Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?
Philip Pullman,
The Subtle Knife
Meggie hated quarrelling with Mo. It left her shaking inside, and nothing could comfort her – not a hug from her mother, not the liquorice sweets Resa’s aunt Elinor gave her if their loud voices had carried to the library, not Darius, who firmly believed in the miraculous healing powers of hot milk and honey in such cases.
Nothing helped.
This time it had been particularly bad, because Mo had really only come to see her to say goodbye. He had a new job waiting, some sick books too old and valuable to be sent to him. In the past Meggie would have gone with him, but this time she had decided to stay with Elinor and her mother.
Why did he have to come to her room just when she was reading the notebooks again? They’d often quarrelled over those notebooks recently, although Mo hated a quarrel as much as she did. Afterwards, he usually disappeared into the workshop that Elinor had had built behind the house for him, and a time would come, once Meggie couldn’t bear to be angry with him any more, when she would follow him there. He never raised his head when she slipped through the doorway, and without a word Meggie would sit down beside him on the chair that was always ready for her and watch him at work, just as she had done even before she could read. She loved watching his hands free a book from its shabby dress, separate stained pages from each other, part the threads holding a damaged quire together, or soak rag paper to mend a sheet of paper worn thin. It was never long before Mo turned and asked her a question of some kind: did she like the colour he’d chosen for a linen binding, did she agree that the paper pulp he’d mixed for repairs had turned out slightly too dark? It was Mo’s way of apologizing, of saying: don’t let’s quarrel, Meggie, let’s forget what we said just now.
But that was no good today. Because he hadn’t disappeared into his workshop, he’d gone away to see some book collector or other and give the collector’s printed treasures a new lease of life. This time he wouldn’t come to her with a present to make up the quarrel – a book he’d found in a second-hand bookshop somewhere, or a bookmark decorated with bluejay feathers found in Elinor’s garden …
So why couldn’t she have been reading some other book when he came into her room?
‘Good heavens, Meggie, you seem to have nothing in your head but those notebooks!’ he had said angrily. It had been the same every time, these last few months, whenever he had found her like that in her room – lying on the rug, deaf and blind to all that went on around her, eyes glued to the words with which she had written down what Resa told her – tales of what she had seen ‘there’, as Mo bitterly called it.
There.
Inkworld was the name Meggie gave to the place of which Mo spoke so slightingly, and her mother sometimes with such longing. Inkworld, after the book about it, Inkheart. The book was gone, but her mother’s memories were as vivid as if not a day had passed since she was there – in that world of paper and printer’s ink where there were fairies and princes, water-nymphs, fire-elves, and trees that seemed to grow to the sky.
Meggie had sat with her mother for countless days and nights, writing down what Resa’s fingers told her. Resa had left her voice behind in the Inkworld, so she talked to her daughter either with pencil and paper or with her hands, telling the story of those years – those terrible magical years, she called them. Sometimes she also drew what her eyes had seen but her tongue could no longer describe: fairies, birds, strange flowers, conjured up on paper with just a few strokes, yet looking so real that Meggie almost believed she had seen them too.
At first Mo himself had bound the notebooks in which Meggie wrote down Resa’s memories – and each binding was more beautiful than the last – but a time came when Meggie noticed the anxiety in his eyes as he watched her reading them, completely absorbed in the words and pictures. Of course she understood his uneasiness; after all, for years he had lost his wife to this world made of words and paper. How could he like it if his daughter thought of little else? Oh yes, Meggie understood Mo very well, yet she couldn’t do as he asked – close the books and forget the Inkworld for a while.
Perhaps her longing for it wouldn’t have been quite as strong if the fairies and brownies had still been around, all those strange creatures they had brought back from Capricorn’s accursed village. But none of them lived in Elinor’s garden now. The fairies’ empty nests still clung to the trees, and the burrows that the brownies had dug were still there, but their inhabitants were gone. At first Elinor thought they had run away or been stolen, but then the ashes had been found. They covered the grass in the garden, fine as dust, grey ashes, as grey as the shadows from which Elinor’s strange guests had once appeared. And Meggie had realized that there was no return from death, even for creatures made of nothing but words.
Elinor, however, could not reconcile herself to this idea. Defiantly, desperately, she had driven back to Capricorn’s village – only to find the streets empty, the houses burned down, and not a living soul in sight. ‘You know, Elinor,’ Mo had said when she came back with her face tear-stained, ‘I was afraid of something like this. I couldn’t really believe there were words to bring back the dead. And besides – if you’re honest with yourself – you must admit they didn’t fit into this world.’
‘Nor do I!’ was all Elinor had replied.
Over the next few weeks, Meggie often heard sobbing from Elinor’s room when she slipped into the library one last time in the evening to find a book. Many months had passed since then – they had all been living together in Elinor’s big house for nearly a year, and Meggie had a feeling that Elinor was glad not to be alone with her books any more. She had given them the best rooms; Elinor’s old schoolbooks and a few writers she no longer much liked had been banished to the attic to make more space. Meggie’s room had a view of snow-topped mountains, and from her parents’ bedroom you could see the distant lake with its gleaming water, which had so often tempted the fairies to fly in that direction.
Mo had never simply gone off like that before. Without a word of goodbye. Without making up the quarrel …
Perhaps I should go down and help Darius in the library, thought Meggie as she sat there wiping the tears from her face. She never cried while she was quarrelling with Mo; the tears didn’t come until later … and he always looked terribly guilty when he saw her red eyes. She was sure that yet again everyone had heard them quarrelling! Darius was probably making the hot milk and honey already, and as soon as she put her head round the kitchen door Elinor would begin calling Mo, and men in general, names. No, she’d better stay in her own room.
Oh, Mo. He had snatched the notebook she was reading out of her hand and taken it with him! And that one was the book where she had collected ideas for stories of her own: beginnings which had never got any further, opening words, crossed-out sentences, all her failed attempts … how could he just take it away from her? She didn’t want Mo to read it, she didn’t want him seeing how she tried in vain to fit the words together on paper, words that came to her tongue so easily and with such power when she read aloud. Meggie could write down what Resa described to her; she could fill pages and pages with the stories her mother told her. But as soon as she tried to make something new of them, a story with a life of its own, her mind went blank. The words seemed to fly out of her head – like snowflakes leaving only a damp patch on your skin when you put out your hand to catch them.
Someone knocked on Meggie’s door.
‘Come in!’ she snuffled, looking in her trouser pockets for one of the old-fashioned handkerchiefs that Elinor had given her. (‘They belonged to my sister. Her name began with an M, like yours. Embroidered in the corner there, see? I thought it would be better for you to have them than let the moths eat holes in them.’)
Her mother put her head round the door.
Meggie tried a smile, but it was a miserable failure.
‘Can I come in?’ R
esa’s fingers traced the words in the air faster than Darius could have said them aloud. Meggie nodded. By now she understood her mother’s sign language almost as easily as the letters of the alphabet – she knew it better than Mo and much better than Elinor, who often called for Meggie in desperation when Resa’s fingers went too fast for her.
Resa closed the door behind her and sat down on the window-sill with her daughter. Meggie always called her mother by her first name, perhaps because she hadn’t had a mother for ten years, or perhaps because, for the same inexplicable reason, she had always called her father just Mo.
Meggie recognized the notebook as soon as Resa put it on her lap. It was the one that Mo had taken. ‘I found it lying outside your door,’ said her mother’s hands.
Meggie stroked the patterned binding. So Mo had brought it back. Why hadn’t he come in? Because he was still too angry, or because he was sorry?
‘He wants me to put them away in the attic. At least for a while.’ Meggie suddenly felt so small. And at the same time so old. ‘He said, “Perhaps I ought to turn into a glass man or dye my skin blue, since my wife and daughter obviously think more of fairies and glass men than of me.”’
Resa smiled, and stroked Meggie’s nose with her forefinger.
‘Yes, I know, of course he doesn’t really think that! But he always gets so angry when he sees me with the notebooks….’
Resa looked out through the open window. Elinor’s garden was so large that you couldn’t see where it began or ended, you just saw tall trees and rhododendron shrubs so old that they surrounded Elinor’s house like an evergreen wood. Right under Meggie’s window was a lawn with a narrow gravel path round it. A garden seat stood to one side of the lawn. Meggie still remembered the night when she had sat there watching Dustfinger breathe fire. Elinor’s ever-grumpy gardener had swept the dead leaves off the lawn only that afternoon. You could still see the bare patch in the middle where Capricorn’s men had burned Elinor’s best books. The gardener kept trying to persuade Elinor to plant something in that space, or sow more grass seed there, but Elinor just shook her head energetically. ‘Who grows grass on a grave?’ she had snapped the last time he suggested it, and she told him to leave the yarrow alone too. It had grown luxuriantly around the sides of the blackened patch ever since the fire, as if to make its flat flower-heads a reminder of the night when Elinor’s printed children were swallowed up by the flames.
The sun was setting behind the nearby mountains, so red that it was as if it, too, wanted to remind them of that long-extinguished fire, and a cool wind blew from the hills too, making Resa shiver.
Meggie closed the window. The wind blew a few faded rose petals against the pane; they stuck to the glass, pale yellow and translucent. ‘I don’t want to quarrel with him,’ she whispered. ‘I never used to quarrel with Mo. Well, almost never …’
‘Perhaps he’s right.’ Her mother pushed back her hair. It was just as long as Meggie’s, but darker, as if a shadow had fallen on it. Resa usually held it back with a comb. Meggie often wore her hair like that too, and sometimes when she looked at her reflection in the mirror of her wardrobe she seemed to be seeing, not herself, but a younger version of her mother. ‘Another year and she’ll be towering over you,’ Mo sometimes said when he wanted to tease Resa, and the short-sighted Darius had confused Meggie with her mother several times already.
Resa ran her forefinger over the window-pane as if tracing the rose-petals that clung to it. Then her hands began speaking again, hesitantly, just as lips can sometimes hesitate. ‘I do understand your father, Meggie,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I myself think the two of us talk about that other world too often. Even I don’t understand why I keep coming back to the subject. And I’m always telling you about what was beautiful there, not the other things: being shut up, Mortola’s punishments, how my hands and knees hurt so much from all the work that I couldn’t sleep … all the cruelty I saw there. Did I tell you about the maid who died of fright because a Night-Mare stole into our bedroom?’
‘Yes, you did.’ Meggie moved very close to her mother, but Resa’s hands fell silent. They were still roughened from all her years of toil as a maid, working first for Mortola and then for Capricorn. ‘You’ve told me about everything,’ said Meggie. ‘The bad things too, even if Mo won’t believe it!’
‘Because all the same he feels that we dream only of the wonderful part. As if I ever had many of those!’ Resa shook her head. Again her fingers fell silent for a long time before she let them go on. ‘I had to steal it for myself, in seconds, minutes … sometimes a precious hour when we were allowed out in the forest to gather the plants Mortola needed for her black potions.’
‘But there were the years when you were free too! When you disguised yourself and worked in the markets as a scribe.’ Disguised as a man … Meggie had pictured it over and over again: her mother with her hair cut short, wearing a scribe’s tunic, ink on her fingers from the finest handwriting to be found in the Inkworld. So Resa had told her. It was the way she had earned a living in a world which didn’t make it easy for women to work. Meggie would have liked to hear the story again now, even if it had a sad ending, for after that Resa’s years of unhappiness had begun. But wonderful things had happened during that time too, like the great banquet at the Laughing Prince’s castle to which Mortola had taken her maids, the banquet where Resa saw the Laughing Prince himself, and the Black Prince and his bear, the tightrope-walker called Cloud-Dancer …
But Resa hadn’t come into her room to tell all those stories again. She said nothing in reply. And when her fingers did begin to speak once more, they moved more slowly than usual. ‘Forget the Inkworld, Meggie,’ they said. ‘Let’s both of us forget it, at least for a little while. For your father’s sake – and for yours. Or one day you may be blind to the beauty around you here.’ She looked out of the window again at the gathering dusk. ‘I’ve told you all about it already,’ said her hands. ‘Everything you wanted to know.’
So she had. And Meggie had asked her many questions, thousands and thousands of them. Did you ever see one of the giants? What sort of clothes did you wear? What did the fortress look like, in the forest where Mortola took you, and that prince you talk about, the Laughing Prince – was his castle as huge and magnificent as the Castle of Night? Tell me about his son Cosimo the Fair, and the Adderhead and his men-at-arms. Was everything in his castle really made of silver? How big is the bear that the Black Prince always keeps beside him, and what about the trees, can they really talk? And that old woman, the one they all call Nettle, is it true that she can fly?
Resa had answered all these questions as well as she could, but even a thousand answers did not add up to a whole ten years, and there were some questions that Meggie had never put to her. She had never asked about Dustfinger, for instance. But Resa had talked about him all the same, telling her that everyone in the Inkworld knew his name, even many years after he had disappeared. Of course, he was known as the fire-dancer too, so Resa had recognized him at once when she met him for the first time in this world …
There was another question that Meggie didn’t ask – although it often came into her mind – for Resa couldn’t have answered it: what about Fenoglio, the writer of the book that had drawn first her mother and finally even its own author into its pages? How was Fenoglio now?
More than a year had passed since Meggie’s voice had cast the spell of Fenoglio’s own words over him – and he had disappeared as if they had swallowed him up. Sometimes Meggie saw his wrinkled face in her dreams, but she never knew if it looked sad or happy. Not that it had ever been easy to read the expression on Fenoglio’s tortoise-like face anyway. One night, when she woke suddenly from one of these dreams and couldn’t get to sleep again, she had begun a story in which Fenoglio was trying to write himself home again, back to his grandchildren and the village where Meggie had first met him. But as with all the other stories she’d started to write, she never got past the first three sentences.
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Meggie leafed through the notebook that Mo had taken away from her, then closed it again. Resa put a hand under her chin and looked into her face.
‘Don’t be cross with him!’
‘I never am, not for long! He knows that. How much longer will he be away?’
‘Ten days, maybe more.’
Ten days! Meggie looked at the shelf beside her bed. There they were, neatly ranged side by side: the Bad Books, as she secretly called them, full of Resa’s stories: tales of glass men and water-nymphs, fire-elves, Night-Mares, White Women and all the other strange creatures that her mother had described.
‘All right. I’ll phone him and say he can make them a box. But I’ll keep the key to it.’
Resa dropped a kiss on her forehead. Then she carefully passed her hand over the notebook in Meggie’s lap. ‘Does anyone in the world bind books more beautifully than your father?’ her fingers asked.
Meggie shook her head with a smile. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No one, in this world or any other.’
When Resa went downstairs again to help Darius and Elinor with supper, Meggie stayed by the window to watch Elinor’s garden filling with shadows. When a squirrel scurried over the lawn, its bushy tail stretched out behind it, she was reminded of Dustfinger’s tame marten Gwin. How strange that she now understood the yearning she had so often seen on his master’s scarred face.
Yes, Mo was probably right. She thought about Dustfinger’s world too much, far too much. She had even read some of Resa’s stories aloud a few times, although didn’t she know how dangerous her voice could be when it spoke the words on the page? Hadn’t she – to be perfectly honest, more honest than people usually are – hadn’t she cherished a secret hope that the words would take her to that world? What would Mo have done if he’d known about these experiments? Would he have buried the notebooks in the garden or thrown them in the lake, as he sometimes threatened to do with the stray cats that stole into his workshop?
Yes, I’ll lock them away, thought Meggie, as the first stars appeared outside. As soon as Mo has made them a new box. The box with her favourite books in it was crammed full now. It was red, red as poppies; Mo had only recently repainted it. The box for the notebooks must be a different colour, perhaps green like the Wayless Wood that Resa had described so often. Yes, green. And didn’t the guards outside the Laughing Prince’s castle wear green cloaks too?
A moth fluttered against the window, reminding Meggie of the blue-skinned fairies and the best of all the stories that Resa had told her about them: how they healed Dustfinger’s face after Basta had slashed it, in gratitude to him for the many times he had freed their sisters from the wire cages where pedlars imprisoned them to be sold at market as good-luck charms. And deep in the Wayless Wood he … no, that’s enough!
Meggie leaned her forehead against the cool pane.
Quite enough.
I’ll take them all to Mo’s workshop, she thought. At once. And when he’s back I’ll ask him to bind me a new notebook for stories about this world of ours. She had already begun writing some: about Elinor’s garden and her library, about the castle down by the lake. Robbers had once lived there; Elinor had told her about them in her own typical story-telling style, with so many grisly details that Darius, listening, forgot to go on sorting books, and his eyes widened in horror behind his thick glasses.
‘Meggie, supper-time!’
Elinor’s call echoed right to the top of the stairs. She had a very powerful voice. Louder than the Titanic’s foghorn, Mo always said.
Meggie slipped off the window-sill.
‘Just coming!’ she called down the corridor. Then she went back into her room, took the notebooks off the shelf one by one until her arms could hardly hold the stack, and carried the precarious pile down the corridor and into the room that Mo used as an office. It had once been Meggie’s bedroom; she had slept there when she first came to Elinor’s house with Mo and Dustfinger, but all you could see from its window was the gravel forecourt, some spruce trees, a large chestnut, and Elinor’s grey station wagon, which stood out of doors in all weathers, because it was Elinor’s opinion that cars living in luxury in a garage rusted more quickly. But when they had decided to come and live there, Meggie had wanted a window with a view of the garden. So Mo, surrounded by Elinor’s collection of old travel guides, did his paperwork in the room where Meggie had slept before she ever went to Capricorn’s village, when she still had no mother and almost never quarrelled with Mo …
‘Meggie, where are you?’ Elinor’s voice sounded impatient. Her joints often ached these days, but she refused to go to the doctor. (‘What’s the point?’ was her only comment. ‘They haven’t invented a pill to cure old age, have they?’)
‘I’ll be down in a minute!’ called Meggie, carefully lowering the notebooks on to Mo’s desk. Two of them slipped off the pile and almost
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