The Magician of Hoad (24 page)

But Carlyon interrupted him. “I accept the challenge
of Prince Luce,” he said briskly, somehow reducing the challenge to an irritating request. “We will fight on Cassio’s Island according to ancient traditions.” And then he added, “Whether I win or lose, I will enjoy the occasion. Mine is a still life, and I long for the variety of action.”

Luce looked taken aback by the speed of Carlyon’s reply. His mouth hung open slightly as he glanced from Carlyon to his father.

Once again the King inclined his head. “A challenge has been made. A challenge has been accepted. This evening the challenge will be announced and celebrated in the Tower of the Lion.”

Heriot was released. He was a free man for a few hours and made for his orchard, feeling the day reaching toward him. He would lie on his back, perhaps, looking into the sky. He might read. He might slide through that hidden gap in the wall and wander between the stalls of the Second Ring. He might, just for a little time…

But Cayley was suddenly beside him once more, startling him with such a sudden appearance.

“Made you jump!” he said with satisfaction.

“It’s funny,” Heriot said. “I can feel everyone else creeping up on me, but mostly I can’t feel you.”

“I’ve learned to shut myself in,” Cayley said in his wandering but mysterious way. “Things happened to me back a bit and I had to close myself down tight. I taught myself how. It was that or dying. So! No choice! Anyhow, was it interesting sitting in there and gossiping with the King and Hero?”

“It was interesting today,” Heriot said. “Luce challenged
the Hero. Well, we’ve known for some time he was planning to, but…”

And then he fell silent. Cayley might have shut himself in, but suddenly something was leaking out from him. He was angry; he was, perhaps, frightened. Heriot looked closely at him. “Why should you care?” he asked.

“Who says I do care?” Cayley replied in his usual lighthearted voice, and as he spoke Heriot could feel him closing in on himself, growing unreadable once more.

“It jumped from your mind into mine,” Heriot replied. “I could feel you growing fierce at the news.”

“You’re not always right,” said Cayley.

Heriot said nothing but knew he hadn’t imagined that furious, inner alarm Cayley had betrayed. Perhaps he could have pursued it, but then he thought,
People are entitled to their secrets. It may be the Magician’s job to winkle out secrets in the King’s throne room, but out in the city, secrets can be secrets, hidden and unviolated.

A month after Luce’s challenge, a glowing worm of color began writhing slowly through the great Rings of Diamond, then beyond the city along the open road. The King and his entire court, together with envoys and ambassadors from the Dannorad and Camp Hyot, set out in a formal parade along a road that had been cleared and widened and decorated with colored poles and banners in anticipation of the royal progress. The King, mounted on a white horse, rode at the head of the procession. Betony Hoad and his doll-wife rode on the King’s right, Luce on his left, while directly behind him came Dysart, together with the Master of Hagen and the Lords of Argo, Dante, Bay, Isman, Doro, and Glass, along with their families.

Linnet of Hagen rode beside her father. Heriot Tarbas, the Magician of Hoad, rode beside Prince Dysart, for in a curious way their friendship expressed the power of the King. Behind them came the lesser Lords with their wives and sons, attended by ranks of guards and servants, and
among this lesser crowd rode the Magician’s servant Cayley, the transformed rat of the city, staring around him intently, occasionally smiling his vivid smile, as if in following this road he were remembering a story he had been told as a child—a story he knew well. They were bound for Cassio’s Island, where Prince and Hero were to fight. Within two days, one would be dead.

Some members of the procession talked to one another as they rode, but for the most part the riders were curiously silent, many of them tied into themselves with thoughts and speculations. The silence became part of the ceremonial progress between the city and Cassio’s Island, yet somehow it was as if the thoughts of men and women sang in the air, not as words but as strange vibrations, felt but not recognized.

At last!
Luce was thinking.
At last I’ll become what I was born to be. And when I’m set up on Cassio’s Island I’ll remake the world. I’ll change the rules. The Dannorad will fall into line. Camp Hyot will bow down before Hoad. Who knows? Betony doesn’t want to be King. He might step down and… and I might even merge the King and the Hero into one man again.

A breeze crept in from the sea and lifted the golden curls on his forehead. Dysart, staring sideways, saw them stir as if gentle but determined fingers were twisting themselves in his brother’s hair.
Luce must win,
he was thinking.
He must. It’s not just that I want to be King after my father. But if Luce wins, I win in every way. If Luce becomes Hero, he moves off to one side in a glory all his own, and I’ll be second son. I’ll inherit Linnet.
And then another voice—a vagrant from some dark
and unacknowledged part of his mind—whispered slyly,
But even if Luce dies, I’ll still move up a step. I’ll become the second son of the King. Either way I’ll win.
He recoiled in his saddle, shying away violently from this thought, which had become almost immediately an unwelcome yet indissoluble part of a profound longing.

It’s not enough!
Betony Hoad was thinking.
Nothing is enough. Look at this display, this charade. Look at all this posturing, this game they’re playing, this pretense of true wonder. Of course death has excitement, but this will be death carefully arranged, death reduced, made tedious. I don’t care who kills whom. Somewhere there are things wonderful beyond all dreaming. But where are they? Why am I shut away from them? Why do I have to waste time watching these gesturing puppets? I want to be remade. I don’t want to be the mere sign of the sun. I want to be the sun itself.

Heriot was thinking too, remembering another time.
Funny how well I remember it, seeing it’s not a thing I
want
to remember. I struggled along this road, bleeding, thinking there was no place for me… there would never be a place for me. But now I have a place. I live in an orchard with a family of one. It’s not my first place, but it’s come to be a true place. Yet I still don’t know just what it
means
to be a Magician. I know how I’m used in Diamond—I’ve been used like that for years now—but I know that’s misuse of what I could be… what I ought to be. Somehow I’m being reduced. When I was a child, a baby, Izachel got into my head and tore me apart, and I’ve never worked the way I’m meant to work. Somewhere out there I have a true meaning, but I don’t know what it is.
These thoughts faded away when he saw they had reached the ancient aqueduct, built and broken
long before, back in the days when the first people—his own people—the Gethin and the Orts, were Hoad’s only inhabitants.

That curve of water!
he thought.
It’s still like a question mark, asking me something, but until I know what it’s asking, there’s no way I can answer.

The sound of the falling water advanced to meet the passing riders as it gushed endlessly through the ancient channel of stone, as it sighed through the air, then burst furiously toward the river far below, applauding its return home.

The procession moved on, made up of many people, yet moving like a single thing with a single life of its own.

The King turned to Betony Hoad. His movement was smooth and practiced, yet for all that there was something slightly uneasy about it. “You must enjoy this splendor,” he said, and there was something awkward in his simple comment… an advance uncertain of how it would be received. “It’s the sort of thing you take pleasure in.” He was both stating something, yet asking a question.

“If I must, I must,” said Betony Hoad.

Hoad raised his eyebrows. “You don’t enjoy it?” he asked, more directly this time.

“It’s a children’s game,” Betony said. “I was thinking, as you spoke, Lord Father, that I was longing for something much more—oh,
much
more—extreme than this.”

“Your brother’s life is in the balance,” the King pointed out. “Surely that is an extremity.”

“It’s what he’s chosen,” Betony said. “I long for something beyond arrangement and choice.”

“You want to be an elemental?”

Betony didn’t look at his father. He laughed.

“Being King is perhaps the closest any human being can come to being an elemental,” the King suggested, but Betony laughed again, shaking his head as if the words were annoying gnats singing in his ear.

The procession moved on. The King turned to Luce. “And you truly want to be the Hero?” he asked. “It’s not too late to turn around and ride back to Diamond.”

“It’s much too late,” said Luce. “It’s been too late for years. When we last came this way I wasn’t much more than a child. I saw Carlyon win and stand over Link—I saw him
become
the Hero of Hoad. He glowed with it all, and in a little while I’ll glow like that. I’ll be transformed. Carlyon may be a great warrior, but he’s older, and I don’t think he has the same skills he once had.”

They moved on in silence.

“A King makes a poor father,” the King said at last. “Of course I hope you will win. I hope for your victory more than I have hoped for anything in years.”

Somewhere in Heriot’s divided head, the occupant gathered in the hopes of the King, Luce, and Dysart, along with the derision of Betony Hoad, as if it were feeding itself on these drifts of human feeling, and then somehow feeding them back into Heriot himself.

Feeling tired of the intrusion of other people’s conjectures and longings, Heriot spoke ahead to Dysart. “I know this place,” he said. “I saw the last procession as a child from up there on the hills, looking down. Now I’m on the road looking up and seeing myself back then.” He waved
at the hilltop. “I can feel them all watching… particularly Wish.”

“Don’t get too mystic,” Dysart warned.

“Why not? Then and now, it’s the same procession,” Heriot replied. “It’s always the same procession, along this causeway.…”

His voice had changed. Dysart looked at him curiously. “What’s wrong?”

Heriot didn’t reply.

Remember! Remember!
his occupant was asserting somewhere inside his head. Heriot remembered and spoke silently back to the occupant.
Under that arch up ahead is the gate without walls. Beside that gate I saw freshly flattened grass, its blades still rising up again. And later, up there on the hill I won back enough strength to recover. Part of me—you—had hidden and slept. And, back then, you began waking.

The occupant answered him gleefully.
Here on the causeway I woke! We had been torn apart, torn in two. But now we’re twins. We work as twins.

Heriot nodded, continuing his inner dialogue.
And over there, off the causeway. That’s where you unwound yourself and saved me from the Hero of Hoad.

“What’s wrong?” Dysart asked. That outside voice startled Heriot. “Why are you rubbing your side?”

“Just the memory of an old scratch,” Heriot said. “It’s left its mark on me in different ways.”

“Oh, all right! Be mysterious!” Dysart said. “After all, it’s part of your job, isn’t it?”

And in due course they moved on under the arch, and through the gate without walls. The curving road, newly
cleared to make way for a royal procession, twisted toward the heart of Cassio’s Island. And suddenly there before them was one of the island’s great harbors, with a city rising around it. High on a spiky hill stood a spiky castle encircled by a curious lacework of buildings and walls, streets and spires. If it didn’t have the power of Guard-on-the-Rock… if it didn’t give off the same feeling of impassioned history, this island city still had a strength of its own. And there, riding to meet them, like a curious reflection, came another procession.

Heriot heard Luce exclaiming with something like joy touched with a curious note of relief, as if he recognized his own reflection—as if he, at least, was coming home.

Carlyon, the Hero of Hoad, advanced to meet them. Heriot watched him smile politely at the King, then look past him at Luce. Then, impulsively it seemed, Carlyon rode forward, leaned sideways out of his saddle, and embraced Luce as if he were greeting a true friend… more than a friend, perhaps… as if he were embracing an earlier self.

“Welcome to my challenger,” he said, and Heriot was astonished at the warmth and passion in his voice. “You might remake me.”

Heriot couldn’t see Luce’s expression, but he imagined it might be showing some confusion. Luce didn’t have the subtlety of mind to understand that a man might be the Hero, yet still remember himself as the challenger, that he might find himself overtaken both by an ancient presence he could not anticipate, and by a sudden reunion with the passions he had felt as a younger man.

Carlyon killed Link, but that wasn’t all he killed,
the occupant said, speaking as it sometimes chose to do, in Cayley’s broken voice. And almost as if he had heard, Carlyon looked across at Heriot, who smiled back, absentmindedly stroking his side. The scar was nothing but a faint white line, but Heriot sometimes felt that pucker in his skin as an enigmatic road mapped on him. Carlyon turned away from him to greet the King with a cool formality. He sat straight in the saddle without bowing, as those on either side of him were doing, for he and the King were equals in the land of Hoad.

Carlyon’s host led the procession of the King through the streets of his city—streets that were wider and lighter than the streets of Diamond, for Diamond had flung itself carelessly together over its many disordered years, while the Hero’s city had been built with beauty in mind. All the same, it lacked the vitality, the savage mystery of Diamond, for Diamond’s age and sprawling contradictions made it something beyond beautiful.

As they rode in, a great white space on their left suddenly opened like pale cupped hands, empty and begging to be filled, and indeed, the day after tomorrow, that pale cup’s implicit request would be answered. But for now the blended processions rode past the arena and into a series of wide, linked courtyards. Men hurried forward to help them dismount, to take their bundles and lead their horses to the pastures and stables below the castle. The King’s family and followers began to climb the wide staircase that zigzagged up the slopes to the castle door.