Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘A knife is made with a hundred tasks in mind,’ he continued, threading his bone needle. ‘Stab. Slice. Flay. Carve. But scissors are really intended for one job alone – snipping things in two. Dividing by force. Everything on one side or the other, and nothing in between. Certainty. We’re in-between folk, so scissors hate us. They want to snip us through and make sense of us, and there’s no sense to be made without killing us. Watch out for old pairs of scissors in particular, or scissors made in old ways.’

‘Yes,’ Not-Triss admitted reluctantly. ‘They do seem to hate me… and I think it’s been getting worse.’

‘The more you act and think like one of us, the more they’ll see you as one of us.’ The Shrike was feeding the stolen vine back in through her torn side, and she could feel it moving amid her vitals like a dry snake.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘we ran into the same sort of fix when your people started making better maps. Planes flew over and could see everything, and the railways went everywhere and ramblers started wanting charts so they could follow the paths into the remote places. We withdrew and withdrew, until there was nowhere left to withdraw.

‘Some tried to defend their territory from the certainty, some tore each other apart fighting over the last scraps of land…’ The Shrike gave a dismissive wave of his hand, idly brushing away decades of bloody history. ‘We were losing. We were dying. And then one of us – the man you call the Architect – came to the rest of us with a plan.

‘He had noticed something that the rest of us had missed, because we had been skulking further and further away from the villages and towns. He dared to walk right past them and into the fringes of the nearest city. And one Sunday he discovered something. The church bells there no longer hurt him. ’

‘Church bells?’ asked Not-Triss.

The Shrike nodded. ‘We have always avoided them. They sicken us, make our heads ring—’

‘It’s because you’re evil ,’ Pen suggested promptly.

‘It’s the certainty ,’ the Shrike contradicted her. ‘Every Sunday, people have always trooped to that cold crypt of a building to share their faith, their certainty – God’s in his heaven, the vicar is His postman and all’s right with the world.’ There was a glint of mirth in his eye that was not pleasant.

‘But everybody does still believe that!’ Not-Triss exclaimed.

‘Do they? Oh, they still troop in, good as gold, and listen to the vicar’s sermon. But they remember that same vicar telling them that the War was God’s war, that all pious young men should be dropping their hoes and grabbing a gun. And they wonder, Was it? That hell-beast that ate our sons whole, was that really God’s war? ’

The Shrike grinned, and Not-Triss found that she did not like him after all.

‘I do not pretend to know if there is a God,’ he went on, ‘or whether the cold stars go on forever. The War belonged to humanity, and nobody else. But for us it was a godsend , that much I can tell you. The War crushed faith . All kinds of faith. Before the War, everybody had their rung on the ladder, and they didn’t look much below or above it. But now? Low and high died side by side in Flanders Fields, and looked much the same face down in the mud. And the heroes who came back from hell didn’t fancy tugging their forelocks as they starved on the streets.

‘And the women! Once they kept to their pretty little path and didn’t step on the grass. But those that worked in the farms and factories during the War have a taste for running their own lives now, haven’t they? So all their menfolk are panicking. Frightened. Uncertain. And all of this doubt, this shaking up of the foundations, there was more of it in the cities.’

‘Why?’ asked Not-Triss, scarcely wanting to interrupt the Shrike’s flow.

‘Because cities are beautiful… chaos . They’re not like villages, where everybody knows each other and the ruts run deep. They mix hundreds of people and ideas like chemicals in a flask, till things go bang ! You can get lost in cities. The walls rise high and swallow all the landmarks, and you’re nearly always surrounded by strangers. And there are automobiles . Everybody knows where they are with a horse, but motorcars? Nobody knows what they’re doing with them! And nobody driving them bothers with the rules! And they churn up great dust clouds, so that everything is uncharted, and impossible to predict. It’s beautiful.’

‘So that’s why you’re here?’ Not-Triss tried to steer the Shrike back to the main topic. ‘It was the Architect’s idea?’

‘Yes.’ The Shrike grinned. ‘He is an architect of sorts, you see. A brilliant one. He can whisper bricks and mortar into shapes that twist your eye and your mind if you stare at them. He can build a palace with a hundred rooms, and make its outer shell no bigger than an outhouse. He realised that the best way to find uncharted places for us in a city would be to build the places, in ways that would show up on no maps.

‘But he knew that he could not do it alone. He needed an ally, a human architect – or better still a civil engineer – to pose as the creator of his designs, or they would never be accepted.’

‘What does he mean?’ Pen was glaring at the Shrike accusingly. ‘He’s talking about Father, isn’t he?’

Not-Triss, however, could guess all too clearly what he meant, though she did not want to. She still felt the real Triss’s pride in her famous father, the Three Maidens bridges, all the landmarks that had put Ellchester on the map…

‘All those buildings, the ones that made Fath— Mr Crescent famous.’ She took a deep breath. ‘He didn’t design any of them, did he?’

‘What?’ Pen stared, appalled as the Shrike shook his head.

‘No,’ confirmed the Shrike. ‘But he did rather well out of the deal.’

‘What was his side of the bargain?’ Not-Triss thought of poor, misled Triss, who worshipped her father, and felt an unexpected spark of anger on her behalf. ‘What did Mr Crescent have to do in return?’

‘Oh, you don’t understand,’ answered the Shrike. ‘That was his side of the bargain. He was very reluctant actually. Thought the whole business very queer. It took quite an offer to bring him round.’

‘What was… ?’ Not-Triss did not end the sentence, because already her mind was spiralling away from her towards the truth.

‘It was just after the end of the War,’ the Shrike explained. ‘Thousands of young men still stranded out in Europe, waiting to be brought home. Their families over here combing through the bulletins, looking for news. But sometimes it was the wrong kind of news.

‘Your parents received a letter from your brother’s commanding officer. The usual kind of letter, along with your brother’s personal effects. But they did not want to believe it. And then the Architect told your father that if he made a deal with him and gave him one of the items, he would hear from his son again. ’

At last the terrible letters from Sebastian started to make sense.

‘But… where is he?’ exploded Pen. ‘Where’s Sebastian? Why didn’t he come home?’

‘Because he died,’ answered the Shrike, calmly and mercilessly. ‘He is not gone , but he is not alive either. Sorry. He is just… stopped.’

‘Stopped?’ Not-Triss’s mouth was dry.

‘How do we un-stop him?’ asked Pen.

‘I have no idea. You would have to ask the Architect.’ The Shrike gave a smile that made it clear that he did not think she would do anything of the sort.