Come along, Elinor told herself, lie to them. Lie yourself blue in the face! Quick! But she hadn’t even opened her mouth when she heard the key in the lock. Oh no! No, Mortimer! she prayed silently. Stay where you are! Go back to the workshop with Resa, shut yourselves up there, but please, please don’t come in just now!
Of course her prayers made not the slightest difference.
Mortimer opened the door, came in with his arm round Resa’s shoulders – and stopped abruptly at the sight of Orpheus. Before he had entirely grasped what was going on, the man built like a wardrobe had closed the door behind him in obedience to a signal from Mortola.
‘Hello there, Silvertongue!’ said Basta, in a menacingly soft voice, as he snapped his knife open in front of Mortimer’s face. ‘And isn’t this our lovely mute Resa? Excellent! Two birds with one stone. All we need now is the little witch.’
Elinor saw Mortimer close his eyes for a moment, as if hoping that Basta and Mortola would have disappeared when he opened them again. But, naturally, no such thing happened.
‘Call her!’ ordered Mortola, as she stared at Mortimer with such hatred in her eyes that Elinor felt afraid.
‘Who?’ he asked, without taking his eyes off Basta.
‘Don’t pretend to be more stupid than you are!’ Mortola said crossly. ‘Or do you want me to let Basta cut the same pattern on your wife’s face as he did on the fire-eater’s?’
Basta ran his thumb lovingly over the gleaming blade.
‘If by “little witch” you mean my daughter,’ replied Mortimer huskily, ‘she isn’t here.’
‘Oh no?’ Mortola hobbled towards him. ‘Be careful what you say. My legs are aching after that endless drive to get here, so I’m not feeling particularly patient.’
‘She isn’t here,’ Mortimer repeated. ‘Meggie has gone away, with the boy you took the book from. He asked her to take him to Dustfinger, she did it – and she went with him.’
Mortola narrowed her eyes incredulously. ‘Nonsense!’ she exclaimed. ‘How could she have done it without the book?’ But Elinor saw the doubt in her face.
Mortimer shrugged. ‘The boy had a hand-written sheet of paper with him – the one that sent Dustfinger back, apparently.’
‘That’s impossible!’ Orpheus looked at him in astonishment. ‘Are you seriously saying your daughter read herself into the story, using my words?’
‘Oh, so you’re this Orpheus, are you?’ Mortimer returned his glance, not in a very friendly way. ‘Then you’re responsible for the loss of my daughter.’
Orpheus straightened his glasses and gave Mortimer an equally hostile look. Then, abruptly, he turned to Mortola. ‘Is this man Silvertongue?’ he demanded. ‘He’s lying! I’m sure of it! He’s lying! No one can read themselves into a story. He can’t, his daughter can’t, no one can. I’ve tried it myself, hundreds of times. It doesn’t work!’
‘Yes,’ said Mortimer wearily. ‘That’s just what I thought too. Until four days ago.’
Mortola stared at him. Then she signalled to Basta. ‘Shut them up in the cellar!’ she ordered. ‘And then look for the girl. Search the whole house.’
13
Fenoglio
‘I do practise remembering, Nain,’ I said. ‘Writing and reading and remembering.’
‘That you should!’ said Nain sharply. ‘Do you know what happens each time you write a thing down? Each time you name it? You sap its strength.’
Kevin Crossley-Holland,
The Seeing Stone
It wasn’t easy to get past the guards at the gate of Ombra after dark, but Fenoglio knew them all. He had written many love poems for the heavily-built oaf who barred his way with his spear tonight – and very successful they were, he had been told. Judging by the fool’s appearance, he’d be needing to call on Fenoglio’s services again.
‘But mind you’re back before midnight, scribbler!’ the ugly fellow grunted before letting him pass. ‘That’s when the Ferret takes over from me, and he’s not interested in your poems, even though his girl can read.’
‘Thanks for the warning!’ said Fenoglio, giving the stupid fellow a false smile as he pushed past him. As if he didn’t know that the Ferret was not to be trifled with! His stomach still hurt when he remembered how that sharp-nosed fellow had dug the shaft of his spear into it, when he’d tried pushing past him with a couple of well-chosen words. No, there’d be no bribing the Ferret, not with poems or any other written gifts. The Ferret wanted gold, and Fenoglio didn’t have too much of that, or at least not enough to waste it on a guard at the city gates.
‘Midnight!’ he cursed quietly as he stumbled down the steep path. ‘As if that wasn’t just when the strolling players wake up!’
His landlady’s son carried the torch ahead of him. Ivo was nine years old and full of insatiable curiosity about all the wonders of his world. He was always fighting his sister for the honour of carrying the torch when Fenoglio went to visit the strolling players. Fenoglio paid Ivo’s mother a few coins a week for a room in the attic. The price included the washing, cooking and mending that Minerva did for him too. In return, Fenoglio told her children bedtime stories, and listened patiently as she told him what a stubborn oaf her husband could be at times. The fact was, Fenoglio had struck lucky.
The boy scurried along ahead of him with increasing impatience. He could hardly wait to reach the brightly coloured tents, where music played and firelight shone among the trees. He kept looking round reproachfully, as if Fenoglio were taking his time on purpose. Did he think an old man could go as fast as a grasshopper?
The Motley Folk had pitched camp where the ground was so stony that nothing would grow on it, behind the cottages where the peasants who farmed the Laughing Prince’s land lived. Now that the Prince of Ombra no longer wanted to hear their jests and songs, they came less often than before, but luckily the prince’s grandson wanted players to entertain him on his birthday, so this Sunday they would at last come streaming through the city gates: fire-eaters and tightrope-walkers, animal tamers and knife-throwers, actors, buffoons, and many a minstrel whose songs came from Fenoglio’s pen.
For Fenoglio liked writing for the Motley Folk: merry songs, sad songs, songs to make you laugh or weep, as the spirit moved him. He couldn’t earn more than a few copper coins for those songs; the strolling players’ pockets were always empty. If his words were to earn gold then he must write for princes or for a rich merchant. But when he made the words dance and pull faces, when he wanted to write tales of peasants and robbers, of ordinary folk who didn’t live in castles or eat from golden plates, then he wrote for the strolling players.
It had taken some time for them to accept him into their tents. Only when more and more wandering minstrels were singing Fenoglio’s songs, and their children were asking for his stories, did they stop turning him away. And now even their king invited Fenoglio to sit beside his fire, as he had tonight. Although not a drop of royal blood ran in his veins, this man was known as the Black Prince. The Prince took good care of his motley subjects, and they had chosen him to lead them twice already. It was better not to ask where all the gold he gave so generously to the sick and crippled came from, but Fenoglio knew one thing: he himself had invented the Prince.
Oh yes, I made them all! he thought, as the music came more clearly through the night air. He had made up the Prince and the tame bear that followed him like a dog, and Cloud-Dancer who, sad to say, fell off his rope, and many more, even the two rulers who believed that they laid down the law in this world. Fenoglio had not yet seen all his creations, but every time he suddenly met one in flesh and blood it made his heart beat faster – although he couldn’t always remember whether any particular one of them had really sprung from his own pen, or came from somewhere else …
There were the tents at last, bright as windblown flowers in the black night. Ivo began running so fast that he almost fell over his own feet. A dirty boy with hair as unkempt as an alley cat’s fur came out to meet them, hoppin
g on one leg. He grinned challengingly at Ivo – and ran away on his hands. Lord, these players’ children performed such contortions, you might think they had no bones in their bodies!
‘Off you go, then!’ growled Fenoglio when Ivo looked pleadingly at him. After all, he didn’t need the torch any more. Several fires were burning among the tents, which often consisted of little more than a few grubby lengths of cloth stretched over ropes between the trees. Fenoglio looked around with a sigh of satisfaction as the boy raced away. Yes, this was just as he’d imagined the Inkworld as he wrote his story: bright and noisy, full of life. The air smelled of smoke, of roast meat, of rosemary and thyme, horses, dogs and dirty clothes, pine needles and burning wood. Oh, he loved it! He loved the hurry and bustle, he even loved the dirt, he loved the way life here was lived before his very eyes, not behind locked doors. You could learn anything in this world: how the smith shaped the metal of a sickle in the fire, how the dyer mixed his dyes, how the tanner removed hair from leather and how the cobbler cut it to shape to make shoes. Nothing happened behind closed doors. It was all going on, in the alleyways, on the road, in the market place, here among shabby tents, and he, Fenoglio – still as curious as a boy – could watch, although the stench of the leather mordant and the dye tubs sometimes took his breath away. Yes, he liked this world of his. He liked it very much – although he couldn’t help seeing that not everything was working out the way he had intended.
It was his own fault. I should have written a sequel, thought Fenoglio, making his way through the crowd. I could still write one, here and now, and change everything, if only I had someone to read it aloud! Of course he had looked for another Silvertongue, but in vain. No Meggie, no Mortimer, not even someone like that man Darius who was more than likely to botch the job … and Fenoglio could play only the part of a writer whose fine words didn’t exactly keep him in luxury, while the two princes he had invented ruled his world after their own fashion. Annoying, extremely annoying.
One of those princes above all gave him cause for concern – the Adderhead.
He reigned to the south of the forest, high above the sea, sitting on the silver throne of the Castle of Night. As an invented character, not by any means a bad one. A bloodhound, a ruthless slave-driver – but after all, the villains are the salt in the soup of a story. If you can keep them under control. It was for this purpose that Fenoglio had thought up the Laughing Prince, a ruler who would rather laugh at the broad jokes of the strolling players than wage war, and his magnificent son Cosimo. Who could have guessed that Cosimo would simply die, and then his father would collapse with grief like a cake taken out of the oven too soon?
Not my fault! How often Fenoglio had told himself that. Not my idea, not my fault! But it had happened all the same. As if some diabolical scribbler had intervened, going on with the story in his place and leaving him, Fenoglio, the creator of this whole world, with nothing but the role of a poor writer!
Oh, stop that. You’re not so poor, Fenoglio, he thought as he stopped beside a minstrel sitting among the tents, singing one of Fenoglio’s own songs. No, he wasn’t poor. The Laughing Prince, who was now the Prince of Sighs, would hear only Fenoglio’s laments for his dead son, and Balbulus, the most famous illuminator far and wide, had to record the stories Fenoglio wrote for the Prince’s grandson Jacopo in his own hand, on the most costly of parchment. No, he really wasn’t so poor!
And moreover, didn’t his words now seem to him better in a minstrel’s mouth than pressed between the pages of a book, to lie there gathering dust? He liked to think of them as free, owing no one allegiance. They were too powerful to be given in printed form to any fool who might do God knew what with them. Looked at that way, it was reassuring to think that there were no printed books in this world. Books here were hand-written, which made them so valuable that only princes could afford them. Other folk had to store the words in their heads, or listen to minstrels singing them.
A little boy tugged at Fenoglio’s sleeve. His tunic had holes in it, and his nose was running. ‘Inkweaver!’ He brought out a mask from behind his back, the kind of mask worn by the actors, and quickly put it over his eyes. There were feathers, light brown and blue, stuck to the cracked leather. ‘Who am I, Inkweaver?’
‘Hm!’ Fenoglio wrinkled his lined brow as if he had to think hard about it.
The mouth below the mask drooped in disappointment. ‘The Bluejay! I’m the Bluejay, of course!’
‘Of course!’ Fenoglio pinched the child’s red little nose.
‘Will you tell us another story about him today? Please!’
‘Maybe! I must admit, I imagine his mask as rather more impressive than yours. What do you think? Shouldn’t you look for a few more feathers?’
The boy took off his mask and looked at it crossly. ‘They’re not very easy to find.’
‘Take a look down by the river. Even bluejays aren’t safe from the cats that go hunting there.’ He was about to move away, but the boy held on tight. Thin as the children of the strolling players might be, they had strong little hands.
‘Just one story. Please, Inkweaver!’
Two other children joined him, a girl and a boy. They looked expectantly at Fenoglio. Ah, yes, the Bluejay stories. He’d always told good robber tales – his own grandchildren had liked them too, back in the other world. But the stories he thought up here were much better. You heard them everywhere these days: The Incredible Deeds of the Bravest of Robbers, the Noble and Fearless Bluejay. Fenoglio still remembered the night he had made the Bluejay up. His hand had been trembling with rage as he wrote. ‘The Adderhead’s caught another of the strolling players,’ the Black Prince had told him that night. ‘It was Crookback this time. They hanged him at noon yesterday.’
Crookback – one of his own characters! A harmless fellow who could stand on his head longer than anyone else. ‘Who does this prince think he is?’ Fenoglio had cried out into the night, as if the Adderhead could hear him. ‘I am lord of life and death in this world, I, Fenoglio, no one else!’ And the words had gone down on paper, wild and angry as the robber he created that night. The Bluejay was all that Fenoglio would have liked to be in the world he had made: free as a bird, subject to no lord, fearless, noble (sometimes witty too), a man who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, and protected the weak from the tyranny of the strong in a world where there was no law to do it …
Fenoglio felt another tug at his sleeve. ‘Please, Inkweaver! Just one story!’ The boy was really persistent. He loved listening to stories, and would very likely make a famous minstrel some day. ‘They say the Bluejay stole the Adderhead’s lucky charm!’ whispered the little boy. ‘The hanged man’s finger-bone to protect him from the White Women. They say the Bluejay wears it around his own neck now.’
‘Do they indeed?’ Fenoglio raised his eyebrows, always a very effective move, thick and bushy as they were. ‘Well, I’ve heard of an even more daring deed, but I must have a word with the Black Prince first.’
‘Oh, please, Inkweaver!’ They were clinging to his sleeves, almost tearing off the expensive braid he’d had sewn on the coarse fabric for a few coins, so as not to look as poverty-stricken as the scribes who wrote wills and letters in the market place.
‘No!’ he said sternly, freeing his sleeve. ‘Later, maybe. Now go away!’
The boy with the runny nose looked at him so sadly that, for a moment, Fenoglio was reminded of his grandson. Pippo always used to look like that when he brought Fenoglio a book and put it on his lap with a hopeful expression …
Ah, children! thought Fenoglio, as he walked towards the fire where he had seen the Black Prince. Children, they’re the same everywhere. Greedy little creatures, but the best listeners in the world – any world. The very best of all.
14
The Black Prince
‘So bears can make their own souls …’ she said. There was a great deal in the world to know.
Philip Pullman,
Northern Lights<
br />
The Black Prince was not alone. Of course not; his bear was with him, as usual. He was crouching by the fire behind his master, like a shaggy shadow. Fenoglio still remembered the words he had used when he first created the Prince at the very beginning of Inkheart. He recited them quietly to himself as he approached him: ‘An orphan boy with skin almost as black as his curly hair, as quick with his knife as his tongue, always ready to protect those he loved – his two younger sisters, a maltreated bear, or his best friend, his very best friend Dustfinger …’
‘… who would have died an extremely dramatic death if it had been left to me, all the same!’ added Fenoglio quietly as he waved to the Prince. ‘But luckily my black friend doesn’t know that, or I don’t suppose I’d be very welcome at his fireside!’
The Prince returned his greeting. He probably thought he was called the Black Prince because of the colour of his skin, but Fenoglio knew better. He had stolen the name from a history book in his old world. A famous knight once bore it, a king’s son who was a great robber too. Would he have been pleased to think that his name had been given to a knife-thrower, king of the strolling players? If not, there’s nothing he can do about it, thought Fenoglio, for his own story came to its end long ago.
On the Prince’s left sat the hopelessly incompetent physician who had almost broken Fenoglio’s jaw pulling out a tooth, and to the right of him crouched Sootbird, a lousy fire-eater who knew as little of his trade as the physician knew of drawing teeth. Fenoglio was not quite sure about the physician, but there was no way he had invented Sootbird. Heaven knew where he had come from! All who saw him inefficiently breathing fire, in terror of the blaze, instantly found another name springing to mind: the name of Dustfinger the fire-dancer, tamer of the flames …
The bear grunted as Fenoglio sat down by the fire with his master, and scrutinized him with little yellow eyes, as if to work out how much meat there was left to gnaw on such old bones. Your own fault, Fenoglio told himself: why did you have to make the Prince’s companion a tame bear? A dog would have done just as well. The market traders told anyone who would listen that the bear was a man under a spell, bewitched by fairies or brownies (they couldn’t decide which), but Fenoglio knew better. The bear was just a bear, a real bear who loved the Black Prince for freeing him, years ago, from the ring through his nose and from his former master, who beat him with a thorny stick to make him dance in market places.
Six more men were sitting beside the fire with the Black Prince. Fenoglio knew only two of them. One was an actor whose name Fenoglio kept forgetting. The other was a professional Strong Man who earned his living performing in market places: tearing chains apart, lifting grown men into the air, bending iron bars. They all fell silent as Fenoglio joined them. They tolerated his company, but he was not by any means one of them. Only the Prince smiled at him.
‘Ah, the Inkweaver!’ he said. ‘Do you have a new song about the Bluejay for us?’
Fenoglio accepted the goblet of hot wine and honey that one of the men gave him at a sign from the Prince, and sat down on the stony ground. His old bones didn’t really like hunkering down there, even on a night as mild as this, but the strolling players did not care for chairs or other forms of seating.
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