Heriot (7 page)

A
t last Dysart burst out, ‘I’ve always felt I was made not born … made accidentally. Betony … Luce … they feel like intended men. I feel like an afterthought. It took me a long time to accept that I was the only one who could see the ghost, but by then I’d become partly invisible myself. People began looking around me, and I wasn’t so much mentioned as muttered about. Sideways muttering!

‘Mind you, in the beginning they really did try, in spite of my grunting and crying and pointing at empty air. Because – let’s face it – a mad son! Well, that’s the sign of a great imperfection in any King’s reign. They did their best with me, but none of it worked. If I was given any traditional task … as page boy, say, at one of my father’s feasts … things always went wrong. Flagons rattled. Glasses fell over. Wine climbed up the inside of goblets and spilled over all those lips of silver and crystal. Something uninvited was always walking along beside me, pushing into my space and twisting the world around me. Invisibly twisting it! Still does!’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘No wonder the whole court sighed and looked away tactfully as I stumbled on by, plates and glasses falling to the floor. Even you heard the gossip up there among your mountains. Almost the first words I heard from you were,
They say you’re a fool
.’

‘But you asked me if I had pointed teeth,’ Linnet replied.

Dysart laughed again.

‘Fair enough!’ he said. ‘As for me, back then – well, I toughened up inside my haunted space, and started making fun of the world around me. Because there’s always plenty to laugh at, thank goodness. And, in the end, a sort of conceit took over. You’ve probably worked that out for yourself, and I didn’t want to be believed. That demon came to be …’ he hesitated, frowning, then said carefully ‘… my inside certainty of my own special nature, if you know what I mean. It had something to tell me when the right time came and when that right time comes I want whatever it says to be mine. Mine alone. I’m the one who’s done all that suffering for it. And the really strange thing – stranger than all the rest of it – is that sitting on the windowsill, huddled in the space, where the ghost had been, I used to feel that down below me, down in that twisting old city, the crown might grow straight out of the skull of the King, and that Princes, being made of legends not meat, would never be digested by darkness … not even for a moment.

‘So every now and then I crouched there in ghost space, feeling a sort of triumph as I spied on the city, high above everyone else, except for my father in the Tower of the Lion. But then, he was a sort of ghost himself … still is, really.’

Dysart sighed, and stared into space for a moment before going on briskly. ‘Anyhow, as I spied on Diamond somehow I found I could feel it all … I mean
really
feel it all … everything … not just Diamond but out beyond Diamond … the whole land of Hoad … mountains and forests, salt pans, sand hills, herds of white deer in the woods and black horses on the plains … the lot. Long before our Hero, the great Carlyon,’ Dysart sounded slightly sarcastic at the expense of the Hero, ‘long before he single-handedly avenged the massacre of Senlac, I knew as much about Senlac as if I had walked its street … and it only had one … it was all it ever needed … a village of about eighty people, with an ancient graveyard many times bigger
than the whole village. Some crowd descended on them – probably Dannorad, though the Dannorad always denied it – and killed every one of them. And then the Hero swept in and killed the killers.’

As he said all this, Dysart had begun pacing backwards and forwards, a flood of words bursting out of him. Linnet could tell that he had stopped thinking of her. Now he was talking only to himself, reminding himself of who he was, and telling a story he had told himself over and over again.

‘Of course the wars were still going on back then, but I swear that over in the Tower of the Lion I could feel my way into my father’s dream of peace, which was growing stronger. In the beginning he hadn’t thought he would ever be King – but war had killed his father and brothers, so when his turn came he grabbed the power of it and began striking back by declaring war on war itself. Sometimes I think his dream had something in common with my illness and that I caught it from him, though in another form.’ Dysart paused, standing sideways in the doorway staring out into the city of tents. Then he swung around to face Linnet, and his voice became suddenly passionate.

‘I’ve wanted to tell all this to someone who … well, all of a sudden, over the last few days I’ve really wanted to explain it to you. I don’t want you to think I’m mad in the way everyone else does. Anyhow in an odd sort of way I feel you just might believe in my ghost. And you might understand how it happened that, sitting in that haunted space, watching the city and dreaming of Hoad, I came to feel I had a magical life. All right … yes … perhaps I was the Mad Prince, but secretly I thought I might be the
true
Prince … the one who finally becomes King, even though he has two older brothers with dreams of their own. But just thinking that sort of thing is close to treachery, isn’t it?’

Silence came in on them. Then the sides of the tent panted in and out. The outside world was reminding them that it was still there.

‘Do you still see your ghost?’ Linnet asked at last.

‘No,’ Dysart replied. ‘Well, not often. Not in the way I used to. But I feel it in the air around me at times. I feel it nudging at me … breathing in my ear. Feel it brushing against the thoughts in my head, and when it does that, it throws me off balance. The day we met, the day they first brought you into the scholar-tent, something happened to my ghost. I felt the shock of it. Remember?’

Linnet suddenly remembered the pages flying up around him as if they were being whirled around by a wind that no one else could feel. Dysart seemed to see her remembering, and nodded slowly. ‘No wonder they think I’m mad,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to tell the difference between being mad and being haunted.’

A
few hours before Dysart, Prince of Hoad, began telling his story to Linnet of Hagen, Heriot Tarbas began climbing a hill, hoping his ascent would be undetected. He climbed as quickly and quietly as he could, sliding through long grass, or dodging from bush to bush. When he reached the rock Draevo he leaned against it for a little while, looking back down at the farm, feeling he might be seeing it for the last time.

At that time of day it was nothing but a series of black and grey masses, buildings, yards, orchard and garden. Roosters crowed. The dew on certain angles of roof and wall was beginning to catch the light, and there was a suggestion of movement at one of the doors. It might simply have been Baba and Ashet setting out to bring the cows in, but Heriot wasn’t prepared to wait. He realised he must have left tracks in the wet grass … tracks which, if followed, would zigzag remorselessly to his retreating heels. So, turning, he plunged down towards the sea, and didn’t stop until he had put the first of many little headlands between himself and the top of the hill.

By now the sun was well-risen. The light, flooding in over the sea and across the sand, was strong and yet somehow a little shy as well, just as if the sun had to reintroduce itself to the land. (Remember me? Shall we dance?) The coastline stretched ahead, unwinding like thread from a spool – a series of looping
bays, some of them little more than creases in the series of hard, rocky faces the land turned to the sea. ‘What shall I do?’ he asked himself. And then, ‘Well, here I am and I’m going somewhere.’ And then … ‘Yes, but where am I going?’ There was no answer to this question. He moved on steadily, but in no great hurry now, for he imagined he had left the farm and the possibility of pursuit behind. All the same he still walked above the tideline, first in the light, dry sand where he left no footprints, and then, after jumping from stone to stone down to the water’s edge, along firm, wet sand, certain that the waves would wash out his traces almost at once.

He had walked for a long time and around several headlands when he came to an abrupt stop. Somewhere someone was frying food, and Heriot found he was starving. Going silently from one patch of lupins to another he came, quite suddenly on a tethered horse, a huge animal, all of seventeen hands, sniffing from time to time without great enthusiasm at the coarse sea grass. And there beyond it, was a naked man, sitting on a black cloak which he had spread out on the dry sand, and cooking himself a morning meal. The back, half-turned towards Heriot, was as powerful as Radley’s, but Radley would have had black waving hair, the ends twisting into ringlets, falling down over copper-coloured shoulders, This man had, instead, a wide, springing halo of red-gold hair, shedding drops that ran down his pale back in slow tears.

Beside him was a cloth set with a wineskin, a loaf of bread that looked very fresh, and thin slices of smoked beef, delicately veined with a little fat. There was also a sausage which the man was cutting into rings, so that he could toast them on the end of a long stick. His clothes lay folded to one side of him. For all his nakedness and the campfire breakfast, Heriot knew he was not looking at a vagrant. The way the man’s hair was trimmed, the pure whiteness of the cloth, the elegant way the beef was sliced,
the warm blush of light along the blade held out to the fire, all suggested someone used to money and style. Yet what Lord could he be, alone on this remote shore, naked in the late autumn morning, cooking sausage with a knife that looked beautiful, ancient and wicked?

A piece of driftwood crumbled. The man shifted, half-turning his head. Heriot opened his mouth to speak, feeling his intention fly out ahead of his words. Then, before he actually spoke he had an overwhelming answer. Unhappiness poured into him, unhappiness shot through with a terrible ferocity, accompanied by another feeling, a twin to misery, a feeling he could not name though it made him shrink back among the lupins. These feelings were accompanied by a huge irritation. The man was deeply unhappy about something, and, at the same time, angry with himself for his own unhappiness. Somewhere along the line, he had done something terrible, and, though he wasn’t sorry he had done it, the memory of doing it was infuriating him.

These wild emotions were flowing directly from the naked giant before him, and though Heriot was receiving them, they belonged to that man alone. Heriot stepped back as silently as he could, but the man turned sharply, teeth slightly bared. Then, seeing Heriot, he paused and relaxed; he smiled; he even laughed a little at his own momentary shock. His red-gold eyebrows arched with astonishment, his long thin-lipped mouth turned up at the corners in a curling smile that reminded Heriot of the smiles on the faces of the carved lions in his garden at home. That tide of savage feeling seemed to sink rapidly away into the rocks and sand, though it did not totally disappear.

‘Don’t look so frightened,’ the man said. ‘You’re welcome, whoever you are. I could do with company. Sit down and have breakfast with me.’

Heriot looked around doubtfully, not knowing whether to retreat or advance.

‘It’s a command,’ the man said, a different tone now creeping into his voice. Heriot slowly obeyed, baffled by some quality in this encounter. It was hard to think that anyone with such a warm, easy, amused voice could be the source of the menacing distress that had assailed him only a moment earlier.

‘You’re one of the Orts?’ the man said after a moment. Heriot looked confused. ‘A Traveller? Yes?’ the man added. Heriot’s black plaits and olive skin had misled him.

‘Half and half, I think,’ Heriot said cautiously. ‘Like, I mostly don’t travel. Well, I might be travelling right this minute, but only just.’

‘Oh!’ said the man as if he understood everything. ‘You’re running away then?’ Heriot did not reply, and the man, nodding as if Heriot’s silence was an answer, clapped a slice of beef between two bits of bread and passed the sandwich over to Heriot, who, even though he felt shy in the presence of a stranger, both naked and noble, took it gratefully. The man looked at him closely, apparently puzzled.

‘You’re not a girl by any chance, are you?’ he asked.

‘No!’ cried Heriot indignantly.

‘Oh, do excuse me!’ the man exclaimed, lifting his eyebrows in amusement at Heriot’s vehemence. ‘You look so shy, and then your long hair made me wonder.’

‘Our lot like it long,’ Heriot explained. ‘It’s the way you tell us from the Hoadish men.’

‘So your father wears his long, too?’ asked the man, grinning a little.

‘I don’t know about him,’ Heriot said doubtfully. ‘He was in the King’s army, and died before I was born.’

‘I’ve placed you now,’ said the man, in a more subdued voice.

‘You come from among those ruins over the hills back there, don’t you? You’re one of
that
family.’

‘Right!’ Heriot agreed. ‘The Orts wander, but our lot, we stand still in the old place.’ He gratefully accepted a ring of sausage from the end of the knife.

At this moment the horse suddenly swung around, lifted its head, and put its ears forward. It nickered and another horse, further down the beach in the direction from which Heriot had come, neighed faintly but distinctly. Heriot scrambled rapidly to his feet, cramming the ring of sausage into his mouth as he did so.

‘Someone chasing you?’ asked the man sympathetically.

‘Well, they could be,’ Heriot said. ‘Not that I’ve done anything wrong,’ he added hastily. ‘It’s just I don’t want to go to places where other people want me to go, that’s all.’

‘Hide!’ the man suggested. ‘No one will search too closely around me. I can promise you that.’

Heriot gave him a grateful glance, and wriggled back among the lupins as quickly as he could.

‘Get yourself comfortable,’ the man advised. ‘I’ve had to hide a few times in my life, and it’s important to start off by being as comfortable as possible.’

‘I know,’ Heriot said, thinking of his wretched night on the roof of the old barn. If he put his hands against the ground, the rhythmic approach of the strange horse could be felt like a heartbeat under his palms, but it still took a few minutes for it to arrive. And there was Lord Glass himself, curiously resplendent in his marvellous green coat, trotting towards them. Heriot’s self-appointed protector, who had continued very calmly to make himself a sandwich of beef and bread, stared, started, and leaped to his feet with a shout of incredulous laughter.

‘Dorian, Lord Glass!’ he shouted. ‘You of all people! What are you doing out here on a deserted beach in the early morning?’

‘This is County Glass, after all,’ Lord Glass replied, dismounting. ‘It is my county. What are you doing here, naked and solitary as the first man in the world? I thought you were taking advantage of the break to put your island in order. A change for you, my dear! No flash of steel! No splash of blood!’

‘I wanted to be on my own,’ the man said. ‘I wanted to think things over. It looks as if the King might get that great peace he has worked for, but what happens to the Hero when there’s no need for his Heroism? After all I’m not so old – nearly forty– that’s still young. I’ve got a long way to go. Anyhow, I thought I’d come back to my own place and enjoy a little solitude.’

‘You wanted the war to go on?’ Lord Glass asked as if he could not quite believe what he was hearing, but the man merely laughed.

‘Can I offer you food? Drink? You’ll have to drink from the bottle, mind you. And then you can tell me just why you of all people have appeared out of nowhere.’ His voice changed, growing suddenly eager. ‘The King hasn’t had second thoughts about my suggestions, has he?’

‘No,’ said Lord Glass. ‘The King never has second thoughts, my dear. And as for me, I’d love to sit, tipping the bottle and gossiping, but unfortunately I’m too busy to be sociable. I was sent to escort a young man back to Diamond. He’s turned down a royal invitation, and you know just how pressing they can be. You’ve haven’t seen a dark-haired boy, have you? I left Cloud following what might have been tracks in the sand back there, and cast on ahead myself.’

The man ignored the question. ‘Cloud?’ he exclaimed. He sounded thunderstruck. ‘This boy … do you want him alive or dead?’

‘We were intended as his escort, not his huntsmen,’ Lord Glass sighed. ‘It’s a long story, my dear.’

‘I haven’t seen anyone,’ the man answered, ‘but if I do, I will
look at him very carefully indeed. He must be a treasure.’

‘Well, if you do come across my runaway you could bring him to the Tarbas farm over the hill. Largely unharmed, of course.’

‘Of course,’ the man agreed rather savagely. ‘By the way, what has this boy done to deserve such very distinguished attention?’

‘He represents a possibility, nothing more,’ Lord Glass replied. ‘As you know the King likes to collect curiosities of nature.’

Through a cross-hatching of stems and a stipple of leaves beyond them, Heriot watched Lord Glass wheel his horse, and ride back the way he had come. He wasn’t sure why the naked man, so familiar with Lord Glass, so lordly in himself, had chosen to conceal a runaway.

‘Stay where you are,’ the man murmured, as he, too, stared after Lord Glass. Then he began dressing rapidly, talking all the time, in a low but sharpened voice. ‘I’ll take you up in front of me and carry you further down the shore if you like. Lord Glass is a true King’s man, so I owe him a bad turn. You can edge out now … he’s well around the next headland.’

As Heriot scrambled out, his hair catching on dried stems of lupin, which were behaving as if they were trying to pull him back into hiding, his protector turned to face him, wearing a very different expression from the one he had worn earlier. ‘I take it you know who that was?’

Heriot said nothing. He watched the man knot a sash of brilliant colour at his waist, then twist it to display its fringe, after which he slid rings of turquoise and silver out from his pocket and then, one by one, on to his fingers. Naked and pale, he had been a casual companion. Dressed and coloured in, he had suddenly become a master.

‘Lord Glass is a great man in the land,’ the man said,
straightening the rings, then holding out his hand in front of him as if he would be able to admire them better from a distance. ‘He’s the King’s Devisor, and his closest friend. If you’ve really done nothing wrong he’d be good to you.’

‘I just want to be let alone,’ Heriot said.

The man laughed. ‘Too much to expect!’ he replied. ‘After all, I wanted to be left alone too, and you broke in on me, disturbing my thoughts.’ His last words sounded brotherly. Heriot’s heart warmed to this voice.

‘Lucky I did, though,’ Heriot said cheerfully. ‘No fun having thoughts like those – all black and savage. It must be good to have a break from them.’ The man had been shaking the sand from his cloak, but, for a fraction of a second, he froze, smile fixed, eyes staring straight ahead. He recovered in the same moment, and, as he slung the cloak around his shoulders, he said in an absent voice, ‘Thoughts like what?’

Heriot already knew he had made a mistake. ‘Just joking,’ he said apologetically. The man did not press him for any more answer than that.

And then, a moment later, they were cantering, even galloping along a stretch of hard sand, Heriot clinging on to the horse’s mane, his rescuer’s powerful arms on either side of him. He laughed aloud with relief and pleasure, and the man responded by laughing too. ‘Wonderful to go free!’ he shouted.

‘Run off like me then,’ Heriot cried back.

‘Ah, but I never run away!’ the man replied. ‘Never!’

They slowed down to pick their way around one rocky headland, cantered again, then slowed a second time, as they confronted a narrow stretch of stones that ran between the sea and the severe cliffs, which seemed to beetle out over Heriot and his companion. Perhaps quarter of a league further down the shore, Heriot could see that these cliffs dwindled abruptly to banks, and were cut by an impatient
stream, which split into a series of winding channels before reaching the sea.

At last the man spoke, pointing over Heriot’s shoulder. ‘If you go up that stream you’ll come to a path. You can’t miss it. It’s quite easy to see. Just keep going until you get the aqueduct in your sights. The aqueduct marks the main road, and, after a league or so, the road forks into two. The left-hand road is the one that leads to Diamond. And once you’re in Diamond you can lose yourself for ever.’