Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (44 page)

‘Why do you trouble the children of men?' said Leo, with his heart between his teeth.

‘Are you so sure that I trouble the children of men alone?'said the Scorpion. ‘Speak to your brother the Bull, and see what he says.'

‘I come on behalf of the children of men,' said Leo. ‘I have learned to love as they do, and I wish them to live as I – as we do.'

‘Your wish was granted long ago. Speak to the Bull. He is under my special care,' said the Scorpion.

Leo dropped back to the earth again, and saw the great star Aldebaran, that is set in the forehead of the Bull, blazing very near to the earth. When he came up to it he saw that his brother the Bull, yoked to a countryman's plough, was toiling through a wet rice-field with his head bent down, and the sweat streaming from his flanks. The countryman was urging him forward with a goad.

‘Gore that insolent to death,' cried Leo, ‘and for the sake of our honour come out of the mire.'

‘I cannot,' said the Bull, ‘the Scorpion has told me that some day, of which I cannot be sure, he will sting me where my neck is set on my shoulders, and that I shall the bellowing.'

‘What has that to do with this disgraceful work?' said Leo, standing on the dyke that bounded the wet field.

‘Everything. This man could not plough without my help. He thinks that I am a stray beast.'

‘But he is a mud-crusted cottar with matted hair,' insisted Leo. ‘We are not meant for his use.'

‘You may not be; I am. I cannot tell when the Scorpion may choose to sting me to death – perhaps before I have turned this furrow.' The Bull flung his bulk into the yoke, and the plough tore through the wet ground behind him, and the countryman goaded him till his flanks were red.

‘Do you like this?' Leo called down the dripping furrows.

‘No,' said the Bull over his shoulder as he lifted his hind legs from the clinging mud and cleared his nostrils.

Leo left him scornfully and passed to another country, where he found his brother the Ram in the centre of a crowdof country people who were hanging wreaths round his neck and feeding him on freshly-plucked green corn.

‘This is terrible,' said Leo. ‘Break up that crowd and come away, my brother. Their hands are spoiling your fleece.'

‘I cannot,' said the Ram. ‘The Archer told me that on some day of which I had no knowledge, he would send a dart through me, and that I should die in very great pain.'

‘What has that to do with this disgraceful show?' said Leo, but he did not speak as confidently as before.

‘Everything in the world,' said the Ram. ‘These people never saw a perfect sheep before. They think that I am a stray, and they will carry me from place to place as a model to all their flocks.'

‘But they are greasy shepherds; we are not intended to amuse them,' said Leo.

‘You may not be, I am,' said the Ram. ‘I cannot tell when the Archer may choose to send his arrow at me – perhaps before the people a mile down the road have seen me.' The Ram lowered his head that a yokel newly arrived might throw a wreath of wild garlic-leaves over it, and waited patiently while the farmers tugged his fleece.

‘Do you like this?' cried Leo over the shoulders of the crowd.

‘No,' said the Ram, as the dust of the trampling feet made him sneeze, and he snuffed at the fodder piled before him.

Leo turned back intending to retrace his steps to the Houses, but as he was passing down a street he saw two small children, very dusty, rolling outside a cottage door, and playing with a cat. They were the Twins.

‘What are you doing here?' said Leo, indignant.

‘Playing,' said the Twins calmly.

‘Cannot you play on the banks of the Milky Way?' said Leo.

‘We did,' said they, ‘till the Fishes swam down and told us that some day they would come for us and not hurt us at all and carry us away. So now we are playing at being babies down here. The people like it.'

‘Do you like it?'said Leo.

‘No,' said the Twins, ‘but there are no cats in the MilkyWay,' and they pulled the cat's tail thoughtfully. A woman came out of the doorway and stood behind them, and Leo saw in her face a look that he had sometimes seen in the Girl's.

‘She thinks that we are foundlings,' said the Twins, and they trotted indoors to the evening meal.

Then Leo hurried as swiftly as possible to all the Houses one after another; for he could not understand the new trouble that had come to his brethren. He spoke to the Archer, and the Archer assured him that so far as that House was concerned Leo had nothing to fear. The Waterman, the Fishes, and the Scorpion gave the same answer. They knew nothing of Leo, and cared less. They were the Houses, and they were busied in killing men.

At last he came to that very dark House where Cancer the Crab lies so still that you might think he was asleep if you did not see the ceaseless play and winnowing motion of the feathery branches round his mouth. That movement never ceases. It is like the eating of a smothered fire into rotten timber in that it is noiseless and without haste.

Leo stood in front of the Crab, and the half darkness allowed him a glimpse of that vast blue-black back and the motionless eyes. Now and again he thought that he heard some one sobbing, but, the noise was very faint.

‘Why do you trouble the children of men?' said Leo. There was no answer, and against his will Leo cried, ‘Why do you trouble us? What have we done that you should trouble us?'

This time Cancer replied, ‘What do I know or care? You were born into my House, and at the appointed time I shall come for you.'

‘When is the appointed time?' said Leo, stepping back from the restless movement of the mouth.

‘When the full moon fails to call the full tide,' said the Crab, ‘I shall come for the one. When the other has taken the earth by the shoulders, I shall take that other by the throat.'

Leo lifted his hand to the apple of his throat, moistened his lips, and recovering himself, said:

‘Must I be afraid for two, then?'

‘For two,' said the Crab, ‘and as many more as may come after.'

‘My brother, the Bull, had a better fate,' said Leo, sullenly; ‘he is alone.'

A hand covered his mouth before he could finish the sentence, and he found the Girl in his arms. Womanlike, she had not stayed where Leo had left her, but had hastened off at once to know the worst, and passing all the other Houses, had come straight to Cancer.

‘That is foolish,' said the Girl, whispering. ‘I have been waiting in the dark for long and long before you came.
Then
I was afraid. But now—' She put her head down on his shoulder and sighed a sigh of contentment.

‘I am afraid now,' said Leo.

‘That is on my account,' said the Girl, ‘I know it is, because I am afraid for your sake. Let us go, husband.'

They went out of the darkness together and came back to, the Earth, Leo very silent, and the Girl striving to cheer him. ‘My brother's fate is the better one,' Leo would repeat from time to time, and at last he said: ‘Let us each go our own way and live alone till we die. We were born into the House of Cancer, and he will come for us.'

‘I know; I know. But where shall I go? And where will you sleep in the evening? But let us try. I will stay here. Do you go on?'

Leo took six steps forward very slowly, and three long steps backward very quickly, and the third step set him again at the Girl's side. This time it was she who was begging him to go away and leave her, and he was forced to comfort her all through the night. That night decided them both never to leave each other for an instant, and when they had come to this decision they looked back at the darkness of the House of Cancer high above their heads, and with their arms round each other's necks laughed, ‘Ha! ha! ha!' exactly as the children of men laughed. And that was the first time in their lives that they had ever laughed. Next morning they returned to their proper home, and sawthe flowers and the sacrifices that had been laid before their doors by the villagers of the hills. Leo stamped down the fire with his heel, and the Girl flung the flower-wreaths out of sight, shuddering as she did so. When the villagers returned, as of custom, to see what had become of their offerings, they found neither roses nor burned flesh on the altars, but only a man and a woman, with frightened white faces, sitting hand in hand on the altar-steps.

‘Are you not Virgo?' said a woman to the Girl. ‘I sent you flowers yesterday.'

‘Little sister,' said the Girl, flushing to her forehead, ‘do not send any more flowers, for I am only a woman like yourself.' The man and the woman went away doubtfully.

‘Now, what shall we do?' said Leo.

‘We must try to be cheerful, I think,' said the Girl. ‘We know the very worst that can happen to us, but we do not know the best that love can bring us. We have a great deal to be glad of.'

‘The certainty of death,' said Leo.

‘All the children of men have that certainty also; yet they laughed long before we ever knew how to laugh. We must learn to laugh, Leo. We have laughed once already.'

People who consider themselves Gods, as the Children of the Zodiac did, find it hard to laugh, because the Immortals know nothing worth laughter or tears. Leo rose up with a very heavy heart, and he and the Girl together went to and fro among men; their new fear of death behind them. First they laughed at a naked baby attempting to thrust its fat toes into its foolish pink mouth; next they laughed at a kitten chasing her own tail; andthen they laughed at a boy trying to steal a kiss from a girl, and getting his ears boxed. Lastly, they laughed because the wind blew in their faces as they ran down a hillside together, and broke panting and breathless into a knot of villagers at the bottom. The villagers laughed too at their flying clothes and wind-reddened faces; and in the evening gave them food and invited them to a dance on the grass, where everybody laughed through the mere joy of being able to dance.

That night Leo jumped up from the Girl's side crying: ‘Every one of those people we met just now will die—'

‘So shall we,' said the Girl sleepily. ‘Lie down again, dear.' Leo could not see that her face was wet with tears.

But Leo was up and far across the fields, driven forward by the fear of death for himself and for the Girl, who was dearer to him than himself. Presently he came across the Bull drowsing in the moonlight after a hard day's work, and looking through half-shut eyes at the beautiful straight furrows that he had made.

‘Ho!' said the Bull, ‘so you have been told these things too. Which of the Houses holds your death?'

Leo pointed upwards to the dark House of the Crab and groaned: ‘And he will come for the Girl too,' he said.

‘Well,' said the Bull, ‘what will you do?'

Leo sat down on the dyke and said that he did not know.

‘You cannot pull a plough,' said the Bull, with a little touch of contempt. ‘I can, and that prevents me from thinking of the Scorpion.'

Leo was angry and said nothing till the dawn broke, and the cultivator came to yoke the Bull to his work.

‘Sing,' said the Bull, as the stiff muddy ox-bow creaked and strained. ‘My shoulder is galled. Sing one of the songs that we sang when we thought we were all Gods together.'

Leo stepped back into the cane-brake and lifted up his voice in a song of the Children of the Zodiac – the war-whoop of the young Gods who are afraid of nothing. At first he dragged the song along unwillingly, and then the song dragged him, and his voice rolled across the fields, and the Bull stepped to the tune, and the cultivator banged his flanks out of sheer light-heartedness, and the furrows rolled away behind the plough more and more swiftly. Then the Girl came across the fields looking for Leo and found him singing in the cane. She joined her voice to his, and the cultivator's wife brought her spinning into the open and listened with all her children round her. When it was time for the nooning, Leo and the Girl had sung themselves both thirsty and hungry, but the cultivator and his wife gave them rye-bread and milk, and many thanks, and theBull found occasion to say: ‘You have helped me to do a full half-field more than I should have done. But the hardest part of the day is to come, brother.'

Leo wished to lie down and brood over the words of the Crab. The Girl went away to talk to the cultivator's wife and baby, and the afternoon ploughing began.

‘Help us now,' said the Bull. ‘The tides of the day are running down. My legs are very stiff. Sing if you never sang before.'

‘To a mud-spattered villager?' said Leo.

‘He is under the same doom as ourselves. Are you a coward?' said the Bull. Leo flushed and began again with a sore throat and a bad temper. Little by little he dropped away from the songs of the Children and made up a song as he went along; and this was a thing he could never have done had he not met the Crab face to face. He remembered facts concerning cultivators, and bullocks, and rice-fields, that he had not particularly noticed before the interview, and he strung them all together, growing more interested as he sang, and he told the cultivator much more about himself and his work than the cultivator knew. The Bull grunted approval as he toiled down the furrows for the last time that day, and the song ended, leaving the cultivator with a very good opinion of himself in his aching bones. The Girl came out of the hut where she had been keeping the children quiet, and talking woman-talk to the wife, and they all ate the evening meal together.

‘Now yours must be a very pleasant life,' said the cultivator, ‘sitting as you do on a dyke all day and singing just what comes into your head. Have you been at it long, you two – gipsies?'

‘Ah!' lowed the Bull from his byre. ‘That's all the thanks you will ever get from men, brother.'

‘No. We have only just begun it,' said the Girl; ‘but we are going to keep to it as long as we live. Are we not, Leo?