Heriot (4 page)

L
ate one afternoon, on the very day that Heriot Tarbas felt the black window in his head dissolve and the huge possessing fragment of himself sweep out and over him, Linnet of Hagen, her mother, her nurse, her father’s marshal and a small guard of campaigners came riding out of a winding pass and on to the edge of a high plain set around with mountains.

There, far in the distance, Linnet could make out the southernmost boundary of Hoad trembling with cold, yet bleeding fire out of its mountains, and between her party and those distant fires lay a battlefield. Fourteen days earlier, the seven counties of Hoad, including her own county, Hagen, had fought their eastern enemies, the Hosts of the Dannorad to a standstill, and now the noble families were coming together to celebrate the victory and to witness the beginning of what was already being called the King’s Peace. History was being made, and they were to be part of it all.

Linnet and her party made their way along a track that wound between mounds of broken wheels and weapons, strips of shredded canvas, piles of dirt flung up to make temporary frantic defences … debris of the last battle. Among the trenches and mounds Linnet saw a drifting population of shabby men and women picking fragments over, searching for anything valuable that might have been left by the first wave of searchers, and she
wondered, with a sort of captivated horror, just how it would feel to come unexpectedly on a little piece of someone … an eye staring up at the sky, or a hand with a wedding ring on it.

As they rode towards the city of tents another party came riding to meet them, bathed in the rich light of the late afternoon. Linnet made out a pointed helmet lined with blond fur, and a robe of golden velvet embroidered with roses set in delicate medallions of black. For the first time in her life, she was seeing the King of Hoad, and the man beside him must be Carlyon, the Hero of Hoad. His handsome face sat squarely above a finely pleated, almost womanish, white silk shirt; a long white coat fell in swooping folds from his huge shoulders. It seemed that Linnet and her mother were to be greeted by both the King and the Hero, twin emblems of the land, both more myths than men. But Linnet looked eagerly past these legends, searching for her own father among the men who followed the King. His face, harsh yet smiling, made her forget all others, so that, later, when she tried to recall the welcome all she could remember was a glittering shape, golden but blurred, riding beside a shining, white one. Later, she was to find herself half-believing the King’s clothes might ride and rule on their own, without anyone inside them.

Then Linnet stared at two young men, neither of whom looked back at her with any interest whatever. The handsome one, being the taller of the two, seemed as if he must also be the older, but he was so good-looking he had to be Prince Luce, which meant he was a year younger than the slighter, round-faced fair brother beside him, Betony Hoad, the King’s heir. Linnet knew she was considered a possible bride for Luce, so it was Luce she studied most intently, until her nurse, Lila, nudged her. She realised that, just when she most wanted to be regal, she had been gazing and gaping like a simple girl who had never seen such glory before.

‘My oldest son … Prince Betony Hoad,’ the King was saying to her mother from somewhere under his helmet, gesturing with a pale hand, while the round-faced Prince smiled a curious, wincing smile, as if, by naming him, his father had struck him a blow. Linnet wondered about the third Prince, the mad one. Was he out among the tents somewhere? He was almost never seen … indeed some stories said he ran on all fours, like a dog, and Linnet’s father had told her, sounding slyly triumphant, that the Prince’s madness was a sign of some sort of flaw in the King’s power.

They had arrived in a city of tents and pavilions whose streets and landmarks were constantly changing. They passed through a series of shelters made of rags and sticks put up by poor camp followers, who included women and little children, and then through a whole market of booths for pedlars and moneychangers, burning torches and braziers flaring dangerously in the early evening. Temporary smithies … kitchens … painted wagons and herds of horses … everything enchanted Linnet as they rode into Tent City. The gypsies of Hoad, the mysterious Orts (called Orts because they were the left-over scraps of a people who had lived in Hoad before the King’s people took command of the land), stood braiding ribbons into the manes of the horses they had already sold. They looked up as the newcomers rode by but did not smile. The wind, lifting strands of rusty hair from Linnet’s forehead, smelt of freshly bruised grass, but under this innocent smell there was a taint that made her wrinkle her nose a little, an edge of decay that came and went, so that, sometimes, she thought she must be imagining it.

Linnet had believed she would stay with her father and mother and attend all the King’s parties, so she was furious, when, after a few hurried hugs, kisses and promises she and Lila were led in another direction. Yet her disappointment was
blotted out almost at once, for there were so many new and amazing things to be seen on the crowded, muddy tracks, running between the tents. In spite of weariness Linnet wanted to laugh aloud, not because things were funny but because they were so surprising. Tomorrow, she thought still later, as she tumbled to sleep, tomorrow I’ll be part of it all. Tomorrow will be nothing but excitement and surprises.

But next morning she found she was expected to study just as if she were at home, not with Luce, who was beyond study, but with the third Prince, the mad one. He was a whole two months younger than her, and, though nobody was supposed to say so openly, everyone knew there was something wrong with him.

Carrying her quills and book, Linnet stumped crossly after Lila to a pavilion on the edge of the city of tents. Inside, with a small, folding frame set up in front of him to serve as a desk, sat Dysart, Prince of Hoad.

He had rough, waving, mouse-coloured hair, which stood on end like a puppet’s wig, a big nose, a wide smile, and his right eye was a light clear blue while his left was hazel, so it was as if two different people were looking out of the same head. As she came into the tent, he caught her expression and burst into wild laughter. Later, she was to think someone had stolen part of Dysart’s life, and that he constantly filled the empty space by laughing, and that she had been able to tell this from the first moment she ever saw him.

His laughter died away as she stalked by him without another glance.

‘You’ve brought only one book,’ he said curiously.

‘It’s all I need,’ Linnet replied, noticing with alarm, however, that he had a whole pile of books beside him, some of them wrapped in silk and velvet, as if they were treasures. Suddenly she didn’t want the Mad Prince to know her book was her only
book, and, though he continued to stare at her with undisguised interest, she refused to look back at him.

‘People say you’re fierce – they say you were born with teeth like needles,’ he said inquisitively. ‘Go on, show me. Smile!’

‘And people say you’re a fool,’ Linnet retorted. Then she was ashamed, partly because her words made her seem rough when she wanted to be graceful, and partly because she sounded unkind. But he answered in an unexpectedly patient voice as if he were correcting a mistake he’d corrected many times before.

‘Not a fool, get it right. I’m mad,’ he said. ‘There’s a difference between a foolish Prince and a mad one.’ Then he laughed again.

The wall of the tent beside him sucked in, then billowed out again as if the very weave of the canvas were breathing. Dysart’s careful pile of papers swarmed up into the air around his head. He grimaced, and made an odd barking noise at nothing while the papers drifted down around him.

I
n the next few days Linnet studied the endless history of Hoad, but she was also part of ceremonial entertainments, standing beside her father, feeling his strong hand holding hers, as the clowns and fools of Diamond performed their dances, or catching her breath as teams of campaigners, led by the warriors known as Dragons of Hoad, clashed with one another in mock battles. Linnet cheered for Luce who rode with the Dragons, and hoped he noticed her urging him on, out of the corner of his eye.

They were living in a city so mixed that Linnet might see, all within a few yards, ladies sitting in chairs of gilded leather, or working men with heavy yokes over their shoulders carrying lavatory cans and buckets of kitchen refuse out beyond the boundary of Tent City. Linnet learned to tell the campaigners of County Glass in their green jackets from those of County Doro who wore long leather coats with the fur turned in, and to recognise all the banners along with the Lords they represented … the seven Lords of the seven counties of Hoad. Argo, Dante, Bay, Glass, Isman, Doro, and her own county, ambivalent Hagen.

From the edge of the camp she could stare curiously across the battered plain to the other city … the Camp of the Hosts of the Dannorad. The King and his older sons passed like mirages of gold and silver between the two cities, for, in a great
pavilion between the camps, men of both Hoad and the Dannorad Host, maps spread between them, were working in and out through the natural lace of valleys and spurs that knitted the lands together. As the victorious one, the King of Hoad could have demanded everything, but Lila declared (just as if she knew all the secrets of the golden pavilions) that the King wanted a peace that would hold … something stronger than the frail truces of the last two hundred years … and was prepared to be generous to former enemies, for generosity seemed as if it might forge a true reconciliation.

In the evening the two tent cities entertained each other with banquets and parties given by firelight, the King’s parties being the grandest of all, and there the Dukes of the Dannorad Host and the Lords of Hoad sat together, talking and laughing as if they had not spent so much of their recent history trying to kill each other. Out from the shadows came clowns on stilts, jugglers, acrobats, fools, freaks, and fire-eaters. One of the King’s bodyguards always stood behind him, ready to taste the King’s wine or to guard his back.

‘That’s an Assassin,’ whispered Lila dramatically.

Linnet had heard of the Assassins, even in Hagen. They were the bogymen of Hoad, faces masked in white paint like the faces of dangerous clowns. It was said they never died, that their heads held no brains, only a space in which a King might lodge an order, and that once the King had put a name in that space nothing could save the man to whom the name belonged.

Prince Betony Hoad had a constant attendant of his own, Talgesi, not an Assassin but a young man of his own age who had once been his whipping boy, and had taken all his beatings for him, for no nurse or tutor was allowed to beat the heir to Hoad while his mother was alive. Both Prince and servant wore the same expression. When one smiled, the other smiled. Occasionally Betony Hoad might murmur something aside to
his companion, and they would look into each other’s eyes as if they were the only real people in a world of ghosts.

Not all the fallen campaigners had been buried. The scent of their decay, carried in on the south wind, was part of every spectacle and public occasion. For all that, as the excitement and strangeness of Tent City worked its spells on Linnet, she found herself unexpectedly touched by another magic.

Partly because she didn’t want to admit that Dysart might know more than she did, she began to read and to learn the rhyming histories of Hoad by heart. Reciting couplets she had learned the night before, she smiled across the tent at the third Prince, triumphant because she was just as clever as he was, and could be part of the wide world whenever she wanted. Though she was Linnet of Hagen, a county that seemed closer to the sky than to the rivers, plains and beaches of the rest of Hoad, she, too, could invoke the King and the Hero, those vast spirits made tangible in Dysart’s father and the warrior Carlyon, who was particularly glorious at present because, single-handed, he had killed ten soldiers of the Dannorad, avenging the massacre of every single man, woman and child, in the remote Hoadish village of Senlac.

Without quite meaning to, Linnet became a Dysart watcher, and saw how a mischievous wind, which no one else seemed to be able to feel, followed the Prince like a playful dog, fluttering his papers, tumbling the world a little whenever he walked by. The left side of his face didn’t quite match up with the right. It was not just his different-coloured eyes that gave him this unbalanced look, he had an odd smile in which the right side of his mouth curled up more than the left, yet when he wrote or turned pages he used his left hand. He was so lopsided, Linnet found it easy to understand why he was only brought out on occasions when royal children were traditionally displayed like banners. Yet, when he recited the tales of Hoad, or talked about
Diamond the King’s city, or quoted old aphorisms about the King and the Hero, Dysart seemed to pull himself into a different shape, and to become somehow … not handsome, exactly, but remarkable.

‘What’s so wonderful about Diamond anyway?’ Linnet asked him one afternoon. ‘It’s not the only city in the world.’

‘It’s the King’s city,’ he answered, interrupting her just as she was about to talk about Hagen’s Rous Barnet, her own city. ‘Diamond’s the shape of the King.’

‘And your father just happens to be King,’ Linnet cried derisively. ‘I suppose you think that makes you great too!’

Dysart stared down into the pages of his book as if he could see indecipherable words swimming like fish behind the lines of ordinary print. When he spoke again it was in an odd, uncertain voice – he was trying out a new idea as much on himself as on her.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Kings have sons, but Princes don’t have fathers.’

‘You can’t have sons without fathers!’ argued Linnet.

‘But what if the King hates us all?’ Dysart said doubtfully. ‘Betony says he does, because a long time ago, before my father’s father and brothers died, before he ever dreamed he’d be King, he was married to a woman from the Second Ring of Diamond … she wasn’t noble or rich, but he loved her. When he became King, he had to give her up because the Queen of Hoad has to be noble.’

‘Did your father have to be King then?’ Linnet asked. ‘If he loved the first one best? He could have stepped back.’

Dysart was silent, then he gave a long sigh.

‘More than anything, everyone wants to be King,’ he replied, ‘but you have to be next in line. My father was the next in line, whether he wanted to be or not, and when the time came he …’ Dysart paused. For once he didn’t smile. ‘Anyhow,
the time came and, being the chosen one, he
did
want it,’ he added. ‘I think when it came to him he wanted it so badly that wanting altered him. He gave up his first life. He gave up being one man and turned into another. He turned into a King.’

Earlier they had been given the task of writing a poem thirty syllables long, in the approved style. Dysart had written … 

 Days became a week … three weeks … and Linnet grew bored with the city of tents, the distant, glittering King and the cold wind with its taint of decay. She began to long for home. But perhaps everyone had grown weary. Lila told her, one evening, that, on the very next day, there was to be a break in the negotiations. Lords who lived close to the plain would get a chance to go back to their homes for a few days. Even the Hero was going to ride back to Cassio’s Island. And though the King was staying on the battlefield, along with his sons, there were to be festivities. On the next day there was to be a picnic and both she and Prince Dysart were to take part. Linnet was delighted. She was longing for something to happen: she was longing for changes.