Arcadia (49 page)

“How come you can talk?” Rory blurts.

The fox angles its head and then answers, “How come
you
can?”

“But normally—” Rory can't tell whether he's more frightened, tired, or just plain confused. “I thought it was just people.”

“I wouldn't like to say what's normal from where you're sitting. Though they do say there's different conditions as obtains hereabouts. Different from what, now, I couldn't tell you. All relative, isn't it, when you think about it.”

A thought drops on Rory like it's grown on the branch above and now wants to demonstrate gravity. “Is this the Valley?”

“Sharon?”

“Yes, dear?” The female's been nosing the cubs, who are getting fidgety.

“The Valley? Sound familiar at all?”

“Some of them call it that, don't they?”

“I think you'll find I was asking you.”

“Sorry, Phil.”

“Never mind.”

“Are you going to be much longer? The kids are getting—”

The big fox silences her with a glare, before turning back to Rory after a suitably dignified pause.

“It's certainly
a
valley, if that helps. Characterful little spot. Not too many of your sort crashing around these days either, which I must say counts for something. Used to dribble in in ones and twos but not so much anymore. They never seemed to last long anyway. Much like yourself in that respect.”

“Phil?”

“Now what?”

“You've upset it.”

“Please,” Rory says. “Can't you just let me go?”

“Well,” the big fox says, doubtfully, “I
could
. But it wouldn't be very sensible.”

“It's not fair to spin it out, Phil.”

The big fox whirls around and snaps its jaws. “Excuse me! I'd actually prefer to be allowed to speak, thanks very much.”

“Do get on with it then, there's a love. It's only a little one.”

“Sharon, I'm disappointed in you. What do you think little Persimmon's thinking, listening to you twitter on about whether her lunch is getting upset? Did that big oaf yesterday give anyone else a moment's thought when he pegged our cub with a bloody great stone? Might have knocked her brains clean out.”

“I'm hungry, Dad!” wails the one with the torn ear, but the father has already turned back to Rory.

“I ask you,” he says. “All the poor little nipper wanted to do was watch. Lucky to be alive, is Persimmon, after the clout that stone fetched her. An inch or two the other way and . . .” The fox shivers. “I don't like to think. My fault, really. I shouldn't have let them get that close. But we were quite enjoying it, until that lummox started flinging missiles. Weren't we, kids? Wasn't that fun, yesterday? Watching all the people go by, sitting on them horses?”

“'Simmon got pranged in her ear'ole!” squeaks one of the cubs.

“Phil,” the mother says. “You're going on again.”

“Am I? I suppose I am. Sorry, young fellow. Sharon's always telling me I'm a bit too fond of the sound of my own voice, aren't you, Shaz?”

The female coughs a short bark.

“Right, then.” The big fox stands up, arches its back, stretches. “Let's get on with it.”

“Wait,” says Rory.

“Best not to, in all honesty.”

“No. Wait. Wait!” The fox has taken a couple of loping steps towards him. He pushes himself to his feet, his back against the tree trunk. “I saw that! Yesterday. I was there. Wolf, he was called. He chucked that stone.” The fox has paused, ears twitching. “I can . . .” Rory stammers, “I can tell you what happened to him. After. He's dead. Wolf is. The man who did it.”

“Dad?” says the fox with the damaged ear. The father is standing still. He smells of the woods, very pungently.

“He got killed by the Pack. By their dogs. He got torn apart.”

“I'm not a hundred percent sure,” the big fox begins, “what the point—”

“The guy who, who hit your—” Rory points shakily at the injured cub. He almost says
that
but corrects himself in time. “Her. With the stone. He got killed that night.”

The fox's tail twitches.

“Horribly,” Rory adds.

There's a longish pause.

“And?” the big fox says.

A branch overhead dips heavily, rustling. Both Rory and the fox look up. The owl's appeared there. It settles, opens its hooked beak, and makes its cry, not a hoot at all but a sort of repeated cough, worryingly close to laughter.

“And,” Rory says, feeling a surge of deranged confidence, “and, God talked to me. Just now. This morning.”

The fox sits again.

“Dad!” yelp the cubs together.

“This is all a bit deep,” the father says, ignoring them, and ignoring his mate as well, who's slumped to the soft floor of decaying leaves in an attitude of resignation. “You're not . . .” It cranes its neck very, very close to Rory's chest, and sniffs. “
Lying,
are you?”

“No. I swear.”

“I can't understand the trick of it, but they say you lot are born knowing how to. Like those thumb jobbies you've got.”

“I'm not. I promise. It's all true.”

“Are you telling me that chap who nearly took Persimmon's ear off has just been eaten?”

“Torn to bits,” Rory says, nodding overenthusiastically.

“Hang on.” The fox pauses to lick a foreleg. “Would this be an example of . . .” It shifts around as if embarrassed. “That poetic thing. Poetic whatsit. What is it, what is it, poetic . . .”

“Justice!” Rory almost yelps himself. “Yes. That's it. Exactly.”

“I see,” the fox says, very unconvincingly.

“Phil? What's going on?”

“Put a sock in it, Shaz,” it snaps. “I'm trying to think.”

“About what?”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“'Course I wouldn't. 'Cause it's bollocks. Either kill it or don't kill it, just do us all a favor and don't stand there waffling like you know what justits is.”

“Justice!” the big fox barks, losing its temper. “And I do know perfectly well what it is, which is not something every fox in the world can say.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

“It's not a simple thing to explain. Quite tricky to put into words, in fact. It's, how shall I put it. It's . . .”

“It means you have to let me go,” Rory says quickly.

“Exactly! Wait!” The fox snaps its head back towards him. “Does it?”

“Yes,” Rory says. “That's how it works.”

“Mum! You kill it!”

The female lays its long snout on the ground. “If only,” she sighs.

“You have to,” Rory says. “Because I told you about it. So it all evens out. And don't forget.” His mouth is running away with him. “God.”

“Right,” the fox says.

“That's the most important bit.”

The fox eyes his family. “As you lot would know,” he says, “if any of you ever took the time to give it a bit of thought, instead of running around in the woods not looking where you're going.”

Rory backs around the tree. His legs feel tight and stringy but they're doing the job still, somehow. “OK then,” he says. The owl flits down behind him and glides to a perch deeper in the woods. “Bye.”

“It's not as complicated as it sounds,” the big fox is saying, as Rory turns his back.

“Dad! It's running away!”

Which is overstating it, since the best he can do is a cramped and plodding jog, but they're not coming after him, so he pushes on, following the owl because there's nothing else to follow. “Look,” he hears the fox say, “why don't we all try some fish instead?” Rory stumbles away into the shadows under the trees, and dives for a hole in the trunk, escaping just in time.

T
he wood grows thicker and darker the farther in he goes, which seems right. It's full of whispers and half-glimpsed things. He's quite sure at one point that he passes a big-nosed man no taller than his shins who's hacking away at a rhododendron bush with a tiny golden axe and stops to mop his brow as Rory looks on. But Rory doesn't look for long. He has to keep a careful eye on the owl. It's very easy to lose sight of it in the tawny autumn trees.

They come to a tiny stream, really just a trickle in the mud. He lies flat to drink and discovers he's too exhausted to get up again. At least the water gets the taste of sick out of his throat. Throwing up's stopped him feeling hungry, which is something too.

The owl watches him from a bough while he lies there in the leaf mold. It looks annoyed with him but it doesn't say anything. Perhaps if it did start talking it would be in Italian anyway. He'd like to get moving but it's actually strangely peaceful here, wherever he is. “Sorry,” he says to the owl.

He tries to decide whether it really is Lino or not, and discovers something quite interesting. The difficulty turns out not to be about trying to figure out which of the alternatives (is Lino, isn't Lino) is correct; it's more that he doesn't know what
really
means.

It reminds him of a conversation he had with Her once. He'd been trying to explain to her that she didn't exist, not properly, not the way his mother and Laurel and Pink and Kate and all the others did. (He must have grown up a lot since then, he thinks. He'd never talk like that now.)

—
But you weren't
there
before
.

—
Where?

—
Anywhere. You weren't . . . There wasn't any such thing.

—
That's a funny thing to say.

—
There wasn't. I remember. Everyone knows. You could sail around wherever you liked. There were lots of boats in The Old Days. All over the place.

—I remember that too. I remember watching them.

—No one ever saw anything like you. You weren't . . . You just weren't. Things like that didn't happen.

(She waits for him to finish, curious.)

—
They're not real. You're not. Not, like, really real.

(He thinks she's going to get cross. He'd quite like her to get cross, actually, because then maybe she'd tell him why he was wrong, and explain What Happened. But—)

—Still. (She smiles her funny lopsided smile.) Here I am.

And here Rory is, in the Valley. He wonders how big it is. It feels like somewhere you'd measure in a way that wasn't to do with distances.

He's heard many times by now that no one ever comes back, but it's not frightening. It's very beautiful. There's none of the debris from The Old Days at all, not even the cap of a plastic bottle or a scrap of a soggy label sticking out among the dead leaves. It feels untouched. He's alone and completely lost but as he lies there listening to the trickle of water beside his head he doesn't feel like he's going to wander around hopelessly until he dies of starvation and exposure. It doesn't feel like that sort of place. It feels more organized. Like it knows what it's doing, even if it's not telling you. He can well believe that no one ever comes back from it, because it doesn't seem like the kind of place you'd go in and out of, like it was just sitting there waiting for you to decide what to do. He supposes he'll never get out of it either but at the moment that doesn't seem to matter so much. He doesn't feel so much lost as
found
.

When he's had his rest he gets to his feet. The owl swoops away at once and he limps after it. It's leading him down a slope. Every direction is just trees. He comes to a patch of evergreen shrubs and loses sight of the owl there, but he can see clearer ground beyond so he keeps going anyway, squeezing through the dead-looking twiggy bits inside the shrubs. He wriggles out onto a grassy path just in time to see the bird flit out of sight over its far end, where the roof of a house is poking out between yellowing trees.

There's a skeleton lying on the path. It has boots on its feet, trousers on its legs, and a coat on its back, but thin bones stick out of the cuffs of the coat and the head's just a skull. A few spears of grass have grown up through the eye sockets. Stopping to look, Rory notices bits of more skeletons in the hedge beside the path, mostly hidden in the tangle. The toes of a pair of running shoes poke out from the bottom of the hedge.

A small thing neither animal nor person scurries out from a bunch of leathery leaves. “Travelers!” it says. It has arms and legs and a stumpy top bit like a miniature man but it's all woody and gnarly, wound around with cobwebby scraps. It's carrying something rattly in a tiny cup like the cap of an acorn. It races out onto the path in front of Rory and addresses itself to him. “Game of chance, sir?” The voice is crabbed and wheezy-croaky. It shakes the tiny cup. “Throw of the dice? Cast your fate in fortune's lap?”

“No, thank you,” Rory says, looking for the owl.

“A question if you win. Any question you like. Answer guaranteed as honest as language allows. Go on, sir.” It rattles the cup in a manner which is probably supposed to be enticing. “You know you want to.”

He'd like to walk past but he's having difficulty doing so. The owl's disappeared, and the grotesque miniature thing keeps positioning itself so he feels like he'll step on it unless he stays still. “I'm all right,” he says. “Thanks.”

“ ‘All right,' says he. That's a good one. Me oh my. All right, are you? Don't you want to ask how to get out of here? Most do.” It jiggles in a way which might be intended to indicate the skeleton in the grass. “All of them, actually. Tell you what, sir. I'll double my offer, how's that? Two questions if you win. You get all the time you want to decide what to ask. I'd suggest along the lines of
How do I escape the Valley
and
Will I make it out alive,
but up to you, of course, up to you.”