And we the bones grow dust and ash withal.
François Villon,
tr. A.C. Swinburne,
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 blood-bath 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 market place, 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 blood-bath 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 hide-out, 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 further 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 awake to say so, and he put his arms round 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 harbour, on condition that they boarded a ship there and never returned.
‘The road to the harbour. 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 quietened down again. And very likely,’ he added almost as an afterthought, ‘we shall need fire.’
Dustfinger blew on his fingers until flames as delicate as butterfly wings were dancing there. ‘What do you think I’m still here for?’ he asked. ‘Fire there shall be. But I will not take a sword in my hand, in case that’s what you’re hoping. You know I’m no good with such things.’
68
A Visit
‘If I cannot get me forth out of this house,’ he thought, ‘I am a dead man!’
R.L. Stevenson,
The Black Arrow
When Meggie woke, she didn’t know for a moment where she was. In Elinor’s house? she wondered. With Fenoglio? But then she saw Mo bending low over the big table, binding a book. The book. Five hundred blank pages. They were in the Castle of Night, and Mo was to have the book finished tomorrow … A flash of lightning illuminated the soot-blackened ceiling, and the thunder that followed sounded menacingly loud, but it wasn’t the storm that had woken Meggie. She had heard voices. The guards. There was someone at the door. Mo had heard it too.
‘Meggie, he mustn’t work such long hours. It could bring the fever back,’ the Barn Owl had told her that very morning, before they took him down to the dungeons again. But what could she do about it? Mo sent her to bed the moment she began yawning too often. (‘That was the twenty-third yawn, Meggie. Go on, bed for you or you’ll be dead on your feet before this damned book is finished.’) Then it would be ages before he went to sleep himself. He stayed up cutting, folding and stitching until it was nearly dawn. He’d done that tonight as well.
When one of the guards opened the door, Meggie thought for a dreadful moment that Mortola had come to kill Mo after all, before the Adderhead let him go. But it was not the Magpie. The Adderhead stood in the doorway, breathing heavily. Two servants stood behind him, their faces pale with exhaustion, carrying silver candelabras from which wax dripped to the floorboards. Their master, treading heavily, approached the table at which Mo worked, and stared at the book. It was almost finished.
‘What are you doing here?’ Mo still had the paperknife in his hand. The Adderhead stared at him. His eyes were even more bloodshot than on the night when Meggie had made her bargain with him.
‘How much longer?’ he demanded. ‘My son is crying. He cries all night. He feels the White Women coming close, just as I do. Now they want to fetch him away too, him and me at the same time. Folk say they’re particularly hungry on stormy nights.’
Mo put the knife down. ‘The book will be finished tomorrow, as agreed. It would have been ready sooner, but the leather to cover it was full of tears and holes made by thorns, so that held us up, and the paper wasn’t as good as it might have been either.’
‘Yes, yes, very well, the librarian has passed your complaints on!’ The Adderhead’s voice sounded as if he had been shouting himself hoarse. ‘If Taddeo had his way, you’d spend the rest of your life in this room, rebinding all my books. But I will let you go – you, your daughter, your wife, and those good-for-nothing strolling players. They can all go – I just want the book! Mortola has told me about the three words that your daughter so cunningly failed to mention, but never mind that – I shall take good care that no one writes them in its pages! I want to be able to laugh in the Cold Man’s face at last – laugh at him and his pale women! Another night like this and I shall be beating my head against the wall, I shall kill my wife, I shall kill my child, I shall kill all of you. Do you understand, Bluejay or whatever your name is? You must finish the book before dark falls again! You must!’
Mo stroked the wooden boards that he had covered with leather only the day before. ‘I’ll be finished by the time the sun rises. But you must swear to me on your son’s life that then you will let us go at once.’
The Adderhead looked at him as if the White Women were there standing behind him. ‘Yes, yes, I swear by whoever and whatever you like! By sunrise, that sounds good!’ He walked ponderously over to Mo and stare
d at his chest. ‘Show me!’ he whispered. ‘Show me where Mortola wounded you. With the magic weapon that my master-at-arms took apart so thoroughly that now no one can put it together again. I had the fool hanged for that.’
Mo hesitated, but finally he opened his shirt.
‘So close to the heart!’ The Adderhead put his hand on Mo’s chest as if to make sure that the heart in it was really still beating. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, you must indeed know a way to cheat death or you wouldn’t be alive now.’
He turned abruptly and waved the two servants over to the door. ‘Very well – I shall have you fetched soon after sunrise, you and the book,’ he said over his shoulder.
‘Now get me something to eat in the hall!’ Meggie heard him shouting outside the door as the guards bolted it again. ‘Wake the cooks, wake the maids and the Piper. Wake them all! I want to eat, and listen to a few dark songs. And the Piper must sing them so loudly that I don’t hear the child crying.’
Then his footsteps retreated, and only the rolling of the thunder remained. A flash of lightning made the pages of the almost-finished book shine as if they had a life of their own. Mo had gone over to the window. He stood there motionless, looking out.
‘By sunrise! Can you do it?’ asked Meggie anxiously.
‘Of course,’ he said, without turning. Lightning was flickering over the sea like a distant light being switched on and off by someone – except that no such light existed in this world. Meggie went over to Mo, and he put his arm round her. He knew she was afraid of thunderstorms. When she was very small and had crept into bed with him, he always told her the same story: thunderstorms were because the sky longed to be united with the earth, and reached out fiery fingers to touch it on such nights.
But Mo didn’t tell that story today.
‘Did you see the fear in his face?’ Meggie whispered to him. ‘Exactly as Fenoglio described it.’
‘Yes, even the Adderhead must play the part that Fenoglio has written for him,’ replied Mo. ‘But so must we, Meggie. How do you like that idea?’
69
The Night Before
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air.
William Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet
It was the last night before the day when the Adderhead would show his clemency. In a few hours, just before dawn, they would all be in position by the road. None of the informers had been able to say exactly when the prisoners were to come down it – they knew only that this would be the day. The robbers were sitting together, telling each other tales of old adventures in loud voices. Presumably that was their means of keeping fear at bay, but Dustfinger did not feel like either talking or
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