The Frog of Lilith Taught Yochanan Every Language

The Creature That Taught Him

Yochanan kept a frog. He did not know at first what kind of frog it was. He fed it, he sheltered it, he let it sit near him through the slow ordinary days of a poor man's life, and he asked nothing of it. He learned eventually what he had been keeping: the creature was a child of Lilith, the demon of night, and it had been placed in his keeping for a purpose that would take years to unfold.

Before it left, the frog gathered every animal under heaven. They came before it the way court subjects come before a departing official, walking and crawling and flying in from every quarter, and each brought a gift. Jewels carried up from underground. Herbs pulled from the slopes of remote mountains. Each stone had a virtue that could be laid against a wound or a sickness. Each plant opened something, a path, a gift, a door in a situation that seemed to have no exit.

The Stones and the Herbs

The frog taught him slowly, one virtue at a time. This stone for this wound. This herb for this fever. This root for the sickness that no physician could name. Yochanan held each object as the frog named it, learning the weight of it in his palm and the color of it and the place it had come from, until the knowledge of the whole animal kingdom had passed from the creature into the man. Then the frog was gone, and what it left behind could not be taken back.

Knowledge of that kind changes a man's station. Yochanan became wealthy. He became known to the king's court. A poor man who could heal what physicians could not, and who spoke with birds and beasts the way other men spoke with neighbors, became useful, and usefulness near power is never a comfortable position. The same gift that lifted him out of obscurity bound him to the men who now had reason to want him close.

The Hair That Fell From the Sky

A bird dropped a long golden hair onto the king's shoulder. The king picked it up, turned it over in the light, and made an oath. He would not marry anyone except the woman this hair belonged to. No one in the court knew whose it was. The hair was long and golden, and the woman who grew it was somewhere in the wide world, and the king needed someone who could find her.

Yochanan understood the language of birds. He went to the bird and asked it where the hair had come from. The bird knew. There was a princess across the sea, in a kingdom beyond the horizon, and the hair was hers. So Yochanan became the messenger, the one man in the court who knew, the one who could hear the answer no one else could hear and follow it to its source.

The Quest He Could Not Decline

What followed was the full shape of a dangerous quest. A voyage across water. A foreign court. A princess who had to be retrieved from a kingdom beyond the horizon. A passage back through every obstacle the road could throw across it. The gift from Lilith's child had made Yochanan capable of understanding what no one around him could hear, and that capability pulled him from obscurity into a chain of missions he had not chosen.

He could not decline them. To refuse the king was to surrender the position the knowledge had bought, and to keep the position was to keep walking into errands that grew more perilous the higher they reached. The frog had given him the speech of every bird and beast, and the speech had given him a place at court, and the place at court had given him a golden-haired princess to find across the sea. Each gift was the door to the next danger.