A squad of Southerners retreating southward stopped at the boxcar and formed a rearguard. This defensive line had only one mission: buy time. Time for Mindwalker to arrange a defense of the bridge and get the City’s young across the river to safety. The Southerners acknowledged the Brigades with a nod, and waited for their princess’s main army to filter through. Soon they arrived, some limping, some with bloodied muzzles, one with a discharge dripping from the socket where her eye had been. Yet their spirits were indomitable. As they passed, they shouted a salute in their lyrical tongue, whereupon the rearguard abandoned its position and joined the retreat. It would now be up to the Citizens Brigade squadron to hold the enemy at the top of the park.
Then suddenly the High Guard was on top of them. The group of Citizens fell back, but they held. The snarling was feral – it was pure wildness. She’d never heard such language before. Whoever thought that veteran alpha males could be stopped in their tracks by a barrage of observations about their relative sexual prowess, the virtue of their mothers, the morals of their sisters, the loyalty of their wives, the trustworthiness of their cubs, if any? Not to mention, on top of this verbal bombardment, remarks about the comparative merits of their homeland, Creek Town, together with rumours about a hedonism that had recently possessed their kinsfolk there. Suddenly, under the duress of the taunts, an enemy fighter lost it completely and hurled himself at the line of Citizens. He was quickly herded into the river, still screaming abuse as the current carried him into the night. Yet the High Guard fought on impassively.
But look! Second Brigade had come and joined them. Her brilliant cautious Mindwalker had committed his forces to cover the general withdrawal to the East Bank. He meant to sacrifice the untested Second Brigade who had been guarding the railway bridge. This wasn’t Fight or Flee anymore. This was Win or Die.
Then she found him. Her stalker. He was watching the moonlit battle from the shadow of a river willow. Alone, holding his ear. The great Number One who replicated himself in this mass of militarized cubs without moms. The One Who Cannot be Named who stripped the names off things. Animals and beings and places.
She ran behind the wavering battle line and popped out where it met the river, right in front of her father. She had no idea what she was doing.
“You’re too young for me. And anyway I don’t have time for you. Go back to your mammy.”
“But I have brought you a new name to wear tomorrow.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, I’ll hear it tomorrow. Meanwhile, get lost. I have to win a battle.”
“But I’m your daughter. And I’m smarter than you.”
“The nasty one who told me to eat my ear. That’s not very smart. No cub of mine is smarter than me.”
“I am. And you’re still holding your ear.”
Meatbreath fondled his ear in his paw. His ear had become a talisman, a magic charm that reminded him that he was whole in spirit. As long as he held all his body parts, he was still in one piece. “If you’re so smart, answer this riddle. If you win, you can have my ear. If you lose, I get your tail.”
She analysed the wager for a split second. “Deal!”
Her father looked her in the eye. “How far is it from East to West?”
“I think that would be a day’s journey. You see, I watch the Sun every day, and he starts his journey in the East and finishes at evening in the West.”
“Not bad for an alpha maid.”
“I’m diurnal.”
“Okay then, Know-it-all. How far is it from Earth to Heaven?”
“Oh, that’s easy. It is the width of an eye. Because the eye looks down and sees earth, and the eye looks up and sees heaven.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“I figured it out because I’m smarter than you.”
A cry from the battlefield. The terrible whimpering sound a raccoon makes when it submits. The crying of a broken spirit. A Citizen had fallen; the sound of defeat would spread among the Brigades and everybody would weaken. Soon their will would break.
“It seems I am about to win.” Meatbreath paused. “And you are about to lose.”
She braced her mind for the next riddle. Riddles came in threes, and this last one would decide her fate.
Again, her father looked down into her eyes. The force of his mental energy was like nothing she’d ever felt. It had forced her mom to submit. She wasn’t going to submit though. Then, the riddle came:
“How far is it from truth to falsehood?”
Another riddle about the eye and distance. He was obsessed with his visual sense. The sense that controls space. That isolates objects against backgrounds. That alienates things from their processes. Her answer must come, therefore, from another sense. Touch – the haptic sense. The sense that the eye, in its singlemindedness, disregards because the eye is linked directly to the mind. Whatever the paw picks up is held under her nose for verification. And her nose is connected to her ears and her tongue by bodily channels that she can feel when she swallows. Touchwit looked her father Meatbreath in the eye. If she lost, she would have to roll over at his feet and submit.
“How far is it from truth to falsehood?” she repeated. What did the creep know about truth and falsehood? “That would be the width of my five fingers. The distance from my eye to my ear. Because, you see, the eye sees falsehood, but the ear hears truth.”
“Truth!” she repeated. Her talisman.
He could not hold her gaze. His eyeballs began to quiver. It looked like they were going to rotate in his massive head. Spin away, eyeballs! Maybe you’ll look inward and discover something about yourself. Then Meatbreath’s gaze dropped to the ground. The High Guard warriors lay panting, waiting for the Protector to give them an order. They had won the battle. But she had won an ear.
Touchwit looked away from the strangely slim paw offering her an ear. Her citizen comrades were fleeing.
***
A high wavering sound. A battle cry of some sort. Two cousins, Bandit and Sensibella, still on the stage, pricked up their ears. The calling was in a foreign tongue, but it wasn’t the flowing honey speech of Southerners. It had different pitches in it, like wind chimes. It came from the Heights beyond the top of the park. Again – the long, thrilling war cry. Sensibella knew the tongue. Her father spoke it to her when she was a cub and he visited the Pond. He was coming. He had raised an army among his kinfolk. A father rescuing his daughter.
A trilling ululation much closer, from the street where he was supposed to ambush a flanking column. The rescuing army had sent out a flanking column. The High Guard would be caught at the front and the rear. This general, thought like a pair of paws. Smartwhisker. Sensibel’s father.
Then suddenly, the first warriors burst through the bushes into the park. And there was Friskywits at the front of them instead. Imagine – Frisk leading a wing of an army! She separated herself from her kinsfolk in the Heights and ran up to him on the patio and saluted smartly.
“I did my errand,” Frisk reported.
***
Standing on the stage with Frisk, Bandit witnessed the last charge of the High Guard. They tore through the picnic tables like a pack of Droolers, aiming to re-take the battlefield, organize the Peoples Corps, and reinstate their leader. But the Peoples Corps volunteers who were still feasting didn’t get up from their places and join the Guard. They had lost all interest in politics. But look at these Eastern citizens with their golden fur standing silently in perfect formation led by a warrior maiden? The Heights had come down to join the battle. The High Guard elite came to a halt. That was the moment when Bandit felt a strange kinship with the dozens of yearling males all bearing the dramatic face mask of their father. They looked left and right, but they had no father to give them direction.
A shape with one ear slinked along the bushes by the river and disappeared behind the outdoor restaurant.
“There’s your leader,” Bandit shouted. The yearling males looked to see who had spoken. A senior male stood on the stage in the blackest of masks, a look-alike of their progenitor. He could almost be their father.
