The Magician of Hoad (16 page)

“There,” he said, standing the tub before the fire. “You clean yourself and I’ll get you something to eat. Dear life, do you call this a shirt?”

“The one that had it before me… he called it that,” mumbled Cayley. “Anyhow, I’m not going all naked. That means trouble to someone like me,” he declared unexpectedly, and Heriot shook his head.

“You don’t have to be scared of me,” he said. “I don’t fancy you. I’m not a man who goes after boys. You know that.”

“Going naked in front of other men—that takes practice,” Cayley exclaimed, clutching his rags around him. “Maybe I don’t fancy being seen. I have to have myself to myself. It’s all I’ve got. Anyhow, there’s no point in washing and then putting my clothes on again. Dirty within two seconds.”

“I’ll lend you something of mine,” Heriot said. “You don’t look as if you worry too much whether things fit or not.”

He had already noticed the scars on the boy’s throat, but
now his attention was arrested by a pattern of blue lines just below the scars, springing into intermittent prominence in the firelight, and he exclaimed in astonishment. “You’re illustrated. You’ve got a picture on you.”

“I’m a book,” the boy said, “I’m to be read there, but not farther down. No words! No pictures, even.”

He was tattooed with a picture of a singing bird on its nest, and the nest was shaped like a heart hung with blossoms. Beneath the picture were the words “Love and Courage.”

“My mother, she paid money to have that cut into me,” Cayley said with tired scorn. “Good money paid over. I starve, maybe, and all the time that bird sings on me, ‘Love and Courage. Love and Courage.’ I think it might be a fool, that bird. I’ll try courage, but I’m not never going to love. Courage is enough for me.”

Heriot didn’t want to be distracted by this babble. “Forget all that,” he cried. “Here’s a towel. Wash yourself. I’ll turn my back if you don’t want to be looked at.”

Cayley still fingered his tattoo. “If I die, I’ll die real,” he mumbled.

“Wash a bit,” Heriot insisted. “Then if you die, you’ll die clean.”

He took a bucket and a dipper and went out to his rainwater barrel to fill it. Then, edging in to stand at what was now his kitchen bench, he cut bread in thick slices and, having no butter, put slabs of farm cheese straight onto it. He could hear Cayley splashing around behind him.

“I’ve been off a bit,” Cayley muttered monotonously. “Otherwise I’d make do. All that happens to me, well, I get
up, face up, and mostly make do. But this time round, it wasn’t so easy. It was my little brother that was taken first, not me. I saw that. Back a bit I saw him taken… saw his blood run! I cried back then. A long time ago, that was. I never forget. Never forget that crying. But I don’t cry now. These days I’m as dry as stone.”

Heriot listened to this sinister prattle. “I’m not,” he said. “I cry easily. I’ve never grown out of it.”

“Once!” Cayley said, exclaiming with a strange emphasis. “I used to once. Never again. My brother dying back then, that was like a—well, it was like a sort of question. And me, I’m to be the answer. What I do finishes
his
story. Or that’s how it feels.”

Heriot turned back toward Cayley with bread and cheese, then turned again to get a pot of milk, stooping to stand it on the hearth. Cayley stepped out of the tub and stood, shivering and scarred, wrapped in Heriot’s towel.

“Have you washed your hair?” asked Heriot, though he could see Cayley had neglected to do this. “Bend over and I’ll help you. We’ll get some of the dirt out and then maybe wash it again tomorrow when I’ve got more warm water. You look as if you might be full of lice. Fleas, too.”

“I do have some of them little creepers on me,” Cayley admitted. “I’m a world, and they’re my citizens. But these days… all starve… them as well as me.” He kneeled down and bent over the tub he had been standing in a moment earlier with the weary obedience of a blind man being instructed, step by step, up a long stair.

“What’s happened to you?” Heriot cried out in sudden consternation. “Your shoulders!”

“That’s just lawful punishment,” Cayley replied indifferently. “What’s left of it, that is. I was caught and hit a good many times when I was just catching on to my power, sometimes on my shoulders and mostly on my back. See, it’s five strokes right off, to learn you better. Worse if you’re fetched up before the warden. Sometimes it’s hanging, but I ’n’t been stretched yet. The rod’s not so bad. Some captains, they know it’s a hard life for us that’s out there. They hit, but they could hit harder, and anyhow, hit like that you need to get away… you learn to be quick. And those marks, they’re what’s left over. I don’t get caught these days. Still, you can work out why I don’t want anyone looking at my skin. I don’t want anyone reading what’s been beaten into me.”

Heriot washed the dirty hair with an infusion supposed to kill lice, one he constantly used himself. “I’ll have to cut it off,” he said at last. “This isn’t hair. It’s nothing but a mat.”

“Not to mind!” Cayley comforted him. “I give up being pretty. Use my knife, it’s sharp—sharpening’s free.”

Heriot cropped the fair hair closely if unevenly. “You’ll feel better now,” he said. “You smell better already.” He threw the mat of hair onto the fire and watched it flare and writhe in the flames, before draping another towel across the inscribed shoulders. The smell of that dirty hair burning filled the shed.

Cayley stood, hitching the towels around him with one hand and holding the dark soap in the other. He sniffed at the soap with interest. “I ’n’t think of smelling,” he said, grinning briefly. “Live with it, you likely don’t notice. Or care.”

Heriot was still distracted by those marks of beating, old stripes crossing very old ones, now all wrapped in under towels. “You’re like a wall that’s been written on,” he said.

“In the Third Ring they write on the walls,” Cayley said, “and they write, ‘Rid the world of a rascal. Die!’ Or that’s what they tell me, them that can read. But I’m not obliging. Anyhow, I can’t read my own back.”

“And what’s written here?” asked Heriot lightly, as he traced the line of a scar just above the edge of the towel, the scar running from under Cayley’s ear across his throat. As he touched it, remembering the ragged sash with the unraveling butterflies that had concealed it on their first meeting, he felt something wild flare up in him, something he suppressed with shame and astonishment and more disturbance than he allowed his face to show.

“That!” said Cayley scornfully. “Once my mother thought to kill me. She thought it was an act of mercy. She started thinking that love and courage and all that would never be enough. She thought she was doing me a kindness, setting me free from it all. But she didn’t cut deep enough. Her hand turned cowardly. Maybe she didn’t really want to.” He looked up at Heriot. “Everything heals that can. You learn that at my school.”

Heriot went to search for something for Cayley to wear and the boy’s voice followed him, though he spoke more to himself than Heriot. “There’s those that die but take no notice. Don’t they just get up and go on walking. Likely I’m a bit of a ghost by now.” His voice wavered, as the voice of a ghost might be supposed to do.

“Somewhere back a bit you were certainly lucky,” Heriot said, coming back with a shirt of his own.

“I don’t know.” Cayley sighed. “It’s doom, ’n’t it, and I was doomed to live on.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” said Heriot. “Put on the shirt and I’ll find you a blanket.” He was sure he had a blanket somewhere. After a little searching he found it, and turned to find Cayley now draped in the shirt, which came down to his knees, the towel dipping farther down beneath it. Covered, Cayley slumped onto a stool by the fire to eat the bread and cheese Heriot had prepared for him, though with nothing like the unashamed greed he had shown whenever they had wandered in the Second Ring together. Then he leaned forward and was violently sick into the wood bucket on the edge of the hearth.

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 skeptically. He drank some of the sweetened milk, after which Heriot wrapped him 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 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. I want to face it… laugh at it, tell it I just don’t care.”

“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 toward Heriot, who almost casually let his occupant lead him toward 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 the King of Hoad, 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.

And at last spring came again, after which the city moved, with self-conscious majesty, into early summer. Heriot turned eighteen. (
Growing up. Growing out. Growing in,
he thought.) And 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, whose spirits were 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.