Arcadia (36 page)

Ellie reins in. “The kid needs a break,” she calls out.

“Now?” someone replies from behind. “We're nearly back.” No one else stops. Horses plod past in the gloom. They're in a wide lane under a high canopy of slender branches.

“Just five minutes,” Ellie says. “You go on ahead.” She leans close to Rory's ear and whispers, “Keep your wrists together.” She's got a knife from somewhere. She starts sawing through the twine around his wrists, surreptitiously, stopping whenever anyone passes them.

Two others insist on waiting with Ellie. One's Haze, though it takes Rory a while to recognize her now that she's pushed her sunglasses up. The other's a grey-haired woman with a faintly mad expression. She was one of the three who got off to pray when they crossed the river. Ellie gets Rory out of the saddle and sets him on his feet, sending shooting pains all up the back of his legs. He hobbles a few steps.

“Hang on.” Haze jumps down in front of him and grabs. “He's got his hands free.”

Ellie twirls the knife in her fingers.

Haze glares at her. “We lost a good friend today. You didn't see what these people can do.”

“He's just a kid,” Ellie says.

“I doubt that.”

“Keep moving,” Ellie tells him. “It'll help. He doesn't really look like he's about to run away, does he?”

“Let me look,” says the older woman, dismounting slowly. She turns out to have an absurdly posh voice, even more so than Missus Grouse, though it's soft and quavery. She peers into Rory's face like it's an inspection. “I see no mark on him,” she says.

“To be fair, Margery,” Ellie says drily, “it is getting a bit dark.”

“Speaking of which,” Haze says, “let's not waste time.”

“A bit longer.” Ellie nudges him. “Keep walking. It'll be murder when you get back on but it's not that far now.”

“The question is,” the older woman says, “what we're going to do with him when we get there.”

“No need to make it sound so alarming.”

“Doesn't matter,” Haze says. “He doesn't understand anyway.”

“Yes he does. Don't you, Rory?”

“Rory?” Haze steps in front of him again. “Is that your name?”

Trying very hard not to well up again, Rory nods.

“That woman said he didn't speak English.”

“It was a mistake,” Rory says.

“What?”

“An accident,” he says. “I wasn't supposed to be with them. I got kidnapped.”

“Where are you from?”

“Here,” Rory says. “England.”

“Here?” Haze has a sharp face and a sharp manner and she's turned them on him like a threat. “What do you mean, here? I've never seen you before.”

“Not here. I'm from,” he remembers the name from The Old Days, “the Isles of Scilly. Tresco.”

There's a long pause. He's stopped hobbling around. He's intensely aware of being stared at.

“There are people living on the Scillies?” Haze says, in a completely different tone.

“Did you say Tresco?” says the old woman, Margery.

“Yeah.”

“Do you know any of the Le Rieus?”

That's Kate's family's name. They were the important family on the island, for ages. “You mean Kate,” he says.

“Katherine Le Rieu? The daughter? Is she alive?”

“Yeah.”

Margery closes her eyes, clasps her hands, and whispers something.

“This could be a trick,” Haze says.

“Could be,” Ellie says. She's got the kind of voice that conceals its sarcasm well enough to be polite but not so well that you could miss it. “I think Rory's going to have a date with the Professor.”

As she predicted, it's torture sitting in the saddle again, but the brief respite was worth it, and with his wrists untied and only three of them riding together he doesn't feel quite so much like a captive. He's clinging to the fact that Ellie's being Nice to him. He can't imagine what's going to happen to him when they get where they're going, whether he's going to be punished or tortured or interrogated, so any slight hint of kindness is a straw to clutch at.

“Who's the Professor?” he asks her, as they plod along.

“You'll see,” she says. “Nothing to worry about.”

“I'm sorry about the one who died,” he says. He wouldn't dare say this to any of the others but maybe if he tells Ellie she'll believe him. “It wasn't supposed to happen. We told him to stop.”

“I heard that bloke drove the horse mad.”

“Yeah.”

“He did it to Charlie as well, back there. She's lucky she only broke her arm.”

“Sorry,” he says.

“Do you know how he did it?”

“No. It's to do with his staff. I think it didn't work properly the second time.”

“You'll have to tell the Professor all this later on.”

“What's going to happen to him?”

“Who? That big bloke?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? Friend of yours?”

He doesn't know what to say.

“There's an easy way to dispose of annoying men around here,” she says, and leaves it at that.

Aching and exhausted and benighted, in the midst of strangers, Rory's beginning to feel like he's not himself anymore, like he's no one and nothing, a brittle, empty, washed-up carcass, when from nowhere he catches the smell of wood smoke, and suddenly it's just like coming up the tree-lined Abbey road in the evening, knowing there's a fire and food and a warm room waiting, a reminder of Home so sweet and pure it forces tears into his eyes. “Here we are,” Ellie says, pretending not to notice him crying, or perhaps she's tired of it. A chorus of barking starts up, and soon he hears other voices as well. The sun's long down by now. A strong glimmer of firelight seen through a screen of trees makes everything near it seem entirely dark.

They come to a gap in the tall hedge. There's a gate here, wrapped up and down in barbed wire. From branches overhanging the gate many objects are suspended on long strings, hundreds of them and all different it looks like, though it's getting too dark to see what most of them are except for one or two of the bigger or shinier ones: a bicycle wheel, a spanner, a frosty bauble like a Christmas decoration. Someone on the inside pulls the gate open and they ride in. Four big dogs come racing up a wide avenue and start frisking around the horses' legs. No one seems to mind. There are suddenly more people milling around, talking with each other, men as well as women. They talk quietly and most of them stop to look at Rory as Ellie rides him down the avenue. “Doesn't look like much,” one bearded man says to her. She ignores him.

The avenue runs dead straight between two neat lines of enormous trees. Ahead Rory can see the outline of a single bare hill. To the left are lots of buildings, firelight and movement and chatter all around them. Some of the Riders have dismounted by a stone trough ahead and are talking while they let their horses drink. It's a camp, the enemy camp. It feels startlingly alive and busy. There are even children, running around in and out of the trees, chasing dogs. A woman in a puffy jacket and a woolly bobble hat comes over and takes the reins of Ellie's horse. She's the first woman Rory's seen for more than a year who looks like she might have more than enough to eat. She glances at Rory in a bored, businesslike fashion and says, “So this is the prisoner, is it?”

“Yup,” Ellie says, swinging herself down and offering Rory a hand. Neither of them seems to be joking, not even slightly.

“Let me, I'll look after the nag. What are you going to do with him?”

“Feed him, I think, first up,” Ellie says. She plants him on his feet again. He wobbles and nearly falls.

“Your lucky night,” the other woman says to him, without warmth. “Was he with the lot that killed Ace?”

“I don't know the whole story,” Ellie says.

“Not the Pack, though?”

“Doesn't look like it.”

Another person comes marching over. It's Sal, still in her general's coat. “Who untied his hands?” she says. “Was that you, El?”

“He didn't give me any trouble.”

“Yet,” Sal says. She takes off the red scarf tied around her head, unknots it, and bends in front of Rory without even looking at him. “Hands out,” she says. “I hear you speak English perfectly well after all? Is that right?” Rory's abject with humiliation, standing there with legs so stiff he can barely keep himself upright while this woman trusses his wrists as indifferently as if he's a piece of meat, and can't muster any kind of answer.

“Says he's from Tresco,” Ellie says.

That makes Sal stop and look. “Scilly?”

Biting his lip, Rory nods.

Sal checks her knot, tugs it a little tighter. “Let's leave him like that,” she says to Ellie, “all right? Will your posse keep an eye on him?”

“As long as we can eat while we do it.”

“In the barn, then. We'd better keep him inside. They're talking to Hester now. I imagine she'll want to see him tonight.”

“All right.”

“El, seriously. Don't leave him on his own. Those people weren't like anything we've come across before. I'll tell Soph as well.”

“It was a mistake,” Rory says.

Sal looks at him like he's interrupted something important.

“They kidnapped me,” he says. “I was never supposed to go with them. They didn't even want me. I'm nothing to do with it.” He's started to snivel again.

Sal looks at him. She's got a rather hard, rather handsome face.

“What's your name?” she says.

“Rory.”

“You want everything to be all right, don't you, Rory?”

He mumbles that he does.

She props her hands on her knees and stares him in the face like an angry teacher. “Later on this evening someone's going to ask you some questions. There's one simple thing you have to do if you want everything to be all right. Do you know what it is, Rory?”

No, he doesn't. He wishes she'd go away. He should never have opened his mouth.

“Tell the truth.” She straightens. “There. That's easy to remember, isn't it? Make sure you do it.” She turns on her heels and stalks away.

Ellie's behind him. She leans close to his ear again. She doesn't have to lean far. Her cropped fringe tickles his face. “Oh well,” she says. “I tried.”

After more talking a small group gathers around them. It's a different sort of talking from the kind he's used to, the hesitant and tired back-and-forth which takes up so much time at the Abbey. It doesn't have that undertow of perpetual anxiety. It doesn't feel like it might turn at any moment into complaining. There's no sense that at any moment someone might mention The Future. It's so different he can't help noticing it. These people feel like they know what they're doing even when they're arguing about what to do. They take him through a group of low buildings rank with the smell of horse and then through an arched gap in a holly hedge, and all at once he's at the heart of it.

The heart's a fire. A wide gravel circle rings it, noisy with people going back and forth, men and women and some children too, amazing numbers of people. In the center of the circle there's a lawn, and on the lawn a bonfire's burning, as wide as a man is tall, tossing fistfuls of sparks up into the dark. It's as hot as the summer sun. Beyond it Rory sees the front of an old house, a very old house, long and squat and grey, the upper floor resting on a row of fat columns, all its windows alive with reflections of dancing flame. The space around the columns makes a kind of long porch, and there are lots of people sitting there, a crowd, so many that it takes Rory some effort to remember that there were once such things as crowds like this. But they don't look like the people he remembers from The Old Days, squashed onto the island ferries or pressed close together around the tables in the garden of the Pub. They're
messier
. Their clothes are gaudy and mixed-up, with lots of odd decorations, belts and bangles and patches. They're not even standing and sitting around the way Rory remembers people standing and sitting around. They're not divided up. They don't look as if some of them are pretending others aren't there. They don't look as if they're on the way between one place and another, or taking a few moments off between work and home. They look
planted
. Rory can see it at a glance. They look like they're supposed to be there, all of them, equally. They look like they're at home.

He's led around the side of the house to a much newer set of buildings arranged around a courtyard. It's getting quite dark now, and candles and fires are appearing all around him. Rory can't imagine what these people's Stash must be like to be able to burn so much wax and wood, and to be wearing so many things they don't need, like Ellie's collection of rings. Perhaps they don't even need a Stash. There's no cursed sea closing them in. This land, wherever it is (he's long since stopped thinking of it as the Mainland, or England, or anywhere he ever imagined he knew), seems to go on forever. Maybe they use as many things as they want and then just go out the next day and get more, the way everyone used to.

They take him inside, into a low-ceilinged smudgy room with shuttered windows and lots of unmatched chairs and a smell of old clothes. There are rugs and sleeping bags scattered around the floor. A couple of fat candles in alcoves give enough light for him to see that the walls are decorated with shells and bits of sea-glass lined up on narrow strips of wood. Five people have come in with him, Ellie and Soph and Haze and another woman he doesn't recognize, and a man with a shaved head and a multicolored scarf so long it's wrapped four or five times around his neck. They shut the door and sit him down in a chair. He's trying his best not to snivel but there's something about sitting down in a strange room with people he doesn't know which makes him feel so desperately small and lost that he can't stop himself. They all go a bit quiet when he starts crying.