The Serpent Answered Every Charge but the Last One

The hedge at the field's edge was thorn and dead vine grown into one wall, and the serpent lay flat in the roots of it. The creatures came at midday, two at first, then a dozen, then a ring pressed close enough that the shade went black under the branches. An ox at the front. A hare shifting its feet, a hyena, a stork with mud to its knees, and at the back a man up from the furrows with a hoe on his shoulder.

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Nobody had convened them. They arrived the way a court arrives.

The Fence It Broke and the Fence It Sleeps In

The ox spoke first. "Why is it that you are always found in the hedges?"

The serpent's head came up out of the thorn, slow, no higher than a man's ankle. It had not been asked anything in a long time.

"I breached the hedge of the world," it said, and put its head back down among the roots.

The Tongue That Drags Through the Dust

"Your tongue," the hyena said. "The rest of you lies there like a rope and that thing never stops, wet, out, in, tasting the dirt. Why?"

"That," the serpent said, "is what did this to me."

Then it told them what the tongue had done. There had been a tree, a woman at the tree, and the serpent upright beside her with all the time in the world. It did not begin with the fruit. It began with the Maker. "From this tree He ate," it told Eve, "and then He made the world. He forbids it to you so that you will not make worlds of your own. Every craftsman hates the man who works his trade."

She said nothing, so it kept going. Whatever is made later rules whatever came before it, the serpent said, and counted the days out for her the way a man counts coins onto a table. The firmament carries the heavens that preceded it. The trees water the firmament. The sun and the moon ripen the fruit of the trees. Last came the birds, and among them the Ziz, so wide that when its wings open the sun goes out behind them and the field turns to evening at noon.

"You were made at the end of everything, to rule everything," it said. "So hurry. Eat, before He makes another world and whatever comes after you stands over you the way you stand over me."

She looked at the tree and found it good. What she was looking at was the words of the serpent.

"I did that with this," the serpent said, and let the tongue slide out flat over the dirt. "It has been down here ever since."

The Word That Comes Down and Finds It

Into the quiet the ox put the question the field had come for. "All of us bite. The horse breaks ribs, the dog takes a hand at the wrist, and by harvest the man is up and cursing us. You touch a heel and he goes out feet first. Why you?"

"If the serpent bites when no charm has been whispered," the serpent said, and stopped there, as if the rest of the verse belonged to everyone. "Am I able to do a thing that has not been said to me from above? I am sent. I do not pick the house."

The hyena laughed. Nothing else in the ring did.

The Question It Refused to Take

The hare asked the last one, and asked it quietly, which is how the worst questions get asked. "You strike one limb. A heel. A finger. Why does the whole body feel it? Why does a man's jaw lock and his hands go cold over a wound in his foot?"

The serpent did not answer.

The stork shifted in the mud. The ox waited. When the head came up it came up higher than it had all day. "To me you say this?" the serpent said. "Say it to the master of the tongue."

The Head That Turned Toward the Man With the Hoe

The head turned, and every creature in the ring turned with it, toward the man with the wet blade on his shoulder.

"He is standing right here," the serpent said, "and he kills in Rome."

The man did not move.

The serpent told them how that is done. One word about a neighbor, dropped in a doorway at the hour when the jars go down to the well. A man who takes a wife, comes to hate her, and hangs an evil name on her at the gate. Out of the name comes a hatred nobody says aloud, out of the hatred the grudge, and the grudge gets paid, and the brother who was meant to live alongside him lies in a ditch one morning with his throat open.

The word gets onto the trade road with the caravans, crosses the water on a grain ship, and in Rome a man who has never seen this field is taken out of his house and killed for what was said in the doorway. The speaker's feet have not moved.

"I bite one limb and the whole body shakes," the serpent said. "He opens his mouth here and a man drops at the other end of the world. Put your question to him."

The stork went first, then the hyena, then the ox, back down toward the furrows. The man stood alone at the edge of the emptying ring, and nobody asked him anything. The serpent lowered itself through the thorn until only the wet line of the tongue showed.