towards the Black Prince the Adderhead raised a hand. ‘I will let you know just as soon as the Bluejay is my guest!’ he said, while the silver-nosed man reluctantly rode back to his place. ‘And believe me, that will be before long. I’ve already ordered the gallows to be built.’ Then he spurred his horse, and the men-at-arms rode on again. It seemed an eternity before the last of them had disappeared through the gateway.
‘Yes, off you ride!’ whispered Fenoglio, as the castle courtyard gradually filled with carefree noise again. ‘Viewing this place as if it would all soon be his, thinking he can spread his power through my world like a running sore, and play a part I never wrote for him …’
The guard’s spear abruptly silenced him. ‘Very well, poet!’ said Anselmo. ‘You can go in now. Off with you!’
‘Off with you?’ thundered Fenoglio. ‘Is that any way to speak to the Prince’s poet? Listen,’ he told the two children, ‘you’d better stay here. Don’t eat too much cake. And don’t go too close to the fire-eater, because he’s useless at his job, and leave the Black Prince’s bear alone. Understand?’
The two of them nodded, and ran straight to the nearest cake stall. But Fenoglio took Meggie’s hand and strode past the guards with her, his head held high.
‘Fenoglio,’ she asked in a low voice as the gate closed behind them, and the noise of the Outer Courtyard died away, ‘who is the Bluejay?’
It was cool behind the great gate, as if winter had built itself a nest here. Trees shaded a wide courtyard, the air was fragrant with the scent of roses and other flowers whose names Meggie didn’t know, and a stone basin of water, round as the moon, reflected the part of the castle in which the Laughing Prince lived.
‘Oh, he doesn’t exist!’ was all Fenoglio would say, as he impatiently beckoned her on. ‘But I’ll explain all that later. Come along now. We must take the Laughing Prince my verses at last, or I won’t be his court poet any more.’
21
The Prince of Sighs
The man couldn’t very well tell the king, ‘No, I won’t go,’ for he had to earn his bread.
Italo Calvino, tr. George Marten,
Italian Folk Tales,
‘The King in the Basket’
The windows of the hall where the Prince of Sighs, once the Laughing Prince, received Fenoglio were hung with black draperies. The place smelled like a crypt, of dried flowers and soot from the candles. The candles were burning in front of statues which all had the same face, sometimes a good likeness, sometimes less good. Cosimo the Fair, thought Meggie. He stared down at her from countless pairs of marble eyes as she walked towards his father with Fenoglio.
The throne in which the Prince of Sighs sat enthroned stood between two other high-backed chairs. The dark green upholstery of the chair on his left was occupied only by a helmet with a plume of peacock feathers, its metal brightly polished as if it were waiting for its owner. A boy of about five or six sat in the chair on his right. He wore a black brocade doublet embroidered all over with pearls as if it were covered in tears. This must be the birthday boy: Jacopo, grandson of the Prince of Sighs, but the Adderhead’s grandson too.
The child looked bored. He was swinging his short legs restlessly as if he could hardly prevent himself running outside to the entertainers, and the sweet cakes, and the armchair waiting for him on the platform adorned with prickly bindweed and roses. His grandfather, on the other hand, looked as if he never intended to rise from his chair again. He sat there as powerless as a puppet, in black robes that were too large for him now, as if hypnotized by the eyes of his dead son. Not particularly tall but fat enough for two men, that was how Resa had described him; seldom seen without something to eat in his greasy fingers, always rather breathless because of the weight his legs, which were not especially strong, had to carry, and yet always in the best of tempers.
The Prince whom Meggie saw now, sitting in his dimly lit castle, was nothing like that. His face was pale and his skin hung in wrinkled folds, as if it had once belonged to a larger man. Grief had melted the fat from his limbs, and his expression was fixed, as if it had frozen on the day when they brought him the news of his son’s death. Only his eyes still showed his horror and bewilderment at what life had done to him.
Apart from his grandson and the guards standing silent in the background, there were only two women with him. One kept her head humbly bent like a maidservant, although she wore a dress fit for a princess. Her mistress stood between the Prince of Sighs and the empty chair on which the plumed helmet lay. Violante, thought Meggie. The Adderhead’s daughter and Cosimo’s widow. Her Ugliness, as people called her. Fenoglio had told Meggie about her, emphasizing the fact that she was indeed one of his creations, but that he had never intended her to be more than a minor character: the unhappy child of an unhappy mother and a very bad father. ‘It’s absurd to marry her to Cosimo the Fair!’ Fenoglio had said. ‘But as I told you, this story is getting out of hand!’
Violante wore black, like her son and her father-in-law. Her dress too was embroidered with pearly tears, but their precious lustre didn’t suit her particularly well. Her face looked as if someone had drawn it on a stained piece of paper with a pencil too pale for the purpose, and the dark silk of her dress made her look even plainer. The only thing you noticed about her face was the purple birthmark, as big as a poppy, disfiguring her left cheek.
When Meggie and Fenoglio came across the dark hall, Violante was just bending down to her father-in-law, speaking to him quietly. The Prince’s expression did not change, but finally he nodded, and the boy slipped down from his chair in relief.
Fenoglio signalled to Meggie to stay where she was. His head respectfully bent, then he stepped aside, and unobtrusively signalled to Meggie to do the same. Violante nodded to Fenoglio as she passed him, her head held high, but she didn’t even look at Meggie. She ignored the stone statues of her dead husband too. Her Ugliness seemed to be in a hurry to escape this dark hall – in almost as much of a hurry as her son. The maid who followed her passed so close to Meggie that the servant girl’s dress almost touched her. She didn’t seem much older than Meggie herself. Her hair had a reddish tinge, as if firelight were falling on it, and she wore it loose, as only the women among the strolling players usually did in this world. Meggie had never seen lovelier hair.
‘You’re late, Fenoglio!’ said the Prince of Sighs as soon as the doors had closed behind the women and his grandson. His voice still came out of his mouth with an effort, like a very fat man’s. ‘Did you run short of words?’
‘I won’t run short of words until my last breath, my Prince,’ replied Fenoglio, with a bow. Meggie wasn’t sure whether to copy him. In the end she decided on a clumsy curtsey.
At close quarters the Prince of Sighs looked even more fragile. His skin resembled withered leaves; the whites of his eyes like yellowed paper. ‘Who’s the girl?’ he asked, bending his weary gaze on her. ‘Your maid? Too young to be your lover, isn’t she?’
Meggie felt the blood rise to her face.
‘Your Grace, what an idea!’ said Fenoglio, dismissing it and putting an arm around her shoulders. ‘This is my granddaughter who’s come to visit me. My son hopes I shall find her a husband, and what better place for her to look for one than at the wonderful festivities you’re holding today?’
Meggie blushed more than ever, but she forced herself to smile.
‘You have a son, do you?’ The voice of the Prince of Sighs sounded envious, as if he begrudged any of his subjects the luck of having a living son. ‘It’s not wise to let your children go too far away,’ he murmured, without taking his eyes off Meggie. ‘Only too likely that they may never come back!’
Meggie didn’t know where to look. ‘I’ll be going home soon,’ she said. ‘My father knows that.’ I hope, she added in her mind.
‘Yes. Yes, of course. She’ll be going back. When the time comes.’ Fenoglio’s voice sounded impatient. ‘But now we come to the reason for my visit.’ He took t
he roll of parchment so carefully sealed by Rosenquartz from his belt, and climbed the steps to the princely chair with his head respectfully bent. The Prince of Sighs seemed to be in pain. He tightened his lips as he leaned forward to take the parchment, and cool though it was in the hall, sweat stood out on his forehead. Meggie remembered what Minerva had said: This Prince of ours will sigh and lament himself to death. Fenoglio seemed to think so too.
‘Aren’t you feeling well, my Prince?’ he asked with concern.
‘No, I am not!’ snapped the Prince, annoyed. ‘Unfortunately the Adderhead noticed it today too.’ He leaned back, sighing, and struck the side of his chair with his hand. ‘Tullio!’
A servant clad in black, like the Prince, shot out from behind the chair. He would have looked like a rather short human being but for the fine fur on his face and hands. Tullio reminded Meggie of the brownies in Elinor’s garden who had turned to ashes, although he clearly had more of the human being about him.
‘Go and get me a minstrel – one who can read!’ ordered the Prince. ‘He can sing me Fenoglio’s song.’ And Tullio scurried off, as willing as a puppy.
‘Did you send for Nettle, as I advised?’ Fenoglio’s voice sounded urgent, but the Prince just waved the idea angrily away.
‘Nettle? What for? She wouldn’t come, or if she did it would probably just be to poison me, because I had a couple of oaks felled for my son’s coffin. How can I help it if she’d rather talk to trees than human beings? None of them can help me, not Nettle nor any of the physicians, stonecutters and boneknitters whose evil-smelling potions I’ve swallowed. No herb grows that can cure grief.’ His fingers trembled as he broke Fenoglio’s seal, and all was so still in the darkened hall as he read that Meggie heard the candle flames hiss as the wicks burned down.
Almost soundlessly, the Prince moved his lips as his clouded eyes followed Fenoglio’s words. ‘He will awake no more, oh never more,’ Meggie heard him whisper. She looked sideways at Fenoglio, who flushed guiltily when he noticed her glance. Yes, he had stolen the lines, and certainly not from any poet of this world.
The Laughing Prince raised his head and wiped a tear from his clouded eyes. ‘Fair words, Fenoglio,’ he said bitterly, ‘yes, you know all about those. But when will any of you poets find the words to open the door through which Death takes us?’
Fenoglio looked round at the statues. He stared at them, lost in thought as if he were seeing them for the first time. ‘I am sorry, but there are no such words, my Prince,’ he said. ‘Death is all silence. Even poets have no words once they have passed the door Death closes behind us. If I may, then, I would humbly beg your leave to go. My landlady’s children are waiting outside, and if I don’t catch them again soon they may well run off with the strolling players, for like all children they dream of taming bears and dancing between heaven and hell on a tightrope.’
‘Yes, yes, go away!’ said the Prince of Sighs, wearily waving his beringed hand. ‘I’ll send to let you know when I want words again. They are sweet-tasting poison, but still, they’re the only way to make even pain taste bittersweet for a few moments.’
He will awake no more, oh never more … Elinor would certainly have known who wrote those lines, thought Meggie, as she walked back down the dark hall with Fenoglio. The herbs scattered on the floor rustled under her boots. Their fragrance hung in the cool air as if to remind the sad Prince of the world waiting for him out there. But perhaps it reminded him only of the flowers in the crypt where Cosimo lay.
At the door, Tullio came to meet them with the minstrel, hopping and leaping in front of the man like a trained, shaggy animal. The minstrel wore bells at his waist and had a lute on his back. He was a tall, thin fellow with a sullen set to his mouth, and so garishly clothed that he would have put a peacock’s tail to shame.
‘That fellow can actually read, can he?’ Fenoglio whispered to Meggie as he pushed her through the door. ‘I don’t believe it! What’s more, his singing sounds as sweet as the cawing of a crow. Let’s be off before he gets his great horsy teeth into my poor lines of verse!’
22
Ten Years
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
Wallace Stephens,
‘The Pure Good of Theory’,
Collected Poems
Dustfinger was leaning against the castle wall, behind the stalls where people were crowding. The aroma of honey and hot chestnuts rose to his nostrils, and high above him went the tightrope-walker whose blue figure, from a distance, reminded him so much of Cloud-Dancer. He was holding a long pole with tiny birds sitting on it, birds as red as drops of blood, and when the dancer changed direction – stepping lightly, as if standing on a swaying rope was the most natural thing in the world – the birds flew up and fluttered around him, twittering shrilly. The marten on Dustfinger’s shoulder looked up at them and licked his lips. He was still very young, smaller and more delicate than Gwin, not half as likely to bite, and most important of all he didn’t fear fire. Absently, Dustfinger tickled his horned head. He had caught him behind the stable soon after his arrival at Roxane’s house, when the marten was trying to stalk her chickens, and had called him Jink, because of the way he jinked as he moved, dodging and darting before jumping up at Dustfinger so suddenly that he almost knocked him over. Are you crazy? he had asked himself when he lured the animal to him with a fresh egg. He’s a marten. How do you know that it makes any difference to Death what name he bears? But he’d kept Jink all the same. Perhaps he had left all his fears behind in the other world: his fears, his loneliness, his ill fortune …
Jink learned fast; he was soon leaping through the flames as if he’d been doing it all his life. It would be easy to earn a few coins with him at the markets – with him and the boy.
The marten nuzzled Dustfinger’s cheek. Some acrobats were building a human tower in front of the empty platform that still awaited the birthday boy. Farid had tried persuading Dustfinger to perform too, but he didn’t want people staring at him today. He wanted to stare himself, see his fill of all he’d missed so long. So he was not in fire-eater’s costume either, but wore Roxane’s dead husband’s clothes, which she had given him. They had obviously been almost the same size. Poor fellow: neither Orpheus nor Silvertongue could bring him back from where he was now.
‘Why don’t you earn the money today for a change?’ he had asked Farid. The boy had turned first red and then white as chalk with pride – and shot away into the turmoil. He was a quick learner. Only a tiny morsel of the fiery honey, and Farid was talking to the flames as if he’d been born with their language on his tongue. Of course, they didn’t yet spring from the ground when the boy snapped his fingers as readily as for Dustfinger himself, but when Farid called to the fire in a low voice it would speak to him – condescendingly, sometimes with mockery, but still it answered him.
‘Oh, but he is your son!’ Roxane had said when Farid had drawn a bucket of water from the well early in the morning, cursing, to cool his burned fingers. ‘He’s not,’ Dustfinger had replied – and had seen in her eyes that she didn’t believe him.
Before they set off for the castle, he had practised a couple of tricks with Farid, and Jehan had watched. But when Dustfinger beckoned him closer, he ran away. Farid had laughed out loud at him for it, but Dustfinger put his hand over his mouth. ‘The fire devoured his father, have you forgotten?’ he had whispered, and Farid bowed his head, ashamed.
How proudly he stood there among the other entertainers! Dustfinger pushed his own way past the stalls to get a better view. Farid had taken off his shirt as Dustfinger himself sometimes did – burning cloth was more dangerous than a small burn on the skin, and you could easily protect your naked body against the licking tongues of fire with grease. The boy put on a good act, such a good one that even the traders stared at him spellbound, and Dustfinger took his chance to free a few fairie
s from the cages where they had been imprisoned, to be sold to some fool as lucky charms. No wonder Roxane suspects you of being his father, he told himself. Your chest swells with pride when you look at him. Next to Farid, a couple of clowns were exchanging broad jokes, to his right the Black Prince was wrestling with his bear, but all the same more and more people stopped to look at the boy standing there playing with fire, oblivious of all around him. Dustfinger watched as Sootbird lowered his torches and looked enviously their way. He’d never learn. He was still as poor a fire-eater as he’d been ten years ago.
Farid bowed, and a shower of coins fell into the wooden bowl that Roxane had given him. He glanced proudly at Dustfinger, as hungry for praise as a dog for a bone, and when Dustfinger clapped his hands he flushed red with delight. What a child he still was, even though he had proudly shown Dustfinger the first stubble on his chin a few months ago!
Dustfinger was making his way past two farmers haggling over a couple of piglets when the gate to the Inner Castle opened again – this time not, as before, for the Adderhead, when Dustfinger himself had only just managed to hide from the Piper’s searching glance behind a cake stall. No. Obviously the birthday boy himself was finally appearing at his own festivities – and his mother would accompany the child, with her maidservant. How fast his foolish heart was suddenly beating! ‘She has your hair,’ Roxane had said, ‘and my eyes.’
The Prince’s pipers made the most of their big scene. Proud as turkey-cocks they stood there, long-stemmed trumpets held aloft in the air. The strolling players, being their own masters, disapproved without exception of musicians who sold their art to a single lord. In exchange, the pipers were better dressed, not in motley array like the players on the road, but in their Prince’s colours. For the pipers of the Prince of Sighs, that meant green and gold. His daughter-in-law wore black. Cosimo the Fair had been dead for barely a year, but his young widow would certainly have been courted by several suitors already, in spite of the mark, dark as a burn, that disfigured her face. The crowd came thronging around the platform as soon as Violante and her son had taken their seats. Dustfinger had to climb on an empty barrel to catch a glimpse of her maidservant beyond all those heads and bodies.
Brianna was standing behind the boy. Despite her bright hair, she was like her mother. The dress she wore made her look very grown up, yet Dustfinger still saw in her face traces of the little girl who had tried to snatch burning torches from his hand, or stamped her foot angrily when he wouldn’t let her catch the sparks he brought raining down from the sky.
Ten years. Ten years he’d spent in the wrong story. Ten years in which Death had taken one of his daughters, leaving behind nothing but memories as pale and indistinct as if she had never lived at all, while his other daughter had grown up, laughing and weeping through all those years, and he had not been there. Hypocrite! he told himself, unable to take his eyes from Brianna’s face. Are you trying to tell yourself you were a devoted father before Silvertongue lured you into his story?
Cosimo’s son laughed out loud. His stubby finger pointed first at one, then at another of the entertainers, and he caught the flowers that the women players threw him. How old was he? Five? Six?
Brianna had been the same age when Silvertongue’s voice had enticed him away. She had only come up to his elbow, and she’d weighed so little that he scarcely noticed when she climbed up on his back. When he forgot time yet again and stayed away for weeks on end, in places with names she had never heard, she used to hit him with her little fists and throw the presents he brought her at his feet. Then she would slip out of bed the same night to retrieve them after all: coloured ribbons as soft as rabbit fur, fabric flowers to put in her hair, little pipes that could imitate the song of a lark or the hoot of an owl. She had never told him so, of course, she was proud – even prouder than her mother – but he always knew where she put the presents – in a bag among her clothes. Did she still have it?
She had kept his presents, yes, but they could never bring a smile to