This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by V. Peyton
Cover art copyright © 2015 by Iacopo Bruno
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in paperback as Silo the Seer by Corgi Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK, London, in 2015.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Peyton, V. (Veronica), author.
Title: Silo and the Rebel Raiders / V. Peyton.
Other titles: Silo the seer
Description: First U.S. edition. | New York : Delacorte Press [2016] | Originally published in the United Kingdom by Corgi Books in 2015 under title: Silo the seer. | Summary: A ten-year-old boy who can see the future is recruited by the Capitol to help keep the people safe.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015043617 (print) | LCCN 2016019671 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-399-55241-0 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-399-55242-7 (ebk)
Subjects: | CYAC: Extrasensory perception—Fiction. | Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P515 Si 2016 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.P515 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780399552427
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: The Island
Chapter 2: What Happened at the Hump
Chapter 3: Maximillian Crow
Chapter 4: The Red Hand
Chapter 5: Orlando
Chapter 6: The Capital
Chapter 7: The School for Seers
Chapter 8: The Seeing
Chapter 9: The Unicorn Tower
Chapter 10: News from the Island
Chapter 11: Drusilla Creates a Stink
Chapter 12: On the Rampage
Chapter 13: How Aquinus Became Accursed
Chapter 14: The Sea Pig
Chapter 15: The Sea of Souls
Chapter 16: The Battle of Lundun
Chapter 17: Zyco the Psycho
Chapter 18: The Homecoming
About the Author
To Colin Murray
Silo Zyco, Thirteenth Chronicle Keeper for the Islanders, took pen in hand and prepared to make his last-but-one entry. The Chronicles were 350 years old and Silo was ten. But although he often distrusted old things—most adults and the Ancients, to name but two—he was proud to be Chronicle Keeper. They were the only books he had, and he knew them by heart. The first entry of the first volume was written on 1 April 113 and read:
On this day we four families—Beans, Mudfords, Pattles, and Zycos—arrived here at this lonely island in the marsh in the hope that we might live here in peace and security, and that by our honest labor build here a community that ages to come shall marvel at.
Well, they had certainly achieved that, thought Silo, although perhaps not in the way they had hoped. The peace and security had been a bit optimistic too. He skimmed through years 113 to 213, reading random entries:
Fires on the western horizon. The Uplands are burning.
A great flood. Many houses destroyed.
Died today, Brian Bean, aged thirty-two. Killed by Elmo Zyco over Eel Rights.
The mud fever has returned.
Today the lookout tower was struck by lightning.
And so on for 250 years: the story of lives lived on the margins, of years of hardship when fish and eels were scarce, of floods and drownings and mysterious diseases, violent deaths, family feuds, and the treachery of Uplanders. These were the contents of the Chronicles. The very books themselves told a story, for the first Chronicle was a handsome volume with smooth white pages, while the most recent book was made of ragged gray sheets roughly stitched together. Silo drew it toward him, dipped his quill, and wrote a new entry in small neat writing, as clear as print. Previous Chronicle Keepers had sometimes been chatty or long-winded, and one had included some bad poems about geese, but there were only a dozen pages left, so Silo kept it short:
20 April 366: Today the government inspector arrived.
Of course, it was early morning still, and it hadn’t happened yet. The inspectors turned up about once every five years, and Silo dearly hoped that they would come today, because if they did, it would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was a seer.
To be a seer was to have a rare and precious gift. Seers could see into the future, and a good one would have a glorious career in the Capital. There had been many famous and successful seers in the past, legendary figures whose achievements were still talked about. Elmore Davis had saved hundreds of lives when he predicted raging fires in the Western Wilds. Emma Aberdeen’s seeings had kept the whole north coast warned of storms and tidal waves for almost thirty years. Chelsea Payne had seen the Great Crab Pox Epidemic of 308, and the whole Capital was evacuated in time to prevent a terrible disaster. Silo wished to be counted among their number, but the problem was, he wasn’t sure if he was a very good seer, let alone a great one. He often saw pictures in his mind that didn’t seem to belong there, but he had to admit that his mind could be a messy place at times. But last night he had seen, as clear as day, two horsemen approaching from the Uplands. It was a seeing—not a very impressive one, perhaps, but he was sure his gift would improve with time. Silo stared moodily at the entry in the Chronicles for a moment, then stood up with sudden determination. The inspector would come today, and Silo would be ready for him.
—
Silo’s hut was the same one that had always belonged to the Chronicle Keepers. It was a modest two-story building, with the ground floor used for smoking eels, and the whole place smelled strongly of them, as indeed did Silo himself. The top floor was his home, where he lived alone, an oblong room without much in it. He wrote the Chronicles on a table that stood against one of the short walls beneath the only window. A hammock was slung from the beams at the other end, and there was a bucket to catch drips from a leak in the roof, which doubled as a useful fresh water supply. It had rained in the night and the bucket was nearly full. Silo stared glumly at his reflection for a moment—black hair, white face, blue eyes—then plunged his head in, and from there progressed to other parts of his body until he had had a thorough wash. He wanted to look his best. Clothes were a problem, though, as Islanders dressed differently from Uplanders. Islanders had a great deal of wet and muddy work—eel trapping, duck hunting, reed cutting, fishing, and so forth—and they found it convenient to dress with extreme simplicity, and occasionally not at all. They went barefoot, and both men and women wore a sleeveless knee-length garment resembling a sack. Silo possessed two of these, and both were actually made of sacks, roughly taken in to fit his small body and with holes cut for his head and arms.
He chose the one without cabbage written on it and pulled it on. He tied a belt of knotted cord around his waist and hung his knife on one side and his slingshot on the other. This morning he would be leaving the safety of the marsh and wanted to be prepared in case he met a zoo animal. Silo put on his cloak and slung his bow and a quiver of arrows o
ver his shoulder, then hesitated for a moment over his boots. He had inherited the characteristic webbed feet of the Zyco family, long-toed and rather large for the rest of him, but his boots were larger still. He decided to stuff the toes with rags and carry them. He would put them on just before he met the inspector. Uplanders noticed things like boots, or the lack of them.
Silo stepped out into the damp morning air and walked along the alley running steeply downhill to the dock. It was early and not many people were stirring yet, but Boris Bean yelled from an upstairs window, “Zyco the psycho, going for a hike-o!” Silo decided to ignore him, for this morning he had more important things on his mind. He reached the quay and the lonely expanse of the marsh spread out before him, stretching flat and bleak beneath a leaden sky. At high tide all this would be awash but now, at low water, little islands were surrounded by mud with only bright threads of water trickling through the wider channels. Between the marsh and the open sea lay the great sweep of the Causeway, a huge seawall that dated back hundreds of years to the time of the Ancients. Once it must have led all the way to the Island, but it had broken many years ago, before the first entry to the Chronicles was written, and now the muddy brown waters of Goose Creek lay between them.
Hitched to the foot of the jetty was Silo’s prize possession, a tiny raft made of driftwood. Like all the Island children he was at home on the water, and he sent it skimming over the ruffled waters of Goose Creek with sure strokes of his paddle, balanced as delicately as a cat. The salt wind tugged at his tattered clothing and then the first drops of rain, big as coins, pitted the surface of the creek. He secured his raft to the end of the Causeway and squelched and scrambled his way to the top and onto the broad track that curved away to the Uplands four miles distant. Silo pulled his cloak over his head and padded forth, with only the slop of the waves and the cry of the marsh birds for company. There was a solitary tree at the end of the Causeway, the only one in all the marsh, but it was long dead, killed by a lightning strike, and had been lopped for firewood so that its stunted branches reached to the sky like the fingers of a mangled hand. It marked the end of the marsh and the beginning of the Uplands and stood all alone in the bleak landscape. When Silo finally reached it he wormed his back into a deep scar in its trunk, and there, partially protected from the rain, he put on his boots and settled down to wait.
They came a few hours later from the low hills to the south. The first in sight was a small hairy brown man on a small hairy brown horse. Silo dimly remembered him from their last visit five years ago. He was followed by a man he didn’t recognize but who must surely be the inspector himself, a lean and miserable-looking man, splendidly dressed and riding a much larger horse. Following up behind was an enormous white horse that was hairy of leg, mighty of belly, and loaded with baggage. The horses impressed Silo. The Islanders kept no animals because the damp climate of the marsh was disagreeable to them (4 September 114: Left today, Mill Mudford’s dog, Lucky. Swam to the Uplands), and Silo thought horses awesome creatures.
The inspector was complaining to the hairy brown man: “Are you sure this is the right road, Ruddle? It leads straight into a swamp.”
“Yes, sir. There’s a swamp right enough, but the Island is actually in the swamp.”
Silo thought it was time to make his presence known.
“It’s not a swamp, it’s a marsh,” he said, then added, “I came to meet you.”
The inspector eyed Silo. He saw an undersized bony boy with black hair and a white face. With his pointed chin and ears he looked a little like an elf, a moody one, and he had bright, very blue eyes of an unnatural intensity. The inspector had the uneasy feeling that the boy was looking not just at him, but also at the contents of his head and something several miles behind him. He shifted his gaze and noticed that Silo was wearing a sack, bristled with weaponry, and had unusually large feet for his size. He smelled of something the inspector could not quite place but made him wonder how long it would be until dinner.
“Hello, son.” The man called Ruddle reined in his horse and smiled, revealing a mouthful of rotten teeth. “And who might you be?”
“My name is Silo Zyco. I’m a seer, Thirteenth Chronicle Keeper for the Islanders, and I know how to make coffee out of seaweed.” Silo wanted to make a good impression and he mentioned this last because it was an unusual accomplishment for a ten-year-old—or anyone, for that matter.
“You’re very young to be Chronicle Keeper, aren’t you?” said the inspector coolly.
“I’m ten.”
“But surely that’s a job for an adult?”
Silo hesitated before replying. He suspected that the inspector held the usual Uplander’s view of the Islanders—that they were a backward and uneducated race—and it was rather difficult to explain things without proving him right.
“The adults on the Island mostly don’t read and write too well. The old teacher was Miss Mudford and…well, they say she was good once, but she got the mud fever and it settled on her brain. After that the things she taught were”—Silo struggled to find the exact word for the nature of Miss Mudford’s teachings—“unusual.”
“And so who taught you?”
“Ryker. He was an Uplander. He was good. That’s why the young ones can read and write better than the old ones.”
“An Uplander?” The inspector made a sweeping gesture that took in mile upon mile of mud and marsh. “Why would an Uplander come to live in a place like this?”
Silo shrugged. They’d all wondered about that.
“And why did you come to meet us?”
Silo stated the obvious. “To prove I’m a seer. If I’d waited until you got to the Island and then said I knew you were coming, you’d think I was lying.”
The inspector nodded and nudged his horse forward. The interview was at an end and had not gone as well as Silo had hoped. Ruddle gave him a friendly wink as they moved off down the Causeway, and when he thought they were out of earshot the inspector spoke, but his words blew back on the wind:
“These Islanders, Ruddle—who appoints a ten-year-old as Chronicle Keeper? And what kind of person teaches a child to make coffee out of seaweed?”
As he plodded after them Silo thought fondly of Ryker, who had taught him to make coffee out of seaweed, and blessed whatever quirk of fate had led him to the Island.
—
Ryker had arrived one day about five years ago. Ben Mudford was manning the lookout tower and rang the signal bell to warn of visitors, so when Ryker arrived there was quite a crowd waiting for him. His little boat was full of water and he was bailing furiously. He nearly made it but not quite. A few yards from the quay the boat lurched and he stood up, revealing himself to be a long lean man of unusual height dressed in Uplander clothes. As he stood the boat sank beneath him and he descended smoothly into the waters of Goose Creek, finally coming to rest with it up to his chin. His long dark hair and beard swirled about his head and he fixed the assembled crowd with shining brown eyes.
“Good morning, Marshlanders. Any chance of breakfast?”
And that evening a new entry appeared in the Chronicles, written in the uncertain hand of one of Miss Mudford’s students:
2 November 361: Today arrived RykR, UplandR and strangR on a 6-weak vizit.
The six-week visit had been touch and go to begin with. The Islanders were naturally curious to know what he was doing there. But he wouldn’t exactly say. When he mentioned, over a breakfast of eels, that it just seemed a nice place to visit they felt doubtful; when he went on to speak of the joys of the fresh sea air, the beauty of the marsh, and the pleasures of solitude they became downright suspicious, fearing they were harboring a Raider or a tax evader or something worse. Allman Bean, the village headman, told him he must leave by nightfall. Ryker made no immediate objection but presently he mentioned, in a casual way, that he knew how to make coffee out of seaweed. Headman Bean thought intently. It came hard to him as he was not a clever man, but he was one who enjoyed a spot o
f coffee, and coffee-making was a lost art on the Island (21 March 350: Died today, coffee-maker Morris Mudford aged 70, of mud fever).
“Seaweed, hmm? Who would have thought it possible?” A long pause. “And so how long does it take to make, this coffee of yours?”
“If this mild weather continues, and given a plentiful supply of bladder wrack, and peat for roasting, I could have it ready in six weeks.”
Six weeks it was, then, and next morning Ryker was gathering seaweed at the tide line.
He used his six weeks wisely. He made himself an expert on Eel Rights. He took over the Chronicle keeping and village accounts, discovering that the Uplanders were overcharging the Islanders for almost everything. He made a new flood-warning system, a magnificent wooden horn powered by bellows that could be heard all over the marsh, and fixed it on top of the lookout tower. Ben Mudford was delighted and caused widespread panic when he tested it unexpectedly one night.
Finally the coffee was ready for Headman Bean and a couple of his brothers to test. They drank; they clutched their throats. Their eyes bulged, then streamed with tears, and they uttered small cries of distress. But then, puzzlingly, the Beans recovered themselves and called for a second cup, and then a third and even a fourth. It seemed that the taste was unpleasant but the results satisfactory, and from that day on Ryker stayed on the Island.
Now he turned his attention to the school, or rather lack of it, for Miss Mudford (she of the unusual teachings) had taken to spending long hours on the dock peering into the murky waters below, and occasionally shouting abusive words at the mudfish that gathered there. Ryker tactfully suggested that, as she was a busy woman, he could help her by teaching the occasional class. The proposal pleased her, and from then on Ryker spent his mornings teaching while she spent hers insulting fish, an arrangement that seemed to give pleasure to both.
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