Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel

by Boris Akunin

  And I have also heard tell of a certain hunter from Zealand by the name of Rip who heard a rooster crowing from an underground burrow, realized that a fox must have carried the rooster away, and went in to get the fox’s skin. He came back out only a very short time later, but when he went back to the village nobody recognized him, because he had been away for twenty years.

  And a certain Ligurian merchant, on returning from the land of Cathay, told the noble gentleman Klaus von Weiler, who is well known to me (it was in the town of Lubeck, in the victualing house Under the Ship, in the presence of witnesses), that the people of Cathay had told him, the merchant, about a certain fisherman from the kingdom of Japan, which lies in the Ocean-Sea close to the land of the tsar Ioann. This fisherman, while gathering oysters, entered a sea cave at dawn, just as a red turtledove cried out, of the kind that announce the arrival of day in the country of Japan instead of cockerels, as a punishment for the local inhabitants not following the Christian faith, and this fisherman fell asleep for a short time, but it transpired that he had slept for all of eighty-eight years, and they would not admit him into his native village, because nobody there remembered him, and he wandered around various places, and those Chinese people had seen him themselves when they sailed to Japan for gold, of which there are immense amounts in that kingdom and it costs no more than silver or even copper.

  And concerning the question of why the crowing of a red rooster produces such a remarkable effect on the soul, I have written in Disputado ypothetica de rubri galli statu preelectu (A Conjectural Discourse on the Select Nature of the Red Rooster) and so I shall not write again about that, but shall instead move on to

  Chapter XXXIX, Which Treats of the Cultivation in

  Caves of Edible Mushrooms

  Let it be said that on reading about the red rooster, Pelagia leaped off her chair and read to the end of the chapter standing up, such was the degree of her excitement. Running on through sheer inertia to read of mushrooms as well, she soon realized that there was no mention of Special Caves in this chapter. She leafed through the volume carefully all the way to the end, hoping to come across some further mention of the “Conjectural Discourse,” but failed to find anything. Then she furiously slammed the book shut and went dashing to His Eminences study.

  Mitrofanii looked around in amazement. Never before had his spiritual daughter burst in on him at this hour of sacred solitude, and without even knocking.

  “Your Eminence … the ‘Discourse on the Red Rooster’?” the nun blurted out.

  The bishop took a moment to come down to earth from his exalted thoughts. “Eh?” he asked rather inelegantly.

  “The treatise on the red rooster, written by that same Adalbert, where is it?” Pelagia asked impatiently.

  “On what rooster?” the bishop asked, overcome by even greater astonishment. “What is wrong with you, my daughter? Do you have a fever?”

  When he understood what the nun was seeking, he explained that apart from the Treatise on Caves, no other works by Adalbert the Beloved had survived to our times. The monastery in which the mystic lived and died had been burned by the soldiers of Count Nassau during the religious wars. This composition was the only to survive, and that was owing to a fortunate coincidence—the manuscript had been at the binder’s. This was the first time Mitrofanii had heard that Adalbert had produced a work about the rooster.

  “In the fifteenth century it was fashionable to ascribe marvelous properties to various animals,” His Eminence went on to say. “Some of the scholars of those times were obsessed by the idea of duality. In other words, that the Lord created everything in pairs: man and woman, black and white, sun and moon, heat and cold. They tried to find a pairing for the human race in the animal kingdom—some kind of beast chosen and marked out by the Lord on a level with man. Some proposed the ants for this role, some the dolphins, and some the unicorn. Judging from the title of the work, Adalbert was an apologist for the chosen status of roosters, but why red ones in particular, God alone knows. The proposal of ants is understandable enough, as an anthill really does resemble human society. The reason for dolphins is clear, too—they are intelligent. The medieval authors had never actually seen a unicorn, so they could imagine anything they liked about them. But what is the point of a rooster? A quarrelsome, stupid bird that does nothing but jump on hens and screech?

  “Ah, but no,” continued the bishop, raising one finger. “Roosters have been regarded in a special light since ancient times, during the pre-Christian period. And this attitude is particularly common everywhere the species Gallus domesticus, the domestic cock, is to be found. To the Chinese, for instance, it embodies the principle of yang, that is, courage, benevolence, dignity, and fidelity. And a rooster with red feathers is also a symbol of the sun. If we turn our gaze to a completely different corner of the planet, to the ancient Celts, for them a red rooster was an embodiment of the gods of the Underground. In Greco-Roman culture a rooster is a harbinger of renewal. And in general, in a majority of mythologies this bird is linked with the gods of the dawn, light, the fire of heaven—in other words, with the inception of new life. The rooster drives out the night and the darkness, fear, and blindness that accompany it.”

  Improvised lectures of this kind, sometimes given on the most unlikely of pretexts, were a favorite hobbyhorse of Mitrofanii’s, and Pelagia listened to them every time with great interest, but never before had she listened as avidly as she did now.

  “Let us take Christianity,” His Eminence continued. “In our religion the feathered creature that interests you also holds a special status. The rooster is a symbol of light. He greets the rising of the Christ-Sun who puts the powers of darkness to flight. At the festival of Easter, when we remember the Passion of Christ, the rooster signifies the Resurrection. Are you aware that the Cross, now the generally accepted symbol of Christianity, appeared only relatively recently, in the mid-fifth century? Until that time, Christians used other symbols, very frequently a rooster, which is an image of the Son of God Who came to awaken mankind. Nor should we forget the prophecy of the wise Ecclesiastes: ‘And man shall rise at the crowing of the cock, and the daughters of song shall be silent’—that is to say, it is a cockerel that shall announce the Judgment Day to men.”

  The longer Pelagia listened to Mitrofanii’s learned speechifying, the more thoughtful her expression became, so that by the end her gaze seemed to have turned entirely inward, and when the bishop finished, the nun did not ask any more questions. She bowed to thank him for his instruction, apologized for distracting His Eminence from his writing, and took her leave until the following day.

  The lair of the Cyclops

  THE HOLY SISTER was intending to leave the episcopal center the same way she had entered—not by the long way through the yard and the main gates, but by the short way, through the garden gate, to which she had a key of her own.

  The lights in the windows of the communal block had already been extinguished and not even the lamp beside the front porch was burning, but there was a bright crescent moon shining in the sky and it was a clear night. There was a smell of young foliage in the air, and the fountain could be heard gurgling in the avenue of apple trees, and in response, the mood of intense concentration that had held the nun in its tight grip began to ease slightly.

  The bishop’s garden was regarded as one of the sights of the town and was maintained in exemplary condition. The snow-white pathways, covered with a special fine-grained sand, were swept several times a day, and so Pelagia had the feeling that she was walking across the Milky Way, not over the ground. She even felt ashamed to leave the trail of her own tracks on this image of beauty and tried to keep to the very edge.

  Suddenly she saw footprints ahead of her, right in the very center of the snow-white strip. Someone had walked this way very recently, after the late evening sweeping.

  Who could it have been, Pelagia thought absentmindedly, her thoughts still occupied with caves and red roosters. Not many people
were permitted to stroll in the garden, especially at a late hour. Father Userdov? No, the cleric’s stride would be far shorter, for it was restricted by a cassock, Pelagia deduced. She adjusted the spectacles on her nose, still thinking her own thoughts, but at the same time looking at the tracks, which led toward the garden gate.

  Suddenly the holy sister gasped and went down on all fours, almost pressing her nose against the surface of the ground. Then she gasped again, more loudly. Square toes! That outline of the heel! And if you looked closer, you could see three rhomboids!

  The nun’s heart leaped in her chest. He had been here! Recently! Perhaps even only a moment ago! He had left through the little gate.

  She jumped up and dashed back toward the building, but immediately turned back again. Before she could wake up the servants, he would be gone! And there would not be any tracks on the street, with its surface of cobblestones. What if he was still close by, and she could follow him?

  Gathering up the hem of her habit, Pelagia dashed forward—not along the tracks, but beside, in order not to trample them. She didn’t stop to think what this sudden appearance of Wolf-Tail in the episcopal center might mean.

  The footprints turned off the main avenue onto a side path that seemed to lead, not to the gate, but into a distant, deserted corner of the garden.

  The holy sister halted for a moment, trying to understand the meaning of this maneuver. And she guessed it: the villain could not have a key, so he would have to climb over the fence. She started running even faster. The path was narrower here, hemmed in on both sides by tall bushes casting shadows that made the tracks invisible, but on the other hand, there was nowhere to turn off.

  Here was the end of the garden already. The little plank shed, where they put the boxes of apples in autumn, and behind it the fence. She had to run up to it, stick her head between the railings, and take a cautious peep to see if there was a dark figure receding into the night. And if there was, she had to climb over on to the other side and follow it. Even if it turned out to be someone entirely innocent, at least she would be able to find out who had made his boots. And then she …

  Pelagia had just drawn level with the shed. Her peripheral vision detected a black crack—the door was slightly open—and the thought flashed briefly though her mind that this was an oversight.

  But then the door suddenly swung wide open. A long arm reached out of the darkness, a hand seized the holy sister by the collar and snatched her into the little building, and the bolt clanged home.

  Stunned by the shock of it and blinded by the sudden darkness, Pelagia cried out, but a broad, rough hand immediately squeezed her mouth shut. “Well, hello, my little steamship dame,” a voice said in the darkness.

  She realized instantly who it was. Not even from the voice, which she had heard only once, but from that offensive word “dame.” Glass-Eye (alias Wolf-Tail—Berdichevsky had been right) paused, apparently savoring his captives distress.

  The darkness no longer seemed impenetrable to her. The shed had deliberately been built flimsily, with cracks in the walls, so that the apples could breathe, and the moonlight came in through the gaps. The first thing Pelagia made out was a pair of eyes glittering, but glittering differently. It was hard to tell which of them was real and which was false.

  “I’ve been running after you so long, it would be a shame to polish you off right away,” the appalling man said. “So you can have another minute to live, okay? On one condition: if you so much as squeak, you’re on your way into a coffin with pretty tassels.”

  “We’re not allowed,” the nun replied, her voice muffled by the hand.

  “What’s not allowed?” asked Glass-Eye, taking his hand away.

  “A coffin with tassels. Nuns aren’t allowed to have them,” she explained, thinking of only one thing: to keep saying anything at all, any nonsense, as long as it postponed the inevitable for a moment or two.

  Not in order to escape—what escape could there possibly be here?—but in order to prepare her soul for the great mystery and recite the words of her final prayer in her own mind.

  “You’re joking. Good girl!” the killer said approvingly “And you have a lively brain. If only it was a bit dimmer, you’d have lived longer. Have you seen this gadget?”

  He took an object out of his pocket. It bobbled about strangely in his hand, and when Pelagia looked closer, she saw it was a weight on a spring.

  “My invention,” Glass-Eye boasted. “It can strike from a good six feet away, and it’s very accurate.”

  He moved his hand ever so slightly, the spring straightened out, something whistled through the air, and a clay jug on a shelf, no doubt used by the gardener for his drink, shattered into smithereens. The weight returned to the hand that had thrown it.

  “How did you get out of the cave? A really slick dame, no two ways about it. And you sketched the sole of my boot. And now I’ve caught you with that sole, like a gudgeon on a rod.” He laughed quietly and triumphantly.

  The most terrible thing was that the nun could not see his face, and she didn’t remember it properly from the first time. So this is what death is like, Pelagia thought with a shudder. Faceless, laughing quietly.

  “How … how did you know that I sketched the boot print?” the nun whispered.

  He chuckled again. “Aren’t you the curious one! You’ll find out everything soon enough. Up there.” He pointed one finger up at the ceiling.

  “Where?” she asked, puzzled.

  His merriment redoubled at that. “Where, where? In the next world. Where all earthly secrets are revealed.”

  “Why do you want to kill me?” the nun asked meekly. “What have I done to offend you?”

  “Not you—your brains.” The frivolous killer tapped her on the forehead. “So I’m going to smash them out in a moment. It will be interesting to see what that dish looks like—scrambled brains.”

  Pelagia glanced involuntarily at the shelf where the shards of the jug lay. Spotting this movement, Glass-Eye was overwhelmed by a fit of giggles—the way the girls in Pelagia’s classes used to giggle when one of them got the stupid, ticklish laugh bug and infected the entire class.

  The nun fitfully pressed her hands to her chest. Something pricked her palm.

  A knitting needle! As usual, the holy sister’s knitting bag was hanging around her neck. A knitting needle might not seem like much of a weapon, but what if there was no other to be had? And those two steel rods had already saved their mistress in situations no less desperate than the present one.

  Pelagia jerked the bag off her neck and grabbed tight hold of it.

  “What’s that you have there, a prayer book? Oh, no, we’re not going to pray, that’s boring. Good-bye, dame.”

  He stepped back, and in order to get a good swing—or perhaps in order to savor his victim’s terror—he brandished the weight in a circle through the air.

  But Pelagia didn’t wait for the second circle: with a sickening squeal, she thrust the two needles straight through the cloth of the bag into the murderer’s only eye. At the final moment she suddenly felt frightened: What if she hadn’t remembered which eye was the natural one?

  However, to judge from the wild howling, her blow had struck home as intended.

  The howl turned into a frightful groan. The killer grabbed his face in his hands and immediately pulled them away again. Pelagia staggered back—it was a terrible sight, the satin bag dangling and swaying there in front of that human face. She dashed to the door and tugged hard on the bolt, but she couldn’t open it—it was rusty and she wasn’t strong enough.

  The wounded man pulled the bag off his face and cast it aside, and a dark mass trickled down his cheek. He gathered it in his hand and started stuffing it back into the socket.

  Pelagia squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Bitch!” the blinded man roared. “Viper! I’ll kill you anyway!” He swung his arm back, and the nun barely managed to squat down in time. The weight flew over her head with a ter
rifying whistle.

  And then the throwing began in earnest in that narrow space. Glass-Eye swung his arm about, striking to the right and the left. The weight cut through the air, smashed empty wooden boxes on the shelves, crashed into the walls with a crunch, snapped the handle of a garden fork in half.

  The nun dashed into one corner, then another, squatting down. Once the killer squatted down too and tried to strike her legs, but Pelagia managed to jump up in time.

  It was all like some monstrous game of tag or cat-and-mouse.

  And the nun also recalled the scene with Odysseus in the cave of Polyphemus: “The eyeball burst, the eye splashed out with a hiss. The cannibal howled wildly and the cave resounded with his howls.”

  This Cyclops wailed and sobbed and howled incomprehensibly, but Pelagia, short of breath from all her darting and jumping, still tried to make him see reason. “Calm down! You need a doctor!” But in so doing she only gave away her position. Each exhortation was followed by a blow more accurate than the one before.

  Then the nun squatted down on her haunches and fell silent.

  Glass-Eye kept on throwing his weight across the shed for a moment, until he realized that his opponent had changed tactics. He, too, froze, and listened.