Arcadia (35 page)

Puzzled, Rory says, “Didn't she find you?”

Both the men go peculiarly still.

“She go with you,” Lino says. He's stopped fidgeting around.

“Yeah,” Rory says. “Then she said to wait while she went to meet you. She's not here?”

Lino says “
No no no no no
” in a completely Italian way even though the word's the same in English. “She with you.”

“I told you,” Rory says. “She and me went down along the beach. Then she said she was going to find you.”

“Where is the woman?” Per says.

Rory's starting to feel a bit panicky. “I don't know! She said she'd be here.”

“Here?” says Lino. “When here?”

“Now! With you, I mean!”

“You went with the woman,” Per says. His voice has a dangerous rumble to it. “Meet here.”

“She told me she was going to look for you. That's what she said. I swear!”

The three of them look at each other.

It's the stricken expression on Lino's face which reminds Rory. “Wait,” he says. “Wait. She said to say . . .” In his rising panic he's forgotten it. “I was supposed to tell you something if anything was wrong.”

“She say what?” Lino's eyes have gone even rounder than usual.

“She said tell you. It's an Italian word. Wait!
Arrivederci
!
” Thank God he's remembered. All that practice has saved him. “That was it.
Arrivederci
.”

Rory's relief lasts no longer than the time it takes to draw one breath. Lino's reaction kills it. The round eyes fill with stunned shock, then pain, and then Lino gives an awful cry and sprints out into the street.

“Fuck,” says Per. He shoves Rory out of the way and lumbers after Lino. Rory, without the slightest idea what's happening beyond the fact that something's gone horribly wrong, can't think of anything better to do than follow them outside. Lino's already far ahead. He's as light on his feet as a rabbit, sprinting for the slipway as if his life depends on it. Per roars, a bellow of pure frustrated rage, and then begins to shout in his own language as he runs after Lino. By the time Rory gets to the ramp he's way behind. There's a terrible drumming heaviness in his heart. He can hear it aloud. Lino's barreling down the causeway towards the Mount, shouting “Silvia! Silvia!” Per follows him, lurching heavily. The drumming gets louder. It's not Rory's heart at all, it's a sound in the air which rhymes with his gathering horror, accelerating, deepening.

Hoofbeats.

A little way down the causeway Per stops. He grips his staff in both hands and swings it over his head as if he's trying to bring down the sky, and he shouts with such concentrated fury that Rory skids to a halt, afraid to get any closer to him: “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!”

The base of the Mount ripples.

Out of the shadows of its overgrown skirts a moving glittering mass appears, raising steady thunder from the causeway's stones. It's Riders, lots of them, too many to count. They're coming fast. The late sun gleams on the things they're carrying and the things they're wearing, flashing metallic glints. Lino stops, backs up, then begins running landwards again. He's shouting still but you can't hear him now; it's impossible to hear anything except the thrum of the oncoming army. The horses are rushing in like an unnatural tide. The Riders lean forward in the saddle, elbows wide. It feels like the ground's shaking. Per spins around as if to run, sees Rory standing at the top of the ramp, turns back again. Running's useless, you might as well try to outsail a hurricane. Per howls, braces his shoulders, and brings the staff cracking down on the causeway at his feet, once, twice, again, roaring a desperate summons with each blow. Ahead, Lino's about to be swamped. He swerves from one side of the causeway to the other but its sides are jagged and tumbled rock. The Riders are all screaming, swinging lengths of glittering chain up over their heads. Lino looks back in terror, misses his footing, falls forward, and then changes.

It happens as he's falling. He slumps forward, the wave of horses almost on top of him, and then as Rory watches in wide-eyed terror he keeps slumping, forward, in, folding himself inside his own clothes, and then there's a blurry eyeblink when there's no Lino left, only the clothes dropping towards the stone, soft and limp. Then there are wings. The horses swerve for an instant as a bird beats up over them, big, blunt-headed, ungainly in its rising but too swift and smooth to be caught. The wings reach out straight to grip the wind and he's gone.

The horses barely hesitate. They can't, their momentum is too full. A
crack
like the shattering of a bell snaps Rory's look back to earth: it's Per, driving the foot of his staff against the ground again with a force that must surely have either splintered the wood or cleaved the causeway in half. The air hums and crackles and for a moment seems alive with fire, but maybe Rory's imagined it, maybe it's just the gold of the evening and the whirring shimmer of the Riders' weapons. Per brandishes the staff one final time as the onrushing army closes in on him. The women are screaming war cries. One of the horses rears high, throwing its rider, causing skidding stumbling confusion behind it, but the others flow around it as effortlessly and irresistibly as the ocean. The first Rider to reach Per is a crop-haired woman who doesn't look much older than Laurel, standing up in her stirrups and yelling like a banshee. Her horse skids as Per swings his staff but another presses behind her, ridden by someone wearing a motorcycle helmet with the visor closed; she heaves a length of metal down on Per's back.

Then it's all chaos and noise. Rory can't follow it. Without knowing what he's doing he's facing the road again, running, and then he's surrounded by snorting and stamping and legs and shouting. At one stage he finds himself sitting on sand-scoured tarmac with one arm over his head, the other clutching the bag of comics to his chest like a lifebelt. Boots land in front of him and someone jerks him upright. The superheroes and soldiers spill out of the bag and across the road and are shredded under churning hooves. Rough hands haul Rory off his feet and throw him over the back of a horse like he's a sack. His eyes fill with streaks of pain. Someone grips the belt of his trousers to stop him sliding off again and they're away, hard muscle and bone jolting the wind out of him with every stride. Through his own breathless terror and the chaos of noise around him he still manages to hear Per somewhere behind, cursing and bellowing like he's being dragged to the gallows.

T
he one who grabbed him turns out to be Jody the horse-faced woman. She stops riding when she sees that Rory's having trouble breathing, and pulls him off the horse onto his feet, and that's when he sees it's her. She wipes his snotty nose. As well as dangling and bouncing with his head upside down he's been fighting back tears, so he's coughing and bubbling. While he's standing there trying to keep himself upright a few other women ride up and talk to Jody about whether they should tie him up.

“Please don't,” he snivels.

“Eh?” Jody sticks her face close to his. She's yelling. “What's that?”

Rory starts crying properly.

“No need to get all Guantánamo,” someone else says. “He's just a kid.”

“Just a kid, is he?” Jody sounds out of breath too, pumped up on the adrenaline of battle. “You.” She elbows him, almost knocking him off his feet. “Speak English, do you?”

“For God's sake.” The other woman dismounts.

“Told us you didn't speak English, didn't they? Any more lies? Eh?”

In the abysm of his misery Rory remembers what Silvia told him to do. “I'm not with them,” he says, between sobs. “It was an accident.”

Jody snorts—
pah!
—but the other woman interrupts.

“What's your name?” she says.

He tells her.

“So where's home for you, Rory?”

A distant roar stops him answering. It's Per, far behind, but shouting loud enough for them to hear even though they've ridden up out of the town.

“What are you doing to him?” Rory says.

“He'll get what he deserves,” says someone else, still mounted.

“Leaving him for the man-eaters,” Jody says, with grim pleasure.

“Better than he deserves,” the mounted woman says. “If they take him before he dies of thirst at least he'll die happy.”

“Bet they will too,” another woman says. “Big bastard like that.” Rory thinks he recognizes her accent and looks up to check. It's Soph, the skinny black-haired one with the pockmarked cheeks, the one Per and Lino ambushed on the road. “Reckon we should have kept him for ourselves.”
Kept
comes out as
kipt
. “The fish get all the fun.”

“We'll get him gagged soon, don't you worry,” Jody says. “Won't hear him no more after that.”

The one who dismounted looks at Rory closely. She's the one he saw at the head of the charging Riders, standing in the stirrups and yelling. Now she's calm she looks incapable of that sort of fury. “Is he your dad?” she says.

“No.”

“Were any of those people your family?”

He shakes his head.

“Not too many questions, Ellie.”
Quistions:
this is Soph again. “Better save them till everyone's listening. This little bugger's going to have a fair bit of explaining to do.”

“I want his arms tied at least,” Jody says. “Till we know what we're dealing with.”

“Really?” The one called Ellie gives Jody a sarcastic look. “ ‘What we're dealing with?' ”

“You didn't see what happened to Ace. And that other one turned himself into a bird and flew off.” Jody's already unwrapping some twine from a pocket. “Turn round, you,” she says, prodding Rory with the toe of her boot.

“At least let him have his arms in front,” Ellie says.

Jody glares, but lets Rory face her as she begins wrapping the twine around his wrists. “Where's that woman?” she asks him, while she's tying it.

Silvia. She knew all this was going to happen. She knew the Riders were in the Mount. When she gave Rory that quick kiss it was because she was saying good-bye.

“Never mind, then,” Jody says, when his only answer is more sniveling. “We'll find her. Or something else will. Strangers don't last too long around here, specially not at night.” She's about to yank Rory back to her horse when Ellie steps between them.

“He can ride with me,” she says, and before Jody can answer, “All right, Rory?” she adds, in a gentler voice, and steers him away.

She lets him sit straight, squeezed on the saddle in front of her. With his hands tied she has to pull him up but she does it carefully, never forcing. She's a short well-built woman with a button nose and a rather faraway expression. She has an extraordinary collection of rings, mismatched and lurid: some are shaped like flowers, one's like a miniature ball of twine in silver, one's a winged skull. Every finger has at least one. “Sorry about tying you up,” she says in his ear once they're both mounted. She's reaching around him to take the reins. “Ridiculous.” The rest of the women come riding up from the beach soon afterwards. There must be twenty or thirty of them in all. One's cradling her left arm and grimacing and catching her breath in pain. The one with the motorcycle helmet turns out to be Sal, the general. He sees the helmet propped on her pommel. She gives Rory a long hard-eyed look but doesn't say anything to him. The one called Haze is there as well, still wearing her sunglasses although the shadows are long by now. From their discussion it's clear they've left Per tied up on the beach. Rory thinks of the dead man who greeted them on their arrival, bleached and bloated and pecked by birds, and goes faint for a moment. “Careful,” Ellie says, holding him upright. When they set off in a slow convoy she tells him how to keep his back straight and grip with his knees. Rory can barely keep his head straight, let alone his back, but he does his best. He can't see any option but to do as he's told. He's a prisoner. A Rider comes past them, exchanging a curt comment with Ellie while giving Rory a black resentful look, and as she passes Rory sees a length of sturdy wood sticking out from her saddlebag: the wizard's staff.

  *  *  *  

The journey's a torment. He thought they might be taking him back to the Mount, but from things the Riders say to each other he gathers it's not their home, it's just some kind of base, safe for the women because it's in the sea. They're heading somewhere else. It's not close by. He's aching up and down before they've ridden away from the gorse and scrub near the coast, and by the time they're in among dark tree-shaded lanes he's so sore he thinks he might die of the pain, though at least it helps him not think about how utterly miserable he is. No one speaks to him. They don't even speak to each other much. They stop at a village of boarded-up houses where children come running out of an alley. An exhausted-looking man leans out of an upper window to talk to a couple of the Riders, and Rory hears them saying something about Ace being dead. Someone gives the children a bag of food.

They stop a couple more times, at a road junction under wind-stunted trees and then by a washed-out bridge where they have to ford a stream. The stop at the ford is longer. Some women at the front dismount and do something before the rest cross, scattering things in the water and speaking in unison. Ellie says something under her breath as she steers her horse across. Rory's head is bowed as they go, and for a moment he thinks he sees a shy and shadowy face among the eddies, breaking the surface like a fish except it's a human face. No one else notices, and he's too bound up in his battle with the agony in his bum to care.

On and on they go, under taller trees, the shadows twilight-deep. Single leaves drop slowly. Rory bites his lip and squeezes the pommel with his bound hands and keeps going as long as he can but eventually he can't hold it back anymore and he's making swallowed whimpering noises and shaking like he's in fever.