Arcadia Awakens (21 page)

Rosa looked back at the space outside the room. The three big cats had crossed it and were approaching slowly, relaxed and confident. As they did so, they passed the man without even looking at him. They knew him; he fed them and looked after them. All Rosa could see of him was the outline of his figure and the woolly cap he wore.

The opening through which she had entered the straw-covered space was a short tunnel about six feet long through the massive concrete wall. Only one of the animals could fit through it at a time. There was a barred door closing the tunnel off, but it lay at the far end, and she couldn’t get at it from her side without moving closer to the creatures. That would have been suicide, since all three were prowling into the building now. They’d be on her in a few minutes.

She hastily looked around her. An iron door at the back of the room might be the zookeeper’s way in when he came to feed the animals. She walked over, and almost slipped and fell on the big cats’ droppings. What a lovely death that would be, she thought. Landing with your butt in tiger shit while the beast itself bites your head off.

One of the big cats let out a roar. It was already in the tunnel. Rosa put out her hand to the iron door but couldn’t turn the doorknob, even with both hands.

With a cry of rage, she kicked the door. It didn’t even shake. She heard the rustle of straw behind her.

To her right, one of the cages stood open. Without thinking, she took three steps toward it, seized the grating, and pulled it shut after her as she ran in. Iron crashed as the door struck the frame—and rebounded off it. Rosa was thrown backward, but she didn’t let go of the grating. She closed it again, a little more slowly—and this time the barred grating latched into place.

Groaning, with a dry mouth and burning eyes, she looked out through the bars.

A white lioness stood on the other side, staring at her. Her fur was wet and dirty, her paws black with mud. She growled and came closer, raised one paw, and struck the barred door with it.

Rosa retreated, stumbling farther into her voluntary prison, and only now did she realize that she wasn’t sure whether it was really empty. Expecting the worst, she spun around.

Here, too, a neon tube shone from the cement ceiling. Straw covered one side of the cage, sand the rest of it. In the back wall, at eye level, was a horizontal slit that had probably once been a loophole for gunners. It had been closed from the other side with some kind of yellow substance sprayed into it, bulging like a sore into the interior of the room. A water pipe also ran through the slit and into a trough.

The lioness struck the door again. Rosa jumped. When the zookeeper came in with his keys, she wouldn’t be safe here anymore. But there was no way out. She had maneuvered herself right into a trap.

Outside, she heard a human scream. Wild roars and growls reached her ears, muted by the concrete. The lioness paced restlessly back and forth before deciding to stand by her companions. She disappeared back down the tunnel.

Rosa took a deep breath. She felt like she was about to throw up. Not just because of the stench. Images flickered through her mind, but she couldn’t pin any of them down. The lion up on the rock. The panther who had come to her aid. Alessandro’s wet clothes scattered in the rain puddles. It was clear to her now what it all meant, and she stopped trying to shut the idea out.

But she had guessed long ago, hadn’t she? The tiger with Tano’s eyes. Zoe’s injuries and the lies she’d told about them. But it was one thing to imagine people turning into giant snakes, something else entirely to actually see it happen.

A howl rose outside, interrupted by a hoarse roar. Then silence. Finally the whimpering of an animal in retreat. Maybe two. Someone called out, but the voice ended in a dull sound of pain.

Step by step, Rosa retreated from the barred door until she could see only a small section of the room outside the cage. A strip of straw, the closed iron door. Her calves backed into the water trough against the wall, and she stopped. She pulled at the metal pipe sticking out of the wall, but it wouldn’t budge. There was nothing else she could use as a weapon.

She was sweating, but at the same time she felt terribly cold. When she looked at her forearm, she saw that the veins were standing out in a blue network, as if her blood had been exchanged for ink. Her skin was dry and scaly as if she had eczema.

She’d felt this once before, waking up in the greenhouse in that strange state between trance and a hyperawareness of her surroundings. She was trembling, sweating, with tears in her eyes. She felt sick, but she stayed on her feet, one hand on the iron pipe, the other clutching the drenched fabric of her minidress. Something was trickling into her eyes like sand. But when she wiped her face, the back of her hand was white with the scales of skin peeling from her forehead, sticking to the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones, gluing her eyes shut.

“You don’t have it under control,” said a voice at the entrance to the room.

Alessandro was now wearing jeans much too large for him. His bare torso shone with a mixture of rainwater and blood. “You have to suppress it. It’s the best thing to do right now.”

But how could she suppress it when she didn’t even know what it was?

Alessandro set to work on the lock of the cage with a bunch of keys. The third one fit, and the grate swung open.

Stumbling, Rosa supported herself on the rough concrete of the wall with an outstretched arm. Exhausted, she let her head drop forward, looked at the floor without seeing anything, and tried to concentrate on her breathing. She still wasn’t entirely successful, but she imagined warm air streaming into her rib cage, pushing away the icy cold, forcing it out of her. It worked.

He rested his hands gently on her shoulders from behind. Warmth seemed to flow out of them and spread through her whole body. The trembling died down, and now it came only in short bursts of shivering.

His fingertips carefully felt their way down her ribs, held her waist, closed around her flat stomach. He held her very firmly, pressing his upper body to her back, burying his face in her wet hair. Warming her until the last of the shivering went away. She was still shaking slightly, but for a different reason, one that frightened her almost as much as the big cats.

They stood like that for a long time, her back to his chest, and she didn’t ask what had happened outside because no words would pass her lips, only a hissing that sounded strange and alarming even to her own ears.

R
OSA AND
A
LESSANDRO SAT
wrapped in blankets in the saloon on the top deck, among the shiny gold fittings and expensive wood paneling. Artificial flames flickered in the fireplace; a hidden fan wafted gentle warmth with a pinewood fragrance through the air.

“I’ve never in my life seen anything so awful,” said Rosa, and she didn’t mean the animal cages on the island.

“Not everyone can afford it,” said Alessandro, “so it must be something special. At least, that’s what my father thought.”

They were sitting opposite each other in two big wing chairs in front of the fire. The
Gaia
was on her way back to her home harbor on the north coast of Sicily and would be under way for more than another two hours. The sea was rough, but the storm was over.

Rosa wore a fluffy bathrobe much too large for her, and fur slippers. Her own clothes were in the dryer on the lower deck. She had snuggled deep into the chair, drawing up her knees, which now had bandages over the scrapes. The blanket came right up to her chin. She was still freezing, but that was partly because she was so tired.

“Go ahead,” she demanded.

Alessandro was wearing a Norwegian sweater, borrowed from a member of the crew, and an old pair of jeans that he had found in one of the cabins. The zookeeper’s jeans that he had worn in the cage were back with their owner somewhere belowdecks, where the crew had locked the man in. Alessandro was wrapped in a blanket as well, and he held a steaming cup of tea. Rosa hated tea.

“You really don’t know anything about it?” he asked.

She stared at him over the blanket and shook her head. Her old impatience was returning.

“That book,” he said, “
Aesop’s Fables
. I gave it to you because I wanted to know how you’d react. To find out what they’d told you. If you’d known, then you would have said something. Given yourself away.”

“What makes you think so? You didn’t know me at all.”

He grinned. “I got to know you on that plane.”

She sighed softly.

“The fables are about animals with human qualities. And all of us, your family, my family, many of the others—we’re the same. Or maybe the exact opposite, depending how you look at it.”

She briefly considered acting stupid so that he’d finally put it into words. Human beings turning into animals. Tigers and snakes and panthers.

“Have you ever heard of the Arcadian dynasties?”

She shook her head and thought, Here we go again, this must be the Alessandro who’d been taught rhetoric at boarding school.

“A country called Arcadia keeps coming up in ancient Greek mythology. In fact there’s still an Arcadia today. It’s a province of modern Greece, but it’s only taken on the old name. The
earlier
Arcadia, the one in the old stories, was a Greek island kingdom in the Mediterranean. Over thousands of years it acquired a few more names, too.”

“And they taught you all this stuff at Hogwarts?”

“One of the names is Atlantis.”

She looked at him sternly. “Panthers, Alessandro. And lions. Not little green men, okay?”

He drank some of his tea, made a face, and went on. “In the earliest Greek legends, only the gods could take on animal form—never human beings. But that changed when Zeus, the father of the gods, visited the kingdom of Arcadia one day. It was ruled at the time by a king called Lycaon, and more than anything else he was a criminal.”

“Same as us,” she said gloomily.

“Lycaon wasn’t only a tyrant, he was also a cannibal. He ate human flesh. When Zeus dined at his table, King Lycaon had large chunks of meat on spits served to him. Zeus tasted them and instantly knew what they were. In his anger and disgust he cursed all of Arcadia, starting with its ruler. He turned Lycaon into a wolf, so that everyone would know what a beast he was, and what he fed on.”

“Clearly we have all the time in the world,” she said crossly. “Feel free to start way back with the dinosaurs—just as long as you get to the Carnevares and Alcantaras sometime.”

“Hang on! Lycaon was the first human who could take on animal form. He was both man and wolf. The curse of Zeus spread all over Arcadia, and later, when the island sank into the sea, the few survivors scattered to all corners of the world. But at heart they were still Greeks, and at the time Greece was the mightiest realm in the Mediterranean. Its seafarers had founded colonies on all the coasts of the known world. The surviving Arcadians settled in Europe and Africa and Asia, and many of them rose to fame in new city-states and provinces. Have you seen all the ruins on this island? Sicily was one of the most important Greek outposts.”

The warmth of the fire ought to have made her sleepy, but Rosa was wide awake now. She nodded silently.

“The Arcadians quickly became very powerful. Their families acquired more and more land; they were governors of the island, or influenced the governors’ decisions. When the Greeks were finally driven out by the Carthaginians, many Arcadians negotiated with the new rulers for the right to stay. They were far too comfortable in the nests they had made for themselves to simply leave Sicily. That was about two and a half thousand years ago, and nothing has changed to this day.”

“And all that time they were turning into big cats and snakes and so on when the moon was full—”

“It has nothing to do with the full moon,” he interrupted her, smiling. “We can control it—at least, we can with a bit of practice. But sometimes strong outbursts of emotion trigger the change. Anger and hatred, even love, can make us lose control, and then it simply happens.”

She rubbed her eyes with both hands. When she took her fingers away from her face again, there were no scales clinging to them. The change had stopped long ago; her skin was smooth and almost back to normal, it just looked slightly sunburnt. “With everything I’ve been through in the last year … wouldn’t you think I’d have felt a few
strong outbursts of emotion
?” She had meant to sound scornful, but with Alessandro she somehow couldn’t quite succeed.

“It doesn’t happen until our bodies are ready.” The corners of his mouth stretched into a smile. “I know what that sounds like … usually it happens around the time we come of age, if not exactly on the day. It will probably take a little longer for you.” He put his cup down and leaned forward. “By the way, did your aunt invite you here, or was it your idea?”