“But I have no robin for you, not now,” I say, and set her into her cage. “It is no longer the season.” The sparrowhawk closes her eyes, and the blackbird shakes out his feathers in relief and trills his wry song. But the wren answers with her own clarion song, no less lovely but loud, so loud for such a small shape, and the blackbird bows his head and falls silent.
“Ah, Jenny Wren, grant me a moment or two before this next reminding.” I pace a circle around my tower room. The moon’s light is flown from the west window, but the forest has its own green light for the likes of us, and a smudge in the east window promises dawn. I tidy what is left of the bat, spool some loose thread, find an errant holly berry like a drop of blood on the mantle and feed it to the blackbird. I straighten the nest on the table with its one tiny egg, touch the egg with one finger to feel the quivering life inside. There is one more story yet to come; it is not yet time to wake it.
“Not yet,” I sigh. “But soon enough.”
The sparrowhawk opens her eye as if in response; she’s looking not at me but to the east window. I sigh again and straighten my skirts, rummage amongst the loose pages and stray feathers on the side table for the carved wooden box. Its contents stir sleepily, beetles as bright as gems. I can hear the jackdaw approaching, the uneven rhythm of its wings and a chortling as if it rehearsed its tale.
“Now,” it says from the window ledge, before I bid it speak. “Quick, now, here, now.”
“Always,” I say. “Always here.”
I put the box on the table by the nest and the jackdaw jumps across to eat its fill, first turning each new beetle about to admire its gleam before swallowing. It lays the brightest at the feet of the wren and bows as she takes it in several dainty bites, steps wide around the sparrowhawk’s cage though her eyes are closed again, mutters something that sets the blackbird cackling. Then it stares up at me and I stare down at it. Black, all black it is, like a shadow on the table, lacking even the blackbird’s orange trim. Though in daylight its eye would be my own green, and daylight would come soon enough. Just one moment more, I think.
“Now,” it says again. It will not look at the nest with its egg. It looks to me instead.
I lower my head and bid it speak.
* * *
What the jackdaw says to Tallys:
All in others’ feathers we were, entering the King’s charivari. I wore oriole and yellowhammer, a crown of goldfinch and a trail of blue peacock with eyes like suns. And you wore my own black, a sleek fall of feathers from shoulder to heel, a backwards sweep from cheek and brow like wings, neither a lords’ soft hat or a ladies’ high-peaked veil, your eyes like oak-green glass and near as bright as mine. A fine disguise it would have been had you not given your name as Tallys at the entry to the tent. But such are mortal folk, that they confuse their own fancy with true nature and welcome the Lady of the Wood into their masquerade.
The tent inside was decorated as a clearing in the forest at night. Garlanded posts formed a gallery around the outer edge, with carved benches below and platforms for musicians among faux branches. In the center were vats of wine styled as ponds in which floated fish of gold and lilies of silver, piled high with fruit and surrounded by roasts of boar and buck, hare and fowl, all posed as if drinking, and the flesh of one great hart laid out on its own skin with its head on a stake overlooking. The musicians sent competing tunes to flirt and fight in the air overhead, which was thick with the scent of cut branches and burnt meat. A single chandelier hung like the Moon.
“An sad end for a hunt,” you said, stopping by the hart.
“A fine currée for curs,” said I.
“Hush, now, or the Queen will bind your beak with string,” you said.
“More like to wring your neck,” said I.
“I must abide your presence, bird of my recalling, but I could bid your voice fly elsewhere,” you said.
“They say the swan squawks when the jackdaw is silent,” said I. “Look, those ladies there think you talk to yourself, and laugh behind their hands. Let us go speak to them and show how well trained the two of us are, we wild things in the guise of the courtly.”
“And the court in the seeming of the wild. There is a balance to things, which this King threatens.
“The balance is broken these thirty years, and was it he who broke it?” said I, and set the ladies talking behind their hands again. You raised your hand then and I said no more for a while.
The ladies took your gesture as directed to them and approached. They were arrayed as animals of the forest: gowns of fur or feather, hair shaped to ear and antler, masks with eyes of hawk and hart. A Hare swept her hand in a courtesy and said, “We have a wager that you can settle, if the bird on your shoulder is a peacock or a common hen?”
A Quail with a bobbing plume of ruby said, “Was the wager on the bird? I thought it on the shoulder.” Their laughter fluttered up to fret the musicians at their playing.
You stroked my head with a finger, a thumb hooked firmly under my beak, and said, “Who’s to say which feathers are more rightful, those acquired by birth or those acquired by choice? Strip enough away and then who can judge?”
The Hare waggled its tall veiled ears. “Strip away, then, Jack or Jill Daw, for I assure you I have excellent judgment.”
Laughter flew again about their false faces.
“Come, this is a rough music,” said a new voice. It was the Sea: a hem of leaping fish, waves of seagreen silk and silver thread that rose to a spray of veil about a great nautilus of hair. The mask was scaled with mother of pearl and topped with sweeping gull wings of pearl. “We are here to delight the King with the harmony of nature, not the babbling of beasts.”
The group swirled in a murmuration of courtesies. The Hare, as bold and foolish as her chosen guise and the worse for wine, said, “Beg pardon, you Majesty, but we saw these two crowlings and thought they intended the little murder.” This said with a shake of her furry tail.
The Sea joined in the laughter, briefly, and then said, “Let us enjoy the peace of this garden awhile, before falls the apple of the King’s diversion. And let us be wary of drinking too deeply from the pool, lest we fall in.” This last to the Hare, who caught the Sea’s warning tune and wisely had no answering chorus.
The crowd dispersed in twos and threes to explore the false clearing. The Sea turned to us and said, “My dark-feathered friends, would you join me for a stroll?”
You nodded, not quite a bow. I had to duck to avoid the feathers of your cheeks sweeping up, and again as they came down.
“A clever bird,” the Sea said. “As are all the crow family, despite their mischief. I thought I heard it speak as you entered the tent.”
“It has a gift for mimicry,” you said. “But the tales say the jackdaw, vain as it is, knows when to keep its silence.”
“She give us a penny to bury the wren,” said I.
The Sea’s gull brows tilted toward me. “I remember, now, the fable of the bird that dressed itself in fine cast-off feathers when the birds contested who would be King.” The Sea gestured toward a bench under the false branches, carved like a fallen log and strewn with pillows like moss. “Here, now, sit with me, if you please.”
“Always,” you said.
“Yes, of course it was the jackdaw,” the Sea continued. “My mistake, but for a moment, I thought it was the blackbird.”
You shrugged. I flapped once to keep my balance, and you smoothed me still with a hand, swept the other to take in the tent. “It’s hard to judge a bird’s true nature in this false light.”
“Or by fire,” the Sea said. “I thought I heard you speak as well, as you entered. I thought I heard you give a name not wise nor welcome here.”
You shrugged again. “My mistake, but for a moment, I thought it was the King had welcomed the Wild into this tent.”
The Sea made a noise like foam on rocks.
“A gift for mimicry,” I said, to both you and her.
“As for wis
dom,” you said, “that’s also hard to judge in by false light. You might see more clearly under true trees.”
“True?” the Sea said, quiet and cold, and took off her mask. Queen Meriel’s eyes were no less hard than were the Seas’s pearls. “You say ‘true’ to me, you whose every appearance is one seeming or another? Come, if you want judgment, take off that mask and show me your true face.”
“If you are so certain it is a mask,” you said, “take it off me yourself.”
Queen Meriel reached her hand up, paused, her grey eyes reflecting your green, ran a finger along one long cheek feather then down to the tiny pinfeathers of your wrist. She held her hand out before me and I stepped up.
“Its like those fables and firelight tales,” Queen Meriel said to me, in a voice both sad and wondering. “The King is taken by the Wild and the Wild will not give him leave to come home.”
You sighed then, that close to human you were there and then, for all your feathers. “The Wild does not take or give,” you said, “it just is. If you had stayed by your ocean instead of coming here and looked each day on its waves dancing with the light and dreamt each night of its deep dark wonders until its ceaseless changing peace filled all your heart and you threw yourself in out of love, let it fill you, let yourself become part of it forever, tell me, if you did that, would those you left behind judge the ocean?
The Queen’s hand trembled under me.
But then you said, “No doing of mine.”
The Queen’s hand grew very still. She and I together said, recalling, “‘Nor any of this mortal madness.’“
“Oh yes,” the Queen said, and her fingers closed about my legs. “Maybe those I left behind would not judge, but I would. As I sank and drowned, I would speak my judgment with my last breath, not because the ocean was responsible, but because it refused to be. And so the King speaks, every night in his sleep, when and if it comes. In his fits he says ‘It is broken’, but in his dreams he says, ‘‘No, Tallys, no, it will break’. ‘No,’ he said, and whose doing, then, was the breaking?”
She shook me by the legs as if to demonstrate that last word. I kept my beak shut despite the pain. Now was my time to be silent and listen and remember.
“I had to know what manner of King he would be toward all the wild places,” you said. “You speak of responsibility. I am responsible to that in my care.”
The Queen fury was as quiet and certain as the tide. “And so am I to those in mine,” she said. “These people so far from my sea, not my responsibility by birth but by choice. Ah, choice, choice. Would you hear how I would chose?” Her grip was about my body now, and very strong. “It is this. If you will not give the King back to us whole, then take him entirely, before his descent drowns us all as well. Look how your Wild undoes us.”
The Queen’s gesture took in the masqueraded court, the sad mockery of the hunt. At that moment a group of men leapt into the false meadow. They were dressed as Wildmen in fur of dyed flax and cloaks of vine and branch, masks of leaf and bark. The men were linked by silver chains that jangled as they capered. They howled like baying hounds, and on that cue the musicians took up a rough ancient tune.
One of the Wildmen shouted, “You creatures, you crawlers and creepers, rattle your bones in fear! The hunt is upon you!”
The Queen stopped, mid-gesture, fingers tightening about my wings. You leaned forward to better see, a scent on you like the promise of lightening cutting the thick air.
“That is the King’s voice,” Queen Meriel said.
You put your hand on the Queen’s arm and her grip on me lessened somewhat. “No,” you said, and the Queen gave you a fierce look; if you had continued, “No doing of mine,” I am certain she would have crushed me. “No, not the King’s voice. It is his person, but the voice is the voice of his madness.”
The King and his band were spinning around the tent, rattling their chains to the music, spitting wine and curses. “You dung dwellers, you filthy fur, do you know us? Do you dare guess?” they shouted.
“Our fabulous King,” the foolish Hare cried, laughing and clapping, and got a face full of wine in reply.
“No no no!” the dancers shouted in time to the music. “No Kings in the wild, they’ve all been betrayed, the Queen’s in the branches and the hart is Unmade.”
The Queen took your hand off her arm, put her face close to ours. “Madness is his voice, the only voice you’ve left him,” she said. She put me back on your shoulder with a care which said much about her, gathered her skirts and stood.
The Queen had only taken a step, though, and you had only just started to rise, when Duke Eduoard stepped out from under the far gallery, his face as red as if he wore a mask of blood. “Enough,” he growled. “Have some respect for the Kingship, if not for the King. Which one of you fools is he?”
“Which one, which one?” the dancers sang.
The Duke clutched at one of the dancers, got a handful of flaxen fur and a splattering of wine. “Enough of this darkness. Bring me a light!” Not waiting for a response, he grabbed a stake on which was mounted a roasted goose, ripe with fat, and shoved it into the hanging candle Moon. The bird flared and caught fire. The Duke caught a pair of dancers by the chain between them, shoved the dim dripping torch in one face and then the other. “The King,” he demanded. “Which of you is the King?”
You went to leaf and glamour beneath me, were suddenly beside the Queen without taking a step. “The flames,” you said, “and those costumes”. The Queen echoed the Duke’s curse, lifted the waves of her skirt and ran.
She had not yet reached the center when a rivulet of flame ran down the stake and over the Duke’s fingers. He cursed and dropped the torch at the feet of the closest Wildman, a splash of fat and fire, and before the Queen’s heart could beat twice or mine a dozen times—as yours beats not at all—the man’s flax fur and cloak of pine boughs was all aflame.
There was a strange silence, like that moment after thunder when all the birds go still, just the crackle of the flame and a splashing as the Queen ran straight through the pool of wine. And then the burning man howled, and the creatured court under the gallery took up his cry in panic. The Duke, cradling his hand, stumbled back to fall into the roasted hart. The musicians, unable to see down through the false canopy of leaves, played louder.
The Wildmen tried to flee the fire but their effort simply wrapped the chains between them tighter. In the few steps it took the Queen to reach them, they were all alight, and the leaves of the ‘branches’ overhead were starting to smoke.
“Which of you is the King?” Queen Meriel shouted. She pulled one of the men into the pool of wine by the silver chain, though her skin sizzled where it touched the metal, and tore at his mask. The face was twisted unrecognizable by the pain, the hair unburnt but black, one of the King’s knights.
Again you were beside the Queen, knee deep in wine. “Hugh,” you said, and I flew through the swirling flame and smoke to circle the one Wildman who burned in silence, curled on the ground in the center of the madness.
Queen Meriel stepped from the pool, under one chain and over another, reached for the King, but the flames, though low, were fierce. She looked about, saw the hart’s skin and tried to pull it over the king, but the Duke was still sprawled across it. She knelt, instead, and smothered the King in the sea of her skirts. The wine-soaked silk hissed, a cloud of steam and smoke around us, not enough to hide the last desperate agony of the Wildmen as their flesh began to fall from the bone.
The King muttered something to Queen Meriel, only his face visible in the pool of the Queen’s skirts, one embroidered fish draped over a miraculously unburnt brow.
The Queen put a hand on that brow. “Broken,” she said, agreeing. She looked up. From her expression she was looking not for aid but for you. She saw me instead and raised her hand, and despite her expression I flew to her. We crows are well used to ruin and take no sides.
“Tell her,” Queen Meriel said, “if she does not t
ake this Wild from us, then I shall come take the Wild from her. Par force, as they say. Men may hunt for pleasure, but not I. Tell her.”
And so I have.
* * *
“And so you have,” I say. I offer my hand and the jackdaw steps up. I hold it to my cheek, feel the feathers that I have worn myself, at once soft and sharp, and whisper, “When the time comes, tell her that I do not hunt, for pleasure or otherwise. I am the hunt, for ever and ever.”
The jackdaw will not look at me, but it has no choice but to remember. I put it in its cage. The other birds look up; even the sparrowhawk opens its eyes. I expect the wren’s song, too clear and loud, but it is the jackdaw that speaks. “What name will you give it, this last bird? You never gave me a name.”
I turn away, somehow tangle myself in another loose thread from the loom, blindly tug until it snaps and falls to the floor.
“I never give or take,” I say, unwrapping the end of the thread from around my legs, not looking up. “And names make no difference to the likes of us. Choose one yourself, if you must.”
There is silence. I pick up the nest. The egg is so small.
“Tallys,” the jackdaw says. I do not look up. “Now,” it says.
I do not look up, but I nod, and touch the egg with a fingertip, and it shakes and cracks from side to side, the tiny shape inside unfolding. The goldfinch trembles and opens its eyes against what little light there is.
“Who am I to tell my own story?” I ask. The jackdaw is silent, all the birds are silent.
I cup the goldfinch between my hands and hold it to my chest, a hundred tiny heartbeats against my silence as the goldfinch grows to fill the cage of my fingers. Even full-grown the bird is tiny, almost as small as the wren, a bright red mask slashed with black and gold stripes across her wings. I keep her to my chest with one hand, singing little nothings, while I feel with the other on the mantle for the prick of thistle that is the goldfinch’s fate to eat. And eat she does, her first meal, perhaps her last, plucking the tiny seeds from the between the thorns. And then I set her in her cage and bid her listen.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #158 Page 3