‘What’s he doing?’
Suddenly Violante was standing behind them. Brianna and Tullio were with her.
Dustfinger snapped his fingers, and the flames lost their human form and twined around the window like a fiery plant. ‘Don’t worry. There’ll just be a little soot left on the stones, and for the moment,’ he added, glancing at Brianna, who was staring into the flames as if enchanted, ‘it looks beautiful, don’t you think?’
It did. The fire surrounded the window with red leaves and flowers of gold. Tullio instinctively took a step towards it, but Violante roughly pulled him back to her side. ‘Put it out, Fire-Dancer!’ she ordered Dustfinger. ‘This minute.’
Shrugging his shoulders, Dustfinger obeyed. A whisper, and the fire went out. Violante’s anger did not impress him, and that alarmed the Adderhead’s daughter. Mo could see it in her eyes.
‘It did look beautiful, don’t you agree?’ he asked, passing his finger over the sooty sill. It was as if he could still see the three girls standing at the window.
‘Fire is never beautiful,’ said Violante with scorn. ‘Have you ever seen anyone die by fire? They burn for a long time.’
She obviously knew what she was talking about. How old had she been when she first saw someone die at the stake, how old when she first saw a hanging? How much darkness could children bear before darkness became a part of them for ever?
‘Come with me, Bluejay!’ Violante turned abruptly. ‘There’s something I want to show you. Only you! Brianna, get some water and wash that soot off.’
Brianna hurried away without a word, but not without casting a quick glance at her father, who held Mo back as he was about to follow Her Ugliness.
‘Beware of her!’ he whispered. ‘Princes’ daughters have a weakness for mountebanks and robbers.’
‘Bluejay!’ Violante’s voice was sharp with impatience. ‘Where are you?’
Dustfinger painted a fiery heart on the floor.
Violante was waiting on the staircase in the tower as if afraid of the windows. Perhaps she liked shadows because she still felt the mark on her cheek from which her cruel nickname came. Meggie had been called very different pet names when she was little: ‘my pretty’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘honey’ … Meggie had grown up in the certainty that the mere sight of her filled him with love. Presumably Violante’s mother had shown her daughter that kind of love, but everyone else had looked at her and shuddered, or felt pity at the most. Where had Violante hidden, as a child, from all those glances of dislike and all that pain? Had she taught her heart to despise everyone who could show the world a pretty face? Poor Adder’s daughter, thought Mo as he saw her standing on the dark staircase, so lonely in her dark heart … no, Dustfinger was wrong. Violante loved nothing and no one, not even herself.
She hurried down the steps as if running away from her own shadow. She always walked fast and impatiently, picking up her long skirts as if cursing the clothes women had to wear in this world at every step she took.
‘Come with me. I want to show you something. My mother always told me the library of this castle was in the north wing, with the unicorn pictures. I don’t know when it was moved, or why, but see for yourself … the tower guardroom, the scribe’s room, the women’s room,’ she whispered as she walked. ‘The bridge to the north tower, the bridge to the south tower, the aviary courtyard, the hounds’ courtyard …’ She really did move around the castle as if she had lived in it for years.
How often had she studied the books describing this place? Mo could hear the lake as she led him through a courtyard containing empty cages, gigantic cages made of metalwork as elaborate as if the bars were meant to be substitute trees for the birds inside. He heard water breaking on the stones, but the walls surrounding this courtyard were painted with beech and oak trees, and flocks of birds sitting in their branches: sparrows, larks, wild doves, nightingales and falcons, crossbills and robin redbreasts, woodpeckers and hummingbirds dipping their beaks into red flowers. A bluejay sat beside a swallow.
‘My mother and her sisters loved birds. So my grandfather didn’t just have them painted on the walls, he had live birds brought here from the most distant lands, and filled these cages with them. He had the cages covered in winter, but my mother crept in under the covers. Sometimes she would sit for hours in one of the cages, until the nursemaids found her and plucked the birds’ feathers from her hair.’
She hurried on. A covered passage under a gateway, another courtyard. Kennels, hunting scenes on the walls, and above it all the sound of the water of the lake, so far away and yet so close. Of course Violante’s mother loved birds, thought Mo. She wished she had wings too. No doubt she and her sisters dreamt of flying away when they climbed into the cages and waited for their fine dresses to be covered with feathers.
It saddened him to think of the three lonely girls, but all the same he would have loved to show Meggie the cages and the painted birds, the unicorns and dragons, the Hall of a Thousand Windows, even the Impregnable Bridge that seemed to be hovering over the lake when you looked down on it from above. You’ll tell Meggie about all this one day, he said to himself, as if just imagining it could make the words true.
Another staircase, another covered bridge like a tunnel suspended between the towers. The door at which Violante stopped was stained black, like all the doors in the castle. The wood had swelled, and she had to brace her shoulder against it to open it.
‘It’s terrible!’ she said, and she was right. Mo couldn’t make out much in the long room. Two narrow windows let in only a little light and air, but even if he hadn’t been able to see anything he would have smelt it. The books were stacked like firewood by the damp walls, and the cold air smelt so strongly of mould that he put his hand over his mouth and nose.
‘Look at them!’ Violante picked up the nearest book and held it out to him, tears in her eyes. ‘They’re all like that!’
Mo took the book from her hand and tried to open it, but the pages had stuck together in a single blackened, musty-smelling lump. Mould covered the cut edges of the pages like foam. The covers were eaten away. What he was holding wasn’t a book any more – it was the corpse of a book, and for a moment Mo felt nausea as he thought that he had condemned the Book he had bound for the Adderhead to the same fate. Did it look as bad as this one by now? Hardly, or it would have killed the Adderhead long ago, and the White Women wouldn’t be reaching out their hands to Meggie.
‘I’ve looked at so many of them. Hardly any of them are in a better state! How can it have happened?’
Mo put the ruined book back with the others.
‘Well, wherever the library originally was, I’m afraid there’s no safe place for books in this castle. Even if your grandfather tried to forget the lake outside, it’s still there. The air is so damp that the books started rotting, and since no one knew how to save them I suppose they were put in this room, in the hope that they’d dry out more quickly here than in the library. A bad mistake. They must have been worth a fortune.’
Violante pressed her lips together and passed her hand over the crumbling covers, as if stroking a dead pet’s coat for the last time. ‘My mother described them to me even more vividly than the rest of this castle! Luckily she took some to the Castle of Night with her, and then I took most of those to Ombra. As soon as I arrived I asked my father-in-law to send for the other books too. After all, this castle had been empty for years. But who listens to an eight-year-old girl? “Forget the books, and the castle where they stand,” that’s what he said whenever I asked him. “I’m not sending my men to a place like the Castle in the Lake, not for the finest books in the world. Haven’t you heard of the fish your grandfather bred in the lake, and the eternal mists? Not to mention the giants.” As if giants hadn’t disappeared from these mountains years ago! He was such a fool! A greedy, gluttonous fool!’ Anger took the sadness from her voice.
Mo looked around. The idea of the treasures that had once been hidden between all these wreck
ed covers nauseated him more than the stench of mould.
‘You can’t do anything for the books now, can you?’
He shook his head. ‘No. There’s no remedy for mould. Although you say that the Adderhead has found one. I don’t suppose you know what it is?’
‘Oh yes. But you won’t like it.’ Violante picked up one of the spoilt books. This one would still open, but the pages fell apart in her fingers. ‘He’s had the White Book dipped in fairy blood. They say that if that hadn’t worked he’d have tried human blood.’
Mo felt as if he could see the blank pages he had cut in the Castle of Night soaking up the blood. ‘That’s appalling!’ he said.
It obviously amused Violante that such a ridiculous piece of cruelty could shake him. ‘Apparently my father mixed the fairy blood with the blood of fire-elves so that it would dry more quickly,’ she went on, unmoved. ‘Their blood is very hot, did you know that? Hot as liquid fire.’
‘Indeed?’ Mo’s voice was hoarse with disgust. ‘I hope you aren’t planning to try the same remedy with these books. Believe me, it wouldn’t help them now.’
‘If you say so.’
Was he just imagining the disappointment in her voice?
He turned round. He didn’t want to see the dead books any more. Nor did he want to think of those pages drenched in blood.
As he came through the doorway, Dustfinger moved away from the painted wall of the corridor. It was almost as if he were stepping out of a book again. ‘We have a visitor, Silvertongue,’ he said. ‘Although not the one we were expecting.’
‘Silvertongue?’ Violante appeared in the open doorway. ‘Why do you call him that?’
‘Oh, it’s a long story.’ Dustfinger gave her a smile which she did not return. ‘I assure you the name fits him at least as well as the one you give him. And he’s had it very much longer.’
‘Has he?’ Violante looked at Dustfinger with barely concealed dislike. ‘Is that what they call him among the dead too?’
Dustfinger turned and ran his finger over the gold-mocker sitting among the painted branches of a rose bush. ‘No. No one goes by any name among the dead. We’re all alike there. Mountebanks and princes. You’ll find that out yourself some day.’
Violante’s face froze, and once again it looked like her father’s. ‘My husband once came back from the dead too. But he didn’t tell me mountebanks were so highly honoured there.’
‘Did he tell you anything about it at all?’ Dustfinger replied, looking so directly at Violante that she turned pale. ‘I could tell you a long tale about your husband. I could tell you I’ve seen him twice among the dead. But I think you should greet your visitor now. He’s not in a very good way.’
‘Who is this visitor?’
Dustfinger plucked a fiery brush out of the air.
‘Balbulus?’ Violante looked at him in disbelief.
‘Yes,’ said Dustfinger. ‘And the Piper has left the mark of your father’s anger on him.’
49
Masters New and Old
‘No problem!’ cried Butt the Hoopoe. ‘Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.’
Salman Rushdie,
Hassan and the Sea of Stories
How his behind hurt! As if he’d never be able to sit on it again. Damn all this riding about the place. It was one thing to go through the streets of Ombra on horseback, his head held high, attracting envious glances. But it was no fun following the Adderhead’s coach for hours in the dark, along rough paths where you were liable to break your neck the whole time.
For Orpheus’s new master travelled only by night. As soon as dawn came he had his black tent pitched to hide there from the light of day, and only when the sun set did he heave his rotting body back into the coach standing ready for him. It was drawn by two horses as black as the velvet that lined the coach. Orpheus had cast a surreptitious glance inside it the first time they stopped to rest. The Adder’s crest was embroidered on the cushions in silver thread, and they looked much softer than the saddle he’d been sitting in for days. He wouldn’t have minded a coach like that himself, but he had to ride behind it with Jacopo, Violante’s horrible brat, who kept demanding something to eat or drink, and showed such doglike devotion to the Piper that he wore a tin nose over his own. It still surprised Orpheus that the Piper wasn’t travelling with them. Well, of course – he’d let the Bluejay escape. Presumably the Adderhead had sent him back to the Castle of Night to punish him. But why, for heaven’s sake, didn’t his master have more than four dozen men-at-arms to escort them? Orpheus had counted them twice, but that was all. Did the Adderhead think this handful of men was enough against Violante’s child soldiers, or did he still trust his daughter? If so, then the Silver Prince was either considerably more stupid than he was reputed to be, or the rot had attacked his brain, which might well mean that Mortimer would be playing the hero again and he, Orpheus, had backed the wrong side. A terrible idea, so he was very careful not to think of it too often.
They made such painfully slow progress in the heavy coach that Oss could keep up with the horses on foot. Cerberus had been left behind in Ombra. The Adderhead, too, thought keeping dogs was a privilege of the nobility … it really was high time the rules of this world were rewritten.
‘Slow as snails!’ grumbled one of the men-at-arms behind him. Those fellows stank to high heaven, as if competing with their master’s odour. ‘You wait and see, by the time we reach that damn castle the Bluejay will have flown again.’ Idiots in armour. They still hadn’t realized that the Bluejay had ridden to Ombra Castle with a plan in mind, and that plan had not yet been put into practice.
Ah, they were stopping at last. What a relief to his poor bones! The sky was still black as pitch, but presumably Thumbling had spotted a fairy dancing at the approach of dawn in spite of the cold.
Thumbling …
The Adderhead’s new bodyguard could teach anyone the meaning of fear. He was as thin as if Death had taken him once already, and the scaly snake from his master’s crest was tattooed across his larynx, so that when he spoke it writhed on his skin as if it were alive. A very unsettling sight, but luckily Thumbling didn’t talk much. He did not owe his name to his stature. Indeed, Thumbling was rather taller than Orpheus, not that it was likely anyone in this world knew the fairy tale of the same name and its tiny central character. No, this Thumbling apparently got his name from the cruel things he could do with his thumbs.
Orpheus hadn’t found anything about him in Fenoglio’s book, so presumably he was one of those characters who – if Fenoglio himself was to be believed – had been hatched out by the story itself, like midge larvae in a marshy pond. Thumbling dressed like a peasant, but his sword was better than the Piper’s, and it was said that, like Silvernose, he had no sense of smell, which was why the two of them could be near the Adderhead without being overcome by nausea, unlike everyone else.
Lucky for them, thought Orpheus as he slid off his horse, groaning with relief.
‘Rub it down!’ he ordered Oss testily. ‘And then pitch my tent, and jump to it.’ Orpheus thought his bodyguard extremely foolish since he had set eyes on Thumbling.
Orpheus’s tent was not particularly large. He could hardly stand up in it, and it was so cramped that he almost knocked it down when he turned around, but he hadn’t been able to read himself a better one in a hurry, even though he had searched all his books for a rather grander version. His books … well, they were his now, anyway. Formerly the property of the library of Ombra Castle, but no one had stopped Orpheus when he’d helped himself to them.
Books.
How excited he had been, standing in the Laughing Prince’s library. He had been so sure that he’d find at least one book there containing words by Fenoglio. And he had, indeed, come upon a book of Bluejay songs on the very first lectern. His fingers had been shaking as he freed the book from its chain (the locks were easily picked; he knew how to do these things). Got you now, Mortimer, he had thought
. I’ll knead you into shape like dough. You won’t know who and where you are once I get my tongue around your robber’s name! He had been all the more painfully disappointed when he read the first words. Oh, those leaden sounds, those badly-rhymed lines! Fenoglio couldn’t have written any of the songs in that book. Where were the old man’s songs? Violante took them with her, you fool, he told himself. Why didn’t you think of that before?
The disappointment still hurt. But who said only Fenoglio’s words could come alive in this world? Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!
However that might be, what Orpheus had read so far during those endless hours in the saddle was not, unfortunately, very promising. It seemed that there wasn’t a single storyteller in this world who understood his art, or at least not in the Laughing Prince’s library. What a pitiful collection of beautifully handwritten tedium, what wooden babbling! And the characters! Not even his voice would bring them to life.
Originally Orpheus had intended to impress the Adderhead with a sample of his skill the next time they stopped to rest, but he still hadn’t found anything that tasted better on his tongue than dry paper. Damn it all!
Of course the Adderhead’s tent was already pitched. Thumbling always sent a few servants on ahead so that his master could stumble out of the coach and straight into it. It was a fabric palace, the dark lengths of cloth embroidered with silver snakes shimmering in the moonlight as if thousands of slugs had been crawling over the material.
Suppose he summons you now, Orpheus said to himself. Didn’t you promise him entertainment? He still heard the Milksop’s malicious words only too clearly: My brother-in-law doesn’t like to have his expectations disappointed.
Orpheus shivered. He sat down under a tree, feeling wretched, lit a candle and fished another book out of the saddlebags, while Oss went on struggling with the tent.
Children’s stories! Oh, for heaven’s sake! Damn it, damn it, damn it … or not? Wait a minute! This sounded familiar! Orpheus’s heartbeat quickened. Yes, these were Fenoglio’s words, no doubt about it.
‘That’s my book!’ Small fingers snatched the book from Orpheus’s hands. There stood Jacopo, lips pouting, brows drawn together above his eyes – probably in imitation of his grandfather. He wasn’t wearing the tin nose. Maybe it had become rather a nuisance after a while.
With difficulty, Orpheus resisted the temptation to tug the book out of those slender hands. Not a clever move. Be nice to the little devil, Orpheus!
‘Jacopo!’ He gave him a broad and slightly deferential smile, the kind a prince’s son would like, even if the prince in question was dead. ‘This is your book? Then I’m sure you know who wrote it, don’t you?’
Jacopo stared darkly at him. ‘Tortoise-Face.’
Tortoise-Face. What a fabulous name for Fenoglio.
‘Do you like his stories?’
Jacopo shrugged. ‘I like the songs about the Bluejay better, but my mother won’t let me have them.’
‘That’s not very nice of her, is it?’ Orpheus stared at the book that Jacopo was clutching so possessively to his chest. He felt his hands