was pursing its lips.
Resa watched the strange creature go, and abruptly straightened up. ‘It’s all lies,’ she said. Her voice shook on every word. ‘This beauty is only a lie. It’s just meant to take our minds off the darkness, all the misfortune – and all the death.’
Mo put the book on Meggie’s lap and got to his feet, but Resa stepped back.
‘This isn’t our story!’ she said, in a voice loud enough for some of the robbers to turn and look at her. ‘It’s draining our hearts with all its magic. I want to go home. I want to forget all these horrors and not remember them until I’m back on Elinor’s sofa!’
Gecko had turned too. He stared curiously at them while one of his crows tried to snatch a piece of meat from his hand. Snapper was listening as well.
‘We can’t go back, Resa,’ said Mo, lowering his voice. ‘Fenoglio isn’t writing any more, remember? And we can’t trust Orpheus.’
‘Fenoglio will try to write us back if you ask. He owes it to you. Please, Mo! There can’t be any happy ending here!’
Mo looked at Meggie, who was still kneeling beside Farid with Balbulus’s book on her lap. What was he hoping for? Did he want her to contradict her mother?
Farid glared at Resa and let the fire between his fingers go out. ‘Silvertongue?’
Mo looked at him. Yes, he had many names now. What had it been like when he was only Mo? Probably Meggie couldn’t remember either.
‘I must go back to Ombra. What am I to say to Orpheus?’ Farid looked at him almost pleadingly. ‘Will you tell him about the White Women?’ There it was again, like fire burning on his face – his foolish hope.
‘There’s nothing to tell. I’ve said so before,’ replied Mo, and Farid bowed his head and looked at his sooty hands as if Mo had snatched hope itself from his fingers.
He stood up. He still went barefoot, even though there was sometimes frost at night now. ‘Good luck, Meggie,’ he murmured, giving her a quick kiss. Then he turned without another word. Meggie was already missing him as he swung himself up on to his donkey.
Yes. Perhaps they really ought to go back …
She jumped when Mo put his hand on her shoulder.
‘Keep the book wrapped in a cloth when you’re not looking at it,’ he said. ‘The nights are damp.’ Then he made his way past her mother and went over to the robbers, who were sitting around the embers of their dying fire as silently as if they were waiting for him.
But Resa stood there, staring at the book in her hands as if it were another book, the one that had swallowed her up entirely over ten years ago. Then she looked at Meggie.
‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Do you want to stay here, like your father? Don’t you miss your friends, and Elinor and Darius? And your warm bed without any lice in it, the café down by the lake, the peaceful roads?’
Meggie wished so much she could give the answer that Resa wanted to hear, but she couldn’t.
‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly.
And that was the truth.
11
Sick with Longing
I lost a world the other day.
Has anybody found?
You’ll know it by the row of stars
Around its forehead bound.
A rich man might not notice it;
Yet to my frugal eye
Of more esteem than ducats.
Oh, find it, sir, for me!
Emily Dickinson,
Collected Poems
Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she’d dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love, or longing for something they’d lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings – as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you’d never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.
Elinor had wallowed in misery on the printed page, but she’d never thought that in real life, grey and uneventful as hers had been for many years, such pain could enter her own heart. You’re paying the price now, Elinor, she often told herself these days. Paying the price for the happiness of those last months. Didn’t books say that too: that there’s always a price to pay for happiness? How could she ever have thought she would simply find it and be allowed to keep it? Stupid. Stupid Elinor.
When she didn’t feel like getting up in the morning, when her heart faltered more and more frequently for no apparent reason, as if it were too tired to beat steadily, when she had no appetite even at breakfast time (although she had always preached that breakfast was the most important meal of the day), when Darius kept asking how she was with that anxious, owlish expression on his face, she began wondering whether becoming ill with longing was more than just a literary invention after all. Didn’t she feel, deep down inside, that her longing was sapping her strength and her appetite, even her pleasure in her books? Longing.
Darius suggested going away to auctions of rare books, or famous book shops that she hadn’t visited for a long time. He drew up lists of volumes not yet in her library, lists that would have filled Elinor with delighted excitement only a year ago. But now her eyes passed over the titles with as little interest as if she were reading a shopping list for cleaning products. What had become of her love for printed pages and precious bindings, words on parchment and paper? She missed the tug at her heart that she used to feel at the sight of her books, the need to stroke their spines tenderly, open them, lose herself in them. But it seemed as if all of a sudden her heart couldn’t enjoy or feel anything, as if the pain had numbed it to everything but her longing for Meggie and her parents. Because by now Elinor had understood this too: a longing for books was nothing compared to what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn’t kiss her like Meggie, they couldn’t hug her like Resa, they couldn’t laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.
She began spending days on end in bed. She ate too little and then too much. Her stomach hurt, her head ached, her heart fluttered inside her. She was cross and absent-minded, and began crying like a crocodile over the most sentimental stories – because of course she went on reading. What else was there for her to do? She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolates. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy. And Orpheus’s ugly dog lay beside her bed, slobbering on her carpet and staring at her with his sad eyes as if he were the only creature in the world who understood her sorrows.
Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite fair. Presumably Darius, too, knew just how wretched she was feeling. ‘Elinor, won’t you go for a little walk?’ he would ask when he had brought her breakfast in bed yet again, and she still hadn’t appeared in the kitchen by twelve noon. ‘Elinor, I found this wonderful edition of Ivanhoe in one of your catalogues. Why don’t we go and take a look at it? The place isn’t far away.’ Or, as he had said only a few days ago, ‘Please, Elinor, go and see the doctor! This can’t go on!’
‘The doctor?’ she snapped at the poor man. ‘And what do you expect me to say to him? “Well, doctor, it seems to be my heart. It feels this ridiculous yearning for three people who disappeared into a book. Do you have any pills for that kind of thing?”’
Of course Darius had had no answer. Without a word, he had just put down her tea – tea with honey and lemon, her favourite – beside the bed among the mountains of books piled on her bedside table, and gone downstairs again looking so sad that Elinor had a shockingly guilty conscience. All the same,
she didn’t get up.
She stayed in bed for three more days, and when she dragged herself into her library on the fourth day, still in her nightdress and dressing gown, to get something else to read, she found Darius holding the sheet of paper. The one that had taken Orpheus to the place where Elinor supposed Resa, Meggie and Mortimer still were.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked, horrified. ‘No one touches that piece of paper, understand? No one!’
Darius put the sheet back in its place and wiped a speck off the glass case with his sleeve. ‘I was only looking at it,’ he said in his gentle voice. ‘Orpheus really doesn’t write badly, does he? Although it sounds very much like Fenoglio.’
‘Which is why it can hardly be described as Orpheus’s writing,’ said Elinor scornfully. ‘He’s a parasite. A louse preying on other writers – except that he feeds on their words, not their blood. Even his name is stolen from another poet! Orpheus!’
‘Yes, I expect you’re right,’ said Darius as he carefully closed the glass case again. ‘But perhaps you should call him a forger instead. He copies Fenoglio’s style so perfectly that at first glance you can’t tell the difference. It would be interesting to see how he writes when he has to work without a model. Can he paint pictures of his own? Pictures that don’t look like someone else’s?’ Darius looked at the words under the glass lid as if they could answer his question.
‘Why would I be interested in that? I hope he’s dead and gone. Trodden underfoot.’ Grim-faced, Elinor went up to the shelves and took out half a dozen books, supplies for another cheerless day in bed. ‘Yes, trodden underfoot! By a giant. Or – no, wait! Even better – I hope his clever tongue is blue and sticking out of his mouth because they’ve hanged him!’
That brought a smile to Darius’s owlish face.
‘Elinor, Elinor!’ he said. ‘I think you could teach the Adderhead himself the meaning of fear.’
‘Of course I could!’ replied Elinor. ‘Compared to me, the White Women are a bunch of sisters of mercy! But I’m stuck for the rest of my life in a story where there’s no part for me but the role of a batty old woman!’
Darius didn’t reply to that. However, when Elinor came downstairs again that evening to find another book, he was standing in front of the glass case once more, looking at the words Orpheus had written on the sheet of paper.
12
Back in the Service of Orpheus
Come close and consider the words.
With a plain face hiding thousands of other faces
and with no interest in your response,
whether weak or strong,
each word asks:
Did you bring the key?
Carlos Drummond de Andrade,
Looking for Poetry
Of course, the city gates of Ombra were closed when Farid finally rode his stubborn donkey around the last bend in the road. A thin crescent moon shone down on the castle towers, and the guards were passing the time by throwing stones at the bones dangling from the gallows outside the city walls. The Milksop had left some skeletons hanging there, though, to spare his sensitive nose, the gallows were no longer in use. Presumably he thought that gallows left empty were too reassuring a sight for his subjects.
‘Well, well, who comes here?’ grunted one of the guards, a tall thin fellow propping himself on his spear as if his legs alone wouldn’t carry him. ‘Take a look at this laddie!’ he added, roughly seizing Farid’s reins. ‘Riding around all on his own in the middle of the night! Aren’t you afraid the Bluejay will steal that donkey from under your skinny behind? After all, he had to leave his horse up at the castle today, so he could do with your donkey. And you he’ll feed to the Black Prince’s bear!’
‘I’ve heard the bear eats nothing but men-at-arms because they crunch so nicely in his jaws.’ As a precaution, Farid’s hand went to his knife. He felt too tired to be humble – and perhaps it made him lightly reckless to know that the Bluejay had managed to get out of the Milksop’s castle safe and sound. Yes, he too found himself calling Silvertongue by that name more and more often, although Meggie was always cross if she heard him.
‘Ho, ho, hark at the lad, will you, Rizzo?’ called the guard to the other man on duty. ‘Maybe he stole the donkey himself to sell to the sausage-maker in Butchers’ Alley before the poor beast drops dead under him!’
Rizzo came closer, smiling unpleasantly, and raised his lance until the ugly spearhead was pointing straight at Farid’s chest. ‘I know this fellow,’ he said. He had two missing front teeth, which made him hiss like a snake. ‘Saw him breathing fire once or twice in the marketplace. Aren’t you the one they say learnt his trade from the Fire-Dancer?’
‘Yes. What about it?’ Farid’s stomach muscles contracted. They always did when Dustfinger was mentioned.
‘What about it?’ Rizzo prodded him with the spearhead. ‘Get off your decrepit donkey and give us a bit of a show. Maybe we’ll let you into the city afterwards.’
They did finally open the gates – after he had turned night into day for almost an hour for their pleasure, making the fire grow flowers as he had learnt to do from Dustfinger. Farid still loved the flames, even though the crackling of their voices reminded him only too painfully of the man who had taught him all about them. But he no longer made them dance in public; he did it only for himself. The flames were all that was left to him of Dustfinger, and sometimes, when he missed him so much that his heart was numb with longing, he wrote his name in fire on a wall somewhere in Ombra and stared at the letters until they went out, leaving him alone, just as Dustfinger had left him alone.
Now that Ombra had lost its menfolk, it was usually as quiet as a city of the dead by night. Tonight, however, Farid ran into several troops of soldiers. The Bluejay had stirred them up like a wasps’ nest and they were still buzzing around, as if that would bring the bold intruder back. Lowering his head, Farid dragged the donkey past them, and was glad when he finally reached Orpheus’s house.
It was a magnificent building, one of the finest in Ombra, and the only one on this unrestful night with candlelight still shining through the windows. Torches burnt at the entrance – Orpheus lived in constant terror of thieves – and their flickering light brought the stone gargoyles above the gate to life. Farid always shuddered to see them stare down with their bulging eyes, their mouths wide open, their nostrils distended, looking as if they were about to snort in his face. He tried to put the torches to sleep with a whisper, as Dustfinger often did, but the fire wasn’t listening to him. That happened more and more often now – as if to remind him that a pupil whose master was dead was a pupil for ever.
He was so tired. The dogs barked at him as he led the donkey across the yard to its stable. Back again. Back in the service of Orpheus. He would so much rather have rested his head in Meggie’s lap, or sat by the fire with Silvertongue and the Black Prince. But for Dustfinger’s sake he always came back here. Again and again.
Farid let Jink climb out of the rucksack on to his shoulder, and looked up at the stars as if he could find Dustfinger’s scarred face there. Why didn’t he appear to him in a dream and tell him how to bring him back? Didn’t the dead sometimes do that for those they loved? Or did Dustfinger come only to Roxane, as he had promised, and to his daughter? No, if Brianna was visited by any dead man it was Cosimo. The other maids said she whispered his name in her sleep and sometimes put out her hand to him, as if he were lying beside her.
Perhaps he doesn’t appear to me in my dreams because he knows I’m afraid of ghosts, thought Farid as he climbed the steps to the back door. The main entrance of the house, which led straight out into the square, was of course reserved for Orpheus himself and his fine customers. Servants, strolling players and delivery men had to plough through the muck in the yard and ring the bell at the modest little door hidden at the back of the house.
Farid rang three times, but nothing stirred. By all the demons of the desert, where was that Chunk? He had nothing to do but ope
n a door now and then. Or was he snoring away like a dog outside Orpheus’s bedroom door again?
However, when the bolt was finally pushed aside it wasn’t Oss who let him in but Brianna. Dustfinger’s daughter had been working for Orpheus for two weeks now, but presumably Cheeseface had no idea whose daughter was doing his laundry and scrubbing his pots. Orpheus was so blind.
Without a word, Brianna held the door open, and Farid was equally silent as he passed her. There were no words between them except those that went unspoken: My father died for you. He left us alone for you, only for you. Brianna blamed him for every tear her mother shed. She had told him so in a low voice after their first day together in the service of Orpheus. ‘For every single tear!’ Yet again, he thought he felt her glance on the back of his neck like a curse when he turned his back to her.
‘Where’ve you been all this time?’ Oss seized him as he was stealing away to the place in the cellar where he slept. Jink hissed and ran off. Last time Oss kicked the marten he had almost broken Jink’s ribs. ‘He’s been asking for you a hundred times over! Made me search every damn alleyway. I haven’t had a wink of sleep all night because of you!’
‘So? You sleep enough as it is!’
The Chunk hit him in the face. ‘Less of your cheek! Go on, your master’s waiting for you.’
One of the maids came towards them on the stairs. She blushed as she made her way past Farid. What was her name? Dana? A nice girl, she’d often slipped him a delicious piece of meat when Oss had stolen his food, and Farid had kissed her in the kitchen a few times for that. But she wasn’t half as beautiful as Meggie. Or Brianna.
‘I just hope he’ll let me give you a good hiding!’ Oss whispered before knocking on the door of Orpheus’s study.
That was what Orpheus called the room, although he spent far less time studying in it than groping under one of the maids’ skirts, or stuffing himself with the lavish dishes his cook had to prepare for him at any time of day or night. Tonight, however, he really was sitting at his desk, head bent over a sheet of paper, while his two glass men were arguing under their breath over whether it was better to stir ink to the