The Book of the Dun Cow

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  The Weasel was busy running. The battlefield was nothing but flat open spaces. No place to hide. No time to dig. Just running, dodging, and running again—while Cockatrice screamed out of the sky yet a third time. Suddenly the Weasel felt very tired. He thought that he would stop running soon.

  Animals and Basilisks both had ceased their fighting. Basilisks because their numbers had been decimated; those left were slipping toward the river. Animals because they were horrified by the scene before them and helpless.

  On a whim Chauntecleer looked to his right. There, far away across the plain, he saw Mundo Cani coming, head low, beating the earth with his feet, running. “Oh, run, Dog!” the Rooster crowed. “Run! Run!” Mundo Cani had seen the trouble.

  Again, Cockatrice was falling from the white sky like an arrow. The Weasel was bustering around the field, veering left and right to make a difficult target of himself. But if this caused trouble for the dropping Cockatrice, it also troubled the Dog. Mundo Cani was fast flat out. Already he had halved the distance. But how could he veer with the Weasel?

  “Russel’s bush!” he roared to the Weasel without slowing his course.

  John Wesley stopped dead, looked at him, surprised.

  “Run!” screamed the Dog. “Oh, John! Run!” Cockatrice was taking level aim.

  The Weasel ran. He made a pattern of his sudden, jagged running. He glanced at the Dog, gauged his speed, then stared at the place where the bush used to be.

  From the top of the Coop Chauntecleer saw a Dog of enormous speed and a Weasel of quick turns close in on one another. At a certain spot they met; and then the Weasel was no longer visible. Cockatrice drove himself into a lump of earth.

  Mundo Cani made a wide, pounding circle and returned to the camp.

  “Home! Home! Come home!” Chauntecleer raised his voice again to cry retreat to his animals. It was time. “Home! Home! Home! Home! Home!”

  And they came. Shaggy, sad, small, and stumbling, they came. In the instant of the retreat, insufferably weary; dragging, shambling; hurrying more against their fatigue than from the enemy; stunned, they streamed back—the Dog foremost of them all. They mounted the wall and fell into the camp, damp, sick, sorry, and alive.

  The day was ending. The hot day was nearly over. The night was at hand. Here and there on the camp floor lay the broken animals, too tired even to consider that the battle had been theirs. They slept and did not sleep at once. Just—they were there, and that was all. Inert.

  Chauntecleer, still on the top of the Coop, gazed at them and choked on his love for them. The strain of the day had left him soft toward his animals.

  And while he looked, he heard a very weak but bitter voice nearby the Coop. The voice said: “Tell a Dog to put me down. John’s wet, he is.”

  In spite of himself, Chauntecleer let slip a sudden, stupid giggle. Then, in a manner more grave: “Mundo Cani, it’s over for a day, don’t you know?”

  “Is ways to bite a Weasel,” the Weasel said, and then he passed out. He looked like a wet rag hanging out of either side of the Dog’s mouth. Blood dripped from the point of his nose and from his tail.

  “All this time you’ve been standing there?” Chauntecleer wondered, for it had been a while gone as the animals found places inside the camp.

  Mundo Cani’s eyes were filled with anguish. They looked mournfully up to the Rooster. Who knew how kindly the Dog’s tongue was licking John Wesley’s wound on the inside of his mouth?

  “Well?”

  The Dog laid the Weasel gently on the earth and sighed.

  “Chauntecleer!”

  Like an iron arrow the cry came to him.

  Chauntecleer spun around. He saw the battlefield moist and glutted. He saw wreckage. He saw bodies in which there was no life. The field everywhere was still. So who called to him?

  “Chauntecleer! Proud Chauntecleer!”

  From across the entire battlefield came the poisoned voice. Standing on an invisible island out in the flooding river, Chauntecleer’s mirror was crying challenge. Cockatrice. His tail twisted powerfully and dashed the water as he called. His red eye watched the Rooster unblinking. His voice was slamming into Chauntecleer’s face:

  “What are animals? No account! What is a battle won with numbers? Nothing! What is a commander who hides behind a wall? Let the commander show himself tomorrow. Cockatrice will meet him—and him will Cockatrice kill!”

  Chauntecleer’s mirror slipped into the water and disappeared. Chauntecleer watched that place until the ripples had played themselves out, and the river became smooth in the evening. Battles, battles—how many to make a war? And when you have won one, then what have you won?

  The Beautiful Pertelote stepped out of the Coop and looked up at her husband. He didn’t see her. He was grieving. He was listening.

  Another voice arose from the soil itself, a voice confident and mild. It said: “Behold the Rooster who suffers much more than he must. Ah, Chauntecleer, Chauntecleer. Why do you suffer today and tomorrow?” oozed the compassionate voice. “Curse God. Curse him, and all will be done. Or, lest you forget the truth of things, remember: I am Wyrm. And I am here.”

  And then, finally, it was the night.

  [TWENTY-THREE] “We fight against a mystery”

  Before and after, and a battle in between. The night before the battle had crackled with energy and fear. But this night afterward fell loose to the ground in exhaustion. Animals took no care where or how they lay. They sprawled everywhere.

  Here and there a head rose from the ground, snapping at the air; a cry trembled on the night; a leg began to thrum and jerk violently. Once John Wesley Weasel begged vengeance for the death of the Wee Widow Mouse; then Pertelote sang to him and soothed him back into silence. But silent or screaming, neither one made any difference to the Weasel, because he was sleeping and did not know what he was doing.

  As if it were the earth itself underneath them all, or the wind around them all, a groaning never ceased the whole night through. This was the voice of the wounded; they could not take breath or release it except in pain. Even as they slept, they groaned.

  From the top of the Coop, at the right time, Chauntecleer crowed a short, bitter compline—very much like a growl. And when the ceremony was done, the Rooster, too, was done. In silence he descended from the Coop; he walked among his animals, climbed the wall, turned once to look the whole camp over, then disappeared down the other side.

  The night was not altogether dark. Some grim, shadowy light touched things. So Pertelote had seen the Rooster leave. She had been watching him ever since the retreat, never saying a word or asking one of Chauntecleer. But now she felt a deep compulsion to follow him outside the camp.

  She knew that he wasn’t coming back in again. Today all the warriors had fought; tomorrow it would be Chauntecleer alone. This knowledge had driven him out, for already he was effecting a separation between himself and them. This knowledge he carried while he wandered through the stiff field beyond the ditch. And this same knowledge drew Pertelote’s heart after the singular Rooster.

  She followed Chauntecleer’s path among the animals toward the wall. She climbed the wall and made ready to go over, just as Chauntecleer had done. She tried—but in that moment, for the first time, her courage failed her. She stood still.

  Poor Pertelote! For a long time that night she struggled with herself, hesitating between the camp and the battlefield, loathing herself, yet loving her life too dearly to trust it to the darkness. Some light there was, to be sure. But it was the darkness, the nothingness in front of her, which struck fear into her soul.

  The light which so thinly illuminated this night came not from the sky but from the river itself: strange light! A smoky glow hovered just above the water; a softly flowing sheet of bloodless light stretched as far as the river went. It was light barely seen, fatu
ous fire; but it was enough to make the battlefield seem a black, bottomless pit.

  That pit, that mouth in the earth—that’s what frightened the Hen. She knew perfectly well that there was firm land under the blackness. And yet she feared that once off the wall she would fall and fall forever.

  Strange light. Stranger darkness! And the warm, familiar camp behind—this was the confusion, the struggle which rooted Pertelote’s poor feet to the wall and would not set her free to fly.

  Oh, but somewhere in the darkness was her husband, her Chauntecleer. . . .

  “Chauntecleer,” she whined softly. At least she thought it had been soft. But he must have heard her.

  “Get back!” he barked, bodiless in the night. “You’ve got no business up there, Pertelote. Get back into the camp!”

  That broke the spell.

  Her first impulse was to focus on his voice, to know where he was. But her second impulse was the swifter; it was to become suddenly, hotly, angry with the Rooster. And at the third impulse Pertelote took to her wings and flew straightaway from the wall.

  Instantly the wall, the camp, the animals, the Coop, and everything else was swallowed up in darkness. She came from nothing. She flew over nothing. There was nothing ahead of her. She felt no motion in the flying, because nothing showed her that she moved. Only—there was the dim, smiling light above the river, white, shapeless, smooth, and soft. That was the only something in all the world around her. All the rest was chasm. All the rest was pit—horrible, hopeless blackness!

  “Ah, God,” she said, stabbed with panic at her foolishness, beating her useless wings. Where was she to go? She tried to fly straight up. But suddenly she herself was nothing anymore. For one small second between wing beats, she truly thought that she had died.

  “Pertelote, you fool!” Chauntecleer’s voice! Again, it broke her.

  She simply quit flying, folded her wings, fell out of the air, and hit the earth.

  “I told you, didn’t I? I said you had no business out here. This isn’t for you, idiot! Nor for anybody else. I’m the one—! WHERE ARE YOU?”

  Pertelote tried to stand up on shaky legs, and slipped. The bloody earth. She did stand up, and then she stood stock-still, looking around. Some shapes on the ground were coming visible to her, though they were only blacker forms in the darkness. This was a foreign land, and she was very lonely in it.

  “All right, then,” Chauntecleer shouted, “where are you? Let’s get it over with and be done.” He was quiet a moment. Then: “Pertelote! For God’s sake, where are you?”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Here.”

  “I’m coming to you,” he shouted, and she nodded.

  There was a long silence, and then Chauntecleer shouted from a different place: “Listen, how am I supposed to know where you are? Make a noise.”

  “Here,” Pertelote said. How terribly lonely she felt!

  “Good! Keep it up.”

  “Here. Here. Here. Here,” she repeated, singsong. The word grew ridiculous in her mouth. “Here. Here. Here.” Maybe to give it some meaning, maybe to make a responsible adult of herself once again, Pertelote started to walk—whether toward the camp to avoid the Rooster, or toward Chauntecleer himself, she did not know. Her loneliness in this place was stunning her.

  The ground was uneven, and the darkness around her feet total. She tripped. Her face slithered into the mud. She lifted up her head, sick with the smell of blood; her eyes saw a dim sight; and she was horrified. Two inches away from her own face was the open mouth of a Deer—neither speaking nor breathing. It was open as in a scream, but it screamed no sound at all. The Deer was dead.

  Pertelote gagged, stumbled to her feet, and backed away. Again she slipped and fell, this time to rise from the mud gasping, like someone drowning. She plunged away—and Chauntecleer grabbed her.

  “Now!” he said. “You tell me what you’re doing out here.”

  For one moment the Hen was rigid. In the next she seized Chauntecleer and drove him with an incredible force back toward the Deer. Loneliness had split open in rage.

  “What’s his name?” she demanded.

  “What?” Chauntecleer was overwhelmed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see.”

  Pertelote pushed him closer. “Touch him. Feel his face. Tell me his name!”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “I don’t care,” the Hen fairly screamed. “I want to know his name!”

  Chauntecleer reached through the darkness and felt the Deer. He drew back, then, until he was standing right next to Pertelote. In a stricken voice he said, “Nimbus.”

  “Nimbus!” cried the Hen. “His name is Nimbus! Nimbus, too, is dead!”

  “Pertelote—” Chauntecleer tried to say, but she spun away from him.

  “I will give you my children. I’ll sit with a suffering Fox. I’ll patch you a Weasel. I’ll sing to him. I’ll even watch you leave the camp without a word to me—and I will endure. Stop! Listen to me! You will go out and you will fight with Cockatrice and you will die, and I will endure. This is the way that it is. You choose. Fox, Weasel, Chauntecleer, Lord and Rooster—you all of you choose; and I am born to endure. But who is Nimbus? Oh, God, why does he have to die?”

  “Pertelote, I didn’t—”

  “Let it end, Chauntecleer! With Nimbus let it end right there. He’s the last sacrifice, the most stupid! Nobody knows who Nimbus is. Well, then he’s a child to me—my husband and my father. And he’s the last that I’m going to give!”

  Chauntecleer put a foolish wing around her shoulder. “You can’t talk this way. Not now.” But Pertelote wrenched herself free.

  “Get away from me, you! You’ve already left me. So! You’ve gone to fight the Cockatrice, my Lord. You’re dead already. So! So! I go to mourn Nimbus.”

  She began to run through the darkness. Chauntecleer made no attempt to stop her, nor even to follow her. But his head fell back and he wailed in pain: “Pertelote!”

  Immediately, as if shot, Pertelote collapsed. Right where she was in the muddy field she began to weep loudly. The sobs were ripped from her soul like roots from the earth, and Pertelote cried. “Oh, Chauntecleer.”

  And so he came to her, and this time she let him hold her. Among all the black forms on the battlefield, these two made one small incidental lump—but this was a living lump; that was the difference.

  After an age had passed Chauntecleer said: “Pertelote, I love you.”

  “I can’t do it anymore, Chauntecleer,” she said gently, in her own voice. “Twice I’ve seen the Basilisks. Twice the destruction. And Cockatrice—he never, never goes away. I’m tired, Chauntecleer.”

  “So am I,” he said.

  “I thought we won today. But I thought I won nine months ago when I fled by the river. Marriage and our children—I thought these were victories. But Cockatrice came back, and he comes back, and he comes back; and now he wants you, too. There should be an ending.”

  “There will be.”

  “But what kind of an ending? You will die, and then what? When will I die? Oh, God, I should have died a year ago.”

  “Pertelote, it’s not written that I must die.”

  “So you say. So you say. Chauntecleer, you have never been close to Cockatrice. God help me, I have.”

  To this Chauntecleer had no answer whatever. He held his peace.

  She said, “Who is Wyrm?”

  Chauntecleer said truthfully, “I don’t know.”

  Pertelote made the question more difficult: “Why is Wyrm?” she said.

  Chauntecleer began to chuckle, and the Hen was surprised. “Ask me why is Mundo Cani’s nose,” he said. “I don’t know why that boot was born into the world, but there it is. I don’t
know, Pertelote. I don’t know.”

  “What is Wyrm?” she asked.

  “Oh, Pertelote. Have I seen him? Do I know his father or his mother? Has he told me his shape or his purpose? Has God ever explained to me what lives beneath our feet or why he permits it to be? I’ve asked him often enough, Lord knows. But he never answers. Wyrm is. How shall I say what Wyrm is?”

  “Beyond everything else we fight against, there is Wyrm. Beyond the Basilisks. Deeper even than Cockatrice—Wyrm.”

  “Even so it seems to be.”

  “Then we fight against a mystery,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  And she said, “Chauntecleer, I am so very tired.”

  The loose light above the river rolled and seemed to form itself into shapes—grinning, confident faces billowing across the water. Against that unholy light Pertelote saw Chauntecleer’s silhouette. Then her thoughts passed from herself to him, for she saw how sadly low his head was bent. And Pertelote was changed.

  “Chauntecleer?”

  “What?”

  “And I love you.”

  Now the Rooster found a fine hold on her body and squeezed her so tightly that she grunted.

  “Oh, Chauntecleer, I have such a very little faith,” she said.

  “But you came out to this wretched place,” he said. “Who else came out to find me?”

  She searched to see his eyes and failed. Only his comb like a crown was visible against the river’s light. “Do you forgive me?”

  “Ah, the lady with a flaming throat, who sings like the spheres, who weeps and sings again, the lady who endures forever—she asks me whether I forgive.” He touched her gently. “What else is there, Pertelote? I forgive.”

  “Will you fight with Cockatrice tomorrow?” she asked. Perhaps she finally wanted all things properly in place by his speaking them: It was an honest question.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Such a thing is possible?”

  “Such a thing will be. I am not going back into the camp until I have fought him.”

  “You have chosen against evil.”