Heriot (21 page)

‘I’ll talk to you later,’ Heriot said after another silent moment. ‘Right now we’d better get the guard, and a doctor for the hurt one. No doubt he was only doing what he’s been told to do by someone a lot further up in the world.’

‘Or been paid to do,’ said Cayley, struggling with her ruined jacket. ‘You! You’re too kind. It’ll be the death of you.’

They stared at one another across the groaning man.

‘Are you … are you hurt?’ Heriot asked. ‘I … I could see enough, but I couldn’t see everything.’

‘See it now then,’ said Cayley and flung the slashed jacket wide. ‘I took on one, bending away from the others. Then one of them came in again, slashed twice, cut my jacket but mostly missed me. It’s only a scratch. Because I’ve learned to be quick, and I’ll keep on learning. No one will ever get me. Not so it counts.’

They stared at each other for a moment more.

‘You might have told me,’ Heriot said at last, in a low voice. ‘You didn’t need to be scared of me.’

‘Scared of you?’ Cayley laughed bitterly. ‘Everyone has secrets from the rest of the world. You’ve got your secrets and I’ve got mine. And this isn’t my only one, either.’

Heriot crossed over and pulled the slashed jacket across her small breasts.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked for the second time.

‘Help me,’ groaned the man at their feet.

‘You’re the Magician. Why didn’t you guess?’ she asked, half mockingly. ‘You never did, not even that evening here, when I was sick but wrapping that towel round and round myself. Mind you I was a lot flatter back then.’

‘People out there have had funny things to say about our friendship,’ Heriot said at last, ‘and at times I’ve wondered too. Perhaps I knew, without knowing I knew.’

‘I’ve been good at being a man,’ Cayley said. ‘Back when I first came to the city with my mother we soon caught on it was a dangerous place all over, but more dangerous for a girl than for a boy. So my mother got me boys’ clothes and I’ve been a boy, ever since. And I don’t plan to change, not until … well, I just don’t plan to change. My voice didn’t deepen up like a man’s but then, having had my throat cut about makes me speak with a mixed voice anyway. At the time it seemed bad luck having someone try to kill me back a bit, but really it was good fortune disguised.’

‘Well-disguised,’ Heriot said. ‘Mind you, I’ve got a scar myself. We’re a matching pair.’ Then, almost without realising what he was doing, he pulled her across the space that separated them. ‘You’re your own sort of Magician of Hoad,’ he said, and began kissing her.

It was a long time since he had kissed anyone, and, as he kissed her, the kiss changed from one sort of kiss into another. He had never kissed like this before, and knew he was clumsy at it, but Cayley was even clumsier.

‘What’s happening to us?’ Heriot said at last. ‘It seems like we’ve become something else, and all in five minutes.’

‘You tell me,’ said Cayley. ‘You’re the one who does the changing. Me, I feel like what I’ve always been.’ However, her damaged voice was shaking. Like Heriot, she had been taken aback by sudden inner revelation.

But then, as they kissed yet again, Heriot heard the groaning coming up from his feet.

‘I’d go along with it,’ Cayley was saying. ‘The kissing, I mean. Only there’s this one thing I have to do. I can’t just turn away from it – it’s what I
am
by now.’

But Heriot was listening in an entirely confused way. ‘I’ll have to get a guard …’ he said, looking down at the fallen men. ‘And a doctor. Just wait for me. Wait for me and we’ll talk it all through.’

‘There’s not much to say,’ said Cayley, laughing in her strange way, as Heriot set off, loping rapidly back through the orchard, running across first one courtyard, and then another and in once more at the kitchen door.

‘
B
ack again, Magician,’ the maids called, but he simply lifted his hand and jogged on past them.

Climbing the stairs, searching for a guard, all Heriot could think of was Cayley. He struggled with the double image he now had of her … the boy … the girl. He wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to pull her so close to him they became fused, finally becoming what he now found himself believing he had always wanted them to become – something single and indissoluble.

He came on a guard, and was trying to argue him out into the orchard, when suddenly one of the King’s Wellwishers, a man called Fern, both familiar and fabulous, joined them, listened to Heriot’s story and, turning to the guard, ordered him to send one of his fellows out into the orchard to look at the wounded man and perhaps to identify the others.

‘Treat him kindly to begin with,’ Fern said. ‘He will have things to tell us, no doubt.’ He turned to Heriot. ‘You must come with me. The King must be told.’

They strode through halls that grew livelier as they climbed, with each door guarded, and with guards at the foot and top of each stair.

‘I had no clue they were waiting for me,’ Heriot said, talking as much to himself as he was to Fern. ‘I wasn’t looking for anything, and that can make a difference. Sometimes the feeling
comes out of nowhere, telling you someone’s there … sometimes it doesn’t. I miss out on a lot of things if I’m thinking of something else.’

‘I think the King might know who set it up,’ said Fern.

They came towards the door of the old schoolroom where Dysart, Heriot and Linnet of Hagen had once studied together. The guard standing at the door swung it open, then leaped back. Heriot followed Fern into the room.

‘Welcome, Magician,’ said the King, sounding, for once, a little surprised. However Heriot was more surprised than the King, for the King was sitting where Dr Feo used to sit, Lord Glass on his left, Dysart and Betony Hoad on his right. ‘I’m glad to see you well,’ the King added, and Heriot inclined his head submissively. He felt he wasn’t really there – all the best of his attention was back in his shed, touching Cayley, teaching her how to kiss, and learning to kiss himself.

There were other men sitting in the room. In a chair a little to one side, two guards standing over him, was Dr Feo, who was looking at Heriot with an expressionless face, but, simultaneously, horror, fear and guilt were pouring out of him, invisible yet forcible, striking deeply into Heriot, who could not retreat from this new shock on a night of shocks. He felt his face twist into an expression of incredulity.

‘Why?’ he shouted at Dr Feo, and on the great map on the wall behind him the Islands suddenly shone out as if they were set there like malevolent jewels, rather than inscribed with simple paint and ink.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Dr Feo began. ‘This is foolishness. Lord King, I swear I’m innocent of … of any disloyalty. I swear it. I am innocent.’

‘What a claim,’ said Betony Hoad.

Heriot ignored him. ‘Lord King, three men have just tried to kill me. I only just escaped, and even then I needed help. But
why?’ he repeated, momentarily unaware of everyone else and looking at Dr Feo. ‘What have I ever done to you?’

‘This is remarkably felicitous,’ said the King. ‘We were planning to call on you, so you could observe while Dr Feo was questioned. There is a suggestion he might be involved in treachery against us.’

Heriot, ignoring the King, still stared incredulously at Dr Feo. ‘But none of it makes sense,’ he exclaimed. ‘Dr Feo paid the killers and someone else paid him …’ He looked across at the King. ‘What’s coming out of him is an image … he was paid by a man from the Islands … a man with ginger hair … well-dressed, but not a Lord.’

Dr Feo’s hands, firmly folded in front of him, suddenly tightened on one another.

‘There’s no name in his thoughts,’ Heriot said, knowing that mentioning the absence of a name might cause that name to spring alive in some form he could read … and a second later it was there. ‘Grevalle! The man was called Grevalle.’

Dr Feo tore his hands apart, flapped them wide, then hastily cupped them side by side, dropping his face into them.

And then, it seemed, everyone began talking at once – everyone except Betony Hoad, who leaned back, smiling as if the whole scene before him had been arranged purely for his entertainment.

‘Why?’ Heriot asked Dr Feo again. ‘Why?

‘The Islands,’ Dysart was exclaiming. ‘Lord King, the Islands have been restless for months now.’

‘I can’t believe the Island Lords are treacherous,’ Lord Glass turned to the King. ‘There is some discontent … there is always some discontent … there is discontent even in Diamond … discontent is part of the human condition. All the same …’

‘It is strange to think we must fight so hard to maintain
peace,’ the King was murmuring. ‘Why do we have to live with such contradictions? Peace should be of value to every one of us. Why do some resent it so bitterly?’

‘The city owes me mercy,’ Dr Feo was screaming, now clapping his hands together with a slow beat as if he were applauding himself.

Who’s whispering?
the occupant was murmuring inside Heriot’s head.
What is that whisper saying?

For, coming out of all this chaos, there was indeed a whisper, though Heriot couldn’t quite make out what it was trying to tell him. He heard the sound of it … had the picture of lips moving … but the meaning of the whispered words dissolved before he could pin it down.

When, an hour later, he walked, yet again, into his orchard, Dysart walked with him. The familiar trees, which had become so suddenly unfamiliar, had become recognisable again, nothing more or less than apple trees.

‘Something wicked is going on,’ Heriot said. He hesitated. ‘I think it might be to do with … to do with …’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure of anything. There was too much going on, too quickly. There were things I couldn’t untangle.’

‘Let’s sleep it off,’ said Dysart. ‘You know it already, but I’m going to tell you anyway – I’m lucky to have you as a friend. And I hope you’re lucky to have me. Since you won’t come into the castle, I’m setting guards around the orchard. We don’t want anyone else creeping in on you.’

‘I
am
lucky to have you,’ said Heriot. ‘Forget all that Magician-Prince business. Right now, we’re just good friends.’ And spontaneously, without hesitation, they hugged one another. Then Dysart walked back towards the castle which was the closest thing to a home he had, and Heriot went into his shed. He was exhausted, and yet for all that he was anticipating embraces of another kind.

But the shed was empty. Heriot went from one of its two rooms to the other, then back again, yet immediately knowing that Cayley, who believed she was frightened of nothing, had found herself terrified by their kiss, and had chosen to run and lose herself in Diamond. She was gone, and he understood almost at once that she wouldn’t be back. What was it she had said? There’s this thing I have to do first. Heriot had always recognised in his curious way that she had a dominating inner commandment driving her on. Perhaps, an hour earlier, she might have talked to him about it, as, just for a few minutes, their embraces made her vulnerable. But he had been swept away on the King’s business and, while he was gone, that unreadable commandment had exerted its power over her. Cayley had vanished, just as quickly and cleanly as if she herself were a Magician and had chosen to whisk herself out of his life.

T
en years since I left the farm, thought Heriot. Two years since I lost Cayley. I’m dissolving in time.

But somebody spoke his name, ‘Magician! We first met on the edge of the battlefield, didn’t we?’ the King said looking at Heriot. ‘That was how many years ago?’ It was strange that the King’s question seemed an echo of Heriot’s own thoughts

There they all sat yet again, King, Princes, Lords and a solitary Magician in that round Room of Reception, its stone walls arching up over them, picking up their voices and swinging them around its curves. Once again those sly stone faces looked down on a royal assembly, seeming to narrow their eyes as they listened. The conversations and arguments rising from the room in a mixed puzzle of words were immediately haunted by their own ghosts. ‘And there’s no end to being a King,’ the King went on. Dysart was sitting on his left hand, Betony Hoad on his right. Lord Glass sat a step lower than the King and Princes. Heriot, like someone partly discarded yet still essential, sat opposite Lord Glass but almost on the same level. For Heriot, at least, there was a huge tedium about the ancient room, about the placements, both magical and monotonous, locking them into an ancient pattern.

‘Perhaps I have clung too closely to my city,’ the King was saying. ‘Perhaps I have over-protected myself. Things are
changing in the wider world, and perhaps I don’t change enough to keep up with them. I still want peace. Why does it suddenly seem that no one else cares?’

No one could answer this question. Dysart and Heriot exchanged glances, each reading inner confusion in the other. Looking away, Heriot saw that Betony Hoad had twisted in his grand chair, and a curious alertness had replaced the tired derision with which the Prince usually listened to his father. The King, for his part, was looking across at Lord Glass, who did not reply immediately.

‘We have said before that peace is not as simple as we have imagined it would be, Lord King,’ Lord Glass said at last. ‘We believed, did we not, that it would be universally embraced. We knew we would have to work to attain it and, having attained it, I think we believed we would find ourselves living, not in a perfect world, of course, but in a state of partial grace that might last for ever. But it seems contentment is elusive. There are many beyond this castle longing for the assertions of battle. It causes grief and distress, but, for all that, perhaps battle is one of the necessary adventures of the world.’

‘No rest then,’ suggested the King, smiling at him. Lord Glass was one of the few people at whom he really smiled.

‘It seems not, my dear,’ said Lord Glass with an unusual familiarity. ‘You can surround yourself with peacemakers who share your passion. But there are others …’

‘I don’t believe my sons share my passion,’ the King said, interrupting him. ‘If some of our distant lands and allies have forgotten that peace is the essence of our kingdom, it seems I will have to travel there in order to remind them.’

There was an arrested moment, as if the listeners were taking in an incredible announcement. Dysart was the first to break the silence. ‘To Hagen?’ he cried, leaping to his feet, but
his father, without looking at him, waved a vague hand at him, commanding him to sit.

‘To the Islands,’ he said. ‘And maybe home again through the Dannorad. Though maybe not!’

‘Lord King, it might be … risky,’ objected Lord Glass. His voice was not so much calm as playful, yet something was creeping into his expression that Heriot had never seen before. Try as he might, Lord Glass could not hide profound alarm. ‘Remember you are the very essence of the peace of Hoad and …’

‘I’d go with good protection,’ said the King. ‘And I would leave my city well protected.’

‘Lord King, you’d be taking our best protection with you,’ Lord Glass persisted, ‘because you are the protection of the city. You would be leaving Diamond without a King, and the King is more than a man. The King is the sign of dominion, of power …’

‘I would leave you in charge,’ said the King. He turned to look at his oldest son. ‘And Betony Hoad is old enough to try being King in my place for a few weeks. It is time he went beyond contemplating the outer colour of kingship and made some connection with its inner ferocity.’

Heriot knew beyond all doubt that, while Lord Glass was filled with something approaching dismay, something entirely different was leaping up in Betony Hoad. His elbow might rest languidly on the gilded upward curl of his chair’s bright arm and his chin might rest between his thumb and forefinger. All the same, somewhere inside his head, he was transfiguring. Heriot, tempted to read the Prince, straightened his glasses. I’m not that fond of looking into another man these days, he was thinking, I was never that keen on it and now it’s even lost its novelty. All the same I’m going to read Betony Hoad. I’m going to read him now …

‘Magician,’ said the King, interrupting. ‘I might want you to come with me … but then, perhaps not. You are sometimes seen as a threat, rather than an entertainment. I will think about your place in my plans.’

‘If you are planning to move into debatable company,’ said Lord Glass, ‘and the climate of the Islands suggests there is considerable debate in progress, it might be good policy to have something of a threat at your elbow …’

‘Oh, I will be defended,’ the King said. ‘I’m not planning to go alone. We have a navy, largely unused these days. They need a project. I am planning to take a brigade with me, sufficient presence to impress the Lords of the Islands. After all a grand escort will be expected, and it can be both my glory and my defence. And if I take my Magician too …’

‘I don’t know if I would make an adequate replacement for you without the Magician at my elbow,’ said Betony Hoad unexpectedly. ‘The journey you are talking about is a long one, and the inner business of Diamond, and of Hoad itself, will presumably need to go on while you are travelling.’

‘Well,’ said the King, ‘it is early days. There is time to turn it over and argue. We don’t have to come to any immediate decisions.’ He looked at his oldest son. ‘Of course it will give you considerable power, perhaps more than you want. But you can think about that, and perhaps we can talk about it later.’

He stood up, which was a sign the session was over. Heriot knew Betony Hoad and Dysart were both looking at him, hoping to read something in his expression, but he refused to give any clue as to his thoughts about the vulnerability of Diamond without its King. Two years since Cayley had vanished, he was thinking. But that was what he found himself thinking almost all the time.
There’s this thing I have to do first
, she had said, over and over again.

What am I? What’s left of me? he thought incredulously.
The world is still wonderful. I can feel it around me and I can still move into it. I can be a seed, a branch, a whole tree. I can be free drops of water flung up from a breaking wave. Why am I sitting here at the King’s elbow, nothing but his threat or his promise … his point of power?

Then he thought he would enjoy, no he must have, a glass of wine, so that he could relax with the world, and let his strange, inner loss become not his master – but one of many things flooding in on him over and over again. These days Heriot found himself drinking a lot and enjoying the immediate ease and escape wine offered him. It was like relief from pain … a relief from this golden room, from the castle beyond it and the city beyond the castle and, in a different way a release from Dysart’s friendship, too, shot through as it was with strange, unspoken expectations.