Inkspell (36 page)

– book so forcibly puts it.”

“Her son was a murderer!” Elinor clenched her fists. She wanted to rush at the moon-face and snatch her book from his hands, hands that looked as soft and white as if they had never in their life done anything but turn the pages of a book. However, Sugar barred her way.

“Yes, yes, I know.” Orpheus heaved a heavy sigh. “I know all about Capricorn. I’ve read the
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book telling his story more times than I can count, and I have to say he was a very good villain, one of the best I ever met in the realm of the written word. Just killing someone like that – well, if you ask me, it’s almost a crime. Although I’m glad of it for Dustfinger.”

Oh, if only she could have hit him just once, on his broad nose, on his smiling mouth!

“Capricorn had Mortimer abducted! He captured his daughter and kept his wife a prisoner for years on end!” Tears of rage and helplessness came into Elinor’s eyes. “Please, Mr. Orpheus or whatever your real name is!” She put all her strength and self-control into sounding reasonably friendly. “Please! Bring them back, and while you’re at it please bring Meggie back, too, before she gets trodden on by a giant or impaled on a spear in that story.” Orpheus leaned back and looked at her as if she were a picture on an easel. How naturally he had taken over her armchair

– as if Elinor herself had never sat there with Meggie beside her, or with Resa on her lap when she was still tiny, so many years ago. Elinor bit back her fury.
Control yourself
, Elinor, she thought, as she kept her eyes fixed on Orpheus’s pale, bespectacled face.
Control yourself ! For the
sake of Mortimer, and Resa, and Meggie!

Orpheus cleared his throat. “I don’t know what’s bothering you,” he said, examining his fingernails, which were bitten like a schoolboy’s. “I envy all three of them!”

It was a moment before Elinor realized what he was talking about. Only when he went on did it become clear.

“What makes you think they want to come back?” he asked softly. “If I were there I never would!

There’s nowhere in this world I’ve ever wanted to be half as much as on the hill where the Laughing Prince’s castle lies. I’ve walked through Ombra market countless times, I’ve looked up at the towers and the banners with the lion emblem. I’ve imagined what it would be like to wander through the Wayless Wood and watch Dustfinger stealing honey from the fire-elves. I’ve pictured the minstrel woman he loves, Roxane. I’ve stood in Capricorn’s fortress smelling the potions that Mortola brewed from monkshood and hemlock. The Adderhead’s castle often figures in my dreams, even today. Sometimes I’m in one of its dungeons, sometimes I’m stealing in through the gate with Dustfinger and looking up at the heads of minstrels set there on pikes by the Adderhead for singing the wrong song .. By all the words and letters in the world, when Mortola told me her name I thought she was crazy! Yes, she and Basta did look like the characters they claimed to be, but could it really be true that someone had brought them here out of my favorite book? Were there other people who could read aloud the way I can? I didn’t believe it until Dustfinger came up to me in that musty, ramshackle library. Oh God, how my heart beat when I saw his face with the three pale scars left by Basta’s knife! It beat faster than on the day I first kissed a girl. It really was him, the melancholy hero of my very favorite book.

And I helped him to disappear into it again, but what about me? Hopeless.” He laughed, a sad and bitter laugh. “I just hope he doesn’t have to die the death that idiot of an author intended for him.

No, he can’t! He’ll be all right, I’m sure he will. After all, Capricorn is dead and Basta’s a coward.

Do you know, I wrote to that Fenoglio, the author, when I was twelve, telling him he must change his story, or at least write a sequel in which Dustfinger comes back? He never answered my letter, any more than Inkheart ever had a sequel. Oh well.” Orpheus sighed deeply.

Dustfinger, Dustfinger . . Elinor compressed her lips. Who cared what happened to the matchstick-eater?
Keep calm, Elinor, don’t go off the deep end again, you must be clever now,
clever, go carefully
. . Easier said than done.

“Listen, if you’d like to be in that book so much” – and this time she really did manage to make
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her voice sound as if what she was saying didn’t matter all that much to her – “then why not just bring Meggie back? She knows how you can read yourself into a story. She’s done it! I’m sure she can tell you how to do it or read you over there, too.”

Orpheus’s round face darkened so suddenly that Elinor immediately knew she had made a bad mistake. How could she have forgotten what a vain, conceited creature he was?

“No one,” said Orpheus softly, rising slowly and menacingly from her chair, “no one can tell me anything about the art of reading. Certainly not a little girl!”

Now he’ll put you straight back in the cellar
, thought Elinor.
What am I going to do? Think, Elinor,
try to find the right answer in your silly head! Do something! Surely you can think up something!

“Oh, of course not!” she stammered. “No one but you could have read Dustfinger back. No one.

But –”

“No buts. You watch out.” Orpheus posed as if he were about to sing an aria onstage and picked up the book lying on the chair where he had so carelessly put it down. He opened it right where the dog-ear disfigured the creamy white page, ran the tip of his tongue over his lips as if he had to smooth them so that the words would flow freely – and then his voice filled Elinor’s library again, the captivating voice that did not suit his outward appearance in the least. Orpheus read as if he were letting his favourite food melt in his mouth, relishing it, greedy for the sound of the letters, pearls melting on his tongue, words like seeds from which he was making life emerge.

Perhaps he really was the greatest master ever of his art. He certainly practiced it with the utmost passion.

“There is a tale of a certain shepherd, Tudur of Llangollen, who came across a troop of faeries, dancing to the tune of a tiny fiddler.” A faint chirping sound arose behind Elinor, but when she turned around there was no one to be seen but Sugar, listening to Orpheus’s voice with a bewildered expression on his face. ”
Tudur tried to resist the enchanting strains, but finally,
throwing his cap in the air and shouting, ‘Now for it, then, play away, old devil!’ he joined in.
”

The fiddling grew shriller and shriller, and when Elinor turned around this time she saw a man standing in her library, surrounded by small creatures dressed in leaves and prancing around on his bare feet like a dancing bear, while a step or so away a tiny little thing with a bellflower on its head was playing a fiddle hardly larger than an acorn.

“Immediately, a pair of horns appeared on the fiddler’s head and a tail sprouted from beneath his coat!” Orpheus let his voice swell until he was almost singing. ”
The dancing sprites turned
into goats, dogs, cats, and foxes, and they and Tudur spun around in a dizzying frenzy.
”

Elinor pressed her hands to her mouth. There they were, emerging from behind the armchair, leaping over the stacks of books, dancing on the open pages with their muddy hooves. The dog jumped up and barked at them.

“Stop it!” Elinor cried to Orpheus. “Stop it at once!” He closed the book with a triumphant smile.

“Chase them out into the garden!” he told Sugar, who was standing there transfixed. Confused, the man groped his way over to the door, opened it – and let the whole troop dance past him, fiddling, screeching, barking, bleating, on down Elinor’s corridor and past her bedroom, until the noise gradually died away.

“No one,” repeated Orpheus, and now there was not the smallest trace of a smile to be seen on his round face, “no one can teach Orpheus anything about the art of reading. And did you notice?

Nothing disappeared! Maybe a few bookworms if there are any in your library, maybe a couple of flies. . ”

“Maybe a couple of motorists down on the road,” added Elinor in a hoarse voice, but unfortunately there was no hiding the fact that she was impressed.

“Maybe!” said Orpheus, carelessly shrugging his round shoulders.

“But that wouldn’t make any difference to my mastery, would it? And now I hope you understand something about the art of cooking, because I’m sick and tired of what Sugar serves up. And I’m hungry. I’m always hungry when I’ve been reading aloud.”

“Cooking?” Elinor practically choked on her rage. “You expect me to act as your cook in my own house?”

“Well, of course. Make yourself useful. Or do you want to give Sugar the idea that you and your stammering friend are superfluous to requirements? He’s in a bad mood, anyway, because he hasn’t yet found anything worth stealing in your house. No, we really don’t want to put any stupid notions into his head, do we?”

Elinor took a deep breath and tried to control her trembling knees. “No. No, we don’t,” she said, turned – and went into the kitchen.

Chapter 32 – The Wrong Man

So she placed the healing herb in his mouth – he slept straightaway. She covered him most
carefully. He still slept on the livelong day.

– Wolfram von Eschenbach,
Parsifal

Resa and Mo were alone in the cave when they came in: two .women and four men. Two of the men had been sitting by the fire with Cloud-Dancer: Sootbird the fire-eater and Twofingers. His face was no friendlier by daylight, and the others, too, were looking so hostile that Resa instinctively moved closer to Mo. Only Sootbird seemed to feel awkward.

Mo was asleep. He had slept this uneasy, fevered sleep for many days now, and it made Nettle shake her head anxiously. The six strolling players stopped only a few paces away from him.

They loomed between Resa and the daylight coming in from outside. One of the women stepped out in front of the rest of them. She wasn’t particularly old, but her fingers were crooked like a bird’s claws.

“He must go!” she said. “Today. He’s not one of us, and nor are you.”

“What do you mean?” Hard as Resa was trying to sound calm, her voice shook. “He can’t go anywhere. He’s still too weak.”

If only Nettle had been there! But she had gone away muttering something about sick children –

and the root of an herb that might perhaps cure Mo’s fever. The six would have felt afraid of Nettle, they’d have been respectful and timid, but to the strolling players Resa was only a stranger, a desperate stranger with a mortally sick husband – even if none of them guessed just how much of a stranger she was in this world.

“It’s the children .. you must see how we feel!” The other woman was still very young, and she was pregnant. She placed one protective hand on her belly. “A man like him puts our children in danger, and Martha’s right, you don’t even belong to us. This is the only place where they let us stay. No one drives us away, but once they hear the Bluejay is here, that will be over. They’ll say we were hiding him.”

“But he isn’t this Bluejay! I told you so before. And who do you mean by ‘they’?”

Mo whispered something in his fever, his hand clutching Resa’s arm. She soothingly stroked his forehead and forced a little of the decoction that Nettle had made between his lips. Her visitors watched in silence.

“As if you didn’t know!” said one of them, a tall, thin man shaken by a dry cough. “The Adderhead’s looking for him. He’ll send his men-at-arms here. He’ll have us all hanged for hiding him.”

“I’m telling you again!” Resa took Mo’s hand and held it very tight. “He’s not a robber or anyone else out of your stories! We’ve only been here a few days! My husband is a bookbinder, that’s his trade, he isn’t anything else!”

The way they were looking at her!

“I’ve seldom heard a worse lie!” The twofingered man’s mouth twisted. He had an unpleasant voice. Judging by his brightly patterned clothing, he was one of the players who put on comic shows in marketplaces, loud, coarse farces to make the spectators laugh all their troubles away.

“What would a bookbinder be doing in Capricorn’s old fortress in the middle of the Wayless Wood? People never go there of their own free will, what with the White Women and the other horrors haunting the ruins. And why would Mortola bother with a bookbinder? Why would she shoot him with some witchy weapon no one’s ever heard of before?”

The others nodded agreement – and took another step toward Mo. What was she to do? What could she say? What use was it having a voice if no one would listen to her? “Don’t let it worry you, not being able to speak,” Dustfinger had often told her. “People tend not to listen, anyway, right?”

Perhaps she could call for help, but who was going to come? Cloud-Dancer had set off early in the morning with Nettle, when the leaves had still been tinged red by the light of the rising sun, and the women who brought Resa food and sometimes kept watch beside Mo for her, to let her get a few hours’ sleep, had gone down to the nearby river with the children. There were only a few old men outside the cave, and they had come here because they were tired of other people and were waiting to die. They weren’t likely to help her.