Sssssss whump. Whump.
I don’t know how long we kept going till we stopped for a rest. I didn’t think I’d heard any bullets in a while. Jill was now the one hanging back with me, putting her hand under my arm when I staggered. I was exhausted, but Taks . . . where was Takahiro?
I’d dropped my algebra book when they shot Takahiro. It had saved my life and rescued Val and Arnie and I’d left it behind.
It hadn’t rescued Takahiro.
I think we didn’t exactly stop. I think I fell to my knees and couldn’t go any farther, and everyone else stopped too. I heard Val and Arnie talking in low voices: “. . . puzzled them for a while; I can make nav ’tronic go wrong easy as breathing, and your gruuaa are still on the job.”
“We’re still leaving a trail of magic the gruuaa can’t begin to abolish, nor the six dogs either and one large cat, and when Takahiro rejoins us it will be much, much worse.”
When Takahiro rejoins us. I took a deep breath.
“Takes an awful lot of critters to damp me, even when I haven’t just been taking out army headquarters,” said Arnie. “Not much we can do about it. Keep going. I can carry Mags a while. She’s not all that much bigger than when I used to give her and Jill piggyback rides.”
I wanted to protest this but I was too tired. Jill was crouched beside me with her arm around me. I think she was pretending we weren’t listening. I hadn’t noticed my face was wet with tears. I thought it had been that way for a while. Mongo was lying next to me with his head in my lap, worrying, wanting something to do to make me feel better. I took his head in my hands. “Mongo, my love,” I said. “If you ever, ever felt like taking the initiative in your life, now is the time. We need all the critters we can get.”
I stood up and took the Dog Commanding Posture. Mongo sat up eagerly. “Away,” I said, and threw my arm out in the go-get-those-balky-alpacas-at-the-bottom-of-their-field-now gesture. The one that said, and don’t let them give you any nonsense either. Alpacas are notorious for giving herding dogs nonsense.
Mongo disappeared. I looked at Jill. Jill looked at me and gave me a tiny worried smile.
We joined the others. “I can walk a while longer,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m just a little tired.”
“You have every right to be extremely tired,” said Val. “But we must keep moving.”
“You start folding up, babe, you let me know,” said Arnie. “I bet I remember how to give a good piggyback ride.”
It was only a minute or two later when the first rabbit dashed across our path. Bella turned into a blur and snatched it out of the air, and brought it to me, unhurt, kicking like sixteen pistons, and obviously terrified out of its mind. I looked around for Val. “Say yalarinda orfuy la and then put your hand on its head,” he said.
“Uh—yar,” I said.
“Yalarinda orfuy la.”
I got it the second time. Bella was the most patient of dogs, but I didn’t want to try her too far. Reluctantly I reached out to touch the frantic bunny. It went limp. I took it from Bella. Its little heart was going five hundred beats a minute, but its ears were relaxed and it snuggled up against me like I was its favorite littermate. Fleas, I thought. “Good girrrrrrl,” I said. Bella was too dignified for mad tail-wagging, but she flattened her ears briefly. She caught the second rabbit too, and the third. We were up to five rabbits—Athena caught one of them, and we put the other three Baskervilles back on lead (Casimir having amazingly tucked the leads in his knapsack) rather to their disgust, but nothing was going to escape Jonesie’s jaws still breathing, and I didn’t know about the other two.
There was a pause after the fifth rabbit, and then the first sheep came hurtling through. Val shouted something—it was yalarinda again with something else—and then there was a second sheep, and a third.
And a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth. At about that point I lost count.
“I can’t hold them long,” said Val, sounding pretty strained. “It’s not much more than a conjurer’s trick, what I’m doing. And I haven’t time to teach Maggie to contain something so large.”
“Where are they coming from?” said Arnie, sounding kind of amazed. “Are you calling them?”
“No,” said Val. “It’s Mongo, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, with a lump in my throat for my very fabulous dog. “I told him to—to herd what he could find toward me.”
Casimir said, “A mgdaga is resourceful, and has good friends.”
About six more sheep went streaming past us in a mob, but this time there was a black and white shadow racing parallel on their flank. He managed to turn them, but rather than dodging past us as you’d expect they plunged into the middle of us, possibly because there were a dozen or so sheep there already. Uproar. Between Val and Mongo nobody got knocked over, although I thought Jonesie was going to have a heart attack. You could see him thinking, I’d have order in ten seconds. Try me.
If I’d been a real shepherd, I would have been telling my heroic dog what to do now, but I didn’t have the faintest idea. He dropped in behind us, creeping along in classic style, as if he’d been watching the Teach Your Dog Herding videos with me—which he had, of course, but I hadn’t realized he’d been paying attention. Also, sheep-herding usually happens in a field in daylight, with sheep that know the drill, and this was patchy scrubland in the dark, with sheep that probably hadn’t seen a dog or a shepherd in a couple of generations.
When a sheep began to drift off to one side or another Mongo was on the job instantly. There was one especially large, especially raggedy one that didn’t like its present circumstances at all, despite Val’s conjurer’s trick, and kept trying to make a bolt for it. Mongo wasn’t having any of that, and I was afraid if I tried to tell him to let that one go we’d lose the rest of them—Mongo and I hadn’t practiced much but the basic bring them over there to here and stop.
Val managed to comb a handful of the rebel sheep’s wool loose with his fingers, trotting along beside it as it tried to get away from him. It stopped and stamped at Mongo, but Mongo eeled around behind it and it shot forward and bumped into another sheep. Baaaa, said the bumped-into sheep. Jill and Bella and Athena were now walking along one side of our weird herd, and Casimir with Jonesie, Dov and Eld on leads were on the other side. Arnie was leading, with four sleeping bunnies down his shirt: two in front and two behind. I doubted the shirt would recover. I was carrying the fifth, wrapped up in the hem of my Mongo-stretched T-shirt.