Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God Read online

  The coffin case in which my mummy was placed was of carved sandalwood and was so cunningly carved that it resembled me to the life so that when my priestesses looked upon it they wept and said, “That is indeed Bast the Beautiful, our beloved,” for so I was known. And the coffin was painted in lemon yellow and white and cinnabar, for such was my coloring of mottled lemon and madder, with white feet and breast and with green eyes, and therefore the eyes of the coffin were two emeralds.

  Harps and trumpets played and the sound of the sistra were heard above the weeping; the priests shaved their heads and eyebrows when they brought me to my vault, but my ka ascended and remained in the keeping of Isis-Hathor, lady of heaven.

  I was born and lived a goddess. I died. I was resurrected and born again.

  The months of my festivals in Bubastis were April and May, and in my honor the inhabitants of the city gathered in a great fleet of ships with banks of oars flashing in the sunlight; the boats were painted blue and crimson and the sails dyed in purple or ocher and the vessels of the priests and priestesses gleamed with gold and silver, all, all in my honor, so great a goddess was I.

  And as they sailed up the two branches of the Nile that enclosed my island city, they played upon drums and tabors and castanets, the heavenly voices of my priestesses rose above the silvery shivering of the sistra.

  And I, within the sanctuary of my temple, waited and dozed and slept and dreamed those dreams that were to become the destinies of men, spinning those strands that enmeshed them from the cradle to the grave. For I was and am Bast, the living goddess.

  My temple was the most graceful of all those in the city, and light and airy, with the inner court surrounded by a grove of trees whose branches gave cool and pleasant shade. My temple buildings were more than two hundred yards long and the same in width and the columns of my inner sanctuary were of porphyry. My priestesses were chosen from the most beautiful and pure maidens of Bubastis and they served me night and day.

  All this is changed now. My temple is a small stone house. I have but one priestess. Her name is Lori. She has not the beauty of my twelve priestesses of the Nile, for her skin is fair. Her eyes as light as mine, and her hair the color of the copper ingots that used to lie gleaming on the wharf at Bubastis. But she is kind and sings to me beautifully.

  I am in a different country and a different era. It is 3914 years since last I dwelt on earth. It is the year 1957 once more, the fourth of the reign of the great Queen Elizabeth II in the ninth Dynasty of Great Britain. I live in the cold northland of Scotland. It is here in a forest hut by a brook close to an arm of the salt sea that my ka has been returned to me and I live again. The others of our household do not believe in me and laugh when I tell them I am a goddess. Even my name is changed, for my priestess calls me Talitha. But I am Bast-Ra. I still dream the dreams of the destinies of men and spin the strands of fate by which they are ensnared. And someday they will know my power here as they did in my first incarnation by the banks of the Nile.

  It is a curious thing to be a goddess, all knowing, all powerful—and to be a cat as well.

  Sometimes in my temple sanctuary in Bubastis I used to laugh softly to myself at the cleverness of men. Oh, so, so clever! They walk erect, they use their hands and wear clothes; they have invented speech and writing, they can send messages from afar, fight wars, sail the waters, ride the land, store up food and wealth and rule the earth, and yet they prayed to us.

  For all of their being men and lords of the earth, they came a-begging to us of favors, burned incense to us, brought us gifts, sang to us and danced and staffed us with priests and servants.

  When I heard them approaching, tambours beating, sistra shivering, trumpets braying, when I smelled the incense from afar and heard the measured tramp of feet and the voices raised in songs of praise, and thought ahead to the address of the supplicant; “Oh, great Goddess Bast, oh, Bast-Ra, oh, great Sekhmet-Bast-Ra, child of the gleaming lady of heaven, protector of thy heavenly father the sun, oh, perfumed one, wondrous one, look with favor upon this humble supplicant and grant him this one prayer—” it was hard for me to repress a snigger.

  But at other times, deep in my heart, I pitied them.

  For it must be painful to be at once so great and yet so small, to be lord of all and yet master of nothing, to walk the earth as conqueror and yet never for a moment to live without fear.

  But I, Bast-Ra, feared no one or nothing because I was a goddess and lived in a shrine, and because of me, all cats in the land might walk free of fear. Whoever harmed one of us was punished by death, imprisonment or banishment, for those were times when men were wiser and trod softly in the presence of their superiors.

  In the days of my godhood when even my father the sun god Ra was referred to as The Great Cat, I represented the beneficent powers of the sun; I concerned myself with the fertility of the fields and the fertility of women; I was beauty and voluptuousness; the hieroglyph for my name was the picture of a jar of perfume; I comforted those maddened by the moon and contended with the desert jackal for the soul of the world.

  For the jackal is a liar and the Dog of Evil. Our world was directed by the gods of which I was one, and not a bird, not a lamb might be injured without justice being visited upon the perpetrator for his violence. In the eternal struggle between good and evil, those who believed in the gods knew that in the end virtue must triumph and we must win. Storms darkened the air, winds wrought their havoc, thunders and lightnings split the heavens, yet in the end the sun returned and sailed its bark across the arc of the sky, the moon and the stars came out again, and all was right with the world once more.

  Those were the days of my power, when I could blast, forgive, arrange, preordain, punish, reward, grant favors and protection, produce sunshine for picnics and moonshine for lovers, when men swore “By Great Bast,” and I could work wonders when I felt so inclined.

  All this seems changed now and my powers are diminished, for no one believes that I am a god or worships me or prays to me, not even Lori, though she loves and serves me and in her way performs those rites of morning and evening that I require. To remain a god, to keep the god-power, people must believe you are and that you hold it, as they did when I reigned in the temple of Khufu in far-off Bubastis. There was in us all, in the scarab, the mouse, the crocodile, the cow, as well as us cats, the sacredness which gave us the Power to be not as man or beast, but as God, the power to hearken to the groans of man, his fear and despair, and twist the skein to alter the threads of his destiny. For so he believed. We lived, we died, we gods and goddesses, but the Power stayed and so will remain as long as there is yet one who believes and calls upon it

  It was strange that my priestess Lori did not know me for who and what I was, for she was a human whom the Power once at some time had touched. She lived more in my world than in hers. It was the world of little beasts to whom she was nurse, mother, friend, and priestess, serving them. Like us, Lori saw and communed with things out of the past, the little forgotten creature-gods that once had been man’s friend and allies on earth, elves and pixies, naiads of the brook and hamadryads of the trees, brownies and kobolds, nixies and sprites, faeries and things of the air, visible and invisible. And she saw and conversed, too, with that new heavenly host, angel and archangel, cherub, cherubim, and seraphim.

  Besides which, my Lori was a weaver. She spun wool into thread and gathered the thread into skeins, the skeins she wove upon her hand loom into cloth, and the cloth she returned to the sheep farmers and herders up in the hills and they gave her food in exchange and enough money for her needs and sometimes they brought her things for the hospital where she tended the sick and injured beasts who came to her, or that she found in the woods; bandages and medicines, and simple grease and tallow from which she made the salves and unguents that she used out of the herbs she found and collected in the forest.

  In Lori’s household, in Inveranoch of Argyllshire, Scotland, in the summer of the year 1957, I, Bast-Ra, go
ddess of Bubastis, who reigned in Egypt in the year 1957 before the coming of the Christ god, I set up my sanctuary and entered into my temple again.

  I remember the day when my ka descended from heaven out of the hands of Hathor and entered a body once more, and Lori brought me forth.

  She set me down before the little stone cottage that was to be my temple and said to the others, “Here is a new friend for you, she shall be called Talitha.” The others were very ordinary beasts, three cats, a kitten or two, a jackdaw, a mangy Scots terrier, an old sheep dog, a hedgehog and a squirrel. The cats spit at me, the dogs barked, the jackdaw screeched, the hedgehog rolled himself into a ball, and the squirrel chattered and scolded.

  Lori said, “Come, ’tis no’ a kind way to welcome a stranger. Are ye not ashamed of yourselves?”

  One of the cats, the yellow Tom with a scarred face, whose name I later learned was McMurdock, put his back up, but Wullie, a plain-looking ordinary black with no breeding whatsoever, but who was the oldest there, remembered something of manners and came forward and said, “Well then, before we welcome you, who are you and where do you come from? Also what do you want? As you can see, there are quite a lot of us, there is hardly enough to go around now and we could do very well without another, thank you.”

  I replied, “I am Bast-Ra the sacred, the beautiful, the lustrous and the all powerful. I am Sekhmet-Bast-Ra; my father is the sun, my mother the moon; his name was Amen-Ra, hers Isis-Hathor. The world rides upon the arch of my back. I am sacred and venerated and called ‘Lady of the East.’ ”

  The two kittens stopped playing with their tails and ran to their mother, a long-haired tabby named Dorcas, and Wullie said, “Can’t say I ever heard of them, but I’ll admit you talk big for one small, ugly she-cat—”

  The anger of the gods flamed up in me and in another instant I should have summoned Horus the falcon to plummet from the sky and peck out their livers. But I decided to give them one more chance before blasting them.

  I fluffed up my tail and fur and stretched to my full height “I am Bast-Ra, the divine, goddess of Bubastis, bow down before me and worship; pray that I do not smite you from the face of the earth, fools, blasphemers, unbelievers, prostrate yourselves, look not upon my divine countenance lest my glory blind you.”

  I was greeted with roars of laughter, I, the sky goddess returned to earth. They shouted with laughter, holding their sides and rolling on the ground! The magpie flapped its wings and screamed, the squirrel ran up a tree, and the dogs became hysterical, the Scotty coming at me in short rushes, pretending to nip at my tail, until, not even bothering to blast him, I hit him a practical one on the nose that gave him something to think about.

  But the others were still shouting and rolling about, thumping one another on the back and wiping their eyes. Dorcas hurried her kittens away, while making motions toward her head as though I were mad. McMurdock said, with his back suddenly arched, “You try any blinding around here, my lass, and you’ll get what for.”

  There was then nothing left for me to do but to blast these impious ones, shiver, shrivel, burn, and slay them and let their carcasses be fed to the sacred crocodiles. I called upon Sopdu and Anubis, Maahes and the great and fearful serpent Apophis and his brothers, Besit and Mehen, Ammut who devoured the souls of the condemned and Aden, the demon of sickness.

  Yet none came and nothing happened to the blasphemers.

  The earth failed to open and swallow them up. They remained there unharmed, howling with sacrilegious laughter.

  It was my first experience with those who did not believe. I was about to be beside myself with indignation, outrage, and shame when Lori settled the matter. She picked me up, saying, “Well, if they won’t be having you or be polite, you shall be my ain puss then,” and she took me inside the little temple where she dwelt and where I was the only one allowed, though I was not permitted to go abovestairs where she slept. Instead she made me a shrine in a basket by the side of the fireplace in the room next, where her loom was kept, and I accepted her as my priestess and soon busied myself to find out where I was and to what kind of life I had returned.

  It was a strange and very sacred place, this forest temple, for few if any humans ever seemed to come there and then only when they brought a sick dog or injured wild thing to be healed. The shepherds from the hills, and the crofters from the wild country up glen sometimes came across some little beast of field or forest that had been caught in a trap, or suffered an injury. Then they rang the silver Mercy Bell that hung from a branch of the great covin oak that stood outside my temple, and Lori came forth to learn their needs.

  They seemed to be afraid of Lori as indeed they should be of one who was a priestess now devoted to a true goddess. Rarely a shepherd would stay to have a wound upon his dogs leg or foot bound up, but mostly if they had some small wild thing they would leave it at the foot of the rope beneath the bell and vanish before Lori appeared. Lori never answered a knock at her door, or a shout, but only the silvery ringing of the Mercy Bell, which reminded me of the shivery glitter of the sistra of the priestesses, shaken in my honor in that Bubastis, removed from me by nearly four thousand years. Later Wullie, who was a most knowledgeable cat, even if plain and common, told me that Lori had found the bell in the woods far up in the glen and that it had once been used by Rob Roy, the outlaw, to warn him of the coming of the King’s men.

  There were three rooms on the ground floor of the stone house I called my temple; the kitchen, then the one with the fireplace, which was my shrine, and the big bare room where the loom was kept. There was a room up the stairs, a kind of loft where Lori slept, but I was not allowed to go up there even though I was a goddess.

  Behind the cottage there was a small barn of stone with a slate roof and here it was that Lori had her hospital for hurt things and there were several places on the roof where the tiles were off that McMurdock showed me, where one could climb up and peer down inside and watch Lori as she tended the sick and the wounded. There was a rabbit and several shrews and field mice, some birds that had fallen out of their nests, and a young stoat that had an injured foot. There were many vacant pens and small wire cages, but Mac tells me that often it is quite full.

  Oh yes, it is “Mac” and “Wullie” now, and even Dorcas, who is a snob, is quite friendly and lets me wash her kittens sometimes; the dogs have learned to keep their places. I never spoke of Bubastis again, or my godhead, and nothing more was said, even though the jackdaw would sometimes flap his wings when he saw me coming and screech, “Hi there, Goddess, old girl.” The dogs thought it was very funny, but I must say the cats rallied round and didn’t even seem to mind that I lived in Lori’s house.

  But I knew who I was and who and what I had been and that someday I would show them my power and what a goddess can do when she is determined. The Power would return and I would spin and weave like Lori and once again twist the threads of human destiny and bind the cloth of life.

  My ka felt at peace and satisfied with my new body. There were no mirrors in Lori’s house, but from what I saw of myself looking into the pool made by the burn near to the house, I was beautiful and not unlike in color and markings what I had been when I was the adored of all and man’s hope and guide in my temple by the Nile.

  There I had inspired love in my priestesses, who, in private, when there were no priests about or temple officials, used to stroke me and cuddle me and scratch me under my chin and let me listen to their gossip, where you may be sure I learned a great many things I used in my goddess business, and this was the case with Lori too, for she spoiled and hugged me and, when she was at her loom, sang to me, for she soon learned that I loved to be sung to and was used to it. Her voice was high and sweet like the reed flutes of Bubastis and sometimes when I shut my eyes I could fancy myself back there again in my sanctuary, listening to the music of my worshipers come to adore and petition me.

  I was not unhappy in my new incarnation as Talitha. Lori was attentive and kind. There was suf
ficient to eat, but it was forbidden to go out and catch something even if I had wished to do so, for Lori could not bear to see harm come to any living thing and through that alone I should have recognized her as a priestess and one of us.

  And so, soon, my life was proceeding peacefully and happily and would have no doubt continued to do so but for the coming of the Man with the Red Beard—

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  Mr. MacDhui was marching truculently through Dumreith Street, bareheaded, thrusting through the summer drizzle, having just paid what he considered an utterly useless call upon a spinster who kept her cat in a child’s crib, when a black umbrella sailed up alongside him, and he heard the quick patter of feet attempting to fall into stride and keep pace with him.

  “Would you wish me to try to have a word with the child?” Mr. Peddie asked, with no preliminaries or greetings, and then added seemingly inconsequentially, “You know it will be time soon for her to be thinking of attending the Sunday school.”

  The second speech served to distract and take the sting out of the first query, and the roar that had been gathering within MacDhui deflated, since he was not sure whether he had been presented with one idea or two.

  “I am not at all sure I want her to attend the Sunday school,” he growled, but then considered in softer vein, “I suppose, after all, her mother would have wished it and seen to it if she were here.” And a moment later, “Confound it, man, why do you have to come a-bothering me at this time with such business?”

  It had been an unhappy fortnight for Mr. Veterinary MacDhui, living as an outcast in his own house, eating his meals in the chill of his daughter’s stony glare and silence, and listening to the nervous remarks of Mrs. McKenzie trying to fill the breach.