‘Isn’t that obvious? He can talk to fire! They say he can make the flames grow to a great height without burning him.’
Fenoglio understood even before Cosimo explained. ‘You want Dustfinger for your war.’ He couldn’t help it, he laughed aloud.
‘What’s so funny about that?’ Cosimo frowned.
Dustfinger the fire-dancer as a weapon. Fenoglio shook his head. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I know Dustfinger very well –’ he saw Brianna give him a look of surprise as he said so – ‘and he is many things, but certainly not a warrior. He’d laugh in your face.’
‘He had better not.’ There was no mistaking the anger in Cosimo’s voice. But Brianna was looking at Fenoglio as if she had a thousand questions on the tip of her tongue. Well, this was no time for them! ‘Your Highness,’ he said hastily, ‘please excuse me now! One of Minerva’s children is ill, and I promised to get a few herbs from Brianna’s mother for her.’
‘Oh, I see. Of course. Yes, of course, ride on, and we’ll talk later.’ Cosimo gathered up his reins again. ‘If the child doesn’t improve let me know, and I’ll send a physician.’
‘Thank you,’ said Fenoglio, but before he finally went on his way there was one question he himself had to ask. ‘I’ve heard your wife isn’t well either?’ Balbulus, who at present was the only visitor allowed to see Violante, had told him so.
‘Oh, she’s just in a temper.’ Cosimo took Brianna’s hand as if to comfort her for the fact that they were talking about his wife. ‘Violante loses her temper easily. She gets it from her father. She simply will not understand why I won’t let her leave the castle, yet it’s obvious that her father’s informers are everywhere, and who would they try to pump for information first? Violante and Jacopo.’ It was hard not to believe every word that those beautiful lips uttered, particularly when they spoke with so much genuine conviction.
‘Well, I expect you’re right! But please don’t forget that your wife hates her father.’
‘You can hate someone and obey him all the same. Isn’t that so?’ Cosimo looked at Fenoglio with that naked expression in his eyes, like the eyes of a very young baby.
‘Yes, yes, probably,’ he replied uncomfortably. Every time Cosimo looked at him like that, Fenoglio felt as if he had found an empty page in a book, a moth-hole in the finely woven carpet of words.
‘Your Highness!’ he said, bowing his head again, and he finally, if not very elegantly, got his horse to trot out of the gateway.
Brianna had given him a good description of the way to her mother’s farmhouse. He had asked her about it after Roxane’s visit, apparently in all innocence, saying that he was plagued by aching bones. Dustfinger’s daughter was a strange child. She wanted nothing to do with her father, and obviously not much with her mother either. Luckily she had warned him about the goose, so he was holding the horse’s reins firmly when the cackling bird came towards him. Roxane was sitting outside her house when he rode into the yard. It was a poor place. Her beauty seemed to fit into it as little as a jewel in a beggar’s hut. Her son was sleeping in the doorway beside her, curled up like a puppy, his head on her lap.
‘He wants to come with me,’ she said as Fenoglio slid clumsily off the horse. ‘The little girl cried too, when I told her I had to go away. But I can’t take them, not to Argenta. The Adderhead’s had children hanged before now. A friend is going to look after the girl for me, and Jehan, and the plants and animals too.’
She stroked her son’s dark hair, and for a moment Fenoglio didn’t want her to ride away. But what would become of his words then? Who else would find Meggie? Should he ask Cosimo for another horseman who might not come back either? Well, who knows, maybe Roxane won’t come back, an insidious voice inside him whispered. And then your precious words will be lost. ‘Nonsense!’ he said angrily, out loud. ‘I made a copy, of course.’
‘What did you say?’ Roxane looked at him in surprise.
‘Oh, nothing, nothing!’ Heavens above, now he was talking to himself. ‘There’s something else I have to tell you – don’t ride to the mill! A minstrel who sings for Cosimo has brought me news from the Black Prince.’
Roxane pressed her hand to her mouth.
‘No, no. It’s not so bad!’ Fenoglio quickly reassured her. ‘The fact is, Meggie’s father has obviously been taken prisoner by the Adderhead, but to be honest I feared as much. As for Dustfinger and Meggie – well, to be brief, the mill where Meggie was going to wait for my letter seems to have burned down. Apparently the miller is telling everyone that a marten made fire rain down from the roof, while a wizard with a scarred face spoke to the flames. It seems this wizard had a demon with him in the shape of a dark-skinned boy who saved him when he was wounded and helped him and a girl to escape.’
Roxane looked at him with a thoughtful expression, as if she had to search for the meaning of what he said. ‘Wounded?’
‘Yes, but they escaped! That’s the main thing. Roxane, do you think you really can find them?’
She passed a hand over her forehead. ‘I’ll try.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Fenoglio. ‘You heard what they’re saying. Dustfinger has a demon protecting him now. In any case, hasn’t he always managed very well on his own?’
‘Oh yes, indeed he has!’
Fenoglio cursed every wrinkle on his old face, she was so beautiful. Why didn’t he have Cosimo’s good looks? Although would she like that? She liked Dustfinger, who ought to have been dead by now if the story had gone the way he had once written it. Fenoglio, he told himself, this is going too far. You’re behaving like a jealous lover!
But Roxane was taking no notice of him anyway. She looked down at the boy sleeping in her lap. ‘Brianna was furious when she heard I was going to ride after her father,’ she said. ‘I only hope Cosimo will look after her, and won’t begin his war before I get back.’
Fenoglio made no reply to that. Why tell her about Cosimo’s plans? To make her even more anxious? No. He took out the letter for Meggie from under his cloak. Written words that could become sound, a mighty sound … he had never before made Rosenquartz seal a letter so carefully.
‘This letter can save Meggie’s parents,’ he said urgently. ‘It can save her father. It can save us all, so take good care of it!’
Roxane turned the sealed parchment this way and that, as if it seemed to her too small for such great claims. ‘I never heard of a letter that could open the dungeons of the Castle of Night,’ she said. ‘Do you think it’s right to give the girl false hopes?’
‘They aren’t false,’ said Fenoglio, rather hurt to find that she had so little faith in his words.
‘Very well. If I find Dustfinger, and the girl is still with him, she’ll get your letter.’ Roxane stroked her son’s hair again, very gently, as if to brush a leaf away. ‘Does she love her father?’
‘Yes. Yes, she loves him very much.’
‘My daughter loves hers too. Brianna loves him so much that she won’t speak a word to him now. When he went away in the old days, when he just used to go into the forest or down to the sea, anywhere that fire or the wind happened to lure him, she would try to run after him on her little feet. I don’t think he even noticed, he always disappeared so fast, quick as a fox that has stolen a chicken. But she loved him all the same. Why? That boy loves him too. He even thinks Dustfinger needs him, but he needs no one, only fire.’
Fenoglio looked thoughtfully at her. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘He was wretchedly unhappy when he was away. You should have seen him.’
She eyed him incredulously. ‘You know where he was?’
Now what? Old fool that he was, what had he said this time? ‘Well, yes,’ he stammered. ‘Yes. Yes, I was there myself.’ He needed some lies, and where were they? The truth wasn’t going to be much use this time. A few good lies were needed to explain everything. Why shouldn’t he find a few good words for Dustfinger for a change – even if he envied him his wife?
‘He says he couldn’t come
back.’ She didn’t believe it, but you could tell from Roxane’s voice how much she wished she did.
‘That’s exactly how it was! He had a bad time! Capricorn set Basta on him, they took him far, far away and tried to make him tell them how to talk with fire.’ Here came the lies now, and they might even be close to the truth, who could say? ‘Believe me, Basta took his revenge for your preference for Dustfinger! They shut him away for years, and he finally escaped, but they soon found him and beat him half to death.’ Meggie had told him that part. A little of the truth couldn’t hurt, and Roxane didn’t have to know that it was because of Resa. ‘It was dreadful, dreadful!’ Fenoglio felt the pleasure of storytelling run away with him, the pleasure of watching Roxane’s eyes widen as she hung on his lips, waiting eagerly for his next words. Should he make Dustfinger a little villainous after all? No, he’d killed him once already, he’d do him a favour today. He would make his wife forgive him, once and for all, for staying away those ten years. Sometimes I can be a truly benevolent person, thought Fenoglio.
‘He thought he’d die. He thought he’d never see you again, and that was the worst of it for him.’ Fenoglio had to clear his throat. He was moved by his own words – and so was Roxane. Oh yes, he saw the distrust disappear from her eyes, he saw them soften with love. ‘After that he wandered in strange lands, like a dog turned out of doors, looking for a way that would take him not to Basta or Capricorn but to you.’ The words were coming as if of their own accord now. As if he really knew what Dustfinger had felt all those years. ‘He was forlorn, truly forlorn, his heart was cold as a stone from loneliness. There was no room in it for anything but longing – longing for you. And for his daughter.’
‘He had two daughters.’ Roxane’s voice was almost inaudible.
Damn it, he’d forgotten that. Two daughters, of course! But Roxane was so rapt with his words that his mistake didn’t break the spell.
‘How do you know all this?’ she asked. ‘He never told me you knew each other so well.’
Oh, no one knows him better, thought Fenoglio. I can assure you, my beauty, no one knows him better.
Roxane pushed her black hair back from her face. Fenoglio saw a trace of grey in it, as if she had combed it with a dusty comb. ‘I shall ride early in the morning,’ she said.
‘Excellent.’ Fenoglio drew his horse to his side. Why was it so difficult to get on to these creatures with anything like elegance? ‘Look after yourself,’ he said, when he was finally on the horse’s back. ‘And the letter too. And give Meggie my love. Tell her everything will be all right. I promise.’
As he rode away she stood beside her sleeping son, looking thoughtful, and watched him go. He really did hope she would find Dustfinger, and it wasn’t just that he wanted Meggie to get his words. No. A little happiness in this story couldn’t hurt, and Roxane was not happy without Dustfinger. That was the way he’d fixed it.
He doesn’t deserve her, all the same, thought Fenoglio again as he rode towards the lights of Ombra, which were neither as bright nor as many as the lights of his old world, but were at least equally inviting. Soon the houses behind the protecting walls would be without their menfolk. They would all be going with Cosimo, including Minerva’s husband – although she had begged him to stay – and the cobbler whose workshop was next to his. Even the rag-collector who went round every Tuesday was going to fight the Adderhead. Would they follow Cosimo as willingly if I’d made him ugly, Fenoglio wondered? Ugly as the Adderhead with his butcher’s face? No, people find it easier to believe that a man with a handsome face has good intentions, so he had done well to put an angel on the throne. Yes, that was clever, extremely clever. Fenoglio caught himself humming quietly as the horse carried him past the guards. They let him in without a word, their prince’s poet, the man who put their world into words, and had made it out of words. Bow your heads to Fenoglio!
The guards would go with Cosimo too, and the soldiers up in the castle, and the grooms who were hardly as old as the boy who went around with Dustfinger. Even Minerva’s son Ivo would have gone if she had let him. They’ll all come back, thought Fenoglio as he rode towards the stables. Or most of them, at least. It will end well, I know it will. Not just well, but very well indeed!
52
Angry Orpheus
All words are written in the same ink,
‘flower’ and ‘power’, say, are much the same,
and though I might write ‘blood, blood, blood’
all over the page the paper would not be stained
nor would I bleed.
Philippe Jacottet,
‘Chant d’en bas’
Elinor lay on her air mattress staring at the ceiling. She had quarrelled with Orpheus again, even though she knew she’d be punished with the cellar. Sent to bed early, Elinor! she thought bitterly. That was how her father used to punish her as a child when he caught her yet again with a book that he didn’t think she should be reading at her age. Sent to bed early, sometimes at five in the afternoon. It had been particularly bad in summer, when the birds were singing and her sister was playing outside under the window – her sister who didn’t care for books at all, but liked nothing so much as telling tales on Elinor when, instead of playing with her, she buried her head in a book that her father had said she mustn’t read.
‘Elinor, please don’t quarrel with Orpheus!’ Darius had tried drumming that into her so often, but no, she just couldn’t control her temper! How could she be expected to, when his wretched dog slobbered all over some of her most valuable books because his master never thought of putting them back on their shelves when he’d had his fun with them?
Recently, however, he hadn’t been taking any more books off the shelves, not one. That at least was a small comfort. ‘He just reads Inkheart,’ Darius had whispered to her as they were washing the dishes together in the kitchen. Her dishwasher had gone wrong. As if it wasn’t bad enough to be working as a kitchen-maid in her own house, now her hands were all swollen with washing-up water! ‘He seems to be looking for words,’ Darius whispered. ‘Then he puts them together differently, writes them down, writes and writes, the wastepaper basket is brimming over. He keeps on trying, and then he reads what he’s written out loud, and when nothing happens …’
‘Yes? Then what?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Darius had said evasively, scrubbing away industriously at a pan encrusted with fat, but Elinor knew that if it was ‘nothing’ he wouldn’t have turned so embarrassed and silent.
‘Then what?’ she repeated – and Darius, blushing to his ears, had finally told her. Then Orpheus threw her books, her wonderful books, at the walls. He flung them on the floor in his rage – now and then one even sailed out of the window – and all because he couldn’t do what Meggie had done. Inkheart was closed to him, however lovingly he cooed and implored in his velvety voice, reading and rereading the sentences he so longed to slip between.
Of course, she had run straight off when she next heard him shouting. She’d gone to save her printed children. ‘No!’ Orpheus had yelled, so loudly that you could hear him in the kitchen. ‘No, no, no! Let me in, you thrice-accursed thing! I sent Dustfinger back into you! Can’t you understand that? What would you be without him? I gave you back Mortola and Basta! I’ve earned my reward, haven’t I?’
The man built like a wardrobe wasn’t standing outside the library door to stop Elinor. He was probably roaming the house yet again, to see if he could find something worth stealing after all. Not in a hundred years would it have occurred to him that the books were by far the most valuable things in the place. Later, Elinor couldn’t remember the names she had called Orpheus. She remembered only the book he was holding in his raised hand, a beautiful edition of the poems of William Blake. And for all her furious insults, he threw it out of the window, while the wardrobe-man grabbed her from behind and dragged her to the cellar stairs.
Oh, Meggie! thought Elinor as she lay on the air mattress, staring up at the crumbling plaster on
her cellar ceiling. Why didn’t you take me with you? Why didn’t you at least ask if I’d like to come too?
53
The Barn Owl
And every doctor must know that God has set a great mystery in the plants, if only because of the spirits and wild fancies that cast men into despair, and this aid comes not from the Devil but from Nature.
Paracelsus, Works
The sea. Meggie hadn’t seen it since the day they drove back from Capricorn’s village to Elinor’s house with the fairies and brownies who were nothing but ashes now. ‘This is where the physician I told you about lives,’ said Dustfinger, when the bay appeared beyond the trees. It was beautiful. The sun made the water shimmer like green glass, foaming glass constantly shaped by the wind into new folds. It was a strong wind, driving veils of cloud over the blue sky, and it carried a scent of salt and distant islands. It would have gladdened the heart but for the bare hill in the distance rising above the wooded slopes, and the castle on top of the hill, broad and heavy as its master’s face, in spite of its silvered rooftops and battlements.
‘Yes, there it is,’ said Dustfinger, when he saw Meggie’s look of alarm. ‘The Castle of Night. And the hill where it stands is called Mount Adder, what else? Bare as an old man’s bald head, so no one can come close under the cover of trees. But don’t worry, it’s not quite as close as it looks.’
‘The towers,’ said Farid. ‘Are they really all pure silver?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Dustfinger. ‘Dug from the mountains, this one and others. Roast fowls, young women, fertile land … and silver … the Adderhead has a hearty appetite for many things.’
A broad, sandy beach edged the bay. Where it joined the trees a long wall and a tower rose, sand-coloured and inconspicuous. There was not a soul to be seen on the beach, no boat was drawn up on the pale sand, only that building – the low tower and the long, tiled rooftops hardly visible behind the wall. A path wound towards it like a viper’s trail, but Dustfinger led them round to the back of the building under cover of the trees. He beckoned impatiently to them before disappearing into the shadow of the wall. The wood of the door outside which he was waiting for them was weathered, and the bell hanging above it was rusty with the salty wind. Wild flowers grew near the door, faded blossoms and brown seed-heads with a fairy nibbling at them. She had paler skin than her woodland sisters.
It all seemed so peaceful. The buzz of a wasp reached Meggie’s ear, mingling with the roaring of the sea, but she remembered only too well how peaceful the mill had looked. Dustfinger had not forgotten it either. He stood there listening intently before he finally put out his hand and pulled the chain of the rusty bell. His leg was bleeding again – Meggie saw him press his hand to it – but nonetheless he had kept urging them to make haste on the way to this place. ‘There’s no better physician,’ was all he would say when Farid asked where he was taking them, ‘and none we can trust more. In addition, it’s not far from there to the Castle of Night, and that’s where Meggie still wants to go, doesn’t she?’ He had given them some leaves to eat, downy and bitter. ‘Get them down inside you,’ he said when they made faces of disgust. ‘You can stay where we’re going only if you have at least five of them in your belly.’
The wooden door opened just a crack, and a woman peered through. ‘By all good spirits!’ Meggie heard her whisper, and then the door opened and a thin, wrinkled hand beckoned them in. The woman who quickly closed it behind them again was just as wrinkled and thin as her hand, and she
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