The Second Book of the Dun Cow: Lamentations (5 page)

Wyrm’s gross body clogs the caves through all the expanses under the mantle of the earth. His tail from the southern sea to the northernmost pole. He lies beneath the feet of the Animals, those whom Chauntecleer rules and those who wander the forests and the plains and the arctic tundra.

It was a piece of Wyrm that had extruded itself into Russel’s crypt.

Now then. There lives on the marshy tussocks north of the boreal forests a Plain Brown Bird. As she considers it, she is of no account. Thus have the other Birds judged her, and she has never found an argument to counter them.

At the crack of the early winter, all the other Birds hurried their migrations. They took to the air, Geese thrusting their long necks forward and forming gracious V’s to the south. Flocks of lesser Birds flew up in shapes of revolving clouds. The clouds stretched and broke and hastened south. Terns and Plovers and a hundred varieties of loveliness all left the Plain Brown Bird behind unaccompanied, for she has always been crippled by timidity. Least is her name, though no one has ever asked it of her.

She flies on blunt wings, trimming her flight with an attenuated tail. She’s dressed in drab. And wisdom has taught her not to bewail her state, but to accept it. Least is reconciled. She will be a spinster till the end.

Presently she finds a meager nourishment by piercing the frosty sedges with a long, narrow bill. This is her single tool, slightly curved and needle-sharp.

And then today—pleasure upon impossible pleasure—the plain brown Bird begins to hear a music. She twitches into the air to find the source of the music. It is a melody that tugs at her heart.

She should refuse it. Tenderness is nothing she deserves. But a yearning makes her break her rules.

She flies the tundra, following the sound.

It ascends in a single, easeful voice, a cordial song that seems to give itself freely away, both to the earth and to the turning spheres—and to a misfitting Bird.

Least smiles. Airborne, she discovers a crack in the tundra, a rocky defile, and descends, and the music grows louder. When she alights on the edge of the crack she feels a warming steam arising, comforting her.

Then the melody turns into words, and the words are love. It is a love song.

The words sing, “Plain” and “Brown” and “Oh, so lonesome” and “Come.”

The words strike her heart and she tingles with fear and with desire.

Immediately the Singer sings a gentle and personal sentence: “I overcome fear.”

If she could, Least would fly away. For she knows the truth. She cannot be the object of anyone’s love.

But the beautiful voice sings, “I know your name. I will call you by your name.”

No, the Plain Brown Bird does not fly away. In spite of herself, she bows and listens like a communicant.

“The lady is Least. Come, my dearest Least, and I will make you mine.”

The plain brown Bird realizes that she is crying.

“Nor,” the Singer modulates his melody until it is a silken thread. “Nor is it too much to say that I love you.”

He lies! Who can love a flaw in the handiwork of God?
Least covers her face in the feathers of one blunt wing. Even in her disbelief she yearns to believe.

“Come and love me in return. It isn’t loveliness I love. I love the heart deep within its plain brown dress.”

Least murmurs, “Who are you?”

“Come and I will ask nothing—except a kiss. What is a kiss? The pressure of your marvelous bill. Give it away, and you have lost nothing. Give it to me, and the touch alone will make my beloved lovely.”

Spinster Bird. Drab and dull, poor spinster Bird, she releases herself to the song. She spreads her blunt wings and floats into the hole.

“Ahhhh,” the Singer sings, “she comes.”

Least descends to the stones that lie at the bottom of the defile, then enters a cleft from which the ardent heat arises. Least is beyond decisions. She is beyond thought. It is her soul that answers. Below the stones a tunnel opens. Least flies the tunnel, unafraid of the darkness that surrounds her now.

The Singer sings a history of suffered injustices, of bitter and undeserved assaults, all of them borne courageously, sings of personal exile—and hasn’t she known exile too? She has. Least nearly bursts with pity and with solace for the one who woos her.

The song lays down the trail before her. She plumbs the depths until the voice of the Singer is immediately before her and she can feel a presence as huge as a mountain underground. Least seems to be standing inside a cathedral hallway.

The voice changes into many voices, a demanding hiss of a thousand voices. No, this isn’t lovely any more. It is not love.

“And now,” the urgent chorus commands “the kiss!”

The Plain Brown Bird is, in fact, inside the Serpent’s empty eye socket

A loud, drum-booming rhythm lifts her, carries her to the thin bone at the back of the socket.

“The Kiss!”

Least is no longer in control. She lost autonomy when her heart insisted
Follow.

“Sum Wyrm sub terra,”
the Serpent sighs. “Kiss me and set me free.”

A great force swells behind her. It drives her like a spear through the thin bone at the back of Wyrm’s eye socket, drives her until her sharp bill plunges into the mud of his brain. Corruption and gore explode backward, sending the Plain Brown Bird out of the socket like a feather on a fountain. A hard gush of blood carries her up the long tunnel and all the way to the stones at the bottom of the earth-crack. And the blood, it sighs, “Thy kissing hath killed me. All is well.”

Least’s feathers are soaked. Her throat burns. She coughs, wretches, then vomits and vomits. Her bones shiver. She wishes she were dead.

When she tries to speak, the plain brown Bird discovers that she has lost her voice.

One more calamity awaits her. In the weeks to come two Coyotes will begin to make a den on a shelf below the lip of the earth-crack. What will be left in Least to meet this new challenge? However will she be able to save them from the hell below?

Chauntecleer had chosen a residence more elegant than the Animals could ever have imagined. Instead of a ceiling, the interior space of the Hemlock soared up to the apex of a king’s high tower.

Outside and inside and sashaying round and round their grand spaces, the Hens elevated their beaks to the angles of hauteur. Oh, how they gussied about like ladies of a royal pedigree, and each chose for herself a roosting branch as accomodating as the beds of princesses.

As far as the Mice were concerned, the great hall granted them a skedaddling land as wide as all outdoors. Then, when skedaddling gave way to the need for sizzle-snoring sleep, the good earth mothered them in a fine, small pocket for a nest.

The Family Swarm of Honey Bees left the old hives and fashioned new ones in the crotches of the Hemlock’s sturdy limbs.

The Black Ants then engineered ground tunnels and bins wherein to store the winter’s provisions.

Sheep lay themselves down outside the rim of the mighty Hemlock.

Somewhere in the tree’s interior a Squirrel had built his nest of twigs and leaves. He skittered down the trunk to watch this new action below, then skittered up the trunk to frown in gloomy mediations. He thought he’d run unseen. In fact, the Weasel had heard the Squirrel’s nails scratching bark, which got his back up. He told Chauntecleer that there was a bandit above them. Chauntecleer flew through the limbs of the Hemlock until he found the nest.

“Who,” he said, “are you?”

“Who,” the Squirrel answered, “are
you?”

“Chauntecleer, captain and commander.”

“Chauntecleer, land-thief and plunderer. I was here first.”

“And you can surely stay. There’s room enough here for herds and oxen, flocks and belly-crawlers.”

“Me, I take up a whole tree. I need room!”

“You!” the Rooster crowed, “won’t have a butt to sit on once I chew it to pulp. What is your name?”

A Rooster is five times the size of a Squirrel. Grudgingly this Squirrel answered, “Ratotosk the Grey Squirrel.”

And so it was that the Society of Animals felt themselves well settled and protected.

Nation shall not lift up swords against nation,

Neither shall they learn war any more.

Pertinax the Ground Squirrel had not complained when a clutch of babbling Hens began to trample and scratch the soil above his burrow; had not complained when they busified the daylight with perpetual peckings and scratchings. Neither had he complained when Sheep of a noxious stink and squadrons of Insects bleated and buzzed and broke his sleep in his nest among the roots of the World-Tree which his family had inhabited for generations and generation past.

But now he stood erect on the mound beside his doorway, watching with dismay the bustle of immigrants, and realizing that they planned to make their homes above his own.

So sure was he of his not-complaining that he had freely, nay,
fearlessly
put the question to his wife.

Down into his passages he went, and into the bedroom where Mrs. Cobb was weaving a pallet for their long nap. “Mrs. Cobb,” he said, “you decide. Am I complaining?”

“Why, no, Mr. Cobb.”

“Right!” he said, and straightway raced up a passage to the heap of his residue dirt, where he sat and held his narrow body erect, having been assured that he was indeed a tolerant Ground Squirrel and a not-minding-the-new-neighbors neighbor—though he
did
put a rather more severe twitch to his whiskers.

Neither had Pertinax Cobb minded the proudful presence of that golden Rooster, nor the metronomic regularity of his crowing, for he valued schedules and disciplines. Besides, the tender mercies of the Bird’s midnight Matins always sent his wife into a puppyhood of peaceful dreamings.

What Pertinax
did
mind, when all at once the winter had slammed the land, was that now he could
not
go to sleep!

Pertinax the Ground Squirrel had been planning on that sleep. It was the tradition of Ground Squirrels everywhere to sink into a three-months’ slumber, which was their pleasant reward for the three months of their hard labor preparing for the frigid season. Indeed: before this migrant population arrived, Pertinax had dashed abroad, stuffing harvests into his cheek’s pouches until they bulged with prosperity, and then, back in his tunnels, pouring the foodstuffs into granaries. Moreover—before this ruck-ruckering ruckus—he had concentrated on the seeds that he and Mrs. Cobb loved the most: the winged seeds from the fallen cones of the Hemlock Tree.

“Mrs. Cobb, Mrs. Cobb!”

It was midnight. The Ground Squirrel poked his wife awake.

“What is it, Mr. Cobb?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what, Mr. Cobb?”

“Did you feel that?”

“Feel what, Mr. Cobb?”

“I think the earth quaked.”

“In fact,” Mrs. Cobb answered, “I dreamed of a bumping and a sprinkling of dust.”

“There! That’s what I’m talking about.”

“It wasn’t a dream?”

“I don’t want to complain.”

“You are a wonderful not-complainer.”

“But I can’t sleep.”

“Mr. Cobb, I am sorry for you.”

“You
sleep.”

“That too. I am sorry for that too.”

“I think some somebody just chopped off a limb of the tree.”

“My, but that is very disconcerting.”

“A limb, Mrs. Cobb. A very big limb—of the Hemlock!”

“I don’t doubt it. Nobody puzzles puzzles better than you, Mr. Cobb.”

“I am at the end of my rope. If they break our tree, what then? They break our
world.”

“Well, Mr. Cobb, I believe the time has come.”

“The time has come indeed.”

So Pertinax Cobb the Ground Squirrel betook himself to the door of his personal burrow, and hopped up onto his mound, and straightened his spine in order to complain from the highest of his height, and chittered furiously. If he couldn’t sleep, no one should sleep. If they disrespected the Hemlock, they must depart the Hemlock. One Creature—it was the Rooster, by the hearing of it—went flapping off into the night.

But no one else stirred. Snozzle-snorings from the Mice’s pocket-pouch. Sleep-clucks from the branches, and antennae-tickings from countless Instects under the ground. But not a single cackle of fear.

No one seemed to notice the Ground Squirrel’s scoldings. Except Mrs. Cobb, who loved him.

Pertelote was awake. She too had felt the earth tremor. And then, by the sudden coolness at her right wing, she felt the absence of Lord Chauntecleer.

The first had wakened her. The second caused her soul a quick disquietude, because her husband had said “Wyrm” with his old bitterness, and his flight had been angry.

A half hour later she heard someone muttering at the roots of the tree.

“By-cause Chickies sneaked away! John knows! Didn’t his burrow bust and tumble down on him? Didn’t a
Boom
bury him? And he to grub him poor self out or
die?
And what when he come up? Wasn’t nobodies what told John Double-U, ‘Come out, come out, and run away.’ Nor nobodies what said, ‘Bye-bye.’ Nor not neither a ‘Stick-it-in-your-ear.’”

Pertelote heard the Weasel scratch around the trunk of the tree, forth and back, seeking something.

“John, he smells gone-ness. And the only somebody in sight is John!”

Pertelote heard distinctly a Weasel-nose scrape against a tree root.

“Gaw!”

A Mouse said, “Step-papa? Is that you?”

There came a grunt, then a shuffling, and then a bark, “Mices! Move over!”

Three of the Brothers Mice said, “Hello, Step-papa.”

The first Mouse spoke through a yawn: “Good night.”

And a Weasel said, “Ack.”

It was during that same night that Fimbul-winter with a might slam concluded all seasons except itself. If the moon was cold, earth was colder. The fog snapped and became crystals of ice. Ice whitened the ground, creating a pale light. The clouds swept in and cloaked the universe.