Bookweirder (30 page)

Just writing it was almost like escaping. It was like being there. Norman would have gone on writing all night if he could have, but he quickly ran out of paper. The lines of writing got more cramped as he wrote, trying to cram it all in. He couldn’t go back and make it more about home and less about Malcolm now. He didn’t even dare try to correct any mistakes. He took a handful of sand and shook it over the sticky ink to dry it. Then he sat down to the unappetizing task of eating his composition.

It was even tougher than he’d imagined. The paper didn’t dissolve in his mouth. He had to chew it to break it up, tearing it into ever-smaller pieces. The pieces just stuck to the roof of his mouth. He needed some water or something. He rummaged around the tent, dragging the chest around after him like an anchor. Amongst some blankets in one corner he uncovered two dark green bottles stoppered with cork. He opened one and took a whiff, blinking away the tears as his eyes stung. The second was better, a dark red fluid, wine maybe. He hesitated for just a moment. Of all the rules he’d broken today, taking a few sips of wine was probably the least important.

He swilled each sip around in his mouth, letting it soak into the fibres of the paper, breaking them down as much as he could before swallowing, but even then it didn’t go down easily. It was the toughest paper he’d ever eaten, but he somehow managed it.

When he’d completely eaten the strip of paper, he lay down and tried to fall asleep. The sun had set, but there was a new light outside. The canvas walls of the tent had begun to glow orange. Already it felt cooler. Norman put on his sweatshirt.

Fall asleep
, he told himself.
It’s nighttime. Just go to sleep.
But it wasn’t that easy. His stomach gurgled and twisted as it tried to deal with the paper he’d sent it. He imagined his stomach working at breaking down the story in his belly. Just how eaten did the paper have to be? Did the story get sent to a particular gland or organ that made the bookweird happen? His stomach groaned,
and he belched. He didn’t feel well at all. If he puked right now, he wondered, and spewed the bits of paper onto the sand, would it still work?

He rolled over on his side and tried to put it out of his mind. He tried to imagine himself at home with Malcolm, but it only set his mind racing again. There was so much to do. Malcolm had to get back to Undergrowth with the map, but first they had to get Todd out of Kelmsworth Hall and the poacher back to his own book. When all that was done, he’d have to come here and put Sir Hugh’s letter back. That was a lot of bookweird to do and undo. Thinking of everything he had to put right made it hard to get to sleep.

Outside the tent, the shouts of Black John’s knights were louder. The light had changed again. It was no longer the orange glow of sunset. There were just spots of light, smaller but more intense—campfires?

He rolled closer to the edge of the tent and lifted the canvas experimentally. It wasn’t hard. The canvas wasn’t pegged tightly. He made a gap just high enough to stick his head out. The cool night air pricked his face. He had to blink to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.

There were fires all right, but they weren’t for warmth. The flames lit up the desert night. Men-at-arms and archers were silhouetted in their flickering light. Some of them carried armfuls of arrows that they carefully placed beside the fires. Others shuttled burning torches to two skeletal wooden towers closer to St. Savino’s walls. The towers were about as tall as five or six men, a crisscross of beams lashed to the ground by ropes. Norman shivered, but not from the chill of the desert night. He had seen and read enough to know exactly what these machines were—trebuchets, siege engines that could catapult projectiles over and through thick fortress walls. Black John was not waiting for Sir Hugh to produce his letter from the King of England.

Already archers were sending single arrows across the night sky in huge, illuminated arcs. The first arrows fell short, burying themselves in the sand and extinguishing like matches tossed into water,
but they slowly crept towards the fortress as the archers found their range. Soon they were smashing into the thick outer walls, exploding in sudden sparks like fireworks. The archers adjusted again, and their next arrows flew high and far, launching almost vertically into the air and plummeting in an arc just as steep, this time into the heart of the fortress.

No sound from the fortress reached Norman in the tent, but surely the defenders would be busy inside, running buckets of water to the danger spots, trying to douse the fires before they spread. It would be just possible now, with only one or two fire-arrows finding their marks, but could they keep it up?

Without warning the archers stopped firing. That would give the defenders time, but surely the archers were just waiting for an order to fire again. That was not all they were waiting for. Orders were barked and men scrambled to the trebuchets. They took torches and lit the huge oil-coated rocks that sat at the end of each catapult arm. There was silence as the soldiers stood back and gazed at the blazing projectiles.

A single voice rang out in the night. Shouting out a countdown, he barked five times before giving the order to fire. With a jolt one of the machines was unleashed. The trebuchet shuddered under the whiplash motion of its firing arm. The soldiers stood back in silent awe, following the flight of the blazing missile.

Norman held his breath, watching the fiery ball hurtle towards the walls. It smashed against the mud fortifications with a thud. Norman exhaled—the walls would hold. But a cheer went up from the gathered soldiers, and they soon began to reload. This was just a practice shot. The trebuchets had found their range even faster than the archers.

Norman scanned the roofs of St. Savino, looking to the tall wooden tower that jutted into the sky above the mud walls at the north-east end. That was the library—Jerome’s hiding place, the most vulnerable part of the whole fortress.

“Get out of there,” Norman whispered. “Just get out of there now.”

The second trebuchet creaked and shuddered, launching its blazing rock through the bleak desert sky. Again the soldiers stood back in awe of their war machine, and again Norman held his breath. The missile skimmed the top of the fortress wall, sending chunks of hardened mud careening through the crumbled wall into the heart of the fortified town.

Again Black John’s soldiers cheered—it was an ugly, violent sound. They knew who was in there. It wasn’t full of soldiers. It wasn’t a military outpost. It was just a fortified village full of families, elderly monks, gardeners, scribes, librarians.

“Get out of there,” Norman whispered to himself again. He meant all of them, not just Jerome. They should all just get out of there. He had no idea what Black John’s men would do if they came out. Maybe they would die just the same. But if they stayed inside it was certain death.

Norman waited for any sign that the inhabitants of St. Savino might escape. The gate remained resolutely shut. Maybe, he dared to hope, they were leaving by hidden passageways, sneaking away into the night unseen. He clung to this thought as the arrows flew again in earnest, whole flights of fire-arrows screaming across the sky like falling meteors. Then the trebuchets resumed, an uneven rhythm of creak and whoosh and thud, sending huge balls of fire into the heart of the peaceful fortress.

What could Sir Hugh and his people do against this? They might rush with pitiful wooden buckets to the site of one fiery arrow or swarm hopefully into the wreckage where the giant projectiles had crashed, but it would be useless. Too many arrows plummeted into the dry straw roofs of St. Savino. Too many fires sparked and raged. And there were too few defenders, with limbs too old and too few buckets.

An orange glow ascended from behind the walls of St. Savino. The buildings were ablaze, the timber-framed houses, sheds, their thatched roofs and canvas canopies. Norman couldn’t look away. He was desperate to see some movement, some evidence that Sir Hugh was sending his people out of the conflagration to safety. But
now the flames themselves were visible. The wooden tower had taken a direct hit from a trebuchet missile. Flames were licking up the side of the tower and flickering in its tiny windows. All those scrolls would be perfect kindling. The library was like a huge torch waiting to be lit.

It finally became too much to watch. Norman closed his eyes and buried himself in the canvas of the tent. “Let me go to sleep now. Just get me away from this,” he muttered, desperately wishing to be away, out of this terrible book. But it was not to be. Now that the only useful thing he could do was fall asleep, he couldn’t manage to do it. Even with his eyes closed the sound of the fire was terrible. The whoosh of arrows and the shuddering recoil of the trebuchets had stopped, but the sounds of the fire continued. Timbers crackled and creaked. Norman couldn’t stop himself from looking when something crashed or snapped. He opened his eyes to see the tower lean and fall in on itself. He shut his eyes again and covered his head with the canvas of the tent, but even that could not muffle the crackle and spit of burning timbers, the sounds of St. Savino and its library burning to the ground.

At some point late into the night or early the next day, he must have finally fallen asleep, but not before seeing St. Savino’s final destruction. The towers fell. The massive gates gaped open, charred and black. Even the mud walls crumbled under the pressure and the heat of the fire. No one could have survived this.

Sleep was no escape for Norman. In his dreams he still heard the desert fortress burning. He saw the blackened faces of Jerome and Brother Godwyn as they raced frantically through the library, trying to save their precious manuscripts. These were terrible nightmares because they were true. That’s exactly what Jerome and Godwyn would do. They wouldn’t think of themselves first. They would think of the scrolls, and they would die in there.

And once again it was all Norman’s fault. He had let himself be caught. He’d let Black John believe he was the boy he was looking for. They wouldn’t have burned the place down if they’d known
Jerome was in there, or if Sir Hugh had been able to show his letter of protection from the king.

Should he have admitted that Jerome was still in there? Would Black John have believed Norman? Would it have been different if he’d shown them the letter? His mother was right. The bookweird was too dangerous. People were dying now because of him, and he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to make that right.

N
orman knew Malcolm was there even before he was fully awake. He could feel the rhythm of the stoat’s breathing as Malcolm slept in the crook of his arm. It made everything right. He was back. His best friend was here. Everything would be fine. He allowed himself to sleep in. His mom would call up when it was time for breakfast.

The sound of rain blown against the window by the wind finally made him open his eyes. He tried pulling the sheets up to cover his head, but that only disturbed Malcolm, who growled in complaint. By then their sleep was wrecked.

Malcolm stretched and smacked his lips dramatically. “Is your dad going to make us some pancakes?” he asked drowsily.

Norman snorted and rolled over, trying to hold on to that last bit of sleep. “Breakfast? That’s what you’re thinking about? How about the map? You don’t want to know about
A Secret in the Library
?” He yawned. It was no use. He was awake now.

Malcolm didn’t answer. It was unusual for the stoat not to have a sharp answer when called on, but Norman could no longer enjoy the silence.

“I did get it, by the way,” he said, rousing himself and rubbing his eyes, “but I’ve made a mess of another book.”

Norman sat up and tried to figure out where Malcolm had got to. It took about two seconds to realize that he was not at home in bed after all.

“Malcolm?” he asked hopefully. “Did you do this?”

“I was going to ask you the same question,” Malcolm replied.

The room was familiar to them both. Here were the high-backed chairs where the Cooks usually sat. Beyond them was the kitchen where George made tea. They had not woken up in Norman’s bedroom after all. They had woken up on George’s couch, but the lodge was not as they had left it. It was not as they had ever seen it.

“Todd?” Norman asked. “Do you think Mr. Todd did this?”

Malcolm frowned. “He didn’t make this rat’s nest, nor did George.”

Norman had meant the bookweirding, not the mess, but there was no point in clarifying. The lodge was a bigger emergency. It was a disaster area. Furniture had been dragged into the centre of the room, away from the windows. All the cupboard doors were open. The shelves were almost bare. Empty cans and cardboard boxes were strewn across the floor. There were dirty dishes everywhere, on the side tables, on the floor. The kitchen sink was piled high with filthy pots and pans, but no one had taken the extra step of actually washing them. Had it got that bad for George?

Malcolm answered his unspoken question, pointing to a pile of cigarette butts in the crystal bowl beside the sofa.