The Second Book of the Dun Cow: Lamentations (10 page)

The first to emerge from the throat of the underworld, the first to gain the shelf at Rachel’s den is John Wesley Weasel.

“Inside, Coyote’s! John, he’s gots the Rooster at his back!”

“Twill! Hopsacking do what the Weasel asks!”

They do, backing into the den. Rachel herself stands guard.

“Benoni,” she says. “You too.”

But Benoni hesitates.

“Rooster! He’s not happy!”

John races down the steps to the stones below. Black-Pale stands as he stood when Chauntecleer first marched through the portal to do battle.

The Weasel pleads with him, “Is not good the Stag, he stays here. Up, Stag! And out!!”

Black-Pale gives no sign that he has heard. He stands unmoved.

“Please, please, please, pretty Stag! Is a Rooster coming!”

Failing to persuade Black-Pale, John rushes up again.

It isn’t more than a minute when the Weasel and Rachel and Benoni hear a mighty bugling below.

Then, galloping up the steps of the defile, there come the second two Creatures out of darkness. Chauntecleer rides the Stag’s neck. His weapons, his spurs both Gaff and the Slasher, rake Black-Pale’s flesh. John Wesley shrinks from an angry crow, “I am for you, John Wesley!”

Benoni cries, “Do and do for
you!”
He steps off the shelf and begins to descend the steps.

Black-Pale’s tongue is thrust out between his teeth. His head is thrown back, his nose in the air. With his antlers he is trying to unseat the Rooster. He does not see where he’s going.

Benoni cries, “Do for you!”

Rachel races down to Benoni in order to bring him back.

Then the Stag’s right fore-hoof comes down on the young Coyote, snapping his spine. The little Coyote falls several steps lower then lies still as if he were sleeping.

His mother wails, “Benoni! Oh, Benoni!” then throws herself over the ledge. The Stag’s hooves trample her too. Then she lies beside her son, licking his face. There isn’t a mark on him. But the small Coyote is dead. Then Rachel, his mother, sighs and gives up her ghost.

Running the tundra, Black-Pale-On-A-Silver-Field manages finally to dislodge the Rooster.

“And why mayn’t Chalcedony bear a child as Hens do? As any Hen might?”

In the evening before he had departed the Hemlock with the glorious Lord Chauntecleer as the crown in his antlers, Black-Pale-on-a-Silver-Field knelt before his daughter. He nuzzled her for affection and farewell.

De La Coeur had whispered, “Papa, who will watch over me when you are gone?”

The Fawn had regained her health. Her coat was smooth. And bright were her large, liquid eyes.

“Those who have nursed you,” her father answered. “They have been kind souls, every one.”

Sitting close to this darling family was the Hen Chalcedony. Though Pertelote had ministered most the ailing De La Coeur, it was Chalcedony who had sat by the Fawn all the days and all the nights of her convalescence.

Now she thought to herself,
Why mayn’t Chalcedony be the one, she as loves the precious bairn and kissed clean her rheumy eye—?

The skinny Hen clapped her beak closed, for she realized that she’d spoken her wishes out loud. Chalcedony shrank back, burning with embarrassment.

But Black-Pale swung his head in her direction, his sixteen-point antlers limning arabesques against the dusk.

“Beg pardon, sir, oh sir,” she clucked a cluck of shame. “‘Twas but a slip of the tongue. ‘Twas a pure perversity.”

But the Stag kept considering the Hen. Then he said, “Thou?”

The Fawn De La Coeur said, “She tells me the tales that make me sleep, Papa. And I dream good endings for the stories.”

“Aye,” the Stag said after a moment, “Thou.” His voice was royal, but the Hen did not recoil because of his next words: “You shall have a father’s lasting gratitude if you consent to befriend my daughter till I come home again.”

And so it had been arranged. For a time (and maybe, please, a longer time?), the anemic Chalcedony had her child.

But the child’s father never came home again.

Pertelote had never doubted that her husband must spend days accomplishing his mission. Yet, two weeks were almost more than she could bear. It wasn’t only that she missed him now. She had been missing him ever since he’d lost sight in one eye and had withdrawn into mystery. And Chauntecleer had taken his challenge to Wyrm as a Rooster crippled.

Two weeks. But Pertelote’s distress made it seem a month.

She couldn’t sleep. She spent the midnight hours awake on her roost, watching the Beetle Lazara doing her slow duty below, playing the part of a Dung Beetle.

Lazara wore a black babushka and black coverlets over her softer parts. From dusk to dawn she shaped the Animal’s waste into balls three times her size, then rolled them with her backward with her back legs to the woods. She who had been capable of digging through stone she dug through the iron of Fimbul-winter to bury the Animals’ dreck.

Pertelote took some comfort from her sister’s presence.

On the dot of every midnight the cowled Beetled paused and said, “My Lady.”

And the Hen answered with the same grave formality, “My Lady.”

Each kept company with the other.

But by the sixteenth night Pertelote could no longer give herself over to her wasting apprehension. She had been measuring the stockpiles of food, how quickly they were diminishing. On that sixteenth night the Hen was hectored by a waking dream in which the apparition of her agate-eyed husband stood on the wind. He expression was dead-dull. His coral comb had become a grey slug.

At midnight Lazara said: “My Lady.”

Lady!
The title scathed Pertelote’s spirit. She opened her wings and sank softly to the ground then crept from the Hemlock into the rigid winter. She flew south, the direction her husband had gone on his nighttime flights.

In time a ghostly light presented itself above the southern horizon. Flying closer, Pertelote saw that the glowing exhalations hovered over the length and breadth of a great black island, a
floating
island, so it seemed, because its surface heaved with every heave of the ocean’s waves.

Chauntecleer! Is
this
the sea? Is
this
the source of your “wisdom?”

If Fimbul-winter could possibly have gradations, here it seemed more paralyzing than anywhere near the Hemlock.

Coldness of
the
Cold. Darkness of
the
Dark. The dyings of Death itself.

Yet even under the bitterest conditions the Animals were able to survive since adversity strengthened love, and calamity tightened the bonds among them. But Pertelote feared that it was survival itself that Wickedness sought to shred—by shredding the bonds of love. Therefore, new fears heaped upon old fears. Pertelote thought that neither famine nor the Fimbul-winter were the worst disasters about to befall the Animals.

Where, exactly, where had Chauntecleer gone? Where was this tunnel through which Chauntecleer meant to brave great Wyrm in his dungeons? And how did he hope to defeat Hatred with but two weapons?

He had chosen to characterize himself as Grandeur after Glory. Oh, God, would that this were true.

But Pertelote, trust your husband. He
has
done great things in the past. Can’t the fault be yours? Haven’t you woven a cloak of your own suspicions? Wait upon him. Trust him as much as you have always loved him. It was he who took you into his community, he who married you, he with whom you bore your children.

Chauntecleer, come home again. I need no victory to honor you. Exhausted, come home again. Defeated, come home again.

Unto his spirit, unto herself, now sitting on the battlefield, Pertelote began to sing:

“My Lord, what is

This poor world’s blisse,

That changeth as the moon?

That winter’s day

You went away

Was blacked before the noon.

I heard you say,

‘Farwell. Oh, nay!

Depart me not so soon.

Why said ye so?

Where did ye go?

Alas! What have ye done?

My weal is woe.

He cannot know

Who loveth two, not one.

Thou hast bestowed

Upon my soul

The wimple of a nun—”

Suddenly Pertelote stopped the song and listened. She heard something like ice grinding between herself and the sea.

Next the wind blew from the waters a loathsome odor. Pertelote gagged. She turned aside and retched.

Again, louder, came that rasping on ice—no, on stone! Then the stone fractured and cracked like a gunshot.

Pertelote ducked. She peeped across the ground. Shards of stone clattered backward through a Beast’s hind legs. A Beast of outlandish proportions. Large. He was fifty pounds large, with massive forepaws, legs long and thick with fur, a voluminous bush of a tail, and a mini-sized head!

Pertelote breathed the name of the Beast’s race: “Wolverine.”

Larcenous Wolverines who prowled only in the dark of night, never letting himself to be seen. At the least little noise, these Creatures would dissolve, as agile as a shadow.

Because the Animals had ever only knew the fetid Wolverine’s stink, they called him, “Mr. Fart.”

Now, among the shards of stone, Pertelote saw the silhouette of a small bone spinning away. Then another. Then the Wolverine pulled back from the cavity with rib bones in his jaws. These he broke in a single bite and swilled their marrow. The Woverine rammed his snout into the cavity and brought up a skull.

Pertelote whispered, “Russel, my Fox of Good Sense.”

And the Wolverine vanished.

It has always been an article of John Wesley’s faith that ”Thinkings buggars a blaggard’s brains.” Nevertheless, here is the Weasel—thinking.

For the first time in his life the Weasel met an ending.

He stands beside the poor Woodie Coyote, both of them staring at the corpses of a mama and her son, and John was filled with mighty emotions. They drove him up and out of the rocky defile and sent him racing across the tundra, following a bloody trail. Maybe he would catch up and fight the Rooster himself. Maybe he would curse the murderous Rooster.

Instead, the Weasel finds Black-Pale returning alone.

“Oh, Stag,” says John.

Black-Pale is weary, the sides of his neck slashed.

“Stag?” John repeats as the Stag approaches him then passes him by. The noble Deer walks with his head hung low. He is doubling the bloody tracks of his going—and keeps going until he is out of sight.

The Weasel’s bowels twist into a knot: rage and pity and hysteria. He leaves Black-Pale and bullets the freezing red trail after Chauntecleer.

But the blood ran out before the Rooster is found.

John keeps running, but hopelessly. Finally he loses purpose altogether, and here now he sits—thinking. He is meditating on endings. This grim wilderness seems to be the end of the earth. No bush, no hummock, no outcropping rock, not so much as a ridge of ice to break the visible reaches of the wasteland.

Endings, for there are only so many Critters left on earth, and few at that.

Endings: one by one the Critters will perish. Could be
all
the Critters would die. Then the stars would turn and turn silently—no eyes to see them, nor no voices to cry out.

John Wesley shrivels. Finally his own little life would wink out and then the universe would be deserted altogether, wind and stone and the ice alone.

“Hey! Ho!” The Weasel tries to make the phrase a shout. “Double-u’s gives your butts a hundred cuts.” Then he says, apropos of nothing, “Please pass the sugar, yo!”

No good. His taunt is a mere puff in his mouth, blowing feathers.

Endings.

The Fawn De La Coeur raised her head. She opened her nose and sniffed the wind.

“Papa?”

She stood up and walked across the great hall of the Hemlock. She paused a moment, then went out through the silvery boughs and into the brittle weather.

“Papa? Papa?”

Chalcedony rose and flapped her wings and tumble-flew after her ward.

De La Coeur was trotting toward the woods.

“O best beloved,” Chalcedony called. “‘Tis a troublous thing, to go alone.”

But the Fawn out-walked the frail Hen and disappeared among the trees.

Chalcedony pushed her poor self forward. “Ma’am?” she cried back to the Hemlock, “help me! My bairn’s gone barmy!”

Then she too was breasting the prickly briars at the edge of the woods. Chalcedony’s head had been picked bald. Her feathers gave no protection against the thorns. But what was that when her charge had lost all sense and was endangering herself? And if she, Chalcedony should catch caught up to De La Coeur, what would she do then? Weakness chasing weakness.

Then Chalcedony heard her Fawn’s voice, pleading, “Where is my papa? When is he coming home?”

De La Coeur stopped, her nostrils flaring. The words came all from one place. The skinny Hen, gasping at she stumbled around a last tree trunk, saw Creature beside De La Coeur. It was he that she was questioning, “What have you done with my papa?”

John Wesley Weasel. It had been his that the Fawn had smelled. John sat in misery, shaking his head.

He said, “Oh, poor, poor little daughter, your papa—he is hurt. John, he saw his body-hurts. John thinks, might-be his heart is hurt. Oh, little girl. John thinks your papa, he is not coming back. Is two Coyotes killed.” John’s voice was thick with misery. “Kicked dead,” he said. “Not saying the who nor the what did kick them dead. Sad, sad, sad news. By-cause….” John cannot finish the sentence.

De La Coeur began to cry.