For ages the Cat Goddess perforce had nourished herself on a peasant diet, and of this muckish fare she was fulsomely sick.  Of serf and slave also was she well fed up. She had in consequence watched eagerly take shape the battle plans of Queen Katerina. She dreamt of the savoury flesh of Othon XVIII, as well as his plump wives. ‘Soon,’ she consoled herself, ‘very soon now that my daughter cracketh open the rodent city with its teeming streets.’ The thought of that city full of pulsating hearts, arteries throbbing with blood, tender, quivering thighs, fleshy ribs, marrow, livers, brains and testicles maddened her with desire. She remembered nostalgically that great feast when she had supped on the rich, aristocratic fare of Prince Hranu and the tender and so savoury flesh of the boy Esan. The saliva dripped anew from her fangs. She shook her head for frustration, for all she had now were dried bones to suck and crunch, leftovers from a few lousy rat peons. She did not know how to distract herself from her carnivorous lustings. Her splendid temple had become to her a cage, and as a caged beast restlessly she paced it end to end. The fine tapestries she rent with claws that ached to sink into the deep, fatty, gelatinous folds of the Rat King. She stretched wide her jaws that tingled to snap the necks of a dozen or so rat lords. She craved to bash in skulls of rat warriors.
  Nothing was there to mark time nor the duration of her impatience, till skies, long overcast, splintered at last. Cloud continents drifted apart and sunlight flooded in through the window, making her drowsy. She stretched beneath the delicious hot beams to sleep. After some fussy adjustments of position she grew still except the barely discernible bellows of her chest, the occasional furling and unfurling of her tail tip as she dreamt of coming feasts. Once or twice she started awake, having imagined hearing the howling of Katerina’s army as they poured through the breached walls of the rat city. Once, she was so convinced of this that she rose and padded to the window. There was no smoke rising from that direction, however, and the only sound was the lonely weird of the wind sweeping down the valley, carrying with it the chill from off the high glaciers. Disappointed, she resumed her sun nap. Now she fell into a dreamless sleep, a well of slumber, a lightless, bottomless abyss of timeless oblivion. In that sightless nothingness she heard breathing. Her ear twitched. Then something snickered. Her eyes flew open. An age it seemed had passed. It was night. In a gloomy corner hunched the darker, loathsome form of the Rat, its yellow eyes two lamps.
  She pounced. It squealed and dashed away. Around and around the room she gave chase, but it ever eluded her claws just when she thought she had forked it. Then up the wall it scrambled and jumped out the window. She leapt up on to the ledge and scanned where it had gone, and there it hung, backdropped by the glacier turned rose by the new-risen sun, flapping on bat wings. Sluggishly it flew, improbably, heavy and brown like a turd. Through the window she sprang, landing on the snow, and gave pursuit. Her white fur, also rose-tinted, streaked. Her paws flying over the snow blurred.
  Up the snowy flanks of the mountains they raced, then down into the purple shadows of the other side, and so back into the folds of Mistress Night. Long the Goddess pursued the Rat, past Mercury and past Mars, till out of breath she stopped. Fiery comets flew overhead, the artillery fire of warring angels. The Rat had vanished. Perhaps he had hitched himself to one of those comets. She turned and dragged herself back to Kitania, exhausted and famished. She was not far from home when she entered heat like an oven. She had been absent so long that spring must have given way to high summer. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘Queen Katerina hath had time enough to take the city.’ She looked hopefully in that direction and her heart sprang when her eyes were dazzled by a piercing light. ‘She is burning the city! The Rats will be roasted to a turn in their brick houses!’ She licked her chops. But this light was white, she noticed next. When her eyes adjusted, she beheld the pyramid of the Rats. Her exaltation crumbled. The astonishing structure rose to challenge even the mighty ramparts of her own fastness. Like a mountain it pierced a carpet of vapour so that its peak seemed detached from the structure below. Surmounting its peak was a cage with which it had captured the Sun. Thus day had stopped, night never came, and the heat blistered hotter and hotter. The naked rocks of the mountains glowed hot as coals. Then the jaw of the Cat Goddess fell open as she understood. She was overcome with dread. The glaciers were gone. She divined the fiendish purpose of the Rat. An ocean of melted ice was sweeping towards the dry lakebed, an inundation so immense that it had smashed through the beaver dams. Her own hot rage boiled over. ‘No, no, no! Not a second time you will not!’ She sprang.
  Crack! Rats, drenched in the hot, streaming rain, looked up in bewilderment at the thunderclap, and some as they looked up were crushed or mangled by rubble dropping out of the roiling vapours. A white turmoil tore a gash in the iron clouds. In that skylight of blazing light the temple was revealed, two of its columns snapped. The ball of fire, plucked like a heart from its rib cage was a spinning billard ball. The white blizzard twisted round the Sun. A great paw, red-hot from having grasped the fireball, gave it a bat. The Sun whizzed off, growing smaller until it was a speck that blinked out of existence. Ratona was plunged into night, cold as outer space. The pouring rain fell more slowly and, ceasing to hiss, turned quietly to snow.