main staircase and was discovered. “I will confess everything and accept my punishment, whatever that is,” I said. The tin bird sang a gay and humorous ditty.
It fell silent though as I reached the gate, quieted by a different song not far off: a girl’s sobs. I listened, confused, and crept uncertainly back to where I had murdered Lithodora’s beloved. I heard no sound except for Dora’s cries. No men shouting, no feet running on the steps. I had been gone half the night, it seemed to me, but when I reached the ruins where I had left the Saracen and looked upon Dora it was as if only minutes had passed.
I came toward her and whispered to her, afraid almost to be heard. The second time I spoke her name she turned her head and looked at me with red-rimmed hating eyes and screamed to get away. I wanted to comfort her, to tell her I was sorry, but when I came close she sprang to her feet and ran at me, striking me and flaying at my face with her fingernails while she cursed my name.
I meant to put my hands on her shoulders to hold her still but when I reached for her they found her smooth white neck instead.
Her father and his fellows and my unemployed friends discovered me weeping over her. Running my fingers through the silk of her long black hair. Her father fell to his knees and took her in his arms and for a while the hills rang with her name repeated over and over again.
Another man, who held a rifle, asked me what had happened and I told him. I told him the Arab, that monkey from the desert, had lured her here and when he couldn’t force her innocence from her, he throttled her in the grass and I found them and we fought and I killed him with a block of stone.
And as I told it the tin bird began to whistle and sing, the most mournful and sweetest melody I had ever heard and the men listened until the sad song was sung complete.
I held Lithodora in my arms as we walked back down. And as we went on our way the bird began to sing again as I told them the Saracen had planned to take the sweetest and most beautiful girls and auction their white flesh in Araby—a more profitable line of trade than selling wine. The bird was by now whistling a marching song and the faces of the men who walked with me were rigid and dark.
Ahmed’s men burned along with the Arab’s ship, and sank in the harbor. His goods, stored in a warehouse by the quay, were seized and his money box fell to me as a reward for my heroism.
No one ever would’ve imagined when I was a boy that one day I would be the wealthiest trader on the whole Amalfi coast, or that I would come to own the prized vineyards of Don Carlotta, I who once worked like a mule for his coin.
No one would’ve guessed that one day I would be the beloved mayor of Sulle Scale, or a man of such renown that I would be invited to a personal audience with his holiness the pope himself, who thanked me for my many well-noted acts of generosity.
The springs inside the pretty tin bird wore down, in time, and it ceased to sing, but by then it did not matter if anyone believed my lies or not, such was my wealth and power and fame.
However. Several years before the tin bird fell silent, I woke one morning in my manor to find it had constructed a nest of wire on my windowsill, and filled it with fragile eggs made of bright silver foil. I regarded these eggs with unease but when I reached to touch them, their mechanical mother nipped at me with her needle-sharp beak and I did not after that time make any attempt to disturb them.
Months later the nest was filled with foil tatters. The young of this new species, creatures of a new age, had fluttered on their way.
I cannot tell you how many birds of tin and wire and electric current there are in the world now—but I have, this very month, heard speak our newest prime minister, Mr. Mussolini. When he sings of the greatness of the Italian people and our kinship with our German neighbors, I am quite sure I