Bookweirder (25 page)

Of the boy even less was known. He wore no armour and no crest. He had not spoken because he had yet to awaken. Brother Godwyn, the archivist and herbalist, did his best to treat the boy’s visible wounds and left him to sleep in a tiny cell behind a wall of scrolls in the library.

The next morning, Black John and his knights rode out of St. Savino. He might not have known about the secret in the library, but John of Nantes had a feeling, as he turned back for a final glance at St. Savino’s single tower, that he would be returning one day for a more satisfactory visit.

Malcolm said what Norman was thinking: “This is a great story.”

“Uh-huh,” Norman agreed. “That boy must be a prince or something.”

“Or the son of Black John’s enemy,” Malcolm suggested excitedly.

Norman put the book down, his arm sore from holding it for them both.

“It’s weird, though. This doesn’t seem like a book my mom would read. It’s … well …” Norman couldn’t find the right word. “It just seems too exciting for a girl.”

“Well, didn’t you tell me she reads mystery books, books where someone has been murdered? That knight has obviously been murdered.”

Norman murmured a skeptical “Hmmm.”

“Keep reading,” the stoat king urged. “My bet is that there’s a girl in it soon, someone to fall in love with the boy in the library.”

Norman turned on his side and let the stoat settle in the crook of his neck, where he could see the book. As a precaution Norman angled the lamp beside his bed so it shed less light towards the door. If his parents discovered him now, he’d be in huge trouble. If that happened, it might almost be worth introducing them to the talking stoat, just to distract them.

The opening of
A Secret in the Library
was a little bit misleading, but by the time Malcolm and Norman had realized it, they were too far into the book to care. There were none of the Crusader battles and knights in armour that they had been led to expect. It was mostly about the boy growing up in the desert outpost of St. Savino.

Two days after his arrival at the desert fort, the boy woke up. He remembered nothing about his ride across the sands. He didn’t even remember his own name.

He remained in his tiny cell for a week, cared for by Brother Godwyn. Only three men visited him there: Godwyn, Father Lombard and Hugh Montclair himself.

After a week’s convalescence, the skinny, pale-skinned boy was able to walk about and speak both in French and in a strange northern tongue that startled and worried anyone who heard it. He also had a smattering of German and Latin, so he was obviously highborn, probably the son of a crusading knight, but that was all that they could determine. It was enough. The blue Livonian cross on
his rescuer’s surcoat told the most important part of his story: the boy was both dangerous and in danger himself.

Only Father Lombard, Montclair and Godwyn knew that he was alive, concealed in Godwyn’s library. When he was well enough to walk, the boy was allowed the freedom of the archives and a small hidden courtyard. His entire life was constrained to the tiny space of the courtyard and the library. He spoke only to the three men who protected him. Each of them grew to love him. Each tried to teach him, to protect him and to replace the father who was no doubt dead on some battlefield somewhere.

The boy studied history with Sir Hugh and scripture with Father Lombard, but it was the books of Godwyn’s library that he loved the most. They took to calling the boy Jerome, after the saint who had first translated the Bible into Latin. The boy answered to that name, but as he lay in the tiny chamber behind the bookshelves each night, he prayed for his real name to come back to him in a dream, the name that his dead father had given him.

The boy whom they called Jerome was not unhappy in the library. The library was the most important part of St. Savino. The fort existed only because of it. A hundred years ago the hermit St. Savino had unearthed this trove of ancient scrolls in his desert cave. The Crusaders had come, built the walls and the tower and enlarged the church, but the heart of St. Savino remained the hermit’s collection of scrolls. Scholars across Europe coveted its treasures: sermons of ancient prophets, diagrams of temples and palaces, and maps to lost cities and treasure mines. This archive was kept in the highest tower of the fort and jealously guarded by a series of archivists, the latest of which was Brother Godwyn.

Brother Godwyn had been a young man when he’d arrived in the Holy Land, but he was now old and grey and bent by years. When Hugh Montclair had brought the boy to him, Godwyn had rolled his ancient eyes and arranged the hiding place. Charged with the boy’s education, the archivist had bowed slowly and taken on the burden, but it soon became no burden at all. Jerome was bright and attentive, cheerful without being boisterous. He
learned quickly and eagerly and soon became Godwyn’s assistant, copying texts that the old man’s failing eyes could no longer read and asking the questions that prodded the old man’s sluggish mind to solutions.

The young foundling became the Holy Land’s youngest scholar. Godwyn finished off the boy’s foundation in Latin and added Greek and Aramaic. When Jerome had mastered these, they turned to English.

Brother Godwyn had almost forgotten the language of his own homeland. It was decades since he’d spoken it regularly. Only in his dreams, when the desert wasteland of the day was replaced by the green hills of his youth, did he speak and hear English. It was a pleasure to be able to speak it out loud again with the strange boy with the prodigious facility for languages.

As Jerome grew older and the archivist’s eyes grew weaker, Brother Godwyn enlisted him in his great struggle to maintain the archive at St. Savino. For years the kings of England and France had tried to get their hands on the St. Savino scrolls. England and France agreed that the scrolls were not safe in this far-off desert outpost. The kings disagreed only on whether the scrolls would be safer in London or Paris. Brother Godwyn’s campaign of letter writing had kept the courts of England and France at bay and at each other’s throats for years. The boy now acted as his scribe.

Jerome and Godwyn worked together during the warm desert days at the top of the tower that housed the library. It was just a few small rooms, tightly packed with shelves, but it contained documents of incalculable value. Every cubbyhole was stuffed with scrolls. Brother Godwyn and Jerome had hardly begun their quest to catalogue them. There were scrolls there that no hand had unravelled for hundreds of years.

“That’s where your map is,” Norman declared.

“Sure as Stoats,” Malcolm agreed. “When are we going?”

Norman shook his head reluctantly. “We can’t both go. My
ingresso
works only for me.” He knew his friend wanted to be part
of the action, and to tell the truth, he would have liked to have the little warrior at his side.

“Then let’s get back to Kelmsworth. We’ll make Todd send us both.”

Norman had thought about this already, but he had realized the limitations of the lawyer’s
ingresso
. “He can’t either. He was bluffing. He needs more than just the book. He needs something from it. He needs a piece of paper, something, or else he can’t get in. He didn’t think we’d figure it out, but that’s why he needs our help.”

“But you can’t get in either. You can’t eat a page of this book. You know what your mum said. It could be the only copy.”

Malcolm was right. He couldn’t eat any part of
A Secret in the Library
. “I don’t know what would happen if I ate the last copy. Probably its whole world would disappear. But I don’t have to. I can just copy part of it and eat it.”

The stoat started to say something, but instead he sighed and snarled, showing his little fang in frustration. “I don’t like being put out of the action like this. At least if I were back in Kelmsworth, I could be helping George.”

“I wish you were coming too. I don’t like the looks of this Black John guy.”

The stoat just stared back silently, his whiskers rippling with a frown. But there was one thing about Malcolm you could always count on—he never stayed down for long.

“Right, there’s no use moping about it.” He bared his teeth determinedly. “You fetch a pen and paper. I’ll find that page about the library.”

The section about the library was almost perfect, a full page, four paragraphs, describing its location at the centre of a maze of chambers, how it could be reached only by a flimsy wooden stairway, its rows of shelves and cubbyholes for the scrolls.

Norman sat down at the desk and slid out a blank piece of foolscap. Malcolm held the book open for him with his small paws while Norman copied it out in the tiniest letters he could manage.
He was going to have to eat it, and he wanted to keep it late-night-snack size. The result was just barely readable.

Malcolm huffed and tutted as he looked it over. “You should have let me do it. I could have written it much smaller and tidier. This looks like it was done by a palsied giant.”

“We didn’t have all month,” Norman shot back.

Malcolm held up his paws and grimaced. They were not made for holding a pen. “All right, then,” he conceded. “
Bon appétit
.”

“Promise me you’ll put the book back when I’m gone,” Norman pleaded between chewing, swallowing and ripping another strip of foolscap.

“Sure,” replied the stoat. He wasn’t convincing. “When I’ve read some more.”

“No, right away. You have to put it back,” Norman insisted. “If my mom wakes up and finds it gone …” That was certainly part of the reason, but something else bothered him about Malcolm reading on without him. Maybe it was just that he didn’t want his friend to know more of the story. Part of him felt weird about Malcolm reading a book when he was in it. “You need to get it back as soon as possible. I’ve no idea what time my parents get up in the morning.”

“Okay, sure,” Malcolm assured him.

Norman wasn’t assured. “Promise?” He looked him in the eye.

Malcolm’s glossy black eye stared back for a long time before blinking. “Just be quick and bring back that map.”

They lashed one of Norman’s belts around the book to make it easier for the stoat to carry. It was still an enormous load for the little animal, but Malcolm just winked and hoisted it over his shoulder. Like all stoats, he was enormously strong for his size. He left by the bedroom window and promised to be back within the hour. Norman lay in bed waiting, imagining he could hear his friend scrambling up the drainpipes and across the roof, but sleep finally came, and he never felt the stoat return and curl up in the crook of his arm beside him.

I
t was more than dark. It was the dark of a windowless room. He could tell without opening his eyes. The dark seemed to seep in through Norman’s closed eyelids. The air was thick and hot and heavy on his skin. He had to fight the panic that made him want to flail his arms around to find a light switch. There would be no light switch here.

There was a scent in the air that Norman recognized, that peculiar scent of old books. It reminded Norman of the library at his father’s university, a sort of dusty, homey smell that made you tired but not sleepy, just the right mood for reading books. But Norman was not waking up at the university library. He knew with absolute certainty that he was waking up in Brother Godwyn’s library in the desert fortress of St. Savino.

His eyes opened, but there was nothing to see. The dark was absolute.

“Jeeze,” he admonished himself with a whisper, “you could have brought a flashlight.”

Slowly he rose to his knees. The rough-hewn planks beneath him creaked as he shifted his weight. Cautiously he reached out into the dark, his fingertips grasping for something to grab onto and pull himself up. They touched nothing. He waved his hands,
but they just wafted in the air. It made him dizzy, kneeling there in the dark with nothing to brace himself with. He could be on a high balcony or at the top of the stairs. The bookweird didn’t really think about safety when it set you down somewhere.

“Okay, Norman,” he whispered, “just relax. Close your eyes.” He screwed them closed, as tight as he could. It was a trick you used when sneaking downstairs to inspect your presents on Christmas Eve. Closed your eyes tight so you got used to absolutely no light. When you opened them, your eyes would be ready to take advantage of the smallest amount of illumination.

His eyelids opened slowly again to absolute darkness. He could hear his breathing now, ragged and scared, panting as if he’d just run a race, but only his mind was racing. Where was he? Had he woken up in a sealed chamber? Was this the dungeon instead of the library? He cursed himself for his lack of preparation. The bookweird could get you into a locked room, but you needed a book to get yourself out again, or at least a page. Norman had counted on writing himself home. How could he do that now without any paper and no light to read or write by?

“Stop it. Stop thinking like this. Just relax,” he hissed.

“Who are you talking to?” a voice asked. It wasn’t an especially deep voice or a threatening tone, but Norman jumped anyway. He wasn’t alone here in the dark. He stayed as still as he could, not answering. If Norman couldn’t see the owner of the other voice, the other voice couldn’t see him. He thought of Bilbo Baggins falling into Gollum’s cave in
The Hobbit
and his heart raced a little more.