Tenjo at that got up from off his knees. He came toward Gerald: and the white-bearded, grave King then spoke with rather less of peevishness than of compassion.
“You will regret such sayings. For that also is a law of Lytreia. However, do you now ask what you will for the vigor which you have restored to our noses, and we will gladly pay that price. Yet for the blasphemies which you have uttered in this temple the spirit of the Holy Nose will by and by be asking a price: and that price nor you nor any other lad will ever pay gladly.”
Gerald replied, “For the renovation of your noses, and as a propitiatory trap for the doomed wu in Peter’s Tomb, you will pay me the price of one black rooster.”
“But what,” asked Tenjo, “is a rooster?”
“Why, a rooster is the herald of the dawn, it is the father of an omelet, it is the pullet’s first bit of real luck, it is the male of the Gallus domesticus.”
“We do not call a male chicken that—”
“No,” Gerald assented, “no, but you ought to. And not to do so is wholly un-American.”
“Yet why do you Americans call this particular bird a rooster, when everybody knows that all birds except ostriches and cassowaries roost, and that every flying bird everywhere is thus a rooster?”
“Well, I admit that we do not reason about it as you reason in Lytreia. I admit that the word ‘rooster’ is a word without connotations and without any correspondence in anatomy. Nevertheless, every nation has its customs. And it is as much our well-established American custom to call the male of the chicken a rooster as it is your custom to call that thing a nose.”
“But we call that a nose because it is, in point of fact, a nose. It is, as we have told you I do not know how many times, the Holy Nose of Lytreia.”