Cuckoo Song

by Frances Hardinge

  Some skimmed away on spread wings and were lost from sight almost immediately. Others alighted briefly on this roof or that, then sprang away again with the lightness and power of a flea.

  Violet took a left, a right, a left through the shadowed streets. Scattered pubs cast haloes of light from their bright windows.

  Just as they were nearing a crossroads, there came the sudden ting-ting-ting of a bell. The sound was familiar, but so spectral in the circumstances that Trista could not place it. Violet braked sharply.

  The road ahead was briefly illuminated by headlights, and then a bulky oblong burst into view from left to right across their path. It was a familiar double-decker outline, its inner recesses brilliant with electric light. Only then did Trista recognize the noise as that of a tram bell.

  The tram flashed past, followed by two large trailer cars, both double-decker like the tram, but with their upper seating open to the sky. Instead of the usual red, the tram and trailer cars were jet black.

  As each passed, Trista caught a glimpse into its brightly lit lower saloon, a gleaming yellow tableau that passed in an instant.

  In the tram itself, a collection of long-nosed men in grey coats and dark glasses stared out through the windows with binoculars.

  In the saloon of the first trailer car stood a coterie of women with red, red mouths, and fox furs round their necks that might almost have been alive and sleeping.

  In the saloon of the second trailer car sat the Architect in his smart sportswear with a green cravat, and beside him the hunched, miserable shape of Triss, in a white hat and coat.

  There was no way to shout over the sound of the motorcycle engine. Instead Trista pointed madly after the disappearing tram. Violet forced the engine into a roar once more, surged forward and then swung right to follow. Trista felt the tyres bounce over the tram rails.

  At the far end of the road Violet once again had to screech to a halt, this time bringing the motorcycle around into a sideways skid. The gleaming tracks had come to an abrupt end, as had the road. Beyond a wooden barrier lay a dark pit, piles of sand, spades and the gaping mouth of a concrete mixer.

  Violet stared all around, her expression hidden by her goggles, then cut the engine. Her breath was ragged and unguarded.

  ‘It’s the tram route they are still building.’ Her voice had a hard force to it, and Trista knew that she was battling with bewilderment and frustration.

  The tram had simply run off the end of the unfinished rails and vanished.

  ‘No!’ Trista heard her own voice sounding raspy and hollow. They had been so close. She had seen the Architect and Triss. They had been within fifteen yards of each other, divided only by metal, glass and momentum.

  Trista scrambled out of the sidecar, legs shaking. She ran down the darkened road, ducked past the barrier and scrambled over a sand heap, which gave softly under her tread. Then she was sprinting down the dark road beyond.

  ‘Trista!’ called Violet, then swore. Now two sets of footsteps were echoing down the road, but Trista did not stop until she was brought up short by a row of houses with innocently dark alleys to left and right. From straight ahead, the wind again carried her the whisper of wings, and a faint echoing noise like the sound of hoofs.

  She stared up at the house before her. The roof looked low – she could catch at it, she was sure she could. She kicked off her shoes, bent her knees and sprang. The motion felt as easy and natural as breath, or batting away a fly. As she rose, she instinctively raised her hands and caught at the edge of the guttering. Then she kicked out against the wall, yanked herself upward using her arms . . . and landed silently on the very edge of the roof.

  Her bare feet made no sound. Her long toes somehow found a grip on the cold sloping slates. A few springing steps took her to the roof’s raised spine, where she crouched so that nothing would see her outline against the sky. Trista could still hear Violet somewhere below calling out her name, but the voice seemed small and inconsequential now.

  This was yet another Ellchester, a town of silvery-grey inclines, sudden precipices and a chimney forest spewing scented plumes of smoke. She had no time to boggle at its beauty, however.

  A hundred yards away, she could make out a convoy of shapes surging over the roofs. Three black carriages, each drawn by two night-black horses, were riding up and down the slopes of roofs as easily as if they were on the flat. The wheels did not disturb the tiles, nor did the horses’ hoofs slither. Above and around them surged and flew and leaped a host of smaller forms that seemed to change shape as they passed in and out of the stray shafts of light.

  In that moment, Trista’s fear of losing her quarry pushed out all others. She scrambled down the roof, and at the edge felt her knees tingle with the sense of the hungry drop before her. Thankfully it was only a small jump to the next house, and she leaped it with only a slight spasm of vertigo. Over the ridge of the roof, down the other side . . .

  . . . just in time to see the three black carriages drop off the lip of a roof and vanish into the maze of streets, like frogs disappearing off the edge of a lily pad. The swarm swooped down with them and was lost to view.

  With new urgency, Trista sprinted and leaped, sprinted and leaped, zigzagging her way through the roof maze. She reached the place where she had last seen the carriages and stared around her, shivering.

  Somewhere she thought she heard the ting-ting-ting of a tram and the beating of wings, but the breezes were fighting and she could not tell where the sound came from. The ride was continuing – but where?

  Trista stared around her for a little age, her eye baffled by chimney-smoke mirages and the rapid passing of bats, before the unbearable truth sank in. She had lost track of the riders.

  She hobbled to the edge of the roof, peered over and felt her stomach flinch inwards like a sea anemone. Caught up in the frenzy of the chase, she had not felt that she was so very high, nor had the distances between the roofs seemed so very great. Now, as she returned to her usual perspective, she almost seemed to see the street dropping away to a perilous depth below her, and the gaps she had so confidently leaped widening like opening mouths.

  She was a good two storeys above the ground, and her leaps from one roof to another had carried her the breadth of streets.

  There was something flapping against her side. Staring down, she saw a loose ribbon trailing out of a tear in her flank. As she watched the wind whipped it free and carried it away. Instinctively turning to follow it with her eye, Trista realized that she could see other oddments scattered over the roofs she had crossed. Wind-chased scraps of paper, twigs tumbling over the tiles, hazy tangles of pale hair.

  No.

  Filled with a new desperation, Trista scrambled after the fleeing fragments. The ribbon had wrapped itself around a chimney pot, where it trembled temptingly, but flung itself free just as Trista’s reaching hand was within inches of it. The other pale pieces bounded away with the jollity of the wind and were swallowed by the night.

  Shaking, Trista sank into a crouch on the roof’s edge, hugging her knees. It was a few minutes before she became aware of Violet’s voice still calling and calling her name.

  Chapter 34

  A GAPING HOLE

  Trista’s jaw seemed to have locked solid, and minutes passed before she was able to call back. There was a pattering of steps down in the street, and then the tiny figure of Violet emerged in the road below her.

  ‘Trista?’

  Trista only managed a faint squeak in response. The street now looked terrifyingly far down, and the drop dragged at her stomach. She closed her eyes, hugged her knees and couldn’t move. The air was cold.

  She was dimly aware of noises below, a rapping on wood, voices, creaks and bangs. Then something clacked loudly against the guttering near her feet. She opened her eyes, and her gaze settled upon the top prongs of a wooden ladder, shifting uneasily against the roof’s edge. After a sequence of creaks, Violet’s head and shoulders rose into view.

&nbs
p; ‘Come on,’ was all she said, very quietly. Trista edged over and shakily followed Violet back down the ladder. At the bottom, a stout man in a dressing gown viewed Trista with outrage.

  ‘You said it was your cat what was stuck on my roof!’ he exclaimed, glaring at Violet.

  ‘Thanks for the use of the ladder,’ Violet answered him blandly.

  ‘Here, wait! What was she doing—’

  Violet turned on him.

  ‘My daughter sleepwalks,’ she declared icily, ‘and I didn’t want to spend an hour explaining that to you. What do you want me to do – put her back on the roof?’ Before the enraged man could reply, Violet took Trista by the hand and led her back to the alley where the motorcycle was waiting.

  Thank you. Trista mouthed the words, but could not give them voice. Thank you for coming to rescue me. More than anything else, it was the way Violet had called Trista her daughter that set Trista’s eyes prickling. It made her feel that she had something small, fragile and warm to hold on to, something to put in the hole left by the fragments that the wind had chased across the roofs.

  They rode back in silence. When they had slipped into the attic of Jack’s house, they sat down on one of the mattresses and Trista told of the chase, in whispers to avoid waking Pen. Violet hugged her all the while.

  ‘It’s not over,’ Violet murmured at last. ‘We’ll find them tomorrow. But now you need to sleep. You’re pale as paper.’

  ‘But I’m afraid to sleep!’ whispered Trista. ‘What if I fall to pieces before I wake up? What if tomorrow morning I’m just a pile of leaves and sticks tucked under a blanket? What if this is the last time I’ve got left, and I waste it all being asleep, then wake up dead?’

  For a moment, Violet looked conflicted. Then her jaw set, and she took Trista by the shoulders.

  ‘You won’t,’ she said gently but firmly. ‘I’ll make sure you don’t. I’ll be watching you sleep. And if your hair starts to turn into leaves, or anything like that, I’ll wake you up.’

  ‘You promise?’ Trista felt the icy, titanic force of her terror recede a step or two. ‘You . . . you won’t leave me when I’m asleep and go out?’

  ‘I promise,’ said Violet, with a firmness in her tone that allowed no doubt. Her dark grey eyes were resolute as flint.

  The long path down to the Grimmer had changed. Now it was knobbly with the roots of twisted trees. Rotting apples puckered on the grass like ancient, wizened faces. There were words to the birdsong and the leaves were softly laughing. Under Trista’s bare feet she could feel a flutter in the turf like a pulse. Ahead through the trees she could make out the sleek, obsidian surface of the water. An inky threat, a coal-black promise.

  You have nothing of your own, said the Grimmer. Everything you have is borrowed, and when it is paid back there will be nothing left. Even your time is borrowed, and it is running out. One day. One left . . .

  The wind rose and became bitingly chill. Trista could feel it starting to tear her apart like a dandelion clock . . .

  . . . and then she woke, shivering with the cold.

  She was in one of the attic beds, tucked under a blanket. Nearby, Violet reclined in a chair, her face set in a frown, her head moving in the discontented manner of one who is nodding in and out of slumber. Beyond her, in another bed, Pen was still fast asleep. White morning light was creeping in through the skylight.

  Morning. My last morning. Only one more day . . .

  The thought stared back at her, bald, cold and inescapable as the sky.

  Trista’s breath was steam. She sat up, chafing feeling back into her hands.

  Violet started fully awake, glaring around her for a baffled instant with glass-eyed antagonism.

  ‘Oh.’ She recovered herself, and let out her breath. ‘Still with us then?’ She came over and studied Trista with a speculative scowl, then drew her fingers through Trista’s hair, causing a faint, crackling rustle.

  Violet stared down at the dead leaves in her hand, biting her lower lip hard.

  ‘It could be worse,’ she muttered under her breath.

  ‘It is worse,’ Trista said softly. She did not need to say anything more.

  ‘We still have a day,’ Violet answered doggedly.

  ‘What time is it?’ asked Trista.

  Violet strode to the skylight, peered out and gave vent to a not-in-front-of-children word. Tiptoeing to her side over the chill floor, Trista could see at a glance why Violet had sworn.

  The window was covered in a delicate lacework of frost, and through it Trista could just make out a faint sugaring on the nearby roofs and some gleaming thread-like icicles drooping from the guttering opposite. The sky was an uneasy grey, tinged with sepia. Storm yellow. The heavy yellow of a sky full of snow.

  Violet’s face was mask-like, but in her clenched jaw and the movement of her eyes Trista detected panic and a deep-seated dread. With a shock she realized how much she had asked of Violet the night before. For Trista’s sake, she had stayed in one place for hours. Now Winter, which had been stalking Violet in vain all these years, was settling upon Ellchester with unseasonable speed.

  ‘You cursed !’ A sleepy, querulous-looking Pen was sitting up in her bed.

  ‘Right after breakfast, I need to go out,’ declared Violet. ‘I’ll head to Plotmore Hill – that was where you lost track of the midnight ride, wasn’t it, Trista? You two will have to stay here.’

  Both girls started to protest.

  ‘No arguments,’ Violet told them flatly, with a concerned glance at Trista.

  Breakfast was chaotic and sparse. Jack was apparently still asleep. His aunt and brother-in-law had already left for work, and his two teenage sisters were just hurrying out to their jobs at the laundry. His mother and eldest sister were getting ready to go to the market, so making breakfast was left to Jack’s eight-year-old niece, who took care of it with the briskness of practice, pausing to wipe the faces of the younger children like a miniature mother.

  Everybody’s fingers were numb with cold, but the cover remained in place over the hearth. The tea tasted like puddle water. Breakfast was a slice of bread with margarine. Violet devoured hers in seconds and then fidgeted, waiting for everyone else.

  ‘But I’m still hungry!’ protested Pen. ‘Why are they getting more?’ The younger children in Jack’s family were being handed a second slice of bread and margarine, wrapped in paper.

  ‘That’s their lunch, Pen,’ muttered Violet with a wince. ‘They’re taking it to school.’

  Whenever she got the chance, Trista tried to make eye contact with Violet, willing her to hear her mute appeal. Please don’t leave me behind with Pen! I don’t know if she’s safe with me! But Violet seemed stubbornly determined to avoid her eye, and kept following Jack’s mother and sister with her gaze.

  Trista barely noticed the front door slam, but was slightly surprised when Jack’s oldest sister came back into the kitchen, removing the hat and coat she had just donned.

  ‘Mum’s just gone to buy some bread and eggs,’ she said brightly, ‘so you can have a breakfast that’s closer to what you’re used to. I’m to stay and make you more tea. Wait there and make yourselves comfortable.’ She ran up the stairs, presumably to put away her hat and coat.

  Instantly Violet rose from her chair, taking care not to let the feet scrape.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ she said softly. ‘Quickly and quietly. Now.’

  When the trio were back on the street, Pen stared back incredulously at the house. ‘Why did we leave? They were going to make us more breakfast!’

  ‘We’re in the newspapers,’ Violet said in a low tone. ‘I’ll bet my hide on it. The paper arrived while we were eating. Jack’s mother and sister read it, then went to whisper in the hall. Then Jack’s sister came back to keep us here. Jack’s mother must have gone to the police. There’s probably a reward.’

  ‘She betrayed us for money?’ Pen exclaimed in disbelief. ‘I’m going back to break her windows!’

  ‘Don�
�t you dare!’ snapped Violet, then sighed and gave Pen a gentle exasperated look. ‘Pen . . . money only seems like a mean reason if you’ve never had to think about it. Most people have to think about it all the time. Money doesn’t mean cake and diamonds; it means finally paying off what you owe to the landlord, the baker and the tally man. It means having coins for the gas meter, so you don’t have to chop up your shelves for firewood. It means keeping the wolf from the door for a while.

  ‘She didn’t owe us a thing, Pen, and if she doesn’t fight for her family, no one else will.’

  The wolf from the door. Hunger was like a wolf, Trista reflected. She had felt its teeth savaging her innards many times now. She had been caught up in her own self-absorbed, frantic battle with it, and had never considered that many people might go through their whole lives with the wolf trotting a pace behind them. Perhaps she had still been trapped in Triss’s conviction that the world revolved around her own needs and suffering. Her own story now seemed very small.

  Then her personal terror consumed her again, and she snatched at Violet’s sleeve.

  ‘Violet! I left Triss’s dress behind in the attic room!’

  ‘Oh hell !’ Violet looked back the way they had come, clearly conflicted. ‘Trista . . . I’m sorry. We can’t go back. It’s just too dangerous. Let me know if you start to get hungry and . . . I’ll think of something.’

  ‘So . . . are we going to meet racketeers?’ asked Pen when they had parked the motorbike on Plotmore Hill. ‘Will they have guns? Are you their moll?’

  ‘No, Pen!’ Violet rolled her eyes. ‘Guns only happen in movies and America. And I’m not a moll, for crying out loud! Most of the time I just deliver things. That’s why I have the sidecar, so I can load it up with anything or anyone that needs to get somewhere fast. And I’m a good mechanic who doesn’t ask questions – even if the car I’m fixing is full of black-market tinned cheese.’