written rainbow-coloured fairies into this world, and unicorns and—’
‘So? Maybe Orpheus can add something to Fenoglio’s story here and there. But he’d have to write something of his own to take us back to Elinor. I doubt if he can do that. And even if he can – from all Farid says, he’s not interested in anything but making himself the richest man in Ombra. Do you have the money to pay him for his words?’
This time it was Resa who remained silent – for so long that she might have been mute again, as she was when she left her voice behind in the Inkworld.
It was Mo who finally broke the silence.
‘Resa!’ he said. ‘If we go back now I’ll be sitting in Elinor’s house doing nothing but wondering how this story goes on, day in, day out. And no book in the world will be able to tell me that!’
‘You don’t just want to know how it goes on.’ Now it was Resa’s voice that sounded cool. ‘You want to decide what happens. You want to be part of it! But who knows whether you’ll ever find your way out of the letters on the page again, if you tangle yourself up in them even more?’
‘Even more? What do you mean? I’ve seen Death here, Resa – and I have a new life.’
‘If you won’t do it for me,’ – Meggie could hear how hard it was for her mother to go on – ‘then go back for Meggie … and for our second child. I want my baby to have a father, I want the baby’s father to be alive when it’s born – and I want him to be the same man who brought its sister up.’
Once more Meggie had to wait a long time for Mo’s answer. A tawny owl hooted. Gecko’s crows cawed sleepily in the tree where they roosted at night. Fenoglio’s world seemed so peaceful. And Mo stroked the bark of the tree against which he was leaning, as tenderly as he usually caressed the spine of a book.
‘How do you know Meggie doesn’t want to stay? She’s almost grown up. And in love. Do you think she wants to go back while Farid stays here? Because stay he will.’
In love. Meggie’s face was burning. She didn’t want Mo to say what she herself had never put into words. In love – it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn’t that just how it sometimes felt? Yes, Farid would stay. She had so often told herself that, when she felt a wish to go back: Farid will stay even if Dustfinger doesn’t return from the dead. He’ll go on looking for him and longing for him, much more than he longs for you, Meggie. But how would it feel never to see him again? Would she leave her heart here and go around with an empty hole in her breast ever after? Would she stay alone – like Elinor – and only read about being in love in books?
‘She’ll get over it!’ she heard Resa say. ‘She’ll fall in love with someone else.’
What was her mother talking about? She doesn’t know me! thought Meggie. She never knew me. How could she? She was never there with us.
‘What about your second child?’ Resa went on. ‘Do you want the baby born in this world?’
Mo looked round him, and once more Meggie felt something she had long known: by now her father loved this world as much as she and Resa had once done. Perhaps he even loved it more.
‘Why not?’ he retorted. ‘Do you want it born in a world where what it longs for can be found only in books?’
Resa’s voice shook when she replied, but now it was with anger. ‘How can you say such a thing? Everything you find here was born in our world. Where else did Fenoglio get it all from?’
‘How should I know? Do you really still think there’s only one real world, and the others are just pale offshoots?’
Somewhere a wolf howled and two others responded. One of the guards came through the trees and put wood on the dying fire. His name was Wayfarer. None of the robbers went by the names they had been born with. He moved away again, after casting a curious glance at Mo and Resa.
‘I don’t want to go back, Resa. Not now!’ Mo’s voice sounded determined, but at the same time Meggie could tell he was trying to win her mother over, as if he still hoped to convince her that they were in the right place. ‘It will be months yet before the baby’s born, and maybe we’ll all be back in Elinor’s house by then. But right now, this is where I want to be.’
He kissed Resa on the forehead. Then he went away, over to the men standing on guard among the trees at the far end of the camp. And Resa dropped into the grass where she stood and buried her face in her hands. Meggie wanted to go to her and comfort her, but what could she say? I want to stay with Farid, Resa. I don’t want to find someone else. No, that would hardly be much comfort to her mother. And Mo didn’t come back either.
16
The Piper’s Offer
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him.
Graham Greene,
Advice to Writers
At last. Here they came. Trumpets rang out in a fanfare from the city gates, an arrogant metallic sound. Just like the man it announced, Fenoglio thought. The Milksop – the common people always found the most suitable names. He couldn’t have thought of a better one himself, but then he hadn’t invented this pallid upstart either! Not even the Adderhead had his arrival announced by long-stemmed trumpets, but his pigeon-chested brother-in-law had only to ride around the castle and they struck up.
Fenoglio drew Minerva’s children closer to his side. Despina didn’t mind at all, but her brother wriggled out of Fenoglio’s grasp and climbed up, nimble as a squirrel, to a ledge on the wall where he would have a view down the street along which they’d soon be coming. The Milksop and his retinue, also known to the townsfolk as his pack of hounds. Had the Adder’s brother-in-law already been told that almost all the women of Ombra were waiting for him at the castle gate? Yes, surely.
Why is the Piper counting our children? That was the question that had brought them here. They had already called it out to the guards, whose faces were unmoved and who had merely lowered their spears in the direction of the angry women. But the women hadn’t gone home, all the same.
It was Friday, the day when the hunt rode out, and the crowd had been waiting hours for the return of their new master, who had set about killing all the game in the Wayless Wood from the moment of his arrival. Once again his servants would be carrying dozens of bloodstained partridges, wild boar, deer and hares through the streets of starving Ombra, past women who hardly knew where to find food for the next day. That was why Fenoglio hardly ever went out of doors, and even less on Fridays than on any other day of the week, but curiosity had brought him here today. Curiosity – a tiresome feeling!
‘Fenoglio,’ Minerva had said, ‘can you look after Despina and Ivo? I have to go to the castle. We’re all going. We want to make them tell us why the Piper is counting our children.’
You know why, Fenoglio wanted to say. But the desperation on Minerva’s face silenced him. Let them hope their children weren’t wanted for the silver mines, he told himself. Leave it to the Milksop and the Piper to take their hope away.
Oh, how tired he was of all this! He’d tried his hand at writing again yesterday, roused to anger by the arrogant smile with which the Piper rode into Ombra. He had picked up one of the sharpened pens that the glass man still placed encouragingly in front of him, sat down in front of a blank sheet of paper, and after an hour of waiting in vain told Rosenquartz off for buying paper that anyone could see was made of old trousers.
Ah, Fenoglio, he wondered, how many more stupid excuses will you think up for the way you’ve turned into an old man with no power over words any more?
Yes, he admitted it. He wanted to be master of this story, strongly as he had denied it after Cosimo’s death. More and more often these days he set to work with pen and ink in search of the old magic – usually while the glass man was snoring in his fairy nest, because it was too embarrassing to have Rosenquartz as a witness of his failure. He tried it when Minerva had to give the children soup tasting little better than dishwater, when the horrible rainbow-coloured fairies jabbered
away in their nest at the tops of their voices, keeping him awake, or when one of his creations – like the Piper yesterday – reminded him of the days when he had woven this world out of letters, intoxicated by his own skill with words.
But the paper stayed blank – as if all the words had stolen away to Orpheus, just because he took them and savoured them on his tongue. Had life ever tasted so bitter before?
In Fenoglio’s gloomy mood he had even played with the idea of going back to that village in the other world, such a peaceful, well-fed place, so wonderfully free of fairies and stirring events, back to his grandchildren, who must be missing his stories. (And what fabulous stories he’d be able to tell them now!) But where could the words be found that would take him back? Certainly not in his empty old head, and he could hardly ask Orpheus to write them for him. He hadn’t sunk as low as that yet.
Despina tugged at his sleeve. Cosimo had given him the tunic he was wearing, but it too was moth-eaten now, and as dusty as his brain that wouldn’t think. What was he doing here outside this damn castle? The sight of it depressed him. Why wasn’t he lying in bed?
‘Fenoglio? Is it true that when people dig silver out of the ground they spit blood on it?’ Despina’s voice still reminded him of a little bird’s. ‘Ivo says I’m just the right size for the tunnels where they find most of the silver.’
Damn the boy! Why did he tell his little sister such stories?
‘How often have I told you not to believe a word your brother says?’ Fenoglio tucked Despina’s thick black hair back behind her ears, and looked accusingly at Ivo. Poor fatherless little thing.
‘Why shouldn’t I tell her? She asked me!’ Ivo was at the age when you despise even comforting lies. ‘I don’t expect they’ll take you,’ he said, leaning down to his sister. ‘Girls die too quickly. But they’ll take me and Beppo and Lino, and even Mungus, although he limps. The Piper will take us all. And then they’ll bring us back dead just like our—’
Despina put her hand over his mouth quickly, as if her father might come back to life if only her brother didn’t speak the bad word. Fenoglio could happily have seized and shaken the boy, but Despina would only have burst into tears on the spot. Did all little sisters adore their brothers?
‘That’s enough! Stop upsetting your sister!’ he snapped at Ivo. ‘The Piper’s here to catch the Bluejay. Not for anything else. And to ask the Milksop why he isn’t sending more silver to the Castle of Night.’
‘Oh yes? Then why are they counting us?’ The boy had grown up in the last few weeks. As if grief had wiped away the childishness on his face. At the tender age of ten, Ivo was now the man of the family – even if Fenoglio sometimes tried to lift the burden of that responsibility off his thin shoulders. The boy worked with the dyers, helped to pull wet fabric through the stinking vats day in, day out, and brought the smell home with him in the evening. But he earned more with that work than Fenoglio did as a scribe in the marketplace.
‘They’re going to kill us all!’ he went on unmoved, his eyes fixed on the guards, who were still pointing their spears at the waiting women. ‘And they’ll tear the Bluejay to pieces, like they did last week with the strolling player who threw rotten vegetables at the governor. They fed the pieces to the hounds.’
‘Ivo!’ This was too much. Fenoglio tried to grab him by the ears, but the boy was too quick for him and ran away before he could get a hold. However, his sister stood there squeezing Fenoglio’s hand as tightly as if there were nothing else for her to cling to in this shattered world.
‘They won’t catch him, will they?’ Despina’s little voice was so timid that Fenoglio had to bend down to hear what she was saying. ‘The bear protects the Bluejay now as well as the Black Prince, doesn’t he?’
‘Of course!’ Fenoglio stroked her jet-black hair again. The sound of hoof beats was coming up the street, echoing among the houses, with voices chatting as casually as if they scorned the silence of the women waiting there, while the sun sank behind the surrounding hills and turned the roofs of Ombra red. The noble lords were late coming back from the pleasures of the hunt today, their silver-embroidered garments spattered with blood, their bored hearts comfortably aroused by killing. Death could indeed be a great entertainer – when it was someone else’s death.
The women crowded closer together. The guards drove them back from the gates, but they stayed outside the castle walls: old women, young women, mothers, daughters, grandmothers. Minerva was one of those in front. She had grown thin in the last few weeks. Fenoglio’s story, that man-eating monster, was eating her alive. But Minerva had smiled when she heard that the Bluejay had gone to see some books in the castle and ridden away unscathed.
‘He will save us!’ she had whispered. In the evenings she sang, low-voiced, the songs going around Ombra, and very bad songs they were. About the White Hand and the Black Hand of Justice, the Jay and the Prince … a bookbinder and a knife-thrower against the Piper and his army of fire-raising men-at-arms. But why not? After all, didn’t that sound like a good story?
Fenoglio picked Despina up as the soldiers escorting the hunting party rode by. Strolling players followed them down the street: pipers, drummers, jugglers, brownie-tamers, and of course Sootbird, who wasn’t going to miss any fun, even if – so they said – he felt ill at the sight of people being blinded and quartered. Then came the hounds, dappled like the light in the Wayless Wood, with the kennel-boys who made sure the dogs were hungry on the day of the hunt, and finally the hunters, led by the Milksop, a skinny figure on a horse much too large for him. He was as ugly as his sister was said to be beautiful, with a pointed nose that seemed too short for his face and a wide, pinched mouth. No one knew why the Adderhead had made him, of all men, lord of Ombra. Perhaps it had been at the request of his sister who, after all, had given the Silver Prince his first son. But Fenoglio suspected it was more likely that the Adderhead had chosen his puny brother-in-law because he could be sure the Milksop would never rise against him.
What a feeble character, thought Fenoglio scornfully as the Milksop rode by with a supercilious expression on his face. Obviously this story was now filling even leading roles with cheap supporting actors.
As expected, the fine ladies and gentlemen had brought back plenty of game: partridges dangling from the poles to which the grooms had tied them like fruit that had just fallen, half a dozen of the deer he had thought up especially for this world, with reddish-brown coats that were still as dappled as a fawn’s even in old age (not that these animals had been particularly old), hares, stags, wild boar …
The women of Ombra stared at the slaughtered game expressionlessly. Many put a telltale hand to their empty stomachs, or glanced at their ever-hungry children waiting in doorways for their mothers.
And then – then they carried the unicorn past.
Damn that Cheeseface!
There were no unicorns in Fenoglio’s world, but Orpheus had written one here just so that the Milksop could kill it. Fenoglio quickly put his hand over Despina’s eyes when they carried it by, its white coat pierced and bloodstained. Rosenquartz had told him not quite a week ago about the Milksop’s commission. The fee for it had been high, and all Ombra had wondered what distant country Four-Eyes had brought that fairy-tale creature from.
A unicorn! What stories could have been told about it! But the Milksop wasn’t paying for stories, quite apart from the fact that Orpheus couldn’t have written them. He did it with my words, thought Fenoglio. With my words! He felt fury clenched like a stone in his belly. If he only had the money to hire a couple of thieves to steal the book which supplied that parasite with words! His own book! Or if, at least, he could have written a few treasures for himself! But he couldn’t manage even that – he, Fenoglio, formerly court poet to Cosimo the Fair and creator of this once-magnificent world! Tears of self-pity came to his eyes, and he imagined them carrying Orpheus past, stabbed and bloodstained like the unicorn. Oh, yes!
‘Why are you counting our childre
n? We want you to stop it!’
Minerva’s voice brought Fenoglio out of his vengeful daydreams. When she saw her mother step in front of the horses Despina wound her thin little arms so tightly around his neck that he could hardly breathe. Had Minerva lost her wits? Did she want her children to be not just fatherless but motherless too?
A woman riding just behind the Milksop pointed her gloved finger at Minerva with her bare feet and shabby dress. The guards moved towards her with their spears.
For heaven’s sake, Minerva! Fenoglio’s heart was in his mouth. Despina began crying, but it wasn’t her sobs that made Minerva stumble back. Unnoticed, the Piper had appeared on the battlements above the gateway.
‘You ask why we’re counting your children?’ he called down to the women.
As always, he was magnificently dressed. Even the Milksop looked like a mere valet by comparison. He stood on the battlements shimmering like a peacock with four crossbow-men beside him. Perhaps he had been up there for some time, watching to see how his master’s brother-in-law would deal with the women waiting for him. His hoarse voice carried a long way in the silence that suddenly fell on Ombra.
‘We count everything that’s ours!’ he cried. ‘Sheep, cows, chickens, women, children, men – not that you have many of those left – fields, barns, stables, houses. We count every tree in your forest. After all, the Adderhead likes to know what he’s ruling over.’
His silver nose still looked like a beak in the middle of his face. There were tales saying that the Adderhead had ordered a silver heart to be made for his herald too, but Fenoglio felt sure there was still a human heart beating in the Piper’s breast. Nothing was more cruel than a heart made of flesh and blood, because it knew what gives pain.
‘You don’t want them for the mines?’ The woman who spoke up this time did not step forward like Minerva, but hid among the others. The Piper did not answer at once. He examined his fingernails. The Piper was proud of his pink nails. They were as well manicured as a woman’s, just as Fenoglio had described them. In spite of everything, it was still exciting to see his characters acting exactly as he had imagined.
You soak them in rosewater every evening, you villain, thought Fenoglio, as Despina stared at the Piper like a bird staring at the cat that wants to eat it. And you wear them as long as the nails of the ladies who keep the Milksop company.
‘For the mines? What a delightful idea!’
It was so quiet now that the silver-nosed man didn’t even have to raise his voice. In the setting sun his shadow fell over the women, long and black. Very effective, Fenoglio thought. And how stupid the Milksop looked. The Piper was keeping him waiting outside his own gates like a servant. What a scene. But this one wasn’t his own invention …
‘Ah, I understand! You think that’s why the Adderhead sent me here!’ The Piper leant his hands on the wall and looked down from the battlements, like a beast of prey wondering whether the Milksop or one of the women would taste better. ‘No, no. I’m here to catch a bird, and you all know the colour of its feathers. Although, as I hear, he was black as a raven during his last impudent exploit. As soon as that bird is caught, I’ll be riding back to the other side of the forest. Isn’t that so, Governor?’
The Milksop looked up at him and adjusted his sword, still bloodstained from the hunt. ‘If you say so!’ he called in a voice that he could control only with difficulty. He glanced angrily at the women outside the gates, as if he’d never seen anything like them before.
‘I do say so.’ The Piper smiled condescendingly down on the Milksop. ‘But on the other hand,’ he said, and the pause before he continued seemed endless, ‘if this bird should escape capture once more …’ He paused again, for a long time, as if he wanted to inspect each of the waiting women thoroughly. ‘If any of those present here should go so far as to give him shelter and a roof over his head, warn him of our patrols, sing songs of how he pulls the wool over our eyes …’ The sigh he heaved