"Midnight!" he cursed quietly as he stumbled down the steep path. "As if that wasn't just when the strolling players wake up!"
His landlady's son carried the torch ahead of him. Ivo was nine years old and full of insatiable curiosity about all the wonders of his world. He was always fighting his sister for the honor of carrying the torch when Fenoglio went to visit the strolling players. Fenoglio paid Ivo's mother a few coins a week for a room in the attic. The price included the washing, cooking, and mending that Minerva did for him, too. In return, Fenoglio told her children bedtime stories and listened patiently as she told him what a stubborn oaf her husband could be at times. The fact was, Fenoglio had struck lucky.
The boy scurried along ahead of him with increasing impatience. He could hardly wait to reach the brightly colored tents, where music played and firelight shone among the trees. He kept looking around reproachfully, as if Fenoglio were taking his time on purpose. Did he think an old man could go as fast as a grasshopper?
The Motley Folk had pitched camp where the ground was so stony that nothing would grow on it, behind the cottages where the peasants who farmed the Laughing Prince's land lived. Now that the prince of Ombra no longer wanted to hear their jests and songs, they came less often than before, but luckily the prince's grandson wanted players to entertain him on his birthday, so this Sunday they would at last come streaming through the city gates: fire-eaters and tightrope-walkers, animal-tamers and knife-throwers, actors, buffoons, and many a minstrel whose songs came from Fenoglio's pen.
For Fenoglio liked writing for the Motley Folk: merry songs, sad songs, songs to make you laugh or weep, as the spirit moved him. He couldn't earn more than a few copper coins for those songs; the strolling players' pockets were always empty. If his words were to earn gold then he must write for princes or for a rich merchant. But when he made the words dance and pull faces, when he wanted to write tales of peasants and robbers, of ordinary folk who didn't live in castles or eat from golden plates, then he wrote for the strolling players.
It had taken some time for them to accept him into their tents. Only when more and more wandering minstrels were singing Fenoglio's songs, and their children were asking for his stories, did they stop turning him away. And now even their king invited Fenoglio to sit beside his fire, as he had tonight. Although not a drop of royal blood ran in his veins, this man was known as the Black Prince. The Prince took good care of his Motley subjects, and they had chosen him to lead them twice already. It was better not to ask where all the gold he gave so generously to the sick and crippled came from, but Fenoglio knew one thing: He himself had invented the Prince.
Oh yes, I made them all! he thought, as the music came more clearly through the night air. He had made up the Prince and the tame bear that followed him like a dog, and Cloud-Dancer who, sad to say, fell off his rope, and many more, even the two rulers who believed that they laid down the law in this world. Fenoglio had not yet seen all his creations, but every time he suddenly met one in flesh and blood it made his heart beat faster – although he couldn't always remember whether any particular one of them had really sprung from his own pen, or came from somewhere else…
There were the tents at last, bright as windblown flowers in the black night. Ivo began running so fast that he almost fell over his own feet. A dirty boy with hair as unkempt as an alley cat's fur came out to meet them, hopping on one leg. He grinned challengingly at Ivo – and ran away on his hands. Lord, these players' children performed such contortions, you might think they had no bones in their bodies!
"Off you go, then!" growled Fenoglio when Ivo looked pleadingly at him. After all, he didn't need the torch anymore. Several fires were burning among the tents, which often consisted of little more than a few grubby lengths of cloth stretched over ropes between the trees. Fenoglio looked around with a sigh of satisfaction as the boy raced away. Yes, this was just as he'd imagined the Inkworld as he wrote his story: bright and noisy, full of life. The air smelled of smoke, of roast meat, of rosemary and thyme, horses, dogs and dirty clothes, pine needles and burning wood. Oh, he loved it! He loved the hurry and bustle, he even loved the dirt. He loved the way life here was lived before his very eyes, not behind locked doors. You could learn anything in this world: how the smith shaped the metal of a sickle in the fire, how the dyer mixed his dyes, how the tanner removed hair from leather and how the cobbler cut it to shape to make shoes. Nothing happened behind closed doors. It was all going on, in the alleyways, on the road, in the marketplace, here among shabby tents, and he, Fenoglio – still as curious as a boy – could watch, although the stench of the leather was mordant and the dye tubs sometimes took his breath away. Yes, he liked this world of his. He liked it very much – although he couldn't help seeing that not everything was working out the way he had intended.
It was his own fault. I should have written a sequel, thought Fenoglio, making his way through the crowd. I could still write one, here and now, and change everything, if only I had someone to read it aloud! Of course he had looked for another Silvertongue, but in vain. No Meggie, no Mortimer, not even someone like that man Darius who was more than likely to botch the job… and Fenoglio could play only the part of a writer whose fine words didn't exactly keep him in luxury, while the two princes he had invented ruled his world after their own fashion. Annoying, extremely annoying.
One of those princes above all gave him cause for concern – the Adderhead.
He reigned to the south of the forest, high above the sea, sitting on the silver throne of the Castle of Night. As an invented character, not by any means a bad one. A bloodhound, a ruthless slave driver – but after all, the villains are the salt in the soup of a story. If you can keep them under control. It was for this purpose that Fenoglio had thought up the Laughing Prince, a ruler who would rather laugh at the broad jokes of the strolling players than wage war, and his magnificent son, Cosimo. Who could have guessed that Cosimo would simply die, and then his father would collapse with grief like a cake taken out of the oven too soon?
Not my fault! How often Fenoglio had told himself that. Not my idea, not my fault! But it had happened all the same. As if some diabolical scribbler had intervened, going on with the story in his place and leaving him, Fenoglio, the creator of this whole world, with nothing but the role of a poor writer!
Oh, stop that. You're not so poor, Fenoglio, he thought as he stopped beside a minstrel sitting among the tents, singing one of Fenoglio's own songs. No, he wasn't poor. The Laughing Prince, who was now the Prince of Sighs, would hear only Fenoglio's laments for his dead son, and Balbulus, the most famous illuminator far and wide, had to record the stories Fenoglio wrote for the prince's grandson, Jacopo, in his own hand, on the most costly of parchment. No, he really wasn't so poor!
And moreover, didn't his words now seem to him better in a minstrel's mouth than pressed between the pages of a book, to lie there gathering dust? He liked to think of them as free, owing no one allegiance. They were too powerful to be given in printed form to any fool who might do God knew what with them. Looked at that way, it was reassuring to think that there were no printed books in this world. Books here were handwritten, which made them so valuable that only princes could afford them. Other folk had to store the words in their heads or listen to minstrels singing them.
A little boy tugged at Fenoglio's sleeve. His tunic had holes in it, and his nose was running. "Inkweaver!" He brought out a mask from behind his back, the kind of mask worn by the actors, and quickly put it over his eyes. There were feathers, light brown and blue, stuck to the cracked leather. "Who am I, Inkweaver?"