Dogsbody (17 page)

“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 have 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.

“That’s stopped them for a moment. Hurry. They’ll come round the house. This way.” She skipped around a corner, where another door stood open on green countryside. “There. Good luck.”

“Thank you very much,” said Sirius. He ran limping across a stretch of garden and a lane and gathered himself for a gallop across the field beyond. His back leg hurt hideously over the first hundred yards. Then he felt his Companion behind him again. He forgot his leg. He ran. He raced. He crossed the ten-acre field like a hare, except that instinct and fear and green thoughts combined to make him run low and slinking, as the cats did, in order not to make a target for another white sheet of hatred. There was a wood on the skyline. Sirius raced toward it, up a long slope, taking cover in a fold of ground as he went. He tore through a fierce hedge, and climbed another meadow. It was vivid with growing grass. He trod on wrinkled leathery leaves and broke the primroses growing from them with his heavy paws. It seemed a pity, even in his panic. His Companion was closer every step.

As he reached the cool shade of the wood, something held her up. He did not know what it was, but he was sure it would not detain her for very long. He ran up a bank. There was a filthy strong smell there, like a butcher’s shop mixed with peppermint. It was coming from a large damp-looking hole. The smell was horrible, but Sirius had no time to be dainty. He squeezed into the hole and pushed his way down it.

It was a tight fit, but it opened out shortly. Sirius, though he had never noticed the fact before, could see in the dark rather better than the cats. He saw that the hole went on beyond the wider part,
but he decided to go that way only if he had to. The smelly occupant of the hole was down there somewhere. He turned around, pressing himself against the earthy side of the space, so that, if need be, he could turn around again and face the occupant, and stared anxiously up the way he had come. The entrance to the hole was a dim circle, where grass and leaves fluttered. There was a hint of bright sunlight above and beyond, but it did not strike the mouth of the hole. His Companion seemed to have stopped in the middle of the meadow, about a hundred yards away. He could hear her talking to someone.