The Courtyard

Silence slunk like a black cat through the grates, inking the walls with its shadow as it went. It was early yet, too early even for the pilgrims that had arrived seeking solace and a blessing. Beyond the dim pool of a courtyard, etched in wet, reached the sacred tree. Bare and arthritic.

How could a god reside in such profanity? That was the way of the tree. Unremarkable to the uninitiated and sometimes even to the initiate. But the myth held. Those who had seen beyond its withered husk of a disguise, barren, leafless, knew. This was no ordinary tree. It held power. The black cat knew and it circumambulated the perimeter, sly and stalking, keeping one slit eye on the tree, the other like a razor to the throat of naysayers. Those who blasphemed the sacred one would disappear, silently devoured by shadows. The tree was not the only one who was not what it appeared, for gods do not usually stand alone and this was no exception.

The mop man appeared then. A bamboo broom under one crimson-clad arm and a bowl of milk in the opposite hand. The milk was yellow and spiced with saffron. He set it down next to a pillar on the inside of the courtyard and out of the rain that misted gently onto the ground from the open sky in the center. Cat eyed him, flicking his damp tail back and forth. The mop man had been a caretaker of the tree for half a century. His back was hunched and the skin on his hands thick and creased like that of a rhinoceros. He ignored cat’s upturned nose and narrowed eyes and began sweeping the leaves from the stone floor beginning in the Eastern corner and working toward West mimicking the direction of the sun’s trajectory of light.

The milk tasted of yak, dense and tangy, not sweet like the cream he got on festival days. But Cat didn’t care. He had been around long enough to know that eventually, he would taste cream again. Immortality had that effect on a person, feline or not.