Bookweirder (29 page)

He had been caught in Montclair’s chamber. John of Nantes’s men had found him. There had been a blade thrust through the curtain. He’d heard it hack through the thick tapestry, and he’d felt blood dripping down his side. He prodded the side of his ribs gently, his fingers seeking out the centre of the injury. His skin seemed
intact. There was no gash where he’d expected one. It felt more like a bruise than a cut. Where was the wound? Where had the blood come from?

Slowly he ran his fingers over his body, starting at his ankles. There was a sharp pain there, too. His fingers grasped the band that encircled the pain. A thick leather manacle was strapped tightly to his ankle. The manacle was attached to a chain that ran to a small chest. This was what had pulled at him and brought him to the ground with such a jolt.

Norman continued searching for the source of the blood. He rubbed his fingers along his calves and up his legs to his hips. His jeans felt stiff near the belt line and were coated in a flaky substance where the blood had dried, but still no wound. Confused, he frisked himself more vigorously. How was it possible that there was blood and no cut?

In the front pocket of his jeans he found the answer. The sharp edge of broken glass grazed his fingertip. He removed it carefully and placed it on the ground beside him. It was a piece of the ink pot.

His first thought, as he gingerly picked out the rest of the glass shards, was relief. He wasn’t cut. He wasn’t going to bleed to death in the desert and be left to feed the desert dogs. A second thought cut his relief short.

“Please,” he whispered to himself, “let there be some ink left.” He turned his pocket inside out and removed the last splinters of glass. One large, curved piece, the thick base of the broken vial, was still sticky with ink. There might still be a way out of this.

Had he managed to keep the quill and paper, or had he dropped them when they’d brought him here? He reached into his back pocket and withdrew the pieces of the quill. He was rifling through the folds of his sweatshirt when a shadow passing across the flap of the tent alerted him.

Norman curled up again on the ground, keeping as still as he could. Through the slit of one barely opened eye he saw the dark silhouette of a man lean into the tent and peer down at him for a
moment. Norman lay as still as he could, counting the seconds. The figure loomed silently for what felt like an eternity but came no closer. Finally he closed the flap and turned away with a snort.

Norman was not left alone for long. Within moments the tent flaps were thrown open wide and an armoured figure appeared in the triangle of light. He was smaller than Norman had imagined, his face wrinkled and tanned by the sun. The black hair that gave him his name curled around his ears, nearly touching the gleaming epaulettes of his armour. He snarled as he entered, flaring his nostrils as he spat out an order in a language Norman couldn’t understand.

Two men-at-arms trundled over to Norman and lifted him roughly by the arms. Norman winced as they hoisted him up, but he tried to keep his eyes on the dark knight in front of him.

Black John stared over the hump of his crooked nose, taking the measure of his captive. He looked disappointed. Norman guessed that he didn’t look like much of a prize.

The knight barked a question at him. At least Norman thought it was a question. Norman didn’t understand a word. He guessed it was French.

When Norman didn’t answer, Black John stepped forward, shaking the metal gauntlet he held in his hand, and repeated his question more loudly and more harshly.

Norman felt his hands trembling at his sides. “I don’t understand,” he said meekly.

His captor’s dark eyes flashed from Norman to the men-at-arms at either side of him. There was a short, muttered conversation that served only to stoke Black John’s fury. Norman looked down, unwilling to meet the French knight’s glinting eyes. The Frenchman lifted his chin so Norman could not look away.

“Please …” Norman began, but Black John’s tightening grip on his chin stopped him.

“So you play a game wiz us?” He sneered. “You think to fool us by talking only the
Anglais
?”

Norman shook his head slowly.

“The
petit
Vilnius is afraid.” He let out a short, cruel laugh.

Confused, Norman blinked and narrowed his eyes, surprised to hear his name.

“No need to be afraid, little desert rat,” Black John mocked. “The worst has happened. But I won’t harm you. John of Nantes does not harm children, even the children of his enemies.”

The vicious gleam in his eye told Norman otherwise. If he thought he had to, Black John would hurt anyone.

“You look like your father, you know,” Black John said. “How sad that he cannot be here to see how you’ve grown.”

So they thought he was Jerome. Black John thought he had captured his enemy’s son. Norman wasn’t sure whether to correct him.

“Now tell me about your protector, the stubborn Hugh. Why won’t he give up the fortress? Why does he insist on provoking me?”

“I …” Norman stammered, “I don’t know.”

“Has he told you about his letter from the English king?”

Norman started involuntarily.

“He has spoken of it,” Black John concluded ruefully, seeing the answer in Norman’s face. He turned and muttered something to the henchman behind him.

John turned back to Norman, his face taking on a forced calmness. “It is not true. It is a ruse,” he said. “Have you seen such a letter?” he asked, daring Norman to contradict him.

Norman wasn’t sure what to say. If he said yes, would Black John leave St. Savino alone?

“Just tell me and we’ll be done here. It would have his crest,” the French knight pressed. “Three lions rampant.”

Norman was looking away again, peering at the sand at his feet, or else Black John would have seen the realization in his eyes, the shock of understanding. The king’s letter—the letter that guaranteed Hugh Montclair’s rights to St. Savino and the safe passage of its books to England—it had been in his hands when he’d been caught.

“I knew it,” John spat. “There is no such letter. If the old fool had such a letter he would have produced it. The King of England
cares nothing about that old pile of baked mud.” He gave Norman one last, dismissive stare before turning. He pulled the gauntlet onto his hand and motioned to the henchman who held his armoured helm. “Raze it to the ground,” he ordered as he strode to the entrance of the tent.

The men who held Norman’s arms released him, and he slumped to the ground.

“No!” he cried, looking up from where he lay. “There is a letter. I saw it.”

Black John kept walking.

For a moment Norman was about to produce the letter, but that would have been a disaster. Black John would destroy it.

“Take me back to St. Savino,” he pleaded. “I’ll show you where the letter is.”

Black John paused beneath the tent flaps and sneered. “Now he knows about a letter, now he thinks it can save his precious friends. He’ll tell us anything, even if it isn’t true. Living with the monks has not been good for you,” he taunted. “Your father would have taught you to be a better liar.”

With that he let the tent flap fall, and Norman was alone once more.

Norman slowly shifted on the ground, his hands rifling through his clothes for the paper. He was almost convinced that he’d dropped it. Finally, in the folds of the sweatshirt tied around his waist, he found the smooth scroll of paper he’d pilfered from Sir Hugh’s desk. He glanced again to the entrance of the tent. The shadow of the lone sentry was still there, growing duller as the sun sank into the dunes. Norman could do little while the guard stood there.

Outside, he could hear orders being given, horses neighing and the squeak of heavy wheels turning. Black John’s army was on the move. Would they really raze the desert fortress? Did it mean that much to Black John?

What, Norman wondered, were they doing in St. Savino tonight? Would Jerome have told Sir Hugh about him? Surely not. Jerome wouldn’t have given away Meg’s secret—his mother’s secret.

Norman almost thought of them as two different people, his mother and this Meg girl who could slip into a book about the Crusades just to talk to an orphan librarian named Jerome. It was hard to imagine them as the same person.

He had to forget that now. He had to get out of here. He hauled himself up to a seated position and grasped the leather manacle around his ankle. If he could cut through the leather or somehow pry it off, he might be able to escape. He pulled off his sock and sneaker and tried to tug the manacle past his ankle. He was skinny, but not that skinny. He pulled until he couldn’t stand the pain. That was not going to work.

He rubbed some feeling back into his ankle and pondered his next step. The leather manacle was fastened to a thick iron chain. Its links were firmly joined. There would be no prying them apart. He ran his finger over each link, searching for some weakness, following the chain to where a thick ring of steel fastened it to the trunk.

Norman examined the trunk. It was a firmly constructed little box, reinforced with iron bands and studs. It was almost exactly the size of a breadbox, which Norman thought was funny. Very few things are exactly the size of a breadbox. He gave it an experimental shove. It didn’t move. It was a lot heavier than a breadbox. Norman looked around for something with which to pry it open. If he emptied it, he might be able to carry it.

There wasn’t much in the tent that could be used as a pry bar. It wasn’t like Black John’s thugs were going to leave a sword lying around for him, but that’s what he needed.

He wracked his brain. At the beach once he’d seen seagulls pick up shellfish and drop them on rocks to smash them open. Maybe that would work. Norman crouched down beside the chest, wrapped both arms around it and muscled it up on top of his knees, resting it there for a moment, then jerking it upwards and straightening his legs. He’d just about raised it over his head when the chain jerked at his ankle, throwing him off balance. He pulled his vulnerable toes out of the way as the chest fell with a thud into the soft sand, half burying itself there. That was not worth trying again.

There was nothing to it. There was only one thing left to try. He hated leaving Jerome, but he was going to have to bookweird his way out of this mess. He just hoped that there was enough usable ink. He retrieved his broken quill and ink pot and placed them on top of the wooden chest.

Norman unravelled the letter he’d stolen from Sir Hugh’s desk and eyed it warily. He could, he guessed, just eat it as it was. That would be the fastest way out. You didn’t always have to eat the story you wanted to fall into. Once you’d started falling into books you seemed to get to most other books by way of the real world. Norman had once escaped a Viking attack by eating a bicycle-safety pamphlet.

He fingered the letter nervously, running his fingers across the red seal of three lions. He shouldn’t destroy it. This letter was his best chance of saving St. Savino and its inhabitants. Besides, it seemed to help if you ate a page from the book you wanted to land in. Maybe he was fooling himself, but Norman felt more in control of the bookweird if he targeted his landing that way.

The king’s letter was short. It took up only two-thirds of the page. After the signature and the seal, there was still a slim margin at the bottom of the page. If he wrote a story for himself in that remaining bare space, he could save the letter. Even a few sentences might be enough.

Norman folded the letter, making a crease above the small, precious rectangle of bare paper. As carefully as he could he tore along the line. It didn’t tear easily. This wasn’t like the paper he was used to. It was thick and flexible, almost like cloth. That was another reason to keep it small.

Ink was the next problem. It wasn’t completely dry, but it wasn’t exactly liquid either—more like glue than ink. He spat experimentally into the biggest piece of the broken ink pot and stirred it around with the sharp end of his quill. The quill wasn’t much of a pen at all, just a whittled stick with a thin metal nib. Norman’s penmanship wasn’t very good at the best of times. His grade three teacher had told him that calling it chicken scratch was an insult to
chickens. With his spit-diluted ink and his blunt, broken quill he was glad that the bookweird didn’t seem to give points for neatness. What counted for the bookweird was that you got it right. You couldn’t just write, “My bedroom in England,” and zip back there. You had to describe it. You had to make it so that someone reading it could imagine it perfectly.

He hesitated, the quill poised inches from the surface of the square of paper. He was finding it hard to visualize the little room and the cottage. The pressure of getting it right made it harder. What colour were the curtains? Were the flowers on the sheets yellow or pink? Was the floor still covered with laundry or had someone picked it up?

He started with the bed. He knew he’d left it a mess.

“Norman’s bed was a mess,” he wrote. It was a mess because it always was a mess. He never made it.

Norman found himself describing Malcolm more than his bedroom, but he guessed it didn’t matter.