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 can hear a tin bird singing with him. Its tune plays especially well amplified over modern radio.

I don’t live in the hills anymore. It has been years since I saw Sulle Scale. I discovered, as I descended at last into my senior years, that I could no longer attempt the staircases. I told people it was my poor sore old knees.

But

in truth

I developed

a fear of heights.