Arcadia (56 page)

The music stops. It's as if he's broken the spell by talking. He takes Silvia's hand to show her she's supposed to follow him. Out of nowhere a beautiful clear woman's voice says:

“Welcome, liar.”

He looks around. There's still no one there. For a weird moment he almost persuades himself that it was the statue which spoke.

  *  *  *  

If someone's watching him they're as invisible as the music. It's probably God again, Rory thinks, as he leads Silvia down the track into the woods. This is the kind of place God would live in. Everything's perfect. Not perfect like in tidied-up: there's grass sprouting in the middle of the path, and drooping nettles and leathery dock and the big candelabra of dried-out hogweed at the edge of the wood, and the undergrowth is messy with rotting boughs. But still, everywhere he looks, it's perfect. It's like the difference between the photos in fancy calendars and the photos you take yourself. Even if they're exactly the same place the calendar makes everything look gleaming and beautiful where your own picture ends up washed-out and sort of boring. There's nothing about these woods that aren't ordinary autumn woods, and yet it's the most beautiful place he's ever seen. It makes him go on tiptoes, like it'll vanish if it realizes he's there.

Everything that's happened to him in his life before now feels like a dream.

It's funny, because he can suddenly remember all of it. In fact it's almost like he can't stop remembering. He looks at the caked layers of fallen leaves and thinks of a time when his wellies got stuck in deep mud when he was little, and of foraging for mushrooms with Ol who bragged on and on about kissing Laurel, and of his mother turning a stick over and saying
Look, a beetle!
He looks at the curve of a bough and thinks of rough seas, and of the handle of a knife in his hand, and of Soph terrified and wanting him to kill her. He glances back to make sure Silvia's still following and thinks of how far she's walked across Europe, and then he's thinking of maps in Geography, and then school, little humiliations, pointless triumphs. The smell of school lunch. The smell of when the toilets stopped working. The smell of Missus Stephenson dying. The whole world beyond this place buzzes around in the back of his head, a gargantuan anthill of biting crawling distresses.

It occurs to him that he's found what all those people were looking for. Everyone who came to the Valley, people like Silvia and Lino and Per, looking for the heart of magic. This is where they were trying to get. All left behind.

He thinks it's probably heaven.

Beyond the woods is a garden. Actually the woods feel like a garden too, but this is a proper one, with borders of different flowers laid out with grass spaces between them, and small trees dotted around. On the far side of the garden is a house. It's a big old higgledy-piggledy grey mansion, as big as the Abbey but heavier and wilder somehow, and all built of stone.

He stops. “Look,” he tells Silvia, pointing. “Smoke, see? Someone must live here.”

It's as though his words have magic power, because as soon as he says that he sees someone, though it's only a cat. It appears from somewhere, the way cats do, skipping up to the steps at the front of the house and then disappearing inside the big double doors.

Which means they must be open, Rory thinks.

They walk through the garden and across to the doors. There's a crack between them. He pushes and they swing in without a sound. Beyond is a warm brown dimness. He can smell the fire.

He can imagine a god living here, in a grand old country house with fruit trees in the garden and a cat for company. If he was a god it's what he'd do.

He goes inside.

He's in a corridor lined with panels of wood. It's more like a museum than a house, but comfortable. It's incredibly quiet. It feels like nothing here's moved for a very long time. There are paintings on the walls, unmoving old faces. It's like stumbling upon a secret, an incredibly ancient secret no one's thought about for centuries. He's glad he's not by himself. If it weren't for Silvia shuffling along behind him he'd feel very small and irrelevant.

There's just the faintest crackle of sound: burning logs muttering to themselves. Halfway down the corridor on the right a door is open. That's where the sound's coming from, and a hint of warmth as well.

He doesn't shout
Hello,
or knock, or clear his throat. It's not that sort of place. You don't just show up like a random visitor. A god would know anyway. He looks around the open door on the right, into a hallway with a high ceiling and a stone arch at the far end. Beyond the arch fluid shadows shimmer in a big room.

He looks back at Silvia on the off chance that she's woken up now and can tell him whether or not this is a bad idea. In the dimness her dark head is almost invisible.

He goes down the hallway into the big room.

It's like a church. It's taller inside than the church next to Parson's, its vaulted roof crisscrossed with massive wooden beams. The three tall windows on the left wall are cased in pointed stone. A gallery runs along the right wall, way above head height. The fireplace beneath the gallery is as big as double doors. Light flicks out from it across the top of an enormously long table of smooth wood, so there's a dusky aurora spilling like water down the whole length of the room, from where Rory and Silvia are standing at one end of the table to where the god's sitting at the other.

The god is dressed all in faded black. He's facing them, but his head's bowed and shrouded in some kind of cloaking hood. He doesn't move. Perhaps he's dead, a dead god. He's sitting in a high-backed wooden chair, his arms on its arms. In the firelight his hands look small and old.

Rory goes a little farther into the room.

What he took for a hood or a cloak is in fact hair, masses of it, black hair that's grown down to touch the floor. The god's a she, not a he.

She raises her head.

She pushes her hair out of her face and looks down the length of the room at Rory. He can't really see her face very well in all the shadows but he can tell at once she's a sorrowful god, a god of old and forgotten things.

Her hands grip the arms of the chair. She stands up.

For the first time since the fountain Silvia speaks. She says a single word, which doesn't sound like a word at all, at first.

“Ygraine.”

She walks past Rory, then jogs, then runs. Her scuffing steps echo in the cavernous room as if someone's turned on a tap. She runs the length of the table, falls to her knees in front of the sorrowful god, and hugs her around the waist, like a lost child come home.

N
ight's come at last. They've drawn chairs closer to the fireplace. Rory's is a puffy old one with bandy legs; it smells of cat. The lady's has a low wooden back. She's sitting very straight. Silvia stands behind her chair, cocking her head thoughtfully. She snicks scissors in the air.

“Light is not so good,” she announces.

This isn't the huge churchlike room where they first saw the lady. It's a warmer shabbier place altogether, full of heavy-looking old-fashioned things. There are fat weeping candles in sticks taller than Rory, but the lady—whose name turns out to be Iz, short for something he didn't hear properly—hasn't lit them: only the fire. It's burning sort of bright and dark at the same time, in that way fires do when they're the only light. Three sash windows show nothing but black. Full night. It took them quite a long time to get Silvia back to the house, especially without the lantern.

She takes a thick handful of Iz's hair. “But, good enough,” she says, and slices through it. A black mess slithers onto the rug, making the cat twitch in brief surprise.

She's talking in her own voice. She's Silvia again. She's even in a good mood, Rory thinks, which is amazing, given that she's just lost something he imagines most people would give their right arms to have.

They took her to the well, Rory and Iz. It turned out to be more like a pool. Rory'd been imagining a cylinder of bricks with a pointy wooden roof and a bucket on a handle. Instead, the lady led him to a tiny ancient stone building deep in the woods beyond the house. On the way she explained why she's not Ygraine. Ygraine turns out to be the name of someone who died a long time ago. The lady is her twin sister. It took her and Rory quite a long time to get even that much from each other but they managed eventually, though the only thing that was really clear to either of them was that just one person knew the whole story, and that was Silvia.

So they nudged and cajoled her to the well, which cures every illness of body and soul, and got her to kneel beside the pool, and made her drink.

“Your sister used to let me do like this for her.” Silvia snicks away at Iz's hair. She's already ankle deep in it. “In the car. She sat in the front, I'm in the back. With too big scissors for my little hands. I must have made her look like . . .” She raises an eyebrow at Rory. “
Gorgona?
”

“A gorgon?”

“Gorgon, yes. Like Medusa. But she always said I made her look pretty. It makes me so proud. I feel like an adult.” She stops slicing, distracted. “All the time she speaks to me that way. Never like I'm just a little girl. Everyone else I know, they shout at me, hit me, tell me what to do, don't listen. Like adults normally do to children. I'm right, yes, Rory?” She winks at him.

She's teasing him now. He hates being teased, usually, but tonight it makes him feel better. It was much worse after she drank the water. She was screaming then, raving, flat on her back in the ancient stone building, thrashing her arms around so wildly she knocked their lantern into the pool and plunged them all into the pitch dark. Some of the screaming was in English. The sun's in my eyes! I can't see, I'm blind, help me. My eyes are burning! Even after she stopped raving and flailing, and they got her outside into the twilight, she clung on to Rory and wouldn't let go. She kept whispering
Am I blind? Where am I? Is this place real?
They got her back to the house eventually and wrapped her in a blanket and made her eat and drink, but it was like she was shell-shocked and Rory was the only thing in the world she could hang on to. While Iz lit the fire and got water and whatever they needed he kept on trying to explain to Silvia that she was safe, everything was OK, he's cured her.

Cured?

Gradually, she understood. She'd drunk from the well whose water cures every illness of body or soul, and it turned out her gift had been an illness too. She doesn't know where she's going anymore. Her future's gone dark. The god's been washed out of her for good.

Perhaps that's why she's a bit more cheerful now. Rory's met that god, and he'd be quite happy never to go anywhere near him ever again.

Silvia nods to herself and resumes cutting Iz's hair.

“The one thing your sister won't let me do is drive. I begged her, let me try, let me try! She said she needs me to use the map. To help me learn reading, see.”

“She'd have made a good mother,” Iz says.

Iz is very shivery. Of the two of them, she's the one who looks like she was screaming her head off in madness a while ago and has had something terrible happen to them. She's been getting worse as Silvia's been getting better. It's because she wants to know about her dead sister, but at the same time sort of doesn't want to know. She was getting so worked up, starting to ask questions and then stopping herself, telling Silvia to say things and then telling her not to, that eventually Silvia asked for a pair of scissors and told her just to sit quietly.

“Do you have children?” Silvia asks.

Iz is very pale. It's easy to imagine that she's been sitting in that high-backed chair in the big room for years, her hair growing to the floor, never going out into sunlight and fresh air. Silvia's question seems to make her go even paler.

“No,” she whispers, eventually. “I found out I couldn't.”

Silvia crouches to inspect her handiwork so far. “Maybe that's good. This isn't a good world for children anymore.”

Iz winces. “You're right,” she says.

“And your sister,” Silvia goes on, getting back to work. “She was wonderful, she was clever, she taught me everything, yes. But then she left me. So not such a good mother, maybe. Still, it's lucky for you. After she left me I had to learn to cut hair properly.” Silvia smiles at her own joke. The contrast with Iz's face—stiff with suppressed pain—is awful.

Perhaps it's a relief not seeing the future, Rory thinks. He can imagine that. If he'd known even parts of what was going to end up happening to him, he might have asked Her to drown him like Ol.

“You have the same hair as her,” Silvia says. “Same ears. Same everything.”

Iz turns around, making Silvia tut. “What happened to Iggy?” she says. “Where did she go?” She's hoarse, like it hurts to speak.

Silvia gently takes hold of her head and pushes it straight.

“
Shh,
” she says.

“I tell you everything. Just listen. Be patient.”

She's in charge again. It's like she can't help it. Other people go weak next to her. So that's not part of her lost superpower, then, Rory thinks. That's just Silvia's nature.

“She sent postcards to you, yes? You received them?”

“Yes,” Iz whispers.

“Do you remember from where the last one came?”

“She was going south, wasn't she. Greece. The last one might have been from Delphi.”

“I help her post them. I go with her to buy . . .” She looks at Rory, miming licking.

“Stamps.” It's taken him a while to figure it out, but he understands now that Ygraine, Iz's dead sister, the one she's so desperate to know about, was also the English teacher Silvia told him about before, the one who rescued Silvia from the gypsy camp.