Heriot (13 page)

Heriot exclaimed with irritation. ‘I should have thought!’ he said. ‘You should have started off slowly with milk and eaten just a little.’

‘I’m sorry, mister. My stomach ’n’t clever, not even hungry. But it hates to miss out on any lucky chance. That’s habit.’

Heriot laughed at him as he carried out both bucket and bowl.

‘I’ll do the same for you one day,’ Cayley persisted. ‘Tidy up after you, clean up after you, smiling too, that’s a promise.’

‘A promise from a man with luck – that’s worth something,’ Heriot said gently. He came back and searched a shelf until he found a pot of honey. ‘There’s some milk left. I’ll put this honey through it. You just sit back, don’t move, don’t talk.’

‘I talk always. First I didn’t, now I do,’ Cayley said obscurely. ‘Words have got power over us, you and me both. It confuses them.’

‘Confuses who?’ Heriot asked, busily stirring milk.

‘Death, doom, that lot,’ said Cayley. ‘Off they go, fingers jammed in their ears.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Heriot told Cayley. ‘If you’re trying to hide from doom, don’t talk aloud all the time.’

‘Think so?’ asked Cayley sceptically. He drank some of the sweetened milk, after which Heriot wrapped him around in a fur rug.

‘You look better already,’ he said, but Cayley shook his head.

‘Not better, just tidier,’ he said. He let Heriot put him to bed and feed him with the last of the milk and honey from a spoon.

‘Sleep!’ suggested Heriot.

Cayley looked at him, exhausted but not sleepy, twitching with restlessness. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he complained. ‘Close my eyes maybe, but nothing else.’

‘I thought you weren’t a man to be afraid,’ Heriot said severely.

‘It’s not fear,’ Cayley answered. His hoarse voice was little more than an indignant sigh. ‘I just don’t want to go off when I’m asleep. If it comes at me, I want to see it coming.’

‘You’ll wake up again,’ Heriot said, all the more impatiently because he wasn’t entirely sure this was true. ‘Here, look at me!’

Cayley obediently turned his eyes towards Heriot who, almost casually, let his occupant lead him towards a mind that at first shocked, then chilled him, as it had done from the beginning.

There was none of the usual confusion of memories, no tangle of personality, no scattered threads of old dreams, none of the assaulting legion of needs and desires sweeping out from the point affected by Heriot’s entry. Once again, Heriot was in a hugely defended place, a blank place of imprisonment, doors closed, memories measured and hidden. Cayley’s mind admitted no past and no future, living only in a narrow present. Though Heriot could read Lords and Princes, diplomats, and messengers, though he could find his way through dark and unknown landscapes there was no way he could read this boy from the streets of Diamond

Cloud and Tree, the King’s Assassins, had impressed Heriot as men lacking the warm variety and untidiness of other people, purposely tying themselves to a single function, but Cayley was more single than any Assassin, certainly more so than Hoad the King, distracted with symbolic guilt and concern for his children, more touched by love than he was ever prepared to admit.

Now Cayley’s singleness took charge of Heriot and turned him, aligning him along the axis of a compulsion. He found himself looking along the blade of a sword so sharp its edges seemed to dissolve into the air. And suddenly it was a blade no longer, but a silver road, a causeway that led straight without any deviation into a dark mass on the very edge of sight. Cayley was aimed along that particular causeway and into that anonymous darkness as surely as if he was an arrow in a bow, though he was both archer and arrow, the actor and the act itself.

So intense was this image that Heriot struggled to break away. He had sometimes speculated that he might get lost in a complicated and tangled mind, but he had never imagined anything like this simplicity, where there were no landmarks, only a field of insatiable intention, meaningless to any outsider. Nevertheless he instructed his occupant, and his occupant spoke to Cayley, commanding sleep. Sleep took over immediately. The relaxing of the field around the despotic image allowed Heriot to break free and a moment later he was back in his own mind, in his own body, in his cottage, a shaken and successful Magician standing over a sleeping child, ravished by illness, compelled by commitment to some secret dream of doom, statements of punishment inscribed on his skin like lines of merciless poetry.

A
nd at last spring came again, after which the city moved, with self-conscious majesty, into early summer. At last it was that particular time the city had been anticipating … the time of huge festivity … the time of Betony Hoad’s wedding. Heriot knew some great act of magic was expected of him and tried out various things in his mind, though he had no doubt he would be able to astonish people with imposed illusions. He did an inner rehearsing, strangely becoming the roses thrown and falling through the air, flower petals scattered, spreading out into the allegories acted at the gate in each wall. All the same he refused to go beyond the garden walls to join the crowds, spirits high with the excitement of the febrile celebration the city had engendered within itself.

‘The Hero is riding into Hoad for the wedding of Betony,’ Heriot muttered to Cayley. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to see him ride into Diamond?’

‘Not me,’ Cayley said with a strange derision in his voice. ‘He’s got enough to watch him. He doesn’t need me.’

‘Why not?’ Heriot asked, as the afternoon burst apart yet again with cheering voices.

Two months of food and care had changed ruined Cayley back to what he had been when Heriot first knew him, a tall, tough boy, thin but broad across the shoulders, strong enough
to throw off the infection that had wrestled so furiously with him. He entertained Heriot with black cheerfulness, and with his scorn for the images by which Diamond sought to control its people.

Working in the garden, between his royal duties, Heriot talked half to himself, half to his companion, while Cayley, not so much an incalculable visitor these days as a constant attendant who despised gardening, would stare at his face, watching his lips move, following or even anticipating his words, his own lips silently framing them, so that he was repeating these conversations a fraction of a second behind Heriot.

He had begun speaking with exaggerated care and, unexpectedly, produced, out of distant memory perhaps, words and expressions that came to him from the folk tales of Hoad, for Heriot gathered Cayley’s mother had been a great storyteller and, once upon a time, Cayley had sat cuddled on her knee, in between her moments of despair and madness, listening to tales of love and death.

‘It would be a good afternoon for collecting,’ Cayley now said, rather wistfully. He meant stealing. ‘I used to collect a lot on busy days. I hate to lose a skill.’

‘Think how you’re gaining one,’ Heriot replied, distracting him from past glories by reminding him of present ones. ‘These days they’re trying to make a warrior of you, aren’t they? You work out with Voicey Landis when I’m not around. Who’d have thought it, six months back?’

‘That Voicey, he’s a master,’ Cayley declared, his face brightening with anticipation. ‘But I’m to be better. In the end that is. There’s others he teaches that’s noble or born to it but I’m best of all.’

‘I’m astonished he took you in,’ Heriot said. ‘You looked more like a victim than a victor when I brought you along.’

‘He fancies a fighter first above everything,’ Cayley replied.
‘There’s bigger than me, prettier, nobler and all that, but Voicey, he
knows
me, he
roars
for me.’ Cayley was speaking familiarly of the old Warden of Arms, Voicey Landis, who worked in the castle arena, conducting the war games, the fencing, archery, wrestling – the fossilised remains of noble aggression brought to the level of a sport for everyone except Luce, and now Cayley, to whom it represented something more serious.

Heriot cocked his head at the cheering, now so close it was almost as if the sound turned trees, gardens, and walls glassy, and he could look through them all, to see Carlyon riding by on his black horse, sprinkled by a wind from the past, perhaps, with sand from the beach of Heriot’s childhood.

‘You worried that you’ve got to be magic tomorrow?’ Cayley asked.

‘No, I know what I can do,’ Heriot answered, ‘but I don’t feel anything much for it. I could often be magical out of lightheartedness, but lightheartedness can’t be commanded. It’s wonderful in its own way, this royal wedding, but not enjoyable. It’s heavy and stiff as if someone had made a clockwork horse of gold and silver and set it all over with jewels. It glitters but it won’t gallop. It just walks on stiffly to an ending that mightn’t be happy.’

‘Happy?’ Cayley spoke the word as if it was one of uncertain meaning. ‘You think the Prince mightn’t fuck the Princess. He always does in fairy tales.’

‘Do you have to put it like that?’ Heriot said irritably.

‘It’s the right word for it,’ Cayley answered blankly. ‘Everyone knows. He’s to make a boy to follow after him. So what other way is there?’

Heriot was silent. In this case at least, he could think of no word that Cayley might use equally well to define the fact, hung around as it was with the fantasies of entertainment and ritual in the city beyond.

‘They talk about it over in the arena,’ Cayley went on, ‘but how would they know if he did it or not? It doesn’t show, does it, not on the outside.’

‘I’m not interested in all that,’ Heriot said, not entirely truthfully. ‘It’s Prince Betony’s private business.’

The shouting outside the garden walls retreated. The Hero was passing through the amphitheatre of the Lion, perhaps crossing the bridge and entering the castle. Relieved of the possibility of a chance encounter Heriot straightened up and stretched himself.

‘Let’s be off,’ he said to Cayley. ‘Let’s go all the way down to the sea.’ They left by a northern gate and skirted the amphitheatre of the Lion, still crowded with people who had collected to see the Hero greet the King.

Only yesterday Heriot, a step behind the King and the Princes, had stood there watching the entry of Princess Quaeda into the city arena, carried in a litter held by Lords of her own land and Lords of Hoad, Prince Luce among them. Trumpets had been blown, white doves released, the steps by which she descended into the public streets had been covered with flowers, all of which she acknowledged while being escorted, pretty, painted and enamelled after the Camp Hyot fashion, through a crowd of strangers. Assaulted by music and acclamation, the last part of this strange journey was made across tapestries laid under the feet of her bearers as she was carried to meet the King and his eldest son, neither of them less polished or artificial than she.

Hoad glittered in a dragon skin of gold and diamond, not natural but supernatural as if he might, in a startled moment, put out wings and soar off after the trumpet notes of his own annunciation, a phoenix among the wheeling doves. His aura of difference surrounded him, so that he wasn’t dwarfed by the wide arena, its tiered seats dappled with the faces of the
ebullient men and women of Hoad. He somehow filled it with a feverish brilliance that seemed to flow directly out from him and his absurd crown.

In that moment, Heriot, himself a specialised instrument of reception, felt a multitude of other minds open to take in the image of the King, gaining some personal direction from the crown. For the first time he came to believe the King was not simply the possessor of Diamond but was possessed by it, an act of imagination thrown up by the city’s need. But did the King imagine the city, or the city the King? Was Hoad’s image of himself so strong that he managed to project it into every other mind in Diamond?

And what of Betony Hoad, successfully transformed into a Prince of Dreams? Was he his own dream, or the projection of an ancient fairy tale, shining through and focused by the prismatic surfaces of the books of Diamond?

In one of the deepest channels of the port, moving between flowery islands, chains, wreaths and garlands flung into the sea to welcome her, guarded by men with dragon masks in front of their helmets, the ship that had brought the Princess to Hoad rocked sinuously, its brilliant banners rippling in the wind.

‘Rich man’s washing,’ Cayley said, untouched by the beauty of the silk stroked by sensuous air. Beyond lay channels filled with ships from Camp Hyot and the Islands, even one from Cassio’s Island with the Hero’s device on its bow, though the Hero himself had ridden into Diamond … had started off, of course, by riding down the Hero’s Causeway, Heriot thought, perhaps watched by Radley and Wish, their wives and children from up on the hill.

The next day Betony Hoad and Princess Quaeda were married in the crowded amphitheatre of the Lion in the presence of the King and the Hero and various noble visitors from the Dannorad, and Camp Hyot as well as the Lords of Hoad.
The Magician of Hoad stood among them as a sign of the Hoad’s power.

And in the evening, at the banquet, Heriot was called on to present an amazing entertainment. The hall was lighted with pinewood torches and lamps shaped like doves. Smoke collected up under its arched roof, clouding the geometry of interesting curves. The painted designs and cornices older than either city or hall, hanging between the lamps, included stone roses of so dark a red they looked black, set among circles of laurel leaves and pictures of men and women hunting and picnicking in the forest rides. The tables were set out in the form of a letter ‘E’ and covered with fine linen and damask.

Hoad, dressed in gold, sat like a hieroglyph of power at the head of his table. Dysart waited on his father, Luce on the Hero, the man he hoped one day to kill with honour. Behind Hoad’s chair, beside Dysart, stood the Assassin Cloud in pure white, his head glittering with its swarm of bright pins, and behind Carlyon, a purposely dark balance perhaps, was a hooded figure in black, a face impossible to see. Between the Hero and the King sat Betony Hoad and the Princess Quadea, she looking very young, even childish, in a way she had not during her procession through Hoad. Heriot felt suddenly anxious for her, this girl delivered into Betony Hoad’s life like a well-wrapped present, though the Prince, at this moment, looked particularly charming and happier and kinder than Heriot had ever seen him.

Over the past seven years Heriot had met with Lord Glass in many moods – cheerful, ironical, sometimes even angry, but he had never seen him as troubled as he appeared to be on this occasion – an occasion that seemed to Heriot to be both brilliant and successful.

‘I do hope my dear …’ Lord Glass said in a mechanical imitation of his usual birdlike voice ‘… I do hope you have it
in your power to perform something quite, quite incredible. You promised me forests and fairy tales and I require nothing less …’

‘Look at me closely,’ said Heriot, but Lord Glass didn’t hear him.

‘I needn’t hesitate to tell you,’ he murmured, ‘that Carlyon has been very difficult. Oh, very inexorable. Only the most unremitting diplomacy has saved us from an exchange of personalities and a rehashing of old incidents and insults, quite out of keeping with the season of rejoicing we hope to celebrate tonight. He is too intelligent for me to think he’s simply being tactless. I cannot speak too highly of the efforts of my Camp Hyot counterpart further down the table, who has appeared on some occasions to have been quite deaf. We have been most fortunate that he has more in common with Hoad, the same sympathies and ambitions, than you might think possible.’ Lord Glass stopped speaking to sip his wine.

‘The thing is,’ said Heriot, ‘once Carlyon thought being Hero would be enough for him. But by now it isn’t. Maybe he wants to be King of Hoad too. Wants to be both.’ He spoke in an absentminded way, but felt Lord Glass looking at him intently. Servants were passing around the table with jugs of rosewater and napkins. Heriot was momentarily entranced by a jug of rock crystal, with a rim and lip and handle of engraved gold.

Let me through
… the occupant was saying within him.
Make a guest of me.

Soon!
Heriot promised, speaking back into his own head.
We’ll share ourselves soon.

‘Well, we all have our theories,’ Lord Glass said at last, ‘but I do hope that you won’t let us down. I just know Carlyon is planning something. There is a certain entertained restraint about his provocation, as if he was distracting us with one
effect while secretly preparing another. I feel it might be demonstrated here tonight. This is a grand occasion and …’

‘We will now have the Dance of the Clown,’ announced the steward of the hall, and out came dancers, one of whom, the clown, was dressed as a parody of the Assassin Cloud, with a red mop-head wig sewn over with glass beads.

‘In festivity we try to deflect what we fear,’ Lord Glass said, turning and looking at last into Heriot’s eyes. His expression slowly changed, as the dance proceeded, and he divined Heriot’s other, inner face imposing its alterations on familiar flesh and bone.

‘There is another Magician in this room,’ Heriot said very quietly. ‘What are you playing at, Lord Glass? You’d better tell me.’

Lord Glass frowned, silently shook his head, then slowly looked across the dancers to the Hero and the dark figure behind his chair.

Heriot nodded. ‘He’s strong. He recognised me when I came in, though he didn’t see me and I don’t think he’s put a face to me quite yet, but it won’t be long. He’s so public there, standing behind the Hero. Something’s intended.’

Lord Glass said nothing.

‘You know him then?’ Heriot asked. ‘Or do you think there’s no face in the hood?’

‘I think there is a face,’ said Lord Glass ‘and that, if it is revealed, I’ll recognise it, but to find there was no face might be preferable.’

Heriot watched the acrobatic clown weaving through the dance, nervously mocking the King’s Assassins. Carlyon looked over at Heriot with a suddenly arrested expression. Heriot didn’t know that the top half of his face was entirely hidden by a little explosion of light reflecting from his glasses, but he stared out of the disruptive glare and the shadow of his
womanish hair, with an expression so inimical that the Hero, if he had been able to read it, might have looked more cautious.

A moment later the dance ended, and Carlyon rose to his feet and addressed Hoad, praising the hospitality, the food, the wine and the entertainment, in a warm, embracing voice. Nevertheless, as he spoke, he also seemed to be mocking the very things he was praising, with a secret derision. ‘I, too, shall honour Prince Betony Hoad and his bride with an entertainment,’ he said. ‘I am not without facilities. You have many entertainers, and I have brought only one, but though he is a single man he has a strange gift. He can appear to be many.’