The Magician of Hoad (15 page)

Suddenly the mazes of this arboreal dance fell apart,
revealing nothing more sinister than an old gardener’s cottage, falling into disrepair, three rooms of plaster bricks, packed earth, and stone built up around a timber frame, grass growing tall against walls that had once been white. Heriot had sometimes seen it there during his wandering in the orchard, but he had never really thought about it as a place that might be lived in.

“I sleep out here sometimes,” Cayley said. “I’m the rat of the city out there, but then, as well, I’m the King’s neighbor. Hello, Mr. Your Majesty!” He waved at the Tower of the Lion, visible through the leaves and branches of apple trees.

Then, bending down by the door at the back, he struggled to remove two blocks of plaster and compressed soil, and wriggled through the space, turning to fit them back in behind him. A moment later the front door opened grudgingly.

“I bolt it up, see,” Cayley said as proudly as any Lord showing off a new estate. “Mine these days.” Heriot entered a dim, dusty little room lit by whatever daylight seeped through the sheets of oiled linen stretched over the windows and through a hole in the roof. As he looked around him, thinking of his own room in Guard-on-the-Rock, he felt an idea forming.

I was happy here,
said his occupant.
I will be—I am—I was… happy here.
But Heriot already knew it had no recognizable sense of past or future. He leaned his back against the wall and slid slowly down to sit on the floor, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his palms. He could
live here himself. He could belong to the King, yet have solitary, stolen times among the apple trees, times when the history of Guard-on-the-Rock and its Lords, Princes, and Kings wasn’t a necessary part of the air he breathed. Perhaps he could find his way back to being a total self, rather than a mere aspect of the King’s power. He watched Cayley take a long-stemmed pipe from a ledge, then take a flint from beside it and strike it against some stone half-buried in the floor beneath them.

“It’s been a strange day so far,” he told Cayley.

“Aren’t they always?” Cayley said resignedly. “Every one of them!”

“You live by stealing?” Heriot asked.

“Stealing and finding,” Cayley agreed. “My stomach—it’s glad of anything it can get. No questions. And what it gets, it holds on to. Well, mostly it does. It gets all sorts,” he added, in case Heriot was unclear on this point. “I’ve et what they put out for dogs. I’ve even et rat stew, which is not too bad, all in all. Hard on the rats, though.”

Heriot laughed, not so much at the story, which he felt was partly invented to entertain, but at the way Cayley was watching him, reading his expression intently, trying to match something in himself to whatever he read there. Down below the torn, elliptical voice of the street child, he thought he detected a faint echo of his own voice and of Radley’s.

“Are you from the country?” he asked idly. Cayley looked at him warily.

“What if?” he asked. “Back a bit, perhaps. ’N’t there now, am I? Not never again. Borned there, die here.”

“How long have you been in Diamond?” Heriot persisted.

Cayley shook his head. “I told you before—no history.” He stretched himself. “Just always now! Now, now, now, over and over again.”

“What’s in the pipe?” Heriot asked.

“Happy smoke,” Cayley said. “I know where to gather it,” he added. It wasn’t just because of the happy smoke, however, that Heriot was finding himself immediately tempted by this small, dark space and the wolfish child smiling at him. Living here, he suddenly felt, he might even become a family man again, and some sort of family life would tie him back to the farm that he missed every day of his city life.

“You take a risk showing me this place,” he said, and was startled when Cayley burst into laughter, spilling the oranges from the front of his shirt.

“I mostly guess right,” he said. “Dead if I didn’t.” He pulled a particularly threatening knife out of a leather sheath at his belt and began to peel the oranges.

“I’d better get back,” Heriot said, nodding in the direction of the castle. “I’ve been gone a long time, and they’ll come looking. I’d take you with me, but they wouldn’t let me keep you. Suppose I come back whenever I can, bringing some food and money?”

“Happy smoke talking!” said Cayley scornfully. “You’ve breathed it in. They don’t let you out alone, ’n’t you the Magician of Hoad?”

“Too true,” Heriot agreed. “But my five years good are up. Maybe from now on, five years shifty. I’m out alone now, aren’t I?” He found himself adopting the pattern of
Cayley’s speech as if it were a private language spontaneously invented. It was partly his occupant talking, as it had never spoken through him before. He took what coins he had left out of his pocket. “Housekeeping!” he said, passing the money over, laughing as he did so. “But I’ll have to go. Better to go and show myself, rather than be hunted out.”

“No one hunts me,” Cayley said through a mouthful of orange. “Or everyone does,” he added rather more clearly. “No one and everyone—they’re like the same thing to me.”

“They only want my head.” Heriot shrugged. “The thing is, there’s only one of it, and I need it too.”

Cayley laughed his strange, breathless laugh once more. “Too much of me, too little of you,” he said.

A few minutes later Heriot left the shed, and the private feast of oranges that was taking place inside, and began walking home through the orchard.

Suddenly he heard someone shouting at him. He turned, recognizing the voice. Dysart came charging toward him though the early evening twilight.

“Where have you been?” Dysart was shouting.

“Walking! Walking in the orchard,” Heriot replied. “I wanted silence. And your city owes me a bit of time.”

In the next moment Dysart was beside him, glaring at him and shaking his shoulder. “The city doesn’t owe you anything,” he cried. “It’s a question of Diamond telling you to do what Diamond needs. You’re not just a Magician, you’re the Magician of Hoad. Hoad! You don’t belong to yourself… you belong to the King.”

Heriot was startled by Dysart’s fury. As he gaped in
astonishment, Dysart suddenly struck him on the side of the head. The blow wasn’t hard, but once delivered, it took them both aback.

Dysart’s grip on Heriot’s shoulder relaxed. His hand fell away. “Oh damn!” he cried impatiently. “I didn’t mean… I’m sorry, but…”

“Why?” asked Heriot, wrinkling his face with disbelief as he tenderly stroked his ear.

“Because… ,” Dysart said, his voice milder now. “Because you’d vanished away, and I was frightened you’d somehow truly gone. And you’re my good fortune. Don’t you know that by now? The good fortune of a third son.”

At that moment, as if Dysart’s words had somehow given birth to a possible new perception, Heriot found he suddenly knew something—knew it in an irrational, almost visionary way. Dysart was a true friend, yet he was revealing a certain vulnerability—a certain need—and a particular possibility now buzzed out of the orchard air and lodged resolutely within Heriot.

Within a moment he decided to bargain over something.

“There’s a little old garden shed behind me,” he said, pointing with his thumb back over his shoulder. “I’d like to live there sometimes. Sleep there, perhaps, out among the trees. Because being among trees might make more of a Magician of me. More of a friend, too—we’d both enjoy that, wouldn’t we? Not just ‘enjoy,’” he added hastily. “We’d benefit.”

Dysart looked taken aback. “You might!” he said. “But I wouldn’t.”

“Listen! It would work out for both of us if I became an even more powerful Magician,” Heriot told him. “We could look out for each other. And anyhow, things are going to change for you soon,” he added, reconnecting to the distraction of a moment ago. “Linnet of Hagen’s on her way here. Linnet! Her father’s bringing her. Won’t that make Guard-on-the-Rock a different place for you?”

After his day of rebellion, Heriot settled down with a different and unexpectedly comfortable feeling about the shapes and routines of the city. The city was still there, of course, still spying on him, looking down on him from all angles, peering over his shoulder as he wrote or read, but he no longer felt like a mechanical device, ticking over within it. Now he knew that, given a chance, he could escape. And he had a new acquaintance out there… a boy who suddenly seemed like his own ragged shadow, struggling with words yet able to talk joyously. Not a possession of Hoad but a true part of the city, able to come and go freely. Heriot felt liberated at the thought of the boy Cayley’s strange freedom, conferred by neglect, freedom that the whole clockwork of Diamond could not control, for the boy wasn’t confined by any necessity except staying alive, laughing as he did so.

This secret internal image of escape and of an intermittent friendship made his routines in Guard-on-the-Rock things he was able do from day to day, no longer feeling
that he had been reduced to a mere movable device. Even when he sat at the King’s elbow, some part of him was out in the city, stealing oranges, dancing down streets, and passing effortlessly through stone walls.

To his surprise, Lord Glass obligingly gave orders for the old shed to be restored, so that he could use it as an orchard retreat. Heriot had won himself a place where he could enjoy a little solitude. So the season grew restful and mellow around him for a while, and though he knew it couldn’t last—for no season, neither sun or storm, lasts forever—he was happy to enjoy it while he could.

A month went by with Heriot doing exactly what Guard-on-the-Rock instructed him to do—moving from under the double gaze of the King and Lord Glass to the study room and the penetrating stare of Dr. Feo, and then off over the bridge to his shed in the long orchard. Though Diamond was no longer pressing in on him, he could still feel it watching in its inexorable way, but he no longer cared.

He was the Magician of Hoad, and that was that. Nothing he could do about it. Apparently, it was what he had been born to be. Every now and then he reached beyond the city walls, out into County Glass, to touch his family and feel them farming and thriving, often smiling when no one else could see anything to smile at.

And now, like a bright, broken thread stitching through his thoughts, ran the street boy, Cayley, the rat of the city, coming and going through the hidden hole in the first wall. Sometimes Heriot’s brief, stolen orchard hours coincided with Cayley’s own furtive ventures under the ivy and into the First Ring. Then they would sit together in the old
shed, talking about nothing much… simply joking, gossiping about the day, perhaps, and its casual happenings or about the city beyond the wall.
The time will come,
Heriot found himself thinking in an absentminded way.
I’ll know every grain of dust. I’ll walk out into the Second Ring and then the Third Ring—walk into forbidden realms—and I’ll take Diamond over. But then I’ll walk out of it, and beyond it, carrying it all folded up in a corner of my mind. In the meantime I’ll just work on, winking at it from time to time, and it can wink back at me, sending me its secret messages.

The daytime city swung down into darkness, and Heriot, often set free from the demands of royal duty and royal friendship, released to be a true nighttime man, came running though the orchard to his shed. He ran without hesitation, for at night he could see by something other than light.

Although he had just left Lord Glass with the King and his tight circle of trusted men, he half feared finding Lord Glass waiting for him in the garden shed, inquiring with an ironic and coercive civility whether or not he was giving his best attention to the King’s business. The shed door wasn’t locked, for Heriot had nothing worth protecting. He slid gratefully and easily into darkness, pulling that door closed behind him. Yet, as he did so, an even darker figure rose from the one chair behind the table.

“It’s me,” said a shadow among the shadows.

“I’ll light a lamp, said Heriot. “Where have you been?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Round and about,” Cayley answered, croaking a little. “I had this friend put down with the coughing sickness.
Couldn’t just leave him to cough and die alone, could I? I’d to be nurse, even doctor to him. But… well, he’s gone, poor bastard, dead now. Then I ’n’t too good myself.”

“I’ve not seen you in ages,” Heriot said, still busy with his lamp. “I thought you might be dead as well.

“I ’n’t to go yet,” Cayley said huskily. “I’ve something to do first. Something I must do. But I’m wore down a bit.” There was an extreme thinness about his voice, a flattening of its previous buoyancy. Heriot turned, suddenly alarmed, and saw for the first time just what was sitting in the chair behind his table.

The boy was reduced to nothing but a witch’s doll made of sticks and bird bones, his blue eyes abnormally large, sunken back into a face where the cheekbones seemed sharp enough to cut through skin that was cracked in places with open sores. His lips showed patches of infection at the corners, and his filthy blond hair hung lanky around a face that already seemed inhabited by death.

“I ’n’t catching,” Cayley said quickly. “Well, not so very. But people notice me, and stealing’s hard enough without being noticed. And no one wants me working for them… not looking like this. And I ’n’t eaten so much lately—not that I’m hungry, but, well, you know.” He smelled dreadful in the warm room. It crossed Heriot’s mind that he might already be dead and decaying but was too obstinate to acknowledge the fact. The rags he wore were peeling away like a disgusting skin and probably filled with vermin. All the same, he smiled his transforming smile, which now seemed to illuminate his worn face with a ghastly light, showing the skull close under the skin.

“No need to do any worrying,” Cayley added, seeing Heriot’s expression. “I’ll get by for a bit now, if I get to sleep.”

In the main part of the shed, which had become pantry, kitchen, and washhouse all in one, Heriot had a round wooden tub pushed under a bench. On the edge of his fire, burned down to embers, were two ponderous iron kettles filled with water. He blew up the fire, piled on logs, and managed to produce sufficient warm water to wash his orphan of the savage night.