Heriot Page 19

  The King looked at Luce and inclined his head gravely. ‘Speak on!’ he said with curious cool formality, Heriot thought, for though it was indeed a formal occasion, the King was speaking to his son.

  ‘The time has come,’ Luce announced with a formality of his own. ‘I put forward a challenge to Lord Carlyon. I challenge him to an encounter on Cassio’s Island. I challenge him …’

  But Carlyon interrupted him.

  ‘I accept the challenge of Prince Luce,’ he said briskly, somehow reducing the challenge to an irritating request. ‘We will fight on Cassio’s Island according to ancient traditions …’ and then he added, ‘Whether I win or lose I will enjoy the occasion. Mine is a still life and I long for the variety of action.’

  Luce looked taken aback by the speed of Carlyon’s reply. His mouth hung open slightly as he glanced from Carlyon to his father.

  Once again the King inclined his head. ‘A challenge has been made. A challenge has been accepted. This evening the challenge will be announced and celebrated in the Tower of the Lion.’

  Heriot was released. He was a free man for a few hours and he made for his orchard, feeling the day reaching towards him. He would lie on his back perhaps, looking into the sky. He might read. He might slide through that hidden gap in the wall and wander between the stalls of the Second Ring. He might, just for a little time …

  But Cayley was suddenly beside him once more, startling him with such a sudden appearance.

  ‘Made you jump!’ he said with satisfaction.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Heriot said. ‘I can feel everyone else creeping up on me, but mostly I can’t feel you.’

  ‘I’ve learned to shut myself in,’ Cayley said in his wandering but mysterious way. ‘Things happened to me back a bit and I had to close myself down tight. I taught myself how. It was that or dying. So! No choice! Anyhow, was it interesting sitting in there and gossiping with Kings and Heroes?’

  ‘It was interesting today,’ Heriot said. ‘Luce challenged the Hero. Well, we’ve known for some time he was planning to, but …’

  And then he fell silent. Cayley might have shut himself in, but suddenly something was leaking out from him. He was angry; he was, perhaps, frightened. Heriot looked closely at him. ‘Why should you care?’ he asked.

  ‘Who says I do care?’ Cayley replied in his usual light-hearted voice, and as he spoke Heriot could feel him closing in on himself, growing unreadable once more.

  ‘It jumped from your mind into mine,’ Heriot replied. ‘I could feel you growing fierce at the news.’

  ‘You’re not always right,’ said Cayley.

  Heriot said nothing, but knew he hadn’t imagined that furious, inner alarm Cayley had betrayed. Perhaps he could have pursued it, but then he thought, people are entitled to their secrets. It may be the Magician’s job to winkle out secrets in the King’s throne room, but beyond, in the city, secrets can be secrets, hidden and unviolated.

  28

  Cassio’s Island

  A month after Luce’s challenge a glowing worm of colour began writhing slowly through the great rings of Diamond, then beyond the city along the open road. The King and his entire court, together with envoys and ambassadors from the Dannorad and Camp Hyot, set out in a formal parade along a road that had been cleared and widened and decorated with coloured poles and banners in anticipation of the royal progress. The King, mounted on a white horse, rode at the head of the procession. Betony Hoad and his doll-wife rode on the King’s right, Luce at his left, while directly behind him came Dysart, together with the Master of Hagen, the Lords of Argo, Dante, Bay, Isman, Doro, and Glass, along with their families.

  Linnet of Hagen rode beside her father. Heriot Tarbas, the Magician of Hoad, rode beside Prince Dysart, for in a curious way their friendship expressed the power of the King. Behind them came the lesser Lords with their wives and sons, attended by ranks of guards and servants, and among this lesser crowd rode the Magician’s servant Cayley, the transformed rat of the city, staring around him intently, occasionally smiling his vivid smile, as if in following this road he were remembering a story he had been told as a child – a story he knew well. They were bound for Cassio’s Island, where Prince and Hero were to fight. Within two days, one would be dead.

  Some members of the procession talked to one another as they rode, but for the most part the riders were curiously silent, many of them tied into themselves with thoughts and speculations. The silence became part of the ceremonial progress between the city and Cassio’s Island, yet somehow it was as if the thoughts of men and women sang in the air, not as words but as strange vibrations felt but not recognised.

  At last! Luce was thinking. At last I’ll become what I was born to be. And when I’m set up on Cassio’s Island I’ll remake the world. I’ll change the rules. The Dannorad will fall into line. Camp Hyot will bow down before Hoad. Who knows? Betony doesn’t want to be King. He might step back and … and I might even merge the King and the Hero into one man again.

  A breeze crept in from the sea and lifted the golden curls on his forehead. Dysart, staring sideways, saw them stir as if gentle but determined fingers were twisting themselves in his brother’s hair. Luce must win, he was thinking. He must. It’s not just that I want to be King after my father, but if Luce wins, I win in every way. If Luce becomes Hero he moves off to one side in a glory of his own, and I’ll be the next in line for Linnet. And then another voice – a vagrant from some dark and unacknowledged part of his mind whispered slyly, But even if Luce dies I’ll still move up a step. I’ll become the second son of the King. Either way I’ll win. He recoiled in his saddle, shying away violently from this thought, which had become almost immediately an unwelcome yet indissoluble part of a profound longing.

  It’s not enough! Betony Hoad was thinking. Nothing is enough. Look at this display, this charade. Look at all this posturing, this game they’re playing, this pretence of true wonder. Of course death has excitement, but this will be death carefully arranged, death reduced, made tedious. I don’t care who kills who. Somewhere there are things wonderful beyond all dreaming. But where are they? Why am I shut away from them? Why do I have to waste time watching these gesturing puppets? I want to be remade. I don’t want to be merely the sign of the sun. I want to be the sun itself.

  Heriot was thinking too, remembering another time. Funny how well I remember it, seeing it’s not a thing I want to remember. I struggled along this road, bleeding, thinking there was no place for me … there would never be a place for me. But now I have a place. I live in an orchard with a family of one. It’s not my first place, but it’s come to be a true place. Yet I still don’t know just what it means to be a Magician. I know how I’m used in Diamond but I know that’s misuse of what I could be … what I ought to be. Somehow I’m being reduced. When I was a child, a baby, Izachel got into my head and tore me apart and I’ve never worked the way I’m meant to work. Somewhere out there I have a true meaning … These thoughts faded away when he saw they had reached the ancient aqueduct, built and broken long before, back in the days when his people, the Gethin and the Orts, were Hoad’s only inhabitants.

  That curve of water! he thought. It’s still like a question mark, asking me something, but until I know what it’s asking, there’s no way I can answer.

  The sound of the falling water advanced to meet the passing riders as it gushed endlessly through the ancient channel of stone, as it sighed through the air then burst furiously towards the river far below, applauding its return home.

  The procession moved on, made up of many people, yet moving like a single thing with a single life of its own.

  The King turned to Betony Hoad. His movement was smooth and practised yet for all that there was something slightly uneasy about it. ‘You must enjoy this splendour,’ he said, and once again there was something awkward in his simple comment … an advance uncertain of how it would be received. ‘It’s the sort of thing you take pleasure in.’ Once again he was both stating some
thing, yet asking a question.

  ‘If I must, I must,’ said Betony Hoad.

  Hoad raised his eyebrows. ‘You don’t enjoy it?’ he asked, more directly this time.

  ‘It’s a children’s game,’ Betony said. ‘I was thinking, as you spoke, Lord Father, that I was longing for something much more – oh, much more extreme than this.’

  ‘Your brother’s life is in the balance,’ the King pointed out. ‘Surely that is an extremity.’

  ‘It’s what he’s chosen,’ Betony said. ‘I long for something beyond arrangement and choice.’

  ‘You want to be an elemental?’

  Betony didn’t look at his father. He laughed.

  ‘Being King is perhaps the closest any human being can come to being an elemental,’ the King suggested, but Betony laughed again, shaking his head as if the words were annoying gnats singing in his ear.

  The procession moved on. The King turned to Luce. ‘And you truly want to be the Hero?’ he asked. ‘It’s not too late to turn around and ride back to Diamond.’

  ‘It’s much too late,’ said Luce. ‘It’s been too late for years. When we last came this way I wasn’t much more than a child. I saw Carlyon win and stand over Link – I saw him become the Hero of Hoad. He glowed with it all, and in a little while I’ll glow like that. I’ll be transformed. Carlyon may be a great warrior, but he’s older, and I don’t think he has the same skills he once had.’

  They moved on in silence.

  ‘A King makes a poor father,’ the King said at last. ‘Of course I hope you will win. I hope for your victory more than I have hoped for anything in years.’

  Somewhere in Heriot’s divided head, the occupant gathered in the hopes of the King, Luce and Dysart, along with the derision of Betony Hoad, as if it were feeding itself on these drifts of human feeling, and then somehow feeding them back into Heriot himself.

  Feeling tired of the intrusion of other people’s conjectures and longings, Heriot spoke ahead to Dysart. ‘I know this place,’ he said. ‘I saw the last procession as a child from up there on the hills, looking down. Now I’m on the road looking up and seeing myself back then.’ He waved at the hilltop. ‘I can feel them all watching … particularly Wish.’

  ‘Don’t get too mystic,’ Dysart warned.

  ‘Why not? Then and now, it’s the same procession,’ Heriot replied. ‘It’s always the same procession, along this causeway …’

  His voice had changed. Dysart looked at him curiously. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Heriot didn’t reply.

  Remember! Remember! his occupant was asserting somewhere inside his head. Heriot remembered and spoke silently back to the occupant. Under that arch up ahead is the gate without walls. Beside that gate I saw freshly flattened grass, its blades still rising up again. And later, up there on the hill I won back enough strength to recover. Part of me – you – had hidden and slept. And, back then, you began waking.

  The occupant answered him gleefully. Here on the causeway I woke! We had been torn apart, torn in two. But now we’re twins. We work as twins.

  Heriot nodded, continuing his inner dialogue. And over there, off the causeway. That’s where you unwound yourself and saved me from the Hero of Hoad.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Dysart asked. That outside voice startled Heriot. ‘Why are you rubbing your side?’

  ‘Just the memory of an old scratch,’ Heriot said. ‘It’s left its mark on me in different ways.’

  ‘Oh all right! Be mysterious!’ Dysart said. ‘After all it’s part of your job, isn’t it?’

  In due course they moved on under the arch, and through the gate without walls. The curving road, newly cleared to make way for a royal procession, twisted towards the heart of Cassio’s Island. And suddenly there before them was one of the island’s great harbours, with a city rising around it. High on a spiky hill stood a spiky castle encircled by a curious lacework of buildings and walls, streets and spires. If it didn’t have the power of Guard-on-the-Rock … if it didn’t give off the same feeling of impassioned history, this island city still had a strength of its own. And there, riding to meet them, like a curious reflection, came another procession.

  Heriot heard Luce exclaiming with something like joy – a joy touched with a curious note of relief as if he recognised his own reflection – as if he, at least, was coming home.

  Carlyon, the Hero of Hoad, advanced to meet them. Heriot watched him smile politely at the King, then look past him at Luce. Then, impulsively it seemed, Carlyon rode forward, leaned sideways out of his saddle and embraced Luce as if he were greeting a true friend … more than a friend perhaps … as if he were embracing an earlier self.

  ‘Welcome to my challenger,’ he said, and Heriot was astonished at the warmth and passion in his voice. ‘You might remake me.’

  Heriot couldn’t see Luce’s expression, but he imagined it might be showing some confusion. Luce didn’t have the subtlety of mind to understand a man might be the Hero, yet still remember himself as the challenger, that he might find himself overtaken both by an ancient presence he could not anticipate, and by a sudden reunion with the passions he had felt as a younger man

  Carlyon killed Link, but that wasn’t all he killed, the occupant said, speaking, as it sometimes chose to do, in Cayley’s broken voice. And almost as if he had heard, Carlyon looked across at Heriot, who smiled back, absentmindedly stroking his side. The scar was nothing but a faint white line, but Heriot sometimes felt that pucker in his skin as an enigmatic road mapped in on him. Carlyon turned away from him to greet the King with a cool formality. He sat straight in the saddle without bowing, as those on either side of him were doing, for he and the King were equals in the land of Hoad.

  Carlyon’s host led the procession of the King through the streets of his city – streets that were wider and lighter than the streets of Diamond, for Diamond had flung itself carelessly together over its many disordered years, while the Hero’s city had been built with beauty in mind. All the same, it lacked the vitality, the savage mystery of Diamond, for Diamond’s age and sprawling contradictions made it something beyond beautiful.

  As they rode in, a great white space on their left suddenly opened like pale cupped hands, empty and begging to be filled, and indeed the day after tomorrow, that pale cup’s implicit request would be answered. But for now the blended processions rode past the arena and into a series of wide, linked courtyards. Men hurried forward to help them dismount, to take their bundles and to lead their horses to the pastures and stables below the castle. The King’s family and followers began to climb the wide staircase that zigzagged up the slopes to the castle door.

  ‘It’s easy to be dignified on a stair like this,’ Dysart said to Heriot. ‘Even for a mad Prince and a mixed-up Magician.’ A few moments later they came into an upper courtyard that was also a great garden. The pointed doors of the castle swung wide, and within minutes, though they were such a grand company, it had swallowed them all.

  There was a night of sleeping and then a day of feasting and friendship – a formal celebration of the duality of Hoad, throughout which Luce and Carlyon sat together like brothers. And then, the following day, late in the morning, both the Hero’s people and the King’s filed through the open gates of that pale arena. Music played and trumpets blew traditional fanfares as the gathered company took their places. Some whispered but on the whole the arena was filled with grave silence, until, at last, a great gong spoke out, making a single metallic announcement.

  Luce emerged through an arched doorway to the east while Carlyon came out through a twin doorway to the west. They advanced and faced one another across a stretch of short green grass. Heriot could feel Luce’s ambition, certainty and exaltation like an echo of the trumpets, but the feeling that flowed from Carlyon was quite different. There was no exaltation. Carlyon gave off nothing beyond ruthless intention as old skills sprang to life within him. Both men, oiled and armed, shone like spirits. They held swords in their right hands, dagg
ers in their left. Trumpets sounded, and once again the arena echoed with the single note of the gong. Prince and Hero closed on each other without a moment’s hesitation, slashing at one another with the swords.

  The Hero struck, Luce parried, laughing as he did so. Then Luce struck, and the Hero parried. They swung and circled around each other then closed in again. The clash of blade against blade came faintly but distinctly to the high seats where Heriot sat among the King’s company.

  ‘It’s stupid,’ said Heriot under his breath, speaking to Cayley who had been allowed to sit at his elbow. ‘It has a sort of magnificence, but it’s stupid.’ And as he said this, he saw Betony Hoad turn a little in his seat and look at him with an expression in which surprise and recognition were mixed together.

  ‘Just being alive – that’s got its stupid side,’ Cayley muttered back, intent on the two figures below. ‘And none of us asks to be born.’ Then he laughed, flinging out his arm as if he too brandished a sword, but an invisible one.

  The two men clashed again, striking in at one another with a series of rapid and skilful blows, then curving briefly away from each other to gasp and balance themselves before closing in to strike again. Blood leaped from Carlyon’s shoulder, and a great sigh arose from the crowd. Tributaries of blood ran down from his shoulder and wound across his chest, but he seemed to ignore this crimson stream, leaping forward and thrusting at Luce, inflicting a small gash low in the Prince’s side. Luce struck the Hero’s sword away, but Carlyon moved in on him almost in the same moment. The blades slid against one another and just for a moment they struggled, their faces almost touching, both grinning savage grins of ferocity, not friendship. Their left hands rose. Light gleamed on the daggers, but somehow, before either of them could truly strike, they tore apart. It was Luce who had leaped back this time, trying to free himself, hoping perhaps for a better chance, but as Luce retreated Carlyon moved in on him. Heriot was suddenly seeing, somewhere inside his head, a face he had seen before, a face twisted with a ruthless fury. He was seeing it from a distance this time – he was not the target – but it all came back to him, and he took a breath, half-intending to protect Luce as he had once protected himself. Luce smashed a sword blow down at Carlyon and the whole arena gasped, but Carlyon was already whirling away, beads of blood pumping out into the air around him. Luce, committed to his savage blow, lost his balance a little and it was Carlyon’s turn to dive in. Once again the two men fought skin against skin, not clashing swords but left-arm wrestling with one another, shouting with wordless fury. Heriot thought that one or other of them must drop his sword, but even as they embraced they struck at one another with their daggers, inflicting shallow cuts on shifting shoulders, but no wound so great that either gave in. Then they tore apart from each other yet again – sweating, panting, bleeding – trying to move constantly, refusing to be any sort of target.