Bookweirdest

by Paul Glennon

  “But you are here. You escaped?” Jerome asked. “You are unharmed?”

  Jerome’s concern helped him snap out of it. The girl who would grow up to be his mother may not care that he had been captured and tortured by an evil knight, but Jerome had a kind heart. It reminded him why he was here.

  “I’m here to help Jerome. That’s the only reason,” Norman said, reaching into his knapsack. “Read this if you don’t believe me.” He removed the copy of Kit’s story and thrust it towards Meg. “But hurry—we don’t have much time.”

  Meg took the stapled sheaf of papers from his fingers. She glanced down long enough to read the title and the name of the author, then flashed a questioning look at Norman.

  “That sweater …” she said, suddenly recognizing the burgundy-and-yellow piping of the grey V-neck that George Kelmsworth wore in every cover illustration.

  “It’s George’s,” Norman said quietly.

  Her brow furrowed and she returned to the pages in front of her.

  “Where is Malcolm, then?” Jerome asked, relieved now that his two visitors had made some sort of truce. “I’ve been dying to tell Meg about him. If she could meet him for herself, that would be even better.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Norman started to say, but Malcolm had finally decided to show his face.

  “Don’t worry. I’m here,” he announced. “Just looking for something of mine, that’s all.”

  He bounded across the floor and began to pry his arrow free. “Can never have too many of these,” he said, pulling on it and the ribbon it held. “Lady Meg, I believe this is yours.” As gallant as ever, he presented the ribbon to the girl. She still had not closed her mouth, which had dropped open the moment Malcolm revealed himself. “My apologies for loosing an arrow upon your lovely hair. I pray you are not harmed. In the darkness, I could not tell that you were a maid. I dare say that in a fair fight, you would have bested young Strong Arm.” He didn’t hide his admiration.

  Meg finally found the voice to express her outrage. “I cannot believe this!” She turned on Norman, throwing the pages of the story at him in disgust. “You’re just like Kit. You can’t leave a book alone. Have you any idea what you’ve done? Has anybody else seen the talking weasel?”

  Malcolm bared a sharp tooth and let out a low growl.

  “Stoat,” Norman corrected her hurriedly. “He’s actually the king of the stoats. The weasels aren’t our friends at the moment.”

  Meg snatched the ribbon from Malcolm’s paws and turned on Norman. “Stop it! Stop telling us this. We can’t know. That’s another book altogether. You can’t keep mixing things up like this. What do you think you’re doing bringing him here?”

  “To tell the truth, Lady Meg”—Malcolm leapt to Norman’s shoulder so that he could meet her eye—“you brought us here. You are the one who took the Mustelid treaty map and hid it here.”

  “What?” She put her hands on her hips and widened her eyes in an expression of outraged disbelief that Norman recognized instantly. “What are you talking about?”

  Norman, Jerome and Malcolm exchanged confused glances.

  “But, Meg,” Jerome said, “do you not remember? You told me to keep it safe for you. You said that by hiding it here, you were protecting someone you held dear.”

  Now everyone was confused. This Meg, the childhood Meg, had never seen the map. The adult Meg wouldn’t bring it to the library for another twenty years, and yet it was always this library at this time to which she returned. For Jerome it had already happened. Norman had thought that he was getting used to the bookweird, but this was hard to get his head around.

  “I what?”

  The sound of a thousand whips lashing the air interrupted her latest outrage.

  Malcolm was instantly on his guard, grasping his bow and an arrow as he dashed to the window. “Heads down, everyone!”

  But no one obeyed him. Drawn by the sound, they followed him to the window in time to see the arrows unleashed from the desert camp inscribe their fiery orange arcs across the night sky.

  Malcolm made a rough estimate of their numbers as arrows rose and fell. “Two hundred archers. That’s a party of some size, and well outside my range.”

  Back in Undergrowth, the stoat king was a sharpshooter of some renown, but he’d only witnessed human archery once, and that was Norman’s one lucky shot, which had felled the wolf at Lochwarren. Seeing the work of these professionals, he could not help marvelling at their power.

  They were all a little speechless standing there, watching the arrows rise and then ever so gently begin their descent towards the fortress. Two hundred tiny points of light hurtled in their direction. They would have been beautiful, had they not meant their destruction. The three human children held their breath as the arrows began to fall. Malcolm continued to count, estimating the distance and the range. At the end of their arcs, the arrows plummeted steeply towards the ground, until one by one the fires blinked out, extinguished by the sand.

  Collectively, they exhaled.

  “Does that mean we’re safe?” Meg asked.

  “They’re just getting their range,” Norman and Malcolm answered together—Malcolm because he knew his siegecraft, and Norman because he had seen it all before from a tent out in the desert.

  “We have to get out of here,” Norman urged them.

  Meg shook her head. “We can’t. Jerome can’t reveal himself. He has to stay hidden.”

  “There’s no use anymore. They’re going to burn the whole fort down. We have to go,” Norman urged her. Then in a lower voice, hoping only she would hear, he added, “I’ve seen it from the desert out there. The whole fort burns down.”

  Her eyes glinted with understanding. She knew how he knew. Still, she couldn’t move. “But the book. We’re wrecking the book.”

  “I … I know.” Norman felt bad for her, but they had to get moving. “But if Jerome dies here, there will be nothing left of the book to salvage.”

  The whoosh of the second volley of arrows finally made her budge.

  Jerome needed no more persuasion. “Let me get my things,” he said.

  Unlike Meg, the young archivist seemed eager to be moving. He’d spent his whole life hiding away in this library, and now finally he was being asked to do something. He ducked into his cubby and drew out the small sack of belongings he’d packed for the trip to England. From the writing table in the middle of the room, he plucked a small scroll from where it had been lying, in plain sight, ever since Meg had asked him to hide it for her.

  “Your map, Your Majesty,” he said, presenting it to Malcolm. The stoat nodded thankfully and held it appreciatively before stuffing it into the ever-useful knapsack.

  “Let me lead the way. It’s easy to get lost,” Jerome said, striding to the first stair.

  Norman well knew it. The last time he was here in San Savino, he’d walked right into a squad of Nantes’s men. He’d been forced to duck behind a curtain. It had not worked very well and had ultimately led to his capture.

  Now they tumbled down the stairs one by one, trusting Jerome to lead them through the dark, but letting Malcolm run ahead at each corner to make sure the coast was clear. The steps descended in twists down to the main clay walls of the fortress. Norman was relieved to be out of the dry wooden tower that housed the library. The scrolls and paper were just so much kindling, and the image of them igniting like a giant torch was hard to forget.

  He couldn’t remember the turns he’d taken through the hallways last time. The baked-clay passages all looked alike to him, but Jerome seemed to know exactly where they were going. Clearly this wasn’t the first time the young archivist had snuck out of his hiding place to do some exploring.

  “There are three main ways out of San Savino,” Jerome explained. “The Jerusalem Gate is the main one on the north side. The Sinon Gate to the west and the Desert Gate to the east are smaller.”

  “We have to assume those are being watched,” Malcolm warned them. “We�
�d have to be prepared to fight our way out.”

  “Is there another way?” Norman fervently hoped there was. He trusted Malcolm in a fight against his own kind, but he was no match for Nantes’s knights.

  The archivist paused as he peered around a corner, holding up a hand to make them wait. When the coast was clear, he beckoned them on again. “I’ve seen some of the boys throw ropes through the lower windows so they may come and go at night,” he said breathlessly. “But we’ll need some rope for that.”

  At the next window, Norman stopped to check the distance to the ground. At that very moment, a volley of arrows landed. Some clattered off the clay walls and others struck the straw roofs below them, setting them instantly ablaze. The sudden light illuminated just how high up they were. “Let’s keep going down,” he urged them.

  They could hear the shouts of the men in the courtyards now—shouts of “Fire!” and “Water!” and a few high-pitched screams of terror.

  “I know a way out,” Meg blurted, as if breaking a vow of secrecy. “Through the cellars, there’s a passage.”

  Norman didn’t have to ask how she knew. He knew how. The Secret in the Library was like a second home to her.

  “Follow me, this way.” She urged them down a narrow passage, away from the main corridor. They met people rushing here and there through the fortress—men rushing down to the courtyard to help in the firefighting effort; women hurrying to fetch their children and find safety. Norman wondered what would happen to them. He had not seen anyone escape the conflagration of San Savino.

  “They’ve found their range now,” Malcolm told them solemnly. “The siege engines will begin soon.”

  He spoke prophetically. They were too deep in the fortress to hear the first projectile being launched and hurtling through the air, but they felt its impact. All of San Savino seemed to shudder. Ahead of Norman, Jerome stopped dead in his tracks, a look of terrified realization on his face.

  “Come on,” Norman told him, grabbing him by the shoulder to urge him on. “Don’t give up now.”

  “But the others—” Jerome whispered. “I had not understood the destruction. So many will die here if we don’t warn them.”

  “There’s nothing we can do!” Norman argued. He could feel the heat coming from down below and was beginning to panic. He fought a sudden cowardly desire to devour a piece of paper and curl up somewhere to try desperately to fall asleep.

  “But Godwyn—he’s an old man. He needs my help.” Jerome did not stay to argue with them, but set off in the opposite direction.

  Norman, Meg and Malcolm stood in stunned silence for a moment, then realized they had to follow him. After all, he was the reason they were all here.

  As Jerome hared through the corridors, he began shouting out warnings. “Hurry to the courtyards! Save yourselves!” If anyone wondered who this strange boy in a monk’s habit running through the fortress was, now was not the time to ask him his name.

  The interlopers could only follow. They were climbing back up towards the main apartments of San Savino, towards the maze where Norman had been captured last time. “We have to warn Sir Hugh and Father Lombard!” Jerome shouted back to them breathlessly. “How big is this passage you spoke of, Meg? Could we all escape that way?”

  “I—” She shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “Not big,” she told him.

  “But some could escape with us, right?”

  There was no arguing with him. The catapults continued their bombardments. San Savino was rocked by tremor after tremor as each flaming projectile struck the town walls. Below them, the screams became louder and higher pitched. A giant crashing sound was heard as some inner building finally gave up under the heat and the flames and fell in on itself.

  “Sir Hugh’s rooms are through here!” Jerome shouted, rounding the corner.

  Norman thought he recognized this corridor—the iron lantern brackets, the enamelled shields that punctuated the walls.

  They were running so frantically now that they didn’t notice who passed them in the other direction. Jerome yelped in pain and surprise as a strong hand grabbed his arm and spun him round.

  “Where on God’s earth do you think you’re going, young man? Father Lombard’s pulling out what’s left of his hair worrying about you.”

  Jerome looked up into the familiar grey eyes of his protector, Sir Hugh.

  “Sir Hugh!” he said. “We all need to flee. They won’t be happy until all of San Savino is rubble.”

  Sir Hugh had seen his share of fighting in his life. He’d walked with a slight limp since the day a horse was taken down beneath him at full gallop, and his tunic hid many old scars. But he had long ago given up the sword and learned that most fights could be avoided.

  “Ah, it may take some doing, but I think we can get Nantes to call off his dogs,” he told them, sounding perhaps more confident than he was. “What we need is a parley, a truce so we can discuss how to resolve this without losing any more lives. I’m heading down to open the gates now. You need to get yourselves to the shelter of the cellars.”

  “That’s just where we were going,” Norman interrupted. He couldn’t help himself. He had to tell Hugh what he knew. “But, Sir Hugh, they won’t stop. They think they have Jerome. All Black John wants now is vengeance.”

  Sir Hugh was not accustomed to interruptions. “Who are you?” he asked, turning angrily. “And what do you know of Black John?” As he spoke, another boulder struck the outer walls; the shudder it sent through the fortress seemed to underline his anger.

  “I’m the boy they found in your chambers,” Norman continued, undaunted. “They think I’m Jerome. They think they’ve captured him.”

  Sir Hugh looked him over. “The thief from my chambers, eh? So it is,” he concluded. “Captured you, did they? And yet here you are now. How to explain that?”

  “I escaped.”

  “Escaped the clutches of evil John of Nantes and ran back here to save us all?” he said mockingly.

  “Yes,” Norman assured him. “And I’m no thief.”

  “And Nantes thinks you are Jerome here?” Sir Hugh continued. “And what would the most powerful knight in the Holy Lands want with our little archivist, eh?” The scorn almost hid the worry in his voice.

  Close by in the shadows, a growling Malcolm was spoiling for a fight, but Norman did not need his help just yet. He looked Sir Hugh in the eye and said solemnly, “He knows who Jerome really is.”

  Sir Hugh’s right eye twitched. With Jerome standing there, he could not ask what Norman meant or how he knew. He cast a quick sideways glance at his ward before responding. “Well, if Nantes wants you”—he stared pointedly at Norman—“let’s let him see that he doesn’t have you. Come with me to the Jerusalem Gate. Jerome, go with Father Lombard here. He will get you to safety.”

  Norman didn’t protest, letting himself be turned around and pointed down the stairs again. He looked over his shoulder, meaning to catch Meg’s or Jerome’s eye, hoping to silently communicate his plan, but Meg had melted into the crowd of escaping San Savinans or ducked into a dark corner. All Norman could do was shout, “Remember the plan!” and trust that she cared enough about Jerome to get him safely to her cellar escape route.

  Just then, he felt the familiar tug of stoat claws on his legs. In the confusion and the darkness, no one noticed Malcolm climbing into his knapsack.

  “No,” Norman muttered. “Stay with Jerome.”

  The stoat hissed his refusal. There was no telling that animal what to do sometimes.

  Sir Hugh pushed Norman ahead of him as they continued down through the fortress to the courtyard. He was not a cruel man, but Norman had put San Savino in danger and Sir Hugh was only just curbing his anger.

  “A talk with Nantes will sort this out. We’ll see what Black John really wants from you, and what you said to him to bring all this on. Perhaps I misjudged you. Perhaps you are more than a thief after all. Perhaps you are a spy.”

  Norman knew it was
pointless to argue. Sir Hugh would find out soon enough what John of Nantes thought, but if Norman could keep Black John believing he was the boy monk a little longer, perhaps he could buy the real Jerome enough time to escape.

  The walls of San Savino were still standing, but inside the fortifications, the little desert outpost was a tangle of fallen timbers and blazing straw. It would take all night to reduce it to rubble. Norman had lived through it once. He could take a little rough handling from Sir Hugh if he could put a stop to the bombardment.

  As they stumbled through the debris of the courtyard, Malcolm whistled gently inside the knapsack. It was that same old tune of the Great Cities that the rabbits of Willowbraid sang. It was a strange time to be whistling—while San Savino fell around them—but Norman was grateful. His friend was letting him know that he wasn’t alone.

  He was so distracted by the whistling that he didn’t hear how the sounds around him had changed, but as they approached the gate, he realized that it was quieter somehow. Men and women still ran around, shouting to be heard above the flames and the creaking of falling timbers. But where was the thud and shudder of the catapults? Where was the ominous whoosh of the arrows? Was it possible that the assault had stopped?

  Sir Hugh seemed to notice it too. He did not let go of Norman’s collar and continued to push him towards the big gate at the end of San Savino’s only street, but his face betrayed a self-confident smile. “Just as I told you. Even Black John wouldn’t raze a town just to sate his anger.”

  Norman couldn’t help arguing. “Maybe he’s just realized that I escaped and he’s come looking for me. He thinks I’m Jerome, and you know that’s who he’s looking for. He’s looking for the son of Johan Vilnius. This is about Vilnius and the Livonian Knights.”

  Sir Hugh stopped in his tracks and turned fiercely to Norman. “That’s enough of that! If you say a word of this to Nantes, I’ll have you put in stocks.”

  Norman gulped and nodded. “Jerome is my friend. I’m trying to save him.”

  “Then keep your mouth shut, boy,” the governor of San Savino commanded. “Open the gates!” he called out to the small party of guards ahead of him. They were a scraggly bunch, too fat or too skinny or too short to be mistaken for real soldiers and with barely a full suit of armour between them. They froze at the order. “Do it now!” Hugh directed, even more firmly. “And raise a white flag for parley.”