Heriot Page 24

  Once again the guards rapidly made way for Cayley.

  ‘I haven’t seen you before,’ one of them said to Heriot, who bobbed so that the buckets clanked against the ground, trying to angle himself so that his face was shadowed under the hood.

  ‘Let her go!’ said the other. ‘They’re always getting new cleaning women in Hoad’s Pleasure. After all, there’s always blood on the floor that needs mopping, even in times of peace, isn’t there? And probably a bit more these days, what with that Betony Hoad being such a sensitive King.’

  Heriot’s shuffling footsteps set curious hollow echoes running ahead of him as he limped across the bridge. Then he was safely over it, and making, in his agonised fashion, for the narrowest and darkest of the streets that fanned away from Hoad’s Pleasure.

  ‘No!’ said Cayley, almost at his shoulder now. She must have stepped aside and waited for him to catch up with her. ‘Follow me!’

  ‘Can I stand straight now?’ Heriot asked, though he wasn’t sure he would be able to stand straight ever again.

  ‘Just walk on,’ Cayley muttered, striding on ahead of him. ‘Not far to go.’

  And now she was leading him into a street that seemed familiar, turning left into yet another street. Heriot felt Diamond advancing to meet him, enfolding him once more in its ancient embrace.

  ‘Right,’ said Cayley, speaking out of the shadows. ‘You can let those buckets fall, and stretch up if you can.’ Heriot unlocked his fingers, heard the buckets crash at his feet then roll away. He tried straightening himself.

  ‘I didn’t think it would be so easy, getting out of the tower and over the bridge,’ he said.

  ‘It isn’t easy,’ Cayley said. ‘But you had me to unlock your door and tell you the passwords. And when a Wellwisher walks by, that’s the one people look at, even the guards. And, though things are shifty at present, what with the King out at sea and his son playing games, it has been peace for a long time, hasn’t it? Things relax. The hard part was getting up the first stair, and we danced through that. Turn right along here.’

  Heriot stumbled after her, swayed, fell against a wall, straightened himself and stumbled on again taking tiny steps, performing that painful dance. He understood there were closed doors on either side of them … humble doors … and sometimes dimly lit windows that seemed to blink as he limped slowly by. He got the impression from the smells of food in the air that he must be walking along a street that served the kitchens of the grand houses of the Third Ring. And then, suddenly, he was aware of someone coming down the street towards them.

  ‘Cayley,’ he whispered, hearing panic in his voice.

  ‘Quiet,’ she whispered back. ‘No worries. It’s friends come to meet us.’

  They were suddenly surrounded.

  ‘Is he all right?’ someone asked.

  ‘Nothing that won’t heal, given time,’ Cayley said. ‘He’s done amazingly well, considering what’s been done to him. Let’s move on quickly.’

  ‘We’re ready,’ said another voice. ‘No one will wonder if we leave early. No one wonders about us.’

  ‘Follow me,’ said Cayley to Heriot. ‘I know the way. Better to go through the wall rather than past a guardhouse.’

  Heriot simply obeyed her, stumbling across streets, and squares, into a little park, down rough steps where he fell, only to be hoisted up again. Early morning was staining the sky over the Second Ring. His damaged knee collapsed under him and he fell yet again, but the others crowded in around him, pulling him back on to his feet and pushing him forward.

  ‘Bring him here,’ Heriot heard someone ordering. It was an accent he hadn’t heard for a long time, but it was a voice from a distant past – a voice he vaguely remembered. How long ago? Who? ‘Nearly there,’ Cayley was saying, distracting his wandering memory. ‘Only a few steps more. Can you see to step up?’

  ‘It’s a bit of a challenge,’ said Heriot, suddenly confident, stepping up with his good leg and then stepping up again. His companions closed in around him and hoisted him forward into a hooded wagon. Somewhere he could hear horses shifting in their harnesses.

  ‘Move on!’ said Cayley impatiently from somewhere behind him.

  ‘Welcome home,’ said that vaguely familiar voice. ‘You make a considerable woman, don’t you? Lie down on the bunk there and I’ll do what I can to clean you up.’

  The voice belonged to Azelma, the Travellers’ wise woman. Heriot was being taken in by the Travellers and, as he sighed with relief, closing his struggling right eye, swollen and weeping, he did indeed feel almost at home.

  36

  ‘There’s This Thing That Must Be Done First’

  The Travellers travelled, and the land of Hoad opened to receive them. In the beginning they moved along wide, winding roads across gentle hills. Heriot, lying closed in Azelma’s wagon, felt that wagon slowly tilting up then dipping down, up then down, and it seemed to him, as he lay in a dream of both pain and relief, that he was feeling the whole land of Hoad breathing, huge breaths deeper and slower than his own yet somehow in tune with them. He even felt that Hoad might be breathing for him, or that he could be doing what the Magicians were supposed to do – that he might be breathing for the land itself. And he felt, once again, his occupant stirring cautiously in his head.

  At one stage the van came to rest. They had been stopped by soldiers of Hoad, who questioned the Travellers, and then began searching the vans.

  ‘They’ll be in here in a minute,’ Azelma said, sounding anxious for the first time. ‘We’ll try hiding you, but …’

  ‘I might be able to hide myself,’ said Heriot, and began thinking himself out of existence, relieved to find himself becoming something of a Magician once more, and, simultaneously, feeling relief at the prospect of becoming nothing. One of the soldiers came in, hesitating briefly at the door. The occupant shifted and touched the soldier’s mind, altering his perception. He went out again.

  ‘No one in there,’ Heriot heard him calling.

  ‘A good trick, that,’ said Azelma, sounding impressed.

  ‘I’m healing a bit,’ Heriot replied. ‘I’m getting myself back again.’

  ‘But you lost yourself, back there,’ Azelma said. ‘I felt it. Just for a moment you thought yourself out of the world.’

  ‘Everyone needs a break from existence,’ Heriot answered lightly, and then added, ‘I didn’t really think myself out of the world. What I really did was shift things in that man’s mind. Yours too. You could both see me, but you didn’t know what you were seeing.’

  Why did you desert me back there? he was silently asking his occupant. Why did you let Betony bring me down so far?

  The melting, it said faintly. We must save our strength for the melting!

  What melting? Closing his eyes, Heriot sent this question back into his own head, but there was no answer.

  – ± –

  After two days had gone by, Azelma and Cayley helped him out to the front of the van, and he was able to sit there for an hour or so, his injured leg stretched in front of him, and watch the world unwinding around him – watching mainly from his left eye, though his right was slowly recovering. The Travellers went though a series of small woods, then entered a great forest. The stillness of that forest seemed to impose silence upon them all. Even the Traveller children grew quiet, and they moved on, following a road that was clear but softened by leaves, so that, for a while, they were enclosed by an inexplicable tranquillity. Taking it all in, dreaming in that silence, Heriot felt himself somehow drifting, but with a profoundly purposeful drift. He was coming together again. Riding out from under the forest branches was like breaking out of enchantment. Voices rose again; someone somewhere laughed; children began shouting and arguing once more. They camped and slept, then woke and took to the road again, now following the course of a river for a few leagues before it spread out, growing wide and shallow, when they crossed it at a stony ford and came into farmlands, which meant Heriot had to go back inside th
e wagon once more in case he was seen and commented on, which might mean some rumour winding its way back to Diamond. After all, the Travellers were still travelling in Hoad.

  At first this journey seemed timeless … Heriot, more than willing to surrender to the farms and forest and river he saw around him, didn’t care where they were going … but little by little curiosity came alive in him.

  ‘How long have we been going?’ he asked.

  ‘Only a week,’ said Azelma. ‘Lie still!’

  ‘I’m feeling better,’ Heriot said.

  ‘Lie still,’ Cayley told him sternly. Her broken voice was amused yet just a little ominous too. ‘I’ve owed you all these years. Now you owe me. You do what I tell you.’

  ‘We’re well out of Diamond,’ Azelma said. ‘They’ve checked us so they’re letting us go on. All the same …’

  ‘All the same …’ echoed Cayley.

  After a moment Heriot began, gingerly, to feel his face.

  ‘And stop that,’ Cayley told him. ‘I’ll let you know everything you need to know. Like, you’ve got a smashed nose. You’ll never be pretty again.’

  ‘Forget being pretty. It hurts to laugh,’ Heriot said restlessly. ‘That’s the worst of it.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you nothing but sad stories,’ Cayley promised him.

  It seemed to Heriot that, despite the fact he was still racked with various pains, despite being dominated by a huge and puzzling weakness that seemed, in a curious way, to go all the way back to that strange seizure he had experienced as a boy out on the causeway, he was somehow more at rest with himself than he had been for years. He was beyond Diamond … free of the King’s zoo … free of the haunting mazes of the city … even free of his strange friendship with Dysart, all things that had become part of him but which had also, somehow, further divided his divided self. He wasn’t tempted to ask the Travellers in what direction they were travelling. He wasn’t tempted to ask for any map of Hoad they might have. He thought that, anyway, they probably had no maps except for one single map that was part of every Traveller mind, every Traveller dream, every Traveller movement, as they slid silently across the land, following tracks they had followed for hundreds of years. And, as he healed, Heriot found himself invaded by a curious lightness, which he thought he recognised.

  ‘It’s happiness,’ he said aloud, and looked with astonishment at Cayley, hunched in beside the bunk in which he lay. She looked back at him curiously. ‘I’m not just interested. I’m happy – truly happy!’ he exclaimed incredulously.

  ‘Good on you,’ she said. ‘Now me – I don’t know if I’ve ever been that … well, not since I was learning to walk … I was happy back then, I think. But at times I do feel relief. Ease. A sort of sunny ease. I feel it now. For a while. It won’t last but I’ll enjoy it while I can.’

  ‘Why won’t it last?’ Heriot asked curiously.

  ‘I’ve told you. There’s this thing I have to do,’ she replied. ‘Just the one thing, but it’s like a commandment coming out of me … out of my heart. Out of my head. It was laid on me back when I was a child and by now it’s worked right into me, so it’s in every heartbeat. I even breathe it in from the air. I’ll never be completed until that thing’s over and done. And don’t you try reading it out of me. I’ll tell you when the time comes.’

  ‘I’ve never been able to read you,’ Heriot said. ‘And I’m not even sure if I’m a true Magician any more. I hung there in chains and I couldn’t help myself.’

  And mumbling this, Heriot fell asleep yet again. Cayley sat there, staring at him with an expression of puzzlement and desire.

  ‘Free!’ Heriot muttered in his sleep. ‘Free of it all!’

  37

  Melting

  Out in the far reaches of County Doro, Heriot began walking again, striding along beside the Traveller wagons with Cayley … only for a short time the first day, but more the next, and then more again. As he walked his way back into himself he felt his occupant coming increasingly alive, after its apparent hibernation, stretching itself out through him as it had never done before. Some part of him was responding to this by stretching along with it, by ranging out and briefly inhabiting blades of grass, stones of the road. I am nothing and everything, the occupant was saying, I am a pinpoint in you, yet I am altogether you. I am nowhere and I am every where. We have survived so far.

  ‘I’m almost what I am meant to be,’ he said to Cayley.

  ‘What’s that then?’ asked Cayley.

  A cross-over place, thought Heriot, struggling with an answer. Everything out there sustains the Magician, and the Magician builds himself back into the world and sustains the world.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said aloud. ‘There aren’t words for it. Back when I was a baby the Magician Izachel felt a possibility in me. He had power, but he was greedy for more. And he wanted to use that possibility in some way that was a wrong way. I’ve told you how he fed on me, and part of me went into hiding. It even hid from me – hid from my thinking, understanding, everyday self, though I finally recognised it was there after something happened to me out on the Hero’s Causeway. From then on it’s been alive in my head. I’ve called that torn-away part my occupant, and I’ve been able to call on it when I need to make a Magician of myself. But being a true Magician isn’t just doing astonishing things to take Kings and Lords by surprise. It’s working its way towards an understanding that’s beyond understanding. It’s becoming a true part of the world’s strangeness.’

  ‘You’ve always been strange,’ said Cayley.

  ‘Right now, walking along these roads, I’m dissolving into everything along my edges,’ said Heriot. ‘Everything except you.’ He took her by the shoulder. She turned towards him and they kissed.

  ‘What is it?’ Heriot asked. ‘Why do you defend yourself from me? What is that iron secret you have to protect?’

  ‘I could dissolve into you,’ Cayley replied. ‘Those flowers and grasses you say you link into – I think you take them over, but likewise you give them freedom in a funny way. And sometimes I feel you could do that for me …’ They kissed again. ‘You could dissolve me and, being that dissolved creature, I would be completed too. But it’s like I’ve told you. I can’t ever be free until I’ve done what I was made to do.’

  ‘And what is that?’ Heriot asked yet again.

  ‘Oh, I’m not telling you,’ Cayley replied. ‘You’d only get that old-woman look on your face. Even a broken nose can’t change that expression. What governs me – well – it’s an old promise, that’s what it is, a promise I made to the world a long time back a bit. And a promise is a promise.’

  The Travellers were following a road that twisted between trees and then more trees.

  ‘These trees! ‘Heriot said. ‘They all mean the same as one another, and yet each tree means something different from all the rest.’

  ‘Oh, very clever,’ said Cayley derisively. ‘Very magic-mystical!

  ‘We’ve both got secrets we can’t tell,’ said Heriot. ‘I’d have to invent a language to really tell you mine.’ He came to an abrupt standstill. ‘What’s that? There, through the trees.’

  ‘It’s some old woodcutter’s hut, I’d say,’ said Cayley. ‘Ask Azelma.’

  And Heriot took this advice.

  ‘There used to be a town close by,’ Azelma told him. ‘But back in the times of the wars people left, made for Diamond, I think. We’ll be into the village soon.’

  And indeed, within another fifteen minutes, they were trailing through a deserted village … tumbledown houses and stalls … the remains of walls and fences. Heriot came to a standstill, staring around him with a curious enchantment.

  ‘We usually stop off here,’ Azelma told him. She looked at him with a knowing smile. ‘I can tell you’ll like it.’

  ‘I like it already,’ Heriot said. ‘Do you stay here for long?’

  Azelma laughed. ‘We’re the Travellers. We don’t stop anywhere unless we have something to sell. And
there’s no one here to buy what we have to offer. We’ll be moving on tomorrow.’

  ‘You might,’ Cayley said, watching Heriot’s expression. ‘But perhaps we won’t. I think this man might have found a stopping-off place now he’s not bleeding, blinking and limping. Funny really, that just when he gets the chance to be a real traveller he wants to give up travelling.’

  ‘It’s in me to like still places,’ Heriot said. ‘And I like this one. It’s my orchard hut all over again.’

  ‘You can stay here,’ Azelma said sceptically. ‘But can you live here?’

  ‘We can for a while at least,’ Heriot said. ‘There’s fruit on those trees in between the houses, and my friend here is probably a good hunter.’

  ‘I can outrun rabbits,’ Cayley said. ‘That’s my skill … to be quicker than the quickest. And the quick often survive when the strong tumble over. At least I’ve built a lot of hopes around that idea, and one of the hopes is that I hope I’m right.

  ‘I’ll find us a good cottage to live in,’ Heriot said. ‘With a roof and all four walls. I’ll collect wood for a fire and be a good family man.’

  Cayley smiled the brilliant smile that had first caught his attention all those years ago – a smile that seemed to celebrate life so joyously.

  ‘Great! I’ve never had one of those,’ she said.

  – ± –

  The next day the Travellers moved on, leaving Cayley and Heriot in the empty village. There they stood, side by side, watching the wagons jolt off along the road and out of sight. They turned to face each other. Cayley laughed just a little breathlessly.

  ‘You look ruthless,’ she said. ‘Have you caught it from me like some sort of sickness?’

  ‘No!’ said Heriot. ‘This particular ruthlessness is all my own. I don’t think I invented it, but it’s not yours, and it doesn’t belong to the King or the Hero. It’s older than both of them, and right now it’s all mine.’