Heriot Read online

  Linnet had believed she would stay with her father and mother and attend all the King’s parties, so she was furious, when, after a few hurried hugs, kisses and promises she and Lila were led in another direction. Yet her disappointment was blotted out almost at once, for there were so many new and amazing things to be seen on the crowded, muddy tracks, running between the tents. In spite of weariness Linnet wanted to laugh aloud, not because things were funny but because they were so surprising. Tomorrow, she thought still later, as she tumbled to sleep, tomorrow I’ll be part of it all. Tomorrow will be nothing but excitement and surprises.

  But next morning she found she was expected to study just as if she were at home, not with Luce, who was beyond study, but with the third Prince, the mad one. He was a whole two months younger than her, and, though nobody was supposed to say so openly, everyone knew there was something wrong with him.

  Carrying her quills and book, Linnet stumped crossly after Lila to a pavilion on the edge of the city of tents. Inside, with a small, folding frame set up in front of him to serve as a desk, sat Dysart, Prince of Hoad.

  He had rough, waving, mouse-coloured hair, which stood on end like a puppet’s wig, a big nose, a wide smile, and his right eye was a light clear blue while his left was hazel, so it was as if two different people were looking out of the same head. As she came into the tent, he caught her expression and burst into wild laughter. Later, she was to think someone had stolen part of Dysart’s life, and that he constantly filled the empty space by laughing, and that she had been able to tell this from the first moment she ever saw him.

  His laughter died away as she stalked by him without another glance.

  ‘You’ve brought only one book,’ he said curiously.

  ‘It’s all I need,’ Linnet replied, noticing with alarm, however, that he had a whole pile of books beside him, some of them wrapped in silk and velvet, as if they were treasures. Suddenly she didn’t want the Mad Prince to know her book was her only book, and, though he continued to stare at her with undisguised interest, she refused to look back at him.

  ‘People say you’re fierce – they say you were born with teeth like needles,’ he said inquisitively. ‘Go on, show me. Smile!’

  ‘And people say you’re a fool,’ Linnet retorted. Then she was ashamed, partly because her words made her seem rough when she wanted to be graceful, and partly because she sounded unkind. But he answered in an unexpectedly patient voice as if he were correcting a mistake he’d corrected many times before.

  ‘Not a fool, get it right. I’m mad,’ he said. ‘There’s a difference between a foolish Prince and a mad one.’ Then he laughed again.

  The wall of the tent beside him sucked in, then billowed out again as if the very weave of the canvas were breathing. Dysart’s careful pile of papers swarmed up into the air around his head. He grimaced, and made an odd barking noise at nothing while the papers drifted down around him.

  9

  Sons without a Father

  In the next few days Linnet studied the endless history of Hoad, but she was also part of ceremonial entertainments, standing beside her father, feeling his strong hand holding hers, as the clowns and fools of Diamond performed their dances, or catching her breath as teams of campaigners, led by the warriors known as Dragons of Hoad, clashed with one another in mock battles. Linnet cheered for Luce who rode with the Dragons, and hoped he noticed her urging him on, out of the corner of his eye.

  They were living in a city so mixed that Linnet might see, all within a few yards, ladies sitting in chairs of gilded leather, or working men with heavy yokes over their shoulders carrying lavatory cans and buckets of kitchen refuse out beyond the boundary of Tent City. Linnet learned to tell the campaigners of County Glass in their green jackets from those of County Doro who wore long leather coats with the fur turned in, and to recognise all the banners along with the Lords they represented … the seven Lords of the seven counties of Hoad. Argo, Dante, Bay, Glass, Isman, Doro, and her own county, ambivalent Hagen.

  From the edge of the camp she could stare curiously across the battered plain to the other city … the Camp of the Hosts of the Dannorad. The King and his older sons passed like mirages of gold and silver between the two cities, for, in a great pavilion between the camps, men of both Hoad and the Dannorad Host, maps spread between them, were working in and out through the natural lace of valleys and spurs that knitted the lands together. As the victorious one, the King of Hoad could have demanded everything, but Lila declared (just as if she knew all the secrets of the golden pavilions) that the King wanted a peace that would hold … something stronger than the frail truces of the last two hundred years … and was prepared to be generous to former enemies, for generosity seemed as if it might forge a true reconciliation.

  In the evening the two tent cities entertained each other with banquets and parties given by firelight, the King’s parties being the grandest of all, and there the Dukes of the Dannorad Host and the Lords of Hoad sat together, talking and laughing as if they had not spent so much of their recent history trying to kill each other. Out from the shadows came clowns on stilts, jugglers, acrobats, fools, freaks, and fire-eaters. One of the King’s bodyguards always stood behind him, ready to taste the King’s wine or to guard his back.

  ‘That’s an Assassin,’ whispered Lila dramatically.

  Linnet had heard of the Assassins, even in Hagen. They were the bogymen of Hoad, faces masked in white paint like the faces of dangerous clowns. It was said they never died, that their heads held no brains, only a space in which a King might lodge an order, and that once the King had put a name in that space nothing could save the man to whom the name belonged.

  Prince Betony Hoad had a constant attendant of his own, Talgesi, not an Assassin but a young man of his own age who had once been his whipping boy, and had taken all his beatings for him, for no nurse or tutor was allowed to beat the heir to Hoad while his mother was alive. Both Prince and servant wore the same expression. When one smiled, the other smiled. Occasionally Betony Hoad might murmur something aside to his companion, and they would look into each other’s eyes as if they were the only real people in a world of ghosts.

  Not all the fallen campaigners had been buried. The scent of their decay, carried in on the south wind, was part of every spectacle and public occasion. For all that, as the excitement and strangeness of Tent City worked its spells on Linnet, she found herself unexpectedly touched by another magic.

  Partly because she didn’t want to admit that Dysart might know more than she did, she began to read and to learn the rhyming histories of Hoad by heart. Reciting couplets she had learned the night before, she smiled across the tent at the third Prince, triumphant because she was just as clever as he was, and could be part of the wide world whenever she wanted. Though she was Linnet of Hagen, a county that seemed closer to the sky than to the rivers, plains and beaches of the rest of Hoad, she, too, could invoke the King and the Hero, those vast spirits made tangible in Dysart’s father and the warrior Carlyon, who was particularly glorious at present because, single-handed, he had killed ten soldiers of the Dannorad, avenging the massacre of every single man, woman and child, in the remote Hoadish village of Senlac.

  Without quite meaning to, Linnet became a Dysart watcher, and saw how a mischievous wind, which no one else seemed to be able to feel, followed the Prince like a playful dog, fluttering his papers, tumbling the world a little whenever he walked by. The left side of his face didn’t quite match up with the right. It was not just his different-coloured eyes that gave him this unbalanced look, he had an odd smile in which the right side of his mouth curled up more than the left, yet when he wrote or turned pages he used his left hand. He was so lopsided, Linnet found it easy to understand why he was only brought out on occasions when royal children were traditionally displayed like banners. Yet, when he recited the tales of Hoad, or talked about Diamond the King’s city, or quoted old aphorisms about the King and the Hero, Dysart seemed to pull himsel
f into a different shape, and to become somehow … not handsome, exactly, but remarkable.

  ‘What’s so wonderful about Diamond anyway?’ Linnet asked him one afternoon. ‘It’s not the only city in the world.’

  ‘It’s the King’s city,’ he answered, interrupting her just as she was about to talk about Hagen’s Rous Barnet, her own city. ‘Diamond’s the shape of the King.’

  ‘And your father just happens to be King,’ Linnet cried derisively. ‘I suppose you think that makes you great too!’

  Dysart stared down into the pages of his book as if he could see indecipherable words swimming like fish behind the lines of ordinary print. When he spoke again it was in an odd, uncertain voice – he was trying out a new idea as much on himself as on her.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Kings have sons, but Princes don’t have fathers.’

  ‘You can’t have sons without fathers!’ argued Linnet.

  ‘But what if the King hates us all?’ Dysart said doubtfully. ‘Betony says he does, because a long time ago, before my father’s father and brothers died, before he ever dreamed he’d be King, he was married to a woman from the Second Ring of Diamond … she wasn’t noble or rich, but he loved her. When he became King, he had to give her up because the Queen of Hoad has to be noble.’

  ‘Did your father have to be King then?’ Linnet asked. ‘If he loved the first one best? He could have stepped back.’

  Dysart was silent, then he gave a long sigh.

  ‘More than anything, everyone wants to be King,’ he replied, ‘but you have to be next in line. My father was the next in line, whether he wanted to be or not, and when the time came he …’ Dysart paused. For once he didn’t smile. ‘Anyhow, the time came and, being the chosen one, he did want it,’ he added. ‘I think when it came to him he wanted it so badly that wanting altered him. He gave up his first life. He gave up being one man and turned into another. He turned into a King.’

  Earlier they had been given the task of writing a poem thirty syllables long, in the approved style. Dysart had written …

  The man in the crown

  Rides by. Moving beside him,

  Stretching before,

  His dark and breathless shadow

  Engulfs the bright, breathing land.

  Days became a week … three weeks … and Linnet grew bored with the city of tents, the distant, glittering King and the cold wind with its taint of decay. She began to long for home. But perhaps everyone had grown weary. Lila told her, one evening, that, on the very next day, there was to be a break in the negotiations. Lords who lived close to the plain would get a chance to go back to their homes for a few days. Even the Hero was going to ride back to Cassio’s Island. And though the King was staying on the battlefield, along with his sons, there were to be festivities. On the next day there was to be a picnic and both she and Prince Dysart were to take part. Linnet was delighted. She was longing for something to happen: she was longing for changes.

  10

  Broken Glass

  Out in his farm in County Glass, Heriot Tarbas was sitting on his own in a corner, playing cards. He was draped in a thick woven rug with a hole for his head and slits for his hands. A chilly wind was blowing around the courtyard, but, apart from any wind or weather, he was now in the habit of covering himself up as much as he could. The cats suddenly looked up, then flattened themselves to the ground and fled, but his little cousins clustered around, staring in amazement at the stranger who rode into the courtyard, staring at his long, green coat edged with fur and his boots, so soft and polished they looked as if they were made of silk rather than fine leather. He wore gloves, and the fingers of the gloves were crowded with rings. His face was far older than his short, bright chestnut curls might have suggested.

  Heriot stared like everybody else at this shiny insect of a man, out of place yet utterly commanding in the Tarbas courtyard. His authority sat on him so naturally that everything around him immediately grew subservient, yet his voice, when he spoke to Joan, was gentle rather than commanding. Heriot couldn’t hear all that was being said, though he gathered Great-Great-Aunt Jen’s presence was being demanded. What he could make out was an unfamiliar accent, much quicker and more clipped than the family voices, and more careful. Lord Glass polished every word a little bit before he let it out on its own in the world.

  Joan hurried off. Lord Glass turned and looked around him. A breeze turned back the edge of his green coat to show a scarlet lining embroidered with gold. Heriot’s mouth opened a little. He was bewildered to think a man might ride with such a coat belted across when he could ride with it open, showing off that wonderful lining.

  A progressive disturbance, beginning somewhere on the first floor of the house and rattling down the stairs, marked Great-Great-Aunt Jen’s rapid descent into the courtyard. Out she came, hesitated and then gave a stiff bow to Lord Glass, who immediately dismounted, and turned towards her, holding out his hand.

  ‘Jenny Tarbas,’ Heriot heard him say, and thought that ‘Jenny’ was an unexpectedly sweet and yielding name for a woman as dauntless as his Great-Great-Aunt Jen. She was taller than Lord Glass, but he acted as if he were the taller, easily accepting a square of bread and a glass of wine from Wish.

  ‘Through this gift of bread,’ he was saying in a formal ritual, ‘obligation returns to your Lord and magnifies the King and the Hero who are boundless in the land.’

  Heriot knew Lord Glass was not just Lord of County Glass, but Castellan, Lord Palatine, the King’s Devisor and one of the Council of Ten, those of the General Council who most closely advised Hoad the King, a man who had given up his own name and taken the name of the land when he first came to the throne, and who would not reclaim his given name until he died. Lord Glass was one of the Lords on that mysterious plain on the other side of the hills, where the King and the Hero, together with Lords and Dukes, were struggling to negotiate a peace of some kind with the Dannorad and Camp Hyot, those ancient enemies of Hoad. It was strange that he should be here and not there among the other Lords, where fortunes and futures were being settled. Heriot could tell Great-Great-Aunt Jen’s anxious welcome was not simply because he was the rock upon which so much of their prosperity depended. Some other anxiety was involved. Her voice rose with a vague desperation and, for the first time in his life, Heriot heard her say something which was almost a lie.

  ‘What boy? The place is full of boys.’

  Lord Glass laughed and patted her arm. His next words were lost, but then a slight turn of his head brought his voice clearly to Heriot’s ears. ‘And, Jenny, we’re too old for these games, you and I. Word’s got around. Even out here people enjoy gossip, and gossip flows. So just put the perplexing Heriot here before me, please. You might as well do it now as later.’

  Great-Great-Aunt Jen slowly turned and looked over at Heriot, sitting in his corner, the cards spread out in front of him in their four suits – Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Great-Great-Aunt Jen crooked her finger at him, so he carelessly swept his cards together before he rose, and, sliding them into his pocket, walked reluctantly across the courtyard, pulling the old woolly hat lower as he did so. Great-Great-Aunt Jen met him and took his hand, placing him directly before Lord Glass.

  ‘This is my great-great-nephew Heriot Tarbas, my Lord. He’s a good boy, very dear to us all. I don’t know what you’ve been told, but he’d never intend any harm to Hoad, the land or the King. In many ways I don’t think he believes they exist.’

  ‘Well, I am here to convince him they do,’ Lord Glass replied. ‘Hello, Heriot Tarbas … your fame has gone abroad in the most gratifying way.’

  From behind Lord Glass, Wish was making impatient signs to Heriot, so he pulled his hat off and made a clumsy, ducking movement that was his idea of a bow. ‘Now I’ll come to the point at once, which I almost never do. Someone tells me you have had a vision of a sort. Is this true?’

  Heriot’s thoughts began to run quickly but somehow coolly. He shot a look at Great-Great-Aunt Jen,
then looked back to Lord Glass.

  ‘I warn you I shall take silence for assent,’ said Lord Glass a little sharply. ‘Don’t stand there looking stupid, because, by now, I know a lot about you. I know you’re not stupid, and if you pretend to be I will get cross, and we won’t get on. Don’t you think that would be a pity?’

  ‘My Lord, you’re confusing him,’ Great-Great-Aunt Jen cried indignantly.

  ‘Come now, Jenny, he’s not so very confused,’ Lord Glass said. ‘I’ll swear he knows exactly what I’m talking about. Heriot, I didn’t come alone. Just look towards the gate there, and my companions will ride through.’ He raised his gloved hand by way of a signal. ‘First on the bay horse comes Dr Feo, the Queen’s astrologer and the master of the King’s clocks. He is very wise, and tutors noble children in Diamond. And behind him, look carefully, is that a face you know? Ah, I see it is.’

  The second rider, on a white horse, pushed his white hood back from his blood red hair, and it was the Wellwisher, the Assassin of his dream. This time he was dressed entirely in white, his face painted and powdered white, but Heriot was in no doubt about whom he was seeing. The pale blue eyes with their dreadful emptiness, the straight nose, under the dyed and braided, glittering hair were part of his memory for ever. He would always recognise the single nature of this creature, who seemed entirely without the many falterings self-doubt puts into the human heart.