When Lissar followed her a little later (having produced nothing in response to the belly-rubbing; perhaps there was a trick to it, I would not do to have succeeded at step one and failed at step two; she adamantly refused to let this happen, even if she did not yet see, straight away, what to do about it), conversation stopped as soon as she appeared, barefoot and silent, in the doorway. Yet she had heard what they were discussing as she walked past the heaps of sleeping dogs, for whom she must already bear the correct smell of a fellow pack-member, for none challenged her or Ash. The common-room discussion was of a recent hunt, during which one dog had done particularly well; nothing, Lissar thought, that they should have cared about her, or anyone, overhearing, nor anything that, in a collection of dog people, should have broken off upon the entry of another person.
Jobe stood up and served her a bowl of stew, and set another one down on the floor for Ash. Lissar never quite got over her amazement at how swiftly and delicately Ash could inhale large amounts of food; it was like a magic trick, the mystic word is spoken, the hand gesture performed and presto! the food disappears, without a crumb or speck left behind. Ash looked up hopefully at the bowl in Lissar's hands.
"Come and sit," said a man Lissar did not know. She went and sat, but she did not stay long; the conversation tried to start up again around her, but it lurched and stumbled-barely more deft than a day-old puppy. She set her bowl on the floor for Ash to perform her magic on, took a hunk of bread and a tall mug of malak-whose name drifted into her mind as she tasted it for the first time, in, when?-said
"good-night," and left as silently as she had entered. A chorus of "good-night"
followed her, sounding both eager and sad, like a dog who is hoping for a kind word and doubts its luck. She paused and looked back at them as they looked at her; and realized that they were not anxious for her to Ieave even if they were uneasy in her company. She smiled a little, not understanding, and returned to the puppies' pen.
Some of them in her absence had responded in the desired way to the belly-rubbing, and some cleaning up was in order, since they did not differentiate between one substance, like straw or sibling's body, and the next. Lissar thought, frowning, that she would have to keep track of who needed more belly-rubbing. She sighed; tiredness fell on her suddenly, with the arrival of food in her own belly. She would figure it all out tomorrow.
The fire-pot had arrived while she was at supper, and there was a low, heavy-bottomed jug of milk beside it.
The puppies were all asleep again in their heap, as soon as she set down the cleaned-up ones. She wondered how the ones on the bottom were managing to breathe. She laid out two more of the blankets Hela had brought for a mattress, and lay down herself. Ash was standing by the closed door in alarm: You don't mean we're spending the night in here with-them?
"Come," said Lissar. "You can lie next to the wall, and I will protect you."
She fell asleep in some anxiety, not knowing how she would awaken to feed the puppies again. They could not be left all night, and she was too tired to remain awake. But her anxiety made her sleep lightly, and the first uncertain murmuring protests from the puppy-heap brought her awake at once, staring around a moment in fright, feeling the ceiling leaning down close to her, not able to remember where she was, or what it was that had awakened her. She staggered upright, the ceiling returning to its normal position, and went to warm the milk. Ash, who could ordinarily not be moved by force once she was comfortably asleep for the night, got up at once and perched near her. Ash had a lot to say about the whole situation, in a low rumbling mutter.
Lissar's cheek muscles were aching before the first puppy was fed; by the sixth she was balancing the pup on her knees because she needed her other hand to keep her lips clamped on the straw. Tomorrow, she told herself fuzzily, without moving her lips, I will find an alternative. The puppies were weaving themselves back into their pile; it became impossible in the dim light to differentiate one puppy from the next. The puppyheap was one creature, fringed by tails and a surprising number of feet.
She stroked a nearby back. Two of the puppies were discernibly weaker than the other four. She remembered what everyone kept telling her about the pups' future, and the uselessness and duration of her temporary job; what she was doing was only to reassure the prince that his bitch's last litter hadn't automatically been given up on.
But she wanted to succeed. She didn't want to be reasonable. She wanted the pups to live. She didn't even want four pups to live; she wanted all of the remaining six.
There was a sudden, surprising rush of heat like anger as she thought this; and, warmed and strengthened by it, she began lifting the puppies up again, one by one, and massaging their bellies. Tomorrow she would ask for an old glove, and cut the fingers off , and make a tiny hole in a fingertip, and pour milk down the puppies'
throats that way.
TWENTY-TWO
LISSAR WOKE UP VERY WARM. ONE LARGE DOG WAS KNOTTED UP
against her back and six tiny dogs who had, by some osmosis, slowly oozed their way the short distance across the floor during the night, were now piled up in a small irregular sausage from her breastbone to her thighs. There were various sounds of protest when she moved; a baritone grumble from behind her and a series of fairylike cheeps from before.
"It's morning," she whispered. "Is everybody still alive?" Everybody was. Her throat relaxed, and there was suddenly more room in her chest for her heart to beat.
But the two weak pups had been joined by a third. The worst was a tiny grey bitch, who simply lay limp in Lissar's hand, without moving her head, without making the least fluttering movement with feet or tail. "Don't die," said Lissar, sadly, "don't die": and she was warmed by another swift blaze of anger. "You haven't been alive yet; what did you go and get born for if you're just going to die?"
It was so early there was almost no one else stirring; but Berry was in the common-room grumbling over a shortage of biscuit-meal to make dog breakfasts with, and he found her an old pair of gloves, and a pin to prick with. She took her new supplies back to the puppy pen, sawed off a glove-finger, and prepared to try out her invention. The little grey bitch lay exactly as Lissar had laid her down, looking almost more like a small grey puddle than a dog. She picked her up first.
The pup lay dully in her hand. She weighed so little Lissar felt that if she tossed her into the air, the puppy would float to the ground, whisking gently back and forth like a leaf. Lissar wined her over, cupped her in her hand, and wiggled the little muouth open till she could get the glove-tip inside. The jaw, once open, merely hung slack; the glove-tip would not go in far enough, nor stay put. Lissar wrestled for a minute or two. The milk only leaked out of the puppy's indifferent mouth. She did not swallow, she did not resist; she did nothing. She lay in the position Lissar had pinned her among her own fingers, the any ribcage only barely registering the tiniest of breaths.