The Wildings (29 page)

It was the rain, Mara thought, eyeing the greyness of the day from the window near the kitchen sink. It was something in the air, stirred up by the storm, brought here by the winds that were gusting against the kitchen door. Her fur remained fluffed, no matter how much she washed it with
her rough pink tongue. Her Bigfoot ruffled the top of her head affectionately and opened the window.

The Sender’s growl started at the back of her throat and deepened into a warning. “What’s wrong,” she heard her Bigfoot say. “What do you see?”

It wasn’t what she could see—the birds seeking shelter, the rain beating down on the flame tree, darkening its vivid green leaves. The kitten’s fur was standing on end and her nostrils were flared, her teeth chattering as she stared at the window. The rain drummed heavily, changing direction, and Mara growled again at the scent it brought to her: the unmistakeable stink of blood, and behind it, the darker scent of fear.

She leapt towards the window, just as her Bigfoot closed it. “No!” she said, trying to explain as her Bigfoot picked her up, making soothing noises, attempting to calm her down. Mara struggled as she was borne away in the Bigfoot’s arms. “Let me go! Danger! Death! Woe!” But when she caught the puzzled look in her Bigfoot’s eyes, the kitten stopped squirming and allowed herself to be carried off. She had no way of explaining to her Bigfoot that something was terribly wrong, that the messages carried by the rain and the wind had raised her hackles with a fear she couldn’t name.

Mara meekly suffered the indignity of being fed a cod liver oil pill, and accepted a catnip mouse as a palliative. She even played with it, willing her Bigfeet to leave; they watched her with concern, but after she had batted the toy around for a few minutes, they seemed to think she was all right.

The moment they were out of the room, Mara abandoned her toy. She leapt up to the windowsill, and closing her green
eyes, she dropped her head to her paws. The rain still whispered songs of blood and horror into her ears, but she shut down her fears. “Beraal?” she sent hesitantly, but though she waited for a long time, there was no response.

Mara washed a fat paw, and thought of Southpaw. The brown kitten’s face shimmered in her mind. She thought of the times they had played chase in the drawing room. She thought of the way he bullied her but also cleaned the dustballs out of her fur when she’d spent too much time exploring under the bed. Now all of her instincts told her there was something badly wrong, that he and Beraal were in trouble.

The kitten spread her whiskers out, wondering whether Beraal would respond. Beraal had often tried to get her to stay in touch after their lessons had ended; it was Mara who had refused, because she hadn’t wanted to risk hearing the exasperation in the mews of the other wildings when they spoke of the Sender.

The rain and the thunder rumbled ominously. The skies boiled over with dark clouds, and every time the wind drove against the windows of the Sender’s house, they brought the stink of blood and death with them. Mara had never wondered much about Beraal’s life outside, but some of the things Southpaw had told her about predators and Bigfeet came back to her. The blood on the rain spoke to her eloquently of the risks that all the outside cats took—including Beraal.

The kitten unfurled her whiskers and sniffed at the air. Perhaps she should go into Nizamuddin, she thought, and the idea took her by surprise. Hesitantly, Mara let her whiskers rise. Sending came so easily to her now; her green eyes blinked
and closed as she focused, stepping out into the park, feeling the familiar shift in her small gut as she hovered over the rain-darkened branches of the trees. The thunder rumbled close by, and Mara watched the squirrels shiver and run for cover. But neither the thunder nor the rain worried her.

Her whiskers radiated uncertainty. There was the familiar, well-known route to the zoo; the other way was a clear path between the rooftops that would probably lead her to the wildings. The Sender wished Beraal was here to tell her what to do. The rain beat down on the trees in the park as Mara tried to make up her mind. Out in the open, the smell of blood was even stronger, but it came in gusts as the wind eddied back and forth. Perhaps she should go and see if Beraal was all right, Mara thought. But what if she was, and the blood on the rain was just some sort of residue from one of the outside cat’s endless hunts? What if she met Southpaw and he laughed at her, or thought she was even more of a freak, once he saw her hovering in mid-air?

The kitten’s concentration broke as, back in her house, the Bigfeet picked her up off the bed, one of them holding her close and offering a new catnip mouse. Mara made her decision; she broke the sending, curling up into her Bigfeet’s arms for comfort. From time to time, her nose twitched as the wind rapped at the window, but the outside was too big for her, the clan of wildings too intimidating. Mara stayed indoors.

“
GO
,”
GROWLED HULO
. “Get out of here and don’t let me see you back in the grounds again!”

Southpaw quailed in fright as the black tom slashed at him, so surprised at Hulo’s attack that he didn’t realize the tom’s claws were carefully drawn in so as not to cause any hurt. “But Hulo, I’ll stay in the baoli—” he said, his mew almost piteous.

The tom glared at the kitten. His black fur had matted with the rain and the mud, and when Hulo fluffed it up menacingly, he looked truly terrifying.

“For once in your life, Southpaw, do as you’re told!” he snarled. “Don’t make me cuff you! There’s a road running along the perimeter of the garden, the one lined with wild-rose hedges—that’s not the one you take, you hear me? Go through the back roads, over the rooftops if you can, to the market. Shelter there or in the park. I don’t want you anywhere near the Shuttered House! Now run along!”

He smacked Southpaw sharply across his striped backside to give the kitten the best start possible. Then the great black tom frowned and bounded down the muddy path, flying through the puddles of water without so much as shaking his paws out, in order to catch up with the other wildings. Miao and Katar had led the group, Beraal and Qawwali pausing only long enough to send urgent calls to the canal and dargah cats—they were to come to the Shuttered House as soon as they could. Hulo had his doubts that the canal cats would get there any time before sunset—the other side of the canal was a long way off, and too many Bigfeet used the bridge to make the crossing safe for cats during the day

Qawwali was worried, too; his group of wildings had spent the night awake and would be tired. The Bigfeet were beginning to emerge from their homes, and the dargah cats would
have to creep along the alleys and rooftops to avoid them on their way to the Shuttered House. He didn’t think they would be here any time soon, and when he caught Hulo’s worried eyes, he understood what the great tom’s fears were.

“The birds are not used to the ferals roaming the grounds,” he said to Hulo as they splashed through the puddles, both toms ignoring the rain on their fur. Neither liked being wet, but both were used to the perils of a life outside. “Perhaps it was only an alarm.”

“More than that,” grunted Hulo. “I’ve never seen Katar move so fast or with such urgency. And the smell of blood in the air makes me uneasy.”

“Yes, they must have killed a few of the wild rats and mice,” said Qawwali. “Unsporting to do it at daybreak, but the ferals wouldn’t know any better.”

Hulo grimaced, thinking of how bewildered the prey must have felt, to be caught sleeping. All prey, napping or not, was fair game from twilight to past midnight, but once the inky blackness of the night started lifting, most animals obeyed the silent but deep call to sleep. Few predators would kill at dawn or in the first hours of the morning, unless they were driven by gnawing hunger or were too old to make their kills fairly, when prey was at its most alert. “Ugly to think about it, but I suppose a few ferals couldn’t control themselves, like mannerless kittens on their first hunt.”

“It would happen to ferals who’d been indoors for a long while,” said Qawwali. “But they can’t have done much damage—their leader would have curbed their claws and teeth before long.”

The toms slowed down as they approached the Shuttered House, reaching out cautiously with their whiskers to see where the other wildings were. In the thick undergrowth, with the morning light a weak grey in the rain, scent was a better marker than visibility.

“It reeks of blood,” said Hulo uneasily.

“They must have killed something large,” said Qawwali warily, wondering if the ferals could possibly have brought down a dog or even a mongoose. But they had heard no barks, none of the typical mongoose alarm calls.

The two cats moved through the lantana bushes, using their forepaws to push back the branches. Hulo thought he could smell Beraal and Katar ahead, but wondered why the other cats were so silent—perhaps they didn’t want to alert the ferals.

“It smells as though the hedges are drenched in blood,” said Qawwali. The old cat was not easily scared, but his mew was hoarse, his whiskers trembling in disgust. The two toms turned the corner, into a clearing. Hulo blinked, his eyes adjusting to the light, and then he saw what the ferals had done.

THE RAIN SLOWED
, turning from downpour to gentle shower in the abrupt fashion typical of Delhi weather. Mara’s Bigfeet opened the windows, letting the breeze cool the house. The kitten stirred uneasily. The whiskers over her eyes tingled painfully each time she smelled the iron stink of blood, and she heard the squirrels and the babblers asking each other if they knew what was going on.

She considered getting onto the Nizamuddin Link, but if she didn’t find Beraal, she’d have to talk to the other wildings. Mara cringed at the thought, and Southpaw’s words came back to her: “You’re such a freak!” he had said. Southpaw knew her; they had played together, slept paw-to-tummy and eaten from the same bowl. If he thought she was a freak, what would the other wildings think?

She missed Southpaw. With Rudra and Tantara, she had never been able to play hunt-the-paw or chase-your-whiskers, and though she wished Southpaw was better at his grooming, she loved digging her nose under his belly, making him yelp when she gently bit his tail.

She found his stories of the rooftops and the excursions with Hulo fascinating, even if she secretly thought the way he swaggered sometimes in imitation of the older toms was very funny—instead of the menacing swagger Southpaw aimed for, he often ended with an undignified waddle, though Mara would never tell him that. She could almost smell his wet fur, imagine that the scrabbling outside was him balancing on the parapet as he came through the window.

And then, there he was. Southpaw jumped down from the sill, his brown eyes filled with terror. “I missed you so much!” mewed Mara delightedly, forgetting all about their quarrel. She rushed up, her tail raised in happiness, eagerly rubbing her whiskers along his furry face, feeling the rain and the mud and the quiver of fear that ran through his small body. Southpaw was trembling so hard that Mara could feel him shaking before she touched him.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Is Beraal all right? Why does the rain smell of blood today?”

The brown kitten allowed himself to be gently nudged onto a cushion, and made no demur when Mara started to wash him, using her rough pink tongue as a sponge.

“Beraal’s all right, I think,” he said. “Though I don’t know how long she and the others will be safe—oh, Mara, it’s terrible out there. The ferals—”

Instead of telling his friend what had happened, Southpaw reverted to early kittenhood, wrapping his black whiskers tight around Mara’s white ones. He shivered as he let her retrace his travels.

AFTER HULO HAD ROUNDED ON HIM
, Southpaw meant to go back to the park by the market route, except that the road that led away from the Shuttered House, across the clusters of homes that stood back-to-back, was waterlogged. The kitten stared at the road in dismay, wondering how he could possibly cross. In the shrubbery nearby, a family of beetles traipsed wearily away from the muddy water that threatened to drown them.

The sun was behind a rack of grey clouds, but it was high in the sky, as by now it was well into mid-morning. When he trotted left, trying to see if he could go through the hedges instead of across the waterlogged road, the rain dripped insistently onto his neck from the lantana leaves, and tiny spiky thorns pushed into his stomach and back.

There was nothing in front of him except for a stink-beetle clicking its mandibles inquisitively. Southpaw had the distinctly unpleasant sense that the ground under his flattened belly was turning to mud and slush. He wriggled forwards, only to be
brought up short by another line of ants, marching in the opposite direction.

“Do.not.step.across.this.line,” droned the ants in a quiet monotone that drilled through the kitten’s head. “Do.not.attempt.to.pass. We.have. spray.in.four.strengths: pepper.chilli.jalapeno.bhutjolokia and.we.are.not.afraid.to.use.it.” Southpaw froze, but the ants kept marching and as they came closer, the kitten had to wriggle ignominiously out of the hedge, his striped brown backside picking up quantities of mud.

Southpaw couldn’t stay in the baoli—if Hulo found him afterwards, the tom would tan his bottom until the stripes fell off his fur, as he had once memorably threatened. Gingerly, staying close to the perimeter, the kitten began to crawl through the acacia and the grass, hoping that Hulo wouldn’t see him if he stuck to the perimeter of the Shuttered House. The kitten had padded more than halfway up the perimeter, pushing through the tangled bushes, making his stubby legs stretch to clamber over the old fat tree roots, when he heard the screams break out. He couldn’t see what was screaming, but it sounded horribly like very young prey—baby mice, fledglings—and then more screams joined in.

He had stopped, almost paralyzed with fear, his paws sweating. It seemed to him that the rain dripped with blood.

Mara curled around Southpaw as he told this part of the tale, and he was grateful for her steady, comforting purr. And then the kitten felt his blood chill again, as a familiar scent came like an arrowhead towards him—the thick aroma of damp fur and cedar, a powerful, warning smell. The bistendu leaves rustled, and Kirri stepped into Southpaw’s path.