stop roaring, or else it would go badly for him.

“I’m so sorry, Ozzy,” she said. “It must be terrible not to have Rudra right here. But are you sure he’s feeling as bad? I mean, he must miss the two of you, but he was born in the zoo, wasn’t he? And he’s seen other cubs being shifted away from their parents, so perhaps it isn’t as hard for him as for you.”

“RIP THEIR INTESTINES INTO TINY … what?” Ozzy said, his last roar tailing off.

The kitten was looking at him, her head to one side, and as he paced up and down, Ozzy found his anger disappearing when he considered Mara’s question.

“BLOOD! REVENGE!” he said stubbornly, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“You must miss him a lot,” said Mara. “Your fur has the scent of sadness. But you know he’s safe and happy, so isn’t it really the jungle that you’re missing?”

Ozzy opened his red-tongued mouth to roar, but what came out was a confused, “Grrmmmmphhh.”

The keepers were watching him closely, one leaning on the bars.

“My head hurts with all this thinking, Rani,” the tiger said crossly. He glared at Mara. “I was doing fine until you came along and confused me, you—you—miniature furbag!”

Rani eyed her mate, and Mara could see the beginnings of a smile on the white tigress’s face as her whiskers twitched upwards.

“Go for a swim, Ozzy,” she said, her low growl so soothing that Mara felt her own fur settle back into calmness.

The Bigfeet keepers relaxed as the tiger plunged into his pool. “Aaroo!” he said happily, splashing around. Swimming always made his head feel cooler. Ozzy did a grand rolling dive and splashed and splashed until he felt much better. Reassured by his action, the Bigfeet keepers dispersed.

Later, as he lay on the rocks, letting his skin and fur dry in the afternoon sun, Ozzy eyed the kitten’s curled-up shape with grudging respect.

“In the jungles,” he said presently, “there are no bars and no boundaries.”

“That seems scary to me,” said Mara. “I don’t like the outside at all.”

“Why not?” said Ozzy.

Neither Beraal nor Southpaw had asked her this question, and Mara washed her paws slowly, first the left, then the right, trying to explain why being outside in person, without the safety of the link, felt so terrifying.

“It’s because there’s so much of it,” she said at last, “and it confuses my whiskers—there are too many scents to follow, too many cats and other animals thinking at the same time, and it all seems so difficult! You have no shelter when it rains, and the food isn’t already dead—you have to kill it, and it talks to you …” The kitten bent her head and washed her back paws with fierce concentration.

Ozzy didn’t contradict her. Instead, he let his whiskers stretch out in Mara’s direction, questioning, open, friendly.

“So you’ve killed, little one?” he asked gently. She had grown up since that first surprising sending, he thought. A season and more had gone by since the kitten had tumbled into their lives; she would soon be a full-grown cat.

Mara meeped, very softly.

Ozzy raised his immense white whiskers, each one of which could have circled the kitten twice over, and his eyes met Mara’s. The two looked unblinking at each other, tiger and cat. It was Ozzy who blinked and looked away, after a few moments.

In the distance, a baby elephant trumpeted, the shrill call followed by the rough bark of a cheetah. The cats, the big one and the small one, ignored the sounds from the zoo, and the attempts of the Bigfeet visitors to get them to come closer to the bars. Some of the Bigfeet were throwing plastic packets into the enclosure. Usually Ozzy would have warned them off with a growl, but he ignored them this time round.

“Thank you for letting me share your memories, little one,” said the tiger. His flaming flanks rippled as he shifted, and once again, Mara was reminded of how much power lay dormant in his massive body. The kitten was curled up in a small heap near Ozzy; Rani had padded back to the cave, knowing that it was best to leave the two alone.

Ozzy let the silence grow and deepen, allowing Mara to consider the endearment he had used: from the time he and the orange kitten had met, the bond between them had grown, in a way that the tiger could not explain. She reminded him of his first child, the feisty tiger cub he had lost so many years
ago—the two had shared the same spirit, even though they came from different species.

“I was just a young cub when my mother came back to our den one day, her jaws bloody, an ugly wound raking her hind leg, and told us that my father was dead,” said Ozzy. His voice was low as he roamed the forests again in his mind. “There had been a fight with a pair of wild boars; my mother won her battle, my father lost his. My sisters left soon, to make their claims to their territory; I was too young to leave my mother, but I was old enough to learn how to hunt.”

The artificial river, the dusty grass, the bars of the cage: all of these seemed to disappear as Ozzy shared his life in the ravines and the forests, the territory that he and his mother would roam for nights in a row without scenting another tiger’s scat or seeing unfamiliar pugmarks.

“The first deer I hunted spoke to me,” he said. Mara sat up, her tail flicking back and forth in interest. From what Southpaw and Beraal had said, she had gathered that most cats didn’t hear their prey, or didn’t listen to the voice of the kill.

“What did it say?” she said, her ears upright and alert.

“It caught my scent first, and it begged silently for its life,” said Ozzy. “As I drew closer and it sensed how eager I was for the kill, as I lay crouched in readiness, it shared with me the joy it felt when it drank water from a stream that had not dried in summer, when it raced its friends and mates to see who was the fastest; it spoke of the babies it hoped to have, the mate with whom it hoped to raise a family in the shelter of Ranthambore’s jungles.”

“And so you spared it,” said Mara, thinking of the moth, wishing she had been less impulsive.

“I broke its neck in two with my first bite,” said Ozzy, “and when the hot blood ran out, I was sorry only for a moment before I began to feed.”

The tiger shifted and let his giant paw shoot out, resting on the ground right near Mara. The claws extended, and the kitten could see how wickedly sharp and curved they were; massive, deadly versions of her own.

“Killing is in my bones and blood, Mara,” the tiger said, “as it is in yours. I felt sorry for the deer, but I showed it mercy.”

“You killed it,” said Mara. “How was that any kind of mercy?”

Ozzy yawned, and she saw his long, curved teeth exposed, the fangs larger than her furry head.

“I killed it fast,” he said. “That is no small mercy, Mara. You’re running away from being a Sender, because it sets you apart from the other cats; but you can’t run away from being a cat. When your prey speaks next, listen to it for as long as you choose, and then kill it as swiftly as you can. That is the only mercy, little one.”

Mara blinked, and then she gazed again into his golden eyes, and saw that what he was saying was true. She set it aside neatly in a corner of her mind to think about later, but the way in which the tiger had said it made the kitten feel better. Ozzy understood. And if a cat as large and powerful as him could listen to prey, perhaps she wasn’t as much of a freak, after all.