Arcadia (62 page)

I
f Rory's honest with himself, he hasn't thought that much about the future. You don't, when you're ten. If one of the others had asked him, he'd probably have said, Aren't we all going to live here now? Like this? There's a big house, safe, dry, at peace. There's food, though he hasn't seen exactly where it comes from; it's magic, he supposes. None of these people are his family but he's decided he likes Silvia as much as he's ever liked anyone, and Gwen and her sister are a bit like the Nice women on Home except without getting tired or cross or smelling of fish. Anyway he saved Silvia's life, all by himself, and his family's all dead. So it wouldn't have seemed very unlikely—if he'd let himself think about it—that they'd all just, whatever. Stay. Go on. And nothing else would happen. End of.

It's not going to be like that now.

The really weird thing is that it's his fault. Nobody made him speak up. He could have let them all forget about Her, like Gwen and Iz were saying they ought to. But no. And now everyone's worried, everyone's unhappy.

He wonders whether this is why Holly's started calling him
serpent
as well as
liar
. It's not an insult, as far as he can tell, but it stings a bit all the same. He's not sure he's all that comfortable around Holly. Her eyes are like something out of the horror comics. He's not too sure about Corbo either. Being stared at by Corbo makes him feel like food.

It's one of the reasons he's decided he's going to go with Gawain.

Deciding who's going and who isn't is what's causing all the unhappiness. It's like being back in the Abbey. There must be something about the process of making decisions that makes people miserable, Rory thinks. Iz is the worst. She's desperate for Gawain to change his mind and stay, but he's not going to, so she's torn between wanting to go with him and knowing she can't face the outside world again, which given what Rory's seen of it seems fair enough. Silvia's torn as well, wanting to help but dreading the idea of going without her gift, not knowing what she's doing. Only Gwen is certain she doesn't want to leave Pendurra, but even she's tormented with worry about parting from Gawain. It doesn't help that Corbo keeps clacking around muttering the word
unwise
.

Gawain's made up his mind, but he knows he's about to break his promise and he's brooding over it. Rory finds this a bit peculiar, though he's careful not to say so. Does it really matter what Gawain said to someone six hundred and something days ago? People promise things all the time when they don't mean it. Whenever Pink says
I swear,
what she basically means is
Actually I'm not going to do this and we both know it
. In the first months after Dad and Jake and Scarlet sailed away his mother used to tuck him in every night promising they'd all be together again soon. The world's made of lies, big and little, black and white. Perpetual truth would be like that god, too unbearably bright to live with.

Though one of the names Holly greets Gawain with is
oracle
, so maybe he's tried living like that. He's got a look about him like he's got too close to a fire and been burned by it, like Gwen except with all the burning on the inside.

Rory's got to go with him, anyway. Who else can show Gawain the exact cove at the far northern tip of Home where She always appears? And how could he let anyone sail to Home without going with them? Someone's got to explain to Kate and everyone what's been happening.

There's another reason too. It's currently in his trousers. He turns it between his fingers sometimes when he's got his hands in his pockets. If it's really a magic ring—
the
magic ring—then isn't Gawain going to need it?

He's already tried giving it back to Gawain, quietly, when it was just the two of them. The man just looked at him and asked whether he remembered what his mother had said. Flustered, Rory mumbled that he did, yes.

“I think you'll know what to do, then,” Gawain said, and that was it.

He won't, of course. He has no idea. He doesn't understand the ring at all. He's beginning to think Hester the Professor and Silvia were both right, and there's actually no such thing, it's just a hoax. Maybe that's what Gawain means. The ring's not for anything, it doesn't do anything, they're just supposed to get rid of it. Like those hobbits.

He keeps it in his pockets anyway, though.

So now they're scrambling down through steep-sloping woods, just the two of them, Gawain barefoot as always. The undergrowth's straggly and twisty and the ground's slick with old leaves. They've said their farewells. Rory kept hoping until the very last minute that Silvia would change her mind and come with them, but she didn't.

“Promise you'll return to me,” Iz said to Gawain, more than once. Her face when he couldn't promise was terrible to see. Rory kept thinking of Molly sitting in the brown chair in the corner of the big room in the Abbey after Ol died, not saying a word, looking utterly destroyed.

“So are we coming back here afterwards?” Rory asks, as they pause to get their footing, both holding the same contorted bough for balance.

“I don't know,” Gawain says. He sounds distraught. “I promised I'd never leave her, once. That was on the day her father died. Then it turned out I had to, so I promised I'd come back here and stay forever. That's broken too. I don't know what I'm doing anymore.”

Rory finds this surprisingly frightening.

“Maybe we should,” he begins, after Gawain's been staring at him for a while. He can't finish, but he looks back up the slope.

“No,” Gawain says. “I've got to try to find her.”

He doesn't sound like an oracle when he says that. He sounds like an unhappy boy, not quite a man yet after all.

  *  *  *  

The slope levels out, the ground becomes rock, and there's the river.

Within the enchanted confines of Pendurra, Rory's stopped thinking about the outside world. He's forgotten how bad it was. Here's the truth of it, stretching upstream and down as far as the eye can see. The river's a graveyard.

He'd imagined the thorny rose encircling Pendurra like a castle wall. Now he sees there's no need for it on this side. No one's ever going to cross this moat. Plenty of people have tried, by the looks of it. Tried and died. The wrecks lie so thickly in the dull dark water you could almost use them as stepping-stones.

To the right, downstream, the river widens, and there, where it meets the cursed sea, the smashed and sunken boats are at their most colossal, tankers and container vessels, some no more than looming peaks of rust, others still almost whole but overrun by the waves, smothered in kelp. To his left the wooded banks press closer together and the ruins are small boats, launches, yachts, gigs, dinghies. The yachts' masts stick up at all angles, some of them trailing fouled canvas like collapsed tent poles. Mostly they're crowded near the wilderness of purpling bramble on the opposite shore.

There's just one boat riding upright and sound. It's at anchor near the rocks where Rory and Gawain have come down to the shore. It's a single-masted sailing boat, scratched and battered. It was probably once mostly white but it's turned the same grey as the river. The stern's facing them. The name, painted in black capitals, is
LOOKFAR
.

“Gwen's idea,” Gawain says. “Marina loved that book. Mum says she had it with her when they met.”

“What book?”

“Never mind.”

“You and Gwen really came all the way here in that?”

“And Corbo.”

“From America?”

“Canada. Yes. Halfway round the world. It felt like the whole way round.”

“It should only take us a day to Scilly.” Rory looks at the sky. “What time is it? Is it still morning?” There are layers of low cloud, passing in slow motion. “Where's the wind coming from?”

“It's always followed me before,” Gawain says. “Let's hope it does today.”

There's a rigid inflatable pulled up in a shingle cove nearby. Rory gets in first and lets the man push them out into the river. As Gawain rows them out to the yacht Rory tries to read the inflatable's name, stenciled on its side in letters faded almost to invisibility:
SHENANIGANS, HARDY, B.C
.

“B.C.? Is that how old it is?”

“British Columbia. Part of what used to be Canada.”

“What is it now?”

“Something else. Did you grow up in the Isles of Scilly?”

“Yes. Always.”

“And is it the same place now?”

“Oh,” he says. “I see.”

As they're climbing aboard, Rory says, “Are we really going to make everything go back to how it was before?”

Gawain offers Rory a hand over the rail. The boat sways and settles under them. The decking and the cabin are pale wood, scoured completely smooth.

“You can't undo what happened,” he says. “Nothing's going to make the lights come back on, just like that.”

“But no more magic? Isn't that what your mother said?”

“All I'm trying to do,” Gawain says, “is find a friend who never deserved to be abandoned.”

“But I thought she told us—”

“That's all I'm trying to do,” Gawain says, this time with an emphasis on the
I
. Not for the first time, Rory's left wondering what the man means, and by the time he's got himself moving again Gawain's already busy with something else, unknotting the cover from the boom.

There's no wind at all where they are, though out towards the mouth of the river a stand of tall evergreens is nodding as if in answer to a breeze. Gawain lets the ebbing tide take hold of the boat as he winds up the anchor. The creased and smeared sail hangs limp. Rory takes the tiller—he feels like someone ought to—but there's no pressure on the rudder at all, he might as well not bother. They're spinning in the current like a bath toy. Gawain isn't concerned. He sits himself forward of the mast and watches as though it doesn't matter at all that the waters ahead are clogged with giant slabs and reefs of wreckage.

“Should I steer?” Rory calls out, in case Gawain's forgotten. You wouldn't put it past him.

“They'll take us out to sea,” Gawain answers, over his shoulder.

“Who will?”

“Whoever they are. Marina's people.”

“Oh,” he says again. “OK.”

“At least I hope they will. They brought me in.”

“Right.” Rory doesn't bother asking what'll happen otherwise. You only have to look around to see the answer. Something's steadying their course already, though. The bow stops drifting.

“After that it'll be up to us to sail,” Gawain says. “I hope you know the way.”

“Me?” His heart thuds.

“Don't you?”

“To the Isles?”

“More or less straight west from the Lizard, right?”

“Yeah.” Isn't it? “Roughly.”

Gawain turns. “We'll find them,” he says.

  *  *  *  

At the river's choked mouth the current becomes furious rapids. Rory doesn't notice how angry it is until they're almost caught up in billows of dirty foam, and at that stage he decides it's much better not to look at all. The half-submerged tanker lying slantwise almost from shore to shore breaks the tide into sucking eddying channels between rock and rusting steel. When the boat starts tipping into that channel under the huge shadow of the wreck he throws himself forward into a little hollow by the cabin roof and curls up into a ball, cursing himself for not staying in Pendurra with the others. The boat groans and bucks. A wall of spray slaps over him. He can smell dead metal and weed. The sail flaps and cracks above his head and they heel over. He can't help opening his eyes as he grabs for a handhold. There's Gawain, already at the wheel, an arc of canvas stretched tight behind him. They're out. The wreck's receding and there's open sea ahead. Under a sullen sky a coast stretches away, fading into smudgy obscurity. He can even see buildings in the distance, and, closer, a church tower struggling up between trees. The ruins of England, still there, where he left them.

It's cold. He steadies himself and stuffs his hands in his pockets. There it is, small, hard, smooth: all the magic in the world.

  *  *  *  

They sail along the coast under an easy steady wind. Rory sits by the rail, dangling his legs over the side, looking down at the water. He's thinking of how it must be full of drowned people. His family. Everyone else's families.

“You know when there wasn't any magic?” he says.

Gawain's staring forward without apparently looking at anything, the way people steering boats always seem to. “Before all this started, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“What about it?”

Rory fingers the ring again. “Where did it go?”

He's worried it's a stupid question, but Gawain appears to be considering it carefully.

“It didn't go anywhere,” he says, eventually. “What happened is that people stopped seeing it. They forgot about it. Looked the other way.”

“Why?”

“Easier that way, I suppose. You can see how you might prefer living in a world that did what you told it and didn't answer back.”

“What about the ring?”

“What about it?”

“If it's . . . If all the magic's in it. Where did it go?”

“It was lost,” Gawain says. “Hidden.”

“Where? How did you find it?”

“I didn't. It was in the sea. And under a spell.”

“A magic spell?”

“Presumably.”

“Even though there wasn't any magic?”

“There was,” he says. “Always was, always will be. It's just the way things are. You can hide the truth, though, that's the thing. Or ignore it. Work around it. Replace it with something else. People do that all the time. In fact I'm pretty sure that's what makes people people. Different from every other kind of being.”