Silvertongue bent down, picked up one of the branches and weighted it in his hand. ‘And how are you going to control it once you’ve got a fire going? It hasn’t rained for ages. The hills will be ablaze before you know it.’
Farid shrugged. ‘Only if the wind blows the wrong way.’
But Silvertongue shook his head. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I won’t play with fire in these hills unless I can’t think of anything else. Let’s steal into the village tonight. Maybe we can get past the guards. Maybe they know each other so little they’ll think I’m one of them. After all, we managed to slip through their fingers once, so maybe we can do it again.’
‘That’s a lot of maybes,’ said Farid.
‘I know!’ replied Silvertongue. ‘I know.’
45
Telling Lies to Basta
‘If ye see the laird, tell him what ye hear; tell him this makes the twelve hunner and nineteen time that Jennet Clouston has called down the curse on him and his house, byre and stable, man, guest and master, wife, miss, or bairn – black, black be their fall.’
Robert Louis Stevenson,
Kidnapped
It took Fenoglio only a few words to persuade the guard outside the door that he had to speak to Basta at once. The old man was a gifted liar. He could spin stories out of thin air faster than a spider spins its web.
‘What do you want, old man?’ asked Basta when he was standing in the doorway. He had brought the tin soldier. ‘Here, little witch!’ he said to Meggie, handing her the soldier. ‘I’d have thrown it on the fire, but nobody here listens to me these days.’
The tin soldier started at the word ‘fire’. His moustache bristled, and his eyes looked so alarmed it touched Meggie’s heart. When she put her hands protectively round him she thought she felt his heart beating. She remembered the end of his story: The soldier melted. The next day when the maid emptied the stove, she found a little tin heart, which was all that was left of him.
‘That’s right, no one listens to you any more. I can see that for myself!’ Fenoglio looked sympathetically at Basta, as a father might look at his son – which in a way he was. ‘And that’s why I wanted a word with you.’ He lowered his voice and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I’m offering you a deal.’
‘A deal?’ Basta scrutinised him with a mixture of wariness and arrogance.
‘Yes, a deal,’ repeated Fenoglio softly. ‘I’m bored here! I’m a scribbler, as you so aptly put it. I need paper to live on much as other people need bread and wine and so forth. Bring me some paper, Basta, and I’ll help you to get those keys back. You remember – the keys that the Magpie took away from you.’
Basta took out his knife. When he snapped it open the tin soldier began trembling so much that the bayonet slipped from his tiny hands. ‘How?’ asked Basta, cleaning his fingernails with the tip of the knife.
Fenoglio bent down to him. ‘I’ll write you a magic charm to put a hex on Mortola. A hex that will keep her in bed for weeks and give you time to show Capricorn you are the rightful keeper of the keys. Of course that kind of charm doesn’t work instantly, it needs time, but believe you me, when it does start to take effect …’ Fenoglio raised his eyebrows meaningfully.
But Basta only wrinkled his nose in scorn. ‘I’ve already tried with spiders. And parsley and salt. The old woman’s proof against them all.’
‘Parsley and spiders!’ Fenoglio laughed quietly. ‘What a fool you are, Basta! I’m not talking about children’s magic. I mean the magic of the written word. Nothing is more powerful for good or evil, I do assure you.’ Fenoglio lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I made you yourself out of words and letters, Basta! You and Capricorn.’
Basta flinched. Fear and hatred are closely linked, and Meggie saw both on his face. He believed the old man. He believed every word of it. ‘You’re a sorcerer!’ he muttered. ‘You and the girl alike – you both ought to be burned like those accursed books, and her father too.’ He quickly spat three times at the old man’s feet.
‘Ah, spitting! What’s that supposed to prevent? The Evil Eye?’ Fenoglio mocked him. ‘That notion of burning us isn’t a very new idea, Basta, but then you never were fond of new ideas. Well, are we in business or aren’t we?’
Basta stared at the tin soldier until Meggie hid him behind her back. ‘Very well!’ he growled. ‘But I shall check what you’ve been scribbling every day, understand?’
How are you going to do that, thought Meggie, when you can’t read? Basta looked at her as if he had heard her thoughts. ‘I know one of the maids,’ he said. ‘She’ll read it to me, so don’t try any tricks, right?’
‘Of course not!’ Fenoglio nodded energetically. ‘Oh yes, and a pen would be a good idea too. A black one if possible.’
Basta brought the pen and a whole stack of white typing paper. Fenoglio sat down at the table with a purposeful look, put the first sheet of paper in front of him, folded it and then tore it neatly into nine parts. He wrote five letters on each piece. They were ornate, barely legible, and always the same. Then he carefully folded these notes, spat once on each, handed them to Basta and told him to hide them as he told him. ‘Three where she sleeps, three where she eats, and three where she works. Then, after three days and three nights, the desired effect will set in. But should the accursed woman find even one of the notes, the magic will instantly turn against you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Basta stared at Fenoglio’s notes as if they would strike him with plague on the spot.
‘Best to hide them where she won’t find them!’ was all that Fenoglio replied as he propelled Basta towards the door.
‘If it doesn’t work, old man,’ growled Basta before he closed the door behind him, ‘I shall decorate your face to match Dustfinger’s.’ Then he was gone, and Fenoglio leaned against the closed door with a satisfied smile.
‘But it won’t work!’ whispered Meggie.
‘So? Three days are a long time,’ replied Fenoglio, sitting down at the table again. ‘And I hope we shan’t need that long. After all, we want to prevent an execution tomorrow evening, don’t we?’
He spent the rest of the day alternately staring into space and writing like a man possessed. More and more of the white sheets were covered with his large handwriting, scrawled impatiently over the paper. Meggie didn’t disturb him. She sat by the window with the tin soldier, looking at the hills and wondering exactly where Mo was hiding among all the branches and leaves there. The tin soldier sat beside her, his leg stretched straight out in front of him, looking with fear in his eyes at the world that was so entirely new to him.
Perhaps he was thinking of the paper ballerina he loved so much, or perhaps he wasn’t thinking at all. He said not a single word.
46
Woken in the Dead of Night
‘Let us use our magic and enchantments to conjure up a woman out of flowers.’ … Math and Gwydyon took the flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet and from these conjured up the loveliest and most beautiful girl anyone had seen; they baptized her with the form of baptism that was used then, and named her Blodeuedd.
‘Math Son of Mathonwy’,
from The Mabinogion,
translated by Jeffrey Gantz
Night had fallen long ago, but Fenoglio was still writing. Under the table lay the sheets of paper he had crumpled up or torn. He had discarded many more pages than he had laid aside, collecting those few pages very carefully, as if the words themselves might slip off the paper. When one of the maids, a skinny little thing, brought their supper Fenoglio hid the written sheets he had kept beneath the covers of his bed. Basta did not return that evening. Perhaps he was too busy hiding Fenoglio’s magic charms.
Meggie did not go to bed until everything outside was so dark that she couldn’t distinguish the hills from the sky. She left the window open. ‘Good-night,’ she whispered into the dark, as if Mo could hear her. Then she took the tin soldier and clambered up to her bed. She put the little soldier by her pillow. ‘You’re better off than Tinker Bell, honestly!’ she whispered to him. ‘Basta has her in his room because he thinks fairies bring good luck, and if we ever get out of here I promise I’ll make you a ballerina just like the one in your story.’
The tin soldier said nothing in reply to that either. He just looked at her with his sad eyes, then, barely perceptibly, he nodded. Has he lost his voice too, wondered Meggie, or could he never speak? His mouth did look as if he had never once opened it. If I had the book here, she thought, I could read the story and find out, or I could try to bring the ballerina out of it for him. But the Magpie had the book. She had taken all the books away.
The tin soldier leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. No, the ballerina would only break his heart, thought Meggie before she fell asleep. The last sound she heard was Fenoglio’s pen scribbling over the paper, writing word after word as fast as a weaver’s shuttle turning threads into colourfully patterned cloth …
Meggie did not dream of monsters that night – not even a spider scurried through her dream. Even though she dreamed of a room that appeared to be the bedroom in Elinor’s house, she knew that she was at home. Mo was there, too, and so was her mother. She looked like Elinor, but Meggie knew she was the woman who had been in the net hanging beside Dustfinger in Capricorn’s church. You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them. She was about to sit down next to her mother on the old sofa surrounded by Mo’s bookshelves when someone suddenly whispered her name. ‘Meggie!’ Again and again: ‘Meggie!’ She didn’t want to hear it, she wanted the dream to go on and on, but the voice kept calling to her. Meggie recognised it. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. Fenoglio was standing by her bed, his ink-stained fingers as black as the night beyond the open window.
‘What’s the matter? Let me sleep.’ Meggie turned her back to him. She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don’t dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind? The tin soldier was still asleep, with his head sunk on his chest.
‘I’ve finished!’ Fenoglio whispered. Even with the guard’s snores reverberating through the door, she couldn’t ignore it.
Meggie yawned and sat up.
A thin pile of handwritten sheets of paper lay on the table in the light of the flickering candle.
‘We’re going to try an experiment!’ whispered Fenoglio. ‘Let’s see whether your voice and my words can change what happens in a story. We’re going to try to send the little soldier back.’ He quickly picked up the hand-written sheets and put them on her lap. ‘It’s not the best of ideas to try the experiment with a story I didn’t write myself, but that can’t be helped. What do we have to lose?’
‘Send him back? But I don’t want to send him back!’ said Meggie, horrified. ‘He’ll die if he goes back. The little boy throws him into the stove and he melts. And the ballerina burns up.’ Among the ashes lay the metal spangle from the ballerina’s dress; it had been burned as black as coal.
‘No, no!’ Fenoglio impatiently tapped the sheets of paper on her lap. ‘I’ve written him a new story with a happy ending. That was your father’s idea: changing what happens in stories! He just wanted to get your mother back, he wanted Inkheart rewritten to give her up again. But if the idea really works, Meggie – if you can change the fate of a character you read out of a book by adding new words to his story, then maybe you can change everything about it: who comes out, who goes in, how it ends, who’s happy and who’s unhappy afterwards. Do you understand? It’s just a trial run, Meggie! If the tin soldier disappears, then believe me, we can change Inkheart too! I still have to work out just how, but for now, will you read this aloud. Please!’ Fenoglio took the torch out from under the pillow and put it in Meggie’s hand.
Hesitantly, she turned the beam on the first densely written page. Suddenly her mouth went dry. ‘Does it really end well?’ She ran her tongue over her lips and looked at the sleeping tin soldier. She thought she heard a tiny snore.
‘Yes, yes, I’ve written a truly sentimental happy ending.’ Fenoglio nodded impatiently. ‘He moves into the toy castle with the ballerina and they live happily ever after – no melted heart, no burnt paper, nothing but their blissful love.’
‘Your writing is difficult to read.’
‘What? I went to endless trouble!’
‘It’s difficult all the same.’
The old man sighed.
‘Oh, all right,’ said Meggie. ‘I’ll try.’
Every letter, she thought, every single letter matters! Let the words echo, ring out, whisper and rustle and roll like thunder. Then she began to read.
At the third sentence the tin soldier sat bolt upright. Meggie saw him out of the corner of her eye. For a moment she almost lost the thread of the story, stumbled over a word and re-read it. After that she dared not look at the little soldier again – until Fenoglio put his hand on her arm.
‘He’s gone!’ he breathed. ‘Meggie, he’s gone!’
He was right. The bed was empty.
Fenoglio squeezed her arm so hard that it hurt. ‘You truly are a little enchantress!’ he whispered. ‘And I didn’t do so badly myself, did I? No, definitely not.’ He looked with some awe at his ink-stained fingers. Then he clapped his hands and danced round the cramped room like an old bear. When he finally stopped beside Meggie’s bed again he was rather breathless. ‘You and I are about to prepare a most unpleasant surprise for Capricorn!’ he whispered, a smile lurking in every one of his wrinkles. ‘I’ll set to work at once! Oh yes, he’ll get what he wants: you’ll read the Shadow out of the book for him. But his old friend will be slightly changed! I guarantee that! I, Fenoglio, master of words, enchanter in ink, sorcerer on paper. I made Capricorn and I shall destroy him as if he’d never existed – which I have to admit would have been better! Poor Capricorn! He’ll be no better off than the magician who conjured up a flower maiden for his nephew. Do you know that story?’
Meggie was staring at the place where the tin soldier had been. She missed him. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘What flower maiden?’
‘It’s a very old story. I’ll tell you the short version. The long one is better, but it will soon be light. Well – there was once a magician called Gwydyon who had a nephew. He loved his nephew better than anything in the world, but his mother had put a curse on the young man.’
‘Why?’
‘It would take too long to tell that part now. Anyway, she cursed him. If he ever touched a woman he would die. This broke the magician’s heart – must his favourite nephew be condemned to being sad and lonely for ever? No. Was he not a magician? So he shut himself up in the chamber where he worked magic for three days and three nights and made a woman out of flowers – the flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet, to be precise. There was never a more beautiful woman in the world, and Gwydyon’s nephew fell in love with her at first sight. But Blodeuedd, for that was her name, was his undoing. She fell in love with another man, and the two of them killed the magician’s nephew.’
‘Blodeuedd!’ Meggie savoured the name like an exotic fruit. ‘How sad. What happened to her? Did the magician kill her too as a punishment?’
‘No. Gwydyon turned her into an owl, and to this day all owls sound like a weeping woman.’
‘That’s beautiful! Sad and beautiful,’ murmured Meggie. Why were sad stories often so beautiful? It was different in real life. ‘Right, so now I know the story of the flower maiden,’ she said. ‘But what does it have to do with Capricorn?’
‘The point is that Blodeuedd didn’t do what was expected of her. And that’s our own plan: your voice and my words, beautiful, brand-new words, will see to it that Capricorn’s Shadow does not do what’s expected of him!’ Fenoglio looked as pleased as a tortoise who has found a fresh lettuce leaf somewhere entirely unexpected.
‘Then what exactly is he to do?’
Fenoglio wrinkled his brow. His satisfaction was all gone. ‘I’m still working on that,’ he said crossly, tapping his forehead. ‘In here. It takes time.’
Voices were raised outside – men’s voices. They came from the other side of the wall. Meggie slipped quickly off her bed and ran to the open window. She heard footsteps, rapid, stumbling, fleeing footsteps – and then shots. She leaned out of the window so far that she almost fell out, but she could see nothing. The noise seemed to come from the square outside the church.
‘Careful!’ whispered Fenoglio, grasping her shoulders. More shots were heard. Capricorn’s men were calling to each other. Their voices sounded angry and excited – oh, why couldn’t she make out what they were saying? She looked at Fenoglio, her eyes full of fear. Perhaps he had been able to understand some of the shouting – words, names?
‘I know what you’re thinking, but it certainly wasn’t your father,’ he soothed her. ‘He wouldn’t be crazy enough to creep into Capricorn’s house at night!’ Gently, he drew her back from the window. The voices died away. The night became still again as if nothing had happened.
Her heart beating fast, Meggie went back to bed. Fenoglio helped her up.
‘Make him kill Capricorn!’ she whispered. ‘Make the Shadow kill him.’ Her own words frightened her, but she did not take them back.
Fenoglio rubbed his forehead. ‘Yes, I suppose I must, mustn’t I?’ he murmured.
Meggie took Mo’s sweater and held it close. Doors slammed somewhere in the house; the sound of footsteps echoed up to them. Then all was silent again. It was a menacing silence. A deathly silence, thought Meggie. The word kept going through her mind.
‘Suppose the Shadow doesn’t obey you?’ she asked. ‘Like the flower maiden. Then what?’
‘We had better not even think of that,’ replied Fenoglio slowly.
47
Alone
‘Why, O why did I ever leave my hobbit-hole!’ said poor Mr Baggins bumping up and down on Bombur’s back.
J.R.R. Tolkien,
The Hobbit