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The king of the world sat on a balcony, listening to the wind blow around his tower. He was drunk. He would get drunker still, and then he would be sick, and the dogs would take care of him. By tomorrow afternoon, he would be drunk and sick again.

The dog Roland lay near his feet—not quite near enough for a kick. The man felt his patient gaze like an itch, like the scab on an ill-healed wound that he could not scratch. Here we sit, he thought with blurred irony, the last man and the last dog. In a world of bitches.

He glanced down at the dog, and saw the grizzled fur above the great bloodshot eyes, the hanging dewlaps, the yellow teeth. You’re too old, my lad, he thought with bitter satisfaction. You won’t last another century.

Dogs and men, they all died eventually. The dogs lived five hundred years at most; all the art of their masters had not been able to give them more. But the race of dogs was not finished; the race of man was.

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