He will awake no more, oh nevermore… Elinor would certainly have known who wrote those lines, thought Meggie as she walked back down the dark hall with Fenoglio. The herbs scattered on the floor rustled under her boots. Their fragrance hung in the cool air as if to remind the sad prince of the world waiting for him out there. But perhaps it reminded him only of the flowers in the crypt where Cosimo lay.
At the door, Tullio came to meet them with the minstrel, hopping and leaping in front of the man like a trained, shaggy animal. The minstrel wore bells at his waist and had a lute on
his back. He was a tall, thin fellow with a sullen set to his mouth and so garishly clothed that he would have put a peacock's tail to shame.
"That fellow can actually read, can he?" Fenoglio whispered to Meggie as he pushed her through the door. "I don't believe it! What's more, his singing sounds as sweet as the cawing of a crow. Let's be off before he gets his great horsey teeth into my poor lines of verse!"
22. TEN YEARS
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
Wallace Stevens, "The Pure Good of Theory"
Dustfinger was leaning against the castle wall, behind the stalls where people were crowding. The aroma of honey and hot chestnuts rose to his nostrils, and high above him went the tightrope-walker whose blue figure, from a distance, reminded him so much of Cloud-Dancer. He was holding a long pole with tiny birds sitting on it, birds as red as drops of blood, and when the dancer changed direction – stepping lightly, as if standing on a swaying rope was the most natural thing in the world – the birds flew up and fluttered around him, twittering shrilly. The marten on Dustfinger's shoulder looked up at them and licked his lips. He was still very young, smaller and more delicate than Gwin, not half as likely to bite, and most important of all he didn't fear fire. Absently, Dustfinger tickled his horned head. He had caught him behind the stable soon after his arrival at Roxane's house, when the marten was trying to stalk her chickens, and had called him Jink, because of the way he jinked as he moved, dodging and darting before jumping up at Dustfinger so suddenly that he almost knocked him over. Are you crazy? he had asked himself when he lured the animal to him with a fresh egg. He's a marten. How do you know that it makes any difference to Death what name he bears? But he'd kept Jink all the same. Perhaps he had left all his fears behind in the other world: his fears, his loneliness, his ill fortune…
Jink learned fast; he was soon leaping through the flames as if he'd been doing it all his life. It would be easy to earn a few coins with him at the markets – with him and the boy.
The marten nuzzled Dustfinger's cheek. Some acrobats were building a human tower in front of the empty platform that still awaited the birthday boy. Farid had tried persuading Dustfinger to perform, too, but he didn't want people staring at him today. He wanted to stare himself, see his fill of all he'd missed for so long. So he was not in fire-eater's costume, either, but wore Roxane's dead husband's clothes, which she had given him. They had obviously been almost the same size. Poor fellow: Neither Orpheus nor Silvertongue could bring him back from where he was now.
"Why don't you earn the money today for a change?" he had asked Farid. The boy had turned first red and then white as chalk with pride – and shot away into the turmoil. He was a quick learner. Only a tiny morsel of the fiery honey, and Farid was talking to the flames as if he'd been born with their language on his tongue. Of course, they didn't yet spring from the ground when the boy snapped his fingers as readily as for Dustfinger himself, but when Farid called to the fire in a low voice it would speak to him – condescendingly, sometimes with mockery, but still it answered him.
"Oh, but he is your son!" Roxane had said when Farid had drawn a bucket of water from the well early in the morning, cursing, to cool his burned fingers. "He's not," Dustfinger had replied – and had seen in her eyes that she didn't believe him.
Before they set off for the castle, he had practiced a couple of tricks with Farid, and Jehan had watched. But when Dustfinger beckoned the boy closer, he ran away. Farid had laughed out loud at him for it, but Dustfinger put his hand over Farid's mouth. "The fire devoured his father, have you forgotten?" he had whispered, and Farid bowed his head, ashamed.
How proudly he stood there among the other entertainers! Dustfinger pushed his own way past the stalls to get a better view. Farid had taken off his shirt as Dustfinger himself sometimes did – burning cloth was more dangerous than a small burn on the skin, and you could easily protect your naked body against the licking tongues of fire with grease. The boy put on a good act, such a good one that even the traders stared at him spellbound, and Dustfinger took his chance to free a few fairies from the cages where they had been imprisoned, to be sold to some fool as lucky charms. No wonder Roxane suspects you of being his father, he told himself. Your chest swells with pride when you look at him. Next to Farid, a couple of clowns were exchanging broad jokes, to his right the Black Prince was wrestling with his bear, but all the same more and more people stopped to look at the boy standing there playing with fire, oblivious of all around him. Dustfinger watched as Sootbird lowered his torches and looked enviously their way. He'd never learn. He was still as poor a fire-eater as he'd been ten years ago.
Farid bowed, and a shower of coins fell into the wooden bowl that Roxane had given him. He glanced proudly at Dustfinger, as hungry for praise as a dog for a bone, and when Dustfinger clapped his hands he flushed red with delight. What a child he still was, even though he had proudly shown Dustfinger the first stubble on his chin a few months ago!
Dustfinger was making his way past two farmers haggling over a couple of piglets when the gate to the Inner Castle opened again – this time not, as before, for the Adderhead, when Dustfinger himself had only just managed to hide from the Piper's searching glance behind a cake stall. No. Obviously, the birthday boy himself was finally appearing at his own festivities – and his mother would accompany the child, with her maidservant. How fast his foolish heart was suddenly beating! "She has your hair," Roxane had said, "and my eyes."
The prince's pipers made the most of their big scene. Proud as turkey-cocks they stood there, long-stemmed trumpets held aloft in the air. The strolling players, being their own masters, disapproved without exception of musicians who sold their art to a single lord. In exchange, the pipers were better dressed, not in Motley array like the players on the road, but in their prince's colors. For the pipers of the Prince of Sighs, that meant green and gold. His daughter-in-law wore black. Cosimo the Fair had been dead for barely a year, but his young widow would certainly have been courted by several suitors already, in spite of the mark, dark as a burn, that disfigured her face. The crowd came thronging around the platform as soon as Violante and her son had taken their seats. Dustfinger had to climb on an empty barrel to catch a glimpse of her maidservant beyond all those heads and bodies.
Brianna was standing behind the boy. Despite her bright hair, she was like her mother. The dress she wore made her look very grown-up, yet Dustfinger still saw in her face traces of the little girl who had tried to snatch burning torches from his hand or stamped her foot angrily when he wouldn't let her catch the sparks he brought raining down from the sky.