Arcadia (33 page)

“Oh,” Silvia says. “Yes, I remember. It's a different place.”

“What?”

“It's a different mount. The one they talk about. Not—” she indicates the island castle with her eyes—“this one.”

Rory's very confused. “But that is the Mount. That's what it's called.”

“There must be many hills in this country.”

“I know, but that's not—”

“Rory.” She bends very close. “Didn't I tell you I know the truth?”

You can't argue with her. He wouldn't dare even if he really thought she was wrong, and like she says, she can't be wrong, although it did seem awfully like the women with the horses were talking about Saint Michael's Mount.

“It's best if you don't say things like this to the others.” They both glance back at Per and Lino. “Questions. It makes them nervous. I don't want Per nervous. OK?”

“OK,” Rory says.

She smiles at him. It's a rather steely smile. “You were good to listen, though. You did well.”

“That woman,” Rory says. “The one who got dragged away by her horse. Was she all right?”

Silvia just looks at him for a while, then presses her lips tight and shakes her head.

“You must be hungry,” she says. It's obvious she doesn't want to talk about it. “Come on.”

As they rejoin the group Lino asks her something in Italian, glancing at Rory. It's pretty clearly something along the lines of,
What was all that about?
When Silvia answers, he nods sadly. “
Povero,
” he says, sympathetically. “But soon!” His look brightens. “Very soon! End of walking! Soon, 'obbits have ring of biggest power!” He laughs and tosses Rory a hunk of bread.

  *  *  *  

They sit and eat in silence. The bread's very tough and takes a lot of chewing. Lino starts up a couple of times, cocking his head, scanning the horizon, thinking he's heard something; once he scampers away and they hear him working his way to the top of a tree. But he comes back shaking his head, and mutters only a few words to Silvia.

Rory's very troubled. He's not sure why. He can't get his head around the idea that this adventure's about to finish. It only started yesterday! And he's even more baffled when he tries to imagine the ending that's coming up. Are they really,
really
going to find the Ring of Power this afternoon? He's not ready for it. And then what? The three of them keep talking about the end of their journey, but what happens after that? Where's he going to go next?

As if reading his thoughts, Per stretches out a leg and nudges Rory's back with the toe of his boot. “You,” he says. “Boy. Time to go home.”

At this Silvia looks up. “What?”

Per shrugs. “We don't want him now.”

“
No no no no no,
” Lino says. He's in the middle of chewing a strip of some sort of dried meat. “Good boy.”

“We decided,” Per says. “Three, together. Not other people.”

Silvia stands up. “You would leave him here? Alone?”

Per stares at her, as if he's thinking about it, then scrunches his mouth:
Why not?

Rory's cheeks are burning. “I'll go if you don't want me,” he says.

“No,” Lino says. “Go with Lino.”

“We decided this before,” Per rumbles.

“We are not there yet,” Silvia says. She steps between Per and Rory, decisively. “Until we have the ring, Rory is with us. After that we can talk about what we agreed.”

“Agreed before,” Per says. “Finish. No more talk.”

Rory's gaping at Silvia. Is she really going to abandon him as soon as they find it? But she's filling her pack, suddenly brisk. “Let's go,” she says. “We wait long enough. This is how we will do it. Rory comes with me”—she gestures over the sweep of the bay—“by the shore. You two—” she indicates the ruin of Penzance—“that way. Behind this town.”

Now both men are frowning at her, slowly taking in what she's said. Lino begins something unhappy-sounding in Italian. She cuts him off impatiently.

“By the sea, it's safest. We don't know who's in that town. Look at it. There may be people in those houses. Hungry people, maybe. Or those women, who hate us now.” She glares at Per. “I'm not going that way. On the beach, you can see there's no one there. It's the best way. You two, you can't go by the sea, but you will be OK in the town. You can protect yourself. I look after Rory. We meet again afterwards, there”—she's pointing across the long bay to the shore opposite the Mount—“and cross when the sea is low.”

“No,” Per says. “All go together.” He swings the staff up, tapping it into his calloused palm.

“Listen to me,” she says. There's no real argument. It's like a cat arguing with a bear, but it's obvious even to Rory that the cat's going to win. If you go by the water, if the
sirene
come, what then? You think your spirits will come when you call? You think they are your slaves? I don't think so. I think if you are by the sea and the
sirene
come you drown. You and Lino. You can see the end of our journey and you don't make it, you die. It's stupid. No. You men go the other way. You fight if you want to fight, hide if you want to hide, it's up to you. Rory and me want to walk in peace.”

There's a long unhappy silence. Lino asks a question.

Silvia answers in English. “We meet there.” She points. “See? On the shore, opposite the island. Wait there until the sea is low, and then we all walk across, like Rory tells us.”

“Boy makes all the trouble,” Per says. He's not sneering or threatening, just saying it like it's obvious. He starts arranging the bags over his staff.

There's a bit more arguing in Italian as they're getting ready. Lino sounds hesitant, Silvia determined. Rory can imagine what she's saying:
Don't argue with me. I can tell the future.
He's quietly happy with her Plan. He was beginning to worry about what Per might do. Perhaps they're going to end up fighting over the Ring like supervillains rather than heroes, but if they do he wants to be on Silvia's side.

They set off again. The road dips into a small steep valley which has almost filled itself in. There are fallen trees everywhere, plastered with stringy moss. Someone's trampled through the mess to keep the road more or less passable, though at the bottom of the valley there's no road at all; it's completely sunk under mud and matted willow branches and rotting leaves and general rubbish.

They climb away from that, round a corner, and find themselves at the outskirts of the town.

Another of the most important Rules on Home was that whenever you finished a job you always had to put everything you'd used back where it went. You did it even if you knew someone was about to do exactly the same job using the exact same things. If it was the end of the day you put things back and then went with a small bucket to wherever the nearest fresh water was and you cleaned everything with one of the cloths and dried it off again. It didn't matter how tired you were—everyone was always tired at the end of every day—you made sure the places where the little band of survivors lived and worked and ate and slept never got any worse.

The reason for this Rule was that everyone knew what would happen otherwise. It was there for all to see, in the abandoned houses smelling of sewage and mold, in the no-go zone of smashed glass and scrap metal around the Hotel, in the tendrils of bramble that had swallowed the island's untended gardens and fields over the course of two summers. Ruin and decay would grow as remorselessly as weeds if they weren't kept at bay by the endless, patient, boring work of tidying and cleaning and putting away.

And here's the proof. They walk down into it.

It's like a bomb combined with a typhoon. Everything's broken and everything in the wrong place. Inside things (a cooker, a toilet, a lampshade) are scattered around outside. A farm trailer's tipped up against the side of a house. There's a small pile of clothes heaped in a black puddle in a ditch between houses. Walls are sprouting weeds, and trees have plastic bags caught in their branches. Chimneys are sending up sheaves of grass or birds' nests. There are circles of charred ground on the verges, fringed with unburned rubbish. Rory can't list all the wrong things he sees. Everywhere he looks it's the same strewn chaos. As on Home, anything that might be useful has been taken away: anything that might burn, or hold water, or keep a body warm. The rest is left like stripped bones. Per and Lino and Silvia pick their way through it without a pause. They've seen it all before, Rory realizes. It must all be like this. All those times he stood on Briar Hill and looked out at the deadly sea and wondered about the world beyond it: here's his answer.

They come to a place where other streets branch off down the slope towards the harbor and the sea. Here Silvia stops. She and Lino confer for a while, pointing and looking around. Then she gestures for Rory to follow her downhill.

“This way.”

It's where she's decided they're splitting up. She's already striding away. He doesn't look back. Lino shouts something after them. Whatever it is, she ignores it. You have to concentrate anyway: the roads are wide here in the town but they're full of obstacles, silted-up cars sticky with bird poo and pollen, and there are cracks and gouges and bare patches underfoot, as well as sharp scraps and dustings of the kind of shattered glass that looks like hundreds of tiny ice cubes. A pair of foxes startles Rory by trotting out of a gaping front door to watch them go past. The animals tread lightly and easily through the wreckage. It doesn't worry them. They live here now. When he looks back up the road Lino and Per are out of sight.

A fetid reek hangs around the bottom of the street. Gulls are swarming, diving at the ground and at each other. Rory and Silvia come down by what used to be the harbor; he can see the stone quay with the lighthouse at the end, across a span of slimy algae through which wrecks are studded like stepping-stones. The buildings are bigger here. Some still have words written on the sides, high enough that the creeping damp hasn't yet flaked them away. A single intact awning flaps above a window, waiting for another storm or two to tear it down. There are lampposts lining what was once a broad seaside road and is now a dumping-ground of indistinguishable rubbish rattling occasionally in the fouled breeze. One of them catches Rory's eye as he trots along trying to keep up with Silvia. It's flickering on and off, the light just about visible though it's an increasingly bright afternoon. He points it out to her.

“Why's that one working?”

She stops, hands on hips. “I don't know.”

“There's no electricity, is there?”

“There must be another thing instead. Another power.”

He thinks about this for a little bit, then decides not to anymore.

“Did you mean that,” he says, “about when we find the Ring? Leaving me behind afterwards?”

She looks at him for a long time, her face as indecipherable as the power that's making the broken lamp shine.

“When we get there,” she says, “we will know what to do.”

“I don't know anyone here.” He hadn't meant to say this, it just sort of comes out. “I don't know where I'd go.”

She appears to be thinking about it.

“But I told you,” she says eventually. “Your road and mine. Like this.” She puts her index fingers together, making the train tracks again. And off she sets while he's still trying to work out what her answer means. He never has the chance to finish working it out. He can't do anything but follow. There are disgusting soft patches in the mess, oozing squelching bits that tug at your feet when you step on them. Whatever he does he doesn't want to trip over. He keeps after Silvia's long steady strides as best he can.

It's almost worse when they finally pick their way across the seaside plain of rubbish and find a place to scramble down onto the sand. Now the whole length of the bay opens up, the ebbing sea leaving a blissfully unmarked sweep of beach below the heaps of scummy flotsam which mark the tide line. The problem here is the wrecks. They're terrifyingly huge. They're monsters of decaying steel lounging along the top of the beach. The mere height of them gives Rory sickening vertigo. Every time he looks at them he's convinced they're about to roll over, tip slowly with a grinding echoing sound, and crush him like an insect under a boulder. He makes himself concentrate on Silvia's footprints, following them along the wide curve of the bay.

At least the Mount looks a bit closer already. In fact . . .

“Look,” he says, hurrying to bring himself alongside Silvia. “There. See?”

Between the Mount and the shore a thin line of waves is breaking, brilliant as a spill of broken glass in the sun. Above those sparkles a solid surface is showing. It's a bit like a mirage. It looks as if a phantom road has formed itself on the surface of the sea.

It's the causeway to the Mount. The tide's already come down far enough that the path has begun to emerge from the water. The waves are breaking against it.

“OK,” Silvia says, quietly, to herself. “OK.”

Rory's a little stung. He's pleased that he remembered about the causeway and he thought maybe she'd be pleased with him too. But she's unusually distracted.

They walk for a long while. It's slow going in sand. The softness underfoot is easier on his feet, which is good since they're aching badly now, but harder on his legs. They've come perhaps halfway around the long bay when in desperation he asks her whether they can stop for a bit.

He's expecting to be ignored, maybe even told off, but to his surprise she looks back and nods. “All right,” she says. “Here.” On their seaward side a pale blue shipping container is half-buried in the beach. She looks around and then motions him towards it. “Come.”