Arcadia (60 page)

“Tell us what happened. It's all right.”

“He can make me suffer like this even though I died. I'm here, I can see you, I want to touch you, I want to talk to you forever, I want to be your mother. He won't let me escape all this wanting.”

“Silvia says you traveled with her to that place in Greece.”

“Silvia. Poor little Silvia.”

“She's all right now. Everything's turned out all right. She told us most of your story. You stayed with her until she went to sleep, is that it? You were going to walk to a temple.”

“Don't, Gawain.”

“It's OK, Mum. I'm here. You went to the temple, didn't you? That night.”

“Don't. It'll burn me.”

“It won't.”

“The words will come out and they'll burn everything. He is the Plague. He made ruin.”

“Mum, I spent too much of my life pretending things hadn't happened. Honestly, there's no alternative to the truth. That's what's happening out there. That's all it is; it's just truth. The Plague, magic, all of it. Tell me. You found the temple. What happened, did you pray? Iseult told me you always wanted so much to believe in miracles.”

“Don't.”

“You'd been all that way with Silvia. You must have known she had a gift. Did you want to say thank you? Is that it?”

“It was terrible.”

“Someone told me once that truth hurts. But this'll be the last time. I promise.”

“I lay down.” A deep tremor has come into her voice. “It was so warm. The night was so wide. Incredibly soft. The temple's covered in scaffolding, I was crushed when I saw it. It wasn't much better than a building site. But just near it there was a stand of oaks. Old trees. So beautiful in the starlight. I thought, That's the real temple. You could tell as soon as you went under them it was a magic place. And little Silvia, her name was
acorn
. It felt so right. It's all stony and dry up there but just in that one place, just among those trees there was a little grass, where the water ran underground. Dry grass, but soft. It was all so blissful I had to lie down. The journey with Silvia had been such a struggle but I'd done all the hard parts, it was almost over. I'd never thought I'd want children but she'd become like my own daughter. There were acorns in the grass. I kept picking them up, touching them, thinking about her, how she'd grow, what she'd become. How she might change the world. Thinking about what grows from something small. Touching them . . . I hadn't been with a man for half a year. I was tingling with joy, Gawain, buzzing with it. You have to imagine what it was like. So far from everywhere, so wonderful. I took all my clothes off. I couldn't help it. The air was just perfect. I lay there and there were all the acorns under me and in my fingers, and I couldn't help it, I started . . . I started . . .”

“It's all right,” Gawain says again.

“I just wanted to say thank you. It felt like the right way of doing it. I did say it. I cried it aloud. I kept saying it afterwards, Thank you, thank you, like that, in the grass.” There's no bliss at all in her voice. She's whispering with swallowed horror. “You could feel . . . I knew the trees were listening to me. It was like praying. Like praying's supposed to be.”

“And then,” Gawain says.

“I didn't sleep. I know I didn't.”

“No.”

“I wouldn't have. Not with Silvia back in the village by herself. I'd never have done that.”

“It's OK.”

“I didn't. I made myself all dreamy but I know I didn't let myself go to sleep.”

“Right.”

“But . . .”

“The sun came.”

“Don't say it!”

“Tell me, then. Say the words yourself. I've done it, see. It's all right.”

“The sun came. Oh, God. It was still night, I swear it was. It was like fire under the trees. It was my fault. I'd been lying there, all blissed out. I knew I was in a temple. I said it aloud, I said, Whatever god lives here, whatever god led me to Silvia and her gift, I want to . . . I want . . .”

The shadow shudders into silence.

“You wanted the god to show himself.”

“Don't,” she whispers.

“So he did.”

“Oh, God. The light.”

“And you were scared.”

“It was terror. He was terror.”

“You called him, and then when he came you said no.”

“No!” The woman almost screams. “No!”

“Just like Cassandra did, once. At the beginning.”

“I ran. Like running through lava. I could feel it at my back. Burning. I ran down the mountain. God help me, I ran away. I left Silvia. A little girl. That fire was all over my skin. Trying to get inside me. You can't escape it. I don't want to say any more. Let me go now, Gawain, please. Close the door.”

“Nearly. You're nearly finished, Mum. Nothing can hurt you. Not where we are now.”

“No. You can't hide.”

“You tried, didn't you? Iseult told me. She said you came back to England, joined those Christians. She said you wouldn't go outside in daylight.”

“You can't.” The ghost of Gawain's dead mother is fixed fast on those two words. “You can't.”

“But he found you.”

“The force of him, Gawain. The fire of a god. He made me like a spark. Tiny, like nothing. Like a speck of dust in a tornado. He burned my tongue so I couldn't say no. Or yes. I didn't matter. I was just a thing; he was fire. He melted me. He split me open. He put you inside me. His gift.”

Neither of them speaks for a long time, if
time
's the right word: things don't start or finish or waste away between the living and the dead.

“Which,” Gawain says at last, “is also a curse.”

“Undo it,” the woman says, with a sudden hopeless urgency, the desiccated fervor of the dead. “Give it back. For my sake.”

“Is that why he gave you back your voice? To tell me that?”

“I can't tell you why. Reasons are for people in the world. Not for me. Or him. I just know you can do it. If I'm allowed to tell you my story then I'm giving you a way back to the beginning. I'm showing you where you began. You can undo it.”

“I can't undo myself.”

“You know who you are now. You can choose not to carry that weight. You're not him, you're my boy too. What else is my story for? If my sin was irreversible I'd be nothing, I'd be finished. You can put it right.”

“It wasn't a sin, Mum.”

“I called him into the world. I did it.”

“He's always been in the world.”

“I didn't mean to! I just wanted . . . For that one night, in that place, I so wanted it to be true. It was all so magical. I thought, if ever there was something more wonderful that we know about, this would be the place. Like when I was thirteen and reading books about dragons and so so wishing that world was true.”

“It was always the truth,” Gawain says. “People just forgot. For a long time.”

“Then let them forget again. Give back your gift. You said it yourself; it's a curse. The world can't bear it. I know. No one knows like I do. He hounded me, Gawain. You can't imagine the terror of it. Let it all go quiet again. Hide yourself here, away from the world. Leave the ring alone. Bury it, let it be forgotten. Please. We're better off without gods.”

Gawain answers reluctantly. “I wouldn't know.”

“I remember being young. I hated the banality of everything. Ask Lizzie, she'll tell you. I so desperately wanted things to be different, not stupid and empty. I never noticed how hard people work just to make existence bearable. All those things I despised, comfort, money. The things everyone spent all their time thinking about instead of God. They did it because the gods are intolerable. It must have taken centuries of struggle for people to forget magic. So much effort. And I brought it blazing back and threw the world into catastrophe. You can turn it, Gawain, my love. I know you can. Send the gods away. Hide us from them again. Oh. Oh, my mouth is drying up. This is it. This is all I have to say.” In the shadows she's harder to see already. “These are all the words allowed me. Gawain?”

“I'm here.”

“I love you. I'm sorry.”

“You're forgiven. Totally.”

“I love you all. You and Lizzie and Gwen and little Silvia. You most of all, though I never knew you.”

“All right. I understand.”

“Return.” The fire's finally gone out altogether. The woman's voice is drifting away like the last thread of smoke.”

“Return the ring, you mean.”

“Refusal,” she says, though the word is barely anywhere at all.

“Refuse the gift.”

“Love” is the last thing distinguishable from mere air.

Gawain says nothing.

He waits a long time. The boy stands behind him, the ring on his finger still.

Then Gawain leans forward and at last touches the folded shadows in the opposite chair.

The woman twitches and makes a sleepy noise.

“Mum?” Gawain says.

“Mmm?”

“Mum? The fire's out.”

“Gav?” She stretches.

“Let's get you upstairs. Find a proper bed.”

Iz pushes her hair away from her face and sighs. “I still can't believe you're back,” she says. “Is that Rory?” She squints into the dark corner. “I thought you'd gone to bed ages ago. Do you want some pajamas?” She gets up, holding on to Gawain. “I had a dream about Iggy.”

“So did I,” Gawain says.

T
he boy roams the house, an enchanted forest of architecture, a secret garden of oak and iron and plaster. Its only season is night. Time, growth, and decay have abdicated. Everything sleeps, or stops rather than sleeps, perfectly hidden behind the impenetrable briar rose. Even Gawain sleeps, a blessing almost forgotten. The boy can smell his dreams: salt air, wet canvas, the ocean. The house has dreams too, rhythms of motion alternating with emptiness. Smoke and dust. Everything is equally substantial and insubstantial. The boy himself is both body and ghost, thought and ignorance. His own bed dreams of a girl growing up. She smells of the ocean too. He passes in and out of the sleepers' rooms. Everything that has happened is a tapestry, flat, soft, pressed into one plane and one frame. He sees it, but what he sees is not a picture but a hundred thousand twists of colored thread, muted by night, which makes all colors the same color.

It is the nature of cats and owls to roam their houses at night, with no one to know or afterwards say, This is what they did. This is what happened. The boy and the cat meet at the bottom of a secret stair. They ascend to a secret window and come out into the owl's house, slate and stone and moss under their feet and only air above. An owl whickers to a stop on a shallow gable beside the boy and says “'obbits!”

Uccellino, says the boy. Little bird. Threads of the tapestry run through his fingers. Each has two ends: Then and Now. At the far end is a boy, himself, Rory, and another night, when he was surprised in darkness and his story changed. The owl coughs “'obbits!”

The boy holds out his right arm. On his right hand is a magic ring. All the magic in the world, the magic of all the world, all the world made magic. The owl blinks and reminds him again, “'obbits!”

The boy takes off the ring and he's sitting on the roof. He's still naked, but it's not cold, or rather
it
is but
he's
not. Though he is, suddenly, tired. His head's spinning in the aftermath of wearing the ring. Not actually spinning, it just feels like that, whereas the owl's head is, literally, swiveling. There are damp piles of autumn leaves caught among tiles and in gutters.

“Lino!” Rory says. He's glad to see the owl. He'd like to pat it but he doesn't know how you'd do that to a bird. He can hardly see it anyway. The stars are gone, clouded over. There's a grey radiance from somewhere, diffused moonlight perhaps, but it's not much.

The owl screeches softly. Rory looks at the ring in his hand, or rather feels it: it's too dark to make out.

“Probably if I put this on again I could talk to you.”

The owl pecks at its feathers.

“Maybe even turn you back into Lino. I don't know. Though he said it doesn't actually do anything, didn't he. This is it, by the way.” He holds it out in his palm. “The ring Silvia told you that you were going to find.”

The beak clacks fretfully.

“Funny how things turn out,” he says.

A yawn ambushes him. It fades into a shiver.

“I should go back to bed,” he says. “I'm glad you're here, though. I should have known it was you all along. You really helped me out.”

Lino makes a throaty noise. Whatever kind of owl this is, it doesn't hoot.

Rory turns the ring over in his hand. “I'll give it to you if you want it. I don't mind.”

The owl watches him. He can't see its face but he remembers the ferocious expressionlessness.

“But actually,” Rory says, “I was thinking.” He closes his fingers over the ring. “The hobbits? They weren't actually looking for the ring. Actually they were trying to get rid of it. Weren't they? That was the whole point. You're not even supposed to wear it.” He feels the small hard circle trapped in his fist. “All those bad things happen whenever he puts it on.”

The owl vanishes. A ripple of chilly air disturbs a few dead leaves. It's flown off with barely a sound.

“I wonder if that's why he gave it to me,” Rory says aloud. He feels around for the ledge of the window the cat led him out of. His hand brushes fur, and a moment later a grating purr starts up.

“It's pretty weird,” Rory says, to no one in particular, “that he turns out to be the son of God.”

He wriggles back inside and feels his way down to the corridor at the top of the house. It's completely dark but he remembers the way. He gets himself back to the bedroom Silvia found for him. He remembers that the bed used to be Her bed, which is also pretty weird, but the memory's there (the salt flavor, the sweet-sharp tang). For a moment he's tempted to put the ring on again and taste Her as he lies there.