Heriot Read online

  Yet, at last, the forest faded into real night and he came to recognise himself … just Heriot running, though, even as he ran and remembered himself, he thought he also stood still, a rock outside time, a brother to Draevo, the rock on the hills overlooking the farm. Diamond, with its restless opinions and manoeuvrings, fell away from him like tattered leaves in a black autumn, and history flowed under him like a river of dust.

  ‘What am I? What am I?’ he shouted, shaking his head, for his triumph was also a kind of despair. Ordinary humanity seemed to have deserted him. ‘I’m a freak of freaks!’ he mumbled.

  A moment later and he was surrounded by the general celebration that was briefly transforming the castle gardens … by pedlars selling ribbon, bells, gingerbread, dolls, sweets, and pretty laces, by jugglers and tumblers and by men dancing an ancient dance. People ate and drank and kissed: a group of twenty men dressed in different colours walked past on beautifully painted stilts; thieves stole, gifts were bought and exchanged. On this occasion the Second Ring celebration had been allowed to flow through into the First Ring.

  Heriot stood on the fringe of the unfamiliar crowd, watching them as if they were a series of narrative pictures. A hand touched his arm. It was Cayley.

  ‘I saw you running,’ he said. ‘A mad ghost, you!’

  ‘I am,’ Heriot replied, shuddering and talking, not only to Cayley, but out into the fantastic city as it surged around him. ‘I was so keen to put it over the Hero I nearly turned all Diamond over to the forest of night. If I was braver I’d die now, on the world’s behalf.’

  ‘’N’t so easy to die,’ said Cayley smiling. ‘You can’t just do it for wanting. You’ve got to know how. I told you that.’

  Heriot said nothing. ‘Anyhow, you stopped it, didn’t you?’ Cayley went on. ‘Whatever it was, it’s you here now, not any forest of the night.’

  Heriot, twisting his finger in his hair, began to smile in turn. ‘Listen!’ he said in a cracking, unfamiliar voice. ‘I’m going to put myself where I ought to be. Come with me. You could be useful.’

  Part Three

  Choosing the Cage

  25

  Entertaining Visitors

  Morning had taken over the King’s gardens, but it made way for a distinguished company wandering between the flowers and trees. Dressed in crimson velvet, their hair frizzled into still haloes, the King’s dwarfs rode their big dogs through the zoo, ahead of the noble visitors. A young girl walked beside them playing a pipe. The Dannorad Lords, Luce, Dysart, the Camp Hyot nobles, the King with his attendant Cloud, and Carlyon with Izachel at his elbow all strolled behind the dwarfs, who were flickering like prismatic butterflies. It was a very still, hot day, summer like an unseen dog panting in the air around them.

  The lions, still upset by the lights and fireworks of the night before, paced up and down their arena complaining loudly. The woman with two faces laughed, then slowly turned, drawing aside her hair to reveal her other shrunken countenance grimacing like a very new baby.

  ‘Poor soul,’ said one Dannorad Lord, grimacing himself. ‘Lord King, to speak honestly, I wonder at this, I really do.’

  ‘It is a head with two faces,’ said the King. ‘A warning sent to Hoad, an instruction to balance itself between King and Hero, or one will lose its power and shrivel, to blink and sigh behind the other. And this poor creature lived a hard life until she came here, where a woman is paid to care for her, even to love her. In the world outside the bars no one would pay to have her loved.’

  They walked on, past the place where brilliant fish with filmy tails came up to the surface of the water, hoping to be fed, then past a grey pool from which a crocodile grinned at them, his collar glittering in the sun.

  ‘There can’t be many treasures better guarded, Lord King,’ said Carlyon. Hoad met his unrepentant and derisive stare, sighed and looked away as if confronted by a wearing prospect.

  ‘Hero of Hoad,’ said one of the Camp Hyot men, as if he had been puzzling over a question for a long time and had finally brought himself to mention it. ‘I confess I for one was rather confused by last night’s entertainment. At first it seemed we were insulted, later glorified, and finally, all of us, rebuked for any bitter memories we might have. It was a strange way to celebrate a wedding.’

  ‘I was the only one rebuked,’ Carlyon said without rancour.

  ‘Your own Magician placed a very distressing tableau before us,’ the Lord persisted, ‘which was alarming enough, but the compliment that followed was stranger still. Was such annihilating flattery intended to test our courage? Those trees revealed to us as the apotheosis of lost friends, as that weeping forest, made it seem as if the room had filled with spirits from the beginning of the world. I couldn’t help feeling a spirit had been invoked that we were somehow entertaining with the wrong part of our minds.’

  ‘I must admit,’ said Carlyon lazily, ‘I felt for the young Prince and Princess. To be married must be frightening enough, although that’s one act of heroism from which the Hero is exempt. It would surely take the most dedicated love to successfully shut a bedroom door on such a spectacle.’

  ‘Your new Magician is not very old,’ said one of the Dannorad men to the King.

  ‘He is eighteen,’ the King replied. ‘Lord Glass is our expert on the condition of Heriot Tarbas. You must ask your questions of him.’

  ‘He was born among the Gethin ruins,’ said Carlyon, perhaps maliciously, and the two Lords of the Dannorad stared briefly at each other, before moving on to peer at another barred enclosure.

  ‘This is the cage of the illustrated giant,’ said the King, ‘but he is in his house.’ The chain lay stretched across the enclosure from the block of iron. The gardener Nidd rang the bell, the chain moved and, abruptly, Heriot, the Magician of Hoad, appeared in the doorway of the illustrated man’s enclosure, staring out at them without his glasses, then slanting himself across the door frame.

  ‘I’m not quite as decorated as your last pet, Lord King,’ he said, ‘but I speak more freely. I can recite the rhymed histories of Hoad, list the Heroes who have submitted to the demon, tell stories of Horun and Hoel, Cassio and both Martel Hoads, father and son.’ Self-conscious as it was there was a defiant sincerity in his voice. Beyond the bars there was a cautious silence.

  ‘Magician,’ said the King at last, ‘what are you doing there? Where is my illustrated man?’

  ‘Gone, Lord King. I turned him loose,’ Heriot replied. ‘I gave him a cloak and a guide through the city … over to him after that. But you’ve lost nothing – under his illustrations, he was nothing but a man, I promise you. Safer for everyone if he goes free and I’m the one kept behind bars.’

  The King turned to his companions. ‘My Magician is young and dramatic,’ he said with apologetic tolerance. ‘He does not always enjoy the peculiarity that makes him so interesting. I shall leave him until common sense and boredom force him to leave the cage.’

  Heriot, rather taken aback by this easy acceptance of what he had intended as a challenge, saw that others of the group stared at him with expressions ranging from open fear to distaste and an aloof curiosity. They had all felt his occupant storm out through him into that darkened banqueting hall and seen his face outlined in light, a star, cool enough on its surface, but showing, through its cracks and apertures, that it was coldly lit from within. The King, apparently on the point of moving on, turned back.

  ‘Magician,’ he said. ‘You must know my younger son, the Prince Dysart, is still lying in a faint as the result of your enchantments. He is something of a friend of yours. Are you happy to leave him like that?’

  ‘Dysart!’ Heriot exclaimed, suddenly disconcerted. There was silence on both side of the bars. ‘Good for him to rest,’ Heriot said at last, though there was doubt in his voice. ‘Your city has twisted both of us. We have to take whatever shape it tells us. Maybe it’s Diamond, not me, that is telling him to sleep.’

  ‘Well,’ Carlyon said to Heriot. ‘At leas
t I think you are in the right place.’

  Heriot promptly thrust his hand under his arm, as if he had felt a sudden pain in his side. When he took it out his fingers were bloodstained. ‘Old blood,’ he said. ‘A little more than five years old. But I’d hate to tempt a Hero into a further display of Heroism. Lucky for me there are these bars between us.’ He met Carlyon’s eyes at last. ‘I still think a lot about that first time we met.’ He held out his hand, palm upwards, dreadfully stained. ‘And the bars go both ways. They not only keep the monster in. They keep the Hero out.’

  ‘Then we both see them as appropriate,’ Carlyon said lightly.

  ‘Magician, you presume!’ warned Hoad, but without anger.

  ‘I hope to be nothing more than a parrot and say back to the world what it says to me.’ Heriot’s voice became hesitant again. ‘But I nearly became a true basilisk last night. Don’t be misled, Lord King; at last you’ve got a real beast in this cage.’

  ‘So much for the Magician of Hoad,’ the King said in a tranquil voice. ‘Let us move on and see the white foxes.’

  Heriot was left, standing at the bars of his cage. After a moment he went in and lay down on the straw mattress and woollen blankets. The iron collar was incredibly uncomfortable around his leg, though there was an anklet of fleece that fitted under it. He was puzzled at his own mood, which was neither one of despair or of moral fortitude, but of a totally unexpected shame as if he had been caught out in some act of petulant self-indulgence.

  There was a slight sound, felt rather than heard, and Cayley was with him. ‘They ’n’t noticed the lock’s undone,’ he said, using his old, Third Ring voice as if this was the voice Heriot would remember. ‘So you can come out now. It’s no way homely here.’

  Heriot shook his head. ‘I’m not safe in the world.’

  ‘Don’t tell them, then no one will know,’ Cayley advised. ‘I’m not safe either, but no one guesses that about me.’

  ‘I’m warning the world, trying to save it maybe,’ Heriot said, and Cayley made a sound of irritation.

  ‘It’s one of those thoughtful games, but I don’t play them,’ he said. ‘Wasted on me. I’m common sense, and you’re nothing but poetry this mood – not dancing poetry neither – nothing but rubbish.’

  ‘Still,’ said Heriot, laughing and feeling comforted for no reason he could understand. ‘Suppose it was you?’

  ‘I’d let the world go hang, and save myself,’ Cayley said frankly. ‘No question!’

  They sat together in a companionable silence, but, as the evening advanced, Heriot was to have notable visitors. He heard someone coming hesitantly through the orchard towards his cage. ‘Quickly! Hide in the hay,’ he told Cayley. ‘If they find you with me they might take you away.’

  As Cayley obediently pulled hay over himself, the soft but determined footsteps came closer. For that night Linnet had not returned to the Hagen house in the First Ring. She had told her father she had been summoned by the old Queen, which wasn’t true, although she visited friends in the Tower of the Swan, and watched as the light of the setting sun blazed then faded on the stone walls of the opposite tower, where she supposed Dysart must still be lying in trance-like sleep.

  As darkness crept over Guard-on-the-Rock she excused herself, saying her father’s servants would be waiting for her, and wandered through the mazed castle, past a library, past the door to the room where Lord Glass assessed petitions to the King, across the Bridge of the Swan, and, came, at last, into the gardens and then the orchards. Beyond the trees, a faint filtering of silver light hinted at an approaching moonrise.

  But Linnet turned away from the moonshine. Walking into shifting blackness, guiding herself by the sounds of caged animals crying in the night ahead of her, she moved hesitantly forward. She made out familiar trees, identified corners in the path, and, at last, began moving steadily onward, turning only once to look back at the castle … the Tower of the Lion, not so much a tall rectangle eclipsing the stars, as a hollow place, into which she might fly, if she had the right wings – fly and be changed for ever.

  At the other end of the castle the Hero’s tower blazed defiantly, lamps in every window. Linnet looked longest at the Tower of the Crow, but could see no light in Dysart’s room. She turned away and walked on, imagining the ghost she had been told about, that familiar – the disconnected, prophetic, damaged part of Heriot – patiently sitting on Dysart’s windowsill, herding him first this way then that, for its own purposes. She thought of Dysart’s madness and the ruffling papers, the whirlwinds of twigs and dust that had once accompanied him, like the pets of childhood, giving him the edge of incoherence which had isolated him. Dysart’s wish to own the Magician had been nothing more than a reflection of the Magician’s determination to own Dysart, because, somewhere along the line, he would need him.

  There was a guard by the cage door. Linnet was quite prepared to march up to him and order him to stand to one side, but, as she watched, he moved of his own accord, marching off around the line of cages and out of sight, so that she had time to run the last few yards, open the gate of the last in the line of cages, and to scramble towards the shelter at the back. The door was so low Linnet had to stoop to slide through it, but once she was in there she could feel space around her and over her, and stood up cautiously in the dense night.

  ‘I know you’re in there!’ she hissed. Somewhere she heard a flint strike and a flame leaped up. Heriot was leaning back against a large pile of hay, his face lighted from below by a little candle in a pottery holder. Shadows shifted rapidly across his skin. Linnet caught the gleam of his teeth as he directed a feral smile in her direction.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you’re not here just to be nice to me, are you?’

  ‘How could you do this to Dysart?’ Linnet whispered, surprised to find herself whispering, surprised, too, to hear how savage she sounded.

  Heriot stared at her, biting his lower lip. ‘You’ve never liked me that much, have you?’ he asked her curiously. ‘Why not? I’ve never done you any harm.’

  ‘Dysart!’ Linnet insisted. ‘I’m here to talk about Dysart.’

  ‘Him?’ Heriot said. ‘All right. Talk away.’ She could see him shrug as he spoke. ‘It’s funny really, I’ve always fancied you.’

  ‘Dysart saved your life that first time we met,’ Linnet hissed. ‘Those boys might have killed you.’

  ‘He did save my life,’ agreed Heriot. ‘Is that what you came to tell me?’

  ‘I want him safe and happy,’ said Linnet stubbornly. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Heriot exclaimed incredulously. ‘You think safe and happy is easy?’ His voice suddenly tipped towards fury. ‘When I saw Izachel I remembered! I remembered too much.’

  Linnet closed her eyes, in case her courage somehow leaked out and ran down her cheeks like tears.

  ‘And it wasn’t ordinary memory. It was recognising a voice I hadn’t ever really heard before. Listen!’

  She heard his breath now as he panted a little in the shadows.

  ‘Do you know what my first memory is? My very first? It was feeling someone pushing a hook through my head, ear to ear and I grew up with that hook being pushed into me, sometimes several times a day … all the way from here to here.’ He slapped first one side of his head and then the other. ‘And when I hung from that hook, I’d bleed … bleed at my nose and out of the corner of my eyes, even though the hook wasn’t what you’d call real. But it did something real to me though, didn’t it? I spent hours of my childhood sleeping off the pain.’

  In spite of everything Linnet was affected by the horror of his story. She waited, and at last he spoke again, sounding rather more resigned. ‘I thought it was just something that had gone wrong with me. Some people are born to have fits, and that’s just Nature. But when I saw Izachel I recognised the hook. He’d felt me out there in the country, being what I was, and he’d tried to feed on me, using the power he hooked away from me as his own
. That was his particular talent. And the King of Hoad, and Lord Glass, too, without knowing it, had been pushing him into my head, day and night, night and day until I somehow learned the trick of holding them off. Which I did. At least my rag did … the bit that had been ripped out of me by Izachel. That torn-away bit hid in me for years. Mind you, it came out when it was ready and it’s still there, off to one side flapping away. Sometimes we get together, but only as – like – like twins. I should be the one single thing, but I’m not. I’m two forces in the one body.’

  ‘Dysart didn’t have anything to do with that hook,’ Linnet declared, sure of what she was saying.

  ‘I know. He’s got a kind heart,’ Heriot said. ‘Come to that, I think I must have put a hook of my own into him. I promised him a kingdom, didn’t I? Not that I actually remember promising anything.’ He sighed, screwing up his face and half-turning away from her, shifting the hay as if he might burrow into it. When he spoke again it was as if he were explaining something to himself. ‘The part of me they really want is that restless part that twists the world. None of them want me to move on to … to become what I’m truly supposed to become. And I’m a stranger to that part of myself. I know it’s there … but I don’t know what it knows, even if it’s still me … even if it’s me that’s doing the knowing. There are two people inside my head … the farmer and that other one, both signalling to one another, waving from hill to hill, and then having to guess what the signals mean.