Though more often the animals went in tearing and scrapping, and when they did they went for their opposite numbers, head to head, speaking versus nonspeaking. The cats went down immediately, snarling and pawing at each other in a haze of dust. You didn’t see any dog-on-cat action, or not yet.

The talking animals were calling out in the fray, just the way human soldiers would:

“To me! To me!”

“On my right! The right flank, right flank!”

“Hold, damn you! Hold the line! Hold! Hold!”

It was a pretty even matchup. The talking animals were smarter and more organized, and they were, on average, a bit bigger than the dumb kind, but the dumb animals had the numbers. Janet found herself rooting for the talkers, instinctively, but then asking herself why. Were they morally better than the dumb ones? Did they deserve to win? Maybe she was just prejudiced. The talking ones at least got to talk. Maybe she should give the dumb ones this much, a victory in the last battle, the one that didn’t count for anything.

Janet thought of the sloths. Probably there was a contingent of sloths like fifty miles from here, a whole fighting regiment of them, and they wouldn’t get here for a month, and by then it would all be over. Or maybe the sloths didn’t care enough to fight at all? Good God, was that Humbledrum the bear, laying about him in the press? Slow to anger, that one, but my God. What a monster. He had a steel collar protecting his neck, and he was in full-on berserker mode, no doubt fueled by a barrel or two of schnapps.

She hoped he survived. But then again none of them were going to survive, were they, so maybe it was better if he died like this, in the thick of it, rather than watching the ruins of his world break apart under his feet. The hippogriff soared on, and Janet lost sight of Humbledrum in the chaos and the gloom. She would never know.

She was dimly aware that there was fighting in the air around her now too, birds having at it, complex dogfights, sprays of blood and feathers. Once in a while a pair would lock together and go twirling down out of the sky, neither one willing to release the other to save itself. Janet wondered if they’d break apart before they hit the ground, but she could never follow a pair long enough to see.