Anton and Cecil (13 page)

CHAPTER 11

A Mouse at Sea

A
s Anton jumped down to the deck of the new ship, the clacker feathers lodged around his shoulders pricked him as he moved, and though he couldn't see them, he had a mental image of what he must look like. A cat with feathers! Approaching him was something he had rarely met on land, but never at sea: a toddling baby girl. Behind her came another onboard first for Anton: a young woman, presumably the child's mother, hurrying along with her hands on her hips, speaking in a way that made it clear she wanted to be listened to but didn't expect to be. The child had spotted Anton and was cooing joyfully, reaching out to grab him if she could, but Anton made sure she couldn't. He didn't want to hurt her, so he dodged this way and that, which made the baby laugh, and the mother laughed, too.

Anton sighed, leaping atop a coiled rope, thinking about how lonely it was on a ship, because the only creatures to talk to were rats, and they said nothing worth hearing. Anton's conversation with Dave the lizard had been the most companionable one he'd had in a long time. He thought of the long evening chats with Cecil, as they strolled about trading stories they had heard from other cats. Sometimes Anton had talked with some of the gulls that hung around the wharf, but it was hard to understand them and they were very full of themselves. Seen it all; that was gulls. He'd spoken to a dog occasionally. As Cecil pointed out, they weren't all bad, but one didn't see them much and they were often on leashes, which looked dreadful as far as Anton was concerned, though the dogs seemed quite happy with their lot. This baby could scarcely make her mother understand her, so there wouldn't be much hope there. “Cat,” the baby crowed. “Cat.”

The mother said, “Yes, that's a cat.” They were both smiling and the mother approached Anton cautiously, holding out her hand for him to sniff. “How on earth did you get here?” she said. “And what bird have you tangled with? You must have dropped out of the sky.”

She might pull the feathers off,
Anton thought. She was very interested in them. He sat still and put on his most serious expression. She brought her fingers around his face cautiously, molding his cheek in her palm, and he felt such a chill run down his spine that he shrugged a little. She murmured something consoling. Then she began to feel around the base of the feathers. “I see,” she said. “I see.” Carefully she began to pluck them out one by one. Anton thought of his own mother, cleaning his face and neck with her rough pink tongue, but always gentle, even when she had to use her teeth to loosen up a knot of fur. He was so tired from his ordeal with the clackers that he nearly fell asleep while the woman petted and plucked and crooned to him. It was a good thing, he decided, to have a woman on a ship.

When the kind lady had removed his feather dressing, Anton set to work giving himself a good cleaning from head to toe. The captain had come out by this time and spoke with his wife, who gestured from Anton to the sea, to the sky, and back again. The captain puffed his pipe, wide-eyed at first, then squinting closely at Anton, he picked up a feather from the pile on the deck, looked up at the sky, and examined the feather as if it was a text. “
A cat that falls out of the sky is one we'd better make welcome,” he said. Taking up the baby, who shouted with joy, he carried her off to the cabin. His wife, with a nod at Anton that told him he was on his own, followed her family.

There were sailors aloft in the rigging, and one fellow working on a barrel near the stern. Anton could smell fish cooking in the fo'c'sle. He leaped down from the rope coil and slunk along toward the promising odor.

The moment he stepped through the doorway, Anton knew there was a mouse behind the hardtack barrel, but he had to pay attention to the humans who greeted his appearance with shouts of surprise. “Will you look at what the cat drug in,” one shouted to the next. And another said, “It's a catfish for sure.” The cook, a young fellow with bright blue eyes and a black beard that grew to his chest, studied Anton with a suspicious look, but Anton sat down and sniffed the air so appreciatively that the cook's expression softened, and he said something that contained two words Anton knew well: “yer dinner.” It wasn't long before the traditional tin pan of the sea galley was put before him, and a meaty fish head stared back balefully at the new ship's cat.

The next morning Anton took a long stroll on the deck, allowing the news of his arrival to be passed from mouth to ear all up and down the length of the ship. He noted a few good spots for snoozing in the sun and others for hiding from bad weather, or that baby. The sailors weighed anchor and dropped the mainsail, which took the breeze at once. The ship began to plow smoothly through the calm sea, steering away from the island. Going where?

As the sun descended into the horizon, pouring a stream from a flaming red cauldron into the darkening water, Anton made his way back to the fo'c'sle to deal with the mouse hiding behind the barrel. The sailors had finished their meals and were either sleeping or on deck, and the cook had shut down the stove for the night. Anton didn't bother with a stealthy approach; his nose told him exactly where the mouse was. He walked to the back of the barrel and shoved his head into the space where it curved away from the wall.

The mouse let out a shriek and shrunk down on the floor, hiding his head between his front feet. “I knew it,” he cried. “I knew it. Now I'll be eaten, just like my poor father and my brother, and there's no escape.” And then he sat up, tears streaming from his eyes, his nose running hopelessly, shivering from his ears to his tail. “Please don't eat me,” he said through his sobs. “I'm barely a morsel to you, but to myself, I'm all I have left. I'm the last mouse in my family.”

“That's an interesting argument,” Anton said.

The mouse pulled his tail round and used the tip to wipe the tears from his eyes. “You don't mean it,” he said. “That's the teasing way of you heartless felines. Soon you'll be tossing me from paw to paw just for the sport of seeing a poor wee beastie in terror.” His tail was of no use against the steady flow of his tears and he let it go. “I'll not run wild for your amusement,” he said, looking sullen, but still the tears poured down his face and his shoulders shuddered. “My dear brother did that, and to no avail.”

“You need to stop blubbering or you're going to drown in your own tears,” Anton warned.

“Would that I could,” the mouse replied.

What an odd mouse,
Anton thought. Rodents weren't generally thoughtful, and rats, as Anton recalled too well, were downright murderous. “So, you were close to your brother?”

“We were different as night and day,” the mouse said. “Nobody would have taken us for brothers. He was a big mouse, and he had a fine, dark pelt, and he loved adventures, whereas I was always”—and here he sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his front foot—“I was always what you see before you. But we were close. Oh, he was my dearest friend. We were close like that.” The mouse held up his foot and somehow managed to cross the two front claws.

“I have a brother like that,” Anton said. Cecil appeared for a moment in his mind's eye, just as if he were there before him, and Anton sighed as he looked back at the still sniveling mouse.

“That's fine for you,” the mouse said. “Nobody has eaten your brother.”

“What was his name?” Anton asked.

“Oh, lord of mice, what do you care what my poor dead brother's name is? Just finish me off and be done with it, will you not?”

“I'm going to tell you something that will surprise you,” Anton said. “I don't really like the taste of mice.”

“Right, shipmate. I'm sure you don't. You're just making the sacrifice for the good of the enterprise.”

“Well, that's just it. If the sailors find out, or that lady, if she finds out you're here, they won't feed me until I hand over your corpse. But if they don't know you're here and you're the only mouse on board . . .”

“I am that. The last of a fine clan.”

“I'll bet you could find enough to eat without the humans noticing you're here.”

“I'm a creature of great stealth and caginess. That's how I've outlived my poor family.”

“Well, then. If no one sees you, I'm not obliged to kill you.”

“Are you not?” said the mouse. “Are you not obliged by the ancient enmity between our kind?”

Anton chuckled. This mouse was a dramatic mouse. “What's your name?” he asked.

“My name is Hieronymus,” the mouse said proudly. “My brother was Geronymus.”

“Her-on-i-mus,” Anton repeated. Even the mouse's name was funny. “My name is Anton.”

“I can't say I'm pleased to meet you.”

“Right,” said Anton. “The ancient enmity.”

“I won't deny that you're an improvement over the last cat on this ship.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was a great brute, always getting himself into scrapes. Once, he got himself locked in the larder for two days. Would that they'd never found him. The ship got into some wicked weather and he was stupid enough to go aloft. A big wave came and pulled him off the ropes, dashed him on the deck, and before he could get to his feet, he was swept over the side into the deep blue sea.”

Anton gasped. “Poor fellow,” he said. “That's a terrible fate.”

“Excuse me if I'm dry-eyed,” said Hieronymus. “He ate my dear brother before my eyes, and not in one bite, either.”

“Yes,” Anton said. “That must have been traumatic for you.”

“It was the worst moment of my life.” And the mouse burst into tears again.

As Anton frowned at the mouse's fresh waterworks, he felt a bit of moisture gather in his own eyes. Hieronymus had given him the thought that Cecil, who was so reckless, might have had some terrible accident back home, and Anton would have no way of knowing. “Please stop your crying,” Anton said.

To his surprise the mouse nodded his head and said, between sobs, that he would try. When he could control his voice again, Hieronymus asked, “What's your brother's name?”

“Cecil,” said Anton. “I got impressed on the wharf. He was far down the dock and I called to him from the ship, but I expect he couldn't hear me.”

As he spoke there was a shout on the deck, and the sailors began to stir in their bunks. “Look,” Anton said. “Just stay out of sight.”

“You won't see me, unless you've a mind to,” Hieronymus replied. “I generally stay here until the night watch goes on, and then I move out to that big rope coil up in the bow. I've a comfy nest there for sleeping, and if I can't sleep, I like to see the stars.”

A stargazing mouse. Anton chuckled. He knew he'd come to a low pass to have taken a mouse for a friend, but Hieronymus was clearly a very unusual mouse.

In the days that followed, Anton established a routine on this new ship to which he had been delivered by a whale. It was much smaller than the
Mary Anne,
with a crew of only eight men, not counting the captain and his family. The captain's wife took an interest in Anton and invited him into the family's quarters, where she spent much of her time confined with the baby. Anton was wary of the baby, who charged at him on unsteady legs, but the lady was kind and offered Anton treats, a little milk in a saucer or a bit of meat or fish from her own plate. One day, when she found him curled up for a nap in a basket of clothes, she laughed, gently chasing him out. “You want a bed,” she said. On his next visit, she showed him a wooden box with one end open, in which she had placed a soft cushion.
Now this is the life,
Anton thought, as he curled up for a good long snooze. The top of the box had slats that let in light and air, but the sides were solid, so he felt safe and secret, comfy and warm.

In the evenings, he visited the fo'c'sle for his dinner, after which he went out on the deck for a stroll, ending, when the night watch came on, with a visit to the rope coil in the prow and a conversation with Hieronymus the mouse. And could that mouse talk. He was a well-traveled, observant, witty, and lyrical mouse, a spinner of tales full of adventure, bravery, and narrow escapes. Many of his stories had been handed down in his family: the story of Great-Uncle Pyramus, who fell asleep in what he thought was an oversize basket and woke up high above the earth in a hot-air balloon; of Great-Grampa Maximus, who was making a nest in a wheat field when out of the woods came hordes of furious humans marching in long lines toward one another and firing rifles, charging and falling and firing until the air was all smoke, and the ground so thickly covered with the dead and dying that Maximus nearly drowned in a pool of blood; of cousin Minimus, who wound up somewhere miles inland and set up house in a big seashell because he loved to hear the sea when he was falling asleep; and of his own uncle Micromus, who, having perfected the art of springing traps with his tail, died suddenly when he bit into a brightly colored wire he thought might be useful for pulling free the cheese once the trap was sprung. Hieronymus was also revealed to be a thoughtful mouse. He had theories about why all animals could understand each other while humans could only talk to other humans, and why rocks sank if they fell off ships, but ships didn't sink if you put rocks in them.