Heriot (11 page)

Heriot’s amazement must have showed.

‘Oh, I very well remember riding back from the battlefield and the great welcome as we came in.’ Betony Hoad got to his feet and took Heriot’s arm. ‘Walk with me down the path until it divides.’ It was an order, not a suggestion. ‘It’s only a few steps away. Then I will wind my way back over the Bridge of the Lion, to meet the Lords from Camp Hyot who are here to negotiate my wedding plans. And you will doubtless take a few deep breaths, then go to your studies with Dysart and other noble boys, where I understand you distinguish yourself admirably. Mind you, I must say I think you could try harder to eliminate that unfortunate accent.’

He stepped forward, pulling Heriot with him.

‘Talgesi, do try to make up your mind,’ he added, speaking severely over his shoulder. ‘I don’t wish to have to take matters into my own hands.’

‘Lord Prince,’ Heriot declared, ‘what you are suggesting is wicked!’

‘Oh, I do hope so,’ said Betony Hoad. ‘That young man is only a dull machine unless he suffers. So it’s five years for you? You’ve been very quiet … a little boring, really. But here we are. I go my way and you go yours – if you have a way. Goodbye Magician – and run hard, won’t you?’

‘Likely I’ve got a bit to run from and a bit to run after, Lord Prince,’ Heriot said, emphasising his slow speech very slightly.

‘Likely you have,’ said Betony Hoad, and, grimacing and turning away, he walked off along a broad, paved path back towards the King’s zoo and the Bridge of the Lion.

Heriot watched him go. The King wouldn’t need him today. There were always those studies, of course. Yet suppose it really was time for rebellion? As he thought this, there was a spasm in the air, an agitation that resolved into something like a rapid muttering in his ear. Once again the stones of Guard-on-the-Rock had begun instructing him. Be free! Be free!

Re-plaiting his hair into a single braid as he walked, he moved on out from under the trees and on to a wide path that followed the green curve of the towering, ivy-covered wall towards the gates between the Second and Third Rings of Diamond. There were guards at the gates but Heriot knew the passwords. No one questioned him as he moved into the Second Ring.

It was like coming into another world. Early as it was, there were people up and about, setting up their stalls, trading and tallying.

In one of the Second Ring marketplaces, among relatively elegant stalls, between a man mending broken china pottery with his own mixture of egg and lime, and another concerned with spices, stretched a busy counter piled with vegetables, baskets of gooseberries, raspberries and oranges. Heriot, stopping to buy an orange, suddenly had the strange feeling he had seen a face he somehow recognised. Or perhaps it was a face his occupant wanted him to know. He turned slowly, sure he must not seem too urgent.

There, beside him at the stall was a child thief, a boy of about eleven, practising his art. Heriot stared. ‘I know that boy,’ he was thinking. ‘But how can I know him?’ The child stared into the air while lifting, with incredible speed and skill, orange after orange from a row of baskets, slipping them into the front of a baggy
shirt. ‘Who is he?’ thought Heriot, searching his memory, but that particular face, though familiar, was nowhere to be found … and yet the certainty that he knew the boy strengthened.

The boy caught his eye, hesitated and then smiled, a smile of such vitality and shared fellowship that Heriot, though he had paid for his own orange, was instantly won over. The child’s face was thin and bruised, but the smile was entirely joyous Even as Heriot marvelled, there came a shout from behind the baskets of fruit. The smile vanished. The boy spun around, weaving desperately out into the scrambling crowd, without waiting to see if, in fact, the cry had been directed at him. A moment later one of the Second Ring wardens pushed past Heriot in pursuit, and Heriot, worked on by that mysterious sympathy, first put out his foot to trip the warden, and then began to run too, though there was absolutely no necessity for him to get involved in someone else’s wild adventure.

H
agen was barren but always beautiful, a county of long winters and short, brilliant summers, of winds, lakes and stunted forests. In the north-east, the mountain Warning, its plume of smoke perpetually streaming, reared up between fans of rock where nothing would grow except pale medallions of lichen or small, tough shrubs. Yet, in the spring, whole slopes could be transformed overnight by a sudden flowering of silken poppies, delicate as tissue, but tough enough to survive the harsh winds. They survived because they knew how to bend. But the mountain, rather than the flower, was Linnet’s chosen sign – an unyielding cone with fire at its heart. All the same, bending of some sort became unexpectedly necessary.

Until the expedition to the edge of the battlefield Linnet had always had her mother’s full attention, but suddenly all that warm concentration shifted and focused passionately on someone else … a child forming inside her. She acted as if she were trying to create a son through concentration … by some perfect act of will. She performed ancient rituals, and even invented spells, anxious not to miss out on any right magic, no matter how accidental, which might allow her to bear the Master the male heir he had always longed for. Her love for Linnet was still there, but became more and more distracted.

Meanwhile traders, selling precious glass and woollen cloth,
and buying hides, furs and fire opals, brought stories from Diamond … stories of Luce who had left the city to fight under the command of Carlyon the Hero on fretful borders in County Doro, of Betony Hoad’s perpetual arguments with his father, or even stories of Dysart, the younger Prince, the lesser one – the unexpected one.

And suddenly it seemed, according to the gossip, as if Dysart himself had nothing better to do with his life than to fling it away. One morning he had been seen leaping and scrambling along the walls of Guard-on-the-Rock, dancing on edges hundreds of feet above the river. Cornered, at last, by the King’s guards, he had listened to Dr Feo’s appeals, laughed, and then flung himself, arms wide, into space, plunging eagerly towards death. But, incredibly, the river caught him, cradled him safely and swept him on to a wharf in the mazy, active port beyond the castle. There he had hauled himself out, still laughing and apparently joyous, to sit on stone steps, dripping and drying in the sun. But this was, perhaps, his last mad adventure. From then on, stories suggested, he had quietened down. Gossip also suggested he had become a friend of that weird, magical boy who had replaced the vanished Izachel at the King’s court, and become the Magician of Hoad. There was no way secrets could be kept from the King when his new Magician was sitting at his elbow, and the magical displays at the King’s banquets spread overwhelming enchantment over everyone who saw them in the King’s Hall.

These stories of Guard-on-the-Rock, a castle she had never seen, distracted Linnet, particularly when her own home was filled with the sense of hard, cold waiting. The baby was born at last, and it was indeed a boy, but he died and Linnet’s mother died with him.

Linnet imagined that, from now on, she and her father would stand back to back, facing outwards against both the
Dannorad and Hoad, protecting Hagen and each other too. But her father was negotiating a new marriage before the end of the year, and his second wife, the daughter of a Dannorad duke, was the same shy girl Dysart had once pointed out to her.

Linnet refused to bend. No matter how her father threatened, Linnet would not sit sewing at her stepmother’s elbow, or listen meekly as the newcomer gave instructions in a soft but determined voice to the stewards of the castle … (My castle! Linnet would be thinking, Mine, not yours!) Shouting and swearing aloud, she would break away, run down stair after stair to the stable, saddle her horse and ride out across the tilted plains of the plateau, yelling at the sky, consumed by thrilling rage, until she was hidden by forests where the prevailing winds bent all growing things to the north, so that whole hillsides seemed to be paying some sort of deference to Hoad. Even with everything pointing the one way, it was still possible to get lost in the forests of Hagen. Paths were soon stippled out by layers of tiny, round leaves, or by a deep, cross-hatching of needles. Among the trees lay hundreds of small lakes gouged out by retreating glaciers, milky, blue-green eyes staring steadily upwards, or, depending on the season, dreaming under lids of ice.

Linnet crouched, shivering and looking deeply into these eyes, waiting for a revelation that never came, until cold drove her home to her father’s rages and, sometimes, to a beating. But by then, disobedience seemed the only way to get his full attention. She was glad he found her difficult, and yelled back, reminding him that Hoad was not happy with a Dannorad marriage, particularly as there had been times over the last two hundred years when Hagen had struggled under false masters – all Dannorad men.

And now, from time to time, alone in her room, Linnet studied herself in the glass, willing her freckles to fade or fall off, leaving her skin pale and pure, or wishing her hair might
fall in golden waves rather than standing out around her face like a rusty bush. But her freckles and her hair persisted. It was her treacherous body that began changing. ‘Don’t change,’ she commanded her reflection. ‘You changed before I did,’ her reflection reminded her. ‘You’re the first traitor.’

Standing in front of the polished glass, Linnet remembered Luce with his first and last unwilling smile; she remembered Carlyon of Doro, and then, abruptly and deliberately, she made herself think of Dysart. He leaped up obediently in her head every time she called him, arms outspread, offering to embrace the galloping horses, yet smiling sideways at her. Something inside her tightened then melted, and that strange, thrilling spasm dismayed yet fascinated her. She invoked him over and over again … turning and smiling … turning and smiling … a puppet of her will. Was he drawing power from his new friend, turning himself from a mad Prince to a clever one? Was he so obsessed with the Magician that he had forgotten her? Then she would shrug. It was all such a long time ago – years ago now – five years. She was seventeen … well, almost seventeen. And she was the heir to Hagen.

But then one day, after yet another fight, her father looked at her mildly, speaking in a voice that was almost loving again.

‘Linnet, my dear girl, life is too difficult for us all. You need a new father, one who can do the right things for you.’

‘You’re the only father I can ever have,’ she said, far more frightened by his suddenly kind voice than she had ever been by his angry one.

Her father’s reply was not a true one. It was a ceremonial formula.

‘The King is father to the children of Hoad. I’m sending you to Diamond. It’s time for you to go. You’re too rough, Linnet. Too wild! But in Diamond you’ll be one of the ladies who attend the old Queen … you’ll make friends … have the best
tutors … you’ll have more chances to read there than you have here.’

‘You’ll learn to be a lady,’ said Shuba, Linnet’s stepmother, sewing in a corner. The Master glanced over at her, and Linnet suddenly understood that certain kinds of love could make every previous love irrelevant. She understood something else too.

‘Is it because you’ve married into the Dannorad?’ she blurted out. ‘Are you sending me there to make the King feel safer about you and her? I’ll be like a hostage, won’t I?’ Her father looked away, frowning. ‘There’s no point in arguing,’ he said. ‘You’ve made life impossible for us all. You know you have.’ Then he added, ‘Shuba is going to have a baby, and I don’t want her troubled.’

‘Hagen is mine,’ Linnet whispered. Her words could not have been heard on the other side of the room, but the Master read her expression.

‘I do want to have a son, yes!’ he exclaimed. ‘I want my land to have a true Master. Is that so terrible? As for you, dear girl, I want to protect you,’ he cried. ‘Women are destroyed by ruling!’ He looked into her eyes. ‘We’re going to Diamond,’ he said, ‘and that’s my final word.’

I
F THE WOLF IS NOT BEHIND YOU HE IS BESIDE YOU. Heriot read the painted words as he ran twisting wildly through the crowds of the Second Ring, who largely ignored him. The street boy turned as he ran, clenched his fist and shook it once in a gesture of triumph. His sharp features broke into that brilliant smile and, there among the indifferent, jostling crowd, he suddenly danced – danced a few steps with astonishing grace and elegance.

‘Well, what about that then,’ Heriot said rather blankly, continuing to stare at that familiar – that impossibly familiar – face, marked on its skin and around its eyes with the infections prevalent in the Third Ring. ‘Hey! Who are you? What’s your name?’

‘No name,’ the boy replied, shaking his filthy hair, which was, under the dirt, the colour of honey and butter melted together. ‘No name, no history.’

‘Come on, you’ve got a name,’ Heriot said. ‘Don’t get clever with me. I could read you like a book if I wanted to.’ He was astounded to hear himself adding this, like one child boasting to another.

‘Some can read,’ the boy agreed, looking interested. ‘Not me. Do you have one?’

‘One what?’ Heriot asked. ‘Oh, a name. Yes, I’ve got a name. Heriot.’ His occupant moved behind his eyes, unexpectedly
insisting that the gift of his name was only half of what was needed.

This is the one
, the occupant was saying.
This is the one
. Over and over again. Heriot shook his head, trying to shift things into some more understandable order.

‘What’s your name?’ he insisted.

‘I’m called Rat, mostly,’ the child admitted, ‘but my name’s Cayley, which is my first name littled down. Before that it was grand and noble, all that, but it’s nothing but a stump now, shrunk to nothing. Just do this, do that, bring this, carry that, stand up for me, lie down for me. Give me! Get me!’ His voice sounded hoarse as if one of the city coughs had him in its grip. He laughed softly to himself, though nothing in his rapid babble sounded funny to Heriot. The boy looked desperately pale as if he were the victim of some shocking illness yet, for all that, he gave off such exuberance that there was no feeling of death in him. Around his neck was wound and rewound a man’s sash, once beautiful, now shredding away, its embroidered butterflies unravelling in threads of blue and scarlet and gold.

‘Where’s your home?’ Heriot asked, knowing as he asked that it was a stupid question. He was rewarded with the wild smile once more.

‘Home? Me? Everywhere! Nowhere!’ said Cayley, and laughed again. ‘No home for me, only hidey-holes!’

‘Where do you hide then?’ Heriot asked, determined to pin the boy down.

‘Wherever I tumble,’ Cayley said. ‘I flatten out and no one sees me. It’s all city land ’n’t it, and me –’ he flung his arms wide – ‘rats
are
the city, right? I know all the ways in and the ways out. I know its hidey-holes more than most. This city wants me dead, but me – burn it all up! I stay alive.’ He started to trot away, looked back and jerked his head. ‘Come on.’

Heriot moved after him. It was impossible to be sure of the age of such a wolfish child, so battered, so desperately thin, but Heriot guessed he might be twelve or thirteen. His teeth were astonishingly good for a Third Ring child, which added to his predatory appearance; the irises of his weeping eyes were deep blue, set around in scarlet inflammation.

‘You going into the First Ring?’ he asked

‘I am,’ Heriot said.

‘I’ll come with you,’ the boy announced. ‘You’re strange and I fancy strange company. And you feel like a sort of good luck,’ the boy said, ‘and me – I need good luck. Always I need it. Over and over again! If I don’t get it free, I have to steal it.’

‘They won’t let you through the gates … not unless you know the passwords,’ Heriot said.

‘Passwords!’ exclaimed the boy derisively. ‘Likely
you
have to know passwords. But me, I don’t need those. I’ve got my cleverness. All ways open up to me.’

Heriot smiled, moving on. The boy came too, not so much walking beside him as dancing around him, singing a little under his breath. The stolen oranges bounced like impossible breasts under his dirty shirt.

An evening bird sang somewhere. Just for a moment it was almost, thought Heriot, as if he were back in the country again. The gates between the Second and First Rings came into sight … a distant barrier at the end of the road they were on, but Cayley grabbed Heriot’s arm.

‘This way,’ he cried. ‘Sideways! I know where to go.’

Heriot hesitated, then turned sideways and followed obediently, increasingly fascinated by this dancing, smiling ruin of a child. Walking through the Second Ring he felt unconsciously sure he could glide into any of the heads bobbing past him on those crowded streets. He had always been unconsciously sure he could invade their thoughts and dreams any time he wanted.
But he could feel the boy Cayley was somehow defended against his powers, and, paradoxically, this tempted him to try an invasion. He half-tried, and came up against a barrier of a kind he had never encountered. Until then every mind he had tested had opened to him to some extent. Every head had its secrets and, though Heriot shrank from intruding on secrets, he knew they were there. But this child presented him with blank obstruction.

By now they were up against a section of the city wall that divided the First Ring from the Second. He’ll have to stop now, thought Heriot, yet the boy slid in under the ivy that grew over this part of the wall, just as if he were slipping behind a familiar curtain. Heriot hesitated, then felt his way in after him.

At first he could see nothing in the dark green dusk but twisting stems and the undersides of crowding leaves. Then, as he became used to what dim light there was, he made out a dark oblong, put out a hand to touch it and found he was touching nothing but space.

‘I’ll never get through,’ he said, speaking to the vanishing head and shoulders of Cayley.

‘Try,’ said Cayley, his voice coming back in a muffled command. ‘Breathe in! Pull yourself down into yourself.’

Heriot tried, angling his wide shoulders. He breathed in. Pushing himself, half-sideways, into this narrow slot he inched his way forward, stopped to gasp, then wriggled on yet again. Slowly, slowly he groped his way into yet another curtain of ivy, dived down under it, twisting as he dived, and broke out into the evening, only to find himself, once more, rolling on the grass in one of the sprawling outposts of the orchard he had left hours earlier, with the towers of Guard-on-the-Rock looking down at him through the branches of apple trees.

Heriot scrambled to his feet.

‘This way!’ said Cayley. ‘Slink along!’ So they slunk through
trees, which were reaching out to the breeze and beginning an illusory dance of their own. The trunks seemed to change places, curving their branching arms towards the sky. Cayley, trotting a little ahead, was so flecked with afternoon light he sometimes seemed to break up and vanish into the dappling of the very last sunlight and advancing shade, flashing in and out of existence.

Suddenly the mazes of this arboreal dance fell apart, revealing nothing more sinister than an old gardener’s cottage, falling into disrepair, three rooms of plaster bricks, packed earth and stone built up around a timber frame, grass growing tall against walls which had once been white. Heriot had sometimes seen it there during his wandering in the orchard, but he had never really thought about it as a place that might be lived in.

‘I sleep out here sometimes,’ Cayley said. ‘I’m the rat of the Third Ring out there, but then, as well, I’m the King’s neighbour. Hello, Mr Your Majesty!’ He waved at the Tower of the Lion, visible though the leaves and branches of apple trees.

Then, bending down by the door at the back he struggled to remove two blocks of plaster and compressed soil, and wriggled through the space, turning to fit them back in behind him. A moment later the front door opened grudgingly.

‘I bolt it up, see,’ Cayley said as proudly as any lord showing off a new estate. ‘Mine these days.’ Heriot entered a dim, dusty little room lit by whatever daylight seeped through the sheets of oiled linen stretched over the windows, and through a hole in the roof. As he looked around him, thinking of his own room in Guard-on-the-Rock, he felt an idea forming.

I was happy here
, said his occupant,
I will be – I am – I was
… happy here.
But Heriot already knew it had no recognisable sense of past or future. He leaned his back against the wall, and slid slowly down to sit on the floor, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his palms. He could live here himself. He
could belong to the King, yet have solitary, stolen times among the apple trees, times when the history of Guard-on-the-Rock and of its Lords, Princes and Kings wasn’t a necessary part of the air he breathed. Perhaps he could find his way back to being a total self, rather than a mere aspect of the King’s power. He watched Cayley take a long-stemmed pipe from a ledge, then take a flint from beside it and strike it against some stone half-buried in the floor beneath them.

‘It’s been a strange day so far,’ he told Cayley.

‘Aren’t they always?’ Cayley said resignedly. ‘Every one of them!’

‘You live by stealing?’ Heriot asked again.

‘Stealing and finding,’ Cayley agreed. ‘My stomach – it’s glad of anything it can get. No questions. And what it get, it hold on to. Well, mostly it does. It gets all sorts,’ he added, in case Heriot was unclear on this point. ‘I’ve et what they put out for dogs. I’ve even et rat stew, which is not too bad, all in all. Hard on the rats, though.’

Heriot laughed not so much at the story, which he felt was partly invented to entertain, but at the way Cayley was watching him, reading his expression intently, trying to match something in himself to whatever he read there. Down below the torn, elliptical voice of the street child he thought he detected a faint echo of his own voice and of Radley’s.

‘Are you from the country?’ he asked idly. Cayley looked at him warily.

‘What if?’ he asked. ‘Back a bit, perhaps. ’N’t there now, am I? Not never again. Borned there, die here.’

‘How long have you been in Diamond?’ Heriot persisted.

Cayley shook his head. ‘I told you before – no history.’ He stretched himself. ‘Just always
now
! Now, now, now, over and over again.’

‘What’s in the pipe?’ Heriot asked.

‘Happy smoke,’ Cayley said. ‘I know where to gather it,’ he added. It wasn’t just because of the happy smoke, however, that Heriot was finding himself immediately tempted by this small, dark space, and the wolfish child smiling at him. Living here, he suddenly felt, he might even become a family man again, and some sort of family life would tie him back to the farm which he missed every day of his city life.

‘You take a risk showing me this place,’ he said, and was startled when Cayley burst into laughter, spilling the oranges from the front of his shirt.

‘I mostly guess right,’ he said. ‘Dead if I didn’t.’ He pulled a particularly threatening knife out of a leather sheath at his belt, and began to peel the oranges.

‘I’d better get back,’ Heriot said, nodding in the direction of the castle. ‘I’ve been gone a long time and they’ll come looking. I’d take you with me but they wouldn’t let me keep you. Suppose I come back whenever I can, bringing some food and money?’

‘Happy smoke talking!’ said Cayley scornfully. ‘You’ve breathed it in. They don’t let you out alone – ’n’t you the Magician of Hoad?’

‘Too true,’ Heriot agreed. ‘But my five years’ good are up. Maybe from now on, five years shifty. I’m out alone now, aren’t I?’ He found himself adopting the pattern of Cayley’s speech as if it was a private language spontaneously invented. It was partly his occupant talking as it had never spoken through him before. He took what coins he had left out of his pocket. ‘Housekeeping!’ he said, passing the money over, laughing as he did so. ‘But I’ll have to go. Better to go and show myself, rather than be hunted out.’

‘No one hunts me,’ Cayley said through a mouthful of orange. ‘Or everyone does,’ he added rather more clearly. ‘No one and everyone – they’re like the same thing to me.’

‘They only want my head.’ Heriot shrugged. ‘The thing is there’s only one of it, and I need it too.’

Cayley laughed his strange, breathless laugh once more. ‘Too much of me, too little of you,’ he said.

A few minutes later Heriot left the shed, and the private feast of oranges that was taking place inside, and began walking home through the orchard.

Suddenly he heard someone shouting at him. He turned, recognising the voice. Dysart came charging towards him though the early-evening twilight.

‘Where have you been?’ Dysart was shouting.

‘Walking! Walking in the orchard,’ Heriot replied. ‘I wanted silence. And your city owes me a bit of time.’

In the next moment Dysart was beside him, glaring at him and shaking his shoulder. ‘The city doesn’t owe you anything,’ he cried. ‘It’s a question of Diamond telling you to do what Diamond needs. You’re not just a Magician, you’re the Magician of Hoad. Hoad! You don’t belong to yourself … you belong to the King.’

Heriot was startled by Dysart’s fury. As he gaped in astonishment Dysart suddenly struck him on the side of the head. The blow wasn’t hard but, once delivered, it took them both aback.

Dysart’s grip on Heriot’s shoulder relaxed. His hand fell away. ‘Oh damn!’ he cried impatiently. ‘I didn’t mean … I’m sorry but …’

‘Why?’ asked Heriot, wrinkling his face with disbelief as he tenderly stroked his ear.

‘Because …’ Dysart said, his voice milder now. ‘Because you’d vanished away, and I was frightened you’d somehow truly gone. And you’re my good fortune. Don’t you know that by now? The good fortune of a third son.’

At that moment, as if Dysart’s words had somehow given
birth to a possible new perception, Heriot found he suddenly knew something – knew it in an irrational almost visionary way. Dysart was a true friend, yet he was revealing a certain vulnerability – a certain need – and a particular possibility now buzzed out of the orchard air and lodged resolutely within Heriot.