The Long Earth

weapons, his pack, were stolen and scattered, but the parrot still sat on his shoulder. He grabbed the parrot’s frame with both hands, and shoved it in the face of the elf. Bits of glass and plastic erupted, the elf fell back screaming, and mercifully that death grip at his throat was released.
    But the other elves on their hogs screamed and closed.
    ‘Joshua!’ A loudspeaker, booming from the air. The airship was coming down, slowly, ponderously, dangling a rope ladder.
    He got to his feet, gasping for breath through a crushed throat, but a bank of elves on hogs stood between him and the ladder, and the injured elf on the ground shrieked its fury. The only gap in the circle surrounding him was the way that lead elf had come.
    So he ran that way, away from the airship, but out of the circle of elves. The wrecked parrot was still attached to his coverall by cables; it dragged through the dirt behind him. The yelling elves pursued him. If he could somehow double back, or maybe reach the forest—
    ‘Joshua! No! Watch out for the—’
    The ground suddenly gave way under him.
    He fell a yard or so, and found himself in a hollow surrounded by dogs – no, like a mix of dogs and bears, he’d glimpsed this kind before, lithe canine bodies with powerful heads and muzzles like bears. Their black-furred bodies squirmed all around him, females, puppies. This was some kind of den, not a trap. But even the puppies were snapping, snarling packets of aggression. The smallest of them, it was almost cute, closed its bear-like jaws on Joshua’s leg. He kicked, trying to loosen the little creature’s grip. The other dog-bears barked and snarled, and Joshua expected them to fall on him in a moment.
    But here came the elves on their swinish mounts. The adult dogs rose up out of their den in a pack, and hurled themselves at the hogs. The fight erupted in a cloud of yelps, barks, grunts, cries, pant-hoots, snapping teeth, screams of pain and sprays of blood, while the elves flashed in and out of existence, as if glimpsed under a strobe lamp.
    Joshua climbed out of the den and ran away from the fight, or tried to. But that stubborn pup clung to his leg, and he was still dragging the absurd wreckage of the parrot. He glanced up. The airship was almost overhead. Joshua jumped for the rope ladder, grabbed it, and viciously kicked away the pup. The airship rose immediately.
    Below, the dogs had now encircled the huge hogs, which fought back ferociously. Joshua saw one big dog-bear sink its teeth into the neck of a screaming hog, which crashed to the ground. But another hog scooped up a dog in its big tusked jaw and threw it through the air, squealing, its chest ripped open. Meanwhile the elves flickered through the carnage. Joshua saw one elf face a dog that leapt for his throat. The elf flicked away and reappeared beside the dog as it sailed through the air, spun with balletic grace, and swiped at the animal’s torso with a thin stone blade, disembowelling the dog before it hit the ground. The elves were fighting for survival, but Joshua got the impression they were fighting individually, not for each other; it wasn’t a battle so much as a series of private duels. It was every man for himself. Or would have been, if they had been men.
    And the airship rose up, beyond the reach of the trees, and into the sunlight. The fight was reduced to a dusty, blood-splashed detail in a landscape across which the airship’s shadow drifted serenely. Joshua, still barely able to breathe, climbed the ladder, and spilled into the gondola.
    ‘You kicked a puppy,’ Lobsang said accusingly.
    ‘Add it to the charge sheet,’ he gasped. ‘Next time you pick a vacation site, Lobsang, think a bit more Disneyland.’ Then the darkness around his vision that had been there ever since the close encounter with the elf folded over him.

31
    HE WAS PRETTY badly hurt, he learned later. Lots of minor injuries, many of which he hadn’t noticed at the time. The damage to his neck, his throat. Scratches, cuts, even a bite mark – not from the puppy at his ankle, this was the imprint of human-like teeth in his shoulder. Lobsang’s ambulant treated the cuts, dosed him with antibiotics, and fed him painkillers.
    He drifted away. Sometimes he woke briefly, fuzzily, to see bone-white stars above, or green carpets rolling beneath the airship. The steady swinging rhythm of stepping was comforting. He slept away days, in the end.
    But the further they travelled,