Heriot Page 21

  ‘I was about to say that in the back of his mind your father is angry because you won’t go to bed with your wife,’ Heriot said, defending himself by way of an immediate attack.

  ‘I’ve made no secret of the fact that I will not have children,’ Betony Hoad replied. ‘I may be cruel but I’m not totally without mercy.’

  ‘Oh, Betony!’ exclaimed Dysart impatiently. ‘So you want to be wonderful. All right! Being a father and being King will make you wonderful.’

  ‘Ah, but not wonderful enough!’ Betony replied. He looked at Heriot with something approaching the animosity he had revealed earlier – a glance of less than a second, but one that Heriot read easily.

  ‘Goodnight, Princes,’ he said, going downstairs and then down more stairs, making for the kitchen door, the closest door to the orchard.

  ‘Goodnight, Magician,’ said the maids, yawning as they washed the last dishes of the day. Flaring torches lit the first courtyard at the back of the castle but Heriot knew the linked courtyards so well by now he could have walked them in the dark. He knew every ridge – every slight subsidence, knew the places where the stones caught the light of the torches bracketed into the castle wall and the places where they dipped into darkness. As he moved into the orchard at last, with all the relief of someone coming home at the end of a long day, he wondered if Cayley was likely to be there, and then rather hoped he wasn’t, for he had to sit beside the King early next morning. He needed to sleep. There would be no time to talk or joke together, telling stories that seemed like pins holding the day back for a minute or two before it moved on and dissolved for ever.

  As he came up to the door of his shed, feeling relief at the thought of darkness and rest, darkness betrayed him. The orchard night seethed with a sudden movement and a blow fell on his shoulder with such force that his arm froze to its very finger tips. Not just one man, three at least. An arm was drawn back – an arm with a sword. He saw the blade gleaming. In another second …

  Protect me, he cried back into his head, where he could feel the occupant moving. But protection was already there, coming not from the occupant, but from a fourth figure, which suddenly wheeled out of the shed. Heriot couldn’t tell what was happening. A ringing clash and the urgent blade was deflected. Movements so quick it was as if a puppet master was flicking his fingers and making his puppets dance. Someone screamed. A second blade slashed down at him, there was a clatter of steel and the blow slid sideways, striking the wall. He was aware of another, immediate blow somewhere to his left – not directed at him this time. One of his attackers screamed out and fell. Shivering movement all around him, as someone slashed at his defender, then something or someone thumped down on to the ground beside him. The sound of limbs thrashing came out of the night, and then a spasming in the orchard grass that had brushed so peacefully against him only moments before.

  ‘That’s three to me,’ said Cayley’s voice. ‘Big ones too. I told you it was important to be quick on your feet.’

  A groaning rose from the grass under the trees.

  ‘Why?’ Heriot exclaimed furiously. ‘Why did they attack me?’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Cayley. ‘You’re the Magician.’ There was something unexpectedly distracted in his voice.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Heriot asked, with sudden anxiety, staring through the shadows at his companion. His expression changed abruptly as Cayley, just as abruptly, stepped back into even deeper darkness.

  Heriot did something he almost never did outside of the King’s throne room unless forced. He became a Magician for his own purposes, drawing light from the air around him, for, though it was night, there was always light to be found in darkness … starlight, the glow of lamps and torches seeping down from the tall towers of Guard-on-the-Rock or from the Ring beyond the castle, all reflecting faintly on orchard leaves and boughs. Three men lay between him and his doorway, one still alive, and trying to drag himself into the shadows, which disappeared as stolen light spread around them.

  ‘Help me,’ mumbled the man on the ground, thinking, maybe, that his friends were still alive. But Heriot was staring incredulously at Cayley, who, caught by the suddenly intrusive light, was hastily gathering his slashed jacket around himself. But, as he did so, a piece of the jacket peeled away and fell to the ground. A thin worm of blood snaked across pale skin, and softly rounded curves. Cayley looked up and met Heriot’s eyes.

  ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ Heriot said at last. Inside he was filled with a huge confusion, as if the world was remaking itself around him.

  ‘It was close,’ Cayley replied. ‘But it wasn’t luck. Like I said, I’m quick.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘All these years …’ Heriot began.

  ‘You’ve never caught on though, have you?’ Cayley said, that damaged voice defiant but also filled with a curious, shaken triumph. ‘Not to what I really am. What I’ve always been. A girl.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ Heriot said after another silent moment. ‘Right now we’d better get the guard, and a doctor for the hurt one. No doubt he was only doing what he’s been told to do by someone a lot further up in the world.’

  ‘Or been paid to do,’ said Cayley, struggling with her ruined jacket. ‘You! You’re too kind. It’ll be the death of you.’

  They stared at one another across the groaning man.

  ‘Are you … are you hurt?’ Heriot asked. ‘I … I could see enough, but I couldn’t see everything.’

  ‘See it now then,’ said Cayley and flung the slashed jacket wide. ‘I took on one, bending away from the others. Then one of them came in again, slashed twice, cut my jacket but mostly missed me. It’s only a scratch. Because I’ve learned to be quick, and I’ll keep on learning. No one will ever get me. Not so it counts.’

  They stared at each other for a moment more.

  ‘You might have told me,’ Heriot said at last, in a low voice. ‘You didn’t need to be scared of me.’

  ‘Scared of you?’ Cayley laughed bitterly. ‘Everyone has secrets from the rest of the world. You’ve got your secrets and I’ve got mine. And this isn’t my only one, either.’

  Heriot crossed over and pulled the slashed jacket across her small breasts.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked for the second time.

  ‘Help me,’ groaned the man at their feet.

  ‘You’re the Magician. Why didn’t you guess?’ she asked, half mockingly. ‘You never did, not even that evening here, when I was sick but wrapping that towel round and round myself. Mind you I was a lot flatter back then.’

  ‘People out there have had funny things to say about our friendship,’ Heriot said at last, ‘and at times I’ve wondered too. Perhaps I knew, without knowing I knew.’

  ‘I’ve been good at being a man,’ Cayley said. ‘Back when I first came to the city with my mother we soon caught on it was a dangerous place all over, but more dangerous for a girl than for a boy. So my mother got me boys’ clothes and I’ve been a boy, ever since. And I don’t plan to change, not until … well, I just don’t plan to change. My voice didn’t deepen up like a man’s but then, having had my throat cut about makes me speak with a mixed voice anyway. At the time it seemed bad luck having someone try to kill me back a bit, but really it was good fortune disguised.’

  ‘Well-disguised,’ Heriot said. ‘Mind you, I’ve got a scar myself. We’re a matching pair.’ Then, almost without realising what he was doing, he pulled her across the space that separated them. ‘You’re your own sort of Magician of Hoad,’ he said, and began kissing her.

  It was a long time since he had kissed anyone, and, as he kissed her, the kiss changed from one sort of kiss into another. He had never kissed like this before, and knew he was clumsy at it, but Cayley was even clumsier.

  ‘What’s happening to us?’ Heriot said at last. ‘It seems like we’ve become something else, and all in five minutes.’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Cayley. ‘You’re the one who do
es the changing. Me, I feel like what I’ve always been.’ However, her damaged voice was shaking. Like Heriot, she had been taken aback by sudden inner revelation.

  But then, as they kissed yet again, Heriot heard the groaning coming up from his feet.

  ‘I’d go along with it,’ Cayley was saying. ‘The kissing, I mean. Only there’s this one thing I have to do. I can’t just turn away from it – it’s what I am by now.’

  But Heriot was listening in an entirely confused way. ‘I’ll have to get a guard …’ he said, looking down at the fallen men. ‘And a doctor. Just wait for me. Wait for me and we’ll talk it all through.’

  ‘There’s not much to say,’ said Cayley, laughing in her strange way, as Heriot set off, loping rapidly back through the orchard, running across first one courtyard, and then another and in once more at the kitchen door.

  31

  A Vanishing

  ‘Back again, Magician,’ the maids called, but he simply lifted his hand and jogged on past them.

  Climbing the stairs, searching for a guard, all Heriot could think of was Cayley. He struggled with the double image he now had of her … the boy … the girl. He wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to pull her so close to him they became fused, finally becoming what he now found himself believing he had always wanted them to become – something single and indissoluble.

  He came on a guard, and was trying to argue him out into the orchard, when suddenly one of the King’s Wellwishers, a man called Fern, both familiar and fabulous, joined them, listened to Heriot’s story and, turning to the guard, ordered him to send one of his fellows out into the orchard to look at the wounded man and perhaps to identify the others.

  ‘Treat him kindly to begin with,’ Fern said. ‘He will have things to tell us, no doubt.’ He turned to Heriot. ‘You must come with me. The King must be told.’

  They strode through halls that grew livelier as they climbed, with each door guarded, and with guards at the foot and top of each stair.

  ‘I had no clue they were waiting for me,’ Heriot said, talking as much to himself as he was to Fern. ‘I wasn’t looking for anything, and that can make a difference. Sometimes the feeling comes out of nowhere, telling you someone’s there … sometimes it doesn’t. I miss out on a lot of things if I’m thinking of something else.’

  ‘I think the King might know who set it up,’ said Fern.

  They came towards the door of the old schoolroom where Dysart, Heriot and Linnet of Hagen had once studied together. The guard standing at the door swung it open, then leaped back. Heriot followed Fern into the room.

  ‘Welcome, Magician,’ said the King, sounding, for once, a little surprised. However Heriot was more surprised than the King, for the King was sitting where Dr Feo used to sit, Lord Glass on his left, Dysart and Betony Hoad on his right. ‘I’m glad to see you well,’ the King added, and Heriot inclined his head submissively. He felt he wasn’t really there – all the best of his attention was back in his shed, touching Cayley, teaching her how to kiss, and learning to kiss himself.

  There were other men sitting in the room. In a chair a little to one side, two guards standing over him, was Dr Feo, who was looking at Heriot with an expressionless face, but, simultaneously, horror, fear and guilt were pouring out of him, invisible yet forcible, striking deeply into Heriot, who could not retreat from this new shock on a night of shocks. He felt his face twist into an expression of incredulity.

  ‘Why?’ he shouted at Dr Feo, and on the great map on the wall behind him the Islands suddenly shone out as if they were set there like malevolent jewels, rather than inscribed with simple paint and ink.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Dr Feo began. ‘This is foolishness. Lord King, I swear I’m innocent of … of any disloyalty. I swear it. I am innocent.’

  ‘What a claim,’ said Betony Hoad.

  Heriot ignored him. ‘Lord King, three men have just tried to kill me. I only just escaped, and even then I needed help. But why?’ he repeated, momentarily unaware of everyone else and looking at Dr Feo. ‘What have I ever done to you?’

  ‘This is remarkably felicitous,’ said the King. ‘We were planning to call on you, so you could observe while Dr Feo was questioned. There is a suggestion he might be involved in treachery against us.’

  Heriot, ignoring the King, still stared incredulously at Dr Feo. ‘But none of it makes sense,’ he exclaimed. ‘Dr Feo paid the killers and someone else paid him …’ He looked across at the King. ‘What’s coming out of him is an image … he was paid by a man from the Islands … a man with ginger hair … well-dressed, but not a Lord.’

  Dr Feo’s hands, firmly folded in front of him, suddenly tightened on one another.

  ‘There’s no name in his thoughts,’ Heriot said, knowing that mentioning the absence of a name might cause that name to spring alive in some form he could read … and a second later it was there. ‘Grevalle! The man was called Grevalle.’

  Dr Feo tore his hands apart, flapped them wide, then hastily cupped them side by side, dropping his face into them.

  And then, it seemed, everyone began talking at once – everyone except Betony Hoad, who leaned back, smiling as if the whole scene before him had been arranged purely for his entertainment.

  ‘Why?’ Heriot asked Dr Feo again. ‘Why?

  ‘The Islands,’ Dysart was exclaiming. ‘Lord King, the Islands have been restless for months now.’

  ‘I can’t believe the Island Lords are treacherous,’ Lord Glass turned to the King. ‘There is some discontent … there is always some discontent … there is discontent even in Diamond … discontent is part of the human condition. All the same …’

  ‘It is strange to think we must fight so hard to maintain peace,’ the King was murmuring. ‘Why do we have to live with such contradictions? Peace should be of value to every one of us. Why do some resent it so bitterly?’

  ‘The city owes me mercy,’ Dr Feo was screaming, now clapping his hands together with a slow beat as if he were applauding himself.

  Who’s whispering? the occupant was murmuring inside Heriot’s head. What is that whisper saying?

  For, coming out of all this chaos, there was indeed a whisper, though Heriot couldn’t quite make out what it was trying to tell him. He heard the sound of it … had the picture of lips moving … but the meaning of the whispered words dissolved before he could pin it down.

  When, an hour later, he walked, yet again, into his orchard, Dysart walked with him. The familiar trees, which had become so suddenly unfamiliar, had become recognisable again, nothing more or less than apple trees.

  ‘Something wicked is going on,’ Heriot said. He hesitated. ‘I think it might be to do with … to do with …’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure of anything. There was too much going on, too quickly. There were things I couldn’t untangle.’

  ‘Let’s sleep it off,’ said Dysart. ‘You know it already, but I’m going to tell you anyway – I’m lucky to have you as a friend. And I hope you’re lucky to have me. Since you won’t come into the castle, I’m setting guards around the orchard. We don’t want anyone else creeping in on you.’

  ‘I am lucky to have you,’ said Heriot. ‘Forget all that Magician-Prince business. Right now, we’re just good friends.’ And spontaneously, without hesitation, they hugged one another. Then Dysart walked back towards the castle which was the closest thing to a home he had, and Heriot went into his shed. He was exhausted, and yet for all that he was anticipating embraces of another kind.

  But the shed was empty. Heriot went from one of its two rooms to the other, then back again, yet immediately knowing that Cayley, who believed she was frightened of nothing, had found herself terrified by their kiss, and had chosen to run and lose herself in Diamond. She was gone, and he understood almost at once that she wouldn’t be back. What was it she had said? There’s this thing I have to do first. Heriot had always recognised in his curious way that she had a dominating inner commandment driving her on. Perhaps, an
hour earlier, she might have talked to him about it, as, just for a few minutes, their embraces made her vulnerable. But he had been swept away on the King’s business and, while he was gone, that unreadable commandment had exerted its power over her. Cayley had vanished, just as quickly and cleanly as if she herself were a Magician and had chosen to whisk herself out of his life.

  Part Five

  The Melting

  32

  To the Islands

  Ten years since I left the farm, thought Heriot. Two years since I lost Cayley. I’m dissolving in time.

  But somebody spoke his name, ‘Magician! We first met on the edge of the battlefield, didn’t we?’ the King said looking at Heriot. ‘That was how many years ago?’ It was strange that the King’s question seemed an echo of Heriot’s own thoughts

  There they all sat yet again, King, Princes, Lords and a solitary Magician in that round Room of Reception, its stone walls arching up over them, picking up their voices and swinging them around its curves. Once again those sly stone faces looked down on a royal assembly, seeming to narrow their eyes as they listened. The conversations and arguments rising from the room in a mixed puzzle of words were immediately haunted by their own ghosts. ‘And there’s no end to being a King,’ the King went on. Dysart was sitting on his left hand, Betony Hoad on his right. Lord Glass sat a step lower than the King and Princes. Heriot, like someone partly discarded yet still essential, sat opposite Lord Glass but almost on the same level. For Heriot, at least, there was a huge tedium about the ancient room, about the placements, both magical and monotonous, locking them into an ancient pattern.

  ‘Perhaps I have clung too closely to my city,’ the King was saying. ‘Perhaps I have over-protected myself. Things are changing in the wider world, and perhaps I don’t change enough to keep up with them. I still want peace. Why does it suddenly seem that no one else cares?’