Penguin Books Australia

In the middle of a great sprawling grey city was a place that no human had ever entered.

It looked like a trackless wilderness humped up at the centre and edged in tangled bushes knitted together by a winding creeper. Sometimes people talked of getting rid of the wilderness, but it was almost impossible for humans to think about it long enough to act. The only way they managed it was if two or more of them thought it together. But as soon as they went away from one another, it slipped from their minds.

The power that protected the wilderness came from seven ancient trees. They were all that remained of a marvellous grove of singing trees, which had once been part of a forest that had covered the land. Then humans came and began cutting down trees to make room for their black roads and high houses. The forest shrank, but the earth magic that had flowed through the dead trees did not vanish. It was absorbed by the trees that remained until the seven singing trees were so saturated in magic that they were able to sink their roots deep enough into the ground to touch the earth spirit. When it heard the song of their sorrow, it bestowed upon them the power to dim the idea of the wilderness in the minds of humans, and so the chopping ended.

In time, the small wilderness became home to hundreds of creatures.

One was an elf troll called Little Fur. As tall as a three-year-old human child, she had slanted green eyes, wild red hair that brambled about her pointed ears and bare, broad, four-toed feet.

Little Fur loved the seven ancient trees, and tended them carefully. She would carry cool water to pour over their exposed roots on hot, dry days, and when snow blanketed the wilderness in winter, she would sing to them of summer days to come. The trees did not need her protection, but they loved her as only trees can love. They sang no more, but when she rested her cheek upon their gnarled bark, they whispered to her of the world that lay beyond the wilderness.

Little Fur was a healer. Within the wilderness she brought water and seed to bare patches of earth and looked after new plants by pulling the grass aside to give them breathing space. She collected herbs to make poultices, salves and tisanes, and, as she treated the wounds of small animals and birds that came seeking her help, she would sing to them, knowing that a wound to the body was only part of what was hurt. The spirit also needed healing.

Most of the creatures who came to her from outside the wilderness blamed their hurts on humans or upon their devices and machines, so that Little Fur sometimes wondered if the damaging of small things was their sole purpose and delight. It troubled her very much that one of her best friends, a shaggy pony called Brownie, belonged to a human and spoke kindly of it. But it was the same with many of the beasts and birds who had been born as the slaves and companions of humans.

Brownie's human had brought him and his brothers from a city by the sea to live in a park where they gave rides to small humans. He pulled them to and fro in a cart, but the other two ponies, being bigger, wore saddles and carried older children on their backs.

The pony field almost touched fingertips with the westernmost point of the park, and it was the smell of wildness that lured Brownie to jump his low fence one night and gallop over the black road to see what had caused it.

Little Fur was sitting quietly on one of the small hill meadows waiting for the exact moment some yellow evening primroses opened, when Brownie came thundering down the moonlit slope, kicking his heels up and neighing and tossing his mane until steam rose like mist from his hot coat. Only when he stopped to tear at a mouthful of grass did he catch the scent of Little Fur. She did not smell of badness, but his nose told him that she was some sort of troll and he had always thought the smell of badness was the smell of troll.

'What are you?' Brownie asked warily.

'I am an elf troll,' Little Fur said, smelling on him the same salty, sour odour that came from the cats or birds who lived with humans.

'I have never heard of an elf troll,' Brownie said.

'My father was an elf,' Little Fur explained.

'An elf!' Brownie exclaimed. 'A sea sprite told me they built boats shaped like swans and sailed away when humans came.'

'What is a sea sprite?' Little Fur asked.

'One of those things left over from the age before humans came. Like you and mermaids and pixies. There are not many of you left. I wish I could meet your father.'

'He and my mother went away when I was very small,' Little Fur said.

'I suppose he went over the sea with the other elves. But your mother could not have gone if she was a troll.'

'What about you?' Little Fur interrupted, because his talk about her parents made her feel strange. 'Did you escape from the humans?'

Brownie told her about jumping over the barrier that held him and his brothers, then he said, 'I will go back before morning so that my human does not make it too high to jump. That way I will be able to come again.'

'Why don't you stay, now that you have escaped?' Little Fur asked, astonished that he would talk of going back just like the cats and birds who had lived with humans.

'I like my human and I could not leave my two brothers,' Brownie said.

Little Fur had not known what to say. The idea of being owned by a human seemed dreadful to her. Her greatest fear was that humans would some day enter the wilderness and lay it waste.

Brownie came a step nearer and asked, 'You are not bad, then?'

'Can't you smell the answer?' Little Fur asked him with pity, knowing that creatures who dwelt with humans lost their proper sense of smell so that they could only smell things, and not thoughts and ideas and feelings.

'You don't smell like the bad trolls that used to live in the city by the sea,' Brownie said. 'But there are many more trolls here and they might have learned to hide the smell of their badness.'

'There are thousands of trolls here,' Little Fur said. 'They hide in drains and sewers and cellars in a network of tunnels beneath the city. And deeper down are great caverns unknown to humans, where the trolls have made a city of their own. Yet they cannot hide the smell of their badness. I don't think that's possible.'

'Aren't you afraid to live where there are so many trolls?' Brownie asked, glancing around as if a storm of trolls might come boiling out of the night shadows.

Little Fur laughed. 'Trolls never come here. They hate green and growing things almost as much as they hate the sunlight.'

'I wonder what they did before there were human cities to hide in,' Brownie murmured.

'Trolls were here before the earth spirit woke,' Little Fur said. 'When green things began to grow, they hated it. They burrowed deep into places where the earth magic could not reach them, but the ground was wrong and it hurt them and made them sick. They were almost extinct when humans started making cities.'

'How do you know about such things?' Brownie asked.