The Magician of Hoad (30 page)

Curiously enough, anger at his shorn head filled Heriot with something approaching strength. He quickened his step. One knee surrendered again, but feeling its collapse coming, he shifted his weight and straightened himself, prepared now for the spears of pain that shot up and down his leg.

“Now then,” said Cayley. “Bend a little.” And when
Heriot did as he was told, Cayley tossed something over his stubbled head.

“Arms!” said Cayley. “Arms now! Work your arms. Hold them up.” A moment later Heriot stood straight, with folds of a skirt tumbling around him.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“You’re dressed as one of the cleaning women,” Cayley said. “Not that it works really well, you’re so tall. But then they don’t always look closely at cleaning women. Lean forward again.” Heriot now felt something pulled forward over his head, then folded back from his eyes. “Lucky the cleaning women here wear hoods. The dress is really short on you, so bend over. Pity we can’t work out some exchange. I’m tall too, and I’m strong in the shoulders, but in my line of business I could do with being even broader. When the time comes I’ll have to make do, so let’s practice. Let’s make do now. There are two buckets outside the door… bit of water in one, brushes in the other. I thought they might have broken every joint in your body, but mainly what they done is break your nose, which is nothing, really.”

“They promised to come back and work me over again,” Heriot said.

“I’ll just bet they did,” Cayley replied. “But I’ve got in first. Now, pick up those buckets, stoop forward… stoop far forward… and let’s go. That shuffle is good.”

“I’m not acting. It’s all I can manage,” said Heriot. He picked up the buckets, stooped forward, then shuffled ahead.

“Look in front of you!” Cayley commanded, and once again Heriot did as he was told.

They came out of the cell into a long, curving gallery. A low roof twisted up over him in a shallow arch, and, even stooping, he felt his head was going to knock against it. On ahead of them, a flickering torch, set in a wall bracket, filled the gallery with a vague light.

“On! On!” hissed Cayley in that broken, urgent voice. “Walk toward the torch, and on around the bend. There’s a stair going up.” Heriot began to walk ahead of Cayley, the buckets swinging in his hands. “There might be a guard, though at this time of day, probably not. If there is a guard, today’s password is ‘Liberation.’ Whisper it as if you were afraid of the guard. Once you’re up the stair, you turn to the right and wind around another bend. There’ll be another stair upward with two guards. The password for them is ‘Eminence.’ Can you remember that, or have they shaken your brains to bits? Walk on quickly! Get ahead of me.”

The hall was lined with doors fitting so snugly it was difficult to distinguish them from the walls in which they were set. Once Heriot thought he heard a sound coming from behind one of them and hesitated.

“Walk on!” hissed the voice behind him.

It was just as Cayley had thought it might be. There was no guard at the first stair, but two men stood at the second, looking like unreliable shadows in the light of yet another flickering torch behind them.

“Well, here’s a true Lady of Diamond,” said one of them as Heriot climbed the stairs. “And what’s the word today, sweetheart?”

“Eminence!” croaked Heriot.

“Clever as well as beautiful,” said the other guard. “What have you got in your buckets?”

“Move her on!” That was Cayley now, coming up to the foot of the stair and speaking impatiently. “Get her out of my way.”

Heriot suddenly found himself pushed forward and sideways.

“Eminence,” he heard Cayley say in the soft voice of a Wellwisher. And within the next moment she was striding ahead of him. Heriot shuffled after her as quickly as he could.

A door in the right-hand wall showed itself. Once again it was guarded, but there seemed to be no password needed. Cayley strode on through. The guards stood back for her, and Heriot followed, expecting a challenge, but none came. Step after step he struggled on, bracing himself against threatening collapse, following Cayley. Suddenly he knew where he was and where she was leading him. They were moving toward the door from Hoad’s Pleasure to the Third Ring of Diamond. A bridge between the prison and the city curved in front of them. The first light of a new day advanced to meet them. Only a few steps more—a few steps more—and…

Once again the guards rapidly made way for Cayley.

“I haven’t seen you before,” one of them said to Heriot, who bobbed so that the buckets clanked against the ground, trying to angle himself so that his face was shadowed under the hood.

“Let her go!” said the other. “They’re always getting new cleaning women in Hoad’s Pleasure. After all, there’s
always blood on the floor that needs mopping, even in times of peace, isn’t there? And probably a bit more these days, what with that Betony Hoad being such a sensitive King.”

Heriot’s shuffling footsteps set curious hollow echoes running ahead of him as he limped across the bridge. Then he was safely over it and making, in his agonized fashion, for the narrowest and darkest of the streets that fanned away from Hoad’s Pleasure.

“No!” said Cayley, almost at his shoulder now. She must have stepped aside and waited for him to catch up with her. “Follow me!”

“Can I stand straight now?” Heriot asked, though he wasn’t sure he would be able to stand straight ever again.

“Just walk on,” Cayley muttered, striding on ahead of him. “Not far to go.”

And now she was leading him along a street that seemed vaguely familiar, then turning left into yet another street. Heriot felt Diamond advancing to meet him, enfolding him once more in its ancient embrace.

“Right,” said Cayley, speaking out of the shadows. “You can let those buckets fall, and stretch up if you can.” Heriot unlocked his fingers, heard the buckets crash at his feet then roll away. He tried straightening himself.

“I didn’t think it would be so easy, getting out of the tower and over the bridge,” he said.

“It isn’t easy,” Cayley said. “But you had me to unlock your door and tell you the passwords. And when a Well-wisher walks by, that’s the one people look at, even the guards. And, though things are shifty at present, what with
the King out at sea and his son playing games, it has been peace for a long time, hasn’t it? Things relax. The hard part was getting up the first stair, and we danced through that. Turn right along here.”

Heriot stumbled after her, swayed, fell against a wall, straightened himself, and stumbled on again, taking tiny steps, performing a painful dance. He understood there were closed doors on either side of them… humble doors… and sometimes dimly lit windows that seemed to blink as he limped slowly by. He got the impression from the smells of food in the air that he must be walking along a street that served the kitchens of the grand houses of the Third Ring. And then, suddenly, he was aware of someone coming down the street toward them.

“Cayley!” he whispered, hearing panic in his voice.

“Quiet!” she whispered back. “No worries! It’s friends come to meet us.”

They were suddenly surrounded.

“Is he all right?” someone asked.

“Nothing that won’t heal, given time,” Cayley said. “He’s done amazingly well, considering what’s been done to him. Let’s move on quickly.”

“We’re ready,” said another voice. “No one will wonder if we leave early. No one wonders about us. Not really!”

“Follow me,” said Cayley to Heriot. “I know the way. Better to go through the wall rather than past a guardhouse.”

Heriot simply obeyed her, stumbling across streets and squares into a little park, down rough steps, where he fell, only to be hoisted up again. Early morning was staining the sky over the Second Ring. His damaged knee collapsed
under him and he fell yet again, but the others crowded in around him, pulling him back onto his feet and pushing him forward.

“Bring him here,” Heriot heard someone ordering. It was an accent he hadn’t heard for a long time, but it was a voice from a distant past—a voice he vaguely remembered. How long ago? Who? “Nearly there!” Cayley was saying, distracting his wandering memory. “Only a few steps more. Can you see to step up?”

“It’s a bit of a challenge,” said Heriot, suddenly confident, stepping up with his good leg and then stepping up again. His companions closed in around him and hoisted him forward into a hooded wagon. Somewhere he could hear horses shifting in their harnesses.

“Move on!” said Cayley impatiently from somewhere behind him.

“Welcome home!” said that vaguely familiar voice. “You make a considerable woman, don’t you? Lie down in the bunk there and I’ll do what I can to clean you up.”

The voice belonged to Azelma, the Travelers’ wise woman. Heriot was being taken in by the Travelers, and as he sighed with relief, closing his struggling right eye, swollen and weeping, he did indeed feel almost at home.

The Travelers traveled, and the land of Hoad opened to receive them. In the beginning they moved along wide, winding roads across gentle hills. Heriot, lying closed in Azelma’s wagon, felt that wagon slowly tilting up, then dipping down, up then down, and it seemed to him, as he lay in a dream of both pain and relief, that he was feeling the whole land of Hoad breathing, huge breaths deeper and slower than his own, yet somehow in tune with them. He even felt that Hoad might be breathing for him, or that he could be doing what the Magicians were supposed to do—that he might be breathing for the land itself. And he felt, once again, his occupant stirring cautiously in his head.

At one stage the van came to rest. They had been stopped by soldiers of Hoad, who questioned the Travelers, and then began searching the vans.

“They’ll be in here in a minute,” Azelma said, sounding anxious for the first time. “We’ll try hiding you, but…”

“I might be able to hide myself,” said Heriot, and began
thinking himself out of existence, relieved to find himself becoming something of a Magician once more, and, simultaneously, feeling relief at the prospect of becoming nothing. One of the soldiers came in, hesitating briefly at the door. The occupant shifted and touched the soldier’s mind, altering his perception. He went out again.

“No one in there,” Heriot heard him calling.

“A good trick, that,” said Azelma, sounding impressed.

“I’m healing a bit,” Heriot replied. “I’m getting myself back again.”

“But you lost yourself, back there,” Azelma said. “I felt it. Just for a moment you thought yourself out of the world.”

“Everyone needs a break from existence,” Heriot answered lightly, and then added, “I didn’t really think myself out of the world. What I really did was shift things in that man’s mind. Yours, too. You could both see me, but you didn’t know what you were seeing.”

Why did you desert me back there?
he was silently asking his occupant.
Why did you let Betony bring me down so far?

The melting,
it said faintly.
We must save our strength for the melting!

What melting?
Closing his eyes, Heriot sent this question back into his own head, but there was no answer.

***

After two days had gone by, Azelma and Cayley helped him out to the front of the van, and he was able to sit there for an hour or so, his injured leg stretched in front of him, and watch the world unwinding around him—watching mainly from his left eye, though his right was slowly recovering.
The Travelers went though a series of small woods, then entered a great forest. The stillness of that forest seemed to impose silence upon them all. Even the Traveler children grew quiet, and they moved on, following a road that was clear but softened by leaves, so that, for a while, they were enclosed by an inexplicable tranquility. Taking it all in, dreaming in that silence, Heriot felt himself somehow drifting, but with a profoundly purposeful drift. He was coming together again. Riding out from under the forest branches was like breaking out of enchantment. Voices rose again; someone somewhere laughed; children began shouting and arguing once more. They camped and slept, then woke and took to the road again, now following the course of a river for a few leagues before it spread out, growing wide and shallow, when they crossed it at a stony ford and came into farmlands, which meant Heriot had to go back inside the wagon once more in case he was seen and commented on, which might mean some rumor winding its way back to Diamond. After all, the Travelers were still traveling in Hoad.

At first this journey seemed timeless.… Heriot, more than willing to surrender to the farms and forest and river he saw around him, didn’t care where they were going… but little by little curiosity came alive in him.

“How long have we been going?” he asked.

“Only a week,” said Azelma. “Lie still!”

“I’m feeling better,” Heriot said.

“Lie still,” Cayley told him sternly. Her broken voice was amused, yet just a little ominous, too. “I’ve owed you all these years. Now you owe me. You do what I tell you.”

“We’re well out of Diamond,” Azelma said. “They’ve checked us, so they’re letting us go on. All the same…”

“All the same… ,” echoed Cayley.

After a moment Heriot began, gingerly, to feel his face.

“And stop that,” Cayley told him. “I’ll let you know everything you need to know. Like, you’ve got a smashed nose. You’ll never be pretty again.”

“Forget being pretty! It hurts to laugh,” Heriot said restlessly. “That’s the worst of it.”

“Then I’ll tell you nothing but sad stories,” Cayley promised him.

It seemed to Heriot that, despite the fact he was still racked with various pains, despite being dominated by a huge and puzzling weakness that seemed, in a curious way, to go all the way back to that strange seizure he had experienced as a boy out on the causeway, he was somehow more at rest with himself than he had been for years. He was beyond Diamond… free of the King’s Zoo… free of the haunting mazes of the city… even free of his strange friendship with Dysart, all things that had become part of him but that had also, somehow, further divided his divided self. He wasn’t tempted to ask the Travelers in what direction they were traveling. He wasn’t tempted to ask for any map of Hoad they might have. He thought that, anyway, they probably had no maps except for one single map that was part of every Traveler mind, every Traveler dream, every Traveler movement, as they slid silently across the land, following tracks they had followed for hundreds of years. And, as he healed, Heriot found himself invaded by a curious lightness, which he thought he recognized.