her face when he had stayed away for a long time. Only fire could do that, and for a moment – a seductive moment – Dustfinger was tempted to step out of the gaping crowd, take his place among the other entertainers performing tricks for the Prince’s grandson, and summon fire just for his daughter’s sake. But he stood where he was, invisible behind the throng, watching her smooth back her hair with the palm of her hand in the same way as her mother did so often, unobtrusively rubbing her nose and shifting from foot to foot, as if she’d much rather be dancing down there than standing stiffly here.
‘Eat him, bear! Eat him up this minute! So he really is back, but do you think he’s planning to go and see an old friend?’
Dustfinger spun round so suddenly that he almost fell off the barrel where he was still standing. The Black Prince was looking up at him, with his bear behind him. Dustfinger had hoped to meet him here, surrounded by strangers, rather than in the strolling players’ camp, where there were too many who would ask where he had been … The two of them had known each other since they were the same age as the Prince’s grandson enthroned in his chair on the platform – the orphaned sons of strolling players, adult before their time, and Dustfinger had missed that black face almost as much as Roxane’s.
‘So will he really eat me if I get off this barrel?’ The Prince laughed. His laughter sounded almost as carefree as in the old days. ‘Maybe. After all, he’s noticed that I really do have a grudge against you for not coming to see me. And didn’t you scorch his fur last time you two met?’
Jink crouched on Dustfinger’s shoulder as he jumped off the barrel, chattering excitedly in his ear. ‘Don’t worry, the bear doesn’t eat your sort!’ Dustfinger whispered to him – and hugged the Prince as hard as if a single embrace could make up for ten years.
‘You still smell more of bear than man.’
‘And you smell of fire. Now tell me, where’ve you been?’ The Black Prince held Dustfinger at arm’s length and looked at him as if he could read in his face everything that had happened during his friend’s absence. ‘So the fire-raisers didn’t string you up, then, as many folk say. You look too healthy for that. What about the other story – that the Adderhead locked you up in his dankest dungeon? Or did you turn yourself into a tree for a while, as some songs say, a tree with burning leaves deep in the Wayless Wood?’
Dustfinger smiled. ‘I’d have liked that. But I assure you, even you wouldn’t believe the real story.’
A whisper ran through the crowd. Looking over all the heads, Dustfinger saw Farid, red in the face, acknowledging their applause. Her Ugliness’s son was clapping so hard that he almost fell off his chair. But Farid was searching the throng for Dustfinger’s face. He smiled at the boy – and sensed that the Black Prince was looking at him thoughtfully.
‘So the boy really is yours?’ he said. ‘No, don’t worry, I’ll ask no more questions. I know you like to have your secrets, and I don’t suppose that has changed much. All the same, I want to hear the story you spoke of, some time. And you owe us a performance too. We can all do with something to cheer us up. Times are bad, even on this side of the forest, though it may not seem so today …’
‘Yes, so I’ve heard already. And the Adderhead obviously doesn’t love you any better than before. What have you done, to make him threaten you with the gallows? Did the bear take one of his stags?’ Dustfinger stroked Jink’s bristling fur. The marten never took his eyes off the bear.
‘Oh, believe me, the Adderhead scarcely guesses half of what I do, or I’d have been dangling from the battlements of the Castle of Night long ago!’
‘Oh yes?’ The tightrope-walker was sitting on his rope above them, surrounded by his birds and swinging his legs, as if the milling crowd down below was nothing to do with him. ‘Prince, I don’t like that look in your eye,’ said Dustfinger, looking up at the man walking the rope. ‘You’d do better not to provoke the Adderhead any more, or he’ll have you hunted down just as he’s hunted others. And then you won’t be safe on this side of the forest either!’
Someone was pulling at his sleeve. Dustfinger turned, so abruptly that Farid flinched back in alarm. ‘I’m sorry!’ he stammered, nodding rather uncertainly to the Prince. ‘But Meggie’s here. With Fenoglio!’ He sounded as excited as if he had met the Laughing Prince in person.
‘Where?’ Dustfinger looked round, but Farid had eyes only for the bear, who had affectionately placed his muzzle on the Black Prince’s head. The Prince smiled and pushed the bear’s muzzle away.
‘Where?’ Dustfinger repeated impatiently. For Fenoglio was the very last person he wanted to meet.
‘Over there, just behind the platform!’
Dustfinger looked the way Farid’s finger was pointing. Sure enough, there was the old man, with two children, just as he had first seen him. Silvertongue’s daughter stood beside him. She had grown tall – and even more like her mother. Dustfinger uttered a quiet curse. What were those two after, here in his story? They had as little to do with it as he had to do with theirs. Oh yes? mocked a voice inside him. The old man won’t see it that way. Did you forget he claims to have created everything here?
‘I don’t want to see him,’ he told Farid. ‘Bad luck clings to that old man, and worse than bad luck too, mark my words.’
‘Is the boy talking about the Inkweaver?’ The Prince came so close to Dustfinger’s side that the marten hissed at him. ‘What do you have against him? He writes good songs.’
‘He writes other things as well.’ And who knows what he’s already written about you, Dustfinger added in his mind. A few well-chosen words, Prince, and you’re a dead man!
Farid was still looking at the girl. ‘What about Meggie? Don’t you want to see her either?’ His voice sounded husky with disappointment. ‘She asked how you were.’
‘Give her my regards. She’ll understand. Off you go, then! I can see you’re still in love with her. How was it you once described her eyes? Little pieces of the sky!’
Farid blushed scarlet. ‘Stop it!’ he said angrily.
But Dustfinger took him by the shoulders and turned him round. ‘Go on!’ he said. ‘Give her my regards, but tell her to keep my name out of her magic mouth, understand?’
Farid cast a last glance at the bear, nodded – and strolled back to the girl very slowly, as if to show that he wasn’t in any hurry to reach her. She was going to great pains herself not to look his way too often, as she fidgeted awkwardly with the sleeves of her dress. She looked as if she belonged here, a maidservant from a not particularly prosperous home, perhaps the daughter of a farmer or a craftsman. Well, her father was indeed a craftsman, wasn’t he? If one with special talents. Perhaps she was looking around rather too freely. Girls here usually kept their heads bent – and sometimes they were already married by her age. Did his daughter Brianna have anything like that in mind? Roxane hadn’t said so.
‘That boy’s good. Better than Sootbird already.’ The Prince put out his hand to the marten – and withdrew it when Jink bared his tiny teeth.
‘That’s not difficult.’ Dustfinger let his eyes wander to Fenoglio. So they called him Inkweaver here. How contented he looked, the man who had written Dustfinger’s death. A knife in the back, plunged so deep that it found his heart, that was what Fenoglio had planned for him. Dustfinger instinctively reached to touch the spot between his shoulder-blades. Yes; he had read them already, after all, Fenoglio’s deadly words, one night in the other world when he had been lying awake, trying in vain to conjure up Roxane’s face in his memory. You can’t go back! He had kept hearing Meggie’s voice saying those words. One of Capricorn’s men is waiting for you in the book. They want to kill Gwin, and you try to help him, so they kill you instead. He had taken the book out of his rucksack with trembling fingers, had opened it and searched the pages for his death. And then he’d read what it said there in black and white, over and over again. After that he had decided to leave Gwin behind if he should ever come back here … Dustfinger
stroked Jink’s bushy tail. No, perhaps it had not been a good idea to catch another marten.
‘What’s the matter? You look as if the hangman had given you the nod all of a sudden.’ The Black Prince put an arm around his shoulders, while his bear sniffed curiously at Dustfinger’s rucksack. ‘The boy must have told you how we picked him up in the forest? He was in a state of great agitation, said he was here to warn you. And when he said of whom, many of my men’s hands went to their knives.’
Basta. Dustfinger ran a finger over his scarred cheek. ‘Yes, he’s probably back too.’
‘With his master?’
‘No, Capricorn’s dead. I saw him die myself.’
The Black Prince put his hand in his bear’s mouth and tickled its tongue. ‘Well, that’s good news. And there wouldn’t be much for him to come back to, just a few charred walls. Only old Nettle sometimes goes there. She swears you can’t find better yarrow anywhere than in the fire-raisers’ old fortress.’
Dustfinger saw Fenoglio glancing his way. Meggie was looking in the same direction too. He quickly turned his back on them.
‘We have a camp near there now – you’ll remember the old brownies’ caves,’ the Prince went on, lowering his voice. ‘Since Cosimo smoked out the fire-raisers those caves have made a good shelter again. Only the strolling players know about them. The old and frail, cripples, women tired of living on the road with their children – they can all stay and rest there for a while. I tell you what, the Secret Camp would be a good place for you to tell me your story! The one you say is so hard to believe. I’ve often been there for the bear’s sake. He gets grouchy when he spends too long between city walls. Roxane can tell you how to find the place; she knows her way about the forest almost as well as you by now.’
‘I know the old brownie caves,’ said Dustfinger. He had hidden from Capricorn’s men there many times, but he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to tell the Prince about the last ten years.
‘Six torches!’ Farid was beside him again, wiping soot off his fingers on his trousers. ‘I juggled with six torches and I didn’t drop one. I think she liked it.’
Dustfinger suppressed a smile. ‘Very likely.’ Two of the strolling players had drawn the Prince aside. Dustfinger wasn’t sure whether he knew them, but he turned his back, to be on the safe side.
‘Did you know everyone’s talking about you?’ Farid’s eyes were round as coins with excitement. ‘They’re all saying you’re back. And I think some of them have recognized you.’
‘Oh, have they?’ Dustfinger looked uneasily around. His daughter was still standing behind the little prince’s chair. He hadn’t told Farid about her. It was bad enough having the boy jealous of Roxane.
‘They say there was never a fire-eater to match you! The other one there, Sootbird they call him –’ Farid put a piece of bread in Jink’s mouth – ‘he asked about you, but I didn’t know if you wanted to meet him. He’s really bad at it, he doesn’t know how to do anything – but he says he knows you. Is that right?’
‘Yes, but all the same I’d rather not meet him.’ Dustfinger turned. The tightrope-walker had come down from his rope at last. Cloud-Dancer was talking to him and pointing Dustfinger’s way. Time to disappear. He would be happy to see them all again, but not here, and not today …
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he told Farid. ‘You stay and earn us a few more coins. I’ll be at Roxane’s if you want me.’
Up on the platform, Her Ugliness was handing her son a gold-embroidered purse. The child put his plump hand into it and threw the entertainers some coins. They hastily bent to pick them out of the dust. But Dustfinger cast a last look at the Black Prince and went away.
What would Roxane say when she heard that he hadn’t exchanged a single word with his daughter? He knew the answer. She would laugh. She knew only too well what a coward he could be.
23
Cold and White
I am like a goldsmith hammering day and night
Just so I can extend pain
Into a gold ornament as thin as a cicada’s wing
Xi Murong,
‘Poetry’s Value’,
Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry
There they were again. Mo felt them coming closer, he saw them even though his eyes were closed – white women, their faces so pale, their eyes colourless and cold. That was all there was in the world, white shadows in the dark and the pain in his breast, red pain. Every breath brought it back. Breathing. Hadn’t it once been perfectly easy? Now it was difficult, as difficult as if they had buried him already, heaping earth on his breast, on the pain burning and throbbing there. He couldn’t move. His body was useless, a burning prison. He wanted to open his eyes, but his lids weighed down as heavily as if they were made of stone. Everything was lost. Only words remained: pain, fear, death. White words. No colour in them, no life. Only the pain was red.
Is this death? Mo wondered. This void, full of faint shadows? Sometimes he thought he felt the fingers of the pale women reaching into his agonized breast as if to crush his heart. Their breath wafted over his hot face, and they were whispering a name, but it was not the name he remembered as his own. Bluejay, they whispered.
Their voices seemed to be made of cold yearning, nothing but cold yearning. It’s easy, they whispered, you don’t even have to open your eyes. No more pain, no darkness. Stand up, they whispered, it’s time to go, and they entwined their white fingers with his. Their fingers were wonderfully cool on his burning skin.
But the other voice wouldn’t let him go. Indistinct, barely audible, as if it came from far, far away, it penetrated the whispering. It sounded strange, almost discordant among the whispering shadows. Be quiet, he wanted to tell it with his tongue of stone. Be quiet, please, let me go! For nothing but that voice kept him imprisoned in the burning house that was his body. But the voice went on.
He knew it, but where from? He couldn’t remember. It was long ago that he had last heard it, too long ago …
24
In Elinor’s Cellar
The lofty bookshelves sag
Under thousands of sleeping souls
Silence, hopeful –
Every time I open a book, a soul is awakened.
Xi Chuan,
‘Books’,
New Generation
I ought to have furnished my cellar more comfortably, thought Elinor, watching Darius pump up the air mattress he had found behind one of the storage shelves for her. But how could she have guessed that some dreadful day she’d have to sleep down here, while a bespectacled, moon-faced man sat up in her wonderful library with his slobbering dog, playing master of the house? The wretched animal had almost eaten the fairy who had slipped out of Orpheus’s words. A blue fairy and a lark fluttering in panic against the window-panes, that was all that had come out of the book – to replace four people! ‘Look at that!’ Orpheus had triumphantly announced. ‘Two for four! There are fewer and fewer coming out, and one day I’ll manage not to let anything out of a book at all.’ Conceited pig! As if anyone was interested in who or what came out of the book, when Resa and Mortimer had gone! And Mortola and Basta …
Quick, Elinor, think of something else!
If only she could have hoped that someone useful would soon come knocking on her front door! But unfortunately such a visitor was highly improbable. She had never had much to do with her neighbours, certainly not since Darius had taken over the care of her books and Mo, Resa and Meggie had moved in. What more did she need in the way of company?
Her nose began to prickle ominously. That’s the wrong way to think, Elinor, she warned herself – as if she’d been able to think of anything else these last few hours. They’re all right! she kept telling herself. You’d have sensed it if anything had happened to them. Wasn’t that what all the stories said? You felt it, like a pang in your heart, when something happened to someone you loved?
Darius smiled hesitantly at her as his foot went tirelessly up and down on the pump
. The air mattress already looked like a caterpillar, a huge, squashed caterpillar. How was she supposed to sleep on that thing? She’d roll off and land on the cold cement floor.
‘Darius!’ she said. ‘We must do something! We can’t simply let them shut us up here while Mortola …’
Oh God, how that old witch had looked at Mortimer. Don’t think about it, Elinor! Just don’t think about it! Or about Basta and his gun. Or Meggie wandering through the Wayless Wood all alone. I’m sure she’s alone! A giant will have stepped on that boy and crushed him by now … It was a good thing Darius didn’t know the silly way her thoughts were getting all mixed up, making the tears start to come all the time …
‘Darius!’ Elinor whispered, for the man built like a wardrobe would certainly be on guard outside the door. ‘Darius, it’s all up to you! You must read them back!’
Darius shook his head so vigorously that his glasses almost slipped off his nose. ‘No!’ His voice was trembling like a leaf in the wind, and his foot began pumping again as if that stupid mattress were the most important thing in the world. Then, very suddenly, he stopped and hid his face in his hands. ‘You know what will happen!’ Elinor heard him say in a stifled voice. ‘You know what will happen to them if I read while I’m afraid.’
Elinor sighed.
Yes, she knew. Distorted faces, stiff legs, a lost voice … and of course he was afraid. Probably even more afraid than she was, for Darius had known Mortola and Basta considerably longer …
‘Yes. Yes, I know. All right,’ she murmured, and began abstractedly straightening a few cans on the shelves – tomato sauce, ravioli (not a particularly nice brand), red kidney beans – Mortimer loved red kidney beans. There it came again, that prickling in her nose.
‘Very well!’ she said, turning round resolutely. ‘Then that Orpheus will have to do it.’ How composed and sure of herself she sounded! She was obviously a gifted actress, thought Elinor, she’d realized that before, back in Capricorn’s church when all had seemed lost … indeed, now that she came to think of it, everything had seemed rather gloomier then, if anything.
Darius stared at her, bewildered.
‘Don’t look at me like that, for God’s sake!’ she hissed. ‘I don’t know how we can make him do it either. Not yet.’
She began pacing up and down, up and down, between the shelves full of cans and preserving jars.
‘He’s vain, Darius!’ she whispered. ‘Very vain. Did you see how he changed colour when he realized that Meggie had done something he’s tried and failed to do for years? I’m sure he’d like to ask her—’ She stopped suddenly and looked at Darius.