Miranda the Great by Eleanor Estes Read Free Book Online Page A

Barcelona, known as the lizard cat, was allowed to sing. He began his song before the last singer was finished, he was so impatient to start. At first he sang from the top of the broken column, then he leaped to the top of a ruined wall, then he came nearer and nearer to the chorus, like a player coming from behind the scenes, then to take the center of the stage. In his song he told how he had made his departure from the city of Barcelona, Spain (the way he sang it, you would think he had chosen to leave and had not been chased out by the terrible rooftop cats there), and he sang of his arrival, after much wandering hither and thither, here in the Eternal City, Rome.
    Miranda, still standing on the throne, listened sharply to his song, and she narrowed her eyes. "Danger is ever imminent," she thought, for this broke-tail cat from Barcelona might be plotting to seize the throne. He might be singing his plot in Spanish and inciting some cats to join him and crown him king. Therefore, Miranda raised a majestic paw and butted in at the peak of his drama with the same sort of high note with which she had frightened off the sixteen dogs. The lizard cat got the point. Their duet was a short one, and Miranda easily drowned him out. The lizard cat staggered away, quite spent from his tremendous solo, back to the shadows where he remained for the rest of the opera.

    In her next solo Miranda warned the cats and kittens that they were to live in peace and harmony here, and practice their music, and not to fall into the quarrelsome ways of the cats who were already making a bad name for themselves in the Forum, wrangling all the time. And "Let the lizard cat beware," she sang, "else he be outcast from this Colosseum as he had been from Barcelona and have to resume his wanderings."
    For variety, other large cats sang their songs, some fierce, some sad and poignant, but all blended together into one splendid choir, all these individual histories being mingled and intermingled into a great magnificent rising and falling of voices such as one had never heard before. "Wah!" was the one note that Punka was allowed to sing. She sang it during an important pause, and it sounded fine but made her rather nervous, lest she sound it too soon or too late.
    Miranda then entered into her third solo, which was one of tender sweetness. In it she promised that she would never leave them, never part from them, that she was their mother, their queen mother, queen cat of the Colosseum, that the kittens must have no fear, be brave as little lions, be brave as she, and lead gentle lives.
    "Mew, mew, mew," sang the little kittens' choir in their sweet high voices. One, instead of singing, grinned foolishly. But Miranda did not rebuke him (it was the little tiger cat), though the others were appalled at his disrespect.
    The moon shone high over the Colosseum now, and pale stars appeared as Miranda reached her last solo, singing the most tragic part of her role in the opera, singing of her decision, just made, to renounce her life of peace and plenty with Claudia and instead take up the hard, albeit regal and splendid, life here, of caring for the cats of the Colosseum and keeping it safe for them.
    She turned her head toward Claudia as she sang, "Farewell, farewell,
carissima,
most dear, Claudia, farewell!" The other cats, made musical and sad by the tragedy being enacted before their very eyes, took up the theme of her farewell song and blended it into a touching chorus that, in nights to come, they would polish and refine, add to and enhance. And finally, in a great burst of lyric beauty Miranda ended the opera with a whispered "woe-woe!"
    Then came the cries and howls of acclaim. "
Io! Io!
" cried some. "Bravo!" cried others. "Long live Miranda! Long live Miranda the Great!
Viva! Viva! Viva Miranda Regina!
Long live Miranda the Queen!"
    It was awesome, and Claudia and her mother and father were awed. They were also sad, for they realized that the gist of all