Arcadia (53 page)

“First question,” Rory says.

“One! No, there's no way out of the Valley. Two! Yes, you will die here. Three! No, there's nothing you can do about it. There! Done! And I hope you're happy! Now be off with you and never ever come this way again!”

He waits until it's stopped hopping and kicking and shrieking.

“First question,” he says. “Is there really a well in the Valley where the water cures every illness of body or soul?”

“Ha!” It dances with angry delight. “Ha! Ha ha ha! Yes there is, but you've already been told that, obviously, so that's a total waste of a question. Idiot! Bumpkin! Fathead! Epic, epic f—”

“Second question,” Rory says loudly, feeling stupid. “OK, so where is this well?”

“It's in the deepest darkest part of the woods at Pendurra, of course, but oh dear, oh dear oh dear, you don't have the foggiest where that is, do you? Oh dearie me, could that possibly be another wasted question? I suspect it might be. You know, I never thought losing the game would turn out to be such fun. I should almost thank you for the experience. Although I can't imagine anyone else would have been as stupid as—”

“Last question.” He nearly shouts. He can't let the taunting get to him; he's got to be careful. He's got to think. He's so ashamed and cross he nearly says
Are you listening?
, but by some miracle he just manages to bite his tongue in time, because that of course would have been a question. He takes a few deep breaths. “OK,” he says. “OK. Tell me exactly—
exactly
—how I get there from here. Along roads. Proper roads. Which I can use. Safe ones.” It's not answering. “Turn by turn. Tell me each turn.”

It stands still.

“I'm waiting,” it says.

“For—” He so nearly says
For what?
And then even as he chokes off that question he nearly says
Why aren't you answering?
and then he's so frightened by how close he's come to messing up that he can't say anything at all, he just scrunches his eyes shut and tries to make himself concentrate. It's his last chance. Why won't it tell him?

“Still waiting.”

Is it that there aren't any safe roads? Is that it? What's the best way of rephrasing it? He knows it'll trick him if it can.

“Sometime before Christmas would be convenient.”

Take your time
, he tells himself.
Be careful. Think.

“You're not very clever, are you?”

“Shut up.”

Of course. He never actually asked a question.

“If you can't think of a third one, that's fine with me. I'll let you off.”

“I said shut up,” he says. “Right. Here goes. What would you say, exactly, if you had to—like, absolutely
had
to—say the very best and most helpful description you possibly could say of how I can get to the place I just asked you about?”

It's quiet for a long time, so long that he starts thinking he must have messed up. He's going over his question in his head again wondering where he went wrong when it kicks the ground, raising a little spray of earth.

“All right. That was quite good, I'll admit.”

He thinks he'd better not do anything at all except shut his eyes and concentrate very hard on what it's about to say.

It does the throat clearing thing again. “Very well, then. I would say: ‘Leave Trelow by its main gate, turn left, then immediately left again, follow that lane to the first village you reach, there turn right and then the next left, where that lane ends go left, and then ignore all turnings right or left until you reach the gate of Pendurra on your left, and if you are able to gain access there you may ask Holly the way to the well.' That's what I'd say. And I won't repeat a single word of it if you fall on your knees and beg me.
And
it gives me particular pleasure to inform you that you won't be able to enter Pendurra should you try from now until Doomsday, and indeed you'll almost certainly die impaled on a thousand thorns if you do try. That's no small comfort to me.” It snatches up the dice. “It's my earnest hope that we never meet again. You've ruined my whole day.” It's burrowing into the ground, or just sinking as if the earth were thick water, grumbling as it goes. “Keep your nasty little soul. I never wanted it anyway. Yuck.”

Rory pays it no attention. He's repeating the directions to himself. He sits there, saying them over and over again until he's made them into a little song.

S
ilvia's where he left her. The owl's come down to perch on top of the fountain. It's very big when you see it close up, especially its enormous round face with the odd inside-out cheeks and stony eyes. Rory's still humming his song to himself, but he takes a moment to say “Hi, Lino.” The bird blinks.

He's decided to drop the crucifix in the fountain, since that's where the god appeared. After that he'll worry about how to get Silvia to follow him. First things first. He's pretty sure you've got to keep promises you make to gods.

“Helper,” he says aloud, feeling silly. “Thanks. For, um. Helping. So here's what I said I'd give you. OK?” He takes the silver statuette out of his pocket and holds it over the water.

Silvia moves so fast he doesn't even see her get to her feet. She almost takes Rory's fingers off in her eagerness to snatch the crucifix out of his hands. She grabs it and stares at it as if it's the answer to some problem she's been trying to solve her whole life.

“What are you doing?”

Her mouth works, but nothing comes out.

“I need that back,” Rory says. “I've got to give it to that god.” She doesn't resist when he tries to tug it out of her grasp, but nor does she let go, and she's a lot stronger than him.

“Please, Silvia,” he says. He peels her fingers back one by one. “I really have to. I promised.” He has to wrestle her fingers away, but there's no fight in her, and eventually he manages to get the crucifix back. He drops it in the fountain quickly.

“There,” he says. “Now we've got to go, OK? Out the main gate, left, immediately left again.” He sings the whole song to himself again to make sure he hasn't forgotten it. “Come on.” He pulls at her arm, rather shyly. “Understand? Go.” He makes a walking motion with his fingers.

It's easier now she's standing up. He tugs her off balance. To his surprise she makes a hesitant motion to follow him. “Yeah, that's right. Off we go.” It's like he's taking a dog for a walk but it seems to be working. “This way. I saw a sign for the main gate, it's up past that big house. Keep going.”

She's about to follow him out of the courtyard when she stops and looks back, for all the world as if she's forgotten something. She goes back to the fountain and sticks her arm in without rolling up the sleeve. She fishes around for a bit and comes back out with the crucifix. Satisfied, she trots back after Rory and stands beside him. Her wet sleeve drips onto her shoes. The owl coughs raucously.

Rory turns his eyes heavenward. “I tried, OK?” he says. He can't stop to worry about it now. The day must be getting older, and for a nasty moment while Silvia was messing around he thought he'd lost a line of his directions.

  *  *  *  

He feels a bit like the Pied Piper in the story, though without the flute. He never understood why a piper would have a flute anyway, though no one in their right mind would follow someone with a bagpipe so maybe that's why. (Also he never understood where the pies came in.) Silvia plods along at his heels, not saying anything, stopping when he stops and following when he starts again, never letting go of the silver crucifix. Lino—he knows it's Lino now, because how could it not be? The Valley's just like that—swoops along behind. It's a peculiar procession, though no more peculiar than the things he glimpses, or thinks he glimpses, among the trees or across fields or out of the corner of his eye. Really the weirdest thing about it is that he's the one at the front. He's not used to being the leader.

For the first little while his biggest worry is whether he's remembering his song right. And what if he gets to one of those junctions where it could be straight on or could be left, depending on how you look at it? But it turns out that each time he gets to a place where he might have to make a decision, the way he's supposed to go is the only way he
can
go. At the main gate of Trelow he has to go left because the way to the right is blocked by a hill of rubble where one of the stone houses guarding the entrance has collapsed into the road. After that he remembers he has to take a quick left, and when they get to the turn there's something squatting between the hedges straight ahead, a hooded thing with its back to him, scraping a scythe against a big rough stone between its knees; he's quite sure that he doesn't want to go that way. Then he's supposed to keep going along the lane to a village, and all the side roads turn out to be closed. One's been washed away by a frothing stream. The next has been swept clear of weeds and gravel and chalked with unspeakably horrible pictures. There's only one way to go after all, it seems, and that way is farther in.

They walk past a lot of quietly abandoned things. They get to the village and it's quietly abandoned too. It's not all smashed up like most places from The Old Days. It's just deserted and overgrown. It's on a little ridge, so as they pass between its peacefully empty houses he can see for miles in different directions. Not a single thing is moving apart from the three of them. The horizons are hazy with autumnal mist.

The angel appears again, in the distance, wheeling lazily over wooded ground before gliding down over the horizon. He points it out to Silvia but he's not sure she even knows what he's saying. She might be listening or not: it's impossible to tell. He hums the song to himself. He's leg-weary and hungry but for some reason it's not as hard to keep going as you'd think. The turns pass quite quickly. Wherever he's going, it doesn't seem to be all that far.

They reach a crossroads near the top of another ridge. To Rory's left the land drops away quite steeply into a long concealed valley. Looking back along its length he can see fragmentary stretches of a wide river. There's a crashed car in a hedge at the crossroads, almost entirely buried in very tall grasses and the black sprigs of fruiting ivy. He stops, because for the first time there's more than one way to go. He remembers he's supposed to ignore every turn to the right and left but he hasn't had to think about it until now. Here, though, every direction seems open. It's like the Valley's daring him to go wrong now, at the last moment.

He can hear music.

He might not have noticed it if he hadn't stopped. It's very quiet, and it's sort of wreathed into the air, almost like it's only the noise of the breeze, but with a bit of a tune. He can also now smell something, in the same subtle, not-quite-there-at-all way, a mild sweetening. Both the music and the smell are as lovely as they are elusive.

“Nearly there,” he tells Silvia. The look she gives him in answer is no more expressive than the owl's.

He goes straight on, as he was told to. He's walking along a gently curving road with a field to the right and a hedge to the left; beyond the hedge are tall trees. A little way beyond the crossroads the hedge on the left starts to get taller. The farther they go, the higher it becomes, until it meets the place where the woods come right up to the edge of the road. By that stage it's so high it reaches halfway up the trunks. It's not even a hedge anymore, it's a huge green wall. Up close you can see that it's made of plants, boughs knotted tightly together all over and round each other, covered with small deep green leaves, but when you step back from it and look up it's more like a solid barrier. The boughs are finger thick and barbed with thorns hooked as viciously as the owl's beak. In among them a few limp flowers are clinging on still, scattering more or less shriveled petals through the hedge and down onto the road. The farther he goes, the more flowers there are, and the fresher they look. They're a warm pink color. The smell's getting stronger all the time. It's the scent of the flowers, he realizes, turning aside to sniff one. Looking around a curve ahead he sees that so many petals have fallen it's like a pink carpet.

The music stops. He was just getting to the point where he was pretty sure it was someone humming. He rounds the curve and sees a girl in a green dress sitting on a heap of bones.

“Good evening,” the girl says.

According to Rory's directions the gate's supposed to be on the left. He goes a bit farther, carefully, hoping he'll get to it before he reaches the girl, but there's no break in the wall of thorns, which is now at least five times higher than his head.

“Welcome to Pendurra,” the girl says in a pretty voice. “I'm Rose.”

So he's in the right place, at least. He examines the impenetrable hedge more carefully and sees what might be a pair of stone gateposts wedged in among the woven boughs, exactly adjacent to where the pile of bones is in the road. The space between the gateposts is just more hedge.

“Aren't you going to introduce yourself?”

The pile Rose is sitting on is almost as wide as the lane at its base, and nearly as tall as Rory. It's a little bone-colored mountain, rising like a volcano from a pink sea. There must be thousands of bones. There are big ones and little ones, straight ones like clubs and curvy plate ones. There are skulls too, heaped in with all the rest. The girl's sitting with her legs curled up on the flattened top of the volcano. Her dress is the exact deep soft-looking green of the leaves in the hedge. She has pink-blushed cheeks and her hair's as black as night. She's more a woman than a girl but her skin's so smooth and her voice is so pretty she seems younger.