In the Night Garden

“You may try to pass through me, but you will find I am very thick, and made more or less of bone and meat, and therefore I am afraid you will find it tough going.”

I blinked at her, and she threw off her hood, revealing a middle-aged woman, neither thin nor fat, with the beginnings of gray hair creeping through brown, and skin like an old blasted oak. Her eyes were narrow and dark. She reached behind her head and loosed a clasp, pulling the beak away from her face—she was only a woman, with a mouth and a nose and teeth like any other.

“Didn’t you like my joke?” She laughed. “One doesn’t get many opportunities to chat in my line of work. The least you could do is chuckle a little. Maybe even giggle. Don’t girls still giggle out there in the world?”

“I’m out of practice,” I grunted.

“So am I, dear. Maybe it was not a very good joke.”

“What do I have to do to get through?” I am afraid I was very short with her. Perhaps you did better.

She sighed. “You might listen, instead of talking so much…”

THE

MOURNER’S

TALE

I OCCUPY A STRANGE PROFESSION. IT IS ONLY slightly stranger than my previous employment. I was once a mourner by trade, an avocation which harpies take particularly well to, having a screech like no other creature.

Did I forget to mention? Well. Don’t look under the cloak.

We know what a lament is better than any who walks on five toes. When we are required, we live with a corpse for weeks on end, we live with our lament until it has shape and heft, until it has the weight of the corpse, and in the putrefying gases we detect the virtue or degeneracy of the subject. Decomposition does not lie. We lament not when we are told to, but when the lament is finished, be it days or years hence. When we can hold its hand and walk down the street of a city, showing it the grocer’s where the deceased bought her carrots and turnips, the butcher where she cut her meat and in secret met her lover, the gallery where just once, a portrait of her hung, then the lament is grown and done. It nods sadly and passes through all these places to a grave, where we screech and sing and tear our hair, where we rend our breasts and howl grief into the ground.

Once, in Irsil, which is poor and sad in all things save retired soldiers with broken swords and useless plowshares, we took fifteen years to rear the lament of a certain general. We walked it through the shanties and the porches where old officers told their bloody tales to the wind, and they followed behind, falling in like ranks, to hear how the old man was mourned.

It is necessary work. I was good at it. I suppose that is what got me here.

One cannot, among the mourning harpies, be truly considered adept without the hoopoe’s beak. We can crow and keen and split your ears into bloody halves with the anguish in our throats—but not all of a lament is sorrow. Even in the old general’s scar-kneed life there was sweetness—there was a woman in a village who looked like his mother, and he married her, and we did not refrain from commenting on that, for a lament has no shame—but there was a moment before he left on campaign when the woman who looked like his mother showed him twin babies, a boy and a girl, and he could not breathe for the sweetness of their cheeks, and we sang that, too.

But it is hard to sing of sweetness with a harpy’s mouth. We are made for rending. It is hard to simply weep.

We must go and get it, the beak, and we may not steal it, but must sing the hoopoe’s lament when it dies, and if its chicks deem the lament sufficient, they will give it over. In such a way the hoopoe ration the grief of the world.

I was past thirty by the time I went to get my beak. Not a few of the others were unsure that I would ever be ready to wear it. I am sure you wonder at the hoopoe—are these not tiny, colorful, but shallow and flittering birds? How could a beak like a dove’s wishbone ever produce such funeral songs as I speak of? But I say to you that once there were great hoopoes the likes of which you have never seen in these fallen days. Their rose-orange wings were like those of an albatross, and their beaks were trumpets, and we were the wind blown through them.

I went into the mountains. I will not bore you with the details of a Quest. They are all much the same: One goes forth, one obtains, one returns. But when I found a huge old mother hoopoe dying in her nest, I crouched down among her flame-headed chicks, their feathers tipped in black and white speckles, to hear the life of the bird I would lament. She turned her old downy head to me and this is what she said:

THE

HOOPOE’S

TALE

MY EGG WAS HARD TO BREAK. THE YOLK WAS golden and ropy. I opened my eyes in such brightness. My mother pierced her breast with her beak, and fed me on her blood, which tasted like flying. She called me Orange as the Sun.

The tide came in, the tide went out. I ate worms and beetles.

I sang very loudly and so did another hoopoe whose tail was black and strong. I made a nest of hazel and down and bits of a strange, sweet red wood that a raft-builder had left carelessly behind. I laid three eggs that year, and four the year after. I pierced my breast with my beak, and fed them on my blood, which tasted like flying. I called them Pink as a Fat Worm and Speckled as a Shadow and Red as Mother’s Blood and other things. There were a lot of them. It is hard to remember.

The year after that I laid one, and last year I laid five. So it goes.

The tide came in, the tide went out.

A hawk chased me once. She made a dent in my skull and another in my beak. I clipped out one of her eyes.

A cat mauled the hoopoe with the black tail and my last eggs were from one with a blue crest.