It will be as you require. By the Devil's cloven hoof, he was writing in the style of public proclamations, like the robbers of the old days. I will try to call up the White Women, and in return you will write words to take my wife and daughter back to Elinor's house. But all you are to say about me is that I will follow them later.
Well, well. What was this?
Surprised, Orpheus lowered the sheet of paper. Mortimer wanted to stay? Why? Because his noble and heroic heart wouldn't let him steal away now that the Piper had made his threat? Or did he just like playing the part of a robber too much?
"Well, never mind which, noble Bluejay," said Orpheus softly (oh, how he liked the sound of his own voice!). "It won't turn out the way you think it will. Because I have plans of my own for you!"
High-minded idiot! Hadn't Mortimer ever read any tale of robbers right through? No happy ending for Robin Hood, for Angelo Duca, for Dick Turpin, and all the rest of them. Why would there be a happy ending for the Bluejay? No, he was going to play just one part: the bait on the hook, a tasty bait – and one condemned to certain death.
And I will write the last song about him! thought Orpheus as he strode up and down with a spring in his step, as if he already felt the right words inside him all the way down to his toes. Good people, hear the amazing tale of the Bluejay who brought the Fire-Dancer back from the dead but then, sad to say, lost his own life. Heartrending. Like Robin Hood's death at the hands of the treacherous nun, or Angelo Duca's end on the gallows beside his dead friend, with the hangman riding him to death on his shoulders. Yes, every hero needs a death like that. Even Fenoglio wouldn't write it in any other way.
Ah, but he hadn't finished reading the letter yet! What else did that most noble of robbers have to say? Hang a piece of blue cloth in the window when you have written the words. (How romantic! A real robber's idea. He really did seem to be turning more and more into the character made by Fenoglio in his image!) I will meet you at the graveyard of the strolling players on the following night. Farid knows where it is. Come alone, bringing one servant at the most. I know you are on friendly terms with the new governor, and I will not show myself until I am certain that none of his men is with you. Mortimer. (Well, well, so he actually still signed his old name. Who did he think he was fooling?)
Come alone? Oh yes, I'll come alone, thought Orpheus. And you won't be able to see the words I've sent on ahead of you!
He rolled up the letter and slid it under his desk.
"Everything ready, Ironstone? A dozen sharpened pens, ink stirred slowly while you take sixty-five breaths, a sheet of the best parchment?"
"A dozen pens. Sixty-five breaths. The very best parchment."
"What about this list of words?" Orpheus looked at his bitten fingernails. He had recently taken to bathing them in rose water every morning, but unfortunately that just made them tastier. "Your useless brother left his footprints all over the words beginning with B."
The list. The list of all the words used by Fenoglio in Inkheart, arranged in alphabetical order. He had only recently told Jasper to prepare it – his brother had terrible handwriting. But unfortunately the glass man had only just reached the letter D, so Orpheus still had to look everything up in Fenoglio's book if he wanted to be sure that any words he used were in Inkheart, too. It was a nuisance, but it had to be done, and so far his method had proved its merits.
"All ready!" Ironstone nodded eagerly.
Good! The words were already coming. Orpheus sensed them like a tingling of his scalp. As soon as he picked up the pen he could hardly dip it in the ink fast enough. Dustfinger… the tears still came to his eyes when he remembered seeing him lying dead in the mine. Certainly one of the worst moments of his life.
And how the promise he'd given Roxane had come to haunt him, even if she had never believed a word of it! He had given it with the dead man at his feet. "I'll find words as precious and intoxicating as the scent of a lily, words to beguile Death and open the cold fingers he has closed around Dustfinger's warm heart!" He had been looking for those words ever since he arrived in this world – even if Farid and Fenoglio thought he did nothing but write unicorns and rainbow-colored fairies into it. But after his first failed attempts he had accepted the bitter fact that beauty of sound alone was not enough in this case. Words like lilies would never bring Dustfinger back. Death demanded a more substantial price – a price paid in flesh and blood.
Incredible that he hadn't hit upon the idea of Mortimer before – the man who had made Death a laughingstock to the living when he had bound an empty book to make the Adderhead immortal!
So away with him! This world needed only one silver tongue, and it was his. Once he had fed Mortimer to Death, and Fenoglio's brain was wrecked by the drink, only he would go on telling this story, on and on – with a suitable part in it for Dustfinger and a not inconsiderable part for himself.
"Yes, call up the White Women for me, Mortimer!" whispered Orpheus as he filled the parchment with word after word in his elegant script. "You'll never know what I've whispered into their pale ears first! 'Look what I've brought you! The Bluejay. Take him to your cold lord with greetings from Orpheus, and give me the Fire- Dancer in exchange.' Ah, Orpheus, Orpheus, they can say many things about you, but they can never call you stupid."
He dipped his pen in the ink with a soft laugh – and spun around when the door opened behind him. Farid came in. Damn it, where was Oss? "What do you want?" he snapped at the boy. "How often do I have to tell you to knock before coming in? Next time I'll throw the inkwell at your stupid head. Bring me wine! The best we have."
How the lad looked at him as he closed the door. He hates me, thought Orpheus.
He liked that idea. In his experience only the powerful were hated, and that was what he meant to be in this world.
Powerful.
23. THE GRAVEYARD OF THE STROLLING PLAYERS
He sits down on a hill and sings. They are songs of magic, strong enough to wake the dead to life. Softly, cautiously, his song rises, then it grows louder and more insistent, until the turf opens up and the cold earth cracks.
Tor Age Bringsvaerd, The Wild Gods
The strolling players' graveyard lay above a deserted village. Carandrella. It had kept its name, although the inhabitants had left long ago. Why and where they went no one knew now – an epidemic, some said, while others spoke of famine, and others again of two warring clans who had slaughtered each other and driven out any survivors. Whichever story was true, it wasn't in Fenoglio's book, nor was this graveyard where the peasants had buried their dead among the Motley Folk, so that now they slept side by side forever.
A narrow, stony path wound its way from the abandoned cottages up the furze-grown slope and ended on a rocky headland. Standing there you could look far south over the treetops of the Wayless Wood toward Argenta, where the sea lay somewhere beyond the hills. The dead of Carandrella, they said in Lombrica, have the best view in the country.
A crumbling wall surrounded the graves. The gravestones were of the pale stone that was also used to build houses here. Stones for the living, stones for the dead. Names were incised on some of them, scratched clumsily as if whoever wrote them had learned the letters only to preserve the sound of a beloved name, rescuing it from the silence of death.
Meggie felt as if the stones were whispering those names to her as she walked past the graves – Farina, Rosa, Lucio, Renzo. Those stones that bore no names seemed like closed mouths, sad mouths that had forgotten how to speak. But perhaps the dead didn't mind what their names had once been?