Read Six Lives of Fankle the Cat for Free Online Page B

fishermen would be forced to call me by a better name.”
    â€œAnd did they?” asked Jenny.
    â€œDon’t rush me,” said Fankle. “All in good time. Just listen.”
    â€œI
am
listening,” said Jenny. “But you’d better hurry. Mother might be back from the shops at any minute.”
    â€œOne day,” said Fankle, “as I was slouching along the left bank of the Nile, I heard singing from the Temple of the Sun God, a chant. As you know, I have a very poor opinion of the human voice as a lyrical instrument, but I paused and listened for a while to this choir of men and boys. Usually their hymns were as gay and cheerful as human beings can manage, but this piece was full of the most awful desolation. It was a sponge dripping with pain and grief and terror that they offered to the sun’s benign golden eye. What could be the matter? The provinces were at peace. The harvest had been gathered in and it was a plenteous one. As far as I knew, there was no plague in the city. So I said to the priest’s dog, who was squatting at the temple door and blinking his stupid eye, ‘Hound,’ I said, ‘what’s got into them?’
    â€œâ€˜Go away,’ said the dog. ‘Be off. Or I’ll tear you limb from limb, Little-thief-with-the-whiskers-that-eats-fish-fins.’
    â€œWho could be bothered reasoning with a churl like that?” said Fankle. “Not me. I strolled down to the reeds and I said to the monkey that was sitting on a rock there, ‘What’s eating them?’ I said. ‘They’re in a blue funk about something.’
    â€œâ€˜Haven’t you heard?’ said the monkey, whose name was Flower-face, ‘It’s the rats from Persia, the new strain. That’s what’s biting them.’
    â€œâ€˜I thought,’ said I, ‘that the official poisoners with their thousand different kinds of venom could easily deal with a tribe of rats.’
    â€œâ€˜That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Flower-face. ‘Because this rat, you see, from Persia, eats the poisons and seems to thrive on them. Of course they like corn better, and now they’ve taken up residence in the great granaries.’
    â€œâ€˜Good luck to them,’ I said. You must understand, Jenny, at that time there was no ill-feeling between rats and cats. None at all. We went our separate ways. We left each other alone. The only animals we cats disliked were dogs.”
    â€œI never knew that,” said Jenny. “I thought –”
    â€œWhat you thought or think is irrelevant to this story,” said Fankle. “You are ruining the story with your interruptions.”
    â€œI’m sorry, I’m sure,” said Jenny.
    â€œTo continue,” said Fankle. “It seemed, from what Flower-face told me, that the entire nation of Egypt was threatened with starvation. The Persian rats had got into their granaries. They were devouring everything. They were breeding like arithmetic gone mad.”
    â€œHow terrible!” said Jenny.
    â€œTerrible for human beings,” said Fankle. “Nice for rats. It had nothing to do with me. I could always get my bit of fish out of the river ... Well, now, that same afternoon as I was sitting on a wall giving my face a bit of a wash, along come three councillors of the city, very grave and important men. They stopped right in front of me. It looked like business. This was the first time human beings had ever tried to negotiate with me, except in the way of kicks, insults, and the flinging of stones.
    â€œThe oldest senator addressed me. ‘Little-thief-with-the-whiskers-that-eats-fish-fins, a word with you.’
    â€œâ€˜When I have a better name,’ I said, ‘I will speak with you. Not before.’ Nobody likes being called a thief, really.
    â€œThe councillors turned their backs on me and conferred in whispers. Then they turned again to face me.