Heriot (22 page)

D
ays later, as Heriot snatched time to work in his garden, he found Diamond nudging in on him, muttering, singing and wailing. Sometimes it came to him as a deep single voice droning on, sometimes as a chorus – manipulative voices from the First Ring … that controlling core of Diamond … as those around the King twisted and jumped and elbowed, to find places for themselves and their ambitions. Sometimes voices burst in from the Second Ring as the merchants and the dealers in trade counted their profits, struggling to become rich and make themselves powerful. And sometimes the voice of the Third Ring also burst, dominating the other voices with a single savage scream, as if those Third Ring people, trying desperately to stay alive, had all cried out together, shrieking about their intricate struggle. Even voices from beyond the walls of the city beat in on him … voices not only of Hoad’s living people but from its history.

The oldest stones of Hoad spoke to him strangely from its walls and from the winding mazes of its streets, crying out about lives beginning, lives ending … singing of times so ancient that time itself became timeless. These voices exploded in him from time to time in a demanding chorus. They seemed to require some response from him … some offering of self … but he had no idea of how he should respond. Stunned, he listened into them over and over again,
unable to hold the song at bay, listened, transformed and transforming.

‘Heriot,’ said a voice, and he looked up, blinking, to find Dysart standing at the end of his garden looking at him cautiously, no longer certain which face would look up at him over the handle of the spade.

‘You were in your other place, weren’t you?’ Dysart said, with just a little accusation in his voice. ‘That place you go to. That place you get lost in.’

‘I was totally in your place, ‘Heriot said. ‘Your city took me over. It does from time to time.’

‘Are you drunk?’ Dysart asked.

‘I don’t think so. Just a little lifted-up,’ Heriot said. ‘What about you?’

‘I think I am drunk,’ Dysart said. ‘And it’s only halfway through the morning.’

‘Well then,’ said Heriot, and he propped his spade against an apple tree, and then flopped down into a patch of sunlight. Dysart, just a little unsteadily, took a few steps, then sank down beside him. They sat there, side by side in the same shaft of warm light, both illuminated but in contrasting ways.

‘It’s strange the way things are turning out,’ Dysart said reflectively. ‘When Luce was killed, before I could stop it, I felt a burst of joy and I was horrified at myself. I had seen my brother killed and felt a sort of grief, but it was a symbolic grief. When you mention
your
brother there’s passion in your voice, but Luce was just a bright shadow to me. We’d been held apart, probably because I was a mad Prince back then, but also because of our family. We’re treated as if we’re devices, not people. We’re the King’s signs, not his sons. What was truest in that gruesome arena was that burst of guilt mixed in with joy. Because I thought Linnet would be mine – she thought so too. But it turns out her father is determined to marry her into the
Dannorad, which is a sort of treachery to Hoad. She’s fighting against her father … she tells me so in the letters she smuggled out, and I know she is, or she’d be well and truly married off by now. And here am I, sitting here with my father’s Magician, confessing to guilt about that moment of joy. Isn’t it all mad? Mad to be several people all at once. Prince. Man. Thinker. Feeler. And what about you? You miss your boy Cayley … not that he was a boy any more, he was becoming a grown man, quick and strong.’

‘He saved me, no doubt about it. He took on those three men so neatly,’ Heriot said. ‘And I’m told they’d had a lot of practice at what they’d been ordered to do to me.’

‘They were after money,’ Dysart said sharply. ‘They thought you had money hidden in your hut.’

‘Dream on!’ said Heriot derisively. ‘You know Dr Feo sent them, either to beat me unconscious and take me somewhere or kill me outright, one or the other. But I don’t know why and I don’t know who stood behind Dr Feo. Someone did. I can tell so much about a lot of secret things, but I still can’t tell about that.’

Dysart was silent for a moment.

‘Well, you’re the Magician,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll have to take your word for it that you’re a faulty Magician. Anyhow, how are you finding it with Betony in charge?’

Heriot looked around the orchard as if the very trees he trusted might have suddenly become treacherous … might be taking in his words in order to report back to some hidden authority.

‘I’m finding it dangerous,’ he said at last. ‘Something’s going on. I can feel the danger but I don’t know what it is. It’s so mixed-up. Why has your father taken off like this? Why has he left your mad brother – whose madness is entirely more serious than any madness of yours and mine – in charge? He
knows Betony isn’t fit – he’s not to be trusted as a King should be trusted. Betony works on an entirely different plane from your father.’

‘I’ve wondered too,’ said Dysart slowly. ‘But I think it’s a test for Betony. Maybe my father hopes a taste of kingship will turn out to be something of that marvellous life Betony says he longs for. And it may even be a trap. If he tries anything too impulsive, you’ll be able to report to Lord Glass. The men of County Glass will be there to protect Diamond and the King would then be able to displace Betony as heir to the throne –’

Heriot interrupted him, exclaiming incredulously. ‘You mean he’d have his own son executed?’

‘If his son tried to cut him down he’d be entitled to,’ Dysart said. ‘It’s happened before. But I think he’d probably exile him to an island prison off the coast, and Betony would have to live out his days on his own. It might suit him. He might find that extremity he longs for in being solitary on a solitary island.’

‘That’s not the sort of extremity he longs for,’ Heriot said derisively. ‘You Kings and Princes! Isn’t there any sort of ordinary kindness left in any of you?’

Dysart was silent as if he was puzzling something out. ‘You go on about kindness and family life,’ he said at last. ‘But what about the life of Hoad itself? There’s life there and a different set of rights and wrongs. You’ve read the histories. You know there’s always been shifting and sliding, and manoeuvring, treachery and death around the throne. Everyone wants to be a king. Everyone wants to be as powerful as it’s possible for an ordinary person to be. It’s a longing lodged in the human brain.’

‘Not every brain. Your father didn’t want it – well, not to begin with,’ Heriot argued. ‘He had to give up certain possibilities … a certain sort of happiness … other children who were never born …’

‘But he was obedient. A new sort of longing moved in on him, and he did give them up,’ Dysart replied. ‘Now he has to make do with the children who
were
born. And he wants to be infinitely powerful on behalf of his peace. Peace is his truest child, it’s melted into his dreams.’

‘And, deep down, you think you’re the only one who’d look after the King’s peace for him, don’t you?’ Heriot asked.

Dysart said stoutly, ‘Not until after my father. If I was King of Hoad after him I’d try to look after his peace and the changes he’s made. Whereas Betony would take pleasure in destroying it all, burning it up, and burning himself along with it.’

‘That feels about right,’ Heriot agreed, nodding slowly.

‘You read that in him?’ asked Dysart curiously.

‘I get close to reading it,’ Heriot said. ‘Sometimes his moods come out to meet me, and then linger on in my head, like flavours of despair. But since Cayley disappeared it’s as if that reading part of me has stepped back.’

He didn’t want to talk about his occupant even to Dysart, didn’t want to admit he was living through days when his occupant had retreated back into some deep crack in his head and was unwilling to reveal itself, even to him. At the same time he was astonished to find he had become so proud of his power and his difference that he didn’t want to acknowledge its incomprehensible diminishment. He had not only lost Cayley, he seemed to have lost something of that extra sense that might have enabled him to find her. Fleetingly he wondered if this had happened to Izachel, and it was from that despair he had been driven to steal power from the child Heriot had once been. And, as he felt this, he also felt himself flooded by Dysart’s despair over losing Linnet.

‘I don’t think Linnet will let her father marry her into the Dannorad,’ he said. ‘I think she’ll fight against it, even if she beats herself to death in the battle.’

‘Maybe,’ said Dysart, ‘but are you guessing as a Magician or a peasant or a family man? Now Linnet and I – we’re not just people. We’re noble, signs of Hoad and Hagen, and it’s part of our tradition to be loyal to the Lord of the land and to the King. Being noble isn’t the same as being free. And what if Linnet gets worn out by it all and gives in? I couldn’t blame her, could I?’

Later that afternoon Heriot set out, as he had set out every day when he had had the freedom to do so, to wander into the Second Ring, hoping to pick up some echo of Cayley’s wild laughter, or catch the reflection of her brilliant smile on some shining surface, hoping his occupant might dissolve into a mist of awareness, eager to seize on any clue. But these days when he went out into the city the occupant refused to blossom out. If anything, it shrank deeper into him, forcing itself into some sort of hibernation. Sometimes it seemed to Heriot that it had received a sign from the outer world, and was saving itself for something. Sometimes it seemed as if he had unconsciously cut himself away from its contradictory powers. He could not tell. There was a certain freedom in his new isolation, but most of the time he felt he had been lessened, that his occupant had turned its back on him.

Heriot was to be betrayed. Returning, at last, to his shed in the shadowed evening he received no warning and no protection.

Once again a blow fell, but this time Heriot fell too, toppling forward not only into the grass under the apple trees, but into a darkness stabbed every now and then with daggers of white lightning. And when he woke once again, he woke into darkness of an entirely different kind.

A
t first Heriot thought he was lying on his back, hands clasped somewhere over his head. Then his aching arms spoke to him urgently, and he realised he was hanging by his wrists, unconsciously trying to brace his back against a stone wall. Scrabbling with desperate feet, he found a floor, balancing himself on his first and second toes, believing, for a moment, he might be standing. Pain shot up through his calves and into his hips. Was he standing?

Yes, he was definitely standing – or, at least, he was able to touch that invisible floor. He tried adjusting his arching feet, groaning at the cramps that immediately took over, knotting him into himself. Yes. But those feet had been wearing laced boots only a moment ago. Why were they bare now? Why was he was bare all over, hanging naked in the dark? He was chained to a wall, and only trying to stand. Standing, then slumping, swinging by his chained wrists.

‘Magician,’ said a voice out of the darkness. ‘You’re waking up.’

‘Lord Prince,’ Heriot replied automatically, a picture of Betony Hoad framing itself around that voice. ‘I can’t see you.’

‘I can’t see you,’ Betony replied. ‘But I can hear you groaning.’

‘No surprise there,’ Heriot replied, gasping. ‘I’ve always been a coward. Where am I?’

‘You know where you are. Chained to the wall in a dungeon
under Hoad’s Pleasure,’ Betony replied. ‘Can you set yourself free? Be a Magician! Try!’

‘I don’t think I can,’ Heriot answered, testing himself. ‘It’s like … like something in me has decided to sleep until the King comes home.’

‘But what King? For now I am the King. You know that,’ said Betony Hoad.

‘Standing in for the King isn’t the same as being the King,’ Heriot mumbled, hearing his own voice, faint and dreary, drifting back to him from some other space.

‘I am being what my father has declared me to be,’ exclaimed Betony Hoad. He was invisible, but the intense triumph in his voice brought its own reality with it. Heriot was able to imagine him, blotted out by blackness, yet flinging his arms wide with a vivid intensity. ‘My father has left Diamond. I am King. Think that over as you hang there. And think about saving yourself if you can. I strongly advise it. You know I long for wonderful extremity, and what could be more wonderfully extreme than killing the Magician of Hoad … even eating him. Digesting him and feeling his power dissolving into my blood and becoming part of me. Now there’s something for you to think about as you swing there in the dark.’

An altering, oblong greyness flashed somewhere in front of Heriot. A door was opening and a featureless shape moved through it. Almost immediately the greyness surrendered to the original blackness. The door had closed. Heriot, half-hanging, still half-standing in the dark, was blind again.

Where are you?
Heriot asked, speaking inwardly to his occupant.

Here! Here!
it replied, in no real voice but a voice all the same, a soft voice, blurred with sleep, yet carrying its own echoes.

Help me!
Heriot groaned, twisting himself, hoping to find a point of painless rest.
Let’s get out of here.

I must save myself,
the occupant said. It mumbled incomprehensively then said clearly.
There must be a true melting
.

Melting?
Heriot exclaimed inwardly.
What do you mean?

But there was no reply.

Very occasionally, footsteps could be heard somewhere beyond the darkness. Or was it his own heartbeat he was hearing? The door Betony had used was fitted so tightly there was no indication of its place, not the finest line to indicate its secretive shape. Heriot continually struggled to stand, but his struggles brought on agonising cramps in his legs. If he tried to spare his legs, other pains attacked him, shooting down through his wrists and shoulders.

‘What’s the point of being a Magician,’ Heriot muttered, ‘if I can’t save myself? What’s the point?’ He tried to command his occupant again, but it refused to emerge from that secret hole in his head. Suddenly he was nothing more than an ordinary man, hanging by his wrists over a stone floor. He was powerless.

At last the door was opened. Someone moved through the darkness towards him and held a jug of water to his lips. He tried to drink – his thirst raged – but the jug was snatched away and the water poured over him. Much later someone brought in food, setting it down carefully close to him. He could smell cheese and freshly baked bread, but there was no way he could reach it. It had not been put there to feed him, but to torment him. His fingers opened and shut uselessly in the air above him.

At last the door opened for a third time, rather more slowly. Betony Hoad came in, carefully carrying a small flare, a light that shone upwards painting the underside of his chin a warm gold, and spilling downwards to touch the embroidery on his clothes into strange life so that he seemed to be advancing through a small jungle of vines and butterflies. He wore the
crown of Hoad and his hair hung from beneath it like yellow threads of silk. A giant shape, tall and broad, stalked in behind him, carrying a chair which it set down carefully. Betony Hoad sat down cautiously, then settled himself comfortably back into the chair, arranging his opulent robes around him. Then he crossed one leg casually over the other, his right ankle resting on his left knee.

‘Well, Magician,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

Heriot wondered for a moment if he would be able to remember how to speak. He swallowed, cleared his throat, swallowed again, and spoke at last.

‘You can see how things are, Lord Prince,’ he said, and his voice sounded in his own ears to be as damaged as Cayley’s had been.

‘It warms my heart to see you so appropriately displayed,’ Betony said. ‘Now, be a Magician and perform some astonishing act. Save yourself, and maybe I will applaud, and save you too.’

Heriot coughed. ‘All Hoad would rejoice to find that you have a heart, Lord Prince,’ he mumbled.

The dark giant … a jailer, perhaps … stepped out from behind Betony Hoad and struck Heriot a huge blow to his face. He felt his nose crack and twist, and thought he would lose consciousness. However, the blow had been well-judged. He was not to be so lucky. Warm blood ran freely down into his mouth. As Heriot tasted himself in the dark, Betony Hoad clapped his hands languidly.

‘I still don’t know quite what my father had in mind leaving me here,’ he said. ‘I know he doesn’t trust me. How could he, when I have declared myself to be untrustworthy over and over again? So did he hope I would lay myself open to criticism? Did he hope I would overstep the mark to such an extent he would be justified in chaining me to the wall, just as you are chained?
It wasn’t an innocent decision on his part, was it? Innocence is beyond him. Perhaps you know. Tell me!’

‘But I don’t know,’ Heriot began, croaking, then saw the guard stepping forward once more.

‘Wait,’ said Betony, holding up his hand, and the guard hesitated. ‘Plead,’ Betony said seductively. ‘Do plead for mercy!’

Heriot closed his eyes. ‘There’s no point,’ he muttered wearily, and, as he shook his head, the guard struck him again, across the knees this time. Heriot heard himself cry out as his awareness spun away from him, then spun back again. He had no idea if he had been unconscious for a few seconds or for an hour. He only knew he was swinging from the chains around his wrists, pain in his ribs … agony in his knees. He had been struck and struck again. His human structure of bones, joints, and muscles no longer worked in the way he automatically expected it to work.

‘But I’ve done nothing,’ he cried, and heard, in his own blurred, exhausted voice, not only appeal, but a great irritation.

‘It’s not what you’ve done, it’s who you are,’ someone said. ‘
What
you are!’ It wasn’t Betony Hoad speaking. The words came to him, loaded with memory.

Heriot tilted his battered head against the wall behind him.

‘I’ll leave you for now,’ he heard Betony Hoad say. ‘But I will be back again. And again. Why don’t you save yourself?’ His familiar face advanced out of the darkness, only inches away from Heriot’s own. ‘We’ll move on to something more intricate than a simple beating next time. Your eyes perhaps.’ Saying this, smiling as he said it, he stabbed his forefinger into Heriot’s right eye before he could close it.

The guard spoke. ‘He’s seen too much already,’ he said.

Through the screaming agony in his eye Heriot forced himself to listen and knew at once the name of Betony Hoad’s companion.

Touching his fingers in the blood still running around Heriot’s mouth Betony Hoad studied his stained finger tips, and then, while Heriot still struggled with the pain of his violated eye, slowly licked them one by one. ‘Mmmm! Delicious!’ he murmured. ‘What a vintage. You see, I want to be more than a mere King. I want you to make a Magician of me. I want to explore that particular ecstasy I can sometimes feel in you. I’m sure there must be a way to bleed the power into me. Think about it, if you want to keep on seeing the world.’

But Heriot, his right eye screwed up, weeping and possibly bleeding, was now looking over Betony’s shoulder with his left eye, staring wildly at the guard.

‘Lord Carlyon,’ he croaked, talking past the Prince. ‘Hero of Hoad. You have such talent for attacking the helpless.’

Carlyon turned, pulling the hood away from his face. ‘Both of the central powers of Hoad … King and Hero … have come to wait on you,’ he said. ‘We’ve merely patted you so far. But next time we’ll flatter you with intricacy – with steel. There are no rocks here to fall on me this time … other than the stones of the walls, but they are well sealed. Besides, you seem to have lost your skill as a Magician, and, without it, you have no future.’ Heriot said nothing, and his occupant did not stir. ‘I don’t think our dear, departed King will be imagining a partnership between Prince Betony and the Hero, do you? But you can hang there, monster, and do more than imagine it. You can think about it … and remember this.’ Then he stepped forward, displacing Betony Hoad.

What happened next Heriot was never able to remember. The blackness that suddenly enveloped him was hugely welcome.