The Long War

The cart slowed to a stop. The beagle driver jumped to the ground, and she – nude save for a kind of belt of pockets, you could see she was female – greeted Snowy. They ran around each other briefly, and Snowy even dropped for a moment to all fours, wagging a stub of tail.

‘The females are dominant,’ Sally murmured.

‘What?’

‘Look at the two of them. He’s more pleased to see her than the other way around. Something worth noting.’

‘Hmm. Maybe you’re jumping to conclusions.’

Sally snorted. ‘You could learn all you need to know about human males from one miserable specimen. Why not the same here? Listen, we need to find an angle of our own.’

‘We came here to help Mary. We came for the trolls.’

‘Yeah. But we weren’t expecting all this complication. We’ll play for time – and stay alive in the process. Just remember, we can always step out, if it gets bad enough. I can carry you. These dogs can’t follow, we know that now.’

With the greeting done, the female beagle approached the humans. She pointed to her own chest. ‘Li-Li. Call me Li-Li.’ She turned to the cart. ‘Ride to Eye of Hunte-hhr.’

Sally nodded. ‘Thank you. We need to bring the trolls we came with . . .’

But Li-Li had already turned away, and was beckoning to the trolls, singing a kind of warbled melody. Without any fuss Mary stood, picked up Ham and set him on her shoulder, and clambered aboard the cart.

The humans followed, with Finn McCool. Snowy snapped the reins, the bird beasts cawed like pigeons on steroids, and the cart jolted into motion, nearly knocking Jansson over. There were no seats. Jansson held on to the rough-finished wall of the cart, wondering how far it was to this city, and if she could make it all the way without collapsing.

Li-Li approached Jansson. Again Jansson had to endure a wet dog-like nose sniffing at her mouth, armpits, crotch. ‘Sick,’ Li-Li said without ceremony.

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.