The Clockwork Nightingale

In the emperor’s garden there stood a cage with no door, and in the cage sat a nightingale made of brass and blue enamel. It had been put there a hundred years before by a clockmaker whose name nobody had thought to write down.

The bird did not sing. It only listened. That was its whole design: to sit in the garden, year upon year, and take in every song that passed through.

And a great many passed through. Nightingales and blackbirds. Thrushes that repeat themselves twice to be sure. Geese going over in November. A washerwoman who sang badly and constantly for thirty years. A boy practising a flute, very slowly getting better.

The hundredth spring

On the first warm evening of the hundredth spring, something in the brass bird turned over with a click you could hear across the lawn. And it opened its beak and sang.

The song was not a nightingale’s. It was not a blackbird’s. It had the long silver run of a thrush in it, and a lift at the end that belonged to the geese, and somewhere in the middle a small stubborn phrase that was unmistakably the washerwoman. It went on for eleven minutes. Three of the court wept, and one of them was the Chancellor, who had not wept since childhood and was extremely annoyed about it.

I am the thrush and I am the goose,I am the woman at her tub,I am the boy who could not playand played until he could.

The week of arguing

The palace argued for seven days.

The Chancellor said the song belonged to the emperor, since the garden did. The clockmakers’ guild said it belonged to the clockmaker, whose name was still nobody’s idea. A visiting poet said it belonged to no one, being merely an echo, and was therefore worth nothing — though he had wept along with the rest and hoped no one had noticed.

The gardener, who was sweeping and had not been asked, said: “It is made of every bird that ever came through here, and of none of them. That is not nothing. But it is not the bird’s alone, either.”

Everyone told her that was no answer. She kept sweeping, having noticed that it was.

They put a small brass plate on the cage in the end. It reads: Sung by the nightingale. Taught by everything that ever sang in this garden. The washerwoman’s granddaughter comes to read it sometimes.