Heriot (2 page)

O
nce clear of the farm buildings and pens, Heriot Tarbas skirted two wide fields, each one with its own name, then crossed another diagonally, scrambling through well-known holes in hedges, or hoisting himself over dry stone walls. The fields grew steeper as he climbed the hill, and he was out of breath as he climbed the last fence and reached the top at last, clapped his hand over his confused eye and looked past his little finger to the view on the other side of the hill.

The whole world seemed to tilt. The stretch and sigh of the sea seemed to swell towards him, while the sound of his own hard breathing was briefly swallowed by the greater breath of breaking waves.

Dominating the horizon, dark with forests on its landward side, was an island … Cassio's Island, the Kingdom of the Hero of Hoad and Revenger of Senlac, one of the rulers of the people Heriot's family called ‘Secondcomers'. There were towns and a castle and a whole busy life on Cassio's Island, but none of this could be seen from Heriot's hilltop. From here the island looked completely empty.

Still it was not drifting; it was firmly tethered to the mainland. Many years ago the same people who had once lived in the ruins of the castle, which now held Heriot's home, had built the Hero's Causeway … a road over which traders and
messengers could bring goods and information from the King to the Hero and back again. And every now and then the Lords of the Counties of Hoad, along with the King and his family and other Secondcomers gathered on Cassio's Island to watch men fight to the death for the right to be Hero. Heriot had never set foot on the causeway. His only travels were to the nearest village with Radley or his cousin Wish, for Great-Great-Aunt Jen discouraged any of her family from wandering, and Heriot most of all.

‘In many ways it's best not to be seen out in the world,' she had told him over and over again in her calm, dry fashion. ‘Work hard, keep your head down and don't let the Secondcomers catch sight of you … not even Lord Glass though he's a kind man compared with a lot of them. Take it from me, the Lord's eye is the King's eye! So keep out of sight.'

Just down the hillside Nesbit, Wish and Heriot's brother Radley were carrying stones to block a big gap in the wall, washed out during the previous winter. Shouting and waving, Heriot admired Radley's wonderful shoulders and back, and the way the sea air had persuaded his shoulder-length hair into ringlets. If Heriot had a single ambition in the world, it was to look and live exactly like Radley, who was swinging rocks as easily as he swung his baby in the courtyard at home.

‘Don't tell me!' he said as Heriot came up. ‘She wants us home! Is it because of the storm?' He nodded at a solid bank of cloud, which was moving towards them, grey at its leading edge but billowing blue-black on the horizon.

‘She wants you home because the Travellers have arrived,' Heriot said, watching Radley set the stone in place, as precisely as if it were a chessman on a board.

‘Which tribe?' asked Wish, but Heriot didn't know.

The three men stopped working, straightened up, and began to wander up the hill, joking and laughing with each other, but
for some reason Heriot didn't want to go back to the farm. He hesitated, watching them climb, half-expecting Radley, at least, to turn and call him to heel. But they went on and up, past Draevo and out of sight, talking all the time without noticing he wasn't tagging along behind.

Heriot turned towards the sea and the dark forests of Cassio's Island. He didn't want to see Azelma again, or hear her suggest he was different from everyone else in his family. He didn't want to be forced into thinking of himself as anything but plain and mostly invisible.

Somewhere on Cassio's Island was a port where ships put in, and somewhere beyond the forests a city that held the castle of the Hero – one of the two great spirits of Hoad – at present alive in the person of Carlyon of County Doro. Somewhere on that Island lived a whole population of men and women who were loyal to the Hero first and King second. This was not only allowed, it was an ancient rule.

‘It keeps the King just a little humble,' Great-Great-Aunt Jen had once declared. ‘Once the Kings of Hoad used to be the Heroes as well, but it's too much glory for one man to have both Hero and King alive in him at the same time. Sometimes they're contrary spirits. They might tear him apart.'

The causeway was still green, a quick arrow pointing out to the Island. On a day like this, a fine day when usual events were yielding to strange ones, someone might walk along the causeway and step on to Cassio's Island, and stand in another country just for a little while. It was not forbidden; it was just something no one in the Tarbas family had ever done … at least not as far as Heriot knew.

Two years earlier he had stood on that hilltop with his family, looking down on the causeway at glittering columns of men and women. According to the customs of Hoad, a young man called Carlyon had challenged the Hero, Link, and the King and his
court were carrying him to combat in the Hero's Arena. To Heriot, looking down from above, the parade had seemed more than royal. It had seemed to him not a company of mere Kings and Princes, but one of sun-bears, centaurs and strange, stalking birds as beautiful and passing as dreams. Three days later they had returned, carrying Link's body in great splendour, leaving young Carlyon, Hero by conquest, to discover the Island on his own and take possession of his hidden city. Heriot had believed the whole world was being paraded past the farm in a glittering thread so he could take note of it, but by now brambles and wild grasses were pushing in on either side of the narrow road which, on this particular day, at this particular time, was totally deserted.

And now, as he walked along the causeway, with his whole family left behind him on the other side of the hill, Heriot was seized with a lonely elation, and began to run and leap and to fling up his arms, chanting under his breath, spinning wildly, shouting wordlessly. Feeling he could twist all the way to the island, he turned cartwheels, until he toppled over, laughing as he fell, only to sit up in the middle of the road, staring wildly around him.

Then he relaxed, laughed at himself yet again, and breathed deeply, taking conscious pleasure in the smell of salt and seaweed, and the lap and rattle of water in the rocks on either side. The thought that the sound went on and on like that (water on rock, rock on water), whether there was anyone to listen to it or not, gave him a sort of relief. Free at last, he thought, without having the least idea just what it was he had been freed from, and set off once more along the wild road … the central seam of the causeway.

Directly before him at the end of the road was a stone arch.

At first it seemed enormously far away, and insignificant compared with the wide expanses of sea and sky, but suddenly
he found he could not look around it or over it any more. Suddenly it had become the only thing the world had to show him.

A great fountain of seawater erupted beyond it, and then another and another. Heriot approached it warily. Increasingly the arch seemed to drain colour and shape out of everything around it, even from the water and the autumn air.

A
nd then, at last, he had reached it, was walking under it, then standing for a moment to read the inscribed names of the Heroes. Carlyon’s name was there, freshly cut into the old rock. Heriot put a tentative hand to touch the names, trying to imagine his own name carved among them. But the stone would not accept his name, even in imagination. He wasn’t noble, and only men who were born to nobility were free to fight on Cassio’s Island. Heriot moved out from under the arch to stand on the island itself.

Directly in front of him, the forest began. Looking into it he felt his first uneasiness grow stronger. It could not be shaken off. On his right, the road skirted the edge of the wood for a little way, while on his left, the long sinuous swelling waves cast themselves on to the rocks over and over again. Fountains of spray, forcing their way through unseen blowholes, leaped into the air, while the whole island creaked and muttered and gurgled. Heriot could hear it, even though he was concentrating on something else.

The forest in front of him had a door. It hung on huge iron hinges between two columns of black stone. But there were no walls on either side, and it was a gate that seemed to demand walls.

‘No wall!’ Heriot mumbled. ‘Door but no wall! Hey, you! You couldn’t keep a cat out! It’d just walk round you.’ But the
door would not be mocked. Out of its stones and iron and its dense wood there reflected, like ancient stored heat, a terrible weariness, as if the gate might choose to fall on him, crushing him into the dirt, out of boredom and nothing more. Not only this, little by little he began to feel certain that someone was watching him.

Abruptly he was invaded by a single terrifying image. Somewhere behind his eyes a window of black glass sprang into existence. It seemed it had always been there, though he had only just become aware of it, and he suddenly believed that, for years and years, a hand had been rubbing, rubbing against the glass with a soft patience as the black barrier had grown thin and then thinner. In a minute it would finally dissolve under the pressure of the preoccupied hand. In another moment he would be able to look not only forwards but backwards too – far backwards – backwards into himself, and he would see something terrifying – something that would change him for ever.

This waking dream, almost a vision, came and went in a moment, but it frightened him so fiercely he spun away from the gate, and saw, in the long grass on his right, a flattened patch as if some animal, no larger than a dog had been lying there. The grass blades were still moving, in the act of springing up again. Heriot understood that, only a moment earlier, something must have been curled up there, hiding itself from the world. Only a moment earlier something must have been watching his approach and had chosen to disappear. He clapped a hand over his puzzled eye and stared at the space with the eye that saw straight. Then, turning abruptly, he fled from the gate without a wall and from the flattened patch of grass, away from the fringe of Cassio’s Wood, out under the arch and on to the causeway.

O
nce again it seemed to stretch endlessly before him, dimmer and cooler than it had been, for a drift of cloud had sidled over the face of the sun. Its beauty was still there, but it no longer moved him. As he had walked towards the island its great length had not mattered. Now the causeway seemed endless. He needed to get himself home again – he needed to be contained once more, surrounded by cheerful arrivals, happy endings.

But even the causeway wasn’t endless. Panting and struggling and sprinkled with the first rain, he reached the place where he could climb away from it. He was just about to leap on to the slopes of his own farm when something happened that was beyond description. He stopped mid-stride, falling to his knees as if he had been clubbed down. Deep inside his head that black barrier was finally dissolving. Something from the other side rushed out and ran through him like a contradiction of everything homely. Something looked directly out into the world for the first time, using Heriot’s eyes. And for some reason the most frightening thing was that this intruding force was not a stranger, but a wild part of himself … a part of himself he had never suspected, but which he immediately recognised. At some time in the past something had happened to him; had violated him over and over again; something had fed on him. Somehow, back then, during the time of his fits and
headaches, perhaps, he had been torn in two, and now, suddenly he was confronted with that other – that torn-away self. But now, though it was part of him, this rag of self was a stranger, settling back into him without fusing into him, becoming an occupant.

The landscape in front of him, the whole hillside broke into a shifting mosaic of coloured crystals, skewed madly, and contracted, before swelling back into a recognisable form, while Heriot, filled with a terror so extreme it was like pain, toppled sideways on to the edge of the path and lay there, whining through clenched teeth, clutching the grass stems and worked on by such vertigo that, even with the whole earth bearing up under him, he still believed he was falling. Inside his head something demanded recognition. He gasped. Inside his head, that new, separate self breathed in too … a gigantic first breath.

In the outside world Heriot gasped again. ‘It’s all right!’ he muttered. ‘It will be all right. Take another breath. Last a bit longer. It will end.’ This was what he had learned to say to himself during the violent cramps, fits, and headaches of his early childhood … those times when he felt that something was stealing whole pieces of him … devouring him. ‘It will end,’ he repeated, though he couldn’t hear his own voice. ‘It will end. It will be over.’

Now, as if he were looking out of blackness through a far-off window, unnaturally clear, he saw the boy of his dreams, not in bed this time but standing on a great confused plain, dressed in rich strange clothes, staring back at him.

‘Help me,’ he said, but the boy looked frightened and puzzled, then vanished as completely as if he had been blown out. In the silence that followed, he heard, coming in at him from somewhere, a deep, slow breathing, and made himself breathe in time with it. It was several minutes before he understood it was only the sound of the sea.

He opened his eyes, and looked into a tuft of grass half an inch from his nose. Fear continued to subside. He began to move his hands and feet, to sit up, to stand, to run. For then, indeed, he did run. He scrambled wildly until he was back on Tarbas land.

He had changed. Something new was stirring in him … a new nerve … a new appetite, anxious to be fed. However he was too alarmed to try and make any real contact with this … this thing … this wild presence he had carried within himself unknowingly until it had swept in from the other side of the black barrier. He began climbing again, and kept on climbing until he reached the spot where, only a little time ago, he had stood beside his brother and looked out over the sea to Cassio’s Island.

Something moved on the road below. Heriot stared down, screwing up his face a little as wind blew in on him.

Someone was walking away from the Cassio’s Island. He stared, narrowing his eyes. A woman carrying something heavy – a woman carrying a child who lay limply in her arms, while another child trailed behind her, getting left behind and running, every now and then, to catch up. But the woman seemed to take no notice of her follower. She stumped along, looking neither right nor left, up nor down, looking straight ahead as if the road might vanish if she took her eyes from it. The child behind her, on the other hand, was staring around all the time, and suddenly came to a standstill. Looking up, it had seen Heriot standing on his hilltop looking down. Knowing he was seen, Heriot waved rather incoherently, feeling himself become more wonderfully ordinary by making this ordinary human sign. The child stared up at him for a moment longer, then waved back, before turning, and racing after the woman who had walked on, without once glancing over her shoulder at the child she was leaving behind.

There was a flash of lightning and a sound as if a tin sky were being beaten apart. Unable to distinguish any longer between inside events and outside ones, Heriot half-believed he was responsible for the harsh sound, but it was only the storm sweeping in from the north-east. The bruised sky had taken on a luminous sheen, but directly overhead the sun still shone through a haze of finer cloud. Heriot turned and ran. He was going home with the storm growling at his heels.

But the day had not finished with him. Though Heriot believed that, after what he had just gone through, he couldn’t be frightened any more, he was wrong. His strange ordeal on the causeway had prepared the way for yet more terror, and this time there would be witnesses.