Arcadia (59 page)

They don't quite feel real to him. There was something wrong with the way they looked at the world, clinging on to whatever fragments of The Old Days they could dig out of the ruins. Drops of diesel, scraps of solar power, specks of toothpaste. Hating and fearing Them. He can't imagine his mother or Laurel or Pink or even Kate following him into this world of magic gypsies and talking foxes and God and everything.

The only person he properly misses is Her.

Someone is coming into his room after all. Maybe he dozed off, he can't tell. There's no candlelight but he can hear the steps.

He sits up. “Silvia?”

“She's asleep.” It's the man. “Everyone's asleep except us.”

The man goes to sit in the ledge by the window. He's changed his clothes, not surprisingly since the ones he arrived in were in tatters like a castaway's. He's wearing an old man's dressing gown. Oddly, this makes him look younger. He's hardly a man at all anyway. When he pulls his legs up on the window seat and rests his chin on his knees he could almost be younger than Laurel.

He's washed his feet off a bit but they still look like they belong to a bird, scrawny and leathery and knobbly. White hawk. He wiggles his toes.

“Aren't you tired?”

“Dunno.”

Rory's not sure what he thinks about the man, whose name is Gawain, though Iz and the burned woman both call him Gav. He has a lurking sense that he ought to apologize for pretending to be him when he was tricking Rose. Plus he liked it better when it was just Iz and Silvia and himself, before the others arrived and it all got emotional.

“What made you choose this room?” Gawain says. Like Iz (who both is and isn't his mother, in some way Rory still doesn't properly understand) he's got an odd stuttering way of talking, as if he's not used to it and it takes a lot of effort, or at least a lot of thought.

“Dunno. I didn't. Silvia chose it. Said it looked OK.”

Gawain sees something on the floor and bends to fetch it. A pencil. He examines it in the soft white light.

“I can go somewhere else if this is your room,” Rory says.

“No need, it's fine.”

Gawain taps the pencil against his lips. Rory waits for him to say something else. After all, the man's the one who invited himself in.

“Is this your house?”

Gawain stops tapping to think about it.

“Yes,” he says, a little doubtfully.

“So you're the white hawk.” It sounds like a superhero. The man could just about work as a superhero, one of the moody troubled ones.

Rory feels foolish as soon as he's said it.

“Who told you that?”

“Rose,” he mumbles. “At the gate.”

“It's just my name. Gawain. One of the things it might mean.
Gwalch gwin
is ‘white hawk' in Welsh. They have trouble with names.”

“The Welsh?”

“Spirits. Beings like Rose. Names turn out to be complicated things. They're true in an unusual way.”

“Spirits? Like . . . ghosts?”

Gawain leans back. Again like his mother (or whatever Iz is) he has a way of starting a smile without ever getting there. “One of the things I found out,” he says, “is that you don't get very far trying to say what something actually is. I learned that lesson early on. When I was your age, probably. How old are you?”

“Ten. And a half.”

“That's good,” Gawain says, as if Rory's confirmed something he already knew. “No wonder the rose let you in.”

“I tricked her.” He mumbles it, head down.

“That's all right.”

“Is it?”

“Yup. Doesn't it sound weird to you? Saying you tricked a rose?”

Rory hasn't thought of it that way. “She looked like a girl and everything. Almost,” he adds, remembering the teeth. “She talked. Anyway, it's different here, isn't it. Earlier on I ran into some foxes and they could talk.”

“You've come a very long way from home,” Gawain says, or maybe he says
from
Home
. “For a ten-year-old.”

Rory's faintly annoyed by the man's tone. “Yeah,” he says. “That god said it's because I'm not surprised.”

Gawain looks at him very steadily. He's got a rather pointy face, meaning there are deep shadows in it whenever he turns side-on to the window.

“You met a god?”

“Twice, actually.”

“And you're not surprised?”

Gawain's not at all like Ol, but Rory still can't help wondering whether he's being mocked. “Should I be?”

Gawain's not offended. “I'd like to give you something, Rory,” he says. He puts the pencil into a fraying pocket of the dressing gown and takes something else out, hidden in his fist. He climbs onto the bed, startling Rory. “To look after.” He sits cross-legged and opens his hand to reveal a plain dark ring threaded on a metal chain. The chain glistens, a tiny snake coiled on the man's palm. He finds the clasp, unhooks it, draws the chain out of the ring and puts it away. “Here,” he says, holding out his hand.

Rory hesitates.

“So there really is a ring,” he says.

“Yes,” Gawain says. “There really is.”

“A magic ring.”

“Yes.”

“Silvia told me she'd made that up.”

“She might well have. Perhaps she couldn't help telling the truth anyway.”

“So is it what she was actually looking for?”

“No. I'd have offered it to her if it was.”

It's not shiny or carved with mystic runes, at least not that he can see. It looks like it's made of plain wood. “What does it do?”

“It doesn't do anything. It
is
something.”

“Is what?”

“Magic. As you said.”

Rory puts his fingers out and then stops.

“Is it safe to touch it?”

“I'm not trying to play some kind of trick on you, Rory. No harm can come to you here.”

“What's magic about it? If it doesn't do anything?”

“That's one of the other things I've found out. Magic isn't about doing things. I have a feeling people just don't get that. Probably because doing stuff's like air to people, it's what they live on, without even noticing. If a person was stuck like Holly is they'd go mad in a couple of days. Like taking away their air.”

“Who is this Holly everyone keeps talking about?”

“I'll take you to meet her in the morning if you like.” He pushes his hand a bit closer. “Will you take this?”

Rory picks up the ring. It's completely smooth in a soft, almost grainy way. It feels light and ordinary and a bit boring. He can tell just by the feel of it that it's not going to summon armies of the dead or let him turn invisible.

“Where's it from?” he asks.

Gawain's fiddling with the chain, looping it back around his own neck and reattaching the clasp. “I could tell you,” he says, “that at the beginning of time, when people began to write things down and so created the past and future, a god gave this to a woman as a pledge of love, and then made her keep it when she broke her promise and refused to love him back. And that it was lost under the sea when people decided to forget about magic, and came back when they remembered again. But that probably wouldn't help much. I walked a very long way to fetch it, and then Auntie Gwen and I sailed even farther to bring it back here. This is where it belongs. If it belongs anywhere.”

“So why are you giving it to me?”

“To look after. And because I'm not sure I want it anymore. And because you're not surprised.”

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I might be.”

“You only just got here!”

“I know. And I promised I'd never leave again when I did. I can't break a promise if I'm carrying that ring. I'm a bit like Silvia, I have to tell the truth even when I don't want to.”

So is it really a magic ring or not? Rory's very confused. Silvia and the Professor were both quite certain there was no such thing, that it was just a hoax. “Does it matter if I put it on?”

Gawain thinks for a while before answering. “Nothing matters in this place. I think that's what being here means.”

Rory repeats that to himself a couple of times and decides it's an unnecessarily complicated way of answering
No
. He puts the ring on the index finger of his right hand. Nothing happens. What can happen in Paradise? Happening is abolished, or not yet thought of.

A
ncient light refracts in slices of glass, the springs of a four-poster bed store energy under the weight of two lean boys, the air curls in invisible waves as they exhale, but all because this is the order of things, like day after night after day after night after day, change without difference, sequence without consequence, like the endurance of absent things in memory, like the knowledge that although everyone else in Pendurra is asleep, Iseult and Silvia and burned Guinevere and even the cat, there's “someone waiting downstairs.”

Gawain's got to his feet. He's standing by the bed, watching Rory. Over the past couple of years his eyes have taken on that unfathomable look, bequeathed to him by the prophetess along with her two-faced gift.

“Is there,” he says. “Shall we go and see?”

“OK,” the boy says, and pushes back the covers. He's naked, but neither of them cares and there's no one else to see. The two of them go down barefoot to the room at the bottom of the stairs, with its three windows and almost dormant fire.

Everything's made out of shadow, every solid substance interchangeable with its neighboring space. In the chair (all planes and angles of varying dark) where Iseult sat before, she sits again, shrouded and dissolved, though the winking embers pick out a face from which nearly twenty unspent years have fallen away. She's holding the silver crucifix in her lap.

“Gawain,” she whispers. “Gawain.”

He goes to sit in the chair opposite her. The other boy stands behind him.

“Is it really you?” the woman says.

“It's me,” Gawain answers.

“My boy,” she says. “My child.”

“Hello, Mum,” Gawain says.

“Could I touch you? If you wore the ring? Would that be allowed?”

“Sorry. We can't do that. And Rory has to hold the ring. He's the one who brings it all together. He found your crucifix, and Silvia. The god appeared to him.”

“Don't say his name.”

“I won't. I don't even know what it is.”

“Don't let him come. Don't let him send me away from you now.”

“It's all right, Mum.”

“I'm so sorry for everything I did. Can you please forgive me, Gawain? Is that why I'm here?”

“There's nothing to forgive.”

“There is. Please say it. I need to hear it.”

“If you're trying to say sorry for leaving me, of course I forgive you. You couldn't help it.”

“Was Lizzie good to you? I didn't know where else to turn.”

“Lizzie?—oh, you mean Mum. Iseult. She tried her best.”

“And Nigel?”

“Nigel's a prick.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's OK. I managed. We all managed.”

“It's my fault.”

“You're not to blame for Nigel being a prick.”

“It all began with me.”

“That's not true. I promise it isn't. It's all an old, old story.” Gawain looks like he wants to reach across the gap between them, put his hand into the shadows which make up the woman. “It's time for you to forget it all. Let everything go.”

“I want to, Gawain. But he won't let me.”

“The god won't?”

“Don't say his name.”

“It'll be better now, Mum. Now that everything's come together. Auntie Gwen's here too, did you know that? We all found each other. Even Silvia. I think that's what you've been waiting for, isn't it?”

“I've been waiting for you.”

“And that.”

“Only for you. To hear your voice. I can actually see you. Like you were here with me in the flesh. You look so like Lizzie.”

“Everyone always says that.”

“I made her promise never to tell you that you weren't hers.”

“She never did.”

“Can you forgive me for that?”

“Of course I can. You don't need forgiveness.”

“I do.”

“Well, not from me.”

“From everyone. I do. From the whole world.”

“It's not like that.”

“It is, Gawain. You can't imagine how terrible it is. Since magic came back.”

“I've seen it, Mum.”

“Terror. Chaos. Such awful things.”

“The world's always been full of bad things happening. That was true before.”

“No, you don't understand. I've seen even good people do unspeakable things, just to keep themselves alive, or their children. And the hunger is everywhere. Hunger's horrible to watch, it's like being tortured to death. And the grief. Everywhere. I can't stand it.”

Gawain waits a while and then says, gently, “I think you'll be better if you said what happened to you.”

“I can't.”

“I think it's what you need. The last thing. Tell me how I began.”

“I'm frightened to.”

“Don't be. Nothing can go wrong here. I'm with you.”

“I don't want to say his name.”

“You don't have to say any names.”

“I don't want him to come. I don't want him to speak to me. Or to you. Anything but that.”

“Mum, listen. He's my father, isn't he?”

The shadow-woman doesn't answer, but her silence answers for her.

“I'm not a child,” Gawain says. “I changed. I can't really explain how, but I'm not afraid anymore. Of anything. You can tell me.”

“You should be afraid,” the woman whispers.