Heriot

by Margaret Mahy

  ‘Not to mind!’ Cayley comforted him. ‘I give up being pretty. Use my knife, it’s sharp – sharpening’s free.’

  Heriot cropped the fair hair closely if unevenly. ‘You’ll feel better now,’ he said. ‘You smell better already.’ He threw the mat of hair on to the fire and watched it flare and writhe in the flames, before draping another towel across the inscribed shoulders. The smell of that dirty hair burning filled the shed.

  Cayley stood, hitching the towels around him with one hand, and holding the dark soap in the other. He sniffed at the soap with interest. ‘I ’n’t think of smelling,’ he said, grinning briefly. ‘Live with it, you likely don’t notice. Or care.’

  Heriot was still distracted by those marks of beating, old stripes crossing very old ones, now all wrapped in under towels. ‘You’re like a wall that’s been written on,’ he said.

  ‘In the Third Ring they write on the walls,’ Cayley said, ‘and they write, Rid the world of a rascal. Die! Or that’s what they tell me, them that can read. But I’m not obliging. Anyhow, I can’t read my own back.’

  ‘And what’s written here?’ asked Heriot lightly, as he traced the line of a scar just above the edge of the towel, the scar running from under Cayley’s ear across his throat. As he touched it, remembering the ragged sash with the unravelling butterflies that had concealed it on their first meeting, he felt something wild flare up in him, something he suppressed with shame and astonishment and more disturbance than he allowed his face to show.

  ‘That!’ said Cayley scornfully. ‘Once my mother thought to kill me. She thought it was an act of mercy. She started thinking that love and courage and all that, would never be enough. She thought she was doing me a kindness, setting me free from it all. But she didn’t cut deep enough. Her hand turned cowardly. Maybe perhaps she didn’t really want to.’ He looked up at Heriot. ‘Everything heals that can. You learn that at my school.’

  Heriot went to search for something for Cayley to wear and the boy’s voice followed him, though he spoke more to himself than Heriot. ‘There’s those that die but take no notice. Don’t they just get up and go on walking. Likely I’m a bit of a ghost by now.’ His voice wavered as the voice of a ghost might be supposed to do.

  ‘Somewhere back a bit you were certainly lucky,’ Heriot said, coming back with a shirt of his own.

  ‘I don’t know,’ sighed Cayley. ‘It’s doom ’n’t it, and I was doomed to live.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ said Heriot. ‘Put on the shirt and I’ll find you a blanket.’ He was sure he had a blanket somewhere. After a little searching he found it, and turned to find Cayley now draped in the shirt, which came down to his knees, the towel dipping further down beneath it. Covered, Cayley slumped on to a stool by the fire to eat the bread and cheese Heriot had prepared for him, though with nothing like the unashamed greed he had shown whenever they had wandered in the Second Ring together. Then he leaned forward and was violently sick into the wood bucket on the edge of the hearth.

  Heriot exclaimed with irritation. ‘I should have thought!’ he said. ‘You should have started off slowly with milk and eaten just a little.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mister. My stomach ’n’t clever, not even hungry. But it hates to miss out on any lucky chance. That’s habit.’

  Heriot laughed at him as he carried out both bucket and bowl.

  ‘I’ll do the same for you one day,’ Cayley persisted. ‘Tidy up after you, clean up after you, smiling too, that’s a promise.’

  ‘A promise from a man with luck – that’s worth something,’ Heriot said gently. He came back and searched a shelf until he found a pot of honey. ‘There’s some milk left. I’ll put this honey through it. You just sit back, don’t move, don’t talk.’

  ‘I talk always. First I didn’t, now I do,’ Cayley said obscurely. ‘Words have got power over us, you and me both. It confuses them.’

  ‘Confuses who?’ Heriot asked, busily stirring milk.

  ‘Death, doom, that lot,’ said Cayley. ‘Off they go, fingers jammed in their ears.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Heriot told Cayley. ‘If you’re trying to hide from doom, don’t talk aloud all the time.’

  ‘Think so?’ asked Cayley sceptically. He drank some of the sweetened milk, after which Heriot wrapped him around in a fur rug.

  ‘You look better already,’ he said, but Cayley shook his head.

  ‘Not better, just tidier,’ he said. He let Heriot put him to bed and feed him with the last of the milk and honey from a spoon.

  ‘Sleep!’ suggested Heriot.

  Cayley looked at him, exhausted but not sleepy, twitching with restlessness. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he complained. ‘Close my eyes maybe, but nothing else.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t a man to be afraid,’ Heriot said severely.

  ‘It’s not fear,’ Cayley answered. His hoarse voice was little more than an indignant sigh. ‘I just don’t want to go off when I’m asleep. If it comes at me, I want to see it coming.’

  ‘You’ll wake up again,’ Heriot said, all the more impatiently because he wasn’t entirely sure this was true. ‘Here, look at me!’

  Cayley obediently turned his eyes towards Heriot who, almost casually, let his occupant lead him towards a mind that at first shocked, then chilled him, as it had done from the beginning.

  There was none of the usual confusion of memories, no tangle of personality, no scattered threads of old dreams, none of the assaulting legion of needs and desires sweeping out from the point affected by Heriot’s entry. Once again, Heriot was in a hugely defended place, a blank place of imprisonment, doors closed, memories measured and hidden. Cayley’s mind admitted no past and no future, living only in a narrow present. Though Heriot could read Lords and Princes, diplomats, and messengers, though he could find his way through dark and unknown landscapes there was no way he could read this boy from the streets of Diamond

  Cloud and Tree, the King’s Assassins, had impressed Heriot as men lacking the warm variety and untidiness of other people, purposely tying themselves to a single function, but Cayley was more single than any Assassin, certainly more so than Hoad the King, distracted with symbolic guilt and concern for his children, more touched by love than he was ever prepared to admit.

  Now Cayley’s singleness took charge of Heriot and turned him, aligning him along the axis of a compulsion. He found himself looking along the blade of a sword so sharp its edges seemed to dissolve into the air. And suddenly it was a blade no longer, but a silver road, a causeway that led straight without any deviation into a dark mass on the very edge of sight. Cayley was aimed along that particular causeway and into that anonymous darkness as surely as if he was an arrow in a bow, though he was both archer and arrow, the actor and the act itself.

  So intense was this image that Heriot struggled to break away. He had sometimes speculated that he might get lost in a complicated and tangled mind, but he had never imagined anything like this simplicity, where there were no landmarks, only a field of insatiable intention, meaningless to any outsider. Nevertheless he instructed his occupant, and his occupant spoke to Cayley, commanding sleep. Sleep took over immediately. The relaxing of the field around the despotic image allowed Heriot to break free and a moment later he was back in his own mind, in his own body, in his cottage, a shaken and successful Magician standing over a sleeping child, ravished by illness, compelled by commitment to some secret dream of doom, statements of punishment inscribed on his skin like lines of merciless poetry.

  23

  Celebrating a Wedding

  And at last spring came again, after which the city moved, with self-conscious majesty, into early summer. At last it was that particular time the city had been anticipating … the time of huge festivity … the time of Betony Hoad’s wedding. Heriot knew some great act of magic was expected of him and tried out various things in his mind, though he had no doubt he would be able to astonish people with imposed illusions. He did an inner rehearsing, stran
gely becoming the roses thrown and falling through the air, flower petals scattered, spreading out into the allegories acted at the gate in each wall. All the same he refused to go beyond the garden walls to join the crowds, spirits high with the excitement of the febrile celebration the city had engendered within itself.

  ‘The Hero is riding into Hoad for the wedding of Betony,’ Heriot muttered to Cayley. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to see him ride into Diamond?’

  ‘Not me,’ Cayley said with a strange derision in his voice. ‘He’s got enough to watch him. He doesn’t need me.’

  ‘Why not?’ Heriot asked, as the afternoon burst apart yet again with cheering voices.

  Two months of food and care had changed ruined Cayley back to what he had been when Heriot first knew him, a tall, tough boy, thin but broad across the shoulders, strong enough to throw off the infection that had wrestled so furiously with him. He entertained Heriot with black cheerfulness, and with his scorn for the images by which Diamond sought to control its people.

  Working in the garden, between his royal duties, Heriot talked half to himself, half to his companion, while Cayley, not so much an incalculable visitor these days as a constant attendant who despised gardening, would stare at his face, watching his lips move, following or even anticipating his words, his own lips silently framing them, so that he was repeating these conversations a fraction of a second behind Heriot.

  He had begun speaking with exaggerated care and, unexpectedly, produced, out of distant memory perhaps, words and expressions that came to him from the folk tales of Hoad, for Heriot gathered Cayley’s mother had been a great storyteller and, once upon a time, Cayley had sat cuddled on her knee, in between her moments of despair and madness, listening to tales of love and death.

  ‘It would be a good afternoon for collecting,’ Cayley now said, rather wistfully. He meant stealing. ‘I used to collect a lot on busy days. I hate to lose a skill.’

  ‘Think how you’re gaining one,’ Heriot replied, distracting him from past glories by reminding him of present ones. ‘These days they’re trying to make a warrior of you, aren’t they? You work out with Voicey Landis when I’m not around. Who’d have thought it, six months back?’

  ‘That Voicey, he’s a master,’ Cayley declared, his face brightening with anticipation. ‘But I’m to be better. In the end that is. There’s others he teaches that’s noble or born to it but I’m best of all.’

  ‘I’m astonished he took you in,’ Heriot said. ‘You looked more like a victim than a victor when I brought you along.’

  ‘He fancies a fighter first above everything,’ Cayley replied. ‘There’s bigger than me, prettier, nobler and all that, but Voicey, he knows me, he roars for me.’ Cayley was speaking familiarly of the old Warden of Arms, Voicey Landis, who worked in the castle arena, conducting the war games, the fencing, archery, wrestling – the fossilised remains of noble aggression brought to the level of a sport for everyone except Luce, and now Cayley, to whom it represented something more serious.

  Heriot cocked his head at the cheering, now so close it was almost as if the sound turned trees, gardens, and walls glassy, and he could look through them all, to see Carlyon riding by on his black horse, sprinkled by a wind from the past, perhaps, with sand from the beach of Heriot’s childhood.

  ‘You worried that you’ve got to be magic tomorrow?’ Cayley asked.

  ‘No, I know what I can do,’ Heriot answered, ‘but I don’t feel anything much for it. I could often be magical out of lightheartedness, but lightheartedness can’t be commanded. It’s wonderful in its own way, this royal wedding, but not enjoyable. It’s heavy and stiff as if someone had made a clockwork horse of gold and silver and set it all over with jewels. It glitters but it won’t gallop. It just walks on stiffly to an ending that mightn’t be happy.’

  ‘Happy?’ Cayley spoke the word as if it was one of uncertain meaning. ‘You think the Prince mightn’t fuck the Princess. He always does in fairy tales.’

  ‘Do you have to put it like that?’ Heriot said irritably.

  ‘It’s the right word for it,’ Cayley answered blankly. ‘Everyone knows. He’s to make a boy to follow after him. So what other way is there?’

  Heriot was silent. In this case at least, he could think of no word that Cayley might use equally well to define the fact, hung around as it was with the fantasies of entertainment and ritual in the city beyond.

  ‘They talk about it over in the arena,’ Cayley went on, ‘but how would they know if he did it or not? It doesn’t show, does it, not on the outside.’

  ‘I’m not interested in all that,’ Heriot said, not entirely truthfully. ‘It’s Prince Betony’s private business.’

  The shouting outside the garden walls retreated. The Hero was passing through the amphitheatre of the Lion, perhaps crossing the bridge and entering the castle. Relieved of the possibility of a chance encounter Heriot straightened up and stretched himself.

  ‘Let’s be off,’ he said to Cayley. ‘Let’s go all the way down to the sea.’ They left by a northern gate and skirted the amphitheatre of the Lion, still crowded with people who had collected to see the Hero greet the King.

  Only yesterday Heriot, a step behind the King and the Princes, had stood there watching the entry of Princess Quaeda into the city arena, carried in a litter held by Lords of her own land and Lords of Hoad, Prince Luce among them. Trumpets had been blown, white doves released, the steps by which she descended into the public streets had been covered with flowers, all of which she acknowledged while being escorted, pretty, painted and enamelled after the Camp Hyot fashion, through a crowd of strangers. Assaulted by music and acclamation, the last part of this strange journey was made across tapestries laid under the feet of her bearers as she was carried to meet the King and his eldest son, neither of them less polished or artificial than she.

  Hoad glittered in a dragon skin of gold and diamond, not natural but supernatural as if he might, in a startled moment, put out wings and soar off after the trumpet notes of his own annunciation, a phoenix among the wheeling doves. His aura of difference surrounded him, so that he wasn’t dwarfed by the wide arena, its tiered seats dappled with the faces of the ebullient men and women of Hoad. He somehow filled it with a feverish brilliance that seemed to flow directly out from him and his absurd crown.

  In that moment, Heriot, himself a specialised instrument of reception, felt a multitude of other minds open to take in the image of the King, gaining some personal direction from the crown. For the first time he came to believe the King was not simply the possessor of Diamond but was possessed by it, an act of imagination thrown up by the city’s need. But did the King imagine the city, or the city the King? Was Hoad’s image of himself so strong that he managed to project it into every other mind in Diamond?

  And what of Betony Hoad, successfully transformed into a Prince of Dreams? Was he his own dream, or the projection of an ancient fairy tale, shining through and focused by the prismatic surfaces of the books of Diamond?

  In one of the deepest channels of the port, moving between flowery islands, chains, wreaths and garlands flung into the sea to welcome her, guarded by men with dragon masks in front of their helmets, the ship that had brought the Princess to Hoad rocked sinuously, its brilliant banners rippling in the wind.

  ‘Rich man’s washing,’ Cayley said, untouched by the beauty of the silk stroked by sensuous air. Beyond lay channels filled with ships from Camp Hyot and the Islands, even one from Cassio’s Island with the Hero’s device on its bow, though the Hero himself had ridden into Diamond … had started off, of course, by riding down the Hero’s Causeway, Heriot thought, perhaps watched by Radley and Wish, their wives and children from up on the hill.

  The next day Betony Hoad and Princess Quaeda were married in the crowded amphitheatre of the Lion in the presence of the King and the Hero and various noble visitors from the Dannorad, and Camp Hyot as well as the Lords of Hoad. The Magician of Hoad stood among them as a sign o
f the Hoad’s power.

  And in the evening, at the banquet, Heriot was called on to present an amazing entertainment. The hall was lighted with pinewood torches and lamps shaped like doves. Smoke collected up under its arched roof, clouding the geometry of interesting curves. The painted designs and cornices older than either city or hall, hanging between the lamps, included stone roses of so dark a red they looked black, set among circles of laurel leaves and pictures of men and women hunting and picnicking in the forest rides. The tables were set out in the form of a letter ‘E’ and covered with fine linen and damask.

  Hoad, dressed in gold, sat like a hieroglyph of power at the head of his table. Dysart waited on his father, Luce on the Hero, the man he hoped one day to kill with honour. Behind Hoad’s chair, beside Dysart, stood the Assassin Cloud in pure white, his head glittering with its swarm of bright pins, and behind Carlyon, a purposely dark balance perhaps, was a hooded figure in black, a face impossible to see. Between the Hero and the King sat Betony Hoad and the Princess Quadea, she looking very young, even childish, in a way she had not during her procession through Hoad. Heriot felt suddenly anxious for her, this girl delivered into Betony Hoad’s life like a well-wrapped present, though the Prince, at this moment, looked particularly charming and happier and kinder than Heriot had ever seen him.

  Over the past seven years Heriot had met with Lord Glass in many moods – cheerful, ironical, sometimes even angry, but he had never seen him as troubled as he appeared to be on this occasion – an occasion that seemed to Heriot to be both brilliant and successful.

  ‘I do hope my dear …’ Lord Glass said in a mechanical imitation of his usual birdlike voice ‘… I do hope you have it in your power to perform something quite, quite incredible. You promised me forests and fairy tales and I require nothing less …’

  ‘Look at me closely,’ said Heriot, but Lord Glass didn’t hear him.