‘He’s alive, Mortola!’ she whispered to the Magpie. ‘This story isn’t over yet, and his death isn’t written anywhere in it – but my daughter will whisper yours in your ear when she hears what you did to her father. You’ll see one day. And then I shall watch you die.’
This time she didn’t manage to catch Mortola’s hand, and her cheek was still burning long after the Magpie had gone away. She felt the eyes of the other prisoners like fingers feeling her face when she was sitting on the cold ground again. Mina was the first to say something. ‘Where did you meet the old woman? She mixed poisons for Capricorn.’
‘I know,’ said Resa tonelessly. ‘I belonged to her. For many long years.’
55
A Letter from Fenoglio
Is there then a world
Where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?
Wislawa Szymborska,
‘The joy of writing’,
View with a Grain of Sand
Dustfinger was asleep when Roxane arrived. It was already growing dark outside. Farid and Meggie had gone out to the beach, but he was lying down because his leg was hurting. When he saw Roxane standing in the doorway he thought at first his imagination was playing tricks on him, as it so often did by night. After all, he had once been here with her, very long ago. The room they had then had looked almost the same, and he had been lying on a straw mattress just like this, his face slashed and sticky with his own blood.
Roxane was wearing her hair loose. Perhaps that was why she woke the memory of that other night. His heart always seemed to miss a beat at the mere thought of it. He had been mad with pain and fear, had crawled away like a wounded animal, until Roxane found him and brought him here. At first the Barn Owl had hardly recognized him. He had given him something to drink that made him sleep, and when he woke again Roxane had been standing in the doorway, just as she was standing now. When the cuts would not heal, for all the physician’s skill, she had gone into the forest with him, deeper and deeper into the forest to find the fairies – and she had stayed with him until his face was healed well enough for him to venture among other people again. There could be few men whose love for a woman had been written on his face with a knife.
But what was his greeting when she suddenly appeared? ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. Then he could have bitten his tongue off. Why didn’t he say how much he had missed her, so much that he had almost turned back a dozen times?
‘Yes, indeed, what am I doing here?’ Roxane asked back. Once she would have turned her back on him for such a question, but now she just smiled, so mockingly that he felt as awkward as a boy.
‘Where have you left Jehan?’
‘With a friend.’ She kissed him. ‘What’s the matter with your leg? Fenoglio told me you were wounded.’
‘It’s getting better. What do you have to do with Fenoglio?’
‘You don’t like him. Why not?’ Roxane stroked his face. How beautiful she looked. So very beautiful.
‘Let’s just say he had plans for me that I didn’t care for in the least. Has the old man by any chance given you something for Meggie? A letter, for instance?’
Without a word, she brought it out from under her cloak.
There the words were – words that wanted to come true. Roxane offered him the sealed parchment, but Dustfinger shook his head. ‘You’d better give that to Meggie,’ he said. ‘She’s down on the beach.’
Roxane glanced at him in surprise. ‘You look almost as if you were afraid of a piece of parchment.’
‘Yes,’ said Dustfinger, reaching for her hand. ‘Yes, I am. Particularly when Fenoglio’s been writing on it. Come on, let’s go and look for Meggie.’
Meggie smiled awkwardly at Roxane when she gave her the parchment, and for a moment looked curiously from her to Dustfinger, but then she had eyes only for Fenoglio’s letter. She broke the seal so hastily that she almost tore the parchment. There were three closely-written sheets. The first was a letter to her. When she had read it Meggie put it away under her belt, paying it no further attention. The words she had been so eagerly waiting for filled the other two sheets. Meggie’s eyes travelled over the lines so fast that Dustfinger could hardly believe she was really reading them. Finally she raised her head, looked up at the Castle of Night – and smiled.
‘Well, what does the old devil say?’ asked Dustfinger.
Meggie offered him the two sheets. ‘It’s different from what I expected. Quite different, but it’s good. Here, read it for yourself.’
Gingerly, he took the parchment in his fingertips, as if he might burn himself on it more easily than on a flame. ‘When did you learn to read?’ Roxane’s voice sounded so surprised that he had to smile.
‘Meggie’s mother taught me.’ Fool; why was he telling her that? Roxane gave Meggie a long look as he laboured to decipher Fenoglio’s handwriting. Resa had usually written in capital letters, to make it easier for him.
‘It could work, couldn’t it?’ Meggie was looking over his shoulder.
The sea roared as if to agree with her. Yes, perhaps it really would work … Dustfinger followed the written words like a dangerous path. But it was a path, and it led right into the middle of the Adderhead’s heart. However, Dustfinger didn’t like the part the old man intended Meggie to play. After all, her mother had asked him to take care of her.
Farid looked unhappily at the letters. He still couldn’t read. Sometimes Dustfinger felt that he suspected those tiny black signs of witchcraft. What else would he think of them, indeed, after all his experiences? ‘Come on!’ Farid shifted impatiently from foot to foot. ‘What’s he written?’
‘Meggie will have to go to the castle. Straight into the Adder’s nest.’
‘What?’ Horrified, the boy looked first at him and then at the girl. ‘But that’s impossible!’ He took Meggie by the shoulders and turned her roughly round to face him. ‘You can’t go there. It’s much too dangerous!’
Poor boy. Of course she would go. ‘That’s the way Fenoglio has written it,’ she said, removing Farid’s hands from her shoulders.
‘Leave her alone,’ said Dustfinger, giving Meggie the sheets of parchment back. ‘When are you going to read it aloud?’
‘Now.’
Of course. She didn’t want to lose any time, and why should she? The sooner the story took a new turn, the better. It could hardly get worse.
Or could it?
‘What’s all this about?’ Roxane looked from one to another of them, baffled. She scrutinized Farid without much friendliness; she still didn’t like him. Dustfinger thought that wouldn’t change until something convinced her that Farid was not his son. ‘Explain!’ she said. ‘Fenoglio said this letter could save her parents. But what can a letter do for someone in a dungeon in the Castle of Night?’
Dustfinger stroked her hair back. He liked to see her wearing it loose again. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I know it’s difficult to believe, but if anything can open the dungeon doors in the Castle of Night, it’s this letter – and Meggie’s voice. She can make ink live and breathe, Roxane, just as you can bring a song to life. Her father has the same gift. If the Adderhead knew that, then I imagine he’d have hanged him long ago. The words that Meggie’s father used to kill Capricorn looked just as harmless as these.’
The way she was looking at him! As incredulously as she used to when he had yet again tried to explain where he had been for weeks on end. ‘You mean magic, an inkspell?’ she whispered.
‘No. I mean reading aloud.’
She didn’t understand a word of this, of course, which was not surprising. Perhaps she would if she heard Meggie read, if she saw the words suddenly trembling in the air, if she could smell them, feel them on her skin …
‘I’d like to be alone when I read it,’ said Meggie, looking at Farid. Then she turned and went back to the infirmary with Fenoglio’s letter in her hand. Farid wan
ted to follow her, but Dustfinger detained him.
‘Let her!’ he said. ‘Do you think she’ll disappear into the words? That’s nonsense. We’re all up to our necks in the story she’s going to read anyway. She only wants to make sure the wind changes, and it will – if the old man has written the right words!’
56
The Wrong Ears
Song lies asleep in everything
That dreams the day and night away,
And the whole world itself will sing
If once the magic word you say.
Joseph von Eichendorff,
The Divining Rod
Roxane brought Meggie an oil lamp before leaving her alone in the room where they would be sleeping. ‘Written words need light, that’s the awkward thing about them,’ she said. ‘But if these words are really as important as you all say, I can understand that you want to read them alone. I’ve always thought my singing voice sounds best when I’m on my own too.’ She was already in the doorway when she added: ‘Your mother – do she and Dustfinger know each other well?’
Meggie almost replied: I don’t know. I never asked my mother. But at last she said: ‘They were friends.’ She did not mention the resentment she still felt when she thought how Dustfinger had known where Resa was, all those years, and hadn’t told Mo. But Roxane asked no more questions anyway. ‘If you need any help,’ was all she said before she left the room, ‘you’ll find me with the Barn Owl.’
Meggie waited until her footsteps along the dark corridor had died away. Then she sat down on one of the straw mattresses and put the sheets of parchment on her lap. What would it be like, she couldn’t help thinking as the words lay spread out before her, simply to do it for fun, just once? What would it be like to feel the magic of the words on her tongue when it wasn’t a matter of life or death, good or bad luck? Once, in Elinor’s house, she had been almost unable to resist that temptation, when she had seen a book that she’d loved as a small child – a book with mice in frilly dresses and tiny suits making jam and going for picnics. She had stopped the first word forming on her lips by closing the book, though, because she’d suddenly seen some dreadful pictures in her mind. One of the dressed-up mice in Elinor’s garden surrounded by its wild relations, who would never in a million years dream of making jam. And an image of a little frilly dress, complete with a grey tail, in the jaws of one of the cats that regularly roamed among Elinor’s rhododendron bushes. Meggie had never brought anything out of the words on the page just for fun, and she wasn’t going to do it this evening either.
‘The whole secret, Meggie,’ Mo had once told her, ‘is in the breathing. It gives your voice strength and fills it with your life. And not just yours. Sometimes it feels as if when you take a breath you are breathing in everything around you, everything that makes up the world and moves it, and then it all flows into the words.’ She tried it. She tried to breathe as calmly and deeply as the sea – the sound of the surf came into the room from outside – in and out, in and out, as if she could capture its power in her voice. The oil lamp that Roxane had brought in filled the bare room with warm light, and outside one of the women healers walked softly by.
‘I’m just going on with the story!’ whispered Meggie. ‘I’m going on with the story. That’s what it’s waiting for. Come on!’ She pictured the massive figure of the Adderhead pacing sleeplessly up and down in the Castle of Night, never guessing that there was a girl who planned to whisper his name in Death’s ear this very night.
She took the letter that Fenoglio had written her from her belt. It was as well that Dustfinger hadn’t read it.
Dear Meggie, it said, I hope that what I’m sending won’t disappoint you. It’s odd, but I have found that obviously I can write only what doesn’t contradict anything I wrote about the Inkworld earlier. I have to keep the rules I made myself, even though I often made them unconsciously.
I hope your father is all right. From what I hear he is now a prisoner in the Castle of Night – and I must admit that I am not entirely blameless there. Yes, I admit it. After all, as you will have found out by now, I used him as a living model for the Bluejay. I am sorry, but I really did think it was a good idea at the time. He made an excellent and noble robber in my imagination, and how could I guess that he would ever really come into my story? Well, be that as it may, he’s here, and the Adderhead won’t set him free just because I write a new passage saying so. I didn’t make him that way, Meggie. The story must be true to itself, that’s the only way to do it, so I can only send you these words. At first they may do no more than delay your father’s execution, but I hope they will ultimately lead to his freedom after all. Trust me. I believe the words I enclose are the only possible way of bringing this story to a truly happy ending, and you like stories with happy endings, don’t you?
Go on with my story, Meggie, before it goes on with itself!
I would have liked to bring you the words myself, but I have to keep an eye on Cosimo. I am rather afraid that in his case we made it a little too easy for ourselves. Take care of yourself, give my good wishes to your father when you see him again (which I hope will be soon), and to the boy who worships the ground under your feet too – oh yes, and tell Dustfinger, though I don’t suppose he’ll like it, that his wife is much too beautiful for him.
Love and kisses,
Fenoglio
P.S. Since your father is still alive, I have wondered whether perhaps the words I gave you for him in the forest worked after all? If so, Meggie, then that could be only because I made him one of my characters, in a way – which would mean that some good came of the whole Bluejay story, don’t you think?
Oh, Fenoglio. What a master he was in the art of turning everything to his own advantage!
A breath of wind came through the window as Meggie reread the letter, making the sheets of parchment move as if the story itself were impatient and wanted to hear the new words. ‘Yes, all right. Here I go,’ whispered Meggie.
She had not often heard her father read aloud, but she remembered exactly how Mo gave every word the right sound, every single word …
It was quiet in the room, very quiet. The whole Inkworld – every fairy, every tree, even the sea – seemed to be waiting for her voice. ‘Night after night,’ Meggie began, ‘the Adderhead could get no rest. His wife slept soundly and deeply. She was his fifth wife, and younger than his three eldest daughters. Her body, pregnant with his child, was a mound under the bedclothes. It must be a boy this time; she had already borne him two daughters. If this child were another girl he would disown her, just as he had repudiated his other wives. He would send her back to her father, or to some lonely castle in the mountains.
Why could she sleep, although she feared him, while he paced up and down the magnificent bedchamber like an old dancing bear in its cage?
Because he alone felt the truly great fear. The fear of Death.
Death waited outside the windows, outside the glass panes paid for by selling his strongest peasants. Death pressed its ugly face against them as soon as darkness swallowed up his castle like a snake swallowing a mouse. He had more torches lit every night, more candles, yet still the fear came – to make him shake and fall on his knees because they trembled so much, to show him his future: the flesh falling from his bones, the worms eating him, the White Women leading him away. The Adderhead pressed his hands to his mouth so that the guards outside the door would not hear him sobbing. Fear. Fear of the end of all his days, fear of the void, fear, fear, fear. Fear that Death was already in his body somewhere, invisible, growing and flourishing and eating him away – the one enemy he could never defeat, never burn or stab or hang, the one enemy from whom there was no escaping.
One night, blacker and more endless than any that had gone before, the fear was particularly terrible, and he had them all woken, as he quite often did, all who were sleeping peacefully in their beds instead of trembling and sweating like him: his wife, the useless physicians, the petitioners, scribes, administr
ators, his herald, the silver-nosed minstrel. He had the cooks driven into the kitchen to prepare him a banquet, but as he was sitting at his table, his fingers dripping with fat from the freshly roasted meat, a girl came to the Castle of Night. She walked fearlessly past the guards and offered him a deal: a bargain with Death.
That was how it would be. Because she was reading it. How the words made their way out through Meggie’s lips. As if they were weaving the future. Every sound, every character a thread … Meggie forgot everything around her: the infirmary, the straw mattress she was sitting on, even Farid and his unhappy face as he watched her go. She went on spinning Fenoglio’s story; that was why she was here, spinning it out of threads of sound with her breath and her voice – to save her father and her mother. And this whole strange world that had enchanted her.
When Meggie heard the agitated voices she thought at first that they were coming out of the words, but they grew louder and louder. Reluctantly, she raised her head. She hadn’t read it all yet. There were still a few sentences waiting, waiting for her to teach them to breathe. Look at the words on the page, Meggie, she told herself. Concentrate!
She gave a start when a dull knocking resounded through the infirmary. The voices grew louder, she heard hasty footsteps, and Roxane appeared in the doorway. ‘They’ve come from the Castle of Night!’ she whispered. ‘They have a picture of you, a strange picture. Quick, come with me!’
Meggie tried to put the parchment in her sleeve until she could read those last few sentences, but then thought better of it and pushed it down the neck of her dress. She hoped it would not show under the firm fabric. She could still taste the words on her tongue, she still saw herself standing before the Adderhead just as she had read it, but Roxane reached for her hand and pulled her along. A woman’s voice came down the colonnade, Bella’s voice, and then the voice of a man, loud and commanding. Roxane did not let Meggie’s hand go but led her on, past the doors behind which the patients slept, or else lay awake listening to their own heavy breathing.
The Barn Owl’s room was empty. Roxane took Meggie in with her, bolted the door and looked around. The window was barred, and the steps were coming closer. Meggie thought she heard the Barn Owl’s voice, and another voice, rough and threatening. Then, suddenly, there was silence. They had stopped outside the door. Roxane put her arm round Meggie’s shoulders.
‘They’re going to take you with them!’ she whispered as the Barn Owl talked to the intruders on the other side of the door. ‘We’ll send word to the Black Prince. He has spies in the castle. We’ll try to help you, understand?’
Meggie just nodded.