SERVICES: FOOD, WATER, BLACKSMITH, MOTEL
“What’s a motel?” said Silo as they pulled up outside.
“An inn without any booze,” said Ruddle. “Blooming useless places.”
—
But to Silo it seemed no worse than his usual lodgings. He had a room to himself, for in the evenings Orlando abandoned him and reverted to being the saintly Maximillian Crow. He confessed to finding the role rather tedious, but luckily none of their fellow seers seemed to have noticed. Daisy and Elgarth had become inseparable and Daisy had a way of looking at Elgarth, wide-eyed and adoring, that turned Silo’s stomach. And as for Bella and Stella, they seemed to spend all their time huddled together in corners, alternatively whispering and giggling. Silo, who found gigglers intensely irritating, didn’t think he would ever wish to count them among his little friends, and that evening he became certain of it.
Blossom was a horse of gargantuan appetites, and it was Silo’s habit to look in on her before he went to bed to give her a fresh bucket of water and something extra to eat, but he had discovered that innkeepers, and doubtlessly motel keepers too, took a dim view of horses that ate twice as much as all the others—which was why he left his boots in his room that night and went tiptoeing to the feed shed, silent on webbed feet. But Bella and Stella had arrived before him. When he eased open the door he found Stella piling hay in a corner. She was giggling as she did so, and Bella was poised over it with a lighted candle in her hand and an unhealthy gleam in her eyes.
“Don’t,” said Silo.
They spun around and stared at him, their eyes wide with shock.
He stepped forward and snatched the candle, amazed at their stupidity. “No fires tonight.”
They shook their heads numbly, then Stella said, “Promise you won’t tell.”
“If you don’t, we’ll tell you a secret,” said Bella. “It’s about Elgarth’s seeing. Maximillian had a seeing, and now Elgarth’s had one. That’s why we…” She looked wistfully at the candle.
Silo sat down on a bale of hay. “Tell me about Elgarth’s seeing.”
“He had it three days ago, but we didn’t hear all of it. He only told Daisy. We had to listen behind the door. But he said that something bad is going to happen to Maximillian.”
It already had, thought Silo, then remembered she was talking about Orlando. “What?”
“It’s going to happen when he gets to the Capital. He’s going to hurt his head, get a brain injury. There was a letter involved—at least I think he said a letter. It was difficult to hear. They were whispering.”
Silo was horrified. How had Elgarth found out about Orlando’s plan? And did he know about the letter that Orlando had stolen from Maximillian Crow? It didn’t sound like a seeing to him; more as if Elgarth had been listening in to their conversations, for these were both subjects they had discussed on their rides.
He stood up and blew out the candle. “I won’t tell anyone I saw you tonight.”
He scooped up a double armful of hay and headed off to Blossom’s stable.
—
Silo had lied, for he told Orlando the whole story as soon as they were alone together at the back of the column next morning.
“Heck!” said Orlando. “So Elgarth’s on to me—but that can’t be a seeing, can it? I stole that letter weeks ago—seeings are always about the future, aren’t they?”
Silo’s were. It certainly didn’t sound like any of his own seeings.
“He must have paid someone to spy on us,” said Orlando. “Hid them in the last baggage wagon or something. But he hasn’t said anything to the inspectors yet, and he told Daisy it was a seeing. I think he’s going to try to pass it off as one somehow—try to make people think he’s a real seer. And the Arson Sisters said it was going to happen in the Capital, so he’s biding his time.”
“But why?”
Orlando shrugged. “He probably wants to make a big deal of it, wait until we get to the city before he reports me to the authorities. But never mind—at least we know now. As soon as we get within the city walls I’ll be off and running.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll spend a few days in the Capital first—always wanted to see it. Then I’ll hitch a ride down the river Rampage to the coast, see if I can find Val and the Raiders. Shouldn’t be too difficult. They say she leaves a trail of destruction wherever she goes. She always did, actually. You should have seen the state of her bedroom.”
Silo’s heart sank. He’d never had a proper friend of his own age before, and suddenly the prospect of a world without Orlando seemed a very lonely one.
—
That afternoon they finally met some fellow travelers on the great highway. Silo heard a slow drumbeat from up ahead—bam-BAM, bam-BAM, bam-BAM, bam-BAM, bam-BAM, bam-BAM—growing louder by the minute, at once menacing, insistent, and strangely irritating. A party of horsemen was approaching in the distance, and Orlando scowled.
“It’s the Bucket Heads,” he said. “I guess we must be getting back to civilization.”
As they watched the horsemen approach, Silo felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck, for their leader carried a black banner on a tall pole, a banner that unfurled lazily in the breeze to reveal the sign of the red hand.
“What does that sign mean?” he asked. “The hand with the hole in it?”
“That’s not a hole,” said Orlando. “It’s a coin. They’re the collectors—the Government’s tax collection squad, and they are one evil, evil bunch of Bucket Heads. They’re the ones my mum and dad tangled with.”
The horsemen were moving at a fast trot and in a moment they were sweeping by. Watching them pass, Silo was not surprised at the fate of Orlando’s parents, for they were a formidable-looking bunch. There were thirty in all, big men in black uniforms with studded leather breastplates and huge, crushing boots. As well as swords and bows, each carried a hefty club strapped to his saddle, and a shield slung on his back: a black shield decorated with a bloodred hand, a black coin in its palm. The bucket-shaped helmets they wore made them look even more sinister, for they covered their entire heads and necks, leaving just a slit to see out of. They moved to the jingle of harness, the clink and clank of weapons, and the deafening drums—bam-BAM, bam-BAM, bam-BAM, bam-BAM; in his mind’s eye Silo relived his seeing—the burning village and the fleeing villagers, the horseman with his upraised club—and felt a quick chill in his heart. The Government employed some very strange people, and he suddenly wondered if he really wanted to be among their number.
—
That evening brought them almost to the end of their journey. The forest petered out and the old highway suddenly ran riot. Instead of one road it branched into many, roads that swept high above the Earth supported on giant pillars, then around and above and beneath each other in long, looping curves like a vast nest of snakes, coiling off into the great plain that stretched before them. Smoke rose from the fires of a dozen villages and, dark and ominous against a flaming sunset, the mound of the Capital rose up in the distance. They had arrived at the last outpost and Silo and Orlando were making plans.
“There are four gates in, but one of them is for river traffic,” said Orlando. “My guess is we’ll be entering through the south one. Bound to be a big crowd there. I’ll just mix in with it and slip away.”
Silo had half a mind to go with him. Working as a government seer had been a simple decision to make back on the marsh, but things had grown more complicated since then. He would miss Orlando badly, and he didn’t like the inspector or the collectors, but he wasn’t as worldly-wise as his friend—or a thief or a forger, come to that. His gift of the seeing was the only talent he had. He would see how things worked out first, and if they didn’t, well, maybe then he would consider joining Orlando.
“Is there anywhere we could meet up?” he said. “If I decide to come with you?”
“My uncle spent a bit of time in the Capital. There’s a street called Great Sewer All
ey, and he said there’s an inn there called the Invisible Worm. It’s next to a dung works.”
Silo sighed. Presumably Orlando’s uncle had not frequented the smart side of town. “Why there?”
“Well, if you knew my uncle, you’d understand that he’s got a gift for finding places—the kind of places where you might meet useful people.”
“Would that be criminals?”
“Some of them, yeah, but the sort of people who might know what the Raiders have planned for the summer. We can meet up there in a week’s time.”
—
So that was their plan. Silo wasn’t sure if it was a good one, and the next day he felt sick with apprehension as they set out on the last stage of their journey, watching the Capital looming slowly larger on the horizon. The smoke from a thousand fires hung over the city, and through its fog they could dimly discern a mass of rooftops rising above the city walls, dwarfed by the huge old buildings that stood among them. In the center, dominating the skyline, stood the famous Lion Tower. Silo saw that its balconies were strung with washing lines and he noticed a pig standing on one of them, giving the whole place a rather scruffy, domestic appearance. The great stone lion that stood at the tower’s apex was impressive enough, though, and it stared angrily down the road to the Capital with its jaws open in a savage, silent roar.
Their way was slowed by wagons, herds of animals, and the seemingly endless squads of tax collectors traveling in and out of the city. The ceaseless bam-BAM, bam-BAM, bam-BAM of their drums seemed like an evil omen as they finally found themselves within the shadow of the great walls, soaring thirty feet into the air and studded with guard posts. They gave the place a grim, fortresslike air; somehow Silo had expected the approach to the Capital to be much grander. The inhabitants seemed to be in the habit of throwing their rubbish over the walls and so their way led past piles of festering garbage, picked over by buzzards and pigs and stray dogs. And children, Silo saw with sudden shock. He watched a tiny girl beat off a buzzard with a stick and snatch up a loaf of moldy bread.
The image of the Capital that had formed in his mind long ago, his shining city on the hill, died a sudden and painful death. The crush on the road had grown so great by now that they were almost at a standstill, and all at once a group of soldiers shouldered their way through the crowd and surrounded their party. For one dreadful moment Silo thought that Elgarth had told all he knew, but then the soldiers started shoving people roughly to one side.
“Make way for the government inspectors!”
They were beating a path through the crowd.
“Make way for the inspectors! Make way for the seers! Stand back, make way!”
A soldier seized the bridle of Orlando’s pony and bawled, “Make way for Maximillian Crow!”
A girl rummaging through a nearby garbage pile heard the name and sprang to her feet: a tall girl dressed in a ragged gray vest and breeches, with 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 green eyes blazed with hatred. She glared at Orlando, then stooped, picked up a rotten lettuce, and threw it, with astonishing force and accuracy, at his head. He was taken completely by surprise. He reeled back in his saddle, lost his balance, and fell off his pony. His head hit the ground with a dull thud and he lay motionless among the garbage, blood oozing from a gash in his temple. Silo slid off Blossom and knelt by his side, stunned into a sudden, shocking realization. The words of the Arson Sisters rang in his head—something bad happening when he got to the Capital, a brain injury, something about a letter. A lettuce. Not a letter, a lettuce. This was Elgarth’s seeing. He had known this would happen all along and kept it secret. He was a genuine seer. Silo sought out his face in the crowd and knew that this time at least he was right, for Elgarth was smiling and his eyes were shining with triumph.
—
Two days later Silo found himself standing in front of a grimy door. Screams came from behind it. A sign depicting a severed arm hung over his head, and the door had a big cross on it, executed in two broad slashes of dripping red paint that looked like blood. He hated visiting the hospital. Steeling himself, he pushed open the door and walked quickly down the corridor ahead, trying to ignore the cries that came from the rooms on either side. He found Orlando at the end of the hall with his head swathed in bandages.
“Hi. How’s your head feeling today?”
“Awful. Like Blossom trod on it. And I can hear this weird screaming noise.”
It didn’t seem the right time to tell Orlando that it was the sound of his fellow patients. But Silo was relieved to hear him making sense again, for on his previous visit Orlando had been semiconscious and rambling on about goats, and Silo had begun to worry that his brain was well and truly damaged.
“What happened to me?”
“Some loony lobbed a lettuce at you. You fell off your pony. And no need to worry about Elgarth. He won’t be talking to anyone.” He explained why.
Orlando was mightily relieved that his secret identity was safe but enraged that Elgarth hadn’t warned him of the impending lettuce attack. “So he’s a real seer, then, curse him, and the evil beast didn’t say a word! Just my luck, I suppose. I’m stuck here feeling rubbish and you’re having fun exploring the Capital. What’s it like?”
Silo shrugged. It was a question he found almost impossible to answer. One thing was for certain: the place wasn’t anything like he’d expected.
The Capital was chaos. As he shoved his way through its crowded streets, Silo could dimly see that it had once been designed to some kind of plan, but that had been a long, long time ago, and although many of the buildings and broad avenues of the Ancients still remained, the passing years had changed them out of all recognition: imprisoned within its encircling walls, the Capital was bursting at the seams. The great stone buildings and concrete towers were home to thousands now, surely far more than had originally been intended, and they bulged under the strain. Whole families camped on balconies, huts perched on rooftops, and the gaps between the old buildings had been filled in with tenements. Rows of huts had mushroomed down the center of the once-wide streets, and squashed into these narrow confines the daytime traffic was almost unbearable: thousands of pedestrians and riders and wagons shunting back and forth, along with goats, chickens, dogs, and pigs. Buzzards and vultures wheeled overhead, making even the skies seem crowded.
Looking at Orlando’s eager face, Silo hadn’t the heart to tell him that he lay in bed at night and dreamed he was out on Goose Creek again, alone on his raft under a great sweep of sky, with the fresh salt breeze blowing in from the sea and only the cry of the marsh birds for company.
“Wait and see,” he said. “You’ll be up in a few days.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At the Academy in Cowcross Street. It’s where they train seers.”
“Is it any good?”
Silo shrugged. “I don’t know yet. We don’t start classes until tomorrow. We’re waiting for some woman from the State Archaeological Division to arrive—she’s the headmistress, apparently.”
“Heck!” said Orlando. “You may have a problem, then. I’ve heard a few things about the State Archaeological Division, and they sound like seriously bad news.”
“Why?” asked Silo.
“Well, it’s all to do with that stuff about power supplies and power stations again. And how my sister got to be Valeria the Violent instead of just Val Bramble. The story they told me was that there’s a peninsula somewhere on the west coast. It had a big ruin on it, something left over from the time of the Ancients. So a bunch of people from the State Archaeological Division turned up there one day and said they’d found out it used to be a power station. They got all the people from the nearest village to start digging it up, to see if they could find the power. But it was like the Ancients had left a curse on the place or something, because after a few weeks people started getting sick. First they got blisters
on their skin and then they got really ill, but when they tried to leave, the people from the Division got Bucket Heads to guard them, made them keep on digging. Well, a few of them managed to get away in a boat, and that’s when they met Val. She was sailing down the Horse Island Straits—her along with a few other Raiders’ ships. When they heard what was happening, they sailed to the peninsula and had a big battle with the Bucket Heads. Val took in the first ship, led the first assault. That’s how she got to be called ‘the Violent’—for her heroic deeds. Anyway, they won the battle and took the villagers away with them to the Horse Islands.”
“Did they get better?” said Silo.
“Some did, but lots of them died. So that’s the sort of people the State Archaeological Division are. Not very nice ones.”
Silo scowled. Already he had formed a dim view of the Academy, and the news that his future headmistress might be party to mass murder was deeply depressing.
“I just realized something,” said Orlando. “That screaming’s not in my head, is it?”
“No. They’ve got a few cases of crab pox down the hall, but it looks like they caught it in time. No one’s gone terminal yet, anyway.”
A grim-faced nurse came in holding a spoon and a bottle of something that looked nasty. She gave Silo an unfriendly look and jerked her thumb in the direction of the corridor. “End of visits.”
“See you tomorrow,” Silo said to Orlando. “Good luck with it.”
—
Silo was in low spirits as he weaved his way through the crowded streets, for he was on his way to say good-bye to Ruddle. He found him saddling Blossom outside the Burning Buzzard, and his parting words awakened a suspicion that had long lain lurking in some dusty corner of his mind.
Silo and the Rebel Raiders Page 7
