“How do you know all this?” she asked. “He never told me you knew each other so well.”
Oh, no one knows him better, thought Fenoglio. I can assure you, my beauty, no one knows him better.
Roxane pushed her black hair back from her face. Fenoglio saw a trace of gray in it, as if she had combed it with a dusty comb. “I shall ride early in the morning,” she said.
“Excellent.” Fenoglio drew his horse to his side. Why was it so difficult to get onto these creatures with anything like elegance? “Look after yourself,” he said, when he was finally on the horse’s back. “And the letter, too. And give Meggie my love. Tell her everything will be all right. I promise.”
As he rode away she stood beside her sleeping son, looking thoughtful, and watched him go. He really did hope she would find Dustfinger, and it wasn’t just that he wanted Meggie to get his words. No. A little happiness in this story couldn’t hurt, and Roxane was not happy without Dustfinger. That was the way he’d fixed it.
He doesn’t deserve her, all the same, thought Fenoglio again as he rode toward the lights of Ombra, which were neither as bright nor as many as the lights of his old world but were at least equally inviting. Soon the houses behind the protecting walls would be without their men folk.
They would all be going with Cosimo, including Minerva’s husband – although she had begged him to stay – and the cobbler whose workshop was next to his. Even the rag-collector who went around every Tuesday was going to fight the Adderhead. Would they follow Cosimo as willingly if I’d made him ugly? Fenoglio wondered. Ugly as the Adderhead with his butcher’s face? No, people find it easier to believe that a man with a handsome face has good intentions, so he had done well to put an angel on the throne. Yes, that was clever, extremely clever. Fenoglio caught himself humming quietly as the horse carried him past the guards. They let him in without a word, their prince’s poet, the man who put their world into words and had made it out of words.
Bow your heads to Fenoglio!
The guards would go with Cosimo, too, and the soldiers up in the castle, and the grooms who were hardly as old as the boy who went around with Dustfinger. Even Minerva’s son Ivo would have gone if she had let him. They’ll all come back, thought Fenoglio, as he rode toward the stables. Or most of them, at least. It will end well, I know it will. Not just well, but very well indeed!
Chapter 52 – Angry Orpheus
All words are written in the same ink, “flower” and “power,” say, are much the same, and though I might write “blood, blood, blood” all over the page, the paper would not be stained nor would I bleed.
– Philippe Jaccottet, “Chant d’en Bas”
Elinor lay on her air mattress staring at the ceiling. She had quarreled with Orpheus again, even though she knew she’d be punished with the cellar. Sent to bed early, Elinor! she thought bitterly. That was how her father used to punish her as a child when he caught her yet again with a book that he didn’t think she should be reading at her age. Sent to bed early, sometimes at five in the afternoon. It had been particularly bad in summer, when the birds were singing and her sister was playing outside under the window – her sister who didn’t care for books at all, but liked nothing so much as telling tales on Elinor when, instead of playing with her, she buried her head in a book that her father had said she mustn’t read.
“Elinor, please don’t quarrel with Orpheus!” Darius had tried drumming that into her so often, but no, she just couldn’t control her temper! How could she be expected to, when his wretched dog slobbered all over some of her most valuable books because his master never thought of putting them back on their shelves when he’d had his fun with them?
Recently, however, he hadn’t been taking any more books off the shelves, not one. That at least was a small comfort. “He just reads Inkheart, ” Darius had whispered to her as they were washing the dishes together in the kitchen. Her dishwasher had broken down. As if it wasn’t bad enough to be working as a kitchen maid in her own house, now her hands were all swollen with washing-up water! “He seems to be looking for words,” Darius whispered. “Then he puts them together differently, writes them down, writes and writes; the wastepaper basket is brimming over. He keeps on trying, and then he reads what he’s written out loud, and when nothing happens .. ”
“Yes? Then what?”
“Oh, nothing,” Darius had said evasively, scrubbing away industriously at a pan encrusted with fat, but Elinor knew that if it was “nothing” he wouldn’t have turned so embarrassed and silent.
“Then what?” she repeated – and Darius, blushing to his ears, had finally told her. Then Orpheus threw her books, her wonderful books, at the walls. He flung them on the floor in his rage – now and then one even sailed out of the window – and all because he couldn’t do what Meggie had done. Inkheart was closed to him, however lovingly he cooed and implored in his velvety voice, reading and rereading the sentences he so longed to slip between.
Of course, she had run straight off when she next heard him shouting. She’d gone to save her printed children. “No!” Orpheus had yelled, so loudly that you could hear him in the kitchen. “No, no, no! Let me in, you thrice-accursed thing! I sent Dustfinger back into you! Can’t you understand that? What would you be without him? I gave you back Mortola and Basta! I’ve earned my reward, haven’t I?”
The man built like a wardrobe wasn’t standing outside the library door to stop Elinor. He was probably roaming the house yet again, to see if he could find something worth stealing after all.
Not in a hundred years would it have occurred to him that the books were by far the most valuable things in the place. Later, Elinor couldn’t remember the names she had called Orpheus.
She remembered only the book he was holding in his raised hand, a beautiful edition of the poems of William Blake. And for all her furious insults, he threw it out of the window, while the wardrobe man grabbed her from behind and dragged her to the cellar stairs.
Oh, Meggie! thought Elinor as she lay on the air mattress, staring up at the crumbling plaster on her cellar ceiling. Why didn’t you take me with you? Why didn’t you at least ask if I’d like to come, too?
Chapter 53 – The Barn Owl
And every doctor must know that God has set a great mystery in the plants, if only because of the spirits and wild fancies that cast men into despair, and this aid comes not from the Devil but from Nature.
– Paracelsus, Works
The sea. Meggie hadn’t seen it since the day they drove back from Capricorn’s village to Elinor’s house with the fairies and brownies who were nothing but ashes now. “This is where the physician whom I told you about lives,” said Dustfinger, when the bay appeared beyond the trees. It was beautiful. The sun made the water shimmer like green glass, foaming glass constantly shaped by the wind into new folds. It was a strong wind, driving veils of cloud over the blue sky, and it carried a scent of salt and distant islands. It would have gladdened the heart but for the bare hill in the distance rising above the wooded slopes, and the castle on the top of the hill, broad and heavy as its master’s face, in spite of its silvered rooftops and battlements.
“Yes, there it is,” said Dustfinger when he saw Meggie’s look of alarm. “The Castle of Night. And the hill where it stands is called Mount Adder, what else? Bare as an old man’s bald head, so no one can come close under the cover of trees. But don’t worry, it’s not quite as close as it looks.”