Cats, so some have noted, are not quite as smart as some people believe them to be, but then again, they are nowhere near as unintelligent as some others believe them to be. The intelligence level of felines, particularly from their own perspective, is just right. Put another way, a cat is smart enough to possess a sort of raw animal cunning and fuzzy self-absorption, but does not quite possess the necessary level of intelligence to craft a world of comfortable illusions about itself. The world of the cat is raw and unadorned, lacking in such finery as self-delusion, misplaced idealism, or blind faith. Cats, so it is said, see the world around them exactly for what it is.
The one who called herself Morrigan Aensland had been aware of this for some time. The usual deceptions, suggestions and recursive assumptions she crafted from the loose detritus of peoples' minds in order to confuse, distract, or bewitch the occasional individual never worked on cats, who had minds like a smooth, lean coat of fur. This wasn't a particularly anxious concern, however. Cats minded their own business and kept their own counsel, and rarely had any use for the affairs of humans, save for feeding, petting or shelter. She didn't interfere in their business, so they saw no reason to concern themselves with hers. Theirs was a highly convivial arrangement.
Therefore, Morrigan had no objection on a warm night in high summer, deep in the barrio of downtown East Los Angeles where the heat rose in waves off the pavement, when a gangly orange and white tabby casually hopped over the edge of a fire escape to saunter onto her rooftop, seeking nothing more than to find a quiet spot and take a nap after a meal of a particularly filling rat. When he saw Morrigan, he stopped, and stared, entirely immune to the massive screen of mild hypnotic lures and subtle cues that led the attention of humans and even other animals in other directions, though he could see it stretching above her like a series of concentric domes. She lay stretched out upon a long beach towel, lying on her stomach, entirely nude, which he knew vaguely was somewhat rare for humans, even in L.A. Long arms perched on elbows, fingers laced together to support her chin atop the backs of her hands. A bare calf wagged languidly up and down. However the most unusual feature in the tableau set before him was the immense, black, leathery, and vaguely batlike wings attached to her body, just below her shoulderblades. Their movements described a slow, lazy undulation, up from their nadir at the hard concrete of the rooftop to their zenith, barely touching against each other at a perpendicular angle to their owner as they spread to their full span, and then down once again, a warm breeze resulting from their passage. Dangerously sharp claws curled from each wing's apex. At the animal's approach, her head, crowned with a mane of soft, silky-tressed sea-green hair, lazily turned to regard him through half-lidded eyes of piercing cobalt-blue, though their expression communicated nothing but a mild and easy languor; almost, he noted, bordering on catlike. Much smaller black wings curled up from the sides of her head from within the waterfall of green, just above her ears, where they flapped lightly to fan her face, but to his feline sense of priority these were far less unusual than the wings upon her back, due to their clear difference in size.
Morrigan, for her part, relished the occasional opportunity to loll about in this form, pretending to believe that her wing-muscles would otherwise grow stiff and sore from disuse. In fact the ethereal nature of her wings made such a term as 'muscle' entirely irrelevant, but the sensual pleasure of stretching them made such a difference entirely academic. It was an easy form of self-indulgence, and it cost her nothing. "Hello," she purred aloud to her feline visitor, before intimating to him through a series of non-verbal signals and sub-vocal communication, similar to the ones that cats themselves employed, that his company at this time was not unwelcome. But there was no pressure if he was busy The cat agreeably trotted over to the recumbent form before him, pawed against her side for a moment to test the security of his potential perch, before hopping up onto her backside, well out of reach of the slowly flapping wings. Morrigan's eyes closed, letting one arm drop while her cheek leaned against her opposite palm. A small sigh escaped her lips at the feel of his fur against her bare skin, as the cat turned around a few times before curling into a compact furry ball, settling warmly into the cradle formed by the small of her back. Once fully satisfied with his position, he commenced an agreeable purring, the tip of his tail drowsily brushing against the curve of her hip. Quite an equitable arrangement for all concerned.
"Wanna hear a story?" she murmured softly after a long moment of languorous drifting, accompanying the question with its sub-verbal equivalent. The feline modulated the amplitude and pitch of his steady purrs to a short burst of staccato, signaling in the affirmative. "Once upon a time," she began, "I knew someone who loved cats with all her heart..."
Edinburgh, Scotland - Spring, 1687
Inside the somber and forbidding 12th-century architecture of Holyrood Abbey, its conical spires and parapets jabbing the sky with the insistent strength of its history, there lay a small green courtyard consisting of a few stone benches, misshapen by age, ancient ash trees, dandelions, thistles, and overgrown grass, weeds, and shrubs covering all. The grounds were hilly and uneven, covered with loose scree and dead leaves, a testament to generations of lackadaisical groundskeepers preferring to spend their time in the local Edinburgh taverns.
The present Holyrood groundskeeper was a man named Fergus Frasbett, who maintained this legendary tradition of negligence by spending the lion's share of his days and nights firmly ensconced in the welcoming fellowship of the local Edinburgh rowdies down at an alehouse known as 'The Two Maries'. Painted effigies hung by nooses above the tavern's lintel of both Mary of Guise, that dowager Queen of Scotland who ran the kingdom as a satellite of the French, and Mary Stuart, her daughter and that Queen who fled to England from a charge of plotting to kill her husband, Lord Darnley. In a lack of judgment that was regarded by the Edinburgh populace as typically Stuart, she spent most of her time engaging in clumsy attempts to depose Elizabeth, the English Queen, until the wise yet sad Queen Bess finally chopped the fool woman's head off. There had been a lot of sympathy for Elizabeth in Scotland, which had endured centuries of Stuart rule.
"By God, if but Queen Bess were Scottish," Frasbett and his fellows would often say, especially in those days, raising a tankard to that illustrious monarch of what was, much of the time, Scotland's most hated rival. "We'd have married her off to a fine Scottish lad and given her a bundle of bonny Scottish princes and plump Scottish princesses!" The age-old Anglo-Scottish enmity had waned briefly a century before when the same Queen Bess had helped the Scots free themselves from the French, to whom a previous Stuart had foolishly sold virtual control of the kingdom for the hand of the lovely Marie de Guise. Several years after that, the same Faerie Queen would defend the Isles from the hated Spanish, whose dastardly King Philip sought to bring all of Britain under his dainty Habsburg bootheel and return them all to the soul-grubbing arms of the equally-hated Pope Sixtus V. Francis Drake and the Sea-Dogs, as well as a gift from God of foul English weather, had sunk most of the fleet; that which remained had limped north to Scotland and tried to put in at the port of Leith for repairs, only to be met by the port battery guns of the Black Watch and well-nigh a thousand stout and righteous stone-throwing Presbyterians shouting good honest Scottish obscenities most foul at the top of their hardy Scottish lungs. Sadly, poor Elizabeth's own ungrateful subjects would never let the poor girl marry, in a move most regarded as typically and perfidiously English, and when she died, the throne had passed to the son of Mary Stuart, King James VI of Scotland, a dubious prospect for both kingdoms.
Frasbett, who considered himself an upright Presbyterian though seldom attended services (rather like most upright Presbyterians), hated his Catholic employers at Holyrood and took every opportunity to declare his disloyalty. Except of course on the day he was paid, when, hat in hand, he visited the offices of the Abbot, Brother Sergius, to collect his weekly sum of unholy papist gold. Nor did Frasbett distrust the Abbey enough not to leave his only daughter Felicity in their constant care while he spent his time raising mugs of ale and mead with his cohorts.
His choice in babysitter might have been indifference, of course. Felicity's mother Eldspeth Frasbett, whose famous taste for good honest Scotch whiskey was rivaled only by that of her husband, caught a bad case of the flu following her pregnancy and hadn't lived long past the birth, which had been regarded even by the local Edinburgh midwives as extremely difficult. The woman's last thoughts were of her daughter, holding the babe close to her breast and whispering, "my Felicia... my Felicia..." Those would prove to be her last words, as well.
Felicity had been cursed by the further misfortunes of having a cleft lip and palette, clubbed and webbed feet, a hunched back, and a misshapen stump for a left arm. Her head was oddly oversized as well, which the local physicians had attributed to an excess of fluids and bodily humors in her cranium. In the years following her birth, Fergus virtually ignored his daughter, leaving her to be cared for and raised by the sisters of the Holyrood nunnery. It was thus that little Felicity Frasbett met her best friend in all the world, Holyrood Abbey's only resident orphan, who had been baptized on a dark All Hallow's Eve eight and a half years before as Margaret Morgana MacAensland Stuart. Felicity called her 'Morgan', while Margaret dubbed Felicity with the name 'Figgy'. Both girls had no parents to speak of. Felicity's mother was lost to influenza and her father to the bottle, while Morgan had always been told, quite falsely, that she'd been found in a wicker basket on the Abbey doorstep.
The two became inseparable; often, when they were seen playing together, the other inmates at the abbey would shake their heads and make signs of warding. "Aye, that makes sense," they would sneer. "A Covenanter and a child of the Evil One." No other children were resident in the abbey below the age of twelve. None of the Brothers of the monastery or the Sisters of the nunnery would speak to either of them unless they had to, save for Morgan's two guardians, Sister Alexandra and Sister Pauline, and all the young novices were told to keep their distance. Thus all the girls had for the most part was each other. Though little Morgan's time, unfortunately, was forever being filled by endlessly tedious instruction from Abbey tutors, in a variety of subjects ranging from Latin to mathematics to history, and often the only chances the two girls had to play together was when Morgan managed to engineer some devious escape plan from the watchful eyes of Alexandra and Pauline. No one bothered to educate Felicity, who most of the time was left to her own devices. Each girl secretly envied the other.
So it was that when she was off by herself one day, in a quiet corner of the Abbey, young Felicity discovered a small fissure in the wall where the stone had partially given way, exposing a small hole to the outside. It wasn't large enough for a person to fit through, not that Felicity had any wish to venture beyond the walls of the Abbey. She couldn't walk very well, and the few times she'd been to the city, the world had seemed a vast, forbidding and dirty place, where everyone was staring at her and there was always smoke in the air. The hole opened into a small alleyway, situated between the Abbey's wall and a small stand of trees nearby. Beyond that lay a low hill, the spires and towers of grim stone buildings rising from below.
What captured Felicity's attention was the inner edge of the alley, where lay the most amazing thing she'd ever seen in her life. A mother cat giving birth to kittens, the tiny creatures entering the world pink, naked, and utterly defenseless. The mother cat was thin, not quite emaciated, her eyes closed as she lay on a pile of trash and dead scrub-brush swept against the wall, the poor mother-cat's chest heaving tiredly as she gasped for breath. Within moments, Felicity was hobbling toward the abbey kitchens, where she pounded on the rear entrance with her good hand, only to be loudly and roughly informed from behind the locked wooden door that it wasn't lunchtime yet. "Go away, you filthy Covenanter brat!"
Sobbing, gasping for breath, moving faster than she'd ever moved in her life, Felicity was desperately stumbling toward the nunnery, hoping to find anyone who'd listen to her pleas, when God gave her a miracle. Sitting in the courtyard were none other than Sisters Alexandra and Pauline, reading from open books, Morgan sitting between them with a book open in her lap and looking bored. "Mor-GAN!" Felicity screeched, running forward and waving her hand. "Morgan please help theres a mama kitty she looks sick we need milk pleasehelpmehelpmehelpme HELP!"
Morgan, welcoming the interruption, tossed the book off her lap and jumped to her feet to run toward Felicity, only to be caught on the shoulder by the restraining iron grip of Sister Alexandra, her guardian since birth. Morgan's arms waved forward, as her feet tried to carry her free, but Alexandra's grip was viselike and unbreakable. "Your lessons!" Alexandra barked. "You can play with your little godless heretic friend later."
"Let me go!" Morgan wailed. "Figgy's in trouble, can't you see?" Felicity had managed to totter halfway across the courtyard before the uneven ground and rubble resulting from her drunken father's inattention to his duties caused her unsteady stride to falter, the girl pitching forward to fall flat on her face. Alexandra's resolve weakened as Felicity's face lifted from the ground, streaked with tears as she starting bawling in frustration and fear.
It was enough for the nun's grip to loosen, allowing Morgan the chance to lunge forward and escape her grasp, with enough force to stumble a few paces and almost trip over her plain brown dress. Quickly righting herself with preternatural deftness, she broke out into a furious run before finally falling to her knees at her friend's side. The duo exchanged several urgent words that Alexandra couldn't hear. Grunting, the nun lifted herself to her feet, straightening her nun's habit and jerking her head toward the two girls at Pauline, who was sitting there blinking her eyes. "Come on," sighed Alexandra.
"This probably won't be good." Pauline quickly shut her book and carefully placed it to the side, scrambling to her feet. The younger Sister was ten years Alexandra's junior and had been only a young novice, freshly arrived at the abbey from some tiny hamlet deep in the Highlands, when she'd been assigned to assist Alexandra in caring for Morgan once the girl had proven to be the devil's own handful.
As Alexandra and Pauline approached the two girls, Morgan helped Felicity regain her footing; and when Alexandra finally reached her, putting her hands on her hips and trying to tower over the young orphan, Morgan was standing with her arms crossed, her feet planted, and what she hoped was a sternly commanding expression on her face. "Figgy needs milk and some meat," she declared. Felicity stood behind her shyly, her eyes downcast, intimidated by the Sisters' presence.
"Young Felicity can wait until lunchtime with the rest of us," Alexandra replied flatly, not deigning to spare a glance at Felicity herself. "Though perhaps girls who ignore their schooling don't deserve a good meal, eh?"
Morgan was unmoved by the threat, her gaze never wavering. "Figgy needs MILK," she repeated, stamping her foot.
Pauline, dropping to her knees, fell into her usual role of peacemaker between the two. "Morgana, please," she said, reaching a hand for the girl's shoulder. The sisters tended to call her 'Morgan' or 'Morgana' as well, for their own reasons. "Once we finish your Latin we can all go to lunch and have plenty. What do you say?"
Morgan only batted Pauline's hand away as her gaze remained fixed on Alexandra. "Figgy needs milk NOW," she stated, putting her own hands on her hips to echo Alexandra's stance. There was a drawn-out pause as the will of the girl clashed with that of the older woman, until Morgan leaned forward, her eyes narrowing. "If Figgy does not get her milk NOW, then I will not learn any more Latin! And I'll forget all the Latin I've learned already. It will all be gone! Bye-bye Latin!" Alexandra's eyes remained cold and unmoving, as did her face. For a moment, Morgan wondered if she'd taken a step too far - Sister Alexandra wasn't above an old-fashioned boxing of the ears. "But if Figgy gets her milk and some meat," Morgan continued, smiling hopefully and leaning back, her hands moving behind her waist, eyes casting downward, "then for the rest of the day, I will be the best Latin student ever. No talking back, no rolling my eyes, no daydreaming, woolgathering, or lollygagging. Just 'yes Sister' and 'no Sister', ad nauseum. Won't that be mirabile visu?" Morgan lifted her eyes again, putting on her widest, charmingest, most dazzling smile for the Sister's benefit.
Alexandra remained motionless, her gaze inscrutable. The tension stretched onward for a moment, before her head leaned to the side toward Pauline, eyes never leaving Morgan's. "Turn her around."
Pauline did as she was bid, gently but quickly grabbing Morgan by the shoulders and spinning her around, the girl letting out a yelp. Behind her back the eight-year-old's hand was grasping the wrist of the other, the opposite hand clenched in a fist. Pauline turned her head to report. "Fingers uncrossed, Sister Alex."
Alexandra allowed for a moment the idea of an entire day with an attentive, perfect little angel taking Morgana's place to infiltrate her resolve. Such temptation, she decided, even God must surely forgive. She made a spinning gesture to Pauline, who turned Morgan around once again, smiling weakly in apology to the girl. Pauline had far too much sympathy for the little she-beast than Alexandra was comfortable with. Morgan giggled as she spun, then quickly lifted her face to Alexandra once more with a hopeful expression. Alexandra knelt down, bringing her face level with the girl's, who leaned back just a little, blinking her eyes. "You have a deal, child," Alexandra told her. "I'll forgive your earlier lack of respect as well if you manage to keep your word. For nothing is more dear in the sight of God than an oath given in good faith. Do we understand each other?"
Morgan nodded earnestly. "Yes, Sister Alexandra."
The little party, Alexandra in front, Pauline in her train, Morgan and Felicity following behind hand-in-hand, thereafter descended upon the abbey kitchens. When told that lunch wasn't for another hour, Alexandra, with all the wrath of the Almighty that she normally employed with Morgan - but to gratifyingly better effect with the cooks and kitchen drudges - informed the staff that God's mercy was spontaneous and forgiving, while the fires of Hell kept to a rigid schedule and their rules were never broken for anyone. It wasn't so much the content of her speech, but its delivery, that inspired the kitchen staff to present to the little party two bowls of milk, a bowl of water for good measure, and a plate of finely chopped beef within mere moments. All the while Morgan had to struggle not to giggle her head off, as Pauline and the normally shy and diffident Felicity covered their mouths from apparent fits of choking. As they exited the kitchens, even Alexandra allowed herself a small smile, feeling somewhat vindicated in her technique for sternness, since obviously it wasn't a lack of authoritativeness on Alexandra's part that made Morgan so willful. She was just a devil-child, purely and simply. As such thoughts veered in that direction, however, she quickly banished them, willing herself to forget the circumstances of the girl's birth. Her reverie was interrupted by Morgan turning to face her and affecting a small, grateful curtsy. "I shall return in ten minutes to honor our agreement," she earnestly informed the two nuns. Then in one impulsive moment she carefully put down the plate of beef she carried, lunged forward to hug Alexandra around the legs, then turned around again, picked up the plate once more and scurried off with Felicity to deeper within the Abbey, laden with their precious cargo. Felicity stumbled and hobbled a little as she led the way, but managed to keep the two to a rapid pace without dropping the bowls she carried so carefully.
Sister Pauline allowed herself a smile of her own. "Perhaps they've found a poor, lonely soul without sustenance," she said, clasping her hands together. "Such small hearts are always bursting with goodness." When Alexandra didn't make her usual cynical reply, Pauline turned toward her, blinking her eyes in curiosity. "Alex," she says after a moment, lifting a finger. "Are you blushing?"
Alexandra quickly turned away, raspily clearing her throat. "Absolutely not. Quickly, we must prepare the most intense lesson plan ever devised," she grunted, stalking forward. "We have only ten minutes. We cannot waste such a God-sent opportunity!"
Pauline followed behind her, smiling. "Yes, Sister Alexandra."
With the help of Felicity and Morgan, the kittens and their mother managed to survive, and grow strong. It became Felicity's obsession to return to that little hole in the wall, leaving whatever food she could spare from her own meals for the little feline family. As the kittens became cats, they still visited, anxiously mewling for Felicity's attention, which she gave happily. Soon other cats in the neighborhood, perhaps venturing thither to see what the fuss was about, would visit as well. Over time, Felicity began to volunteer to assist in the kitchens or the scullery, and though in the beginning she was either ignored or even kicked aside by irritated kitchen staff, they eventually grew to appreciate her willingness to engage in tasks the rest of them found either too distasteful or tedious. Her reward was some of the extra food they would otherwise either burn or bury, or toss over the wall. Each morsel she would slip through her little hole in the wall to her friends, who were always waiting for her. Occasionally some of them began to slip through that hole, and let her pet them, or hold them in her lap. It wasn't long before all the cats of Edinburgh knew the scent of Felicity Frasbett, and knew she was a friend to their kind.
Morgan occasionally helped out as well, but despite her laziness the girl ate like a starving war-horse and for the most part could not herself be troubled to spare any food.
Epilogue
Many of the concepts integral to the story were lost upon Morrigan's audience. For one thing, the idea of the 'past' was so remote and alien to feline sensibilities that the idea that there were cats who somehow existed before his own lifetime struck Morrigan's visitor as somehow ludicrous. They may have looked like cats, acted like cats, and felt themselves to be cats, but they did not qualify as cats in the same sense that he was a cat. Humans, or even dogs for that matter, had more in common with cats as he understood them than some almost-cats who did not, strictly speaking, have a concrete existence save in Morrigan's memories. These and other mild criticisms he attempted to communicate to his gracious and satin-skinned hostess, while at the same time granting that, all-in-all, it was certainly a tale worthy of his attention. He went on to inform her that he would pay her little narrative quite the compliment in the near future by borrowing bits and pieces of it for himself, molding them more to feline tastes, and then regaling his friends and potential mates with the story of a human so enlightened as to her proper place in the world that nothing was more important to her than a cat's appetite. A story that would also include her selfish friend, who despite occasional flashes of compassion for others cared only to stuff her own face.
"Thank you," said Morrigan, with barely a trace of archness in her tone. She made a mental note to evict her guest as soon as possible. Not right now, of course. Perhaps later, when they weren't quite so comfortable. In fact, there was really no hurry. What was she thinking about? Oh yes, she thought to herself, the moonlight. Diffusing through the skin of her wings like light through the facets of a jewel, the warm air gently rolling in currents and eddies beneath them as they stretch up, and down. Up, and down.
The bristling, burgeoning nightlife of East L.A. raced intensely past them below, brightly illuminated by headlights and orange street-lamps, yet entirely oblivious to her presence.