Inkdeath Page 11

  left or the right. They were brothers called Jasper and Ironstone, and as different as day and night. Ironstone, the elder, loved lecturing his younger brother and ordering him about. Farid often wanted to wring his glass neck. He himself had two older brothers; they’d been one of the reasons why he had run away from home and joined a band of robbers.

  ‘Shut up!’ Orpheus snapped at the quarrelling glass men. ‘What ridiculous creatures you are! Stir to the left, stir to the right – just make sure you don’t spatter my whole desk with ink again while you’re stirring.’

  Ironstone looked accusingly at Jasper – of course! If anyone had spattered Orpheus’s desk with ink, it had to be his little brother. But he preserved a grim silence as Orpheus put pen to paper again.

  ‘Farid, you really must learn to read!’ How often Meggie had told him that. And, with some difficulty, she had taught him a few letters of the alphabet. B for bear, R for robber (‘look, Farid, there’s a letter R in your name too’), M for Meggie, F for fire (wasn’t it wonderful that his name began with the same letter?), and D … D for Dustfinger. He always got the rest mixed up. How were you supposed to remember those funny little things with their scrawled lines stretching all whichways? AOUIMTNP … it gave him a headache just to look at them. But yes, he must learn to read, he must. How else was he ever to find out whether Orpheus was really trying to write Dustfinger back?

  ‘Snippets, nothing but snippets!’ Orpheus pushed Jasper aside with a curse as the glass man came up to sprinkle sand over the fresh ink. Grimly, he tore the sheet of paper he had been writing on into tiny scraps. Farid was used to that sight. Orpheus was seldom satisfied with what he put down on paper. He crumpled up what he had written, tore it in pieces, threw it on the fire with a curse, bullied the glass men and drank too much. But when he succeeded he was even more unbearable. He puffed himself up like a bullfrog, stalked proudly through Ombra like a newly-crowned king, kissed the maids with his moist, complacent lips, and let everyone know he had no equal. ‘Let them call the old man Inkweaver!’ he shouted, loudly enough to be heard all over the house. ‘It suits him. He’s nothing but a craftsman, while I … I am an enchanter! Ink-Enchanter, that’s what they ought to call me. That’s what they will call me someday!’

  But tonight, yet again, the enchantment didn’t seem to be working. ‘Toad-twaddle! Goose-cackle! Leaden words!’ he said angrily without raising his head. ‘Just a mush of words, that’s what you’re smearing the paper with today, Orpheus: a watery, unseasoned, tasteless, slimy mush of words!’

  The two glass men hastily scrambled down the legs of the desk and began picking up the shreds of paper.

  ‘My lord, the boy is back.’ No one could sound more servile than Oss. His voice bowed to Orpheus as readily as his massive body, but his fingers held the nape of Farid’s neck in a steely grip.

  Orpheus turned, his face like thunder, and stared at Farid as if he had finally pin-pointed the reason for his failure. ‘Where the devil have you been? With Fenoglio all this time? Or helping your girlfriend’s father to steal into the castle and out again? Oh yes, I’ve heard about his latest exploit. Presumably they’ll be singing the first bad songs about it tomorrow. That fool of a bookbinder really does play the ridiculous part the old man wrote him with touching enthusiasm.’ Envy and contempt mingled in Orpheus’s voice, as they so often did when he spoke of Silvertongue.

  ‘He’s not playing a part. He is the Bluejay.’ Farid trod on Oss’s foot hard enough to make him let go of his neck, and when the man tried to grab it again he pushed him away. With a grunt, the Chunk raised his big fist, but a glance from Orpheus halted him.

  ‘Oh, really? Have you joined the ranks of his admirers too?’ He put a clean sheet of paper on his desk and stared at it, as though that could fill it with the right words. ‘Jasper, what are you doing down there?’ he snapped at the glass man. ‘How often do I have to tell you two that the maids can sweep up scraps of paper? Sharpen me another pen!’

  Farid picked Jasper up, put him on the desk and earned a grateful smile. The younger glass man had to do all the unpleasant jobs – that was how his brother had fixed it – and sharpening pens was the most unpleasant of all, because the tiny blade they used slipped very easily. Only a few days ago it had cut deeply into Jasper’s matchstick-thin arm, and Farid had discovered that glass men bleed like humans. Jasper’s blood was transparent, of course. It had dripped on to Orpheus’s paper like liquid glass, and Ironstone had slapped his little brother’s face and called him a clumsy fool. For that, Farid had mixed some beer with the sand Ironstone ate. Since then Ironstone’s limbs, usually clear as water (and he had been very proud of that), had been as yellow as horse’s piss.

  Orpheus went to the window. ‘If you stay out and about so long again,’ he said to Farid over his shoulder, ‘I’ll tell Oss to beat you like a dog.’

  The Chunk smiled, and Farid cursed silently as he contemplated them both. But Orpheus was still looking up at the black night sky with a morose expression. ‘Would you believe it?’ he said. ‘That old fool Fenoglio didn’t even go to the trouble of naming the stars in this world. No wonder I keep running out of words! What’s the moon called here? You’d think his senile old brain might at least have bothered about that, but no! He just called it “the moon”, as if it were the same moon we saw from our windows in the other world.’

  ‘Perhaps it really is the same moon. It was in my story too,’ said Farid.

  ‘Rubbish, of course it was different!’ Orpheus turned to the window again, as if he had to explain to the entire world out there how badly made it was. ‘“Fenoglio,” I ask him,’ he went on in the self-satisfied voice that Ironstone always listened to devoutly, as if it were announcing truths never heard before, ‘“is Death a woman or a man in this world? Or is it perhaps just a door through which you pass into quite a different story, one that you yourself unfortunately omitted to write?” “How do I know?” he says. How does he know? Who else knows if he doesn’t? He doesn’t tell us in his book, anyway.’

  In his book … Ironstone, who had climbed up to join Orpheus on the windowsill, cast a reverent glance at the desk where the last copy of Inkheart lay beside the sheet of paper on which Orpheus was writing. Farid wasn’t sure whether the glass man really understood that his entire world, himself included, had presumably slipped out of that same book. It usually lay there open, for when Orpheus was writing he kept leafing through it with restless fingers in search of the right words. He never used a single word that couldn’t be found in Inkheart, for he was firmly convinced that only words from Fenoglio’s story could learn to breathe in this world. Others were just ink on paper.

  ‘“Fenoglio,” I ask, “are the White Women only servants?”’ Orpheus went on, as Ironstone hung on every word from his soft – over-soft – lips. ‘“Do the dead stay with them, or do the White Women take them somewhere else?” “I expect so,” the old fool replies. “I once told Minerva’s children about a castle made of bones to comfort them for Cloud-Dancer’s death, but I was only talking off the cuff.” Off the cuff! Huh!’

  ‘The old fool!’ repeated Ironstone like an echo, but in his reedy, glass man’s voice it was not a very impressive sound.

  Orpheus turned and went back to his desk. ‘With all your roaming around, I hope at least you didn’t forget to tell Mortimer I want to talk to him? Or was he too busy playing the hero?’

  ‘He says there’s nothing to talk about. He says he doesn’t know anything about the White Women except what everyone knows.’

  ‘Oh, wonderful!’ Orpheus reached for one of the pens that Jasper had sharpened so laboriously and snapped it in two. ‘Did you at least ask whether he still sees them sometimes?’

  ‘I’m sure he does.’ Jasper’s voice was as delicate as his limbs. ‘Once the White Women have touched someone they never let him go. Or so the moss-women say.’

  ‘I know that!’ said Orpheus impatiently. ‘I tried questioning a moss-woman about that rumour, but
the nasty creature wouldn’t talk about it. She just stared at me with her mousy eyes and said I eat too much rich food and drink too much wine!’

  ‘They talk to the fairies,’ Jasper said. ‘And fairies talk to glass men. Although not all of them,’ he added with a sidelong glance at his brother. ‘I’ve heard that the moss-women tell another tale of the White Women too. They say they can be summoned by anyone whose heart they’ve already touched with their cold fingers.’

  ‘Oh, indeed?’ Orpheus looked thoughtfully at the glass man. ‘I hadn’t heard that one before.’

  ‘And it’s not true! I’ve tried summoning them!’ said Farid. ‘Again and again!’

  ‘You! How often do I have to explain that you died much too quickly?’ Orpheus snapped contemptuously at him. ‘You were in a great hurry to die, and just as great a hurry to come back. What’s more, you’re such a poor catch that I’d assume they don’t even remember you! No, you’re not the person to do it.’ He went to the window again. ‘Go and make me some tea!’ he told Farid without turning. ‘I have to think.’

  ‘What kind of tea?’

  Farid put Jasper on his shoulder. He took the little man with him whenever he could, to keep him safe from his big brother. Sometimes, when Orpheus didn’t need either of them because he was taking his pleasure with one of the maids, or seeing his tailor for yet another fitting of some new clothes – which could last hours – Farid took Jasper with him to Seamstresses’ Alley, where the glass women helped to thread the dressmakers’ needles, tread seams smooth with their tiny feet, and tack lace to costly silk. For Farid had now also learnt that glass men don’t just bleed, they fall in love too, and Jasper was head over heels in love with a girl who had pale yellow limbs. He was only too fond of watching her in secret through her mistress’s workshop window.

  ‘What kind of tea? How should I know? Something good for stomach-ache,’ replied Orpheus crossly. ‘I’ve had a pain in my belly all day as if there were stag beetles in it. How am I supposed to get anything sensible down on paper in that state?’

  Of course. Orpheus always complained of stomach-ache or a headache when his writing wasn’t going well. I hope his belly torments him all night, thought Farid as he closed the study door behind him. I hope it plagues him until he writes something for Dustfinger at last.

  13

  A Knife through the Heart

  So far as he was concerned, as yet, there might never have been such a thing as a single particle of sorrow on the gay, sweet surface of the dew-glittering world.

  T.H. White,

  The Once and Future King

  ‘At least he didn’t tell you to go for the physician!’ Jasper was doing his best to cheer Farid up as he carried him down the steep stairs to the kitchen. Yes indeed, the physician who lived beyond the city gate. Orpheus had sent Farid there only a few days ago. If you went to fetch him at night he threw logs of wood at you, or came to the door brandishing one of the pairs of pincers he used to draw teeth.

  ‘Stomach-ache! Headache!’ said Farid crossly. ‘Cheeseface has been over-eating again, that’s all!’

  ‘Three roast gold-mockers filled with chocolate, fairy-nuts roasted in honey, and half a sucking pig stuffed with chestnuts,’ said Jasper, counting it up. Then he ducked in alarm as he saw Jink by the kitchen door. The marten made Jasper nervous, even though Farid kept assuring him that while martens did like to chase glass men, they never, ever ate them.

  There was only one maid still in the kitchen. Farid stopped in the doorway when he saw it was Brianna. That was all he needed. She was scrubbing the pots and pans from supper, her beautiful face grey with exhaustion. The working day began for Orpheus’s maids before sunrise and often didn’t end until the moon was high in the sky. Orpheus himself made a tour of inspection of the whole house every morning, looking for cobwebs and dust, a speck on one of the mirrors that hung everywhere, a tarnished silver spoon, or a shirt that still showed a dirty mark after laundering. If he found anything he would deduct a sum from all the maids’ paltry wages on the spot. And he almost always did find something.

  ‘What do you want?’ Brianna turned, wiping her wet hands on her apron.

  ‘Orpheus has stomach-ache,’ muttered Farid, without looking at her. ‘I’m to make him some tea.’

  Brianna went to one of the kitchen dressers and took an earthenware jar off the top shelf. Farid didn’t know which way to look as she poured hot water on the herbs. Her hair was the same colour as her father’s, but wavy, and it shone in the candlelight like the red gold rings that the governor liked to wear on his thin fingers. The strolling players sang songs about Dustfinger’s daughter and her broken heart.

  ‘Why are you staring like that?’ She took a sudden step towards him. Her voice was so cutting that Farid instinctively flinched back. ‘Yes, I look like him, don’t I?’

  It was as if, all through the silence of the last few weeks, she had been sharpening her words until they were knives that she could thrust through his heart.

  ‘You don’t look in the least like him. I keep telling my mother so. You’re only some good-for-nothing layabout who made out that he was my father’s son, keeping the pretence up so long that in the end my father thought he had to die for you!’

  Every word a knife, and Farid felt them piercing his heart.

  Brianna’s eyes were not like her father’s. She had her mother’s eyes, and they looked at Farid with the same hostility as Roxane’s. He wanted to hit her to silence her beautiful mouth. But she resembled Dustfinger too much.

  ‘You’re a demon, an evil spirit bringing nothing but bad luck.’ She handed him the ready-brewed tea. ‘There, take Orpheus that. And tell him his stomach would feel better if he didn’t eat so much.’

  Farid’s hands trembled as he took the mug.

  ‘You don’t know anything about it!’ he said hoarsely. ‘Nothing at all. I didn’t want him to bring me back. Being dead felt much better.’

  But Brianna only looked at him with her mother’s eyes. And her father’s face.

  And Farid stumbled back up to Orpheus’s room with the hot tea, while Jasper stroked his hair with his tiny glass hand, full of pity.

  14

  News from Ombra

  And leafing through old books we sometimes find

  A dark, oracular phrase is underlined.

  You once were here, but in time out of mind.

  Rainer Maria Rilke,

  Improvisations from Capri in Winter III

  Meggie liked it in the robbers’ camp. Sometimes it almost seemed to Resa as if her daughter had always dreamt of living in shabby tents. She watched Battista making himself a new mask, asked the Strong Man to teach her how to speak to the larks, and accepted the wild flowers that his younger brother brought her with a smile. It was good to see Meggie smiling again more often, although Farid was still with Orpheus. But Resa missed the farm they had left behind. She missed the silence and seclusion, and the sense of being alone with Mo and Meggie after all the weeks when they had been apart. Weeks, months, years …

  Sometimes, when she saw the two of them sitting by the fire with the robbers, she felt almost as if she were watching them at a game they had played all through the years when she hadn’t been with them. Come on, Mo, let’s play robbers.

  The Black Prince had advised Mo not to go outside the camp for the time being, and for a few days he took that advice. But on the third night he disappeared into the forest once more, all alone, as if to go in search of himself. And on the fourth night he went out with the robbers again.

  Battista had sung Resa the songs that were going around Ombra after Mo’s venture into the city. The Bluejay had flown away, said the songs, escaping on the back of the Milksop’s best horse. It was said that he had killed ten guards, imprisoned Sootbird in the vault and stolen Balbulus’s finest books. ‘How much of it is true?’ she had asked Mo. He laughed. ‘I’m afraid I can’t be said to have flown!’ he had whispered, caressing her belly in which their child w
as slowly growing. And then he had gone out with the Black Prince again. And she lay there night after night, listening to the songs Battista sang outside the tent, terrified for her husband.

  The Black Prince had had two tents pitched for them right beside his own. They were patched together from old clothes that the robbers had dyed with oak bark so that they wouldn’t show up too much among the surrounding trees: one tent for Meggie, one for the Bluejay and his wife. The mats of dried moss on which they slept were damp, and when Mo went out at night Resa shared the tent with her daughter for warmth. One day the grass was so white with hoarfrost in the morning that you could see the glass men’s tracks in it. ‘This will be a hard winter,’ said the Strong Man, not for the first time.

  One could still find giants’ footsteps in the ravine where the camp lay. The rain of the last few weeks had turned them into ponds where gold-spotted frogs swam. The trees on the slopes of the ravine rose to the sky, almost as tall as the trees in the Wayless Wood. Their withering leaves covered the ground, which was cool now in autumn, with gold and flaming red, and fairies’ nests hung among the branches like overripe fruit. If you looked south you could see a village in the distance, its walls showing pale as mushrooms between the trees, but it was such a poor village that even the Milksop’s greedy tax-gatherers didn’t bother to come this way. Wolves howled by night in the surrounding woods, pale grey owls like little ghosts flew over the shabby tents, and horned squirrels stole what food there was to steal among the camp fires.

  There were a good fifty men living in the camp, sometimes more. The youngest were the two boys saved from hanging by Snapper, and now they both went spying for the Prince: Doria, the Strong Man’s brother, who brought Meggie wild flowers, and his orphaned friend Luc. Luc helped Gecko to tame his crows. Six women cooked and mended for the robbers, but none of them went out at night with the men. Resa drew portraits of almost all of them, boys, men and women. Battista had found paper and chalk for her; where, he didn’t say. She wondered, as she portrayed every face, if the lines on them had indeed been drawn by Fenoglio’s words alone, or whether they weren’t perhaps, after all, living their own lives in this world independently of the old man.

  The women did not even join the men when they sat together talking. Resa always sensed the disapproving looks when she and Meggie sat down quite naturally with Mo and the Black Prince. Sometimes she returned those glances, staring Snapper in the face, and Gecko, and all the others who tolerated women in the camp only to cook food and mend clothes. She cursed the nausea that kept coming back and prevented her from at least going with Mo when he and the Prince walked in the surrounding hills, looking for a place offering better shelter for the winter.

  They had been in the camp that Meggie called the Camp of Lost Giants for five days and five nights when Doria and Luc returned from Ombra about midday with news. It was obviously such bad news that Doria didn’t even tell it to his brother, but went straight to the Black Prince’s tent. A little later the Prince sent for Mo, and Battista assembled the men.

  Doria glanced at his strong brother before stepping into the circle of robbers, as if drawing courage from him to tell his news. But his voice was clear and firm when he began to speak. He sounded so much older than he was.

  ‘The Piper came out of the Wayless Wood yesterday,’ he began. ‘He took the road that approaches Ombra from the west, burning and looting as he went, letting it be known everywhere that the Milksop hasn’t sent enough taxes to the Castle of Night, and he’s here to collect more.’