Cuckoo Song

by Frances Hardinge

  Pen glared at Not-Triss. Her eyes were shiny with angry tears.

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘This morning, when everybody was driving away without me, I thought you might do something horrible to Mother and Father if I wasn’t there. So I hid in the back – down on the floor under the blanket. Then when the car was stopped outside the cottage for ages I got bored and cold, so I sneaked out and hid in the kitchen. Then everybody found out you were a monster and caught you, and at first I was really glad, because it meant you wouldn’t come home and scratch my face and try to break into my room.’ Her tone held a mixture of malice and fear. ‘But . . . then they wanted to burn you. And you started crying. And it wasn’t real tears, but it was real crying. You were really scared, even though they kept saying you weren’t.’

  ‘Then why couldn’t Father see that?’ Not-Triss felt despair and hurt welling up inside her again, and it was all she could do to stop her teeth sharpening. ‘Why couldn’t Mother see it?’

  ‘Because they’re stupid,’ growled Pen, rubbing at her nose with her sleeve. ‘They can’t tell when real Triss is fake-crying, so of course they can’t tell when Fake Triss is real-crying.’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ It was hard to say why the words stung so much.

  ‘If you don’t like it, that’s too bad,’ retorted Pen with a sudden gleam in her eye, ‘because that’s what you are. Fake Triss. In fact, that’s your name now. You don’t have a name, and I saved your life, so I get to choose what your name is. And it’s Fake Triss.’

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘Shut up, Fake Triss. You’re lucky I’m letting you have a name at all.’

  Not-Triss closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She thought of Pen dragging her by the hand from the cottage kitchen. She thought of Pen sprinting by her side through the moonlight.

  ‘Tell me more about the Architect.’ Not-Triss thought it safest to change the subject. ‘He gave you a way of calling him on the phone, didn’t he?’

  Pen gave a short nod.

  ‘I had to say, “Waste, wither, want,” before I picked up the mouthpiece, and then when I pressed the button for the switchboard, the voice on the line wasn’t a normal operator. There was this whispery woman instead, and I just had to ask her for the Architect, and she put me through.’

  At last Not-Triss understood why there had been no record of Pen’s mysterious phone call from the Crescent household. It had not gone through the usual switchboard at all. No wonder the operators knew nothing of it.

  ‘Did he ever tell you where he lived, or anything else about him?’ continued Not-Triss.

  ‘Not really, just that he was an architect.’ Pen scowled in concentration. ‘Wait – he said that’s why he was watching us. Because he knew Father. Through their work. But he said he’d decided he liked me better than Father, because I seemed more “honourable”.’

  A blizzard of fragments were flurrying through Not-Triss’s mind and trying to form a picture. She remembered the overheard conversation between Piers and Celeste Crescent, regarding the mysterious he that Piers wanted nothing more to do with. She remembered the article in the newspaper concerning Piers’s new building project. Last of all, there was the mystery of the envelopes in the desk drawer, their existence so carefully concealed. Her mind was too tired to make further sense of the fragments, however.

  ‘We have to find out more about the Architect, Pen.’ Not-Triss saw her not-sister flinch, and after a moment’s hesitation aimed a comforting pat at the smaller girl’s foot. ‘I know you don’t want to, and I don’t really want to either. But we have to. He doesn’t just have Triss. He has Sebastian.’

  Chapter 22

  THE UNDERBELLY

  Not-Triss was woken by the sound of a solitary cock crowing. She lay on the floor staring at the dim, cracked ceiling and listened, remembering where she was. No, she was not in the countryside. The bird she could hear must be in somebody’s backyard coop. It was a bold, brass sound nonetheless. It would not be cowed into silence by the invention of alarm clocks, the subdued buzz of the city or the fact that it was still hours before dawn.

  Memories of the previous evening crept back into her head, but did so numbly. They made her feel scraped out and empty. She wondered if soldiers felt this kind of blankness when they looked out at battlefields that had been pounded into mud and stark wasteland. There was no grieving for the lush valley that had been. Its destruction was too complete.

  From this dull desolation surfaced a single thought.

  I have only two days left.

  As the cock crowed again, it brought with it another set of recollections, from her conversation with the bird-thing. What had the creature said?

  Find yourself a cockerel, and a dagger or knife . . . Go down Meddlar’s Lane under the bridge’s end, turn your face to the bricks and start walking . . .

  You want to talk to the Shrike.

  The Shrike had made Not-Triss. Perhaps, whispered a stubborn voice in Not-Triss’s head, perhaps he knows a way to stop me falling apart. Perhaps I don’t have to die in two days.

  Even if he had no such answer for her, she knew she had to talk to him. He had worked for the Architect and might know about his plans. He might know what had happened to the real Triss, and perhaps even something of Sebastian’s fate. Whatever had befallen them, it sounded as if both were in desperate need of rescue.

  I don’t want to die. I’ll fight to the last moment to stop myself falling apart. But if all I have is two days, I’ll make them count. Every last minute of them.

  Not-Triss sat up, accidentally nudging Pen, who was curled up next to her.

  Pen scowled bitterly and rolled into a tight ball like a sullen hedgehog.

  ‘Go ’way,’ was her barely comprehensible response. ‘Hate you.’

  Not-Triss gazed down at her not-sister, and in spite of herself found a smile creeping on to her face. Pen was still managing belligerence even while asleep, but the frown made her look vulnerable, young and a bit comical.

  ‘All right.’ Not-Triss slipped out from the small portion of blanket she had retained and tucked it around Pen. ‘You stay here and sleep.’

  Violet’s coat and motoring cap were slung over a chair, a sign that their owner had returned and gone to bed. Not-Triss tiptoed to the window, shivering at the cold, and pulled back the curtain. When she rubbed at the clouded pane with her sleeve, the latter came away with a crumbly smudge of white. The mistiness of the window was not steam, she realized to her surprise, but a thin layer of ice. Beyond the cleared pane the sky was low and grey with a yellowish tinge, the street deserted.

  According to the clock it was ten past four. With every passing hour, there would be more people abroad on the streets. If she wanted to sneak through Ellchester without a risk of family friends spotting the eldest Crescent daughter, it had to be sooner rather than later. Not-Triss dug through the boxes of Violet’s belongings by the wall, until she found a carving knife and a cloth bag that she could ‘borrow’.

  It’s best to leave Pen behind, she thought, as she donned her jacket and started looking for her shoes. She’s only little, and she talks too much, and I might be going somewhere dangerous—

  There was a rustle of blankets behind her. She turned to find Pen sitting up, rubbing at her hair in a disgruntled way.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Not-Triss hesitated. Her tongue seemed to have run out of lies.

  ‘I’m going to steal a cockerel, then walk into the Victory Bridge,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ll be back in a few hours. Go back to sleep – it’s four in the morning.’

  ‘You have to let me come! You were sneaking out without me!’ Pen rubbed her eyes, scowling, and Not-Triss could not tell how far her own words had penetrated. ‘And I’m hungry,’ Pen added as an afterthought.

  ‘Then stay here,’ answered Not-Triss, almost keeping the snappishness out of her voice as she continued the search for her shoes. ‘Violet will feed you when s
he gets up.’

  ‘But I’m hungry now,’ Pen declared obstinately. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Slightly to her surprise, Not-Triss realized that she wasn’t hungry. But she had been at one point in the night, ravenously so. She had sat up, wildly famished, and the first thing her eyes had settled upon had been . . .

  Oh.

  She stooped and picked up a solitary shoe buckle from the floor. It was somewhat bent, and there was a row tiny dints that looked like the marks of pointed teeth. Pen moved over to peer at the buckle, then gawped at Not-Triss with awe and horror.

  ‘You ate Triss’s shoes!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Not-Triss answered firmly, putting the buckle in her pocket. ‘I’m faster barefoot.’

  Oddly, once Pen properly understood that Not-Triss proposed to steal a cockerel, this seemed to put all thoughts of sleep or breakfast completely out of her mind. It soon became clear that if Not-Triss tried to leave Pen behind, she would risk a row that would wake Violet and probably the rest of Ellchester.

  ‘You need me,’ Pen explained. ‘I’m your lookout. If I see the coppers coming, I’ll make a sound like an owl.’

  They slipped out of Violet’s rooms, down the stairs and out through the boarding-house front door, which thankfully had a key on a wall hook. As the door closed behind them Not-Triss paused, peering at the front door’s tinted windows, then rubbed at one of them experimentally.

  ‘What is it?’ whispered Pen.

  ‘Nothing.’ Not-Triss bit her lip. ‘There’s no ice on the outside of these windows. And in Violet’s rooms there was – on the inside.’ Once again she recalled the single snowflake that had fallen out of a flawless sky and landed between Violet’s feet.

  The cockerel never knew what hit him. One moment he was king of a small but dusty yard, patrolling between a row of runner-bean poles and his ginger-feathered harem. The next moment something landed behind him as softly as a moth, and a perfumed bag was thrown over his head.

  As she leaped back up on to the fence, Not-Triss gripped the top with her toes and was glad of her bare feet. The rooster was larger than she had expected, and its struggles hard to control. After a while, though, it stopped twisting and squawking so much and settled for a subdued, nervous fluttering and twitching.

  As she dropped down to street level once more, Pen watched her with a mixture of excitement, fascination and disapproval.

  ‘Your toes are strange,’ was her only comment.

  A few streets later, Not-Triss was no longer so sorry to have Pen with her. The younger girl did at least seem to know where they were, and the quickest route to get to Meddlar’s Lane under the Victory Bridge. Once again, Pen’s career of running away seemed to be standing them in good stead.

  Meddlar’s Lane was a steep cobbled zigzag of a road that climbed the hill, and at its crest passed under one end of the Victory Bridge before weaving unsteadily down the other side. It was flanked by dour buildings the colour of tobacco, plain as aprons and dull-eyed as morning-after drunks. Some were homes, and celebrated the fact by stringing washing-line bunting between their upper storeys. Many lay empty, however, having been bought up by the city at the same time as the land for the bridge, still ‘awaiting development’. They were split husks, waiting for the seed of the new to germinate and make them into something better.

  Arching over all stretched the Victory Bridge, which cast the highest portion of the street into shadow. Gazing up at it on the approach, Not-Triss realized for the first time how truly vast it was, many houses high, its sandstone hues still murky in the half-light.

  The two girls walked into the shadow of the bridge. There was a sound of dripping, and Pen’s footsteps began to echo. Not-Triss’s soles made no sound at all.

  Not-Triss produced the carving knife.

  ‘Are you going to kill the cockerel?’ Pen asked, her eyes round.

  ‘No.’ Not-Triss sat down, and managed to find a crack between two of the pavement slabs. With considerable difficulty she managed to work free some of the mortar and slide the blade into the crack so that it remained jutting out when she let go. It looked like a cut-price Sword in the Stone.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ asked Pen.

  ‘We’re going somewhere, and this will help us get out again,’ answered Not-Triss, hoping it was true.

  ‘What happens if it falls out of the hole?’

  ‘Then we can’t get out,’ Not-Triss answered, with as much patience as she could manage.

  ‘What if somebody pulls it out?’

  ‘Then we can’t get out,’ Not-Triss repeated, with slightly less patience.

  ‘This is a stupid plan,’ Pen told her, helpfully.

  ‘Thengo back to Violet’s house and eat canned cheese!’ snapped Not-Triss. ‘I didn’t ask you to come! I didn’t want you to come! It’s going to be dangerous and . . . and if anybody’s going to be hurt . . . then it’s best if it’s just me.’ She had not really planned the sentence, and when she ended it her face burned with shame and annoyance.

  Pen’s face also looked like she might be flushed, but it was hard to tell in the shadow of the bridge.

  ‘I hate canned cheese,’ she growled. ‘It tastes like I bit my tongue. Anyway, don’t be stupid. Go on – tell me. How do we get in?’

  ‘Are you sure you want to come?’ Not-Triss felt like crying, but was uncertain why.

  Pen nodded.

  ‘Then you’d better take my hand.’ She reached out, and was a little surprised when Pen’s small, cold hand was indeed placed in hers. ‘Walk forward, just the way I do.’

  Facing the wall that formed one of the great pillars of the bridge, she began to advance. As the two girls passed the embedded knife, Not-Triss thought she heard a faint musical whine, a sound as frail as a moonlit hair. Go down Meddlar’s Lane under the bridge’s end, the bird-thing had said, turn your face to the bricks and start walking. Then keep walking until the sound of the traffic grows faint and you can understand the gulls . . .

  Step after step. The brick wall approached, but as it did so it seemed to lean back, so that it was not a sheer face but an impossibly steep upward slope. They took another step, and the slope was less steep, almost climbable. Another step brought them to the base of the brick wall and now it was only a mild climb, like a hilly path.

  Instinct told Not-Triss to avoid looking either to left or right, and she was glad that she had Pen by the hand. She stepped out on to the brick ‘slope’, and it tipped to become a level, horizontal surface under her feet. Ignoring the internal voices that screamed that she was walking up a sheer wall, Not-Triss strode on. She ignored them again when the brick gave way to sandstone and concrete and they screamed that she must be walking along the underside of the bridge.

  The faint sounds of the early-morning city were fading. The distant rumbles of the first trams, the the rattle of handcarts – these sounds were dissolving like salt grains in water. A strong wind blew around them, and the peals of the gulls became louder.

  And as they walked and walked, it seemed to Not-Triss that she heard something new in the voices of the gulls. It was not that the sound changed, rather that it was unsheathed like a blade so that its edges were bared. Or perhaps it was her ears that were unsheathed and her hearing that grew sharper.

  ‘Child!’ she could hear the gulls shouting. ‘One child, two child! Pink cheek childs with eyes in their heads! Soft eye childs with hearts like fruit!’

  Not-Triss knew that Pen could hear them too. The smaller hand did not shake, but gripped hers like a vice. Not-Triss squeezed it back as they matched each other, step for step.

  Chapter 23

  SHIFTS AND SHIMMERS

  Not-Triss told herself that she was walking along the top of a bridge, not the underside. That was the only way to stay calm. The path before her was so broad that thirty men could have stood shoulder to shoulder across it. There were curve-topped walls to either side, and they threw the walkway into ever-deepening shadow. Beyond these s
ide walls the sky had a dull lustre like oiled lead, and against it shapes could be seen circling and skimming. They were swift as ice skates and called with their almost-gull voices.

  And ahead . . .

  ‘What’s that?’ whispered Pen.

  About thirty yards away, the shadowy path disappeared into a large dark mound that blocked the way entirely, like a giant molehill. Or a housemartin’s nest under the eaves, thought Not-Triss as she remembered for an instant which way was up. It was so dark that she seemed to hear the hiss as it sucked light out of the air. Its mass was irregular in shape, its outline knobbly and bristling with spikes.

  As they drew closer though, the inkiness seemed to drain away. The opaque mound resolved itself into a cluster of small, dun-coloured buildings, which clustered and jostled and sat on each other’s shoulders, as if somebody had piled them into a cairn. The windows were squint-thin and without glass, the roofs sagged and dimpled like damp bread, and some had steps cut into them so that one could reach other huts further up the mound. Ladders leaned and ropes dangled, so that the whole vista looked like a strange brownish Snakes and Ladders board. There were spires, not lofty like those on a church, but wickedly slender and topped with weathervanes that moved independent of the wind. There were flagpoles too, from which drooped tattered banners, their colours too faded and grimy to be recognizable.

  ‘It’s a village,’ Not-Triss answered, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.

  ‘But we’re under the bridge, aren’t we?’ Pen scowled. ‘Why is there a village under Father’s bridge? Does he know?’

  It was a surprisingly good question.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Not-Triss answered. ‘But I wish I did.’

  There was motion in the house-mound. It was not a single flash of activity to draw the eye, but rather a universal stirring, like the subtle seething of an anthill, or the heat-shimmer of a summer day. Now and then pennants flapped with idle deliberation, like horse tails slapping at a gnat’s bite. The outlines of the roofs shifted, as if low, scarcely seen shapes were scurrying along them. There were faces at the windows too. Not-Triss never saw any of them directly – they were too quick for her – but their fleeting appearances left a smudge upon her eye.