The Knot Garden by Gabriel King
Now, this was all very interesting in a rather pointless way, but it was of no practical use at all.
‘Look,’ I said, more brusquely than I had intended, ‘none of this helps us to find Vita. Besides, you still haven’t told me why you upped and left me to eat all the dreams of the village for the past few days.’
A spasm of pain crossed Hawkweed’s face; then he sighed.
‘Orlando and Vita. Vita and Orlando. Silly names, silly cats. Why I have been cursed with two such idiot grandchildren, I will never know; and one of them destined to take over my job.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I will, given your insistence, pass over the more theoretical aspects of this matter; but you may soon wish you had known more. Let us, then, get to the meat of recent events, since you have the attention span of a gnat.’
Clearly, he was feeling better.
‘I upped and left you to it, as you so eloquently put it, in order to protect you from the Dream, laddie.’ He emphasised the word with the rolling ‘r’ he used when particularly irritated with me. ‘It’s back, you see, Orlando: the one, the worst of them all. Only ever happens when the three of them come together, and she starts to lose her man again to the younger one, and panics.’
‘Which three? What do you mean?’ Now I was completely thrown.
Hawkweed stared at me as if were being deliberately obtuse. ‘The witch, her cousin and your Anna,’ he said succinctly. ‘The witch loves him; he loves Anna, and she – well, from her dreams. I’d say she loves him too. And that’s what sets it all in motion, yet again: their infernal triangle. Life after life after life they keep on making this pattern—’
‘But why,’ I interrupted rudely, wanting this to be over with, ‘why if they keep making this pattern can’t they see what they’re doing and stop it?’
The old cat shrugged. ‘Twists of time, twists of fate, who knows? The old one knows it all: she remembers each life; but the other two – I watch their dreams and still I’m not sure how much they recall. Little flashes, jolts of memory, but no sense of the pattern they make. The witch, though, she knows it’s coming round again, yet no matter what she does, it seems, still she loses the game. And she’s older now: her soul’s frailer. Her powers are not what they were. So when she feels that loss creeping up on her again, her terror grows, and so does the Dream. Now, it’s stronger and more destructive than it’s been in any of my lifetimes.
‘Yet I thought, in my arrogance, that if I could track it down at last, I might be able to put an end to it once and for all; and if that had been the case I would never have had to burden you with the knowledge of its existence, let alone enrol you in its pursuit. But, unfortunately, here I am,’ – he indicated his wounded body – ‘and it’s still out there, gaining strength. You may have noticed how over the past few days the people of Ashmore have been suffering more nightmares than usual. Nightmares breed nightmares, Orlando, and even with both of us working separately, we have not been able to catch them all; yet the more that are left, the more the Dream gathers its own momentum. Last night was the worst possible time your idiot sister could have picked on which to take her first trip on the wild roads.’
I looked away, feeling absurdly and needlessly guilty.
‘Do you know, Orlando, who took her on to the highways last night?’
I shook my head, though I had my suspicions.
‘The Dream is loose on the wild roads of Ashmore, laddie; and last night I tried to confront it. Had it not been for the young cat who was with Vita, I might have died.’
I stared at him.
‘I was searching up and down the little westway,’ he went on. ‘All night I’d been coming across disturbances in the air currents, dreams behaving in a strange fashion, tumbling in the wrong direction to the prevailing compass wind as if drawn by something altogether more powerful. Something more powerful than nature is an awesome thing indeed; nevertheless, I decided to follow them. All those convoluted little highways between the canal and the common, they were in turmoil by the time I arrived. Something unnatural was indeed there: I could sense it in my whiskers. By the time I got to the locus at the old holly, where the roads fan out into the village, my fur was standing on end, as if I had blundered into an electrical storm.
‘I turned a corner, and there it was: the Dream, flowing like the Great Fire, scorching the wild road around it; and behind it, trapped by a loop of burning highway, were two young cats; both female. I believe one of those cats was your sister Vita. It can be hard to perceive the identity of cats on the wild roads; but something about the eyes—’
He broke off.
‘And the other cat?’ I asked, too quickly.
‘I do not know who she was,’ Hawkweed said grimly. ‘It was all such... confusion. For, as I appeared, the Dream sensed an enemy and came straight for me. Vita’s companion leapt at it, knocking it away from me, though not before it had done some damage. Then there was howling and smoke and the highway writhing like a live thing, till it burst open, and I was thrown clear.’
I held my breath and waited.
Hawkweed sighed. ‘I believe it had not yet gathered its full power; or we would none of us have stood a chance.’
‘But what about Vita and her friend?’
My grandfather looked shamefaced. ‘I do not know, Orlando. I was in a bad way; even so, I tried to re-enter that wild road. But I was slow and disorientated, and by the time I had managed to crawl back inside, the Dream had gone, and so had those two cats; though I thought I might have seen just the flick of a striped tail in the distance. Despite my wounds I searched the area for hours, aided by the good friend you later found me with.
‘I fear, laddie, that Vita may have fallen prey to the Dream.’
I felt the blood drain from my face, my heart become chill. Surely he couldn’t mean—
‘Is she dead?’ I heard my voice: too loud, disembodied, nothing to do with me at all.
There was a scuffling noise; a faint thud, and a terrible shriek.
‘Dead?’
Dellifer had returned at just the wrong moment. The vole lay prone on the carpet between us like an accusation.
The old wet nurse confronted Hawkweed, eyes blazing. I had never seen a more discomfiting sight: it was as if a kitchen mop had suddenly gone feral. ‘Where is my foster child, Dreamcatcher Hawkweed? What has happened to my little girl?’
He quailed before her. ‘Ah, Delly, Delly,’ was all he could say.
I thought she would strike him then; but instead she drew herself up, spat with contemptuous accuracy into his open eye, and declared venomously: ‘You have never loved another soul but your own.’
Stumbling over the dead rodent in her urgency, she fled from the room. I heard an exclamation from downstairs as she bolted past Anna. Then she was gone.
‘I’m going after her,’ I cried.
My grandfather looked pained, but said nothing to stop me.
*
Dellifer was quick, but not as fast as a determined young tomcat. I caught up with her on the edge of Ashmore Common.
‘It’s my fault,’ she wailed. ‘First you; now your sister. I should have stood up to him when he took you for a dreamcatcher. I should have kept a better eye on Vita.’ A sob racked her. ‘I should never have let him bring me here!’
By ‘here’ I imagined she must mean Anna’s cottage, which she hardly ever left. ‘Nonsense,’ I said, as soothingly as I was able. ‘Dellifer, if you hadn’t come to us, we would have died.’
‘Perhaps it would have been better,’ she said in a strange tone, obviously in no mood to be reasoned with.
She turned from me, ran blindly on to the common, and hurled herself into the first wild road she came to. Dismayed, I flung myself after her. Inside, it was oddly quiet, as if even the highway winds had lost the will to blow. I rounded a corner, and there she was, small and white in the perpetual gloom. It took me more than a moment to register the wrongness of this. Then I stared and stared. Of all the cats I had ever s
I came to a halt behind her, shaking. ‘You’re... you,’ I pointed out, stupid with shock.
She turned, cocking her head. I had forgotten how deaf she had become. From my great height I looked down at her. One of my paws could have crushed her flat, even by accident: and even as this peculiar thought came to me, I was overcome by her courage. To enter the wild roads at the best of times required fortitude; a strength of spirit made rather easier by the comforting knowledge that in entering, you would at once be transformed into your primal self, your inner great cat. To enter the highways knowing not only that they were in turmoil, but also that you had to do so in your frail domestic form, took a bravery I knew I could never aspire to.
‘They did things to me at that place,’ she said in a tone I had never heard from her before. She did not look at me as she spoke. ‘It was such a long time ago now. Many lives past. I was barely older than a kitten myself, and pregnant with my first brood. I don’t even recall now who the father was... not that it matters, given their fate. One of the old brutes she kept there, I suppose. Still remember the smell, though: ah yes. Old piss corroding metal cages. That awful stuff she brewed up. No cat should ever be allowed to smell such a thing. And to think the woman had some in our house, had the temerity to open it right in front of me...’
I had no idea what she was talking about now. Instead, I asked loudly, ‘So what happened to your kittens, then?’
‘Never got as far as that, my darling. Never fully born. But I’ve been producing milk on and off ever since the day she took them from me, in that life and in others since. If it had not been for old Hawkweed and his friend the fox, I’d be there still. I pray you will never be trapped in your own fate as I have been. I regard it as my curse. That, and this body I can never escape.’
The fox... A memory flickered at the edge of my thoughts. Foxes were red, weren’t they? The red of an autumn leaf, Dellifer had once said to me; the red of Reynard... The thought fled, to be replaced by a sudden searing understanding: Hawkweed had fetched Dellifer to us for her milk. It had never been her own choice. I felt stricken, and it must have showed in my face.
‘Not your fault, my dear, not at all. The young are never to blame for the sins of the old ones. And that’s why we must find Vita, my darling. She is an innocent in all this, and she must stay that way.’
And so we searched, Dellifer and I, up and down the highways of the village for hours and hours. It still being daytime out in the world, the crowd of dreams had yet to emerge, which made our progress easier; even so, our search made two things clear to me. The first was that the wild roads of Ashmore had been disarranged so catastrophically that even I was not entirely sure of where we might next emerge; the second was that there was no sign at all of Vita and Lydia.
I thought about Lydia a lot as we ranged around the highways. Dellifer was never one for idle chatter, and now, determined and despairing, every iota of herself concentrated on peering myopically through the gloom, she had not a word for me. Lydia, with her golden fur and her gleaming eyes: what sort of transformation overtook her as she entered the highways? I wondered. Hawkweed had mentioned her striped tail – a tiger, then, or a... surely something grand and gorgeous. What a pair we would make, together on the wild roads! I thought about the immense courage she had shown in saving my grandfather from the Dream and my heart swelled. No wonder she was so contemptuous of me, a sad dreamcatcher who could be distracted by some piddling human fantasy from mating with a creature so fine.
We came back, at last, to the confluence of roads that had used to debouch at the woodland pond on the edge of the old orchard. I could sense their geographical position had changed, but not by much. What did seem to have happened, however, was that more roads had been added: or perhaps some of the wider highways had been split by the violence of the Dream’s convulsion. A knot had occurred. We followed one small tributary, then another, and ended up back in the same place. We took a third highway, which crossed and recrossed itself until my head was entirely turned around. As we emerged into the confluence again, from a different direction altogether, we were able to make out a figure, sitting motionless in the dark. ‘Vita!’ Dellifer called, at the same time as I cried ‘Liddy!’ But as we approached, I saw at once that it was neither of these cats. Silver and barred, with ears that sprouted tufts of fur as feathery as spring barley, I knew her at once; and my heart sank like a stone.
This was the cat my grandfather had seen with my sister. This was the one who had saved him from the Dream: it was Millefleur, descended from a dreamcatcher herself, who had danced with me on the highways in her beautiful lynx form; Millefleur, whom I had spurned.
‘Millie!’ I called, and my voice rose into the still air like a howl.
Her head came up and she stared at us wildly, her eyes like lamps. She was crouched over something, guarding it between her front paws as if it was the most precious of objects. At once, Dellifer and I were running.
I suppose I had thought to see my sister lying there, injured, perhaps even dead; so I was mystified to find the lynx protecting what appeared to be a single silver ring, spotted with blood. Dellifer, however, did not appear mystified at all; instead she hurled herself at the lynx, spitting and hissing, claws out to rake and tear. ‘You!’ she shrieked. ‘You... harlot, you deceiver!’
I was entirely bewildered.
Millie batted the old cat away with a careful paw; claws sheathed, she held her at arm’s length, where Dellifer fizzed and bubbled like a witch’s familiar.
‘Stop this! I have done nothing to harm Vita—’
But Dellifer was not to be appeased. ‘Evil. You are evil. What have you done with her?’
I got between them and spoke loudly and distinctly into Dellifer’s better ear. ‘She would do nothing to harm Vita, Delly. I know her. She... she has a good heart.’
Now Dellifer rounded on me. ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you? I smelled her on you when you came back that night; just as I smelled her wicked temptress’s scent in the kitchen when she gave that... thing to Vita.’ She indicated the silver ring. I frowned, puzzled.
Finally, Millie lost her temper with the old cat. ‘You have a nerve, you old hag,’ she said coldly, and her eyes were steely, ‘to accuse me of smelling evil. Do you think to hide your own stench, by accusing others? I knew as soon as I came into that house where you had come from. Once the witch has touched you, you carry her smell always. You have the stink of death upon you, the touch of the Dream itself.’
At this, Dellifer gave an ear-splitting howl and, elbowing her way past Millie and me, fled down the highway and out into the world at a random exit.
I have to admit I could follow none of this exchange at all, but to see poor Dellifer further upset was more than I could bear. With a furious look at Millie, I turned and chased after her, yet again.
*
What happened next happened so suddenly I was never very sure of the sequence of events; nor even of the time period in which they took place. You will think me mad, I know, and I cannot blame you for it; but if I tell you that I saw Dellifer – long and thin and pale as a streak of light – run out on to the village’s misty main road, turn to look back at me as if I had called her name, and be bowled over under the wheels of a great dark vehicle, you might understand some of my confusion. A confusion helped not at all by the sight of a tall woman with long dark hair and a flowing black coat exiting the gleaming car and, reaching without hesitation beneath its gleaming chassis, extracting the limp body of a small white cat, which she smiled upon with great tenderness, before stowing it on the back seat and roaring away into the distance.
And this time when she looked at me and smiled, she appeared to have her full complement of teeth.
23
Anna was lying on the sofa hating herself,
‘Alice. Good Lord. You look like a parrot.’
‘I do, don’t I?’ said Alice comfortably. ‘Max Wishart bought them for me.’
‘It’s amazing how people’s tastes can change. Oh Alice, I’m so glad to see you! Come in and talk to me.’ Anna indicated the Kawasaki, which was propped up in the lane outside. Heat rose from its engine and shimmered in the clear winter air. ‘Did you know you’ve left that thing going?’ she said.
Alice looked less comfortable. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Actually I can’t stop. I just wanted to— God, I hate having to do this.’
‘Alice, do what?’
‘Anna, one of your cats got run over.’
‘No,’ said Anna.
She wasn’t really listening after that. She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Was it Orlando?’ she said, thinking of the quick, marmalade-coloured shape she had seen darting away through the fog that morning. She felt bemused. She felt her lip begin to tremble.
She said, ‘Oh no.’
‘I’m really sorry, love,’ Alice was saying. ‘I think it was the old one, I can’t remember what you called her—’
‘Dellifer,’ said Anna quietly. ‘Her name was Dellifer.’
‘It was up near the common. There’s a dip there that often has standing fog in winter, you’ve to treat it with a bit of care...’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I was there when it happened. Stella Herringe went into it all over the road in that bloody great boat of a Mercedes, talking nineteen to the dozen to the bloke in the front seat—’