Ch. 1: The Dyer's Vat

There was once a jackal named Fierce-Howl, who lived in a cave among the thorn scrub at the edge of a market town. It was a poor sort of cave, low in the roof and damp in the rains, but it looked out over the fields toward the town walls, and on clear evenings Fierce-Howl liked to sit at its mouth and watch the lamps being lit in the windows one by one.

He was not a large jackal, nor a handsome one. His coat was the colour of dry grass, his ears were a little too big for his head, and his tail was thin. But he had a voice. When the pack gathered at moonrise on the low hill beyond the tamarind grove, it was Fierce-Howl who began the song, and it was his long, rising note that the others followed. The name had been given to him as a cub, half in mockery, because he howled louder than any creature so small had a right to; and he had kept it with pride.

The pack was led, in so far as jackals are led by anyone, by an old grey jackal called Long-Ears. She had lost two teeth and most of her patience, and she knew every well, every refuse heap and every careless henhouse for a day's trot in any direction. She was fond of Fierce-Howl, though she seldom said so.

“You look at those lamps,” she told him once, “as if they were stars that had come down to visit you. They are only oil and cotton, child. Behind every one of them is a man with a stick.”

“I do not want the lamps,” said Fierce-Howl. “I want to be the kind of creature people light lamps for.”

Long-Ears laughed at that, a short dry bark, and went to sleep.

That year the monsoon came late and left early. The fields cracked, the frogs went silent in the ditches, and the small game that jackals live upon grew thin and wary. For three days Fierce-Howl ate nothing but a mango stone and a beetle, and on the fourth evening his hunger pinched his throat so sharply that he forgot everything Long-Ears had ever taught him.

He went into the town.

He slipped through a gap in the wall where the bricks had fallen, and trotted down a lane that smelled of ghee and woodsmoke and frying onions. Every doorway seemed to breathe out some delicious thing. He found a scrap of chapati in the gutter and swallowed it whole, and a fish head behind a cookshop, and for a little while he thought himself the cleverest jackal in the world.

Then the dogs found him.

There were five of them, then eight, then more than he could count: lean town dogs with torn ears and long memories, who regarded every lane as their own and every jackal as a thief. They came out of courtyards and from under carts, barking until the whole street rang. One caught his flank with its teeth. Another snapped at his heel. Fierce-Howl ran as he had never run, turning left and right and left again, with no notion of where he was going except away.

He saw an open gate and darted through it. Beyond lay a yard full of strange shapes: wooden frames hung with wet cloth, heaps of leaves, and great earthen jars sunk into the ground, wider than a bullock cart. It was the house of a dyer, though Fierce-Howl did not know it. He knew only that the dogs were at the gate behind him, and that there was nowhere left to run.

He leapt. His paws struck the rim of the largest jar, slipped on the wet clay, and he tumbled headlong into the dark.

The jar was full of indigo.

It closed over his head, thick and cold and bitter, and for a long moment Fierce-Howl believed he was going to drown. He kicked and twisted, found nothing beneath his feet, and kicked again. At last his nose broke the surface and he gulped the night air, clinging with his forepaws to the rim.

Outside the gate the dogs had fallen quiet. They sniffed, and growled, and sniffed again; but the yard stank so powerfully of dye that they could no longer smell jackal at all. One by one they lost interest, and wandered off home to their scraps and their doorsteps, grumbling.

Fierce-Howl hung in the vat until the moon had moved the width of a hand across the sky. Then, with a great scrabbling effort, he hauled himself over the edge and fell onto the packed earth of the yard. He lay there panting. He was alive, which was more than he had expected, and he was very, very wet.

When he could stand, he crept out through the gate, keeping to the shadows, and made his way back through the gap in the wall. He did not stop until he reached the fields. There he shook himself, and shook again, and set off toward the dark line of the forest that lay beyond the tamarind grove, for he did not wish to go back to his cave smelling as he did. He meant to wash in the forest stream and sleep under a bush, and tell no one how foolish he had been.

He reached the stream at dawn. He waded into a shallow pool, and as the light grew he looked down to see whether the mud had washed from his coat.

A blue creature looked back at him.

It was not the blue of the sky, which is pale and kind, nor the blue of a kingfisher‘s wing, which flashes and is gone. It was a deep, rich, astonishing blue, the colour of a god’s throat in a temple painting, the colour of the sky an hour after sunset. It covered him from the tips of his too-large ears to the end of his thin tail. Not one hair of dry-grass yellow remained.

Fierce-Howl stared. He lifted a paw, and the blue creature lifted a paw. He opened his mouth, and the blue creature showed its small white teeth. He scrubbed at his shoulder with his tongue until it was sore, and the shoulder stayed blue.

“Well,” he said aloud, in a small voice. “Well, now.”

He thought first of Long-Ears, and what she would say, and his ears went hot beneath their colour. He thought of the pack on the hill, and how they would laugh. He would have to hide, he decided, until the stuff wore off. A week, perhaps. A month.

Then a twig snapped on the far bank, and he looked up, and saw a young spotted deer standing frozen among the ferns with her eyes enormous in her face.

She was not looking at him the way deer look at jackals, with wariness and a little contempt. She was looking at him the way he had once seen a village child look at a painted elephant in a festival procession. She was looking at him with awe.

Then she turned and fled, crashing through the undergrowth, and he heard her voice go ringing away between the trees: “Come and see! Oh, come and see! There is a creature by the stream such as nobody has ever seen before!”

Fierce-Howl stood in the pool with the water running blue from his fur, and something that was not quite fear and not quite hope began to stir beneath his ribs.