Arcadia (19 page)

He can't take his eyes off the walking stick with its twisting halo of soundless fire. It's not like a walking stick at all. It's too big, even for a huge man like Per. Plus it's carved. There are patterns on it, almost like writing.

“So.” Silvia spreads her arms. “Do you think anyone will find us here?”

“Is that magic?” Rory says.

Oochellino makes a
hmm?
sound. “
Magia,
” Silvia says, and he nods. Per grunts and, without letting go of the stick, gestures towards an empty armchair.

“It is,” Silvia says. “Haven't you seen magic before?”

Rory takes a couple of steps towards it. At once Per barks something rough-sounding.

“He doesn't like anyone to go too close. Sit down, please.”

All the chairs are too big for him. He sets himself down nervously, perching on the edge.

“Now,” Silvia says. “We must all say thank you.” She's the leader of the gang, clearly. “Lino tells me you help him very much when he arrives. And you tell nobody.”

“
Si si
. Good boy.”

“And then last night you were very clever. We watch you from the boat, me and Per. We don't know what's happening but we see the other people go away, then Lino goes like this again”—she whistles—“and we know it's safe.”

“It was easy,” he mumbles.

“How old are you, Rory?”

“I'm ten.”

“Only ten!”

“Yeah.”

“You should be proud of yourself.” She sits up smoothly and leans towards him. “So you were born ten years ago,” she says. “Look at me. Look at my face. Did you ever see me before?”

This is such a strange question he almost asks her to say it again, thinking she must mean something else, but he doesn't dare.

“No,” he says.

“Think carefully,” she says. “Maybe imagine a younger girl. A gypsy girl, like me.” She pinches her cheeks:
look at my skin,
she means.

“Are you a gypsy?”

Oochellino chuckles. Rory feels himself blushing. Now that he's said it, it sounds rude.

“I told you,” she says, “I have no country. The gypsies came from the east a long time ago and we're still traveling.”

He thinks she probably means
yes
but he's in no condition to be sure of anything.

“I didn't know there were any real gypsies,” he says.

Oochellino hoots with laughter. Rory's embarrassed again, but Silvia doesn't seem to be put out. “You never met a gypsy girl, then,” she says. He shakes his head. Silvia sits back as if she's not quite satisfied with his answer. “Let me show you something,” she says. She's reaching her hands to her collar. She digs around inside the front of her sweater and pulls out a tiny bag, a pouch, fastened by a cord around her neck. She loosens the top of the bag and takes out some small dark things one by one, one two three four five of them. “Here. Look.”

Oochellino mutters something inquisitive. Silvia shushes him and beckons Rory towards her. “You know what these are?” She holds them out in cupped hands.

Rory has to kneel to look properly.

“Acorns,” he says. He's a little disappointed. With the atmosphere in the room, the light, the hush, the secrecy, and after the way she offered her hands so carefully, he was expecting something wonderful: gold dust, dragons' teeth. “Aren't they?”

Silvia's watching him intently, as if waiting for a different answer. He doesn't know what else to say.

Per makes a sarcastic-sounding grunt,
hmph
. Rory feels like he's failed some kind of test. He stands up and digs his hands into his pockets.

“I better go,” he says. “Everyone's going to be looking for me.”

“OK,” Silvia says. She tips the acorns back into the pouch at her neck and hides it in her sweater again. “We don't want them to look too much.”

“I can try bringing more food if you like.”

Oochellino chuckles again and says, “No no no.” He hops out of his chair and takes a plastic bag out from behind it. He opens the handles to show Rory. It's packed with things from the cellars. “Lino does this now.”

Rory stares in confusion. “How did you . . . ? I thought they locked everything.”

“Hmm?”

Silvia translates.

“Ha!” Oochellino pulls something from Ol's pockets, a jingle and flash of metal. “See.” It's a bunch of keys. He rattles off something in Italian.

“He says old women are forgetful. They leave things lying around.”

“
Si si
. Woman with
aspetto,
like this.” Lino pulls a startlingly good impression of Missus Shark's crabby beaky face.

“You stole those from Missus Shark? And then went in the cellars?”

“
Cantine,
” Silvia explains to Lino.

“But someone's been there all day.”

“No one sees Lino,” Silvia says. “It's his gift. He sees everything and no one sees him.”

“
Come civetta,
” Lino says, and hoots.

“Like an owl.”

Rory remembers how he balanced on the window ledge in the rain and then vanished without a sound in the blink of an eye.

“
Ecco,
” Lino says, snapping the keys away like a conjuror's trick. “Food, clothings, is OK now.”

“But maybe,” Silvia says, “you can help us find what we're looking for.”

Per leans forward sharply. It's the first time he's moved. Under his massive eyebrows his look is pitch-dark. “
Shh
!
” he growls.

“No,” Silvia says. “I know it's OK.”

“A boy?” Per says. So he can speak after all. He sounds the way you'd imagine a bear might sound. He's foreign too: the word comes out like
beuy
.

“I know this boy,” Silvia says. She's half Per's size but she sounds absolutely in charge.

Per slumps back in his seat. “Crazy,” he mutters.

“What are you looking for?” Rory says. “I can help. I know everything here. Better than anyone else.”

“It's not here,” Silvia says. “Not on this island. It's in England.”

There's quite a long silence.

“You're trying to get to the Mainland?” Rory says.

“We were caught in a storm.”

“You mean . . . You were in a boat?” Of course they were, he knew that already. But it's unthinkable. The sea's cursed; no one survives it. “What about Them?”

Silvia cocks an eyebrow.

“I thought They don't let anyone . . . They kill everyone who goes to sea. All the men.”

“
Ahh,
” Silvia says. “The
sirene
.” Hearing the Italian word, Lino echoes her:
ahhh
. It sounds like Silvia said
sea-rainy
. “Well, Rory, you see. Pear has a gift too.”

“Don't say,” Per grumbles.

Silvia props her arms on her knees and fixes Rory with her weirdly gripping stare. “We come a long way. Longer than you can imagine, Lino and me. We come to the sea, we find Per and his boat. And his gift. Now we're sailing to England to find the most important thing in the world.”

“Don't say. He's a boy.”
Hissa beuy
is how it sounds.

“Not just any boy,” Silvia says sharply, and though Per must be three times her size Rory gets the feeling he's just been told off.

“What's that?” Rory says. The mystery is indescribable. He can almost feel the black frame of the panel around the scene, the vivid ink light filling the panel, the wide-eyed boy in the superhero's lair.

“The most important thing in the world? It's a ring.”

Per snorts angrily. “Crazy!” But Lino, who's been following the conversation as best he can, frowning, nodding, bubbling with contained excitement, now hops onto one of the tables, gesturing happily at the three of them. “
Si si si!
We are 'obbits! Big 'obbit, small 'obbit, lady 'obbit!” He laughs delightedly. “We go to find ring. Ring of biggest power! Biggest
magia
.”

The light in the room wavers suddenly, like it's liquid and someone's stirred it. “Stupid talk,” Per says. The glow at the end of his stick is contracting, dimming. “They want to go. Take the boy out. Boy!” He makes sure Rory's looking at him, and makes a zipping motion across his closed lips.

“Is good boy,” Lino says. “Not say to people.”

“I won't tell anyone,” Rory says. “I swear I won't.”

“I know,” Silvia says. “Now you should go.”

“Can I come back?”

“I think you will,” she says, standing up.

“I don't know how I can help,” he says. He doesn't want them to send him back to the open air. He doesn't want this to be over. “I don't know about the Mainland.”

“Maybe you know more than you think,” Silvia says.

Dread of what's waiting for him outside comes all in a rush. “I don't even know if I'm going to be here for long. My mum wants to take me away. She thinks They're going to kill me if we stay. I might not even be here tomorrow.”

Silvia crouches in front of him. She's so close and so intent it's like she's trying to hypnotize him, or searching for a secret hidden in his face. “You know I tell you Lino has a gift, and Per has a gift? I have a gift too. A gypsy gift. Do you know what the gypsies are famous for?”

“Stealing?”

Lino hoots with laughter again, absurdly loud in the dusky stillness of the room. Rory flushes, deeply and instantly ashamed. She just grimaces for a moment.

“Telling fortunes,” she says.

“And stealing!” Lino says, in his best careful English. “Clever boy!”

“
Pssh,
” Silvia hisses at him, not angrily. “Telling fortunes. Reading hands, tea leaves. Ball of glass. What do you think, Rory? Do you think Silvia knows the future?”

The best he can answer is, “Dunno.”

“I tell you, I have the gypsy gift. I see the road ahead. What I see tells me I think we meet again, you and me.” The room's noticeably darker, as if the light from Per's stick is being gradually swallowed by a rising tide. Her eyes are glinting.

“Not long,” Per says.

“When are you going to the Mainland?” Rory says. He can feel this whole enchanted scene slipping away, sinking like the light.

“When the time is right,” Silvia says. “We don't hurry. We find another boat, we wait for the wind, we go.”

“Quick now,” Per says.

“
Via via via
.” Lino turns Rory around and marches him into the black corridor.

“Good-bye,” Silvia says behind him, but already he's at sea in the dark again, just trying to keep his footing as Lino nudges him along from behind, and he can't answer.

  *  *  *  

The outside door groans open. It's dazzling outside. He's amazed to see the island, the world he knows. The dazzle fades quickly. It's late afternoon, shady and chilly on this east side of Home. Everything smells of the sea, vivid and wild.

Lino pushes him out, not roughly. “Go to mamma,” he says.

If it wasn't for the small man behind him, his odd round head poking around the door, Rory would be telling himself he'd imagined the whole thing.

“She like you,” Lino says, grinning.

His mother? What's he talking about? “Who?”

“Who.
Cretino
. Silvia. She like you. I see this.” He winks. Rory looks away, heartsick. He doesn't feel like being teased.

“Can you do magic?” he says.

Lino frowns as though he doesn't understand, then shrugs.

“Can you make it windy? Really windy? So it's too rough to sail anywhere?” But Lino's wide eyes are blank. He doesn't care.

“Go to mamma,” he says, and pulls the door shut with a bang.

  *  *  *  

Rory was right. It's the worst trouble he's ever been in.

Ali's the one who finds him, up at the top of the Lane. She takes him back to the Abbey where he gets told off by Missus Grouse while Laurel and Pink go off to get word out to everyone else who's been looking. Kate arrives first and tells him off some more, and goes on telling him off in front of everyone else as they come in. Finally his mother arrives. She's red-faced and red-eyed and breathing like she does when she wakes up from a nightmare. She doesn't say anything at all, just grabs him by the wrist and drags him outside. Some of the others try to stop her. Viola says she and Rory ought to stay overnight at the Abbey and then his mother blows up at Viola so badly that everyone else sort of falls out of the way like it's an explosion, even Kate. So Rory gets hauled back to Parson's and sat down at the table, and that's when the real telling-off begins, complete with shaking and slaps and tears and his mother doing her thing about how she wishes she'd died at the beginning of it all, right after What Happened.

It's somewhere around the middle of the telling-off that Rory gets his unbelievably brilliant idea.

N
ext morning: the last of his childhood, though he doesn't know that yet.

The first thing he does is go to the window and push aside the curtain. The sun's coming up bright in a clear sky but the tops of the hedges are fidgeting and he can hear gusts.

He was awake long into the night. First it was because he was buzzing with choked rage, later because he was praying for wind and rain. The only clouds he can see are worryingly thin and high but at least it's nowhere near calm. One day is all he needs. One morning, if he can just find a way to be left on his own for a bit. He'll have to be on his best behavior. If there's no other way, he can always say he has to go for a poo. His mother won't follow him to the toilet, surely.

He goes downstairs determined to be obedient and helpful. To his surprise his mother's acting normal as well, as if she hadn't spent the previous evening screaming at him and telling him she wished he'd gone off and died instead of Jake and Scarlet.