The Book of the Dun Cow (17 page)

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.

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, fatuous 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.”

“I have.”

“And perhaps my husband will die for his choice.”

“Even so,” he said. “We fight against a mystery.”

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