Heriot (17 page)

But, even as she fought to stretch her muscles into obedience, she was warmed by a great blush of triumph. She was there … safely there. Her leg muscles grew loose. Her fingers, knotted like a bundle of twigs by the cramp, became their lively, separate selves again. Linnet stood, stretched, walked around, trying to stamp a continuous trembling out of her knees and ankles, then moved to a square opening, which gave on to an inner stair that corkscrewed into darkness, down through the heart of the tower. The darkness was not complete. Light was seeping from somewhere below her. She turned her back on it and tiptoed towards Dysart’s bed. I mustn’t hesitate, she thought. I’m protected, she reminded herself.

Within a minute, she was looking down on Dysart. He lay on his side, flanked by candles, his eyes closed, his whole face sealed like the face of a dead man.

‘Dysart!’ she said. ‘Dysart!’ She touched his face, and then, when he did not wake, she looked, with puzzled wonder, around the room in which he had spent so much of his life.

It was a small round room. His bed took up most of the available space. At the foot of his bed was the desk. In the wall beside his desk was the window through which she had climbed, crossing the very windowsill where once some vagrant, disconnected part of Heriot had sat, watching over Dysart’s childhood, and both threatening and luring him … setting up the moment it would need his friendship, courage and authority.

And here she was, standing in Dysart’s room and looking down at him, while, somewhere in time, she felt she was still on
that plain watching him vanish under the hoofs of charging horses. Somewhere beyond the castle, out in the King’s garden, the Magician of Hoad was curled in his cage, and it seemed to Linnet that his head was not so much a head that took up space, but space itself … a curious space into which the real world spiralled like water through a hole, emerging altered in some way, because, as the world went through him, the Magician watched it spinning, and the power of his watching changed everything.

Looking down once more she saw that Dysart’s eyes were suddenly open, and he was staring at her, wide awake and asking her a silent question. And, as their eyes met, she felt once again, the wave of heat, and the disturbance Heriot’s touch on her cheek had transferred to her. Dysart slowly sat up, without taking his eyes from her. Linnet moved a step towards him, touched his cheek as Heriot had touched hers, then, bending like some tall flower gently pushed by a wind no one else could feel, she kissed him.

Dysart put his arms around her and pulled her against him so tightly it was as if he was trying to catch, between their very bodies, all their misunderstandings and ambitions, all the illusions that had kept them apart. It was as though he was determined to crush all distractions out of existence. In silence they kissed and kissed and kissed again.

‘In the old story,’ Dysart murmured at last, ‘everyone woke when the lovers kissed.’

‘In this story everyone sleeps,’ Linnet answered. ‘Everyone except us.’

‘I’ve always been mad, but I didn’t know that I was a fool as well – not until now. Linnet, I love you.’

‘And I love you,’ she replied, ‘and I’m the fool. I’m promised to Luce. I’m signed and sealed.’

‘Our fathers signed,’ said Dysart, and, speaking from the narrow confines of his bed, he made it sound simple. ‘We tell
them … declare ourselves … and then we hold to it. Hold to each other and forget Hagen!’

‘Forget Hoad!’ she replied, laughing.

He didn’t argue. He nodded. Then he put his arms around her again. She was cocooned in the heavy folds of her dress, cold from the outside air, her back to the candle and her face in shadow, whereas his was lighted. Sliding her hand from his shoulder, she tucked it behind his head, drew his face towards hers and they kissed yet again.

‘We’ve signed now,’ she said, then sighed and leaned against him like someone yielding up a heavy burden to a fellow traveller who was somehow fresher and better able to carry it for a while.

‘So you’ll marry me!’ he said, in the reflective voice he used when committing something to memory.

‘But are you allowed to marry twice over? You’re already married to your city,’ Linnet answered, surprised to hear a little melancholy along with mockery in her own voice.

‘Oh that!’ Dysart replied, debating. ‘Well, my father gave up his first marriage … gave up love, that is … to take on Diamond. I’ll divorce Diamond and take on love. If we do things backwards we just might unknot the past.’

Far out, many leagues beyond what anyone in Diamond could see, far out in distant Hagen, the volcano sighed out dark smoke, unseen in the greater darkness, while the calm eyes of the glacial lakes looked through the mountain forests towards the stars. But Dysart and Linnet didn’t think of brothers, Magicians, Hoad or Hagen. They clung together, kissing in the room at the top of the tower, with the fidgety castle below them, the restless city and the land of Hoad around them, and windy darkness encompassing the world.

In a room of Guard-on-the-Rock Betony sat leaning forward, elbows on his knees, smiling a little, and talking intently with his doll-like bride. In the Tower of the Hero, Carlyon looked across the room, looked past a cluster of wildly gossiping friends and lifted his glass ironically to Luce, seeing in Luce’s simple gaze something he had learned, over many years, to recognise in his own. Behind him, Izachel sat listlessly, looking like the shell of a man, his centre burned away.

And out in the night, not particularly comfortable on his straw bed, though he was used to straw, Heriot listened to Cayley breathing loudly beside him, worked on by such exhaustion he suddenly felt guilty, feeling he had used the child’s offered energy and time unfairly. Then he felt a movement outside, heard the gate scrape and clink. Quickly he tossed more hay across sleeping Cayley, turning as light swung around his darkened room and fell on his mattress. He flung his arm over his eyes for it seemed unreasonably bright.

‘You are distinctly favoured, Magician,’ sighed a voice behind the light. ‘It is the man visiting you, not the King. He seldom appears, this man, but he has come out at midnight to speak to you.’

‘Lord King!’ Heriot said, and was silent.

‘I have Cloud with me,’ the King said. ‘But only by way of simple company. Magician, as I understand it from Lord Glass, who has sought to be your advocate, you have chained yourself up because you feel you have transformed yourself into a monster and you wish to exemplify this state in the most ironical fashion.’

‘Since I was relieving you of one prodigy, Lord King, I thought I might as well offer you another in his place,’ Heriot replied.

‘What makes you prodigious?’ asked the King and Heriot was silent for a while.

Then he said in the slow voice of someone unravelling a mystery, ‘After that first vision, back when I was a boy, no one behaved the same to me, and since then, I suppose, I’ve been trying to get back to what I used to be … contented with my true place in the world, contented and complete …’

‘You’re asking for paradise,’ the King replied. ‘Take it from me, life thrusts us on, and there is no true going back.’

‘But I had it once,’ Heriot cried. ‘I was
there
. Everything around me was my meaning.’

‘If
you
hadn’t changed, something else would have,’ Hoad replied. The candlelight shone up into his eyes. ‘I’m sure you know that, in the beginning I didn’t want to be King, nor did I expect to be. But the moment came, and immediately I began imagining myself as a man who might do good. I was tempted by power – the power of remaking the kingdom by the conceit of kingship – and so I embraced the possibility. And now I cannot imagine myself as anything but King, struggling to achieve peace. A lot of people support me, though there’s still a number that don’t.’ He sighed and looked into the shadowed air over Heriot’s head. ‘You could support my ambitions. You could help me, even though such dreams have their dangers.’ He sighed again. ‘Those of us who think, either grow discontented with our setting in the world or make the world so uneasy around us so that it strives to work us out of its flesh, as if we were festering thorns. And then we must live ever after like parasites trying to eat our way back in.’

‘I’m nothing true here,’ Heriot said. ‘Just a magical function living in the city’s gut.’

‘What would you rather be?’ asked the King. He was dressed in grey, the colour of his sighs. All his colour lay in the glance he now turned on Heriot. And, in considering this question, Heriot was brought to admit to himself again that, by now, he didn’t want to surrender his magical nature, and return to what
he once had been. He groaned at the contradiction and shook his head helplessly.

‘You are not singular in any tendency you might have to be monstrous,’ said the King. ‘We can all be monstrous, and balancing a complicated nature is the most wearing of all responsibilities. Think of that.’ Heriot was silent. ‘For the rest, as King, I am interested in you only as a Magician and in the function a Magician might have in Hoad.’

A moment later he was gone into the night. Heriot stared after him, their conversation turning over in his head. After a while he put that seething head down on his arms, which were folded across his knees. He fell into a tense cramped sleep, only to wake in the first dark grey light of dawn, with Cayley leaning heavily against him, then waking, too, as if he sensed that Heriot was awake, blinking and swearing with astonishment.

‘So, are you going to stay here then?’ he said in a resigned voice.

‘It’s hard to explain …’ Heriot said, sliding his fingers down between the iron fetter around his ankle and the protesting skin beneath.

‘It doesn’t make sense to make things rougher than they need to be,’ Cayley said simply. ‘But it’s a fairy tale, isn’t it? You think you’ve grown too strange to be born. Maybe, says the rest of the world, but we’re all strange, this way and that. But me – I’m a bit stranger than most, you mutter on, mutter on. That’s why, ’n’t it?’

Heriot grinned unwillingly. ‘That’s more or less why,’ he agreed. ‘But already the idea of it is something different from what it was when it came to me last night.’

‘I used to hear fairy tales and that,’ Cayley said. ‘My mother told them, over and over. And if you tell them over and over like that, they get to be true, don’t they?’

Heriot looked straight ahead, smoothing his tangled hair.

‘See, another man wouldn’t do what you’re doing,’ said Cayley. ‘Another man would lie low and get what he could get. But you leap around, thumping your chest and saying
Look at
me! I’m a monster!
and that’s a fairytale thing to do.’

‘I’ve used that word too much. It’s suddenly gone all cosy on me,’ mumbled Heriot. ‘If I’m a monster I’m a cosy monster.’

The morning light grew, not lighter but bluer. Cayley put his mouth against Heriot’s ear. ‘You’re not a monster but I am,’ he said in a very quiet voice. ‘I’m not as old as you, but I’m a long way ahead of you in being one.’

Heriot felt the hair prickle on his neck at the dark, breathy tone. He tried to smile, but his smile refused to be completed.

‘You stay in here, you let me go loose,’ Cayley went on. ‘You might save the city from yourself, but you leave it open to me. It’s had its turn with me, that city. Soon I’m going to have my turn with the city, unless you come out to watch over me. Listen!’

Heriot listened. He could tell that, in the following moments of silence Cayley was struggling to break down something of that terrible, guarded blankness he carried within him.

‘Once my mother tried to cut my throat. I’ve told you that. She did it out of a sort of mad sadness about things. Not that it worked, but I still carry the mark of her sadness And then there was the man I call my stepdadda. He lay there drunk, and his boy, my little half-brother, was coughing and dying under a blanket. I come out from under the bed. Twice …’ he held up two fingers. ‘Twice I put the point of the knife I had back then against my stepdadda’s eye – wrinkled his eyelid up with it. See, the rest of him, it was full of bones … I couldn’t be sure I would get past them back then. No point in just hurting him for nothing, was there? An eye – that’s a sure way in, ’n’t it?’

Heriot shrugged. ‘We often think terrible things and don’t do them.’

‘What do you think I am?’ Cayley said derisively. ‘I’d have done it. Sometimes now, well, I could cry at having let the chance go by. But I couldn’t be sure I’d get away with it. That stopped me. They’d have stretched me, and I wouldn’t stretch for him. See, I got to thinking I might be allowed just
one
–’ he bent one of his fingers down ‘… and my stepdadda wasn’t the right one. Not the one I wanted. Not the one I’ve been practising to have!’

Heriot turned his head very slowly. Cayley wasn’t looking at him, but out into the growing light, a dreamy expression on his patched face as if he were remembering some wonderful honeyed flavour, still tasting its ghost on his lips.

‘Things was looking up for me out there,’ he said regretfully, turning to Heriot. ‘Eating and sleeping and that, working out with Voicey Landis. But now? Shall I live in the straw with you? Steal a chain to match? I can be all sorts of company. You say it and I’ll be it.’

There was a silence

‘You’re a clever little bastard, aren’t you!’ Heriot murmured at last. ‘You’ve been brought up so badly I can’t resist looking after you. So undo the lock on this chain and we’ll go home.’

‘Is that right?’ Cayley said, busily drawing a long pin from the thick hem of his shirt. There was a blob of sealing wax on its end.

‘Don’t you know it!’ Heriot exclaimed derisively, as his companion began to work on the lock, which Heriot himself had closed on his own ankle the night before.

‘I know this,’ Cayley said indistinctly. ‘You like playing just as if you were a little one. All this – it’s nothing but a game, and I can’t be bothered with the rules.’

‘It’s not simple,’ Heriot said. ‘Once I watched children
playing a game in the Third Ring – they were practising for love. They tied it down with names and running and kissing, chasing, and catching and screaming …’