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 sm
all and lost that he can’t stop himself. They all go a bit quiet when he starts crying.
Then they feed him.
It’s almost worth being kidnapped (twice), seasick, terrified, footsore, saddle sore, all of it, just for the plate of food Soph hands him. There’s meat, charred at the edges but juicy when he bites it, smoky and peppery, and there’s other charred stuff which isn’t meat and tastes sweetly earthy in the places where it’s almost burned, and there are leaves which are as peppery as the meat juice, and a dollop of some sauce thing with so many flavors it’s like eating five meals at once. There’s absolutely no fish. Its absence makes him notice for the first time that nothing in the camp smells of fish, not the people, not the cooking fires, not the evening breeze. He has to maneuver the food around with his hands lashed together, which slows him down, and once he’s got it to his mouth he eats slowly and carefully from long habit, so each mouthful becomes a little act of pilgrimage, a concentrated effort followed by a blissful reward. He forgets he’s miserable while he’s doing it. He forgets everything else, in fact. He forgets where he is so completely that he doesn’t notice the room’s gone quiet and everyone’s looking at him until he glances up between mouthfuls.
“I guess” (giss) “that other lot didn’t feed you much, eh?” Soph says, and though no one actually smiles he’s aware of a subtle transition, as if he’s taken the first step from being an enemy to becoming a friend.
When they’re watching him struggle to mop up the last few spots of juice and sauce they decide to untie his hands. Haze thinks they shouldn’t, but instead of arguing about it or discussing it Soph just laughs at her. “What are you afraid he is, some kind of fucking vampire? Hey.” She means Rory. “Show us your teeth, Tiger. Go on.” She bares her own in a grimace. They’re the dirtiest teeth he’s ever seen, so stained they look almost as black as her hair. He sees that she’s making a joke, and copies the gesture. “See? No pointy ones in there.” She kneels by his chair and unknots the scarf. “There you go. Don’t go getting any funny ideas now. I know there’re only five of us against the one of you, but we’re tougher than we look. Especially Haze, she’s fucking hardcore.”
Haze stands up without a word and goes outside, banging the door behind her.
“Shit,” Soph says. “Sorry.”
“She’ll be angry about Ace for a while,” Ellie says. “She wanted to kill that guy on the beach herself.”
“I reckon it’s not the guy we need to worry about,” Soph says, settling on the floor. “It’s that fucking great piece of wood. Who’s got it, anyway?”
“Sal.”
“Took it to the Prof?”
“I assume so.”
“There was something whacked about the way he held it. I swear I heard him talking to it.”
“Why don’t you just ask the kid,” the man says. “He must know better than anyone else.”
They all look at him. He stares at the plate in his lap, scraping with his fingertip for nonexistent specks of food.
“The one in charge was the woman,” Soph says. “She was the brains of the operation. Hey.” She pokes Rory gently with her toe. “Tiger. Whatever happened to her? Is she still wandering around out there? That’d make me nervous.” She sits up suddenly. “Fuck. What if she goes and unties the big bastard?”
Now the others all look at each other. The woman Rory doesn’t know stands up. “Haze was right, we should have finished him off. I’ll go tell Sal.”
She’s got her hand on the door when Rory says, “She won’t.”
Once again they all go quiet.
“What do you mean?” says Ellie.
“Silvia won’t rescue Per if you left him tied up. She’s gone off by herself.”
“Who won’t do what?” says the woman by the door.
“Silvia’s the woman who was there before,” Rory tells Soph. “She’s a gypsy, she can tell the future. Per’s the man with the staff. They were all supposed to be going together but Silvia tricked them and went on her own.”
It feels better saying it aloud. He’s been turning this over as he jiggled and jolted along on the horse, tasting the misery of the thought. Now he’s said it aloud it’s like confirming it. It’s obvious, really.
“Where did she go?” Ellie asks.
“To that place the Valley, I bet. She was the one who knew where it was hidden. That thing they were looking for. She pretended it wasn’t in the Valley but she knew it was, she split the rest of them up and deliberately sent them to the wrong place.”
Soph runs her fingers through her long black hair. “That makes a lot of sense,” she says.
“It does?” says the man.
“It does, actually. You’d know what I mean if you’d been there. She was just the type who’d try her luck in there.”
“What’s the Valley?” Rory says.
“Yeah, well, that’s a good question,” the man says.
“Mainly because no one’s ever come back to tell us,” Ellie says.
“The Valley’s the place where it all began,” says the other woman, still with her hand on the door, though she no longer looks like she’s going to run outside. “Where they first saw the angel. Where all the pilgrims went that first winter. It’s only a few miles east of here.”
“The valley of the Helford River,” Soph says. “Used to be a couple of pretty decent pubs down there.”
“What’s wrong with it now?”
They look at each other. Soph shrugs.
“They say the roads move behind you so you can’t get back out,” the man says.
“They say a lot of stuff,” Ellie says. “Makes me wonder how they know. Or who ‘they’ are, in fact.”
“The priest was the last person in there,” the man says, “wasn’t he? I’ve heard him say there’s a well in the heart of the Valley whose water cures every illness of body or soul.”
“The priest’s off his fucking rocker,” Soph says.
“Sanity’s probably not that useful when it comes to the Valley,” Ellie says.
“Are you sure about this?” the woman at the door says to Rory.
“There’s nothing we can do until tomorrow anyway,” says Ellie. “It’s too dark to go back out. Someone can check in the morning.”
“Haze,” says the man. “If he’s still there she’ll be more than happy to do for him, by the sound of it.”
“Baker,” says Ellie to the man, warning, glancing at Rory.
“Sorry,” mutters the man. Baker is apparently his name.
“How the hell did you get mixed up with that lot?” Soph says to him, stretching herself out on the floor again, arms over her head, so she seems to take up most of the floor. “Don’t answer that. Save it for the Prof. We’d better find you some more water, actually. You’ve got a lot of talking to do.”
18
They’re ready for him,” Haze says, putting her head around the door.
He thought he was too tired to move, but the words jolt him like sea spray. The five of them walk him back out around the big house to where the fire is. A lot of people are sitting closer to it now, leaning on each other back to back, or kissing, or just watching the flames. There’s a man with a guitar, singing. One group is passing a pipe around. A peculiar animal is browsing the grass at the edge of the gravel. Sheep, says some part of Rory’s mind left over from The Old Days, and he thinks of fluffy dots in flat even fields: ridiculous memories, impossible. He’s taken under the porch and in through an ancient-looking pair of doors. A few others get up from whatever they’ve been doing and follow. They cross a courtyard contained by the four sides of the house, empty apart from big drums at the corners to catch rainwater from the gutters, and a single tree in the center. Lots of people touch the tree’s trunk and whisper as they pass it. Under an arch on the far side a door opens into the house, allowing a hum of mingled conversation to leak out into the night. It dies away almost at once. Soph motions at the door.
“After you,” she says.
&n
bsp; He doesn’t know how many people there are in there. Too many. Seeing a crowd outside is one thing, but being indoors with them is another, especially since every single one of them stops talking to look at him when he goes in. It’s a long room, as long as a church, though the ceiling’s low and the walls are hung with what look like rugs covering any windows. All the people are sitting on the floor, on cushions or folded clothes or just straight on the wood. It’s almost oppressively warm from all the bodies, and from a low fire in a stone hearth on one side. It’s dim too, full of restless shadows. A few people are holding lanterns, and there are a couple more hung on the walls. They’ve left a space clear down the middle of the room, leading from the door to the far end, where five thick candles in glass jars are burning on a big table, bright enough for Rory to see that the other thing on the table is Per’s staff.
Beside the table a woman sits in a wheelchair. The wheelchair’s metal, so it catches flickers of candlelight. He can’t see much of the woman except that she looks older, and she’s clearly watching him, like everyone else.
Next to her is an empty chair.
Something quite unexpected happens inside Rory. He’s got no one left: that’s not news, he’s horribly familiar with that feeling by now, the feeling that he’s utterly by himself, no family, no friends, no landmarks, nothing familiar, no one he’s ever known. What’s new is a funny little rush of resistance, a tentative clutch of determination like a hardness in his heart. He’s got to be brave, he thinks to himself. He’s got to be strong.
No one has to tell him what he’s supposed to do. The empty chair is obviously waiting for him. He walks up the cleared space on the floor between all the people. He’s thinking of what Silvia told him: You have a gift.
The woman in the wheelchair speaks as he approaches.
“Welcome to Dolphin House, Rory.”
She’s quite old. There’s a big tartan blanket over her knees and another one around her shoulders. Her hands are folded in her lap. They’re trembling a little all the time though the rest of her looks calm. She has a quiet, sad-eyed face and a rather tired but clever-sounding voice. “Come and sit down, please. Have you had enough to eat?”
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