Suddenly even the weariest feet could walk again. ‘Quiet!’ the Prince warned the children as they shouted louder and louder, but they were too excited to obey, and the forest echoed to the sound of their clear voices.
‘There, told you so, didn’t I?’ Suddenly Fenoglio was walking beside Meggie, his eyes full of his old pride in the world he had written. It was easily aroused.
‘Yes, you did.’ Elinor got in before Meggie with the answer. She was obviously feeling cross in her damp clothes. ‘But I haven’t seen these fabulous nests of yours yet, and I must say the prospect of perching up at the top of a tree in this weather doesn’t exactly sound enticing.’
Fenoglio glared at Elinor with contempt. ‘Meggie,’ he asked in a low voice, ‘what’s that lad there called? You know, the Strong Man’s brother.’
‘You mean Doria?’
Doria glanced around as she spoke his name, and Meggie smiled at him. She liked the way he looked at her. His glance warmed her heart in a way quite unlike Farid’s. In a very different way.
‘Doria,’ murmured Fenoglio. ‘Doria. Sounds somehow familiar to me.’
‘Hardly surprising,’ said Elinor sarcastically. ‘The Dorias were a very famous aristocratic Italian family.’
Fenoglio gave her a look that was far from friendly, but he never got a chance to reply.
‘There they are!’
Ivo’s voice was so loud in the gathering dusk that Minerva instinctively put her hand over his mouth.
And there they really were.
Human nests.
They looked just as Fenoglio had described them in his book. He had read the passage aloud to Meggie. Gigantic nests in the crown of a mighty tree, with evergreen branches reaching so high into the sky that its top seemed lost in the clouds. The nests were round, like fairies’ nests, but Meggie thought she saw bridges between them, ladders and nets made of twining tendrils. The children gathered around the Black Prince and stared up, enchanted, as if he had led them to a castle in the clouds. But Fenoglio looked happiest of all.
‘Aren’t they fabulous?’ he cried.
‘They’re a very long way up, that’s for sure!’ Elinor sounded far from enthusiastic.
‘Well, that’s the whole point!’ replied Fenoglio brusquely, but Minerva and the other women were also looking at the nests in dismay.
‘What happened to the people who used to live up there?’ asked Despina. ‘Did they fall out of the nests?’
‘Of course not!’ said Fenoglio impatiently, but Meggie could see he hadn’t the faintest idea what had happened to the original nest-dwellers.
‘Oh no, I suppose they just wanted to get back to the ground!’ said Jasper in his clear little voice.
The two glass men were sitting in the deep pockets of Darius’s coat. He was the only one who had anything like proper winter clothing, but he was always ready to share his coat generously with a few of the children. He let them slip in under the warm fabric like chicks under a mother hen’s wings.
The Black Prince looked up at the strange dwellings, scrutinized the tree that they would have to climb – and said nothing.
‘We can pull the children up in nets,’ said Doria. ‘The creepers will make ropes. Farid and I have tried them. They’ll hold.’
‘This is the best possible hiding place!’
It was Farid’s voice calling to them. Nimble as a squirrel, he came climbing down the trunk as if he had lived in trees in his old life, not the desert. ‘Even if the Milksop’s hounds find us we can defend ourselves from up here!’
‘With luck they won’t find us at all,’ said the Black Prince. ‘I hope we’ll be able to hold out up there until …’
They all looked at him expectantly. Until – yes, until when?
‘Until the Bluejay’s killed the Adderhead!’ said one of the children so confidently that the Prince had to smile.
‘Yes, exactly. Until the Bluejay’s killed the Adderhead.’
‘And the Piper!’ added one of the boys.
‘Of course, the Piper too.’ Hope and anxiety were equally balanced in the glance that Battista exchanged with the Black Prince.
‘That’s right, he’ll kill them both, and then he’ll marry Her Ugliness and they’ll reign over Ombra and live happily ever after!’ Despina’s smile was as delighted as if she could already see the wedding before her eyes.
‘No, no!’ Fenoglio looked at her, as horrified as if her words might come true the next moment. ‘The Bluejay already has a wife, Despina, doesn’t he? Have you forgotten Meggie’s mother?’
Despina glanced at Meggie in alarm and put her hand over her mouth, but Meggie just stroked her smooth hair. ‘Sounds like a good story all the same,’ she whispered to the child.
‘Start getting ropes up into the tree,’ the Black Prince told Battista, ‘and ask Doria just how he plans to haul the nets up. The rest of you, climb to the top of the tree and see which nests are still sound.’
Meggie looked up at the dense thicket of branches. She had never set eyes on a tree like it before. The bark was reddish brown, but as rough as the bark of an oak, and the trunk did not branch until high up in the tree, although it had so many bulges that you could find footholds and handholds everywhere. In some places huge tree fungi formed platforms. Hollows gaped in the towering trunk, and crevices full of feathers showed that human beings were not the only creatures to have nested in this tree. Perhaps I should ask Doria if he can really build me wings, Meggie said to herself, and suddenly she thought of the magpie that had frightened her mother so much.
Why hadn’t Resa taken her along? Because she thinks I’m still a small child, she told herself.
‘Meggie?’ One of the children slipped her cold fingers into Meggie’s hand. Elinor had nicknamed the little girl Fire-Elf because of her hair, which was as red as if Dustfinger had sprinkled it with sparks. How old was she? Four? Five? Many of the children didn’t know their own ages.
‘Beppe says there are birds that eat children up there.’
‘Nonsense. Anyway, how would he know? You think Beppe’s been up there already?’
Fire-Elf smiled in relief and looked sternly at Beppe. But her face grew grave again as, her fingers still clutching Meggie’s hand firmly, she listened with the others to Farid reporting to the Black Prince.
‘The nests are so large that I should think five or even six of us can sleep in each of them!’ He sounded so excited. ‘Many of the bridges are crumbling, but there are enough creepers and timber up there to repair them.’
‘We have hardly any tools,’ Doria pointed out. ‘We must make do with our knives and swords.’
The robbers looked in some alarm at their swordbelts.
‘The crown of the tree is dense enough to give us good shelter from the wind, but there are gaps in it in some places,’ Farid went on. ‘I guess they were lookout points for the guards. We’ll have to pad and line the nests, as the fairies do.’
‘Maybe some of us had better stay down here,’ Elfbane put in. ‘We have to go hunting and—’
‘Oh, you can hunt up there!’ Farid interrupted. ‘There are flocks of birds, and I’ve seen large squirrels, and creatures like rabbits with fingers that cling to the branches. Though there are wild cats up there as well …’
The women looked at each other, frightened.
‘… and bats, and long-tailed brownies,’ Farid went on. ‘There’s a whole world up there! It has caves in it, and a lot of the branches are so wide you can easily walk along them. Flowers and mushrooms grow there! It’s fabulous. Wonderful!’
Fenoglio was smiling all over his wrinkled face, like a king hearing praise of his domain, and even Elinor looked wistfully up the rough trunk for the first time. Some of the children wanted to climb the tree at once, but the women stopped them. ‘Go and collect leaves,’ they told them, ‘and moss and birds’ feathers – anything you can find to make soft linings.’
The sun was already low as the robbers began stretching ro
pes, weaving nets, and building wooden platforms to be hauled up the tall trunk. Battista went back with some of the men to wipe out their tracks, and Meggie saw the Black Prince looking at his bear, at a loss. How was he going to get the bear up the tree? What would happen to the packhorses? So many questions, and he still wasn’t at all sure that they had outrun the Milksop.
Meggie was just helping Minerva to tie creepers together to make a net for provisions when Fenoglio drew her aside, a conspiratorial expression on his face.
‘You won’t believe this!’ he murmured to her when they were standing among the mighty roots of the tree. ‘And don’t you dare tell Loredan about it. She’d only accuse me of having delusions of grandeur again!’
‘What don’t you want me to tell her?’ Meggie looked at him blankly.
‘Well, that boy, you know who I mean – the one who keeps looking at you and brings you flowers and turns Farid green with jealousy. Doria …’
Above them the crown of the tree was bathed with red in the light of the setting sun, and the nests hung among its branches like black fruits.
Feeling embarrassed, Meggie turned her face away. ‘What about him?’
Fenoglio looked round as if afraid that Elinor might appear behind him next moment. ‘Meggie,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘I think I made him up too, just like Dustfinger and the Black Prince!’
‘Oh, nonsense, what are you talking about?’ Meggie whispered back. ‘Doria probably wasn’t even born when you were writing your book!’
‘Yes, yes, I know! That’s the confusing part of it! All these children,’ said Fenoglio, with a sweeping gesture towards the children searching busily for moss and feathers under the trees, ‘my story lays them like eggs, entirely without my aid. It’s a very fertile story! But that boy …’ Fenoglio lowered his voice as if Doria could hear him, although he was far away with Battista, kneeling on the forest floor and turning knives into machetes and saws. ‘Meggie, this is where it gets so crazy: I wrote a story about him, but the character with his name was grown-up! And even stranger – the story was never published! Presumably it’s still lying in a drawer in my old desk, or my grandchildren have made it into balls of paper to throw for the cats!’
‘But that’s impossible. He can’t be the same person.’ Meggie unobtrusively glanced at Doria. She liked the sight of him; she liked it very much. ‘What’s this story about?’ she asked. ‘What does this grown-up Doria do?’
‘He builds castles and city walls. He even invents a flying machine, a clock to measure time, and –’ here Fenoglio looked at Meggie – ‘and a printing machine for a famous bookbinder.’
‘Really?’ Meggie suddenly felt warm, the way she used to when Mo had told her a particularly good story. For a famous bookbinder. Just for a moment she forgot all about Doria and thought only of her father. Perhaps Fenoglio had already written the words that would keep Mo alive, perhaps he’d written them long ago. Oh, please, she begged Fenoglio’s story, let the bookbinder be Mo!
‘Doria the Enchanter, I called him,’ Fenoglio whispered. ‘But it’s with his hands that he works enchantment, like your father. And now, listen to this: it gets even better! This Doria has a wife who is said to come from a distant land, and she often gives him his ideas in the first place. Isn’t that strange?’
‘What’s so strange about it?’ Meggie felt herself blushing, and just at that moment Farid looked at her. ‘Did you give her a name?’ she asked Fenoglio.
Awkwardly, the old man cleared his throat. ‘Well, you know I sometimes neglect my women characters a bit, and I couldn’t find the right name, so I just called her his wife.’
Meggie had to smile. Yes, that was very like Fenoglio. ‘Doria has two stiff fingers on his left hand,’ she pointed out. ‘So how could he do all the things you say?’
‘But I wrote him those stiff fingers!’ cried Fenoglio out loud, forgetting to be quiet. Doria raised his head and glanced at them, but luckily the Black Prince went up to him just at that moment.
‘His father broke them,’ Fenoglio went on more quietly. ‘When he was drunk. He was going to hit Doria’s sister, and Doria tried to protect her.’
Meggie leant back again the tree trunk. She felt as if she could hear its heart beating behind her, a gigantic heart in the wood. It was all a dream, just a dream. ‘What was this sister’s name?’ she asked. ‘Susa?’
‘How should I know?’ retorted Fenoglio. ‘I can’t remember everything. Maybe she didn’t have a name any more than his wife did. Anyway, it will just make him all the more famous later when people find out he can build such marvels in spite of his stiff fingers!’
‘I see,’ murmured Meggie – and caught herself wondering what Doria would look like when he grew up. ‘That’s a lovely story,’ she said.
‘I know,’ agreed Fenoglio, leaning back with a self-satisfied sigh against the tree he had described in his book so many years ago. ‘But not a word to the boy about all this, of course.’
‘Of course not. Did you leave any more stories like that in your desk drawers? Do you know what will happen to Minerva’s children, and to Beppe and Fire-Elf?’
Fenoglio never got around to answering that question.
‘Well, isn’t that wonderful!’ Elinor was standing in front of them with her arms full of moss. ‘Tell me, Meggie, isn’t the fellow beside you the laziest man in this world – and any other? Everyone else is working while he stands here staring into space!’
‘Oh yes, and what about Meggie?’ Fenoglio retorted indignantly. ‘Anyway, you’d none of you have anything to do if the laziest man in all the worlds hadn’t thought up this tree, and the nests in its branches!’
Elinor was not in the least impressed. ‘We’re probably all going to break our necks in those wretched nests,’ was all she said. ‘And I’m not sure if this is any better than the mines.’
‘Calm down, Loredan. In any case, the Piper wouldn’t want you for the mines,’ replied Fenoglio. ‘You’d get stuck in the first tunnel.’
Meggie left them to their quarrel. Lights were beginning to dance among the trees. At first Meggie thought they were glow-worms, but when some of them settled on her arms she saw that they were tiny moths, shining as if moonlight clung to them.
A new chapter, she thought, looking up at the nests. A new place. And Fenoglio can tell me about Doria’s future, but he doesn’t know what his story is going to say about my father. Why didn’t Resa take me with her?
Because your mother is a clever woman, Fenoglio would have told her. Who but you is going to read my words if I find the right ones? Darius? No, Meggie, you’re the best teller of this tale. If you really want to help your father, your place is here beside me. And Mortimer would certainly see it just the same way!
Yes, she supposed he would.
One of the moths settled on her hand, shining on her finger like a ring. This Doria has a wife who is said to come from a distant land, and she often gives him his ideas in the first place. Yes. That really was strange.
54
The White Whispering
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats,
Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
From the tower battlements, Dustfinger looked down on a lake as black as night, where the reflection of the castle swam in a sea of stars. The wind passing over his unscarred face was cold from the snow of the surrounding mountains, and Dustfinger relished life as if he were tasting it for the first time. The longing it brought, and the desire. All the bitterness, all the sweetness, even if it was only for a while, never for more than a while, eve
rything gained and lost, lost and found again.
Even the blackness of the trees intoxicated him with joy. The night blackened them as if to prove once and for all that this world was nothing but ink. And didn’t the snow on the mountain peaks look like paper?
Even so …
Above his head the moon burnt a silver hole in the night, and the stars surrounded it like fire-elves. Dustfinger tried to remember whether he had seen the moon in the realm of the dead too. Perhaps. Why did death make life taste so much sweeter? Why could the heart love only what it could also lose? Why? Why …
The White Women knew some of the answers, but they hadn’t told him all of them. Later, they had whispered when they let him go. Another time. You will often come to us. And often go again.
Gwin sat on the battlements with him, listening uneasily to the lapping of the water. The marten didn’t like the castle. Behind him, Silvertongue stirred in his sleep. Without a word, the two of them had decided to sleep up here on the tower behind the battlements, even though it was cold. Dustfinger didn’t like sleeping in closed rooms, and Silvertongue seemed to feel the same. Although perhaps he slept up here only because Violante roamed the painted rooms even at night – as restlessly as if she were looking for her dead mother, or as if her sleeplessness would hasten the Adder’s arrival. Did any daughter ever wait so impatiently to kill her father?
Violante was not the only one who couldn’t sleep. Her illuminator was sitting in the room full of dead books, trying to teach his left hand the art that his right had once mastered so superbly. He sat there hour after hour, at a desk that Brianna had dusted for him, forcing his unpractised fingers to trace leaves and tendrils, birds and tiny faces, while the useless stump of his right wrist held down the parchment he had, with forethought, brought with him.
‘Shall I find you a glass man in the forest?’ Dustfinger had asked him, but Balbulus had only shaken his head.