Arcadia (37 page)

Then they feed him.

It's almost worth being kidnapped (twice), seasick, terrified, footsore, saddle sore, all of it, just for the plate of food Soph hands him. There's meat, charred at the edges but juicy when he bites it, smoky and peppery, and there's other charred stuff which isn't meat and tastes sweetly earthy in the places where it's almost burned, and there are leaves which are as peppery as the meat juice, and a dollop of some sauce thing with so many flavors it's like eating five meals at once. There's absolutely no fish. Its absence makes him notice for the first time that nothing in the camp smells of fish, not the people, not the cooking fires, not the evening breeze. He has to maneuver the food around with his hands lashed together, which slows him down, and once he's got it to his mouth he eats slowly and carefully from long habit, so each mouthful becomes a little act of pilgrimage, a concentrated effort followed by a blissful reward. He forgets he's miserable while he's doing it. He forgets everything else, in fact. He forgets where he is so completely that he doesn't notice the room's gone quiet and everyone's looking at him until he glances up between mouthfuls.

“I guess” (
giss
) “that other lot didn't feed you much, eh?” Soph says, and though no one actually smiles he's aware of a subtle transition, as if he's taken the first step from being an enemy to becoming a friend.

When they're watching him struggle to mop up the last few spots of juice and sauce they decide to untie his hands. Haze thinks they shouldn't, but instead of arguing about it or discussing it Soph just laughs at her. “What are you afraid he is, some kind of fucking vampire? Hey.” She means Rory. “Show us your teeth, Tiger. Go on.” She bares her own in a grimace. They're the dirtiest teeth he's ever seen, so stained they look almost as black as her hair. He sees that she's making a joke, and copies the gesture. “See? No pointy ones in there.” She kneels by his chair and unknots the scarf. “There you go. Don't go getting any funny ideas now. I know there're only five of us against the one of you, but we're tougher than we look. Especially Haze, she's fucking hardcore.”

Haze stands up without a word and goes outside, banging the door behind her.

“Shit,” Soph says. “Sorry.”

“She'll be angry about Ace for a while,” Ellie says. “She wanted to kill that guy on the beach herself.”

“I reckon it's not the guy we need to worry about,” Soph says, settling on the floor. “It's that fucking great piece of wood. Who's got it, anyway?”

“Sal.”

“Took it to the Prof?”

“I assume so.”

“There was something whacked about the way he held it. I swear I heard him talking to it.”

“Why don't you just ask the kid,” the man says. “He must know better than anyone else.”

They all look at him. He stares at the plate in his lap, scraping with his fingertip for nonexistent specks of food.

“The one in charge was the woman,” Soph says. “She was the brains of the operation. Hey.” She pokes Rory gently with her toe. “Tiger. Whatever happened to her? Is she still wandering around out there? That'd make me nervous.” She sits up suddenly. “Fuck. What if she goes and unties the big bastard?”

Now the others all look at each other. The woman Rory doesn't know stands up. “Haze was right, we should have finished him off. I'll go tell Sal.”

She's got her hand on the door when Rory says, “She won't.”

Once again they all go quiet.

“What do you mean?” says Ellie.

“Silvia won't rescue Per if you left him tied up. She's gone off by herself.”

“Who won't do what?” says the woman by the door.

“Silvia's the woman who was there before,” Rory tells Soph. “She's a gypsy, she can tell the future. Per's the man with the staff. They were all supposed to be going together but Silvia tricked them and went on her own.”

It feels better saying it aloud. He's been turning this over as he jiggled and jolted along on the horse, tasting the misery of the thought. Now he's said it aloud it's like confirming it. It's obvious, really.

“Where did she go?” Ellie asks.

“To that place the Valley, I bet. She was the one who knew where it was hidden. That thing they were looking for. She pretended it wasn't in the Valley but she knew it was, she split the rest of them up and deliberately sent them to the wrong place.”

Soph runs her fingers through her long black hair. “That makes a lot of sense,” she says.

“It does?” says the man.

“It does, actually. You'd know what I mean if you'd been there. She was just the type who'd try her luck in there.”

“What's the Valley?” Rory says.

“Yeah, well, that's a good question,” the man says.

“Mainly because no one's ever come back to tell us,” Ellie says.

“The Valley's the place where it all began,” says the other woman, still with her hand on the door, though she no longer looks like she's going to run outside. “Where they first saw the angel. Where all the pilgrims went that first winter. It's only a few miles east of here.”

“The valley of the Helford River,” Soph says. “Used to be a couple of pretty decent pubs down there.”

“What's wrong with it now?”

They look at each other. Soph shrugs.

“They say the roads move behind you so you can't get back out,” the man says.

“They say a lot of stuff,” Ellie says. “Makes me wonder how they know. Or who ‘they' are, in fact.”

“The priest was the last person in there,” the man says, “wasn't he? I've heard him say there's a well in the heart of the Valley whose water cures every illness of body or soul.”

“The priest's off his fucking rocker,” Soph says.

“Sanity's probably not that useful when it comes to the Valley,” Ellie says.

“Are you sure about this?” the woman at the door says to Rory.

“There's nothing we can do until tomorrow anyway,” says Ellie. “It's too dark to go back out. Someone can check in the morning.”

“Haze,” says the man. “If he's still there she'll be more than happy to do for him, by the sound of it.”

“Baker,” says Ellie to the man, warning, glancing at Rory.

“Sorry,” mutters the man.
Baker
is apparently his name.

“How the hell did you get mixed up with that lot?” Soph says to him, stretching herself out on the floor again, arms over her head, so she seems to take up most of the floor. “Don't answer that. Save it for the Prof. We'd better find you some more water, actually. You've got a lot of talking to do.”

T
hey're ready for him,” Haze says, putting her head around the door.

He thought he was too tired to move, but the words jolt him like sea spray. The five of them walk him back out around the big house to where the fire is. A lot of people are sitting closer to it now, leaning on each other back to back, or kissing, or just watching the flames. There's a man with a guitar, singing. One group is passing a pipe around. A peculiar animal is browsing the grass at the edge of the gravel.
Sheep,
says some part of Rory's mind left over from The Old Days, and he thinks of fluffy dots in flat even fields: ridiculous memories, impossible. He's taken under the porch and in through an ancient-looking pair of doors. A few others get up from whatever they've been doing and follow. They cross a courtyard contained by the four sides of the house, empty apart from big drums at the corners to catch rainwater from the gutters, and a single tree in the center. Lots of people touch the tree's trunk and whisper as they pass it. Under an arch on the far side a door opens into the house, allowing a hum of mingled conversation to leak out into the night. It dies away almost at once. Soph motions at the door.

“After you,” she says.

He doesn't know how many people there are in there. Too many. Seeing a crowd outside is one thing, but being indoors with them is another, especially since every single one of them stops talking to look at him when he goes in. It's a long room, as long as a church, though the ceiling's low and the walls are hung with what look like rugs covering any windows. All the people are sitting on the floor, on cushions or folded clothes or just straight on the wood. It's almost oppressively warm from all the bodies, and from a low fire in a stone hearth on one side. It's dim too, full of restless shadows. A few people are holding lanterns, and there are a couple more hung on the walls. They've left a space clear down the middle of the room, leading from the door to the far end, where five thick candles in glass jars are burning on a big table, bright enough for Rory to see that the other thing on the table is Per's staff.

Beside the table a woman sits in a wheelchair. The wheelchair's metal, so it catches flickers of candlelight. He can't see much of the woman except that she looks older, and she's clearly watching him, like everyone else.

Next to her is an empty chair.

Something quite unexpected happens inside Rory. He's got no one left: that's not news, he's horribly familiar with that feeling by now, the feeling that he's utterly by himself, no family, no friends, no landmarks, nothing familiar, no one he's ever known. What's new is a funny little rush of resistance, a tentative clutch of determination like a hardness in his heart. He's got to be brave, he thinks to himself. He's got to be strong.

No one has to tell him what he's supposed to do. The empty chair is obviously waiting for him. He walks up the cleared space on the floor between all the people. He's thinking of what Silvia told him:
You have a gift.

The woman in the wheelchair speaks as he approaches.

“Welcome to Dolphin House, Rory.”

She's quite old. There's a big tartan blanket over her knees and another one around her shoulders. Her hands are folded in her lap. They're trembling a little all the time though the rest of her looks calm. She has a quiet, sad-eyed face and a rather tired but clever-sounding voice. “Come and sit down, please. Have you had enough to eat?”

“Yes,” he says, and (remembering his manners—she seems like that sort of person), “thank you.”

“Speak up!” yells someone from the floor. Nearby people shush her.

“I'm Hester,” the woman in the wheelchair says. He feels like he ought to offer to shake hands, but hers remain in her lap. He's relieved he won't have to touch them. They're very wrinkly, and then there's the tremor. “I hope you don't mind the audience. A lot of us want to hear what you have to say.” He sits in the chair. He's aware that the room's gone intensely quiet. The chair's turned so he's facing all the people sitting on the floor. He sees Sal near the front, among some of the other Riders who attacked them at the Mount. “You'll probably find it easier,” Hester says, “if you pretend it's just you and me talking. As it will be, I hope.” A grouchy murmur ripples around the floor, subsiding under a burst of
shh
s. “First of all, Rory: do you know where you are?”

“No,” he whispers. He doesn't mean to whisper but his voice sort of stops in his throat.

“Excuse me?” Hester says. “I'm a little deaf, sorry.”

“No,” he says.

“I'm not talking about this house. I wouldn't expect you to know that. I mean this place, this country. Where you arrived on your boat yesterday.”

“Is it England?” he says nervously.

Hester keeps her eyes on him. She's got the saggy lined skin of an old person, but not the eyes. They're not at all vague or wandery. “That's right,” she says. “It is.”

“Or it was,” mutters a man near the front.

“Shh!”

“Now,” Hester says. “You got off that boat, didn't you, yesterday afternoon?” He's so anxious now he's not even sure if that's right, but he nods. “Where were you when you got on it?”

He blinks. The question seems too easy. He wonders if it's a trick. Nothing in her face suggests any kind of trap.

“When I got on the boat?”

“Yes.”

“Home,” he says, and realizes at once how stupid that sounds. “On the island, I mean. The harbor. My mother . . .” He looks down. “It was a mistake,” he mumbles.

“The island?” Hester says.

“Yeah. Tresco. We all called it Home after . . .” But the room has already filled with agitated chatter. A man near the back stands up and says, “For God's sake keep quiet or no one'll hear anything!” An older woman at the front gets up on her knees. She's staring at Rory with a kind of desperate anger. “Gareth Newlyn!” she says. “Is he alive?”

“Not now,” a man next to her says. An uproar is rising behind her. She shakes the man off. “Do you know Gareth?” she says, shouting now to make herself heard. Sal's standing up too, trying to get everyone to be quiet. The woman who's shouting at Rory pushes herself forward through the crowd.

“All the men died,” he says. No one hears him, it's too noisy, but maybe the woman can read his lips or something because she stops. Everyone's shushing again now.

“Please,” Hester says. “Let him speak.” She's not loud but there's obviously some kind of power in her because silence spreads as fast as the hubbub did. “I'm sorry, Rory,” she says. “What did you say?”

“The men.” It's so quiet again that he can hear his own fingers scratching nervously against the side of the chair. “They all died. I'm the last one. I was going to be.”

And now the silence is like every single person in the room has stopped breathing.

“But instead you got on that boat,” Hester says.

“I wasn't supposed to. It was by accident.”

“You never meant to sail here with those people.”