Bookweirder (12 page)

“How did you get here?” he asked, keeping the “here” deliberately ambiguous.

Malcolm propped himself up further, anxious to tell the story. “The Abbot of Tintern helped me.”

“Fuchs?” Norman whispered the question.

Malcolm cocked his head, perplexed at the reaction. “You remember the abbot. He presided over my investiture at St. Sleekyn. He is teaching me about the bookweird.”

Norman’s thoughts rushed off in a dozen different directions.
Why would Fuchs teach Malcolm about the bookweird? Why would you even mention the word to a character in a book? More practically, though, why hadn’t he said anything when they’d met in London? What game was he playing here?

All he said was “So the abbot knows you’re here?”

“Yes,” Malcolm repeated. “He brought me here.”

“He brought you exactly here?” Norman asked cryptically.

Malcolm’s little stoat brow furrowed as if trying to discern what was meant by “exactly here.” “Well, to the woods near this house. The abbot said you’d be near. I asked the first person I met … turned out to be that treacherous villain with the neckerchief.”

Norman tried to put it all together. Why hadn’t Fuchs brought Malcolm directly to the real world? Why had he brought him to the Intrepid book? Could characters in books not come into reality? Maybe Fuchs had arranged this meeting here. Maybe it was Fuchs who had brought Norman. It was just like Fuchs to make a complicated plan and not tell him.

“You said that the Abbot of Tintern was teaching you about the bookweird. What did he tell you?”

“Well, I don’t pretend to understand it. I’m no adept, like you. I don’t have a whole
ingresso
named after me,” Malcolm teased. “But he told me St. Augustine’s basic concept: ‘The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.’ ”

Norman nodded slowly, as if this were common knowledge. He didn’t want to admit that he knew less about the bookweird than it appeared. “So what
ingresso
did you use?”

“The scriptorium
ingresso
, of course,” Malcolm replied matter-of-factly. “I’m only a beginner, so I’ve stuck to the rudiments. My paw was aching before I’d even copied the passage out a dozen times.”

Norman had seen the scriptorium at St. Sleekyn in Undergrowth; it was a large, open room filled with lecterns where animal monks copied out books by hand. The scriptorium
ingresso
must have involved copying out the book over and over.

“And the Abbot of Tintern gave you
this
story to copy?” Norman asked, careful not to name it.

“Just the one page. It described the woods around George’s palace here. Abbot said it would be easier if it was something I knew and could imagine for myself. He said there were things here I could not even imagine, and I’d never be able to ingress into a place I couldn’t imagine. I’ve seen a few of these marvels already. Your city called London, those roaring wagons, double-decker …” He seemed about to drift off into some reverie of awe, but pulled himself back to practicalities. “Is your house far from here? I can’t wait to meet your parents, and Dora. Is she as magnificent as the giantess Pippa?”

Norman gave his head a shake, not so much to disagree as to shake off an irrelevant comment. Not even a stoat could consider his sister magnificent. She was, in fact, the most annoying human in the world. “But, Malcolm, I don’t live here in this book. I come from somewhere else. I come from the real world.”

Malcolm chuckled. “ ‘The real world.’ I still can’t get my head around that joke.”

Norman blinked and jutted his head forward, waiting for Malcolm to explain.

“Until I arrived here I thought my world was the only real world. Now I can see that it is just one book in the Maker’s universal library. I’m glad to see that even an adept like you still calls his home book ‘the real world.’ ”

“No, I …” Norman started to explain that while all the other worlds were books, his was real. But it seemed unfair and a little cruel.

Malcolm lay back on the pillow and yawned. “When can we go?” he asked sleepily. “Will you show me your
ingresso
?”

Norman was grappling with this idea of a universal library where every world was a book—a library in which
his
world was a book, and he himself and his family were only fictional characters. It made him dizzy and a little sick to his stomach.

“We’ll go in the morning,” he concluded after a long pause. It was the safest thing to do. He needed to get Malcolm away from the poacher as quickly as possible. “Wait here,” he told him. He
tossed the covers back from the bed and fetched his shoes from the mat beside the door. He slid them on and pulled the folded sheet of paper from the pocket of his jeans.

“Your book?” Malcolm asked, his eyes widening in anticipation.

“Part of it,” Norman replied, looking at the page he had written two nights before. He wasn’t at all sure whether this would work. There was a lot he didn’t understand about the bookweird. The book-weird was a tricky subject. After the first
ingresso
, it had become very unpredictable, and he’d begun to fall into books he’d never even tasted. A sort of corruption had overtaken all the books in Norman’s house and he’d had an
ingresso
into all of them. The corruption had stopped only when he’d “fixed” Malcolm’s book,
The Brothers of Lochwarren
.

Norman had been able to escape one book by eating another. Fuchs had once rescued him from
The Magpie
by giving him a typed page that described the very scene they were participating in, right down to Norman’s own thoughts. Norman had tried this current trick once before, writing his own story. It had worked to get him out of
Fortune’s Foal
, but nothing in the bookweird was predictable. He was by no means sure that it would work again.

Norman looked at his own ragged handwriting on the paper in front of him. He considered the proportions for a moment before ripping the page along two of its folds and handing Malcolm about an eighth of the page.

“Do you think you can handle that?” he asked the stoat.

“Depends what you want me to do with it—burn it or make a paper hat out of it?” Malcolm replied. He stood up on the pillow and took the piece of paper in his little paw.

“I want you to eat it,” Norman told him.

Malcolm held the page up in front of his face. “My old mum once told me that if I didn’t want an upset stomach, I shouldn’t eat anything bigger than my head.” The paper was in fact several times bigger than a stoat’s head.

Norman frowned, took the paper back and ripped a corner off it.

“This better?” he asked.

Malcolm took it skeptically.

“You’ll probably still have an upset stomach,” Norman warned as he took a bite of his own.

Malcolm took an experimental nibble and read the fragments of sentence left on the page as he chewed.

“ ‘ … bottom shelf of the library had a row of red encyclopaedias with embossed gold spines … big brown leather armchair with a missing button … Dad’s new coffee maker …’ It all sounds very exotic.”

Norman couldn’t tell if he was serious. “Just finish it,” he told him.

It was taking longer than either of them expected, but neither of them minded the wait. They might be exhausted, but they had waited months to talk to each other. They lay on the couch and caught up. Norman told him about how he was living in England for the summer. How he had given up the bookweird and had almost stopped believing in it. Malcolm told him about his first year of kingship. How it wasn’t as exciting as he’d thought, how it was mostly about settling disputes and fixing roads. That was how Malcolm finally explained why he wanted Norman’s Undergrowth map.

“Guillaume Long Tail turned up at Lochwarren last winter with a few knights and even more lawyers. He has something called the Skerry Parchment. He says it proves his right to the throne.”

“But that’s absurd! Your father’s will … the chronicle of the Mustelids … the gifts in the chapel. I was there. I heard it read out,” Norman protested. “Everyone agrees that you should be king, even Cuilean.”

“Uncle Cuilean has been with me the whole time, but even he can’t refute the Skerry Parchment, and he’s a stickler for the law. Guillaume is a long-tailed weasel. They are our cousins from the south. We never heard anything from them during the long wars with the wolves. We always thought that they were fighting their own wars. It seems they just didn’t care. The Skerry Parchment was written during the time of the Great Mustelid Empire. It gave the mountains to the stoats and the far plains to the long-tailed weasels,
but it also says that if any king, stoat or long-tail, abdicated his throne, the other could claim it.”

“So?” said Norman, not following the argument.

“Guillaume Long Tail says that we abdicated.”

“Your grandfather didn’t abdicate,” Norman scoffed. “He was killed at Tista Kirk.”

“And Uncle Cuilean and my father ran away.” Malcolm repeated the arguments of the weasels with contempt. The stoat idolized his father.

“Escaped,” Norman corrected. “They came back, didn’t they? You conquered all their lands back.”

“The weasel lawyers claim that when my father left, he gave up the throne.”

“Stupid lawyers.” Norman was thinking of Fuchs—as Todd. “So how does the map help?”

“The map my dad gave you is actually our treaty map. It was signed by all the Mustelid kings almost a century ago. The stoats saved the empire. We saved the long-tails’ hides at St. Sauveur and we broke the Siege of Pulawy when the Ermine Kingdom was about to fall to the Corsac foxes. As a reward, the other kings recognized the Stoat Kingdom in perpetuity. No other weasel, ermine or any other Mustelid king could dispute it.”

“Oh,” Norman said. He heard his own loud chewing. “I didn’t realize the map was so valuable.”

“Dad wouldn’t have ever thought that he’d need it,” the stoat said.

This was typical of Malcolm’s father, Duncan—brave and generous, but careless of the consequences.

“Still, he took a risk when he gave it to me.”

“The old battler probably never gave it a second thought.” The little creature choked up a little as he recalled his father. That was the real reason he was here: out of duty to his father, to keep the kingdom his father had died to regain.

The boy and the stoat finished their meal of fine English note-paper in silence.

“What do we do now?” asked Malcolm, lying back on the pillow and rubbing his furry belly.

“We sleep,” Norman replied.

“Excellent.” Malcolm sighed through a yawn. “I’ve a talent for that.”

But neither boy nor stoat was able to sleep right away. Norman could not help worrying about the map. He really had no idea where it was. It might have been thrown in the garbage months ago. He would have to deal with that when he got back … if he got back. He was far from sure that this would work at all. According to Fuchs, Norman was the only one ever to sneak himself into a book by eating it. People must eat pieces of paper all the time. There had to be something more to it.

“Malcolm,” he murmured drowsily, a thought occurring to him as he finally began to give in to sleep, “how did you learn that the map was a treaty map? Whose idea was it to come and get it?”

Malcolm replied wearily, “The abbot’s, of course.”

Norman was confused. “Why did the abbot help you? What does he want?” Fuchs didn’t seem to care much what happened in books.

But Malcolm didn’t answer. The only sign that the stoat had heard him was a long “
Hmmmmm
,” indistinguishable from a snore.

T
he wet grass and the chill of the early-morning air finally became too much to sleep through. He had dreamed of home—his
real
home, his own bedroom and bed. In his dream he’d fallen asleep reading, and he was eager to wake up and pick up where he’d left off. It had been a book about a boy in a library, a giant library where the boy worked as a sort of librarian and guardian of books.

Norman struggled not only to wake himself, but to wake himself in the bedroom of that dream. The sound of the sparrows and the scratch of the grass on his cheeks wasn’t helping. He woke up on the lawn. He sat up and rubbed the sleep and dew from his eyes.

A few blinks assured him where he was. Here was the arched back door of the English house. Here was the clothesline that they used here instead of a dryer—a pair of his jeans hung next to Dora’s new riding pants. Usually the bookweird dropped him off where he’d last been—that should have been his bedroom—but once you’ve fallen into a book, very little is really “usual.” The description he’d written and eaten back at George’s described both the outside of the house and the inside. Perhaps it depended on the part of the page you ate. It was then he realized that he was alone, and that he shouldn’t be alone.

“Malcolm,” he called out in an urgent whisper. There was no response. “Malcolm, are you here?” he called out again.

The only sound was a quarrel of sparrows darting in and out of the wall of ivy under the eaves. There was movement now, too, in the house. Flowered curtains were moving in an upstairs window. Norman leapt to his feet and dashed across the lawn to the back door. Would it be locked? His mother was always nagging him to lock it when he came in. He jiggled the handle and put his faith in his own forgetfulness.