A Tale of Time City

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Polly began to wonder if it might even be against the law for her to be listening to these things. She tried not to listen—and this was not difficult, because most of it was very boring—but she became steadily more unhappy.

  She wished she dared creep away. She was quite near the door. It would have been easy if only that man hadn’t chosen to sit down just beyond her, right beside the door. She looked to see if she still might slip out, and looked at the same moment as the man looked at her, evidently wondering about her. Polly hastily turned her head to the front again and pretended to listen to the Will, but she could feel him still looking. The ice in her drink melted. The Will went on to an intensely boring bit about “a Trust shall be set up.” Beside the door, the man stood up. Polly’s head turned, without her meaning it to, as if it were on strings, and he was still looking at her, right at her. The eyes behind the glasses met hers and sort of dragged, and he nodded his head away sideways towards the door. “Come on out of that,” said the look. “Please,” it added, with a sort of polite, questioning stillness.

  It was a fair cop. Polly nodded too. Carefully she put the melted orange drink down on the chair beside hers and slid to the floor. He was now holding out his hand to take hers and make sure she didn’t get away. Feeling fated, Polly put her hand into his. It was a big hand, a huge one, and folded hers quite out of sight under its row of long fingers. It pulled, and they both went softly out of the door into the hall with the jointed staircase.

  “Didn’t you want your drink?” the man asked as the lawyer’s voice faded to a rise and fall in the distance.

  Polly shook her head. Her voice seemed to have gone away. There was an archway opening off the hall. In the room through the archway she could see the servitor setting wineglasses out on a big, polished dinner table. Polly wanted to shout to him to come and explain that he had let her into the funeral, but she could not utter a sound. The big hand holding hers was pulling her along, into the passage she had come in by. Polly, as she went with it, cast her eyes round the hall for a last look at its grandeurs. Wistfully she thought of herself jumping into one of the Ali Baba vases and staying there hidden until everyone had gone away. But as she thought it, she was already in the side passage with the door standing open on the gusty trees at the end of it. The lawyer’s voice was out of hearing now.

  “Will you be warm enough outside in that dress?” the man holding her hand asked politely.

  His politeness seemed to deserve an answer. Polly’s voice came back. “Yes thank you,” she replied sadly. “I’ve got my real clothes on underneath.”

  “Very wise,” said the man. “Then we can go into the garden.” They stepped out of the door, where the wind wrapped Polly’s black dress round her legs and flapped her hair sideways. It could not do much with the man’s hair, which was smoothed across his head in an elderly style, so it stood it up in colourless hanks and rattled the jacket of his dark suit. He shivered. Polly hoped he would send her off and go straight indoors again. But he obviously meant to see her properly off the premises. He turned to the right with her. The wind hurled itself at their faces. “This is better,” said the man. “I wish I could have thought of a way to get that poor boy Seb out of it too. I could see he was as bored as you were. But he didn’t have the sense to sit near the door.”

  Polly turned and looked up at him in astonishment. He smiled down at her. Polly gave him a hasty smile in return, hoping he would think she was shy, and turned her face back to the wind to think about this. So the man thought she really was part of the funeral. He was just meaning to be kind. “It was boring, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “Terribly,” he said, and let go of her hand.

  Polly ought to have run off then. And she would have, she thought, remembering it all nine years later, if she had simply thought he was just being kind. But the way he spoke told her that he had found the funeral far more utterly boring than she had. She remembered the way the lady she had mistaken for Nina had spoken to him, and the way the other guests had looked at him while he was walking about looking for a seat. She realised he had sat down on purpose near the door, and she knew—perhaps without quite understanding it—that if she ran away, it would mean he had to go back into the funeral again. She was his excuse for coming out of it.

  So she stayed.

  And don’t forget…

  The Dog Star, Sirius, is tried—and found guilty—by his heavenly peers for a murder he did not commit. His sentence: to live on the planet Earth as a dog until such time as he can carry out a seemingly impossible mission—the recovery of a deadly weapon known as the Zoi. The first painful lesson Sirius learns in his lowly earthly form is that humans have all the power. The second is that even though his young mistress loves him, she can’t protect either of them from the cruelty of other humans. The third—and worst—is that someone is out there who will do anything to keep Sirius from finding the Zoi. Even if it means destroying Earth itself.

  With an introduction by Neil Gaiman

  1

  The Dog Star stood beneath the Judgment Seats and raged. The green light of his fury fired the assembled faces viridian. It lit the underside of the rooftrees and turned their moist blue fruit to emerald.

  “None of this is true!” he shouted. “Why can’t you believe me, instead of listening to him?” He blazed on the chief witness, a blue luminary from the Castor complex, firing him turquoise. The witness backed hastily out of range.

  “Sirius,” the First Judge rumbled quietly, “we’ve already found you guilty. Unless you’ve anything reasonable to say, be quiet and let the Court pass sentence.”

  “No I will not be quiet!” Sirius shouted up at the huge ruddy figure. He was not afraid of Antares. He had often sat beside him as Judge on those same Judgment Seats—that was one of the many miserable things about this trial. “You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said, all through. I did not kill that luminary—I only hit him. I was not negligent, and I’ve offered to look for the Zoi. The most you can accuse me of is losing my temper—”

  “Once too often, in the opinion of this Court,” remarked big crimson Betelgeuse, the Second Judge, in his dry way.

  “And I’ve admitted I lost my temper,” said Sirius.

  “No one would have believed you if you hadn’t,” said Betelgeuse.

  A long flicker of amusement ran around the assembled luminaries. Sirius glared at them. The hall of blue trees was packed with people from every sphere and all orders of effulgence. It was not often one of the high effulgents was on trial for his life—and there never had been one so notorious for losing his temper.

  “That’s right—laugh!” Sirius roared. “You’re getting what you came for, aren’t you? But you’re not watching justice done. I tell you I’m not guilty! I don’t know who killed that young fool, but it wasn’t me!”

  “The Court is not proposing to go through all that again,” Antares said. “We have your Companion’s evidence that you often get too angry to know what you’re doing.”

  Sirius saw his Companion look at him warningly. He pretended not to see her. He knew she was trying to warn him not to prove the case against him by raging any more. She had admitted only a little more than anyone knew. She had not really let him down. But he was afraid he would never see her again, and he knew it would make him angrier than ever to look at her. She was so beautiful: small, exquisite and pearly.

  “If I were up there, I wouldn’t call that evidence,” he said.

  “No, but it bears out the chief witness,” said Antares, “when he says he surprised you with the body and you tried to kill him by throwing the Zoi at him.”

  “I didn’t,” said Sirius. He could say nothing more. He could only stand fulminating because his case was so weak. He refused to tell the Court that he had threatened to kill the blue Castor-fellow for hanging around his Companion, or that he had struck out at the young luminary for gossiping about it. None of that proved his innocence anyway.

  “Other witne
sses saw the Zoi fall,” said Antares. “Not to speak of the nova sphere—”

  “Oh go to blazes!” said Sirius. “Nobody else saw anything.”

  “Say that again,” Betelgeuse put in, “and we’ll add contempt of court to the other charges. Your entire evidence amounts to contempt anyway.”

  “Have you anything more to say?” asked Antares. “Anything, that is, which isn’t a repetition of the nonsense you’ve given us up to now?”

  Rather disconcerted, Sirius looked up at the three Judges, the two red giants and the smaller white Polaris. He could see they all thought he had not told the full story. Perhaps they were hoping for it now. “No, I’ve nothing else to say,” he said. “Except that it was not nonsense. I—”

  “Then be quiet while our spokesman passes the sentence,” said Antares.

  Polaris rose, quiet, tall and steadfast. Being a Cepheid, he had a slight stammer, which would have disqualified him as spokesman, had not the other two Judges been of greater effulgence. “D-denizen of S-sirius,” he began.

  Sirius looked up and tried to compose himself. He had not had much hope all through, and none since they declared him guilty. He had thought he was quite prepared. But now the sentence was actually about to come, he felt sick. This trial had been about whether he, Sirius, lived or died. And it seemed only just to have occurred to him that it was.

  “This Court,” said Polaris, “has f-found you guilty on three counts, namely: of m-murdering a young luminary s-stationed in Orion; of grossly m-misusing a Zoi to com-m-mit that s-said m-murder; and of culpable negligence, causing t-trepidation, irregularity and d-damage in your entire s-sphere of inf-fluence and l-leading t-to the l-loss of the Z-zoi.” For the moment, his stammer fazed him, and he had to stop.

  Sirius waited. He tried to imagine someone else as denizen of his green sphere, and could not. He looked down, and tried not to think of anything. But that was a mistake. Down there, through the spinning star-motes of the floor, he looked into nothing. He was horrified. It was all he could do not to scream at them not to make him into nothing.

  Polaris recovered himself. “In p-passing this s-sentence,” he said, “the Court takes into cons-sider-ation your high eff-ffulgency and the s-services you have f-formerly rendered the Court. In view of these, and the f-fact that you are l-liable to rages in which you cannot be s-said to be in your right m-mind, the Court has d-decided to revive an ancient p-prerogative to p-pass a s-special kind of s-susp-pended s-sentence.”

  What was this? Sirius did not know what to think. He looked at his Companion, and then wished he had not, because of the doubt and consternation he saw in her.

  “D-denizen of S-sirius,” said Polaris, “you are hereby s-sentenced to be s-stripped of all s-spheres, honors and eff-ffulgences and banished f-from here to the body of a creature native to that s-sphere where the m-missing Z-zoi is thought to have f-fallen. If, d-during the life s-span of that creature, you are able to f-find and retrieve the Z-zoi, the Court will be p-pleased to reinstate you in all your f-former s-spheres and d-dignities. F-failure to retrieve the Z-zoi will carry no f-further p-punishment. In the Court’s op-opinion, it is s-sufficient that you s-simply die in the m-manner natural to creatures of that s-sphere.”

  Slow as Polaris was in giving this extraordinary sentence, Sirius had still barely grasped it when Polaris sat down. It was unheard of. It was worse than nothing, because it condemned him not only to exile but hope—hopeless, brutish hope, over a whole uncertain life span. He flared up again as he realized it.

  “But that’s the most preposterous sentence I ever heard!”

  “Quiet,” said Antares. “The Court orders the prisoner taken away and the sentence carried out.”

  “Try saying preposterous, Polaris!” Sirius shouted as they led him away.

  The sentence was carried out at once. When he came to himself, Sirius was no longer capable of protesting. He could not see clearly, or speak. Nor did he think much, either. He was very weak and very, very hungry. All his strength had to be spent fighting for food among a warm bundle of creatures like himself. He had just found himself a satisfactory slot and was feeding, when he felt himself plucked off again by a large invincible hand and turned upside down. He made noises in protest, and kicked a little.

  A great gruff voice, probably a woman’s, said words he did not understand. “That’s the sixth beastly dog in this litter. To one bitch. Blast it!”

  Sirius was plunked unceremoniously back, and fought his way to his slot again. He did not think much about anything but feeding for quite a while after that. Then he slept, wedged warmly among the other creatures, against a great hairy cliff. It was some days before he thought about anything but food and sleep.

  But at length he was seized with an urge to explore. He set off, crawling strenuously on four short legs which seemed far too weak to carry his body. He tripped several times over the folds in the rough cloth he was crawling on. The other creatures were crawling vaguely about, too. More than once, Sirius was bowled over by one. But he kept on, blinking, trying to see where the strong light was coming from a little farther off. He came to cold floor, where crawling was easier.

  He was nearly in the strong, warm light, when footsteps clacked toward him. The ground shook. He stopped uncertainly. Once again, he was seized by something ineffably strong and turned upward, kicking and undignified, toward a vaguely looming face. “You’re a bold one,” remarked the great gruff woman’s voice. Then, as Sirius blinked, trying to see what had caught him, the voice said, “I don’t like the look of your eyes, fellow. Something tells me Bess has been a naughty girl.”

  Since he understood none of the sounds the gruff voice made, Sirius felt nothing but exasperation when he was put back in the dark on the rough cloth. Now he would have all that crawling to do again. He waited for the heavy footsteps to clack away, and then set off again.

  It did no good. He was put back by someone—either the woman or a being with a hoarse youth’s voice—every time he reached the light. He cheeped with frustration. Something in him craved for that light. Why would they not let him have it?

  He was in the doorway the next day, when they came—the woman, the hoarse youth and another person. They nearly trod on him. Sirius knew it, and cowered down in terror. The woman, with an exclamation of annoyance, plucked him up from the cold floor into the light.

  “Blast this one! It is a wanderer.” Sirius was quite used to being picked up by this time. He lay quiet. “Well?” said the woman. “What do you think, Mrs. Canning dear? Those markings aren’t right, are they? And look at its eyes.”

  Sirius felt the attention of the other person on him. It felt wrong, somehow. He struggled, and was firmly squeezed for his pains. “No,” said a new voice thoughtfully, and it troubled Sirius. It and the smell that went with it set up a ripple that was nearly a memory in his head. “Wrong eyes, wrong color ears. Your bitch must have got out somehow, Mrs. Partridge dear. What are the others like?”

  “The same, with variations. Take a look.”

  There were indignant cheepings that told Sirius that his companions, less used to being handled than he, were being bundled about too. Above the noise, the three voices held a long discussion. And below the cheeping, there was a deeper, anxious whining.

  “Shut up, Bess! You’ve been a bad girl!” said the voice called Mrs. Partridge. “So you don’t think these’ll fetch any money at all?”

  “You might get a pound or so from a pet shop,” said the voice called Mrs. Canning. “Otherwise—”

  “Much obliged!” Mrs. Partridge said. There was such an unmistakable note of anger in her voice that Sirius cringed and his companions stopped cheeping. They were silent when they were plunked back on the ground, though one or two whimpered plaintively when the big anxious mother licked them. The footsteps went away, but two sets of them returned, briskly and angrily, not long after. All the puppies cringed instinctively.

  “Blast you, Bess!” said Mrs. Partridge. “Here
I am with a parcel of mongrels, when I might have got nearly a hundred quid for this litter. Got that sack, Brian?”

  “Uh-huh.” The hoarse youth never used many words. “Brick too. Oughtn’t we to leave her one, Mrs. Partridge?”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” the woman said impatiently. Sirius felt himself seized and lifted. “Not that one!” Mrs. Partridge said sharply. “I don’t like its eyes.”

  “Don’t you?” The youth seemed surprised, but he dumped Sirius down again and picked up the next nearest to set beside the mother. The mother whined anxiously, but she did not try to stop him as he seized the other puppies one by one and tossed them into dusty, chaffy darkness. They tumbled in anyhow, cheeping and feebly struggling. Sirius was carried, one of this writhing, squeaking bundle, pressed and clawed by his fellows, jolted by the movement of the sack, until he was nearly frantic. Then a new smell broke through the dust. Even in this distress it interested him. But, the next moment, their bundle swung horribly and dropped, more horribly still, into cold, cold, cold. To his terror, there was nothing to breathe but the cold stuff, and it choked him.

  Once he realized it choked him, Sirius had the sense to stop breathing. But there was not much sense to the way he struggled. For as long as he had air and strength in his body, he lashed out with all his short weak legs, tore with his small feeble claws, and fought the darkness and the cold as if it were a live enemy. Some of the other puppies fought too, and got in one another’s way. But, one by one, they found the shock and the cold suffocation too much for them. Soon only Sirius was scratching and tearing at the dark, and he only kept on because he had a dim notion that anything was better than cold nothingness.