"Yes, I think so, too," said Mo. "I'm sure of it."
"And?" The old man looked at him hopefully. "Do you know how it can be preserved from further harm?"
Mo carefully closed the book. "Yes, but it won't be easy. Woodworm, the corrosive effect of the ink, who knows what else… Does the second book look the same?"
"Oh, that one" – the librarian cast another nervous look at the door – "Well, it's not in such a bad way yet. But I thought you might like to see it. Balbulus completed it not long ago, for Violante. It contains," he said, looking uncertainly at Mo, "it contains all the songs that the strolling players sing about the Bluejay. As far as I know there are only two copies. Violante owns one, and the other is before you and is a copy that she had specially made for me. They say the man who wrote the songs didn't want them written down, but any minstrel will sing them to you for a few coins. That was how Violante collected them and had them written out by Balbulus. The strolling players, you see – well, they're like walking books here, where real books are so few and far between! You know," he whispered to Mo as he opened the volume, "I sometimes think this world would have lost its memory long ago but for the Motley Folk. Unfortunately, the Adderhead is only too fond of hanging them! I've often suggested sending a scribe to see them before they're executed, to get all those beautiful songs written down before the words die with them, but no one in this castle listens to an old librarian."
"No, very likely not," murmured Mo, but Meggie could tell from his voice that he hadn't been listening to anything Taddeo had said. Mo was immersed in the letters, the beautiful written characters flowing over the parchment in front of him like a delicate river of ink.
"Forgive my curiosity." Taddeo cleared his throat, embarrassed.
"I've heard that you deny being the Bluejay… but if you will allow me…" He took the book from Mo's hand and opened it at a page that Balbulus had illuminated lavishly. A man stood between two trees, so wonderfully painted that Meggie thought she could hear the rustle of the leaves. He wore a bird mask over his face. "That's how Balbulus painted the Bluejay," whispered Taddeo, "just as the songs describe him, dark-haired, tall… doesn't he look like you?"
"I don't know," said Mo. "He's wearing a mask, isn't he?"
"Yes, yes, indeed." Taddeo was still looking intently at him. "But did you know that they say something else about the Bluejay? They say he has a very beautiful voice, not at all like the bird that shares his name. It's said that he can tame bears and wolves with a few words. Forgive me for being so forward, but" – he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone – "you have a very beautiful voice. Mortola tells strange tales of it. And then, when you have the scar, too…" He stared at Mo's arm.
"Oh, you mean this, don't you?" Mo placed his finger under a line beside which Balbulus had painted a pack of white dogs, and read: "'High on his left arm he will bear the scar to his dying day.' Yes, I do have a scar like that, but I didn't get it from the dogs in this song." He put his hand to his arm, as if remembering the day when Basta had found them in the tumbledown hut full of broken pots and tiles.
However, the old librarian took a step back. "So you are him!" he breathed. "The hope of the poor, the terror of butchers, avenger and robber, as much at home in the forest as the bears and wolves?"
Mo shut the book and pressed the metal clasps into the leather-covered binding. "No," he said. "No, I'm not, but thank you very much for the book, all the same. It's a long time since I had one in my hands, and it will be good to have something to read again, won't it, Meggie?"
"Yes," was all she said, taking the book from his hand. Songs about the Bluejay. What would Fenoglio have said if he'd known that Violante had had them written down in secret? And they might offer so much help! Her heart leaped as she thought of the possibilities, but Taddeo immediately dashed her hopes.
"I'm very sorry," he said, taking the book gently but firmly from her hands again. "But I can't leave either of the books here with you. Mortola has been talking to me – to everyone who has anything to do with the library. She's threatened to have anyone who so much as brings a book into this room blinded. Blinded, imagine it! What a threat, when only our eyes reveal the world of words to us! I've already risked far too much coming here with them at all, but I love those books so much that I had to ask your advice. Please, tell me what I must do to save them!"
Meggie was so disappointed that she would have turned down his request point blank, but of course Mo saw things differently. Mo thought only of the sick books. "Of course," he said to Taddeo. "I'd better write it down for you. It will take time – weeks, months – and I don't know if you'll be able to get all the materials you need, but it's worth a try. I'm not happy about suggesting this, but I'm afraid you'll have to take apart at least the first book, because if you're to save it, the pages must bleach in the sun. If you don't know how to go about it – and it must be done with the utmost care – I'll be happy to do it for you. Mortola can watch if she wants, to make sure I'm not doing anything dangerous."
"Oh, thank you!" The old man bowed deeply as he put the two books firmly under his thin arm. "Many, many thanks. I really do most fervently hope the Adderhead will let you live, and if he doesn't that he grants you a quick death."
Meggie would very much have liked to give him the answer this remark deserved, but Taddeo scurried away too fast on his grasshopper legs.
"Mo, don't you help him!" she said when the guard outside had bolted the door again. "Why should you? He's a miserable coward!"
"Oh, I can understand him," said Mo. "I wouldn't like to do without my eyes, either, even though we have useful inventions like Braille in our own world."
"All the same, I wouldn't help him." Meggie loved her father for his strangely soft heart, but her own could not summon up any sympathy for Taddeo. She imitated his voice. "'I hope he grants you a quick death!' How can anyone say such a thing?"
But Mo wasn't listening. "Have you ever seen such beautiful books, Meggie?" he asked, lying down on the bed.
"You bet I have!" she said indignantly. "Any book I'm allowed to read is more beautiful, right?"
But Mo did not reply. He had turned his back to her and was breathing deeply and peacefully. Obviously, sleep had found its way to him at last.
67. KINDNESS AND MERCY
Here are we five or six strung up, you see,
And here the flesh that all too well we fed,
Bit by bit eaten and rotten, rent and shred,
And we the bones grow dust and ash withal.
Francis Villon, "Ballade of the Hanged Men"
When are we going back?" Farid asked Dustfinger this question several times a day, and every time he got the same answer: "Not yet."
"But we've been here so long." It was almost two weeks since the bloodbath in the forest, and he was sick and tired of hanging around in the Badger's Earth. "What about Meggie? You promised we'd go back!"
All Dustfinger said to that was, "If you go on pressing me so hard I shall forget that promise." Then he went to Roxane. She was busy day and night, nursing the wounded they had found among the dead, in the hope that at least these few would return to Ombra, but some of them she tended in vain. He will stay with her, thought Farid every time he saw Dustfinger sitting beside her. And I'll have to go back to the Castle of Night alone. The thought hurt like fire biting him.
On the fifteenth day, when Farid felt he would never be able to wash the smell of mouse droppings and pale mushrooms off his skin, two of the Black Prince's informers brought identical news: The Adderhead's wife had borne him a son. To celebrate this event, so his criers were announcing in every marketplace, in exactly two weeks' time he would show his great kindness and mercy by setting free all the prisoners held in the dungeons of the Castle of Night. Including the Bluejay.
"Nonsense!" said Dustfinger, when Farid told him about it. "The Adderhead has a roast quail where other people have a heart. He would never set anyone free out of mercy, however many sons were born
to him. No, if he really intends to let them go it's because Fenoglio wrote it that way, and for no other reason."
Fenoglio seemed to share this opinion. Ever since the bloodbath he had spent most of his time sitting in some dark corner of the Badger's Earth, looking gloomy and scarcely saying a word, but now he started defiantly announcing to anyone who would listen that the good news was due solely to him. No one took any notice of him, no one knew what he was talking about – except for Dustfinger, who was still avoiding him like the plague in human form. "Listen to the old man! How he boasts and brags!" he said to Farid. "Cosimo and his men are hardly cold in the ground and he's forgotten them already. I hope he drops dead himself!"
The Black Prince, of course, believed in the Adderhead's mercy as little as Dustfinger did, in spite of Fenoglio's assurances that exactly what the informers had said would really happen. The robbers sat together until late into the night, discussing what to do. They would not let Farid join this council, but Dustfinger was with them.
"What's their plan? Tell me!" Farid asked him, when he finally came back from the cave where the robbers had been putting their heads together for hours on end.
"They're going to set out in a week's time."
"Where for? The Castle of Night?"
"Yes." Dustfinger didn't seem half as pleased as he was. "Good heavens, you're fidgeting like fire when the wind blows into it," he snapped at Farid irritably. "We'll see if you're still so happy once we get there. We'll have to crawl underground like worms, and go much deeper there than here."
"Even deeper?"
But of course. Farid pictured Mount Adder before him: There wasn't anywhere to hide, not a bush, not a tree.
"There's an abandoned mine at the foot of the north slope." Dustfinger made a face, as if the mere thought of the place turned his stomach. "Some ancestor of the Adderhead must have dug too deep there, and several galleries fell in, but that's so long ago that obviously not even the Adderhead himself remembers the mine. Not a pleasant place, but a good hideout, and the only one on Mount Adder. The bear found the entrance."
A mine. Farid swallowed. The thought of it left him struggling for air. "Then what?" he asked. "What do we do when we get there?"
"Wait. Wait to see if the Adderhead really keeps his promise."
"Wait? Is that all?"
"You'll learn everything else soon enough."
"Then we're going, too?"
"Did you have anything else in mind?"
Farid hugged him more tightly than he had for a long time. Even though he knew that Dustfinger did not particularly like to be hugged.
"No," said Roxane when the Black Prince offered to have her escorted back to Ombra by one of his men before they set out. "I'm coming with you. If you can spare a man, then send him to my children to tell them I'll be home soon."
Soon! Farid wondered exactly when that was going to be, but he said nothing. Although the time when they would set out was now fixed, the days still passed terribly slowly, and almost every night he dreamed of Meggie. Those were bad dreams, full of darkness and fear. When the day of their departure finally came, half a dozen robbers stayed in the Badger's Earth to go on tending the wounded. The rest set out on the road to the Castle of Night: thirty men in ragged clothing, but well armed. And Roxane. And Fenoglio.
"You're taking the old man, too?" Dustfinger asked the Prince in astonishment when he saw Fenoglio among the men. "Are you crazy? Send him back to Ombra. Take him anywhere else, straight to the White Women for preference, but send him away!"
However, the Prince wouldn't hear of it. "What do you have against him?" he asked. "He's a harmless old man. And don't start telling me again how he can bring the dead to life! Even my bear likes him. He's written us some fine songs, and he can tell wonderful stories, even if he has no appetite for them just now. And he doesn't want to go back to Ombra, anyway."
"I'm not surprised, considering all the widows and orphans he's made there," said Dustfinger bitterly, and when Fenoglio looked his way he cast him so icy a glance that the old man quickly turned his head again.
It was a silent march. The trees whispered above their heads, as if warning them not to take a step farther south, and once or twice Dustfinger had to summon fire to chase away beings that none of them could see, although they sensed them. Farid was tired, tired to death, his face and his arms all scratched with thorns, by the time the silver towers finally appeared above the treetops. "Like a crown on a bald head!" whispered one of the robbers, and for a moment Farid felt he could physically grasp the fear that these ragged men felt at the sight of the mighty fortress. No doubt they were all glad when the Prince led them to the north slope of Mount Adder, and the tops of the towers disappeared again. The earth fell in folds like a crumpled garment on this side of the hill, and the few trees cowered low, as if they heard the sound of axes too often. Farid had never seen such trees before. Their leaves seemed as black as night itself, and their bark was prickly like a hedgehog. Red berries grew on the branches. "Mortola's berries!" Dustfinger whispered to him as he picked a handful in passing. "She's said to have scattered them everywhere at the foot of this hill, until they were sprinkled all over the ground. The trees grow very fast, they shoot up from the earth like mushrooms and keep all other trees away. Bitterberry trees, they're called. Everything about them is poisonous – their berries and their leaves. And their bark burns the skin worse than fire." Farid dropped the berries, and wiped his hand on his trousers.
A little later, when it was pitch dark, they almost ran into one of the patrols that the Adderhead regularly sent out, but the bear warned them in time. The mounted men appeared among the trees like silver beetles. Moonlight was reflected on their breastplates, and Farid hardly dared to breathe as he ducked down into a crevice in the ground with Dustfinger and Roxane, waiting for the hoofbeats to die away. They stole on, like mice under the eyes of a cat, until they had finally reached their goal.
Wild vines and rubble hid the entrance. The Prince was the first to force his way down into the bowels of the earth. Farid hesitated when he saw how steep the climb down into the darkness looked. "Come on!" whispered Dustfinger impatiently. "The sun will soon rise, and the Adder's soldiers aren't going to mistake you for a squirrel."
"But it smells like a burial vault," said Farid, and he looked longingly up at the sky.
"The boy has a good nose!" said Snapper, before pushing his way past him, grim-faced. "Yes, there are many dead men down there. The mountain devoured them because they dug too deep. You don't see them, but you smell them. People say they stop up the galleries like a cargo of dead fish."
Horrified, Farid looked at him, but Dustfinger just pushed him in the back. "Look, how often do I have to tell you it's not the dead but the living you should fear? Come on, make a few sparks dance on your fingertips to give us a light."
The robbers had settled in those galleries that were not buried in rubble. They had given the roofs and walls additional props, but Farid didn't trust the beams now braced against the stone and the ground. How could they support the weight of a whole mountain? He thought he heard it sighing and groaning, and while he made himself as comfortable as he could on the dirty blankets that the robbers had spread on the hard ground, he suddenly remembered Sootbird again. But the Prince only laughed when he anxiously asked about him. "No, Sootbird doesn't know about this place or any of our hideouts. He's often tried to get us to take him along, but who's going to trust such a wretched fire-eater? The only reason he knew about the Secret Camp was because he's one of the strolling players."
All the same, Farid did not feel safe. Almost a week yet to go before the Adderhead freed his prisoners! It would be a long wait. He was already wishing himself back among the mouse droppings in the Badger's Earth. During the night he kept staring at the rubble closing off the galleries where they were sleeping. He thought he heard pale fingers scraping at the stones. "Put your hands over your ears, then!" was all Dustfinger said when Farid shook him awak
e to say so, and he put his arms around Roxane again. Dustfinger was having bad dreams, the kind he had often had in the other world, but now it was Roxane who calmed him and whispered him back to sleep. Her quiet voice, soft with love, reminded Farid of Meggie's, and he missed Meggie so much that he felt ashamed of his weakness. In this darkness, surrounded by the dead, it was difficult to believe that she was missing him, too. Suppose she had forgotten him, the way Dustfinger often forgot him now that Roxane was here? Only Meggie had made him forget his jealousy, but Meggie wasn't with him now.
On the second night a boy came to the mine. He worked in the stables of the Castle of Night and had been spying for the Black Prince ever since the Piper had his brother hanged. He said that the Adderhead would let the prisoners go along the road leading down to the harbor, on condition that they boarded a ship there and never returned.
"The road to the harbor. Ah," was all the Prince said when the informer had gone again – and he set out with Dustfinger that same night. Farid didn't ask if he could go, too. He simply followed them.
The road was little more than a footpath leading through the trees. It ran straight down Mount Adder, as if in a hurry to slip under the canopy of leaves. "The Adderhead pardoned a troop of prisoners once before and let them go along this road," said the Prince, when they were under the trees at the roadside. "And they did reach the sea without mishap, just as he had promised, but the ship waiting for them was a slave ship, and they say the
Adderhead got a particularly fine silver bridle for those prisoners, a scant dozen of them."
Slaves? Farid remembered markets where people were sold, and buyers gaped at them and felt them as if they were cattle. Girls with blonde hair had been in great demand.
"Don't look as if Meggie had been sold already!" said Dustfinger. "The Prince will think of something – won't you?"
The Black Prince tried to smile, but he couldn't conceal the fact that he was eyeing the road with great concern. "They must never reach that ship," he said. "And we can only hope that the Adderhead doesn't send too many soldiers to escort them. We must hide them quickly – in the mine at first, that will be best, until everything's quieted down again. And very likely," he added almost as an afterthought, "we shall need fire."
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