Arcadia (32 page)

The staff drops from Per's hands. Something invisible, something that was never really there at all, whirls itself tight like a typhoon and vanishes up into the sky. Per clutches his face and staggers. “Don't,” Silvia says again, her shout suddenly exhausted, despairing.

There's a little smear of very dark red on the road where Ace's head hit it. It's puddling, slowly; trickling into a crack in the wasted tarmac. Nothing else is moving. In the distance, the crackle of hoofbeats fades swiftly away.

Per takes his hands away from his face. He stares at the staff by his feet. Hidden by the shaggy mass of his beard and hair, his expression is unreadable. He picks up the staff, steps towards one of the sacks, and nudges it with his toe.

“OK,” he says. “Let's go.”

N
o one wants to talk. Well, perhaps Lino does, but he's not going to get anywhere. He and Per don't share enough English to converse, and anyway there's clearly nothing to be said to Per at the moment in any language. Silvia's expression is black and brooding. She looks like she might kill anyone who attempted to chat with her. And Rory's hanging behind the rest of them, staring at his aching feet as he walks, with just as little interest in exchanging a word with anyone. He's waiting for all of this to turn out to be a weird mistake. He's waiting for someone boring and normal to appear round the corner and say
All right, Rory, time for bed now,
and take him off to give him food and then tuck him in.

While he waits, he walks, and walks.

They come to a place where the tangle pressing in on the road has been hacked away, leaving a rough muddy rectangle of spongy grass where two ancient stones are standing upright, each about as tall as Rory. Someone's made necklaces or belts of feathers, white and grey and black, and hung one around each of them. There are words painted sideways on the stones, crude letters which might once have been white. Lino stops and bends his head over, trying to read them aloud.

“ ‘Curse . . . ' ” he begins, hesitantly, his accent making the sounds comical. “Ah!
Maledizione
. ‘Curse the black . . .' ”

Rory comes up beside him. “ ‘Curse the black pack,' ” he reads, and moves to the second stone, where much smaller letters are squashed tight together. “ ‘Let them be drowned. Make them go to the shore and be took.' ”

Per shifts his shoulders and makes an impatient sound. He doesn't like stopping. Lino shrugs, looks at Rory, then at Silvia.

“I go look,” he says, and runs ahead. He seems glad of the chance to escape the others' company for a while.

The landscape's changing. On the horizon ahead are woods now. They're not the dull green spindly woods of Home; they're deep masses of autumn color, old green tinged with rust. The three of them walk through another set of buildings gathered close around the road. These are bleak and shattered like the village where they spent the night, all scabbing paint and empty windows sprouting weeds. They've started passing occasional cars in the road now. Not proper cars, any more than the houses are proper houses; they're the shells of cars, like the dry papery crab shells that wash up on the Beach sometimes. The road's more clogged underfoot, dotted with bits of brick and slate and broken glass. Curves of metal stick out from the undergrowth, and the last visible fragments of other buried things.

More walking, a dip and a rise in the road, and they come to a large sign, a white rectangle planted on poles high enough not yet to have succumbed to the bramble. It has proper writing on it, neat black capital letters. They say:

WELCOME TO PENZANCE

PENSANS A'GAS DYNERGH

Below them, in drippy, wobbly, painted black letters, it says

POPULATION: 0

The sign makes Rory's head spin. He remembers
Penzance
. It's the Mainland, the other Mainland, the one he's failed to arrive in, the one with cars driving around and people everywhere, ice cream and helicopters and Scarlet's big school and TV screens in shop windows all showing the same football match at the same time. He's been there—here—lots of times. It's where the helicopter and the ferry from the islands landed, and where the roads and trains start. It's the connection, the first port of call.

“
Vieni
!
” Lino's reappeared on the next crest of the road. He's waving and shouting excitedly. “
Subito
!
” He hops from foot to foot in impatience.

After a moment's hesitation Silvia hurries ahead, past Per. Rory jogs after her. When they catch up with Lino he beckons them over the road, his outsize eyes shining with enthusiasm.

“
Ecco,
” he says, as the view to the east opens before them.

Penzance. The land drops away below the crest to a scene of desolation. They can see for miles, across the breadth of a long curving bay, the sea glinting to the right and the green-brown land rising to the left. Between the two is a midden, a gigantic tide line of heaped and abandoned wreckage. In the near distance it's chimneys, rooftops, blocky concrete buildings, sticking up like misshapen tombstones out of a jungle of rampant weeds. Beyond the dead town is the edge of the bay, lined along its whole length with the beached hulks of massive washed-up ships, tankers as big as villages tipped uselessly on their sides, hanging gardens of barnacles and rust. Shipping containers are strewn at all angles in the sand. Some of them have spilled their contents onto the beach, bursts of congealed lava.

Beyond that, beyond the ruin and the graveyard at the edge of the sand, a fairy castle rises above the waste.

It's perched on a single steep cone of rock sticking out of the shallows at the far end of the bay. There's a faint mist over the sea, a midday haze going slightly gold where the sun breaks through to touch it, and the castle emerges above that mist as if it's floating on it, as if it's lighter than air. Its top is all towers and pinnacles, like it's part of the rock it sits on, the last delicate flourish of that soaring upthrust of stone. Slanting sunlight falls on those towers, turning them gold as well.

“
Ecco,
” Lino says again, in a wonder-struck whisper.

Rory's seen the fairy castle before. He's seen it with his own eyes and he's seen its picture on postcards. In fact he thinks he sent a postcard of it himself once, when they were coming back from the Mainland and the helicopter was delayed so his father made them all write to Grandpa George in Weston-super-Mare. If you were sitting on the right side of the helicopter you got a view of it as you landed, the old castle, which looked like a church (or maybe it was an old church which looked like a castle), almost balanced on the summit of its own private hill just offshore. You could see tourists like colored beetles crawling up and down its slopes. He remembers what it was called: Saint Michael's Mount. The name's trying to connect him to something that can't ever have been the same place, not
this
place. When they sent those postcards they went into town, into Penzance, to the post office. He remembers the post office, red and beige, people standing in line, a number flashing to tell you when it was your turn. If that memory's true that post office ought to be down there somewhere below him. He looks down and sees sickly purple spears of buddleia sprouting from flat roofs, fallen trees lying on top of houses, every window black. Population zero. If it was ever the place he remembers, it isn't anymore.

Nor's the castle, lifted up on its sea-moated spire. The Saint Michael's Mount he remembers was a picture on a card, a thing to look at out of the window, a place other people went. This one is a dream of fragile loveliness standing mournful guard over a wasteland.

“Yes,” Silvia says. “That's it. That's the place.”

The three of them have been standing there staring east for long enough that Per's come up to join them. He looks at Silvia, then shades his eyes and gazes east too.

“That's it?” he says. “The small island?”

“Yes.”

“Where we go?”

“Yes.”

“It's in there?”

“It is.”

Per unslings the staff with its freight of sacks from his shoulders.

“You know? For sure?”

She just nods.

Per's breathing heavily. If you didn't know him you'd think it would be from the effort of hauling his load all morning, but it's not.

“So close,” he says.

“
Certo,
” Lino says, or rather croaks. He might even be tearing up.

Per leans on the staff. His enormous fingers flex around it, almost like it's an instrument he's learning to play.

“Today,” he says. He sounds throaty as well. All three of them seem almost dumbstruck. “How far?”

Lino makes a thinking noise with his tongue. “Three
kilometri
? Four?”

“Easy,” Per says again.

“Yes,” Silvia says. “We come there this afternoon. The end of our journey.” She sighs and stretches. “We should rest here. Eat.”

Per points over the bay with the staff. “By the sea,” he says, in something like his more usual grumpy tone. The Mount's right next to the shore, but it's still a steep little island of its own, moated by the cursed ocean.

Lino slaps him on the back. “
Si si
. But you make safe, my friend. Eh? Your
spiriti,
no?” He flutters his hands around, making swooshing sounds, miming things darting through the air. “Is still day. Is four
kilometri,
one, two hour. Your
spiriti,
they come still.”

Silvia's hardly moved at all. She's gazing over the lost town and the colossal flotsam, pinching thoughtfully at her lower lip.

“We will need a boat,” she says.

Per grunts the beginning of a mirthless laugh and waves at the crescent of the bay. “Lots of boats.”

“No,” says Rory, “you don't.”

All three of them turn to look at him. Lino stops hopping around.

“You don't,” he says again. “You don't need a boat to get across to the Mount.” He remembers this. It feels like what he's remembering was a thousand years ago, but the tides don't change. The tides are Law. “I know it looks like an island now but it's connected. When the tide goes out you can walk. They built a path. It's underwater now but it'll come out eventually.” From the helicopter it looked like a thick black snake sleeping on the beach, the tourist beetles inching along its back. “It goes all the way across. And at really low tide there's just sand between, it's not even an island anymore.”

“Oh,” Lino says. “Oh! Oh!” He grabs Rory and lifts him off his feet. “
Questo ragazzo
! Éun genio!
I know, always!” He puts Rory down and kisses him on both cheeks. It's surprisingly like being attacked but he's so quick Rory can't react at all. “I tell you! I say, this boy, he is clever boy.”

Per stares at Rory. His eyes are almost invisible under his fierce brow and his Viking straggle of hair. “You know this how?”

Rory swallows. “I remember. I've been here before. Lots of times.” And it's famous anyway. Saint Michael's Mount is its own little island at high tide, but they built a causeway long ago so you can walk across when the sea goes out. Everyone knows that.

“
Si, certo
.” Lino waggles a finger at Per. “Clever boy.”

“Where is the tide now?” Silvia says.

Rory's afraid she's asking him. He has no idea how he's supposed to know just by looking at the sea. But Per squints across the bay and says. “High. Going down.”

“When tide is low, there is no sea at all between?”

“Yeah,” Rory says. He's suddenly queasy with doubt. What if he's getting this wrong? But he's sure he remembers how it works, he remembers his father talking about it. “That's right.”

Silvia doesn't appear to doubt him at all. “We wait for that, then.”

Per frowns. “Hours,” he says.

“We wait,” she says again. “We must not see the
sirene
.”

Per snorts contemptuously and gestures with his staff.

“No,” Silvia says. “Not like that.”

All four of them know what she means. Per's staff can keep the sea-rainy away but she doesn't want him using it. None of them have spoken about what happened with the Riders but they're all thinking about it.

“We rest here,” Silvia says. “Eat. Then, we go on, there.” She points at the far end of the bay: not at the castle itself but towards the shore adjacent to it, where a few barren breaks in the scrub suggest the ruins of another, smaller town, beyond the wastes of what used to be Penzance. “Wait until the tide is down. It's only a little longer. We will still be there today.”

Per doesn't like this, but it's always been obvious that this is Silvia's gang. Lino pats his back again, encouragingly. “Is more good,” he says. “Is more safe.”

The two men start picking around among the bags, finding food. While they're occupied, Rory sidles close to Silvia, who's still studying the long view eastwards, deep in some meditation of her own.

“So that's really where the magic ring is? On Saint Michael's Mount?”

“Is that the name?”

“Yeah. It's really famous.”

“
Sfântul Mihail
. Who fights the dragon. The gypsy patron. That's good.”

“Only,” Rory says, “didn't those women say something about going to the Mount?”

Silvia blinks, looks down at him, then back at Per and Lino. She puts an arm around his shoulders and steers him a few steps along the road, away from them.

“Hmm?” she says quietly.

“I thought . . .” Rory finds himself almost whispering too. Silvia's hugging him close as if they're sharing a secret. “I thought they said something about it. Like it's their place.”