“Iggy always thought that was the only kind.”
“The only kind of love?”
“Yes. She used to say you knew straightaway. Otherwise you were just trying to persuade yourself.”
“And you don’t think so?”
“No.” Iz rubs her wrist where Silvia was holding it. Not because it hurt her, Rory thinks. It’s more like she’d forgotten what it was like to be touched. “The opposite. You don’t really know you love someone until after they’re gone.”
Silvia smiles. “I don’t agree.”
“Did you know her fortune? Did you ever tell her?”
“Of course. I told you, I know it’s the same as mine.” She makes the roads-going-together gesture with her fingers like she did with Rory. “I told her we travel the same road. Towards the truth.”
“That’s what you said? To Iggy? No wonder she stole you away.”
“I told her what I see,” Silvia says sharply. “I don’t lie.”
“No. Of course.”
What I tell her is the truth. You want to know what happened to your sister? That’s what happened. She came to the end of the road and the truth was waiting for her.”
There’s a rather unhappy silence, so Rory says, “That god.”
They both look at him.
“He said so. At that other place, where I found you. He said”—he closes his eyes and finds the words branded on his memory like a permanent scar—“‘This is the end of her road. I’m the light she sought.’”
He’d forgotten how alarming it is when Silvia stares at you full-bore.
“You spoke to him? You saw him?”
He can’t explain about the reflection so he just says, “Yeah.”
“God,” Iz says.
“Yeah. Well, not God god. Not like . . .” What’s he talking about? “He said there were lots, not just, you know, like, one big one. And he said . . .” The words may be burned on his brain but that doesn’t make them any easier to grasp. They’re still livid and strange. “He had lots of names and they’re all different but still him.
Iz exchanges a look with Silvia over her shoulder. Silvia arches her impressive eyebrows.
“Wasn’t it frightening?” Iz asks him.
“Not really.”
Iz turns around in her chair. “Where did you find this boy?”
“Ah,” Silvia says. “Now this is an interesting question.”
Instead of answering, she comes around to the front of the chair, squats down, looks at Iz from the left and the right.
“I’m making you look like her,” she says.
Iz reaches forward and grabs at her arm. “Tell me what happened to her,” she says.
Silvia sighs. She puts the scissors down and sits on the rug next to the cat. She scratches its head. She’s facing the fire, her back turned to the others.
“All I can tell you is what happened to me,” she says. “Maybe Rory can say more.”
He’d just been starting to feel properly sleepy again. He sits up. “What?”
“Maybe.”
“How would I know?”
She turns around. Her face is transfigured by firelight.
“Because you were there,” she says.
32
We came past Korinthos. There were many boats there but all too big, too many people, too many papers. She has to find somewhere small. Quiet. So we go south, west, into empty country. We end up in Arcadia. She talks to men, pays them more money, I guess. I don’t know. I remember she tells me one day that we’re not going to sleep in the car, we’re going to have a room in a taverna. Like a tiny hotel. It’s just a village in the hills, small, very poor, a village taverna with three white rooms, but I remember I’m so excited to sleep in a bed, I think it’s like a palace. She’s very excited too, very happy. She says next day we’re getting on a boat, on the way to England. It’s a beautiful warm evening, we eat outside, by a mountain river. She’s smiling all the time. She’s not always happy but that evening she looks like maybe she’ll come off the ground. She says to me, Silvia, do you know, in the mountains here there is an old temple which belongs to the god Apollo. She says he’s the god of oracles; he’s the one who shows people the future. She’s laughing. She says, That must be your god, Silvia.
“We’re talking in English, I remember. I remember the funny way she says his name, Apollo, with the English o. She tells me she wants to go and say thank you to this god. She’s going to leave me in the white room in the taverna and walk to the temple in the night. I want to go with her but she says no, I need to sleep, the next days will be tiring and maybe it’s hard to sleep on the boat. So when we’re finished eating she takes me to the little room, puts me in bed. She says she will wait to go until I am asleep and come back before I’m awake, so I won’t even know she isn’t there all the time. I remember her sitting in a little wooden chair by the bed, saying that, and I look at her and think, Yes, that’s perfect, I won’t even know. I trust her so much. She can say anything to me and I believe it here, you know? In my heart. I close my eyes and I never see her again. It’s the last thing she ever said to me.
“I woke up early. Maybe even when I’m sleeping I can feel she isn’t there. The room is locked and she’s taken the key. I wait a long time but I know something’s wrong. I climb out of the window and down to the street and go looking for her. Walking. I’m very frightened but I’m more frightened of being by myself without Ygraine so I walk up into the hills alone, the way I think she went. All the time I’m calling, Ygraine, where are you, Ygraine, unless a car comes by, then I hide in the trees. It’s a steep road. I keep walking like that until it’s just coming light.”
“Getting light,” Rory says.
“Then I meet this boy.”
She stops for a long time.
“What boy did you meet?” Iz eventually asks.
“This boy,” Silvia says, without turning away from the fire. “Rory.”
Iz looks at him.
“How old are you?” she says.
“Ten.”
“And this was . . .”
“Twenty years ago,” Silvia says. “Nineteen ninety-three, ninety-four, I’m not sure. I told you, it’s impossible. But it’s the truth.”
Iz shuts her eyes for a moment. “I didn’t say I don’t believe you,” she says. “I spent too long saying that to someone.”
Rory’s sitting bolt upright now. Something inconceivably strange is expanding inside him, impermeable to thought, like a black hole.
“I think because he’s a boy, alone, younger than me, it’s safe to talk to him. I don’t know enough Greek so I talk to him in English. He doesn’t look like a Greek boy anyway. He answers me in Romani. My own language.”
Rory knots his fingers together. They feel solid. They’re picking up the warmth of the fire. He can hear the cat purring. Everything’s steady and straightforward. Everything feels normal.
“He knows my name. He calls me Silvia. I think, He must be a spy, from the orphanage maybe, he wants to take me back there. Or he’s from the police. But he knows things about me and Ygraine so I don’t knock him down or run away. I think he must know where she is. He says he wants to show me something.” Silvia’s reaching to the back of her neck. She unties a knot under her hair and takes off her necklace, the little pouch on its cord. She loosens the pouch and tips its contents into her hand. “He gives me,” she says, swiveling around, “these.”
They have a dull gleam in the light of the fire. They’re so smooth and dark they look wet. Rory falls into the black hole and feels the whole universe turn itself inside out.
Iz leans forward to look. She glides a fingertip over them.
“Acorns,” she whispers, as if they’re exactly what she was expecting.
“I don’t understand what the boy is doing but I take them anyway. Then . . .” She rubs her face, drawing a slow breath. “The sun came over the hills. Suddenly there’s light everywhere. I feel like I’m swimming in it. Everything’
s too bright to look at. The next thing I remember, I’m standing alone again. No boy. But I’m holding these, which he gave me.”
Rory remembers too. How could he not? It was only this morning, or afternoon perhaps. He scooped the acorns out of the fountain and put them in her hand himself.
“Ever since then I carry them. Day and night, all the time. I never take this off except to change the string. Not until now.”
“May I?” Iz says. She’s completely fascinated by the acorns. They’re just random acorns. Rory could have picked up twigs or leaves, there was all sorts of other stuff in the pool. But Silvia lets Iz take them and turn them over between her fingers, one by one.
“It was you, Rory,” Silvia says. “When I saw you on the island, in those ruins, I recognize you straightaway. Even before you tell me your name. Same face, same age, same size, everything. Even your voice is the same though you spoke to me in Romani then and now in English. Why do you think I told Lino to bring you to us, told you everything about us? Do you think I would say who we are, where we’re going, if you are just any English boy on that island?”
Rory’s got no answer.
“That first time I meet you, on that road, in Arcadia, I think afterwards you must be like a god.”
Even though he’s floating around in the middle of his black hole at the center of an unmoored inside-out universe, that gets through to him.
“Me?” he says.
“You know these things about me. You’re just a boy alone but you speak Romani, you say you want to help me. Then the sun rises and”—she raises a hand and flicks the fingers open—“you disappear.”
“But—”
“Then twenty years later I see you on that island where the storm blows me, and you’re still a boy, not older, not younger. Was I right, Rory? Are you the god?”
He’s blushing madly. She’s totally serious. He’s never met anyone who does serious like Silvia. You can’t possibly miss it.
“She had an acorn with her,” Iz says. “Iggy did.” To his relief, Iz is concentrating equally seriously on something different. She’s staring at the little brown pellets as if they might be God too. Perhaps everything is. Perhaps the sodding cat’s actually a god. Rory’s so far out of his depth he’s thinking about standing up and announcing he’ll go to bed now, thanks very much, though he suspects that if he tried getting out of his chair he’d fall over. “On my way here from London I met a man who’d known Iggy,” Iz goes on. “He ended up giving it to me, the acorn. He told me it was hers. He told me it was the only thing she cared about.” She looks at Silvia. “You don’t know why she’d have carried an acorn with her?”
“She used to call me Little Acorn. Like that, in English. Little Acorn. It’s my name, Silvia Ghinda. In Romanian ghinda is acorn. I thought that’s why the boy gives them to me that day. It’s like he’s giving me myself.”
“She fled,” Iz says. “That’s all I know. She was terrified of something. And of the sun, terrified of the sun. That same man I met, he told me she never went outdoors except at night. She did get back to England somehow. That was ninety-four, it must have been quite soon after she left you. She wouldn’t see any of us. She sent us all a letter. The same letter for everyone, I mean, all her family, everyone she knew. I’ll never forget the day I read it. She said she’d discovered she was a sinner and her only hope was Jesus’s forgiveness. She said she was going into hiding and none of us should look for her or expect to hear from her ever again.”
“Jesus’s forgiveness?” Silvia says, incredulous. She takes the acorns back from Iz.
“Yes. She wrote about giving herself into God’s protection. I found out later she joined one of those communities. A Christian retreat. Very near here, actually.”
Silvia looks up sharply. “She lived near here?”
“Very near. Just a few miles away, in the days when that meant anything. I can show you on the map if you like.”
“What’s it called?” Rory says, though he knows. He’s definitely not God, but he does have the strange feeling that the whole of the universe has somehow ended up inside him, instead of the other way around.
“What? The place?”
“That community you were talking about.”
“It was in the grounds of an estate called Trelow.”
“Thought so,” he says, which makes both women look at him with widened eyes. “That’s where I found you,” he tells Silvia.
“I don’t understand,” Iz says.
“Just now. Earlier on today, I mean. When I came into the Valley and was wandering around. I got to that place. Trelow. I saw the name on the signs. That’s where Silvia was when she didn’t know who she was. I mean when, when she was. She didn’t know how old she was; she thought she was a child. She thought she was somewhere else. Then that god showed up and emptied her out completely.” If he knew how to do it he’d explain about giving her the acorns, about how everything she remembers happening ages ago in that place called Arcadia actually happened earlier on today, but there are things words just won’t do, apparently. “It was definitely that place,” he goes on, because they both look like they’re having a hard time believing him. “There were signs for a community center.”
“She lived here?” Silvia says. “So close to where we are?”
“I didn’t find out myself until I was nearly here,” Iz says. “I wasn’t looking for her, I was looking for . . . Someone else.” She’s kneading her hands against each other. “I even found some things that belonged to her. Something she wrote, though you couldn’t read it anymore.”
Silvia has that look on her face which makes Rory suspect she’s forgotten there’s anyone else in the room. “I found her then,” she whispers.
“She must have been with the community two years or so. I never heard from her. She promised we wouldn’t and she meant it. As always.”
“Two years?” Silvia says. “Then what?”
“She got pregnant. I can tell you exactly when that was. It would have been January of ’ninety-six. The Christians obviously didn’t approve. She wasn’t married or anything. So they made her leave. She . . .” Iz is hunched over herself in her chair now. The mess that’s left of her hair hides her face. “She had the baby alone. That’s what killed her. In the end, I mean. She had the baby, a boy, and she brought it to . . .”
Rory watches her squeeze her hands between her thighs.
“She died quite soon afterwards, I think,” Iz goes on. “She suffered terribly from the birth.”
“The child?” Silvia says.
“The boy survived,” Iz whispers, with a minute shake of her head, which means something like I can’t say anything more about this or I’ll die myself.
“My brother,” Silvia says, with a smile.
Startled, Iz looks up.
“She always called me her daughter. I think she means after we come to England and she adopts me, but she says, No, Silvia, as soon as I took you away we become mother and child.” Silvia turns to Rory. “I didn’t tell you the truth. Or Lino, or Per. I don’t come all this way to find a magic ring.” Just like the Professor said, Rory thinks. He should have known, really. “I said this because I need men to help me, the world’s too dangerous to travel on my own. But always I was only looking for her. For Ygraine. Always, all those years, the only thing I want, it’s to find her again. That’s why I make a way to leave you and Per and Lino when I know I’m close.”
She stares at him, calmly unapologetic. She’s not the sort of person you can imagine being sorry for anything they’ve done.
“You went all that way looking for someone who’s been dead for years?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think she’s dead?” Iz says. Her voice has gone scratchy with distress.
“Maybe it’s that. Or maybe she left something behind that’s here still.” She pushes herself across the rug to crouch in front of Iz, arms resting on her knees. “All my life until today,” she says, �
�I know what lies ahead of me. I know that I find what I am looking for. I can’t remember what happened to me after I came in the Valley and now my gift is gone but listen, listen.” She shakes Iz gently but insistently. “I found your sister. Or I found part of her, or what remains from her, whatever she leaves behind. It’s true. Maybe I’ll never remember now but I know it’s the truth. Always, always.”
Iz is shaking her head in despair. “Don’t,” she says. “Please don’t. She’s dead, and her boy’s lost. It’s all finished. Nothing happens here. Nothing more can happen.”
“Look!” Rory says.
The night sky has filled with stars. Behind the muted reflection of firelight in the three sash windows there’s a great chorus of faraway light, like moonlight scattered across the sea except permanent, motionless, and hard, and spread from horizon to horizon. “Look!” he says again, and as the three of them turn to see they hear a sound. It might be falling from the stars themselves it’s so beautiful, though it’s just one voice, a single pristine carol singing on behalf of the innumerable pinpricks of silence.
The two women stand up. They all go to the window. You can’t not go to the window, that’s how amazing the stars are. It’s like the sky’s disappeared entirely and there’s absolutely nothing, not a bubble of air, not a mote, not a molecule between the earth they’re standing on (if it is even still the earth) and the billion suns in the unthinkable distance.
“Holly,” Iz whispers. “I’ve never heard her sing like that before.”
A deep scraping noise echoes down the hallway, making them all jump. The old front doors of the house have just been pushed open. As if in confirmation, a trickle of cold air washes in around their ankles. They all look at each other. Only Silvia has the presence of mind to move: she goes out into the corridor. The doors scrape and creak again, opening wider. Iz clutches at Rory’s shoulder.
“Oh yeah,” he says, slightly ashamed. He should have mentioned this before. “Rose said something about someone coming. Back. Someone coming back.”
Iz turns a slow look on Rory, the kind of look which feels like it might abolish speech altogether. Silvia calls from the hallway.
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