Arcadia (41 page)

“Here we go then,” Rog mutters.

At the head of the procession Sal's wheeled around to face the rest of them. She stands up in the saddle.

“Usual rules from here on,” she calls. “Let's be extra careful, we don't know if our cargo's going to make a difference. Minimal talking and even less looking, all right? El, you'll look after the kid?”

Ellie raises an arm in acknowledgment.

“What's going on?” Rory says, alarmed. Ellie's doing something with a strap around his waist.

“Think of this,” she says, tugging the strap through a buckle and pulling it tight, so he's suddenly fastened to the saddle, “as your safety belt. There's nothing to worry about as long as you don't get off.”

“Helston up ahead,” Rog says. “Right close to the Valley.”

“You might see or hear some weird things,” Ellie says, nudging the horse forward as the line starts moving again.

“Or smell,” adds Rog.

“Ignore everything,” Ellie says. “The best thing is not to even look.”

“Like what?”

“
Shh
now. Talking's a bad idea too. It seems to get them excited.”

“Who?”

“
Shh
.”

They're descending now, and it's not just the chatter that's gone quiet. The whole noise of their passage seems suddenly muffled. Very soon Rory sees why. The horses are no longer trampling on a hard road. Under the scattering of debris there are still patches of decaying tarmac but it's now mostly grass, moss, ferns, breaking through the road like craters from green bombs. The line of riders squeezes to one side ahead and slows down, as if negotiating an obstacle. When it's their turn to reach it Rory looks down and sees a neat ring of mushrooms in the middle of the road, sprouting from a swathe of flattened grass.

Then they're on the outskirts of a town.

It's not like Penzance at all. Penzance was a jumble of rubbish and decay. Nothing's broken here, though the feeling of emptiness is even deeper. The paint on the walls of the houses is streaked and bulging with damp, but no worse. The doors still have numbers on them. There are cars sitting by the sides of the road, sticky with dried sap and dusted in cobwebby old leaves but not dismembered or rusting open. They pass a shop which could almost be a shop from The Old Days. Its sign is tatty but legible:
R & P NEWSAGENTS
. Its awning advertises
Sandwiches Off Licen
se Hot & Cold Drinks
. In an upstairs window of the neighboring house a pair of straw dolls look out from the sill, as if someone still lives there.

But no one does. The town's been invaded, not by ruin but by the not-town, the country. Its streets and pavements have turned into paths and fields, their edges are like gardens, and the old gardens behind them have turned into secret jeweled jungles, unfathomable thickets of bushes and climbers where flowers hide in deep shadow. The roofs are half moss. One terraced house has tipped back from its neighbors like a dislodged tooth, lifted by the massive root of a chestnut tree in the middle of the road. Saw-toothed yellow leaves float down as they ride under the tree. A door creaks and slams behind them. Rory twitches around, only for Ellie to straighten him at once. She puts her fingers to her lips.

The side streets are dark mouths. Up one of them he glimpses colored lights near the ground, flicking around each other like dragonflies. Ellie nudges him in the back:
don't look
. He doesn't really see why he shouldn't. He can feel the other Riders' anxiety all around him but as far as he's concerned he'd much rather this than Penzance. Streetlamps bend over the road on either side, wound to half their height in some plant with flowers like tiny spotted bells. For a moment he thinks he can hear them ringing. The sound makes him think of silver and rain. Between three of the posts hangs an enormous veil of spiderwebs, threads delicate as dew.

The sloping road begins to descend more steeply, and he hears running water. A little farther and they come to a river, running left to right. It's cut through the town like a cleaver. Upstream it tumbles through buildings, and where its course meets them their walls and corners have simply vanished, sliced away into nothing. It spills across the green road and drops over a lip on the downstream side into dense woods, in the middle of which Rory can just about see a long pond with a bandstand and a playground beside it. Five or six swans are paddling around in the shade.

The horses don't want to go into the river. The riders at the front urge them towards the ford at a canter but the animals shy away each time. One woman's thrown off. She remounts hurriedly, looking around in fear as if the ground might swallow her for standing on it, but eventually all of them have to dismount and lead the horses, pulling their reins and smacking their rumps, dragging them across. This leaves Rory the only one mounted, so he sees Silvia before anyone else does.

She's running down the way they've just come, close under the dripping stone walls of the old part of the town. She's running fast, stumbling, looking over her shoulder. Rory's so amazed to see her that at first he can barely draw a breath, let alone cry out. Her face is full of terror. She looks like she hasn't even seen the knot of Riders wrestling with their horses. “Hey!” he manages to blurt, but the wrestling's making quite a lot of noise now, and no one notices. Silvia staggers to a halt as she comes in sight of the river. She stares ahead, breathing hard, totally oblivious to everyone else. Rory tries to turn himself round in the saddle so he can see her properly, forgetting he's strapped in. The moment he starts twisting against the strap Ellie stops pulling the horse, splashes close, and grabs his leg. “That's—” Rory begins, but Ellie hisses at him to be quiet. Why hasn't Silvia noticed them at all? She looks dazed, rapt. She glances over her shoulder and then starts towards the river with a visible spasm of dread. Some of the others have noticed her by now but they look only for a second before turning away without a word or making any attempt to help, though Silvia stumbles in the current, falling to her knees before pushing herself back up, her hands muddy. Rory squirms; Ellie grips him tighter.

“Don't!” she says, as sharply as she dares. “Whatever you think you're seeing, it's not really there.”

Something's not right. He's suddenly not even sure it's Silvia at all, though she's a gypsy woman with a messy tangle of black hair and Silvia's clothes. She looks like someone younger, smaller. She wades on through the current. “Rory,” Ellie snaps at him, “stop looking!”

How can he stop? It
is
Silvia, but she's changing before his eyes. It's as if the river's whittling her down. The water's up to her thighs where it was only running over her shins before. Her face is turning bright-eyed and smooth. She hitches up her jacket to stop the current tearing the hem away. It's suddenly loose on her, much too loose. She shakes drops out of her hair and lets it go. She takes the last few steps across to the far bank. A girl of perhaps Rory's age clambers out onto the pale flat grass, a curly-haired gypsy girl. She's smiling triumphantly. She stretches her arms to the sky, hands open. Invisible sunlight falls on her face. Then she vanishes into thin air.

“Rory!” Ellie's shaking his leg. He blinks. “Look at me! What's my name?”

“Ellie?” he says uncertainly. Is this another trick question?

“Eyes down,” she says. She's cross. “Now.” He complies. She sounds surprisingly fierce when she's cross. He sneaks glances when she's not looking but there's no sign of the Silvia girl anywhere. All the horses get safely across and Ellie mounts up behind him again.

“Whatever you saw,” she whispers in his ear, “forget it. Shut your eyes. Keep them shut.”

He doesn't want to make her any angrier so he keeps his head half-bowed and scrunches up his eyelids, pretending they're closed though he can still see out through a slit. They're riding up now between grey little houses and tatty workshops and sheds, every cranny in the concrete bursting with stalks or saplings. Rory can hear fairground music but he knows better than to ask about it. He's turbulent inside. Even if it wasn't really Silvia at all it was a reminder of her. She may have fooled him and abandoned all of them but all he has to do is think of her and straightaway it's obvious she knows something none of these other people know, she's seen things no one else he's ever met has seen. Even when he closes his eyes properly he can feel the Riders' fear all around him. Silvia wouldn't have been afraid of this place. Or of anything.

And she told him he had a gift too.

He keeps a surreptitious watch in case she appears again, girl or woman. He sees a couple of faces in the windows of houses, brief and ghostly, but they're older, maybe not even people's faces at all, and Ellie snaps at him when she catches him looking. Farther on there's a row of starlings on a flat garage roof. Their heads all turn slowly together as the Riders pass. They're almost out of the town now, wide fields spreading out around them again. The forlorn rectangles of road signs mark the horizon like the standing stones of a lost civilization.

A sudden mutter runs through the procession. Ellie draws the horse to a halt. Rory looks up and sees that everyone's stopped again, this time because a man's come out of a dingy shack beside the road.

“Well, well,” Ellie says.

Apparently it's OK to talk now because Rog, still riding next to them, leans over and says, “Good sign?”

“I wouldn't go that far,” she says.

Up ahead Sal's talking to the man. He has wispy brown hair and spectacles. He's wearing extraordinarily tattered black robes, not a makeshift patchwork robe like the old man at the crossroads had but actual robes, though full of tears and holes. He has a walking stick in one hand, one of those fancy lightweight extendable ones. He looks terribly thin, almost starved, that sunken-cheeked, stringy-necked look Rory remembers from last winter on Home. Nevertheless he's presumably a real person because Sal gives him something from her saddlebag; food, judging by the way he sniffs it before bowing his thanks to her. A few of the others have dismounted now, joining the conversation. Ellie unstraps the safety belt, letting Rory squiggle around in the saddle to ease the soreness.

“See him?” Rog says. “That's the priest. That's what everyone calls him, anyway. Don't know if he was ever a real priest.”

“He was,” Ellie says.

“If you say so. Maybe that's how he survives up here. Someone upstairs looking after him.”

“I doubt that.”

“Used to live in the Valley,” Rog goes on. “Before, I mean. That's what they say.”

“He was the parish priest at Manaccan,” Ellie says.

“Oh, you're the expert now, are you?”

“The Brownes knew him. They're churchy.”

“Well,” Rog says, “whatever. Got to be some reason why it doesn't bother him so close to the Valley. No one else lasts long up here. Way I heard it is, he keeps trying to go in but it won't let him. They say the man-eaters won't touch him either. Story is, something bad happened to him that first winter and he went to the sea to be drowned, they wouldn't take him. Typical bloody fish. The one poor sod who actually wants to die and they won't kill him. Hello. Don't like the look of that.” The group of people in conversation with the man ahead have obviously been told something they didn't want to hear. A number of them look agitated. A nervous mutter works its way back through the group.

“The Pack,” the woman in front says.

Rog swings off his horse at once and jogs to the front.

“We should turn back,” the same woman says. A man next to her, the older-looking man with the tattoos who was being so noisy when they started out from Dolphin, snorts. The woman rounds on him angrily. “Oh, and you're so brave, is it? If you ever ran across the Black Pack you'd hardly have time to piss yourself before you'd be off fast as those four legs can take you.”

The man scowls but doesn't answer. He rides off towards the front as well.

“They have no idea,” the woman says to Ellie. “Idiots.”

“What's going on?” Rory says, but by now everyone's heard whatever the news is and they're all beginning to argue, until someone shouts “Shut the fuck up, the lot of you!”

It's Soph. Everyone shuts up, maybe because she's unexpectedly loud or because she looks quite impressive sitting tall in her scaly tunic. She's shown no signs of bossiness before but everyone's listening to her now. “This is a stupid place for a fucking powwow,” she says. “Sal and I are going to carry on. If there's any trouble we can outride it. Anyone who wants to go back, go back. That's it. Keep quiet and get moving.” She bends down to say something to the priest and then kicks her horse into a walk.

“Not me,” says the woman who's been talking to Ellie. “I'm heading back to Dolphin.”

A few people have already started off in Soph's wake. Those who haven't are hanging back, looking slightly ashamed of themselves. Rog trots back to Ellie and remounts, giving her an inquiring look as he steers his horse around.

Rory twists around to look at Ellie too.

“I should take you back,” she says, clearly displeased by the thought.

“I don't mind,” he says, mostly because he doesn't want to annoy her anymore.

“He's OK, El,” Rog says. He catches Rory's eye. “Look, all you have to do if anything happens is hang on. Ellie rides like a champion.”

“It's probably nothing anyway,” Ellie says. “Where did he say he'd seen them? Penryn? They wouldn't pass this close to the Valley.”

“Someone needs to let them know at Dolphin,” the anxious woman says.

“I've had the odd run-in with the Pack before,” Ellie goes on. “Even if we do bump into them they're just men, they can't catch up with a horse.”