Stories: All-New Tales

He laughed and waved his hand at me. The bird’s wings snapped from the side of its body, like knives leaping from sheaths, and it glided up and lit on my shoulder.

“You see,” said the boy on the stairs. “It likes you.”

“I can’t pay,” I said, my voice rough and strange.

“You’ve already paid,” said the boy.

Then he turned his head and looked down the stairs and seemed to listen. I heard a wind rising. It made a low, soughing moan as it came up through the channel of the staircase, a deep and lonely and restless cry. The boy looked back at me. “Now go. I hear my father coming. The awful old goat.”

I backed away and my heels struck the stair behind me. I was in such a hurry to get away I fell sprawling across the granite steps. The bird on my shoulder took off, rising in widening circles through the air, but when I found my feet it glided down to where it had rested before on my shoulder and I began to run back up the way I had come.

I climbed in haste for a time but soon was tired again and had to slow to a walk. I began to think about what I would say when I reached the main staircase and was discovered.

“I will confess everything and accept my punishment, whatever that is,” I said. The tin bird sang a g*y and humorous ditty.

It fell silent though as I reached the gate, quieted by a different song not far off: a girl’s sobs. I listened, confused, and crept uncertainly back to where I had murdered Lithodora’s beloved.

I heard no sound except for Dora’s cries. No men shouting, no feet running on the steps. I had been gone half the night, it seemed to me but when I reached the ruins where I had left the Saracen and looked upon Dora it was as if only minutes had passed.

I came toward her and whispered to her, afraid almost to be heard. The second time I spoke her name she turned her head and looked at me with red-rimmed hating eyes and screamed to get away. I wanted to comfort her, to tell her I was sorry, but when I came close she sprang to her feet and ran at me, striking me and flaying at my face with her fingernails while she cursed my name.

I meant to put my hands on her shoulders to hold her still but when I reached for her they found her smooth white neck instead. Her father and his fellows and my unemployed friends discovered me weeping over her.

Running my fingers through the silk of her long black hair. Her father fell to his knees and took her in his arms and for a while the hills rang with her name repeated over and over again.

Another man, who held a rifle, asked me what had happened and I told him—I told him— the Arab, that monkey from the desert, had lured her here and when he couldn’t force her innocence from her he throttled her in the grass and I found them and we fought and I killed him with a block of stone.

And as I told it the tin bird began to whistle and sing, the most mournful and sweetest melody I had ever heard and the men listened until the sad song was sung complete.

I held Lithodora in my arms as we walked back down. And as we went on our way the bird began to sing again as I told them the Saracen had planned to take the sweetest and most beautiful girls and auction their white flesh in Araby— a more profitable line of trade than selling wine. The bird was by now whistling a marching song and the faces of the men who walked with me were rigid and dark.

Ahmed’s men burned along with the Arab’s ship, and sank in the harbor. His goods, stored in a warehouse by the quay, were seized and his money box fell to me as a reward for my heroism.

No one ever would’ve imagined when I was a boy that one day I would be the wealthiest trader on the whole Amalfi coast, or that I would come to own the prized vineyards of Don Carlotta, I who once worked like a mule for his coin.

No one would’ve guessed that one day I would be the beloved mayor of Sulle Scalle, or a man of such renown that I would be invited to a personal audience with his holiness the pope himself, who thanked me for my many well-noted acts of generosity.

The springs inside the pretty tin bird wore down, in time, and it ceased to sing, but by then it did not matter if anyone believed my lies or not such was my wealth and power and fame. However.

Several years before the tin bird fell silent, I woke one morning in my manor to find it had constructed a nest of wire on my windowsill, and filled it with fragile eggs made of bright silver foil. I regarded these eggs with unease but when I reached to touch them, their mechanical mother nipped at me with her needle-sharp beak and I did not after that time make any attempt to disturb them.

Months later the nest was filled with foil tatters. The young of this new species, creatures of a new age, had fluttered on their way.

I cannot tell you how many birds of tin and wire and electric current there are in the world now—but I  have, this very month, heard speak our newest prime minister, Mr. Mussolini. When he sings of the greatness of the Italian people and our kinship with our German neighbors, I am quite sure I can hear a tin bird singing with him. Its tune plays especially well amplified over modern radio.

I don’t live in the hills anymore. It has been years since I saw Sulle Scale. I discovered, as I descended at last into my senior years, that I could no longer attempt the staircases. I told people it was my poor sore old knees. But in truth I developed a fear of heights.