Heriot Read online

  ‘It’s been a strange day so far,’ he told Cayley.

  ‘Aren’t they always?’ Cayley said resignedly. ‘Every one of them!’

  ‘You live by stealing?’ Heriot asked again.

  ‘Stealing and finding,’ Cayley agreed. ‘My stomach – it’s glad of anything it can get. No questions. And what it get, it hold on to. Well, mostly it does. It gets all sorts,’ he added, in case Heriot was unclear on this point. ‘I’ve et what they put out for dogs. I’ve even et rat stew, which is not too bad, all in all. Hard on the rats, though.’

  Heriot laughed not so much at the story, which he felt was partly invented to entertain, but at the way Cayley was watching him, reading his expression intently, trying to match something in himself to whatever he read there. Down below the torn, elliptical voice of the street child he thought he detected a faint echo of his own voice and of Radley’s.

  ‘Are you from the country?’ he asked idly. Cayley looked at him warily.

  ‘What if?’ he asked. ‘Back a bit, perhaps. ’N’t there now, am I? Not never again. Borned there, die here.’

  ‘How long have you been in Diamond?’ Heriot persisted.

  Cayley shook his head. ‘I told you before – no history.’ He stretched himself. ‘Just always now! Now, now, now, over and over again.’

  ‘What’s in the pipe?’ Heriot asked.

  ‘Happy smoke,’ Cayley said. ‘I know where to gather it,’ he added. It wasn’t just because of the happy smoke, however, that Heriot was finding himself immediately tempted by this small, dark space, and the wolfish child smiling at him. Living here, he suddenly felt, he might even become a family man again, and some sort of family life would tie him back to the farm which he missed every day of his city life.

  ‘You take a risk showing me this place,’ he said, and was startled when Cayley burst into laughter, spilling the oranges from the front of his shirt.

  ‘I mostly guess right,’ he said. ‘Dead if I didn’t.’ He pulled a particularly threatening knife out of a leather sheath at his belt, and began to peel the oranges.

  ‘I’d better get back,’ Heriot said, nodding in the direction of the castle. ‘I’ve been gone a long time and they’ll come looking. I’d take you with me but they wouldn’t let me keep you. Suppose I come back whenever I can, bringing some food and money?’

  ‘Happy smoke talking!’ said Cayley scornfully. ‘You’ve breathed it in. They don’t let you out alone – ’n’t you the Magician of Hoad?’

  ‘Too true,’ Heriot agreed. ‘But my five years’ good are up. Maybe from now on, five years shifty. I’m out alone now, aren’t I?’ He found himself adopting the pattern of Cayley’s speech as if it was a private language spontaneously invented. It was partly his occupant talking as it had never spoken through him before. He took what coins he had left out of his pocket. ‘Housekeeping!’ he said, passing the money over, laughing as he did so. ‘But I’ll have to go. Better to go and show myself, rather than be hunted out.’

  ‘No one hunts me,’ Cayley said through a mouthful of orange. ‘Or everyone does,’ he added rather more clearly. ‘No one and everyone – they’re like the same thing to me.’

  ‘They only want my head.’ Heriot shrugged. ‘The thing is there’s only one of it, and I need it too.’

  Cayley laughed his strange, breathless laugh once more. ‘Too much of me, too little of you,’ he said.

  A few minutes later Heriot left the shed, and the private feast of oranges that was taking place inside, and began walking home through the orchard.

  Suddenly he heard someone shouting at him. He turned, recognising the voice. Dysart came charging towards him though the early-evening twilight.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Dysart was shouting.

  ‘Walking! Walking in the orchard,’ Heriot replied. ‘I wanted silence. And your city owes me a bit of time.’

  In the next moment Dysart was beside him, glaring at him and shaking his shoulder. ‘The city doesn’t owe you anything,’ he cried. ‘It’s a question of Diamond telling you to do what Diamond needs. You’re not just a Magician, you’re the Magician of Hoad. Hoad! You don’t belong to yourself … you belong to the King.’

  Heriot was startled by Dysart’s fury. As he gaped in astonishment Dysart suddenly struck him on the side of the head. The blow wasn’t hard but, once delivered, it took them both aback.

  Dysart’s grip on Heriot’s shoulder relaxed. His hand fell away. ‘Oh damn!’ he cried impatiently. ‘I didn’t mean … I’m sorry but …’

  ‘Why?’ asked Heriot, wrinkling his face with disbelief as he tenderly stroked his ear.

  ‘Because …’ Dysart said, his voice milder now. ‘Because you’d vanished away, and I was frightened you’d somehow truly gone. And you’re my good fortune. Don’t you know that by now? The good fortune of a third son.’

  At that moment, as if Dysart’s words had somehow given birth to a possible new perception, Heriot found he suddenly knew something – knew it in an irrational almost visionary way. Dysart was a true friend, yet he was revealing a certain vulnerability – a certain need – and a particular possibility now buzzed out of the orchard air and lodged resolutely within Heriot.

  Within a moment he decided to bargain over something.

  ‘There’s a little old garden shed behind me,’ he said, pointing with his thumb back over his shoulder. ‘I’d like to live there sometimes. Sleep there, perhaps, out among the trees. Because being among trees might make more of a Magician of me. More of a friend too, we’d both enjoy that, wouldn’t we? Not just “enjoy”,’ he added hastily. ‘We’d benefit.’

  Dysart looked nonplussed. ‘You might!’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Listen! It would work out for both of us if I became an even more powerful Magician,’ Heriot told him. ‘We could look out for each other. And anyhow things are going to change for you soon,’ he added, reconnecting to the distraction of a moment ago … ‘Linnet of Hagen’s on her way here. Her father’s bringing her. Won’t that make Guard-on-the-Rock a different place for you?’

  22

  A Ragged Shadow

  After his day of rebellion Heriot settled down with a different and unexpectedly comfortable feeling about the shapes and routines of the city. The city was still there of course, still spying on him, looking down on him from all angles, peering over his shoulder as he wrote or read, but he no longer felt like a mechanical device, ticking over within it. Now he knew that, given a chance, he could escape. And he had a new acquaintance out there … a boy who suddenly seemed like his own ragged shadow, struggling with words yet able to talk joyously. Not a possession of Hoad but a true part of the city for all that, able to come and go freely. Heriot felt liberated at the thought of the boy Cayley’s strange freedom, conferred by neglect, freedom that the whole clockwork of Diamond could not control, for the boy wasn’t confined by any necessity except staying alive, laughing as he did so.

  This secret internal image of escape and of an intermittent friendship made his routines in Guard-on-the-Rock things he was able to do from day to day, no longer feeling that he had been reduced to a mere, movable device. Even when he sat at the King’s elbow some part of him was out in the city, stealing oranges, dancing down streets and passing effortlessly through stone walls.

  To his surprise Lord Glass obligingly gave orders for the old shed to be restored, so that he could use it as an orchard retreat. Heriot had won himself a place where he could enjoy a little solitude. So the season grew restful and mellow around him for a while, and, though he knew it couldn’t last, for no season, neither sun nor storm, lasts for ever, he was happy to enjoy it while he could.

  A month went by with Heriot doing exactly what Guard-on-the-Rock instructed him to do – moving from under the double gazes of the King and Lord Glass to the study room and the penetrating stare of Dr Feo, and then off over the bridge to his shed in the long orchard. Though Diamond was no longer pressing in on him, he could still feel it watc
hing in its inexorable way, but he no longer cared.

  He was the Magician of Hoad, and that was that. Nothing he could do about it. Apparently, it was what he had been born to be. Every now and then he reached beyond the city walls, out into County Glass, to touch his family and feel them farming and thriving, often smiling when no one else could see anything to smile at.

  And now, like a bright, broken thread stitching through his thoughts ran the street boy, Cayley, the rat of the city, coming and going through the hidden hole in the first wall. Sometimes Heriot’s brief, stolen orchard hours coincided with Cayley’s own furtive ventures under the ivy and into the First Ring. Then they would sit together in the old shed talking about nothing much … simply joking, gossiping about the day, perhaps, and its casual happenings or about the city beyond the wall. The time will come, Heriot found himself thinking in an absentminded way, the time will come when I can set out into the city again … when I can truly take it in. It won’t just be the King’s city then, or even Dysart’s city. It will become mine in the same way that it’s Cayley’s, but even more so. I’ll know every grain of dust. I’ll walk out into the Second Ring and then the Third Ring – walk into forbidden realms – and I’ll take Diamond over. But then I’ll walk out of it, and beyond it, carrying it all folded up in a corner of my mind. In the meantime I’ll just work on, winking at it from time to time, and it can wink back at me, sending me its secret messages.

  The daytime city swung down into darkness, and Heriot, often set free from the demands of royal duty and royal friendship, released to be a true night-time man, came running though the orchard to his shed. He ran without hesitation for at night he could see by something other than light.

  Although he had just left Lord Glass with the King and his tight circle of trusted men, he half-feared finding Lord Glass waiting for him in the garden shed, inquiring with an ironic and coercive civility whether or not he was giving his best attention to the King’s business. The shed door wasn’t locked, for Heriot had nothing worth protecting. He slid gratefully and easily into darkness, pulling that door closed behind him. Yet, as he did so, an even darker figure rose from the one chair behind the table.

  ‘It’s me,’ said a shadow among the shadows.

  ‘I’ll light a lamp,’ said Heriot. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked over his shoulder.

  ‘Round and about,’ Cayley answered, croaking a little. ‘I had this friend put down with the coughing sickness. Couldn’t just leave him to cough and die alone, could I? I’d to be nurse, even doctor to him. But … well, he’s gone, poor bastard, dead now. Then I ’n’t too good myself.’

  ‘I’ve not seen you in ages,’ Heriot said, still busy with his lamp. ‘I thought you might be dead as well.’

  ‘I ’n’t to go yet,’ Cayley said huskily. ‘I’ve something to do first. Something I must do. But I’m wore down a bit.’ There was an extreme thinness about his voice, a flattening of its previous buoyancy. Heriot turned, suddenly alarmed, and saw for the first time just what was sitting in his chair behind his table.

  The boy was reduced to nothing but a witch’s doll made of sticks and bird bones, his blue eyes abnormally large, sunken back into a face where the cheekbones seemed sharp enough to cut through skin which was cracked in places with open sores. His lips showed patches of infection at the corners, and his filthy blond hair hung lanky around a face that already seemed inhabited by death.

  ‘I ’n’t catching,’ Cayley said quickly. ‘Well, not so very. But people notice me and stealing’s hard enough without being noticed. And no one wants me working for them … not looking like this. And I ’n’t eaten so much lately – not that I’m hungry, but – well – you know.’ He smelt dreadfully in the warm room. It crossed Heriot’s mind that he might already be dead and decaying, but too obstinate to acknowledge the fact. The rags he wore were peeling away like a disgusting skin, and probably filled with vermin. All the same he smiled his transforming smile, which now seemed to illuminate his worn face with a ghastly light, showing the skull close under the skin.

  ‘No need to do any worrying,’ Cayley added, seeing Heriot’s expression. ‘I’ll get by for a bit now, if I get to sleep.’

  In the main part of the shed which had become pantry, kitchen and washhouse, all in one, Heriot had a round, wooden tub pushed under a bench. On the edge of his fire, burned down to embers, were two ponderous iron kettles filled with water. He blew up the fire, piled on logs and managed to produce sufficient warm water to wash his orphan of the savage night.

  ‘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 further 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. 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 on to 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, back then, he was like a question and I’m to be the answer.’

  Heriot turned back towards 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 around 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 h
elp 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.’