CHAPTER 31
It was high summer when Woodcarver’s army left for the north. The preparations had been frantic, with Vendacious driving himself and everyone else to the point of exhaustion. There had been cannons to make—Scrupilo cast seventy tubes before getting thirty that would fire reliably. There had been cannoneers to train—and safe methods of firing to discover. There had been wagons to build and kherhogs to buy.
Surely word of the preparations had long ago filtered north. Woodcarvers was a port city; they could not close down the commerce that moved through it. Vendacious warned them of this in more than one inner council meeting: Steel knew they were coming. The trick was in keeping the Flenserists uncertain as to numbers and timing and exact purpose. “We have one great advantage over the enemy,” he said. “We have agents in his highest councils. We know what he knows of us.” They couldn’t disguise the obvious from the spies, but the details were a different matter.
The army departed along inland routes, a dozen wagons here, a few squads there. In all there were a thousand packs in the expedition, but they would never be together till they reached deep forest. It would have been easier to take the first part of the trip by sea, but the Flenserists had spotters hidden high in the fjordlands. Any ship movement—even deep in Woodcarver territory—would be known in the north. So they traveled on forest paths, through areas that Vendacious had cleared of enemy agents.
At first the going was very easy, at least for those with the wagons. Johanna rode in one of the rear ones with Woodcarver and Dataset. Even I’m beginning to treat the thing like an oracle, thought Johanna. Too bad it couldn’t really predict the future.
The weather was as beautiful as Johanna had ever seen it on Tines world, an endless afternoon. It was strange that such unending fairness should make her so nervous, but she couldn’t help it. This was so much like her first time on this world, when everything had… gone wrong.
During the first dayarounds of the journey, while they were still in home territory, Woodcarver pointed out every peak that came into view and tried to translate its name into Samnorsk for her. After six hundred years the Queen knew her land well. Even the patches of snow—the ones that lasted all through the summer—were known to her. She showed Johanna a sketchbook she had brought along. Each page was from a different year, and showed her special snowpatches as they had appeared on the same day of the summer. Riffling through the leaves, it was almost like a crude piece of animation. Johanna could see the patches moving, growing over a period of decades, then retreating. “Most packs don’t live long enough to feel it,” said Woodcarver, “but to me, the patches that last all summer are like living things. See how they move? They are like wolves, held off from our lands by our fire that is the sun. They circle about, grow. Sometimes they link together and a new glacier starts toward the sea.”
Johanna had laughed a little nervously. “Are they winning?”
“For the last four centuries, no. The summers have often been hot and windy. In the long run? I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter quite so much to me anymore.” She rocked her two little puppies for a moment and laughed gently. “Peregrine’s little ones are not even thinking yet, and I’m already losing my long view!”
Johanna reached out to stroke her neck. “But they are your puppies too.”
“I know. Most of my pups have been with other packs, but these are the first that I have kept to be me.” Her blind one nuzzled at one of the puppies. It wriggled and made a sound that warbled at the top of Johanna’s hearing. Johanna held the other on her lap. Tine pups looked more like baby sea’mals than dogs. Their necks were so long compared to their bodies. And they seemed to develop much more slowly than the puppy she and Jefri had raised. Even now they seemed to have trouble focusing. She moved her fingers slowly back and forth in front of one puppy’s head; its efforts to track were comical.
And after sixty days, Woodcarver’s pups couldn’t really walk. The Queen wore two special jackets with carrying pouches on the sides. Most of the waking day, her little ones stayed there, suckling through the fur on her tummy. In some ways, Woodcarver treated her offspring as a human would. She was very nervous when they were taken from her sight. She liked to cuddle them and play little games of coordination with them. Often she would lay both of them on their backs and pat their paws in a sequence of eight, then abruptly tap the one or the other on the belly. The two wriggled furiously at the attack, their little legs waving in all directions. “I nibble the one whose paw was last touched. Peregrine is worthy of me. These two are already thinking a little. See?” She pointed to the puppy that had convulsed into a ball, avoiding most of her surprise tickle.
In other ways Tinish parenting was alien, almost scary. Neither Woodcarver nor Peregrine ever talked to their pups in audible tones, but their ultrasonic “thoughts” seemed to be constantly probing the little ones. Some of it was so simple and regular that it set sympathetic vibrations through the walls of the little wagon. The wood buzzed under Johanna’s hands. It was like a mother humming a lullaby, but she could see it had another purpose. The little creatures responded to the sounds, twitching in complicated rhythms. Peregrine said it would be another thirty days before the pups could contribute conscious thought to the pack, but they were already being trained and exercised for the function.
They camped part of each dayaround, the troops standing turns as sentry lines. Even during the traveling part of the day, they stopped numerous times, to clear the trail, or await the return of scouts, or simply to rest. At one such stop, Johanna sat with Peregrine in the shade of a tree that looked like pine but smelled of honey. Pilgrim played with his young ones, helping them to stand up and walk a few steps. She could tell by the buzzing in her head that he was thinking at the pups. And suddenly they seemed more like marionettes than children to her. “Why don’t you let them play by themselves, or with their—” Brothers? Sisters? What do you call siblings born to the other pack? “— with Woodcarver’s pups?”
Even more than Woodcarver, the pilgrim had tried to learn human customs. He was by far the most flexible pack she knew… after all, if you can accommodate a murderer in your own mind, you must be flexible. But Pilgrim was visibly startled by her question. The buzzing in her head stopped abruptly. He laughed weakly. It was a very human laugh, though a bit theatrical. Peregrine had spent hours at interactive comedy on Dataset -whether for entertainment or insight, she didn’t know. “Play? By themselves? Yes… I see how natural that would seem to you. To us, it would be a kind of perversion… No, worse than that, since perversions are at least fun for some people some of the time. But if a pup were raised a singleton, or even a duo—it would be making an animal of what could be sturdy member.”
“You mean that pups never have life of their own?”
Peregrine cocked his heads and scrunched close to the ground. One of him continued to nose around the puppies, but Johanna had his attention. He loved to puzzle over human exotica. “Well, sometimes there is a tragedy -an orphan pup left to itself. Often there is no cure for it; the creature becomes too independent to meld with any pack. In any case, it is a very lonely, empty life. I have personal memories of just how unpleasant.”
“You’re missing a lot. I know you’ve watched children’s stories on Dataset. It’s sad you can never be young and foolish.”
“Hei! I never said that. I’ve been young and foolish lots; it’s my way of life. And most packs are that way when they have several young members by different parents.” As they talked, one of Peregrine’s pups had struggled to the edge of the blanket they sat on. Now it awkwardly extended its neck into the flowers that grew from the roots of a nearby tree. As it scruffed around in the green and purple, Johanna felt the buzzing begin again. The pup’s movement became a tad more organized. “Wow! I can smell the flowers with him. I bet we’ll be seeing through each other’s eyes well before we get to Flenser’s Hidden Island.” The pup backed up, and the two did a little dance on the blanket. Peregrine’s heads bobbed in time with the movement. “They are such bright little ones!” He grinned. “Oh, we are not so different from you, Johanna. I know humans are proud of their young ones. Both Woodcarver and I wonder what ours will become. She is so brilliant, and I am—well, a bit mad. Will these two make me a scientific genius? Will Woodcarver’s turn her into an adventurer? Heh, heh. Woodcarver’s a great brood kenner, but even she’s not sure what our new souls will be like. Oh, I can’t wait to be six again!”
It had taken Scriber and Pilgrim and Johanna only three days to sail from Flenser’s Domain to the harbor at Woodcarver’s. It would take this army almost thirty days to walk back to where Johanna’s adventure began. On the map it had looked a tortuous path, wiggling this way and that through the fjordland. Yet the first ten days were amazingly easy. The weather stayed dry and warm. It was like the day of the ambush stretched out forever and ever. A dry winds summer, Woodcarver called it. There should be occasional storms, at least cloudiness. Instead the sun circled endlessly above the forest canopy, and when they broke into the open (never for long, and then only
