Penguin Books Australia

Prologue

A shaft of moonlight. A barred window. A bed of straw, and a young man, little more than a boy, chained to a wall. The chains prevent him from lying down and so he sleeps, exhausted, slumped against it.

The cell is damp and, somewhere, a steady echoing drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . of water falls from the distant ceil­ing into a puddle on the stone floor. The young man's hair is very dark and his face pale - unshaven, smeared with dirt, and weary. But this cannot hide the gentleness and innocence of his expression, which is child-like, despite the long limbs that, if he were standing, would make him very tall. Indeed, even if there was no moonlight, his face would almost glow with its own light.

The young man sleeps. Meanwhile, the night sky above the prison stirs with a strange breeze, or a hundred tiny breezes.

The small barred window is ten feet above the boy's head. Even if his eyes were open he would see little through it. Nevertheless, the courtyard is filling with birds. One here, two there, three over there, in quick succession, they drop out of the sky and land on the icy cobbles. Chirruping busily, hopping, fluttering, they cross the courtyard and gather at the window, peering down through the bars.

They are not wild birds. In fact, they are the kind that usually live their lives in cages - canaries, finches, budg­erigars and the like, with the odd parrot or cockatoo amongst them. They have flown across the great Park, past the Palace and the Houses of Parliament and the great Cathedral, over the grand mansions of the rich, and the tumbledown houses of the poor, over theatres and churches and market squares, over the consulting rooms of physicians and the evil smelling larders of apothecar­ies, over dark, stuffy workshops where seamstresses and cobblers and milliners and wigmakers ply their trade, over public houses and newspaper offices, to get to this window.

At a signal from their leader, an aged white canary, they flutter into the cell, following the shaft of moonlight like tiny angels descending on a ladder of light. Once inside, they perch on and around the young man, while above them, the larger birds keep watch.

And there, in the moonlight, the little birds begin to sing. The song fills the cell like the voices of a choir in a cathedral. The echoes bouncing from the stone walls make a chorale of, not hundreds, but thousands of song birds, as if all the birds of the earth are singing to comfort and to heal.

As they sing the young man's eyelids flicker and open. He blinks; he pushes himself up with the heels of his hands, winces automatically with pain, and yet seems not to notice. His eyes travel from the birds on his knees, to the birds in the straw, to the birds struggling to get a purchase amongst the stones of the wall, and flut­tering as they change position. There must be hundreds. There is barely an unoccupied space. A pair of canaries is perched on his head; he can feel their wiry feet in his hair.

For a moment his face fills with yearning. Tentatively, he holds out his hand as far as the chains allow. Sure enough, a finch and a white canary fly over to perch on it. Then the yearning passes into sadness, and he looks at them with a complicated expression on his face - half tender, half ironic.

'You think you are dreaming,' says the white canary, looking at him with her bright black eyes.

The young man is not surprised. He smiles faintly. If the canary had not spoken he might have allowed him­self to hope. Now he knows he is asleep. His eyes are rueful, as if he thinks the joke is on him.

'So I am not to be freed by magical birds,' he murmurs. The canary looks at him steadily.

'No,' she says. 'We are birds, but we have no magic. And yet we can help you. Tell me your grief, my son.'

The young man's eyes are very dark, so dark that in the dim light they seem cavernous. He is looking not at the bird but inside himself.

'My grief . . .' he says, and the old canary knows he does not really believe that he is talking to anyone. He pauses, then closes his eyes and lowers his head, as if he has experienced a sudden sickening pain. 'I could say that my grief is that I have failed utterly. I could say that I grieve because I have lost everything. I have helped no one, and I myself am doomed. But,' he says, 'in the end, there is only one grief - and that is that I have failed her.'

'Do you believe that there is truth in dreams?' asks the canary.

The young man is startled. 'I have never been asked that in a dream before,' he says after a moment.

'Remember us tomorrow,' says the canary with great seriousness, 'and remember what I tell you now. Do not despair. Tell stories. Will you remember?'

'Tell stories,' whispers the young man. 'But what sto­ries? Why? And to whom?'

'Be consoled, 0 thou without wings. Know that you are prayed for, with every note of song, by The Society of the Caged Birds of the City. All will yet be well.'

With that he feels her push against his finger as she flies off. The other birds follow her immediately. But before each of them departs, they fly towards him in a soft, swinging arc and brush the tips of their wings against his ear or cheek. They are still singing as they leave, one by one, through the bars.

As the young man - who still believes he is dream­ing - gazes towards the window, his face is again filled with yearning, and the tears glisten in his eyes. But the cell is silent except for the steady drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . of water falling from the ceiling to the floor.

In that city, there is another place of imprisonment: the Madhouse.

The Madhouse is a simple building, as simple and faceless as a child's first drawing of a house, except that such a drawing would not have so many windows. From the outside, whether by day or night, it seems empty. But it is not empty. It is crowded. Not with mad people, but with secrets.

Within its walls are secrets that no one dares tell, and that no one would believe. They are packed inside it as stuffing is packed into a rag doll. And sometimes, when a rag doll is ripped open, a little jumble spills out.

The Caged Birds of the City swoop out of the prison courtyard, along the deserted street, and down onto the footpath outside the main entrance: for in that City, the Prison and the Madhouse stand side by side. In the shel­ter of the doorway into the Madhouse lies a very young woman.

She is curled up, like a stray cat, and she shivers from the cold as she sleeps. Her honey-coloured hair, as curly as wool, springs around her like a crazy halo. Her face is tortured with woe. She is dressed oddly in a shapeless smock and hessian slippers, and holds a bundle against her chest.

Descending gently in twos and threes, the birds perch around and over her, folding their feet beneath them like nesting mothers. Huddling together, they make the soft­est, warmest of coverlets.

When the girl stops shivering, the birds begin to sing softly, not with the abandon of the song in the prison cell, but in a soothing manner, as if they were settling a nest of hatchlings to sleep.

But the girl stirs unhappily.

'Damned,' she murmurs feverishly.

'Not so!' says the white canary in her ear. 'You are loved, and you are free, if only you choose to be so. Do not despair, my child,' she urges. 'Seize what has been given you!'

But the girl takes no comfort. Her sad face is as full of yearning as that of the boy in the dungeon, although there is a great difference between them. He longs to be free. She longs to be imprisoned. She begins to brush away the birds, as if they are insects, and to huddle closer to the door. Driven away, the birds rise into the air, their faces grave. They are reluctant to leave. They look to their leader for guidance. They had intended to stay with her through the coldest part of the night.

The white canary looks into the girl's face.

'We can do no good here,' she pronounces with a sigh. 'The poor creature cannot hear us. She will not let herself. Do not fear. The mice will follow her. The mice will send us news. We must wait for other opportunities. Come, fellow birds.'

So the Caged Birds of the City flit wearily across the City, over public houses and newspaper offices, over dark, stuffy workshops and the suites of lawyers, over thea­tres and churches and market squares, over houses both grand and derelict, past the Palace and the Parliament and the Cathedral, and across the silent park.

As they fly, one or another leaves the group to return to its place of residence. One gets back in through a chim­ney. Another through a secret hole in the roof. Yet another through an open window. There they secrete themselves into their cages: for, although their owners do not know it, each bird is capable of using his or her clever beak to get in and out of his or her cage. There they gratefully tuck their heads under their wings and snatch what hours of sleep remain.

When the grey morning light creeps into their rooms, their human gaolers arise and remove the night-covers from the cages, never knowing that their fragile pets are members of a secret network formed to do good: the Soci­ety of the Caged Birds of the City.

As dawn breaks over the City, the girl with the honey-­coloured hair awakes also.

'What, still here?' cries the charwoman as she opens the door of the Madhouse. She dumps her bucket on the threshold and brandishes her mop. 'Go on! Git!' she says. 'There ain't room for you here no more. Didn't you hear what the magistrate said?'

The girl scrambles to her feet and retreats. Then she darts downwards and kisses the hem of the woman's skirt. She is shaking with cold and desperation.

'P-please, m-mistress. P-please let me in,' she begs through chattering teeth. 'I have n-nowhere to g-go! I have n-no h-home but this one!'

'Well, you ain't averse to sleeping on doorstops, dearie. I would've thought accommodation'd be no great prob­lem to the likes of you. Watch out!' and she throws her bucket of soapy water over the steps.

The girl just manages to avoid it. Like a cat, she springs out of the way, lingers for a moment, then gradually creeps back.

'I'm not letting you in,' says the woman, not bother­ing to look up. She is scrubbing the steps on her hands and knees.

The girl hovers.

'I told you to git. Go on, hop it!' The woman seizes her mop, dives down the stairs and goes after the girt rain­ing blows on her thin back until she is forced to take to her heels.

Her purpose fulfilled, the charwoman goes back to fin­ish the stairs.

But the girl has not run far. She has slipped into a dark alleyway, a little way down the street and opposite the Madhouse. From this vantage point, she gazes fixedly at the building in which she has lately been confined.

It begins to snow, but the girl barely notices.

She is trying to think of an answer to her unusual problem. She is by no means without cleverness; and desperation would ordinarily sharpen it. But she is dizzy with hunger . . . aching with cold . . . and the sky is distracting her. She finds it terrible, like a gigantic eye staring at her from above. It is many years since she has experienced the sky without a window, or a high-walled garden, to contain it.

Unconsciously, she has been drawing closer and closer to the wall. Bit by bit, she sinks to the ground. Still gazing at the door of the Madhouse, she huddles into as small a space as possible. She is a tall girl, but she can make her­self surprisingly unnoticeable. Already, she has become all but invisible to passers by.

She will stay there for three days, trying and trying to get back in. Then, defeated, she will set out on a long, cold journey.

But we will hear more of that later.

In his cell, the young man is also shaking with cold.

Yesterday, as the gaoler chained his wrists for the first time, he asked for something, anything, to make or do. A vista of bleakness opened in his mind, a vision of day upon day with nothing to do, with not even the remotest possibility of usefulness. This was a greater terror than the cell itself.

But the gaoler had laughed; and then, with a sniff, limped out. There was a bunch of keys at his hip. As he limped, they jangled; and the jangling, like everything else, echoed. When he shut the door, the process of lock­ing it seemed to go on for fully five minutes.

The young man's mouth is dry with terror. He sim­ply does not know how he will bear the life that now stretches before him.

He stares at the ceiling.

It is like a night sky without moon or stars.

'I will never see the sky again,' he thinks.

Then he remembers the birds.

For a moment, the cell is filled with moonlight and hundreds of tiny singing creatures. Then they are gone, and the cell is dark once more.

'How strange,' he thinks, 'that although dreamers can be imprisoned, their dreams cannot.'

And then ­-

All at once -­

Stories, he thinks. Tell stories.

For a moment he searches his memory. Pictures flash out of the darkness - witches, maidens, wise dolls, magi­cal birds. Then, with the air of one beginning a long and difficult journey, he whispers:

'Once upon a time . . .'