Cedmon reached for one of the gourds and pulled out the tuft of cow’s tail with which it was corked. “The power of the scorpion’s poison is what you mean, Talgarth,” he muttered.
“The spell brings death by one means or another,” Talgarth retorted. “If a scorpion has stung you, the greater the power that made it happen.”
Cedmon drank deep from the gourd and set it back beside the bed. “You have no power, Talgarth,” he said in a loud voice that made the Druid start with surprise. “I saw, and Artog and Lanilar too, how the scorpion was fastened to my spear. The scorpion for me — and the swamp-adder for my wife Dara.”
Talgarth sat motionless, his huge eyes raised in a stare of amazement and alarm.
“Your spell can do me no harm. I am as well as you, and will live as long!” Cedmon declared. “All the village will know these things when the sun is risen. Then you can try to make a spell that will explain how it happens that I am still alive!”
Talgarth sprang to his feet. He threw a glance toward the doorway. Artog had also risen, and the torch light gleamed red on his spear.
“Sit, Talgarth,” Cedmon ordered. “We have a long night before the sun rises and I show the village how weak are your spells!”
He took up one of the gourds. “Will you not drink, while we wait?”
“I will,” Talgarth answered. His voice was pinched. He took up the other gourd. Cedmon, lying on his side, with one hand on his knife, sipped his drink, keenly aware of Talgarth’s eyes watching his every move, then replaced the gourd on the ground. This time he was careful to set it exactly in the small circle which he had marked out earlier.
“This lying in bed wearies me,” he complained, rolling over so that his back was toward Talgarth. By lowering his right shoulder slightly he was able to see his gourd reflected in the mirror above his head.
“Rest, if you will. You have nothing to fear from me, my brother,” Talgarth said in a low voice.
Cedmon, squinting in the mirror, caught a flashing glimpse of long fingers fluttering for an instant above the gourd. He sat up suddenly.
“Talgarth, I learned a bit of magic while I was away. By making a picture of a man in my mind, I can see what he is doing even though I am not looking at him.”
Talgarth regarded him steadily, his eyes enormous.
“I made a picture of you in my mind just now,” Cedmon continued. “Tomorrow the village will know what I saw.”
Talgarth jumped to his feet and Cedmon leaped off the bed, his knife ready.
“They will not believe you,” Talgarth said in a strangled voice. “I can tip over the gourd and then you cannot prove what you say.”
“Now I know that you murdered Dara!” Cedmon shouted. “You hated her because she would have nothing to do with you! Your swamp-adder did not kill her, so you gave her poisoned medicine. When I returned you feared I would discover your wicked deed — and you had to kill me too!”
Talgarth moved a step forward and Cedmon levelled the knife at his heart. “I am not sleeping, as was Dara when you brought the swamp-adder. And I have not my back to you, as when you fastened the scorpion to my spear. Take one more step, Talgarth!”
Talgarth stood motionless, the knife an inch from his heaving chest.
“I will not kill you, Talgarth,” Cedmon added. “I have another picture of you in my mind. I see the former Druid, stripped of robe, headdress and serpent egg. All the village knows him as the man who pretended to make spells but had no power, who tried to kill me when he was found out, and failed in that too. I see him scorned by the men, laughed at by the children, helping the women break sticks for the fires, washing the cook-pots—”
“That you will never see!” Talgarth shouted. He ducked below Cedmon’s knife and seized the poisoned gourd.
“Your magic, too, will fail,” he said as he drank.
Fall of Zoo
by Edward D. Hoch
We have been told many stories, each purporting to be the truth, about the last hours of this man who came so close to destroying forever the Europe our fathers knew. We may in fact never know who fired the shot which wrote finis to his story, as his world crashed around him...
The evening mists lay thick in the grassy fields of the Tiergarten as Rudolph Bohg made his way slowly home. There was still enough daylight in the Sunday sky for him to see the shell craters and fallen trees that dotted the park, and in the distance he could hear the sporadic firing that marked the Russian progress into the city.
He had played here as a child, running through the streets of Berlin with all the others, and then working here in the park when manhood came. It was home to him, more of a home than he’d known in the little apartment by the Teltow Canal, and certainly more of a home than his six years in the German army had ever provided. Now, as the battered barred cages of the Berlin zoo came into view he felt the tension ease for the first time in hours.
He passed the blasted remains of the reptile house, and then the empty cages where the lions had been. Here and there animals still remained — a few monkeys, the crusty-skinned hippo, even some frightened zebras. They all seemed to be waiting for the end that seemed so near. Behind him, near the victory monument at the center of the Tiergarten, a Russian artillery shell landed with a deafening blast. He could hear other shells passing overhead along the trees, sounding that strange low keening that built to a piercing scream like nothing else on earth.
He halted now, along a line of empty cages where only a single dead baboon was visible in the deepening dusk. There was someone ahead, a figure in shabby work pants and leather jacket. Rudolph Bohg raised the machine pistole he’d carried, almost forgotten in his right hand. “Who are you?” he shouted.
The figure came closer, unafraid — because the days of fear had passed. Then he saw that it was a woman. She could have been forty, but he knew she was ten years younger, knew even after six years that only Lotta Kruger Would have remained here with the animals she loved. “This is my home,” she answered him quietly. “Are you a deserter?”
He glanced down at the dirt-stained uniform of an SS Major that he still wore. “This is my home, too,” he told her. “I’m Rudolph. Rudolph Bohg — do you remember?”
“Rudolph!” She ran to him then, and he let the gun drop limply in his hand as they embraced. It was an embrace without meaning, for they had never been lovers, not even in those days before the war when they’d worked long hours together with the animals.
“I’ve come back,” he said, “I had no place else to go.”
“My God, Rudolph! They say the Russians are only a mile away!”
“The Russians are everywhere.” He kept his left arm around her, still holding the pistol in his right as if it offered some protection against the shells and the bombs. He glanced around in the twilight. “You’ve been hit hard here.”
“No Worse than the rest of Berlin. We were open until nine days ago, when the water and electricity went off. People still came, too — every day.”
“Your father?” He had been a zookeeper, had given Bohg his first job.
“Killed in an American air raid last year. Many of the zookeepers are dead or gone, but a few of us have stayed on.”
“The cages seem empty.”
A shell burst a bit too close, sending a sudden fireball to break against some remaining trees. She led him quickly into the shelter of the elephant house, where one great beast still remained.
“You remember there were six elephants,” she said. “Now we have one. Of fifteen thousand animals, only sixteen hundred remained alive when we closed the zoo. Now there are even fewer. The Russians have been shelling us for days.”