The Magician of Hoad (22 page)

Heriot shrugged. “We often think terrible things and don’t do them.”

“What do you think I am?” Cayley said derisively. “I’d have done it. Sometimes now, well, I could cry at having let the chance go by. But I couldn’t be sure I’d get away with it. That stopped me. They’d have stretched me, and I wouldn’t stretch for him. See, I got to thinking I might be allowed just one”—he bent one of his fingers down—“and my stepdadda wasn’t the right one. Not the one I wanted. Not the one I’ve been practicing to have!”

Heriot turned his head very slowly. Cayley wasn’t looking at him but out into the growing light, a dreamy expression on his patched face as if he were remembering some wonderful honeyed flavor, still tasting its ghost on his lips.

“Things were looking up for me out there,” he said regretfully, turning to Heriot. “Eating and sleeping and that, working out with Voicey Landis. But now? Shall I live in the straw with you? Steal a chain to match? I can be all sorts of company. You say it and I’ll
be
it.”

There was a silence.

“You’re a clever little bastard, aren’t you?” Heriot murmured at last. “You’ve been brought up so badly I can’t resist looking after you. So undo the lock on this chain and we’ll go home.”

“Is that right?” Cayley said, busily drawing a long pin from the thick hem of his shirt. There was a blob of sealing wax on its end.

“Don’t you know it!” Heriot exclaimed, as his companion began to work on the lock that Heriot himself had closed on his own ankle the night before.

“I know this,” Cayley said indistinctly. “You like playing just as if you were a little one. All this—it’s nothing but a game, and I can’t be bothered with the rules.”

“It’s not simple,” Heriot said. “Once I watched children playing a game in the Third Ring—they were practicing for love. They tied it down with names and running and kissing, chasing, and catching and screaming.…”

“There’s a lot of screaming to it sometimes,” Cayley agreed, working at the lock.

“Listen. A child from one line would try to fetch away another from the other line back onto his own side. ‘The boy’—no—‘the
burning
boy shall fetch’—or was it ‘catch’?—‘the girl and he shall be her lover.’ Do you know that game?”

“I’ve already said I don’t play,” Cayley pointed out.

“I play,” Heriot said. “I’m playing all the time—acting Magician, acting monster, acting man, to see which feels right. It’s what you call a metaphorical life.…”

“I wouldn’t call it that, just playing, playing, playing,” Cayley put in.

“Perhaps I’m a bit like those children,” Heriot said,
“acting out future choices so I’ll get a bit of practice before they come upon me. I thought it might be right to live in this cage, but maybe everyone else is right and I’m wrong. One thing’s certain,
you
need looking after, you threat to the world.”

“So do you,” Cayley said. “Need looking after, I mean.”

“But it hurt my feelings that Dysart couldn’t look at me directly,” Heriot complained. “I mean, he grabbed me, but he was careful to look past me.”

“He was scared.” Cayley twisted his face, still concentrating on feeling his way into the lock with the pin. “But I always look direct, you’ll never scare me.” The lock clicked, and the anklet fell open with a ringing sound. “See, I’m ruined for beauty and all that, but suppose you was to drop down right this moment into a pool of blood or turn into a devil with looking-glass eyes. I’d still look straight at you. ‘That’s him, that’s my man. Hey you! Stop fooling around!’ I’d say.”

“A devil with looking-glass eyes.” Heriot was momentarily diverted. He laughed with sudden ease. “Now there’s a thought.”

“I made it up,” cried Cayley with a shout of triumphant laughter. “All the time I’m learning your words, catching your ideas, stealing thoughts. Pity to lose a skill.”

“Watch out—words can be an illness,” Heriot said, but without bitterness. He stood up, then cautiously moved his ankle from side to side.

“They won’t sicken me,” boasted Cayley. “I’ve nearly died of thoughts already—always other people’s, not my own. You don’t sicken twice.”

“What are you talking about?” Heriot asked with weary amusement as they came out of the cage together, leaving its door swinging open behind them.

“Your sickness,” said Cayley, dancing a little, like a dog pleased at the prospect of a walk. “It’s got a name, ’n’t it? Im-ag-in-ation!” He pronounced the one word as if it were four.

The morning was already laced with the voices of birds. The two-faced woman, the dwarfs, all slept. The lions paced backward and forward.

“It’s so beautiful,” said Heriot, looking around him with astonishment. “Cayley, it’s so beautiful. All over again!”

The garden was filling with a mysterious and tender light, each tree, each leaf, each blade of grass displaying itself against a color between gray and silver. Ill at ease with the rest of humanity, Heriot found there was a space in the morning into which he fitted exactly. “Supposing the simple act of asking, ‘Am I human?’
makes
you human?” he said, coming to a stop.

“Supposing,” said Cayley.

“And who hasn’t got a beast in them anyway?” Heriot asked again.

“Supposing… just supposing,” Cayley agreed, nodding.

“I’ve tried being good,” Heriot said, “being clever, too… but there isn’t a final answer. I’m wonderful compared to Carlyon, for instance, better off, too. His cage might be a whole island wide, but there’s no one to unlock
his
collar. He’s the great freak of Hoad, displayed.”

“Maybe he sits and asks, ‘What am I?’” Cayley suggested. “It’s easy to ask.”

“I think he did ask once, and didn’t like the answer,” Heriot replied. “I don’t think he’s asked properly since.” The gate to the zoo was a little ajar.

“That royal old fox,” Cayley said half-admiringly. “It’s like a little message, saying, ‘I know you’ll go,’ ’n’t it?”

They crossed into the First Ring, watched by the guards at the gate. High above them, over in the Tower of the Lion, a window shone palely, picked out by the light in the east. They moved on farther; the light deepened and suddenly became miraculous. Heriot found himself weeping, for he thought the morning was extending an irrevocable welcome back into the world of natural men, even though he was bringing his occupant with him, unruly but not outlawed.

“I’m a true man after all,” he said to the air and to Cayley.

“You can do better than just being a true man,” said Cayley, dancing around him.

“I value it,” Heriot exclaimed. “You will too, one day.”

Cayley’s dancing stopped. “I won’t ever live to be one,” he said seriously. “I’m more opposite to all that than you guess.”

“We might both live forever,” Heriot suggested. “I’m becoming immortal, walking in this light. I’ve got a lot of questions unanswered, but I’ll stay still for a little, not fretting and not asking them.”

He looked up into the sky, which was beginning to color, its blush deepening from moment to moment, as if his stare had set love and blood free to contend across the clear skin of the air. Heriot couldn’t think of a more
adequate response than falling on his knees and staring ahead of him, his face rapt and still.

“It’s so beautiful,” he repeated. “If only I could just dissolve into it.” The morning grew, if anything, more intense. But then he shook himself. “Here!” he exclaimed. “I’m getting lost. Hug me back. I want someone to touch me.”

“I’m not good at it,” Cayley said, but obediently knelt and, putting his thin arms around Heriot, hugged him energetically.

“Good enough!” Heriot told him. “Rough but real.” He looked up at the trees, their top twigs burning furiously with the approach of day, quite unable to see Cayley’s face, which was taking on an indescribable expression, tender, triumphant yet menacing, the expression of a demon, not of the night but of the bright morning.

You’re all I ever really wanted. You’re my true kingdom,” Dysart said to Linnet. “The city was only a sign of you.” At the moment it seemed completely true. “Back there in the dream, I just cut the world out. I didn’t want to know anything, because there was nothing worth knowing anymore. I wasn’t even curious. I didn’t want to know what was going to happen next. I didn’t understand.”

“Understand what?” Linnet asked.

“You’re my true kingdom,” Dysart told her.

“It was always meant to be,” Linnet said. Her happy voice came to Dysart from his own shadow, which lay across her. “But we had to be tested.” He couldn’t tell that, as Linnet spoke, she was testing every part of her memory and awareness, fearful of detecting some secret contamination of her own will by the will of the Magician of Hoad. She couldn’t bear the thought that she and Dysart had achieved each other only because Heriot had
somehow slipped desire under their skins. But there was nothing there that was not her own. Heriot might have hovered around her as she risked her life and climbed the wall by its disintegrating steps, but her declaration of love was hers alone.

Outside she could detect the first alteration of light. It was still dark, but it was a transparent darkness. Morning was on the way. “My father will be looking for me,” she said with a sigh. “There are terrible fights ahead of us. He wants to be the one who chooses my husband.”

“Let’s stroll out of here. Let’s walk like civilized sentries around the rim of the castle,” Dysart suggested. “Just once round the walls. Then you can go back and fight with your father, and I’ll go and argue with mine. Don’t straighten the bed! Don’t touch a thing. I’ll come back, see the mark of your head on my pillow, and I’ll know it was all true.”

Linnet stood up, feeling so light and free without her clothes, she was reluctant to dress again. But the night had become part of a time that was attainable only through memory. Day was bearing down on her. She slipped a linen chemise over a silk one. Dysart buttoned a crumpled shirt, and they dressed, putting on the world along with yesterday’s grubby clothes. “Your father… ,” began Dysart. “Linnet, you must think hard about what it really means… being in love with me.”

“I would always have fought for you if I’d known you were going to be fighting beside me,” Linnet declared.

She meant it. She
meant
it.

They walked down the winding stair toward a guttering torch, paling in that first morning light, and then out under an arched doorway onto the battlements. Far below them the Bramber flowed; far beyond them the three Rings of the city stretched toward the first rising hills of County Glass. Nothing in that outer world had changed, yet Linnet had never felt as consciously free as she felt now, as easy, as pure within herself. The Hero’s Tower still blazed with light, but, as morning advanced, as edges and curves began to shine, and hints of depth and distance crept back into the world, these lights too were losing their power. The sound of voices singing came toward them intermittently. High in the Tower of the Lion, the King’s window shone faintly. Perhaps the sleepless King of Hoad was celebrating his son’s strange wedding with yet another night of careful work.

Watching the morning and strolling along the battlements beside Linnet, Dysart felt he was made of paper and ink, made out of stories, and not all of them his own.
Stories never sleep,
he thought.
They tell themselves over and over again.
Beneath him, in the tunneled walls, the campaigners were changing the guard. Celebration fires still smoked in distant city squares. They walked in silence, and the dissolving midnight beast, which had consumed Dysart when he was a dreaming child, grew hazy and doubtful. Inwardly he laughed at it, and drove it away.

At last they paused and leaned together in one of the embrasures, looking out into the King’s garden. Neither of them thought of the Magician, who had declared himself a monster and shut himself in the cage.

There was a step behind them. They turned together, looking away from the garden and the sea into the more resolute light staining the sky beyond Hoad’s Pleasure.

Betony was standing behind them, holding a goblet and a bottle of wine in his pale hands, his face more naked than Linnet had ever seen it. His expression altered at once, as it always did when anyone looked into his eyes. Nevertheless Linnet had fleetingly glimpsed something in Betony—a terrible injury, old and mortal—before he had the chance to conceal it once more.

“I see you have been celebrating my wedding,” Betony said. He stared at them. “Rather too well!” he added.

“Someone has to,” Dysart said.

Betony sighed and took his place beside them, facing the morning and turning his back on the bulk of the sprawling city.

“Oh, I’ve celebrated in my own way,” he said. “I was able to talk to her—my wife, that is. We can’t stand the thought of each other. We’ve agreed not to contaminate ourselves. And we do understand each other… we’ve even become friends of a sort. Willing conspirators, anyway! My father can whistle and wait for the miraculous child, heir to both kingdoms. It just won’t happen. I don’t mind taking life out of the world, but I’ll never feed it back in. I may be cruel, but I’m not as cruel as all that.”

He looked sideways at them.

“You seem to have celebrated my wedding in a particularly personal way,” he went on.

Without turning, Linnet could tell he was smiling.

“Linnet and I have promised to marry each other!” Dysart
said abruptly, anxious to hear what the idea sounded like in the outside world. Once spoken, it became both more and less than a private ecstasy… it became a policy.

“Oh, of course you have,” said Betony. “And I do think you should!”

Dysart and Linnet both looked at him suspiciously.

“You might even get away with it,” he said, smiling his wincing smile at their doubt, “now that Carlyon’s shown a little of his hand… well, of his heart, really! Have you told your father?” he asked, turning to look at Linnet. “Or have you had other things on your mind?”

“The King didn’t seem to be worried by anything Carlyon had to say,” Linnet answered casually. She hadn’t given Carlyon or his visions of death and decay a thought.