The Magician of Hoad

by Margaret Mahy

  “I’ve had enough of this place,” she said, but her mother, who was brushing her own hair, did not look up or smile an agreement.

  “Your father thinks it is too dangerous for us,” she said. “They say there’s an outbreak of sickness among the camp followers.” Her voice was calm… too calm for Linnet, who wanted her mother to rejoice. She wanted her mother to make their return even more real by flinging her arms wide and singing, “Home to Hagen!”

  So she flung out her own arms and spun around joyously, dancing on her mother’s behalf as well as her own. She saw her skirts spinning too—a wheel of colors.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” she cried.

  “Of course,” her mother answered from behind her veiling hair, and Linnet came to a sudden stop.

  “Don’t you want to go home?” she persisted, made suddenly uneasy by her mother’s curious calm.

  “Of course,” repeated her mother, sounding like her own cool echo.

  “I’m tired of all this,” Linnet went on, not wanting to explain that somehow the third Prince, the mad one, had become a friend and, being a friend, had also been able to hurt her feelings by suddenly ignoring her. “I want to be home again. Will Father be coming with us?”

  “Soon… soon,” said her mother, her words sounding like the beginning of a sad song.

  ***

  “It’s all starting again tomorrow,” Dysart told Linnet when they met that afternoon. “Carlyon’s back again. And so’s Lord Glass. They’re close to working it all out in ways that suit everyone. That’s a victory for my father. And then we’ll have a party and we’ll all go home.”

  “I’m going home now!” Linnet told Dysart triumphantly, and this time his expression did change. He looked at her with a dismay that made her feel like a significant person once more, but for some reason, the fact he had this absentminded power in her life annoyed her.

  “What? Now? Back to the ice and snow where nothing ever happens?” he asked half-jeeringly, and Linnet had her revenge by agreeing joyously.

  “It’s beautiful up there,” she cried. “It’s the land of white hares and eagles. I’m Queen of the Sky in Hagen.” Then she was suddenly alarmed to find herself sharing a secret game she’d played with her father ever since she was a little child. But Dysart had paused, his odd-colored eyes still fixed on her face.

  “Queen of the Sky?”

  “In Hagen we’re close to the sky,” Linnet said. “I can almost touch it. Someday I will.”

  “You’ll never grow tall enough,” he declared.

  “I’m catching up, though,” said Linnet, and this was true.

  In the late afternoon, still bickering, they walked out on the plain with members of both courts to witness a riding display by the gypsyish Orts, who, having been part of Tent City, selling horses to those who had lost horses in the great battle, were now about to take the road again. Their wagons, painted canvas stretched across hoops of willow, were making ready to travel down through County Doro and onward into the heart of Hoad. Linnet stared, as she always stared at the Orts, half-enchanted by this display of an ancient but unknown history passing by.

  The King, his Lords, the Hero and his campaigners, and the Dannorad Hosts were seated on platforms spread with furs. Betony Hoad and Talgesi sat side by side, while the King’s Dragons made a place for Luce to stand beside Carlyon of Doro. And there, sitting on the edge of the noble crowd, was the boy Dysart had rescued only the day before, with Dr. Feo standing over him. Linnet saw Dysart staring at the boy.

  “Who is he?” she asked, annoyed once again by Dysart’s sudden concentration on this stranger. The boy had been washed and tidied up and dressed in warm clothes. His many braids of black hair had been concentrated into a single long, thick braid of black that hung like a rope over his shoulder. Seeing them there together, he smiled and lifted his hand, palm outward. Linnet thought there was something in his smile that shouldn’t be there. He was smiling at Dysart as if they were close friends… had known each other for many years.

  “Nobody knows,” Dysart said a little complacently. “Mind you, they’re guessing away.” She was immediately sure there was something he wasn’t telling her… something secretly thrilling. She made up her mind not to gratify him by asking any more questions. But then he said, lowering his voice, “I told you. He’s the one, the one who’s been spying on me all these years. And I can feel him recognizing me.” Linnet was about to ask questions after all, but her mother’s maid nudged her into silence.

  There was a ceremony in which the captured banners of the Host were given back to the Dannorad Dukes… a sign of the Hoadish King’s determination that there should be goodwill and peace between Hoad and the Dannorad. And then the riding began.

  Linnet had wanted to stand with her father and mother, but once again she found herself standing off to one side with other children and their nurses and attendants, set between her maid Lila and Dysart, with Dysart’s watchdog Crespin a step behind them. At first it was entertaining, and they all applauded the elegant tricks of the horses with true pleasure, but then Linnet couldn’t help boasting sideways to Dysart—boasting, yet again, of Hagen, of its pure skies and strange stunted forests, and of Warning, the volcano her family displayed on their banners.

  “But it’s only one little county of Hoad,” Dysart said at last, in a lofty voice, boasting back at her, grinning as he did so because he knew it would annoy her.

  “It isn’t,” Linnet argued. “It’s high above Hoad and the Dannorad.…” She sketched its height with her arms. “It’s the country of the air.”

  “You are the air,” Dysart seemed to say, and she was about to smile, thinking he was agreeing that she was the Queen of the Sky, when she realized that what he’d really said was, “You are the heir.” She nodded proudly. Someday Hagen would all be hers. It was hers now, intricately hers, hers in everything but name.

  “But what if your father has a son?” Dysart asked unexpectedly.

  Linnet knew she would be displaced by a son, but she couldn’t believe her father would really allow Hagen to be taken away from her.

  “I’d still be the heir,” she told Dysart. “I was born first, and my father wouldn’t love anyone more than me.”

  “Crespin says your father has fallen in love with a Dannorad girl,” Dysart muttered, pointing secretly. “That one there!” Linnet looked in the direction in which he was pointing and saw a group of Dannorad women watching the riders. At the front of the group stood a girl with long braids that fell almost to her knees. She was half-veiled in the Dannorad fashion, but she looked as if she might be very young and very pretty under her layers of silk gauze. Linnet thought of her father’s unexpected remoteness and her mother’s sad voice saying, “Soon! Soon!” She was taken over by a dark astonishment that turned almost at once to fear, swelling rapidly into fury.

  “What do you know about fathers? You haven’t really got one,” she hissed as cruelly as she could. “Your father is too grand to be father to anyone—especially anyone mad.” And she glanced scornfully across at the distant golden image of the King, sitting in the great chair, his arms folded in front of him. The honey-colored fur that lined his helmet shone like a circle of light around his forehead; the spiked helmet made him look as if a rod of gold was thrust down through his skull and neck to merge with his straight spine. The clothes were so grand that the face between collar and helmet hardly mattered at all.

  “I told you that,” Dysart said, looking serenely toward the mountains. As he did so, the sun, settling into the west beyond them, came out from behind a bank of cloud, so that within seconds not only the sky but the mountains and the plain—the very ground under their feet—were dyed with a wild light.

  Far out on the plain the Ortish horsemen had gathered for their final stampede. A cry set the horses galloping. The whole horde thundered toward them, the ground trembling under the impact of hoofs.

  Dysart suddenly turned to her.

  “But I don’
t need a father,” he cried. “I’m protected. I always have been. I can feel the protection. It’s around me now. It’s never been as close as this. Watch me!”

  And then, without waiting for a reply, he leaped away from them all, sliding away from Crespin, who exclaimed desperately as he grabbed for him. But Dysart had broken free—he was running out onto the plain toward the oncoming horses. He cartwheeled twice, then ran again. Almost no one saw him to begin with, except Crespin, Lila, and Linnet. Linnet, impressed by a crazy exultation in his running, was almost tempted to follow him just to show him she could be free and crazy too, but Lila caught her arm, moaning and exclaiming under her breath, while Crespin gasped and groaned and swore, as he set off running in a desperate but lumbering fashion. He had no chance of catching the mad Prince. Looking around wildly, hoping for some sort of rescue, Linnet saw the King and the Hero leaping to their feet and, vaguely, saw the strange boy raising his right arm high, as if he were giving a command.

  Springing into the path of the oncoming horses, bright in his crimson clothes, Dysart looked as if he were on fire. Determined rather than graceful, he came to a sliding stop and flung his arms wide as if he might fly up over the stampede. Even those riders and horses who saw him weren’t able to halt their furious pace—they rode him down, and he vanished under their hoofs.

  The noise was astonishing. Some of the Ortish riders, either failing to see him or too caught up in the power of their charge to change their mood, raised their clenched fists, saluting the King. Then they swept on by and were gone. The grass was crushed flat. Yet there was Dysart, standing as straight as ever, his arm still flung up high, turning toward Linnet, smiling back as if he was dedicating a clever trick to her. Linnet stared at Dysart, then, still staring around wildly, saw the strange boy collapsing. Dr. Feo was bending over him—he was being watched over. She looked back at Dysart, wild, triumphant, and standing tall, while beyond him the horses seethed and reared and neighed, touched by some huge alarm.

  Now there was something new to be talked about. There was astonishment beyond reason… an assertion of the power of Hoad. And the next day a wild rumor began to circulate. The King’s Magician, the strange Izachel, had vanished. There was no longer a man of mystery to stand at the King’s elbow to tell who was being devious, who was lying, who was planning alternative possibilities to those the King preferred. Izachel had gone.

  But by then the King’s Peace was mostly worked out between Hoad and the Dannorad. The King had been formidable, yet generous in a way no victor in history had ever been. With or without his Magician to tell tales on other men at the table, his agreements and treaties would be signed and the Peace of Hoad would become more than a dream. And, the rumors ran, he already had a new Magician, a strange child of power. The land of Hoad might have taken away one blessing from its King, but, so the whisper went, it had delivered another.

  Linnet didn’t get a chance to speak to Dysart again on the edge of the battlefield, yet on her way back to Hagen, and over the next five years, she thought about him every day, remembering him, tiny but untrodden and triumphant, making it seem, for the moment, that he was the true center of that great plain set in the ring of mountains, able to hug the sunset, the charging horses, Linnet of Hagen, and time itself, every wild moment of it, along with everything around him, to his heart.

  INTO DIAMOND

  Diamond! thought Heriot, looking out at the world but keeping his horse’s ears in his line of vision. He was grateful that, in this world where everything else was too dissolving to be guessed about, he could still recognize a horse and still feel himself to be a confident rider. I’m being taken to Diamond. I’m being treated with glory. He laughed, shaking his head.

  The horses ahead seemed to be moving up into the air, then sinking away. The King’s procession had been winding up a hill—one of a line of hills—and now it had begun winding down again. Heriot and Dysart, following the flow, came in turn to the hilltop and were able to look down on the other side.

  There, where a broad river met the sea, on a delta made up of little islands, was the confusion of a great port, and behind the port a city contained by a straggling outer wall and two inner walls, one inside the other. It was a city of guildhalls, libraries, arching galleries, markets, houses, and streets whose intersections were celebrated with conduits, fountains, and statues. From the hilltop Heriot felt as if the city already knew him and had leaped forward to take him over. His first sight of Diamond was like a soft explosion somewhere inside his head, but by now he knew his head was untrustworthy. The city was too big to be looked at properly, even from the hilltop. There was one shape, however, that stood above all others, seeming to stare directly yet blankly back at him.

  At the city’s heart, set on a long island in the river, a huge irregular shape pointed to the sky, sprawling sideways even as it stretched upward—a castle with four towers. And just beyond those towers on the far side of the river lay yet another great block of stone, a building so dark it seemed at first to be a deep shadow cast by one of the towers. Remembering the stories of his brother, Wish, and Nesbit, Heriot was suddenly sure he was looking at Guard-on-the-Rock, the King’s home, and its black companion, the huge prison known as Hoad’s Pleasure, humped and poised like a monster, blind and crouching, about to spring out on the world. The biggest tower, the one standing at the head of the island, looking out to sea, was the oldest—older than history itself.

  When the men of Hoad first sailed up to the mouth of the Bramber River, they found an empty country… or so their particular story declared, since they didn’t count the Travelers or the tribes and families, like Heriot’s own, as a real population. Yet that old tower, the Tower of the Lion (like the Tarbas ruins and the broken aqueduct) had been standing there to greet them, proving that well before the days of the first Hoadish King there had been a powerful people in the land… people who had vanished, leaving empty shells behind.

  The tower just behind it must be the Tower of the Swan, the tower of the old Queen and her women. That third tower, built of dark stone, would be the Tower of the Crow. After that Heriot had no idea. Impressed without wanting to be impressed, Heriot followed Dysart down the hill toward the first of the city gates, riding into early afternoon.

  Passing through a grubby outer settlement, they came at last to the first wide gate, set between squat towers from which they were watched but not challenged. They moved on through the gate into a street so crowded it seemed that even the procession of a powerful King must be halted. But people hurried to stand back, bowing their heads as the King rode toward them, and then, as his horse moved on, they began shouting and waving, somehow becoming part of his victorious progress. Everyone in these streets seemed to have blond or brown hair, blue or gray eyes. Everyone appeared to belong to a different race from Heriot’s own.

  “This is the Third Ring of Diamond,” Dysart called across to him.

  “I knew it must be,” Heriot replied, not wanting to seem too much of an ignorant peasant.

  One marketplace, crowded with stalls, then another, and a few streets farther on, a third. The markets were not hugely busy, for most business was concluded in the morning. Nevertheless Heriot was confounded. People shouted up at him and he received an unwelcome shock, for though the crowd was genial he could barely understand a word they were saying. There were so many voices and so many accents all struggling against one another.

  The idea that he was dreaming, that at any moment he would wake up at home or under the tree by the road, nudged Heriot continually. He knew his clothes and his long hair must make him stand out, riding as he was in the company of Lords and Princes, and the thought of being looked at by so many strangers became increasingly alarming. He glanced sideways at Dysart, smiling and waving, responding to something in that shouting welcome that Heriot just could not recognize. But, after all, this was Dysart’s city. This was Dysart’s home. All the same, after a little while, Heriot felt the city reaching greedily toward hi
m, embracing him. Mine! The city of Diamond was telling him, in a voice both passionless and possessive, Now you are mine! Then it fell away to cleave and divide before him, unrolling its tangle of streets, and then, having declared its power over him, seeming to lose interest in his progress.

  It was the names and mottoes on the wagons and carts that most distracted Heriot. It seemed as if the city was constantly sending messages into the world. LOVE ME; I’M YOURS, said one. DEATH OR GLORY, said another. BEWARE THE DEMONS OF THE NIGHT! warned a third. Quick, painted words flew by, often before he had a chance to catch them, so he gave up trying with something like relief.

  On they went, then on again, past taverns, past crowds of people waiting by a bakehouse for their bread and roasts to be given back to them, past open drains, past stalls that sold little sausages and pies, reminding Heriot that he was ravenously hungry. On one street corner men, setting dogs to fight, suddenly straightened, stared, and cheered. Other men and boys, furiously kicking a stuffed leather ball, leaped back as the first guards advanced before they, too, began waving and cheering.

  The procession of the returning King came toward the second wall of the city, an inner wall, yet almost as well defended as the outer one. They passed through huge gates into the Second Ring of Diamond, emerging into wider spaces and rather emptier streets… streets where banks and business halls pushed ahead of ranks of houses. There was a crowd here, too—but a different crowd, a better-dressed crowd, less jostling and noisy. Many were on horseback. All the same they, too, gave way before the guards, flung up their arms, and cheered, just as the poorer people of the Third Ring had done, for the King’s victory belonged to everyone. The King raised his right hand in a calm, remote fashion; Prince Luce and Prince Dysart waved back with pleasure; but Betony Hoad, the oldest Prince and the King’s heir, barely acknowledged the applause. Sometimes Heriot, looking over his horse’s ears, could see Betony Hoad inclining his head as if agreeing with some secret proposition… some unvoiced argument. But he didn’t wave, and Heriot, who could only see his back, knew his smiles would be tight and frosty. Luce, the second Prince, flung his arms wide, and Heriot knew he would be smiling widely. Betony Hoad didn’t want to be part of this occasion, even though it was a celebration of Hoad, and Hoad was part of his name. Luce was rejoicing in the glory of it all, making himself part of the glory, and Heriot suddenly knew that in his own mind Luce was the glory. It was certainly what he wanted to be.