"Cosimo?" It was Roxane who spoke the name, and the Prince nodded.
"Yes. I sent him three messengers with three warnings. One came back, but only to say that Cosimo laughed in his face. I'll admit I don't remember him as being quite so stupid. The year he spent away seems to have robbed him of his reason. He's planning to make war on the Adderhead with an army of peasants. It's as if we were to march against the Adderhead ourselves."
"We'd have a better chance," said Snapper.
"Yes, I expect we would." The Black Prince sounded so discouraged that Farid's heart failed him. Secretly, he had always put far more trust in the Prince than in Fenoglio's words, but what could this troop of ragged men digging themselves holes in the forest like rabbits do against the Castle of Night?
The men brought them something to eat, and Roxane looked at Dustfinger's leg. She treated the wound with an ointment that made it smell like spring in the cave for a moment. And Farid couldn't help thinking of Meggie. He remembered a story that he had heard by a fire on a cold night in the desert. It was the tale of a thief who fell in love with a princess; he still remembered it very well. The two were so deeply in love that they could speak to each other over a distance of many miles. Each could hear the other's thoughts even if walls separated them, each knew whether the other was sad or happy… but intently as Farid listened to his own feelings, he could sense nothing. He couldn't even have said whether Meggie was still alive. She seemed to have gone away, gone away from his heart, from the world. When he brushed the tears from his eyes, he felt Dustfinger looking at him.
"I'll have to rest this wretched leg or it will never heal," he said quietly. "But we'll go back. When the time comes…"
Roxane frowned, but she said nothing. The Prince and Dustfinger began talking so quietly that Farid had to move close to them to make out anything. Roxane put her head on Dustfinger's lap and was soon asleep. But Farid curled up like a puppy beside him, closed his eyes, and listened to the two men.
The Black Prince wanted to know all about Silvertongue – whether the day of the execution was fixed, where he was held prisoner, how his wound was doing. Dustfinger told him what he knew. And he told him about the book that Meggie had offered the Adderhead as a ransom for her father.
"A book to hold Death prisoner?" The Prince laughed incredulously. "Has the Adderhead taken to believing in fairy tales?"
Dustfinger did not reply to that. He said nothing about Fenoglio, he did not say they were all part of a story that an old man had written. In his place Farid wouldn't have said so, either. The Black Prince probably wouldn't believe there were words that could decide even his own fate, words like invisible paths from which you could not turn aside. The bear grunted in his sleep, and Roxane turned her head restlessly. She was holding Dustfinger's hand as if she wanted to take him into her dreams.
"You told the boy you'd go back," said the Prince. "You can come with us."
"Are you going to the Castle of Night? Why? Do you plan to storm it with these few men? Or tell the Adderhead that he's caught the wrong man? With this on your nose?" Dustfinger put his hand among the blankets lying on the floor and brought out a bird mask. Bluejay feathers sewn to cracked leather. He put the mask on his scarred face.
"Many of us have worn that mask before," said the Prince. "And now they're going to hang another innocent man for the deeds we've done. I can't allow that! This time it's a bookbinder. Last time, after we attacked one of the silver transports, they hanged a charcoal-burner just because he had a scar on his arm. His wife is probably still mourning him."
"It's not just the deeds you did. Fenoglio invented most of them!" Dustfinger sounded irritated. "Damn it, Prince, you can't save Silvertongue. You'll only die, too. Or do you seriously think the Adderhead will let him go just because you've turned yourself in?"
"No, I'm not such a fool as that. But I must do something." The Prince put his hand in his bear's mouth, as he so often did, and as always that hand, as if miraculously, came back intact from between the bear's teeth.
"Yes, yes, very well." Dustfinger sighed. "You and your unwritten rules. You don't even know Silvertongue! How can you want to die for someone you don't know?"
"Who would you die for?" the Prince asked in return.
Farid saw Dustfinger look at Roxane's sleeping face – and then turn to him. He quickly closed his eyes.
"You'd die for Roxane," he heard the Prince say.
"Perhaps," said Dustfinger, and through his lashes Farid saw him trace Roxane's dark brows with his finger. "Or perhaps not. Do you have many informers in the Castle of Night?"
"Yes, indeed. Kitchen maids, stable boys, even a few of the guards – although they come very expensive – and most useful of all, a falconer who sends me a message now and then by one of his clever birds. I shall hear at once when they've fixed the day of the execution. You know the Adderhead doesn't have such things done in a marketplace or in front of the common people in the castle courtyard anymore, not since you spoiled my punishment so thoroughly for him. He was never a friend of such spectacles, anyway. An execution is a serious matter to the Adderhead. The gallows outside the castle will do for a poor minstrel, there'll be no trouble about that, but the Bluejay will die inside the gate."
"Yes. If his daughter's voice doesn't open that gate for him," replied Dustfinger. "Her voice and a book – a book full of immortality."
Farid heard the Black Prince laugh. "That sounds almost like some new song by the Inkweaver!"
"Yes," replied Dustfinger in a husky voice. "It sounds just like him, doesn't it?"
64. ALL IS LOST
'Tis war! 'Tis war! God's angel stand by ye
And guide your hand.
'Tis war, alas, and guiltless I would be
Of what betides this land.
Matthias Claudius, "War Song"
After a few days' rest, Dustfinger's leg was much better, and Farid was just telling the two martens how they'd soon all be stealing into the Castle of Night to rescue Meggie and her parents when bad news came to the Badger's Earth. One of the men who had been watching the road to Ombra brought it. His face was covered with blood and he could hardly keep on his feet.
"They're killing them!" he kept stammering over and over again. "They're killing them all."
"Where?" asked the Prince. "Where exactly?"
"Not two hours from here," the messenger managed to say. "Keep going north."
The Prince left ten men at the Badger's Earth. Roxane tried to persuade Dustfinger to stay, too. "You must spare your leg, or it will never heal," she said. But he would not listen to her, so she, too, came on the fast, silent march through the forest.
They heard the sound of battle long before they could see anything. Screams reached Farid's ears, cries of pain, and the whinnying of horses, shrill with fear, A moment came when the Prince signaled to them to go more slowly. A few more paces, bending low, and the ground in front of them dropped steeply to the road that ended, many miles farther on, at the gates of Ombra. Dustfinger made Farid and Roxane get down on the ground, although no one was looking their way. Hundreds of men were fighting among the trees down below, but there were no robbers among them. Robbers do not wear shirts of chain mail, breastplates, and helmets decked with peacock feathers, they seldom have horses, and never coats of arms embroidered on silken surcoats.
Dustfinger held Roxane close when she began to sob. The sun was sinking behind the hills as the Adderhead's soldiers cut down Cosimo's men one by one. It looked as if the battle had been raging for a long time; the road was covered with dead bodies lying side by side. Only a small troop was still on horseback amid all this death. Cosimo himself was among them, his beautiful face distorted by rage and fear. For a moment it looked almost as if those few mounted men would be able to carve themselves a breach in the enemy ranks, but then Firefox came among them with a company of men gleaming like deadly beetles in their armor. They mowed down Cosimo and his retinue like dry grass as the sun sank right behin
d the hills, as red as if all the blood that had been shed was reflected in the sky. Firefox himself struck Cosimo from his horse, and Dustfinger buried his face in Roxane's hair, as if he were tired of seeing Death at work. But Farid did not turn his head away. His face unmoving, he looked at the slaughter and thought of Meggie – Meggie, who perhaps still believed that a little ink could cure anything in this world. Would she believe it if her eyes saw what his were seeing now?
Few of Cosimo's men survived their prince. Barely a dozen fled into the trees. No one went to the trouble of pursuing them. The Adderhead's soldiers broke into cries of triumph and began plundering the corpses like a flock of vultures in human form. They did not get Cosimo's body, however. Firefox himself drove his soldiers off and had that beautiful corpse loaded onto a horse and taken away.
"Why are they doing that?" asked Farid.
"Why? Because his corpse is the proof that he really is dead this time," said Dustfinger bitterly.
"Yes, he is indeed," whispered the Black Prince. "I suppose you think yourself immortal if you've come back from the dead once. But he wasn't, any more than his men, and now almost all the people of Lombrica will be widows and orphans."
It was many hours before the Adderhead's soldiers finally moved away, laden with what they could rob from the dead. Darkness was coming on again when silence fell at last among the trees, the silence that is felt only in the presence of Death.
Roxane was the first to find a way down the slope. She was no longer weeping. Her face was fixed and rigid, but whether with anger or pain Farid could not have said. The robbers hesitated before following her, for the first White Women were already standing there among the dead.
65. LORD OF THE STORY
Iron helmets will not save
Even heroes from the grave.
Good men's blood will drain away
While the wicked win the day.
Heinrich Heine, "Valkyries"
Fenoglio was wandering among the dead when the robbers found him. Night fell, but he did not know what night it was. Nor could he remember how many days had passed since he rode out of the gates of Ombra with Cosimo. He knew only one thing: They were all dead. Minerva's husband, his neighbor, the father of the boy who had so often begged him for a story. All dead. And he himself would very likely have been dead, too, if his horse hadn't shied and thrown him. He had crawled away into the trees, to hide there like an animal and watch the slaughter.
Since the departure of the Adderhead's soldiers he had been stumbling from one corpse to the next, cursing himself, cursing his story, cursing the world he had created. When he felt the hand on his shoulder he actually thought for a moment that
Cosimo had risen from the dead yet again, but it was the Black Prince standing behind him.
"What are you doing here?" he snarled at him and the men with him. "Do you want to die, too? Go away and hide, and leave me in peace." He struck his brow. His damned head that had invented them all, and with them all the misfortune they were wading through like black, stinking water! He fell on his knees beside a dead man whose open eyes were staring at the sky, and blamed himself furiously – himself, the Adderhead, Cosimo and his haste – and then suddenly fell silent when he saw Dustfinger standing next to the Prince.
"You!" he stammered and got to his feet again, swaying. "You're still alive! You're not dead yet, even though I wrote it that way." He took Dustfinger's arm and clutched it tightly.
"Yes, disappointing, isn't it?" replied Dustfinger, shaking off Fenoglio's hand roughly. "Is it any comfort to you that no doubt, but for Farid, I'd have been lying as dead and cold as these men? After all, you didn't foresee him."
Farid? Oh yes, the boy plucked by Mortimer from his desert story. He was standing beside Dustfinger and staring at Fenoglio with murder in his eyes. No, the boy really did not belong here. Whoever had sent him to protect Dustfinger, it hadn't been him, Fenoglio! But that was the wretched part of the whole business! With everyone interfering in his story, how could it turn out well?
"I can't find Cosimo!" he muttered. "I've been looking for him for hours. Have any of you seen him?"
"Firefox has had his body taken away," the Prince replied. "I expect they'll put it on public display so that this time no one can claim he's still alive."
Fenoglio stared at him until the bear began to growl. Then he shook his head again and again. "I don't understand it!" he stammered. "How could it happen? Didn't Meggie read what I wrote for her? Didn't Roxane find her?" He looked despairingly at Dustfinger. How well he remembered the day he had described his death! A good scene, one of the best he'd ever written.
"Oh yes, Roxane gave Meggie the letter. Ask her yourself if you don't believe me. Although I don't think she'll feel much like talking at the moment." Dustfinger pointed to the woman walking among the corpses. Roxane. The beautiful Roxane. She bent over the dead, looked into their faces, and finally kneeled down beside a man whom a White Woman was approaching. She quickly put her hands over his ears, bent over his face, and gestured to the two robbers who were following her with torches in their hands. No, she would certainly not feel much like talking just now.
Dustfinger looked at him. Why that reproachful expression? Fenoglio wanted to snap at him. After all, I invented your wife, too! But he bit back the words. "Very well. So Roxane gave Meggie the letter," he said instead. "But did Meggie read it?"
Dustfinger looked at him with great dislike. "She tried to, but the Adderhead had her taken to the Castle of Night that very evening."
"Oh God!" Fenoglio looked around. The dead faces of Cosimo's men stared at him. "So that's it!" he cried. "I thought all this had happened only because Cosimo wanted to set off too soon, but no! The words, my wonderful words… Meggie can't have read them, or everything would have been all right!"
"Nothing would have been all right!" Dustfinger's voice was so cutting that Fenoglio involuntarily flinched. "Not a man of all these lying here would be dead if you hadn't brought Cosimo back!"
The Prince and his men stared at Dustfinger, unable to make anything of this. Of course, they had no idea what he was talking about. But obviously Dustfinger knew only too well. Meggie had told him about Cosimo. Or had it been the boy?
"Why are you staring at him like that?" Farid challenged the robbers, ranging himself at Dustfinger's side. "It was exactly as he says! Fenoglio brought Cosimo back from the dead. I was there myself."
How the fools flinched away! Only the Black Prince looked thoughtfully at Fenoglio.
"What nonsense!" Fenoglio said. "No one comes back to this world from the dead! Think what a crowd there'd be! I made a new Cosimo, a brand-new one, and everything would have turned out well if Meggie hadn't been interrupted while she read! My Cosimo would have been a wonderful ruler, a -"
Before he could say any more, the Prince's black hand came down over his mouth. "That's enough," he said. "Enough talking while the dead lie here around us. Your Cosimo is dead, wherever he came from, and the man they take for the Bluejay because of your songs may well be dead soon, too. You seem to enjoy playing with Death, Inkweaver."
Fenoglio tried to protest, but the Black Prince had already turned to his men. "Go on looking for the wounded!" he told them. "And hurry! It's time we got off this road."
They found barely two dozen survivors. Two dozen among hundreds of dead. When the robbers set off again with the wounded men, Fenoglio staggered after them in silence without asking where they were going. "The old man is following us!" he heard Dustfinger tell the Prince. "Where else would he go?" was all the Prince replied – and Dustfinger said nothing. But he kept well away from Fenoglio, as if he were Death itself.
66. BLANK PAPER
We make for your sake such things as stand fast, Through the ages these pages forever will last. On blank paper the printer sets down what is heard, Giving life to what's rife with the power of the word.
Michael Kongehl, "On the White Art,"
Die Weisse und die Schwarze Kunst
"Look at that, what an idyll! Father and daughter reunited," sneered Mortola. "Truly touching!"
"Hurry up!" the guard told her through the door, low-voiced. "If the Adderhead hears that I let you in to see him, they'll put me in the pillory for three days!"
"And if they do I've paid you well enough, haven't I?" was all Mortola replied, while Basta went up to Mo with a vicious smile.
"Well, Silvertongue," he purred, "didn't I say you'd all fall into our trap yet?"
"You look more as if it was you who fell into Dustfinger's trap," replied Mo, quickly putting Meggie behind him when, by way of answer, Basta snapped open his knife.
"Basta! Stop that!" Mortola snapped at him. "We don't have time for your games."
Meggie came out from behind Mo's back as Mortola moved toward her. She wanted to show the old woman that she wasn't afraid of her (even if, of course, that was only a brave lie).
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