Heriot (6 page)

It was at that moment Heriot truly understood he was going to be taken away from the Tarbas farm, from the kitchen courtyard and garden and from the unfolding fields of the farm. It was then he truly understood that his own wishes would not be consulted. At that very moment Lord Glass said, ‘After all it isn’t for you to decide, is it, Jenny? Just suppose you were to beg me to leave him be, and just suppose I gave in, not that I would, for I’m not nearly as benevolent as I try to make myself appear, all that would happen would be that someone less talkative but very much more unpleasant would wait on you. You would suffer, the boy would suffer, and I would suffer, too, for my hesitation. There is no decision to be made beyond Feo’s and his decision has been made.’

Heriot looked up, his hands clenched together before him. ‘Don’t I get asked?’ he cried abruptly, and Lord Glass turned to him, surprised and shaking his head.

‘My dear boy – certainly not!’

Heriot turned, not to his mother, but to his Great-Great-Aunt Jen.

‘Don’t let them take me,’ he cried.

‘I have to,’ she answered.

‘Why?’ Heriot asked her, and felt something gathering thunderously in him. Once again a storm was on the way. Once again he thought he might be about to crack in two. ‘I don’t want to go with that Cloud,’ he exclaimed furiously. ‘I’m frightened.
Frightened sick!’ He sounded angry rather than frightened, but all the same, within himself he was terrified. Same old fear, said a voice somewhere in his head. Drive it out! Get rid of it!

‘Don’t shout, Heriot,’ Great-Great-Aunt Jen was saying sternly. ‘Be brave. Face up to it. I can’t help you.’

‘Do I have to help myself then?’ demanded Heriot.

Something moved behind his eyes as he turned to look at Lord Glass. Something in a private space in his head looked out of him. But to use the talents of whatever it was that lay on the other side of the fracture, he had to acknowledge it.

‘You’re all changing me,’ he cried desperately. ‘You’re making me change.’ And he began to tremble … nor was he the only thing that shook, for the glasses on the tray shuddered along with him, softly at first and then with an added clamour. The wine spiralled up the sides of the goblet and the goblet itself danced and spun on its round foot flashing sparkles of light across the walls and ceiling. The slender jug danced on its tray, the windows hummed, each one on a separate note, but in disturbing harmony rising higher and higher, until Heriot’s teeth ached with the sound. Great-Great-Aunt Jen looked around wildly, his mother raised her head and stared at him incredulously, but both Dr Feo and Lord Glass now seemed to recognise him beyond all doubt. The glasses chattered on in shrill voices, the goblet sang and signalled, the jug burned, the windows hummed higher and higher, until they were screaming, pitched on the very edge of possible hearing, and then suddenly everything in the room that was made out of glass burst into clear splinters. Heriot felt his eyes turn back in his head, and his eyelids close over them, like curtains drawn over windows through which too much might be seen.

Dr Feo caught him and held him tightly, even patting him as if he were a good dog who had done well.

‘Just see how radiant Feo looks,’ said Lord Glass in a voice that contrived to be shaken, querulous and somehow entertained as well. ‘Now I would be very annoyed with anyone who treated my treasures like that, but Feo has it in his power to forgive all, though of course in this case, it is not his own property that has been harmed. Feo? You’re pleased, are you?’

‘Oh yes, my Lord,’ said Feo, sounding excited. ‘I think the boy made powerful use of some despair …’ he coughed apologetically. ‘I would surmise, that he wanted to strike at you, but he realised that, if anything happened to you, his family might suffer, so he attacked, we might say, by association.’

‘Might we say that?’ inquired Lord Glass, arching his brows.

‘The glass!’ said Dr Feo eagerly. ‘Not another thing was touched, only the glass. I think it might be a play on your name, a sort of pun.’

Lord Glass sighed deeply. ‘There are people who suggest that, now the wars are over, I no longer take risks on behalf of Hoad.’ He stood up. ‘We must go at once. There is no need to pack anything for the boy. Hoad will provide adequately – even generously.’

‘Sir,’ protested Anna, angrily. ‘You took Heriot’s father for your wars, and he never came back, and now you’re taking Heriot. It’s not funny to us.’

‘My dear,’ said Lord Glass, speaking now in a very different voice. ‘I have a superficial nature that can’t gracefully abide some of the acts I am bound to perform. I joke about many things, including my own misfortunes. My father lost three sons in the King’s wars, and I have lost my eldest. But, like me, you have other boys coming on, and that’s why I am the King’s man, since, after all our wars, he is turned powerfully towards peace, and may well turn us all with him. His reign has brought many blessings, I think, and may bring more, no matter what you may feel at the moment.’

‘It’s true,’ Great-Great-Aunt Jen said with a sigh. ‘We’re bound to submit. Heriot’s our sacrifice this time round.’

‘And a piece of good advice from one who knows – keep your other boy away from Diamond. It seems more and more likely Heriot had a vision of a future possibility, so Diamond might not be altogether suitable for your Carron. Keep him at home or try some other city. Now, boy Heriot! We’ll sleep at my house tonight, and take you to the old battlefield tomorrow. Indeed they are hammering a primitive peace together out there, and I am expected to strike in myself on the part of the King,’ Lord Glass said. ‘Say your goodbyes rather quickly, my dear. And think of all this as an adventure – maybe the road to fortune.’

Heriot looked deep into those smoky eyes for a moment, then let his quivering shoulders relax, and gave a long sigh.

‘If I must, I must,’ he said submissively. ‘May I take my cards with me? They’re out in the courtyard.’ He held his breath.

‘The cards,’ Lord Glass looked at Great-Great-Aunt Jen rather than Anna. She looked doubtful.

‘It’s an ancient set,’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t get another like that. But all right. Be quick.’

Heriot smiled a little, turned and gave Lord Glass an appeasing glance.

‘That’s a good boy,’ said Lord Glass.

Heriot moved slowly to the door, expecting that, at any moment, someone would remember he had put the cards in his pocket, and he would be called back sternly.

However, as they began talking again behind him, he arrived safely in the kitchen.

‘Heriot …’ said Baba. ‘What’s happening? Are you to be taken?’

‘Tell us!’ cried Ashet. ‘Don’t keep us waiting. Is your fortune made?’

Nella, with her baby in her arms, smiled at him.

‘I’ll tell you in a moment,’ Heriot replied, amazed at his own easy, natural voice. ‘Look, I’m to get something for them … something from outside.’ He came to the door of the kitchen where Cloud was watching the little ones, still running in circles and jumping over the tiny stick. Cloud smiled.

Shuddering inside his clothes at the sight of an Assassin overlooking the babies, Heriot walked calmly past, offering no explanation or excuse, then out through the courtyard gates. And then, at last, he allowed himself to run, to run as fast as he could into the old barn. Once there he climbed a ladder into a loft, piled with loose hay. He burrowed into and through, letting it fall behind him. For a moment he thought he might stick there and smother, but finally he won through.

On the other side of the piled hay there was a very small window directly under the peak of the roof. Turning to face back the way he had come, he sat on the sill, reaching out and then up, until his desperate fingers, groping up across the outside stone, encountered a familiar hold, a channel made to drain rainwater into a stone cistern.

As Heriot began wriggling up out of the window, angling himself and holding his breath as he did so, he heard voices questioning, and feet beginning to pelt across the courtyard. As he pulled himself out on to the roof, feet began to shift the hay in the space below him. As he rolled down softly into the cleft between two ridges of stable roof he heard Lord Glass’s voice.

‘Cloud, I am to blame, I saw him put those cards into his pocket. But we’re wasting time. He will have made for the hills.’ The footsteps retreated.

Heriot had begun to breathe rather more easily when suddenly he heard Wish’s voice. ‘He’d be too big to get through that window, wouldn’t he?’

‘Right!’ said Radley from somewhere, and then added, ‘All this, it’s some sort of mistake.’

‘Get away with you!’ Wish answered. ‘He’s something really wild. I’ve always known it. We fling them up from time to time, don’t we? They’re like a throwback to the old people, the Gethin. Still he’s ours, not theirs. So we won’t look too closely. Come on now before they get suspicious.’

Then he set off walking rapidly … treading heavily … as if the sound of his boots might be sending some sort of message up into the space above him.

Heriot lay still, listening to the search going on below. When night came down around him stars pricked into life. Silence fell. Finally, in spite of the hard tiles and the cold, Heriot slept for a while, only to wake shivering, frowning, puzzling, and staring up into the night while the stars, wheeling above him, stared back without sympathy or even curiosity.

And at last … at long last … the first, faint transparency moved above the eastern horizon. Heriot had no choice. He must move on. Aching with cold, wet with night dews he slid to the edge of the dairy roof, arriving at a corner cut back into rising ground, where he crouched for a moment, trying to wring life back into his fingers before lowering himself over the edge of the roof. His cold hands, not yet properly restored, let go before he was ready. He had only a small distance to fall, but it was hard to judge distance in the dark, and the impact drove his knee into his stomach, so that he rolled on the ground, winded. A dog began to bark, but there was no response from the silent house. Picking himself up, limping to begin with but recovering as he jogged, then raced away, Heriot made for the hills.

Over the last few weeks he had kept silent about his experiences on the causeway. They were part of his own secret nightmare, and, anyhow, if they made no sense to him, how could they make any possible sense to anyone else? The subsequent vision in the courtyard had at least had a sort of story to it. But
what sense would it make to say, ‘Something has altered inside me. That thing that used to feed off me, always tearing into me, has been driven out. It’s changed – changed. Now it’s living inside me, pulling me into another shape. I’m changing too. I’m becoming something different.’ Though the causeway had been the setting for such confusion and terror, Heriot nevertheless ran towards the sea, thinking of the series of long beaches stretching eastwards to Diamond, and of the many hiding places they offered. The wet ribbons of tidal shore, running for leagues to the left and right of the causeway, were like roads that might be travelled quickly, and the tide, being a reliable servant, would wipe out any tracks he left behind.

Beyond the tidal zone, hills of dry sand covered with yellow lupins gave way to deep woods filled with leafy rifts, caves, fallen trees, holes. Heriot imagined himself turning into a wild man of the seashore, and living on berries, crabs, birds’ eggs and wild honey.

‘I’m out in the world,’ he thought. ‘I’m on my own. It’s an adventure. It’s just got to be an adventure.’ And he ran on and on.

M
eanwhile… out on the edge of that last battlefield strange days were coming and going, like pages being flicked over. Flick! Flick! Flick! What? A week gone by. And then another. In the great tents in the centre of the plain the King, the Hero with his sword at his side, together with the Lords of Hoad, faced the Lords of the Dannorad and Camp Hyot, slowly arguing their way, day after day, towards a peace of some kind. A lasting peace perhaps. Everyone knew it was what the King was set on, but somehow, after all the years of advance and retreat, battle and bloodshed, the enthusiastic growth of twining hatreds, it did not seem possible.

Linnet had grown weary of it all. At first it had been new and exciting, but she quickly became bored with the city of tents, and all its strange contradictions, tired of the mud, tired of days that seemed to go on and on without arriving anywhere. She even grew tired of the formal occasions when she and her mother were paraded before strangers, just as the King's three sons were being paraded. There they were, lined up like pieces in a game … strange Betony Hoad with his servant Talgesi, handsome Luce who might someday be chosen to be her husband, and sometimes even Dysart – the Mad Prince, silent and closed tightly in on himself on these public occasions, almost as if he might betray himself by laughing aloud when everyone else was serious.

‘They are close to agreement,' Linnet's mother told her. ‘But it has been decided there should be a break of some kind so that people can stretch their thoughts and turn things over. Lord Glass has ridden off somewhere on some errand of the King's and the Hero has gone back to Cassio's Island for a few days.'

There was no great break for Linnet, however. She and Dysart were still obliged to study together. They sat with their books and papers around them, pretending to work but often arguing in a way they both enjoyed. Dr Feo had ridden away with Lord Glass and, though they had other tutors, there were often times when they were left on their own. It was in one of these times that Linnet looked across at Dysart sitting in his chair, reading and twisting a finger in his hair as he did so, and asked him a question that had tormented her for some time.

‘Why do they call you the Mad Prince?' she asked.

He looked up as if he were thinking the question over, and when he turned to look at her, she could see that he was working himself up to give her a long answer.

‘I don't think I am mad,' he said at last. ‘But I think I was born to be haunted.'

‘Haunted?' Linnet sat back. ‘By ghosts?'

‘I don't know,' Dysart answered rather irritably. He shrugged his shoulders ‘Could be ghosts I suppose, although it goes back a long way, back before I knew there could be such things as ghosts.' And then suddenly he began to talk, words pouring out of him as if they had been held in for a long time and were glad of release at last.

‘I don't remember when it ever began … I think I might have been about three or four years old the first time. I'd wake up in the darkness, all sweaty and strange. I felt as if I was being digested in some terrible gut … becoming meat of its meat, but still being myself inside that meat.'

‘You felt you'd been eaten?' Linnet exclaimed.

Dysart hesitated. ‘I suppose so. It was weird. I felt that what was happening to me was really happening to someone else, but I was caught up in it. I do know I was always terrified out of my wits, but, even then I knew that no true man of Hoad gives in to fear. So I didn't give in to it. I just clenched myself up into a fist.' As he spoke Dysart clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles whitened under the skin of his hands. ‘I held myself together against whatever the … well, the
invasion
was, no matter whose dream was coming down on me, until morning came.'

‘What was trying to invade you?' Linnet asked, glad to hear herself sounding sceptical.

‘I don't know,' said Dysart crossly. ‘I still don't know. I know what I felt, but none of it makes any sort of sense. I always thought – well, I was always utterly sure –that there was someone in the room with me … someone waiting for something. I don't mean Crespin, even though he was always there, snoring away in a bed at the foot of my own bed. It was someone else. Mind you, I wouldn't even try to see anything. I'd just screw myself up, elbows in, knees up, eyes pinched shut. Hour after hour. But once I felt the first light of day on the other side of my eyelids I'd open my eyes just a chink and turn my head. And then I'd see him, sitting there silently on the sill of my window, face turned away, staring down into the city … just staring down as if he had all the time in the world to admire the view.' Dysart looked across at Linnet and laughed, but not in the way he usually laughed. ‘My ghost!' he said, nodding to himself. ‘Well, more of a demon maybe. I don't know.'

He fell silent. Linnet stared back at him. For once she had nothing to say. He was telling a tall story, and yet at the same time she knew he was being serious. He was trusting her with his nightmare. Not only that, she found she was believing him.

‘Go on,' she told him, ‘Tell me the rest.' For she knew there was more to tell.

And, after a moment, Dysart did go on, telling her, yet telling himself at the same time, listening carefully to his own story. Perhaps it was the first time he had set it free in the outside air.

‘I did try speaking to it sometimes, though not with words. I'd try to get its attention with squeaks and grunts … sounds that were sort of asking questions … that sort of thing. Sometimes Crespin would wake up and catch me acting in a strange way, and of course he told other people.' Dysart shrugged. ‘Once I was seriously ill, and my ghost suddenly appeared in full daylight, sliding in between Crespin and the doctors who didn't seem to see or hear as it spread its left-hand fingers across its own face …' Dysart spread his own long, left-hand fingers over his own face as he told her this, ‘… as it laid the right hand on mine. Its fingernails were odd lengths, a funny thing to remember. Anyhow, when it touched me the fever slowly drained away. I felt as if I'd been saved. Well, I
had
been saved, but I don't know why.'

Dysart shrugged and stopped again, looking at her half-defiantly, as if he were expecting some derisive comment or question. Linnet still had nothing to say.

‘So, anyhow,' said Dysart at last. ‘I'd wake and wait, like I told you, and sometimes if I were alone with it – no Crespin or anyone – I'd get impatient and scramble towards the window, yelling, ‘Here I am!' But I could never touch it. It would simply dissolve into air and shadow. So then I'd climb into the space where it had been and sit on that big sill, and look out from my room up there at the top of Crow Tower, across the courtyards of Guard-on-the-Rock, and down into the city below. And I'd see what I suppose the ghost had been seeing … all that gilt and glass and wood and stone spread out like a parade. And
somehow the sight of the city always drove my fear back into the place where it usually lived, tucked in, all cosy and calm, under my ribs. At times I wondered if the dissolving ghost might be the city itself, trying to get in touch with me.'

‘Didn't you ever tell anyone?' asked Linnet, speaking at last.

Dysart shrugged again and gave an impatient sigh. ‘In the beginning I told them over and over again. But who would believe me? It sometimes seemed as if that demon was somehow my only true friend, watching me from that windowsill, giving me nightmares but rescuing me from a different sort of nightmare, something I could feel building out there, and always dissolving when I tried to look at it closely. Morning after morning I saw it soak away into the city out beyond my window, just like water soaking into sand. I did try to tell. I did try to tell Crespin, and Dr Feo. And a few others they brought to look after me. But they didn't believe me. And anyhow, words collapsed when I tried to use them. They all became grunts and humming.'

Dysart stood up and walked restlessly about the room. Linnet knew he had still more to tell her, and waited in silence.