“I have.”
“And perhaps my husband will die for his choice.”
“Even so,” he said. “We fight against a mystery.”
[TWENTY-FOUR] The second battle—Wyrm’s Keeper and his minion in the sky
So peaceful the morning that dawned, then. Mist on the river hid it, and there was quietness there. Mist filled the round wall of the camp, so that it was a bowl filled with drowsy white. Quiet white, because the invisible animals slept. Mist floated among the tree trunks in the forest. Mist floated across the battlefield like the train of a white gown. So gentle the day. And the sky, so benevolent.
So insidious, so foul the lie!
Pertelote alone was visible. She was a rag left sleeping on the wall. Her head lolled over the edge in loose fashion; her wings had lost strength and fanned away to either side of her; her beak was grimed, dusty, because she had literally fallen asleep in the middle of a watch. For a little while she had no idea that the morning was upon her. Her sleep was a blessing, for just a little while.
Suddenly a sound went up from the hidden river and blasted her awake.
One note. One long, eternal note so cold, so drilling, so fierce with hatred, that Pertelote reeled backward. If the sound had broken off, she might have frozen in her attitude. But it didn’t. It kept on blasting, and Pertelote began to run away. She ran, broken and crazy, beating the dirt with the ends of her wings, snapping feathers. She rounded the wall toward the forest, pumping her small head, breathing through her nose.
Her eyes rolled wildly in her head.
But a second sound trumpeted from the forest, shrill, unearthly. It hit her full in the face and with such sudden power that the poor Hen crumpled down and covered her head.
The river sound trebled, shrieking fury like the winds of a tornado. The sound from the forest echoed that and shook the trees. One, and then the other. The ground trembled. One, and louder still the other. They clapped together over Pertelote, and she began to pray.
The mist was everywhere calm. Invisibly the voices searched one another, fought one another.
Then Pertelote began to recognize one of the sounds—and she was filled with wonder. Slowly, slowly she lifted up her head. She looked toward the forest. Then she sat up, astonished.
There, on the topmost limb of the tallest tree, stood Chauntecleer, his wings wide like an eagle’s. He was crowing lauds as lauds had never been crowed before. The tree dipped and swayed from the impact, but Chauntecleer rode the motion and crowed: Lauds was his challenge to the hidden fury of the river, to Cockatrice.
Pertelote’s vision became intensely clear now. She saw the Rooster, his high head, his golden breast, his azure legs. And she could see, bound tightly to his spurs, two savage spikes.
“Gaff,” she breathed into the splitting sounds of the morning, “and the Slasher. He’s put on Gaff and the Slasher!” Thus the names of the Rooster’s weapons, old weapons.
Pertelote wanted to weep.
But then the river sound began to change. Pertelote whirled around and saw Cockatrice burst out of the white mist. He swooped low for a moment, crying his own hateful lauds, writhing his tail into devilish, impossible shapes. Then he gave power to his wings and soared up and up, stretching his neck and screaming, until he was but a dangerous needle in the sky.
Blitzschlange! Cockatrice had become the Lightning Snake!
Pertelote turned to Chauntecleer’s tree, and then she cried, “Don’t! Chauntecleer! Chauntecleer! Don’t!” But who could hear her? The challenge must turn to fighting now. Lauds was over.
Chauntecleer had also leaped into the air. He sank some way, but then his wings caught at the air, grabbed at it, and lifted his body up above the forest.
“Oh, for the love of God!” Pertelote pleaded. “Chauntecleer, don’t!”
But who could hear her?
Chauntecleer bumbled upward. There was no doubt that he could not fly as the Blitzschlange could, that Cockatrice! Roosters do not belong in the air. But he had ceased his crowing and bent his energies to the flight. He rose higher and higher above the forest, putting space between himself and the ground. He went to meet the enemy.
There was only one sound now. Cockatrice lay on high and laughed! Cold, evil, powerful his bellowed laughter! He had contempt for the Rooster laboring to meet him. And he seemed almost to be still, so high was he above the earth. He seemed to have found a windy shelf up there, and from there he spat at Chauntecleer.
But then the Blitzschlange slipped the shelf. That devil tipped forward, made a dart of his beak, a rod of his tail, and dived.
Down he streaked out of the sky.
Pertelote lifted a wing, as if she might protect her husband.
Chauntecleer saw him coming and changed his course. He flew no longer up, but straight forward.
But Cockatrice only bent his dive as if it were a gleaming, flexible saber. He ripped the air, faster and faster. He was a bolt, an arrow; he was lightning. The little needle grew into a spear, an axe—and he hit the Rooster full on the back!
Chauntecleer fell.
Cockatrice spread his powerful wings and sailed up and up again to a greater height.
Pertelote watched the Rooster tumble from the sky; but he was fighting the fall. He tore first one wing and then the other out of the wind; then, by main strength, he spread them out again and caught himself. Soon his fall began to slow. He made a level flight of it, and he flew just above the treetops. He was in control. Pertelote started to breathe again.
Cockatrice, a little dot near heaven, laughed; he saw what Chauntecleer was doing. But Pertelote began to strike herself on the breast because she, too, saw what Chauntecleer was doing.
He was flying upward, struggling upward again.
“Come to me!” screamed Cockatrice from his enormous height. “Come to me, Rooster, and I will give your flesh back to your own beasts, and they will feed on it!” He circled near heaven and laughed like a demon.
But Chauntecleer answered nothing. Silently he labored higher and higher, the one living thing in all the middle sky.
The mists of the morning were gone, burned away by a white sky; and the air was glassy clear. Nobody had heard the animals waken, yet there they were, one thousand faces rounded by a wall, watching their Lord as he lugged himself higher above them.
Suddenly Cockatrice’s laughter broke off, and he attended to business. The dot cried, “Then I will come to you!” And he pitched down out of the sky.
Chauntecleer worked hard. Again he laid his flight flat over the earth, but again it was useless. Faster than thought the demon dived. He didn’t check. He didn’t swerve. He went straight at the Rooster and cracked into him with all of his falling might.
Pertelote jumped at the sound of that hit. This time the Rooster did not catch himself. He fell. Turning over and over, his loose wings doubling backward, a chunk of feathers in disarray, Chauntecleer fell out of the sky and crashed into the forest.
Pertelote did not know that she was beating her breast. Neither did she hear the pleading, mewing sounds coming out of her own throat. Nor did a single animal in all the camp move. Their eyes were at the forest, seeing nothing.
Cockatrice sat on the top of the sky once again. His wings were tireless.
Then Pertelote wailed: “Not again!”
Out of the forest, crippled in his flight, Chauntecleer was rising up again. With much trouble he cleared the treetops. He hung midair for a moment. Then, thrumming his weary wings with a great deal of wasted motion, he turned his flight upward again—a sadly broken flight. He slipped and flew, slipped and flew. He fought his way—but he went up.
This time Cockatrice waited. This time Cockatrice forced the Rooster to go higher than he had ever gone before. But the Rooster pounded the air, and he did go higher than he had ever gone
before. He made no sound. Neither did the demon above him. Cockatrice cried no challenge. He bided his time and waited.
The third flight lasted forever.
Then Cockatrice was waiting no longer. Everyone was watching; yet no one knew when the dive had begun. Deadly, and as silent as time, Cockatrice hurtled from the roof of the sky.
Who was left to believe that Chauntecleer could escape the plunging Blitzschlange? But yet everyone pleaded in his soul, wished that Chauntecleer would try, would dodge.
But he didn’t. The Rooster hung still upon the air as the demon closed distance, shooting at him. Nor did he even straighten his flight. As if in a dream he regarded Cockatrice; and then, just before the murderous strike, he rolled over on his back with his claws above him.
Crack!
The collision echoed through the forest, sent ripples across the river, and caused Pertelote’s heart to break.
But this time the Cockatrice did not find his own wings. He did not rise up again. He was bound to the Rooster, and they fell down together. They whirled together to the ground—then hit with such force that they bounded up again, and only stopped rolling at the wall of the camp.
Pertelote stared, transfixed.
Chauntecleer lay underneath—Cockatrice, his winding tail, on top of him. Gaff had pierced Cockatrice at the throat. The Slasher was buried deep in his chest. Cockatrice was not dead; but he was dying. Yet his hatred for the Rooster was so intense that he did not back away nor pull the weapons out of his body. Instead he lunged forward, reaching with his beak for the Rooster’s neck.
He thrust Gaff entirely through his own throat. The point slid bloody out of the back of his neck. Jerk by jerk he pressed the Slasher ever deeper into his chest. He inched closer to Chauntecleer’s face.
Chauntecleer only held his legs above him, a barrier, and watched the cold red eye. Watched the beak slash and snap at him.
The demon’s face was just in front of his own—a mirror.
Then hot blood burst out of Cockatrice’s mouth, spurting and steaming, and the demon died. Beak to beak, his red eye open, the dead stared at Chauntecleer; and the Rooster vomited.
In thorough disgust Chauntecleer heaved the body over. He yanked the weapons out of it. He ran a short distance, then stopped and drove his beak into the ground, squatted, and slid his chest and both sides of his head against the earth to clean the filth away. Spasms shook him. He vomited again a thin bile. Then he went limp and stood with his head bowed, exhausted.
For a moment there was utter silence. Pertelote had never moved from her place on the wall. The animals were glaring at her back, waiting for some gesture to tell them of the events outside the camp; but they saw none—only a Hen absently beating her breast.
But the answer came.
In a rasping, tormented voice, Chauntecleer began to crow the crow of victory. So the animals were set free. They climbed the wall to see what he had done; and when they saw, they were astonished by the thickness and the strength of the demon’s tail. But still no one said a word. Chauntecleer was not done.
Slowly he returned to the body, gargling a vehement, crazy crow. Savagely he began to hack at its neck, ripping the skin, exposing veins and cords and a dark green meat. The animals turned away. Chauntecleer, it seemed, had become an offense. Into his own beak he took the bare neck bone of the enemy; this he shook with such violence that it broke and the head came away from the body. Chauntecleer raised this head high, and walked.
Across the battlefield he walked. Around the corpses he walked. Wearily, but with the head of Cockatrice above him like a standard which trailed torn flesh, Chauntecleer walked to the river.
At the shore he stretched his neck and cried out: “Wyrm! Oh, Wyrm! Oh, wretched Wyrm! Swallow this thing and gag! Your Cockatrice is dead, and I have done it!”
Then he threw the head with its open eyes into the water. Like a stone it sank, and Chauntecleer watched with satisfaction the long string of blood which followed it down the water. Done. He started to go home.
He was halfway across the battlefield when he heard a new noise behind him. He turned, and all unconsciously he groaned. Waves of sorrow nearly drowned the Rooster, because he saw that the waters of the river were seething. Where the demon’s head had entered them, the waters were boiling: Bubbles broke the surface in a steady, restless rash; then the boil spread wide, and the whole river itself was churning.
“Chauntecleer! Chauntecleer!” cried the voice from underneath the ground. “The last sin is the worst. How vain to kill the Cockatrice. But how much more contemptible to glory in an empty thing! Chauntecleer! I am Wyrm!”
The waters began to crawl up onto the battlefield, closing like fists around the large corpses and lifting the little ones up. For three days the river had held to this shoreline; but no more. The river was rising again, spreading itself toward the camp.
“I am Wyrm!” The voice issued from every pore in the ground, a stinking violation. “And I am here!”
Suddenly Chauntecleer took dizzy and began to sway. How many battles make a war? How much, and how much more, can a Rooster bear before the break? He let his slack wings touch the ground on either side of him so that he wouldn’t fall altogether, and then he dragged back to the camp. But again and again he turned his head to look behind, trying to believe what he saw.
He stumbled into the trench at the bottom of the wall. Slowly he raised his eyes. There was Pertelote, still standing on its top and looking at him. Chauntecleer shrugged his shoulders and tried to smile. He spread his wings empty in front of her. The smile didn’t work. It hung all too crooked on his face. “Do you know? Do you know?” he said as if he were very young. “Pertelote. I don’t know anymore,” he said, and then he fainted. Many of his bones had been broken.
Chauntecleer had won. Chauntecleer was victorious, but
[TWENTY-FIVE] The Hen, the Dog, the dun-colored Cow
But it is entirely possible to win against the enemy, it is possible even to kill the enemy, and still to be defeated by the battle.
Chauntecleer had not lost his life to Cockatrice, but he’d lost something infinitely more dear. He had lost hope. And with it went the Rooster’s faith. And without faith he no longer had a sense of the truth.
When the battle with Cockatrice—sore, exhausting battle—turned out not to be the final battle after all, then it was Wyrm and not the Rooster who rejoiced in victory. With seven words Wyrm had more than weakened him, for he was already weak. With seven words Wyrm had made the war an endless thing and every victory a joke. With seven words Wyrm had murdered hope and sent the Rooster mumbling through the windless halls of despair. And with seven confident words Wyrm had struck down the leader of the land, so that the land was no longer proof against his escape. Leaderless, loose, the Keepers would lose their strength. The bond was breaking, the patch frayed at the center of it, the prison gate unlocking. And Wyrm saw freedom in front of him!
For Chauntecleer one thing and one thing only held any meaning now: his own feelings. All of the rest was mere shadow—smiling, mocking shadow.
When he swam to awareness again, Chauntecleer discovered that he was in the Coop on a clean bed of straw. He tried to move, but he couldn’t. His whole body—the bones within and the flesh without—was stiff, wooden.
All of the sights and the sounds around him washed into one another, so that he thought he was seeing everything through a sheet. Someone, he thought, had put a sheet over his head.
He considered this sheet for a moment. “Muslin,” he thought to himself. “No, not muslin. Something sheer, something thin and light.”
The color of the sheet kept changing, flushing red every time his heart beat and deep crimson when he breathed, almost as if it would blot out all things else. Chauntecleer thought that this was both kind and remarkably beautiful, and for a moment he took pleasur
e in it.
But only for a moment. Soon the fact that the sheet was over his head struck him with a deep and piteous sorrow.
“They think I’m dead!” he thought. “They didn’t even wait for me to wake up. They covered me and left me for dead!” All of a sudden Chauntecleer felt profoundly sorry for Chauntecleer.
“Well, they rot!” he decided with monumental dignity. “I can do without them,” he proclaimed to his soul. “Let them go their selfish ways. Chauntecleer the Rooster was ever the noblest bird of them all!” And speaking that way in his heart, Chauntecleer composed himself for an eternity of lonely suffering.
But the colors around him never ceased pulsing. Slowly they began to move as with a purpose, drawing together, wrapping themselves around a shape. They were taking form. And they were blending into each other—swirling, mixing, losing distinction, until all the colors were one color: dun. And the shape was the shape of a Cow.
Chauntecleer’s heart leaped! He blinked and looked very hard.
Yes! He saw the rangy, pointed horns of the Dun Cow and her liquid eyes, so soft with sympathy. They were in pain, these eyes, and the Rooster knew them very well.
“You didn’t forget!” Chauntecleer cried—without opening his mouth. “You saw my suffering! They left me, but you, my friend—you came back to me!” The cry caused sparks to fly all around his head, and the image of the Dun Cow wavered, like a water reflection.
But this is the sadness of Chauntecleer’s hopeless condition, that wild delight can fall quickly into a wild and bitter tantrum. Nothing lasts.
When the image of the Dun Cow stilled again, anger exploded in Chauntecleer’s brains. Her eyes were as sympathetic as before, but now he could see that they were not looking at him. There was company between the Dun Cow and himself. Mundo Cani Dog was there. And him was the Dun Cow gazing at!
“Out! Out! Out!” roared the Rooster, still without the benefit of his mouth. “My place isn’t yours anymore, Dog! Get out of the Coop! Out of the camp! Die, you loathsome—”
The Book of the Dun Cow Page 19
