Bestiary!

by Jack Dann

  "I venture to try the trout in this stream," said Percy.

  "Come, come," said Cotton. "Our goal is Bedford, and we seek Leviathan himself! Would you tempt sport by angling here?"

  "But a brace of trouts would be fine now."

  "Have some more cold mutton," said Marburton. He passed out bread and cheese and meat all around. The drivers tugged their forelocks to him and put away their rougher fare.

  "How far to Bedford?" asked Cotton of the driver called Humphrey.

  "Ten miles, sir, more or less. We should have come farther but, what with the Plague, the roads haven't been worked in above a year."

  "I'm bruised through and through," said Marburton.

  Izaak was at the stream, relieving himself against a tree. "Damn me!" said Percy. "Did anyone leave word where I was bound?"

  Marburton laughed. "Izaak sent word to all our families. Always considerate."

  "Well, he's become secretive enough. All those people following him a-angling since his book went back to the presses the third time. Ah, books!" Percy grew silent.

  "What, still lamenting your loss?" asked Izaak, returning. "What you need is singing, the air, sunshine. Are we not Brothers of the Angle, out a-fishing? Come, back into the carts! Charles, start us off on 'Tom o' the Town.' "

  Cotton began to sing, in a clear sweet voice, the first stanza. One by one the others joined, their voices echoing under the bridge. The carts pulled back on the roads. The driver of the baggage cart sang with them. They went down the rutted Bedford road, September all about them, the long summer after the Plague over, their losses, heartaches all gone, all deep thoughts put away. The horses clopped time to their singing.

  Bedford was a town surrounded by villages, where they were stared at when they went through. The town was divided neatly in two by the double-gated bridge over the River Ouse.

  After the carts crossed the bridge, they alighted at the doorway of a place called the Topsy-Turvy Inn, whose sign above the door was a world globe turned arse-overteakettle.

  The people who stood by the inn were all looking up the road, where a small crowd had gathered around a man who was preaching from a stump.

  "I think," said Cotton, as they pulled their baggage from the cart, "that we're in Dissenter country."

  "Of that I'm sure," said Walton. "But once we Anglicans were on the outs and they'd say the same of us."

  One of the drivers was listening to the man preach. So was Marburton.

  The preacher was dressed in somber clothes. He stood on a stump at two cross streets. He was stout and had brown-red hair that glistened in the sun. His mustache was an unruly wild thing on his lip, but his beard was a neat red

  spike on his chin. He stood with his head uncovered, a great worn clasp Bible under his arm.

  "London burned clean through," he was saying. "Forty-three parish churches razed. Plagues! Fires! Signs in the skies of the sure and certain return of Christ. The Earth swept clean by God's loving mercy. I ask you sinners to repent for the sake of your souls."

  A man walking by on the other side of the street slowed, listened, stopped.

  "Oh, this is Tuesday!" he yelled to the preacher. "Save your rantings for the Sabbath, you old jailbird!"

  A few people in the crowd laughed, but others shushed him.

  "In my heart," said the man on the stump, "it is always the Sabbath as long as there are sinners among you."

  "Ah, a fig to your damned sneaking disloyal Non-Conformist drivel!" said the heckler, holding his thumb up between his fingers.

  "Wasn't I once as you are now?" asked the preacher. "Didn't I curse and swear, play at tipcat, ring bells, cause commotion wherever I went? Didn't God's forgiving Grace ... ?"

  A constable hurried up.

  "Here, John," he said to the stout preacher. "There's to be no sermons, you know that!" He waved his staff of office. "And I charge you all under the Act of 13 Elizabeth 53 to go about your several businesses."

  "Let him go on, Harry," yelled a woman. "He's got words for sinners."

  "I can't argue that. I can only tell you the law. The sheriff's about on dire business, and he'd have John back in jail and the jailer turned out in a trice. Come down off the stump, man."

  The stout man waved his arms. "We must disperse, friends. The Sabbath meeting will be at ..."

  The constable clapped his hands over his ears and turned his back until the preacher finished giving directions to some obscure clearing in a woods. The red-haired man stepped down.

  Walton had been listening and staring at him, as had the others. Izaak saw that the man had a bag of his tools of the trade with him. He was obviously a coppersmith or brazier, his small anvils, tongs, and taphammers identifying him as such. But he was no ironmonger, so Walton was not duty-bound to be courteous to him.

  "Damnable Dissenters indeed," said Cotton. "Come, Father Izaak, let's to this hospitable inn."

  A crier appeared at the end of the street. "Town meeting. Town meeting. All free men of the Town of Bedford and its villages to be in attendance. Levies for the taking of the Great Fish. Four of the clock in the town hall."

  "Well," said Marburton, "that's where we shall be."

  They returned to the inn at dusk.

  "They're certainly going at this thing full-tilt," said Percy. "Nets, pikes, muskets."

  "If those children had not been new to the shire, they wouldn't have tried to angle there."

  "And wouldn't have been eaten and mangled," said Marburton.

  "A good thing the judge is both angler and reader," said Cotton. "Else Father Walton wouldn't have been given all the morrow to prove our mettle against this great scaly beast."

  "If it have scales," said Marburton.

  "I fear our tackle is not up to it," said Percy.

  "Didn't Father Walton always say that an angler stores up his tackle against the day he needs it? I'll wager we get good sport out of this before it's over."

  "And the description of the place! In such a narrow defile, the sunlight touches it but a few hours a day. For what possible reason would children fish there?"

  "You're losing your faith, Marburton. I've seen you up to your whiskers in the River Lea, snaggling for salmon under a cutbank."

  "But I, praise God, know what I'm about."

  "I suppose," said Izaak, seating himself, "that the children thought so too."

  They noticed the stout Dissenter preacher had come in and was talking jovially with his cronies. He lowered his voice and looked toward their table.

  Most of the talk around Walton was of the receding Plague, the consequences of the Great Fire on the region's timber industry, and other matters of report.

  "I expected more talk of the fish," said Percy.

  "To them," said Cotton, "it's all the same. Just another odious county task, like digging a new canal or hunting down a heretic. They'll be in holiday mood day after tomorrow."

  "They strike me as a cheerless lot," said Percy. "Cheerless, but efficient. I'd hate to be the fish." "You think we won't have it to gaff long before the

  workmen arrive?"

  "I have my doubts," said Marburton.

  "But you always do."

  Next morning, the woods became thick and rank on the road they took out of town. The carts bounced in the ruts. The early sun was lost in the mists and the trees. The road rose and fell again into narrow valleys.

  "Someone is following us," said Percy, getting out his spyglass.

  "Probably a pedlar out this way," said Cotton, straining his eyes at the pack on the man's back.

  "I've seen no cottages," said Marburton. He was taking kinks out of his fishing line.

  Percy looked around him. "What a Godless-looking place."

  The trees were more stunted, thicker. Quick shapes, which may have been grouse, moved among their twisted boles. An occasional cry, unknown to the four anglers, came from the depths of the woods. A dull boom, as of a great door closing, sounded from far away. The horses halted, whinnying,
their nostrils flared.

  "In truth," said Walton from where he rested against a cushion, "I feel myself some leagues beyond Christendom."

  The gloom deepened. Green was gone now, nothing but grays and browns met the eye. The road was a rocky rut. The carts rose, wheels teetering on stone, and agonizingly fell. Humphrey and the other driver swore great blazing oaths.

  "Be so abusive as you will," said Cotton to them, "but take not the Lord's name in vain, for we are Christian men."

  "As you say." Humphrey tugged his forelock.

  The trees reached overhead, the sky was obscured. An owl swept over, startling them. Something large bolted away, feet drumming on the high bank over the road.

  Percy and Cotton grew quiet. Walton talked, of lakes, streams, of summer. Seeing the others grow moody, he sang a quiet song. A driver would sometimes curse.

  A droning, flapping sound grew louder, passed to their right, veered away. The horses shied then, trying to turn around in the road, almost upsetting the carts. They refused to go on.

  "We'll have to tether them here," said Humphrey. "Besides, Your Lordship, I think I see water at the end of the road."

  It was true. In what dim light there was, they saw a darker sheen down below.

  "We must take the second cart down there, Charles," said Walton, "even if we must push it ourselves."

  "We'll never make it," said Percy.

  "Whatever for?" asked Cotton. "We can take our tackle and viands down there."

  "Not my tackle," said Walton.

  Marburton just sighed.

  They pushed and pulled the second cart down the hill; from the front they kept it from running away on the incline, from the back to get it over stones the size of barrels. It was stuck.

  "I can't go on," said Marburton.

  "Surely you can," said Walton.

  "Your cheerfulness is depressing," said Percy.

  "Be that as it may. Think trout, Marburton. Think salmon!"

  Marburton strained against the recalcitrant wheel. The cart moved forward a few inches.

  "See, see!" said Walton. "A foot's good as a mile!" They grunted and groaned.

  They stood panting at the edge of the mere. The black sides of the valley lifted to right and left like walls. The water itself was weed-choken, scummy, and smelled of the sewer ditch. Trees came down to its very edges. Broken and rotted stumps dotted the shore. Mist rose from the water in fetid curls.

  Sunlight had not yet come to the bottom of the defile. To left and right, behind, all lay in twisted woody darkness. The valley rose like a hand around them.

  Except ahead. There was a break, with no trees at the center of the cleft. Through it they saw, shining and blue-purple against the cerulean of the sky, the far-off Chiltern Hills.

  "Those," said a voice behind them, and they jumped and turned and saw the man with the pack. It was the stout red-haired preacher of the day before. "Those are the Delectable Mountains," he said.

  "And this is the Slough of Despond."

  He built a small lean-to some hundred feet from them. The other three anglers unloaded their gear and began to set it up.

  "What, Father Walton? Not setting up your poles?" asked Charles Cotton.

  "No, no," said Izaak, studying the weed-clotted swamp with a sure eye. "I'll let you young ones try your luck first."

  Percy looked at the waters. "The fish is most likely a carp or other rough type," he said. "No respectable fish could live in this mire. I hardly see room for anything that could swallow a child."

  "It is Leviathan," said the preacher from his shelter. "It is the Beast of Babylon, which shall rise in the days before Antichrist. These woods are beneath his sway."

  "What do you want?" asked Cotton.

  "To dissuade you, and the others who will come, from doing this. It is God's will these things come to pass." "Oh, Hell and damn!" said Percy.

  "Exactly," said the preacher.

  Percy shuddered involuntarily. Daylight began to creep down to the mere's edge. With the light, the stench from the water became worse.

  "You're not doing very much to stop us," said Cotton. He was fitting together an eighteen-foot rod of yew, fir, and hazelwood.

  "When you raise Leviathan," said the preacher, "then

  will I begin to preach." He took a small cracked pot from his large bag, and began to set up his anvil.

  Percy's rod had a butt as thick as a man's arm. It tapered throughout its length to a slender reed. The line was made of plaited, dyed horsehair, twelve strands at the pole end, tapering to nine. The line was forty feet long. Onto the end of this, he fastened a sinker and a hook as long as a crooked little finger.

  "Where's my baits? Oh, here they are." He reached into a bag filled with wet moss, pulled out a gob of worms, and threaded seven or eight, their ends wriggling, onto the hook.

  The preacher had started a small fire. He was filling an earthen pot with solder. He paid very little attention to the anglers.

  Percy and Marburton, who was fishing with a shorter but thicker rod, were ready before Cotton.

  "I'll take this fishy spot here," said Percy, "and you can have that grown-over place there." He pointed beyond the preacher.

  "We won't catch anything," said Marburton suddenly and pulled the bait from his hook and threw it into the water. Then he walked back to the cart and sat down, and shook.

  "Come, come," said Izaak. "I've never seen you so discouraged, even after fishless days on the Thames."

  "Never mind me," said Marburton. Then he looked down at the ground. "I shouldn't have come all this way. I have business in the city. There are no fish here."

  Cajoling could not get him up again. Izaak's face became troubled. Marburton stayed put.

  "Well, I'll take the fishy spot then," said Cotton, tying onto his line an artificial fly of green with hackles the size of porcupine quills.

  He moved past the preacher.

  "I'm certain to wager you'll get no strikes on that gaudy bird's wing," said Percy.

  "There is no better fishing than angling fine and far off," answered Cotton. "Heavens, what a stink!"

  "This is the place," said the preacher without looking up, "where all the sins of mankind have been flowing for sixteen hundred years. Not twenty thousand cartloads of earth could fill it up."

  "Prattle," said Cotton.

  "Prattle it may be," said the preacher. He puddled solder in a sandy ring. Then he dipped the pot in it. "It stinks from mankind's sins, nonetheless."

  "It stinks from mankind's bowels," said Cotton.

  He made two backcasts with his long rod, letting more line out the wire guide at the tip each time. He placed the huge fly gently on the water sixty feet away.

  "There are no fish about," said Percy, down the mire's edge. "Not even gudgeon."

  "Nor snakes," said Cotton. "What does this monster eat?"

  "Miscreant children," said the preacher. "Sin feeds on the young."

  Percy made a clumsy cast into some slime-choked weeds.

  His rod was pulled from his hands and flew across the water. A large dark shape blotted the pond's edge and was gone.

  The rod floated to the surface and lay still. Percy stared down at his hands in disbelief. The pole came slowly in toward shore, pushed by the stinking breeze.

  Cotton pulled his fly off the water, shook his line, and walked back toward the cart.

  "That's all for me, too," he said. They turned to Izaak. He rubbed his hands together gleefully, making a show he did not feel.

  The preacher was grinning.

  "Call the carters down," said Walton. "Move the cart to the very edge of the mere."

  While they were moving the wagon with its rear facing the water, Walton went over to the preacher.

  "My name is Izaak Walton," he said, holding out his hand. The preacher took it formally.

  "John Bunyan, mechanic-preacher," said the other.

  "I hold no man's religious beliefs against him, if he be an honest man, or an
angler. My friends are not of like mind, though they be both fishermen and honest."

  "Would that Parliament were full of such as yourself," said Bunyan. "I took your hand, but I am dead set against what you do."

  "If not us," said Walton, "then the sheriff with his powder and pikes."

  "I shall prevail against them, too. This is God's warning to mankind. You're a London man. You've seen the Fire, the Plague?"

  "London is no place for honest men. I'm of Stafford." "Even you see London as a place of sin," said Bunyan. "You have children?"

  "I have two, by second wife," said Walton. "Seven others died in infancy."

  "I have four," Bunyan said. "One born blind." His eyes took on a faraway look. "I want them to fear God, in hope of eternal salvation."

  "As do we all," said Walton.

  "And this monster is warning to mankind of the coming rains of blood and fire and the fall of stars."

  "Either we shall take it, or the townsmen will come tomorrow."

  "I know them all," said Bunyan. "Mr. Nurse-nickel, Mr. By-your-Leave, Mr. Cravenly-Crafty. Do ye not feel your spirits lag, your backbone fail? They'll not last long as you have."

  Walton had noticed his own lassitude, even with the stink of the slough goading him. Cotton, Percy and Marburton, finished with the cart, were sitting disconsolately on the ground. The swamp had brightened some; the blazing blue mountain ahead seemed inches away. But the woods were dark, the defile precipitous, the noises loud as before.

  "It gets worse after dark," said the preacher. "I beg you, take not the fish."

  "If you stop the sheriff, he'll have you in prison."

  "It's prison from which I come," said Bunyan. "To jail I shall go back, for I know I'm right."

  "Do your conscience," said Walton, "for that way lies salvation."

  "Amen!" said Bunyan, and went back to his pots.

  Percy, Marburton, and Charles Cotton watched as Walton set up his tackle. Even with flagging spirits, they were intrigued. He'd had the carters peg down the trace poles of the wagon. Then he sectioned together a rod like none they had seen before. It was barely nine feet long, starting big as a smith's biceps, ending in a fine end. It was made of many split laths glued seamlessly together. On each foot of its length past the handle were iron guides bound with wire. There was a hole in the handle of the rod, and now Walton reached in the wagon and took out a shining metal wheel.