Jansson forced a smile. ‘My body’s going wrong, and I’m full of drugs. No wonder I smell strange to you.’
Li-Li took Jansson’s hands in hers. Li-Li wore no gloves, unlike Snowy. Her fingers were long, human-like in that regard, but her palms had leathery pads on the underside, like canine paws. ‘My jj-rrh-ob. Care for sick and injured. You lucky.’
‘How?’ Sally asked sharply. ‘How were we lucky?’
‘Snowy found-dd you.’ She glanced up at the big beagle at the reins. ‘Not ve-hhry clever but big spir-rrit. Always truth-tells. B-hhrave. Good hunter, but kind. Takes you back to city, see Granddaughter Petra. Some hunter-hhrs, just take back head. Or ear-rrs.’
Sally and Jansson exchanged a glance. Jansson said, ‘So we’re lucky we got found by a beagle that didn’t just kill us outright.’
‘There’s no higher morality,’ Sally said. ‘By the way,’ she added more softly, ‘I just jumped to another conclusion.’
‘What?’
‘She said Snowy’s truthful. That implies that others aren’t. These super-dogs know how to lie.’
Jansson nodded. ‘Noted.’
49
SOON THEY MADE out a smear of smoke on the eastern horizon.
The trail they followed turned to bare mud scored by the ruts of traffic. The land seemed greener too, away from the open sward of scrubland into which they had stepped. They even passed by a few forest clumps. To Jansson, no naturalist, many of the trees looked like ferns, with squat, stubby trunks and sprawling, parasol-like leaves.
In one place she could see through a screen of trees to a shimmer of open water, a lake, and by its bank creatures had gathered to drink. They were rather like small deer, Jansson thought, but their bodies were a little too heavy, their legs a bit too stubby. Deer with a dash of pig, perhaps.
Li-Li was on the alert as the cart rolled through its closest approach to the lake. At his reins, Snowy stared fixedly at the deer things, his ears erect. Li-Li growled a phrase to him, over and over.
Finn McCool the kobold grinned his anxious, nervy grin at Sally and Jansson. ‘She says, “Snowy. Remember wh-hho you a-are . . .” These dog fellows-ss run off four-legged after prey if they get chance. Sh-should be on leash-shsh . . .’
‘Nothing would surprise me,’ Jansson said, as the cart rolled on away from the water.
Sally said, ‘We ought to remember that our hosts might look like dogs, but they’re not dogs. That might lead us astray. Their ancestors never were dogs, because dogs probably never evolved here, not as we know them. These are sapient creatures carved from some dog-like clay. Just as we are sapients made from heavily modified apes . . .’
Jansson found herself longing for the concrete and glass of the Datum, the reassuringly grubby crimes of lowlife humanity. Perhaps all this, natural selection’s arbitrary shaping of living things, was something you got used to out in the Long Earth. Not her, not yet. ‘The plasticity of living forms.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing. A line from a book.’
Her reaction merely seemed to puzzle Sally.
Now they passed through farmland, a belt of it that evidently surrounded the beagle city. A scrawl of dry stone walls, none of them straight, divided the land into rough fields crowded with beasts browsing or grazing. Some of these looked like fatter, stupider versions of the deer things Jansson had spotted by the lake in the forest. Others were more like cattle, goats, pigs, even what looked like some kind of rhinoceros with lopped-off horns, and a few fat, feathery versions of the bird creatures that drew this truck. Dogs could be seen patrolling the herds. In one field, deer-like animals were being driven into an enclosure, perhaps for milking.
And here Jansson saw trolls, the first since they’d arrived in this world, save for Mary and Ham. A party of a couple of dozen, perhaps, were working their way along a dry stone wall, evidently making repairs. They sang as they worked, the usual beautiful multi-part harmony applied to a lively, jumping melody. Ham, who had been napping on Mary’s lap, woke up now, and climbed up on his mother’s shoulder to see. In his immature piping voice he sang back phrases, echoing the song.
Sally listened hard. ‘I’d swear they’re singing “Johnny B Goode”. My father would have known.’
Jansson said, ‘These are the farms of smart carnivores. Right? Nothing arable, no crops. Nothing but meat on the hoof.’
‘Right. There’ll be plenty of peptides in the arteries after they’ve fed us up a few times here, Monica.’
‘The trolls seem happy, judging by that party we saw.’
‘Yes.’ Sally seemed oddly uneasy with that observation. ‘These dogs are evidently sapient. We know trolls like to be around sapients. I guess that’s why they’re coming here, to this world, for refuge. Sapients, but non-human. So they’re comfortable here.’
‘You’re jealous!’
‘Am not.’
‘Come on. Everybody knows you like trolls, Sally Linsay. You championed their cause even before this latest blow-up, even before we absconded from the Gap with Mary.’
‘What about it?’
‘Well, now you’re finding out that, no matter how special trolls are to you, humans aren’t all that special to trolls.’
Sally just glared back.
Suddenly Snowy stood bolt upright, staring out to the north, ears pricked again, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. Again Li-Li murmured words, or growled commands, and Snowy stayed in control of his reins.
‘You can see why he’s distracted,’ said Sally. ‘Take a look.’
When Jansson twisted to see, she saw small compact brown-furred forms bounding across the fields away from the cart, white tails bobbing. ‘They look like rabbits,’ she said.
‘I think they are rabbits. Authentic Datum pedigree. I wonder how they got here.’ And Sally turned to glare at Finn McCool.
He grinned, showing too many triangular teeth. ‘Beagles-ss love them. Fun to chase. Good to eat.’
‘What else have you sold these creatures?’
‘As-side from rabbits?’
‘Aside from rabbits.’
He shrugged. ‘Not juss-st me. The wheels-ss. The iron . . .’
‘You sold them iron-making?’
‘Brought blacksmith-th. Humann.’
Jansson asked, ‘And the fee you negotiated for all this—’
‘The litters-ss of their litters will be paying in ins-sstallmentss.’
And, Jansson thought, paying for this ‘gift’ of the rabbits. Ask an Australian about rabbits . . .
The kobold had been leaning towards them, apparently keen to join the conversation. Distracted, the women abandoned their talk, and he shrank back. Jansson wondered if Finn McCool picked up some undertone of contempt, of dismissal. Now he dug his elderly walkman out of his pouch, lifted his headphones over his ears, and played his music, swaying to a beat Jansson could hear, tinnily. He smiled again, watching the faces of Sally and Jansson, making sure they were noticing him. The kobold was like a poor imitation of a human, and a needy one, Jansson thought: needing the regard of humans, whatever animal dignity his distant ancestors had once possessed long bred out by corrosive contact with mankind. Jansson turned away with a peculiar disgust.
And she saw, to her horror, that while Li-Li and Snowy were distracted, Sally had slipped the ray gun from its loose holster at Snowy’s waist. She inspected it briefly, then put it back. ‘Dead,’ she whispered to Jansson. ‘I thought it looked kind of inert. Another useful fact, Monica . . .’
50
THE TRAIL GREW wider as they approached the city. There was more traffic now, carts laden with butchered carcasses and cut leather and heaps of bones. Live animals on the hoof were driven forward too, things like bears, some even a little like apes, controlled in rough herds by beagle shepherds with sticks and whips that cracked. There was even a party of trolls being led by a beagle but under no apparent duress, singing what sounded like rockabilly to Jansson.
And there
were many pedestrians: beagles, adults and pups alike, all sparsely dressed, with belts or jackets replete with pockets. Jansson saw no sign of adornment, nothing like jewellery, no hats or fancy clothing. But as the crowds thickened Jansson started to smell them, the sharp stink of wet fur and piss or dung, and she wondered if that was how these dog-like people decorated themselves: not with visual embellishment but with fancy scents.
The adults all walked upright. Maybe dropping to all fours was frowned on in the city, something you only did out in the country or in private – like a human going naked, maybe. But the young would get down and hop and gambol around their parents’ legs like puppies around a new owner. Jansson was no anatomist, but she watched the beagles curiously, trying to see how a presumably dog-like four-legged body plan had been adapted to a natural-looking upright stance – and how it had been arranged that slipping back to all fours was so easy. That was a difference with humans, she thought; even as a kid she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes if she’d tried to knuckle-walk like her remote chimp-like ancestors. But she couldn’t make out the detail.
She clung on in the rattling cart, letting the sights and scents wash over her. The gathering crowd might almost have been human, if you looked at it through half-closed eyes. The beagles’ bodies, upright, were taller than human, and with the pelvis slung oddly low, so the torso was long, the back legs, short. Not impossibly far from the human. But then she would see ears prick up, and cold wolf-like eyes stare back at her, and the pack scent of the dogs would wash over her, and she felt as if these creatures could not have been more alien.
Finn McCool was watching her. ‘You strange to them-mm, but not that ss-strange. They think you kobolds-ss.’ He laughed at that. ‘We’re all the ss-same to them, we human-nn f-folk. Ss-ame to stupid puppies-ss.’
‘You and I,’ Sally said with cold contempt, ‘are not the same.’
It was a relief when the cart at last reached the city itself. The Eye of the Hunter was a wide brownish smear of wooden buildings set in a muddy plain, under a pall of smoke. The central development was bounded by a wide moat spanned by solid-looking bridges of wood and stone. The moat was evidently for defence, but there was no city wall that Jansson could discern, just a low, irregular dry stone barrier that looked as if it was intended to keep out beasts wandering from the fields rather than purposeful invaders.
Just before they reached the moat, they passed stockades into which farm animals were being driven for slaughter. Jansson, in a quick glance, saw the beagles working, polished stone blades flashing, blood spurting, and the animals fell one by one. Death and blood: universals on every world, it seemed, no matter how far you travelled. Jansson felt her queasy stomach churn.
In the city, the buildings, none more than a couple of storeys high, were robust but unadorned, wooden boxes with walls of stone or packed mud and roofs of timber or a kind of coarse thatch: irregular shapes, nothing of the squareness or roundness you’d associate with a human town. There seemed to be only a couple of traffic arteries, long, straight avenues running north–south, east–west through the heart of the city; the other tracks were winding, irregular. Whatever these dogs were, they weren’t geometers – not in the style of human geometry, anyhow. Now the dominant smell was of wood smoke and a lingering raw-meat stench, overlying the rich dog-like scent of the beagles themselves. And this was a noisy place as well as a smelly one, with an unending chorus of barks and yaps and howls.
They didn’t get much further before they were held up by a small pack of tough-looking male dogs. They surrounded the cart, and began to interrogate Snowy and Li-Li with rapid-fire yelps and growls.
‘Cops,’ Sally said. ‘Or royal guards. We must be heading straight for the palace . . . Some palace, however. Not exactly Paris, France, is it?’
‘It’s not even Paris, Texas.’
‘But it’s not built to impress us.’
Li-Li gave them a wolfish grin, and sniffed, with short chuffing sounds. ‘Know this from rrh-kobolds. Humans can’t smell. But city, city full of wo-rrds. Scent over there. I he-hre, half day ago, seeking you. And distant, distant – hear howls? I, I have fine f-hhrresh meat from count-hrry, buy now, buy now . . .’
Sally grinned. ‘Think of that, Jansson. Imagine if you had the nose of a police dog. The city’s full of information. There are scent markers everywhere, just like posters or graffiti on the walls, and the howls must be more long-range, like some kind of internet.’
They came at last to a building bigger than most, wider, but no taller, and no more elaborately constructed than the rest. Here the human party was told to wait with Snowy, while Li-Li jogged inside.
The strongest smell just here was wood smoke. ‘Dogs discover fire,’ Jansson murmured.
‘Maybe that’s how it started,’ Sally mused. ‘Dogs are smart animals. Intensely social, adaptable, easy to train. Here, maybe us clever monkeys never evolved to keep them in their place. And one day, in some starving pack out on the prairie, one bright young female comes home with a burning branch in her jaws, taken from some lightning-struck forest . . .’
‘Or some bright young male.’
Sally grinned. ‘Be serious.’
Li-Li returned, to say they would be taken in to see the Granddaughter immediately.
51
THEY WERE LED through narrow, twisting, confusing corridors – confusing unless you could follow scents, probably – to a large chamber, with long curving walls of stone and mud, a high ceiling, windows, and a fireplace, unlit.
The basics of the room might have been laid out by a human, Jansson thought, down to the detail of the fireplace built under what was evidently a chimney stack. Some things were universal. But the room, while well constructed, was drab to human eyes; there was no paint, no wallpaper, no tapestries, no art on the walls. What there was, however, was a rich melange of scents, which even Jansson’s battered old cop’s schnozzle could detect.
The princess of the beagles had no throne; she sat easily on the ground, on what looked like a patch of natural turf growing in the middle of the room. The princess was flanked by guards, who had stone-tipped spears and space-age blasters to hand. Jansson wondered how the grass got the light to grow.
The Granddaughter’s title was not ‘Granddaughter’. Her name was not ‘Petra’. The adviser beside her, an ageing male with a glum posture, was not called ‘Brian’. But these were the best labels Sally and Jansson were given, courtesy of the kobold. The Granddaughter wore only a practical-looking pocket belt – that, and, Jansson saw, some kind of pendant on a loop of leather at her neck, what looked like handsome blue stones set in a ring of gold. It was an artefact that caught Jansson’s eye; it looked naggingly familiar.
And there was a dog by her side! A real dog, an authentic dog, a Datum dog, a big Alsatian if Jansson was any judge. It sat up, watching the newcomers, its tongue lolling; it looked healthy, well fed, well groomed. Somehow it looked the most natural presence in the world, here in this room full of dog-people, and yet the strangest too.
All the beagles watched stonily as Jansson and Sally, hastily instructed by Finn McCool, showed submission to the Granddaughter by getting down on the ground and lying on their backs, arms and legs up in the air.
‘God, how humiliating,’ Sally murmured.
‘You should worry. I’m going to need help getting up again.’
The kindly nurse type Li-Li came over to assist when the gesture was finished. Then Sally and Jansson, with McCool, had to sit as best they could on the hard-packed earth of the floor, while the Granddaughter murmured to her advisers.
‘That dog,’ murmured Sally, ‘is a Datum dog. Something to do with you, McCool?’
‘Not me . . . anoth-ther kobold seller-rr. Popular here. They lik-ke big males. Sex-ss toys.’
Sally snorted, but kept from laughing.
Jansson leaned over and whispered, ‘Sally. That pendant she’s wearing.’
‘Yes. Shut up about it.’
‘B
ut it looks like—’
‘I know what it looks like. Shut up.’
At length the Granddaughter deigned to consider them. She said, with the usual rough approximation of English, ‘You. What you call hhrr-uman. From worr-ld you call Datum-mm.’
‘That’s correct,’ Sally said. ‘Umm – ma’am.’
‘Wh-hrr-at you want her-hhre?’
Sally and Jansson went through a halting explanation of why they had come: the problems with the trolls across the human Earths, how Sally had learned from the kobolds that many of the trolls had fled to this world, how they hoped that the trolls they had brought here, Mary and Ham, would be safe . . .
The Granddaughter considered this. ‘Trolls hrr-appy here. Trolls like beagrr-les. Beagles like trolls. Troll music fine. H-rruman music arse shit.’ She perked her own ears. ‘Beagle ears better-hhr than human. Human music ar-hhrse shit.’
‘That’s what my father kept telling me,’ Sally said. ‘All downhill since Simon and Garfunkel broke up, he said.’
Petra stared at her. ‘I know noth-thing of this Simon and Garr-hrr—’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Beagles despise human music. Beagles despise h-hrr-umans.’
That blunt statement shocked Jansson. ‘Why?’
The Granddaughter stood upright now and walked over to her, towering over the sitting women. Jansson did her best not to flinch, and to return that wintry stare. ‘Why? You-hhr stink. You especially . . .’
But it seemed to Jansson that the Granddaughter’s own scent was odd, unnatural, overlaid by some kind of perfume perhaps. Maybe, for a species to whom scent was so important, to mask your smell was to mask your thoughts.
‘And,’ said Petra, ‘you-hhr dogs.’ She pointed at the patient Alsatian. ‘Once wolf. Now toy, like sc-hhrap of bone in mouth. No mind-dd. Hrr-umans did this.’
Jansson supposed that was true: dogs were wolves reduced to submissive pets. She imagined seeing a small-brained humanoid in a collar, on a lead . . . Still, she protested. ‘But we love our dogs.’
The Long War Page 28