‘Did he get the dog?’ asked Meggie quietly.
‘Of course,’ replied Dustfinger, looking at her thoughtfully. ‘Believe me, no one sleeps soundly with Capricorn’s men standing outside the door looking up at their window – or their children’s window. Capricorn usually gets what he wants within a couple of days, maximum.’
‘Disgusting!’ said Elinor. ‘He wouldn’t have got my dog.’
Dustfinger examined his fingernails again, smiling.
‘Stop grinning like that!’ snapped Elinor. And, turning to Meggie, she added, ‘You’d better pack a few things! We set off within the hour. It’s about time you got your father back. Even if I don’t like having to leave the book with this Capri-what’s-his-name. I hate to see books fall into the wrong hands.’
They were going in Elinor’s estate car, although Dustfinger would have preferred to travel in Mo’s camper van.
‘Nonsense, I’ve never driven anything like that,’ said Elinor, dumping in Dustfinger’s arms a cardboard box full of provisions for the journey. ‘Anyway, Mortimer’s locked the van.’
Meggie saw that Dustfinger had an answer on the tip of his tongue, but chose to keep it to himself. ‘Suppose we have to spend the night somewhere?’ he asked, carrying the box over to Elinor’s car.
‘Heavens above, who said anything about that? I intend to be back here tomorrow morning at the latest. I hate leaving my books on their own for more than a day.’
Dustfinger rolled his eyes up at the sky, as if more sense might be expected there than in Elinor’s head, and began clambering into the back seat, but Elinor stopped him. ‘No, wait, you’d better drive,’ she said, handing him her car keys. ‘You’re the one who knows where we’re going.’
But Dustfinger gave her back the keys. ‘I can’t drive,’ he said. ‘It’s bad enough sitting in a car, never mind driving it.’
Elinor got behind the steering wheel, shaking her head. ‘Well, you’re an oddity and no mistake!’ she said as Meggie climbed into the passenger seat beside her. ‘And I hope you really do know where Meggie’s father is, or you’ll find out that this Capricorn of yours isn’t the only person to be frightened of around here!’
Meggie wound down her window as Elinor started the engine. She looked back at Mo’s van. It felt bad leaving it behind here, worse than leaving a house, even this one. Strange as a place might be, the camper van meant that Mo and she always had a bit of home with them. Now that was gone too, and nothing was familiar any more except the clothes in her travelling bag in the boot of the estate car. She had also packed a few things for Mo – and two of her books.
‘Interesting choice!’ Elinor had commented when she lent Meggie a bag for the books, an old-fashioned one made of dark leather that you could sling over your shoulder. ‘These stories about the ill-made knight, and people with hairy feet going on a long journey to dark places. Have you read them both?’
Meggie had nodded. ‘Lots of times,’ she smiled at Elinor’s descriptions, stroking the bindings before she put the books in the bag. She could remember every detail of the day when Mo had rebound them.
‘Oh dear, don’t look so dismal!’ Elinor had said, looking at her with concern. ‘You just wait – our journey isn’t going to be half as bad as those hairy-footed people’s quest. It will be much shorter too.’
Meggie would have been glad to feel as sure of that herself. The book that was the reason for their own journey was in the boot, under the spare tyre. Elinor had put it in a plastic bag. ‘Don’t let Dustfinger see where it is!’ she urged Meggie, before putting it into her hands. ‘I still don’t trust him.’
But Meggie had decided to trust Dustfinger. She wanted to trust him. She needed to trust him. Who else could lead her to Mo?
13
Capricorn’s Village
‘But to the last question,’ Zelig replied, ‘he probably flew to beyond the Dark Regions, where people don’t go and cattle don’t stray, where the sky is copper, the earth iron, and where the evil forces live under roofs of petrified toadstools and in tunnels abandoned by moles.’
Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Naftali the Storyteller
The sun was already high in the cloudless sky when they set off. Soon the air was so hot and muggy in Elinor’s car that Meggie’s T-shirt was sticking to her skin with sweat. Elinor opened her window and passed a bottle of water round. She herself was wearing a knitted jacket buttoned up to her chin, and when Meggie wasn’t thinking of Mo or Capricorn she wondered whether Elinor might melt away inside it.
Dustfinger sat on the back seat, so silent that you could almost have forgotten he was there. He had put Gwin on his lap. The marten slept while Dustfinger’s hands restlessly stroked his fur, passing over it again and again. Now and then Meggie turned to look at him. He was usually gazing out of the window indifferently, as if he were looking straight through the mountains and trees, houses and rocky slopes passing by outside. His expression seemed perfectly empty, as if he were thinking of something far away, and once, when Meggie glanced round, there was such sadness on his scarred face that she quickly turned to look out of the windscreen ahead of her.
She would have liked to have an animal on her own lap during this long, long journey. Perhaps it would have driven away the dark thoughts that insisted on coming into her mind. Outside, the world was a place of gently unfolding mountains rising higher and higher. Sometimes it seemed as if they would crush the road between their grey and rocky sides. But worse than the mountains were the tunnels. Pictures seemed to lurk in them that not even Gwin’s warm body could have kept at bay. They seemed to be hiding there in the darkness, waiting for Meggie: pictures of Mo in some dark, cold place, and of Capricorn … Meggie knew it must be Capricorn, although his face was different every time.
She tried reading for a while, but soon noticed that she wasn’t taking in a word of what she read, so she gave it up and stared out of the window like Dustfinger. Elinor chose minor roads without much traffic on them. ‘Otherwise the driving gets so boring,’ she said. It made no difference to Meggie. She just wanted to arrive. She looked impatiently at the mountains, and the houses where other people lived. Sometimes, through the window of a car coming the other way, she caught a glimpse of a stranger’s face, and then it was gone, like a book you open then close at once. When they were driving through one village she saw a man by the roadside sticking a plaster on the grazed knee of a tearful little girl. He was stroking her hair comfortingly, and Meggie couldn’t help remembering how often Mo had done that for her, how he sometimes chased all round the house, cursing when he couldn’t find a plaster in time. The memory brought tears to her eyes.
‘Heavens above, it’s quieter in here than in a Pharaoh’s burial chamber!’ said Elinor at some point. (Meggie thought she said ‘Heavens above’ rather a lot.) ‘Couldn’t one of you at least say something now and then? “Oh, what a lovely landscape!”, for instance, or, “That’s a very fine castle!” If you keep as deathly quiet as this I’ll be falling asleep at the wheel any minute now.’ She still hadn’t undone a single button of her knitted jacket.
‘I don’t see any castle,’ muttered Meggie, but it wasn’t long before Elinor spotted one. ‘Sixteenth century,’ she announced as the ruined walls appeared on a mountainside. ‘Tragic story. Forbidden love, pursuit, death, grief and pain.’ And as they passed between the strong and silent rock walls Elinor told the tale of a battle that had raged in this very place over six hundred years ago. ‘To this day, if you dig among the stones you’ll still find bones and dented helmets.’ She seemed to know a story about every church tower. Some were so unlikely that Meggie wrinkled her brow in disbelief, and Elinor, without taking her eyes off the road, always responded, ‘No, really, that’s just what happened!’ She seemed to be particularly fond of bloodthirsty stories: tales of the beheading of unhappy lovers, or princes walled up alive. ‘Yes, everything looks very peaceful now,’ she remarked when Meggie turned a little pale at one of these stories. ‘But I can tell you there’s always a sad story somewhere. Ah, well, times were more exciting a few hundred years ago.’
Meggie didn’t know what was so exciting about times when, if Elinor was to be believed, your only choice was between dying of the plague or getting slaughtered by invading soldiers. But Elinor’s cheeks glowed pink with excitement at the sight of some burnt-out old castle, and whenever she told tales of the warrior princes and greedy bishops who had once spread terror and death abroad in the very mountains through which they themselves were now driving on modern paved roads, a romantic gleam lit her usually chilly pebble eyes.
‘My dear Elinor, you were obviously born into the wrong story,’ said Dustfinger at last. These were the first words he had spoken since they set out.
‘The wrong story? The wrong period, you mean. Yes, I’ve often thought so myself.’
‘Call it what you like,’ said Dustfinger. ‘Anyway, you should get on well with Capricorn. He likes the same kinds of stories as you.’
‘Is that supposed to be an insult?’ asked Elinor, offended. The comparison seemed to trouble her, for after that she kept quiet for almost an hour, which left Meggie with nothing to distract her from her miserable thoughts and the frightening pictures they conjured up for her in every tunnel.
Twilight was beginning to fall when the mountains drew back from the road and the sea suddenly appeared beyond green hills, a sea as wide as another sky. The sinking sun made it glisten like the skin of a beautiful snake. It was a long time since Meggie had seen the sea, and then it had been a cold sea, slate-grey and pale from the wind. This sea looked different, very different.
It warmed Meggie’s heart just to see it, but all too often it disappeared behind the tall, ugly buildings covering the narrow strip of land that lay between the water and the encroaching hills. Sometimes, the hills reached all the way down to the sea, and in the light of the setting sun they looked as if they were giant waves that had rolled up on to the land.
As they followed the winding coastal road Elinor began telling stories again: tales of the Romans who, she said, had built the road they were on, and how they feared the savage inhabitants of this narrow strip of land. Meggie was only half listening. Palm trees grew beside the road, their fronds dusty and sharp-edged. Giant agaves flowered among the palms, looking like spiders squatting there with their long spiny leaves. The light behind them turned pink and lemon-yellow as the sun sank further down towards the sea, and dark blue trickled down from the sky like ink flowing into water. It was so beautiful a sight that it almost hurt to look at it. Meggie had thought the place where Capricorn lived would be quite different. Beauty and fear make uneasy companions.
They drove through a small town, past houses as bright as if a child had painted them. They were colour-washed orange and pink, red and yellow. A great many were yellow: pale yellow, brownish yellow, sandy yellow, dirty yellow, and they had green shutters and red-brown roofs. Even the gathering twilight couldn’t drain them of their brightness.
‘It doesn’t seem so very dangerous here,’ remarked Meggie, as they drove past another pink house.
‘That’s because you keep looking to your left,’ said Dustfinger behind her. ‘But there’s always a light side and a dark side. Look to your right for a change.’
Meggie did as he said. At first she saw nothing but the brightly coloured houses there too. They crowded close to the roadside, leaning against each other as if they were arm in arm. But then the houses were suddenly left behind, and steep hills with the night already settling among their folds lined the road instead. Yes, Dustfinger was right. It looked sinister over there, and the few houses left seemed to be drowning in the gathering dusk.
It quickly grew darker, for night falls fast in the south, and Meggie was glad that Elinor was driving along the well lit coastal road. But all too soon Dustfinger told her to turn off along a minor road leading away from the coast, away from the sea and the brightly coloured houses, and into the dark.
The road wound further and further into the hills, going up and down as the slopes by the roadside grew steeper and steeper. The light of the headlamps fell on gorse, on vines run wild, and olive trees crouching like bent old men beside the road.
Only twice did they meet another vehicle coming towards them. Now and then the lights of a village emerged from the darkness. But the roads along which Dustfinger guided Elinor led away from the lights and deeper and deeper into the night. Several times the beam of the headlights fell on ruined houses, but Elinor didn’t know stories about any of them. No princes had lived in those wretched hovels, no red-robed bishops, only farmers and labourers whose stories no one had written down, and now they were lost, buried under wild thyme and fast-growing gorse.
‘Are we still going the right way?’ asked Elinor in a muted voice, as if the world around her were too quiet for anyone to speak out loud. ‘Where on earth do we find a village in this God-forsaken wilderness? We’ve probably taken at least two wrong turnings already.’
But Dustfinger only shook his head. ‘We’re going the right way,’ he replied. ‘Once we’re over that hill you’ll be able to see the houses.’
‘I certainly hope so!’ muttered Elinor. ‘I can hardly make out the road. Heavens above, I had no idea anywhere in the world was still so dark. Couldn’t you have told me what a long way it was? Then I’d have filled up the tank again. I don’t even know if we have enough fuel to make it back to the coast.’
‘So whose car is this?’ Dustfinger snapped back. ‘Mine? I told you I don’t know the first thing about cars. Now, keep your eyes on the road. We’ll be coming to the bridge any moment.’
‘Bridge?’ Elinor drove round the next bend and suddenly stamped on the brake. Right across the road, lit by two builders’ lamps, was a metal barrier. It looked rusty, as if it had stood there for years.
‘There!’ said Elinor, clapping her hands on the steering wheel. ‘We have gone the wrong way. I told you so.’
‘No, we haven’t.’ Dustfinger took Gwin off his shoulder and got out of the car. He looked round, listening intently as he approached the barrier, then dragged it over to the side of the road.
Elinor’s look of disbelief almost made Meggie laugh out loud. ‘Has the man gone right out of his mind?’ she whispered. ‘He doesn’t think I’m going to drive down a closed road in this darkness, does he?’
All the same, she started the engine when Dustfinger impatiently waved her on. As soon as she was past him he pulled the barrier back across the road.
‘No need to look at me like that!’ he said, climbing back into the car. ‘The barrier’s always there. Capricorn had it put up to keep unwanted visitors away. Not that people often venture up here. Capricorn spreads stories about the village that keep most of them at a distance, but—’
‘What sort of stories?’ Meggie interrupted him, although she didn’t think she really wanted to know.
‘Blood-curdling stories,’ said Dustfinger. ‘Like most folk, the locals round here are superstitious. The most common tale is that the Devil himself lives on the far side of that hill.’
Meggie was cross with herself for being scared, but now she just couldn’t take her eyes off the dark hilltop. ‘Mo says human beings invented the Devil,’ she said.
‘Well, maybe.’ Dustfinger’s mysterious smile was hovering round his mouth again. ‘But you wanted to know about the stories. They say no bullet can kill the men who live in that village, they can walk through walls, they kidnap three boys every month when the moon is new, and Capricorn teaches them to commit theft, arson and murder.’
‘Good heavens, who thought all that up? The folk of these parts or this man Capricorn himself?’ Elinor was leaning right over the steering wheel. The road was full of potholes, and she had to drive very slowly so as not to get stuck.
‘Both.’ Dustfinger leaned back and let Gwin nibble his fingers. ‘Capricorn rewards people who think up new stories. The one man who never joins in that game is Basta. He’s so superstitious himself he even goes out of his way to avoid black cats.’
Basta. Meggie remembered the name, but before she could ask any more questions Dustfinger was speaking again. He seemed to enjoy telling these tales. ‘Oh yes, I almost forgot!
Of course everyone living in the village of the damned has the Evil Eye, even the women.’
‘The Evil Eye?’ Meggie looked at him.
‘That’s right. One glance and you fall mortally ill. Three days after that, at the latest, and you’re dead as a doornail.’
‘Who’d believe a thing like that?’ murmured Meggie, turning to look ahead of her again.
‘Idiots would.’ Elinor stamped on the brake again. The car skidded over gravel on the road. The bridge Dustfinger had mentioned lay ahead, its grey stone pale in the headlights.
‘Go on, go on!’ said Dustfinger impatiently. ‘It’ll hold, though you might not think so.’
‘It looks as if the ancient Romans built it,’ muttered Elinor. ‘But for donkeys, not cars.’
All the same, Elinor drove on. Meggie squeezed her eyes tight shut, and didn’t open them until she could hear the gravel under the car tyres once more.
‘Capricorn likes this bridge a lot,’ said Dustfinger quietly. ‘A single well-armed man is enough to make it impassable. But luckily he doesn’t post a guard here every night.’
‘Dustfinger.’ Meggie turned hesitantly to look at him as Elinor’s car laboured up the last hill. ‘What are we going to say when they ask us how we found the village? I mean, it’s not going to be a good idea for Capricorn to know that you showed us the way, is it?’
‘No, you’re right,’ muttered Dustfinger, avoiding Meggie’s eyes. ‘Although we are bringing him the book.’ He picked up Gwin, who was clambering around the back seat, held him so that he couldn’t snap, and then lured him into the rucksack with a piece of bread. The marten had been restless ever since darkness fell. He wanted to go hunting.
They had reached the top of the hill. The world around them had disappeared from view, swallowed up by the night, but not far away a few pale rectangles glowed in the dark. Lighted windows.
‘There it is,’ said Dustfinger. ‘Capricorn’s village. Or the Devil’s village, if you prefer.’ He laughed softly.
Elinor turned to him crossly. ‘For heaven’s sake, will you stop that!’ she snapped at him. ‘You really seem to like these stories. Who knows, perhaps they’re all your own invention, and this Capricorn is just a rather eccentric book collector!’
Dustfinger made no reply, but only looked out of the window with the strange smile that Meggie sometimes wanted to wipe off his face. Yet again it seemed to be saying: how stupid you two are!
Elinor had switched off the engine. The silence surrounding them was so absolute that Meggie hardly dared to breathe. She looked down at the lighted windows. Usually, she thought brightly lit windows were an inviting sight in the dark, but these seemed far more menacing than the darkness all around.
‘Does this village have any normal inhabitants?’ asked Elinor. ‘Harmless old grannies, children, people who don’t have anything to do with Capricorn?’
‘No. Nobody lives there but Capricorn and his men,’ whispered Dustfinger, ‘and the women who cook and clean and so on for them.’
‘“And so on” … oh, wonderful!’ Elinor snorted with distaste. ‘I like the sound of this Capricorn less and less! Right, let’s get this over and done with. I want to go home to my books, proper electric light and a nice cup of coffee.’
‘Really? I thought you were longing for a little adventure?’