The Legend Begins

by Isobelle Carmody

  “What is the matter with her?” she whispered to Ginger.

  “Dog,” he said.

  Little Fur’s heart began to race. She had never seen a dog, but almost as many animals and birds had been hurt by dogs as by humans and trolls. Each one of them described the fearsome beasts quite differently, so that Little Fur knew they must have shape-changing blood in them.

  The worst thing of all about dogs was their complete devotion to their human masters. It was even said that dogs would kill at a human’s command.

  Sly padded over to the tree and said softly, “The dog has smelled us but it does not know that we have smelled it.” Her green eye glittered with triumph.

  “Will it come after us if we turn back?” Little Fur asked. They could climb the tree to escape the dog’s brutal teeth, but then they would be trapped there until its master came.

  Before either cat could answer, the dog began to howl. Little Fur clapped her hands over her ears at the sound, which seemed to tear the night. Crow fluttered onto one of the dead branches and peered down at her. “Why stopping? Not goodly!”

  “Dog ahead,” Sly murmured. “Big dog.”

  Crow cawed his derision. “Dog being trapped behind metal web and chained to small house.”

  So they went on up the street. Little Fur’s legs trembled because the horrible noises the dog was making were actually screams of rage, and she could understand them.

  “I smell you!” the dog snarled. “Come close and I will tear and bite you. My fangs will crack your bones! I will pull you to pieces and eat you up! I will eat the moon! I will crack it like an egg. I will slurp up the light in it and all will be darkness!”

  “Do not be afraid,” Sly commanded. “That dog is all bark and no bite. It wants to frighten us. That is what the humans trained it to do.”

  “The humans want it to frighten us?” Little Fur asked, but Sly sprang back to the web and began winding back and forth before it, crooning.

  “I smell you, Cat,” the dog growled, and Little Fur saw it loom as a huge, dark shape behind the web of metal. “I have killed a million cats,” it whispered. “I have sucked them out of their fur. I will tear and bite you. My teeth will—”

  Sly gave a long, chilling warble that made Little Fur’s hair stand on end. “Cur. Slave and idiot who cannot hunt but must be fed dead meat by human hands.”

  Little Fur saw the dog clearly then. It was as tall as she was, with a chest broader than Brownie’s and a coat so short it was like a skin clamped about the hot-smelling muscles of its body. Its head was wedge-shaped and massive, with a gaping maw that hung open to allow its red tongue to loll out between gleaming teeth. White-frothed drool hung from its bottom lip and there was a red shine in its eyes.

  “Jump into my yard, Cat, and I will show you what I am,” the dog invited.

  Sly swayed close enough that the dog could have licked her face, had it not been for the fence. She showed no fear. Indeed, her smell was cruel and amused. “What could a tame beast like you do to a wild thing such as I? Tell me that, Pet?” she taunted.

  This last word seemed to madden the dog. It threw itself violently against the web, which creaked and bulged out toward the cat but did not give way. Instead, there was a white flash of light and a loud clap as the dog was thrown yelping and howling into the dust of its yard.

  Little Fur cried out once in fright at the flare of light, but the dog went on whimpering for some time. When at last it rose, it staggered as if it had been hit on the head. It came slowly right up to the fence, and Little Fur gagged, not at the singed smell it gave off, but at the rich, dreadful reek of its hatred. “I will know the scent of you again, Cat, and the scent of the thing from the last age that stands behind you. And next time, there will be no fence. . . .”

  Sly gave a sniff and continued on down the lane, her tail high and haughty. Little Fur followed on shaking legs, as much appalled by the cat’s deliberate cruelty as by the dog’s hatred.

  “What happened back there?” she asked to stop herself thinking of what might have happened if the dog had gotten through the web to them. “What made that light and the burning smell?”

  “The web burned the dog!” Sly’s eye flashed with sneering triumph. “Humans spin sky-fire into the metal web.”

  “I . . . I didn’t realize they could do that.”

  “They can do anything they can imagine,” Sly said carelessly. “The dog knows that the fence bites and burns but it is easy to make dogs forget because it is easy to make them angry. Things that are angry are always stupid.”

  “Why did you make it jump at you?” Little Fur asked. “You have made it your enemy by doing what you did. It won’t forget you and it will try to hurt you if it smells your scent again.”

  Sly only gave her a cool look. “I am not afraid of a dog,” she jeered.

  But I am, Little Fur thought, for the dog had sworn to remember her scent as well.

  They followed the metal web, and the cluster of huts behind it gave way to a vast, bleak plain scraped bare of all green and growing things. There was nothing on it except a few glimmering puddles that smelled like the road-beast feeding place. Little Fur was so aghast that she almost failed to notice that the cobbles had ended. The street had become one of the black roads and it stretched away into the distance. There was a track of stubbled grass between the black road and the web, but it was dangerously close to the web full of sky-fire.

  “I don’t think I can go along that,” Little Fur said, remembering the terrible singed smell of the dog.

  “Not following fence. Must crossing wasteland.” Crow had landed by a gate in the web.

  “What about the sky-fire?” Little Fur asked nervously.

  “No sky-fire in gateway,” Crow said, and to prove it, he flew to the top of the gate.

  “What is this place?” Little Fur asked, staring through the fence at the bleak plain.

  “Once here being grass and trees and empty stone dwellings. Good roosting for many birds. Then humans bringing roaring road beasts with long claws and great metal teeth to break everything to pieces. Maybe humans will building more high houses here. Or maybe this being new road-beast feeding place.”

  Little Fur had seen too much to disbelieve this. Crow must have smelled the sinking of her heart, for he added, “After this being grass plain. Then we coming to burying ground.”

  So Little Fur squeezed through the gate, but she had taken only a single step when she staggered back, pale and horrified. “The ground is dying!”

  “Must crossing quickly then,” Crow urged.

  “You don’t understand. It’s dying because the earth spirit has just left it! You must find another way!”

  Little Fur was pacing up and down the cobbles willing Crow to hurry when a thought struck her. She sat down and emptied the contents of the seed pouch onto her cloak. At the very bottom were several small seeds with dagger-tip points. They belonged to a greedy plant that would happily and swiftly strangle anything growing nearby. She gathered them only for their juice, which healed various forms of claw rot. But if she could bear to plant the voracious things in the ravished ground, they might just take hold swiftly and vigorously enough to summon the flow of earth magic.

  She set pouch and bottle and cloak aside and went back along the street to get some moss. Then she squeezed back through the gate and pressed the moss onto the bare earth, knowing that the good earth adhering to its roots would help shield the seeds so they might have a chance to germinate. Touching the moss protected her from the worst of the dying earth’s pain, but she could easily tell that the ground had not only been savagely stripped of life, it had been deliberately poisoned.

  That was what had driven the earth spirit away.

  Little Fur got shakily to her feet and squeezed through the gate again. There was only a slim hope that the seeds would survive, but she had done her best. She went to the step of the stone dwelling where Ginger had curled up to sleep and sat by him, staring across th
e street at the ravaged earth. Then she lay against his soft flank and gave herself up to the soothing beat of his blood.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Wasteland

  She woke to darkness and the scent of humans.

  Ginger was already mantling himself in cat shadow when Little Fur peeped out of the doorway to see three humans standing at the open gate in the metal web. They were staring at the ground. A cold wind seemed to blow through Little Fur, for they were looking at the patches of moss where she had planted the seeds.

  The biggest of the humans, a gross creature stinking of greed, pointed savagely at the moss. Its companions cringed, giving off the hot, acrid scent of their fear. Little Fur wished that she could slip away, but the humans were too close, and one of them carried a small square box spilling bright false light in all directions that swallowed the shadows which might have hidden her.

  The smaller humans were speaking to the big one now, their voices full of pleading. Then, just as Brownie said sometimes happened when he listened to humans, a picture came from their words into Little Fur’s mind of the two smaller humans spilling a milky liquid onto the ground and looking nervously about them every few steps. Little Fur understood immediately that it was they who had poisoned the wasteland. The bigger, dominant human had ordered them to do it and, seeing the moss, thought they had disobeyed.

  Without any warning, the big human lashed out at one of the smaller ones, and it fell to the ground with a cry of pain. Little Fur thought the bigger human would kick it then. She smelled that it wanted to, but the one on the ground seemed to be holding something up. Then she saw what it was.

  Her precious cloak!

  The dominant human ground its heel into the moss, shaking the cloak as if it wanted to strangle it. Little Fur’s hair stood on end at the thought of what it would do if it got ahold of her.

  Ginger spoke urgently into her ear. “Do not move.”

  The big human was shouting orders and the other two took short metal tubes from their coats and held them out. Powerful beams of light slashed out into the darkness as they went through the gate. One went left and the other right, their beams of light cutting this way and that as they moved across the poisoned earth.

  They are hunting for me, Little Fur thought, and trembled.

  The big human remained by the gate, striding back and forth swinging the light box, stopping now and then to glare at Little Fur’s cloak. Its heavy black eyebrows were drawn low over its glittering eyes. Little Fur smelled that it was thinking hard, and that its mind was clever and subtle. She knew that it was only a matter of time before it thought of looking in the street, and a desperate desire to flee filled her.

  “Wait,” Ginger said. She smelled that he was moving away from her and feared that he meant to attack the big human as he had the greep. But a few minutes later there was a cry from the wasteland. The big human turned and plunged through the gate, running after the others.

  Little Fur knew that Ginger had given her one chance to escape. She crossed the cobbles, took a steadying breath, then stepped carefully onto the track of grass running alongside the fence. All of her senses strained backward to the humans on the other side of the fence, trying to discern where they were. But her fear and the closeness of the dying earth confused her senses.

  The webbed fence suddenly changed direction, and Little Fur stopped. She would have followed it, because that was the way Crow had said they must go to reach the burying place, but there was too much of a risk that the humans would catch her with their stabbing lights. She struck out across a grassy slope that ran up and away from the bleak wasteland. Despite her fear, Little Fur thrilled at the strong, clean feel of the earth and air. Unfortunately, there was no tree or shrub or even a hollow where she could hide herself and her senses told her that the sun would soon open its eye.

  At last she came to a ragged stand of bushes and stopped, feeling less as if the Troll King were slavering at her heels. She drank a brackish mouthful of the remaining water from her bottle, glad that she had slung it and her pouch over her head before going to sit with Ginger, or they would have been left behind as well. She would not let herself think about the dreadful loss of the cloak.

  Instead, Little Fur set herself to listening and was reassured to hear nothing but the sighing of the wind. She decided to rest a little in the hope that Ginger would find her, but when more time had passed, she was forced to go on alone, lest she be trapped there when day came. She told herself that the cats could follow her trail and Crow would fly ahead since he knew the way to the burying place. The best thing to do, Little Fur decided, was to get there as quickly as possible. She didn’t know exactly where it was, but she knew which way to go, and Crow had said it was not far.

  Little Fur was almost at the top of the slope when she heard the roar of a road beast! She stopped, bewildered. Then a thick, painfully bright wedge of light bit into the darkness in front of her and swept this way and that. Instantly Little Fur understood that the big human had found some way to get in front of her. She could not run back and she could not go forward, so she bent low and hurried sideways, praying that the slope would stop it from seeing her, for she could smell it now, the hot, urgent fury of its thoughts stretching out to her like claws.

  As if the earth reshaped itself to help her, she had gone only a few steps before she fell headlong into a deep, lanelike ditch. She was astonished to find two lines of metal running along it, exactly like the rails she had followed before. But surely these could not be the same ones, even though they did go in both directions as far as she could see. Little Fur decided to follow them, because the ditch would hide her from the human if she crouched down.

  She could not move very quickly while crouching, and she soon had a sore back and head from bending over so oddly. That might be what kept her from noticing that the ground had begun to rise. But when the ditch flattened out suddenly, she discovered that she had come up onto the beginning of some sort of structure which lifted the strip of earth beneath the metal rails high above true ground level. This must be what Brownie called a bridge, built by humans to let them go over things. Fortunately for her, grass and true good earth lay over the bridge, though she could not see what lay under it. A road, perhaps; maybe the very road the human had used to get from the wasteland to the top of the slope.

  Little Fur started across the bridge. She had to move quickly because the sky was streaked with purple and orange now. The sun was very near to opening its bright eye, and the enormous human might yet be somewhere waiting for daylight to reveal her.

  She had just reached the top of the bridge when a long, dreadful scream rent the air. It was so loud that it seemed to come from all directions at once, and there was a horrible metallic edge to it that hurt Little Fur and made her cry out and clap her hands over her ears. The scream seemed to go on forever and when it stopped, the air quivered. Little Fur straightened and a sharp premonition of danger made her glance back. A monstrously long serpent of gleaming silver metal was writhing along the ground at an impossible speed, its single piercing eye casting a yellow glare before it.

  So great was her wonderment that it was not until the metal rails began to vibrate and the earth began to shudder under her feet that Little Fur realized it was coming along the rails.

  She turned and went on as fast as she dared, her heart thundering painfully in her breast. She reached true ground an instant before the great metal serpent came roaring and grinding over the bridge. She staggered away from the rails, but as the monster roared past, a wind pushed out like a giant hand and Little Fur fell forward. She managed to catch her balance, only to feel the earth give way under her feet. With a cry, she slipped and slithered down a smooth, hard slope into a swift, dark swirl of water.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Stone Fairie

  Little Fur had fallen into a tumbling river. At first her shock was so great that she did not think to fight. It was as if she had fallen into a chilly dream. But then her
heart began to bang and her breath to burn in her throat, and she thrashed her hands and kicked her feet until she reached the surface. She had time to gulp in a great breath of air, but then the current dragged her under again.

  She floundered desperately against the force of the water, working her way toward the bank. It was exhausting because if she rested an instant, she was at once pulled back to the center. The battle became harder the longer it went on, and as a deadly tiredness stole through her, Little Fur found herself wondering if it would be so bad to let herself go down into the liquid darkness.

  A vision of the Old Ones, stately and green in their hidden hollow, came into her mind. A great longing to see them welled up in Little Fur, giving her the strength to go on fighting, but a moment came when she had no more strength left. She gave in to the flow, only to find that she had made it to the edge. Indeed, her feet were dragging on the ground and, fortunately, the bank nearest to her was curved enough so that the main force of the river passed by.

  It took an immense effort of will for Little Fur to haul herself halfway up the bank. She was utterly spent. She did not faint or sleep, but for a time it seemed that her mind had been left behind in the dark, violent water, being smothered and swept along.

  When she returned to her senses, the eye of the sun was glaring down at her from overhead and her legs were numb. Little Fur rolled onto her back, dragging her feet clear of the river. The bank sloped gently where she had come ashore, but it mounded steeply upward before her, hiding what lay beyond. She rubbed life back into her legs and then reached for her water bottle, only to find that it was gone. Her pouch was safe, though the seeds in it would need drying out and some would be ruined. She groped anxiously for the stone which she wore around her neck on a plaited reed and was relieved to find that it, at least, was safe. It was all that remained of her mother, as the cloak had been all that remained of her father. Then she chided herself for thinking of things when she might so easily have lost her life.