by John Crowley
When he came upon them one day, he greeted them as usual: “Hello, Boy,” he sang. “Hello, Girl.”
“I’m not a boy,” the Man said. “Not anymore. Once I was, but now I’m a Man.”
“I’m not a girl,” said the Woman. “I’ve changed. Now I’m a Woman.”
“Oh,” said the Nightingale. “Sorry. I’ll try to remember.” He sang a few notes, and then he asked the Man, “Did you ever find an answer to your question?”
“No,” said the Man. “But I learned a lot of things.”
“Is that so,” said the Nightingale.
“Yes,” said the Man. He pointed up at the Nightingale. “Things aren’t as you think they are.”
“No?” said the Nightingale.
“No,” said the Man. “Listen to the Moon. You’ll learn.”
“Oh?” said the Nightingale. “The Moon never spoke to me. What did the Moon say?”
“There is Time,” said the Man. He came closer to the branch where the Nightingale sat. “There was a time before you were,” he said, “and there will be a time after. You won’t live forever. You will die.”
“Do you think so?” said the Nightingale, who didn’t know at all what the Man meant.
“You will. There are hawks, Bird. There are foxes. There are owls and weasels.”
“But not just now,” said the Nightingale, looking around quickly.
“There will be!” said the Man. His expression was so fierce and strange that the Nightingale flew to a higher branch away from him.
“You will die, Bird!” said the man in a terrible voice. “You will die!”
The Nightingale was astonished and troubled and didn’t know what to do. So he sang. “It’s all right,” he sang. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right!” cried the Man. “It’s not. Because you’ll die. And so will I!”
And just at that moment, with a noise of winds and many rivers, with a clamor of birdsong and a sound of leaves falling, Dame Kind came striding through the forest toward them.
The Woman leapt up. “We’ll run and hide!” she said. She took the Man’s hand. “Quick, we must!” she said, and together they ran to hide in the forest.
“Come out,” said Dame Kind.
She waited.
“Come out,” she said again. And the Man and the Woman came out from where they had hidden themselves.
“Why did you hide?” asked Dame Kind.
“Because we were afraid,” said the Woman.
Dame Kind looked at them sadly for a long time. Then she said in a gentle voice: “Who told you you should be afraid?”
The Man and the Woman looked away from Dame Kind, and they made no answer.
“And who told you that you would die?” Dame Kind asked them. “Was it the Moon?”
“It was the Moon,” said the Man.
“No,” said the Woman, and she raised her eyes to Dame Kind. “It wasn’t the Moon. We learned it ourselves.”
And that was true.
Dame Kind took the Man’s shoulder in her great hand. She gently brushed away the hair that fell before the Woman’s face. She said, “Oh, dear. Oh, my poor children.” Then she covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head. “Oh, my,” she said. “Oh, dear.”
“We only wanted to learn,” said the Man. “There is Time, and there is Change, and there is Death. And you never told us.”
“You never told us,” the Woman said, her eyes filling with tears. “You never told us we would die.”
Dame Kind lowered her hand from her eyes. “No,” she said. “I didn’t. And I will tell you why. Until you thought of those things, they did not exist.
“Until you thought of Time, there was no such thing. Things went on as they always had; there wasn’t a Yesterday, and there wasn’t a Tomorrow; there was only Today.
“Until you thought of Change, everything remained the same. The flowers were always growing, the young ones were always being born, the Sun and the stars and yes, even the Moon, were always doing just as they always do. Now you will see them change, you alone, and nothing will ever be quite the same for you.
“Until you thought of Death, dear children, nothing died. My creatures only lived. They didn’t know of a time when they had not been, and they couldn’t think of a time when they would not be. And so they lived forever. And so would you have too: except that you thought of Death.
“And when you thought of those things,” she said, “you thought of fear, too.
“And you thought of weeping.” She dried the Woman’s eyes with the sleeve of her gown.
“And the worst thing is,” Dame Kind said, and a tear came to her own eye, “that now you have thought of these things, you cannot take them back, ever. That’s the way it is with ideas. Once you have one, there’s no going back.”
The Woman wept, and the Man hung his head at these words of Dame Kind’s; and the Nightingale remembered a morning—an important morning—when Dame Kind had said those very words to him: once you have an idea, there’s no going back.
Dame Kind crossed her arms and rose up to her full height. “And now,” she said. She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, what now? I just don’t know. I don’t know if you can ever be happy here again; not as happy as you once were.” She looked around her at the blooming forest. “I can’t have you going about the world weeping. I can’t have you telling the birds and the beasts that they will die. I can’t have that.”
“It’s all right,” sang the Nightingale. He hadn’t understood much of what had passed between Dame Kind and the Man and the Woman, but he didn’t like to see them sad. “It’s all right,” he sang. “I don’t mind.”
“All right then,” said the Man. His face was brave, and his eyes were dry. His knees shook, but he pretended that they didn’t. “All right then, we’ll go someplace else.” He clenched his fists and set his jaw. “If we can’t be happy here, we’ll go someplace else.”
“You can’t,” Dame Kind said. “There isn’t anyplace else.”
The Man put his arm around the Woman. “All right,” he said, all right then: I’ll make one up. I’ll make up another place. I’ll make up another place, a better place, and go there.”
“Oh, dear,” said Dame Kind. She lifted her fingers to her chin in alarm and puzzlement.
The Woman brushed the last of her tears from her eyes. She said, “Yes! I’ll make up someplace else, too. A better place. And I’ll go there.”
“No!” the Man said turning on her. “I’ll make up another place, and we’ll both go there. Come on!” And he took the Woman’s arm and led her away; and though she looked back once, and though her eyes began again to fill with tears, she knew that she could not leave the Man; and so she went with him, and they went out of the forest together.
“Perhaps,” Dame Kind said when they were gone, “perhaps I made a mistake.” She sat sadly on the stump of a tree she had made long ago, and had made to fall down, too. “Perhaps the Boy and the Girl were a mistake.”
“Oh, no,” the Nightingale said. “I don’t think you could make a mistake.”
“I didn’t think so either,” Dame Kind said. “Well—I have made one or two—some animals and plants that didn’t work out—but they all came right in the end. They did their part.”
“So will the Boy and the Girl.”
“I don’t know,” said Dame Kind. “It’s odd, having things come about in the world that I didn’t think of. This place they’re going to make up: What will it be like? I don’t know. Because I didn’t think of it.”
“But you did,” said the Nightingale. “I don’t know anything about it, but—didn’t you think up the Boy and the Girl? If you thought up the Boy and the Girl, didn’t you think up everything they can think up? In a way, I mean.”
Dame Kind thought about that.
“I guess I did,” she said at last. A broad smile came over her face, a smile that was like the Sun coming from clouds; and in fact at that very moment a mass of thick clo
uds did go away from the face of the Sun, and the Sun’s smile remade the patterns of light and dark amid the ferns and the flowers. “I guess I did at that. In a way.” She sighed, and stood. A thousand thousand duties were calling to her. “Anyway, I’ll just have to get used to it. And I don’t suppose the story’s over yet.”
The Nightingale didn’t know what she meant by that, but he was glad to see Dame Kind happy again. He sang a few notes. “It’s all right,” he sang.
“You know,” Dame Kind said to him as she went away, “all those things the Man said are true. About Time. About Death.”
“It is?” said the Nightingale.
“But if I were you,” said Dame Kind, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“If you say so,” said the Nightingale, and his heart was filled with gladness.
And Dame Kind went away, to pour rain, to plant seeds, to turn the world in its socket. “And as for you,” she said to the Moon when next she saw it, “from now on you will hold your tongue.” She pinched its nose and squeezed its cheeks and locked up its lips until its face was hardly a face at all. “And from now on forever,” she said, “when the Man and the Woman ask you questions, no matter how they insist, you will answer nothing, nothing, nothing at all.”
And so it has been, from that day to this.
It was another day when the Nightingale saw the Man again, but whether it was the next day, or the day after that, or many many days later, the Nightingale didn’t know, for he didn’t keep track of such things.
The Nightingale was singing in the forest when he saw the Man some way off.
The Man stood looking into the forest where the Sun fell in patterns of dark and light on the flowers and the ferns.
“Why don’t you come in?” said the Nightingale. “Come in and rest, and have a chat.”
“I can’t,” the Man said. “I can’t pass through this gate.”
“What gate is that?” the Nightingale asked.
“This one here,” the Man said, pointing ahead of him with the stick he carried.
But the Nightingale could see no gate there. “Well, I don’t know what you mean,” he said, “but if you say so.”
The Man went on staring into the forest, through the gate that he alone saw there. He seemed at once sad and angry and resolute. The Nightingale sang a few notes and said, “Tell me. How is it with you now? How did the place you made up turn out? Is it better than here?”
The Man sat down, holding his stick in his lap, and put his elbows on his knees and his cheeks in his hands.
“I wouldn’t say better,” he said a little sadly. “It’s interesting. Bigger. I think it’s bigger, but we haven’t gone very far yet. There’s a lot of work to do.”
“A lot of what?” asked the Nightingale.
“Work,” the Man said, looking up at the branch where the Nightingale sat and saying the word a little bitterly. “Work. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I think,” the Nightingale said cheerfully, “I think I understand you less and less. But don’t hold it against me.”
The Man laughed, and shook his head. “No, I won’t,” he said. He sighed. “It’ll be all right. It’s the nights that are the hardest time.”
“Why is that?” asked the Nightingale. He hardly knew what Night was, after all; he slept all through it, and when he awoke, it was gone.
“Well, there are Things in the dark. Or anyway I think there are Things. I can’t be sure. She says they’re Dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Things that you think are there but aren’t.”
“If you say so,” said the Nightingale.
“But it doesn’t matter,” said the Man. He grasped the stick in the two clever hands the Nightingale had always marveled at. “See, I’ve got this stick now. If anything comes near—” He struck out with the stick, which made a swishing noise in the empty air.
“That’s a good idea,” said the Nightingale. “I never would have thought of it.”
The Man was turning the stick in his hands with a dissatisfied expression. “I could make it better,” he said. “Somehow better. Stronger. Like stone—that’s the strongest thing. So it would cut, like a sharp stone.” He made an imaginary jab with the stick, like a jay’s sharp beak breaking into an egg, except there was no egg there. Then he put down the stick and sat again with his cheeks in his hands.
“Anyway,” the Man said, “there’s nothing to be afraid of now.”
“No,” said the Nightingale.
“But then,” the Man said. “Soon. There might be something to be afraid of.”
“If you say so,” said the Nightingale.
The Man rose to go, shouldering the stick he had thought of. “It’ll be all right,” he said again. “It’s just the nights that are hard.”
He looked back once through the gate that he saw there, which kept him from the precincts of the forest, and which the Nightingale couldn’t see.
“Well, good-bye then,” he sang. “Good-bye.”
And the Man went away down the valley to the place he and the Woman had made up.
When darkness came that night, the Nightingale perched on his usual branch. He fluffed his feathers; he bent his legs so that his sharp, small feet locked themselves tightly around the branch (so that he wouldn’t fall from the tree in his sleep). He nestled his beak in the feathers of his shoulder and closed his eyes.
But sleep wouldn’t come.
The Nightingale’s eyes opened. He shut them again, and again they opened.
The Nightingale was thinking.
For the first time in his life, and the first time in all the time there had been a Nightingale, the Nightingale was thinking about something that was not in front of his eyes.
He was thinking about the Man and the Woman, alone in the place they had made up, wherever it was.
He was thinking of what the Man had said to him: that it was all right, but that the nights were hard.
That there were Things in the night to be afraid of.
The Nightingale took his beak out from the feathers of his shoulder and looked around himself.
There were no Things in the night to be afraid of that he could see.
There was a sparkling dimness; there were the black shapes of the sleeping trees and the very, very dark pool of the forest floor. There was the secret Moon turning in the clouds and saying nothing. There were stars, and there were breezes. But no Things.
“It’s all right,” the Nightingale sang. And because there were no other songs being sung, the Nightingale’s song was stronger and sweeter than he had ever heard it.
“It’s all right,” he sang again, and again his song floated out into the night, and lingered, all alone.
That’s interesting, thought the Nightingale, very interesting: but the night is for sleep. He tucked his beak again into the feathers of his shoulder and closed his eyes.
Without even knowing he had done so, he found after a few moments that he had opened his eyes again and was looking around himself and thinking.
He was thinking, What if I fly to where the Man and the Woman are?
If they hear me sing, he thought, they might not be so afraid. If they heard me singing, they would remember that day will come. And anyway, he thought, what’s the use of sleeping all night, when you can be awake and singing?
He made up his mind to do this, even though it was something he had never done before. He looked around himself, wondering how he would find the Man and the Woman. He unlocked his feet from the branch where he sat, opened his brown wings, and sailed off carefully into the cool darkness.
He flew, not knowing exactly where he should fly; now and then he stopped to rest, and to eat a few of the bugs that were so plentiful, and to look at the new world of night he had discovered, and to test his song against it. And after a time that seemed to him more short than long, he came upon the place where the Man and the Woman were.
“Why, it isn’t very far away at all,” he said to
himself. “In fact it seems just like the same old forest to me.”
There was one difference, though.
In the place where the Man and the Woman were, there was something bright, something yellow and orange and red, dancing and shifting and shining. It was as though a tiny piece of the Sun had been broken off and set before them.
The Man and the Woman had thought of fire.
They sat before their fire, with their arms around each other, looking into the fire and into the deep darkness around them. In one hand the Man held the stick he had thought of.
The Nightingale didn’t like to get too close to the new idea of fire, which was surely marvelous but a little scary; and so he hid himself in a thicket. And from there he sang.
“It’s all right,” he sang.
The Woman listened. “Did you hear that?” she asked.
“What?” said the Man, looking up in alarm.
“Listen,” the Woman said.
The Nightingale sang: “It’s all right.”
The Man and the Woman listened to the song. In the stillness of the night it was so clear that it seemed they heard it for the first time. They had never noticed that it was so beautiful, so strong and soft, so happy and sad all at once.
“Once,” said the Man, “he sang in the day.”
“Now he sings at night,” the Woman said.
“We’ll call him the Nightingale,” said the Man.
The Woman rested her head on the Man’s shoulder. Hearing the Nightingale’s song, she remembered the forest they had left. She remembered the happiness they had had there. She remembered the Sun falling in patterns of light and darkness on the flowers and the ferns. She remembered it all, and hot tears came to her eyes, because they had lost it all.
“It’s all right,” sang the Nightingale.
The Woman thought: I can remember it all. And then she thought: If I can remember it all, then I haven’t lost it—not completely. If I can remember it, I will have it always, even if only a little bit of it. Always: no matter what.
She closed her eyes. “It’s all right,” she said. “It will be all right. You’ll see.”
The Man put his arm around her, glad of her warmth in the darkness. He listened to the Nightingale sing, and he thought: Day will come. No matter what happened before, day will always come. Tomorrow the Sun will lift itself over the hills, and the world will be new. What will it be like? He didn’t know, but he thought it might be good. He hoped it would be good.