by Paul Glennon
Norman wasn’t sure what to say. If he said yes, would Black John leave St. Savino alone?
“Just tell me and we’ll be done here. It would have his crest,” the French knight pressed. “Three lions rampant.”
Norman was looking away again, peering at the sand at his feet, or else Black John would have seen the realization in his eyes, the shock of understanding. The king’s letter—the letter that guaranteed Hugh Montclair’s rights to St. Savino and the safe passage of its books to England—it had been in his hands when he’d been caught.
“I knew it,” John spat. “There is no such letter. If the old fool had such a letter he would have produced it. The King of England cares nothing about that old pile of baked mud.” He gave Norman one last, dismissive stare before turning. He pulled the gauntlet onto his hand and motioned to the henchman who held his armoured helm. “Raze it to the ground,” he ordered as he strode to the entrance of the tent.
The men who held Norman’s arms released him, and he slumped to the ground.
“No!” he cried, looking up from where he lay. “There is a letter. I saw it.”
Black John kept walking.
For a moment Norman was about to produce the letter, but that would have been a disaster. Black John would destroy it.
“Take me back to St. Savino,” he pleaded. “I’ll show you where the letter is.”
Black John paused beneath the tent flaps and sneered. “Now he knows about a letter, now he thinks it can save his precious friends. He’ll tell us anything, even if it isn’t true. Living with the monks has not been good for you,” he taunted. “Your father would have taught you to be a better liar.”
With that he let the tent flap fall, and Norman was alone once more.
Norman slowly shifted on the ground, his hands rifling through his clothes for the paper. He was almost convinced that he’d dropped it. Finally, in the folds of the sweatshirt tied around his waist, he found the smooth scroll of paper he’d pilfered from Sir Hugh’s desk. He glanced again to the entrance of the tent. The shadow of the lone sentry was still there, growing duller as the sun sank into the dunes. Norman could do little while the guard stood there.
Outside, he could hear orders being given, horses neighing and the squeak of heavy wheels turning. Black John’s army was on the move. Would they really raze the desert fortress? Did it mean that much to Black John?
What, Norman wondered, were they doing in St. Savino tonight? Would Jerome have told Sir Hugh about him? Surely not. Jerome wouldn’t have given away Meg’s secret—his mother’s secret.
Norman almost thought of them as two different people, his mother and this Meg girl who could slip into a book about the Crusades just to talk to an orphan librarian named Jerome. It was hard to imagine them as the same person.
He had to forget that now. He had to get out of here. He hauled himself up to a seated position and grasped the leather manacle around his ankle. If he could cut through the leather or somehow pry it off, he might be able to escape. He pulled off his sock and sneaker and tried to tug the manacle past his ankle. He was skinny, but not that skinny. He pulled until he couldn’t stand the pain. That was not going to work.
He rubbed some feeling back into his ankle and pondered his next step. The leather manacle was fastened to a thick iron chain. Its links were firmly joined. There would be no prying them apart. He ran his finger over each link, searching for some weakness, following the chain to where a thick ring of steel fastened it to the trunk.
Norman examined the trunk. It was a firmly constructed little box, reinforced with iron bands and studs. It was almost exactly the size of a breadbox, which Norman thought was funny. Very few things are exactly the size of a breadbox. He gave it an experimental shove. It didn’t move. It was a lot heavier than a breadbox. Norman looked around for something with which to pry it open. If he emptied it, he might be able to carry it.
There wasn’t much in the tent that could be used as a pry bar. It wasn’t like Black John’s thugs were going to leave a sword lying around for him, but that’s what he needed.
He wracked his brain. At the beach once he’d seen seagulls pick up shellfish and drop them on rocks to smash them open. Maybe that would work. Norman crouched down beside the chest, wrapped both arms around it and muscled it up on top of his knees, resting it there for a moment, then jerking it upwards and straightening his legs. He’d just about raised it over his head when the chain jerked at his ankle, throwing him off balance. He pulled his vulnerable toes out of the way as the chest fell with a thud into the soft sand, half burying itself there. That was not worth trying again.
There was nothing to it. There was only one thing left to try. He hated leaving Jerome, but he was going to have to bookweird his way out of this mess. He just hoped that there was enough usable ink. He retrieved his broken quill and ink pot and placed them on top of the wooden chest.
Norman unravelled the letter he’d stolen from Sir Hugh’s desk and eyed it warily. He could, he guessed, just eat it as it was. That would be the fastest way out. You didn’t always have to eat the story you wanted to fall into. Once you’d started falling into books you seemed to get to most other books by way of the real world. Norman had once escaped a Viking attack by eating a bicycle-safety pamphlet.
He fingered the letter nervously, running his fingers across the red seal of three lions. He shouldn’t destroy it. This letter was his best chance of saving St. Savino and its inhabitants. Besides, it seemed to help if you ate a page from the book you wanted to land in. Maybe he was fooling himself, but Norman felt more in control of the bookweird if he targeted his landing that way.
The king’s letter was short. It took up only two-thirds of the page. After the signature and the seal, there was still a slim margin at the bottom of the page. If he wrote a story for himself in that remaining bare space, he could save the letter. Even a few sentences might be enough.
Norman folded the letter, making a crease above the small, precious rectangle of bare paper. As carefully as he could he tore along the line. It didn’t tear easily. This wasn’t like the paper he was used to. It was thick and flexible, almost like cloth. That was another reason to keep it small.
Ink was the next problem. It wasn’t completely dry, but it wasn’t exactly liquid either—more like glue than ink. He spat experimentally into the biggest piece of the broken ink pot and stirred it around with the sharp end of his quill. The quill wasn’t much of a pen at all, just a whittled stick with a thin metal nib. Norman’s penmanship wasn’t very good at the best of times. His grade three teacher had told him that calling it chicken scratch was an insult to chickens. With his spit-diluted ink and his blunt, broken quill he was glad that the bookweird didn’t seem to give points for neatness. What counted for the bookweird was that you got it right. You couldn’t just write, “My bedroom in England,” and zip back there. You had to describe it. You had to make it so that someone reading it could imagine it perfectly.
He hesitated, the quill poised inches from the surface of the square of paper. He was finding it hard to visualize the little room and the cottage. The pressure of getting it right made it harder. What colour were the curtains? Were the flowers on the sheets yellow or pink? Was the floor still covered with laundry or had someone picked it up?
He started with the bed. He knew he’d left it a mess.
“Norman’s bed was a mess,” he wrote. It was a mess because it always was a mess. He never made it.
Norman’s bed was a mess. There were plates underneath it. The red one was from when he’d brought the pancake up for Malcolm. The teacup and the bowl were there from lunch, when he’d brought Weetabix and milky tea up to his friend. Malcolm had slurped all the milk from the cereal and eaten the rest with a souvenir gift spoon from Windsor Castle. He’d waited for the tea to get cold, then slurped it, too, dripping tea onto the bedsheets from his whiskers.
Norman found himself describing Malcolm more than his bedroom, but he guessed it didn’t
matter.
Malcolm might have been a king, but he ate like a slob. There was always food in his whiskers for hours after a meal. Sometimes, if the meal happened to be lingonberry pie or jam tart, there would be food in his ears, too. It wasn’t unusual for there to be a dark stain of blue or purple on the tufts of hair in his round little ears. When he was finished a meal he liked to lie back and rub his belly. That’s how jam got on his belly, too. He didn’t look so fierce when you saw him like that, lying back on a pillow with jam on his white belly and ear-tufts, but he could change in a second. Just like that, he could leap up, bare a fang and focus his sharp eyes and you’d know he’d fight to the death for you.
Just writing it was almost like escaping. It was like being there. Norman would have gone on writing all night if he could have, but he quickly ran out of paper. The lines of writing got more cramped as he wrote, trying to cram it all in. He couldn’t go back and make it more about home and less about Malcolm now. He didn’t even dare try to correct any mistakes. He took a handful of sand and shook it over the sticky ink to dry it. Then he sat down to the unappetizing task of eating his composition.
It was even tougher than he’d imagined. The paper didn’t dissolve in his mouth. He had to chew it to break it up, tearing it into ever-smaller pieces. The pieces just stuck to the roof of his mouth. He needed some water or something. He rummaged around the tent, dragging the chest around after him like an anchor. Amongst some blankets in one corner he uncovered two dark green bottles stoppered with cork. He opened one and took a whiff, blinking away the tears as his eyes stung. The second was better, a dark red fluid, wine maybe. He hesitated for just a moment. Of all the rules he’d broken today, taking a few sips of wine was probably the least important.
He swilled each sip around in his mouth, letting it soak into the fibres of the paper, breaking them down as much as he could before swallowing, but even then it didn’t go down easily. It was the toughest paper he’d ever eaten, but he somehow managed it.
When he’d completely eaten the strip of paper, he lay down and tried to fall asleep. The sun had set, but there was a new light outside. The canvas walls of the tent had begun to glow orange. Already it felt cooler. Norman put on his sweatshirt.
Fall asleep, he told himself. It’s nighttime. Just go to sleep. But it wasn’t that easy. His stomach gurgled and twisted as it tried to deal with the paper he’d sent it. He imagined his stomach working at breaking down the story in his belly. Just how eaten did the paper have to be? Did the story get sent to a particular gland or organ that made the bookweird happen? His stomach groaned, and he belched. He didn’t feel well at all. If he puked right now, he wondered, and spewed the bits of paper onto the sand, would it still work?
He rolled over on his side and tried to put it out of his mind. He tried to imagine himself at home with Malcolm, but it only set his mind racing again. There was so much to do. Malcolm had to get back to Undergrowth with the map, but first they had to get Todd out of Kelmsworth Hall and the poacher back to his own book. When all that was done, he’d have to come here and put Sir Hugh’s letter back. That was a lot of bookweird to do and undo. Thinking of everything he had to put right made it hard to get to sleep.
Outside the tent, the shouts of Black John’s knights were louder. The light had changed again. It was no longer the orange glow of sunset. There were just spots of light, smaller but more intense—campfires?
He rolled closer to the edge of the tent and lifted the canvas experimentally. It wasn’t hard. The canvas wasn’t pegged tightly. He made a gap just high enough to stick his head out. The cool night air pricked his face. He had to blink to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
There were fires all right, but they weren’t for warmth. The flames lit up the desert night. Men-at-arms and archers were silhouetted in their flickering light. Some of them carried armfuls of arrows that they carefully placed beside the fires. Others shuttled burning torches to two skeletal wooden towers closer to St. Savino’s walls. The towers were about as tall as five or six men, a crisscross of beams lashed to the ground by ropes. Norman shivered, but not from the chill of the desert night. He had seen and read enough to know exactly what these machines were—trebuchets, siege engines that could catapult projectiles over and through thick fortress walls. Black John was not waiting for Sir Hugh to produce his letter from the King of England.
Already archers were sending single arrows across the night sky in huge, illuminated arcs. The first arrows fell short, burying themselves in the sand and extinguishing like matches tossed into water, but they slowly crept towards the fortress as the archers found their range. Soon they were smashing into the thick outer walls, exploding in sudden sparks like fireworks. The archers adjusted again, and their next arrows flew high and far, launching almost vertically into the air and plummeting in an arc just as steep, this time into the heart of the fortress.
No sound from the fortress reached Norman in the tent, but surely the defenders would be busy inside, running buckets of water to the danger spots, trying to douse the fires before they spread. It would be just possible now, with only one or two fire-arrows finding their marks, but could they keep it up?
Without warning the archers stopped firing. That would give the defenders time, but surely the archers were just waiting for an order to fire again. That was not all they were waiting for. Orders were barked and men scrambled to the trebuchets. They took torches and lit the huge oil-coated rocks that sat at the end of each catapult arm. There was silence as the soldiers stood back and gazed at the blazing projectiles.
A single voice rang out in the night. Shouting out a countdown, he barked five times before giving the order to fire. With a jolt one of the machines was unleashed. The trebuchet shuddered under the whiplash motion of its firing arm. The soldiers stood back in silent awe, following the flight of the blazing missile.
Norman held his breath, watching the fiery ball hurtle towards the walls. It smashed against the mud fortifications with a thud. Norman exhaled—the walls would hold. But a cheer went up from the gathered soldiers, and they soon began to reload. This was just a practice shot. The trebuchets had found their range even faster than the archers.
Norman scanned the roofs of St. Savino, looking to the tall wooden tower that jutted into the sky above the mud walls at the north-east end. That was the library—Jerome’s hiding place, the most vulnerable part of the whole fortress.
“Get out of there,” Norman whispered. “Just get out of there now.”
The second trebuchet creaked and shuddered, launching its blazing rock through the bleak desert sky. Again the soldiers stood back in awe of their war machine, and again Norman held his breath. The missile skimmed the top of the fortress wall, sending chunks of hardened mud careening through the crumbled wall into the heart of the fortified town.
Again Black John’s soldiers cheered—it was an ugly, violent sound. They knew who was in there. It wasn’t full of soldiers. It wasn’t a military outpost. It was just a fortified village full of families, elderly monks, gardeners, scribes, librarians.
“Get out of there,” Norman whispered to himself again. He meant all of them, not just Jerome. They should all just get out of there. He had no idea what Black John’s men would do if they came out. Maybe they would die just the same. But if they stayed inside it was certain death.
Norman waited for any sign that the inhabitants of St. Savino might escape. The gate remained resolutely shut. Maybe, he dared to hope, they were leaving by hidden passageways, sneaking away into the night unseen. He clung to this thought as the arrows flew again in earnest, whole flights of fire-arrows screaming across the sky like falling meteors. Then the trebuchets resumed, an uneven rhythm of creak and whoosh and thud, sending huge balls of fire into the heart of the peaceful fortress.
What could Sir Hugh and his people do against this? They might rush with pitiful wooden buckets to the site of one fiery arrow or swarm hopefully into the wreckage where the
giant projectiles had crashed, but it would be useless. Too many arrows plummeted into the dry straw roofs of St. Savino. Too many fires sparked and raged. And there were too few defenders, with limbs too old and too few buckets.
An orange glow ascended from behind the walls of St. Savino. The buildings were ablaze, the timber-framed houses, sheds, their thatched roofs and canvas canopies. Norman couldn’t look away. He was desperate to see some movement, some evidence that Sir Hugh was sending his people out of the conflagration to safety. But now the flames themselves were visible. The wooden tower had taken a direct hit from a trebuchet missile. Flames were licking up the side of the tower and flickering in its tiny windows. All those scrolls would be perfect kindling. The library was like a huge torch waiting to be lit.
It finally became too much to watch. Norman closed his eyes and buried himself in the canvas of the tent. “Let me go to sleep now. Just get me away from this,” he muttered, desperately wishing to be away, out of this terrible book. But it was not to be. Now that the only useful thing he could do was fall asleep, he couldn’t manage to do it. Even with his eyes closed the sound of the fire was terrible. The whoosh of arrows and the shuddering recoil of the trebuchets had stopped, but the sounds of the fire continued. Timbers crackled and creaked. Norman couldn’t stop himself from looking when something crashed or snapped. He opened his eyes to see the tower lean and fall in on itself. He shut his eyes again and covered his head with the canvas of the tent, but even that could not muffle the crackle and spit of burning timbers, the sounds of St. Savino and its library burning to the ground.
At some point late into the night or early the next day, he must have finally fallen asleep, but not before seeing St. Savino’s final destruction. The towers fell. The massive gates gaped open, charred and black. Even the mud walls crumbled under the pressure and the heat of the fire. No one could have survived this.