Cats

Overview

Cats are the granary's guard. Every threshing floor in the Basins has its cats, every ship's hold and store-room wants one, and a household without a cat counts its grain twice. They live with people without quite belonging to them, and the feral cats of the ruins, the culverts, and the empty farms are the same animal gone back to keeping itself.

Appearance

A cat is about the length of a forearm and hand, with a tail nearly as long, lithe and light, with a round head, pricked ears, long whiskers, and eyes that narrow to slits in daylight and shine green or gold in lamplight. Coats come in tabby stripes of grey or brown, ginger, black, white, and patches of all of these; the granary cats of the Basins are mostly striped grey-brown.

A cat walks silently on its toes, sits with its tail wrapped round its feet, and pounces from stillness. It mews to its people, purrs when content, and yowls and screams at night in the mating season. A tom marks his ground with a sharp stink.

Habitat and Range

Cats live wherever people store food: granaries, threshing barns, mills, cellars, ships, inns, and houses, from the villages of the Confluence Basins to the quays of the Lower Serath and the fold houses of the far side. Feral cats live in ruins, such as those of the Broken Marches, and around any settlement's edges.

Behaviour and Temperament

A cat hunts mice, rats, small birds, and anything else small that moves, mostly at dusk and by night, and brings its catch home as often as it eats it. It is solitary, self-willed, and clean, attached to a place more than to a person, and affectionate on its own terms. It cannot be trained as a dog can and does not try to be.

Life Cycle

A queen bears two litters a year, three to six kittens each, in a hidden corner of a barn or loft. Kittens hunt by three months. A house cat may live fifteen years; a feral one far fewer.

Uses and Dangers

Cats keep down rats and mice in stores, which is why every granary keeper feeds them a little, never enough to stop them hunting; barn owls do the work as well, and the two are rivals. They are harmless, though they kill songbirds and a cat in the dovecote is a disaster.

Lore and Belief

A cat that will not enter a house is held to have seen something there. Sailors on the far-side coasts take a cat aboard for luck. Basin tales give cats to witches as companions, and scholars note that a familiar in cat's shape is a spirit-construct and no cat at all, which basin villagers do not find reassuring.

Granary-keepers say a good cat is worth a guard, and thieves say the same of a bad one.

Where It Appears

• Owls