Arcadia (34 page)

Limpets and kelp have clustered around it, and the tides have filled its dark interior with swampy sand. Rory doesn't mind the containers so much. They drift into the Gap occasionally and bump ashore on the islands or the offshore rocks. Everyone always got excited when one beached itself on Home. One turned out to be full of toys, plastic rubbish, but sometimes the women found useful things. Once it was metal parts from a shipment of motorcycles, another time crates of flat-pack furniture, which kept the Abbey fires burning for weeks last winter. Best of all was the one that turned out to be full of bags of fertilizer. Fi says it'll last them years if she's careful with it. He's used to poking around inside them so he doesn't mind when Silvia settles down by the tilting mouth of this one. His legs throb as soon as he takes his weight off them.

“Here,” she says, unslinging her pack and giving him water and a handful of spindly carrots.

She sits beside him and they stare at the sea while he eats. A bank of cloud is retreating behind them, its edge sliced off like a wall. The water's brilliant with white light and there's sun on his face. At the far end of the bay the windows of the castle on the Mount are shining too.

“How did it end up in there?”

“Hmm?” Silvia was thinking about something else, miles away.

“This ring. What's it doing in Saint Michael's Mount?”

“I don't know. I don't know the past.”

“I mean, loads of people go there. Tourists. Used to go there. It must be hidden really well.”

“Maybe.”

“It might be guarded or something. Like with traps.”

“It's possible.”

“You don't know?”

She smiles at him. It's an oddly uncertain smile, like her thoughts are elsewhere and she's not really listening, like a normal adult. “I'm not the Internet,” she says. “I don't know everything. I know only that where I want to go, I will go.”

“You're definitely going to find it?”

She sighs. “Not so many questions,” she says. “We'll see what happens.”

Yeah,
he thinks,
that's easy for you to say when you know the future.

“Oh. I almost forget.” She digs in her pack and brings out the plastic bag from Parson's with the comics in it. She hands it to him. “Per didn't want to carry these so I take them for you.” She stands up. She hitches the pack back onto her shoulders.

“Wait,” Rory says. “Are you going somewhere?”

“Yes. I go to find the others.”

Rory stares at her in confusion. “Others?”

“Lino and Per. In the town.”

“But.” Rory's sitting with the pile of comics in his lap, feeling like he must have missed something. “I thought you said we were going to meet them there.”

“We're quite close now. Faster than I expect. So I go back and see, maybe they need help.”

“What do I do?”

“Rest,” she says. She gestures at the plastic bag. “Read. Watch the tide. When it's as low as can go, come there.” She points along the beach to the place where the causeway meets the shore. “We meet, we all go across.”

This wasn't the Plan. Didn't she say she was going to look after him? “You want me to go by myself?”

“You're safe on the beach.”

“Aren't you coming back?”

“We meet you there later. It's not far. You're hiding here.”
Hidden,
she means: the container behind him blocks off the view of the land and the massive wrecks. “It's a good place to rest. You walk a long way today for a boy.”

“I don't—”

Suddenly she's not distracted anymore. She turns her stare on him, the one that makes even Per do what she says. “Here's what you do. OK? Sit like this until the tide is at the bottom, there's no water there.” She's pointing between the Mount and the shore, where the black causeway bars the sea. “I think maybe two hours. Maybe less. Then walk across the beach, we meet you. Easy.”

“Two hours?” Alone?

“No one can see you here except the
sirene
. And they don't like boys.”

“I want to go with you,” he says. She just shakes her head. She doesn't do arguments.

“Now listen.” She crouches in front of him. “This is important. If you meet those women again, tell them straightaway you are English boy.”

What's she talking about? “The ones with the horses?”

“They look for us, I think. They will be angry. It's OK for you to talk to them. If it's necessary, tell them what happened, that you came with us by mistake. Do you understand?”

He's thoroughly bewildered now. A few moments ago he had the sun on his face, he'd had some food, everything felt like it was going to be all right.

“And one more thing,” she says. “Listen very carefully. If anything turns wrong, there is a special word you can use. Italian. Do you know any Italian?”

“No.”

“I teach you. If there is a problem, later, you say this word to Lino, tell him I told you to say it.”

“But why—”

“Listen.
Arrivederci
.” She says it slowly. “You try. Repeat it.”

“Areevy . . .”

“
Arrivederci
.” She makes him repeat it three times. “Say it while you sit here.” She demonstrates, mumbling it over and over like a prayer. “Practice. It's like a magic word. And now.” She straightens. “I must go.”

“So you want me to—”

“Wait. At low tide, you come. Right there.” She points again to where the end of the causeway heaps itself up at the top of the beach. “We wait for you, see you. Don't come before. And remember,
arrivederci, arrivederci
. Practice, practice.” To his surprise she bends and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek. Her lips are very dry and her hair smells of salt. “Thank you,” she says, and she's up and gone.

After a few horrible moments he crawls around the corner of the container to look. She's striding up the beach very quickly. She doesn't look back. Already she looks tiny against the backdrop of the monstrous wrecks. He watches her go, thinking about grabbing the bag of comics and sprinting to catch up. He thinks about it until she walks under the angle of a vast overhanging bow and disappears.

  *  *  *  

Sand's surprisingly uncomfortable to sit on. You'd think it would be soft, but no. It's cold as well. Not properly cold, but beneath the sun-warmed surface it's damp enough to chill him through his trousers.

The sea scratches away at the beach.

He tries reading but he can't seem to get lost in the comics. He's read them all a million times before, of course. Normally that doesn't matter but this afternoon's different. The heroes and villains with their perfect skin and color-block costumes don't convince him today. If he let go of the comics the small breeze would tug them out of his fingers and they'd be little scraps of rubbish like so much else.

He looks across at the Mount. Its peak is actually lots of different buildings, not one castle. They're not really castlelike at all, in fact, more like normal houses, walls and windows and roofs; it's the way they're jumbled so tightly together which makes them look magical and mysterious and old. The steep slopes below them are thickly overgrown, though they don't look wild. Rory knows what ruin looks like, and that's not it.

The windows facing the bay are beginning to blaze golden as the sun angles lower. Suddenly Rory's imagining faces at those windows, invisible to him but watching. He backs a little farther into the mouth of his metal cave until all he can see is the tide, retreating from him, slowly, slowly.

What was she thanking him for?

  *  *  *  

The longer he sits there the worse it gets.

He's becoming increasingly agitated about his instructions. How's he supposed to know when it's low tide? It's not like you can ever see the point where the tide turns. He stands up, shaking stiffness out of his legs, and peeks around the corner of the container to check the causeway. The landward end of it is dry for a long way now and the rest is sticking high above the waves, but the sea still has a lot of retreating to do before the foot of the Mount emerges from the water.

Has it been an hour? It feels like it's been an hour. It's beginning to feel like it's been a lifetime.

  *  *  *  

He makes a Plan. The Plan is that he'll check the tide, then read one comic all the way through, then check again. That way he'll be able to see how much the tide's gone out, instead of looking all the time and not being able to see any difference.

He can't stop himself looking up every time he turns the page.

Indecision torments him like hunger. He shuts his eyes tight and whispers
arrivederci, arrivederci, arrivederci
. If it's magic it's not working. No one comes to rescue him.

  *  *  *  

The thing which finally makes up his mind for him is the descending sun. Time passes invisibly slowly, but there's a moment when he looks up from the doodle he's scraping in the sand and notices the ripe warm gold of late afternoon, and a feeling in the air too, a hint of coolness. This is the last straw. Whatever Silvia says he's not going to stay here all by himself while it starts getting dark.

Just like that, as soon as he's made the decision to stop waiting he feels a hundred times better. The tide's a long way out now, most of the way to the Mount. It has to be far enough. She won't mind if he gets there a bit early, and anyway it's her fault for leaving him on his own when he's only ten and she's already stolen him from his mother. He tucks the bag of comics under one arm and sets off. It even feels good to be walking again after hours of sitting on sand.

He keeps his eyes down to avoid looking at the beached tankers, steering himself around mounds of kelp and the humps of granite poking out of the beach. He's breathing very hard and trying not to run. The Mount rises as he approaches. He can hear the sea breaking on its seaward face. He angles his course towards the shore. Behind the last of the train of decaying ships he can now see another ghost town gathered behind a sea wall where the causeway meets the land, more buildings stamped with vacancy. Somewhere up there must be where he's supposed to meet them.

Something feels wrong.

Shells and shingle underfoot: he can't go fast. He's exhausted too. It's been a terrible day. The causeway's fairly close now, a rough-and-tumble wall slicing across the beach, high as a house. To his right, it attaches itself to the base of the Mount. To his left, on the landward side, it runs up over the sand and junk and stops by the sea wall at the back of the beach. He can see now that there's a gap in the wall there, opposite the start of the causeway. That's what he's heading for: the way up off the beach.

It's impossible to run but also impossible not to. He breaks into a stumbling jog. The tide's still not all the way out but never mind that.

At the back of the beach the fouled kelp's piled waist-high. In among it is a crust of that sickly residue of plastic froth, which is the farthest the sea can get towards annihilating the indestructible. The only way around it is to climb up the side of the causeway, scrambling over barnacles and massive lumps of eroded concrete and slimy rock. He makes it up eventually, at the cost of torn trousers and badly scratched hands. Catching his breath, he turns to face the Mount. It's a shadowed triangle cut out of the blue-gold sky.

For a moment he's convinced he sees something moving among the buildings on its peak.

He puts his back to it and runs properly, now that there's hard stone underfoot. The landward end of the causeway peters out into a rubbish-clogged ramp leading up through the break in the sea wall. At one edge of the ramp there's a clear slice through the flotsam and filth, like a path. Sides aching, Rory runs towards it. Nearly there. He's about to head up into what remains of the town above the beach when he notices a deep mark printed in a pocket of loose gravel in the concrete.

It's a horseshoe-shaped mark. A hoofprint.

It's neat, clear, deep. Its open end points up the ramp, which means the horse was going the other way, out to (he turns to look again, shielding his eyes)—

High up on the Mount there's a flash of metal. A sound drifts down: a drawn-out creak, like a gate opening.

He dashes up the slipway. At the top is an old beachfront road, cars without tires scattered all along it like roadkill, soft-edged dunes of sand heaped among them. He stares around but the buildings are all deserted. They've been thoroughly scoured by scavengers, or perhaps by the wind. Everything's barren and quiet. “Silvia!” he hisses, too frightened to shout. “Where are you?”

An owl hoots.

“Lino!”

There the little man is, appearing as suddenly as always, beckoning from an open doorway across the street. Rory doesn't think he's ever been so happy to see anyone in his life, not even Her. He bolts to Lino, who's bobbing his head around, peering up and down the road.

“
Eccola
. In.” He motions Rory inside. Sand's blown in here, covering a moldering carpet; beyond is an empty grey space which smells of pee. Per's lifting himself sluggishly to his feet as Rory comes in, using his staff as a prop.

“
Bene,
” Lino says, ducking back in. “Silvia comes after?”

“What?”

“Silvia. After?”

Still catching his breath, Rory looks around. “Where'd she go?”

Lino frowns like he doesn't understand, goes back to the door, cups his hands to his mouth, and hoots. You'd never think it was a human mouth making the noise if you weren't watching him do it.

“What's this?” Per says. He rolls his neck, loosening cricks. He looks like he might have been asleep.

“Wait,” Lino says. “For Silvia too.”