Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Get away from me!’ She backed away, helplessly shrill. But the crowd was closing in now, weary of watching and laying traps. Her gaze still would not settle on their faces, but she could see and feel their eyes – hard, childlike and multicoloured, like toy marbles. No matter which way she turned, there were always wicked fingers behind her, tugging at her wounds. One of her arms was taken up with gripping the rooster bundle, so it was impossible to defend herself properly.

A long, dry vine was tweaked from her flank and carried away by a cackling figure. The pain was shocking, but worse was the dizzy weakness that followed, the sense of having lost part of her very self.

They’re all monsters . I’m going to be torn apart by monsters.

But I’m a monster too.

As cruel fingers plucked and poked at her once more, she rounded on her tormentors and hissed as loudly as she could, showing her thorn-teeth.

‘Don’t touch me!’ Not-Triss raised her voice for the benefit of the surrounding crowd. ‘I bite!’ She felt the tingle of her thorn-claws pushing out through her fingertips.

The throng around her receded sharply, like chaff before a breeze. The cold, hard eyes around her lost their glitter, and became wary, appraising. For a moment she thought she had them at bay, but then an insistent whisper hissed its way through the crowd.

‘They know how to enter!’

‘They know where we are!’

‘They will tell everybody! We cannot let them leave!’

The throng started to close in once more. Not-Triss knew that she had only seconds to act. She pulled the drowsy Pen behind her, turned to face the crowd… and pulled the cloth from the head of rooster. Finding itself abruptly returned to the world, it bucked, flapped and crowed.

The sound was deafening, and set the very streets shuddering like a struck bell. On all sides rose an unearthly howl as Not-Triss’s erstwhile foes doubled up, hands clamped to their ears, and shrieked as if in torment.

‘We want to see the Shrike!’ Not-Triss shouted, fighting to make herself heard over the din.

These were not human screams. This was like the sound she had heard leave her own mouth during her worst anguish, but multiplied a hundredfold.

‘Get out!’ bayed the mob. ‘Get out, or we’ll tear you! We’ll fay you!’

Not-Triss realized that the hostile crowd was parting, offering her a route of escape. Up ahead, she could even see the tempting arc of the bridge-road she and Pen had used to reach the village. Behind her, she could feel Pen trembling. Small hands were clutching at her sleeve.

But Not-Triss had not come all this way just to flee. She gritted her teeth.

‘We want to see the Shrike!’ she shouted again.

The din became so terrible that her ears ached. The crowd surged to envelop the two girls, and Not-Triss was pinched, poked, scraped, scratched, clawed and nipped on all sides. Around her whirled a crazy mosaic of half-seen faces. Pointed features with conker skin.

Puckered bat-faces with human eyes. Colourless girls with wet hair.

It took every ounce of Not-Triss’s will to stop herself breaking into a run. It took all her strength to hold on to the legs of the cockerel. But hold on she did, while the bird stretched its neck to crow, and crow, and crow.

The cockerel’s feathers gleamed a brilliant bronze and its comb was flame. It shook its plumage, scattering sunbeams. Those whom the beams touched screamed and backed away, as if singed by embers.

All around, the buildings shivered and shuddered like a coop full of frightened hens. Stray tiles and lumps of thatch shook themselves free and fell upward, leaving ragged holes in the roofs. Cracks appeared in the street, leaking gravel and loose cobbles, which also flew up and disappeared. Puddles flung themselves upward in a brown rain. Some of the smaller figures were hurled from the ground and had to clutch at house eaves to stop themselves rising out of view.

Not-Triss could feel her own body becoming weightless, giddy. There was a perilous drop somewhere above, beckoning to her. She clenched her eyes shut.

‘We want,’ she bellowed at the top of her lungs, ‘to speak to the Shrike!’

A voice cut through the uproar. It was not loud, but it made itself heard, like a cello note through the roar of a storm.

‘Leave them be. I’ll talk to the ladies… if they’ll hood their bird.’

The pinching and scratching stopped abruptly, and Not-Triss opened her eyes to the see the crowd withdrawing from her with a reluctant hiss. With a shaking hand, she flung the cloth over the cockerel’s head once more.

It took a second or two for the world to settle on its axis with a jerk and a rattle. When her head stopped spinning, Not-Triss found that she was staring down a deserted street, haunted only by flickers of movement at windows and street corners. Pen was clinging to her arm and taking tiny, rapid, terrified breaths.

Further down the street, Not-Triss could see a workshop with an open door. Just outside it stood a short, stocky man in a bowler hat. He was in his shirtsleeves, for all the world as if he had just stepped out for a smoke. As she stared he raised a hand in a casual-looking wave, then beckoned.

Warily, and with Pen gripping her arm, Not-Triss advanced towards the hatted figure.

As Not-Triss drew closer, she saw that the workshop wore a dull grey mop of thatch, streaked with dank green. The man did not wait for them, but ducked back under the low eaves and disappeared into the shop.

The idea of following this stranger into his lair was unappealing, but Not-Triss was even less keen on staying out in the streets.

Pen was shivering slightly. Her face was still pale, but to Not-Triss’s relief, her expression was recovering some of its usual uncertain, belligerent glare.

‘That was him!’ exclaimed Pen shakily. ‘He’s the other man from the Grimmer – the Architect’s friend – the one who called you out of the water!’

Not-Triss had guessed as much. Her hazy recollection of her view from beneath the Grimmer’s surface had shown her the dim outlines of two men standing on the bank above her. The taller of the two had doubtless been the Architect, but beside him there had been another shorter and stouter man.

‘Yes. He’s the Shrike – and we’re going to ask him about the Architect. He might not be our enemy. But he’s probably not our friend.’ Not-Triss wet her lips as the doorway neared. ‘Pen – hold on to me tightly. Everything here is a trick and a trap. Don’t eat anything. Don’t dance to any music. Don’t touch anything. And,’ she added quickly, as Pen’s expression became mulish, ‘don’t let me do any of those things either. We have to watch out for each other.’

With one arm firmly tucked around the rooster-bundle and the other gripped fiercely by Pen, Not-Triss advanced into the workshop.

Within, the light was dim, most of it pouring in through the door, a few pallid shafts from the narrow windows. Above, Not-Triss could make out the thorny thatch past the heavy rafters. There were a dozen tables, all cluttered with tools, china hands, herbs and feathers. On stands and sideboards were displayed dozens of dolls, nearly all of them incomplete. The majority were fashioned from a mixture of green twigs, leaves, porcelain and wood. All of them were life-size, mostly babies, but there were occasional effigies of older children or even full-grown women, their bellies swollen to suggest pregnancy.

Not-Triss was uncomfortably aware that the nearest dolls were turning their incomplete faces towards her, regarding her with hostile eyes of glass.

The man who had greeted them sat in a small rocking chair and watched them with dark grey eyes, brighter than a soldier’s buttons. Now that she saw him close to, Not-Triss realized that he was scarcely taller than she was. He had a heavy, bulldog cast to his face. The curls beneath his bowler hat were grey. His nose was particularly long, with a slight downward curve that made Not-Triss think of predatory birds.