Night of the Animals(74)
The Green Line took Cuthbert and the sand cat past the angular enclosures of Joseph the jaguar, who had been born in the zoo, and who, for a time, garnered much publicity, and also the tragic Sumatran tigers.
The tigers were long-waisted, potent creatures who spent much of their time circling back and forth in a corner, over and over, demonstrating the captive animal reflex known as stereotypy.
These big felids lived their lives out in convoluted, shelf-life residences with low ceilings. There were no impressive moats or ha-has, no tiered daises, no lion-head bollards, no geometrical points of interest. Cuthbert tried to get a glimpse of a tiger or Joseph and saw only the empty, concrete-and-dirt slots they inhabited in the day.
“Where are they?” he asked Muezza, tapping his bolt cutters against his open palm.
“We zoo cats all ask that, too. The keepers used to put these wonder-beings away at night, but they stopped that, years ago. Nonetheless, the cats—hunters of the night—now sleep at night. It’s unholy.”
“Yow’d bloody think they’d get better digs, wouldn’t you?”
“Such cruelties remind people of their own power all the better.”
At last they arrived at the exhibit of the black leopard. Like all the big cat areas where the enclosure lay close to the footpath, a steel fence of a meter high stood between the trail and the caging. This existed for no other reason than to keep guests at arm’s length from the cages. It would have been too easy, otherwise, for an aristocratic hand to be bitten off. Almost no light shone in this section of the zoo at night, and Cuthbert could not easily read the brief description of the leopard on the sign, though he made out something about genetic mutations and pigmentation.
“We are here!” said Muezza, and immediately rolled onto his back and drew in his paws. “You must crawl!”
“I won’t,” said Cuthbert. “I don’t do that for anyone.”
The sand cat said, “You really must, brother. The mercy of the Shayk of Night is not boundless. He is not Allah!”
Cuthbert looked into the cage, but it was impossible to see a thing. He did not understand what the “Shayk of Night” meant precisely, but he felt now a need to meet the animal that, if nothing else, held his little friend’s spirit in thrall. (In fact, the zookeepers had made a point recently of allowing their big cats to wander their exhibits at night instead of keeping them in old-fashioned night rooms. Somewhere, an ebony mutation of Panthera pardus watched.)
Muezza said: “It’s written that the Night, Al Layl, holds the glory of Allah in it, somewhere within it, always, like a bright star. If you let the Shayk free, he will be the harbinger of the Judgment Day, you will see. He is part of the preparation period. As are you.”
Cuthbert felt shaken by the cat’s words, and the hairs on his neck stood up. What Muezza said was just the sort of eschatological banter that could pick up Cuthbert like a scrawny lamb on Armageddon’s Valley of Jezreel, and lurch him away to utter craziness.
Cuthbert asked, in a wavering whisper, “Can he help me to abstain from the Flōt?”
The cat said: “In his way, yes. There is no question.”
Cuthbert felt encouraged, but the cat’s vagueness, again, concerned him.
“But I don’t see him, Muezza,” he said, still speaking quietly, his voice going husky. “I don’t see any star either, for that matter. Just the comet-craft. I don’t like all this Judgment Day talk. Do not forget: y’am a cat.”
“I? Forget that?” asked Muezza. “I see him as clearly as I see you. What do you think you are? And the star—it’s just a comparison, saliq.” That Muezza could suddenly talk as if metaphors could be metaphors and nothing else, as if their long discussion was not a figurative exploration, had the effect of calming Cuthbert. It was as though a creature in a Flōt dream had said to him, “I’m here because you’re smashed, bloke, and that’s that.”
“A’m sorry,” said Cuthbert. “I’m . . . having mind trouble.”
“That is a most excellent way of saying it, brother. You have nothing to be sorry about, not tonight. You possess the same fatal grace our kind all do. Why wouldn’t you?”
With that, he finally realized that Muezza, from the moment they met, actually considered him feline. He did not see the point of disabusing him of the notion; he wondered whether, perhaps, on some level, he had indeed become cat.
Cuthbert grasped his bolt cutters with both hands and stepped over the steel fence. He cut open the leopard enclosure. As far as he could tell, there was no leopard there anyway.
“You think a’m a cat, don’t you?”
“Funny, saliq. You are blessed. And whatever else would you be? You are not just any cat. You are the Mahdi. You will soon meet your Shayk.”
“A’m scared, Muezza. I don’t believe I’ll be hurt. But I don’t like this feeling of fear—it tears you apart. Why can’t I hear him? Perhaps it is better if you take me to the otters. I know about otterspaeke—that I can grasp, at least a bit. Gagoga maga medu and all that.”
“The Shayk is silent,” said the sand cat. “Forget about your zoo otters for a while. We are cats. The Shayk is more vital, for the moment, to us all. However, he may not need, perhaps, to speak with you, not here, not now. He is here to take you, in ways you need not imagine, to Allah. What could there possibly be to say, even with someone as capitally important as you?”