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The robbers' cottage was cozy and the pantry well-stocked, and the four of us kept house quite happily there for some time. In the afternoons we'd laze in the late summer sun, warming our old bones, napping and cracking jokes. At night we each found a comfortable place to rest; with no human hands to light the hearth-fire, I took to curling up with the hound behind the door for warmth. He snored a bit, but then, so did I.
Not a soul came to trouble us there; I'll wager those cowardly robbers were still having nightmares about us. When the night wind was gentle, we'd make music to the moon together, crowing and baying and screeching and wailing. We sang about our past troubles, and the singing loosened the old disappointments and left us feeling lighter. Who knows; perhaps it also changed the minds of anyone who thought to creep up on the house uninvited. It was a most glorious ruckus.
Those days were sweet, but eventually the larder was empty, and none of us had the means to fill it again. The cock and the donkey could do well enough foraging in the yard and the forest beyond, at least until winter came. But as for the hound and me, our hunting days were past; the mice and rabbits took to laughing at us. Though the days were still warm, the nights took on a hint of autumn's chill, and we knew we could not stay in the cottage much longer without provisions.
"We could always take to robbing," suggested the cock one morning, after he caught me gazing at him absent-mindedly and licking my lips. "It clearly worked well for those who lived here before us."
"Not for me," said the hound. "I don't run so fast anymore, and I hate getting pelted with rocks."
"I've never been the stealthy sort," said the donkey. "What about our original plan?"
"You're suggesting we actually go to Bremen and become town musicians," I said, after a stunned pause. This has been a running joke of the donkey's since the day we met; we were amused enough by the conceit that we played along, but none of us had believed for a second that he meant it. "Are you serious?"
"I never know if I'm joking until I do the thing I've been joking about," he replied. "Haw!"
"I can't wait to hear you play the lute, friend Donkey," said the hound, and we all laughed until we wheezed. A donkey playing the lute!
"Why Bremen, though?" asked the cock. "What's there?"
"Audiences! Crowds. Tourists. People with money to spend," replied the donkey expansively. "Stables, grocers, butcher shops, fishmongers. Merchant ships carrying exotic goods. Players, artists, musicians, dancers, drunkards, dreamers. Sightseers, and sights to be seen! Whatever you're looking for, you'll find it in the Free City of Bremen."
"You do know that doesn't mean everything there is free?" I asked.
The donkey snorted. "Old Whiskers, as long as the four of us are together and our masters far behind, I don't much care which way we wander. For me, the question is: why not Bremen? We're old, we can't fend for ourselves, no one will care for us. What have we got to lose? Why not see the city?"
As bad an idea as this was (and I maintain it was a very bad one), none of us had a better. So we took to the road again.
We made our way through the forest until night drew near, but this time there was no light to guide us to shelter. Instead, as the sky darkened, we heard a hideous shrieking. The cock flew up to a treetop to see what was the matter. "It's a trapped deer!" he crowed.
We all ran in the direction of the sound, and sure enough, by the ruins of an old stone hunting lodge, a rusting iron gate had fallen upon a doe who was struggling under its weight. "It burns! It burns!" she wailed. The donkey grunted and groaned and shoved the gate until the doe was free. She sprang up and immediately began looking about, frantically shouting, "My baby! Where is my baby?"
The cock flew up to a tree to look, and the hound began to sniff about. Between the two of them, they discovered the fawn hidden in a pile of stones. It sat there shivering and crying, refusing to come out (nor would I, if a strange dog asked me to!). I squeezed myself into the tiny hiding place and spoke quietly to the great leggy baby, purring and nuzzling until it calmed and followed me back out again to its mother.
"You've done us a great kindness, strangers!" said the doe, after she had comforted her child. "I can offer you little reward. But my baby and I were on our way to a gathering of friends, and we would be most honored if you would join us."
It was now dark enough that we would have otherwise slept in the rubble, so we gladly followed her. Were it not for my sense of smell, I would soon have become quite lost on the winding way she took us, ever farther from the road.
We came at last to an empty but strange-smelling clearing, widely ringed with toadstools. As I stepped over the row of fungus, I halted and hissed: we were not alone. Now that we were inside it, the fairy ring was lit up with little glowing lanterns, and busy with many people coming and going. At one side, a handful of musicians tuned up their instruments.
I turned to look at our host, and she had changed: her head and neck had been replaced by a slender human-like torso and head, though her ears still remained. Her child was similar in form, and he giggled and bumbled about with happy abandon, his former distress quite forgotten. No one seemed to mind when he got in the way; in fact, despite the number of people and the amount of activity in the ring, there were no collisions. Whether smoothly or erratically, they greeted one another, turned a cartwheel, struck a pose, offered and accepted food and drink without any of the confusion one would accept from humans.
Our host smiled at our bewilderment, and motioned us to wait. She approached a great chair on the far side of the circle, where a fairy-woman sat in shining clothes, and spoke to her, gesturing at us.
The fairy in the chair quietly cleared her throat, and suddenly all in the circle hushed and paused. "Good friends, we are honored by unexpected guests this eve. These kind strangers have saved my beloved Fritillaria and little Poppy from a dreadful fate. I beg you, make them all welcome!"
A great cheer arose, and then were we celebrated! Fairy paws and hands decked us with flower garlands and jewelry. Toast after toast was made to us with fairy wine. The most delicate and satisfying foods were brought to us, and we ate until we could eat no more.
"Doesn't eating fairy food mean you have to stay in Fairyland forever?" I whispered to the hound, as he licked clean a shining plate that had, but a moment before, held a most tender steak. "Or does that apply only to humans?"
"I don't even care," he answered, licking his muzzle and grinning at me happily.
The music quickened, and the general air of frolic became more focused. The fairy people, human-like and animal-like and part-human-part-animal-like, all danced in their own ways, making merry mayhem. In the thick of it, the cock strutted and fluttered as grandly as any of the peacocks present. The hound trotted about being petted while wagging his tail in time with the rhythm, and the donkey sat beside the great chair while the fairy-woman stroked his mane and whispered in his big ears. I held back, still doubtful, until a brownie brought me a bowl of catnip; then I cavorted quite as shamelessly as a kitten.
When the fairy woman cleared her throat again, I couldn't hear it above the din; but I felt it, and paused with the rest, giddy though I was.
"My handsome friend the donkey tells me that our guests are musicians! They perform melodies of such power that they can drive humans from their very homes. Dear guests, will you not give us a song?"
So sing we did, as loudly and freely as ever we had. But instead of listening silently, the fairy folk delightedly joined in, filling in the gaps in the sound until it was a mighty tide of noise that somehow all belonged together, terrifying and comforting at the same time. The very trees around us shuddered and waved their branches.
Then the sound dimmed and faded, and we listened to its echoes careering away through the forest into a stunned silence. Not a cricket chirped, nor leaf rustled in the void our music left.
"Ha-hah! " cried the fairy in the chair, her silver voice now edged with fierceness. She rose to her feet. "Let the world hear us, and tremble!" And as the fairy musicians struck up again, she leaped lightly onto the donkey's back, and together they led the dancers in wild abandon.
I don't remember lying down to sleep. I don't remember anyone leaving or saying goodbye. I don't remember the music stopping, or even getting tired -- I felt I could dance forever. But tire I must have, for I awoke late the next morning to an empty clearing, the grass and small flowers untrodden, no toadstools in sight, and no sign of my friends. The bodies of three human men lay scattered nearby; when I saw them, I hissed and scuttled backward. My legs didn't seem to work right, tired and achy as they were, and I got tangled up in some cloth I at first took for a blanket.
The three men roused themselves at the sound of my snarl, and blinked about themselves, clearly bewildered. One opened his mouth as if to speak, made a gurgling sound, and stopped, startled. One staggered to his feet and immediately fell over. One looked down at himself and made an exclamatory noise, then began... laughing. Laughing, and pointing at each of his companions -- and at me! -- and laughing some more.
Gradually, the truth dawned on the rest of us, and we all found ourselves laughing, if a little uneasily, at the trick the fairies had played on us. Though that day they all looked alike to me, my friends looked as much like their true selves as they could while still appearing human: Donkey, long of ear and tooth, was a tall man with a shaggy gray ponytail and a loud laugh; Hound kept his mournful eyes, jowly face, loping stride, and tendency to scratch himself at awkward times; Cock had a barrel chest and a pointed nose, and made up for his lack of height with his trumpeting voice and confident strut. We were dressed in attire that was colorful, but faded and worn. Though I didn't know it then, it was exactly the sort of clothing one might expect a band of old traveling musicians to wear.
"But why is Cat dressed in woman's clothing?" asked Cock, human words still clumsy in his mouth.
"Maybe because she's a woman cat," said Hound dryly; of course his sense of smell had told him so when we first met.
Cock sputtered, "Well how was I supposed to know that? Their feathers are all the same!"
I crept over to a tree, hoping its support would help me stay on these strange legs that bent in the wrong places. At the base of the tree, half-buried in a pile of leaves, was a worn leather case. I fumbled with the latches: it held an old, well-loved viol. "Looks like the fairy musicians left something behind," I said.
"Well? Give us a tune!" said Donkey.
I laughed again, but my hands went to the viol as though they knew it. I picked it up and held it without thinking about how to do so, and when I touched bow to strings, my hand was steady and sure. I played a melody, or rather, the melody played me; it was as close to one of last night's tunes as I could recollect.
Before I had reached the end of the stanza, Cock was crawling about in the leaves, looking for an instrument of his own. He at last pulled out a set of pipes, and was soon playing a reedy accompaniment to my melody as though he'd been doing it for a human lifetime. The fairy folk had left a drum for Hound, and a lute for Donkey, and soon they joined in quite handily.
Pleased with ourselves, we gathered our instruments and tottered onward, leaning on trees and one another for support. The slowness and clumsiness I had felt as an old cat was nothing compared to being an old human. In full daylight, the way back to the road was not hard to find; it led us out of the forest and across farmland. By the end of the day, we reached a small village with a large inn.
Now we were at a loss. Our pockets were empty, and we all felt unsure of how to proceed. We stood before the inn as people came and went, feeling awkward and ignorant; surely at any moment someone would realize we were faking being human. It took us a surprisingly long time to think of taking up our instruments.
When Cock inflated his pipes and Donkey began to tune up his lute, we caught some glances. But when Hound set a rhythm with the drum and the three of us joined in, feeling out the tune as we went, everything around us came to a halt. The humans stared and gathered around us. They tapped their feet, bounced a little on their toes, and then started dancing. Not a one of them, old or young, could stand still for long... and the crowd only grew as we played, from a dozen to two dozen.
As the tune drew to a close, the dancers hooted and bellowed their approval, and tossed a surprising number of coins into our open instrument cases. They begged for more, so we shrugged and gave them another tune, then another, and another. More people came, and more people danced, and more coins flew. Though I couldn't have counted them then, there must have been two score of humans gathered before the inn, kicking up the dust as though they'd never had any other plans for the evening.
When we finally insisted on stopping, tired and hungry as we were, there was no longer any question of how we would pay for our supper. The innkeeper, who had of course been among the dancers, refused to take our money, offering us his finest fare and cleanest rooms. No one seemed to notice how we stumbled over our words and manners; everyone had a light in their eyes, a spring in their step, that seemed to make all of that irrelevant.
We took to the road with both food to eat and money to spend. That morning over breakfast, someone offered us a horse, but we refused; none of us knew how to ride with our clumsy new bodies. We made our way to Bremen on foot, but we didn't sleep outdoors again. When there wasn't a village to stop in, there was a farmhouse, and every place was the same: all we had to do was strike up a tune, and the people would dance, and we had them eating out of our hands (by which curious expression I actually mean the reverse). We kept getting more money, and not needing to spend it. Somewhere along the way we realized the truth of the matter: the fairies hadn't played a trick on us, but with us. It didn't matter that we didn't know how to do human things; once we played for them, they would fall over themselves trying to help us.
So we came at last to Bremen, and it was quite a sight to our country eyes. We wandered the town like the bumpkins we were, gaping at the boats in the harbor, the statues, the great cathedral, the shops, and the masses of people; none of us had ever imagined so many humans in one place before. We paid for our first meal at a grocer's stall, not yet ready to draw attention to ourselves. At last we stopped on the western side of the town hall and, lit by the descending sun's rays, began to play.
At the first sound of our instruments, the square hushed as a hundred humans stopped in their tracks. Then, one by one, they began to tap their feet, step back and forth, and finally let the music have its way with them, twirling and trotting and whooping and clapping. They were not half so graceful as the fairies, and they bumped into one another quite a bit. But their delight was real, and their gratitude boundless. By the time the sun went down, we were rich, and we were celebrities.
Being human was confusing, and being a human in a city even more so. But everyone was eager to help us, for the charm held, and our performances became the most popular events in the region. We got ourselves a comfortable apartment, and paid for very few of our meals. The money piled up faster than we could spend it; it took us some time to figure out what we would even spend it on.
After a while, we stopped being quite so dazzled by Bremen, and became more aware of its darker sides. Of course we noticed from the first how badly used the animals were, from carriage horses to alley cats. But what we hadn't realized before, not really, was how much the humans mistreated each other. It wasn't just old animals who were discarded when they could no longer labor. Though we found ourselves welcome anywhere, we learned that not all humans were equally valued, and certain categories of humans treated other categories just as cruelly as they did animals, though for the life of me I couldn't see the difference between them. And there was treachery and dishonesty everywhere; how we avoided being taken advantage of, I don't know, unless that too was fairy magic.
It was Donkey's idea to buy a big farm outside of Bremen, and to pay the knacker for all the tired old horses sent his way. Hound and I invited our stray friends, and Cock made sure all the birds knew. When word got out, tired old animals began to flee their masters and take refuge with us, and they haven't stopped. We hired humans to do the work, and to make sure our guests are comfortable and happy, and isn't that a nice turn-about? We much prefer the farm to the city, though we visit Bremen often. We are the official town musicians, paid handsomely to play for nobles and wealthy merchants, and we perform outside the town hall once a fortnight for anyone within earshot.
When Donkey sees a hoofed creature being mistreated in the street, he will often buy it from its owner on the spot. Cock has gotten the ear of some local lawmakers, and is pushing for laws that punish such ill-treatment. Hound and I encouraged so many stray cats and dogs to leave the town that the rodents gave the citizens merry hell; when we brought back baskets full of kittens and puppies, the humans begged us for them. Most will not take their four-legged hunters for granted anytime soon... and if they do, well, the animals know their way back to the farm.
It has taken us a couple of years to adjust to this life. Though I miss my nimble cat-form every day, I know these are years that, had we still the bodies of animals, we might not have lived to see. And though we are under no illusions of youth, it feels less now like we are at the end of our story, and more like we have chapters yet waiting. Only yesterday, a messenger brought us a letter marked with the royal seal. I called one of the servants to read it aloud (I've been learning to read, but still have some trouble with it). The message was an invitation to play for the King and Queen at the royal palace.
No, the fairies are not done with us yet, and we will dance to their tune -- and the humans to ours -- until its final measure.