Tweet! went Darter Brown touchily.
"I think it was more a label…," Rossamund elaborated.
The Lapinduce cast a shrewd look at both boy and bird. "He sought perhaps to play a tease upon the everymen?"
"Play a tease?"
"Most certainly-jest with them! Put a theriphim so thoroughly disguised among them and fool them all, yet leave the morsel of a hint to unravel the ruse and reveal the jest." Another coughing laugh.
Standing still on the opposite bank of the runnel, the young factotum could not help his frown. If his arrival on the foundlingery steps was a jest, it was a very poor one.
"Will you tell me, puzzled ouranin," the Lapinduce crooned, "why you remain in their realms? Why have you not joined us and kept yourself away from needless troubles?"
"I–I have not known of what I am supposed to be until only a fortnight gone. My master got a mark of my blood upon his arm to prove it, but it is yet to show."
"Oh, now." The urchin-lord's alien eyes went a little round. "Here you need no such gruesome proofs-I have told it is so; all doubts are ended."
His soul set so fixedly on the confirmation of Fransitart's cruorpunxis, Rossamund did not know what to do with so blunt a revelation. "But can I truly have come from the mud? Am I really the remaking of some lost everyman fallen dead in the wilds?"
The Lapinduce regarded him with glittering eyes.
"Whoever told you so told it true," it said simply.
Rossamund gasped a steadying breath. "But am I an everyman or a monster?"
"Ahh." The Duke of Rabbits clacked its front teeth together impatiently. "Thus did Radica and Dudica, the darlings and saviors of the Brandenfolk, worry. 'Are we mannish monsters or monsterish men?' was ever their quest." The monster-lord became contemplative and so completely still, the young factotum thought he had been forgotten. Finally the creature stirred. "The answer is as it was for them: you are both at once, neither more one nor less the other, an everyman and euriphim congruently and indivisibly, unable to be separated into parts. No marks on arms nor hiding behind unsmells will make you more or less than what you already are and have always been, oh manikin."
Despite all the evidence, Fransitart's recounting and Rossamund's own knowing, a self-denying blank reached out from Rossamund's milt, prickling at his scalp and setting a disconcerting buzz ringing in his ears.
The Lapinduce gave a disgusted snort. "Look at these pullings of long faces! How does knowing what you are make you any different? You have been you all this time; you will remain you for the long stretch of your life regardless of the reckonings in your thinking soils. The only alteration you have undergone is to simply have information to remedy your self-doubtings. Cease these snivels!" Again it clacked its terrible front teeth together, a loud, disapproving sound.
The rabbit-duke turned, took up a fine glass goblet that had sat upon the wooden-keyed spinet and sipped heartily at the wriggling froth it held, chewing on a mouthful. "I welcome you, ouranin, to my warren in this miniature remnant wood of mine." The Lapinduce bowed to him. It spread its arms like an invitation. "Come, let us walk in the cool of the morning so I might show it to you."
With a slow watchful stride over the tiny watercourse, Rossamund approached the urchin-lord under its ancient tree.
Another quaff of its frog-froth and the monster-lord coughed unexpectedly, two loud, clear hacks that bore the suggestion of language.
As if in response, two large buck-rabbits, brown with black faces and brooding jet eyes, hopped from a hole in the flagstones between a tight bole of walnut roots. Each rabbit bore one of Rossamund's boots, carried somewhat uncomfortably in its teeth by the heel-loop.
The young factotum gave an involuntary chuckle of delight.
"This is Ogh." Clearly pleased at the young factotum's reaction, the rabbit-lord indicated the buck carrying his right shoe with an uncurling of its great hands. "And this"-it did the same for the rabbit holding the left boot-"is Urgh; if they had not held them for you, the littler ones might have carried your shoes away for keeping."
The two creatures dropped Rossamund's boots carefully at his feet, and as he wrestled his footwear on, one pulled the leafy blanket from his shoulders and dragged it to its master. The other hopped in lazy lopes to disappear again beneath the walnut. As large as they were, there was nothing especially threwdish about them; they were just rabbits.
As if detecting its guest's inklings, the rabbit-duke declared, "They are of a long line of Oghs and Urghs who have served me ear and nose, keeping watchful eye while I ponder and I play to remember the sweet piping of the cosmic firstenings." The monster-lord reached down to fondle the ears of the one at its feet.
The other reemerged bearing Rossamund's slightly soiled hat in its gentle mouth.
The young factotum laughed again as he took it gratefully.
Eyes glittering, the Lapinduce turned and beckoned him to follow, taking the young factotum through the arches upon the other side of the cellar. By winding root-paneled passages full of half-heard whispers, Rossamund let himself be led upward, holding back cautiously as around and around they went, ever higher. Stooping through a veil of bracken and root fronds-the Duke of Rabbits almost bent to its oddly working knees-they emerged between the roots of an enormous olive onto a bright hillside glade.
Dazzled and blinking, Rossamund perceived a host of rabbits grazing and loping about the thickly flowering grass hemmed by great thickets of thorny trees. To the east over the treetops, where the morning sun was well lifted into the wan blue, he thought he saw the gray misted curve of the city's entire harborage brimming with masts. Founded a dozen yards behind him on the summit dense with pungent sage like some fortalice, the hollow building of the Lapinduce's court rose for four stories. Its banks were grown around with massive ancient trees of many kinds-walnut, sycamore, olive, turpentine-obscuring much of the skeletal tower. A powerful slumbering peace dwelt here, giving no hint that they were indeed in the middle of a vast and hostile city. Alighting with a whir in the branches above, Darter Brown played with little wrens and woodland robins.
Closing his eyes, Rossamund drew in a sweet cleansing breath.
Striding down the embankment, the Lapinduce was quickly gathered about by a milling, frolicking drove of coneys and hares. The monster-lord cooed for a moment to them, then held out its long arms and turned slowly about.
"When far-seeing Idaho was still on pap, this wood covered every dune and vale," it spoke with chanting tone, "from Lillian of the Faye to the People of the Dogs and far into the Piltmen's kingdoms. The Harholt, the Harleywood, Cacolagia, Nemus Cunicula… It has gone by many names, but each one gives it my name. Whether brave sires or cowardly heirs, wide-visioned conquerors or money-hearted gooses-grabbers, all souls have lived in it and about it by my consent."
"You let them cut your trees?" Rossamund asked carelessly, more intent on keeping from crushing a rabbit as he stepped down to the grass.
"Trees do not concern me as long as I am let alone. The ambits of this park are enough; I seek only to be untroubled by man or monster, and I let all these little naughtbringers flurrying about me flourish. I am not bound to be kind to everymen; however, it pleases me to watch their self-important antics. Ahh, everymen, one brief span you get!" the rabbit-duke cried into the sky, its tiny charges crowding about its slender feet untroubled by the monster's passion. "You are like the twigs on a plum tree; in spring you blossom, in summer bear fruit, in autumn you drop your leaves and in winter fall and then are gathered up to be thrown as kindling on the fire… How I delight in watching you all scurry and toil so seriously only to depart too soon. I stop for but a movement of thought, then rouse, my nails grown again, to find that a once-familiar generation have all departed and their children have become grandsires. Think what troubles you could wreak, oh, busy, busy everymen, if your span of years were but doubled! What terrible momentum you might gather. It is well you fight with each other as much as with us and waste time making wagers over the fate of the weakling tykes in their pits."