Endymion Spring (23 page)

There were remnants of a bonfire in the middle of the clearing and Blake sat down on one of the logs that had been placed nearby.
 
The mound of twigs resembled a large, smoldering porcupine and he inched closer, grateful for its warmth.
 
A scratchy, smoky scent prickled his nose.

The
dog sidled up to him and place
a grizzled muzzle on his knee, looking up at him with doleful eyes.

The boy stroked its head while the man selected some more wood for the fire.
 
A tarpaulin had been spread across a pile of twigs on the far side of the clearing and Blake guessed that the man probably camped here often.
 
There were a few tins and discarded blankets weighed down with bricks on the leaf-littered ground.

The stranger approached and pressed an armful of sticks onto the remains of the fire.
 
The mound hissed and crackled slightly, but did not burst into flame.
 
Shrugging, he sat down opposite the children, but not too close.
 
He apparently didn't want to alarm them.
 
His robe hung open behind him and Blake was fascinated to see dozens of pockets zigzagging across its lining.
 
Scrolls of paper stuck out from some of them like vials, while books bulged squarely in others.
 
He was carrying a portable library inside his coat.
 
Blake longed to know what sort of books they were, but the man said nothing and waited patiently for him to speak first.

The boy wondered where to begin and then, clearing his throat, asked the question that was uppermost in his mind.

"Who are you?"

15

T
he man considered the question for a moment, but said nothing.
 
Then, to fill the silence, Blake voiced the idea that had occurred to him earlier:
 
"Are you Johann Gutenberg?"

Duck was the first to react.
 
"Are you serious?" she cackled.
 
"Of course he's not Gutenberg!
 
Gutenberg died more than five hundred years ago, you idiot!"

Blake blushed.
 
Curiously, however, the man's mouth softened into a smile.
 
Blake was surprised by the transformation:
 
It was as though someone had
take
a crumpled sheet of paper and smoothed it out, revealing a hidden greeting inside.
 
The stranger's eyes no longer seemed so distant or far away, but showed renewed signs of life — unlike the fire, which he prodded again with his staff.

The man opened his mouth to speak, but no sound emerged.
 
Blake listened carefully, but the man's voice seemed to have dried up and only a distant sound of breathing could be heard.
 
He closed his mouth again without uttering a word.

Blake frowned.
 
"I'm sorry?"
 
He thought he might have misheard, but the stranger merely shook his head and pressed a fingertip to his lips.
 
His eyes, however, were smiling.

Blake turned to his sister.
 
"Is he hungry, do you think?"

"Don't be silly," she said.
 
"He probably hasn't spoken to anyone in ages.
 
Perhaps he's lost his voice."

Blake pondered this for a moment.
 
Could someone actually forget how to speak?
 
That must be horrible.
 
He chewed on his lip.
 
The man obviously expected him to know where to begin, how to lead the discussion, but too many questions were bombarding his mind and he didn't know which one to ask first — let alone how to express any of them.

"Thanks for the dragon," he said at last.

The man doffed his hat and scratched at the thatch of scraggly hair beneath.

"What dragon?" said
Duck.

He'd forgotten she didn't know.
 
"A dragon he dropped off at the house yesterday morning," answered Blake.

"What?" she blurted out.
 
"That's preposterous!
 
What do you mean by a dragon?
 
There are no such things as dragons!
 
How could he drop off a—"

"I mean an origami dragon he made with special paper," said Blake.
 
"Like the paper in the book I found."

"Why didn't you tell me?" cried Duck, offended.
 
"I could have helped you!"

"I didn't need your help.
 
Besides, I figured out what it meant on my own."

"Oh yeah?
 
So, what does the dragon mean, Einstein?"

"It means we're — I
mean,
I'm
—
supposed to ask him about the blank book."

The man nodded, but neither Blake nor Duck noticed.
 
They were glaring at each other and had started to argue.

"And what exactly are you going to ask?"

"I don't know," he responded lamely.
 
"Something will occur to me as soon as you stop interrupting."

"Yeah, right.
 
You wouldn't know what to say if he wrote down the question for you.
 
Nice going, idiot."

"Look, you
didn
' t
find the blank book and you didn't receive the paper dragon, so mind your own business.
 
This doesn't concern you."

He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the dog's bandanna, which he started threading round his fingers like a boxer taping his knuckles.
 
"You're just jealous," he muttered, giving his sister a sideways glance.

"Oh yeah?
 
Jealous of what?"

"Of the book I found."

"You mean the one you lost," she reminded him.
 
"Or have you forgotten that too?"

"Of course I haven't."

She knew she had the upper hand.
 
"The book probably realized its mistake," she taunted him, "and went back into hiding until someone else could find it."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you're too dumb to solve this mystery on your own," she said.

"That's what you think."

"Yep, and I'm smarter than you
.."

"Well, you're not as clever as you think you are," he said angrily, rising from his log.
 
"You're just a silly girl in a silly raincoat, who thinks Mum and Dad will stick together so long as you go on wearing it.
 
But they won't, you'll see!
 
They'll get divorced and then we'll have to live on different sides of the ocean.
 
Then you'll be happy, won't you, because you'll never have to see me again!
 
Anyway,
Endymion
Spring
chose me, and not you, so get over it."

He knew he was hitting her everywhere it hurt, but he was not prepared for her reaction.
 
Duck looked about to sneeze, but her face crumpled instead into tears.
 
Immediately, he reached out to hold her, but she shook off his clumsy attempt at an apology and covered her face with her hands.
 
She rocked back and forth, sobbing.

He hadn't seen her cry like this — at least, not since the Big Argument.
 
His words had opened a deep and dangerous wound.

The man had been watching them with a subdued look of tenderness on his face, as though he knew the pain and suffering the book could cause.
 
Yet at the mention of
Endymion
Spring
he stood up and approached them.
 
The name seemed to fit like a key in a lock and released him from his inactivity.

He still did not speak, but sat down between them and reached into one of his voluminous pockets.
 
He brought out a battered book — the volume he had been reading outside the bookshop.
 
It wasn't blank, as Duck had led Blake to believe, but full of densely printed words:
 
old-fashioned words with barbed black letters and small illustrations of angels and skeletons and devils — not to mention men working on presses like the one
Jolyon
had shown them yesterday.
 
Some of the pages were torn and others were covered in nasty brown blotches.
 
The book was falling apart.

Duck stopped crying and looked up.

At last the homeless man turned to a series of blank white pages he had inserted near the back of the volume preceding them:
 
the finest tissue paper, veined with silver lines.

Blake gasped.
 
"How did you get this?" he asked, realizing at once that he was looking at part of
Endymion
Spring
.

In answer, the man pointed to one of the blank pages, where Blake could see something forming.
 
It was as if someone had breathed on a mirror and drawn a message on the foggy glass.
 
Lines appeared — at first very faint, but then darker as more and more of the image was revealed.
 
They were like pin scratches on skin before they well with blood.
 
The boy's eyes widened in astonishment.

"What does it say?" squeaked Duck.
 
"Tell me!"

"Can't you see it?" he said, surprised.

"No.
 
I could see the printed bits, but not this," she said, sitting on the edge of her log.
 
"It's like it's the blank book I told you about."

She sounded upset and more than a little bit jealous still, but her curiosity was getting the better of her.

Blake wasn't sure how to describe the apparition
.
  
It was an ancient tree with an odd beast dwelling in its leaves.
 
He could see it quite clearly and reached forward to touch it.
 
The creature seemed to sense his presence and flicked its head nervously from side to side before darting away from his enquiring finger.

And then, perhaps at his touch, the animal shivered and disappeared.
 
The tree was no more than a memory on the page, a wintry outline, becoming fainter and fainter, until it had faded away completely.

Blake held his breath.
 
"What was that?" he asked eventually, thinking it had looked like the dragon he had seen in the tree last night.

"What was what?" cried Duck.

"A dragon, I think," he said less certainly, "in a tree.
 
Something happened.
 
I don't understand.
 
It didn't answer my question at all."

Duck didn't know what the image meant either, but promised to find out something later in the library.
 
Blake might be able to read from enchanted books, she remarked, but at least she could learn things from real ones.

Blake, however, wasn't listening.
 
He had looked up at the homeless man.
 
"How did you — how did the book — do that?" he asked, but the man was miles away, staring at the book, as if he could see something else.

Blake glanced at the page.
 
It was blank.

"Who are you
? he
asked again.
 
"What is your name?"

The man seemed to emerge from a daydream.
 
He shrugged off a memory and flipped to the front of the book, where he underlined a partially obscured word with a grimy fingernail.

Blake frowned.
 
The syllables lodged like fish bones at the back of his throat.
 
How was he supposed to pronounce it?

"It says his name is—" he started.

"I can read this, dummy," said Duck irritably, cutting him off.

She pushed his head out of the way and studied the man's name for a moment.
 
Then she looked up and smiled.

"I'm pleased to meet you,
Psalmanazar
."

A

Blake's face wrinkled in consternation.
 
Psalmanazar
?
 
What kind of name was that?
 
It reminded him of an angel or
a
djinn
.
 
"Are you a wizard or something?" he asked finally.

Psalmanazar
smiled, but shook his head.

"Then how did you know to contact me?" asked Blake, before Duck could interrupt.

Psalmanazar
flipped to the end of the book, where several words were waiting for Blake, in ink as faint as ash.
 
Even this message didn't make much sense.
 
He mouthed the words to himself, unable to fathom their meaning.

"Come on," Duck badgered him.
 
"What does it say?"

He read the lines aloud:

"The Silence will end
—
the Sun approaches.

Mark my Word — the Shadow encroaches.

"That's weird," he added.
 
"The sun appeared in the other riddle, too.
 
It's like an instruction or a warning of some kind."

"And the shadow," said Duck, ominously.
 
"Don't forget that."

With a shiver, Blake remembered
Jolyon's
stark warning about a Person in Shadow — someone who would stop at nothing to find the
Last Book
.

He was about to say something when he noticed the following page had been neatly excised from
Psalmamazar's
book, possibly so that the man could construct the paper dragon.

On a whim, he asked, "Did this message appear the other day, when we saw you outside the bookshop?"