The Legend Begins (7 page)

CHAPTER 10

Underth

Back by the pond, they found Sly had arrived and was watching a big golden fish that nudged its head out into the air. Its scales glinted gold in the sunlight that dappled the pond now, and Little Fur thought it quite the loveliest thing she had ever seen. She could smell that Sly was hungry, but she could not help being glad that the fish was too wily to come close to the bank.

“I smell blood,” the black cat said coolly, without taking her eye off the fish. In the tree overhead, Crow rustled his feathers but said nothing.

“A greep caught me,” Little Fur told her, wanting to ask where she had been all this time, but she knew the black cat would not answer. “Ginger made it let me
go.”

“A pity he did not smell it before it caught you.” Sly threw a mocking look at the gray cat.

“Ginger wasn't with me when the greep jumped out,” Little Fur said, rather indignantly.

Suddenly they heard the long, distant scream of a creature so large that its passing, even at a great distance, made the earth shiver under Little Fur's feet. The surface of the pond rippled and shuddered, and the golden fish sank out of sight.

Crow erupted from the tree. “Thisaway!” he cawed. “Not goodly to be stopping here anymore. Let's going now!” He wheeled away and the others rose.

As they made their way through the garden, Little Fur asked Ginger if he knew what had made the sound.

“There are many things in the world,” he said.

They passed along the side of the empty human dwelling and through a smaller garden to the front fence of the place, which was low and made of stone. Beyond it was another black road bordered by grassy paths. There were several small road beasts sleeping in a line by the side of the road which neither Crow nor the cats seemed to be troubled about. But passing by them, Little Fur could not help imagining that they would wake suddenly and turn their terrible, glowing eyes on her.

“Hurrying,” Crow urged from above. “Big greenplace ahead.”

The greenplace turned out to be an enormous, flat square of short grass bordered by black roads on three sides and human dwellings on the fourth. High, thin, metal-smelling devices stood on it in beds of sand where Sly said small humans came to play. Little Fur wondered what pleasure they would find in such a sad, bare place.

One of the metal devices made a loud creaking noise and Little Fur froze before realizing that it was only the wind that had made it move. Sly said that the metal objects were playthings for human younglings. One of them would sit on the little suspended bench that had made the creaking noise while a big human would push it to make it swing back and forth.

Ginger went to sniff at a bad-smelling metal container fastened to a wooden pole and Little Fur went to a big boulder balanced on its end in the ground, drawn by the smell of water. Water was trickling from the top of it and spilling down the side. Little Fur was about to drink when Crow gave a sudden urgent croak.

“Craaak! Humans coming!”

Heart racing, Little Fur pressed herself to the lump of stone.

“Be still,” Sly warned. “Humans are always more interested in themselves than anything else. If you don't move, they won't even look this way.”

But Ginger darted toward the humans and, to Little Fur's horror, planted himself firmly in front of them!

One of the humans stood back, folding its arms and shaking its head, but the other knelt and, to Little Fur's amazement, stroked Ginger slowly from head to tail. She waited for him to snarl and scratch, but he arched his back and gave every sign of enjoying the caress.

As the humans passed the big rock, Little Fur heard their words, which smelled of wisdom but also of nonsense. “What were they talking about?” she wondered aloud.

“Humans like the sound of their voices,” Sly said. “They don't know what they are saying.”

Little Fur did not think this was entirely true. But Ginger joined them and she thanked him shyly, thinking that this was the second time he had put himself in danger for her sake.

“Enough of resting,” Crow declared. “We should going.”

They passed through another lane and came to yet another black road. Little Fur was beginning to realize that black roads ran in a maze through the city and dreaded to think how many more they must cross. Then they came to a part of the city where there were neither trees nor grass paths, and where the human houses were higher and wider than they had been, and smelled of many inhabitants.

“I can't walk there,” Little Fur protested.

“Must walking cracks in gray path,” Crow urged. “Must going thisaway!”

“What if a human comes along?”

“Crow will flying and pecking at it,” Crow said fiercely.

So Little Fur crept from one crack to the next, praying that no human would come from its dwelling. Yet when one did, she was amazed that it seemed not to see her, though she was quite close and passing through a circle of false light. Sly had been right in saying they saw little outside their own doings.

It seemed an eternity before they came to a cobbled lane, which Crow said they should enter. Little Fur nearly wept with relief to feel earth magic flowing sturdily under the moss-rimmed stones. The lane brought them to a cobbled street where there were rows of human buildings so wide and square that they seemed like walls of buildings running along either side of the street. A queer, cold, metal-sulfur stink flowed from them, and Little Fur thought how practically everything humans built smelled bad. There must be something in their human lives that killed their sense of smell, because after living with them, animals and birds also seemed to lose their proper nose for things.

There were a lot of square, dark openings in the walls of the buildings and Little Fur tried not to feel that humans were peering malevolently from them.

“Humans not living here,” Crow said. “They coming here only to making a muchness of noise and bad smells.” Little Fur grew alarmed at this, but Crow added, “Not coming when moon watching.”

“Fewer humans equal more greeps and trolls,” Ginger muttered.

Occasionally the long, smooth walls of the buildings gave way to small stone houses that smelled very old. Little Fur guessed that a lot of these stone dwellings had been pushed down to make way for the new square buildings. Humans seemed to be always knocking down things they had made to build new things.

Crow flapped down to a narrow lane running between two of the big houses and instructed them to go that way, but Little Fur stopped, suddenly profoundly uneasy.

“What is it?” Ginger asked in his rumbling voice.

“I don't know,” Little Fur admitted. Her nose could detect nothing in the lane, yet her instincts clamored that danger lay in this direction.

“Must going thisaway or must going back and back,” Crow said firmly.

Little Fur did not know what to say. Everything in her resisted entering the lane but she could not say why. After another long, fruitless bout of sniffing, she decided that some forgotten memory must be prompting her fears. She took a deep breath and entered the lane. Halfway along it, she began to smell a horrible, sharp odor that grew stronger as they walked.

Sly had stopped by a square opening at the base of the wall of one of the big houses, and Little Fur realized this was the source of the hideous smell.

“Troll hole,” Sly murmured.

Little Fur stared into the opening. The darkness filling it seemed as dense and sticky as syrup. Yet she could not detect the unmistakable hot reek of troll.

“Troll not being here,” Crow remarked scornfully, strutting to the opening and poking his beak in. “Faugh! Some horrible human doing is down here.”

“Humans have used it, but it's an old troll hole,” Sly said. “It leads to Underth, but trolls don't bother with it because they have better and quicker ways to get there now.”

Little Fur would have liked to ask Sly how she knew such things, but Ginger had stiffened and the fur on his neck was standing up in a thick ruff.

“Greep,” he breathed.

“If greep coming, we must going.” Crow flapped into the air and glided down the lane.

“I am not afraid,” Sly sneered. “I will scratch its eyes out.” She sounded as if she would quite like a greep to come along, and when Little Fur and Ginger hurried after Crow, she lingered by the opening to the troll hole grooming her fur!

When Sly caught up with them a little time after, her long tail curled around Little Fur's neck in a dangerous sort of caress.

The lane brought them out of the big houses and back to the small stone dwellings. These were older than the others, for some of the roofs had fallen in and many of the openings and doors in them were closed up with wooden planks. Before Little Fur could ask why humans had abandoned them, she smelled smoke in the air. It was just a hint, but it made her think of the tree burners, and a wave of fear for the Old Ones crashed over her. Little Fur mastered her panic and told herself that no matter what the Sett Owl said, the Old Ones were powerful and had great resources. Perhaps at the last, the earth spirit itself would rise up through them and stop the tree burners, though that would not help the pear trees or the little sapling by the black road, nor all of the other millions of trees growing throughout the city.

Little Fur sighed, her heart sore and heavy in her chest. Thinking of the Old Ones was like pressing on a hurt place. The pull to go back to the wilderness was suddenly as strong as if she were connected to it by a real vine that was being tugged hard. As if conjured by her longing, she saw a tree growing ahead close by a stone wall. Little Fur's skin prickled because she could feel how the earth spirit surged toward it, yet as she came nearer, she saw that all of the branches on one side of the tree were black and withered.