“Those?” said Sol. The fierce bluish color at the very heart of him spread, so that he blazed somber and formidable. “I’ve nothing against the dogs,” he said. “You were bred from one of them—did you know? But their Master is a dark thing. He’s one of those I wouldn’t like to see getting hold of the Zoi. Listen, I’ll give your Duffie something else to think about, if you promise to go and look upriver as soon as you’re out.”
Sirius shivered. He did not like to say that he suspected that a dark thing had already got hold of the Zoi. He gave another shiver at the thought of Mrs. Partridge. “All right. I promise.”
“Thank you,” said Sol. “Be patient a day or so.”
Patient! thought Sirius. When Sol said time was short, it was. When the Zoi was probably in the wrong hands, and he had found a clue to it, and lost it, when he was tied to this yard, when Kathleen was miserable, how could he be patient? He missed roaming about. He wanted to see Miss Smith, Mr. Gumble and his other providers. He lay and thought of ice cream. He was horribly hungry.
“You do get hungry,” Remus said sympathetically, “if you’re used to going hunting. I remember the time I got shut in the bathroom.”
The cats put their heads together. In the early afternoon, Romulus trotted along the wall and jumped down onto the roof of the shelter, carrying a mouse. “Here you are,” he said kindly. “Let it run about a bit before you eat it. They taste sweeter like that. But I shouldn’t eat the tail. That’s stringy.”
He leaped away again, leaving Sirius staring at a tiny terrified creature crouching between his big blunt paws. He moved his right paw a little. The mouse ran backwards and forwards, squealing with fear. Sirius nosed it. It did not smell very edible and it squealed worse than ever. He knew he could not eat it. He was not used to having his food alive and horrified. But he did not want to offend the cats.
“Run away, you silly thing,” he told the mouse. “I’m not going to eat you.”
The mouse was insane with fear and did not understand. Sirius looked around all the walls and roofs to make sure none of the cats was around. Then he pushed and nosed the mouse into the far corner of his shelter, where it crouched for the rest of the afternoon, too terrified to move. Kathleen found it when she came to untie Sirius. She picked it up and put it gently inside the shed where Duffie kept her clay.
“Stay there, or the cats will find you,” she said to it. The mouse did not understand her either, but it did not appear again.
“I ate the tail,” Sirius told Romulus. “It was quite tasty. Thanks very much.” He made do with half a tin of dog food and the scraps from supper that night, and for the rest of the week. It made him mournful. But he was glad that Kathleen seemed happier. As far as he could tell, the boys were not daring to bother her again.
That weekend, to his dismay, Clive called for Basil and they went to look for the Zoi again. They went upriver, and they took Robin to carry the sandwiches. Robin was so proud and flattered to be taken that when they came home that evening, he was talking of collecting Remains for himself. Basil and Clive had not found the Zoi. But they had some Roman oyster shells, a modern clam, a flint that looked almost like an arrowhead, and a bone Basil rather thought was part of an ichthyosaurus. Sirius sniffed it. It smelled of mutton.
Basil clouted him. “Get out, Rat! I’ll tell the police on you.”
“Please!” Kathleen said. This was a very tender point with her.
“The trouble with you is that you’ll believe anything,” said Basil.
Over the weekend, something strange happened to the pots Duffie had in her shop window. There had been an artistic stack of them. But, on the side the sun struck them, the glaze had melted and run, and the clay underneath crumbled away. What Duffie found in the window on Sunday evening was something like a honeycomb, made of twenty half-pots stuck together with glaze. She brought it into the house and waved it dramatically. She tramped about with it, raging. She raged at the glaze-makers. She wagged the honeycomb in people’s faces and raged at the clay suppliers. She would have liked to rage at Kathleen and Sirius too. They tried to keep out of her way. She raged instead at shoddy modern products.
“It seems to me that you might as well blame the sunlight, while you’re at it,” Mr. Duffield remarked from behind the Sunday paper.
Sirius opened his mouth and lolled out his tongue in a wide grin. On Monday morning, he asked Sol how he had done it.
Sol beamed. “A concentration of the right particles. But you can go out now. I can see her through the window making new pots. And I’ve made sure of a spell of good fine weather, because that usually brings her a shopful of customers. She’s not likely to think of you much today.”
Joyfully Sirius stood up, dragged the collar off over his ears and drew back the bolts on the gate.
11
Miss Smith was delighted to see him. “I was afraid you’d got yourself shut up for good,” she said. She gave him a bowl of raw hamburger. Mr. Gumble gave him a bone and a doughnut. The two old men on the benches gave him a steak pie and a hamburger. Feeling full and contented, Sirius trotted through the sunshine to the cleared space where Yeff had vanished. He told himself he was not putting off Mrs. Partridge: he had to check on this place first.
There was not the faintest prickle from the Zoi. But he hardly knew the cleared space, it had changed so in the last week. It was now the beginning of May. The grass was thick and green. The bushes were putting out leaves and the nettles had come up high enough to brush him underneath. The greening mounds of rubble were so studded with dandelions that Sirius felt homesick. The flowers looked like luminaries, and the green was like his own sphere. Earth was a beautiful place.
He was so homesick he thought he would go and see Patchie. He was not sure why, except that he was sad and joyful at once, and it seemed to fit.
As soon as he came to the end of her street, he knew that the compulsive feeling connected with Patchie had gone. There was no longer a crowd of dogs at her gate. “Hallo, hallo!” said Rover and Redears as he trotted by. Bruce was very busy tugging at the latch of his gate with his teeth.
“I’ve nearly got the hang of this,” he said. “I’m working on a new system. You’ll see—I’ll be out and about like you soon.”
“Great!” said Sirius. He trotted on to Patchie’s gate and put his nose to the netting. Patchie did not seem to see him. She was scratching nonchalantly. “Hallo,” Sirius said.
Patchie looked round. Seeing him, she stood up, stiff-legged and bristling. “Go away. I don’t want you.”
Very hurt and surprised, Sirius said, “I only came to see how you were.”
Patchie let out a rasping growl and advanced on the netting. “Go away. I don’t like you. I don’t want you. Take your nose away or I’ll snap it off.”
More hurt and surprised than ever, Sirius moved his nose. “What’s wrong? You liked me last week.”
“No I didn’t. You’ve got horrid eyes. I don’t like anyone except Rover.”
“Rover!” exclaimed Sirius, deeply wounded. “He’s stupid.”
“And you’re worse,” said Patchie, “thinking I’d like you! Go away.”
Sirius got up and crept away, pursued by snarls from Patchie. He had never felt so hurt or so mortified before. He could not bring himself to face the other three dogs again. He went the other way, down to the filthy gray-green river, and plodded dejectedly along the towpath with his head down and his tail hanging.
“Cheer up,” said Sol. “They often go like that when they come off heat. And she always did like Rover best.”
Sirius turned and snarled at him over his shoulder. “Oh, shut up!”
Sol answered with a glare that would have blinded any other creature. “Stop that! You don’t even like her. You know she’s silly, even for a dog.”
There was truth in that. “Yes,” Sirius said morosely. “Yes. I suppose you’re right.”
“I am,” said Sol. “Now are you going out toward those kennels, or do I ha
ve to arrange to have you delivered there?”
“All right, all right,” said Sirius. “I’ll go. There’s no point in anything anyway.”
He turned and followed the towpath in the other direction. At first he plodded. The river was dirty and depressing. Small, smelly factories sat on its banks making it filthier. After those were the railway lines. Sirius walked a little faster. Ever since he had first seen them, he had been interested in the long clattering trains. The railway gave way to allotments, where the black hedges were spattered with bright green buds. Sirius began to feel more cheerful. He trotted. Then he loped. And suddenly he was out in his own meadow where Kathleen took him for walks. It was all blazing green, with dandelions and daisies thicker than the stars of home. Here the river was soft clear blue, a rival to the Milky Way, and the hawthorns on its banks were a piercing young green, as if they had been newly lit with green fire.
Sirius bounded forward jovially. He forgot his hurt pride and frolicked along by the river, around a couple of bends, under tall trees of black lace and yellow-green flames of leaf, until he came to a meadow where there were few flowers but an interesting smell of dog. The dog smell led him up the meadow and through a gate in a newly lit hedge. Here were concrete paths. He dimly remembered that concrete. It led in crisscrosses around low buildings with wire-netting runs in front of them.
He stopped near the center of the crisscrossings and sniffed the air. There was no Zoi. He was sure Sol was wrong. It was not here. There was dog, however. Dog upon dog, everywhere. And human. A very strong smell of Mrs. Partridge. Sirius hated it. His back rose slightly. There was another smell too, like a mixture of jasmine and ozone. For some reason, it was hauntingly familiar, but Sirius could not place it. All he could tell was that it did not quite fit in with the other smells, the grass, the concrete, the dog, or the Mrs. Partridge. He puzzled about it while he thoughtfully went over and lifted a leg at the corner of the nearest wire run. The smell could have had a tingle of Zoi about it. Or could it? He was not sure.
The dog inside the run hurried over to sniff. “Good morning,” she said pleasantly. “I’m Bess.”
She was a beautiful yellow-white Labrador with a bright black nose and melting brown eyes. Her sole fault was that she was a trifle stout.
“It is a nice morning,” Sirius agreed. He liked the look of this Labrador. He took to her so much, in fact, that he asked, “I say, you don’t happen to have seen the thing I’m looking for, do you? It fell out of the sky with a bang some time last year, and it must have looked quite bright as it fell. You know it if you’re near it by a strange prickly feeling it gives you.”
“Now there you have me,” said the Labrador. She sat on her haunches and put her head on one side to think. “I think I know the thing you mean—”
Sirius’s ears came up. He could hardly believe them. He wished he had taken Sol’s advice earlier. “Go on,” he said.
“I saw it come down,” said Bess. “It was in the night. I think I must have been going to have puppies, because I felt awfully heavy and miserable, and I went outside to have a good moan at the Moon. And the thing came down past the Moon like—well, I thought it was a star coming unstuck and I was scared stiff. The ground jiggled. But I didn’t feel it prickle. It was too far away.”
“Thanks,” said Sirius. “That’s a great help. How far away?”
“Down the river, where all those houses are,” the Labrador said. “I remember seeing it go into the glare from all their lights just before the ground jiggled.”
“So it is in the town!” said Sirius. “I wish I’d met you before this. You’ve been more help than anyone.”
“I like to be useful,” Bess said, a little wistfully. “I used to be a gun dog until I was sold to Mrs. Partridge. I don’t seem much use here.”
“Boring, isn’t it?” Sirius said feelingly.
“Oh it is!” she said. “I see you know, too. Are you a hunting dog, by any chance?”
“Well—only a Zoi-hunter,” said Sirius. “Why?”
“You look a bit like a frosty sort of dog that jumped my fence once,” said Bess. “Mrs. Partridge didn’t have all these high wire things then, so he came over quite easily. He told me he hunted.”
“Did he tell you where he came from?” Sirius asked eagerly.
“He was called Yeff,” said Bess. “And—”
“Sirius!” said Sol sharply. “Sirius!” Light twinkled and blazed on the wire between the dogs, so that the Labrador backed away blinking. “Run!” said Sol. “Get out of here. Not the way you came—the other direction. Quick!”
Sirius, quite confused, started off the wrong way, found Sol blazing in his eyes and turned back. “Why? What’s the matter?”
“It’s my fault,” said Sol. “I’ve slipped up again. I’ve not had much experience recognizing—Just run. Please!”
Since Sol was so urgent, Sirius set off loping toward the next concrete crossroad. He had gone ten feet when Mrs. Partridge came clopping around the corner. Sirius skidded to a stop, turned and bolted the other way.
“Hi!” bawled Mrs. Partridge. “You wretched mongrel! Stop him, Mrs. Canning dear, please!”
Sirius tore back past the Labrador’s run, ears flying, tail outstretched, and galloped around the corner. And stopped as if he had run into a wall.
There was another woman standing there, a more elegantly dressed one. She was small, and she had extraordinary dead white hair falling smoothly to her shoulders. Despite that, she seemed young. Her face was dead white too, with cheekbones and eyes that, ever so slightly, slanted upward. That made her both striking and beautiful. The ozone-jasmine scent which had so puzzled Sirius was coming from her—and he knew now that it was a scent quite alien to Earth. Though he had never seen her look quite like this before, he knew her by the faint white nimbus standing around her. He would have known her whatever she looked like.
Sirius wanted to wag his tail and whine with joy. He wanted to go down on his fringed elbows and lick her elegant feet, and then put his paws on her small shoulders and lick her slanting face. But he did nothing. He just stood there, for agelong seconds, staring at her, unable to credit what all his green nature and his dog nature had learned while he had been on Earth. He had met people like her while he begged at doors. One of them had kicked him. He knew Duffie. But she could not be like Duffie! She was his Companion.
His Companion thought he was simply a dog at first. She looked at him with cold dislike, which hurt him, even so, far more than Patchie had done. Sirius knew he should go before she learned he was anything more. But he was too confounded by knowing it to move. Then his Companion looked at his eyes.
“I can’t believe it!” she said. Duffie at her coldest and highest was nothing to the way she said it. “You! I thought I’d made her have you drowned!” The white nimbus round her spread into a cold blaze. “You—!”
The dog nature reacted like lightning, while Sirius’s green nature still lay shattered. He jumped clear, back and sideways. Wire netting twanged. His Companion’s blast of white hatred lashed the path where he had been standing, consuming dust, setting fire to the grass at the edge, destroying some of the concrete too. Sirius felt the longer hairs of his coat sizzle while he was in the air. He bounced, blundering, into the netting and let it shoot him away again through the chemical reek of the blast, so that he landed on the hot concrete just as his Companion turned and struck the netting where he had been. That blast melted the netting as if it were a nylon stocking, and left it steaming, dripping and turning from dull red to cindery black. Poor Bess howled and ran into the farthest corner. Howling and barking arose from most of the other runs. Sirius had time to see that the Labrador was safe as he ran like a dog possessed, back around the corner of her run and full tilt toward Mrs. Partridge.
Mrs. Partridge had noticed nothing peculiar, beyond an odd smell. She planted her corduroy legs wide across the path to stop Sirius. She did not matter anymore. He went straight between her legs like an
arrow. How he made himself low enough he never knew. Mrs. Partridge staggered about. “Wretched brute!” she yelled.
Sirius heard her boots cloppering on the concrete behind him. He heard the small light feet of his Companion overtake them and patter swiftly after him. She might be in human form, but Sirius knew she would run with unearthly speed. He ran as he had never run before, even to catch Yeff. His tail was curled under him. His eyes stung. His nose was blocked with strong wrong smells from the blasts. His head seethed with misery. This was why he had put off coming here. His puppy brain had remembered “Mrs. Canning dear” persuading Mrs. Partridge to have him drowned, but he had not admitted it. To think he had spent long, long ages doting on a being like Duffie! What a flaming green fool! He dashed down concrete paths, past surprised dog faces, past sheds, past an astonished youth with a bucket. The youth dropped the bucket and gave chase too. Sirius sped from him easily. But he felt his Companion coming, quicker than he could run, closer and closer, until she was bringing even to his blocked nose her scent of ozone and jasmine.
There was a house in front of him and its door was open. Sirius shot inside it. His feet skidded helplessly on a polished floor. He fell painfully on his side and slid across a hall, tangling rugs and smashing a gray pot so ugly that it could only have been made by Duffie.
“Yap! What on earth? Yap! Who are you?” A little black poodle, a cosseted house dog, pattered beside him, her nose and eyes bright with curiosity.
“I’m being chased. Is there another door?” said Sirius, heaving himself out of the rugs. His right back leg hurt.
The poodle cocked an ear to the shouts and pounding feet outside. She sniffed the ozone-jasmine smell distastefully. “The other door’s down that passage. Shall I hold them up for you?”
“Don’t you dare. Keep out of her way—the smelly one—whatever you do.” Sirius limped across the beastly shiny floor. He could hardly move at human walking pace on it, and his terror increased. He seemed to have bolted into the worst possible place. Behind him, to his surprise, the door of the house crashed shut. The little poodle came skipping gaily after him.
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