‘I don’t work with glass men,’ he replied morosely. ‘They’re too liable to leave their footprints all over my pictures!’
Silvertongue slept uneasily. Sleep brought him no peace, and it seemed worse tonight than the nights before. Presumably they were with him again. When the White Women slipped into your dreams you didn’t see them. They came to Silvertongue more often than to Dustfinger himself, as if to make sure that the Bluejay didn’t forget the bargain he had struck with their mistress, the Great Shape-Changer who made all things wither and blossom, grow and decay.
They were with him now, their cool fingers stroking his heart. Dustfinger could feel it as if it were his own. Let him sleep, he thought. Let him rest from the fear that day brings him: fear for himself, fear for his daughter, fear that he’s done the wrong thing. Leave him alone.
He went over to him and placed his hand on his breast. Silvertongue woke with a start, pale-faced. Yes, they had been with him, and Dustfinger made fire dance on his fingers. He knew the chill that those visitors left behind. It was fresh and clear, pure as snow, but it both froze and burnt the heart.
‘What were they whispering this time? Bluejay, immortality is very close?’
Silvertongue pushed aside the fur under which he was sleeping. His hands shook as if he had been holding them too long in cold water.
Dustfinger let the fire grow, and then gently pressed his hand to the other man’s heart again. ‘Better?’
Silvertongue nodded. He did not push the hand away, even though it was still hotter than human skin. ‘Did they pour fire into your veins to bring you back to life?’ Farid had asked Dustfinger. ‘Perhaps,’ he had replied. The idea pleased him.
‘Heavens, they must really love you,’ he said when Silvertongue got to his feet, still drowsy. ‘Unfortunately they sometimes forget that their love always leads to death.’
‘Yes. Yes, they forget that. Thank you for waking me.’ Silvertongue went over to the battlements and looked out into the night. ‘He’s coming, Bluejay. That’s what they were whispering this time. He’s coming. But,’ he turned and looked at Dustfinger, ‘they said the Piper was preparing the way for him. What do you think they mean by that?’
‘Whatever it means,’ said Dustfinger, stepping to his side, ‘the Piper will have to cross the bridge, like his master, so we’ll see him coming in good time.’ It still struck Dustfinger as strange that he could speak the Piper’s name without feeling fear. But it seemed as if he had left his fears behind with the dead for ever.
The wind ruffled the surface of the lake. Violante’s soldiers marched up and down on the bridge, and Dustfinger thought he could hear their mistress’s restless footsteps up here on the battlements. Violante’s footsteps – and the scratching of Balbulus’s pen.
Silvertongue looked at him. ‘Show me Resa. The way you conjured up Violante’s mother and her sisters out of the fire.’
Dustfinger hesitated.
‘Come on,’ said Silvertongue. ‘I know you’re almost as familiar with her face as I am.’
I’ve told Mo everything. That was what Resa had whispered to him in the dungeons of the Castle of Night. Obviously she had not been lying. Of course not, Dustfinger told himself. She can’t tell a lie any more than the man she loves can.
He traced a figure in the night and made the flames paint it.
Silvertongue instinctively put out his hand, but snatched his fingers away when the fire stung them.
‘What about Meggie?’ Love was written all over his face. No, he hadn’t changed, whatever anyone said. He was like an open book, with his burning heart and a voice that could conjure up whatever he wanted – just as Dustfinger could conjure up images with fire.
The flames painted Meggie in the night, filling her with warm life. It looked so real that her father turned away abruptly, because his hands wanted to reach into the fire again.
‘Your turn now.’ Dustfinger left the fiery figures standing behind the battlements.
‘Mine?’
‘Yes, tell me about Roxane. Live up to your name, Silvertongue.’
The Bluejay smiled and leant back against the stones. ‘Roxane? That’s easy,’ he said softly. ‘Fenoglio has written wonderful things about her.’
When he began to speak, his voice took hold of Dustfinger like a hand touching his heart. He felt the words on his skin as if they were Roxane’s hands. Dustfinger had never seen a more beautiful woman before. Her hair was as black as the night that he loved. Her eyes were the darkness under the trees, ravens’ feathers and the sooty breath of the fire. Her skin reminded him of moonlight on the wings of the fairies …
Dustfinger closed his eyes and could hear Roxane breathing beside him. He wanted Silvertongue to go on and on until the words became flesh and blood, but Fenoglio’s words soon came to an end, and Roxane was gone.
‘And Brianna?’ Silvertongue spoke her name, and Dustfinger could already see his daughter standing there in the night, turning her face away as she usually did when he came close to her. ‘Your daughter is here, but you hardly dare look at her. Shall I show you Brianna too?’
‘Yes,’ said Dustfinger softly, ‘show me Brianna.’
Silvertongue cleared his throat, as if to make sure that his voice was at its full strength. ‘There’s nothing written about your daughter in Fenoglio’s book, except for her name and a few words about the small child that she isn’t any more. So I can only say what everyone can see about her.’
Dustfinger’s heart contracted, as if afraid of the words that were coming. His daughter, his daughter who was a stranger to him.
‘Brianna has inherited her mother’s beauty, but everyone who sets eyes on her thinks of you too.’ Silvertongue spoke the words carefully, as if plucking every one of them out of the night, assembling Brianna’s face out of the stars. ‘There’s fire in her hair and in her heart, and when she looks in the mirror she thinks of her father …’
And bears him a grudge for coming back from the dead without bringing Cosimo too, thought Dustfinger. Hush, he wanted to tell Silvertongue, forget my daughter. Tell me more about Roxane instead. But he kept silent, and Silvertongue went on.
‘Brianna is so much more grown-up than Meggie, but sometimes she looks like a lost child whose own beauty seems uncanny to her. She has her mother’s grace and her beautiful voice – even the Prince’s bear listens when Brianna sings – but all her songs are sad, saying that those we love will be lost someday.’
Dustfinger felt tears on his face. He had forgotten how they felt, so cool on his skin. He wiped them away with his hot fingers.
But Silvertongue went on, his voice as gentle as if he were speaking of his own daughter. ‘She looks at you when she thinks you won’t notice. She follows you with her eyes as if looking for herself in your face. And no doubt she wishes both of us would tell her what it’s like among the dead, and whether we saw Cosimo there.’
‘I saw two of him,’ said Dustfinger softly. ‘I expect she’d gladly exchange me for either of them.’
He turned and looked down at the lake.
‘What is it?’ asked Silvertongue.
Without a word, Dustfinger pointed down. A fiery serpent was crawling through the night. Torches. The waiting was over. The guards on the bridge began to move. One of them ran back to the castle to take the news to Violante.
The Adderhead was coming.
55
The Wrong Time
‘Is he your latest?’ asked Man.
‘Hard to say,’ God replied, peering into the Newt’s eyes. ‘He might have been here a while. Some things take an awful lot of work. But others – they just seem to turn up, somehow. All ready-made. Very odd!’
Ted Hughes,
The Playmate, from The Dreamcatcher and Other Stories
Dustfinger saw the torches down in the forest. Of course. The Adderhead feared daylight. Damn it all, the ink was too thick again.
‘Rosenquartz!’ Fenoglio wiped the pen on his sleeve and looked
around in search of the glass man. Walls made of branches elaborately woven together, the writing-board Doria had made him, his bed of leaves and moss, the candle that Farid kept relighting for him when the wind blew it out – but no Rosenquartz.
Very likely he and Jasper hadn’t yet given up hope of finding glass women, even up here. After all, Farid had been fool enough to tell them he’d seen at least two – ‘as pretty as fairies,’ the idiot had added! Ever since then the two glass men had been clambering around in the branches so eagerly that it was only a question of time when they would break their silly necks. Stupid creatures.
Well, never mind. Fenoglio dipped his pen back into the thick ink. He must just make do with things as they were. He loved his new perch for writing, so high that his world was truly at his feet, even if the glass man kept playing truant and it was terribly cold at night. Nowhere before had he felt so strongly that the words were coming to him as if of their own accord.
Yes, he’d write the Bluejay his very best song up here in the crown of a tree. What place could be more suitable? The last picture the flames showed Farid had been reassuring: Dustfinger behind the castle battlements, Mortimer asleep … it could only mean that the Adderhead hadn’t reached the castle yet. Well, how could he, Fenoglio? he thought with satisfaction. You broke his coach wheel in the middle of the darkest part of the forest. That should hold the Silver Prince up for at least two days, if not more. Plenty of time for writing, now that the words loved him again.
‘Rosenquartz!’ If I have to call him once more, thought Fenoglio, I personally am going to throw him out of this tree.
‘I’m not hard of hearing, thank you very much. Far from it. I hear better than you.’ The glass man emerged from the darkness so suddenly that Fenoglio left a large blot of ink on the paper right beside the Adderhead’s name. Well, he hoped that was a good omen. Rosenquartz dipped a thin twig in the ink and started stirring without a word of apology, without a word to explain where he had been. Concentrate, Fenoglio. Forget the glass man. Write.
And the words came. They came easily. The Adderhead was on his way back to the castle where he had once paid court to Violante’s mother, and his immortality was a burden to him. In his swollen hands he held the White Book that tormented him worse than his own torturers could have done. But soon there would be an end to it, because his daughter was going to hand over the man who had done all this to him. How sweet revenge would taste when the Bluejay had cured the book and his own rotting flesh! Dream of your revenge, Silver Prince, thought Fenoglio as he wrote down the Adderhead’s dark thoughts. Think of nothing but your revenge – and forget that you’ve never trusted your daughter!
‘Well, fancy that, he’s writing!’ The words were only a whisper, but the Adderhead’s face, so clear a moment ago that Fenoglio could have touched it, blurred and changed into the face of Signora Loredan. Meggie was with her. Why wasn’t the child asleep? It didn’t surprise Fenoglio in the least that her deranged aunt clambered around the branches by night, very likely in pursuit of every shining moth, but Meggie – she was tired to death after insisting on climbing the trunk with Doria, instead of being pulled up like the children.
‘Yes, he’s writing,’ he growled. ‘And he’d probably have finished long ago if people didn’t keep interrupting him the whole time.’
‘What do you mean, the whole time?’ replied Loredan. She sounded aggressive again, and she looked so silly in the three dresses she was wearing, one on top of the other. It was amazing she could find so many in her considerable size. Luckily Battista had been able to make jackets for the children out of the monstrous garment she’d been wearing when she had stumbled into Fenoglio’s world.
‘Elinor—’ Meggie tried to interrupt her, but no one could ever stop that busy tongue, as Fenoglio had discovered by now.
‘The whole time, he says!’ Now she was letting wax from her candle drop on to the paper too! ‘Is he hard at work day and night making sure the children don’t fall out of these damn nests, is he climbing up and down this wretched tree to bring up something to eat? Is he repairing the walls so that the wind doesn’t kill us all, is he keeping watch? No, but people are interrupting him the whole time.’
Splash. Another drop of candle wax. And what a nerve she had, leaning over to look at the words he’d just written. ‘This really doesn’t sound bad,’ she informed Meggie, as if Fenoglio had dissolved into the cold forest air before their eyes. ‘No, not at all bad.’
It was beyond belief.
Now Rosenquartz too was bending over his lines, wrinkling up his glassy forehead so much that it looked as if water were tracing folds there.
‘Oh, and do you, by any chance, want to deliver your opinion as well before I go on writing?’ Fenoglio asked him sharply. ‘Anything in particular you fancy? You want me to put a heroic glass man into the story, or a fat woman who always knows best and will drive the Adderhead to such distraction that he’ll hand himself over to the White Women of his own free will? That would be one solution, I suppose.’
Meggie came up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘You don’t know how much longer you’ll need, do you?’ Her voice sounded so desolate. Not at all like a voice that had already changed this world several times.
‘It won’t be long now.’ Fenoglio took great care to sound confident. ‘The words are coming. They—’ He fell silent.
From outside came the hoarse, long-drawn-out cry of a falcon. Again and again. The guards’ alarm signal. Oh no.
The nest into which Fenoglio had settled hung over a branch broader than any street in Ombra, but once again he felt dizzy when he climbed down the ladder Doria had made him so that he wouldn’t have to let himself down on a rope. On the Black Prince’s orders, ropes woven by the robbers from bark and climbing plants had been stretched everywhere. In addition, the tree itself had so many air-roots and branches hanging down that there was always something to hold on to. Yet none of that could make you forget the deep void yawning under the slippery boughs. The fact is, Fenoglio, you’re no squirrel, he told himself as he clung to a few woody shoots and peered down. But for an old man you’re not doing too badly up here.
‘They’re hauling in the ropes!’ Signora Loredan, unlike him, was surprisingly agile as she moved through the air along the wooden paths.
‘I can see that for myself!’ growled Fenoglio. They were hauling up all the ropes that went down to the foot of the tree. That boded no good.
Farid came climbing down to them. He often joined the guards posted by the Black Prince in the top branches of the tree. Heavens, how could any human being climb like that? The boy was almost as good at it as his marten.
‘Torches! They’re coming closer!’ he said breathlessly. ‘And do you hear the dog barking?’ He looked accusingly at Fenoglio. ‘Didn’t you say no one knew about this tree? Didn’t you claim it had been forgotten, and the nests with it?’
Blaming him. Of course. Something goes wrong, and it’s all Fenoglio’s fault!
‘Well? Dogs find forgotten places too!’ he snapped at the boy. ‘Why not ask who wiped our tracks out? Where’s the Black Prince?’
‘Down on the ground with his bear. Trying to hide him. The stupid creature just refuses to be hauled up!’
Fenoglio listened. Sure enough, he heard dogs. Damn it, damn it, damn it!
‘So what about it?’ Of course Signora Loredan was acting as if none of it bothered her at all. ‘They can’t get us down, can they? A tree like this must be easy to defend!’
‘They can starve us out, though.’
Farid understood more about situations like this, and Elinor Loredan suddenly looked rather anxious after all. And who was she staring at?
‘Ah, so now I’m your last hope again, is that right?’ Fenoglio imitated her voice. ‘Write something, Fenoglio, go on! It can’t be all that difficult!’
The children clambered out of the nests where they slept. They ran along the branches as if they were meadow footpaths, peering
down in alarm. They looked like pretty beetles in the gigantic tree. Poor little things.
Despina ran to Fenoglio. ‘They can’t get up the tree, can they?’
Her brother just looked at him.
‘Of course not,’ said Fenoglio, although Ivo’s eyes accused him of lying. Ivo was spending more and more time with Roxane’s son Jehan these days. The two boys got on well. They both knew too much about the world for lads of their age.
Farid took Meggie’s arm. ‘Battista says we ought to get the children into the top nests. Will you help me?’
Of course she nodded – she still liked him far too much – but Fenoglio held her back. ‘Meggie stays here. I might need her.’
Naturally, Farid immediately knew what he was talking about. In his black eyes Fenoglio saw the reborn Cosimo riding through the streets of Ombra, and the dead men lying among the trees in the Wayless Wood.
‘We don’t need your words!’ said the boy. ‘I’ll send fire raining down on them if they try to climb up!’
Fire? An alarming word in a forest.
‘Well, perhaps I can think of something better,’ said Fenoglio, and sensed Meggie’s desperate eyes on him. What about my father? they asked. Yes, what about him? Which set of words was more urgent now? Damn it, damn it, damn it!
A few of the children began crying, and below him Fenoglio saw the torches that Farid had mentioned. They shone in the night like fire-elves, but with far more menace.
Farid led Despina and Ivo away with him. The other children followed. Darius went to them, his thin hair untidy from sleep, and took the small hands that reached out in search of his. He glanced in concern at Elinor, but she just stood there staring darkly at the depths below, her hands clenched into fists.
‘Let them come!’ she said fiercely, her voice shaking. ‘I hope the bear will eat them all! I hope those men who hunt children will all be hacked to pieces!’
A lunatic of a woman, but she took the words right out of Fenoglio’s mouth. Meggie’s eyes were still fixed on him.
‘Why are you looking at me like that? What am I supposed to do, Meggie?’ he asked. ‘This story is telling itself in two places again. Which of them needs the words more urgently? Am I supposed to grow a second head, or—?’
He stopped abruptly.