Beasts of New York

Chapter 4 - The Island of the Center Kingdom

Dogs

At last, after long days of dangerous travel, Patch had returned to the island of his birth. But the longer he stood atop the tree onto which they had dismounted, and tried to figure out how to travel through the mountains to the Center Kingdom, the more he realized that his problems had not diminished. If anything they had proliferated. He didn’t know where on the island he was, but he knew he was still a very long way from home. There was no sky-road at all, and the island’s highways and walkways were busier, louder, and more dangerously crowded than any Patch had ever seen before. The one small consolation was that there were very few dogs; but the smell of rat was pervasive.

They stayed on the tree for a long time. Zelina was reluctant to downclimb at all, for the tree’s lowest branches were high above the earth, and Patch was reluctant to venture into the walkway teeming with humans from which the tree sprouted. It was not until the sun was hidden behind the mountains to the west, and the flood of humans had diminished to a trickle, that Patch ran down the slender tree trunk onto the walkway. Zelina tried to follow, and promptly fell – but landed gracefully on her feet, unhurt.

They immediately ran to the edge of the nearest mountain. The rat-smells were stronger there, but humans kept a little distance from the mountains. Some of the humans they passed stopped, turned to look at them, and spoke to one another. Patch and Zelina ignored them. He led her north; he knew, at least, that home was that way.

When they reached the intersection of two highways, the large one they followed and a smaller one that intersected it, he crouched in the shadow of the corner mountain, and tried to measure the timing of the lights above him.

‘Wait,’ Zelina said.

Patch looked at her. He was quivering with tension. Running around on human walkways, surrounded by death machines on highways, still felt profoundly unnatural, and the still-frequent passing humans, some of whom stepped unseeingly within a tail-length of Patch, were even more disturbing. But Zelina seemed considerably more relaxed. ‘What?’

‘We should wait and travel by night.’

‘We can’t travel by night. There are owls –’

‘There may be owls flying above the Center Kingdom, and above the river, and perhaps even across the river,’ Zelina said, ‘but the sky above us now, you will notice, is almost entirely occupied by mountains, leaving very little room for owls. The daytime is too busy, there are too many dangers, something will crush us. But the city night is quiet.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I used to watch the Great Avenue from the metal stairs outside my palace. Believe me, Patch. We can’t run along these highways to your home while the sun is high. You’ll never reach home alive. You must trust in the moon.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘Let’s go down the smaller highway, find a tree or a rooftop, sleep for a little, then travel by night.’

Patch considered. Travel by night was unnatural and unnerving. But so was virtually everything else he had done to get home. ‘All right.’

As they proceeded down the smaller and less-trafficked highway, they passed, across the highway, a large dog with patchy fur, leashed very closely to one of the withered alder trees that grew amid the mountains. Patch kept a very careful eye on it, in case the leash was weak; but even though they were upwind of the dog, it did not howl for their deaths.

‘Hurts bad!’ it whined piteously instead. ‘Oh, hurts bad, hurts bad, hurts so bad!’

Patch, surprised, looked more closely. The dog must have somehow circled repeatedly around the tree to which its leash was tied, because its entire leash was wound around the trunk so tightly that the dog’s side was rubbing painfully against the rough bark. The dog badly wanted to get away, but dogs were not known for their thinking, and this one was unable to understand that it should go backward. Instead it kept trying to leap forward and break free of the leash, but each time it succeeded only in choking itself and further chafing its now-bloody side against the bark.