The Nightingale's Tooth


 
 
 
 
 
 
 Milton, Ontario
 This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, events, and organizations portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
 Brain Lag Publishing 
 Milton, Ontario 
 http://www.brain-lag.com/
 Copyright © 2023 Sally McBride. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact [email protected].
 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
 The nightingale once had teeth as sharp as a shark’s, but she traded them for the ability to sing more sweetly than any other bird. She has regretted it ever since.
 Part One
 Chapter One
 The Dust
 The boy walked along an unfamiliar road. His feet were bare. Each step raised a little puff of the road’s soft tan dust, which laid itself upon his skin and vanished into it.
 He looked around, hoping to spy a landmark, but it was too foggy, though the air did not feel chill or damp. It felt like nothing, it sounded empty. A road of nothing, leading nowhere. But the dust that rose to his nostrils was full of shreds of everything—dung, sweat, metal, worms. Clay, piss, bones, blood.
 The boy looked down at his toes. Brown and limber, they burrowed into the dust like sparrows taking a dirt bath. He stretched out his thin arms and looked at them. They had no hands at their ends. That was wrong.
 I know what to do, he thought. The dust flew up around him in a small whirlwind, seeking a home in his skin. In a moment hands grew, like sea-stars crawling.
 He turned them palms-up before his face, seeing the dirt-darkened seams that were the life-lines and the heart-lines, and the small pink pads of his fingertips.
 He licked one fingertip and tasted nothing, but he could smell the dust. It made him dizzy, and he almost fell.
 The boy jerked upright at a sharp noise. A rhythmic squeaking, as from a wheel. Was there a farm nearby? A woman raising a bucket from a well, turning her winch and peering down into the darkness for the gleam of water? The boy felt that he must be thirsty. He had been walking this dusty road for… hours? Days?
 But the squeaking grew closer, and soon resolved into an old woman pushing a top-heavy wheelbarrow out of the fog, looking as if, instead of getting closer, she and her cart were getting bigger. She stopped in front of him.
 “Boy,” she said, her voice somehow familiar, “are you lost?”
 She had white hair in two long braids tied together across her sagging bosom, and bright blue eyes set deep among many wrinkles. Her wheelbarrow held the implements of a knife-sharpener. It looked too heavy for such an old crone, yet she stood straight, her wrists as hard and sinewy as olive branches.
 He nodded, wanting to make a proper and polite greeting to the old woman, but finding that he could not take a breath. In fact, he was not breathing at all. He made an effort to inflate his lungs, but stopped as the woman scowled down at him.
 “Boy! Are you looking for someone?”
 He began to cry.
 “Hush! What do you have to cry about?”
 “I…” The act of forming the smallest of words made them all come back.
 He had words. He had breath. He had memories. He had horror and pain and regret.
 He knew why he was crying.
 The old woman bent and took him in her arms, and it was like being embraced by a tree that had troubled itself to pity him. He thought he could hear wind in her hair, but that was impossible.
 This isn’t right, he thought. This isn’t how it is meant to be. 
 The dust reached up and pulled him down into its soft relentless bed.
 *
 I found myself clinging to the Minotaur fountain’s edge, the sculpture’s huge stone eyes staring blankly into mine. Wind still sounded somewhere overhead, whining and eerie. An old woman had been holding me. I could still feel her arms.
 My fingers trailed, limp and shaking, in the tepid water of the fountain. I drew them out and ran the blessed wetness over my sweating face.
 Wetness where there should be dust.
 No. I was not a boy trudging aimlessly on a road. I was in the city, and I was most definitely a girl. The wind died away to nothing, vanishing into the heat and clamour of the market.
 The damned visions. This one was The Boy on the Dusty Road. The next would be The Moorish Woman, then The Falling Bird. Were all three to happen right here, one after the other, in the middle of Perpignan’s market? By now, excuses for my strange behaviour came as easily as the slide of honey on a spoon. The heat, the filthy merchants hawking their wares, even my menses if it came to that. Though I had used that once too often, perhaps. Sigrun wouldn’t fall for it again. So, the heat. I’d fainted in the hot sun.
 Sigrun sneered, fed up with waiting for me to revive. “You didn’t faint, Vara. You raved and cried like a lunatic. What’s wrong with you?” She hastened to straighten my robes and snarl at the gawkers. I’d embarrassed her.
 I shook Sigrun’s silk-draped arm off. Even as companion she was lacking; as friend, impossible. Yet I needed someone to accompany me on a clandestine exit from the villa, and I had little choice. Next time, I’d take a servant and pay her for a closed mouth.
 “Nothing is wrong with me. Can’t I test your attention now and then? You’d better learn the difference between a noblewoman receiving the subtle wisdom of the Gods, and a mere lunatic.” I admit I spoke harshly, but she provoked me. Had I really cried and