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“I’ll get something to cut with,” said Ethelbert.

Elmer, still lying down, heard his son lower himself into the chimney of the cave; heard him seek and find footholds deeper and deeper in the earth; heard him grunting and wrestling with logs at the bottom.

When Ethelbert returned, he was carrying something long that caught the glint from the one bright star. “This should do it,” he said.

He gave to Elmer Robert the Horrible’s keen, two-handed broadsword.

It was midnight.

The little family was stuffed with venison.

Elmer picked his teeth with Robert the Horrible’s poignard.

Ethelbert, on watch at the door, wiped his lips with a plume.

Ivy pulled the horse-drapes about her contentedly. “If I’d of knowed you was going to catch something,” she said, “I wouldn’t of thought that trap was such a dumb idea.”

“That’s the way it is with traps,” said Elmer. He leaned back and tried to feel elated about not hanging the next day, now that Robert the Horrible was dead. But he found the reprieve a dull affair compared to the other thoughts carousing in the stately dome of his head.

“There’s just one thing I got to ask,” said Ivy.

“Name it,” said Elmer expansively.

“I wish you two’d quit making light of me, telling me this is unicorn meat,” said Ivy. “You think I’ll believe anything you tell me.”

“It is unicorn meat,” said Elmer. “And I’m going to tell you something else you can believe.” He slipped on Robert the Horrible’s iron gauntlet, and rapped the table with it. “Ivy—there’s a great day coming for the little people.”

Ivy looked at him adoringly. “Ain’t you and Ethelbert nice,” she said, “going out and getting me the clothes for it?”

There were hoofbeats in the distance.

“Hide everything!” said Ethelbert.

In an instant, every vestige of Robert the Horrible and the deer was out of sight.

Norman warriors, armed to the teeth, thundered by Elmer the woodcutter’s humble hut.

They shouted in fear and defiance of formless demons in the night.

“Hien! Hien! Courage, mes braves!”

The hoofbeats faded away.

Unknown Soldier

It was all nonsense, of course, when they said our baby was the first one to be born in New York City into the third millennium of the Christian era—at ten seconds past midnight on January first, 2000. For starters, the third millennium, as countless people had pointed out, would not begin until January first, 2001. Planetarily speaking, the new year was already six hours old when our child was born, since it had begun that much earlier at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, where time begins. Never mind that the numbering of years since the birth of Christ could only be approximate. The datum was so obscure. And who can say in which minute a child was born? When its head appeared? When all of it was outside the mother? When the umbilical cord was cut? Since there were many valuable prizes to be given to the city’s first baby of 2000, and its parents, and the chief physician in attendance, it was agreed well in advance of the contest that severing the cord should not count, since the moment could be delayed past the crucial midnight. There might be doctors all over the city with their eyes on the clock and their scissors poised, and of course with witnesses present, watching the scissors, watching the clock. The winning doctor would get an all-expense-paid vacation on one of the few islands where a tourist could still feel fairly secure, which was Bermuda. A battalion of British paratroops was stationed there. Understandably, doctors might be tempted to fudge the birthtime, given the opportunity.

No matter what the criteria, defining the moment of birth was a lot less controversial than declaring when a fertilized ovum was a human being in the mother’s womb. For the purpose of the contest, the moment of birth was the moment when the baby’s eyes or eyelids were first bathed in light from the outside world, when they could first be seen by the witnesses. So the baby, which was the case with ours, would still be partly inside the mother.