“Hardly conclusive.”
“There is one further piece of evidence. The Roman Church has never quite eased its grip in that part of the world. It seems that about this time a number of R.C. wives clubbed together and sent a petition to their bishop, saying that the region was in need of an exorcism. Specifically, that their husbands were being tormented by a succubus. Or succubi—whether it was one or many was impossible to tell.”
“I shouldn’t wonder.”
“What specially intrigued me,” Sir Jeffrey went on, removing his eyeglass from between cheek and brow and polishing it absently, “is that in all this inconstancy only the men seemed to be accused; the women seemed solely aggrieved, rather than guilty, parties. Now if we take the squire’s words as evidence, and not merely ‘the stuff that dreams are made on,’ we have the picture of a foreign, apparently Egyptian, woman—or possibly women—embarking at Liverpool and moving unnoticed amid Cheshire, seeking whom she may devour and seducing yeomen in their barns amid the fruits of the harvest. The notion was so striking that I got in touch with a chap at Lloyd’s, and asked him about passenger lists for the John Deering over the last few years.”
“And?”
“There were none. The ship had been in dry dock for two or three years previous. It had made one run, that spring, and then been moth-balled. On that one run there were no passengers. The cargo from Alex consisted of the usual oil, dates, sago, rice, tobacco—and something called ‘antiquities.’ Since the nature of these was unspecified, the matter ended there. The Inconstancy Plague was short-lived; a letter from Watt the next spring made no mention of it, though he’d been avid for details—most of what I know comes from him and his gleanings of the Winsford Trumpet, or whatever it calls itself. I might never have come to any conclusion at all about the matter had it not been for a chance encounter in Cairo a year or so later.
“I was en route to the Sudan in the wake of the Khartoum disaster and was bracing myself, so to speak, in the bar of Shepheard’s. I struck up a conversation with an archaeologist fellow just off a dig around Memphis, and the talk turned, naturally, to Egyptian mysteries. The thing that continually astonished him, he said, was the absolute thoroughness of the ancient Egyptian mind. Once having decided a thing was ritualistically necessary, they admitted of no deviation in carrying it out.
“He instanced cats. We know in what high esteem the Egyptians held cats. If held in high esteem, they must be mummified after death; and so they were. All of them, or nearly all. Carried to their tombs with the bereaved family weeping behind, put away with favorite toys and food for the afterlife journey. Not long ago, he said, some three hundred thousand mummified cats were uncovered at Beni Hassan. An entire cat necropolis, unviolated for centuries.
“And then he told me something which gave me pause. More than pause. He said that, once uncovered, all those cats were disinterred and shipped to England. Every last one.”
“Good Lord. Why?”
“I have no idea. They were not, after all, the Elgin Marbles. This seemed to have been the response when they arrived at Liverpool, because not a single museum or collector of antiquities displayed the slightest interest. The whole lot had to be sold off to pay a rather large shipping bill.”
“Sold off? To whom, in God’s name?”
“To a Cheshire agricultural firm. Who proceeded to chop up the lot and resell it. To the local farmers, my dear boy. To use as fertilizer.”
Sir Jeffrey stared deeply into his nearly untouched brandy, watching the legs it made on the side of the glass, as though he read secrets there. “Now the scientific mind may be able to believe,” he said at last, “that three hundred thousand cats, aeons old, wrapped lovingly in winding cloths and put to rest with spices and with spells, may be exhumed from a distant land—and from a distant past as well—and minced into the loam of Cheshire, and it will all have no result but grain. I am not certain. Not certain at all.”
The smoking room of the Travellers’ Club was deserted now, except for the weary, unlaid ghost of Barnett. Above us on the wall the mounted heads of exotic animals were shadowed and nearly unnamable; one felt that they had just then thrust their coal-smoked and glass-eyed heads through the wall, seeking something, and that just the other side of the wall stood their vast and unimaginable bodies. Seeking what? The members, long dead as well, who had slain them and brought them to this?
“You’ve been in Egypt,” Sir Jeffrey said.
“Briefly.”
“I have always thought that Egyptian women were among the world’s most beautiful.”
“Certainly their eyes are stunning. With the veil, of course, one sees little else.”
“I spoke specifically of those circumstances when they are without the veil. In all senses.”
“Yes.”
“Depilated, many of them.” He spoke in a small, dreamy voice, as though he observed long-past scenes. “A thing I have always found—intriguing. To say the least.” He sighed deeply; he tugged down his waistcoat, preparatory to rising; he replaced his eyeglass. He was himself again. “Do you suppose,” he said, “that such a thing as a cab could be found at this hour? Well, let us see.”
“By the way,” I asked when we parted, “whatever came of the wives’ petition for an exorcism?”
“I believe the bishop sent it on to Rome for consideration. The Vatican, you know, does not move hastily on these things. For all I know, it may still be pending.”
THE MANTICORE’S TALE
Catherynne M. Valente
Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, The Labyrinth, and crowd-funded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and two dogs.
She says: “I love the manticore, as one of the composite creatures that generally gets a lot of screentime in games but narrative short shrift. Maybe it’s because they’re cats, and cats are sort of beyond morality. I spent days and days trying to come up with an origin story for them, something that wasn’t: so a lion, a snake, a man and a scorpion walk into a bar… the Upas tree is a real mythological tree, one of the things Darwin actually debunked. I like the idea that a deadly tree could produce deadly creatures—but of course every creature is just trying to find its way.”
Sing, oh, sing, of the sun-muscled Manticore! Thundering fleet are their scarlet feet, and great are their echoing roars! No hunter more patient than we, no serpent so sour-tailed as we, no snarling leaps lighter, no long teeth are brighter than ours—than ours!—on the scrub-spotted deserts of home!
Ha! Let us have none of that. Do not sing of us. We do not want your songs. We will sing, and you will listen.
The desert is wide and white and dry as an old bone. We worry it, we gnaw and tear and peel it bald. And we sing when the moon is jumping on the sand like a skinny white mouse, we sing and the saltbush weeps. The oases ripple under our breath, the blue and clear water where the rhinoceros wrangle, where the cheetah purrs and licks her paws, and the Upas trees waver green and violet in the scalding breeze!