Or do you seriously claim that an author is the rightful owner of every copy of his books?" Puffed-up, milk-faced young upstart! What a way to speak to him, Fenoglio, the creator of everything around Orpheus himself, even the air he breathed!
"Are you after me again for information on Death?" Fenoglio squeezed his feet into his worn old boots. "Why? So that you can go telling this poor boy you’ll bring Dustfinger back from the White Women, just to keep him in your service?"
Farid tightened his lips. Dustfinger’s marten blinked sleepily on his shoulder — or was this a different animal?
"What nonsense you talk!" Orpheus sounded distinctly peeved — he took offense very easily. "Do I look as if I have any trouble finding servants? I have six maids, a bodyguard, a cook, and the boy. You know very well it’s not just for the boy I want to bring Dustfinger back. He belongs in this story. It’s not half as good without him, it’s a flower without petals, a night without stars— ‘A forest without trees?" Fenoglio muttered. Orpheus turned as red as a beet. It was so amusing to make fun of the arrogant fop — one of the few pleasures Fenoglio still had left.
"You’re drunk, old man!" Orpheus spat. His voice could sound very unpleasant.
"Drunk or not, I still know a hundred times more about words than you do. You trade at second hand. You unravel whatever you can find and knit it up again as if a story were a pair of old socks! So don’t you tell me what part Dustfinger ought to play in this one. Perhaps you remember I had him dead once already, before he decided to go with the White Women! What do you think you’re doing, coming here to lecture me about my own story? Take a look at that, why don’t you?" Furiously, he pointed to the shimmering fairies’ nest above his bed. "Rainbow-colored fairies! Ever since they built their horrible nest up there I’ve had the most appalling dreams! And they steal the blue fairies’ stocks of winter provisions!"
"So?" Orpheus shrugged his plump shoulders. "They look pretty, all the same, don’t they? I thought it was so tedious for all fairies to be blue."
"Did you, indeed?" Fenoglio’s voice rose to such volume that one of the colorful fairies interrupted her constant chatter and peered out of her gaudy nest. "Then write your own world! This one’s mine, understand? Mine! I’m sick and tired of your meddling with it. I admit I’ve made some mistakes in my life, but Writing you here was far and away the worst of them!"
Bored, Orpheus inspected his fingernails. They were bitten to the quick. "I’m not listening to any more of this!" he said in a menacingly soft voice. "All that stuff about ‘you wrote me here,’ ‘she read me here’ —nonsense! I’m the one who does the reading and writing around here now. The only one. The words don’t obey you anymore, old man. It’s a long time since they did, and you know it!"
"They’ll obey me again! And the first thing I’ll write will be a return ticket for you!"
"Oh yes? And who’s going to read these fabulous words? As far as I’m aware, you need someone to read them aloud for you. Unlike me.
"Well?" Fenoglio came so close that Orpheus’s farsighted eyes blinked at him in annoyance. "I’ll ask Mortimer! They don’t call him Silvertongue for nothing, even if he goes by another name these days. Ask the boy! If it weren’t for Mortimer, he’d still be in the desert shoveling camel dung."
"Mortimer!" Orpheus produced a derisive smile, although with some difficulty. "Is your head buried so deep in your wine jug that you don’t know what’s going on in this world of yours? He’s not doing any reading now. The bookbinder prefers to play the outlaw these days — the role you created especially for him."
The bodyguard uttered a grunt, probably meant to be something like laughter. What a ghastly fellow! Had Fenoglio himself written him into the story or had Orpheus?