Chapter 1 My name is Nathaniel J. Claw and I am the Captain of a loyal and resourceful crew of cats who are dedicated to the struggle against the pirate dogs on the Cocker Spaniel Main. This is my story. I was born one of a litter of seven. Seven is a lucky number for cats, much as nine is, and I was the seventh son of a seventh son, which has always been considered a magical combination.
From the start, then, my family expected great things from me. The only thing that disappointed them was my colour. My mother was a sealpoint Himalayan; my father was a shaded silver Persian. My paternal grandfather, however, was a common grey alley cat. It was my grandfather who had all the courage, however, and he was a terrific street fighter in his day. He still knows a few tricks with claw and fang to deter an impertinent youth from taking over a piece of the alley! I am the spitting image of my grandfather, Tom Cattington. I am a grey cat with no distinguishing marks, except for a white star at the tip of my tail. There is an old saying that all cats are grey in the dark, but I am grey in all of the Nineworlds, whether in sunlight or in darkness. It can be a useful characteristic actually, especially when setting up an ambush for a pack of dishonest dogs. The earliest days of my youth were spent on the docks, where my uncle built ships for Her Majesty's navy. This uncle of mine had the reputation of having been a bit of a rogue in his own youth, but he had taken his ill-gotten gains and apparently invested them in a very reputable business, and had obtained a charter from the Queen to build and outfit all ships leaving our island. It was from my uncle that I learned how to sail and chart a course by the stars. The Great Cat in the North, with the PoleCat Star at the tip of his tail is the one to follow when all maps are lost, and I learned that lesson well. It saved my life and the life of my Crew on our ill-fated adventure round the Cape of Good Happenstance. But I digress a little. I learned the art of sailing and the art of fighting on the docks as a young cat, and I probably would have joined the Queen's Navy if circumstances had been different. Unfortunately, my father had made a powerful enemy in Lord Balfour when he stole my mother from under his whiskers and eloped with her. Lord Balfour had never forgiven him. When a chance arose to discredit him with the Queen, Lord Balfour leapt to it and accused him falsely of treason, forging documents that allegedly proved my family's disloyalty to the Crown. The sheriffs arrived one stormy morning to impound our property and my father met them at the gate, sword in hand. He fell to a barrage of gunfire, and I, a mere lad still, took up the sword which lay next to his bleeding corpse and sought to avenge his honour then and there. I would have died in the process, no doubt, rash and inexperienced as I was, if my uncle had not grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and spirited me away, kicking and protesting. He threw me into the care of his shipmaster, and off I went, quite ungraciously, to escape the Queen's wrath by embarking upon the first voyage of my life.
Chapter 2
I was not grateful to my uncle, I have to confess. Although I was keen on the idea of going to sea and having adventures, my soul was consumed with the desire to take vengeance on Lord Balfour, the man responsible for my father's death. Apart from this, I was horribly seasick for the first three days. A miserable cat indeed, hardly the dashing figure I would like to have been! After I 'got my sea legs' and recovered from my bout of seasickness, I was treated like any other new sailor and put to work scrubbing the decks. I was deeply offended by this, and resolved to jump ship at the first opportunity. Now, of course, I realise that he behaved both wisely and properly in showing no special favour to a young, arrogant cat who thought he had very little to learn! I have to say that if I have become a decent Captain, most of the credit is due to my uncle.
The biggest difference between my Uncle and his brother, my own father, was the fact that my Uncle was a merchant, and loved nothing better than a good bargain, or making a hefty profit on a commercial transaction. My father was a traditional aristocat, on the other hand, and did not feel that any member of our family should soil his hands or his spirit with 'filthy lucre.' He tried to instill the same attitudes in me, but quite honestly, I did not see much virtue in living in a castle where all of the walls were crumbling and the ceilings sprang a hundred new leaks every time a heavy storm hit, simply because my father was too stubborn to change with the times. After all, many aristocats in our time have restored their fortunes through acute business sense. How can it be more honourable for a noblecat to marry a feline female with a fortune than to earn ones riches through honest labour? Consequently, I always secretly admired my clever Uncle who brought exotic gifts from faraway lands to his favourite nephew when he visited our home, and did not understand my father's continuing refusal to go into partnership with his brother. My father was dead, however, and the ancestral home had been put to the torch by a group of thugs hired by Lord Balfour. I hated the menial labour my Uncle insisted on assigning me, but the truth of the matter was that I was off to a good start in the fine art of making a profit.
'Sell to the birds?' my father scoffed, laughing heartily. 'One doesn't enter into financial transactions with one's dinner!' 'These birds have a lot of power and even more money,' my Uncle retorted. 'You are a hundred years behind the times. The Longbarrow Birds are one of the largest cartels in the South Pacific, and they spend freely in order to impress the world with their newfound wealth and power. They have no qualms at spending a fortune on rare seed for a banquet, and that is one of the easiest cargos I can think of carrying. Weighs next to nothing in the hold, and no pirate will target our ship for a cargo of birdseed!' 'You are out of your mind!' my father laughed. 'What next?' 'Come into partnership with me. This castle needs a new roof, and I know that the harvest was very poor this year.' 'I am a gentleman, not a merchant,' my father replied, with quiet (and possibly foolish) dignity. 'If you choose to forget the blue blood running through our veins, I will never do so.' 'Our own father was a common alley tom!' my uncle retorted. 'No, you know better than that! He was considered so, by our Queen, because he was of the old Catswold Clan. But the Catswold Clan were kings of the North before the Ironcat invasion, and the blood ran pure in his veins.' 'Well, blue blood won't patch up a leaking roof, brother,' my uncle replied with a heavy sigh. 'Your pride will be your undoing one day.'
He spoke prophetically. If my father had not been so proud, he would not have earned the emnity of Lord Balfour, who resented the Catwold Clan and its ancient heritage. Lord Balfour was of the merchant class originally, but with a series of judicious loans to the Crown, managed to insinuate himself into a title, and bit by bit, bought up all of the lands in our province. My father alone refused to sell to him. He became a thorn in Balfour's side, as our land bordered on the Felion River, which was the main artery of commerce from here to the capital. Without access to the river, Balfour was doomed to play an increasingly small role in providing the capital with goods. He would not accept my father's refusal, however, and in the end, my father died for his pride and for a castle that was a safety hazard for its inhabitants.
Chapter 3
Apart from the wretched state of seasickness which the Lords of Mischance visited upon me, our journey to the South Pacific passed without any untoward incident. We docked in due course at the Port of St. Caw, and were met by a most distinguished delegation of birds. The whole business was peculiar to say the least: a shipload of cats being met by a group of nervous birds, who were determined to show only the best of manners, and not to give any hint of their natural terror. The fashions of the BarrowLands were about fifty years behind ours, and the Longbarrow birds were bewigged and powdered in the manner of my own grandfather's generation. If you have never seen a pelican wearing a curled wig, staggering about on platformed court shoes, you can have no real idea of how hilarious the sight was to our entire crew. We made a great show of grooming our whiskers in order to conceal the smiles we could not control. To his credit, my uncle managed to behave with all of the decorum the transaction merited. After all, we exchanged a few sackfuls of birdseed for a cargohold of treasure in gold, silver and gems. My uncle, a true merchant, did not even show curiosity as to the provenance of the treasure we received from the Barrow Birds, but I had retained the lively curiosity which has more than once been the death of members of our species, and has even been immortalised in a nursery saw, to wit: 'Curiosity killed the cat!' In fact, an idle remark to the maid who was airing out our rooms elicited the answer to the mystery and my uncle subsequently cursed me roundly for having uncovered a fact that was to bring him much misery.
'The treasure?' the maid replied, struggling to turn a straw mattress. (For obvious reasons, there were no proper feather mattresses on the Islands, but a cat can sleep in comfort in almost any position anywhere.) 'Why, the Islands are filled with treasure!' she continued. 'These are the BarrowLands, after all!' I had thought Barrow to refer to the rather lowly class of merchant known as 'barrow boy', but apparently it described something that had more to do with my people than with hers. 'They are haunted, you know,' she told me with relish. 'Otherwise, after all of these years, there would be nothing left of the treasure. But only a few birds will venture forth to rob the ancient graves. Usually it's the Vulture Gang, although more often than not you can find them in gaol. It's their nature, you know. Picking over the carcasses of the dead... Begging your pardon, Sir. A Vulture youth once took a fancy to me, but my mum carried on so, you would have thought he was the Foul One himself. Just as well. He was hanged last month in the Courtyard of Justice. Do you like to watch a good hanging, Sir? There are two scheduled tomorrow. Our governor held off on them, seeing as we were expecting guests, thinking you might enjoy the entertainment of watching a couple of felons swing.' 'Good heavens, no!' I stammered, then wondered if perhaps my natural revulsion would be considered rudeness. I quickly added, 'What can you tell me about the Barrows?''It's your sort, really,' she confided. 'But it has been at least a thousand years or so since any warriors lived on these Islands. The barrows were built for the heroes of the Jaguar Clan, and they simply heaped treasure upon treasure over the bodies of the dead. You have no idea! I saw one of them once -- the Barrows, I mean. A robber had opened it up, but had run off and left everything behind. Could be that he saw a ghost. Anyway, I was with my young gentleman, you know. We were, um, well, you know what it's like. And we happened upon this Barrow. There was so much gold and it was shining so bright it just about blinded us both! Gold bars and plates and jewels winking at us like a thousand eyes. It was really something, Sir. You ought to have seen it. Then the governor's soldiers came round and shut it up again, shovelled earth on top of all the pretty jewels and slung the stones on top of it again. I reckon they took their share first, though.'Although I attended to her ramblings with half an ear, my mind was racing. The Jaguar Clan indeed were 'our sort'; they were the illustrious ancestors of our own family, and a few of their most intrepid warriors had sailed across half the world in longships, adventuring and exploring. They finally settled in our own Northern Island, where they ruled as overlords over the natives for many centuries. This was part of our earliest history, but every schoolkit learned the epics of the Jaguar Clan, and their exploits had become the stuff of dreams.
(Here is where the document ends. I suppose that the author intended to write more, but never got around to it -- GREY CAT)