La Catastrophe du République

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The Cockatrice, part IV

I offered to stay as well, and coax Walford back from the brink of madness, until Captain Hargrove could return with the means to annihilate ‘these hellborn harpies’ – as he called them.  The Captain could not abide the ease with which the cockatrice killed – this profligate breeder with a demonstrable ambition to spread beyond its own desecrated habitat.  It flouted my convictions to be complicit in the extermination of this singular species, though I could not stand against him.

As the Captain rowed away in earnest, Walford turned on me, “Have you not heard them?”  Of course I had heard the shrill calls, as the creatures blustered over territory, and bickered over food, but the parson-naturalist entreated me to pick out the individual birdsongs among the clamor, and in so doing I was made aghast:

You hear one song and its pleasant enough, and then another that’s rather shrill; then, at last, you hear the one you were waiting for though you did not know it – the one you traversed the seas and risked everything to hear.  You know it by the tears in your eyes, a lamentation of the beautiful self-created disaster that is life itself.

The Captain returned, with all the dry fuel the boat would bear.  Walford admonished him to turn back and a bitter argument ensued, until Walford fell upon him suddenly, diver’s knife in hand, and the Captain wilted like a flower.  This record may be all of me that escapes this hellish place, but that is well – for it is my deepest wish to stay.

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The Cockatrice, part III

To be sure we are engaged in dangerous enterprise, yet we have found an unique species as rare and bizarre as anything upon the Earth. The island teemed with these, lusus natura, these strange jests of nature.  Relying somewhat on the extant literature, Walford determined that catching the creature’s eye was the fatal provocation, thus were we ever mindful of maintaining a healthy distance.

The adult cockatrice appears always in heat, always strutting and preening before potential mates.  The behavior betrays a complex hierarchy, dominated not by strength but by cunning, for they posses a demonstrable intelligence, superior even to the family corvidae.  A sophisticated social order is also in evidence, driven by competition for subsistence; they eat voraciously.

In only a few minutes several of them had scented the porter’s corpse, which they fell upon and dissipated inside of an hour.  They are extremely untidy gluttons; the whole of the island appears strewn with their leavings.  If they are at all redeemed it is by their vocalizations, for they have been gifted with a syrinx that exceeds in capability that of even the superb lyrebird of New South Wales.

Regrettably, complex birdcalls were not of interest to Captain Hargrove, who was visibly appalled by the creatures.  He extended his spyglass, observing a coterie of them as they struggled to reach a nearby islet.  The cockatrice is a poor flier, but when one of them at last gained the small reef the Captain insisted we row back to Bungula immediately, fetch up all the dry fuel we could muster, and return to scorch the island till there was nothing left.  Walford was of a different mind, “Take my eyes,” he implored me quietly, holding out his diver’s knife, “I would stay.”

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The Cockatrice, part II

We were lured to the Panoptes, this archipelago of coral atolls, by fugitive rumors of a most peculiar beast: the famed cockatrice.  A relative of the basileus, as identified in the ancient bestiaries of Pliny the Elder, the cockatrice is said to resemble a wild cock with leathery wings and serpentine tail, a genuine enigma on this Earth.

A fog obscured our passage this morning; the isle of Enyalios loomed in the gray.  We drew up on the beach and were assailed by clouds of stinging black flies.  Captain Hargrove lit a pipe to drive them off; no sooner had he done so than a weird stench arose, overwhelming the pungent seaman’s tobacco; it was a reek like rancid garlic, the odor brought to mind the stink of the spadefoot toad and I recalled that dubious anecdote in Neckham’s De naturis rerum wherein the cockatrice was purportedly incubated by a toad.

The very beast emerged from the underbrush just then, as if from the obscurity of history.  Its curious head darted this way and that, its beak jet black, its coxcomb a mottled gray; its naked wings and snaking tail the same dull colors.  Upon sighting the lot of us the creature shrieked like a banshee, and the Captain nearly shot it, but he demurred; oh, would that he had, for we paid dearly for the meeting!

Walford’s porter was taken by the bizarre thing, “Oi, Chanticleer!” he said, and carefully approached it, in spite of our remonstrances, a morsel of hardtack in his outstretched hand.  There was a sudden thrash of wings and the man cried out and collapsed!  We hastened to his aid while the wretched beast took flight.  No visible wound had been visited upon his person, yet by some unknown vector the cockatrice had struck with a kind of paralyzing toxin.  The poor fool lay weirdly contorted in the sand; dead from the simultaneous failure of his vital organs.

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The Cockatrice, part I

The Ladybird weighed anchor off Bungula in the midst of a drizzle. The natives on the shore stood on one leg, like placid flamingos, watching the long approach of our landing craft.  They examined us as we disembarked, picking through our clothes, inspecting our teeth like horse traders, until they were satisfied, and evaporated into the bush.

We found an arrangement of tumbledown half-walls, the remains of a mission.  Walford, the parson-naturalist, wanted to cast our tarpaulin there, but our Captain Hargrove balked at the thought of sleeping among ghosts.  Instead we pulled up the boat, and made of it a lean-to.

The Captain took out a bottle of sherry, pilfered from the ship’s store, and we sat and drank in the gathering dusk. Walford’s porter brought a deck of cards, so we hung a lantern and played ruff-and-honours into the night.  Eventually, the others drifted off – now I am left alone, in the quiet of the wind and surf.

I look out across the gulf, to the isle of Enyalios, as it sits beneath the ethereal arc of the Milky Way.  We make our expedition in the morning.  The island’s starlit silhouette fills me with a sense of foreboding; what turn of Fortune awaits I wonder as the sea-wind whips and whelms, and whispers like a whinging wight.

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