Catland - a humorous fantasy

Chapter Twenty-Three: A Good Time to Give Up

When Greg came to, he was more or less where he would have expected to be: in a cold stone cell in a dank, shadowy dungeon, lying on his back on the hard, uneven floor, waiting to die. Leopold was propped up against a wall not far from him, but Leopold was clearly going to be no help. The cat had sunk into a depth of self-pity from which few, if any, ever return. His whiskers drooped, and his eyes stared vacantly. In the past hour (or however long Greg had been unconscious), Leopold seemed to have aged ten years—or, in feline terms, a year or two. He wasn't a pleasant sight to look at. Greg turned and looked instead at the damp, mold-speckled stone wall, which was at least a moderate improvement.

After a few minutes, for want of anything better to do, Greg got to his feet and surveyed his surroundings. The cell he and Leopold had been tossed into stood to one side of a long, narrow corridor, which extended in both directions farther than Greg could see. Opposite their cell was a blank stone wall; in fact, blank stone walls seemed to be a consistent feature of the dungeon's décor. Three of their cell's four sides were done up in the blank-stone-wall style; the fourth side was taken up by a row of ancient iron bars, jagged with rust, which extended from floor to ceiling, with only a scant few inches between each bar and its neighbor. Out in the corridor, a few damp torches burned grudgingly in wall-brackets. There was no other light.

Greg tested the bars without much hope, and his lack of hope was rapidly vindicated; despite their decrepit appearance, the bars were solid, and on top of that they chafed your hands if you pulled on them, which seemed like adding insult to injury, or vice versa. He looked around for a drainage pipe or other aperture—something you might squeeze through if you were sufficiently svelte and determined—but there was nothing: only solid stone walls and a solid stone floor. Greg didn't like to think about the cell's hygienic arrangements. There weren't any.

Naturally, Greg now wished he hadn't succumbed to that mad impulse to dash up the stairs and rip aside the curtain surrounding the throne. And yet some small part of him was glad to have the mystery resolved. It has often been remarked that there is nothing so terrifying as the unknown, and if there are any exceptions to that rule, mice are not one of them. Besides, so many things were clearer now: the replacement of live mice with dummies in the spectacles of the fighting pits; the obscene over-prominence of fish in the Catlanders' diets; and above all the teeth in the pipes, and the toothless noblecats lining the walls of the High Hall, forever denied the visceral, primal satisfaction of tearing their new king to pieces, as all their instincts cried out for them to do. Greg wondered how Glimmerind had escaped a similar fate. Through a lot of smooth talking, he guessed. God, he hated that cat.

Greg looked over at Leopold, who remained propped up against the back wall of the cell, his head lolling back against the cold stone. Leopold's eyes were fixed on Greg now, as if patiently waiting for him to realize the hopelessness of their position and join Leopold in the only rational course available to them: abject, unmitigated despair.

Greg felt annoyed. Wasn't Leopold supposed to be the brave one? The dashing, swashbuckling, derring-do type, with the sword and the smug-bastard smile and so on? Greg was supposed to be the milquetoast coward, pulled along by the lure of adventure against his better judgment, bumbling his way through a series of perilous near-misses, egged on by his companions and perhaps too obtuse to fully realize how serious it all was. They had their roles, dammit! Leopold wasn't supposed to lie around limply waiting for someone braver and smarter to come up with a plan. That was Greg's job! He seethed with indignation.

Besides, there was a very good reason not to succumb to despair, and in a flash Greg remembered what it was. "Where's Millicent?" he said sharply.