“You saved my life,” she told him. “That greep would have—”
“Greep!” Crow squawked, flapping his wings in agitation. “Where being greep?”
“A greep caught me last night and Ginger rescued me,” Little Fur explained. She tried to get up but the pain in her ankle was worse than the night before. Crow hopped away at her request to find a good, stout stick. She padded the top of it with her cloak and used it to help her hobble along. Ginger led them to a loose board in the fence, which they swung aside. A moment later they stood in one of the very small parks that humans liked to cultivate beside their dwellings. Gardens, Brownie called them.
The garden had a reassuringly wild and unkempt air, as if it had been left to its own devices for some time. Little Fur would have happily sat down where she was, but Ginger urged her on with the promise of a pond.
The pond lay in the merged shadow of two leafy trees. After they had all drunk from it, Ginger stretched out to sleep under one of the trees. Little Fur sat under the other and began to make a poultice for her ankle. If she could draw the swelling out, then sleep to replenish her spirit, she should be able to walk without the stick when they set off again.
“Did you see Brownie?” she asked Crow as she worked.
“Brownie in wilderness,” he said. “He saying bravest of all creatures being Little Fur and Crow. Cats brave, too,” he added with a sideways glance at Ginger.
“Did you hear anything of the tree burners?”
“They coming,” Crow said darkly. “But Crow knowing where is human burying place. Starling telling Crow. I can showing the way.”
“That’s wonderful,” Little Fur said. Then she had another thought. “Did you see Sly?”
“Sly not coming,” Crow said.
Little Fur could not blame her. Cats were at a great disadvantage outside their territories. Look what had happened to Ginger. But without him, she would be dead or a prisoner of the trolls.
When she had finished the poultice, she lay down, resting her head on the root of the tree. She sent her mind into the tree, but rather than entering its dream, she was startled to find herself slipping through its roots into the flow of earth magic. She traveled where it went, and felt its delight as it surged strongly through green places where there were no humans to despoil them. It also took her to places where the earth had died, which looked to Little Fur like great gray holes with a howling black wind that whirled and hissed endlessly. Earth magic swirled around the rim of the dead places, unable to enter. Little Fur felt the earth magic’s mourning as a song of strange and compelling beauty.
When she woke next, it was late afternoon and she was hungry. Her leg felt so much better that she wondered if it had been less hurt than she had imagined. But when she pulled the poultice away, the bruising was dark purple and tinged with yellow, as if days had passed since she had hurt it, rather than just a few hours.
Ginger was still sleeping, only now he was lying rather comically on his back with his paws poking up into the air. Crow slept, too, so Little Fur limped quietly away, determined to find food. She had not gone far when she caught the delicious, earthy smell of mushrooms! She soon found a patch growing under an overhanging bush, and sat down at once to gorge herself. There was no point in gathering any for the others because they did not eat mushrooms.
It was then that Little Fur caught sight of the human dwelling. She had learned a great deal about humans during her journey, but somehow instead of satisfying her, this only made her want to know more. For instance, how exactly did a human become a greep? Brownie said that they were humans who were broken inside, while Crow claimed they were outcast humans, shunned by their kind and forced to live alone. Both Sly and Ginger said that they were rotten in the center, like a tree whose heartwood had gone black.
Little Fur came to the edge of a small grassy expanse, and gazed across it at the human dwelling. She knew that she ought to turn back, but she stepped from the long shadows into the sunlight and limped carefully over to a square of unmelting ice set in a gap in the wall of the dwelling. Part of her was amazed that she dared to do it, even though her nose told her there were no humans nearby. She wondered how Brownie would react when she told him what she had done. Then she smiled, thinking that she was as bad as Crow, admiring her own stories even before she told them.
She peered through the ice.
There was nothing at all inside. The humans who had lived here had taken all of their things with them when they went. Little Fur wondered what had made them leave and where they were now. Animals only changed dens or burrows because they had no choice, but she supposed that creatures as powerful as humans could do whatever they wanted to do.
She turned away reluctantly, realizing that the empty dwelling would answer none of her questions. Then her heart gave a great leap of fright, for sitting on the branch of a tree growing on the other side of the fence separating this dwelling from the next was a human! And it was watching her!
Little Fur expected it to scream or call out to other humans. But it only stared at her with wide eyes and an even wider mouth. Then the wind changed direction and she smelled it. The small human gave off a scent that was richer and lovelier than anything she had ever smelled! It was the scent of the Old Ones mixed up with the smell of Crow telling his stories, and of Brownie galloping. It was the smell of ripe cherries and mushrooms and rain on hot grass.
Enchanted, Little Fur found herself limping a few steps closer. The small human’s lips curved into a smile of delight, and Little Fur realized with wonder that seeing her was making the human smell like this. She remembered then that one of the humans at the beast feeding place had given off a similar smell after seeing her, though that had faded at once when another of the humans had sneered at it.
The small human spoke and Little Fur knew that she ought to retreat, but something stopped her. Maybe it was the smallness of the human, or the longing in its voice, which woke an answering echo in her own heart, but she was on the verge of replying when she heard another human calling out.
The small human in the tree turned away to answer it, and Little Fur withdrew into shadows reaching like fingers across the grass. The small human turned back and its face fell. Little Fur could not see the other human, but it spoke and its words were full of tenderness and love, soured slightly by a bitter under-scent of disbelief.
The small human climbed down from the tree and Little Fur was horrified to smell herself in its words—her red hair and her ears and her bare feet. She listened anxiously, but the scent of disbelief given off by the other human grew stronger, and the incredible sweetness of the small human began to fade.
Finally, Little Fur limped slowly back toward the pond, wondering how a small human such as this could grow up to be a greep. Was it something to do with the way the sour smell of disbelief swallowed the sweetness in it?
“Where have you been?” Ginger asked.
Little Fur jumped. “I went to look in the human house,” she said. “I was curious.”
“What did you learn from it?” asked Ginger.
“That humans are mysterious,” she said.
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 w
asn’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.
CHAPTER 11
The Dogness of Dogs
At one time the tree must have been healthy, for its massive, snaking roots had pushed the cobbles awry. Moss and small plants continued to grow thickly in the cracks, which proved that the tree had not been poisoned, as Little Fur had feared. She laid her hands on its much-scarred trunk only to find that its heartwood was rotten. There was nothing she could do, but she went deeper, striving to find a reason for the disturbance of the earth magic that she sensed surrounding the tree.
To her astonishment, she found herself in the tree’s dream, sitting in the dense shade of the Old Ones, sorting seeds! The tree must have taken her image from the flow, and of course that was the answer to why the flow was agitated. The tree was responding to her appearance!
Sly began hissing like a snake. Little Fur turned to see her gazing malevolently along the street where the wall gave way to a queer fence of thin metal strands woven into a great web. This stretched as far along the street as they could see, and on the other side of it was a nasty-smelling huddle of wooden dwellings.