Heriot (8 page)

‘Diamond?’ Heriot exclaimed blankly. ‘I’ve run off so they won’t be able take me there. Where does the right-hand road lead to, then?’

‘It leads to the plain, but the plain’s crowded at present. Probably will be for a few more weeks,’ the man replied indifferently. ‘All right then! Live in the woods if you can, but remember it is winter. And for some reason I get the impression they’ll be searching for you very carefully indeed.’

And then he slipped his hand in under Heriot’s hair to take the back of his neck in a gentle but disturbing grip. ‘Why do they want you so much?’ he asked.

‘Lord Glass is our Lord,’ Heriot replied glibly. ‘We’re under obligation to him.’ His companion laughed; his grip on the back of Heriot’s neck tightened slightly. Heriot felt himself being shaken a little.

‘That’s not a true answer,’ the man said. ‘Come on. Tell me. Why do they want you?’

‘It’s nothing I’ve done,’ Heriot said at last. ‘It’s more what I am. What they say I am.’

‘And what do they say you are?’ the man asked. Heriot shrugged, and the hand tightened still further. By now the grip was painful.

‘They say I’m one of those Magicians,’ Heriot blurted out despairingly, and suddenly knew, beyond any doubt, he must
move on at once. He swung his right leg across the horse’s neck and withers, slipping from under his companion’s grip, towards the ground, which seemed an enormous distance below him.

The man remained sitting on the horse, staring rigidly ahead.

‘You read minds?’ he asked in a noncommittal voice. ‘You read what was in my head back there, didn’t you?’

He looked down at Heriot. His eyes of a clear shallow green like rock pools carrying the hint of a deeper sea. ‘My thoughts. You knew what I was thinking.’ He swung himself gracefully down from the horse to stand over Heriot. ‘Is that why you looked so alarmed?’

‘I didn’t try reading you,’ Heriot said. ‘I didn’t mean to. What you were thinking back there, the feeling of it, just pushed in on me.’

‘Well, not everyone wants his thoughts to be read,’ the man remarked. He held out his hand. Heriot hesitated, then, very cautiously, he took it. ‘So goodbye, Magician,’ said his companion. ‘Because I’m afraid I really must move you on. No sign of anyone coming after you?’

Involuntarily Heriot turned his head to look west, though the curve in the cliffs cut off almost any view of the way they had come. Something whispered slickly beside him, but, even before that whisper reached his ears, he had received a warning. Later, he remembered it as a furious jolt that somehow thrust him out of the man’s grasp and into the margins of the sea. At the same time something burned him, or so he thought at first, as pain slid up his ribs, and slanted into the flesh under his arm. His companion’s hand snatched at him, but Heriot was already free, still spinning away … spinning with the shock of the original warning. Suddenly knee-deep in restless water, still actively retreating, he looked up once more into those pale green eyes. The horse snorted and
backed. Its master, knife drawn, advanced another step or two as Heriot moved back, his hand clapped under his arm.

‘You knew that was coming, didn’t you?’ the man said, sounding interested. ‘Otherwise it would be all over.’

‘But I’ve done nothing,’ Heriot cried.

‘Sorry!’ the man replied briefly. ‘It’s not what you’ve done. It’s what you are. You’re just too risky,’ he added, as if this was an explanation that Heriot himself would naturally accept. The horse shifted uneasily as the man gathered himself to finish what he had begun.

Heriot shrieked with an unexpected hatred as much as fear, and found he had the capacity, not merely to express pain, but the power and even the will to impose it as well. The sound he made was so startling that the man stepped back from him. As the cry tore its way up from somewhere deep inside, Heriot’s wild braids of hair stirred and lifted, and lashed like serpents, and he felt himself transforming. Even the sea shrank from the dreadful sound he was making. The water surged away around his legs and left him standing on wet stones. On and on he screamed with no pause for breath, until the very earth winced and shivered, toppling Heriot on to his knees and flinging the man sideways.

Over Heriot’s shriek, came the cry of the horse and the thud of its stumbling hoofs. In front of him the man twisted gracefully over and on to his feet again, his rising somehow a continuous part of his fall. Then he made for Heriot, his face twisted with fury and repulsion. Heriot let himself tumble, rolling over and over, leaving a series of brief, bloody patches on the stones behind him. The man overtook him, grabbing at him, and swinging the knife high – and at that moment something enormous struck both of them, tearing them apart once more. Emerging from confusion, Heriot found himself scrambling back into the shadow of the beetling cliff, while the freakish
wave which he had somehow commanded rushed wildly back once more, then swept in towards them again. As his enemy, hampered now by soaking clothes, came forwards, Heriot could see he had lost his knife. However, he was still implacable.

‘I could strangle you with one hand,’ he said, which was true.

A single stone fell from somewhere above, and smashed at his feet. The man lifted his eyes to the cliff under which Heriot now crouched, and his expression changed. Shingle and dust began trickling lazily from somewhere overhead but Heriot did not take his eyes from his enemy.

‘We’d both be buried,’ the man said. There was a flicker of reluctant awe on his face.

‘Not me,’ Heriot croaked, and believed this was true, although he could only guess at what the man might be seeing. He was certain he did not have a cry left in him, yet he clapped his hand over his left eye, and took a breath, curling his lip back once more, feeling his face somehow alter, as he smiled a smile he knew he had never smiled in his life before.

‘Don’t!’ the man cried, stepping back, grimacing as he did so. ‘After all, you can’t prove anything,’ he said, speaking to himself, but also as if Heriot would understand just what he was talking about. ‘And after all,
I
am the Hero. I’m beyond the law. I’ve never backed off from any man,’ he added contemptuously, glancing up at the cliff again. ‘But you, you’re not a man. You’re a sad little monster.’

Then he spun on the wet stones and walked away, rounding the headland without once looking back, leaving Heriot lying on the stones behind him.

For an hour Heriot lay like this, his gaze so fixed, his breath so shallow, that anyone coming on him might have believed him dead. But then, suddenly, he sighed, sat up, looked at his scarlet side and the dark patch on the ground. He stood: he walked out
from beneath the cliff, turned and, looking up at it, saw its entire face cracked into a puzzle of fine lines, an incoherent version of the ancient inscription in the kitchen at home.

‘Watch out!’ said Heriot in a new, hoarse voice. ‘Watch out, you! Watch out! I’m a sad, little monster.’ Bleeding, exclaiming, warning his shadow and threatening his recent murderous companion, he began wandering, caught up in a strange dream … a dream woven both of pain and the curious impression that the person feeling that pain was not a true person, but a figure in a story that had never been told before.

He dragged himself through bushes, climbed a slope and came back, at last, on to a definite road. Home, he thought, was somehow behind him, but he must not go there. Instead he wandered on, swaying and mumbling, until he came to a place where the road divided, the wider and better-kept part of it swinging to the right, the narrower and more uneven track turning left. ‘I’m not going to their city,’ he said aloud. ‘I’m going the other way, whatever way that is. I’m going there.’

And he stepped on to the left-hand path, limping along, curving around two bends, after which he found he had to stop, for everything hurt too much and since it seemed he must have saved himself by now, he had an inner permission to lie down peacefully.

H
ow long he lay there, seeping blood and dreaming, he could not tell, but a sound made him look up. At the same time he felt an advancing shadow suddenly moving across him, and then stopping. He looked up and saw a cart had drawn up alongside him, and the man driving the cart was looking down at him with curiosity and concern.

‘What’s happened to you?’ the man asked. Heriot felt it was a question he had been asking himself over and over again, and, since he didn’t really know the answer, he couldn’t tell anyone else. All the same he sat up, wincing as he did, inventing a possible reply.

‘I had a fall back there,’ he said, waving his hand vaguely. ‘I cut myself.’ His voice sounded strange and lost in his own ears. ‘I banged my head. Broke a rib, maybe.’

‘I’m on my way back to the plain,’ the man said. ‘I reckon there’s room for you to lie in the back of the cart, but don’t go bleeding on my trade goods.’

Somehow Heriot scrambled into the back of the cart, and flopped down once more, filled with immediate relief, for he no longer had to think about direction or taking step after step. Moving onward and away was now the horse’s task, not his. Unexpectedly he found the world spinning away from him and, filled with relief because someone else had taken over, he did indeed fall into a sort of sleep.

In this sleep he dreamed he was sitting on that high windowsill once more, but staring, now, into an empty room. The bed was there, straightened and somehow deserted. The fur coverlet was smoothed out for once. And that agile boy with the odd-coloured eyes who had always been there, staring back at him as if he was somehow expecting Heriot to give him a message, was gone.

He woke with no real idea of how much time had passed. All he knew was that the cart had come to a standstill, and, tilting his head sideways, he could see the man had gone too. The horse was tied to a hitching hook in a stone wall, and was feeding from a nose-bag.

Heriot sat up slowly. Ahead of him stretched a great plain cupped by hills. It seemed as if he was on the edge of a shallow bowl of open space, but that space was seething with an energetic life. He was surrounded by tents, some of them so large they looked like castles of canvas. And there were people coming and going … men for the most part … soldiers, perhaps, Heriot thought vaguely, men with hair cut very short and swords at their sides. A few of them were as dark as he was, but many more of them were marked by a fair stubble, and glanced indifferently at him out of blue eyes. He was in a world of strangers.

H
eriot breathed deeply and felt the breath go into him like a thrusting spear. The blood on his shirt was stiffening as well as staining. Under his thin cover he could still feel a movement, as if tiny insects were running down his side, but he took no notice of this faint trickling. Above everything else Heriot was consumed with raging thirst. He looked into the maze around him. Somewhere there must be a place where he could find something to drink.

Moving gently, as if he were a fragile bubble-man who might burst at any moment, Heriot edged himself up, then slid down from the cart, to stand, looking around vaguely before setting off, unaware of the curious glances he was attracting, unaware of just how strange and out of place he looked with his long braid of hair and bloodstained shirt, wandering through a city of tents that was preparing to celebrate a great and powerful declaration of peace.

He hadn’t gone very far before he was challenged. His arm was seized, and he thought, at first, it must be by one of the soldiers. But as he turned, wincing, he found himself face to face with a young man – not much more than a boy really – almost as ragged as Heriot knew himself to be. And there, behind this boy, was a group of other boys, all looking at him as if he were something to be eaten and enjoyed.

‘You! Who are you?’ the young man asked him. Heriot stared back, blinking.

‘Go on! Who are you?’ the youth asked him again, shaking him this time, looming over him.

Heriot gasped a little, pierced through and through by the pain in his side. His name, even in his own head, no longer made any sense. It was nothing but an echoing sound. ‘Who are you?’ he had been asked. Well. Who was he?

‘I … I don’t know,’ he stammered at last. ‘I think I’m a dream man.’

‘A dream man?’ his captor cried derisively. ‘Dream this then!’ And, saying this, he raised his left hand and struck Heriot a swinging blow, before seizing him with his right. The other boys cheered. Heriot staggered in the savage grip.

‘Why?’ he yelped in protest. ‘Why? I’ve done nothing to you.’

But in some vague way he understood that this gang had been skirmishing around, looking for something to torment, some stray dog perhaps, something that would suffer and die for their entertainment, and to them, bloodstained and alone as he was, he had become that stray dog, a dog that would never be missed.

The grip on his shoulder was twisting him to the ground, and suddenly they all closed in on him, striking and kicking, while, beyond them, fair-haired soldiers marched by as if nothing was going on. He tried to connect himself to the power he knew to be lurking somewhere within him, but for some reason he couldn’t touch it. Perhaps he had used it up, protecting himself from the knife of the naked stranger. He remained nothing but a tired boy being beaten by others.

Better to be killed by that other one, Heriot thought, swinging up his arms desperately, trying to protect his head. Better that knife than being kicked to death. Quicker!

But suddenly another voice was shouting, shouting imperiously as if it expected to be obeyed. ‘Leave him alone! You
there! Leave him.’ And his attackers fell back, while, bruised and bleeding yet again, but free from his enemies, Heriot, who had screwed his eyes tight, rolled over and opened them again.

The first person he saw was a girl … a girl in rich clothes staring down at him, as shocked as if he were an animal being slaughtered in front of her. Then he looked at the person in the act of dropping on to his knees beside him, and found himself staring up into odd-coloured eyes, one blue and one green, blinking under a mop of mouse-coloured hair … someone Heriot recognised, even though they had never met before. And, as the boy stared down at him, Heriot saw his expression changing … saw him jerk back on his heels as if he, too, had been given a shock, looking so startled his startlement was almost a form of fear.

‘You!’ the boy cried softly. ‘You! Hey! You’re my ghost. My ghost.’ He looked over his own shoulder at the girl standing behind him. ‘This is
him
! The one I told you about, the one who’s been sitting on my windowsill all these years.’ Then he looked back at Heriot. ‘I’m the only one who’s ever believed in you,’ he muttered.

Heriot took a breath. ‘Fair enough,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t believe in myself, either. Not right now.’

The boy began to recover from that first shock.

‘You can’t be a ghost,’ he said. ‘Ghosts don’t bleed. You’d better come with me and I’ll take you to our doctors. We’ll work it out later – that you-and-me of things I mean. The dream business.’

Slowly, slowly Heriot stood up. He was glad to have someone friendly to talk to. The sound of his own voice began to make the places around him real. He was also glad to be with someone slightly smaller than he was, someone who could be leaned on easily, though, before he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, he looked rather doubtfully at those grand clothes.

‘Likely I’ll bleed on you,’ he said. ‘Most of the bleeding’s over, but it keeps on starting up again. And that kicking will have set it off.’

‘Forget it,’ the boy said. ‘They’ll clean any blood off me.’ He laughed. ‘It’s what they’re there for, to make me respectable.’ He laughed again, a curiously wild laugh as if he were joking with something beyond reason.

‘They won’t make me respectable, not ever,’ Heriot mumbled, still panting a little.

Suddenly the boy, who was also his support, stopped. Heriot, head bent down, could feel that they were making way for others. Shadows moved across them. Horses’ feet drew alongside, shifting and shuffling in the mud. Feelings of apprehension flooded Heriot, but they were not altogether his own feelings. Somehow he was feeling his companion’s response to the world in front of them. Heriot looked up, expecting to see strangers but to his astonishment, an astonishment immediately touched with a kind of weary despair, three of the four riders were known to him, two because he had met them before and the other … Heriot let out a sound that was half a groan and half a growl.