"What?" Orpheus had been only half listening. He knew Mortola's hate-filled tirades, endless and self-glorifying, but he pricked up his ears at that last remark. Violante in league with the Bluejay? Yes, it made sense. Of course! That was why Mortimer had handed himself over expressly to her! He might have known it. That paragon of virtue hadn't let himself be made prisoner only out of nobility of mind. The noble robber was intent on murder.
Orpheus began pacing up and down, while Mortola went on uttering curses in so hoarse a voice that the words sounded hardly human.
Violante – Orpheus had offered her his services as soon as he had settled in Ombra, but she had rejected them, saying that she already had a poet… not very nice of her.
"Oh yes, he plans to kill the Adder! Stole into the castle like a marten into a poultry yard! Even the fairies sing about it as they do their silly dances, but only the Magpie listens!" Mortola bent double. Even her coughing sounded like a croak. She was crazy! How she looked at him, with her pupils so black and fixed that they looked more like the eyes of a bird than of a human being. Orpheus shuddered.
"Yes, yes, I know his plans!" she whispered. "And I tell myself: Mortola, let him live, hard as that is for you. Kill his wife, or even better the daughter he dotes on, and flutter up onto his shoulder when he hears the news, so that you can hear his heart breaking. But let him live until the Adderhead gives him the White Book, because the Adder, too, must die for all the pain he gave me. And should the Silver Prince really be stupid enough to let his worst enemy lay hands on the Book that can kill him, all the better! The Magpie will be there, and not the Bluejay but Mortola will write those three words. Yes, I know what they are. And Death will take both the Bluejay and the Adderhead, and in return for such rich pickings will finally give back what that accursed bookbinder took from me with his silver tongue – my son!"
What the devil? Orpheus nearly choked on the wine he had just raised to his lips. The old witch was still dreaming of Capricorn's return! Well, why not, since first Cosimo and then Dustfinger had come back from the dead? But he could think of more interesting turns for this story to take than the return of Mortola's fire-raising son.
"You really believe the Adderhead will bring the White Book here?" Ah, he felt there were great things in the offing, developments full of promise. Maybe all was not lost, even if Dustfinger had stolen Fenoglio's book from him. There were other ways to play a significant part in this story. The Adderhead in Ombra! What possibilities that opened up…
"Of course he'll come! The Adder is more of a fool than most people think." Mortola sat down on one of the chairs that stood ready for Orpheus's distinguished clients. The wind blew through the unglazed windows and made the candles flicker. Shadows danced like black birds on the whitewashed walls.
"So will the Silver Prince let the bookbinder outwit him for the second time?" Orpheus himself was surprised by the hatred in his voice. To his astonishment, he realized that he now wished for Mortimer's death almost as passionately as Mortola. "Even Dustfinger runs after him these days!" he uttered. "Obviously, Death has made him forget what that hero once did to him!" He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, as if he could wipe away the memory of Dustfinger's cold face. Yes, that was the only reason why Dustfinger had turned against him! Because Mortimer had bewitched him with his accursed voice. He bewitched them all. It was to be hoped that the Piper would cut out his tongue before they quartered him. He wanted to watch as the Milksop's hounds tore him to pieces, as the Piper sliced up his skin and his noble heart. Oh, if only he could have written that song about the Bluejay!
Mortola's coughing brought Orpheus back from his bloodthirsty dreams.
"It's only too easy to swallow these seeds!" she gasped, bent double in the chair, her hands clutching the arms like claws. "You have to put them under your tongue, but they're slippery little things, and if too many of them go astray and down to your stomach, the bird sometimes comes back when you haven't summoned it." She jerked her head like the Magpie, opened her mouth as if it were a beak, and pressed her fingers to her pale lips.
"Listen!" she managed to say as the fit shook her again. "I want you to go to the castle as soon as the Adderhead reaches Ombra and warn him against his daughter! Tell him to ask Balbulus, the illuminator, how many books about the Bluejay Violante has ordered from him. Convince him that his daughter is obsessed with his worst enemy and will do all in her power to save him. Tell him in the finest words you can think up. Use your voice, the way Silvertongue will try to use his. You're very keen on boasting that your voice is more impressive than Mortimer's! Prove it!"
Mortola retched – and spat another seed out into the palm of her hand.
She was clever, even if she was totally crazy, and it was surely best to let her believe she could go on acting as if she were his mistress, although all that retching made him feel so unwell he could almost have spat out his own wine. Orpheus brushed a little dust off his elaborately embroidered sleeves. His clothes, his house, all the maids… How could the old woman be blind enough to think he'd ever serve her again? As if he'd come into this world to carry out other people's plans! No, here he served only himself. So he had sworn.
"It doesn't sound like a bad idea." Orpheus was taking great pains to keep his tone of voice as deferential as usual, "But what about all the Bluejay's noble friends? He won't be hoping for support from Violante alone. What about the Black Prince?" And Dustfinger, he added silently, but he did not speak the name. He was going to take his own revenge on Dustfinger.
"The Black Prince, yes. Another high-minded idiot. My son had trouble with him from time to time himself." Mortola put the seed she had spat out away with the others. "I'll take care of him. Him and Silvertongue's daughter. That girl's almost as dangerous as her father."
"Nonsense!" Orpheus poured himself more wine. Wine made him braver.
Mortola inspected him scornfully. Yes, she obviously still thought him a subservient fool. All the better. She rubbed her
thin arms, shuddering as if the feathers were trying to pierce through her skin again.
"What about the old man? The one who, they say, wrote Silvertongue's daughter the words I took from her in the Castle of Night? Is he still writing foolhardy recklessness into the Bluejay's heart?"
"No, Fenoglio isn't writing anymore. All the same, I'd have no objection if you killed him. Far from it – he's a terrible know-it- all."
Mortola nodded, but she didn't really seem to be listening anymore. "I must go," she said, rising unsteadily from her chair. "Your house is as musty as a dungeon."
Oss was lying outside the door when Mortola opened it. "So this is your bodyguard?" she asked. "You don't seem to have many enemies."
Orpheus slept poorly that night. He dreamed of birds, hundreds of birds, but when dawn came and Ombra emerged from the shadows of night like a pale fruit, he went to the window of his bedroom full of new confidence.
"Good morning to you, Bluejay!" he said under his breath, eyes turned to the towers of the castle. "I hope you passed a sleepless night! I daresay you still think the roles in this story have been cast by now, but you've played its hero long enough. Curtain up, Act Two: Enter Orpheus. In what part? The part of the villain, of course. Isn't that always the best role in a play?"
38. A GREETING TO THE PIPER
There was a smell of Time in the air tonight… What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box-lids, and rain.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Farid wasn't with the party when the Bluejay rode to Ombra Castle. "You're staying in the camp." Dustfinger didn't have to say any more to make Farid worry about causing his death again, and the fear was like a hand clutching his throat. The Strong Man waited among the empty tents with him, because the Black Prince refused to believe that he could pass for a woman. They sat there for many
hours, but when Meggie and the others at last came back, Dustfinger wasn't with them, any more than the Bluejay was.
"Where is he?" The Black Prince was the only person Farid dared to ask, although his face was so grave that even the bear didn't venture near him.
"Where the Bluejay is," replied the Prince, and when he saw Farid's look of dismay he added, "No, not in the dungeon. I mean near him, that's all. Death has bound those two together, and nothing but Death is going to part them again."
Near him.
Farid looked at the tent where Meggie slept. He thought he could hear her crying, but he dared not go to her. She hadn't yet forgiven him for persuading her father to do that deal with Orpheus, and Doria was sitting outside her tent. He was to be found near Meggie a good deal too often for Farid's liking, but luckily he appeared to understand as little about girls as his strong brother.
The men back from Ombra were sitting around the fire, heads bent. Some of them didn't even take off the women's clothes they had been wearing, but the Black Prince gave them no time to drown their fears for the future in wine. He sent them out hunting. They would need good stocks of provisions if they were to hide the children of Ombra from the Piper: dried meat, warm furs.
But that didn't interest Farid. He no more belonged to the robbers than he had to Orpheus. He didn't even belong to Meggie. He belonged with only one person, and he had to keep away from him, for fear of bringing him to his death.
Darkness was just falling, and the robbers were still smoking meat and stretching skins between the trees, when Gwin came scurrying out of the forest. Farid thought the marten was Jink until he saw the graying muzzle. Yes, it was Gwin all right. Since Dustfinger's death he had looked at Farid like an enemy, but tonight he nibbled his calves the way he used to when he wanted to play, and chattered until Farid followed him.
The marten was quick, too quick even for Farid, who could outrun most people, but Gwin kept stopping to wait for him with his tail twitching impatiently, leaving Farid to follow as fast as the darkness allowed, because he knew who had sent the marten.
They found Dustfinger where the castle walls became the city boundary of Ombra and the mountainside on which the city stood rose so steeply that no other houses could stand there. Nothing but thorny bushes covered the slope, and the castle wall towered up without any windows, forbidding as a clenched fist, broken by only a few barred slits that let just enough air into the dungeons for the prisoners not to stifle to death before they were executed. No one stayed long in the castle dungeons of Ombra. Sentences were quickly passed and executions quickly carried out. Why feed someone for long if you were going to hang him anyway? The date of the Bluejay's death depended only on the judge who was coming from the far side of the forest especially for him. Five days, so the whisper went, it would take the Adderhead five days to reach Ombra in his black-draped coach – and no one knew whether the Bluejay would live as long as a single day after his arrival.
Dustfinger stood with his shoulders back against the wall and his head bent, as if he were listening. The deep shadows cast by the castle made him invisible to the guards pacing back and forth on the battlements.
Dustfinger turned only when Gwin bounded toward him. Farid looked anxiously up at the guards before running to him, but they weren't looking for a boy, or a man on his own. One man wouldn't be able to set the Bluejay free. No, the Milksop's soldiers were watching for the arrival of many men, men coming out of the nearby forest or using ropes to help them down the steep slope above the castle – although the Piper must know that even the Black Prince wouldn't venture to storm Ombra Castle.
The sky above the towers shone with the dark green of Sootbird's fire. The Milksop was celebrating. The Piper had ordered all the minstrels among the strolling players to compose songs about his own cunning and the defeat of the Bluejay, but very few had obeyed. Most of them kept silent, and their silence sang another song – a song of the sadness in Ombra and the tears of the women who had their children back but had lost their hope.
"Well, what do you think of Sootbird's fire?" Dustfinger whispered as Farid came to lean against the castle wall beside him. "Our friend has learned a few things, wouldn't you say?"
"He's still useless!" Farid whispered back, and Dustfinger smiled, but his face grew grave again as he looked up at the windowless walls.
"It's nearly midnight," he said quietly. "At this time the Piper likes to show prisoners his hospitality with fists, clubs, and boots." He laid his hands on the wall and passed them over it, as if the stones could tell him what was going on in the cells behind them. "He's not with him yet," he whispered. "But it won't be long now."
"How do you know?" Sometimes it seemed to Farid as if someone else had come back from the dead, not the man he had known.
"Well, Silvertongue, Bluejay, whatever you like to call him…" Dustfinger whispered. "Since his voice brought me back I've known what he feels as if Death had transplanted his heart into my breast. Now, catch me a fairy, or the Piper will half kill him before sunrise. Bring me one of the rainbow-colored kind. Orpheus has given them his own vanity, which comes in handy. You can get them to do anything for a few compliments."
The fairy was soon found. Orpheus's fairies were all over the place, and although winter didn't make them as drowsy as Fenoglio's blue fairies, it was child's play to pluck one from her nest at this hour of the night. She bit Farid, but he blew in her face as Dustfinger had taught him, until she was gasping for air and forgot all about biting. Dustfinger whispered something to her, and next moment the tiny thing was fluttering up to the barred slits in the wall and disappearing through one of them.
"What did you tell her?" Above them, Sootbird's venomous fire went on devouring the night. It swallowed up the sky, the stars, and the moon, and the smoke hanging in the air was so acrid that Farid's eyes were streaming.
"Oh, just that I promised the Bluejay I'd send the most beautiful fairy of all to visit him in his dark dungeon. And by way of thanks she'll whisper him the news that the Adderhead will reach Ombra in five days' time, even if the moss-women pave his way here with curses and that, meanwhile, we'll try to keep the Piper's mind occupied, so that he can't spend too much time beating up his prisoners." Dustfinger clenched his left hand into a fist. "You haven't yet asked me why I sent for you," he said, blowing gently into the fist he had made. "I thought you might like to see this."
He laid his fist against the castle wall, and fiery spiders scuttled out from between his fingers. They hurried up the stones, more and more of them, as many as if they had been born there in Dustfinger's hand.
"The Piper's afraid of spiders," he whispered. "He fears them more than swords and knives, and if these creep into his fine clothes he may forget, just for a while, how much he enjoys beating his prisoners at night."
Farid clenched his own fist. "How do you make them?"
"I don't know – which, I'm afraid, means I can't teach you. Any more than I can teach you this." Dustfinger placed his hands together. Farid heard him whispering, but he couldn't make out the words. When a fiery blue jay flew out of Dustfinger's hands and soared into the night sky on wings of blue-and-white fire, he felt a pang of envy like a wasp sting.
"Oh, show me!" he whispered. "Please! Let me try, at least!"
Dustfinger looked at him thoughtfully. One of the guards above them was raising the alarm. The fiery spiders had reached the castle battlements. "Death taught me the trick of it, Farid," he said softly.
"Well? So I was dead, too, like you, although not for so long!"
Dustfinger laughed. He laughed so loudly that a sentry looked down, and he quickly drew Farid back with him into the blackest shadows.
"You're right. I'd quite forgotten!" he whispered as the guards on the wall shouted in confusion and shot arrows at the fiery jay. The arrows smoldered and went out among its feathers. "Very well, copy me! Try this."
Farid quickly curved his fingers, feeling the excitement he always felt when he was going to le
arn something new about fire. It wasn't easy to repeat the strange words that Dustfinger whispered, and Farid's heart leaped when he really did feel a fiery tingling between his fingers. Next moment spiders were swarming all over the wall from his hand, too, their burning bodies hurrying up the stones like an army of sparks. He smiled proudly at Dustfinger. But when he tried the blue jay, only a few pale moths fluttered out from between his fingers.
"Don't look so disappointed!" whispered Dustfinger as he sent two more blue jays flying into the night. "There's plenty more to learn. But we'd better hide from our silver-nosed friend now."
Ombra Castle wore a burning coat as they made their way through the trees, and Sootbird's fire had gone out. The sky belonged to the fire conjured up by Dustfinger. The Piper sent out patrols, but Dustfinger made the flames give birth to wolves and big cats, snakes slithering out of the branches, fiery moths that flew in the faces of the men-at-arms. The forest at the foot of the castle seemed to be all aflame, but the fire did not take hold, and Farid and his master were shadows among all the red, untouched by the fear they were spreading.
Finally, the Piper had water poured from the battlements. It froze to ice in the branches of the trees, but Dustfinger's fire burned on, shaping new creatures all the time, and died down only in the morning, like a specter of the night. The fiery blue jays, however, went on circling in the air above Ombra, and when the Milksop sent his hounds into the forest where the flames were now extinguished, fiery hares threw them off any track they found. But Farid sat with Dustfinger in a thicket of thorn apple and brownie-thorn, feeling happiness warm his heart. It was so good to be near Dustfinger again, as he had been in the old days, during all the nights when he had watched over him or kept him from bad dreams. Now, however, there didn't seem to be anything he had to protect him from. Except yourself, Farid, he thought, and his happiness was gone like the fiery creatures that Dustfinger had conjured up to protect the Bluejay.
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