Resa took his hand and rose to her feet with difficulty. Co? Go where? she felt like asking. Back to the camp, where an empty tent is waiting and your men will look at me with more hostility than ever?
Doria brought her horse. The Strong Man was still standing with Meggie, his big face as tearstained as her daughter's. He avoided her eyes. So he, too, blamed her for what had happened.
Go where? Back?
Resa was still holding the sheet of paper with Orpheus's words on it. Elinor's house. How would it feel to go back there without Mo? If Meggie would agree to read the words at all. Elinor, I've lost Mo. I wanted to protect him, but… No, she didn't want to have to tell that story. There was no going back. There was nothing anymore.
"Come along, Meggie." The Black Prince beckoned Meggie over. He was about to put her up with Resa on her horse, but Meggie recoiled.
"No. I'll ride with Doria," she said.
Doria brought his horse to her side. Farid gave the other boy a scowl when he lifted up Meggie behind him.
"And why are you still here?" Meggie snapped at him. "Still hoping to see Dustfinger suddenly materialize in front of you? He won't come back, any more than my father will – but I'm sure Orpheus will take you in again, after all you've done for him!"
Farid flinched like a beaten dog at every word. Then he turned in silence and went to his donkey. He called for the marten, but Jink didn't come, and Farid rode away without him.
Meggie didn't watch him go.
She turned to Resa. "You needn't think I'm going back with you!" she said sharply. "If you need a reader for your precious words, go to Orpheus, like you did before!"
Again, the Black Prince didn't ask what Meggie was talking about, although Resa saw the question on his weary face. He stayed at Resa's side as they rode the long way back. The sun claimed hill after hill for its own, but Resa knew that night would not end for her. It would live in her heart from now on. The same night, forever and ever. Black and white at the same time, like the women who had taken Mo away with them.
25. THE END AND THE BEGINNING
Here is a small fact. You are going to die.
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
They brought it all back: the memory of pain and fear, of the burning fever and their cold hands on his heart. But this time everything was different. The White Women touched Mo and he did not fear them. They whispered the name that they thought was his, and it sounded like a welcome. Yes, they were welcoming him in their soft voices, heavy with longing, the voices he heard so often in his dreams – as if he were a friend who had been away for a long time but had come back to them at last.
There were many of them, so many. Their pale faces surrounded him like mist, and everything else disappeared beyond it: Orpheus, Resa, Meggie, the Black Prince, who had been standing beside him only a moment ago. Even the stars vanished, and so did the ground beneath his feet. Suddenly, he was standing on rotting leaves. Their fragrance hung sweet and heavy in the cold air. Bones lay among the leaves, pale and polished. Skulls. Arm bones and leg bones. Where was he?
They've taken you away with them, Mortimer, he thought. Just as they took Dustfinger.
Why didn't the idea make him afraid?
He heard birds above him, many birds, and when the White Women withdrew he saw air-roots overhead, hanging from a dark height like cobwebs. He was inside a tree as hollow as an organ pipe and as tall as the castle towers of Ombra. Fungi grew from its wooden sides, casting a pale green light on the nests of birds and fairies. Mo put out his hand to the roots to see if his fingers still had any feeling in them. Yes, they did. He ran them over his face, felt his own skin, the same as ever, warm. What did that mean? Wasn't this death, after all?
If not, what was it? A dream?
He turned, still as if he were asleep, and saw beds of moss. Moss-women slept on them, their wrinkled faces as ageless in death as in life. But on the last mossy bed lay a familiar figure, his face as still as when Mo had last seen it. Dustfinger.
Roxane had kept the promise she made in the old mine. And he will look as if he were only sleeping long after my hair is white, for I know from Nettle how you go about preserving the body even when the soul is long gone.
Hesitantly, Mo approached the motionless figure. Without a word, the White Women made way for him.
Where are you, Mortimer? he wondered. Is this still the world of the living, even though the dead sleep here?
Dustfinger did indeed look as if he were sleeping. A peaceful, dreamless sleep. Was this where Roxane visited him? Presumably it was. But how did he himself come to be here?
"Because this is the friend you wanted to ask about, isn't he?" The voice came from above, and when Mo looked up into the darkness he saw a bird sitting among the web of roots, a bird with gold plumage and a red mark on its breast. It was staring down at him from a bird's round eyes, but the voice that came from its beak was the voice of a woman.
"Your friend is a welcome guest here. He has brought us fire, the only element that does not obey me. And my daughters would gladly bring you here, too, because they love your voice, but they know that voice needs the breath of living flesh. And when I ordered them to bring you here all the same, as your penalty for binding the White Book, they persuaded me to spare you, telling me you have a plan that will appease me."
"And what might that be?" It was strange to hear his own voice in this place.
"Don't you know? Even though you're ready to part with everything you love for it? You are going to bring me the man you took from me. Bring me the Adderhead, Bluejay."
"Who are you?" Mo looked at the White Women. Then he looked at Dustfinger's still face.
"Guess." The bird ruffled up its golden feathers, and Mo saw that the mark on its breast was blood.
"You are Death." Mo felt the word heavy on his tongue. Could any word be heavier?
"Yes, so they call me, although I might be called by so many other names!" The bird shook itself, and golden feathers covered the leaves at Mo's feet. They fell on his hair and shoulders, and when he looked up again there was only the skeleton of a bird sitting among the roots. "I am the end and the beginning." Fur sprouted from the bones. Pointed ears grew on the bare skull.
A squirrel was looking down at Mo, clutching the roots with tiny paws, and the voice with which the bird had spoken now came from its little mouth.
"The Great Shape-Changer, that's the name I like!" The squirrel shook itself in its own turn, lost its fur, tail, and ears, and became a butterfly, a caterpillar at his feet, a big cat with a coat as dappled as the light in the Wayless Wood – and finally a marten that jumped onto the bed of moss where Dustfinger lay and curled up at the dead man's feet.
"I am the beginning of all stories, and their end," it said in the voice of the bird, in the voice of the squirrel. "I am transience and renewal. Without me nothing is born, because without me nothing dies. But you have interfered with my work, Bluejay, by binding the Book that ties my hands. I was very angry with you for that, terribly angry."
The marten bared its teeth, and Mo felt the White Women coming close to him again. Was he about to die now? His chest felt tight, he was breathing with difficulty, as he had when he felt them near him before.
"Yes, I was angry," whispered the marten, and its voice was the voice of a woman, but it suddenly sounded old. "However, my daughters calmed my rage. They love your heart as much as your voice. They say it is a great heart, very great, and it would be a pity to break it now."
The marten fell silent, and suddenly the whispering that Mo had never forgotten came again. It surrounded him, it was everywhere. "Be on your guard! Be on your guard, Bluejay!"
Be on his guard against what? The pale faces were looking at him. They were beautiful, but they blurred as soon as he tried to see them more distinctly.
"Orpheus!" whispered the pale lips.
And suddenly Mo heard Orpheus's voice. Its melodious sound filled the hollow tree like a cloyingly sweet fragrance. "He
ar me, Master of the Cold," said the poet. "Hear me, Master of Silence. I offer you a bargain. I send you the Bluejay, who has made mock of you. He will believe that he has only to call on your pale daughters, but I am offering him to you as the price for the Fire-Dancer. Take him, and in return send Dustfinger back to the land of the living, for his tale is not yet told to its end. But the Bluejay's story lacks only one chapter, and your White Women shall write it." So the poet wrote and so he read, and as always his words came true. The Bluejay, presumptuous as he was, summoned the White Women, and Death did not let him go again. But the Fire-Dancer came back, and his story had a new beginning.
Be on your guard…
It was a few moments before Mo really understood. Then he cursed his stupidity in trusting the man who had nearly killed him once already. He desperately tried to remember the words Orpheus had written for Resa. Suppose he was trying to make an end of Meggie and Resa as well? Remember, Mo! What else did he write?
"Yes, you were indeed stupid." Death's voice mocked him. "But he was even more stupid than you. He thinks I can be bound with words, I who rule the land where there are no words, although all words come from it. Nothing can bind me, only the White Book, because you have filled its pages with white silence. Almost daily, the man it protects sends me a poor wretch he has killed as a messenger of his mockery. I would happily melt the flesh from your bones for that! But my daughters read your heart like a book, and they assure me that you will not rest until the man whom the Book protects is mine again. Is that true, Bluejay?"
The marten lay down on Dustfinger's unmoving breast.
"Yes!" whispered Mo.
"Good. Then go back and rid the world of that Book. Fill it with words before spring comes, or winter will never end for you. And I will take not only your life for the Adderhead's but your daughter's, too, because she helped you to bind the Book. Do you understand, Bluejay?"
"Why two?" asked Mo hoarsely, "How can you ask for two lives in return for one? Take mine, that's enough."
But the marten only stared at him. "I fix the price," it said. "All you have to do is pay it."
Meggie. No. No. Go back, Resa, Mo thought. Get Meggie to read what Orpheus wrote and go back! Anything is better than this. Go back! Quickly!
But the marten laughed. And once again it sounded like an old woman's laughter.
"All stories end with me, Bluejay," Death said. "You will find me everywhere." And as if to prove it, the marten turned into the one-eared cat that liked to steal into Elinor's garden to hunt her birds. The cat jumped nimbly off Dustfinger's breast and rubbed around Mo's legs. "Well, what do you say, Bluejay? Do you accept my conditions?"
And I will take not only your life for the Adderhead's but your daughter's, too.
Mo glanced at Dustfinger. His face looked so much more peaceful in death than it had in life. Had he met his younger daughter on the other side, and Cosimo, and Roxane's first husband? Were all the dead in the same place?
The cat sat down in front of him and stared at him.
"I accept," said Mo, so hoarsely that he could hardly make out his own words. "But I make a condition, too: Give me the Fire-Dancer to go with me. My voice stole ten years of his life. Let me give them back to him. And there's another thing… Don't the songs say that the Adderhead's death will come out of the fire?"
The cat crouched down. Fur fell red on the rotting leaves. Bones covered themselves with flesh and feathers again, and the gold-mocker with its bloodstained breast fluttered up to settle on Mo's shoulder.
"You like to make what the songs say come true, do you?" the bird whispered to him. "Very well, I will give him to you. Let the Fire-Dancer live again. But if spring comes and the Adderhead is still immortal, his heart will stop beating at the same time as yours – and your daughter's."
Mo felt dizzy. He wanted to seize the bird and wring its golden neck to silence that voice, so old and pitiless, with irony in every word. Meggie. He almost stumbled as he went to Dustfinger's side once more.
This time the White Women were reluctant to make way for him.
"As you see, my daughters don't like to let him go," said the old woman's voice. "Even though they know he will come back."
Mo looked at the motionless body. The face was indeed so much more tranquil than it had been in life, and all of a sudden he wasn't sure whether he was really doing Dustfinger a favor by calling him back.
The bird was still on his shoulder, so light in weight, so sharp of claw.
"What are you waiting for?" asked Death. "Call him!"
And Mo obeyed.
26. A FAMILIAR VOICE
What remains to him? Tall Time wonders. What thoughts and smells, what names? Or are there only sensations and a clutter of incompatible words?
Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone
They had gone. Had left him alone with all the blue, that clashed with the red of the fire. Blue as the evening sky, blue as cranesbill flowers, blue as the lips of drowned men and the heart of a blaze burning with too hot a flame. Yes, sometimes it was hot in this world, too. Hot and cold, light and dark, terrible and beautiful, it was everything all at once. It wasn't true that you felt nothing in the land of Death. You felt and heard and smelled and saw, but your heart remained strangely calm, as if it were resting before the dance began again. Peace. Was that the word?
Did the guardians of this world feel it, too, or did they long for something else? The pain they didn't know, the flesh they didn't dwell in. Perhaps. Or perhaps not. He couldn't tell from their faces. He saw both there: peace and longing, joy and pain. As if they knew about everything in this world and the other, just as they themselves were made of every color at once, all the colors of the rainbow merging into white light. They told him that the land of Death had other places, too, darker than the one where they had brought him and where no one stayed for long – except for him. Because he called up fire for them.
The White Women both feared and loved fire. They warmed their pale hands at it, laughing like children when he made it dance for them. They were children, young and old at the same time, so old. They made him form trees and flowers of fire, a fiery sun and moon, but for himself he made the fire paint faces, the faces he saw when the White Women took him with them to the river where they washed the hearts of the dead. Look into it, they whispered to him. Look into it, then those who love you will see you in their dreams. And he leaned over the clear blue water and looked at the boy and the woman and the girl whose names he had forgotten, and saw them smiling in their sleep.
Why don't I know their names anymore? he asked.
Because we've washed your heart, they said. Because we've washed it in the blue water that parts this world from the other one. It makes you forget.
Yes. He supposed it did. For whenever he tried to remember he saw nothing but the blue, cool and caressing. It was only when he called up fire and its red glow spread that the pictures came again, the same pictures that he saw in the water. But his longing for them fell asleep before it had woken fully.
What was my name? he sometimes asked, and then they laughed. Fire-Dancer, they whispered, that was your name and always will be, because you'll stay with us for all eternity and never go away like all the others, away to another life…
Sometimes they brought him a girl, a little girl. She stroked his face and smiled like the woman he saw in the water and the flames. Who's that? he asked. She's been here and went away again, they said. She was your daughter.
Daughter… the word sounded like pain, but his heart merely remembered and did not feel it. It felt only love, nothing but love. There was nothing else anymore.
Where were they? They had never before left him alone, not once since he had come here… wherever here was.
He had grown so used to the pale faces, to their beauty and their soft voices.
But suddenly he heard another voice, very different from theirs. He knew it. And he knew the name it was calling.
Dustfinger.
He hated that voice… or did he love it? He didn't know. He knew only one thing: It brought back everything he had forgotten – like a violent pain suddenly jolting his still heart into beating again. Hadn't that voice caused him pain once before, so much pain that it almost broke his heart? Yes, he remembered! He pressed his hands to his ears, but in the world of the dead you don't hear with your ears alone, and the voice made its way right inside him like fresh blood flowing into veins that had frozen long ago.
"Wake up, Dustfinger!" it said. "Come back. The story isn't over yet."
The story… He felt the blue pushing him away, he felt firm flesh surrounding him again, and a heart beating in a chest far too small for it.
Silvertongue, he thought. It's Silvertongue's voice. And suddenly all the names came back to him: Roxane, Brianna, Farid… and the pain was back again, and time, and longing, too.
27. LOST AND BACK AGAIN
For it so happens that I could never convince myself that the dead are dead.
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
It was dark when Gwin woke Roxane. She still didn't like the marten, but she couldn't bring herself to chase him away. She had seen him sitting on Dustfinger's shoulder too often. Sometimes she thought she still felt the warmth of his hands on Gwin's brown coat. Since his master's death the marten had allowed Roxane to stroke him. He never used to let her do that before. But he also used to kill her chickens before, and now he spared them, as if that were part of their unspoken agreement – his thanks for her letting him, and no other living creature, follow her when she went to his master. Only Gwin shared her secret and kept her company when she sat beside the dead man for an hour, sometimes two, losing herself in the sight of his still face.
He's back! said Gwin's bristling coat as he jumped up on her breast, but Roxane didn't understand. She pushed the marten away when she saw how dark it still was outside, but he persisted, hissing at her and scratching at the door. Of course, she thought at once of the patrols that the Milksop was only too likely to send to isolated farms at night. Heart thudding, she reached for the knife that lay under her pillow and threw on her dress, while the marten pawed more and more impatiently at the door. Luckily, he hadn't yet woken Jehan. Her son was fast asleep. Her goose wasn't giving the alarm, either… which was strange.
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