The Book of the Dun Cow (15 page)

The sky was a stone—hollowed underneath, hard, pure white, hot, a lid locked over the whole earth. Never before had the sky been so white. Never before had it turned the heat back onto the earth with such ferocity. Neither blue nor pink, neither soft nor kindly, but white, hard, and hot, this sky, and angry.

A hissing sound seemed to come from all around the horizon, where the stone lid trembled and heat escaped like steam.

There was no sun. The sky
was
a sun. And this day did not dawn. It hit the earth with a fury. It struck every animal in the face. It woke each one with pain and with the sound of hissing.

Children stumbled and could not stand. Mothers and fathers found that their legs were sluggish. When they reached to help their children, it was with a maddening, slow motion that they reached. Everyone's thoughts turned unto himself, and he wished for one cool drop of water to loosen his thick, sticky tongue.

The animals began to moan, and would have moaned forever like the sick, except that a thought crept into their minds:

They said, “Where is Chauntecleer?”

Now their eyes began to peel open in spite of the white light. They looked up on the wall which went all the way around them.

They said, “Where is Chauntecleer? Have you seen Chauntecleer? Did he crow the morning lauds? We haven't heard him crow!”

They stood up on their shaky legs to look around. The children, who did not open their eyes, felt their parents' bodies move and depart, and they began to whimper. But the parents looked closely at the wall, and they did not see Chauntecleer on the top of it.

Some thought that they could remember Chauntecleer's crowing in the night; but they were not sure. And no one had heard him crow since the morning began.

Close to panic, they said, “Where is Chauntecleer?”

And then someone said, “He left us!”

Again the animals stared wildly at the wall. It was true. Chauntecleer was not on the wall. The Deer shuddered and stamped their feet. The Rabbits sat up straight and froze at the thought. The heat was heavy on them all. They trembled.

Someone else said, “He left us! He escaped in the night! He saved himself and left us to die!”

The animals began to walk around aimlessly, sweating. They shook their heads against the dismal, universal hissing. Oh, God, the livid sky!

Then someone lost all patience. “Traitor!” he cried.

Immediately John Wesley Weasel screamed, “No!” He was running, dodging through the crowd, trying to force his way up to the wall. He would say something, if he could get somewhere to say it.

“He betrayed us! He locked us in! He called it a fortress! But it's a prison!”

“No! Is no!” John Wesley cried, darting, scrambling, driving for every snatch of open space he could see in the crowd. Who said these things about the Rooster? Was an ass! John Double-u would find him, would bite the tendon in his heel, would bring him down and shut him up. Was an ass! If only John Wesley could get near to him to see.

All of the sweating animals moaned, “A prison!”

They began to surge toward the wall. John Wesley was lost.

Why did the Wild Turkeys go first up the wall? Had panic pierced their ears? Did they run on their own? Or were they driven, helpless foam before a groaning sea?

The Wild Turkeys fumbled up the inside of the wall, falling and rolling and rising again. When they reached the very top of the wall, they suddenly began to shriek in mortal terror. They turned around, tried to fight against the coming crowd. But it was useless. The animals no longer knew them. The Wild Turkeys wanted desperately to be back inside the camp again, but who would let them?

Then the Turkeys went mad. They whirled around, jittering hideously and screaming.

This the animals
did
see—for the Turkeys were wrapped in serpents. Glistening, deadly vipers entangled their legs and gripped them at the throats, coiled their bodies and waited a teasing moment before the bite.

The entire camp of animals fell into a ghastly silence, watching the sad dance on the top of the wall.

And then the Turkeys threw back their heads, and they died, making a gargling sound in their throats before absolute silence.

There was no sound but the hissing. Basilisks hissing.

The dead bodies fell out of sight over the wall. But two of the Turkeys happened to fall inward. They tumbled into the camp. The serpents with burning, lurid eyes slithered off the dead; and the animals, with wild, staring eyes, made room for them, backed and backed away.

These serpents put their heads up, so that as much of their slick bodies stood up off the ground as crawled on it, and they drew away from the two dead Turkeys. They fanned out in several directions, approached the staring animals, crawled slowly, their damp bodies dimpled with light and making wrinkles, their eyes burning a mordant fire, their heads high and proud like little kings, their mouths grinning and hissing.

But the animals stood mute and could not move. Neither could they tear their eyes from the Basilisks.

Suddenly Chauntecleer crowed from the top of the Coop.

The serpents stopped and twisted their heads, looking.

Chauntecleer crowed again—mightily, dangerously, purely.

The animals found their legs, rushed, and stampeded away from this place, some crying out for the first time.

Chauntecleer crowed again. He made a whip out of his crowing, and he lashed the serpents with it.

The serpents withered, shrank back. They rammed their heads against the ground as if they would crawl into it; but the floor which the Bees had put there held tight against them. They began to stream for the wall.

“I adjure you by God,” Chauntecleer crowed—conjured. “If ye be above or if ye be below, that ye go hence!” Such was the cut of his crow.

In a twisting mass the serpents worked their ways to the wall. The animals pressed against the Coop at the Rooster's feet.

“I adjure you by the most great name, go hence! If ye be obedient, go hence! If ye be disobedient, die! Die!
Die!
”

Up and over the wall they crawled. And then none could see them but Chauntecleer, for he was on top of the Coop.
Rooster's crow, confusion
, the Dun Cow had said. Chauntecleer had just practiced the third category of his crowing, new learned. The occasional crows and the canonical crows were nothing, now. These were the Crows Potens!

Up and over the wall, however, they all crawled but one. This one serpent had burrowed deep into the bowels of the Turkey which it had killed and was well hidden. This serpent hid inside of the magnificent Ocellata. This serpent was still inside the camp.

“In God's name,” Chauntecleer spat at the animals huddled so tightly around his Coop, “what is the matter with you? Didn't you hear me yesterday? Did you forget everything?”

The animals put their heads down and stood still, trembling.

In the doorway of the Coop stood three figures apart: John Wesley Weasel and Mundo Cani Dog, both of them out of breath; and Lord Russel the Fox with a grotesque, painfully swollen muzzle. Behind them was a huge pile of rue.

Failing everything else before, John Wesley had leaped the wall and shot into the forest to find Chauntecleer. At his warning Mundo Cani had carried the Rooster back into the camp with an amazing speed.

“God give the lot of you brains!” cried Chauntecleer. “Or not one of you will be left alive. Did you suppose the wall was a joke? Do you think I laugh at you with what I do? I knew the serpents were out there!”

Chauntecleer stared at his animals, furious. Almost to himself he said, “We're going to fight an enemy; but first we will deliver ourselves into their hands.” Then he shouted: “You invited them into this camp! Do you know that? Not just by climbing the wall. Not just by making doorways of your bellies. But by your faithlessness. Warriors! Warriors? Rabble and children, the whole lot! If you don't believe in what I say, if you don't hold together, there will be slaughter! Who wants to go home now? Get out! Get away from me!” Chauntecleer cried—and immediately he was ashamed of his outburst. This was a difficult moment for the Rooster. He glanced at the Turkeys already dead, at the animals already humiliated, pawing the ground; and he felt that he had gone too far in his anger.

A moment to control himself, and then in a quieter voice he commanded that every child and every mother of children be moved to a special place toward the north of the camp.

Then, while that was being done, Chauntecleer took himself into the Coop and stood facing a blank wall for a full ten minutes. Not a Hen disturbed him.

“The rue,” he said finally to Pertelote, even before he had turned to look at her. And when he did turn, it could be seen that his face was calm.

“Rub rue everywhere around the place of the mothers and children. Make a closed circle of it. But see that you keep enough back. Every warrior should also be smeared with the stuff. Every warrior should stink of it.” And then he went outside.

Rue, she said, protection
.

The serpents had been able to approach the camp wall without notice, that morning, simply because the guards—the Foxes—had been no longer on watch, and there had been none to cry warning. When the Dun Cow had left him, when the white morning had just begun to break, Chauntecleer had seen an appalling sight. He had seen the Basilisks begin to break water at the river's edge to blacken the beach—thousands upon thousands, wriggling and creeping into the plain.

Chauntecleer had leaped to the wall, prepared to rouse the camp and to bring Russel back. But first he saw a marvel: Every tree, every bush upon the plain, was withering and falling sere before the Basilisks—every bush except one! This bush they avoided. “Russel!” Chauntecleer had cried. Immediately the Fox shot from that bush and began to run for the wall. The bush withered in an instant; but Russel the serpents did not yet attack. And Russel, against all sensible principle, opened his mouth and snapped at them. He caught three serpents in the middles of their backs and kept running. They writhed around his snout, and he stumbled and fell into the trench at Chauntecleer's feet—but he bit them, and they died.

It was when Chauntecleer helped the Fox—stunned with pain and swelling frightfully around his nose—that the Rooster noticed the bitter smell of rue which cloaked his guard.

Rue, she said, protection
.

“The wonder is,” Chauntecleer said now to his warriors as they stood tight around the Coop, submitting to the vigorous rubbing which Pertelote and the Hens were giving them, “the wonder of it is that they can die! Know that. Repeat it to yourselves. Believe it. Never, never let their strange shapes cloud your minds or persuade you otherwise: They are vulnerable. They can die!” Chauntecleer was making his last, preparing speech before he sent his warriors over the wall.

He began in a low, intense voice to scourge his warriors. He leaned down from the top of the Coop and scraped their souls with a description of the evil outside the wall. Not the Basilisks alone he described, but evil. Evil itself, and what it can do.

Then, in precisely the same voice, without the least comforting transition, he began to name their children. The contrast was tormenting. It produced—without the word ever being spoken—the word “death” in every heart.

The warriors great and small, with many teeth and few, began to cast eyes toward the wall. Their teeth ground together. Hoofs, paws, and claws began to scratch dust. Nostrils flared.

Still in the same voice Chauntecleer gave over the names of their children and began, rather, to name his own. He called each one of the Three Pins “Prince.” He pointed to the place where these lay buried. “Mine,” he said. “Yours,” he said in that low and lashing voice. “But mine are no longer and yours nevermore.”

And then he named the name of the adversary. “Cockatrice,” he said, so quietly that he could barely be heard. “Cockatriss. Cockatrisssssss.”

A deep rumbling rose up from among the warriors, and as it did, Chauntecleer drew out the hissing of the enemy's name like spitfire, louder and louder, until above the rumbling he arched his neck and he screamed: “COCKATRISSSSSSSS!”

Fur stood up like needles on a thousand backs. Muscles twitched violently. Hackles were raised on every feathered neck. Teeth came bare. Lips curled back in a thousand snarling faces.

Chauntecleer's low monotone had driven outrage into the souls of his warriors. It had also restrained them, holding them taut, quivering at his feet. Now he threw it away.

“Up!” he roared, and the traces were loosened. “Go!” he cried, and the reins were dropped. They were free. They turned away from him. “Now God goes out before you! But you! You! Kill them utterly!”

Not fast, but with a dreadful purpose, the warriors moved to the wall. Chauntecleer set up a startling, brilliant crow from the top of the Coop—the Crows Potens—and he watched.

The serpents on the other side all put their heads up, waiting. It was as if all the field between the river and the wall had suddenly sprouted living heads. The heads, like fingers out of the ground, waved back and forth; the flesh gleamed. The hissing sprayed the air, loud, louder, deafening.

All at once Chauntecleer saw a horrifying sight. On a mound by the river he thought he saw himself—like a mirror of himself. He saw a Rooster of grim appearance, a Rooster covered all over with scales, grey scales down the neck and underneath the chest. This Rooster had a powerful, twisting serpent's tail and a red eye. Level, cold across the plain, the eye was looking back at him. Cockatrice, too, was watching.

If it had been more than that instant, if Chauntecleer had thought about what he saw, he might have learned a lesson and abandoned hope on the spot. For there was not one enemy, but three, and each the greater, each the father of the other. And each one wanted the blood and the very soul of the Rooster. And each would have his day: the Basilisk, then Cockatrice, then great Wyrm himself. This, the Rooster might have known, was only the beginning!