Snow fell gently over the Discworld. Granny Weatherwax looked up from a battle involving the hem of her dress and a stubborn hedgehog and scowled. She could the new thing in her bones and she didn't like it. It reminded her of spinning wheels, and bubbling cauldrons, and cackles.
The Librarian felt it too, deep in the bowels of his library. It awakened the animal instincts inside him, fear and thrill and taste of blood.
And Sir Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch felt it, though he wasn't aware of it. So he didn't know where the urge to strip down, to run through the streets, his territory, to kill any who trespassed on His Ground came from. He blamed it on the meat-pie he had unwillingly bought from Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, who firmly believed in organic meat, and, after all, every part of the cow/chicken/cat/unknown was technically organic, right?
But this isn't about them. It's about a young boy and a talking Wonder Dog and slavery. And circuses. And a Dream.
It wasn't that Pocket Beedle hated animals. He quite enjoyed animals, especially mounted on a wall or braised, lightly seasoned with lemon and sherry. It was live animals that worried him. So he had started a traveling circus.
His mother, back in Ankh-Morpork, land of a thousand sewers, had once told him "Face what you fear, hold what you hate." And, thirty years later, he had followed it to the letter. He had traveled across the disk, gathering creatures from the Common Dog-Eating Canary to the Suicidal Grass Snake for the sole purpose to make their lives as miserable as possible. He held the lamb before dashing its head against the cobbles, faced the dormouse as it was fried in its own juices.
Then Beedle had met the acrobat-juggler Krop Bailer, who, remarkably, shared the same views with Beedle, except in regards to people. And now their troop , he Beedle and Bailer Three-Carraige Circus, numbered of seven miscellaneous animals, three humans, a dwarf, a troll, a troll who swore to be a dwarf, a possible vampire, and The Boy and The Dog.
Beedle didn't know why he'd picked up The Dog. He'd found Miles, the resident bear, sniffing at a pile of rotten…something on the side of the road. Then the pile moved, and turned out to be a flea-bitten, well, for lack of a better word, dog. The mongrel had sneezed and stared at Beedle. It wasn't looking at him in a cute, wistful, pleading fashion, because then Beelde would have trod the sorry mistake's brains into the dirt. No, it had stared at him like a hawk. A mangy, disease-carrying hawk. And it never stopped. It kept gazed right into Beedle's eyes, and Beedle could have sworn he'd heard":
"If yew don't pick me up, mister, I swear you'll find dog hair where dog hair shouldn't be. 'Cause I'll find you, as fast as I can waddle." Except, of course, dogs can't talk. But the red-rimmed, watery eyes were making Beedle extremely uncomfortable, so he'd picked the dog up, with tongs, and added it to their little caravan.
Bailer had found The Boy. Beedle was pretty sure The Boy had a name, but, honestly, Beedle didn't care to learn it. Naming means attachment, and Beedle definitely did not want to get attached to Him.
The Boy was runty, weak, and dangerous. He was dangerous because he thought. And thinking led to ideas, and everyone knew ideas were best left to the wizards and the scholars. No one would care when they died. And the worst of The Boy was that the animals liked him. Beedle wasn't jealous, oh no. But it was unnatural to see Him conversing with Miles, or The Dog. It was even more disconcerting when The Dog answered back, which It didn't, It couldn't, because that was impossible. Wasn't it?