The Long War

‘Ex-ssample. This city named for our goddess, who is Hunter-rrh. We believe She is the Mother of Mothers. Her pack the Pack of Packs. As-ss Petra is Granddaughter, and there are Daughters over he-hhr, and Mother-hhr of Pack above them. Pack Mother-hrr lives far from here, rules many Dens. Hunter, Mother of Mothers, gave bi-hhrth to world, rules all, even Mother-hhrs. And when we die, our spi-hhrits flee our bodies, to be hunted by the Mother of Mothers, and taken back. What a-hhre your gods?’

Jansson said, ‘We have many gods. Some of us have no god at all.’

‘You see us as ba-hhrbaric. One step f-hhrom the wolf. Is our religion c-hhrude to you?’

Sally looked blank. ‘I have no opinion.’

‘Some of us despise wolf in us. As you pe-hrrhaps despise your ancestor animal, its ma-hrrk in you. We hunt. Kill. Big litters. Life cheap, wa-hrr common. Great slaughters. Cities empty, Dens fall. Then more litters, more little soldie-hhrs.’

‘A cycle,’ Sally said to Jansson, evidently fascinated. ‘Boom and crash. They have big litters, lots of unloved warrior pups running around, lots of Daughters and Granddaughters competing to become this Mother, head of the nation. They fight, they have wars – they kill each other off, and when the population collapses the cycle begins again.’

‘Like inner-city gangs,’ Jansson said.

‘Maybe. It’s got to impede their progress. Technological, social. Maybe it’s no wonder they’re stuck at the Stone Age. And why they’re easy marks for weapons dealers, like the kobold.’

‘L-look-khh.’ Brian leaned forward and picked out a pink blob from the central bowl. ‘Unborn hrr-rabbit. Cut from the womb of its mother, f-hhresh. Deli . . . delicacy.’ He rested the embryo between his teeth, bit down, and sluiced the blood into his mouth, like a connoisseur savouring a fine wine. ‘Some of us despise wolf in us-ss. But the tass-te, oh, the tass-te . . .’

Suddenly the stink of the meat disgusted Jansson. She stood, stiffly. ‘I must rest.’

‘You a-hhre ill. Scent on you.’

‘I apologize. Goodnight, sir. And you, Sally.’

‘I’ll look in later.’

‘Not necessary.’

The few paces to her room seemed a long way. She thought she could feel the gaze of the kobold Finn McCool on her, watching from behind his curtain.

She slept badly.

Her head ached, her gut, her very bones. She took an extra dose of the painkillers in her pack, but it did no good.

She dozed.

She woke to find a wolfish face over her, in a dark barely alleviated by the starlight from the window above her pallet. Oddly she felt no fear.

‘I am Li-Li.’ The beagle pressed a finger to her lips. ‘You a-hhre ill. I saw it. In pain?’

Jansson nodded. She saw no point in denying it.

‘Please, let me . . .’

So Li-Li helped her. She arranged bundles of warm cloth around Jansson’s body, and applied poultices of what looked like moss and lichen chewed to softness, to her belly, her back, her head. And Li-Li licked her face with her rough tongue, her neck, her forehead.

Gradually the pain receded, and Jansson slipped into a deeper sleep.

52

ABOUT A WEEK after Maggie’s meeting with George and Agnes Abrahams, the Benjamin Franklin approached the Low Earths, heading for the Datum.

Maggie detected relief in the crew of the Franklin that, thanks to their wonky turbine, they were heading for some unscheduled home leave. Their tour of the Westward Long Earth was wearying. Day after day they crossed world after world of numbing emptiness – numbing at least for the city kids who made up most of the dirigible’s crew – punctuated by calls to resolve one idiotic situation after another.

And the trolls were gone: how strange it continued to be to experience, even as seen from within the walls of a military vessel, a peculiar existential shift that cast a shadow over every world they visited.

Still, as the Franklin swam through the increasingly murky skies of the industrializing Low Earths, Maggie – even though she herself was a country girl – felt a warm tug of recognition, and wondered whether city living had some merit after all. The news as they approached home, however, was extraordinary. There was some kind of geological disturbance going on in stepwise versions of Yellowstone, across most of the Low Americas. Maggie found herself staring at images from East 2, of a herd of cattle choked by carbon dioxide emissions, and from West 3, of people being evacuated from threatened townships by twains. Isolated in the reaches of the Long Earth, Maggie and her crew had heard only the vaguest outernet hints that all this was going on.

Strange times, she thought, times of unbalance in the natural world and the human, on Datum Earth itself and far beyond.