High in the forest canopy sat a little round nightingale who could not sing for shit. A bit of a simpleton, she awoke each morning just moments before the sun rose, believing herself responsible for its shine. Her mama, however, preferred to roost in the lower shaded branches of one particularly silver birch. From here, the little nightingale’s mother sang so poignantly that people leaned from their windowsills, stretching the cups of their ears toward the sound as though it were water from the pump. To call it song was inexact, but it was what the villagers heard in the churches and taverns, so it seemed relevant to this bird. “Just listen to that song!” they bid one another, gesturing hither, yon. Each felt it spoke directly to their heart, their sorrow.
The little nightingale loved her mother’s voice too, its fizzy trajectory striking the filaments of her downiest feathers. Mama!, she thought, the notes drifting past her head. Each villager believed that they alone were recipient of that shimmering song, but the little nightingale knew it was just for her.
It wasn’t entirely untrue, since nightingales sing in a dialect known only by their kind. While it sounded lovely to other species, they would never understand its true message—or even that it had one. Instead, they construed meaning from their own reactions to the nightingale’s exquisite, empty tune.
The little nightingale was still learning how to be a nightingale. When her mother flew tree to tree with purpose and élan, so did the little nightingale. When her mother drank the water that collected in shining balls on the surfaces of certain broad leaves, so too did the little nightingale. When her mother efficiently swallowed the small bugs that marched around like they owned the place, the little nightingale hopped close behind, beak open.
While her mother’s song contoured the otherwise untextured day, the little nightingale didn’t dare attempt to try it in any way that might be overheard, for instance, by the owl who spent each day in stubborn repose several trees over. Soon, soon she would learn how to sing, but until then she simply fluttered and swallowed between her mother’s moments of punctuating brilliance.
Now, where there is a beautiful thing, there will be someone who ponders how it might be leveraged for their own benefit. One of the emperor’s pages was shrewd like this. He collected offal from the castle scullery and traded it with the villagers for bowls of stew. He stole hens from the farmer’s harried wife, then loaned out his hound as a watchdog in exchange for eggs. He sold his spoils at a 30 to 50 percent markup, but his patrons did not know this. If they did, they were too hungry to quarrel. The other pages turned to him for advice, which he tendered with varying degrees of self-interest. Every day he made opportunities for himself, and nearly each person he encountered was an unwitting contributor to these opportunities. He was quite close to purchasing a blue doublet with matching breeches.
And so it happened that one morning, seeing both the cooper and the hooper pause their hammering in order to better appreciate the bird’s distant song, the page had an idea: He would find the nightingale, bring her to court, and engage her to sing for the emperor’s pleasure. Not only would this elevate his status in the emperor’s eyes, it would also distract the villagers from their daily business and make them more pliant to his dealings.
That night, the page tiptoed past the castle guards who stood snoring loudly against their spears. Once beyond the castle walls, it did not take long for him to pass the darkened threshold of the North Wood, pushing through the stinging nettles and quivering ferns toward the place he believed the nightingale would be found.
In time the black trunks thinned, giving way to a delicate stand of birch trees, and oddly, a path that stretched to a vanishing point in each direction. Fragrant red needles shifted under the page’s feet, having dropped from the trees on the path’s far side. Dark and dripping with resin, those trees towered in comparison to the pearly birches at his back.
He must’ve drifted off on the soft bed of needles, for the boy abruptly found himself rubbing his eyes under a bright blue sky. A darting shadow drew his attention to the branches of the nearest birch, in which sat a brown and mottled bird. She opened her beak, releasing a startlingly clear run of notes. The page squinted up at the nightingale, her dull feathers and stippled breast. She wasn’t much to look at, but it was nothing that a jewelled cage wouldn’t improve.
“Bird,” he cried, “I come on behalf of the emperor. Your voice is all anyone speaks of.”
The nightingale stopped singing and peered down at the boy. “Oh,” said the nightingale. “The king.”
“The emperor,” said the page. “The king’s king.” The bird’s eyes remained blank, unmoved by the exponent. “The emperor is a great admirer of your singing.” He cleared his throat. “So basically, you’re invited to the emperor’s court, where you will be highly acclaimed and splendidly comfortable.” The nightingale continued to stare, her eyes two black beads. “Prithee,” coughed the page, in case the nightingale hadn’t heard him or something.
“♩,” declared the little nightingale, fluttering down to her mother’s perch. The nightingale glanced at her small and homely child in mild surprise, as did the page. “You,” he said, waving in her general direction. “Sing for me.” The little bird raised her head as high as she could, releasing a stream of arioso trills that were simply not at her mother’s level, and perhaps also a little try-hard.
The page gave a deep snort, hocking a chartreuse wad against the root of the nightingale’s birch. “I’ve heard enough, minuscule bird. You don’t have it.” The little nightingale looked to her mother, who seemed to be studying the page’s elaborately embroidered tunic, or possibly, nothing at all.
*
The little nightingale watched as the page stepped back into the dimness of the wood, her mother swinging in a cage that he held aloft. She waited serenely for her mother to look back.
*
For many weeks, the little nightingale stayed precisely where she was, flying back and forth between a fir on the far side of the path and her mother’s birch. The little nightingale did this so much that she wore a path in the air between the two trees.
This made the owl so surly that he moved to a different knothole a good distance from the little nightingale.
Every morning, the little nightingale probed the earth for insects and dipped her beak into the sparkling dew that collected on the chicory’s sepals. Without her mother’s song, she spent much of the day in circuitous flight, her eyes fixed on the silver birch. Sometimes, late at night, she tested her own voice, which was not sonorous or crystalline in the least. She didn’t know how to do what her mother did. The voles scurried away when the little nightingale tried to sing, though not out of cruelty. There was some respect in their fleeing.
One hot summer day, the little nightingale collided with her birch. Gathering her senses, she found that it had felt somewhat good. So, she kept doing it, briefly caressing the birch’s smooth bark with the tips of her wing feathers before tumbling against it. Soon, she allowed the whole of her body to hit the tree full-force. Over time, its silver trunk collected the marks of the little nightingale’s misaimed beak.
“What the fuck?” whispered a pink worm, watching the nightingale from between two blades of grass. Even the worm, a low thing in every way, knew this was weird, probably pathological behaviour from the bird. Did it bother him? No. Rather, the worm felt a rare and sparkling ease watching this creature fare so poorly. No one really respected the worm, for all he did was eat dirt and shit dirt. Considering the nightingale, he felt pretty good and helped himself to a mouthful of something dead.
The birch leaves began to brighten and curl. The little nightingale was proud of the trees for their gift of colour and how generously they shared it. She did not know how to speak to them, but she thought they must understand her life, the way they whispered to her in the delicate currents that lightly shook their branches. The leaves began to drop and the little nightingale continued to fly, surrounded by falling slashes of yellow. Sometimes she forgot what she was doing and felt only the release of flying through the leaves. Biff, into the tree.
“They do that in the king’s city, too,” said a red fox, standing on the path below. “Except they fly into windows, not trees.” The nightingale settled on a high branch and peered down at the new creature.
“He’s actually the emperor,” she said.
“Oh sure,” said the fox.
“What are windows?” asked the nightingale.
“They are transparent barriers that divide the indoors from the out,” said the fox. “Made with sand and potatoes.”
“I see,” said the nightingale. She remembered suddenly about beasts with conversational skills; how they talked small creatures into their dark mouths. “Fox, not to be rude, but I’d appreciate it if you continued on your way.”
The fox’s copper fur was burred and matted. One of her hind legs dragged behind her. “Of course,” said the fox, turning around. “Goodbye, Nightingale.”
The fox had limped a few paces toward the far side of the path when the nightingale thought of something.
“Hold up,” she said. “You were in the city?” The fox stopped.
“Briefly. I was driven out, struck by a flint from a child’s slingshot.” The fox turned to show her hindquarters, black with blood.
“I understood that children were kind,” said the nightingale.
“Perhaps some,” said the fox. “But not these. I am lucky to have escaped, despite my injury. I find myself quite weak.”
The nightingale considered this. “You should stay here until you get your strength back.”
The fox bowed her head. “You are as generous as your song, Nightingale.”
“I do not sing, Fox. That was my mother’s gift. My voice is garbage. The emperor’s page told me so.”
The fox was taken aback by the small bird’s candour. She was not a social animal, but she had a sense that she should say something…nice.
“Your mother,” she began, “is the emperor’s particular favourite. He probably knows all about you.”
The nightingale considered this. “If this were true, surely he would have called for me to join her at the palace.” The fox then regretted her impulse to say something soothing, for it became all the more obvious that the nightingale had been left. “She still sings for me, though,” said the little nightingale, “even if I can’t hear it.”
Night came and the fox fell in and out of restless sleep. The nightingale tried as much as possible to recall the sound of her mother’s voice.
The next morning, the nightingale began her usual flying back and forth. The fox, much weaker, managed to drag herself a few feet to chew some stems at the path’s border. Above her, the nightingale hit the tree trunk with a dampened thud. The fox wondered if the nightingale wasn’t a bit mad.
“Why do you fly back and forth so?” she asked. The nightingale considered. At first it had been to pass the time, and then it had become time. “Nightingale!” cried the fox. The little bird had increased the speed of her flight and now seemed to be hitting the tree with greater force. “Did I tell you I once heard your mother at court?” The nightingale turned abruptly, flying to a low bramble just inches from the fox’s snout.
“Did she say anything to you?”
“I didn’t meet her. I was passing through the back garden and I heard her voice coming from one of the high windows. It was the sweetest melody I’ve ever heard. I stopped to listen. Then the children started with the stones. I hadn’t even noticed them arrive! That’s how beautiful your mother’s song was.”
The nightingale was thrilled. Her mother could stop a ferocious predator in its tracks! Her mother, the emperor’s favourite! The nightingale flew around the fox’s head, the two of them chortling in their own indiscernible ways.
As darkness fell, the fox curled herself tightly on the ground, tail pulled up to her nose for warmth. Without food and water, each breath hurt. Still, she hoped that something would save her. A slow-witted field mouse might still leap between her parched jaws. She closed her eyes. Above her, she heard the ultrasonic whirr of the nightingale’s flight. Once, the fox might have snatched her easily from the air without a second thought.
In the morning, the fox could hardly open her eyes. “You look about finished,” said the worm. He had drawn himself up from a hole in the ground and was now rolling about in the grass. The fox looked at the wriggling thing, uncertain which side was speaking. “You’re right, Worm, although it’s not polite of you to say.”
“I am largely self-governed,” said the worm, his plump body aglow with morning dew.
“What do you want?” said the fox.
“Not much,” said the worm. “Just to hasten your demise.” The fox, exhausted, thirsty, and sick with hunger, felt a flare of anger rise in her neck. She wheezed a vague threat in the worm’s direction. “What’s that?” said the worm, squirming close. “Can’t hear a dang thing you’re saying.”
The fox would once have crushed this insolent creature with a swipe of her paw. Now, she had hardly the strength to make sense of his insults. She also had a strange, soft feeling that it didn’t really matter—that the worm was just saying worm things because it had always lived as a worm and knew no other way. To the worm, the fox was almost food. How restful it was to no longer be hunting or hunted. Water, she thought. With her eyes closed, she could almost feel it.
“Hey,” shouted the worm. “Don’t die yet.”
The air stirred above them with the flap flap of tiny wings. “What was that, Worm?” said the nightingale, dangerously pleasant. “What did you just say?”
The worm recoiled, then tried to drive itself back into the dirt. “I was just kidding around, Nightingale. Your friend understands, right?”
The fox sighed, sweeping flies away with a slow flick of her tail. “It’s fine, Nightingale,” whispered the fox.
“Maybe so,” said the nightingale, “but I won’t abide it.” With the speed of a different species altogether, the nightingale sank her tiny claws into the worm’s pink body.
“Ow!” cried the worm. “Nightingale, that hurts! What would your mother think, eating an earthworm?”
“I’m not going to eat you, Worm,” said the nightingale. “I’m going to kill you.”
The nightingale tossed the worm in the air, snipping it in two with her beak and crushing its gummy, writhing halves against a flat rock.
“What an asshole,” she said, raising her head from the pâté of the worm’s body. The fox’s amber eyes were wide with shock. “It’s fine!” said the nightingale. “Don’t worry about it!”
The fox was both here in this world with the nightingale and the pulverized worm, and also in a narrow pocket just behind it. There would be no more travel. The fox had always been alone, although she understood that she shared the same instincts and appetites as others of her kind. Once, she had hoped to find a river where she could drink, bathe her wound, watch the butterflies beat the air. Instead, she found this slim path between forests, overseen by a small, hectic nightingale. It was the most gentleness she had known.
The nightingale observed the fox’s increasing stillness. She hopped to the ground, close to her dusty copper chin. Together, they fell asleep.
In the morning, the nightingale was alone.
Day turned to freezing night. From the ground, the nightingale could see the bare tips of the trees where she had once loved to sit, drenched in sun, listening to her mother’s voice. Snow fell, and soon both she and the fox were covered in white dust. Fox must look beautiful, she thought.
From her mother’s branch, Fox was beautiful, sparkling in the darkness. On either side of her body stretched a path to somewhere else altogether. The little nightingale stared hard, once more, at the narrow heap of her friend. Then she flew away.
Winter was long, cold, and quiet. Most of the animals had travelled elsewhere, and the ones who stayed found holes to keep themselves in until the arrival of warmer days. The owl moved back to his preferred tree in the little nightingale’s absence.
The fox was efficiently consumed by animals and insects, her bones sinking deeper into the mulch. Little birds and forest rodents pulled out tufts of fur for their nests, revealing the clean bone beneath.
Eventually the sun found its way through the cataract of winter cloud and shone down on the trees. All the snow resting on their upper boughs began to melt in big wet drops, soaking the dry earth below. The smell of moss and green rot filled the air.
One morning, back at the emperor’s court, the page discovered the nightingale lying on the shit-covered floor of her cage, twiggy legs in the air. Her handlers had become careless in her feeding and watering. The emperor was dismayed, but there were other entertainments, and he’d truthfully become a little bored of the nightingale. She didn’t even sing words. He wanted to hear the Dittye of ye Ladye Greene Sleves; that’s what the townsfolk were talking about now.
The page wrapped the nightingale in a piece of cloth and set out once again to the spot in the middle of the woods where two forests met. He was an enterprising young man but he was also honourable, and he thought the nightingale would rest better in the place from which she had come.
He arrived back at the nightingale’s spot, now bright and leafless in the winter light. The fox’s desiccated body caught the page’s eye. “A fox!” he exclaimed, shocked to see this once-noble creature withered to little more than a few patches of fur on bone. He pulled the nightingale from his pocket and after a moment of consideration, laid her on what was left of the fox’s neck. How tender to see these two animals resting together so peacefully.
The boy made his way back through the forest, satisfied with the deed and ready to pursue new ones. As he stomped through the snow, his mind circled back to that tableau of fox and nightingale. He would seek out a limner, yes, and commission a picture of the bird resting upon the fox’s sunken form. He could even see it as a painting—certainly more than some bestiary illumination, marred by words. Rather, the kind of picture that would stir the soul of those who saw it to say “Look! The brute and the innocent, entwined.” Better still, he could instruct the artist to draw him, in his new vestments, laying the poor nightingale upon the fox’s neck. Yes, that would be ideal.
They would marvel at this peculiar alliance of man, bird, and beast. It would penetrate the meanest corner of their hearts, bare but for the echo of a phrase once whispered by their mother as they fell into sleep: I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.
