The Book of the Dun Cow (6 page)

A cluster of trees showed where the cove was to their right. Between them and the trees pumped the dark brown Liver-brook, thick with water. Mundo Cani never paused, but took the brook all in a single leap, touched land on the other side, and galloped. He ran with the river. Chauntecleer was surprised to find that so much water and so great a current, choked with so many logs, branches, and shunt, made not a sound at all.

Then Mundo Cani sailed into the cluster of trees.

Not the Dog, but the Rooster was breathing hard as they stared at the jam of wood spinning in the cove. Tree limbs from above
were
holding the flimsy island in place; but they wouldn't much longer, because the tree limbs and the island were untwisting one from the other. And then there would be no hope for it at all.

“She said that she tied them to the branches,” Chauntecleer panted. “Can you see them? Can you see them? What do you see?”

“What are they?”

Chauntecleer had forgotten to give the Dog any reason for their trip. “Her children. The Mouse's children.”

“Oh, Master of the Universe!” Mundo Cani began to weep on the spot.

“Not now!” the Rooster barked. “Look for them. What do you see?”

It was like trying to spy a friend on a merry-go-round. This mass of wood had many hidden parts to it, all of it going in circles. The more Chauntecleer stared, the more he didn't see what was really there. Wood was there. Branches, as the Mouse had said; twigs, stems, limbs, leaves, branches: broken and whole, naked and barked, rotten and dry and white above the water. But the Rooster began to see other things. Bones. Shattered ribs. Choppy, dry fingers clutching at the air. Pieces of crushed skull. A spinning cemetery of bones; and for just a moment it made him afraid.

“There!” shouted the Dog. His vision was remarkable. “What's that?”

Chauntecleer saw the branches again. “Where?”

“There.” His nose turned circles, pointing.

“Mundo Cani Dog! There they are!”

It was a bird's nest crammed tightly into a dense part of the branches, a mere fist of twigs. The nest was not tied to the branches; but the children were tied into the nest. Many strands of hair had been patiently tied, crisscross, over the top of the nest; and Chauntecleer could see bulges in the webbing, bodies bumping it.

He leaped to a low branch on the tree beside him, found his balance, then leaped to a higher branch. This way he climbed the tree to the place where it leaned out over the water. Now he could walk along a limb, flipping his feathers to keep balance. The limb sank underneath his weight. His wings went out, but he didn't fall. By his beak and his claws he grappled his way down droopy branches, until he hung, head down, directly over the turning island.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a part of the shore which he had not seen before. There was something white there, like a stone or a pillow, or salt. But in the middle of it was a burning patch of brilliant color. There was no time for the looking. He dropped down.

With the sharp edge of his beak Chauntecleer ripped the hair from the nest. Seven tiny Mice squeezed down into the farthest corner, terrified. He stuck his wing into the nest; that didn't help matters any.

Chauntecleer struggled with his own impatience at tiny bits of stupidity. Simply, they did not know that they should climb this monstrous wedge to safety, and they would have to be told.

“Listen to me, children,” Chauntecleer said. “Your mother is beautiful. She has a coat as warm as sleep. She has a dry place in which to sing to you. But do please listen to me: She isn't here. And the dry place isn't here.”

Perhaps not his words themselves, perhaps his tone and the steady look in his eye, spoke to them. For they looked back at the Rooster, somewhat sadder but less afraid.

“So she sent me to you with this message. Come. Come closer to hear it.”

One did wriggle closer. Chauntecleer's heart beat violently.

“She said, ‘A Rooster will give his wing to you.' This wing. And I'm the Rooster. Forgive me: I have a bad voice, nothing like your mother's. But that is truly her message. And she said, ‘You, my children, must hurry to climb onto his wing.' Do, please, children, climb onto my wing.”

To Chauntecleer it seemed as if the river and the whole world were turning circles, while the thicket-island stood still. Once again, in the flash of passing, he saw white upon the shore. But then he shifted his weight; the island dipped; and not a Mouse was climbing!

“Listen. Listen to me.” The Mice were watching him; it broke his heart how much their gaze resembled their mother's. “Listen. The most important part of her message is something that only the smartest of you can understand. The others are too foolish to understand it; but one of you is much smarter than the rest. She said, ‘I am waiting for you.' Now what do you suppose that means?”

Immediately one Mouse—his pink skin so thin that his bones could be seen within—climbed onto the wing by impossibly small claws. Two more followed.

“There's the smart one!” Chauntecleer hooted, restrained. “Oh, God bless the smart one. And there's a brave one, too—braver than all the rest, God willing.
He
will know that you have to climb all the way to my back—dangerous, dangerous climb!—and he will know that you have to burrow beneath my feathers.”

So the Brave One squirmed past the Smart One, and a procession of naked children needled a Rooster's shoulder while he held himself almighty rigid. Dizzy, swallowing crow after urgent crow until he choked, counting the children before his hot eye, he held still until the last Mouse was snuggled in place—and then he exploded.

Across the nodding island, up with a wild leap, barely grabbing a branch in his claw. The island bowed and floated away. Chauntecleer's tree sank beneath his weight; the Rooster's tail touched water and was tugged by it. He said a curse word. When his other claw would not go high enough to find a grip because of the crusty mud between his legs, he said a dozen more curse words and damned the river pulling at him. There was no island, now. He hung all alone, like bait, in the middle of the cove, heavy with mud from his neck to his tail.

It was at that particular moment that his eye caught the white object on the shore. Perhaps in the desperation his senses were sharper, because he recognized it. Not salt; it was a Hen! But no Hen he had ever seen before. And the color on her was vermilion, blazing at her throat.

All at once Chauntecleer found some more energy inside of him for getting his other claw to the branch. It was wonderful how quickly that claw took hold, and how powerfully claw followed claw up the droopy branch. Into the tree he went like a whizz, across the limb, and down the trunk like a born squirrel.

“Mundo Cani, open your mouth,” he roared.

Mundo Cani opened his mouth. He wanted to put a word into it, or perhaps a whole sentence. But before he could do that, Chauntecleer stuck his head in and pecked at the tongue until it went backward into the throat.

“Gug!” said Mundo Cani Dog. And Chauntecleer said, “I understand. I understand totally, good friend. Keep your tongue where it is. I've some passengers for you.”

And hastily, but with marvelous care, he picked the Mice out of his back feathers one at a time and set them down in Mundo Cani's mouth.

“Not a very dry place,” he said to them. “And it's a certain fact that that clog in the back isn't your mother. But it's the way
to
your mother, children. Your coach! And your mother will rejoice to see you again. Dog, shut it!” he said.

The Dog did, and his eyes began to water.

“If you sneeze, leatherhead,” the Rooster roared, “I'll plug your nose and then it will blow up like a balloon!”

Mundo Cani shook his head. That wasn't why his eyes were watering.

Now Chauntecleer scrambled down the oily shore, to the place where he had seen the Hen.

She was lying unconscious on her back, her small claws balled on top of her. At her throat her feathers were crimson and beautiful. But her tail feathers were lapped in water, and she was wet to the roots. Her beak was open. But she was not dead. And she was so beautiful.

Now Chauntecleer the Ready did a most unready thing: He sat down and stared.

Perhaps if he had first seen her while she walked among a flock of Hens, clucking and pouting, this might not have happened to him. But he saw her in her weakness. He saw her lying open, where anyone in the world could have come by and hurt her. He saw her loose, sleeping, and without protection whatsoever. He saw her truthful, when she was not pretending to be anything else than a purely white Hen with fire at her throat. He saw her when she didn't see him back. He saw her lovely.

Chauntecleer stood up. Then he sat down again. Again he stood up; he ran to find Mundo Cani, but the Dog had gone; so the Rooster returned and sat down—close enough to touch her, should he work up the nerve. Well, the fact is, Chauntecleer the Rooster wanted to wake her up. But he didn't know how. He was embarrassed. Her sleep embarrassed him.

He tried a hoarse little crow. A cough, really. But the Hen remained still. If she didn't notice the rain, which fell everywhere upon her stomach and wings, how could she notice the clearing of one's throat?

So Chauntecleer apologized aloud several times, and then he crowed. He crowed a round, loud, morning crow—lauds, with the full flapping of his wings and the thrusting of his head. Then he watched her and saw her eyes roll underneath their lids. But that was all.

He was in an anguish.

“I can't carry you,” he pleaded. “I can barely walk. You
have
to wake up!”

Then he reached out and touched her. He snapped back, afraid to be caught in the act. But it did no good.

After a long debate with himself, he took courage and shook her. Her head lolled back and forth. He shook her again, and this time she took a sharp breath and began to cough.

“Glory, glory, glory,” Chauntecleer mumbled, but he got away from her and watched.

The Hen rolled over onto her stomach with the coughing and slowly stood up. She had to push at the ground in order to stand, because she was so weak; but she tottered and stood. Chauntecleer unconsciously patted his wings together. Her eyes took on a light. Around at the river she looked, around at the weather as if she didn't understand either one. Then she looked, suddenly, at Chauntecleer himself. And the Hen screamed.

It was a scream of white terror.

Chauntecleer's stomach turned immediately to water and his legs trembled. “Don't,” he said, still patting his poor wings together and hopping from leg to leg.

But the Hen only screamed the more—crazy, unaccountable screaming. Her mouth wide open, she turned and tried to run away. But it was a sadly broken run, with her wings slapping at the ground. She kept slipping toward the river.

Chauntecleer couldn't go after her; he felt too guilty. But he couldn't stand still and watch her pain and do nothing—especially because he
did
feel guilty. So he said, “Oh, please, don't,” and hoped with all his heart that she would stop of her own accord.

She didn't. She came treacherously close to the current. Her screaming took on syllables and resolved into a single word, repeated again and again without meaning and without end. “Cockatrice!” she was screaming so full of terror: “Cockatrice! Cockatrice! Cockatrice!”

Chauntecleer could stand it no longer. Every instinct in him was appalled to see her so careless of her life. In spite of himself he began to run after her. Nor was his run any better than hers. He, too, stumbled on account of his mud cast; but he ran with a purpose.

He caught up with the Hen. With his beak he grabbed the back of her neck, and he wrapped his wings around her. She fought him wildly, flailing her wings and beating him on the sides of his head; but he didn't fight back. He just held her as tightly as he could. And together they began to slip into the river.

She turned her head. With a ghastly determination the Hen tried to pierce the Rooster's eyes with her beak. But Chauntecleer put down his head, letting her cut his neck, and he started to cry. Not for any pain he cried, but because he was exhausted; and because the weather had been so damnably careless; and because she was hitting him at all. He held her tightly, and he cried.

Then, as they churned in the water, Chauntecleer's cast of mud began to melt and to break up. Chunks of it floated off, or sank; and his wound opened again and began to bleed. His blood colored the water.

It was the blood which made the Hen gutter in her throat and finally stop her screaming: for in a moment she was staring at her own feathers, where it stained her. Then she searched the Rooster before her, gazed at his chest and stomach, where there was no longer the grey mud but golden feathers and a bleeding wound. She closed her mouth and looked stricken in her soul. “You're hurt,” she said strangely. “You can be hurt. Oh, look how badly you are hurt.”

Chauntecleer was able to pull her to shore, still holding her tight, tighter than ever. And the two of them lay down in the rain for a while. Both of them were trembling violently. Both of them were crying.

The rain never stopped.

Sometimes it was no more than a chill mist sitting on the air; other times it came down suddenly, like an angry fist, and the Coop shuddered against it. The sky stood iron above. And the weird wind was ever out of the east.

The trees lost their leaves, but there was no beauty in it this year, nor any color but rot. It was as if they had simply given up to the moisture and the cold, and forgotten life. Nor was there any crackling of dry leaves, nor the sharp scent—clean and musty—of falling leaves, nor the blue bite of the year going out. Damp foliage was stripped from the trees by an everlasting rain. The naked trees shivered. That was all.

But if mud and a bleak season lay all around, then Chauntecleer's Coop was a warm, blessed island in the middle of it all. This little company of creatures was proof against dreariness, and together they were very happy.

On account of the strange weather, they lived in an unending twilight; yet the Rooster must have had a rising and setting sun on the inside of him, for lauds and prime he always crowed on time; terce, sext, and none he observed ever on the button; vespers and compline he kept as they should be kept—and his small society was kept very well that way.

Chattering and motion and light and warmth filled the Coop, as if it were a little furnace in a dark land. Food went into stomachs; gossip attended every ear; and the good cheer of the morning made waking a pleasant thing, while friendship—which filled the evenings—made sleep a good conclusion. The creatures were happy, because they were busy with good and important matters:

Four adults and seven children needed constant care, for they were convalescing. And thirty Hens, a Weasel occasionally visiting, a contingent of Black Ants, a Fox of Good Sense (Lord Russel by name), and several others were all more than willing to give these sick ones that care.

Four adults: Chauntecleer himself healed more quickly than anyone else. This was not just because he had so strong a constitution, one well able to knit even the most open wound. But this was also because his spirits were so high. Chauntecleer laughed enormously and often, these days. He talked much; and he would talk on any topic available, to anyone who asked a question. And, given more than two ears listening to his words with earnest attention, the Rooster began to fancy himself a philosopher. He stared at the ceiling and spoke grandly of God and of the ways of the Deity; he disclosed the hidden patterns of his effective rule; most particularly, he discoursed on beauty—female beauty—its attraction to the male—the special appeal of the color crimson—especially when crimson is placed, by nature, like a blossom at the throat of a Hen. And he smiled in his sleep these nights, Chauntecleer did, because his dreams were all good. And he worked trills and cadenzas into his crows. And he healed very quickly.

Ah, beauty! There was a thirty-first Hen in Chauntecleer's Coop—she of the burning, crimson throat. Her name was Pertelote (though Chauntecleer seldom reduced his naming her, or made it anything less than the full: the Beautiful Pertelote). She healed more slowly than he did because her illness went deeper, because this land was strange to her, and for another reason: The Beautiful Pertelote almost never spoke about herself. Not to Chauntecleer, who so often found cause to sit next to her; not to Beryl, who wanted so badly to help the Lady, but who didn't know what to do since the Lady wouldn't tell her of her hurt. To be sure, the Lady talked.

“My Lady slept poorly last night,” Beryl would say privately to her. “I mark how she whimpered and wept in her sleep. And once she cried out. Dreams can be doused, Lady. Please, ma'am, let me give you a potion before tonight. Or tell me what your dreams are that I can make the proper mix.”

But the Beautiful Pertelote would speak of things vastly different from what Beryl had in mind: “Beryl, have you always lived in this Coop?”

“Aye, ma'am.” A brief pause for the Lady's wanderings. And then: “Is it your breathing? Does your breathing torture you?”

“Then you have always known the Rooster of this household?”

“That I have, ma'am.”

“So golden his feathers, and redder than fine coral his comb. His nails whiter than the lily flower. Has he always borne his head so proudly?”

Beryl blinked. “That is his manner, ma'am.”

“Ah.”

“What will my Lady eat? Please you, ma'am, you must eat. If you'll tell me what likes you, I'll grind a little mustard seed into it, that you may mend. Or will you tell me where the pain lies inside of you?”

“Has he always been a Rooster?”

“Ma'am?”

“Has this Chauntecleer always been a Rooster? Was he ever anything else beside a Rooster? Was he ever but the
image
of a Rooster?”

“Forgive me, ma'am. Let me get you a drop of water.”

“You don't understand what I ask you.”

“My Lady excites herself. She breathes too fast, and that is her pain. Let me bring you a wee cup. I'll warm it with an herb or two.”

“Beryl?”

“Ma'am?”

“You are very kind to me.”

“Ma'am.”

Beryl had come to love the Beautiful Pertelote immediately. But, finally, the poor Hen had simply to guess what ailed her Lady, and she had to mix her medicines without a true knowledge of the pain. She used nard mostly, for that seemed most to ease the Lady. But
seeming
is not
certainty
, and that distressed the anxious nurse. Pertelote would speak about herself to no one.

Not even to Chauntecleer. Chauntecleer had to learn what he could about her past and her arrival in his land from the third victim in this Coop-shaped hospital. And even the information which he gathered from the Wee Widow Mouse was next to nothing.

The Wee Widow Mouse and her seven children had a dry room all to themselves. They had moved into Ebenezer Rat's old nest beneath the floorboards. There they found food, furniture, and bedding enough to make them peaceful and to help them heal nearly as fast as Chauntecleer.

The Widow had had dreadful dreams too, at first. Some of the Hens had supposed these dreams to have come out of the air, from the evil fumosity which still murked through Nezer's tunnels. But the words which the Mouse said during her dreams had nothing to do with the Rat. Rather, they were spoken to a husband who was not there, and they described things which the Hens had never seen before. Soon the dreams passed, and the Mouse settled down to being a mother, apologizing many times a day for her seven children. The tiny Mice figured that every Chicken's wing in the world was made for climbing into. Hens woke up with the Widow's children snuggled under their feathers.

Chauntecleer could get the Widow to talk about her children anytime. But every time he turned the conversation to her trip downriver, he saw all over again the staring little Mouse whom he first met in an open field.

“But why would you take that trip?” he would ask in the middle of another sentence. “What could make you do such a thing?”

Then the Mouse would grow silent. Her body would seem to shrink; and she would only look at him. She would step backward, as if there were a punishment coming to her from somewhere. And when he talked softly, assuring her again and again of his kind thoughts toward her, the look would only change, filling up with many questions as eyes fill up with tears.

All that Chauntecleer could patch together was that it had been a long, long, dangerous ride. The trip had started out in sudden panic. Nobody had planned on it; therefore nobody had planned
for
it (although, Chauntecleer thought, the Wee Widow must have acted wonderfully fast, because he remembered how skillfully the hair had been woven over the bird's nest). All of the women on the many branch-boats launched were strangers to one another. And when the branches were snatched by the current, some of the women were drowned straightaway, because they had no experience with water or with wood, and because one did not know how to help the other. Fear separated them. In the end there had been, besides the Hen, whom the Widow was now so grateful to know, two other women on the Widow's branches; but one had died of certain wounds during the night. The other might still be alive somewhere, but that was doubtful. She had gone raving mad one day, skittering all over the branches and chattering nonsense until she announced that she was going home; and she dived into the water. The Widow had not seen her again—not even to come up for air. She had been given a kind of hopeless courage by that drama, to think nothing, speak nothing, do nothing, all on account of her children. On the next day her branches were caught by the reaching arms.

This was, of course, not much for the Rooster to know. And it didn't come all at once. Over many days and with several tricks he learned this information from the Wee Widow. But every time he said, or even hinted, “Why? Why did you take the trip at all?” the Widow went deadly silent, totally ignorant of the importance of causes to rulers who make decisions. Instead, her eyes returned the “Why?” to
him
, and neither did he have an answer. So much the philosopher he was not; and his own ignorance before her eyes hurt him.

After their first meeting, the Wee Widow Mouse never again mentioned her husband or his death or the Terebinth Oak. That was the only picture which Chauntecleer had of anything
before
the trip, and he didn't understand it at all.

The fourth victim in the Coop hospital took the longest time of all to heal. Even Pertelote was breathing better—her cough gone, her breath able to handle a song now and again—before this one healed. This one moaned much in his pain. He moaned at the level of a shout. And he shouted his moans at any given ascension of the sun, but most especially at night.

When all the Coop had settled into sleep, this one would have his most stabbing pains: “Ignore it!” he would suddenly moan. “Put it out of your minds! Beryl, bring me no water! It is too much a burden for the least of you to consider what I am enduring; and I would not have the least of you suffer my suffering. Not a drop, Beryl! Not a moist handkerchief! But sleep, sleep on.”

And should one or another of the sleepers happen accidentally to awaken, this mourner would moan: “Wait! Be patient! Patience you gentle folk have in abundance. Wait—for I am going outside in a little. I'll carry this torment out to the weather. But you—you sleep with the peace which God has given to you.”

Then he would duly step outside of the Coop; and there he would bellow his moan with the quietness of a cannon: “MAROOOOOONED!”

Mundo Cani's problem was that tiny Mice had bitten tiny pieces out of the roof of his cavernous mouth—not to mention a cramp in his tongue.

But, ah, beauty! None of this moaning ever awakened Chauntecleer from his good dreams, so joyful had the cock become. And let it be unwritten what grief such oblivious rejection caused a Dog.