and breathless.
Elinor was the only one who didn’t laugh. ‘I don’t think that’s funny, Mortimer,’ she said sharply. ‘Personally, I’d probably have shot you if you’d simply gone off leaving my poor books behind, all sick and dirty.’
‘Yes, I expect you would.’ Mo gave Meggie a conspiratorial look, as he always did when Elinor lectured him or his daughter on the way to treat books or the rules of her library.
Oh Mo, if only you knew, thought Meggie, if only you knew … She felt as if he would read her secret in her face any minute now. Abruptly, she pushed her chair back, muttered, ‘I’m not hungry,’ and went off to Elinor’s library. Where else? Whenever she wanted to escape her own thoughts, she went to books for help. She was sure to find something to keep her mind occupied until evening finally came and they all went to bed, suspecting nothing.
Looking at Elinor’s library, you couldn’t tell that scarcely more than a year ago it had contained nothing but a red rooster hanging dead in front of empty shelves, while Elinor’s finest books burned on the lawn outside. The jar that Elinor had filled with some of their pale ashes still stood beside her bed.
Meggie ran her forefinger over the backs of the books. They were ranged side by side on the shelves again now, like piano keys. Some shelves were still empty, but Elinor and Darius were always out and about, visiting second-hand bookshops and auctions, to replace those lost treasures with new and equally wonderful books.
Orpheus … where was the story of Orpheus?
Meggie was on her way over to the shelf where the Greeks and Romans whispered their ancient stories when the library door opened behind her, and Mo came in.
‘Resa says you have the sheet of paper that Farid brought with him in your room. Can I see it?’ He was trying to sound as casual as if he were just asking about the weather, but he’d never been any good at pretending. Mo couldn’t pretend, any more than he could tell lies.
‘Why?’ Meggie leaned against Elinor’s books as if they would strengthen her backbone.
‘Why? Because I’m curious, remember? And what’s more,’ he added, looking at the backs of the books, as if he could find the right words there, ‘and what’s more, I think it would be better to burn that sheet of paper.’
‘Burn it?’ Meggie looked at him incredulously. ‘But why?’
‘I know it sounds as if I’m seeing ghosts,’ he said, taking a book off the shelf, opening it and leafing absent-mindedly through it, ‘but that piece of paper, Meggie … I feel it’s like an open door, a door that we’d be well advised to close once and for all. Before Farid tries disappearing into that damn story too.’
‘What if he does?’ Meggie couldn’t help the cool note that crept into her voice. As if she were talking to a stranger. ‘Why can’t you understand? He only wants to find Dustfinger! To warn him against Basta.’
Mo closed the book he had taken off the shelf and put it back in its place. ‘So he says. But suppose Dustfinger didn’t actually want to take him along, suppose he left him behind on purpose? Would that surprise you?’
No. No, it wouldn’t. Meggie said nothing. It was so quiet among the books, so terribly quiet among all those words.
‘I know, Meggie,’ said Mo at last, in a low voice. ‘I know you think the world that book describes is much more exciting than this one. I understand the feeling. I’ve often imagined being right inside one of my favourite books. But we both know that once imagination turns to reality things feel quite different. You think the Inkworld is a magical place, a world of wonders – but believe me, your mother has told me a lot about it that you wouldn’t like at all. It’s a cruel, dangerous place, full of darkness and violence, ruled by brute force, Meggie, not by justice.’
He looked at her, searching her face for the understanding he had always found there before, but did not find now.
‘Farid comes from a world like that,’ said Meggie. ‘And he didn’t choose to get into this story of ours. You brought him here.’
She regretted her words the moment they were out. Mo turned away as if she had struck him. ‘Yes. You’re right, of course,’ he said, going back to the door. ‘And I don’t want to quarrel with you again. But I don’t want that paper lying about your room either. Give it back to Farid. Or else, who knows, there could be a giant sitting on your bed tomorrow morning.’ He was trying to make her laugh, of course. He couldn’t bear the two of them to be on bad terms again. He looked so depressed. And so tired.
‘You know perfectly well nothing like that can happen,’ said Meggie. ‘Why do you always worry so much? Things don’t just come out of the words on the page unless you call them. You should know that better than anyone!’
His hand was still on the door-handle.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, no doubt you’re right. But do you know what? Sometimes I’d like to put a padlock on all the books in this world. And as for that very special book … I’d be glad, now, if Capricorn really had burned the last copy back there in his village. That book brings bad luck, Meggie, nothing but bad luck, even if you won’t believe me.’
Then he closed the library door after him.
Meggie stood there motionless until his footsteps had died away. She went over to one of the windows looking out on to the garden, but when Mo finally came down the path leading to his workshop he didn’t look back at the house. Resa was with him. She had put her arm round his shoulders, and her other hand was tracing words, but Meggie couldn’t make them out. Were they talking about her?
It was sometimes an odd feeling suddenly to have not just a father, but two parents who talked to each other when she wasn’t with them. Mo went into his workshop alone, and Resa strolled back to the house. She waved to Meggie when she saw her standing at the window, and Meggie waved back.
An odd feeling …
Meggie sat among Elinor’s books for some time longer, looking first at one, then at another, searching for passages to drown out her own thoughts. But the letters on the pages remained just letters, forming neither pictures nor words, and finally Meggie went out into the garden, lay down on the grass and looked at the workshop. She could see Mo at work through its windows.
I can’t do it, she thought, as the wind blew leaves off the trees and whirled them away like brightly painted toys. No. I can’t! They’ll all be so worried, and Mo will never, ever say a word to me again.
Meggie thought all those things; she thought them over and over again. And at the same time she knew, deep down inside her, that she had made up her mind long ago.
8
The Minstrel Woman
The minstrel must go on his way,
As he has done so long,
And so a note of sad farewell
Lingers around his song.
Ah, will I e’er come back again?
My dear, alas, who knows?
The heavy hand of death is laid
On many a budding rose.
E. von Monsterberg,
quoted from
Musikanten, Gaukler und Vaganten
It was just getting light when Dustfinger reached the farm that Cloud-Dancer had described to him. It lay on a south-facing slope, surrounded by olive trees. The soil, said Cloud-Dancer, was poor and stony there, but it suited the herbs that Roxane grew. The house stood alone, with no village nearby to protect it. There was only a wall, hardly chest-high, and a wooden gate. You could see the rooftops of Ombra in the distance, the castle towers rising high above the houses, and the road winding towards the city gate – so near, and yet too far to be a refuge if highwaymen or soldiers coming home from war thought it a good idea to loot this lonely farm, where only a woman and two children lived.
Perhaps at least she has a farm-hand, thought Dustfinger as he stood behind some bushes of broom. Their branches hid him, but he had a good view of the house.
It was small, like most farmhouses – not as poor as many of them, but not much better either. The whole house would have fitted a dozen times over and more
into one of the great halls where Roxane had once danced. Even the Adderhead used to invite her to his castle, poorly as he thought of the Motley Folk, for in those days everyone had wanted to hear her sing. Rich traders, the miller down by the river, the spice merchant who had sent her presents for more than a year … so many men had wanted to marry her, had given her jewellery and costly dresses, offered her fine apartments in their houses, and every one of those apartments was certainly larger than the little house where she lived now. But Roxane had stayed with the Motley Folk. She had never been one of those women among the strolling players who would sell their voices and their bodies to a lord and master for a little security, a settled home …
However, the day had come when she, too, had tired of travelling and had wanted a home for herself and her children. For no law protected those who lived on the road, and that meant the Motley Folk as well as robbers and highwaymen. If you stole from a player you need not fear any punishment, if you did violence to one of their women you could safely go back to your comfortable home, and even if you killed a traveller you need not fear the hangman. All his widow could do in revenge was strike the killer’s shadow as the sun cast it on the city wall, only his shadow, and she had to pay for her husband’s funeral too. The Motley Folk were fair game. People called them the Devil’s decoys, they liked to be entertained by them, listened to their songs and stories, watched their clever tricks – and barred their doors and gates to them when evening came. The players had to camp outside towns and villages, outside the protection of the walls, always on the move, envied for their freedom, yet despised because they served many masters for money and bread.
Not many strolling players ever left the road – the road and the lonely paths. But that was obviously what Roxane had done.
There was a stable beside the house, a barn and a bakehouse, and between them a yard with a well in the middle of it. There was a garden, fenced off to keep chickens and goats from uprooting the young plants, and a dozen narrow fields on the slope beyond. Some had been harvested, while in others the herbs stood high, bushy and heavy with their own seed. The fragrance borne across to Dustfinger on the wind made the morning air both sweet and bitter.
Roxane was kneeling in the farthest field, among plants of flax, comfrey and wild mallow. She seemed to have been at work for a long time already, although the morning mist still hung in the nearby trees. A boy of perhaps seven or eight knelt beside her. Roxane was talking to him and laughing. How often Dustfinger had summoned up her face in his memory, every part of it: her mouth, her eyes, her high forehead. It had been more difficult with every passing year, and with every year the picture had dimmed, desperately as he had tried to remember more clearly. Time had blurred her face and covered it with dust.
Dustfinger took a step forward – and two steps back. He had thought of turning back three times already, of stealing away again as silently as he had come, but he had stayed. A wind blew through the broom bushes, catching him in the back as if to give him fresh heart, and Dustfinger plucked up his courage, pushed the branches aside and walked towards the house and the fields.
The boy saw him first, and a goose rose from the tall grass by the stable and came towards him, cackling and beating her wings. Peasants were not allowed to keep dogs, that was a privilege reserved for princes, but a goose was a reliable guard too – and just as alarming. But Dustfinger knew how to avoid the gaping beak, and stroked the excited bird’s white neck until she folded her wings like a freshly ironed dress and waddled peacefully away, back to her place in the grass.
Roxane had risen to her feet. She wiped the earth off her hands on to her dress and looked at him, just looked. She had indeed pinned her hair up like a farmer’s wife, but it was obviously as long as ever and still as black, apart from a few grey strands. Her dress was as brown as the earth where she had been kneeling, no longer brightly coloured like the skirts she used to wear. But her face was still as familiar to Dustfinger as the sight of the sky, more familiar than his own reflection.
The boy picked up the rake lying on the ground beside him. He clutched it with a grimly determined air, as if he were used to protecting his mother from strangers. Clever lad, thought Dustfinger, never trust anyone, certainly not a scar-faced man like me suddenly emerging from the bushes.
What was he going to say when she asked him where he’d been?
Roxane whispered something to the boy, who reluctantly lowered the rake. Suspicion still lingered in his eyes.
Ten years.
He’d often been gone a long time – in the forest, in the towns on the coast, among the isolated villages lying in the hills around – like a fox that visited farmyards only when its stomach rumbled. ‘Your heart’s a vagabond,’ Roxane always said. Sometimes he’d had to search for her when she had moved on with the others. They lived together in the forest for a while, in an abandoned charcoal-burner’s hut, and then in a tent with other strolling players. They even managed to hold out within the solid walls of Ombra all one winter. He was always the one who wanted to move on, and when their first daughter was born and Roxane wanted to stay put more often – in some reasonably familiar place, with the other women among the strolling players, close to the shelter of walls – he would go off alone. But he always came back to her and the children, much to the annoyance of all the rich men who flocked around her wanting to make an honest woman of her.
What had she thought when he stayed away for a whole ten years? Had she, like Cloud-Dancer, thought him dead? Or did she believe he had simply left without a word, without saying goodbye?
He could not find the answer in Roxane’s face. He saw bewilderment there, anger, perhaps love too. Perhaps. She whispered something to the boy, took his hand and made him walk beside her. She went slowly, as if she must prevent her feet from going faster. He longed to run to her, leaving one of those years behind him at every step, but he had used up all his courage. He stood there as if rooted to the spot, looking at her as she came towards him after all those years, all the years for which he had no explanation … except one that she wouldn’t believe.
Only a few paces still separated them when Roxane stopped. She put her arm around the boy’s shoulder, but he pushed it away. Of course. He didn’t want his mother’s arm reminding him how young he still was. How proudly she thrust out her chin. That was the first thing he had noticed about Roxane – her pride. He couldn’t help smiling, but he bowed his head so that she couldn’t see the smile.
‘Obviously no living creature can withstand you to this day. My goose has always driven everyone else off.’ When Roxane spoke there was nothing special about her voice, none of the strength and beauty it had when she sang.
‘Well, nothing’s changed there,’ he said. ‘In all these years.’ And suddenly, as he looked at her, he finally, truly knew that he had come home. It was so strong a sensation that he felt weak at the knees. How happy he was to see her again, how dreadfully, terribly happy! Ask me, he thought. Ask me where I’ve been. Although he didn’t know how he would explain.
But she said only, ‘You seem to have been well off, wherever you’ve been.’
‘It only looks like that,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t stay there of my own free will.’
Roxane examined his face as if she had forgotten what it looked like, and stroked the boy’s hair. It was as black as hers, but his eyes were the eyes of another. They looked at him coldly. Dustfinger rubbed his hands together and whispered fire-words to his fingers until sparks fell from them like rain. Where they landed on the stony ground flowers sprang up, red flowers, each petal a tongue of flame. The boy stared at them with mingled delight and fear. In the end he crouched down beside them and put his hand out to the fiery flowers.
‘Careful!’ warned Dustfinger, but it was already too late. The boy, taken by surprise, put his burned fingertips in his mouth.
‘So the fire still obeys you,’ said Roxane, and for the first time he detected something like a smile in her eyes. ‘You look
hungry. Come with me.’ And without another word she walked towards the house. The boy was still staring at the fiery flowers.
‘I’ve heard you grow herbs for the healers.’ Dustfinger stood indecisively in the doorway.
‘Yes, even Nettle buys from me.’
Nettle, small as a moss-woman, always surly, sparing of her words as a beggar with his tongue cut out. But there wasn’t a better healer in this world.
‘Does she still live in the old bear’s cave on the outskirts of the forest?’ Hesitantly, Dustfinger walked through the doorway. It was so low that he had to duck his head. The smell of freshly baked bread rose to his nostrils. Roxane placed a loaf on the table, brought cheese, oil, olives.
‘Yes, but she isn’t often there. She’s getting more eccentric all the time, she roams the forest talking to the trees and to herself, looking for plants still unknown to her. Sometimes you don’t see her for weeks, so people come to me more and more often these days. Nettle has taught me things these last few years.’ She didn’t look at him as she said that. ‘She’s shown me how to grow herbs in my fields that usually thrive only in the forest. Butterfly clover, jinglebell leaf, and the red anemones where the fire-elves get their honey.’
‘I didn’t know those anemones could be used for healing too.’
‘They can’t. I planted them because they reminded me of someone.’ This time she did look at him.
Dustfinger put out his hand to one of the bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling, and rubbed the dry flowers between his fingers: lavender, where vipers hide, and helpful if they bite you. ‘I expect they grow here only because you sing for them,’ he said. ‘Didn’t folk always say: when Roxane sings the stones burst into flower?’
Roxane cut some bread, poured oil into a bowl. ‘I sing only for the stones these days,’ she said. ‘And for my son.’ She handed him the bread. ‘Here, eat this. I baked it only yesterday.’ Then, turning her back to him, she went over to the fire. Dustfinger watched her surreptitiously as he dipped a piece of bread into the oil. Two sacks of straw and a couple of blankets on the bed, a bench, a chair, a table, pitchers, baskets, bottles and bowls, bundles of dried herbs under the ceiling, crammed close together the way they used to hang in Nettle’s cave, and a chest that looked strangely fine in this otherwise sparsely furnished room. Dustfinger still remembered the cloth merchant who had given it to Roxane. It was a heavy load for his servants to carry, and it had been full to the brim with silken dresses embroidered with pearls, the sleeves edged with lace. Were they still there in the chest? Unworn, useless for working in the fields?
‘I went to Nettle when Rosanna first fell ill.’ Roxane did not turn to him as she spoke. ‘I didn’t know anything, not even how to draw the fever out of her. Nettle showed me all she knew, but nothing helped our daughter. So I rode to see the Barn Owl with her, while her fever rose higher and higher. I took her into the forest, to the fairies, but they didn’t help me either. They might have done it for you – but you weren’t there.’
Dustfinger saw her pass the back of her hand over her eyes. ‘Cloud-Dancer told me.’ He knew these were not the right words, but he could find no better.
Roxane just nodded, and passed her hand over her eyes again. ‘Some