Heriot (18 page)

‘There’s a lot of screaming to it sometimes,’ Cayley agreed, working at the lock.

‘Listen. A child from one line would try to fetch away another from the other line back on to his own side. “The boy – no – the burning boy shall fetch – or was it catch – the girl and he shall be her lover.” Do you know that game?’

‘I’ve already said I don’t play,’ Cayley pointed out.

‘I play,’ Heriot said. ‘I’m playing all the time – acting Magician, acting monster, acting man to see which feels right. It’s what you call a metaphorical life …’

‘I wouldn’t call it that, just playing, playing, playing,’ Cayley put in.

‘Perhaps I’m a bit like those children,’ Heriot said, ‘acting out future choices so I’ll get a bit of practice before they come upon me. I thought it might be right to live in this cage, but maybe everyone else is right and I’m wrong. One thing’s certain,
you
need looking after, you threat to the world.’

‘So do you,’ Cayley said. ‘Need looking after, I mean.’

‘But it hurt my feelings that Dysart couldn’t look at me directly,’ Heriot complained. ‘I mean he grabbed me, but he was careful to look past me.’

‘He was scared.’ Cayley twisted his face, still concentrating on feeling his way into the lock with the pin. ‘But I always look direct, you’ll never scare me.’ The lock clicked, and the anklet fell open with a ringing sound. ‘See, I’m ruined for beauty and all that, but suppose you was to drop down right this moment into a pool of blood or turn into a devil with looking-glass eyes I’d still look straight at you. “That’s him, that’s my man. Hey you! Stop fooling around!” I’d say.’

‘A devil with looking-glass eyes.’ Heriot was momentarily
diverted. He laughed with sudden ease. ‘Now there’s a thought.’

‘I made it up,’ cried Cayley with a shout of triumphant laughter. ‘All the time I’m learning your words, catching your ideas, stealing thoughts. Pity to lose a skill.’

‘Watch out – words can be an illness,’ Heriot said, but without bitterness. He stood up, then cautiously moved his ankle from side to side.

‘They won’t sicken me,’ boasted Cayley. ‘I’ve nearly died of thoughts already – always other people’s, not my own. You don’t sicken twice.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Heriot asked with weary amusement as they came out of the cage together, leaving its door swinging open behind them.

‘Your sickness,’ said Cayley, dancing a little, like a dog pleased at the prospect of a walk. ‘It’s got a name ’n’t it? Im-ag-in-ation!’ He pronounced the one word as if it was four.

The morning was already laced with the voices of birds. The two-faced woman, the dwarfs, all slept. The lions paced backwards and forwards.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Heriot, looking around him with astonishment. ‘Cayley, it’s so beautiful. All over again!’

The garden was filling with a mysterious and tender light, each tree, each leaf, each blade of grass displaying itself against a colour between grey and silver. Ill at ease with the rest of humanity Heriot found there was a space in the morning into which he fitted exactly. ‘Supposing the simple act of asking “Am I human?” makes you human?’ he said, coming to a stop.

‘Supposing,’ said Cayley from his side.

‘And who hasn’t got a beast in them anyway?’ Heriot asked again.

‘Supposing … just supposing,’ Cayley agreed, nodding.

‘I’ve tried being good,’ Heriot said, ‘being clever too … but there isn’t a final answer. I’m wonderful compared to Carlyon
for instance, better off too. His cage might be a whole island wide, but there’s no one to unlock
his
collar. He’s the great freak of Hoad, displayed.’

‘Maybe he sits and asks, “What am I?”,’ Cayley suggested. ‘It’s easy to ask.’

‘I think he did ask once, and didn’t like the answer,’ Heriot replied. ‘I don’t think he’s asked properly since.’ The gate to the zoo was a little ajar.

‘That royal old fox,’ Cayley said half admiringly. ‘It’s like a little message, saying, “I know you’ll go”, isn’t it?’

They crossed into the First Ring, watched by the guards at the gate. High above them, over in the Tower of the Lion, a window shone palely, picked out by the light in the east. They moved on further, the light deepened and suddenly became miraculous. Heriot found himself weeping, for he thought the morning was extending an irrevocable welcome back into the world of natural men, even though he was bringing his occupant with him, unruly but not outlawed.

‘I’m a true man after all,’ he said to the air and to Cayley.

‘You can do better than just being a true man,’ said Cayley, dancing around him.

‘I value it,’ Heriot exclaimed. ‘You will too, one day.’

Cayley’s dancing stopped. ‘I won’t ever live to be one,’ he said seriously. ‘I’m more opposite to all that than you guess.’

‘We might both live for ever,’ Heriot suggested. ‘I’m becoming immortal, walking in this light. I’ve got a lot of questions unanswered, but I’ll stay still for a little, not fretting and not asking them.’

He looked up into the sky, which was beginning to colour, its blush deepening from moment to moment, as if his stare had set love and blood free to contend across the clear skin of the air. Heriot couldn’t think of a more adequate response than falling on his knees and staring ahead of him, his face rapt and still.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ he repeated. ‘If only I could just dissolve into it.’ The morning grew if anything more intense. But then he shook himself. ‘Here!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m getting lost. Hug me back. I want someone to touch me.’

‘I’m not good at it,’ Cayley said, but obediently knelt and, putting his thin arms around Heriot, hugged him energetically.

‘Good enough!’ Heriot told him. ‘Rough but real.’ He looked up at the trees, their top twigs burning furiously with the approach of day, quite unable to see Cayley’s face, which was taking on an indescribable expression, tender, triumphant yet menacing, the expression of a demon, not of the night, but of the bright morning.

‘
Y
ou’re all I ever really wanted. You’re my true kingdom,’ Dysart said to Linnet. ‘The city was only a sign of you.’ At the moment it seemed completely true. ‘Back there in the dream I just cut the world out. I didn’t want to know anything, because there was nothing worth knowing any more. I wasn’t even curious. I didn’t want to know what was going to happen next. I didn’t understand.’

‘Understand what?’ Linnet asked.

‘You’re my true kingdom,’ Dysart told her.

‘It was always meant to be,’ Linnet said. Her happy voice came to Dysart from his own shadow, which lay across her. ‘But we had to be tested.’ He couldn’t tell that, as Linnet spoke, she was testing every part of her memory and awareness, fearful of detecting some secret contamination of her own will by the will of the Magician of Hoad. She couldn’t bear the thought that she and Dysart had only achieved each other because Heriot had somehow slipped desire under their skins.

But there was nothing there that was not her own. Heriot might have hovered around her as she risked her life and climbed the wall by its disintegrating steps, but her declaration of love was hers alone.

Outside she could detect the first alteration of light. It was still dark, but it was a transparent darkness. Morning was on the way. ‘My father will be looking for me,’ she said with a sigh.
‘There are terrible fights ahead of us. He wants to be the one who chooses my husband.’

‘Let’s stroll out of here. Let’s walk like civilised sentries around the rim of the castle,’ Dysart suggested. ‘Just once round the walls. Then you can go back and fight with your father, and I’ll go and argue with mine. Don’t straighten the bed! Don’t touch a thing. I’ll come back, see the mark of your head on my pillow, and I’ll know it was all true.’

Linnet stood up, feeling so light and free without her clothes, she was reluctant to dress again. But the night had become part of a time that was only attainable through memory. Day was bearing down on her. She slipped a linen chemise over a silk one. Dysart buttoned a crumpled shirt, and they dressed, putting on the world along with yesterday’s grubby clothes. ‘Your father …’ began Dysart. ‘Linnet, you must think hard about what it really means … being in love with me.’

‘I would always have fought for you if I’d known you were going to be fighting beside me,’ Linnet declared.

She meant it. She
meant
it.

They walked down the winding stair towards a guttering torch, paling in that first morning light, and then out under an arched doorway on to the battlements. Far below them the Bramber flowed; far beyond them the three Rings of the city stretched towards the first rising hills of County Glass. Nothing in that outer world had changed, yet Linnet had never felt as consciously free as she felt now, as easy, as pure within herself. The Hero’s tower still blazed with light, but, as morning advanced, as edges and curves began to shine, and hints of depth and distance crept back into the world, these lights, too, were losing their power. The sound of voices singing came towards them intermittently. High in the Tower of the Lion, the King’s window shone faintly. Perhaps the sleepless
King of Hoad was celebrating his son’s strange wedding with yet another night of careful work.

Watching the morning, and strolling along the battlements beside Linnet, Dysart felt he was made of paper and ink, made out of stories, and not all of them his own. Stories never sleep, he thought. They tell themselves over and over again. Beneath him, in the tunnelled walls, the campaigners were changing the guard. Celebration fires still smoked in distant city squares. They walked in silence, and the dissolving midnight beast, which had consumed Dysart when he was a dreaming child, grew hazy and doubtful. Inwardly he laughed at it, and drove it away.

At last they paused and leaned together in one of the embrasures, looking out into the King’s garden. Neither of them thought of the Magician, who had declared himself a monster and shut himself in the cage.

There was a step behind them. They turned together, looking away from the garden and the sea into the more resolute light staining the sky beyond Hoad’s Pleasure.

Betony was standing behind them, holding a glass and a bottle of wine in his pale hands, his face more naked than Linnet had ever seen it. His expression altered at once, as it always did when anyone looked into his eyes. Nevertheless Linnet had fleetingly glimpsed something in Betony – a terrible injury, old and mortal – before he had the chance to conceal it once more.

‘I see you have been celebrating my wedding,’ Betony said. He stared at them. ‘Rather too well!’ he added.

‘Someone has to,’ Dysart said.

Betony sighed, took his place beside them, facing the morning, and turning his back on the bulk of the sprawling city. ‘Oh, I’ve celebrated in my own way,’ he said. ‘I was able to talk to her – my wife, that is. We can’t stand the thought of
each other. We’ve agreed not to contaminate ourselves. And we do understand each other … we’ve even become friends of a sort. Willing conspirators, anyway! My father can whistle and wait for the miraculous child, heir to both kingdoms. It just won’t happen. I don’t mind taking life out of the world, but I’ll never feed it back in. I may be cruel, but I’m not as cruel as all that.’

He looked sideways at them. ‘You seem to have celebrated my wedding in a particularly personal way,’ he went on.

Without turning, Linnet could tell he was smiling.

‘Linnet and I have promised to marry each other!’ Dysart said abruptly, anxious to hear what the idea sounded like in the outside world. Once spoken, it became both more and less than a private ecstasy … it became a policy.

‘Oh, of course you have,’ said Betony. ‘And I do think you should!’

Dysart and Linnet both looked at him suspiciously.

‘You might even get away with it,’ he said, smiling his wincing smile at their doubt, ‘now that Carlyon’s shown a little of his hand … well, of his heart, really! Have you told your father?’ he asked, turning to look at Linnet. ‘Or have you had other things on your mind?’

‘The King didn’t seem to be worried by anything Carlyon had to say,’ Linnet answered casually. She hadn’t given Carlyon or his visions of death and decay a thought.

‘Oh, don’t be naive,’ replied Betony scornfully. ‘Our father has never trusted Carlyon as Hero … he’s always wanted to hold Luce in reserve. Otherwise Luce would have been married, probably to you, well before this. And he’ll never forgive Carlyon for that trick last night, for turning Izachel loose at my wonderful wedding feast. So someday he just might give Luce the chance to do what Luce already longs to do. To do more than admire Carlyon … to kill him and become him.
A sort of devouring! That cuts out marriage for Luce. And the Master wouldn’t mind you marrying Dysart, would he, if Dysart was a second eligible son, rather than a third.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s almost too neat a chance. Don’t trust it.’ He sounded neither sympathetic nor hostile … simply curious in a slightly drunken and weary fashion. ‘Or perhaps you’ll live happily ever after,’ he went on, smiling gently, ‘in Hagen.’ It was hard to understand how a voice so empty of expression could, nevertheless, express profound derision.

‘I could learn to do that,’ Dysart said defiantly, but as he spoke his thought twisted in his head. ‘If I could have Linnet and Diamond too …’

We could live in Hagen, Linnet thought like Betony’s echo, then pushed the thought away. Dysart must never know how quickly she had imagined him among mountains and forests of her home, how she had already stood him on the edge of a plateau from which one could look out over the whole land of Hoad.

‘Because,’ Betony went on serenely, ‘since I’m forced to be King, I must warn you I plan to
be
King, childless or not. Actually I can hardly wait. So no secret hopes of something beyond Hagen. I shall become King out of spite.’ The gentle flow of his voice suddenly sounded particularly sinister.

‘Besides, Dysart, you’d never be a true King. You’d be like our father. You’d try to do good: you’d try to be kind: you’d try to be human, and that would bleed the sense out of our sort of kingship. And, over and above any question of your inadequacy, I do so want my father to have the fulfilment of seeing me become what he’s forced me to become.’

‘You want to be King out of revenge!’ exclaimed Dysart.

‘It’s a good reason,’ said Betony mildly. ‘I’ll be different from my father in essence, because I’ll never be taken in by my own story.’

Glancing back at him, Linnet suddenly caught a vagrant reflection of light from a wet streak on his cheek. Betony was weeping. As she watched he touched the tear away with his right forefinger.

‘Rare wine!’ he said, looking at her. Then he licked his finger tip.

‘Talgesi’s not dead,’ Dysart pointed out. ‘Just gone away.’

Linnet leaned more deeply into the embrasure, staring down into the garden. Far below she could now make out an archery lawn, which she knew well. Something flashed out from the trees, a wheel spinning across the grass and chamomile. A strange child was cartwheeling through the King’s retreat, seeming barely to touch the ground. Betony and Dysart, backs to the garden, didn’t notice the somersaulting figure.

‘I really loved my father when I was very small,’ Betony said, still holding the glass high in the air, narrowing his eyes as he looked at the world through it. ‘I have no depth, as you know. I’m fascinated by surfaces and back in the beginning his surface seemed so wonderful, I thought he must glitter all the way through. And then, as I got older, I began to think there might be blackness, a perpetual bitter howling, and that was fascinating too … Since he didn’t love me I thought perhaps he hated me, and I enjoyed the drama of being hated. But when I realised he was nothing but a grey, dull struggler, who’d given up his own life for an inferior one – a royal donkey with a capacity for taking detailed care of things – when I realised I’d been born to be nothing more than a marker in his dreary labour, then I knew I’d never forgive him.’

‘From what I can make out,’ Dysart was saying cautiously, ‘people have been happier since he’s been King.’

‘But
I’m
not happier,’ Betony said. ‘I was born with a longing for extremity, and none of this is anything like enough. The crown, the ritual, the castle … all nothing but tinsel!’

‘Well, perhaps you can’t be happy,’ Dysart suggested, rather brutally. ‘Maybe that’s one gift you don’t have.’

Down in the garden a second figure was strolling on to the archery lawn. Heriot, whose last words to her had been a promise that he would never leave his cage, was walking between the trees. Linnet stared down at him, frowning and transfixed, while Betony watched Dysart with a suddenly inimical stare.

‘You are completely wrong!’ he said. ‘I
know
about happiness. I can feel happiness beating off you this very moment, and how do I recognise it? Because I
have
been happy, on rare occasions. I want happiness very badly.’

But Linnet, watching Heriot Tarbas, and wondering what on earth could have brought the Magician out of the cage, wasn’t thinking of Betony’s happiness. Something had happened to change the Magician’s mind. And, even from this distance, calling on sharp memory rather than sharp sight, she now recognised the cartwheeling boy as the one who often followed him. Strange rumours circulated about them, but Lord Glass had never tried to cut the boy out of Heriot’s life. Had Heriot reached out from his cage and opened its door for him? She looked at Dysart, who was leaning against the wall beside his brother. As if her gaze were a touch, he now turned his odd-coloured eyes towards her, turned and then, together, they looked out over Diamond.

‘Funny!’ said Dysart ‘I’ve never felt so close to it before.’ He didn’t say what he was talking about but Linnet knew. ‘It’s as if giving it all away has mixed me into it more than ever.’

Betony understood. ‘You’ll never give Diamond away. Linnet, be warned! He’ll break every other promise, but that one.’

Dysart treated Betony as if he were a whisper as impersonal, as errant and senseless as wind or rain. He simply laughed, and
shook his head. Though he answered Betony it was Linnet he was really talking to.

‘You’re only jealous,’ he told Betony, before saying what was real to him at that moment. ‘Anyway I’m a Magician in my own way. I’ll fold Diamond up and carry it always, tucked into a little press in my head. Then, whenever I need to, I’ll take it out … shake it free … I’ll have it all.’

And, as Dysart spoke, Linnet believed he really might be able to contain the whole city: that the castle at its heart, the river like a flowing question mark, the three Rings, the merchants, markets, magicians, mottoes, libraries, laundries, lines of washing, the jewellers, the poems on walls, and the gongfermors carrying buckets of excrement to dump in the poorer part of town, even the King and the Hero, would all be Dysart’s for ever. He might even be able to share it with her, if ever she wanted it. And suddenly it seemed as if all the shifting entities of the city had really been standing still, and it had always been Linnet, the heiress of Hagen, and Dysart, the third son, who had moved and changed, dancing between all the confusing others.

‘Dice heart!’ Dysart said suddenly, but whether he said it to Linnet or Betony or to the morning no one could tell. ‘No one will ever be able to take it away from me. I’ll gamble on that.’

He took Linnet by the hand, without noticing the Magician in the garden below, and turned her to face the east and the confidently rising sun.