Be on his guard against what? The pale faces were looking at him. They were beautiful, but they blurred as soon as he tried to see them more distinctly.
"Orpheus!" whispered the pale lips.
And suddenly Mo heard Orpheus's voice. Its melodious sound filled the hollow tree like a cloyingly sweet fragrance. "Hear me, Master of the Cold," said the poet. "Hear me, Master of Silence. I offer you a bargain. I send you the Bluejay, who has made mock of you. He will believe that he has only to call on your pale daughters, but I am offering him to you as the price for the Fire-Dancer. Take him, and in return send Dustfinger back to the land of the living, for his tale is not yet told to its end. But the Bluejay's story lacks only one chapter, and your White Women shall write it." So the poet wrote and so he read, and as always his words came true. The Bluejay, presumptuous as he was, summoned the White Women, and Death did not let him go again. But the Fire-Dancer came back, and his story had a new beginning.
Be on your guard…
It was a few moments before Mo really understood. Then he cursed his stupidity in trusting the man who had nearly killed him once already. He desperately tried to remember the words Orpheus had written for Resa. Suppose he was trying to make an end of Meggie and Resa as well? Remember, Mo! What else did he write?
"Yes, you were indeed stupid." Death's voice mocked him. "But he was even more stupid than you. He thinks I can be bound with words, I who rule the land where there are no words, although all words come from it. Nothing can bind me, only the White Book, because you have filled its pages with white silence. Almost daily, the man it protects sends me a poor wretch he has killed as a messenger of his mockery. I would happily melt the flesh from your bones for that! But my daughters read your heart like a book, and they assure me that you will not rest until the man whom the Book protects is mine again. Is that true, Bluejay?"
The marten lay down on Dustfinger's unmoving breast.
"Yes!" whispered Mo.
"Good. Then go back and rid the world of that Book. Fill it with words before spring comes, or winter will never end for you. And I will take not only your life for the Adderhead's but your daughter's, too, because she helped you to bind the Book. Do you understand, Bluejay?"
"Why two?" asked Mo hoarsely, "How can you ask for two lives in return for one? Take mine, that's enough."
But the marten only stared at him. "I fix the price," it said. "All you have to do is pay it."
Meggie. No. No. Go back, Resa, Mo thought. Get Meggie to read what Orpheus wrote and go back! Anything is better than this. Go back! Quickly!
But the marten laughed. And once again it sounded like an old woman's laughter.
"All stories end with me, Bluejay," Death said. "You will find me everywhere." And as if to prove it, the marten turned into the one-eared cat that liked to steal into Elinor's garden to hunt her birds. The cat jumped nimbly off Dustfinger's breast and rubbed around Mo's legs. "Well, what do you say, Bluejay? Do you accept my conditions?"
And I will take not only your life for the Adderhead's but your daughter's, too.
Mo glanced at Dustfinger. His face looked so much more peaceful in death than it had in life. Had he met his younger daughter on the other side, and Cosimo, and Roxane's first husband? Were all the dead in the same place?
The cat sat down in front of him and stared at him.
"I accept," said Mo, so hoarsely that he could hardly make out his own words. "But I make a condition, too: Give me the Fire-Dancer to go with me. My voice stole ten years of his life. Let me give them back to him. And there's another thing… Don't the songs say that the Adderhead's death will come out of the fire?"
The cat crouched down. Fur fell red on the rotting leaves. Bones covered themselves with flesh and feathers again, and the gold-mocker with its bloodstained breast fluttered up to settle on Mo's shoulder.
"You like to make what the songs say come true, do you?" the bird whispered to him. "Very well, I will give him to you. Let the Fire-Dancer live again. But if spring comes and the Adderhead is still immortal, his heart will stop beating at the same time as yours – and your daughter's."
Mo felt dizzy. He wanted to seize the bird and wring its golden neck to silence that voice, so old and pitiless, with irony in every word. Meggie. He almost stumbled as he went to Dustfinger's side once more.
This time the White Women were reluctant to make way for him.
"As you see, my daughters don't like to let him go," said the old woman's voice. "Even though they know he will come back."
Mo looked at the motionless body. The face was indeed so much more tranquil than it had been in life, and all of a sudden he wasn't sure whether he was really doing Dustfinger a favor by calling him back.
The bird was still on his shoulder, so light in weight, so sharp of claw.
"What are you waiting for?" asked Death. "Call him!"
And Mo obeyed.
26. A FAMILIAR VOICE
What remains to him? Tall Time wonders. What thoughts and smells, what names? Or are there only sensations and a clutter of incompatible words?
Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone
They had gone. Had left him alone with all the blue, that clashed with the red of the fire. Blue as the evening sky, blue as cranesbill flowers, blue as the lips of drowned men and the heart of a blaze burning with too hot a flame. Yes, sometimes it was hot in this world, too. Hot and cold, light and dark, terrible and beautiful, it was everything all at once. It wasn't true that you felt nothing in the land of Death. You felt and heard and smelled and saw, but your heart remained strangely calm, as if it were resting before the dance began again. Peace. Was that the word?
Did the guardians of this world feel it, too, or did they long for something else? The pain they didn't know, the flesh they didn't dwell in. Perhaps. Or perhaps not. He couldn't tell from their faces. He saw both there: peace and longing, joy and pain. As if they knew about everything in this world and the other, just as they themselves were made of every color at once, all the colors of the rainbow merging into white light. They told him that the land of Death had other places, too, darker than the one where they had brought him and where no one stayed for long – except for him. Because he called up fire for them.
The White Women both feared and loved fire. They warmed their pale hands at it, laughing like children when he made it dance for them. They were children, young and old at the same time, so old. They made him form trees and flowers of fire, a fiery sun and moon, but for himself he made the fire paint faces, the faces he saw when the White Women took him with them to the river where they washed the hearts of the dead. Look into it, they whispered to him. Look into it, then those who love you will see you in their dreams. And he leaned over the clear blue water and looked at the boy and the woman and the girl whose names he had forgotten, and saw them smiling in their sleep.
Why don't I know their names anymore? he asked.
Because we've washed your heart, they said. Because we've washed it in the blue water that parts this world from the other one. It makes you forget.
Yes. He supposed it did. For whenever he tried to remember he saw nothing but the blue, cool and caressing. It was only when he called up fire and its red glow spread that the pictures came again, the same pictures that he saw in the water. But his longing for them fell asleep before it had woken fully.
What was my name? he sometimes asked, and then they laughed. Fire-Dancer, they whispered, that was your name and always will be, because you'll stay with us for all eternity and never go away like all the others, away to another life…