Silo and the Rebel Raiders

by Veronica Peyton

  “Indeed it is!” Mrs. Morgan turned on Silo with a face like thunder. “As Elgarth says, the two of you were friends—or should I say co-conspirators? Surely you must have suspected something?”

  “Why should I?” said Silo desperately.

  “Why?” said Mrs. Morgan, her voice heavy with menace. “Because the two of you are inseparable, that’s why! I believe you to be an accomplice in this, a traitor and a spy: a lying, conniving, ungrateful swamp child.”

  She raised her stick and advanced upon him, her face twitching with rage. Silo backed away, praying for intervention. And his wish was granted, but in a manner that seemed likely to compound rather than alleviate his woes.

  “One moment, please! I have some questions to ask of the Zyco boy.”

  The grating voice was depressingly familiar. The inspector was standing in the doorway.

  “Inspector!” Mrs. Morgan paused. “Forgive the violence of my language. A regrettable incident has just occurred, and I have reason to believe that we are nurturing a viper in our bosom.”

  “You mean Silo Zyco?” said the inspector. “I am of your opinion. That is, in fact, the reason for my visit. I came to warn you of his treasonous nature, but it seems I am too late.”

  “Explain yourself, Inspector.”

  “I have just received disturbing news from the provinces,” said the inspector. “It seems a squad of our collectors have been subjected to an armed assault.”

  He stared at Silo, but Silo remained silent, mystified as to what this had to do with him.

  The inspector continued. “They were sent to collect taxes, rightfully owed to the Government, from a village whose inhabitants had refused to pay. But they were ambushed on the road and viciously attacked. They were taken completely by surprise and regrettably came off very much the worse in the encounter. To date only one of the miscreants has been captured, but he told us they were warned of the collectors’ arrival by a seer—a seer named Silo Zyco.”

  Silo froze in horror. It seemed that the villagers of Baldock had excelled themselves.

  “And there is worse to follow. They stole weapons from the collectors and went on a lawless rampage. They have burned two of our outposts to the ground. They have stolen tax money and, they claim, ‘returned it to the people’—by which they mean squandering it on public feasts and goatball tournaments. Even as we speak they are marauding about the Wildwoods, urging people to join them in revolt.” He glared at Silo. “Can you deny that you are at the root of this anarchy?”

  Suddenly Silo was wild with indignation. “Yes, I did warn them,” he cried, “but why wouldn’t I? I didn’t know those collectors worked for you lot! They were burning things and beating people up. I thought they were just a bunch of psychos.”

  “You are not qualified to judge such matters,” said the inspector, and he gave Silo a shrewd, calculating look. “I confess you surprise me. At first I did not believe you to be a genuine seer. It is a rare gift, and one that our Government values—if it be used in their service, for the maintenance of law and order. But rogue seers—that is another matter altogether.”

  “Indeed it is!” cried Mrs. Morgan. “They are the lowest of the low! Despicable child! You are in very serious trouble.”

  “Yeah,” said Silo heavily, “I figured that one out for myself.”

  To the north of the Capital, hard by the river Rampage, stood the Unicorn Tower. It had loomed over the tangled streets for centuries past but it was a smoke-blackened ruin now, and its windows were rimmed with fangs of shattered glass. All around it ran a high wall topped with spikes. Guards stood watch at the gate, and above was a notice that read PROPERTY OF THE STATE ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIVISION: DEDICATED TO SERVICE, OBEDIENCE, UNITY AND PROGRESS. In the forecourt before the tower stood an untidy clutter of huts, one of which had SUPERINTENDENT FRISK written on the door in letters of gold. It was an office, and at this moment in time it contained a guard, Silo Zyco, and the superintendent himself.

  The superintendent was dressed in a black uniform. The dignity it conferred was somewhat diminished by gravy stains and straining buttons, for he was a big man in both directions. His head was as round as a billiard ball and covered in coarse gray bristles, his eyes unfriendly. The object of their gaze was a disheveled and sulky-looking Silo.

  “So! You’re the Zyco boy. Mrs. Morgan’s told me all about you. Scum from the Eastern Swamps, she tells me, born and raised by criminals. A nasty Zyco; a lying Zyco, friend to traitors and rebels. So they’ve sent you here to learn the error of your evil ways.” He gave Silo a malicious smile. “You’ve been sentenced to ten years of voluntary labor for the State Archaeological Division.”

  With that he opened the ledger that lay before him and added Silo’s name to the bottom of a long list. Silo watched, seething with indignation, as his life was signed away, but the words of protest that rose to his lips were silenced when two words sprang out at him from the page: Orlando Bramble. Even upside down they were unmistakable. So they had caught Orlando too! This was news of the worst kind, but at least it meant that he was not alone in this grim place. He had one friend here at least, and a faint glimmer of hope stirred within him, for perhaps between the two of them they could work out some means of escape. A great bell tolled outside, and Superintendent Frisk laid down his quill and spoke to the guard who stood behind Silo.

  “Now get him out of here.”

  —

  The guard led Silo to a dining hall, a filthy shed lined with trestle tables, and no sooner had he entered than his nostrils were assailed by an appalling stench. Apparently mudfish was on the menu. About thirty children were seated before bowls of something greenish that bubbled, and Silo scanned their faces eagerly, searching for Orlando. And his resolve wavered a little, for they were a sad-looking crew: thin, spectacularly dirty, and unnaturally pale, like a race of creatures that had never seen the sunlight. All wore sacks over their tatty clothes, with holes cut for their heads and arms, and on each was stenciled a bold black number. They were young too, he noticed, mostly younger than himself. And very hungry, for they dared to eat their mudfish broth. He took in this unwelcome information, then walked boldly up to the nearest table and addressed the largest of the children seated there, a hefty girl with a number 2 stenciled on her sack.

  “Where can I find Orlando Bramble?”

  The girl stared at Silo with an expression of bovine suspicion. She appeared to be thinking but evidently found it something of a struggle, for after a few painful moments she abandoned the effort and pointed to a forlorn figure seated alone in a corner. Silo headed over, but as soon as he got a good look at the boy he knew it wasn’t Orlando; not his Orlando, anyway. His Orlando was still at liberty, for this was a puny, fair child even smaller than Silo himself, with a head that looked slightly too large for his body and a pale, freckled face. Silo sat down opposite him, and the boy looked up at him apprehensively with huge brown eyes.

  “You’re not Orlando Bramble,” said Silo.

  “That’s what I told them,” said the boy eagerly, “but they wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Who are you then?”

  “My real name is Maximillian Crow.”

  Silo stared at him in wonderment. So here, finally, was the famous Maximillian Crow! He felt suddenly ashamed of himself for ever having nursed so powerful a hatred for such a sad and pathetic-looking little boy. “I thought you’d be in the Us of Ay by now,” he said.

  “How do you know?” said Maximillian, his eyes wide with wonder. “I told them again and again. The real Orlando Bramble is an unkind boy. I thought he was my friend, but he tricked me. He stole my letter and gave me another one full of lies.”

  His eyes filled with tears at the memory, and Silo found himself judging Orlando severely for playing so mean a trick on the hapless Maximillian, however desperate his circumstances had been at the time.

  “How did you manage to get off the Leviathan?” he asked.

  “They said I had to be a cabin
boy. I had to do the cooking, but I didn’t like it. The ship rocked up and down so much it made me feel very sick. I was sick often, and sometimes I was sick in the cooking. The captain got very angry. He said bad words, and once he threatened to throw me overboard. But when we’d been sailing for a week we met a ship that was going back to Mainland, and our captain told them to take me back with them. I was sick on that ship too. Once I was sick in the captain’s boots. He was a rude man. When we got back to land the captain gave me a letter and told me to deliver it to the State Archaeological Division. I told the people there that I was Maximillian Crow but they laughed at me. They said I was a liar called Orlando Bramble and they sent me here to dig things up. I think they’re rude, mean people.”

  It struck Silo that Maximillian was not cut out for seafaring—or probably any other profession, come to that. He had the gift of the seeing, and for vomiting in inconvenient places, but it was an unusual combination of talents and not one that guaranteed a smooth passage through life.

  “They say you used to have three seeings in a single day,” Silo said. “Is that true?”

  “It used to be,” said Maximillian sadly. “But not anymore.”

  “Why not? Have you lost your gift?”

  “No. Now I have dozens and dozens. They get in the way. Sometimes I don’t know where I am or which time I’m in, or if what’s happening is true or not. It’s awful. I had a seeing where the lookout tower in Herringhaven fell, but I didn’t know when it would happen—tomorrow, or next week, or next year. I was going to tell my parents about it when they came home. But they never did.”

  His eyes brimmed with tears again and Silo, who was useless at coping with weeping people, racked his brains for a more cheerful subject. But it was unnecessary. A tall girl came striding across the dining room and stood before him. She was wearing a number 28 sack and gray breeches, and had long bony arms and legs and a mass of wild tawny hair. Her bottom lip was thrust out, giving her face an expression of savage discontent, and her bright green eyes blazed with anger. Silo recognized her immediately as the lettuce thrower from the south gate; to his horror, for he had already seen the havoc she could cause with a simple salad vegetable, he saw that she held a fork in her hand.

  He sprang to his feet and fixed her with his most powerful stare. “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “They arrested me for braining your friend.” She scowled. “I’m charged under Section 303 of the State Criminal Code—Deployment of a Vegetable with Malicious Intent.”

  “Serves you right.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought he was Maximillian Crow.”

  Behind him, Silo heard the real Maximillian emit a squeak of terror.

  “What’s your problem with Maximillian Crow?” asked Silo.

  “Everyone hates government-approved seers,” said the girl. “Most of them are useless, but they use the good ones to spy on people, tell them what they’re going to get up to in the future. And Maximillian Crow was supposed to be a very good one.”

  “The Government don’t approve of him anymore,” said Silo. “He was an impostor.”

  “Yeah, so I heard. The guards were talking about it. And they said you started a tax rebellion out in the Wildwoods.”

  Silo sensed faint approval in her voice. He shrugged. “So?”

  “So it sounds like you and I are fighting on the same side.”

  She dropped the fork and offered him a grimy hand. “I’m sorry about beaning your friend. My name’s Ruby.”

  Silo took it with some reluctance, for he was not a boy who easily forgave an injury. “I’m Silo Zyco.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Ruby. “And word has it you’re a genuine seer. Could be useful, that. I’m working on an escape plan—maybe you could help.” She nodded toward Maximillian. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Yes,” said Silo.

  Ruby gave him a pitying look, and at that moment a bell rang, deafening in the narrow confines of the dining room. When it finally fell silent she said: “We’ll talk this evening. I’ll be waiting for you in the washroom.”

  “Back to work, the lot of you!” Superintendent Frisk had appeared in the doorway. A gigantic bunch of keys hung from his belt, and they jangled with his every movement. “Move it!”

  The children rose as one and scurried for the door. Silo followed at a more leisurely pace, with Maximillian trotting at his side. He looked up at Silo with anxious eyes.

  “Is it true what you said to that rough girl?” he said. “That you’re my friend?”

  Silo sighed. Maximillian seemed badly in need of one. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said grudgingly.

  “Thank you! I’ve never had a friend before.”

  Silo was not altogether surprised. Maximillian slipped a small and grubby hand into his, and together they walked out of the dining hall and toward the Unicorn Tower.

  —

  It stood, partially collapsed, amid a great mound of rubble. Maximillian led him to a well-worn path twisting upward between chunks of concrete and twisted girders. When they entered through one of its many windows, Silo stood astounded on the threshold.

  The scale of it was awesome. For the first time in his life he was standing in one of the great buildings of the Ancients, and the sheer size of it took his breath away. High above his head, rusting girders protruded from the smoke-blackened walls, but the floors they had supported had collapsed long ago, and now the shafts of sunlight that fell through the shattered windows illuminated a vast open space. And jutting out into the void was a great platform, crudely constructed from heavy planks. Silo walked to the end of it, peered cautiously down (for he hated heights), and saw an area the size of a field way below, the sunlight barely reaching its depths. At its center a tall stone plinth rose like an island, and on it were carved in letters a foot high: INVEST IN UNICOM FOR A BETTER TOMORROW. Two gigantic bronze statues stood upon it, a man and a woman dressed in the strange garb of the Ancients. They held briefcases in their hands and strode forward arm in arm, with radiant smiles on their faces, into what Silo presumed was a Better Tomorrow. But if this was the Better Tomorrow, he shuddered to think what kind of day yesterday had been, for the scene below him seemed like a vision of hell. He was staring down into one of the State Archaeological Division’s excavation sites, and the area around the statues was a chaos of pits and piles of earth bisected by serpentine paths. The dizzying drop made his head spin, and he raised his eyes only to see a vulture glide down to perch on the shoulder of the Unicom woman. It seemed to eye him with interest, and Silo hastily backed away and examined the platform on which he stood. To his right was a big wooden bucket beside a pulley, and crates labeled FRAGILE—ANCIENT ARTIFACTS were stacked all around them. And to his left stood a treadmill, a great wheel supported by upright beams, positioned on the very edge of the platform. It was evidently used as a winch to haul loads up from below, for its circumference was wrapped with heavy chains from which hung a huge basket. And it was powered by children, for as Silo watched, the bigger boys and girls were filing into it and taking their places inside its giant wheel.

  “You! New boy!” Frisk handed Silo a sack with holes cut in it. “You’ll wear this at all times. You have no name here, only a number. You’re Twenty-Nine. And you’re a small boy, and a bony boy, and not strong enough to work the treadmill, by the looks of you. So you’ll dig. Why is it that all our volunteers are so very weedy?”

  “Because you feed them on mudfish?” said Silo. He instantly wished he hadn’t, for Frisk struck him a savage blow around the ear.

  “You’ll not answer back to me! Ever! And you will address me as Superintendent Frisk. Always! Now get yourself down to the diggings!”

  Twelve children were now in position inside the treadmill, preparing to winch down the great basket. The rest of the children were scrambling into it, ready to be lowered into the darkness below and commence work on the Division’s mysterious digging. An anxious Maximillian tugged Silo toward it, and Silo, aver
ting his eyes from the nauseating drop beneath them, climbed cautiously aboard.

  “Lower away!” roared Frisk. The children in the treadmill strained forward, and then the great wheel creaked to life and, with a rattle of chains, the basket began its descent into the void.

  Down and down they went, a hundred feet or more, down to below ground level. When they reached the bottom there was a damp, dank earthy smell, and Silo examined his new workplace with growing depression. There was a deep layer of mud and rubble underfoot and great pits had been dug in it. In their shadowy depths he discerned jumbled objects protruding at strange angles from the earthy walls; a ferret-faced man in a black uniform was waiting to greet them.

  “Get to work, all of you. You! Number Twenty-Nine! My name is Officer Feeton, but you may call me sir. Come over here!”

  Silo came, with Maximillian hard on his heels.

  “Is Number Thirteen a friend of yours?”

  “Yes,” said Silo resignedly.

  “That’s ‘Yes, sir’ in future. If he’s a friend of yours, you’re to stop him from daydreaming. And if he’s sick one more time, he’s in for a beating. Got it? You can begin here. Get a shovel and start digging in this spot. Any interesting objects, you’re to ease them out carefully.”

  Silo eyed the surrounding junk. “Define interesting. Sir.”

  “All of it, Number Twenty-Nine, all of it. Everything in here is a genuine Ancient artifact, and the Division is interested in every single little piece of it.”

  —

  Silo was exhausted when he emerged from the Unicorn Tower that evening. He and the others were herded into a cavernous dormitory lit by skylights in the roof twenty feet above. They were barred, and the evening light fell through them in broad stripes of light and shadow, illuminating rows of bunk beds. On each was a little nest of straw and a few pitiful possessions—spoons, combs, and battered tin mugs. The aisles between them were strung with lines of washing.

  “You can sleep in the bunk under mine,” said Maximillian. “It’s empty.”