Arcadia

by James Treadwell

  Rory turns his eyes heavenward. “I tried, OK?” he says. He can’t stop to worry about it now. The day must be getting older, and for a nasty moment while Silvia was messing around he thought he’d lost a line of his directions.

  * * *

  He feels a bit like the Pied Piper in the story, though without the flute. He never understood why a piper would have a flute anyway, though no one in their right mind would follow someone with a bagpipe so maybe that’s why. (Also he never understood where the pies came in.) Silvia plods along at his heels, not saying anything, stopping when he stops and following when he starts again, never letting go of the silver crucifix. Lino—he knows it’s Lino now, because how could it not be? The Valley’s just like that—swoops along behind. It’s a peculiar procession, though no more peculiar than the things he glimpses, or thinks he glimpses, among the trees or across fields or out of the corner of his eye. Really the weirdest thing about it is that he’s the one at the front. He’s not used to being the leader.

  For the first little while his biggest worry is whether he’s remembering his song right. And what if he gets to one of those junctions where it could be straight on or could be left, depending on how you look at it? But it turns out that each time he gets to a place where he might have to make a decision, the way he’s supposed to go is the only way he can go. At the main gate of Trelow he has to go left because the way to the right is blocked by a hill of rubble where one of the stone houses guarding the entrance has collapsed into the road. After that he remembers he has to take a quick left, and when they get to the turn there’s something squatting between the hedges straight ahead, a hooded thing with its back to him, scraping a scythe against a big rough stone between its knees; he’s quite sure that he doesn’t want to go that way. Then he’s supposed to keep going along the lane to a village, and all the side roads turn out to be closed. One’s been washed away by a frothing stream. The next has been swept clear of weeds and gravel and chalked with unspeakably horrible pictures. There’s only one way to go after all, it seems, and that way is farther in.

  They walk past a lot of quietly abandoned things. They get to the village and it’s quietly abandoned too. It’s not all smashed up like most places from The Old Days. It’s just deserted and overgrown. It’s on a little ridge, so as they pass between its peacefully empty houses he can see for miles in different directions. Not a single thing is moving apart from the three of them. The horizons are hazy with autumnal mist.

  The angel appears again, in the distance, wheeling lazily over wooded ground before gliding down over the horizon. He points it out to Silvia but he’s not sure she even knows what he’s saying. She might be listening or not: it’s impossible to tell. He hums the song to himself. He’s leg-weary and hungry but for some reason it’s not as hard to keep going as you’d think. The turns pass quite quickly. Wherever he’s going, it doesn’t seem to be all that far.

  They reach a crossroads near the top of another ridge. To Rory’s left the land drops away quite steeply into a long concealed valley. Looking back along its length he can see fragmentary stretches of a wide river. There’s a crashed car in a hedge at the crossroads, almost entirely buried in very tall grasses and the black sprigs of fruiting ivy. He stops, because for the first time there’s more than one way to go. He remembers he’s supposed to ignore every turn to the right and left but he hasn’t had to think about it until now. Here, though, every direction seems open. It’s like the Valley’s daring him to go wrong now, at the last moment.

  He can hear music.

  He might not have noticed it if he hadn’t stopped. It’s very quiet, and it’s sort of wreathed into the air, almost like it’s only the noise of the breeze, but with a bit of a tune. He can also now smell something, in the same subtle, not-quite-there-at-all way, a mild sweetening. Both the music and the smell are as lovely as they are elusive.

  “Nearly there,” he tells Silvia. The look she gives him in answer is no more expressive than the owl’s.

  He goes straight on, as he was told to. He’s walking along a gently curving road with a field to the right and a hedge to the left; beyond the hedge are tall trees. A little way beyond the crossroads the hedge on the left starts to get taller. The farther they go, the higher it becomes, until it meets the place where the woods come right up to the edge of the road. By that stage it’s so high it reaches halfway up the trunks. It’s not even a hedge anymore, it’s a huge green wall. Up close you can see that it’s made of plants, boughs knotted tightly together all over and round each other, covered with small deep green leaves, but when you step back from it and look up it’s more like a solid barrier. The boughs are finger thick and barbed with thorns hooked as viciously as the owl’s beak. In among them a few limp flowers are clinging on still, scattering more or less shriveled petals through the hedge and down onto the road. The farther he goes, the more flowers there are, and the fresher they look. They’re a warm pink color. The smell’s getting stronger all the time. It’s the scent of the flowers, he realizes, turning aside to sniff one. Looking around a curve ahead he sees that so many petals have fallen it’s like a pink carpet.

  The music stops. He was just getting to the point where he was pretty sure it was someone humming. He rounds the curve and sees a girl in a green dress sitting on a heap of bones.

  “Good evening,” the girl says.

  According to Rory’s directions the gate’s supposed to be on the left. He goes a bit farther, carefully, hoping he’ll get to it before he reaches the girl, but there’s no break in the wall of thorns, which is now at least five times higher than his head.

  “Welcome to Pendurra,” the girl says in a pretty voice. “I’m Rose.”

  So he’s in the right place, at least. He examines the impenetrable hedge more carefully and sees what might be a pair of stone gateposts wedged in among the woven boughs, exactly adjacent to where the pile of bones is in the road. The space between the gateposts is just more hedge.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?”

  The pile Rose is sitting on is almost as wide as the lane at its base, and nearly as tall as Rory. It’s a little bone-colored mountain, rising like a volcano from a pink sea. There must be thousands of bones. There are big ones and little ones, straight ones like clubs and curvy plate ones. There are skulls too, heaped in with all the rest. The girl’s sitting with her legs curled up on the flattened top of the volcano. Her dress is the exact deep soft-looking green of the leaves in the hedge. She has pink-blushed cheeks and her hair’s as black as night. She’s more a woman than a girl but her skin’s so smooth and her voice is so pretty she seems younger.

  “Don’t be shy,” she says. “I won’t eat you.” She adjusts herself a little, tucking her hair behind her ear. The bones whisper and sigh beneath her.

  “Hi,” Rory says, keeping his distance. Maybe there’s another way in somewhere.

  “That’s a start,” the girl says. “I suppose.”

  “Is this the gate?” says Rory.

  She gestures towards the pair of stone posts in the massive hedge. “It is.” Her arm moves to wave at the pile she’s sitting on. “And these are all the people who tried to get in. I pick the bones from my branches and pile them up here. Even the fiddly little ones. Look.” She plucks up something too small for Rory to see and holds it between thumb and forefinger. “Inner ear.”

  “How do I get in then?”

  “You don’t, silly. You want to, but you don’t. Well”—she pouts—“he does.”

  The owl’s come feathering along the lane behind. Rory turns in time to see it sweep up into the trees over the barricade of thorns and drop down out of sight on the other side.

  “But he doesn’t really count, because he’s turned into a bird and can’t turn back again. So that makes him actually just a bird, doesn’t it. Birds come and go as they please. They don’t want to get in it. They don’t really want anything, not properly. Isn’t your other friend going to say hello?”

/>   Silvia’s sat down in the road, as if she’s guessed they’re not going anywhere for a while. “She can’t,” Rory says. “I think she’s forgotten how to speak. I’m taking her to the well.”

  “The well whose water cures every illness of body or soul?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But that’s inside.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re not allowed inside.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s what you want. Never mind, you won’t understand, no one does. I’m just the barrier anyway. Why won’t you tell me your name?”

  “Rory,” he says. “It’s Scottish.”

  “You’re Scottish?”

  “No. The name is. Rory.”

  “Your name’s Scottish but you aren’t? How does that work?”

  There’s something funny about Rose’s teeth. He sees it in glimpses while she’s talking, between her very red, very pretty lips. “Dunno,” he says. “Why shouldn’t I be? You can be called anything, can’t you.”

  “Can you?” she says, delighted.

  “Obviously. Like my sister Scarlet, that’s not Scottish.”

  “Is she red?”

  “What d’you mean, red?”

  “Scarlet. You said your sister was Scarlet.”

  “’Course not. It’s just her name. She’s dead anyway.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Rory says, rather embarrassed.

  “Is it? I suppose it must be if it happens to everyone.”

  Rory’s head is starting to feel thick with frustration. He remembers the nasty warty root-thing telling him he’d never be able to get in but he assumed it was just being bad-tempered. There must be a way in. What would be the point of coming all this way if he was stuck now?

  “It’s nice to talk,” Rose says. “No one’s come for a long time.” She picks up a big bone and turns it over in her hands thoughtfully. “Even when they did they didn’t usually talk much. Most of them had gone mad.”

  Rory makes the mistake of looking at the pile. A pair of huge eye sockets looks back at him. I was a person once, the skull tells him, silently. I got this far, and no farther.

  “Did you really kill all these people?”

  “My petals are oh so soft,” Rose says. “But my thorns are oh so hard.” She gives Rory a quick grin, letting him see her teeth properly. Each one of them comes to a sharp point. Her mouth is full of little white fangs. He can’t help himself. He shies back a step, horrified. She laughs.

  “People usually only want to think about the pretty parts,” she says. She sits taller in a way which makes the hem of her dress come up over her knees. It’s only a little wriggle but for some reason it makes Rory feel acutely uncomfortable. “ ‘Oh, a rose,’ they say. ‘How lovely. I want to put my face in it and sniff sniff sniff.’ Then they get all tangled up.”

  “You’re actually a rose?”

  She sighs and slumps, disappointed.

  “How come you look like a girl, then?”

  “It’s always got to be one thing or the other with you people.”

  He thought it was a perfectly reasonable question but he’s made her cross now. “Sorry,” he says quickly, thinking about her teeth.

  “Is it or isn’t it. This or that, yes or no. I’m sure that’s why most of them”—she flips the bone she’s holding up, lets it spin once in the air, and catches it again—“were mad by the time they got this far. Asking all the wrong questions until their brains went pop. ‘Where am I? What’s going on? Why can’t I go back the way I came? What does it all mean?’ ” The bone’s thicker than her arm but she braces it in her hands and snaps it in half with no effort at all, crack. “Is that what happened to your friend? I bet it is.”

  Rory looks back at Silvia. She’s still sitting in the road, hands in her pockets, looking at nothing in particular, like one of the Riders’ horses after they’d been tied up.

  “No, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “No. She always knew what she was doing. Where she was going.”

  “So what’s wrong with her?”

  “I think the problem is she got there.”

  Rose puts the broken halves of the bone gently back down on the pile between her knees.

  “You’re not stupid, are you?”

  “Everyone says I’m stupid.” Well, Ol always did.

  “Shall I explain about this place? Maybe you will understand after all, a little bit.”

  “The Valley?”

  She nods towards the clogged gateway. “This place. Pendurra. Where magic lives. You see, for a long time it was secret because nobody knew about it. They didn’t need a barrier then. Anyone could have come in, because no one wanted to. I just lived quietly in a back garden. We all did. We all lived inside, and no one knew anything about it, and no one cared. Everyone was happy. Happy enough, anyway.”

  When Rose doesn’t add anything, Rory says: “What then?”

  She smooths her dress. “Then someone from outside came to live here, and got curious. A person, a woman. She started wondering how it worked. She wanted to know more. She wanted to find the secret.” Her voice is still pretty but it’s gone solemn. It’s like the difference between pretty Kate in the portrait in the big room in the Abbey and the real Kate, the same face but serious and capable. “And so they Fell.”

  There’s a long pause. Rose is watching him, so he finds himself looking around. He can’t see a cliff or anything.

  “Fell where?”

  “Not where, silly. They Fell. They just Fell. You know. Dropped from the zenith like a falling star. Earth felt the wound. That sort of Fall.” Baffled, Rory looks up at the misty evening sky. “And that’s what made it a different kind of secret, you see. Because now everyone knows. Pendurra’s just the same, but now everyone wants to find it. So instead of just sitting here forgotten, it’s closed. It’s forbidden. Do you see? It’s just like what you said about your friend. It’s once people know what they want that they’re doomed.”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  “Exactly. I bet that’s why you’ve made it so far. You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re doing in the Valley, do you?”

  “But I’m taking Silvia to the well—”

  “—whose water cures every illness of body or soul, yes. And since that’s the one thing you do want, it’s the thing you’re not going to find, because I won’t let you in. But I’ll bet you anything that’s not why you entered the Valley. Is it? You probably didn’t even know about Pendurra, did you?”

  He has to admit he didn’t.

  “In fact,” Rose says, and she’s gone back to being girly-pretty now, “I expect you didn’t even mean to enter the Valley at all. Am I right? You can tell me, I won’t laugh.”

  He tries to remember how he got here. All he can remember is running in witless terror until his lungs were on the edge of bursting. He can’t remember crossing any border.

  “Do you know,” she says softly, ruffling the bones by her knees as if stroking sand, “you’re the first person who’s ever got here by accident. It’s a kind of innocence.”

  He’s no closer to understanding what Rose is talking about but he seizes on the wistful tone in her voice. It’s almost as if she likes him.

  “Maybe you could let me in, then,” he says. “As a special thing.”

  She shakes her head. “No. I’ve told you now. I’ve spoiled it.”

  “Told me what? You haven’t told me anything. I don’t get what you’re saying at all.”

  “That you’re here. Pendurra. This is it. The heart of everything. Where all the magic in the world was locked up for five hundred years, all quiet and forgotten. Where you can be a girl and a rose at the same time. Where the house never rots and the springs never fail and everything is properly itself. Even grief.”

  Rory stares.

  “But . . .” He struggles to get the thought straight. He’s got to get her b
ack to whatever it was that made her talk sweetly to him. “I don’t care about any of that. I don’t want magic wishes or anything. I’m only trying to take Silvia to that well. I’ll leave as soon as she’s better, I swear.”

  Rose breaks into a delicious peal of laughter.

  “I swear,” Rory mutters, humiliated. “I will.”

  “Oh dear.” She’s wiping her eyes, trying to stifle giggles. “I’m sorry. Poor you.”

  “What.”

  “Do excuse me . . . That’s the only thing you want? To find the well?”

  “Yeah. I swear.”

  “The thing you want more than anything else in the whole world?”

  “Y—”

  Her shoulders stop jiggling. Her mouth settles straight.

  “You see?” she says, not cruelly.

  “What,” he says again, though he thinks he does get it, after all.

  “You’re not innocent anymore,” she says. “You want something. You’ve Fallen too. That’s why the gate’s closed to you, and always will be.”

  “But—”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “You can stay if you want, though. We can go on talking.”

  Rory’s mouth is open but he can’t think of any more answers. He slumps down next to Silvia, dejection and exhaustion taking their toll.

  “But what about her?” he says.

  “There’s no way in,” Rose says. “It’s forbidden. I really am sorry. I can see you care about your friend, it’s sweet. Wait.” She sits straighter, causing a clattering tremor in the pile. Some vertebrae jiggle loose and bounce down the side of the heap. “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “That. That she’s holding.”

  Silvia’s pulled the crucifix out of her pocket and is looking at it again as if it might start talking to her.

  “That?” Rory looks up at Rose and sees a change. The girl’s gone tense. Something’s different. He hasn’t a clue what it is but in his desperation it feels like a tiny advantage, a possibility. He seizes it as best he can and tries the same trick that seemed to work on Phil the fox. “That thing? It’s from a god, actually.”