Heriot (20 page)

‘It's stupid,' said Heriot under his breath, speaking to Cayley who had been allowed to sit at his elbow. ‘It has a sort of magnificence, but it's stupid.' And as he said this, he saw Betony Hoad turn a little in his seat and look at him with an expression in which surprise and recognition were mixed together.

‘Just being alive – that's got its stupid side,' Cayley muttered back, intent on the two figures below. ‘And none of us asks to be born.' Then he laughed, flinging out his arm as if he too brandished a sword, but an invisible one.

The two men clashed again, striking in at one another with a series of rapid and skilful blows, then curving briefly away from each other to gasp and balance themselves before closing in to strike again. Blood leaped from Carlyon's shoulder, and a great sigh arose from the crowd. Tributaries of blood ran down from his shoulder and wound across his chest, but he seemed to ignore this crimson stream, leaping forward and thrusting at Luce, inflicting a small gash low in the Prince's side. Luce struck the Hero's sword away, but Carlyon moved in on him almost in the same moment. The blades slid against one another and just for a moment they struggled, their faces almost touching, both grinning savage grins of ferocity, not friendship. Their left hands rose. Light gleamed on the daggers, but somehow, before either of them could truly strike, they tore apart. It was Luce who had leaped back this time, trying to free himself, hoping perhaps for a better chance, but as Luce retreated Carlyon moved in on him. Heriot was suddenly seeing, somewhere inside his head, a face he had seen before, a face twisted with a ruthless fury. He was seeing it from a distance this time – he was not the target – but it all came back to him, and he took a breath, half-intending to protect Luce as he had once protected himself. Luce smashed a sword blow down at Carlyon and the whole arena gasped, but Carlyon was already whirling away, beads of blood pumping out into the air around him. Luce, committed to his savage blow, lost his balance a little and it was Carlyon's turn to dive in. Once again the two men fought skin against skin, not clashing swords but left-arm wrestling with one another, shouting with wordless fury. Heriot thought that one or other of them
must drop his sword, but even as they embraced they struck at one another with their daggers, inflicting shallow cuts on shifting shoulders, but no wound so great that either gave in. Then they tore apart from each other yet again – sweating, panting, bleeding – trying to move constantly, refusing to be any sort of target.

But even before Heriot had drawn a following breath, Carlyon let out a sound that seemed to ring around the arena – a mixture of a scream and a roar, charged forward, then seemed to slip in the blood underfoot, for by now the blood of the Prince and the blood of the Hero had become a single stain. So Carlyon slipped, staggered, and fell to his knees. Luce moved in behind his sword, a flash of light catching on his teeth for a second, though whether he was smiling or snarling it was impossible to tell.

‘No! No!' Cayley hissed behind Heriot. ‘It's a trap. A trap!' For suddenly Carlyon was springing to his feet again, Luce leaped back, but Carlyon was in under the blow and suddenly it was Luce who was bending … bowing deeply before the Hero of Hoad. Carlyon pulled his sword free, but only to drive his dagger into Luce, slashing him across the belly. Now Luce dropped first his sword, which clanged on the stones at his feet, then his dagger, which tinkled faintly. He swayed, clapping his hands over his wound, but he could not hold back the blood and twisting entrails that now burst out of him, spreading a tangle on the flat arena stones.

‘Quick! He needed to be quick,' Cayley was muttering. ‘And it's under, not over.' He had been a ball of tension beside Heriot, living every blow as if he were the one delivering it, but suddenly he relaxed as if the battle was over. ‘See, it's not just getting in a glorious blow,' he said sideways to Heriot. ‘It's being able to dance away from the other glorious blow that comes at
you
. That's part of quickness. And that Prince – he's dead.'

Heriot knew Luce as a handsome figure moving through the Tower of the Lion, barely glancing in his direction. Now he watched him bowing so deeply over his erupting wound with something approaching grief. Carlyon lifted his sword once more. There was a huge power in his movement as he raised the sword above the staggering Luce, still bowed before him, entrails sliding between his fingers, blood spouting wildly, then brought that sword down on the back of the Prince's neck. Luce's head seemed to leap free from his body with a bright zeal, seemed to bound as if it were glad to be set free from ruined flesh, then scampered wildly across the arena floor, before slowing down and coming to a stop, staring up into the sky.

‘And that's
it
!' Cayley breathed in Heriot's ear, alive with a bizarre excitement. While Heriot was horrified that anyone could be thrilled by a violent death, there was something in Cayley's response he didn't understand … something like relief. He turned and looked at Cayley with sudden curiosity. Around them the whole arena was erupting with a single shout, as if every person held between those pale, cupped hands of stone knew how to shout in chorus. It wasn't a shout of joy or a shout of fury, but a simple shout of recognition … of concession. The Hero of Hoad was being recognised yet again. It might have been Luce, transfigured, but this shout was once again for Carlyon – Carlyon remade. Within a few bloody seconds Dysart had become the second Prince of Hoad, and with Betony Hoad determined to remain childless, he would eventually be heir to the Kingdom of Hoad. Heriot glanced sideways at him, and saw a strange expression struggling on his face, an expression of horror melting into something else, as Dysart looked down at his headless brother, then glanced sideways towards Linnet, who was looking back towards him, also horrified at an emerging hope, yet defiantly hopeful all the same. Feeling like an intruder, Heriot turned away from Linnet
only to find himself staring at her father, the Master of Hagen, and was suddenly aware that the Master was caught up in a dilemma so much his own he could never discuss it with anyone.

T
he failed challengers were always buried on Cassio’s Island and their names inscribed on the stone walls of the Hero’s house. There was calm and dignified feasting as Luce was laid out in glory, robed in silver, displayed for a day, his severed head joined to him once more, made respectable by a silver collar, his belly-wound decently concealed. And then he was coffined and buried in the Hall of Challengers, embraced by stone rather than soil. Flanked by Luce’s father and brothers, Carlyon presided over the traditional Feast of the Victor, at the end of which he was embraced and congratulated dryly by the King. After this, the ceremonies of the challenge were finally over. Across the leagues, Diamond inexorably commanded the King and his court once more.

So they answered the call, riding back on a cloudy day, that long, bright procession, that worm of colour, winding out of the Hero’s city. On the way to Cassio’s Island people had talked a little and thought a lot. On the way back to Diamond the progress was more disorderly. The procession straggled at its edges: this time men and women mixed together, thinking less and talking more.

‘Curiously enough this is a good place to talk … here we’re surrounded by people but they’re all gossiping to one another, and no one is listening to us,’ the Master of Hagen was saying
to his daughter. ‘Linnet – the time has truly come and gone, for you to marry.’

‘You know I want to marry,’ Linnet said. ‘And you know
who
I want to marry. Luce is dead but Dysart takes his place …’

‘No!’ said her father. ‘There has been another death – a death among the Dannorad. Shuba’s father has died. If you marry her brother, you will be an undisputed Queen. You won’t have to make do with a mad Prince, waiting until the King dies, and then again for that distant day when Betony Hoad chooses to die. Linnet, I want more than safety for you. I want glory.’

‘You want glory for Hagen,’ Linnet exclaimed, so loudly, her father looked anxiously left and right.

‘I do admit,’ he said quietly, ‘I am tired of being the Lord of a land that exists merely as a mountainous county on the edge of Hoad. And you are my child. I love you. I want everything for you. Everything!’

‘Dysart is everything to me,’ said Linnet, but now she spoke very quietly indeed, and even if her father guessed what she was saying, he probably couldn’t hear her. ‘You want to use me to get everything for Hagen,’ she said, more audibly.

‘Why not?’ asked her father in a low voice. ‘Why not? We come and go, but the land is the land.’

So the procession wound on home. The horses were tired. The riders were tired. Heriot suddenly felt someone edging up beside him, and turned, half-expecting Betony Hoad. But the intruder was Cayley.

‘I’m moving up in the world,’ Cayley said, and laughed joyously.

Somewhere inside Heriot’s head the occupant moved restlessly.
He means more than he’s letting on,
the occupant was telling Heriot,
but I can’t … I can’t quite …

‘How did you get to be riding up here, mixing with the Lords?’ Heriot asked, looking amused.

‘Like I said! I’m moving up in the world,’ repeated Cayley, grinning. ‘No one tried to stop me.’

‘Luce! Luce!’ sighed the wind in the tall grass on the edge of the road. ‘Luce is dead.’

I barely knew him,
Heriot said to the occupant.
But he was a
living man yesterday morning. He woke up alive with his strength
and skill and hope … and who truly mourns him?
Was that his own thought, or was it the occupant, or was it the land itself – the very land of Hoad – weeping for a lost son?

‘Luce is dead,’ Heriot said aloud, just to see how the words sounded coming out of his own mouth.

‘He didn’t read it right. He hesitated,’ said Cayley. ‘Like I told you, you’ve got to be quick. And you’ve got to laugh. Laughing gives you power. You’ve got to dodge from out under, laugh and then strike home.’

The procession moved on, wearily now, words winding around it, clashing and merging into one another. As it passed, the land sighed and stirred around it, trembling a little, perhaps under the touch of the wind, then settled again. It had seen many processions come and go. The hills shrugged the glory of Kings and Heroes into nothing, settling back into their own ancient calm.

S
omehow the world of Diamond had changed. The hills beyond the city might ignore the shifts of Kings and Heroes, but the city had Guard-on-the-Rock as a pulse. Luce’s challenge and death might have done nothing more than make certain Carlyon would remain the Hero for the foreseeable future, yet in a curious way, Heriot could feel a shift in the quality of the King’s peace. At times it seemed to him that the stone walls whispered … that the echoing streets muttered … with news of changes.

‘Betony,’ Heriot muttered to himself, trying to work out the messages the city was trying to send him. ‘The King wants a reliable heir, but Betony refuses to be reliable. So the King wants to remake Betony. But how can you remake anyone so set in place … Betony Hoad is utterly himself. Not even a King can remake him.’ He stood up, half-looking for Cayley, though he already knew the boy was off in another part of Guard-on-the-Rock, working to make himself strong so he could be powerful as well as quick. Quick might be the skill of which he boasted, but he was determined to be as strong as possible too.

Morning touched the trees, which reached out to catch the first sunlight, but it was time for Heriot to leave morning and the trees behind. He must desert his orchard and make for that gilded room of reception, its arches carved with waves and, where the arches intersected, stone faces, wild and yet still,
peering down, seeming to mock the grandeur below. Sliding into the room, moving to his accepted place, Heriot smiled briefly up as if he were sharing a secret with them, then sat passively at the King’s elbow, a little behind the King’s great chair. Voices made declarations. The fanfares sounded like announcements repeated so often their meanings had become a line of nonsense. The King stood to receive the new Ambassador from the Dannorad, and did not sit again until his guests were settled in the chairs the servants carried forward from the bright edges of the room. Then the talk began.

The King and the new Ambassador discussed trade and treaties of friendship. As they negotiated, Heriot listened to the arguments and propositions, voices advancing and retreating, and felt his occupant receiving everything that was being said, while reading things that were not being said from the minds of the men who talked back and forth so carefully. At a sign from the King, he rose and moved forward to provide a closing entertainment, something he was often required to do … something he generally enjoyed, and something that half-concealed the true reason for his presence at the King’s side.

Heriot laid a sliced apple on the floor at the Dannorad Ambassador’s feet, then closed his eyes. The Ambassador stared down at the apple, smiling a polite smile that had a little puzzled contempt concealed within.

The pips split. Delicate shoots came out, sipping eagerly on the power Heriot was feeding into the air. Heriot opened his eyes, stared down at the pips and their odd tendrils, then moved forward two steps to pick up a tall glass from the metal table at the Ambassador’s elbow, stepped backwards again and cautiously trickled wine over the glowing plants, which suddenly leaped up as if he had commanded them. The shoots turned into green wood, growing and dividing. The trees that now stretched up towards the arches were not quite apple trees,
though the blossom bursting out at the tips of their branches was very like apple blossom. Leaves brushed against the roof as twigs, still dividing, spread out like arms among the arches and suddenly the arches themselves were transformed, covered with mottled bark while the stone faces in the corners of the room and in the curves of the arches came alive, blinking and smiling. The Ambassador’s own smile vanished, for he was unable to hide his astonishment, nor, a moment later, his apprehension, as the strange trees that were not quite trees, closed in around him. Branches that were partly arms embraced the King and the Princes, who suddenly became spirits of the wood, gazing up and out rather as the stone faces on the arches above were gazing down. Blossom fell and apples formed. The King sat still, smiling in his curious unpractised way at the Ambassador, but Betony Hoad reached up to pick one of the apples and bit into it, directing his smile, not at the Ambassador, but at Heriot, somehow challenging the Magician’s power.
Do more. Transform me! Make me marvellous!
Heriot shifted his glasses further up his nose, sighing a little while the trees shrank into themselves, sinking down into the floor, or sideways into the stone walls. The faces in the arches froze again, becoming nothing more than carved decorations. The act of magical entertainment was over and the new Ambassador relaxed, exclaimed and applauded, unable to disguise the fact that his hands were shaking slightly. He glanced briefly at Heriot with an uneasy respect, mixed with something like animosity, before turning to the King.

‘King of Wonders,’ he said, bowing politely before he and his companions withdrew, knowing they would be discussed, and making for the rooms where they could begin a discussion of their own, part of which would be about the power of the King of Hoad who could sit so easily with such strange capacities at his elbow.

Back in the reception room the King sighed and slowly turned towards Heriot. ‘Well, Magician?’ he asked. ‘What is your impression of our new Dannorad Ambassadors?’

Heriot replied. ‘They spoke honestly …’ he hesitated.

‘But …’ asked the King, seizing on this hesitation.

‘There are things they haven’t been told. And they know they haven’t been told. All I could do was to pick at their ignorance. They feel there are shifts in their own King’s policies, and here in this room, where everyone knows that secrets can be read, they were glad they hadn’t been told.’

‘I see,’ said the King. ‘Lord Glass, we may have to look further. Concealment in the Dannorad and trouble in the Islands. It is time my son took more responsibility.’

There was a silence. People looked at Betony Hoad who sat, turned away from his father, eating an apple that could not exist.

‘I am not sure the Lord Prince Betony Hoad would be happy at the prospect of more responsibility,’ said Lord Glass. ‘Well, would you, my dear?’ And he, too, looked at Betony Hoad.

‘I daren’t even guess at my own response, Lord Glass,’ Betony Hoad replied. ‘I enjoy being a mystery, even to myself.’

He sounded calm, even amused, but Heriot could read a busy tumult alive in Betony Hoad. And even more intrusive was Dysart’s mood of confused anger, which had nothing to do with the Dannorad men or Heriot’s magical event, for three days earlier the Master of Hagen had called Linnet home. The different confusions of the two Princes came and went through him like tides drawn this way and that by some invisible, inner moon.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Dysart cried to Heriot, after the ceremony of reception was over, after the Ambassador had gone.

‘Just as I’ve turned into the second son, just as I’ve become the heir, Hagen backs off. It’s crazy.’

‘Something’s happening,’ Heriot said, ‘but I can’t tell you what it is. It has the feeling of a great gamble. A dangerous one,’ he added.

‘Betony?’ Dysart said with resignation in his voice.

‘No, it’s about Betony, but it doesn’t come from him. It’s coming from your father,’ Heriot replied. ‘He’s working his way towards something dangerous. It’s to do with the Islands, but I think he’s really hoping to force something out of Betony Hoad … to make him become something he doesn’t want to be.’

‘Something dangerous from my father?’ Dysart cried. ‘My father’s the most careful man alive. And he would tell me,’ he declared, but didn’t sound entirely sure of this.

Heriot continued. ‘And before he left, I could feel a shift in the Master of Hagen. But I don’t know what’s shifting in him. I can always tell about
you
if I try because you come halfway to meet me. You’re like a partner in a dance of friendship. But Cayley, when I’ve tried reading him it’s like coming up against a wall. Not a word, not a memory, not the colour of a feeling. Just blankness! Something happened to him once that drove him so deep into himself that he’s all protection these days. Mind you, I do know that back in the Third Ring, years ago, we recognised each other – well, recognised something in each other – though how we could possibly have recognised anything when we’d never met before I just don’t know.’

He hesitated, realising that Dysart was not interested in the enigma that was Cayley. Dysart remained silent. Heriot began again.

‘Anyhow, as I’ve told you before, some of these men who now come to the King have something of the same blankness. Not in the way Cayley has, but I can’t read them the way I read the
men of last year and the year before. I think it means the counties, the Islands, the Dannorad of course, are trying to send men who might have some inner protection against the Magicians of Hoad. I’ll tell you what though. Your brother …’ He fell silent.

‘What about my brother?’ Dysart asked sharply.

‘Yes, what about his brother?’ asked a new voice. Neither of them needed to turn to know who had come walking silently up behind them. He was brilliant in his purple and gold, and yet the very magnificence of his clothes seemed to be a secret jibe directed at the world.

‘I was about to say that in the back of his mind your father is angry because you won’t go to bed with your wife,’ Heriot said, defending himself by way of an immediate attack.

‘I’ve made no secret of the fact that I will not have children,’ Betony Hoad replied. ‘I may be cruel but I’m not totally without mercy.’

‘Oh, Betony!’ exclaimed Dysart impatiently. ‘So you want to be wonderful. All right! Being a father and being King will make you wonderful.’

‘Ah, but not wonderful enough!’ Betony replied. He looked at Heriot with something approaching the animosity he had revealed earlier – a glance of less than a second, but one that Heriot read easily.

‘Goodnight, Princes,’ he said, going downstairs and then down more stairs, making for the kitchen door, the closest door to the orchard.

‘Goodnight, Magician,’ said the maids, yawning as they washed the last dishes of the day. Flaring torches lit the first courtyard at the back of the castle but Heriot knew the linked courtyards so well by now he could have walked them in the dark. He knew every ridge – every slight subsidence, knew the places where the stones caught the light of the torches bracketed
into the castle wall and the places where they dipped into darkness. As he moved into the orchard at last, with all the relief of someone coming home at the end of a long day, he wondered if Cayley was likely to be there, and then rather hoped he wasn’t, for he had to sit beside the King early next morning. He needed to sleep. There would be no time to talk or joke together, telling stories that seemed like pins holding the day back for a minute or two before it moved on and dissolved for ever.

As he came up to the door of his shed, feeling relief at the thought of darkness and rest, darkness betrayed him. The orchard night seethed with a sudden movement and a blow fell on his shoulder with such force that his arm froze to its very finger tips. Not just one man, three at least. An arm was drawn back – an arm with a sword. He saw the blade gleaming. In another second …

Protect me
, he cried back into his head, where he could feel the occupant moving. But protection was already there, coming not from the occupant, but from a fourth figure, which suddenly wheeled out of the shed. Heriot couldn’t tell what was happening. A ringing clash and the urgent blade was deflected. Movements so quick it was as if a puppet master was flicking his fingers and making his puppets dance. Someone screamed. A second blade slashed down at him, there was a clatter of steel and the blow slid sideways, striking the wall. He was aware of another, immediate blow somewhere to his left – not directed at him this time. One of his attackers screamed out and fell. Shivering movement all around him, as someone slashed at his defender, then something or someone thumped down on to the ground beside him. The sound of limbs thrashing came out of the night, and then a spasming in the orchard grass that had brushed so peacefully against him only moments before.

‘That’s three to me,’ said Cayley’s voice. ‘Big ones too. I told you it was important to be quick on your feet.’

A groaning rose from the grass under the trees.

‘Why?’ Heriot exclaimed furiously. ‘Why did they attack me?’

‘You tell me,’ said Cayley. ‘You’re the Magician.’ There was something unexpectedly distracted in his voice.

‘Are you hurt?’ Heriot asked, with sudden anxiety, staring through the shadows at his companion. His expression changed abruptly as Cayley, just as abruptly, stepped back into even deeper darkness.

Heriot did something he almost never did outside of the King’s throne room unless forced. He became a Magician for his own purposes, drawing light from the air around him, for, though it was night, there was always light to be found in darkness … starlight, the glow of lamps and torches seeping down from the tall towers of Guard-on-the-Rock or from the Ring beyond the castle, all reflecting faintly on orchard leaves and boughs. Three men lay between him and his doorway, one still alive, and trying to drag himself into the shadows, which disappeared as stolen light spread around them.

‘Help me,’ mumbled the man on the ground, thinking, maybe, that his friends were still alive. But Heriot was staring incredulously at Cayley, who, caught by the suddenly intrusive light, was hastily gathering his slashed jacket around himself. But, as he did so, a piece of the jacket peeled away and fell to the ground. A thin worm of blood snaked across pale skin, and softly rounded curves. Cayley looked up and met Heriot’s eyes.

‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ Heriot said at last. Inside he was filled with a huge confusion, as if the world was remaking itself around him.

‘It was close,’ Cayley replied. ‘But it wasn’t luck. Like I said, I’m quick.’

There was a short silence.

‘All these years …’ Heriot began.

‘You’ve never caught on though, have you?’ Cayley said, that damaged voice defiant but also filled with a curious, shaken triumph. ‘Not to what I really am. What I’ve always been. A girl.’