The Magician of Hoad (2 page)

Great-Great-Aunt Jen stood among them, pointing and gesticulating. A cap with flaps coming down over her ears covered her gray hair, while her calm face, as round as a loaf of bread, brown and crusty, too, wore the expression of someone utterly accustomed to obedience.

“You’ll be our guests tonight,” she was telling the Travelers. “We’ll kill and cut up a sheep, and we’ll set up a fire in the big hall. I’ll send for the men out in the hills. You’re very welcome, I can tell you. It’s good to have you back.”

Heriot watched her with uneasy pride.

“There’s no need for it,” said one of the older Travelers. “No need for any special bother, that is. We’ve just come to see the tokens and the words, carrying on the custom, like.”

“We always welcome the chance for a party,” Great-Great-Aunt Jen replied, a little sternly, as if he had made light of her hospitality. Her dark, unexpectedly sad eyes fell on Heriot.

“You! Heriot!” she said to him. “Run and tell Nesbit and the others that the Travelers are here.”

The Travelers’ spokesman looked at Heriot with interest.

“He looks better these days,” he said.

“He was never sickly… well, not exactly,” Great-Great-Aunt Jen replied casually, though Heriot saw she became cautious as soon as his old trouble was mentioned. “He’s getting over it, whatever it was. Off you go, Heriot. Quickly, now.”

“Run fast!” said another Traveler. “I’d say it was going to rain.”

“Heriot could help to bring wood in,” cried Baba. “I’ll run for the men. And he hasn’t told the eggs yet.”

“What do you mean, he hasn’t told the eggs?” someone— a woman—asked from behind Heriot. “Told them what?”

“It’s a gift he has,” Great-Great-Aunt Jen replied, and once again Heriot saw on her broad face that familiar trace of—what was it—doubt, distaste? “He can tell which eggs will hatch cocks and which hens, and say how long ago they were laid.”

“Oh, he’s that way, is he?” said the speaker, as if she knew all about such talents. “He’s one of those. I thought you farmers had lost the gift.”

She stood in the gateway through which Heriot himself had entered a moment earlier… a young woman in the long, striped skirts and black short-sleeved smock, fastened down the front with buttons of bone, that all Traveler women wore. As they turned to look at her she came forward, walking freely in spite of her long skirts, while those skirts and the petticoats under them made a silky, sifting sound against her hidden legs.

“Azelma, our wise woman,” said the Traveler leader proudly, jerking his thumb at her. “She’s only a girl, but she has some of the old gift. She can see through walls, read closed books, and tell the future in patches. Even read minds. Of course she’s too bold, you can see that, but they do say that those who carry the gift burn up with it.”

“Heriot hasn’t got any gift,” Baba said. She hated to hear anyone else praised. “He’s slow.”

“I’m not slow,” Heriot protested. “I’m on my way now.”

“Not slow in that way… ,” began Baba. Heriot could see her straining to be off and away, over the fields and up the hill. His head filled with images of long waves and a dark island. His sister was longing to see the sea.

“What’s got into you, Baba?” Great-Great-Aunt Jen cried impatiently. “I’ve told you what you have to do. Now do it!”

“Great-Great-Aunt Jen… ,” began Baba, but Nella, who was married to Radley, Heriot’s older brother, tucked her arm under Baba’s, shaking her head. Heriot found his own arm taken and looked up, startled, into Azelma’s face.

“Here,” she said, talking across him to Great-Great-Aunt Jen and shaking his shoulder slightly as she spoke. “Do you know what you’ve got here? Does anyone out in the world know about this one? This one can read thoughts.”

“He’s not reading anything from anyone,” said Great-Great-Aunt Jen. “Off now! Off!” She clapped her hands in Heriot’s direction, and edging out from under Azelma’s hand, Heriot made for the gate.

“Well, talent or not, you’ve made a mistake this time,” he heard his mother saying. “He’s just an ordinary boy.”

“Ordinary?” Baba’s voice cut in. “He sees crooked and he has fits.”

But the disputing voices died away as Heriot ran, leaving behind not only the courtyard, his family, the Travelers, and the disturbing Azelma, but that past self… the one who dreamed over and over again of sitting on the window ledge, looking between rich hangings at a bed with
a twisted fur coverlet, and a boy with mouse-brown curls, staring back at him from odd-colored eyes… one blue and one green. He had stared back with fascination and fear, as if Heriot, that dreamer on the wide window ledge, were not another boy but some sort of monster, and sometimes his lips had moved, but Heriot, dreaming, had never been able to make out what he was saying. Sometimes the boy had pointed and seemed to yell. Sometimes he had hidden his face in his pillows and refused to look out at Heriot. But that was all over and done with. It had to be.

Once clear of the farm buildings and pens, Heriot Tarbas skirted two wide fields, each with its own name, then crossed another diagonally, scrambling through well-known holes in hedges or hoisting himself over dry stone walls. The fields grew steeper as he climbed the hill, and he was out of breath as he climbed the last fence and reached the top at last, clapped his hand over his confused eye, and looked past his little finger to the view on the other side of the hill.

The whole world seemed to tilt. The stretch and sigh of the sea seemed to swell toward him, while the sound of his own hard breathing was briefly swallowed by the greater breath of breaking waves.

Dominating the horizon, dark with forests on its landward side, was an island… Cassio’s Island, the home of the Hero of Hoad and Revenger of Senlac, one of the rulers of the people Heriot’s family called “Secondcomers.” There were towns and a castle and a whole busy life on Cassio’s Island, but none of this could be seen from Heriot’s
hilltop. From there the island looked completely empty.

Still, it was not drifting; it was firmly tethered to the mainland. Many years ago the same people who had once lived in the ruins of the castle that now held Heriot’s home had built the causeway… a road over which traders and messengers could bring goods and information from the King to the Hero and back again. And every now and then the Lords of the counties of Hoad, along with the King and his family and other Secondcomers, gathered on Cassio’s Island to watch men fight to the death for the right to be Hero. Heriot had never set foot on the causeway. His only travels were to the nearest village with Radley or his cousin Wish, for Great-Great-Aunt Jen discouraged any of her family from wandering, and Heriot most of all.

“In many ways it’s best not to be seen out in the world,” she had told him over and over again in her calm, dry fashion. “Work hard, keep your head down, and don’t let the Secondcomers catch sight of you… not even Lord Glass, though he’s a kind man compared with a lot of them. Take it from me, the Lord’s eye is the King’s eye! So keep out of sight.”

Just down the hillside Nesbit, Wish, and Heriot’s brother, Radley, were carrying stones to block a big gap in the wall, washed out during the previous winter. Shouting and waving, Heriot admired Radley’s wonderful shoulders and back, and the way the sea air had persuaded his shoulder-length hair into ringlets. If Heriot had a single ambition in the world, it was to look and live exactly like Radley, who was swinging rocks as easily as he swung his baby in the courtyard at home.

“Don’t tell me!” he said as Heriot came up. “She wants us home! Is it because of the storm?” He nodded at a solid bank of cloud, which was moving toward them, gray at its leading edge but billowing blue-black on the horizon.

“She wants you home because the Travelers have arrived,” Heriot said, watching Radley set the stone in place as precisely as if it were a chessman on a board.

“Which tribe?” asked Wish, but Heriot didn’t know.

The three men stopped working, straightened up, and began to wander up the hill, joking and laughing with one another, but for some reason Heriot didn’t want to go back to the farm. He hesitated, watching them climb, half expecting Radley at least to turn and call him to heel. But they went on and up, past Draevo and out of sight, talking all the time without noticing he wasn’t tagging along behind.

Heriot turned toward the sea and the dark forests of Cassio’s Island. He didn’t want to see Azelma again or hear her suggest he was different from everyone else in his family. He didn’t want to be forced into thinking of himself as anything but plain and mostly invisible.

Somewhere on Cassio’s Island was a port where ships put in, and somewhere beyond the forests was a city that held the castle of the Hero—one of the two great spirits of Hoad—at present alive in the person of Carlyon of County Doro. Somewhere on that island lived a whole population of men and women who were loyal to the Hero first and the King second. This was not only allowed, it was an ancient rule.

“It keeps the King just a little humble,” Great-Great-Aunt
Jen had once declared. “Once the Kings of Hoad used to be the Heroes as well, but it’s too much glory for one man to have both Hero and King alive in him at the same time. Sometimes they’re contrary spirits. They might tear him apart.”

The causeway was still green, a quick arrow pointing out to the island. On a day like this, a fine day when usual events were yielding to strange ones, someone might walk along the causeway and step onto Cassio’s Island and stand just for a little while in a place that was almost another country. It was not forbidden; it was just something no one in the Tarbas family had ever done… at least not as far as Heriot knew.

Two years earlier he had stood on that hilltop with his family, looking down on the causeway at glittering columns of men and women. According to the customs of Hoad, a young man called Carlyon had challenged the Hero, Link, and the King and his court were carrying him to combat in the Hero’s Arena. To Heriot, looking down from above, the parade had seemed more than royal. It had seemed to him not a company of mere Kings and Princes, but one of sun bears, centaurs, and strange, stalking birds as beautiful and passing as dreams. Three days later they had returned, carrying Link’s body in great splendor, leaving young Carlyon, Hero by conquest, to discover the island on his own and take possession of his hidden city. Heriot had believed the whole world was being paraded past the farm in a glittering thread so he could take note of it, but by now brambles and wild grasses were pushing in on either side of the narrow road, which on this particular
day, at this particular time, was totally deserted.

And now, as he walked along the causeway, with his whole family left behind him on the other side of the hill, Heriot was seized with a lonely elation and began to run and leap and to fling up his arms, chanting under his breath, spinning wildly, shouting wordlessly. Feeling he could twist all the way to the island, he turned cartwheels, until he toppled over, laughing as he fell, only to sit up in the middle of the road, staring wildly around him.

Then he relaxed, laughed at himself yet again, and breathed deeply, taking conscious pleasure in the smell of salt and seaweed and in the lap and rattle of water in the rocks on either side. The thought that the sound went on and on like that (water on rock, rock on water), whether there was anyone to listen to it or not, gave him a sort of relief.
Free at last,
he thought, without having the least idea just what it was he had been freed from, and set off once more along the wild road… the central seam of the causeway.

Directly before him at the end of the road was a stone arch.

At first it seemed enormously far away, and insignificant compared with the wide expanses of sea and sky, but suddenly he found he could not look around it or over it anymore. Suddenly it had become the only thing the world had to show him.

A great fountain of seawater erupted beyond it, and then another and another. Heriot approached it warily. Increasingly the arch seemed to drain color and shape out of everything around it, even the water and the autumn air.

And then, at last, he had reached it, was walking under it, then standing for a moment to read the inscribed names of the Heroes. Carlyon’s name was there, freshly cut into the old rock. Heriot put a tentative hand out to touch the names, trying to imagine his own name carved among them. But the stone would not accept his name, even in imagination. He wasn’t noble, and only men who were born to nobility were free to fight on Cassio’s Island. Heriot moved out from under the arch to stand on the island itself.

Directly in front of him, the forest began. Looking into it, he felt uneasy—and this first uneasiness grew stronger. It could not be shaken off. On his right, the road skirted the edge of the wood for a little way, while on his left, the long, sinuous, swelling waves cast themselves onto the rocks over and over again. Fountains of spray, forcing their way through unseen blowholes, leaped into the air, while the whole island creaked and muttered and gurgled. Heriot could hear it, even though he was concentrating on something else.

The forest in front of him had a door. It hung on huge iron hinges between two columns of black stone. But there were no walls on either side, and it was a gate that seemed to demand walls.

“No wall!” Heriot mumbled. “Door but no wall! Hey, you! You couldn’t keep a cat out! It’d just walk round you.” But the door would not be mocked. Out of its stones and iron and its dense wood there reflected, like ancient stored heat, a terrible weariness, as if the gate might choose to fall on him, crushing him into the dirt, out of boredom and nothing more. Not only this; little by little he began to feel certain that someone was watching him.

Abruptly he was invaded by a single terrifying image. Somewhere behind his eyes a window of black glass sprang into existence. It seemed it had always been there, though he had only just become aware of it, and he suddenly believed that, for years and years, a hand had been rubbing, rubbing against the glass with a soft patience as the black barrier had grown thin and then thinner. In a minute it would finally dissolve under the pressure of the preoccupied hand. In another moment he would be able to look not only forward but backward, too—far backward—backward into himself, and he would see something terrifying, something that would change him forever.