The Long Earth

long and strong. And each of them carried a humanoid – not a troll, a skinny upright figure with a chimp face and rust-brown hair, sitting astride his hog as if riding a huge ugly horse.
    Joshua was a long way from the cover of the trees.
    ‘More elves,’ Lobsang whispered.
    ‘The same breed that wiped out the Victims?’
    ‘Or their first cousins. The Long Earth is a big arena, Joshua; there must be many speciation events.’
    ‘You sent me down here to encounter these creatures, didn’t you? This is what you call a restful break?’
    ‘You can’t deny it’s interesting, Joshua.’
    One elf called out, a pant-hoot cry like a chimp’s, and kicked his mount in the ribs. The six beasts trotted forward at Joshua, with guttural grunts.
    ‘Lobsang, your advice?’
    The hogs were speeding up.
    ‘Lobsang—’
    ‘Run!’
    Joshua ran, but the pigs ran faster. He had barely closed any ground on the descending airship, or the forest, when a huge body came plummeting past him. Joshua smelled dirt and blood and shit and a kind of greasy musk, and a small fist slammed into his back and sent him sprawling.
    The pigs capered around him, oddly playful despite their size and bulk. Their huge random violence was terrifying. He expected to be crushed, or gored on the canine teeth embedded in the tips of their snouts. But instead the pigs kept running by him, and the humanoids, the elves, whooping and hooting, leaned over to make passes at him. Blades flashed at him – blades of stone! He cowered and rolled.
    At last they pulled back, into a loose circle around him. Shaking, he got to his feet, feeling for his own weapons. He wasn’t cut, he realized, save for nicks on his face, and on his shoulder where a swipe had gone through the cloth of his coverall. But they had cut the supply pack from his chest, even pickpocketed the knife at his waist. He had been expertly stripped, leaving only the parrot on his shoulder, the processor pack on his back.
    The elves were toying with him.
    Now the elves stood up on the backs of their strange mounts. They weren’t like the trolls, they were much skinnier, more graceful, lithe, strong, their hairy upright bodies like those of child gymnasts. They had long tree-climbing arms, very human legs, and small heads with wizened chimp-like faces. They all seemed to be male. Some of them were sporting skinny erections.
    Joshua looked for positives. ‘Well, they’re smaller than me. Five feet, maybe?’
    ‘Don’t underestimate them,’ Lobsang’s whisper in his headset urged. ‘They’re stronger than you. And this is their world, remember.’
    The pant-hooting cries began again, and seemed to reach a crescendo. Then one of the elves kicked his animal’s ribs. The beast, its own eyes fixed on Joshua, began to stride steadily forward. The elf bared human-looking teeth and hissed.
    This time they weren’t playing.
    There are moments when terror is like a treacle that slows down time. Once when Joshua was a kid he had slipped over an edge at a limestone quarry, just a ten-minute bike ride from the Home, and his friends couldn’t haul him back, and he had had to hang on while they ran for help. His arms had hurt like hell. But what he remembered most of all was the tiny detail of the rock right in front of his eyes. There had been flecks of mica in it, and lichen, a miniature forest dried yellow by the sun. That little landscape had become his whole world, until somebody somewhere started yelling, and some other guy’s hands grabbed his wrists, hauled on arms that felt like they were filled with hot lead …
    The elf leapt in the air, and flickered out of existence. The hog trotted on, grunting, speeding up. The realization came to Joshua, with all the clarity of a mica fleck on a sun-warmed rock, that the elf was stalking him. And it had
stepped
.
    The hog was still coming. Joshua stood his ground. At the last second it hesitated, stumbled, veered away from him.
    And the elf returned, stretching, its feet braced on the hog’s back, its hands clamped around Joshua’s neck – hands in place to throttle Joshua,
even as it stepped back into the world
. Joshua was astonished at the precision of the manoeuvre.
    But now the elf’s strong ape hands were squeezing, and Joshua was driven to the ground, unable to breathe. He reached, but the elf’s arms were longer than his; he flailed, unable to reach the creature’s snarling face, and blackness rimmed his vision. He tried to think. His