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The Flourish of a Divine by Betty Blummen
“And you shall be called Sadiki.”
And so I was.
The others who sprung forth from Bastet’s great maw were given names such as Khepri, morning sun, like their coats that shone bright as Aten’s rays, or Dalila, gentle, like the nature they would soon develop.
While our goddess continued her work of breathing new felidae ka into existence, my newly created siblings and I lounged our spectral bodies about her temple. We were not housecats then, but we were not wild, either. Our coats refracted rainbows and our eyes shone like stars. We were feline in the purest form.
My goddess’s temple is nestled tightly between the realm of being and nonexistence. A holy space with a fish-filled river just beyond the alabaster stone, and a veranda spacious enough for us all to sun our iridescent coats. A place where there was no sickness, no pain, no strife.
And despite dwelling in a holy refuge, a feeling I did not recognize crept in. It persisted as I darted my paws in the river to feed a belly that never hungered; as I chased my brothers and sisters through the lush, green grass; when I basked in the never-setting sun.
The feeling made my tail thrash more often than not, would make my ears fold back against my head. Like an itch that could not be scratched. And I was not alone. The changes in my shimmering siblings were as visible as my own.
The change soon swept through the palace like a windstorm. Our wailing lament billowed through her alabaster halls, garnering annoyed glances from those who were content to sun themselves for eternity. We stalked the perimeter of my goddess’s home; crying, yowling, like common beasts. But for what? I could not say.
Help us, goddess, I prayed with a tongue that could not form words. Alleviate this emptiness.
All the while my goddess continued her task. Every breath from her muzzle would take a lithe feline form before pandiculating, and joining one of the two newly formed factions: the ones who cried for that which they did not know, and the ones who laid about contentedly.
And when at last my goddess did finish her work, she did not have to say a word, nor give any gesture. When a divine calls to her creations, there is no need for such measures. Great striped tabbies burst from the river; small calicos peeled themselves from the warm white stone; long-haired tortoiseshells ceased their napping.
I was at her feet before them all. Up on the dais, great Bastet waited in her throne. Her eyes, slitted against the sun outside, glittered like cut emeralds as she took us in; her precious creations, made in her image. And what an image to be made in!
Her head, with ebony fur more sleek and well-groomed than any of ours could ever hope to be, sat atop a strange yet beautiful body. Its limbs were long, and the color of polished bronze. Sweet perfume, soft and earthy, wafted from her finery.
“My beloveds.” The air around my goddess crackled like fire in the hearth. “You were each created to be part of a great tradition, a cycle all felines have lived for millennia, and will continue to do so until the great Amun dictates otherwise. You will enter the Land of the Living, and live nine lives.”
An excited trill burbled from my throat, joining the refrain of confusion and excitement the others began. Of course, Lady Bastet knew what we longed for, what our very ka needed, when we could not articulate it ourselves: life.
Bastet could not suppress a rumbling purr from deep within her chest. To be made by a goddess who could not mask her truest emotions was a gift of its own.
“As you traverse the sands of time, you will encounter beings called humans. They have the ability to hurt, and to heal. You must encounter them with grace, and remind them of your inherent divinity.”
She raised her right hand. “You will all start in the only place I can guarantee your reverence and safety. Go now, my children, and spread your blessings to the living.”
I bowed my head, and my goddess’s will was done.
Waset, Egypt, Eighteenth Dynasty
Even with all its earthly treasures, the Palace of the Pharaoh could not compete with Lady Bastet’s. However, if I had to guess, it was certainly the closest one could compare her holy refuge to in the Land of the Living. Not only for its elegance and splendor, but for the reverence my kind was given.
While the hunting dogs were kept outside, cats could be found in any corner of the palace, day or night. I could wander the banquet halls during even the most important feasts, and the guests would feed me juicy morsels of roast duck and warm saucers of fresh cream.
“Mau!” The cry of the Pharaoh’s then-youngest daughter was one of my first memories. My mother had the litter I was born in within the concubine’s quarters. Mothers wanting to be around mothers, I suppose.
The rest of the children gathered around me to stroke my soft fur while chattering over one another. So soft, they said. Mau is so pretty.
I was called Mau then, like all the other cats in the palace. Though I was black as night, and the dozens of other cats who stalked the perimeter came in every color and personality imaginable, we were all simply Mau.
Because of our abundant population, cats were no novelty to the children of Egypt. A call from their mothers or tutors, and I was relegated to my own company once more. In my younger years, it was easier to garner attention. All I needed to do was toddle into a room and the lesser of Pharaoh’s wives would fawn over me.
In my adulthood, I learned to relish the time humans in the palace chose to spend with me. Those moments were worth all the jewels in Pharaoh’s treasury. Because in those years, I could feel the affections of the people within the palace waning like the moon.
The wives would keep their reverence during my visits, but their eyes stayed on the statues of Lady Bastet in their room when I overstayed my welcome; like the goddess was watching, and reminding them that though I was a nuisance, I was a holy one.
In my older years, when I stopped birthing my own litters of smoke-gray kittens and my bones were brittle, I found safe harbor in the arms of the palace folk once more. Though my sight was long gone, and my hearing was almost so, their strokes were as soft as I remembered, and tears tasted as salty as they always were.
Madhya Pradesh, Fifteenth Century
I woke with a start as thorns pierced my side. My cub trilled in triumph, rolling off my back to peer up at me with excited amber eyes. Her tail flicked excitedly as I let out a deep groan. She paid my old bones no mind and hopped away, teetering towards the entrance of our den on paws too big for her little body.
My muscles ached as I heaved myself up to follow her. My little tigress sniffed every flower, beetle, and twig as we made our way to the clearing. Pride swelled in my chest as I watched her, every bit the blossoming predator I was in my own youth.
But those were many moons ago. When I drank from the river, an old tigress with a graying muzzle stared back at me. Perhaps I should have been melancholic. Death was only a few short years away, goddess willing. Felines have a sense for that sort of thing. However, as I watched my little tigress paw at insects buzzing in the air, I could not find sadness in my heart.
My little one, my blessing from Tawaret herself. In the long life I lived in the jungles of India, she was my only cub, the fruit of my unending prayers to the fertility goddess. I happily spent my dwindling energies hunting for her the tastiest boars and being her only playmate.
Weariness crept into my limbs. Bringing down a sambar that morning was no easy feat. The old deer had more fight than I expected. We were only able to eat because I held the thrashing thing’s head beneath the river’s waters.
I should have taken her back when the birds in the shishams grew silent. So content with the sound of my little one playing in the lush greenery, I did not consider a greater predator approached.
The men emerged from the blackness of the jungle. They wielded torches, and spears which reflected the fiery light. I was a fool to hesitate, to believe they would approach us with the same reverence as Egyptians.
Lady Bastet, do your followers mean us harm?
My goddess did not answer as they rushed towards us. I crouched over my little one with bared fangs. The men shoved their fire in my face. They screamed at each other, words indecipherable beneath my roars. My cub cried out. She pressed herself further into me.
“Don’t hurt the baby,” one man shouted above the din. “Kill the mother if we have to.”
“Kill? She could have more.”
“More? She’s old. She’ll be dead in a year.”
They settled my fate as if it were their own to decide. Despite my swipes with unsheathed claws and lunges with an open maw, they separated us. They stabbed at us both with their spears. The fiery blades found purchase between my ribs, in my belly.
All I could do was roar after them as they ran away. My body could move no more. My little one, unscathed, peeked her head over her captor’s shoulder and wailed.
Ferocious roars into the treetops dissipated into soft whines as my limbs grew still and cold. Overhead, the sun approached.
She was gone.
Watch over my beloved, goddess. Give her your protection for I have failed.
Tanzania, Nineteenth Century
Watchmen stood at the village perimeter, setting sun at their backs. Machetes glinted at their hips in the dying light. I watched them from afar as it sank behind the rooftops of woven grass.
They reminded me of my sisters, the vigilant warriors of my pride. A buzzard couldn’t so much as sail across the Serengeti’s sky without them seeing.
My pride. It was deserving of the moniker when I was young.
In those days, we flourished like savannah grass after rain. There were many of us: a wizened leader, fierce lionesses and nursing queens, young ones, and many elders. But when the drought came, our numbers dwindled.
It started when the elders refused to drink from the puddles we stumbled across in our pride male’s meandering search for water. They refused a single lap until the others drank their fill, down to the smallest cub. Their kindness was their undoing.
Soon the puddles dried up with the nursing queen’s milk. When their cubs passed, the mothers soon did, too. They refused to keep moving, to leave their cubs behind.
Goddess forgive me, but when our leader passed it was a relief. The old lion, with his graying mane, walked the ones I loved to their end. I always wondered if his mind was all there. Perhaps it was best to never know.
It came down to us—warrior lionesses too hearty to die, though some of my sisters looked like they longed for a rest no sleep could provide. They were my everything, and I could not bear to watch them suffer any longer.
So as my sisters lay hours from death, I gathered the last of my strength to scavenge the most dangerous territory.
When the moon rose, I began my mission. Past the eyes of village guards, past the sharp edges of their weapons and into their settlement. I tasted the air with the sensitive glands on the roof of my mouth.
Somewhere. Their food and water stores must be somewhere.
From hut to hut, I slunk on silent paws. Before entering a hut to search, I lingered, listening for any signs of life inside. If only rhythmic breathing was heard, I would pad in to check the air with deep, quiet sniffs.
All too quickly I checked nearly all of them. Nothing. Every home amounted to nothing.
My sisters lay dying in the sand and I found nothing. I couldn’t go back to them with nothing. It would be condemning them to their untimely ends.
When I tasted the air of the last hut, there were no stores of food or water to be found. I tried to steady my breathing as panic rose in my chest. I failed. I failed them.
I nearly hissed when a high-pitched giggle pierced the silent air.
My body froze. But quietness permeated in the moments that followed, even when the babbling started. I approached the source of sound, hidden beneath a cloth.
I nudged it away with my nose to find a tiny person, nestled with blankets in an intricately woven crib. A baby. Bright-eyed and smiling.
Visions of Pharaoh’s wives introducing their babies to the palace cats came to mind. Their smiles were the same. Wide and innocent.
Like my little tigress. Innocent. Stolen away by someone more powerful.
The baby reached out a chubby hand to brush my whiskers.
My sisters. With their white gums and dull eyes, they withered as I stared at the baby. It kicked its legs and opened and closed its little fists.
Guilt gnawed at me more furiously than hunger.
I left the hut with empty jaws.
Kathmandu, Twentieth Century
Sandy dunes and lush forests floated through my delirium-stricken mind. How I wished for them in those days. I would have chosen anywhere on earth the sun shone. Anywhere but the cave.
Sandy dunes and lush forests floated through my delirium-stricken mind. How I wished for them in those days. I would have chosen anywhere on earth the sun shone. Anywhere but the cave.
This is happening. This is where I am.
I thought of my goddess in her palace of sunshine and light. Did she look upon me? Did her undying heart break as two of her creations suffered? Did she throw her great black head back and laugh?
My body tensed at the blasphemous thought and my mate must have felt me stir. He perked up his silver and black head, flicking an ear where a stray snowflake landed. Somehow it penetrated the impenetrable fortress we found ourselves trapped within.
I pressed my head into his shoulder to block out the view of the cave walls. The male was an unexpected comfort. Snow leopards are solitary cats, and being around another of my kind for so long should have felt strange and unnatural. But no, every time I opened my eyes, there he was, and I was grateful.
He and I had spent many days and nights in the cave before the accident. It seemed a perfect place to raise cubs, but that was all a far-away dream now. The avalanche outside, caused by noisy humans chasing us through the forest, relegated us prisoners to the damp abode. The crags and stalactites became our tormentors as the days lurched onward, and we had no choice but to live through them.
But he began to deteriorate, as I did. Gradually, his coat became dull, and his eyes less fiery. His movements became scarce, and all I could do was press my body into his, hoping the paltry amount of warmth my own body radiated was enough.
When I stopped moving, he rested his head back onto his own paws again. I think he resigned himself to our fate, as I had.
All that was left to do was wait.
England, Seventeenth Century
Drunken shouts and stale ale rained down on my wailing colony, and we scattered like ants.
Only beg when the young man is working, not the old one.
My paws squelched into the warm mud of the town’s main thoroughfare as I began the familiar trek home.
The air stunk, as always. Familiar smells of horse manure and old sweat penetrated the sensitive glands in my maw. My lips curled involuntarily. Putrid, nearly everything about the town was putrid.
Though I was a domesticated feline—a tiny calico despite being fully grown—the humans in the town offered no sympathies or smiles to myself or my kind. They only rushed to and from their positions as tradesmen and hangmen and sailors and everything in between, all while wearing the same dirty clothes from a week before.
Safety from cat catchers and the destitute who baked us into pies could only be found in our home. We wouldn’t have one at all without the town butcher. Despite his bloody profession, he was a kindly man who welcomed us in his house’s crawl space and fed us meat scraps when he could spare it.
It was finally a place to blossom. The young ones could play without the threat of having their backs broken by wagon wheels on dangerous town roads, and queens could nurse their kittens without interruptions—save for the butcher’s child.
He was a boy called Johnathan, a boy who couldn’t have been more than eight years of age, with big brown eyes and unruly hair colored like wheat. He would pat our heads roughly and give us the good cuts of meat his father meant to sell.
Johnathan stopped visiting in the winter. The butcher’s tears flowed until the spring came, and with it, the town became emptier than it was the season prior. The stench of sickness and death blanketed the town entirely, thick and rancid enough to overtake even the foulest of horse dung.
When wheelbarrows began to cart out the dead from homes to be burned in the meadow outside town, the townspeople descended on the butcher’s home.
Your cats, they cried, faces gaunt and pocked with pustules. Your cats brought this upon us!
The butcher, covered in the sores himself, could not stop the mob as they burst through his home and into ours.
My colony and I scattered a final time. The streets were even less safe than before. Now the townspeople who despised us were armed with sickles and axes and a justification for their hatred.
So into the moors I ran. In my wake, I dropped all hope of reuniting with the others, of seeing the butcher again, of healing the buboes covering my body. I exalted only a final, desperate plea to Lady Bastet for a quick and painless end.
Morocco, Twentieth Century
Sand. Endless sand. I stared out before me, and the expanse of sand stared back. It felt almost taunting. As if it knew it was my only companion now.
I considered roaring into the nothingness, to check the hundredth time for what I already knew to be true. But I knew better. If I were to roar into the sky, only my echo would answer back, and I would only further put myself into peril.
There could be humans tracking me at that very moment, using my pawprints in the damned sand to steal me away like they did the others. So I kept moving. Every second spent standing still was a second closer they would get.
The fear wasn’t unfounded paranoia. The humans searched for Barbary lions in the mountain ranges before my father was born, and beyond. I saw the anxiety in my pride’s eyes when we slept too long, when we didn’t eat our kills quick enough.
They’ll find you, and they’ll take you, the elders’ eyes seemed to say. So we kept walking.
It all meant nothing when the men finally did find us. They would bring their long tranquilizer guns and metal cages on wheels that would glide over the mountainous terrain. Then they would take whichever one of us their dart hit, and they would never be seen again.
And so they continued until they were all gone. My father, my cubs, my siblings. It could have been me any time they arrived. But it never was, and now I was alone.
I did not pray to Bastet to return them. I learned many times over that she did not answer.
Clattering from the sky jarred me from my thoughts. I looked up as something soared through the cloudless sky like a massive silver condor. I saw one once before when I was a cub. The pride male led us into a cave, and we waited until it passed.
Humans. It must have been. No other creature on Earth could make us run and hide. But I was tired of running.
The whirring descended on the mountains, enough to send the top layer of silt flying through the air. I looked away from the contraption and set my sights forward.
And as rapid clicking sounded from above, I walked on with my head high.
Alberta, Canada, Twenty First Century
“You have to come see this one, Meredith. He has the cutest little face,” called a man’s voice from somewhere in the room, unseen.
The woman called Meredith did not take her eyes off of me. I shrunk back into the furthest corner of my cage and bared my teeth. “Look at this little tabby here. Her toys are totally destroyed. She has a big personality, I can tell.”
“You can tell? She’s sitting in a cage at the pet store.”
Meredith rolled her eyes. “Maybe...maybe she’s just speaking to me.” And when she smiled, my defenses faltered.
A compulsion from a place unknown overtook me, and I was on my hind legs at once, pressing my paws against the glass. I cried. I cried and meowed like I was still a nursing kit, still newly born and in need of protection.
Meredith reached out a tentative hand before pressing it to the plexiglass plane. I clawed at her hand, so far away, desperately trying to bring it to me.
“Can you get the person who was helping us, Ben? I think I found my kitten.”
During my first night with Meredith, I watched her sleep. She was a peculiar human. (Ben as well, but for different reasons. How one man could make such noise doing simple tasks, I could never understand.)
She displayed no altars in her home, and made no mentions of Bastet, or Isis or even the great Amun. She did not look at me with reverence, or as though a holy spirit was approaching her in small, furry form. But her hands were kind all the same.
I soon learned Meredith’s dream since she was a little girl was to have a cat, and she didn’t adopt one until she was an adult due to her mother’s allergies. She had spent weeks scouring pet stores and classifieds looking for her dream cat, and somehow she landed on me.
“I love you, Jewel,” she would say, and all I could do was purr in response.
And so I knew I was home.
There was nothing I could ever want for with Meredith as my owner, my keeper, my companion. I was given pillows and beds for napping, feathered doodads and crinkly balls for chasing, juicy morsels and crunchy bits for eating.
But all I wanted was her. My favorite days were those I would spend in her lap while she read a book, or when she would dangle my favorite ribbon toy and watch me chase it until I got tired. I was no nuisance to her, even when I most certainly was. I was wanted in every sense of the word.
Even Ben wasn’t so bad. “Spoiled cat,” he would say while stroking my back. He was not wrong. And so our lives went until mine had to end.
Cancer. In all my lives, I never heard of such a thing. It caught up with me before I ever knew there was a race to be lost.
Meredith wept as I lay under fluorescent lights. I was grateful for her touch then; the surgical steel table was so cold, and the tubes going down my throat were so uncomfortable.
“...she won’t feel any pain.” A voice I did not recognize penetrated my haze, but I did not look for who spoke. I used every last bit of my strength to focus on my Meredith. My Meredith. My Meredith, whose face disappeared before her voice did.
“I love you, Jewel. I love you, I love you.”
Snow left the earth long ago but I remained.
North winds were pale imitations of their former glory; their pitiful gusts left me to swelter inside a pelt no longer acclimated to the warming earth. Wetness filled the vacancy the snow opened, and a miserable fog of permanent humidity followed.
How long it had been since I last saw another of my kind, I did not know. It may as well have been when the last snowflake melted. In a mixture of delirium brought on by the new world’s heat, and hunger from not eating for days, I couldn’t even remember my loved one’s faces.
But faces from lifetimes ago were clear as the morning sun. While I could not recall the faces of sabertooth cubs as they rolled in moonlit snow, the face of my little tigress and her amber eyes was almost close enough to touch.
I could see her then, running through the warm water just ahead. Bouncing and purring, batting at butterflies that would not exist for millennia.
African and Barbary warrior lionesses appeared then, with maws stained dark red from the spoils of their hunt. My family. They waded through the muck and onto dry land. I followed their lead on uneasy legs.
A warm body pressed into my side, steadying my weakened body. My snow leopard mate, coat shining and full, met my eye and guided me forward.
The horizon began to spin as I toddled onward. A colony of domesticated cats, so tiny and fragile-boned compared to my enormous prehistoric body, led me to the entrance of a cave not far away. I collapsed after crossing the cave mouth’s threshold.
I was alone once again. So utterly alone.
“There you are, kitty,” a voice called. I blinked, trying to rid my vision of the fuzziness encroaching from all corners. A woman approached from the distance.
“I got more of your favorite food from the pet store! And more toys. But don’t tell Ben, okay?”
She was next to me then. So fast. She must have walked so fast.
“I missed you.” She petted me until the aches in my body disappeared. “Take a nap then we can play when you wake up.”
Okay. I shut my eyes. We can play when I wake up.
“You are home, my loyal Sadiki. Open your eyes.”
And so I did.
Lady Bastet regarded me from her throne on high. I sat before her, in my body of spectral light, a metamorphosed creature. Though I traversed eons, she remained the same as I remembered.
“Eight lives you’ve lived, all composed of their own joys and sorrows. Even now I see their weight in your eyes, little one.” Lady Bastet’s voice, low and rich, was a salve for my invisible wounds. “Tell me. What troubles your heart so?”
I wished I could answer in words so eloquent. If words could flow from my tongue, I would tell her of the way my very ka quaked beneath the weight of so much loss. If tears could fall from my eyes, I would flood the Nile with my bitter anguish. If I could scream, my voice would crack the foundation of her temple and bury her inside.
The eight lives I was made to bleed and breathe in were overripe with sorrow. Losses I sustained while in the mortal realm weighed heavily enough on my heart to make my entire chest ache. While in my goddess’s spectral plane, my loved ones’ names and faces were lost in the eternal expanse of has been and will be. And despite that, I still felt the crater in my ka their losses left behind.
I was no god. I couldn’t have ordered the stars to swallow those that would do my loved ones harm. The ocean would not listen if I begged it to rise and wash away my enemies.
I was only a cat.
I bowed my head to my goddess and whimpered.
“To be feline is to experience the truest natures of the world. Not all creatures are equipped to handle these truths. I am the only divine to teach my children the way of them all. The crocodile or ibis would have turned bitter in the face of the hardships my human children brought you. But instead you lived eight honorable lives as you discovered the feline ma’at and carried yourself with the flourish of a divine. Rise, Sadiki, and accept what I may offer before your journey to the Field of Reeds.”
I did as she commanded and was nearly blinded. My Lady Bastet was shining with the full strength of Aten’s rays. Her emerald eyes were now fiery rubies, and her smoldering inky fur was tinged in glowing embers. She reached out a radiant hand.
“Where will your ninth life be spent, my child?”
I could only stare, uncomprehending.
“You may live any life you wish. Live as a powerful pride leader, the prized pet of any ruler. Or you may simply stay here.”
I realized we were not completely alone. A small few of my fellow felidae I hardly recognized were sprawled throughout the palace. Their coats still refracted rainbows, and they still lounged in the sun. The same as they were. The same as they always would be.
“The choice is yours.”
Of course, my Bastet knew what I longed for when I could not ask for it myself. I approached her hand, and nuzzled it.
Alberta, Canada, Twenty First Century
The rain was relentless. Every cruel drop pierced my puffy fur, still wild and unruly in kittenhood. I yowled at the sensation, and again when thunder boomed above.
I stared up at the door from my shivering place on the brick-laid patio. Lightning struck, and I cried out as loud as my tiny lungs could withstand.
I didn’t relent in my crying. Desperate and frenzied, I did not care how I would seem if another cat passed by. I carried the knowledge of lifetimes, the knowledge of gods.
They brought me to the conclusion I was exactly where I needed to be. All I had to do was cry a little longer.
The curtains shuddered and the door opened at last. A woman stood before me.
“Hello, little one.” Her voice was soft, as though if she spoke too loudly I would run away. But how could I? How could I run from home when I found it again after so long?
She knelt down with crackling knees. She was older now, and her hair was streaked with more gray than I remembered. But her scent was as comforting as it was all those lives ago. My Meredith was different, but the same.
“Would you like to come inside?”
She reached out a hand, and I ran to it as fast as my little legs would take me.