Dogsbody (24 page)

15

T
he underworld—if that was what it was—seemed to Sirius to be a cool, dim place. He did not notice much of it, except that the ground was cold and soft and bright green, like moss, the ideal surface for his sore and weary paws. He was too tired to look further, or even to make plans. Like all the other dogs around him, he simply threw himself down on the soft green stuff and set about going to sleep.

Almost at once, his aching body fizzed and tingled like new life coming into a numb leg. For a second or so, he thought it must be some virtue in the green stuff. Then he recognized the Zoi, very strong and very near. It put such life into him that he stirred and raised his tired head.

The dog next to him snarled. “Warm—this one’s warm!”

Weary dog heads came up all around him. The only light in the place seemed to be coming from the moss-stuff itself, underneath them. Each of them looked like a fierce white gargoyle, with ears of blood and eyes like lamps. “It’s wearing a collar,” one said. “It’s a filthy impostor!”

Sirius recognized Yeff. “Yeff,” he said, “you told me it would be all right if I ran with you.”

“I told you no such thing, mongrel!” snapped Yeff, and heaved to his feet. “Come on, all of you. Kill it!”

Tired and slow and bad-tempered, the dogs around Sirius heaved up too, growling and snarling. Sirius scrambled to his sore feet and did his best to snarl back. As they went for him, he heard snarls and yelps beyond, where Bruce and then Patchie were discovered. Rover, in the distance, was yelping, “Save us, save us, save us!” at the top of his powerful voice. The uproar grew. Sirius thought he heard a human scream as part of it, but he was too busy defending himself to attend. Yeff had him by the ear, and another dog was snatching at his throat.

A voice spoke nearby. “What is going on?” it said wearily. It was a dark voice, flat as a cracked bell, as deep and gloomy as the sound of wind in a hollow corner. It did not seem loud. Nevertheless, the noise stopped at once. The dogs around Sirius crawled aside, frightened and abashed. “Lie down all of you,” said the Master of the hunt, “and go to sleep.”

Sirius was astonished at the force of that command. Every creature around him, and away into the dim distance, at once lay down and fell asleep. Sirius nearly did himself. He was dog-tired. He only disobeyed the command by bracing his whole green nature against it. Shakily and slowly, he staggered over the yielding ground toward the Master of the hunt. He was sure he could not have done that had it not been for the Zoi, humming fresh life into him from somewhere nearby.

“What are you?” said the flat hollow voice.

As it spoke, the command seemed to be lifted. Sirius made his way between cold sleeping hounds until he was standing in front of their Master. The dim figure seemed to be man-shaped now. At least, Sirius saw only two shadowy legs standing on the glowing moss. The rest was hard to see, since light only came from the ground, but Sirius looked up, searching where the Master’s head seemed to flare away into shadow, and caught a glimpse of eyes, round and liquid, with a tinge of red to them. But the shadowy arm went up to cover the eyes as Sirius looked into them.

“What are you?” the hollow voice repeated.

Sirius was certain that he was standing in front of a power as great as, or greater than, any he had known. He could not understand how Earth came to have such a child as this, nor why he should hide his eyes. He felt a good deal of respect, and also the same fierce pity he had felt as they raced back to town. “I used to be a luminary,” he said. “And I need to talk to you.”

“I’m not sure I need to talk to you,” the Master answered. “Luminaries take their powers from light. Mine come from darkness. We can only do one another harm.”

“But I ran with your hounds so that I could talk to you,” said Sirius. “I don’t think you can refuse.”

“No,” said the Master. “I can’t. But—”

“Talk to him,” Earth said suddenly, in a whisper out of the green moss. “He knows how to use the Zoi.”

“Does he?” said the Master. There was interest in his flat voice. “Come with me, then,” he said to Sirius. He turned like a wheeling
shadow and led the way along the mass of sleeping dogs. Sirius found, as he plodded over the chilly moss behind him, that the light which came from it seemed only to light the little circle in which they went. Everything beyond was dim. But the Master could evidently see beyond the circle. He seemed to be searching among the sleeping dogs as he went. First Bruce, then Redears and Patchie, and finally Rover, got up and limped over to them as they passed. “Your brothers and sister are only ordinary dogs, luminary,” the Master said. “Why is that?”

“I don’t really know,” Sirius confessed.

The Master stood still. “And who are these?”

“Oh,” said Patchie, peering around him. “Dead people.”

Beyond the dogs, Kathleen, Robin and Basil were curled up asleep on the moss. They lay so still that Sirius thought at first that Patchie was right. He rushed at Kathleen and nosed her. To his relief, she was warm and moved sleepily away from the cold nose on her face. “Leo,” she mumbled.

“Is she your mistress?” asked the Master of the hunt.

“Yes, that’s Kathleen,” Sirius said.

“They’ll be all right,” said the Master, “Come over here, all of you.”

A little farther on, the feeling from the Zoi was stingingly sharp. The other dogs felt it as well as Sirius, and shook themselves uncomfortably. Meanwhile, the Master sat down in a place where the green stuff was mounded up into the form of a chair. As he sat in it, Sirius noticed that it moved and eased around him to make him as comfortable as possible. Near the chair, the moss had sunk itself into a hollow to make a kind of pen for a red-eared white bitch and
a tumbling mass of frosty white puppies. Seeing the strange dogs, the mother rose up growling and glaring to warn them off. The puppies behaved just like the foxcubs. They tried to climb the steep mossy sides of their pen, squealing to be played with and yelping with frustration when the Master put out a shadowy arm and rolled them back to their mother.

The Master was no easier to see sitting than he had been standing. He was nothing but a flaring gloom. Out of the gloom, the sad, liquid eyes were turned on the four ordinary dogs crouched in front of his chair. “You ran with my hunt,” he said to them. “What is it you want?”

Bruce looked at Sirius to see if he still wanted him to ask for the Zoi, but, while he was looking, Redears said, “We don’t want much. We just want to be sure of not getting into trouble when we get home.”

“Yes, that’s what we want,” Patchie and Rover agreed. And Bruce said, “Particularly me. I’ve been out two days now.”

“I think I can let you have that,” said the Master. There was some amusement in his hollow voice.

“Thank you,” they said gratefully, and they settled down side by side to rest. “You do understand, don’t you?” Bruce said to Sirius before he fell asleep.

“Now,” said the Master to Sirius, and he stretched out an arm. A dim finger pointed to a place in the moss about a yard away from Sirius. It opened like a green mouth. Like a tongue coming out, a green hummock rose from the opening, carrying with it a scaly purple-gray stone about a foot long. It looked like a cinder in the
shape of a pinecone, except that it was heavy. It dented the green moss where it lay.

Sirius had never seen a Zoi look like that before. But he knew it at once, and knew that this must be the form of it best fitted for Earth. His nose turned to it as it might turn into a wind. His tail curled stiffly up behind him. He went slowly toward it, almost unable to believe he had found it at last.

And he was stopped. A foot away from the hummock he could not get any nearer to it. He ran around it to try from the other side, and it was the same there. “What are you doing?” he asked the Master.

“It killed the hound that found it,” he answered. “I’ve not let any creature touch it since. But I could see it was a thing of great power, so I kept it, hoping I could find a way to use it. You tell me, luminary. What is it, this Zoi?”

Sirius sat down, with his nose toward the vibrant dry cinder he so much wanted, and tried to explain. “If you think of all power as a kind of movement,” he said, “then a Zoi is composed of the movement behind the movement. It’s the stuff of life itself, it—”

“If it’s made of movement,” the Master interrupted, “that explains why I can’t use it.”

Sirius was astonished. “I’d have thought you had the power. Why not?”

The Master shook his great head. For a moment, Sirius had a feeling that tall, branched antlers swayed above it. “No, darkness is not movement,” he said somberly. “Nor is the other part of my power, which comes from things as they must be. I’m stronger than
you are, luminary, but I can’t use the Zoi. It’s a different order of being.”

“How did you come to be a child of Earth’s?” Sirius demanded.

“Earth has the seeds of everything,” said the Master. “Tell me what this Zoi can do.”

“Well, everything,” said Sirius. “Everything that is movement, anyway. It can make or change anything, give life or take it away, take something to the other end of space and fetch it back—”

The mother dog growled again. Sirius looked around and saw that Robin was leaning over the side of the hollow, gazing yearningly at the puppies.

“Oh, I want one!” he said to Basil, who was kneeling just beyond him.

Basil was looking at the Zoi. It was obvious he could think of nothing else. “That’s that meteorite,” he said. “I know it is. Isn’t it a beauty?”

Kathleen was awake too. She was sitting on the moss watching Sirius in a puzzled way. When he looked at her, she got up and came to pat him. “Leo, you silly dog! You’re worn out!” Then she turned to the Master of the hunt, meaning to apologize for coming into his private place after her dog. She met his half-seen liquid eyes. Then her own eyes went upward to the dark space above his head, where surely a pair of antlers stood like two dim horny trees. “I’m sorry,” she said. It was all she meant to say. She said it in much the same way as she had refused to open the gate for Sirius.

The Master said uneasily, “Don’t look too closely. The truth has no particular shape.”

“I know that,” Kathleen said, rather impatiently. Her eyes stayed watching the space above the Master’s head for all that. “But you’re not Arawn, are you?” she said.

The boys had seen the Master for the first time. They were both terrified. Robin’s teeth chattered and he said, “But he could be Orion or Actaeon, couldn’t he?”

“Or John Peel,” Basil said, very derisively because he was so scared.

Sirius wondered what the three humans had understood about the Master that he had not. It was clear that the Master knew they had understood it, by the way he changed the subject. “You all ran with my hounds,” he said.

“Only a very little way,” Kathleen said, quickly and firmly.

“But that entitles you to ask one thing of me,” the Master told them. “What do you want?”

Sirius pricked up his ears, knowing he could ask for the Zoi. Kathleen looked eager, then doubtful. Robin swung around and pointed delightedly at the hollow full of tumbling white puppies. “Then, could I—?”

“I want that meteorite,” Basil said loudly. “If we can have one thing, then we ought to have that, because it’s the
only
way I can get it. I need it. So don’t either of you go and be selfish.”

Kathleen and Robin exchanged wistful looks. Robin sighed. “All right.”

“I meant one thing each,” said the Master.

Robin was transformed into delight again. “In that case, can I have one of those puppies, please?”

“Certainly. When you leave here,” said the Master. “But,” he said to Basil, “I don’t think I shall be able to give you your meteorite.”

“Why not?” Basil demanded angrily. “It’s not fair!”

“If you were to give me the Zoi,” Sirius said, for once in his life glad that Basil could not understand him, “I could make him a meteorite exactly like that in a second. He wouldn’t know the difference.”

“That would be the solution,” the Master agreed, and turned to Kathleen. “And you?”

“Leo
is
talking to you!” Kathleen exclaimed. “I thought he was before. And you can understand him, can’t you? And I can’t. I’ve tried and Leo’s tried, but we can’t. How do you do it?”

“I can understand him because neither of us is human,” the Master said. His flat gloomy voice became flatter and gloomier. “If you really wish it, it can be brought about that you and your dog understand one another, but I think you might regret it. Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” Kathleen said recklessly.

“Ask for something else,” said the Master.

Kathleen was puzzled and uneasy. “But there’s only one other thing I couldn’t get in an ordinary way—and I know I can’t ask you that,” she said. “I won’t ask for anything, then.”

There was a short silence. Then the Master said, “No. Have what you asked for. You can all have what you want, but I think two of you are very unwise to ask. Do you really want the Zoi, luminary?”

“I have to have it,” Sirius said. “You don’t understand—it’s harming Sol’s system.”

“I care very little for Sol,” said the Master. “As little as he cares for me. But you can have it if you want. Meanwhile, there’s something you can do for me.” He leaned forward and picked the Zoi off its cushion of green moss. Basil’s eyes followed it as well as Sirius’s. After what the Master had said, Sirius was not surprised to see the Zoi blur and shrink between his shadowy fingers. The prickling life of it stopped entirely, and there was a dead kind of peace. “I don’t find it comfortable to hold,” the Master remarked. “You hold it for me.” To the terror of Sirius and the annoyance of Basil, he passed it to Kathleen.

“Hey!” said Basil.

Sirius jumped forward to try to take the Zoi himself, sure that it would kill Kathleen to touch it. The Zoi was heavy. Kathleen’s hands dipped under it and he almost got it. But Kathleen said, “No, Leo,” and raised it high out of his reach. Sirius jumped anxiously around her, rather astonished that the Zoi did not seem to harm her, and Basil hovered jealously at Kathleen’s elbow.