Snake Eyes

“Has he gone for the girls and the powders, then?” asked Blini Rickett.

“I fancy that horn of plenty myself,” said Puff Wiggery.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them right at that moment that it might be much, much better than that. Prattle came down the steps from the church and stood next to me, stinking faintly in the coral dawn light.

“That was odd,” said he.

“What was odd?”

“I didn’t think he’d leave like that.”

“Ah, but we’ve got his tail.”

“But even if there is a heaven and the Great Father’s still in it, he’ll never make it through Hell to get there. The lord of darkness will stop him.”

“Well, we’ll see, won’t we?” I looked over at Prattle and noticed he had some feathers stuck to his robes. “You been plucking a chicken, Leopold?”

He looked down at himself and tried to brush the feathers away.

“No. I expect a couple of geese had a set to in the church. There’s feathers everywhere in there.”

A strange thing happened then—I say strange; what it was was unusual—we all felt a breeze moving the air. It was the first breath of wind the village had felt in months. Years perhaps. From above us more stray feathers floated down to earth, wafted on invisible currents. I turned back to Prattle and began to speak.

“Leopold, you don’t suppose that Rupert might have been an—”

But I never finished my sentence. Something was happening to the cloud. It was growing. Like a tide sweeping across a flood plain it spread out over the sky, keeping all the time its winged shape. In this way it appeared to be coming towards us at great speed. Rickett and Wiggery flinched at the illusion. Watching calmly I saw that cloud take up the whole sky from horizon to horizon. It blocked out the momentarily risen sun was then darkened from white to grey to dark slate and then to shades of charcoal. The vapours lost their shape and began to turn and roil like a dark ocean suspended above our heads. There was a distant rumble of thunder that reminded me of Rupert’s voice and then a wind, a true gusting wind, came to life around us blowing the dust of the square against our skin. It stung and brought with it a thrill of coolness. The hairs all over my body stood up and I shivered at the touch.

And then, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, it began to rain. Warm, fat drops pattered and broke against every upturned face. They rolled and dirtied themselves in the dust. They made us blink. In moments, no one yet believing it could be true, we were all drenched to the skin. In Prattle’s case, this made him smell worse as his robes became fragrant with moisture.

“If I’m going to come to your church every holy day, is there any chance you might bathe with similar frequency?”

Leopold smiled. I didn’t recognise the look at first because I’d never seen it before.

“I’m sure we can come to some arrangement.”

Epilogue

And that was how Leopold Prattle and I came to exchange our favourite books from time to time. He would peruse the Ledger, when none of the congregation was around, and I would do the same with his copy of the holy book. We occasionally met for an ale, in addition, but I wouldn’t say we became great companions. A margin of respect grew between us that both held us together and maintained our distance. It suited us both very well, I believe.

The demon, Rupert, we never saw again, but after he was gone we marked the event with a festival—one day later than the original event had been planned for—that to this day remains incorrectly named ‘The Feast of The Dragon’. Even Prattle and I agreed that you couldn’t hold a holy festival that involved a demon in the title. No one, not a single soul, ever ventured out loud what they thought Rupert might really have been, but I’m sure that even Wiggery and Rickett had their suspicions.

The women that cavorted in the wood that night, including Velvet, were never told that they’d been liasing with anything other than an evil employee of Hell. They needed to suffer a little for their transgressions, after all, and a little guilt was good for them.

It’s interesting to note that the animals we kill and eat for The Feast of The Dragon are white geese or white chickens. The purity of their feathers serves as an important symbol to those who remember the events of those days. To everyone else, those born later and those who weren’t really involved, The Feast of the Dragon is just another good excuse for an excess of food, ale and flirtation. Not to mention music and dancing.

But never the occasional sheep.