Tailchaser's Song Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 PART

  1 CHAPTER

  2 CHAPTER

  3 CHAPTER

  4 CHAPTER

  5 CHAPTER

  6 CHAPTER

  7 CHAPTER

  8 CHAPTER

  9 CHAPTER

  10 CHAPTER

  2 PART

  11 CHAPTER

  12 . CHAPTER

  13 CHAPTER

  14 CHAPTER

  15 CHAPTER

  16 CHAPTER

  17 CHAPTER

  18 CHAPTER

  19 CHAPTER

  20 CHAPTER

  21 CHAPTER

  22 CHAPTER

  23 CHAPTER

  3 PART

  24 CHAPTER

  25 CHAPTER

  26 CHAPTER

  27 CHAPTER

  28 CHAPTER

  29 CHAPTER

  30 CHAPTER

  31 CHAPTER

  32 CHAPTER

  33 CHAPTER

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  CHARACTERS APPENDIX

  GLOSSARY

  “WILLIAMS’ FANTASY, IN THE TRADITION OF WATERSHIP DOWN, CAPTURES THE NUANCES AND DELIGHTS OF FELINE BEHAVIOR IN A STORY THAT SHOULD APPEAL TO BOTH FANTASY AND CAT LOVERS.”—Library Journal

  Trouble has cast its shadow over the whole cat community, as cats have begun vanishing mysteriously, never to be seen or heard of again. As fear and anger spread, brave young tomcat Fritti Tailchaser tries to rouse the feline clan to action. But when his own cat-friend Hushpad, she of the silky fur and long whiskers, disappears, Fritti can wait no longer. Along with an eccentric, grizzled old tomcat named Eatbugs and the over-energetic kitten Pouncequick, Fritti abandons his home territory and sets out to rescue Hushpad—a dangerous, magical mission that will take him from Firsthome and the Court of the Cat Queen to an underground citadel of horror beyond his wildest catmares!

  “A wonderfully exciting quest fantasy. Fantasy fans are sure to be enthralled by this remarkable book.”

  —Booklist

  “... more than just an absorbing adventure, more than just a fanciful tale of cat lore. It is a story of self-discovery . . . Fritti faces challenges—responsibility, loyalty, and loss—that are universal. His is the story of growing up, of accepting change, of coming of age.”—Seventeen

  DAW BOOKS PRESENTS

  THE FINEST IN IMAGINATIVE FICTION BY

  TAD WILLIAMS

  TAILCHASER’S SONG

  THE WAR OF THE FLOWERS

  SHADOWMARCH

  SHADOWPLAY

  MEMORY, SORROW, AND THORN

  THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

  STONE OF FAREWELL

  TO GREEN ANGEL TOWER

  OTHERLAND

  CITY OF GOLDEN SHADOW

  RIVER OF BLUE FIRE

  MOUNTAIN OF BLACK GLASS

  SEA OF SILVER LIGHT

  Copyright © 1985 by Tad Williams. New Introduction © 2000 by Tad Williams.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14224-0

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 689.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  First Paperback Printing, November 1985

  First Paperback Printing, Anniversary Edition, December 2000

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES —MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.

  S.A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Lao-tzu translations reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. Wing-tsit Chan, trans., The Way of Lao-tzu © 1963 Bobbs-Merrill.

  Stevens, Wallace, from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” reprinted by permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

  Barker, Eric, lines from “A Troubled Sleep,” reprinted by permission of Yankee magazine.

  Dacey, Philip, lines from “Villanelle for the Cat,” reprinted with permission from Cat Fancy.

  Toomer, Jean, lines from “Carma” are reprinted from Cane by Jean Toomer by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1923 by Boni & Liveright. Copyright renewed 1951 by Jean Toomer.

  Turner, W.J., lines from “India” reprinted with permission of the publisher, Sidgwick & Jackson from the volume The Hunter and Other Poems © 1916 by the author.

  Rutledge, Archibald, lines from “Lion in the Night,” reprinted with permission of Irvine H. Rutledge from the volume Deep River: Complete Poems of Archibald Rutledge, copyright © 1960 R.L. Bryan Co.

  Alighieri, Dante, from The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, translated by John Ciardi. Copyright © 1954 by John Ciardi. Reprinted by arrangement with New American Library, New York, New York.

  Jacobsen, Josephine, excerpt from “Bush,” from The Shade-Seller by Josephine Jacobsen. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  Barker, George, lines from “Elegy: Separation of Man from God,” reprinted from The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems, edited by Oscar Williams.© 1953 and 1961 by Oscar Williams. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, New American Library.

  Archilochos: The epigraph of Chapter 29 is by Archilochos, translation by Barriss Mills. © 1975 Barriss Mills, from The Soldier and- the Lady by permission of Iola Mills and The Elizabeth Press.

  I Ching, or Book of Changes. The Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes. Bollingen Series 19, Copyright 1950. © 1967. Copyright renewed 1977 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press.

  Kenko, Yoshida, from “Essays in Idleness,” Yoshida Kenko, An Anthology of Japanese Lit., Donald Keene, editor. © 1955 by Grove Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to John Carswell, Nancy Deming-Williams, and Arthur Ross Evans for their assistance in the preparation of this book. Good dancing to them all.

  Dedicated to my grandmothers,

  Elizabeth D. Anderson

  and

  Elizabeth Willins Evans,

  whose support has meant so much,

  and to the memory of Fever,

  who was a good friend,

  but a better

  cat.

  TAILCHASER’S WORLD

  HOW MUCH IS THAT IN CAT-YEARS?

  (Some Thoughts By The Author)

  It’s easier for me to remember where I was during the time I wrote Tailchaser’s Song than it is for me to remember who I was. And it’s not all that easy to remember the “where” part, actually

  Personal archaeology tells me that at least when I started the book—somewhere in 1981—I must still have been living in that apartment in Menlo Park, California. It was a fourplex, and one of the three neighbors sharing the building was the writer Ron Hansen, who was then teaching at Stanford. I mention it only because Ron has written several fine books, and the fact that two people who would eventually reach The New York Times bestseller list were living in the same fourplex amuses me. It also makes me want to track down my other two neighbors from the building and ask them where the hell their manuscripts are and why are they slacking off.

  The apartment was significant for one other reason—it was the first place I ever lived with cats. I’d always been what is referred to as a “dog person,” which should mean that you scratch yourself in public and howl at the moon, but actually seems to mean that you like dogs. But my (now) ex-wife had cats, and so when we moved in together, I did too.
/>   It took me a long time to understand the cat-human bargain. The dog-human bargain was always pretty obvious:

  1. Human feeds and shelters dog.

  2. Dog worships human.

  3. Repeat daily.

  The cat thing, however, was a bit more oblique. As far as I could tell, it seemed to go something like this:

  1. Human feeds cat.

  2. Cat looks at human as though cat has never seen human before.

  3. Repeat daily.

  Thus, I suppose it’s understandable that I began to think about cats and how they think, and after a while, how they might see the world. It became a sort of private game, inventing cat mythologies, cat folklore, clever little cat in-jokes. And for the first couple of years that I lived as a human domesticated by cats, it pretty much stayed that way—just a bit of mental knitting with which to amuse myself.

  As I said at the beginning, I can remember where I was better than who I was. I was still in my horrible-jobs phase, 1 know that—I know because that phase lasted from my last year of high school until I became a full-time writer in 1990, so it covers the majority of my adult life—which included many of the kinds of occupations most notably held by people who show up on the news for firebombing a neighbor’s house. “We thought it was a little strange that he sold shoes, but he seemed like a normal guy other than that . . .”

  At the beginning of the Tailchaser’s Song experiment, I think I was still waiting tables in one of the world’s least busy restaurants, a little place called La Cigale off the El Camino Real south of San Francisco. (It means “The Cricket.” I have no idea why it was named that.) It was a French restaurant owned and operated by Thai people—very nice people, very good cooks, but perhaps not the world’s best businessfolk. All I remember for certain is that whole nights would go by without customers. The chef, a large mustached man named Johnny, never did figure out that my name was Tad rather than Ted, so he would follow me around the place in our copious free time, doing his best Elvis imitation as he sang “Baby let me be your little Teddy Bear.” His heavy Thai accent turned “Teddy” into “Terry,” which made it even stranger.

  Somewhere around this time I was also working as the graveyard shift operator for an answering service, fielding calls from distraught psychiatric patients. On occasion, when their shrinks had tired of them and refused to answer any more of their calls, I would bravely take on the therapeutic role myself, since most of them just desperately wanted to talk to someone, anyone—even an impoverished waiter. (If the AMA is reading this, however, I will deny everything in court, so don’t bother with the lawyers.) In any case, I don’t think I did any worse for these poor suffering people than their therapists did. On occasion, I would tell them about my work history, which seemed to make some of them feel better about their own lives.

  While I was selling shoes, drawing soldiers’ hands (forget it, it’s a long story), peddling insurance, throwing newspapers, stacking tiles, I was always doing something more or less artistic on the side. I was in a band for a long time, I did theater, I worked as a cartoonist and illustrator, and I did a radio talk show for the entire decade of the eighties. But none of these things made any money to speak of, and I began to wonder if I was finally going to have to go to college and get a real job. Not the sort of thing I’m suited for, I’m afraid. I’m allergic to business suits, for one thing, and I can’t get up in the morning without a major electrical shock of some kind. Also, stupid people trying to manage me sends me into acute depression.

  So I decided that it was time to find some other artistic thing at which not to make money.

  I’m surprised that it took me so long to get around to writing. I came from one of the most bookish families you’ll ever see, and reading has always been one of the most important parts of my life. I’d written bits and pieces here and there throughout my life, some journalism in school, song lyrics, parodies of various things to amuse my friends, but had never seriously considered trying it for real. I’m not quite sure what made me change my mind, except perhaps the glum prospect of having Johnny the chef following me around for another decade singing that damn song.

  The first thing I wrote was a not-too-good science fiction film script called “The Sad Machines.” I still think the title was okay, and the protagonist was sort of an early model for Simon from my Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn books, but otherwise it’s just as well I never tried to sell it to anyone, or even show it to anyone not bound by ties of love and kinship.

  I decided I was ready to write a novel—why I thought so I have no idea, but I suppose the word “chutzpah” figures in there somewhere—and the cat-concepts I’d been playing around with seemed like a fun place to start. I’d grown up on animal stories and fantasy fiction, so it didn’t seem too far from what I knew. Later on, many people told me how clever I was to write about cats—so popular with the fantasy-reading crowd, you know—but I can honestly say that I never thought of that. It was just proximity: if my ex-wife had kept armadillos, I probably would have wound up writing Truck-dodger’s Song or something.

  I wrote at least the first half of the book on a cursive typewriter—yes, it looked funny, but it beat the hell out of handwriting—laboring at night on the kitchen table after the various other jobs were done (I usually had more than one.) I’m not sure how long it took me to write the book all together, but it must have been about two years. I tried to bring real cat-behavior into it, but it was also very much a fantasy novel—there are even a couple of Lord of the Rings jokes, like the audience with Queen Sunback, a glancing parody of the hobbits meeting Galadriel. When I finished I didn’t do anything with it for some time, not because I thought it was bad, but simply because I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do next. Writing a book on the kitchen table was kind of like going out jogging in the evenings. Trying to sell it suddenly seemed like entering the Olympic trials. At last I made a list of publishers who were doing fantasy novels and sent it to the first name. They sent it back so quickly that I’m pretty sure when I got it back I was still waving to the mailman who’d taken the manuscript away in the first place.

  The gist of their refusal was that they didn’t do “talking animal books,” although they’d make an exception for a potential bestseller which mine, they gently informed me, clearly wasn’t.

  They were actually nice people, so except for the time I drove by their corporate offices and tossed a Publishers‘ Weekly bestseller list through their window—it was only coincidentally tied to a large brick—I have never gloated or mocked them for their tactical error.

  And in actuality it was a lucky break for me, because I wound up with DAW Books, who you can see is still printing copies of the book many years later (and presumably selling them, too, or else they’re going through a very expensive charade for the sake of my self-esteem.)

  The day the we-want-to-buy-your-book letter came, in January of 1985, is one of those things you never forget, right up there with weddings and the birth of children. The letter itself, signed by company founder and SF legend Donald Wollheim, is framed and hanging on the office wall across from me as I write this introduction. I was on my way out to walk my dog Gala, who was then a youthful post-pup of about two and a half years. Strolling in the hills above Stanford after getting that letter was like getting a dose of some fabulous but gentle drug, like a big breath of pure oxygen. My life was finally going the way I wanted it to. I had long since left the French restaurant behind—well, it had unceremoniously closed—but I was still doing the same kinds of jobs, so the prospect of doing something I really liked for a living was a heady one.

  (Fortunately, I had no idea how stunningly unusual it is to make a living writing fiction or I might have been a little less joyful. But perhaps my ignorance actually helped me toward being a full-time writer—one of those “the bumblebee doesn’t know it can’t fly” things.) I remember events, times, things, better than I remember the feelings. I remember that neither of the two cats who had fascinated
me in my maiden sharing-with-cats experience were still around when the novel was published. A sexually ambivalent cat named Mishka, who I only found out later was male, had run away from that apartment before the book was finished. Fever, our beloved orange tom (to whom the book is in part dedicated) had died a couple of years earlier, one of the last generation of cats to get lymphoma before they could vaccinate for it. His last afternoon alive, when his strength was failing and we had agreed to take him to the vet for the final shot the next day, he scratched feebly to be let out, although he had not been outside the house for days. He staggered into the front yard and sniffed a dandelion, then walked with unsteady dignity back into the house. He died that night, at home and on his own terms.

  Time passes, and people are as mortal as cats, if longer-lived. I also dedicated the book to my two grandmothers. My mom’s mother, Elizabeth Anderson, only lasted a bit beyond the publication of the book. She was in her early nineties and had been through several strokes; I don’t think she was holding onto life very hard in the end. I miss her very much. More than anyone else, I wish I could show her how lucky I’ve been with my writing, what it’s brought me and where it’s taken me. She was always very proud of me, always expected great things. I don’t know that I have done anything great, but I know that my grandmother would think so (and would even if I were still throwing newspapers.) That’s what grandmothers do.