The Swallow and the Robin
A cobblestone bridge connected two forests. Every day, the swallows of Swallow Forest chirped to the robins of Robin Forest, who tweeted back in reply. In this way, the swallows and the robins mellifluously shared news of their forests’ happenings.
“How goes it in that wooded bend, my feathered friend?” a swallow would say.
“Swell, thank you! And how do you do in that grassy hollow, my sweet swallow?” a robin would reply. Back and forth, their beaks would chirp, awakening the forest with the harmony of their chatter. Yes, the swallows and the robins relished in each other’s voices, but they were doomed never to enjoy each other’s company. The bridge troll had made sure of that.
The bridge troll lived beneath the bridge and splashed all day wildly, for its role was to rile up the rushing rivers. Being a force of nature, the rushing river was capable of stirring up its own inescapable currents, and it had done so for eons before the bridge troll’s encampment. The river found it nice, though, not to have to exert so much energy into its turbulent flow.
There was something ravenous about the body of water. The rapids whisked away any creature unfortunate enough to be wrapped in the wild waters. And whenever a swallow or a robin would gather enough courage to fly across the bridge and see the other forest, the bridge troll would bound onto the bridge with a terrifying leap and smack into it. The dazed bird’s path would be blocked. Then, the bridge troll would open its foul mouth and say:
“Like many feathery fools before you, birds have tried to cross my bridge and failed. Will I gobble you up like the rest, or will you live to tell the tale?”
Inevitably, the daunted but determined bird would stutter back, “Y-yes! I will live to tell the tale!”
With a toss of its loathsome locks of pond scum, the bridge troll would laugh. His laugh was so booming it would send the swallows and the robins to the peaks of their forests’ trees, watching their friend from both sides of the bridge. From their vantage point, the birds could see bones and feathers of their former friends embedded in the bridge troll’s dull teeth.
“I see,” the bridge troll would snort. “Then riddle me this…”
And the bridge troll would pose a riddle so riddling that the swallow or robin couldn’t help but answer it incorrectly.
“I am filled with wood and I have many branches! What am I?” the bridge troll had asked one time, a clod of dirt dangling from its tilted head.
“Th-that’s easy,” the stammering swallow had said. “A tree?”
The bridge troll had shaken its head. “No, I am the future! I am filled with ‘would,’ even ‘would not’ now that I think about it…”
“But I thought you meant a d-different–”
“And I have many branches, each leading to a different outcome. Get it?” But before the swallow had been able to wrap its head around the riddle, the bridge troll had wrapped its head around the swallow.
Another time, the bridge troll had tested a particularly dogged robin. Upon hearing the riddle, the resolute robin had pondered the answer until the sun sank low into the sky. Finally, when night fell, the first glow of moonlight seemed to illuminate the resolute robin’s path to the solution. It had opened its beak to chirp out the answer it had mulled over many times when the bridge troll stuffed it into its mouth.
“Time’s up,” the bridge troll said, licking its mossy fingers.
And so it went. A bird’s desire for company from the other forest would mount until it spilled over, the bird would venture onto the bridge to avoid the unforgiving waters, and the bird would try and fail to answer the bridge troll’s riddle. Then, the swallows of Swallow Forest and the robins of Robin Forest would helplessly watch as their friend, opting for Scylla but likely meeting a more merciful fate with Charybdis, was scooped into the bridge troll’s enormous jaws, never to be seen again in the belly of the beast. Then, with a burp and a splash, the bridge troll would sink back into the frothy rapids below.
The soul of the devoured swallow or robin would descend into the watery depths below with the bridge troll. The bridge troll sealed the bird’s spirit into a current and used it in the choppy waves that engulfed the poor swallow or robin that strayed a bit too close to the river bank. The bridge and the bank were no longer havens for the birds from the wily waterway lapping them up.
The sights of their friends being eaten and drowned disheartened the swallows and the robins. How could they ever hope to brush beaks, to wrangle worms, or to touch talons with their friends from across the bridge? The birds succumbed to their fear. Naturally a skittish kind, the birds eventually stopped trying to cross the bridge altogether.
One day, a swift swallow sought to speed into the distance with its robin friend from the other forest. It soared high above the bridge, keen on avoiding an enigmatic riddle from the bridge troll. But as soon as the swift swallow flew over the middle of the bridge, the bridge troll hopped out of the river and snatched the swallow out of the sky with its yellow claws. The bridge troll gobbled up the swift swallow. The swallows’ and the robins’ hopes dimmed.
The next day, the rowdy robin resolved to reveal a secret to its swallow friend across the river. It flew far away from the bridge and darted low across the rapids, eager to escape a quixotic question from the bridge troll. But as soon as one of the robin’s wings brushed against a drop of foamy, rushing water, the bridge troll sensed its presence and splashed up a storm. The rapids intensified, and a wide wave washed over the robin as it tried to escape. Diving underwater, the bridge troll gobbled up the rowdy robin. The swallows and the robins fell into despair.
Their darkening spirits dimmed the sun. A canopy of clouds, tempted by the prospect of showering the land with all they had, cloaked the forests in shadow. A heavy rain battered the birds, and their damp plumage weighed them down. If even the swift swallow and the rowdy robin couldn’t evade the bridge troll’s clutches, the others certainly couldn’t now.
For the first morning ever, Swallow Forest and Robin Forest were silent. Only the crashing rain greeted the ears of the crestfallen critters. Into their nests the swallows and the robins retreated, huddling and shivering. All the birds burrowed away save for one swallow and one robin. The two birds lacked sight, but their ears had always been bestowed with the bird songs of their friends’ sunrise greetings. The blind swallow and the blind robin adored the sound of the other forest coming alive at the same time as theirs. The muted morning haunted them. Each arrived at the same conclusion: they were going to cross the bridge.
Because it could not see, the blind swallow thought that Robin Forest would be free of rain, so it sought refuge there. The blind robin thought and sought the same, but of Swallow Forest. Their eagerness to escape the sky’s torrent deflected their friends’ warnings from their ears. Bogged down by their wet feathers, the blind birds hopped from their nests in their respective forests to the bridge.
They arrived at the same time. As soon as their claws grazed the bridge’s cobblestone, the river below rumbled. The cruel bridge troll jumped from the rushing river and considered the two birds, one on either side of him.
The bridge troll peered at the two birds’ milky eyes. Its laugh boomed across the land. Upon hearing the predatory guffaw, the swallows and the robins flapped their feathers and frantically fumbled onto the treetops. Their chirping grew shrill and their tweeting grew pitchy. The spectators screamed at the blind swallow and the blind robin to flee. Cacophony and terror had replaced the melody and serenity that once ruled their forests.
Yet the sightless pair refused. Petrified as the blind swallow and robin were, they would not budge from the bridge. They could not see the other, but they could sense the warmth of camaraderie across the bridge. It permeated the vacuum of hate–and even the odor–surrounding the bridge troll.
“Like many feathery fools before you two, birds have tried to cross my bridge and failed. Will I gobble you up like the rest, or will you live to tell the tale?”
“Yes!” the blind birds’ chirps rang out in unison. They were scared, but knowing that a friend was nearby, their voices did not waver. “We will live to tell the tale!”
The bridge troll snorted. Because the swallow and the robin could not see the world, it thought the two birds would be easy to fool and even easier to gobble up. The wind wailed and the downpour deafened and the river roared, but to the blind swallow and the blind robin, the bridge troll’s saying was undeniable:
“I see. Then riddle me this…”
The swallows and robins peering from their perches strained to listen. No one stirred.
“Unless asked what the answer never is, what is never the answer?”
The swallows of Swallow Forest gasped and the robins of Robin Forest gulped. This riddle seemed like the trickiest one yet. They were sure that odious troll would eat two more of their friends that gloomy day.
On the bridge, the swallow and the robin could not see it, but they could sense a glint in the other’s eyes. A solution was seen through their two pairs of unseeing pearls. Having lived their entire lives without vision, the bird games of racing through the woods and catching the early worm and shaking their tail feathers had eluded them. They substituted these avian pastimes with storytelling and story-sharing.
To any swallow that would listen, the blind swallow would tell stories of the different flocks of birds around the world. Initially, with no knowledge of the world beyond Swallow Forest, the swallow’s reports soared away with its imagination. Its eloquence was endearing, but its facts were fictitious.
At the end of every tale, though, it received a correction from the elders of Swallow Forest who gathered around to listen, having nothing else to do. These senile swallows had lived in a time before the bridge troll’s encampment under the bridge. Every so often, the old swallows would break free of their loon-like lunacy to fix one of the blind swallow’s fantasies of the outside world. Day by day, the elders’ knowledge sharpened the blind swallow’s brain, and its steely mind learned to recite entire histories about other bird species, from its ancient reptilian ancestors to its flightless contemporaries.
And to any robin that would speak, the blind robin would perch on a branch to absorb tales of tons of types of birds across the globe. Its eavesdropping earned it silence from the other robins. The others worried that the blind robin, interested in cultivating culture, was invested in garnering gossip.
The elders of Robin Forest, wrinkly and overripe, were not endeared to remembering the time before the troll’s blockade, for they feared being swept up in the current of grief over their lost freedom. Nevertheless, nostalgia tugged at their memories, and every day, the blind robin caught a stray brushstroke of the old robins’ adventures beyond Robin Forest. Entire paintings of bird species, from oil landscapes to watercolor migrations, were soon reconstructed in the blind robin’s fluid mind.
In these ways, the blind swallow and the blind robin pieced together puzzles of other avian lifestyles. There was a plethora of feathered friends that roamed the earth aside from swallows and robins. The penguins of the ice, the toucans of the jungle, and the pelicans of the sea were no strangers to the pair’s sharp minds.
From this familiarity with all feathered flocks did the blind swallow and the blind robin come to know about the dove. They knew that doves carried olive branches in their beaks. They knew that doves loved peace and detested war. And they knew that doves peddled a phrase to reflect this sentiment. So the two birds surely surprised the bridge troll, judging by its widened eyes, as boulders jammed into a face of mud, when they replied to its riddle:
“Violence! Violence is never the answer unless a creature asks what the answer never is!”
The bridge troll blinked. It said nothing, and it didn’t need to say anything. The gobsmacked expression on its grotesque face was something the swallows and the robins on the treetops, the falcons from two forests away with their needle-sharp eyesight, the eagles from four forests away with their razor-sharp eyesight, and even the two blind birds on the bridge could see clearly. The message was even clearer: the sightless birds had solved the riddle.
What began as shock morphed into rage. The bridge troll could not believe his knowledge had been bested. A chorus of triumphant chirping swelled in the swallows’ and the robins’ throats until they could contain it no longer. A victorious melody floated through the trees.
Irate at the celebration around him, its sallow cheeks hot with shame, the bridge troll prepared to feast on the two that had humiliated it. Before the bridge troll had a chance to unclench its jaws though, the jubilant tune burrowed into the pebbles of the cobblestone bridge and made them joyously vibrate. The reverberations surpassed the river rapids’ whale-sized waves in amplitude, and they knocked the bridge troll over the side of the bridge.
Falling onto a jagged stone by the riverbank, the bridge troll was paralyzed by the power of the birds’ hope, which grew stronger with every note. Unable to move, too angry to see straight, and too weighed down by pride like rocks in his pockets, the bridge troll sank to the bottom of the riverbed.
During its descent, the bridge troll commanded the river, which had benefitted from the bridge troll’s gargantuan splashes for many moons, to release it. The river, being a force of nature, refused. It answered to no one but its whims. With this rejection, the bridge troll died. It drowned in its quest to control. The melancholic memories of the birds’ gobbled-up friends drowned with it, and out of the bridge troll’s final splash sprang remembrance of the departed birds’ bravery and desire for togetherness. The swallows and robins would always revere their fallen friends.
The birds’ brightened spirits cleared away the cloudy skies and welcomed the sun out of its slumber. Although the rain had abated, the damage to the bridge was done. The heavy sheets of precipitation had peppered the pebbled surface beyond repair. The blind swallow and the blind robin, sensing the bridge giving out, fluttered onto the other side of the bridge. The bridge collapsed into the overflowing river and doused the two birds on the riverbank.
The birds’ warbling hushed as quickly as it had begun. They feared that their blind friends would be swept up by the splash and claimed by the untameable river. Instead, the two simply shook their drenched wings and the swallows and robins chortled in relief. The river had relented. Why? Its propensity for powerful currents had atrophied when the bridge troll dwelled in it. Out of practice and out of hunger–the bridge troll was enough spoils to last a millennium–the river released its gluttony.
Although their mission to escape being soaked had failed, the two birds had been bestowed a much better consolation prize: other birds. The blind swallow took its first step into Robin Forest and the blind robin took its first step into Swallow Forest, the first talon touching between different species in many moons.
Rubbing the last speck of sleep from its eyes, the boiling sun stared down at the broken bridge parts floating away in the uncrossable river. It seethed. To let off steam, it scolded the retreating rain clouds. How dare they destroy what was once such a beautiful and strong landmark? Sullied by the cruelty of the bridge troll, who was now dead, and the grieving spirits of the birds it had devoured, which had found peace, the rain clouds were the sole target of the sun’s anger at the broken blemish upon the land. The sun’s admonishment wore on until noon, when it stood high in the sky and satisfied. By the end, the clouds had evaporated into wimpy wisps of water.
To make amends to the birds for the bridge’s collapse, the sun scattered its rays off the remorseful rain droplets. A cascade of colors curved into an arc over the swollen river. The multicolored curve connected Swallow Forest to Robin Forest, the two woods forever entwined.
To this day, the rainbow bridge allows the birds to fly freely between Swallow Forest and Robin Forest and every other arboreal abode in the world. The swallows and the robins race through the woods and catch the early worm and shake their tail feathers and tell and share stories–together. The unity that the rainbow bridge brings blesses the swallows and the robins and every other bird that basks in the sun’s light.
It even unites humans. Just wait and watch. Wait for that day, that serendipitous spring day after a heavy rainfall. Watch the rainbow gleam in the sky and wait for the gaggle of people to stop and gawk at its beauty. Should the silhouette of a bird flock be spotted flying towards the rainbow, know that the birds are giving thanks. Their soaring is a sign of gratitude to the blind swallow, the blind robin, the sun, and the rain for uniting those birds in such a vibrant way on such a gloomy day.
Samuel White is a second-year student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who is double-majoring in English and Anthropology. He enjoys reading memoirs, historical fiction, and speculative fiction. When he’s not reading or writing, he’s gushing over antiquated technology (e.g., grandfather clocks, rotary phones), playing video games on his Nintendo 3DS and Switch, or singing with the Men’s Glee Club. He’s excited to have his short story featured in The Albion Review!
