—
That had been almost four months ago, and the beginning of the worst times that Silo could remember. Life had become lonely and cheerless. Now not only his entire family but even the man who had taken him in had died sudden and violent deaths, and an aura of bad luck hung over him like a cloud. Silo Zyco, Death-Bringer, Family-Killer, Hoarder of Eel Rights.
But today the inspector had come. Standing in the shadows outside the meeting hall, Silo prayed that he would whisk him off to the Uplands, the Capital, or beyond: somewhere far away from the Island to a place where no one knew him and he could shrug off his miserable past like a snake shedding its skin. Emma Pattle had just finished telling the story of the great wave and its aftermath, and the inspector was making the exact same comment that certain members of the Bean family had: “I’m surprised he didn’t think to warn his family.” Silo scowled.
“There wasn’t time,” said Emma, then added, “Besides, they weren’t the sort to listen.”
“You are claiming, then,” said the inspector, “that this boy can accurately predict the arrival of birds, beasts, fish, and floods. Let’s put it to the vote. All those of you who think Silo Zyco is a seer will raise your right hand.”
All the Mudfords and Pattles raised their hands, and most of the Beans too, until they noticed that their headman was sitting with his arms moodily crossed, then hurriedly put them down again.
“I take that to be a majority vote,” said the inspector. “Where is Silo Zyco?”
Silo pushed open the door and stepped into the hall.
“Silo Zyco,” he said, “your community believes you to be a seer. As you no doubt know, the Government has an interest in seers. Therefore, you will accompany us to the Capital, where your abilities will be examined by the relevant authorities.”
There was a sudden buzz of excitement in the hut, but he silenced it with an upraised hand.
“It is your duty to name the next Chronicle Keeper, and I suggest you would be wise to choose an older person.”
“Lula Pattle,” said Silo without hesitation. Lula was eleven and had been one of Ryker’s best students. She had an identical twin sister, equally clever, called Lily. Lula and Lily did everything together, and Silo was sure that between them they would do a good job.
“Meeting dismissed.”
The Islanders stood up and headed for the door, everyone talking at once. It was the first time in recorded history that an Islander had been summoned to the Capital, and a crowd of Mudfords and Pattles gathered around to congratulate him, among them Lula, who shot him a look of radiant gratitude. Silo felt dazed by the success of his plan. He escaped from his well-wishers as soon as he politely could.
Silo went back to his hut and made his last entry.
I, Silo Zyco, was accepted as a seer and will accompany the inspector to the Capital.
As he finished, there was a knock at the door and Lula and Lily Pattle edged their way into the room. Lily, Silo was happy to see, was carrying a plate containing a seaweed dumpling. They and their family were his next-door neighbors, and their mother, Emma, had often sent him plates of food since Ryker’s death.
“Oh, Silo,” said Lula, “thank you so much for making us—I mean, me—Chronicle Keeper. Mum and Dad are so pleased! We’ve come so you can show us—I mean, me—what to do…”
“…and we’ve brought you a dumpling,” said Lily.
“Thanks.” Silo speared it with the tip of his knife and pushed the tools of the Chronicle Keeper’s trade across the table: a bundle of goose-quill pens, a bottle of squid ink, and the precious book itself.
“Everything you write in the Chronicles must be true, and the hut goes with the job. Good luck with it.”
“We get the hut?” Lula and Lily beamed at him.
Silo recalled that the twins had six younger brothers and sisters and that the Pattles’ house was rather a small one.
“Thanks, Silo! This is brilliant.” Lula and Lily lunged in at the same time, and both gave him great hugs and kissed him on the top of the head. Silo blushed scarlet, and at just that moment the door swung open to reveal Ruddle, guide to the government inspector.
“Saying good-bye to your little girlfriends, then?” He smiled what was probably meant as a friendly smile but, given the state of his teeth, was actually rather terrifying. Lula and Lily uttered small screams and scurried past him into the night. With as much dignity as he could muster, Silo waited for Ruddle to tell him why he was there. But Ruddle was in no hurry. He was a sturdy little man with unkempt brown and gray hair, which grew thickly from his scalp, chin, and ears. Set within its hairy frame, his face had a battered, weather-beaten appearance. His eyes were brown, as were his teeth, and he wore layer upon layer of patched, dung-colored clothing.
“Don’t you worry, son—there’s plenty of pretty girls in the Capital,” he said at last; then, “So you’re a seer, are you? A rare ability, that, but then you specialize in rare abilities, don’t you? You mentioned earlier that you knew how to make coffee out of seaweed.”
Now Silo knew. He reached for a jug of evil-smelling liquid under the table, filled a cleanish cup, and handed it to Ruddle. Ruddle peered into its oily depths, and for a fleeting moment a look of doubt crossed his hairy features, but then he tossed it back in a single gulp. It had the usual effect. He beat the table with his fists. He choked, tears ran from his eyes, and his whole body shook with powerful spasms. And then the power of speech returned to him.
“So you’re a seer. There’s lots that say they are, but the genuine item—now, that’s very rare. Word’s got around that the Government wants ’em, you see, and there’s lots of people who want to go to the Capital and get a government job. That lad at the meeting, for instance—what a pack of lies! But then it stands to reason a swamp boy like him wouldn’t know anything about the big city. Best to stick to things you know, isn’t it, son?”
Here he winked at Silo and raised his empty cup, which Silo dutifully refilled.
“Geese, now, and eels and seals and floods. I dare say a smart boy like you, living in a place like this, knows all sorts about them. And the people here, they’re…quite simple people, shall we say—maybe the kind of people that a smart boy could fool. So nice work, son. I’d like to know how you found out about us coming, though.”
Ruddle smiled his unsettling smile and rose, a little unsteadily, to his feet. “I thank you for the coffee, and be sure you’re ready early tomorrow. The inspector’s in a hurry to leave. He’s no great man for swamps, and eels don’t agree with him.”
He lurched out, leaving Silo puzzling over his words. Ruddle obviously thought he was a liar but seemed to have been congratulating him on being a good one. And then there was another knock at the door.
This time it was Ben Mudford, keeper of the lookout tower. Silo liked Ben for the simple reason that Ben had always been kind to him, and he had happy memories of the hours they had spent together at the top of the tower, staring out to sea. Ben was good at silence, but tonight it seemed he had something important to say.
“Well, Silo, you’ll be leaving us tomorrow, but there’s something I have to tell you before you go. She said I’d know when the time came and I think it has.”
His tanned face flushed slightly. “I liked your mother a lot, Silo—asked her to marry me, in fact. But she wouldn’t have me. She was a lovely woman, though, your mother. She wasn’t like the rest of the Zycos.”
Silo took this to mean that she was neither a thief, nor a liar, nor a homicidal maniac. He waited for more.
“No one knows who your dad is, but I think he was an Uplander and I think she was waiting for him to come back. She used to spend hours with me up the lookout tower, just standing there with you in her arms and staring northward. Like she was expecting somebody.”
A long-forgotten memory rose from fathoms deep in Silo’s mind. He remembered his younger, happier self sitting on the rail at the top of the tower and gazing out to sea. His mother stood behind
him with her warm arms wrapped around him and her long hair swirling in the wind, whipping across his face and tickling his nose. For a moment it made him feel so sad he wished he had never remembered.
Ben delved into some hidden pocket in his sack. “The thing is, when she realized she was dying she gave me something to give you when the time came: something about your dad. Here!”
He handed Silo a large, much-folded piece of paper. Silo opened it and read, in huge black letters:
WANTED
SHILOH AQUINUS,
also known as AQUINUS THE ACCURSED, for Dog Theft, Horse Theft, Tax Theft, Fire Raising, Impersonating a Member of the Armed Forces, Obtaining Weapons by Unlawful Means, Consorting with Enemies of the State, and the Destruction of Government Property. A Reward of Fifty Gold Crowns to Any Person Providing Information Leading to his Arrest or Capture.
“She left you a message too,” said Ben. “She said it was your destiny to complete the great work your father started.”
“What, stealing dogs?” Silo was stunned.
“Is that what it says?” said Ben. “That doesn’t sound so good, but maybe someone was treating the dog unkindly.”
Silo realized for the first time that Ben couldn’t read—he had been, after all, one of Miss Mudford’s old students. He read the notice aloud and Ben’s kindly face clouded.
“Well, he does sound like a bit of a wild one. But your mum liked him and she was a good sort of woman. She gave you his name, didn’t she? Could be it’s all lies.”
Shiloh—Silo. Yes, she had given him his father’s name, or tried to. Silo realized that not only was his father a dangerous criminal but he himself was a spelling mistake. Thoroughly depressed, he examined the paper again.
“It doesn’t even say what he looks like. Shouldn’t they have put a description?”
“Your father’s a bit of a mystery,” said Ben, then added, “You have your mother’s feet, Silo—webbed, that is—but otherwise you don’t look a bit like her. So I imagine your father’s a blue-eyed man, and probably a bit on the short side.”
He stood up, patted Silo heavily on the shoulder, and left him alone with his thoughts. Silo Zyco, last of the Zycos, son of Aquinus the Accursed, Spelling Error.
—
He rose very early the next morning, dressed as he had the previous day, then wrapped the poster detailing his father’s many crimes into his spare sack and stuffed it under his belt. He was ready.
Ruddle was saddling the horses outside the meeting hall, smiling his ruinous smile. “Bright and early, I see! You’ll be riding Blossom here.”
Blossom was the huge white packhorse and smelled strongly, although not of blossoms.
“Don’t you worry,” said Ruddle, seeing his look of alarm. “She’s a gentle beast. She’ll see you to the Capital safe and sound—won’t you, my lovely?”
Blossom towered above him and had hooves the size of dinner plates, but her dark eyes were kindly and Silo felt somewhat comforted. The inspector had stayed at Headman Bean’s house for the night, and now he came striding up from the direction of the communal toilets, a look of barely concealed horror on his face.
“Everything ready, Ruddle? Then let’s get out of this godforsaken hellhole.”
And half an hour later Silo was looking back at said hellhole, his home for ten years, and wondering what the future held. His gift of the seeing had given him no clues, but considering what lay in store, that was probably just as well.
The first week was wet and painful. It rained nonstop and Silo, unused to horse riding, ached in every bone in his body. The Uplanders thought themselves greatly superior to the Islanders, but for the life of him Silo couldn’t see why; the Uplands turned out to be a bleak, flat country dotted with huts that seemed to contain as many pigs as people. Silo had never seen a pig before and thought them endearing creatures, but even so he didn’t think he’d care to share a room with one. On their second day they skirted a deserted town that dated back to the time of the Ancients, and even in ruins the buildings that remained looked more impressive than those of the Uplanders.
“Why don’t people still live there?” Silo asked Ruddle.
“They’re afraid to,” he replied. “Fact is, the Ancients did a lot of things that don’t seem quite right. There’s legends that they could fly through the air and talk to people hundreds of miles away. There’s plenty who think they were sorcerers who used dark powers to do all these things. But something went wrong, didn’t it? Their world died in the Great Catastrophe, and maybe that was because those powers turned against them. The Government, now—they’s very keen to make a new world like theirs, but most normal folk think they were a crew of black magicians and good riddance to them.”
Silo was surprised. On the Island, people hadn’t spared much thought for the Ancients. The only evidence of their existence had been the Causeway and the Island itself, and both were on such a massive scale that they had been seen almost as geological features, placed there long ago by a helpful race of giants. It seemed that he still had much to learn about the world.
—
They followed a meandering route through the Uplands so the inspector could extract taxes from every village, however small and remote. Silo and Ruddle were always left to fend for themselves. Their first job was to see to the horses, and Silo was glad to help with this, for he had grown fond of Blossom. She turned out to be a sympathetic, kind-hearted animal and on the occasions when he fell off she neither galloped away nor trod on him, but simply waited patiently for him to remount before resuming her stately progress. And once the horses were settled, Ruddle’s thoughts turned to food. Silo thought the Uplanders a miserable bunch on the whole, but Ruddle had a cheerful way about him, which, together with his huge stock of stories and keen appetite for gossip, made him a welcome guest in most of the villages they stopped at. Ruddle would introduce him briefly to the company:
“This here’s Silo. Silo’s coming to the Capital with us. Seems like he might be a seer. Excuse the way he’s dressed, but he’s from the Eastern Swamps and they do things a little differently there.”
“It’s not a swamp, it’s a marsh,” Silo would say, then spend the rest of the evening in silence.
Ruddle urged him to be more sociable. “You’re a useful lad, Silo, but you’re the quiet type—not much of a one for a laugh or a joke, are you? You should cheer up a bit. You’d find the world a nicer place for it. Smile and the world smiles with you, that’s what they say.”
Privately Silo thought that faced with Ruddle’s smile, the world might reel back in horror, but he didn’t say so because he had grown to like the man. He may have thought Silo was a liar, but he treated him kindly, which was more than could be said of the inspector. Silo didn’t like him and was rather pleased to learn, listening to Ruddle’s new friends talk in the evenings, that no one else did either. Everyone was very polite to his face, but behind his back it was a different matter. The Uplanders were poor, and the inspectors and their taxes were universally hated. But so were people who said they were seers, because so many had lied to get the job. This didn’t bother him much, but at that particular moment he almost wished he didn’t have the gift. He had just had another seeing and it was a bad one: Ruddle was going to be eaten by a zoo animal.
Silo didn’t know much about zoo animals because there weren’t any in the marshes, but he knew they were dangerous and could kill a man. People said that long ago the Ancients had kept them as pets, but times had changed, or maybe the animals had. Silo had heard stories about areas where people would only travel in armed bands, fearful of attack by hungry beasts. His seeing had been vivid. He had seen a track running through a meadow bright with buttercups. Ruddle had been sprawled on it, his horse galloping off into the distance, and a huge brown animal, fearsome of tooth and claw, had been lunging toward him with an evil expression in its eye. Ruddle had been struggling to rise, but it was obvious he wouldn’t be quick enough, and Silo was relieved that the seeing ha
d ended when it had, as what followed promised to be extremely gruesome. He wanted to warn Ruddle, but he knew he thought him a liar—at least when it came to his gift of the seeing—and he could hardly tell him to stay away from meadows full of buttercups without him thinking he was mad as well.
After the first week of their journey the rain stopped and the countryside changed for the better. Silo saw his first living tree, and within a few short days the whole landscape grew greener and hillier, and their road led them through dappled woodlands. Silo, used to the bleak expanses of the marsh, thought it a beautiful country and found that this new traveling life suited him. He liked to wake in the morning with no idea of what the day would bring but knowing there would be new sights to see on their journey and new stories to hear in the evening. This was adventure indeed for someone who had lived all his life on a marsh, and he felt at home on Blossom now and rode in comfort, lulled by the steady, plodding rhythm of her hooves.
One afternoon found them riding down a track overarched by trees, and Silo lay slumped against the baggage, enjoying the dappled pattern of sunshine and shadow that fell through the leaves. He felt extremely content. It seemed that his troubles were behind him and his new life would be full of days like this, full of adventure and possibilities. But then the sun was full in his face, and he saw to his horror that the trees had come to an abrupt end and the track continued on through a meadow bright with buttercups. It was unmistakably the site of his seeing. Ruddle was riding on ahead, but Silo shouted a warning.
“Stop! There’s a zoo animal!”
Ruddle reined in his horse, nervously scanning the bushes that bordered the meadow.
“A zoo animal?” said the inspector. “Are you sure? Where did you see it?”
“Here.” Silo tapped his forehead. “It was a seeing.”
The inspector shot him a withering look. “Let us get one thing clear. I had to bring you with us because your village voted you a seer. However, it is one thing to convince a marsh full of morons, and quite another to convince me. It is just possible that you are a seer, but far more likely that you are a liar, particularly as there have been no zoo animals reported in these parts for years. We’ll ride on.”
Silo and the Rebel Raiders Page 3
