The Long War

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.