Anton and Cecil Cats at Sea Part 6

There was a long silence. They both sat down, carefully arranging their tails. Gretchen looked at him. Cecil knew that she was the quicker cat, that she could easily grab the stone and run. He knew he had to wait for her to choose his future. And he knew that she knew this as well. But his face remained perfectly peaceful, his golden eyes just barely smiling at her.

Finally, Gretchen smiled back. "Come on, shipmate," she said with a sigh at last. "Bring your stone. There's someone you need to meet." She turned to the door.

Cecil picked up the stone in his mouth once more and together they walked, their tails in the air, to the captain's quarters.

CHAPTER 11.

A Mouse at Sea As Anton jumped down to the deck of the new ship, the clacker feathers lodged around his shoulders p.r.i.c.ked him as he moved, and though he couldn't see them, he had a mental image of what he must look like. A cat with feathers! Approaching him was something he had rarely met on land, but never at sea: a toddling baby girl. Behind her came another onboard first for Anton: a young woman, presumably the child's mother, hurrying along with her hands on her hips, speaking in a way that made it clear she wanted to be listened to but didn't expect to be. The child had spotted Anton and was cooing joyfully, reaching out to grab him if she could, but Anton made sure she couldn't. He didn't want to hurt her, so he dodged this way and that, which made the baby laugh, and the mother laughed, too.

Anton sighed, leaping atop a coiled rope, thinking about how lonely it was on a ship, because the only creatures to talk to were rats, and they said nothing worth hearing. Anton's conversation with Dave the lizard had been the most companionable one he'd had in a long time. He thought of the long evening chats with Cecil, as they strolled about trading stories they had heard from other cats. Sometimes Anton had talked with some of the gulls that hung around the wharf, but it was hard to understand them and they were very full of themselves. Seen it all; that was gulls. He'd spoken to a dog occasionally. As Cecil pointed out, they weren't all bad, but one didn't see them much and they were often on leashes, which looked dreadful as far as Anton was concerned, though the dogs seemed quite happy with their lot. This baby could scarcely make her mother understand her, so there wouldn't be much hope there. "Cat," the baby crowed. "Cat."

The mother said, "Yes, that's a cat." They were both smiling and the mother approached Anton cautiously, holding out her hand for him to sniff. "How on earth did you get here?" she said. "And what bird have you tangled with? You must have dropped out of the sky."

She might pull the feathers off, Anton thought. She was very interested in them. He sat still and put on his most serious expression. She brought her fingers around his face cautiously, molding his cheek in her palm, and he felt such a chill run down his spine that he shrugged a little. She murmured something consoling. Then she began to feel around the base of the feathers. "I see," she said. "I see." Carefully she began to pluck them out one by one. Anton thought of his own mother, cleaning his face and neck with her rough pink tongue, but always gentle, even when she had to use her teeth to loosen up a knot of fur. He was so tired from his ordeal with the clackers that he nearly fell asleep while the woman petted and plucked and crooned to him. It was a good thing, he decided, to have a woman on a ship.

When the kind lady had removed his feather dressing, Anton set to work giving himself a good cleaning from head to toe. The captain had come out by this time and spoke with his wife, who gestured from Anton to the sea, to the sky, and back again. The captain puffed his pipe, wide-eyed at first, then squinting closely at Anton, he picked up a feather from the pile on the deck, looked up at the sky, and examined the feather as if it was a text. "A cat that falls out of the sky is one we'd better make welcome," he said. Taking up the baby, who shouted with joy, he carried her off to the cabin. His wife, with a nod at Anton that told him he was on his own, followed her family.

There were sailors aloft in the rigging, and one fellow working on a barrel near the stern. Anton could smell fish cooking in the fo'c'sle. He leaped down from the rope coil and slunk along toward the promising odor.

The moment he stepped through the doorway, Anton knew there was a mouse behind the hardtack barrel, but he had to pay attention to the humans who greeted his appearance with shouts of surprise. "Will you look at what the cat drug in," one shouted to the next. And another said, "It's a catfish for sure." The cook, a young fellow with bright blue eyes and a black beard that grew to his chest, studied Anton with a suspicious look, but Anton sat down and sniffed the air so appreciatively that the cook's expression softened, and he said something that contained two words Anton knew well: "yer dinner." It wasn't long before the traditional tin pan of the sea galley was put before him, and a meaty fish head stared back balefully at the new ship's cat.

The next morning Anton took a long stroll on the deck, allowing the news of his arrival to be pa.s.sed from mouth to ear all up and down the length of the ship. He noted a few good spots for snoozing in the sun and others for hiding from bad weather, or that baby. The sailors weighed anchor and dropped the mainsail, which took the breeze at once. The ship began to plow smoothly through the calm sea, steering away from the island. Going where?

As the sun descended into the horizon, pouring a stream from a flaming red cauldron into the darkening water, Anton made his way back to the fo'c'sle to deal with the mouse hiding behind the barrel. The sailors had finished their meals and were either sleeping or on deck, and the cook had shut down the stove for the night. Anton didn't bother with a stealthy approach; his nose told him exactly where the mouse was. He walked to the back of the barrel and shoved his head into the s.p.a.ce where it curved away from the wall.

The mouse let out a shriek and shrunk down on the floor, hiding his head between his front feet. "I knew it," he cried. "I knew it. Now I'll be eaten, just like my poor father and my brother, and there's no escape." And then he sat up, tears streaming from his eyes, his nose running hopelessly, shivering from his ears to his tail. "Please don't eat me," he said through his sobs. "I'm barely a morsel to you, but to myself, I'm all I have left. I'm the last mouse in my family."

"That's an interesting argument," Anton said.

The mouse pulled his tail round and used the tip to wipe the tears from his eyes. "You don't mean it," he said. "That's the teasing way of you heartless felines. Soon you'll be tossing me from paw to paw just for the sport of seeing a poor wee beastie in terror." His tail was of no use against the steady flow of his tears and he let it go. "I'll not run wild for your amus.e.m.e.nt," he said, looking sullen, but still the tears poured down his face and his shoulders shuddered. "My dear brother did that, and to no avail."

"You need to stop blubbering or you're going to drown in your own tears," Anton warned.

"Would that I could," the mouse replied.

What an odd mouse, Anton thought. Rodents weren't generally thoughtful, and rats, as Anton recalled too well, were downright murderous. "So, you were close to your brother?"

"We were different as night and day," the mouse said. "n.o.body would have taken us for brothers. He was a big mouse, and he had a fine, dark pelt, and he loved adventures, whereas I was always"-and here he sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his front foot-"I was always what you see before you. But we were close. Oh, he was my dearest friend. We were close like that." The mouse held up his foot and somehow managed to cross the two front claws.

"I have a brother like that," Anton said. Cecil appeared for a moment in his mind's eye, just as if he were there before him, and Anton sighed as he looked back at the still sniveling mouse.

"That's fine for you," the mouse said. "n.o.body has eaten your brother."

"What was his name?" Anton asked.

"Oh, lord of mice, what do you care what my poor dead brother's name is? Just finish me off and be done with it, will you not?"

"I'm going to tell you something that will surprise you," Anton said. "I don't really like the taste of mice."

"Right, shipmate. I'm sure you don't. You're just making the sacrifice for the good of the enterprise."

"Well, that's just it. If the sailors find out, or that lady, if she finds out you're here, they won't feed me until I hand over your corpse. But if they don't know you're here and you're the only mouse on board . . ."

"I am that. The last of a fine clan."

"I'll bet you could find enough to eat without the humans noticing you're here."

"I'm a creature of great stealth and caginess. That's how I've outlived my poor family."

"Well, then. If no one sees you, I'm not obliged to kill you."

"Are you not?" said the mouse. "Are you not obliged by the ancient enmity between our kind?"

Anton chuckled. This mouse was a dramatic mouse. "What's your name?" he asked.

"My name is Hieronymus," the mouse said proudly. "My brother was Geronymus."

"Her-on-i-mus," Anton repeated. Even the mouse's name was funny. "My name is Anton."

"I can't say I'm pleased to meet you."

"Right," said Anton. "The ancient enmity."

"I won't deny that you're an improvement over the last cat on this ship."

"What happened to him?"

"He was a great brute, always getting himself into sc.r.a.pes. Once, he got himself locked in the larder for two days. Would that they'd never found him. The ship got into some wicked weather and he was stupid enough to go aloft. A big wave came and pulled him off the ropes, dashed him on the deck, and before he could get to his feet, he was swept over the side into the deep blue sea."

Anton gasped. "Poor fellow," he said. "That's a terrible fate."

"Excuse me if I'm dry-eyed," said Hieronymus. "He ate my dear brother before my eyes, and not in one bite, either."

"Yes," Anton said. "That must have been traumatic for you."

"It was the worst moment of my life." And the mouse burst into tears again.

As Anton frowned at the mouse's fresh waterworks, he felt a bit of moisture gather in his own eyes. Hieronymus had given him the thought that Cecil, who was so reckless, might have had some terrible accident back home, and Anton would have no way of knowing. "Please stop your crying," Anton said.

To his surprise the mouse nodded his head and said, between sobs, that he would try. When he could control his voice again, Hieronymus asked, "What's your brother's name?"

"Cecil," said Anton. "I got impressed on the wharf. He was far down the dock and I called to him from the ship, but I expect he couldn't hear me."

As he spoke there was a shout on the deck, and the sailors began to stir in their bunks. "Look," Anton said. "Just stay out of sight."

"You won't see me, unless you've a mind to," Hieronymus replied. "I generally stay here until the night watch goes on, and then I move out to that big rope coil up in the bow. I've a comfy nest there for sleeping, and if I can't sleep, I like to see the stars."

A stargazing mouse. Anton chuckled. He knew he'd come to a low pa.s.s to have taken a mouse for a friend, but Hieronymus was clearly a very unusual mouse.

In the days that followed, Anton established a routine on this new ship to which he had been delivered by a whale. It was much smaller than the Mary Anne, with a crew of only eight men, not counting the captain and his family. The captain's wife took an interest in Anton and invited him into the family's quarters, where she spent much of her time confined with the baby. Anton was wary of the baby, who charged at him on unsteady legs, but the lady was kind and offered Anton treats, a little milk in a saucer or a bit of meat or fish from her own plate. One day, when she found him curled up for a nap in a basket of clothes, she laughed, gently chasing him out. "You want a bed," she said. On his next visit, she showed him a wooden box with one end open, in which she had placed a soft cushion. Now this is the life, Anton thought, as he curled up for a good long snooze. The top of the box had slats that let in light and air, but the sides were solid, so he felt safe and secret, comfy and warm.

In the evenings, he visited the fo'c'sle for his dinner, after which he went out on the deck for a stroll, ending, when the night watch came on, with a visit to the rope coil in the prow and a conversation with Hieronymus the mouse. And could that mouse talk. He was a well-traveled, observant, witty, and lyrical mouse, a spinner of tales full of adventure, bravery, and narrow escapes. Many of his stories had been handed down in his family: the story of Great-Uncle Pyramus, who fell asleep in what he thought was an oversize basket and woke up high above the earth in a hot-air balloon; of Great-Grampa Maximus, who was making a nest in a wheat field when out of the woods came hordes of furious humans marching in long lines toward one another and firing rifles, charging and falling and firing until the air was all smoke, and the ground so thickly covered with the dead and dying that Maximus nearly drowned in a pool of blood; of cousin Minimus, who wound up somewhere miles inland and set up house in a big seash.e.l.l because he loved to hear the sea when he was falling asleep; and of his own uncle Micromus, who, having perfected the art of springing traps with his tail, died suddenly when he bit into a brightly colored wire he thought might be useful for pulling free the cheese once the trap was sprung. Hieronymus was also revealed to be a thoughtful mouse. He had theories about why all animals could understand each other while humans could only talk to other humans, and why rocks sank if they fell off ships, but ships didn't sink if you put rocks in them.

Hieronymus wasn't a bad listener, either. Anton told him about his adventures since he'd left home, about the vicious birds and about how he came to the ship on a whale. One evening he told the mouse about the eye he'd seen in the sky, most recently with Dave. "Do you know the expression, 'Where the eye sees the eye, the lost shall be found'?"

"Can't say as I do. Is the eye a cat's eye?" Hieronymus asked.

"It does look like a cat's eye."

"We have a different expression for that sky. We say, 'Cat's eye in the sky, a mouse will soon die.' "

"No, really?" said Anton.

"But I saw that eye once, with my dear father, and he said there was an old legend attached to it that came from before there were even cats in the world."

"There were no cats in the world?" Anton said wonderingly.

"No, nor mice either. Just fish for some reason. But this eye protects cats; it's special to them. That's why no other animals eat them. No such luck for us mice. We must have been created by a very careless fellow indeed."

"The clackers were going to eat me," observed Anton.

"Well, in those days, when cats were new, they were really, really big. Now they're a lot smaller. When humans started taking them to sea, the eye followed to watch over them, and it still watches them and protects them."

Anton puzzled over this information. A world without cats-he couldn't make sense of that.

The ship sailed on through good weather and bad, and the routine of the sailors hardly varied. We must be going somewhere, Anton thought. We can't just sail forever. But whenever he looked out from the prow, the sea stretched out endlessly. He imagined Cecil raiding a crab party or boring everyone back home with his tales of schooner triumphs. How Anton would love to hear one of those stories right now.

Then, one morning, something extraordinary happened.

All the humans simply disappeared.

CHAPTER 12.

Trade Winds In his new life on the pirate ship, Cecil found himself with quite a lot to do. Birds who landed on deck had to be chased off, as they made a terrible mess. If they perched up in the rigging, which they often did to taunt the cats below with cruel and tasteless jokes, then Cecil climbed the maze of ropes attached to the masts to reach them. Mice and rats who sneaked on board during raids had to be disposed of one way or another. And there was a surprising variety of beetles, worms, and spiders to be caught, batted into submission, and devoured; most of these were imported in the food and loot taken from other vessels. Cecil relished his duties, though once he was stung by what he thought was a small crab until Gretchen called it a scorpion, and his paw swelled up to a painful and tremendous size.

Then there was the actual business of pirating, spurts of furious activity for the crew in the midst of long periods of idleness. Sometimes the target ship fought back, its great guns lobbing heavy b.a.l.l.s of iron over to the pirate ship, where they landed randomly and sometimes did severe damage. During these occasions the cats found it best to scamper belowdecks and hide. Cecil learned to keep his guard up most of the time, since a pa.s.sing crewman was just as likely to give a kick of the boot as he was a friendly pat, and one had to keep that knowledge foremost in one's mind as a ship's cat.

One bright day when Cecil and Gretchen were dozing back to back in the sun on the roof of the map room, a pirate approached suddenly, scooped them up, and dropped them neatly into a crate, banging the lid shut with a mallet. Cecil sprang to his feet, yowling as he pushed frantically on the sides of the crate, to no avail. He ran in tight circles wildly until he noticed Gretchen just sitting, an expression of displeasure on her face. He stopped yowling and faced her. "Hey," he said, breathing heavily. "Why aren't you trying to get out of here?"

She shrugged in resignation, looking moodily out through the slats of the crate. "They've done this sort of thing before. It means we're headed into a port, and they don't want us wandering off."

"Really? A port?" Cecil asked. He looked out as well, and sure enough spotted a dark lump of land in the distance, growing steadily wider. "This could be my chance," he said, mostly to himself. "Maybe I'll finally get some news about Anton."

Gretchen examined the pads of her front paw. "I hope so," she said.

The pirates had replaced the red pirate flags with less threatening blue-and-white striped ones, and once the ship was tied up at the dock they stomped down the gangplanks in high spirits. The sailor carrying the cat crate brought it to a side street set up with colorful stalls and strewn with chattering brown-skinned people. The air was warm and moist, and the only shade came from odd trees that had all their leaves bursting out at the top. Cecil and Gretchen's crate was placed on top of another in the midst of a group of cages and boxes, each holding a creature of some kind. Some of the creatures turned to look at them with interest; others ignored them. The two cats huddled together in the back of the crate.

"I was afraid of this," whispered Gretchen. "They call this the 'markit.' "

"What's that?" asked Cecil, his eyes darting all around.

"People come to trade, you know, give something and get something else in return. The pirates love trading."

"What's that got to do with us?" Cecil asked, looking at Gretchen nervously, but she only nodded grimly toward the man in the center of the cages. He was speaking rapidly to a strangely dressed sailor, handing him a box with three small turtles inside in exchange for a handful of brightly colored beads. "Oh," said Cecil softly, slumping down. "Trading." He turned to Gretchen again and whispered fiercely, "I thought they liked us!"

She shook her head. "They like silver more."

Cecil glared through the slats. "Now you tell me."

The cats could still see the ship from their stall, and they watched in grudging fascination as the pirate crew circulated among many people on the waterfront, talking and gesturing, laughing and arguing. Each sailor seemed to have with him a pouch on a string containing items stolen on raids. They made exchanges with men from the town, who gave them back different items-bottles of liquid, knives or swords, or small pieces of round, flat, shiny metal. Gretchen remarked that these last were what they called "silver," and the sailors valued them highly, privately counting and stacking them over and over. Cecil saw the captain himself offering the glowing white stone Cecil had brought on board in exchange for a very long cutla.s.s, its blade flashing in the sun.

The cats spoke to the other creatures near them, asking about Anton, the whale, the legend. Several seagulls perched on top of the stall swore they had seen the whale surfacing here and there, though Gretchen later discounted their story, as seagulls, she maintained, were notorious liars. An almond-eyed ferret recited the expression while standing on his hind legs in his cage, his skinny arms outstretched: "Where the eye sees the eye, the lost shall be found." None of the others had more than that to offer.

"Thank you so much," said Cecil to each, his spirits gradually falling.

No one had seen or even heard of Anton. An unnaturally large and menacing bird caged on the far side of the stall had been entirely focused on a small lemur in the crate just below it all day, clacking its beak repeatedly and muttering.

"That's a vulture," Gretchen said.

"Wow," said Cecil wryly. "You really know your avian cla.s.sification."

When a sailor traded for the vulture and set it on his shoulder, held there by a chain attached to its ankle, it looked at Cecil, nodded its head, and croaked, "Agggk. Dinner." As its new owner strolled off, it swayed its huge ugly head from side to side cryptically.

Cecil gulped and turned away. "Did you see the beak on that thing?" he asked Gretchen shakily.

"Don't worry about it," said Gretchen. "They only eat stuff that's already dead."

Whenever an interested trader pa.s.sed the stall and looked in at them, the cats sprawled on their backs with their eyes half-closed, trying to look as unappealing as possible. Life was tolerable on the pirate ship-at least they had enough to eat-and they didn't want to be separated at this point. Also, Cecil thought, if he got stuck on land he might never find Anton. So they tried their best not to be traded. During one of these episodes, as they lay stiffly in the crate, a low, rough voice spoke to them from very close by.

"You're not fooling anyone, you know. You don't look nearly bad enough."

Cecil and Gretchen lifted their heads and focused their eyes on a large golden-haired dog peering into the crate, tail wagging and pink tongue lolling. The cats stood and took a few steps backward.