Chapter 2
The Rounds of Hounds
In a deep trough of the meadow's valley sat the sheepdogs in a shaded crowd, if only to sniff at the remaining haze of the morning and nip each other's ears for all they knew, and within the shimmering field above the break of ground the Prime Minister donned the iron bell. Though the chamber of the antique was stuffed with cotton to still the clapper, less occupied dogs still perked at the sound of its rust scraping in his hooves. The herdsmen distracted them with cattail brushes to hold them from the false alarm.
It looped around his neck, broad and dense with wool, though wispier and charcoal tinged it had become with age, and did so loosely to effortlessly clear his nautilus horns. The turning of a rams head is blatant at a distance, as it blocks or frames the long pyramid of their face, as the brown head of herdsman did, and with that eye contact made, the Prime Minster removed the soft swab from the bell. One step, and the bell rattled wearily awake, as if woken by the earthen rumble of the most curious dogs paws, and not them by it. With another step, not an eager soul could resist, and the pack of them all came boiling over the precipice of the lowground. The old ram for a moment remembered his own mornings rattling waking to the day's demand as the bell had, but soon he was surrounded by nothing but dogs, recently trimmed and panting, unknowing that he had come to inspect them.
The bell chanted low and onward with every step he took into the sunlight drying the short lawn. He saw their pearly claws kick the dew and comb through the knotted grass, with high held heads, straight backs and attentive tails, each and all a combed chain link in the swirling, woofing circle, with him the center. A few steps he suddenly took longer and faster, as if to pounce before whichever dog had revolved before him, and then slower, to an agonizing pace, so those behind might be tempted to close the distance. However, they did not, to the herdsman's relief. Like lead bullets spinning around the corners of a cookie tin, not one betrayed the boundary he had traced for months into their mental maps, keyed with little else but food and the scent of a master, a sense he meant to frustrate as he slid on his perfumed evergreen mask.
Much like the litter of last year, and all those of years he'd judged during his office, there was some supernatural confidence within trained dogs. When they focus (and focusing they were) they've no need to study or stare, as sheep do with books, or child's games of fast reaction. Instead they simply lick their noses and gander about, never letting on that they've a task of their own. Many need not even see him slow or quicken to match his speed themselves. Not a single one distracted itself with a bee or a twig and only snap back to place when it had felt itself astray. So when the towering mask propped on the withers of the herdsman rose from the trough like the tower of a lost world breaching the sea, wobbling drunkenly with its yellow-orange yarn mane and dull white teeth cut from linen dishcloth corners, the whole town in all their homes could hear them bearing their real fangs in an impenetrable line of raised hackles, like a cabinet of endless cast iron crashing into stone floors the way they warned against its approach, not even a step closer.
"Very well, very well," said the Prime Minister to the herdsman as he set down and silenced the bell in the grass. The charade unfolded for the dogs as the herdsman as well dismounted his piece and was a sheep to them again, "How about their night patrols?"
"That's something you've never asked me for," The herdsman replied, "been too cold for them,"
"I'll need your cooperation, nonetheless,"
"You have it, it will be warm enough soon, anyhow. I just want to know why,"
All his previous guardians were cooling their bellies on the knoll if not watching every move of the herdsman to be first to catch a treat, as if he had any. When the Prime Minister moved to the shadow of a boulder, for the heat of even the morning sun tangles itself in wool, their panting jaws closed, and between him and the blind corners of the rock a few landed themselves. The ever dangerous angles of the world they could never relax to.
"I get letters from migrating peoples. Not from them, per se, but from those who tried and failed to stop them. Other countries try to discourage their wanderers just like we do. They're pitiful at it, from all I've seen, and the Meadow is easy travelling. Why should I wait for some lamb to be stricken for life before I put passerbys in in their place?"
"Well," The herdsman started, while he retrieved the iron bell from the grass, and a few alarmed woofs crying out from its ring before he stuffed it with cotton again. In doing so he took his time, and the Prime Minister beckoned to hear the words he already knew, "No one wants a scared mayor. Calling the whole town together for problems they've never had? It'd get tired, don't you think?"
Though his untamed wool encroached in a frame upon the Prime Minister's face, the herdsman saw him smile a bit at that, to his own relief.
"You are right. I can always tell by the looks on all their faces how important they think the present vote is. You begin to get a sense of it, you know. Several votes a day, for three decades nearly, on every little trifle they make for themselves, then call them back again for administrative matters. I have to know it's worth it, and by now, I do."
"I'll see you there, then, sir."
"Aye. Bring these lads on back, then, and I'll deal with the youngsters behind the rock."
A sharp whistle formed at the lips of the herdsman, the lingering hex of bell was banished, and all his dogs returned to depart beside him. Even far away, where the littery sat between two hills, its paw-beaten fields saw the stirring of remaining hounds who hesitantly heard the call. In the shade that the Prime Minister remained, as though drawn out on the end of a string pulled by the departing pack, and sorrily, came Pom and her brother from the rock that cast it.
"H-hello sir," said the eldest. Sparing him the need to turn, the siblings placed themselves before the prime minister, in his shadow that darkened further his resting shade. Even when they saw him as a woolen mote on the knoll far from the roads the spark of Pom's determination had flitted and begun to fade. But she hardly knew it until her brother ushered her from behind him, where she'd been hiding no better than behind sparse reeds, as spindly as he was, and she sat beside him. When she saw Woogum's hadn't sat, she stood briskly, but afraid it too defiant a motion, sat again, and tapped at her brother's ankles pleadingly to join her.
"So?" The Prime Minister began, already in such a different tone than before, "hear anything good?"
"Oh, no sir, not from our neck of the woods, sir," said Woogums, and it dawned on him swiftly, but excruciatingly what he had really meant. The silence reminded him of how he had imagined the meeting would go.
"We... We heard the doggies doing well! And... And they'll be ready soon for all their doggy responsibilities, just as we'd hoped. We'd hoped, in fact, that we could help at it, and take them on a walk a little ways beyond the town together. Just past the river's bend. What good guards they are and all, I'm sure they'd do just fine in strange places, though we should see!"
Reading the eyes of the old ram was near impossible, when his eyes and their pinched pupils were not obscured by wool, they were frozen by decades of indifference. There were none more prone to influence and manipulation than the ewes of the cottages and their working husbands. Some extraordinary policies and acts are emplaced in Sheep cities to ensure a vote is of opinion entirely personal. The first mark of integrity lay always in the leaderships eyes and tongue, and the stillness of their throat not to gasp or groan when a poll is read, even after all yays and nays are accounted for. Woogums was relieved, though not accustomed to his little sister's articulation. Letting her do so, however, proved a far lesser humiliation than simply fleeing the conversation with all haste, as he planned.
"Only a few guards, if you would be so kind, sir," Woogums added at last.
"A few?" Pom said, "Oh no, I'd say those pups were more than a few. The twenty or thirty of them all should come, no need to to leave any out! Were any left behind for delousing or were still struggling to heel? We'll take them as well, there's no lacking in dogs out where they don't patrol, aye?"
She spoke as if every word expelled another smoke-stack from the trembling heat that grew in her chest, a glowing coal from the ember had returned from the day prior at the river. Had she been standing, she'd have shook, and even holding up half her weight her front legs shook and buckled as though in another world of thin ice, and her brother, his face pleading her to stop talking, knew her swift words came from nothing close to confidence.
"That's all?" Came his grounding voice, clutching back their full attentions to his question, or lecture, which it was yet they did not know. What interested the lambs was dogs, the flowers, and the bend, and this Woogums told him.
"Of course, of course. An old man's letters not so interesting to a lad your age? Well, lucky for your sister here, you've a right at your age to call a vote, if you feel the happenings in your life may fall upon all shoulders, or all shoulders are needed for your life." Woogums nodded proudly at this, and straightened himself a bit, "And at your age you should know that any expeditions, no matter their length, or motion, or purpose, beyond our safe perimeters do require the full support of the flock, and our town's full company."
Woogums basked in his words as if they anointed him with some holy comfort.
"Full... Company?" asked Pom, who feared only partial support far more than she fantasized of their full consensus.
"Aye, lass. We didn't emplace the borders and their guards to be walked over carelessly. If you're to go, or your brother went, we all move as a flock, or not at all. Whatever your interest past that hill, if it's an interest to us all, we'll all go,"
Until now, Pom carried within herself something like a heat, or perhaps a deep and shivering cold, as extremes of one can be mistaken for another. That trembling cherry stone she had carried with her all the way from her cottage to the field where the dogs practiced, in her realization, dissolved. The flowers she'd occupied herself with since the previous dusk suddenly felt so miserably silly under scrutiny. An entire town, drug from their chairs and kitchens, bound together by a belt of dogs, and set out to go see some flowerbed of her imagination. Woogums shied away from the Prime minister, but couldn't fully turn to see his sister, her disappointment, and the pedals blow away in the wind behind her eyes.
"I've seen you grow up, young man, as much as I have all lambs behind me, but never took you for a wanderer. What's behind that bend that's got you so?"
"Nothing... Sir. We were just curious. I won't waste any more of your time, and if I find a good reason to call us all, I'll come by you."
"It's every sheep's duty to acquaint themselves with the process, you've wasted none of my time, and I've wasted none of yours, as you'll doubtlessly understand one day. There are members of the flock who, in all their life, have never called upon the judgement of the consensus. Those sheep are deeply content, I believe, and they are the cornerstones of our Meadow whom I admire very much."
The inky scratches looked blacker than black on the parchment in their moonlit window.
"How big do you think the hill is? Two stories higher than the clock tower, maybe more? Will it fly high enough?" Pom whispered, not to wake the puppies tangled at the corner of their bed.
"Oh, it will fly alright. I copied this from a book on the Tundra we have in the library, they use balloons like this to gather weather patterns and wind speeds. If anything, it will fly too high. I can be the one to go up in it, if you're afraid of heights. Are you afraid of heights?"
"Yes, I think so,"
"You don't know? Hasn't Pa ever let you on the roof?"
"No, but I look into the pond out back and see the sky's reflection, I feel like I might plummet into it."
"Is that why you won't go near the pond, you're afraid of falling in?"
"What? You mean you can really fall into the sky through the pond? I thought I was crazy."
Pom troubled her brother with her far-away stare as she leaned out the window to see the little water pool with the moon soaking in it. The nights grew quickly cold still in the early spring, and she was lulled back inside by the alto of the wind chimes singing in a crystal breeze.
"What I figure," Woogums continued, "is that we know how far the town's boundaries reach, but nowhere it is written how high. If we can't go high enough, we won't be able to see past the hill of the river's bend, and if it's too high, people may start asking questions,"
In a cottage of mahogany floors, not a hoof could go unheard. The heavy but deliberate step, and lacking in the click like a cricket of their father's aging joints, they identified as their mother's tread in another room. They two split apart from their window's lunar nightlight and into their beds. Pom ducked wholly under her quilt and giddily braced, as though any uncovered bit of herself would suffer the most dire consequences of her young life. She knew, but deceived for her own enjoyment, that anything more than a gentle reminder that rest for tomorrow awaited her should she fail. As the drum of the falling hooves lessened, gained, then stopped where they began, she asked her brother, "When will it be windy enough to fly? Can we build it in time?"
"It doesn't fly by wind," He said, and she heard him say it solemn. One ear against her pillow and the warm, heavy tide of her slowing breath drowned his words, and fully concealed what he said after. Though she doubted it, and hadn't the energy to ask again, it sounded like he said that they needed a flame.