Dogsbody (8 page)

Thereafter, Sirius was taken out every weekday, rain or shine, and tied up in the yard. He disliked rain. It made him itch and shiver. Robin and Kathleen spent all the first weekend of term trying to build him a shelter out of wood, under the bracket in the wall. When Duffie saw it, she was very sarcastic.

“Dogs aren’t hurt by a little weather,” she said. “What do you pamper it so for?”

“The Rat’s used to being in the house, you see,” Robin explained.

“You’re a little toady, Robin,” said Duffie.

The first time Sirius went into the shelter, it fell down on him. He came bolting out of it, with his hind legs lowered against the shower of falling boards and his tail wrapped under his legs. Basil leaned against the house and shrieked with laughter.

“The look on that Rat’s face!” he said. “Trust you two! You don’t know one end of a nail from the other.”

“I’d like to see you do it better,” said Robin.

“Right,” said Basil. He rebuilt the shelter the next weekend. He did not do it too badly. The shelter stood rather sideways and swayed a little in the wind, but it stayed up. After a day or so, Sirius even dared use it. And before it really fell down again, Mr. Duffield took pity on them and built it yet again, this time properly. Except when the wind was in the east, it was snug.

But the worst thing about being a prisoner in the yard was the long, long hours of boredom. Sirius lay with his head on his paws, sighing heavily, wistfully watching the cats trotting along the walls on their private business, or staring at the gate in the wall of the yard and wishing he could open it. The gate had two bolts, one at the bottom and one about a foot from the top, and a rusty latch in the middle. There was no way that Sirius could see of getting it open.

The cats understood how dreary it was for him. When they had no pressing business elsewhere, Romulus and Remus would kindly sit on the walls of the yard to keep him company. Tibbles frequently shared his shelter. But none of them, not even Tibbles, could help him open that gate.

“Yes, I can undo bolts,” Tibbles said. “But those are rusty and I can’t reach the one at the top from the wall. And I can’t reach the latch from anywhere. Make Kathleen undo it for you.”

But Sirius could not make Kathleen undo the door, because he could not talk to her. It was the bitterest disappointment of his life,
and it made his imprisonment even harder to bear. He had never had any doubt that, when he had learned to understand human talk, he would be able to speak it, too. But he could not. Try as he might, he just could not make the proper noises. His throat and his tongue and his jaws were simply the wrong shape. He did not give up easily. He lay in the yard and practiced. But after hours of trying, the most he could manage, by opening his mouth wide, wide, and flapping his tongue, and letting out a sort of tenor groan, was a noise a little like “Hallo.”

Kathleen at least understood that. “Listen!” she said. “He’s saying Hallo!”

“No he’s not,” said Basil. “He’s just yawning.”

“He’s not. He’s saying Hallo,” Kathleen insisted. “He’s talking.”

“If he’s talking, why doesn’t he say other things then?” Basil demanded.

“Because he can’t. His mouth and things are the wrong shape,” Kathleen explained. “But he would if he could. He’s very exceptional.”

It was a small crumb of comfort to Sirius to know Kathleen understood that much, even if she understood so little else. She could not understand the way he communicated with the cats. It was talk or nothing with humans, it seemed. Sirius would have given a great deal to have been able to reply just once to some of the interesting things Kathleen said. He would have given a great deal more to be able to tell her that he had to get out of the yard, go away, look for something, to ask her if she knew what a Zoi was, but he could not.

He nosed and hinted and shoved her into the yard. He took her over to the gate and scrabbled at it, whining.

“No, Leo,” Kathleen said. “I’m sorry. Duffie would be furious.”

So that was that. Week after week, Sirius lay mournfully in the yard, growing bigger and glossier and ever more bored. He despaired of ever getting out. Meanwhile, the weather became colder. In the meadow, the grass was yellow here and there, and the leaves turned brown and blew off the trees. Sometimes the whole field was silvered with little spiderwebs that got up his nose and made him sneeze, and everywhere smelled of fungus. It began to be dark sooner. Suddenly everyone altered all the clocks and confused Sirius utterly, because he still got hungry at the same time, and Kathleen was not even home from school by then.

That was his blackest week. On its second day, Kathleen had to go out again the moment she came home from school, because there was no sugar. Duffie sent Kathleen to try every shop she could before they all shut. Sirius remained tied up in the yard, puzzled and unhappy, until long after sunset. He had never seen night fall before. He watched the red sun flaring down behind the roofs, leaving an orange stain behind it and a much darker blue sky. After a while, the sky was nearly black. And the stars came out. Wheeling overhead they came, tiny disks of white, green and orange, pinpricks of bluish white, cold tingly red blobs, large orbs, small orbs, more and more, crowding and clustering away into the dark, while behind them wheeled the spangled smear of the Milky Way. Sirius stared upward, dumbfounded. This was home. He should have been there, not tied up in a yard on the edge of things. They
were his. And they were so far away. He had no way of reaching them.

He was filled with a vast green sense of loss. Out there, invisible, his lost Companion must be. She was probably too far away to hear. All the same, he threw up his head and howled. And howled. And howled.

“One of you shut that creature up,” said Duffie.

Basil came out into the yard and hit Sirius a ringing slap on the muzzle. It hurt, and the echo inside his head nearly deafened Sirius. He put his face down on his paws with a groan.

“Now shut up!” said Basil.

When the door of the house shut, the sense of loss overwhelmed Sirius again. He looked up, and there were the stars, still unattainable. Howls broke out of him again without his being able to stop them. He howled and howled.

“I’ll do it,” said Robin. He went out and untied Sirius and brought him indoors. It was small and yellow inside, and Sirius began to feel better. “He was miserable,” Robin explained to Duffie.

“You spoil that creature so, it’s no wonder it thinks it owns the house,” said Duffie.

Sirius did not feel truly comfortable until Kathleen came back. And, after that, whenever he saw the stars, he was miserable. Then came a night when the humans seemed to try to imitate stars. There were bangs and fires and star-shapes soaring against the sky. Kathleen made haste to get Sirius indoors, and she seemed so excited that he thought for a while that the Irish people had come with guns to take Kathleen home. He did not want to let her out of his sight.

“No, you have to stay in. It’s Guy Fawkes,” said Kathleen. “You won’t like it anyway.”

She was wrong. Sirius was fascinated. It was like being home again. He watched as much as he could see from Kathleen’s bed, with his paws propped among the plants on her window sill. The cats could not understand him. They all retired into the linen closet and refused to come out until midnight. Sirius learned from their grumbles that people only had these lovely fires one night in every year. He would have to wait longer than he had lived in order to see them again. The last fire he saw was a great green rocket, exploding far above the houses, spreading like a bright, drifting tree, and turning to nothing while it hung in the sky.

It fascinated Sirius, and worried him, too. He thought about it next day as he lay in the yard along a bar of sunlight. The green fire put him in mind of the vast green something inside him. It hung, drifting, behind the warm and stupid dog thoughts, and he was becoming seriously afraid that if he did not try to understand it and make it a proper part of him, it would drift into nothing like the fire from the rocket. But, however hard he tried, he could not seem to make his dog’s brain grasp the green thing, any more than he could make his dog’s mouth say words. The green drifted away out of sight, and he found he was falling asleep.

“Effulgency,” said someone, “I’m sorry I haven’t got round to speaking to you before. I’ve had a lot to do.”

Effulgency? What was this? It was a long time since anyone had addressed Sirius with this kind of respect. Its effect was to bring the green fires he thought he had lost tumbling into his head in such
huge bright profusion that he could only lie where he was in the bar of sun, in a sort of emerald daze.

“I have got the right dog, haven’t I?” said the voice.

Sirius got over his shock a little and opened his eyes, very blank and green against the sun, to see who was speaking.

“Yes, I have,” said the voice.

“I can’t see you,” Sirius said, frowning into the sunlight. “Who are you?”

The voice gave a little chuckle, fierce and gay. “Yes you can. Don’t you remember anything at all?”

That particular fierce, gay sound stirred memories in Sirius. He was surprised to find they were dog memories. But they were so mixed up with vast green things that he was very confused. “You talked to me once before,” he said slowly, “when I was drowning in the river. And I think you helped me. That was good of you.” He was sure this was not all. Puzzled, he searched the great green spaces that now seemed to be expanding and rippling in his head. There was a host of strange bright things flitting there, but none of them had quite this fierce gay voice. It must be someone he had known only slightly, if at all. “You sound as if you might be a luminary,” he said doubtfully.

The voice pounced on this, warmly. “So you
do
remember! Thank goodness for that! Look at me. It may help.”

Still puzzled, Sirius frowned in the direction of the voice, along the band of sunlight where he lay, into the blazing white and yellow heart of the sun itself. Under his eyes, the searing light shifted. It flowed and hardened and became a figure, which seemed to be
made of the light itself. In shape, it was not unlike a human. But it had fierce white-yellow rays lifting and falling about it and massed around its head like a mane of hair. The queerest thing about it was that Sirius could not tell whether it was a tiny figure quite near, or a large figure very far away. It could have been standing somewhere near the top of the yard wall, or in the very heart of the sun.

“Effulgency,” said Sirius, “I’m very sorry. I’ve been very stupid. You’re the Denizen of our luminary, aren’t you?”

“That’s right,” said the bright figure. “The Sun. Sol, they call me.”

He stood blazing cheerfully down on Sirius, so bright and confident in his power that Sirius’s heart ached to see him. He knew he had once been like this. Now he was only a creature in this luminary’s sphere. That put him in mind of his duty. He stood up, with the rope trailing from his neck, and bowed as a creature should to Sol, lowering his front legs till his fringed forearms lay along the ground.

Sol seemed embarrassed. He put out a hand, shimmering awkwardly. “There’s no need to bow, Effulgency. I’m only a minor effulgent. The reason I recognized you was that I used to come under your sphere of office.”

“I know.” Sirius rose from his bow and sat on his haunches. Now he knew it was Sol, and where he must be, he was embarrassed, too, as far as his misty memories would let him be. Sol’s sphere had been his nearest neighbor. He should have known him better. But he did remember that Sol had had rather a name for fierce independence and had highly resented any interference in his sphere. “This is Earth, where I am, isn’t it?” he said. “I remember I used to
admire it because it was so green. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. To tell you the truth, I—Well, I don’t seem to think like a luminary anymore.”

Sol appraised him, suffusing him with warmth. “That body they put you in isn’t more than half-grown yet. You’ll have to wait till it’s older before you can remember properly. But I’m glad you know who you are now. I need your help, and I hope I can help you.”

Sirius gazed up at him dubiously. “Don’t get into trouble. I can’t do anything to help you. And if you help me, you may find the high effulgents objecting.”

“To blazes with that!” Sol was furious. Rays of anger, intense and white, stood out all around him. The dog part of Sirius trembled to see him. He wondered if he had been that terrifying, ever, when he was angry. “I’ll help whom I please in my own sphere!” said Sol. “You may have had the devil’s own temper, but I respected you. You let me manage things my own way. And then they go and thrust you here on Earth without a word to me! No warning, no instructions. Not even a polite hint. The first I knew of this ridiculous sentence was a wretched little star out of Ursa Minor coming along to tell me we were all under Polaris now.
Polaris!
” He flamed with disgust.

“Polaris?” There was an uncomfortable boiling in Sirius’s great green memories. Out of it came a mild, clear-sighted Cepheid, a tall-stander whom he thought he had once liked.

“Yes. Polaris,” said Sol, with the mane of rage lifting and falling around him. “One of your Judges, I understand. He may be all right, but he’s a Cepheid. And what does a four-day Cepheid understand about my system here? Nothing! And to crown it all, the
replacement in your sphere is some blasted amateur from the Castor complex—”

“Castor?” said Sirius. He felt a huge uneasiness, which made the hair stand up all down his back. He could not remember what he knew about the Castor people—except that they were vague and untrustworthy, and too many for their sphere, so that they were always trying to meddle with other people’s. “Tell me, Sol—Do you know—? My Companion—Is she—?”

“Still in her sphere, as far as I know,” said Sol. He was anxious to get on with his grievance. “It’s just as well they didn’t trust that amateur on his own. He’s set up some kind of trepidation that’s almost knocked my outer planet off course, and the next thing I knew there were floods, droughts and famines all over Earth, too. Now I may not be a high effulgent, but there are creatures here, and they’re my responsibility. I can’t have another Ice Age on Earth yet. So I went and gave Polaris a piece of my mind.”