“Hoofprints,” Rory says.
“Ecco.” Rory’s learned this word by now. It means one of Look, There, OK, or I told you so, or a combination of them. Lino’s stopped. He points down by his feet. Rory would never have seen the mark on his own but now he’s looking carefully there it is: a thick quarter-circle stamped into a patch of receptive mud. It’s obviously part of a hoofprint.
Frowning, Silvia stops as well. Per glances back as best he can with the staff straddling his shoulders, but keeps on uphill.
“So they were watching,” she says. “This is not old.”
“I see no one.” Lino explains himself to Rory in a noisy whisper. “This I don’t like. I see them, they don’t see me, that’s OK. This, psshh. Not so good.”
“Is it those people we saw?”
“I think so.” Silvia’s tapping her foot, thinking. “We think they go away but they must not go far. They come back, quietly, watching.”
“Horse is big animale.” Lino trots with his hands and makes clopping sounds. “But I don’t hear.”
“They’re careful, these people. Clever.” Silvia leans close to Rory and grins. “Women.”
Per shouts something which obviously means Keep up, though it’s more snorts than words. The three others start following him again.
“Can we go a different way?” Rory says.
“Not us,” Silvia says. “Lino says this is the only road. There are small roads, foot roads or horse, by the sea. But we can’t go that way. You and me, yes. Them, no.”
“Le sirene,” Lino explains, seeing Rory’s expression.
It sounds even better when Lino says it. He likes this word, sea-rainy. It’s much better than calling Them Them. It’s glistening and misty, like Her skin.
Does She have a proper name too? He’s never thought of it before.
“I thought it was OK with Per.”
Silvia lowers her voice. “Sometimes, yes. Sometimes Per can keep the sirene away. But it’s not good to trust those spirits too much.” Rory’s about to ask what she means when she goes on. “Anyway, look, the staff is busy.” She grins, gesturing at Per’s back. “Like a . . . What is it, male cow?”
“Ox?”
“That’s right.” She mimes walking under a yoke. “Like an ox, yes?”
Lino nudges Rory. “You know le sirene?”
“Er. Yes.”
“You see?”
“You mean did I ever see Them?”
“Si si. Girls without clothings.” He winks. “Molta bella. Very nice.”
“No,” Rory says, looking away. He’s being teased.
“Ma no. For you is OK! Only a boy. You don’t want to see this?”
“’Course not,” he mutters.
Lino sighs. “After we find this ring, I take a sirena, I think. Come sposa. My woman, you know? I think this will be . . .” He smacks his fingers to his lips. “The most beautiful. You help, yes? You go them, you say, This Uccellino is good man, very good man. OK?”
Rory’s saved from having to respond by the fact that Per’s stopped in front of them. They’ve reached the top of the slope above the abandoned town. For the first time the road ahead dips instead of rising. The choking green mass they’ve been walking between has flattened down here, exposed to the sea wind, and all of a sudden there’s a view inland. Disoriented, Rory looks around. He can’t see the sea anywhere. It’s gone.
The wind sounds different: narrower, farther away. Instead of the sea the horizons are all green and brown, with glints of yellow. There are distant trees whose leaves have gone the color of weak afternoon sunshine. There are open acres like fields, but twenty times the size of the fields on Home. The wind blows patterns like waves across their tall weeds and grass. A single heathy hill rises out of them, like one of Sansen’s humps except the sea around it is green instead of grey. He has a picture of the Mainland in his head which shows a great mass of houses and shops and things going off in every direction, like a carpet of buildings unrolled over the ground. There’s nothing like that in sight. He can see a few houses or barns but they’re peeping out of the landscape, not the other way around. They’re scattered in groups, little rocks in the grass ocean. Smoke’s coming up from one of them. The black shapes moving slowly through the green around them aren’t seals or birds but cows, real cows, like the ones there used to be on Home before they all died or were killed. There’s so much solid ground everywhere it makes Rory feel slightly short of breath. So much of it, and so little of anything else. Birds drift around in ones and twos. There are no people, no women working or pausing in their work to chat. There’s just a wide world lying utterly new in every direction, like a giant asleep.
Per sniffs. “Looks OK,” he says. He shifts the staff with its dangling cargo and sets off again.
“I look,” Lino says, meaning I’ll go and look, and he’s off past Per, disappearing quickly around the next bend.
The rest of them walk on quietly until Lino returns. He’s in the middle of a whispered conversation with Silvia when a horrible loud ripping sound starts up out of nowhere. Per’s dropped the sacks to the ground and swung the staff off his shoulders almost before Rory’s stopped cowering at the noise. It’s a throaty pulse of inarticulate fury, like the air shouting at him. It’s a dog barking, he’s telling himself: he used to know what that meant but he’s forgotten. Silvia’s pushing past Per, still talking to Lino. She beckons Rory forward.
“We go first,” she says.
“Huh?”
The noise goes on and on. At least it’s not getting any closer. “Lino says two or three houses, all closed, he sees no people. The dog is inside. If anyone’s there and they see a woman and a child, they don’t get scared, there’s no trouble. Come.”
She actually takes his hand, like his mother does when she’s cross, and starts walking him towards the noise. There’s a sharp right-hand bend in the road ahead. She motions Per and Lino to stay hidden behind it.
“What d’you mean, trouble?”
“Shh.” Her grip is unbreakably tight.
Around the corner lies a clutch of buildings wrapped to their waists in ivy. Their lower windows are nailed over with planks of wood. The road ahead runs straight between them, houses on either side. A charred and fallen pole lies across the road, spilling wires which disappear into the gorse. Beyond it, one small patch of ground in front of the buildings has been kept clear of weeds: a circle of grass around an old red phone box. The noise is locked up inside one of the houses, though it sounds like it’s trying to get out. Something thumps against the inside of a door.
A crackle of bluish sparks shimmers over the fallen wires, there’s a snatch of sound like the shaking of a tambourine, and the phone starts ringing.
The dog stops barking instantly. Silvia lets go of Rory’s hand.
Rory hasn’t heard a phone for at least as long as he hasn’t heard a dog, but he remembers what the sound means at once. It’s like it’s hardwired into him. It’s the lost sound of The Old Days. It was how you knew what was happening, where you were supposed to go, who you shared the world with. It was the first thing to go. He remembers his mother holding the mouthpiece to her chest and turning to the rest of them and saying We’re cut off, and that’s when they knew it wasn’t a glitch or a hiccup or It’ll Get Sorted Out Eventually. She said it like a death sentence. He remembers the adults going to each other’s houses to see if anyone had a working phone. He remembers what his father looked like when he came back and said no one did.
Silvia’s stopped, as dumbstruck as Rory. As the two of them stand there a man comes half-running, half-tumbling out of one of the buildings. He’s wearing a kind of robe like a monk’s, mud-colored, cinched at the waist with orange twine. He pauses only for a moment when he sees Rory and Silvia before picking up the skirts of his robe and hustling shakily across the road to the phone box. He’s an old man, ragged as a pecked crow. He keeps glancing at the two of them and every time he does so he looks like he’s going to l
ose his balance and trip over himself.
Silvia nudges Rory in the back. “Come.”
The man cringes when he sees that she’s started to walk towards him. As he tiptoes across the cleared grass towards the phone box he starts making frantic pushing motions with his arms which obviously mean Stay back.
“I don’t think he wants us to—”
“Shh. Come on.”
The man tries to open the door of the phone box with one hand, still waving at them with the other. It’s too heavy. He whimpers, abandons his efforts to stop Silvia, heaves the door open, and vanishes inside. The windows of the phone box are all cracked and clouded but he must have answered it because the ringing stops.
Everything’s suddenly quiet. Rory looks back and sees Lino peeking around the turn in the road. One of the wires in the road fizzes and there’s a sudden smell of bitter smoke. A burst of music blows by like the echo of an invisible party, riotous and pulsing, gone as quickly as the closing of a door. Silvia whirls around but there’s nothing to see.
They can hear the man inside the phone box. “Hello?” he says. He sounds like an ordinary man, speaking English: another forgotten noise from The Old Days. “Hello?”
Silvia levers herself over the pole. Rory follows. Now he can see that there are things in the grass around the phone box. They don’t look like the usual scattered junk. They look like they’ve been put there. He sees a toy airplane, a violin, one of those lightbulbs made out of twisty spiral tubes, a notebook diary (the damp’s made its edges curl up like a dead leaf), a tangled flattened mobile of colored animals, some little black statues which might be chess pieces, a computer keyboard, and four or five mobile phones.
The door half-opens and the man squeezes out. He’s out of breath. His hands are splotchy and his face is almost grey. There’s nearly as much hair in his nostrils and eyebrows as there is on top of his head. His eyes are wandering as if he can’t see them properly.
“No one there,” he says apologetically.
Behind the door of the house he emerged from the dog’s scratching and whining. It sounds like a large dog. Silvia gives Rory a not very discreet prod in the back. The old man misinterprets their hesitation. “Don’t mind Ralph,” he says. “He always gets like that when the gods are about. Handy, actually. Like them canaries in the mines. Hush, you!” he shouts at the door.
Under her breath Silvia mutters, “Greet him.”
“Er,” Rory says. “Hello.”
“Oh, yes. Hello, and all that.” The man hitches up his robe, which appears to be made of brown curtains sewn together, and steps around the things lying in the grass. “I don’t know you two, do I? You can leave whatever you like. Hair’s good if you didn’t bring anything else. Always gone by morning, the hair. I’ve got a little pair of scissors inside if you want.” He sidles closer, peering. Only now does he appear to see them properly. “Is that a suntan? You’re not with the Riders. Where have you come, oh, oh?” He interrupts his own question with a nervous stutter, stepping back and glancing at his door. “Oh, yes. Well, then.”
“We just arrived,” Rory says. “We came from—”
Silvia drops a hand on his shoulder, hard, and steps in front of him. “We are travelers,” she says. “From far. I have nowhere else seen a telephone that’s working.”
“Just the two of you, then, is it?”
Silvia spreads her hands as if to say, Can you see anyone else? “Me and the boy. We are no trouble.”
“Only they warned me someone had landed down that way. Men.”
“Who told you this?”
“You’re foreign,” he says. It’s an accusation.
“My name is Silvia,” she says. “Silvia Ghinda.” She puts her hand out. He stares at it like it’s dirty. “We have our own food. We are only walking past.”
“Yes, well, you’ll have to leave something anyway. I don’t know if foreign hair’ll do. Ralph! Be quiet! That’s Ralph,” he says. He’s backing towards the door all the time. “He’s very fierce.”
“How’s that phone working?” Rory says.
“Eh? Gods, isn’t it? At the crossroads. This is my crossroads, has been ever since . . . Ever since.” There are side roads between the houses, and now that he’s looking Rory can even see a signpost, its arms all but drowned in ivy.
“Do they speak to you,” Silvia says, “these gods?”
The man droops shamefacedly, winding his fingers in the twine of his belt. “Not yet,” he says.
“We should ask your blessing.” The man blinks in surprise. “If you look after this road.”
“That’s an idea, isn’t it?” He’s stopped his nervous edging towards the door. The dog’s still pawing at it. “Very good. Blessing, absolutely.”
“And also,” Silvia says, “you can say to other people that we make no trouble. You tell them, the gypsy and her friends, they do no harm. They respect the road.”
“Oh, indeed. Respect, that’s the thing.”
“We pass quietly. The men too, who crossed the sea. All of us need only a day to go where we want, maybe two. You will tell these Riders this?”
“Should get there by the evening, I’d have thought,” the man says, squinting at the sky. “No more than a day’s walk for you young folk.”
Silvia’s face is blank. “Excuse me?” she says.
“Or don’t you know the way, being foreign and all. You’ll have to find it yourself, then. Just stay straight on, east, don’t turn to the higher ground or the lower.”
“The way to where?” Silvia says.
“Oh. Oh, now.” The man waves a finger in an indecipherable gesture. If it’s meant as a threat it’s embarrassingly feeble. “Don’t pretend I’m a fool. I may be old but I know what’s what.”
“Where is it you think we are going?”
“Used to be lots like you, back when, when . . . Back when. Tramping around all over the place. Take my advice, tramp back where you came from. No one ever came out again. Good luck to you. You can do your own hair, just put it in the grass anywhere.” He takes a determined stride towards his house. The dog snuffles excitedly.
Silvia’s between him and the door in a flash. The man almost jumps when he finds her in his way. His mouth begins trembling. “Now now,” he says. “Mind out there, young lady.” He makes the beginning of an effort to step around her. She barely has to sway aside to stop him.
“I think,” Silvia says, raising her voice slightly, “you spend too long talking on the telephone to nobody, sir. You forget to answer when someone asks you a question. Where do you think we are going, please?” Rory’s never heard anyone make the word please sound like a threat before.
“No funny business, now.” The man’s plainly worried, not to say frightened. The dog keens and thumps against the door. “The gods send you wrong if you mess with the crossroads. I’m telling you.”
“Rory.” How she can remain so icy with a thing which sounds like it’s the size of a horse banging at the door just behind her back, Rory’ll never know. “Maybe I’m not speaking English right. Or maybe this man doesn’t like to talk to women. Or gypsies. You ask him, please.”
“All right, all right. No need to be like that, is there? I’m not one of them racists. I said good luck to you, didn’t I? Which you might have thanked me for, seeing as you’ll be needing any luck you can get in the Valley. There, I said it. No point pretending I don’t know, everyone knows what your sort want.”
Lino and Per have come into view. They must have thought the situation was about to turn bad. Silvia glances back and waves them away with a swift impatient gesture. “The Valley?” she says, dropping her voice. She says it like that, the same way the old man did. Rory can hear the capital V. “What is this place?”
The old man’s anxious look has fastened on his phone box. His madly sprouting eyebrows are bent in, as if he’s remembering something.
“They say in the heart of the Valley there’s a room with a phone,” he says, “and if you use
it you can speak to the dead.”
Silvia steps forward and wraps her hands in the front of his robe. He gasps in alarm and makes as if to push her away but he might as well be a baby in her grip. The dog breaks into a frenzy of barking. “Tell me again,” Silvia says, low and fast, “how to walk to this place.”
“Hands off!” He’s gone breathless and very shaky. “You can’t do this.”
“East from here,” she says, “and neither high nor low. Is this right?” The old man nods, though Rory’s pretty sure he’d agree to anything by now. He’s almost dangling from her fists. Per and Lino are approaching fast. The door bounces in its frame as the dog flings itself against it. Silvia lets the man go. He sort of shrivels up where she drops him, cringing as Per strides over the fallen pole. Compared to the rest of them Per seems huge enough to block out the daylight.
“Silence your dog,” Silvia says.
“Ralph,” the man stammers. “Hush, boy.”
Per’s swinging his staff down in front of him as he approaches. He points it forward and shouts a command. Silvia’s already holding her hands up to him—Wait, don’t—but it all happens too quickly for her. An indistinct swish of blazing light arrows past Rory—though it’s too faint and fast to see, he has the horrible impression that it’s full of faces, smooth faces with empty eye sockets—and the door of the house is briefly outlined, as if a beacon has flared up behind it. The dog makes a dreadful strangled whining noise and goes silent. There’s a muffled thump a moment later, and then nothing except the echo of Silvia’s shout, “Stop!” Per turns the staff to point at the man, who’s actually cowering, hands over his head and everything. Per’s eyes are reflecting a fire no one else can see. “Stop,” Silvia says again. Lino puts his hands on the staff to push it away. An angry whisper passes overhead, the sound of a sharp gust disturbing a pile of dead leaves. Per starts back with a snarl as if Lino’s slapped him. Something strange and dreadful happens in his face which reminds Rory of his dream; then Lino skips in front of him and claps his hands in front of Per’s eyes. The big man blinks and steps back, and Rory sees that there’s nothing wrong with his eyes after all: just some weird trick of the light. “No,” Silvia’s saying. She repeats it more quietly as the danger drains out of the scene. “No.” Per shakes his head, frowning, letting the staff rest on the ground. “No. This is a holy man. We make no trouble. All right?” The old man’s peeking out between his arms. All of them can now hear him breathing, wheezing gasps like he’s about to have a heart attack. “Look,” Silvia says. She reaches into her hair and tugs out a few long strands. “OK? Like this?” She holds them out to the man. “Is this enough? I put it there, by the telephone?”
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