Catland - a humorous fantasy

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Torrent

Glimmerind didn't like the way this was going.

He didn't much care for battles in general; they were messy, they were unpredictable, they offered little scope for his trademark duplicity and guile. And this battle was proving particularly troublesome, especially since that foolish ambassador with the even-more-foolish name had contrived to increase his size to an alarming extent, turning his rear paws into great, battering, irresistible weapons, which Glimmerind was fairly sure must be a violation of some unwritten code of honorable warfare. Thus far, Glimmerind had managed to stay out of the way of those huge plunging paws, but there was no telling how long that would continue. And now, to make matters worse, Glimmerind's satchel had started to squeak.

In a way, this wasn't particularly surprising; the satchel, after all, was where Glimmerind had secreted his miniature ally, Squeem the Mouse-King, both for efficiency of movement and in order to protect him from Leopold's murderous vengeance. Glimmerind felt no especial loyalty to Squeem, or indeed to anyone, but the mouse had been a useful ally up to this point, and might continue to have his uses in the future. If only he would stop squeaking! The last thing Glimmerind wanted, at this particular moment, was to attract any attention. What he most wanted was simply to escape, and leave the battle to those who enjoyed being kicked by giants; but he was far less clear on the question of where he would escape to, and moreover he hated to abandon the field of combat without at least a reasonable idea of how the whole thing was going to turn out. There was still a chance that whatever magic had turned Thumbledramp into a cat-kicking giant would fade away in due course, leaving Leopold's forces vulnerable once more, and if the presumptuous princeling was going to be defeated, humiliated, and eventually slaughtered, Glimmerind certainly didn't want to miss that.

Squeak squeak squeak, went the satchel at Glimmerind's side, and for a moment he was tempted to fling the satchel, mouse and all, into the thick of the battle to be stomped on by two factions of warring cats. The moment passed, however, and only a few moments later Glimmerind realized, with a happy rising of his heart, what it was the mouse had been squeaking for.

* * *

The sun was just beginning to rise over the buildings, and a half-dozen stupefied spectators had gathered at the edges of the square, when a thundering patter that seemed to come from all directions rose abruptly in the morning air, and seconds later a veritable avalanche of mice—thousands and thousands of them, packed so densely that they looked like a roiling carpet of fur—broke into the square at a mousey gallop, heading straight for the heart of the cats' frenzied battle. The cats had time to still their clashing swords, turn to look at the approaching onslaught, and register a change of facial expression. Then the tide of mice was upon them, covering friend and foe alike.

Greg stood rooted to the spot, gazing down at the fuzzy, swarming mass that now surrounded him on all sides. It took him several moments to realize that the mice, like the cats, were armed, with teeny-tiny little swords that looked like metal toothpicks, and quite possibly were. The cats, meanwhile, had forgotten their own swords completely. The sight of their ancestral enemy/dinner had instantly reduced them to a snarling, bestial state, and they lunged with open jaws at the mice, who dodged and stabbed and slashed with jaunty abandon, like ten thousand miniature Cyranos de Bergerac. All distinction between Bannockburn loyalists and new-regime diehards had been instantaneously forgotten. It was cats against mice now—and the mice appeared to be winning.

Greg wasn't quite sure what he ought to do in this situation. Technically, he was still a giant; in fact, when considered in terms of mouse-scale instead of cat-scale, he was even more of a giant. On the other hand, stomping on mice didn't have nearly the same visceral appeal as goal-kicking enemy felines; it had, instead, a visceral revulsion that made him shudder just to think of it. Besides, the mice were everywhere. How many could he possibly stomp? If he focused on the mice who posed the most immediate threat to his friends, he would inevitably wind up stomping on cats as well as mice, which didn't seem like a very sound policy, no matter how dire the situation was. It has been said that "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," and if you substitute "mice" for "evil" and "Greg" for "good men," then you've described this particular episode more or less exactly.

Greg did nothing. He just stood there and watched. And the mice very nearly triumphed.

What saved them, in the end, was a highly unlikely alliance. Gurgeon the Blind and Graydon Heppingworth—more aptly, under these circumstances, known as the Gray Death—were both nearly twice as large as their companions, but that was where the resemblance ended. Where Heppingworth was elegant, Gurgeon was loutish; where Heppingworth was sleek and urbane, Gurgeon was gnarled, putrid, and fantastically ugly. It would be difficult to conceive of two more different cats—yet there they stood, back to back, as the thick swarm of stab-happy mice whirled and surged and buffeted around them. With great swipes of their paws and great lunges of their battering-ram heads, they cleared a narrow space between them where the mice could not penetrate, and their fellow cats—many already bleeding from tiny puncture-wounds—saw them standing as tall and proud as watchtowers, and made haste to cluster in their shadow. Thus a tight core of mutual defense was formed, with the most grievously injured cats at the center of it, and the mice—for the moment—were held at bay.

This would have been nothing but a noble last stand, however, were it not for what happened next. Greg heard a rumbling dash off to one side, and swiveled his head just in time to see Tanner Bowland and Septimus Cordial charging out of the half-open manhole cover, swords raised in battle-hungry exultation. Behind them came an unbroken stream of armed cats, flowing up like a geyser from the bowels of the earth. Their weapons were in many cases crude—shovels and axes and even a broom or two—but their faces wore the lusty intentness of inspired warriors, and their movements betrayed not the slightest hesitation. Like an army of demons, they plunged into the fray.

The element of surprise was now on the cats' side—along with the element of being ten times larger and the element of being perfectly willing to eat your opponent. The tide of the battle turned against the rodents—but they showed no signs of retreating. If anything, they fought harder, and the bloody, merciless combat was a fearsome thing to see.

* * *

The TV cameraman had climbed up onto his van to get a better view of the action. "Awesome," he kept repeating under his breath. "Awesome." A few days later, someone posted the unedited footage on the Internet, and everyone had a good laugh at the cameraman for saying "awesome" so many times, but the cameraman didn't mind at all, because he was being invited onto all the major TV talk shows, and it turned out he was reasonably clever and charming, in a shaggy, bleary-eyed sort of way, and he became a kind of minor celebrity, and it was the best week-and-a-half of his life.

* * *

Glimmerind, meanwhile, had decided that this battle was not, after all, entirely to his liking, and that all things considered he preferred to skulk off into the shadows and read about the outcome in the afternoon papers. There was no dissenting voice from inside his satchel, so he took it that Squeem the Mouse-King was in agreement.

Glimmerind had already been hanging back a bit from the actual combat, so that when the mouse army arrived, he had escaped the furious tsunami of their assault. Now he darted lightly across the street, through a bright shaft of golden morning light, and into the blessed protective shadow of a narrowish alleyway. Here he found a convenient trash bin, with the lid already hanging partway off. He leapt up onto the lid, gave a speculative sniff, discerned that the bin's interior was only moderately foul, and dropped gracefully down into its depths. The bin was mostly empty, and Glimmerind found a relatively clean, dry corner and sat down. He sighed deeply and closed his eyes. It had been a long morning. In a short while, when the hubbub outside had died down, he would have to treat himself to a nice fresh perch or herring from the dumpster of some exquisite restaurant. Or perhaps he would just eat Squeem.

A noise outside made Glimmerind open his eyes again. Someone was moving about among the trash bins. The trash collector? But no, the steps were light—cat-light. No doubt some feral cat native to this barbarous human city. Well, he would have to find his own trash bin to scrounge around in; this one was occupied. Glimmerind was quite prepared to hiss at him if need be.

A shadow appeared in the opening above him, and Glimmerind squinted up. Something about the shadow unnerved him; it was uncomfortably familiar. Glimmerind did not hiss; he simply stared upward. It was a long moment before the shadow spoke.

"It's a fine way you have of leading your army to battle," said the shadow, in the hard, mocking voice of Millicent Lamley. "But never let's mind that. We've a small matter to settle between us, don't you feel?"

Glimmerind swallowed. His mind was working quickly. He prayed it would be quick enough.