Chapter 153: — "The Cuckoo Story"

“You,” said Tax again.

“Yes,” said Eren agreeably. “Hello.”

“You.”

“You’ve said that.”

Tax did not move a single feather.

Seraphina looked between them — a crow flat as a folded thing on a rail, and a man in a gateway holding a cage, doing absolutely nothing with his face — and said, carefully:

“Tax. Do you know him.”

“No.”

“You said—”

“I’m not talking to him,” said Tax.

“Then who are you—”

“The cuckoo.”

Everybody looked at the cage.

The cuckoo, which had been asleep, opened one eye. Took in a yard containing four humans and a crow. Considered its position.

And then, deliberately, turned round on the perch so its back was to the rail.

Tax made a sound like something tearing.

“Look at that. LOOK at that, that’s—”

“It’s a bird—”

“That’s contempt, Aina. That is calculated, professional contempt from an animal that has been in this county for four days—”

“It turned round.”

“It turned round at me—”

Eren set the cage down on the wall. Slowly. In the manner of a man defusing something.

“I feel I’ve walked into a situation.”

“You’ve walked into a feud,” said Daren, delighted, bread entirely forgotten. “Six years I’ve known this crow and I’ve never — Tax, what did it do—”

“It exists,” said Tax.

“That’s not—”

“Its whole family exists,” said Tax, “and has existed, historically, at my expense, and I’d like to say something about it and I’d like nobody to interrupt.”

Seraphina sat down on the step.

“Go on then.”

“There was a nest,” said Tax.

“When.”

“Don’t ask when. The answer’s unhelpful and you’ll get distracted.”

“Fine—”

“There was a nest,” said Tax, and stopped, and did not say anything else for a moment.

It was spring and the light came through the branches in pieces.

Four eggs. Good ones. She had done the arranging of them because she did the arranging of everything and had strong views about placement, and he had learned in the first season not to touch the arrangement and in the second season not to comment on it.

“Eleven minutes,” she said. “There and back.”

“It’s further than eleven.”

“It’s eleven if you don’t stop.”

“I don’t stop—”

“You stop constantly,” she said, already going. “You stop to look at things. You’ve stopped twice this morning and we haven’t left.”

He went after her.

They got four minutes out.

And then he thought of the thing he’d left — and it was not important, it was not important at all, and he would spend a considerable portion of the following six hundred years thinking about how unimportant it had been — and he said:

“Go on. I’ll catch up.”

And she said, “You stop constantly,” without turning round.

And he went back.

There was a cuckoo in the nest.

Sitting in it. On the eggs. Entirely comfortable, settled in with her feathers down, in the manner of a woman who had arrived somewhere she paid rent.

He landed on the branch.

“Who are you,” he said, “and what are you doing here.”

She looked up.

She opened her beak — and got about half a syllable out —

And his wife came over the branch behind him.

She’d forgotten something too.

Two of them. Same morning. Both went back.

He would think about that for six hundred years as well.

There was a silence on that branch of about a second and a half. He could see it happening. He could see her taking it in — the nest, the eggs, the strange female sitting on them, and him, standing there, having said go on, I’ll catch up.

“Husband,” she said.

“It’s not—”

“Husband. Who is she. What is she doing in our nest.”

“I came back and she was—”

And the cuckoo turned her head, and looked directly at his wife, and said:

“Husband?”

The branch went very still.

“Who is she,” said the cuckoo. “Why is she calling you husband.”

“NO—”

“IT’S NOT FUNNY—”

“IT’S EXTREMELY—”

“IT WAS MY NEST, AINA—”

He did not get to say anything.

He would like that entered into the record. In the entire duration of the incident he was permitted, in total, one complete sentence, and it was the first one.

Because the cuckoo stood up.

And laid an egg.

Right there. In front of both of them. In his nest, in the middle of an argument, with the unhurried competence of a professional doing something she had done four hundred times.

Then she settled her feathers, and stepped back, and looked at his wife.

“Take care of your baby,” she said. “You and your affair.”

And she made a face.

A sad face.

She did a sad face, at his wife, about his nest —

And left.

“AND THEN—”

“I DIDN’T SEE HER AGAIN,” said Tax, over the noise. “Not once. Ever. I have since been informed by a great many birds that this is standard practice, that everyone knows about it, and that I should have known about it—”

“WHAT DID YOUR WIFE—”

She didn’t speak to him for eleven days.

He explained on the first day. He explained on the second day.

On the fourth day he did a reconstruction.

He stood on the branch and did the whole thing back, in order, including where everyone had been standing — she was here, I was here, you came over there — and did both voices.

His wife watched the entire performance.

Then she said: “The cuckoo’s voice was wrong.”

“…What?”

“You’ve made her sound sillier than she was.”

“I have not—”

“You’ve given her a silly voice,” said his wife, “which is convenient,” and turned round on the branch.

That set him back four days.

On the eleventh day she said:

“I believe you.”

He had been asleep. He was not, when she said it, in a state to receive anything.

“I believe you,” she said again, “and I’d have liked to have been the one who came back second.”

And that was all. She never mentioned it again — not once, not in eleven years, not as a joke, and he had waited for it as a joke for a long time and it had never come.

They raised the cuckoo.

You do. That is the entire horrible design of the thing.

It ate more than the other three combined, and it left in the autumn, and it did not say goodbye.

“I have no regrets,” said Tax, on a rail, in a yard, six hundred years later. “I would do it again. And I did not enjoy any part of it.”

The yard settled.

Somebody was still laughing — Daren, on the grass, at intervals, in aftershocks.

And Seraphina, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, said, without thinking about it at all:

“Wait.”

“Mm.”

“Tax.”

“Mm.”

“You’ve got a wife?”

Tax straightened on the rail.

Every feather went back into place. He lifted his head, and settled his shoulders, and looked at her with an expression of such enormous, unbothered, ancient dignity that she sat back on the step.

“So what if I do,” said Tax.

“You’ve been on my windowsill for three years—”

“So what if I do,” said Tax again. “Yes. I have a wife. She was better at everything than I am and she knew it and she never once said so, and she could take a beetle off a branch at four feet in the dark, and I have never met anything since that came close.”

“…That’s—”

“So what,” said Tax, “if I do.”

“Where is she.”

She asked it lightly. She was still half-laughing when she asked it, and she would think about that later.

“Heaven,” said Tax.

The yard went quiet.

“…Oh.”

“Mm.”

“Tax, I’m—”

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t—”

“You didn’t know,” said Tax. “Nobody knows. That’s the arrangement I’ve got with it.”

Seraphina sat on the step with her hands between her knees.

“Hang on,” she said.

“Mm.”

“She wasn’t like you, then.”

“Meaning?”

“You’re — ” she gestured at all of him — “you’re old, Tax. You’ve always been old. You were old when I met you and you’ve got no plans about it. So she wasn’t — she didn’t have the—”

“No,” said Tax.

“So she was just—”

“She was a crow,” he said. “She had eleven years, and she used all of them, and she was very good at it.”

“So why aren’t you—”

“That’s enough,” said Tax.

“I’m only—”

“That’s enough, Aina.”

And she stopped, because he had never once in six years used that voice on her, and because Daren had gone quiet on the grass, and because Kael was standing four feet away looking at the crow with an expression that suggested he had known some part of this for a while.

“Right,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Mm.”

And Tax sat on the rail in a yard, looking at a cuckoo in a cage that had turned its back on him, and thought — in the place where he kept the things he had never said to anybody, and had been not-saying for considerably longer than anyone in that yard had been alive:

Eleven years, and I had all of them.

And then I had six hundred more, and I have not wanted a single one of them.

And it was you.

You did that. In a life you don’t remember, with a hand on my head, meaning it kindly.

And I have never once held it against you.

And I’m not going to start now.

“Right,” he said aloud. “The window.”

“…What?”

“He came in here talking about a window,” said Tax, jerking his head at Eren. “Twelve minutes ago. Nobody’s let him finish and I find I want to know.”