The Book of the Dun Cow (16 page)

But the Rooster did not choose to know. He turned his face and crowed.

How Chauntecleer crowed then!

He ripped his eyes from this Cockatrice he had never seen before. He heard one low, guttural laugh below the hissing. Then he turned attention to his warriors and crowed with a will.

The battle began.

Over the wall the Red Ants streamed, like pouring sand. They went among the Basilisks and bit. It was a stinging bite; but every Ant, when he had bitten flesh, died. Yet his body clung to the place where he had bitten. The serpents writhed. The hissing became a screaming and a curse. They waited no longer. Serpents flowed forward to meet the attack.

Now the warriors of size burst over the wall, crying, galloping, roaring, raging. Great animals raised a battle cry. They tossed their heads. They thundered their hoofs among the serpents; black blood spurted onto the land. But the larger serpents doubled themselves with taut violence; they fired themselves into the air, arrows; they flung their bodies like ropes around the necks of these animals. They squeezed tight until the necks broke and the noses ran red blood.

Small animals took the serpents into their mouths and whipped their heads back and forth to snap the backs of the enemy; but then they spun in circles, shrieking, as the serpents' poison burned through their bodies. The birds swooped down from the air, vicious claws open, piercing, breaking the flesh of the serpents. The Foxes beat left and right with sticks, leaping backward whenever a serpent drew near enough to touch. Their sticks dripped black blood and smoked. The Foxes were quick. They used their tails to turn corners at a sharp angle. When a serpent reared at them, they snapped their tails left, then left with their whole bodies, and the passing stick cut another in two.

But the Basilisks made sharp points of their own tails. They sprang from the earth and sailed through the air tail first like darts. They stabbed the hearts of many creatures. The smallest serpents stung furry animals between their toes; then these animals would curl into shivering balls and plead for someone to chop their feet away. Others clawed at their own skulls until the skin flapped, because the poison had ascended to their brains.

The Sheep had thick, woolen protection over all their bodies. But their eyes were open. The Basilisks flew at their eyes.

The Otters fought together. The Weasels fought, each one of them, alone. But the Weasels fought! Most furious and deadly and courageous of all. So fast their sudden speed across the ground, so quick their cut and their retreat, that the serpents could not watch for them.

The Rabbits were there: That alone was their courage. They died easily under the serpents' bite, legs jerking as they did.

The battle was a long one. The field ran wet with blood both black and red, so that the animals slipped in it, and some who lost their footing came to grief.

Oh, there was a screaming and a busy grunting on every hand across the plain. Animals went forward with their shoulders hunched, their heads down, their eyes stern and dirty. Everywhere the serpents slithered, hissed, and bit, innumerable. And Chauntecleer heard it all from the top of his Coop. He saw it all from his high place. The tears broke from his eyes, and he wept.

But yet he crowed, and he crowed as though his heart would break. Hatred, God's curse, sorrow, and Godspeed he crowed together in a constant, burning beauty. The Crows Potens. And never once, never once in all that time, did he take his eyes from the battlefield.

Then a small figure came to the top of the wall. He came from the bloody plain. Once on the wall, he turned and stared at the fighting. He was breathing hard, winded. But soon his breath came in strange jerks. His whole body began to quiver and shake. After a moment he threw back his head, and it could be seen that his mouth was wide open. It was John Wesley Weasel. And he was laughing.

“Ooo,” he laughed. “Is going, going! Cut for cut! Kill for kill! Serpents wants fighting? Hoopla! Ha, Ha!
Gets
fighting! Furry little buggers knows how to fight, hey?”

He thrust the air a couple of times with his legs. Then he turned and came down into the camp.

There was blood on the left side of his head. It matted the fur, and a swelling had closed his left eye. Also, his left ear was gone. He had lost it to the battle, and now he came for salve to stop the bleeding. If he lost too much of his blood, he would become useless to the fight, and that would have greatly irritated the Weasel.

“Ho, Chauntecleer! Ho, Lord Chauntecleer!” he called as he neared the Coop. “The Rooster sees the way it goes?”

Chauntecleer thought: Yes, I see the many dying, see the slaughter. But he was crowing heart-bloody crows and could not answer the Weasel.

“Is blackguards, Chauntecleer. Is filthy blackguards from hell. We kill them. Double-u's makes the field stink with them!”

They kill us, Chauntecleer thought behind his crowing. Savagely.

“Crow, Lord Chauntecleer!” the Weasel cried buoyantly. “Crow like judgment day! Hears you!” he cried; and he went into the Coop by the Widow's back door.

In the minute while he was gone, Chauntecleer saw a Deer go down to his knees in the vermilion mud. The Deer Nimbus raised his face to heaven, and then he died without a word. There was a serpent lodged in his breast. Chauntecleer crowed. He crowed and crowed.

Suddenly he felt the Coop tremble beneath him. Though he was crowing loudly, yet he heard a storm of shocked, painful curses come from down below. Immediately he thought of Pertelote inside. But he couldn't leave his place, and he couldn't stop his crowing.

Then John Wesley burst out of the back hole, a writhing serpent in his mouth. John Wesley slammed the serpent violently against the Coop. Again and again he whirled the serpent until the body ruptured and spewed black blood everywhere. And still he battered the ragged body with great blows. He tore at the dead flesh. He dug at it with blinding speed and with loathing.

He stood back. “God! God!” he cried, wringing his paws. Then he ran back into the hole.

This was the Basilisk which had hidden itself in Ocellata's body. This one had waited his time before sliding into the very Coop of Chauntecleer.

John Wesley came out of the hole again, tenderly bearing the body of the Wee Widow Mouse. He walked to the Coop door, and he stood there, crying: “Pertelote! Pertelote! Come and see what they have done!”

He cried: “Chauntecleer, this is what they are doing. What does Mice do? Mice cleans in the spring. Mice wears aprons and sweeps. But the damned—! The damned—!” He said no more.

Pertelote came to the door. She took the dead Widow from the Weasel.

He said: “See what they are doing.”

He stood and watched while Pertelote found a place for the Widow within the Coop. Then he filled his lungs to cracking, and he screamed: “Do and do and do! John Wesley will do for you!”

In a flash he had cleared the ground between the Coop and the wall. Up and over the wall he sped. He leaped the trench and threw himself bodily into the war.

How the Weasel fought then!

Here was a serpent raising its head. John Wesley shot by and took the head with him. Here a serpent flew through the air. John Wesley darted off the ground, caught it; when they hit the ground again, the serpent was dead, bleeding at the eyes. Here was a tangle of serpents all leeched to a Fox's back. With a cry John Wesley pounced. He snapped and slaughtered them all. John Wesley was faster and more fierce than fire. He pierced through the battlefield crying, “Do and do and do!” On the left hand he killed a hundred as if they were paper. On the right he killed five hundred. Many, many perished before him. But he was not enjoying his carnage. He was enraged. “Do and do and do for what you have done!”

The animals saw his stark fury, and they took courage. They roared. They turned, every one of them, and pressed a wild attack toward the river.

The serpents hissed and tried to meet this thundering wall.

The river belched forth bales of ready Basilisks. But the animals were convinced: Serpents could die! As one mighty beast, with John Wesley at its head, the animals came forward killing. Dying and killing.

Chauntecleer crowed. He crowed lustily. He stood on the tips of his toes. He stretched his neck and crowed almighty power to his warriors.

“Children!
” Another voice! Another scream not Chauntecleer's!

Suddenly the Rooster was gaping. He saw his mirror on the other side of the field. He saw the scaly, serpentine Cockatrice.

“Children!
” Cockatrice put out his wide wings and lunged into the air. Higher and higher he circled, his tail curling out behind him—ascending until he was at a point above the fighting Weasel. Then he dived.

“John Wesley Weasel!” Chauntecleer shrieked.

The Weasel dodged. But Cockatrice only skimmed the ground and rose up again on his great wings. Again he gained height, then stooped and dived again at the Weasel. He aimed his tail from underneath his body like a stinger.

John Wesley scrambled. He raced back and forth. There was no fighting for him now—only the running to escape.

Down came Cockatrice, a bolt of lightning. His tail opened a wound on the Weasel's side; and again he soared up to the white sky.

The Weasel was busy running. The battlefield was nothing but flat open spaces. No place to hide. No time to dig. Just running, dodging, and running again—while Cockatrice screamed out of the sky yet a third time. Suddenly the Weasel felt very tired. He thought that he would stop running soon.

Animals and Basilisks both had ceased their fighting. Basilisks because their numbers had been decimated; those left were slipping toward the river. Animals because they were horrified by the scene before them and helpless.

On a whim Chauntecleer looked to his right. There, far away across the plain, he saw Mundo Cani coming, head low, beating the earth with his feet, running. “Oh, run, Dog!” the Rooster crowed. “Run! Run!” Mundo Cani had seen the trouble.

Again, Cockatrice was falling from the white sky like an arrow. The Weasel was bustering around the field, veering left and right to make a difficult target of himself. But if this caused trouble for the dropping Cockatrice, it also troubled the Dog. Mundo Cani was fast flat out. Already he had halved the distance. But how could he veer with the Weasel?

“Russel's bush!” he roared to the Weasel without slowing his course.

John Wesley stopped dead, looked at him, surprised.

“Run!” screamed the Dog. “Oh, John! Run!” Cockatrice was taking level aim.

The Weasel ran. He made a pattern of his sudden, jagged running. He glanced at the Dog, gauged his speed, then stared at the place where the bush used to be.

From the top of the Coop Chauntecleer saw a Dog of enormous speed and a Weasel of quick turns close in on one another. At a certain spot they met; and then the Weasel was no longer visible. Cockatrice drove himself into a lump of earth.

Mundo Cani made a wide, pounding circle and returned to the camp.

“Home! Home! Come home!” Chauntecleer raised his voice again to cry retreat to his animals. It was time. “Home! Home! Home! Home! Home!”

And they came. Shaggy, sad, small, and stumbling, they came. In the instant of the retreat, insufferably weary; dragging, shambling; hurrying more against their fatigue than from the enemy; stunned, they streamed back—the Dog foremost of them all. They mounted the wall and fell into the camp, damp, sick, sorry, and alive.

The day was ending. The hot day was nearly over. The night was at hand. Here and there on the camp floor lay the broken animals, too tired even to consider that the battle had been theirs. They slept and did not sleep at once. Just—they were there, and that was all. Inert.

Chauntecleer, still on the top of the Coop, gazed at them and choked on his love for them. The strain of the day had left him soft toward his animals.

And while he looked, he heard a very weak but bitter voice nearby the Coop. The voice said: “Tell a Dog to put me down. John's wet, he is.”

In spite of himself, Chauntecleer let slip a sudden, stupid giggle. Then, in a manner more grave: “Mundo Cani, it's over for a day, don't you know?”

“Is
ways
to bite a Weasel,” the Weasel said, and then he passed out. He looked like a wet rag hanging out of either side of the Dog's mouth. Blood dripped from the point of his nose and from his tail.

“All this time you've been standing there?” Chauntecleer wondered, for it had been a while gone as the animals found places inside the camp.

Mundo Cani's eyes were filled with anguish. They looked mournfully up to the Rooster. Who knew how kindly the Dog's tongue was licking John Wesley's wound on the inside of his mouth?

“Well?”

The Dog laid the Weasel gently on the earth and sighed.

“Chauntecleer!
”

Like an iron arrow the cry came to him.

Chauntecleer spun around. He saw the battlefield moist and glutted. He saw wreckage. He saw bodies in which there was no life. The field everywhere was still. So who called to him?

“Chauntecleer! Proud Chauntecleer!
”

From across the entire battlefield came the poisoned voice. Standing on an invisible island out in the flooding river, Chauntecleer's mirror was crying challenge. Cockatrice. His tail twisted powerfully and dashed the water as he called. His red eye watched the Rooster unblinking. His voice was slamming into Chauntecleer's face:

“What are animals? No account! What is a battle won with numbers? Nothing! What is a commander who hides behind a wall? Let the commander show himself tomorrow. Cockatrice will meet him—and him will Cockatrice kill!
”

Chauntecleer's mirror slipped into the water and disappeared. Chauntecleer watched that place until the ripples had played themselves out, and the river became smooth in the evening. Battles, battles—how many to make a war? And when you have won one, then what
have
you won?

The Beautiful Pertelote stepped out of the Coop and looked up at her husband. He didn't see her. He was grieving. He was listening.