The Nightingale
May. 21st, 2008 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
layangabiTitle: The Nightingale
Word Count: 2,700
Summary: The stories about nightingales are one-sided, and are most certainly wrong.
First of all, the stories are wrong.
Don’t be absurd, it’s the males of our folk who are the singers. Silence is considered a virtue in young hens, a necessity for brooding mothers, and any hen who opens her mouth to sing while she’s sitting with eggs or chicks is asking to be devoured: nest, spawn and all. And as for the rest: what, me press my heart to a rose, sing Death away from her intended catch?
Well. We might, I admit, for we are a romantic folk, and the young males of my kind are particularly prone to idiocy. We’re vagabonds and rogues, hopeless romantics who fall in love with fish of glittering silver, the slender reed by the river, the blossom who will only live for a few days, and besides which, are hideously unfaithful. That story of the young male — the one who fell in love with a scholar and traded his life’s blood for a rose, only to fall in love with his creation instead at the last minute but too late for the young male dies and the Scholar plucks the young rose then dashes him to the curb on the street because his darling received rubies instead, was my second cousin twice removed and a cautionary tale to us young chicks in the nest.
Alas, I did not heed my mother well. I came of age, flew off to make my fortune, and promptly fell in love with an angelic vision of a young cob, his perfectly arched neck and celestial white, flecked with grey. Like me, he was very, very young.
I serenaded him all summer though he often glanced at me askance and never deigned to speak to me. I serenaded him until he paired up with some dapper-gentleman cob who returned his affections. And his new partner was, after all, the same species, the same genus, and most importantly, was of reasonable size for the delicate act.
“But true love conquers all!” I shrilled, ungentlemanly and ungracious as they bobbed away on the water. My cob did not even give me a backward glance. Perhaps I should have added “And I love you, truer than the rise and setting of the sun,” because there is nothing like a true declaration of love to turn a tragic ending into a real one. But I was too heartbroken and I thought of it too late, having fled into the deep of the woods, into the Emperor’s gardens singing of my woe and my fickle, faithless love.
#
Time heals all wounds. I gained many admirers from my days in the woods: visiting scholars, ambassadors, artists and artisans, the Emperor’s many wives, courtesans and singers. I sang a duet with a castrati once, his voice as rich and fine as velvet, and he let me perch on his hand and swore he would not forget me. I sang for children, peasants who threw me grain and bread, monks and philosophers who came to sit in the quiet of the Emperor’s woods.
And then I met her. Yes, her, the little kitchen maid of the Emperor’s palace, who brought food home to her ailing mother. The simplicity her sloping shoulders and long and elegant neck, the paleness of her skin and clothing— I confess, yes, I confess, she reminded me a little of my cob. But she was a completely different species, and she had charms of her own. I have a type.
“O shall I court you? Shall I?” I sang out to her. And though she did not respond at all, gazing up at me with those dark brown eyes, that was far more encouragement that I had received previously.
For her, I threw out my songs of woes, sang her stories of heartbreak and the love that heals, and transcends all boundaries, even the practicalities of the delicate act, for was my singing not enough love-making? And she listened, O how she listened, and she responded, and she came to me time and again for our dalliance before she visited her ailing mother, with bread and wine in a basket and cake. We learned each other’s languages, she and I, and this took time, for she could not mimic the trills and tones of my language and I could not mimic hers.
So I was startled when she one day came with her retinue of lords, a crowd of her folk: kitchen maids, maid servants, gardeners, farmers, cooks, ministers, lords and artisans. She had never expressed any thought of marrying, and indeed, I thought that was a little bold of her. Still, one must account for differences in custom. I did not hold it against her.
“Little nightingale, will you come sing for the Emperor?” she said.
“My song sounds best in the green wood,” I said, for I wanted her to know how much I was giving up for her and how true my love was, to come among these folk who insisted on labeling me a girl. But I went with her faithfully and sang for her Lord the Emperor.
I sang of our love, bright, pure and eternal, and brought tears to the Emperor’s eyes. He consented to our union, or so I thought, and called for a ropesmith to fashion a leash for my leg, a silversmith for a cage. I trilled with joy, for surely, surely these trappings meant I would have my girl as my constant companion. I sang of love, never-changing and always faithful, until the handler leashed my leg with a thin silken cord and took me away, to be trained properly in court etiquette as befitted a bird in the Emperor’s possession.
Alas, this was the beginning of all our woes.
#
Though I never saw her again, for her sake, I let myself suffer the indignity of the silken cords around my feet and the cage at night, twenty handlers to ensure I would be kept for the Emperor’s pleasure. I even suffered, despite my loud insistence otherwise, the court’s weird insistence that I was female.
“I am a male,” I protested, “and besides it is unseemly for girls to sing.” They laughed and treated it as a witticism.
The Emperor sought to console me, for he saw I was quite put out. “Pay no attention, little nightingale,” he said. “Come, sing your songs for me.”
For him, I sang of love and everlasting faithfulness, of the pearls that dotted his robe of beaten gold, and made him and the court weep. He held his finger out and I tasted his tears, salty, cold as river water.
Perhaps I fell in love with him then, who knows? And you already know the kind of passions we throw ourselves into for the sake of love. He already had a hundred wives and a thousand or so courtesans in his employ, but he only had one troubadour of a nightingale, to sing for him. Perhaps he fell in love with me a little, the way a man loves the precious things collected for his pleasures.
I grew drunk on it, I will admit, the strength of his regard, the burning of his eyes as he asked me to sing. I lived for the moments where he asked me to perch on his fingers, where he me breadcrumbs of his hand because it pleased him to do so, and fed me with his tears. I lived for all the trappings of honor: when he appointed a boy as an insect catcher to prepare fresh insects for my evening meal, the gems and gifts sent to the court that he laid about my feet. I sang for him, forgetting the pleasures of flying free without a cord around my ankle, of going where I pleased, of singing and courting whoever I wanted, for I was not allowed to sing unless the Emperor willed it so, and always for him. For vagabonds and rogues such as I, that is tragedy and sacrifice indeed.
It did not matter, so great was the strength my love.
I had pressed my heart against the rose after all.
#
I am not sure when hope turned into self-loathing and self-loathing into poison for the heaven I found myself in. It took a long time, for my mother, an avid romantic that she was, found the philosophy of self-sacrifice and endurance a noble thing. She had fallen in love with the preachings of a Christian priest when young, had had to witness his torture and execution by fire. Enduring torture and agonia is the evidence of a true passion. The priest died for his faith, my mother endured his torture and it has marked her and her children ever since.
Perhaps it was the slow knowledge that for humans, the trappings of possession did not equate to the grand passions we nightingales were prone to. I know that all of the wives were crippled, their feet broken from a young age to fit the delicate, fist-sized slippers that they wore. A hundred of them, a thousand of them, one of them whipped and ruined for an illicit dalliance, once or twice a week, for the Emperor’s pleasure, while another was taken to his chambers to be subjected to more of the same while I, little bird, sang of love and passion for it pleased the Emperor.
Perhaps it was the sight of the nightingale corpses for the Emperor’s feast, and the crooked smiles of the nightingale-man, who bred and raised the hapless creatures, and winked at me when the Emperor called him and the chef forward to praise them for their crafts. Perhaps it was the Emperor offering me a bread crumb from his dish of nightingales, and having the nightingale man force my mouth open and plucking the nightingale-flavored crumb down my throat. The taste lasted for days.
I knew was that I was sick of my service, the cords, the bells, the pearls and gemstones around my feet. I knew I would choke of it, and it would be a long before I sang to any love of pearls, or compared their beauty to a ruby’s fire.
I had never dreamed that love would make me sick.
#
And then the Emperor was given the artificial nightingale.
I will tell you the truth: he looked ridiculous. I knew my father and brothers would have dismissed him as a dilettante, my mother and sisters as a pale imitation and a cheat. The Emperor might chuck gems at my feet and bade me sit on a gilt-embroidered pillow, but nobody decks himself out in sings the same verses over and over again that can expect a courting from a respectable suitor. We sang a duet, the artificial nightingale and I, and he could barely keep up with the range, the trills, the clucks of my voice. He could only sing the same pattern over and over again, the poor gigalo. That the Emperor and his court fussed and lavished over him spoke more about their fondness for gems and metals than anything else.
I could see the Emperor’s eyes as he looked at him: dark and golden. It was the same way he had looked at me.
I’ll tell you the truth. I was bitter for a moment. Then I laughed.
I shook off the chain around my ankle, flew off into the wide world with not even a backward glance. It only occurred to me, some time later, that the artificial nightingale’s waltz grew louder and more frenzied as I sailed out into the sky.
#
I went back to the green wood, to the lake where I had found my cob. He was there still, and happy, neck lovingly entwined with the dapper-gentleman. Or perhaps it was the other way around: they all looked alike now.
“Stay away from the palace, love,” I sang out. Hunters can stab our breasts with arrows, send dogs and cats after us to but only humans will suffocate us slowly with their gilded cages. I never wanted to see him there.
I went back to picking grain at my feet, to catching my own insects, evading things like owls and snakes and the wildcats of the woods. Palace life had made me easy but I did not forget everything I had learned.
There were no grand passions, not for a while. I settled down respectively, as a cock should, courting year after year, with a hen from a good family and had her children. I visited the cob and his lover every now and then, watching them raise cygnets from the pens they courted. They were safe, all of them, because I was invisible after the flush of spring.
#
Word reached us that the Emperor was dying and that the artificial nightingale had refused to sing for him. I cannot say I did not care: I did.
How the powerful fall! I shouted out to my cob. And what irony! But I wondered how the artificial nightingale refused him, for even I had been unable to refuse a request from those golden eyes and marble voice, even when the poison stuck in my craw. It had been a long time since I had broken from his spell, but I still remembered.
I might have left it there, but the question stuck in my craw. I did the foolish thing, and flew back to the Emperor’s palace---in the cover of the dusk, for I heard I had been banished, you see, and did not want to end up as a corpse in the meal of nightingales.
I heard Death in her splendor as I approached the room of the Emperor, whispering his sins and virtues and the actions that resulted from each. I heard the Emperor’s whisper: Sing, sing, damn you! The artificial nightingale, alight on the pillow, whirled and clicked as he turned his neck to look at me. He sang with his eyes, poor thing, for there was no one to wind him up.
“You silly charlatan,” I sang out and the great pin-tail with sapphires moved up and down, slowly, and he managed with a hop, and I realized, to my shock, that he was courting.
“Is that my nightingale?” said the Emperor from his deathbed. But I said nothing to him in reply.
I sang to the false nightingale. I sang to him of the splendor and horror of the Emperor’s palace, the soft quiet of the wood, the wild passion of my folk, and the gentleness of death, because yes, death, I would prefer to be there even now, having found all of my dreams to dust. I sang so beautifully, so eloquently, and with such conviction (for I meant it, every word) that to my horror, death decided to go there and leave the Emperor alone with the false nightingale and me. He was all praises and thanks, and quotes celebrating faithfulness.
“And I will crush this nightingale of gems, who has failed me,” he said, and he picked the poor thing up in his hand. The aritificial nightingale looked at me with such a look, that I had to cry out the Emperor to stop. No one contradicts an Emperor, and he looked at me askance.
I asked the Emperor to spare the silver one’s life, in return for my voice every now and again. What a story it made, coming back to the Emperor in exchange for my lover’s life. Not many people can say they have done the same thing.
#
We live in my swan girl’s house and the rich wild wood my silver lover and I. He can’t serenade me, but he dances his love and I sing, and we make the girl laugh her delight. We are her riches, even though she may never be a real palace cook, and thank God for that. We are all content.
Perhaps there is something to be said for the troubadour life, I told my children and their grandchildren, and indeed, many of them go off to make their fortunes in the wild and untamed wood. Press yourselves to the rose, my dears. It is a worthwhile endeavor, and if you die young, well, most of you were going to anyway.
Take my advice.
Word Count: 2,700
Summary: The stories about nightingales are one-sided, and are most certainly wrong.
First of all, the stories are wrong.
Don’t be absurd, it’s the males of our folk who are the singers. Silence is considered a virtue in young hens, a necessity for brooding mothers, and any hen who opens her mouth to sing while she’s sitting with eggs or chicks is asking to be devoured: nest, spawn and all. And as for the rest: what, me press my heart to a rose, sing Death away from her intended catch?
Well. We might, I admit, for we are a romantic folk, and the young males of my kind are particularly prone to idiocy. We’re vagabonds and rogues, hopeless romantics who fall in love with fish of glittering silver, the slender reed by the river, the blossom who will only live for a few days, and besides which, are hideously unfaithful. That story of the young male — the one who fell in love with a scholar and traded his life’s blood for a rose, only to fall in love with his creation instead at the last minute but too late for the young male dies and the Scholar plucks the young rose then dashes him to the curb on the street because his darling received rubies instead, was my second cousin twice removed and a cautionary tale to us young chicks in the nest.
Alas, I did not heed my mother well. I came of age, flew off to make my fortune, and promptly fell in love with an angelic vision of a young cob, his perfectly arched neck and celestial white, flecked with grey. Like me, he was very, very young.
I serenaded him all summer though he often glanced at me askance and never deigned to speak to me. I serenaded him until he paired up with some dapper-gentleman cob who returned his affections. And his new partner was, after all, the same species, the same genus, and most importantly, was of reasonable size for the delicate act.
“But true love conquers all!” I shrilled, ungentlemanly and ungracious as they bobbed away on the water. My cob did not even give me a backward glance. Perhaps I should have added “And I love you, truer than the rise and setting of the sun,” because there is nothing like a true declaration of love to turn a tragic ending into a real one. But I was too heartbroken and I thought of it too late, having fled into the deep of the woods, into the Emperor’s gardens singing of my woe and my fickle, faithless love.
#
Time heals all wounds. I gained many admirers from my days in the woods: visiting scholars, ambassadors, artists and artisans, the Emperor’s many wives, courtesans and singers. I sang a duet with a castrati once, his voice as rich and fine as velvet, and he let me perch on his hand and swore he would not forget me. I sang for children, peasants who threw me grain and bread, monks and philosophers who came to sit in the quiet of the Emperor’s woods.
And then I met her. Yes, her, the little kitchen maid of the Emperor’s palace, who brought food home to her ailing mother. The simplicity her sloping shoulders and long and elegant neck, the paleness of her skin and clothing— I confess, yes, I confess, she reminded me a little of my cob. But she was a completely different species, and she had charms of her own. I have a type.
“O shall I court you? Shall I?” I sang out to her. And though she did not respond at all, gazing up at me with those dark brown eyes, that was far more encouragement that I had received previously.
For her, I threw out my songs of woes, sang her stories of heartbreak and the love that heals, and transcends all boundaries, even the practicalities of the delicate act, for was my singing not enough love-making? And she listened, O how she listened, and she responded, and she came to me time and again for our dalliance before she visited her ailing mother, with bread and wine in a basket and cake. We learned each other’s languages, she and I, and this took time, for she could not mimic the trills and tones of my language and I could not mimic hers.
So I was startled when she one day came with her retinue of lords, a crowd of her folk: kitchen maids, maid servants, gardeners, farmers, cooks, ministers, lords and artisans. She had never expressed any thought of marrying, and indeed, I thought that was a little bold of her. Still, one must account for differences in custom. I did not hold it against her.
“Little nightingale, will you come sing for the Emperor?” she said.
“My song sounds best in the green wood,” I said, for I wanted her to know how much I was giving up for her and how true my love was, to come among these folk who insisted on labeling me a girl. But I went with her faithfully and sang for her Lord the Emperor.
I sang of our love, bright, pure and eternal, and brought tears to the Emperor’s eyes. He consented to our union, or so I thought, and called for a ropesmith to fashion a leash for my leg, a silversmith for a cage. I trilled with joy, for surely, surely these trappings meant I would have my girl as my constant companion. I sang of love, never-changing and always faithful, until the handler leashed my leg with a thin silken cord and took me away, to be trained properly in court etiquette as befitted a bird in the Emperor’s possession.
Alas, this was the beginning of all our woes.
#
Though I never saw her again, for her sake, I let myself suffer the indignity of the silken cords around my feet and the cage at night, twenty handlers to ensure I would be kept for the Emperor’s pleasure. I even suffered, despite my loud insistence otherwise, the court’s weird insistence that I was female.
“I am a male,” I protested, “and besides it is unseemly for girls to sing.” They laughed and treated it as a witticism.
The Emperor sought to console me, for he saw I was quite put out. “Pay no attention, little nightingale,” he said. “Come, sing your songs for me.”
For him, I sang of love and everlasting faithfulness, of the pearls that dotted his robe of beaten gold, and made him and the court weep. He held his finger out and I tasted his tears, salty, cold as river water.
Perhaps I fell in love with him then, who knows? And you already know the kind of passions we throw ourselves into for the sake of love. He already had a hundred wives and a thousand or so courtesans in his employ, but he only had one troubadour of a nightingale, to sing for him. Perhaps he fell in love with me a little, the way a man loves the precious things collected for his pleasures.
I grew drunk on it, I will admit, the strength of his regard, the burning of his eyes as he asked me to sing. I lived for the moments where he asked me to perch on his fingers, where he me breadcrumbs of his hand because it pleased him to do so, and fed me with his tears. I lived for all the trappings of honor: when he appointed a boy as an insect catcher to prepare fresh insects for my evening meal, the gems and gifts sent to the court that he laid about my feet. I sang for him, forgetting the pleasures of flying free without a cord around my ankle, of going where I pleased, of singing and courting whoever I wanted, for I was not allowed to sing unless the Emperor willed it so, and always for him. For vagabonds and rogues such as I, that is tragedy and sacrifice indeed.
It did not matter, so great was the strength my love.
I had pressed my heart against the rose after all.
#
I am not sure when hope turned into self-loathing and self-loathing into poison for the heaven I found myself in. It took a long time, for my mother, an avid romantic that she was, found the philosophy of self-sacrifice and endurance a noble thing. She had fallen in love with the preachings of a Christian priest when young, had had to witness his torture and execution by fire. Enduring torture and agonia is the evidence of a true passion. The priest died for his faith, my mother endured his torture and it has marked her and her children ever since.
Perhaps it was the slow knowledge that for humans, the trappings of possession did not equate to the grand passions we nightingales were prone to. I know that all of the wives were crippled, their feet broken from a young age to fit the delicate, fist-sized slippers that they wore. A hundred of them, a thousand of them, one of them whipped and ruined for an illicit dalliance, once or twice a week, for the Emperor’s pleasure, while another was taken to his chambers to be subjected to more of the same while I, little bird, sang of love and passion for it pleased the Emperor.
Perhaps it was the sight of the nightingale corpses for the Emperor’s feast, and the crooked smiles of the nightingale-man, who bred and raised the hapless creatures, and winked at me when the Emperor called him and the chef forward to praise them for their crafts. Perhaps it was the Emperor offering me a bread crumb from his dish of nightingales, and having the nightingale man force my mouth open and plucking the nightingale-flavored crumb down my throat. The taste lasted for days.
I knew was that I was sick of my service, the cords, the bells, the pearls and gemstones around my feet. I knew I would choke of it, and it would be a long before I sang to any love of pearls, or compared their beauty to a ruby’s fire.
I had never dreamed that love would make me sick.
#
And then the Emperor was given the artificial nightingale.
I will tell you the truth: he looked ridiculous. I knew my father and brothers would have dismissed him as a dilettante, my mother and sisters as a pale imitation and a cheat. The Emperor might chuck gems at my feet and bade me sit on a gilt-embroidered pillow, but nobody decks himself out in sings the same verses over and over again that can expect a courting from a respectable suitor. We sang a duet, the artificial nightingale and I, and he could barely keep up with the range, the trills, the clucks of my voice. He could only sing the same pattern over and over again, the poor gigalo. That the Emperor and his court fussed and lavished over him spoke more about their fondness for gems and metals than anything else.
I could see the Emperor’s eyes as he looked at him: dark and golden. It was the same way he had looked at me.
I’ll tell you the truth. I was bitter for a moment. Then I laughed.
I shook off the chain around my ankle, flew off into the wide world with not even a backward glance. It only occurred to me, some time later, that the artificial nightingale’s waltz grew louder and more frenzied as I sailed out into the sky.
#
I went back to the green wood, to the lake where I had found my cob. He was there still, and happy, neck lovingly entwined with the dapper-gentleman. Or perhaps it was the other way around: they all looked alike now.
“Stay away from the palace, love,” I sang out. Hunters can stab our breasts with arrows, send dogs and cats after us to but only humans will suffocate us slowly with their gilded cages. I never wanted to see him there.
I went back to picking grain at my feet, to catching my own insects, evading things like owls and snakes and the wildcats of the woods. Palace life had made me easy but I did not forget everything I had learned.
There were no grand passions, not for a while. I settled down respectively, as a cock should, courting year after year, with a hen from a good family and had her children. I visited the cob and his lover every now and then, watching them raise cygnets from the pens they courted. They were safe, all of them, because I was invisible after the flush of spring.
#
Word reached us that the Emperor was dying and that the artificial nightingale had refused to sing for him. I cannot say I did not care: I did.
How the powerful fall! I shouted out to my cob. And what irony! But I wondered how the artificial nightingale refused him, for even I had been unable to refuse a request from those golden eyes and marble voice, even when the poison stuck in my craw. It had been a long time since I had broken from his spell, but I still remembered.
I might have left it there, but the question stuck in my craw. I did the foolish thing, and flew back to the Emperor’s palace---in the cover of the dusk, for I heard I had been banished, you see, and did not want to end up as a corpse in the meal of nightingales.
I heard Death in her splendor as I approached the room of the Emperor, whispering his sins and virtues and the actions that resulted from each. I heard the Emperor’s whisper: Sing, sing, damn you! The artificial nightingale, alight on the pillow, whirled and clicked as he turned his neck to look at me. He sang with his eyes, poor thing, for there was no one to wind him up.
“You silly charlatan,” I sang out and the great pin-tail with sapphires moved up and down, slowly, and he managed with a hop, and I realized, to my shock, that he was courting.
“Is that my nightingale?” said the Emperor from his deathbed. But I said nothing to him in reply.
I sang to the false nightingale. I sang to him of the splendor and horror of the Emperor’s palace, the soft quiet of the wood, the wild passion of my folk, and the gentleness of death, because yes, death, I would prefer to be there even now, having found all of my dreams to dust. I sang so beautifully, so eloquently, and with such conviction (for I meant it, every word) that to my horror, death decided to go there and leave the Emperor alone with the false nightingale and me. He was all praises and thanks, and quotes celebrating faithfulness.
“And I will crush this nightingale of gems, who has failed me,” he said, and he picked the poor thing up in his hand. The aritificial nightingale looked at me with such a look, that I had to cry out the Emperor to stop. No one contradicts an Emperor, and he looked at me askance.
I asked the Emperor to spare the silver one’s life, in return for my voice every now and again. What a story it made, coming back to the Emperor in exchange for my lover’s life. Not many people can say they have done the same thing.
#
We live in my swan girl’s house and the rich wild wood my silver lover and I. He can’t serenade me, but he dances his love and I sing, and we make the girl laugh her delight. We are her riches, even though she may never be a real palace cook, and thank God for that. We are all content.
Perhaps there is something to be said for the troubadour life, I told my children and their grandchildren, and indeed, many of them go off to make their fortunes in the wild and untamed wood. Press yourselves to the rose, my dears. It is a worthwhile endeavor, and if you die young, well, most of you were going to anyway.
Take my advice.
