He stops. “Look,” he tells Silvia, pointing. “Smoke, see? Someone must live here.”
It’s as though his words have magic power, because as soon as he says that he sees someone, though it’s only a cat. It appears from somewhere, the way cats do, skipping up to the steps at the front of the house and then disappearing inside the big double doors.
Which means they must be open, Rory thinks.
They walk through the garden and across to the doors. There’s a crack between them. He pushes and they swing in without a sound. Beyond is a warm brown dimness. He can smell the fire.
He can imagine a god living here, in a grand old country house with fruit trees in the garden and a cat for company. If he was a god it’s what he’d do.
He goes inside.
He’s in a corridor lined with panels of wood. It’s more like a museum than a house, but comfortable. It’s incredibly quiet. It feels like nothing here’s moved for a very long time. There are paintings on the walls, unmoving old faces. It’s like stumbling upon a secret, an incredibly ancient secret no one’s thought about for centuries. He’s glad he’s not by himself. If it weren’t for Silvia shuffling along behind him he’d feel very small and irrelevant.
There’s just the faintest crackle of sound: burning logs muttering to themselves. Halfway down the corridor on the right a door is open. That’s where the sound’s coming from, and a hint of warmth as well.
He doesn’t shout Hello, or knock, or clear his throat. It’s not that sort of place. You don’t just show up like a random visitor. A god would know anyway. He looks around the open door on the right, into a hallway with a high ceiling and a stone arch at the far end. Beyond the arch fluid shadows shimmer in a big room.
He looks back at Silvia on the off chance that she’s woken up now and can tell him whether or not this is a bad idea. In the dimness her dark head is almost invisible.
He goes down the hallway into the big room.
It’s like a church. It’s taller inside than the church next to Parson’s, its vaulted roof crisscrossed with massive wooden beams. The three tall windows on the left wall are cased in pointed stone. A gallery runs along the right wall, way above head height. The fireplace beneath the gallery is as big as double doors. Light flicks out from it across the top of an enormously long table of smooth wood, so there’s a dusky aurora spilling like water down the whole length of the room, from where Rory and Silvia are standing at one end of the table to where the god’s sitting at the other.
The god is dressed all in faded black. He’s facing them, but his head’s bowed and shrouded in some kind of cloaking hood. He doesn’t move. Perhaps he’s dead, a dead god. He’s sitting in a high-backed wooden chair, his arms on its arms. In the firelight his hands look small and old.
Rory goes a little farther into the room.
What he took for a hood or a cloak is in fact hair, masses of it, black hair that’s grown down to touch the floor. The god’s a she, not a he.
She raises her head.
She pushes her hair out of her face and looks down the length of the room at Rory. He can’t really see her face very well in all the shadows but he can tell at once she’s a sorrowful god, a god of old and forgotten things.
Her hands grip the arms of the chair. She stands up.
For the first time since the fountain Silvia speaks. She says a single word, which doesn’t sound like a word at all, at first.
“Ygraine.”
She walks past Rory, then jogs, then runs. Her scuffing steps echo in the cavernous room as if someone’s turned on a tap. She runs the length of the table, falls to her knees in front of the sorrowful god, and hugs her around the waist, like a lost child come home.
31
Night’s come at last. They’ve drawn chairs closer to the fireplace. Rory’s is a puffy old one with bandy legs; it smells of cat. The lady’s has a low wooden back. She’s sitting very straight. Silvia stands behind her chair, cocking her head thoughtfully. She snicks scissors in the air.
“Light is not so good,” she announces.
This isn’t the huge churchlike room where they first saw the lady. It’s a warmer shabbier place altogether, full of heavy-looking old-fashioned things. There are fat weeping candles in sticks taller than Rory, but the lady—whose name turns out to be Iz, short for something he didn’t hear properly—hasn’t lit them: only the fire. It’s burning sort of bright and dark at the same time, in that way fires do when they’re the only light. Three sash windows show nothing but black. Full night. It took them quite a long time to get Silvia back to the house, especially without the lantern.
She takes a thick handful of Iz’s hair. “But, good enough,” she says, and slices through it. A black mess slithers onto the rug, making the cat twitch in brief surprise.
She’s talking in her own voice. She’s Silvia again. She’s even in a good mood, Rory thinks, which is amazing, given that she’s just lost something he imagines most people would give their right arms to have.
They took her to the well, Rory and Iz. It turned out to be more like a pool. Rory’d been imagining a cylinder of bricks with a pointy wooden roof and a bucket on a handle. Instead, the lady led him to a tiny ancient stone building deep in the woods beyond the house. On the way she explained why she’s not Ygraine. Ygraine turns out to be the name of someone who died a long time ago. The lady is her twin sister. It took her and Rory quite a long time to get even that much from each other but they managed eventually, though the only thing that was really clear to either of them was that just one person knew the whole story, and that was Silvia.
So they nudged and cajoled her to the well, which cures every illness of body and soul, and got her to kneel beside the pool, and made her drink.
“Your sister used to let me do like this for her.” Silvia snicks away at Iz’s hair. She’s already ankle deep in it. “In the car. She sat in the front, I’m in the back. With too big scissors for my little hands. I must have made her look like . . .” She raises an eyebrow at Rory. “Gorgona?”
“A gorgon?”
“Gorgon, yes. Like Medusa. But she always said I made her look pretty. It makes me so proud. I feel like an adult.” She stops slicing, distracted. “All the time she speaks to me that way. Never like I’m just a little girl. Everyone else I know, they shout at me, hit me, tell me what to do, don’t listen. Like adults normally do to children. I’m right, yes, Rory?” She winks at him.
She’s teasing him now. He hates being teased, usually, but tonight it makes him feel better. It was much worse after she drank the water. She was screaming then, raving, flat on her back in the ancient stone building, thrashing her arms around so wildly she knocked their lantern into the pool and plunged them all into the pitch dark. Some of the screaming was in English. The sun’s in my eyes! I can’t see, I’m blind, help me. My eyes are burning! Even after she stopped raving and flailing, and they got her outside into the twilight, she clung on to Rory and wouldn’t let go. She kept whispering Am I blind? Where am I? Is this place real? They got her back to the house eventually and wrapped her in a blanket and made her eat and drink, but it was like she was shell-shocked and Rory was the only thing in the world she could hang on to. While Iz lit the fire and got water and whatever they needed he kept on trying to explain to Silvia that she was safe, everything was OK, he’s cured her.
Cured?
Gradually, she understood. She’d drunk from the well whose water cures every illness of body or soul, and it turned out her gift had been an illness too. She doesn’t know where she’s going anymore. Her future’s gone dark. The god’s been washed out of her for good.
Perhaps that’s why she’s a bit more cheerful now. Rory’s met that god, and he’d be quite happy never to go anywhere near him ever again.
Silvia nods to herself and resumes cutting Iz’s hair.
“The one thing your sister won’t let me do is drive. I begged her, let me try, let me try! She said she needs me to use the map. To help me
learn reading, see.”
“She’d have made a good mother,” Iz says.
Iz is very shivery. Of the two of them, she’s the one who looks like she was screaming her head off in madness a while ago and has had something terrible happen to them. She’s been getting worse as Silvia’s been getting better. It’s because she wants to know about her dead sister, but at the same time sort of doesn’t want to know. She was getting so worked up, starting to ask questions and then stopping herself, telling Silvia to say things and then telling her not to, that eventually Silvia asked for a pair of scissors and told her just to sit quietly.
“Do you have children?” Silvia asks.
Iz is very pale. It’s easy to imagine that she’s been sitting in that high-backed chair in the big room for years, her hair growing to the floor, never going out into sunlight and fresh air. Silvia’s question seems to make her go even paler.
“No,” she whispers, eventually. “I found out I couldn’t.”
Silvia crouches to inspect her handiwork so far. “Maybe that’s good. This isn’t a good world for children anymore.”
Iz winces. “You’re right,” she says.
“And your sister,” Silvia goes on, getting back to work. “She was wonderful, she was clever, she taught me everything, yes. But then she left me. So not such a good mother, maybe. Still, it’s lucky for you. After she left me I had to learn to cut hair properly.” Silvia smiles at her own joke. The contrast with Iz’s face—stiff with suppressed pain—is awful.
Perhaps it’s a relief not seeing the future, Rory thinks. He can imagine that. If he’d known even parts of what was going to end up happening to him, he might have asked Her to drown him like Ol.
“You have the same hair as her,” Silvia says. “Same ears. Same everything.”
Iz turns around, making Silvia tut. “What happened to Iggy?” she says. “Where did she go?” She’s hoarse, like it hurts to speak.
Silvia gently takes hold of her head and pushes it straight.
“Shh,” she says.
“I tell you everything. Just listen. Be patient.”
She’s in charge again. It’s like she can’t help it. Other people go weak next to her. So that’s not part of her lost superpower, then, Rory thinks. That’s just Silvia’s nature.
“She sent postcards to you, yes? You received them?”
“Yes,” Iz whispers.
“Do you remember from where the last one came?”
“She was going south, wasn’t she. Greece. The last one might have been from Delphi.”
“I help her post them. I go with her to buy . . .” She looks at Rory, miming licking.
“Stamps.” It’s taken him a while to figure it out, but he understands now that Ygraine, Iz’s dead sister, the one she’s so desperate to know about, was also the English teacher Silvia told him about before, the one who rescued Silvia from the gypsy camp.
“Yes. I know a few words in Bulgarian, I can help in that country.” She’s shorn Iz to her shoulders now. It looks ridiculous, like half a black cooking pot on the back of her head. She begins to snip more carefully, talking all the time. “That’s how we traveled. Helping each other. It was a long journey. Small roads always. Never through the big towns. Sleeping in the car. We find a place to stop each night and lie in the car and she teaches me English words. She talks to me in English all the time, whether I understand or don’t. But always soft, you see. Kind. For me she’s like an angel. In the orphanage we used to say, In the West, America, Germany, England, the people have so much money they piss gold. One day they come to Romania and take us to live in their houses big like castles, that’s what we tell each other. We will have all the clothes we want and when the rich people die they will give us all their money. When Ygraine takes me away, at first I think she’s one of those. I think, All the other kids pushed my face on the floor and bit me and told me the rich Americans won’t choose me because I have dark hair and dark skin, and now it’s me who’s going to be rich and grow up pissing gold. And instead we drive along in this terrible old car, just driving, no airplane to England, no house like a castle. She makes me lie down in the back sometimes, down where the feet go, covers me with suitcases. After two, three days I understand, the English lady is not rich. She is not turning me into a princess. But I don’t care, because by then I know she’s better than rich. She’s kind.”
The scissors click in silence for a while.
“I remember,” Iz says. “She found some sort of job working with children in Romania. After the Wall came down. I remember her ringing up to tell me she was going. That was the last time I spoke to her until . . .”
Iz is very out of practice at speaking. She keeps stalling like this, as if she doesn’t have enough air to make words out of.
Silvia waits patiently until Iz holds still again and then goes on snipping.
“Of course I understand now what she did. She stole me. She went to the camp one day to take me to her lessons like normal but instead of going to the orphanage where she teaches she hides me in her shitty car and drives away. That’s why we go only on little roads. When we get to the border, out of Romania into Bulgaria, we pay a man to put the car on his truck, we hide in the back. I don’t understand what’s happening. I think I fell asleep. I don’t worry, because I know, you see. I know she’s taking me the right way. So even when I get angry with her, because I’m just a small stupid child and sometimes I get angry, I don’t run away. I don’t care that she doesn’t take me to a castle in England with servants. She says, Silvia, you are special, I’m going to look after you. That’s enough for me. All my life until then, everyone else, the old women, the old men, everyone, they say, You are special, make us money. You have a gift, make us rich. Otherwise we’ll beat you. Your sister taught me what this means, to have a gift. Before she appears everything is bad in my life, after she comes and takes me everything is good. I thought maybe she’s a real angel. From heaven.”
Iz almost smiles. “You’d have been the first person ever to think that about Iggy.”
“She was a difficult woman?”
“Impossible.”
“Yes. I can imagine this. But to me—”
“Of course. How far did she take you?”
“Bulgaria, Greece. Through the mountains. Once we arrive in the south of Greece she tells me there is a plan. There’s going to be a boat, sailing from Kyparissia. It’s a little town by the sea on the west. In Arcadia.”
“Is that really a place? I didn’t know.”
“Far from anywhere. It’s a quiet town, very small. A good place to get on a boat and no one notices. Of course I don’t think any of those things then, I just think, OK, this is how we’re going to get to England, where I will be Ygraine’s daughter.”
Rory’s been feeling dozy. The mention of the boat wakes him up a bit, that and the name of the little town. Where’s he heard this before?
“She was going to adopt you?” Iz says.
“Yes.”
“How could she do that? Without paperwork?”
“Your sister wasn’t interested in the right papers.”
“No,” Iz agrees. “She wasn’t.”
“I said to her, Yes, take me to England, it’s the right place.”
“She asked you?”
“Of course. She knows my gift.”
Iz absorbs this for a while.
“That’s why she took you,” she says. “Stole you.”
“Of course.”
“How did she know?”
“She came to my grandmother one day.”
“Your grandmother?”
“In the gypsy camp,” Rory says. He’s quite glad of the chance to show he knows part of the story. “Not her real grandmother, she just made Silvia pretend she was. She said she could do fortune-telling but actually it was Silvia.”
Silvia nods at him. “One day an English woman comes in, in a shawl. The old women are very excited because the English have lots of money. My grandmot
her puts red on her cheeks, makes tea with too much sugar. She tells me to stand like this”—Silvia puts her arms straight at her side and bows her head—“and say nothing, only pour tea. But I have to be there, to listen, because of course my grandmother knows nothing without me. So the English lady comes in and bows to my grandmother, very polite, and looks at me, and says, ‘Who’s this?’ And as soon as I look at her I see the god in her face.”
She’s stopped snipping. The fire spits and murmurs unaccompanied.
“God?” says Iz.
“I see it like a shadow. It’s like she stands in front of the sun. I see the shadow of the light all around her. I know this light, I recognize it, it’s what shows me everything I see. But I’ve never felt it bright like that before. My grandmother gives me a little cup to hold. For tea, for the leaves, you know? She pretends to see the future in the leaves. When I look at the English lady I drop the cup, I can’t help myself. I say to my grandmother, This lady walks in light. My grandmother is so angry with me for breaking the cup, for speaking, she beats me in front of the English lady. Ygraine stops her like this.” Silvia snatches Iz’s wrist and holds it up dramatically. “I think she’s even angrier than my grandmother. She speaks very slowly, she doesn’t know Romanian so well, but she says she’s going to teach me with the other children, at the orphanage where I used to be. There’s no argument. She says she will come to pick me up every second day, and every time she will look to see if I’m hurt. She says if she sees they have hit me she will call the police. Then she takes me outside, by myself, and she asks me, What did you say? I’m too frightened to tell her anything. But she knows. She can tell it’s me who is the famous gypsy fortune-teller, not this horrible old woman. Later she told me she knew as soon as she looked at me. She said it’s like love at first sight.”
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