Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

“Calm down,” Chandani instructed Arfur, approaching the old male with a limber, menacing gait. “It’s almost late.”

“Late? Or early?” said St. Cuthbert. “It must be three in the morning. And I still. I’m not sure. I know what will happen. Or I know what’s supposed to happen. And if you’re free, I will surely be the first to die. I am still waiting for him — for the Christ. Of Otters.”

“Ha!” scoffed Arfur. “I would’ve thought that a saint cannot perish.”

Chandani snarled at Arfur. “Show respect,” she said. “This blessed man can help us.”

But Arfur held his colossal paws up toward the huntress, baring pinkish-yellow claws. He threw his head back. “While Rome burns, you and this old man are talking about otters?” The other three lionesses sneered at Arfur. St. Cuthbert feared a fight was about to erupt.

“You say,” St. Cuthbert asked Arfur, trying to understand, “that the second part of the Gate, that it will appear. at Grosvenor Square? Why? Near the American Embassy? And we’re beside the first part — here, in the zoo? That bit makes sense, of course. But ah wouldn’t have said Grosvenor — never that. Are you sure?”

“Grosvenor, it is,” Chandani said in her low, sweetleather voice. “Already, we feel the invasion under way, holy one. Not American soldiers, of course — but Americans nonetheless. Californian comet-worshippers. So many have laughed at them, but they will do real harm, and it won’t amuse anyone, and it—”

Arfur broke in: “No. No. No. No. No. Not since those dipsomaniacal French felons landed at Fishguard has British soil been under the feet of invaders — but now look. We English lions, you surely know — our blood would boil if even an Argentinian center forward stepped into Wembley. So—”

Chandani interjected: “What my husband wants to say is. we are under. quite some duress. now.”

Arfur nodded, looking satisfied. He said, “And I ask this: If you are a holy man, why will you not sacrifice something — or someone — for us, to stop the invaders? What are you waiting for? Where is this. Christ . of Otters? Mark my words: any great battle will end here, near us, the absolute omega of all earthly animal strife — where the lions live. Is anyone calling me the ‘Christ of Lions’?”

“Arfur!” Chandani scolded.

“Yes?”

“I must say,” said Chandani, “that the simpleminded Arfur is right about one thing. The equivalent of the Légion Noire *will come to us, and they will come here.” She added, with a noble note of recognition for a dreadful enemy, “We must face them, bravely, first with devotion, then with our paws. Here . But someone still must go down to Grosvenor Square, I am convinced. Perhaps — that is where your Otter Messiah will be needed most. And His prophet— you. ”

“I. I. I don’t know,” said St. Cuthbert, filling with a new wave of self-pity. “This is all too much for me.” The lions’ paws suddenly looked to him like huge golden pastries. “A’m a Flōt sot, when it comes right down to it, and I doubt a’m going to be much of anyone’s miracle-maker or giant-slayer. Oi can’t even get me donnies on a seagull — and we’re only an hour from Southend.”

“Let us free,” said Arfur, “and you will have all the winged beings you will ever need. Indeed, a great eagle will carry your savior to you.”

Chandani rolled her eyes.

“I don’t want to see them, ” said St. Cuthbert. “But I did hope to see my brother before I ‘shuffled off this mortal coil.’ And I can’t find Drystan anywhere. That’s all I really cares about. More than the animals — no disrespect meant. More than England. I need to see him, see? There’s summat I’ve got to tell him, right? My brain’s deceived me. Or the Flōt.”

And then, as if on cue, something astounding occurred, at least from the perspective of one grubby saint, and the lions, too. Out of the narrow forest at the zoo’s fence, out of the twinkling green lights and sparrow nests and bowls of darkness, out of his gran’s porcelain thimble and deadly Dowles Brook, out of his drunkenness and sorrow and shame and a loneliness no one but a Flōt sot could know, out of an endless night of kitten games and enclosures drained — there came a being from St. Cuthbert the Wonderworker’s deepest anguish — the Christ of Otters. The Lord of Animals came because, in the end, St. Cuthbert needed a Lord.

St. Cuthbert stared in wonder. His long lost brother’s hair was longer, and his eyes more fearful and feminine, but here he was, risen from the dead, walking purposefully, and looking every bit like Drystan. if.

If .

If, thought St. Cuthbert. If, if, if, if, if.

If he were a woman, in her late twenties or early thirties.

“Drystan?” asked St. Cuthbert. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.”

Arfur roared with a bellicose grandeur that could have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary as the very definition of leonine .

It was, of course, a Royal Parks Constabulary inspector, a woman, and her physical resemblance to the Handley brothers was indeed, as Dawkins had put it, “the spit.” The black-brown eyes, the high cheeks, even the freckles taken from the dappled downs of Clee — she was as close to a doppelgänger as one got. It was the face that had that night launched a thousand scripts in St. Cuthbert’s head.

But she was different, too, from the Drystan whom St. Cuthbert had been imagining all night. She was calmer, and more professional, and less delicate. And she had very long, wispy, obsidian hair.

“Drystan? Are yow the Christ of Otters?”

“I’m Inspector Sullivan,” the woman said. “And you’re Mr. Handley, aren’t you? Cuthbert?”

“Yow’m my brother,” he declared flatly to the woman, shaking his head, gasping to catch his breath. “ Gagoga maga medu, ” he said. His eyes were wet with tears. He nearly comprehended, in his rough way, that this constable, the utter stranger, wasn’t the boy who had died so many, many years ago, but it was hard for him to accept that it wasn’t somehow a kind of Drystan — changed, yes, hidden in the shape of a beautiful woman — but Drystan.

“Are yow ’im? Dryst?”

“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” she said. She felt tears slipping down her face. “But if you want to call me that, you should. I work for the Royal Parks. The constabulary. I’m a special sort of officer.”

“If I say something to yow,” he asked her, “does he hear me? Does the Christ of Otters? Are yow ‘possessed’ by ’im, loik, as it were?”

“I don’t know — Cuthbert. I don’t know if it works like that,” said the woman. “But I’m very interested to hear about all this. Are you hurt?”

“T’snothing,” he said. “But you must leave me now and get down to Grosvenor Square, if you’re the Christ of Otters.”

With that, St. Cuthbert pulled the remake Undley Bracteate from his pocket, the talisman he had tried years ago to give to his cousin Rebekka. He placed it into Astrid’s hand and closed her fingers on it.

“Treasure it,” he said to her. “The animals tell me I’ve become a kind of saint. St. Cuthbert. I don’t know ’bout that. But this talisman, it will keep you safe, Drystan — or whoever you are.”

She looked at the medallion, long broken from its key chain. It showed the two brothers, Romulus and Remus, drinking from the teats of a wolflike creature. There was the inscription, in ancient Frisian runes, gægogæ mægæ medu , and Astrid rubbed her thumb over the ancient incantation, and smiled gently at the man.