The Magician of Hoad

by Margaret Mahy

  “No rest, then,” suggested the King, smiling at him. Lord Glass was one of the few people at whom he really smiled.

  “It seems not, my dear,” said Lord Glass with an unusual familiarity. “You can surround yourself with peacemakers who share your passion. But there are others who—”

  “I don’t believe my sons share my passion,” the King said, interrupting him. “If some of our distant lands and allies have forgotten that peace is the essence of our kingdom, it seems I will have to travel there in order to remind them.”

  There was an arrested moment, as if the listeners were taking in an incredible announcement. Dysart was the first to break the silence. “To Hagen?” he cried, leaping to his feet, but his father, without looking at him, waved a vague hand at him, commanding him to sit.

  “To the Islands,” he said. “And maybe home again through the Dannorad. Though maybe not!”

  “Lord King, it might be… risky,” objected Lord Glass. His voice was not so much calm as playful, yet something was creeping into his expression that Heriot had never seen before. Try as he might, Lord Glass could not hide profound alarm. “Remember, you are the very essence of the peace of Hoad, and—”

  “I’d go with good protection,” said the King. “And I would leave my city well protected.”

  “Lord King, you’d be taking our best protection with you,” Lord Glass persisted, “because you are the protection of the city. You would be leaving Diamond without a King, and the King is more than a man. The King is the sign of dominion, of power.…”

  “I would leave you in charge,” said the King. He turned to look at his oldest son. “And Betony Hoad is old enough to try being King in my place for a few weeks. It is time he went beyond contemplating the outer color of kingship and made some connection with its inner ferocity.”

  Heriot knew beyond all doubt that, while Lord Glass was filled with something approaching dismay, something entirely different was leaping up in Betony Hoad. His elbow might rest languidly on the gilded upward curl of his chair’s bright arm and his chin might rest between his thumb and forefinger. All the same, somewhere inside his head, he was transfiguring. Heriot, tempted to read the Prince, straightened his glasses. I’m not that fond of looking into another man these days, he was thinking. I was never that keen on it, and now it’s even lost its novelty. All the same, I’m going to read Betony Hoad. I’m going to read him now.…

  “Magician,” said the King, interrupting. “I might want you to come with me… but then, perhaps not. You are sometimes seen as a threat, rather than an entertainment. I will think about your place in my plans.”

  “If you are planning to move into debatable company,” said Lord Glass, “and the climate of the Islands suggests there is considerable debate in progress, it might be good policy to have something of a threat at your elbow.”

  “Oh, I will be defended,” the King said. “I’m not planning to go alone. We have a navy, largely unused these days. They need a project. I am planning to take a brigade with me, sufficient presence to impress the Lords of the Islands. After all, a grand escort will be expected, and it can be both my glory and my defense. And if I take my Magician too…”

  “I don’t know if I would make an adequate replacement for you without the Magician at my elbow,” said Betony Hoad unexpectedly. “The journey you are talking about is a long one, and the inner business of Diamond, and of Hoad itself, will presumably need to go on while you are traveling.”

  “Well,” said the King, “it is early days. There is time to turn it over and argue. We don’t have to come to any immediate decisions.” He looked at his oldest son. “Of course it will give you considerable power, perhaps more than you want. But you can think about that, and perhaps we can talk about it later.”

  He stood up, which was a sign that the session was over. Heriot knew Betony Hoad and Dysart were both looking at him, hoping to read something in his expression, but he refused to give any clue as to his thoughts about the vulnerability of Diamond without its King. Two years since Cayley vanished, he was thinking. But that was what he found himself thinking almost all the time. There’s this thing I have to do first, she had said, and disappeared.

  What am I? What’s left of me? he thought incredulously. The world is still wonderful. I can feel it around me and I can still move into it. I can be a seed, a branch, a whole tree. I can be free drops of water flung up from a breaking wave. Why am I sitting here at the King’s elbow, nothing but his threat or his promise… his point of power?

  Then he thought he would enjoy—no “enjoy” was too casual a word—he must have a glass of wine, so that he could relax with the world, and let his inner loss become not his master, but one of many things flooding in on him over and over again. These days Heriot found himself drinking a lot and enjoying the immediate ease and escape wine offered him. It was like relief from pain… a relief from this golden room, from the castle beyond it and the city beyond the castle and, in a different way, a release from Dysart’s friendship, too, shot through as it was with strange, unspoken expectations.

  A BLOW FALLS

  Days later, as Heriot snatched time to work in his garden, he found Diamond nudging in on him, muttering, singing, and wailing. Sometimes it came to him as a deep single voice droning on, sometimes as a chorus—manipulative voices from the First Ring… that controlling core of Diamond… as those around the King twisted and jumped and elbowed, to find places for themselves and their ambitions. Sometimes voices burst in from the Second Ring as the merchants and the dealers in trade counted their profits, struggling to become rich and make themselves powerful. And sometimes the voice of the Third Ring also burst in, dominating the other voices with a single savage scream, as if those Third Ring people, trying desperately to stay alive, had all cried out together, shrieking about their intricate struggle. Even voices from beyond the walls of the city beat in on him… voices not only of Hoad’s living people but from its history.

  The oldest stones of Hoad spoke to him strangely from its walls and from the winding mazes of its streets, crying out about lives beginning, lives ending… singing of times so ancient that time itself became timeless. These voices exploded in him from time to time in a demanding chorus. They seemed to require some response from him… some offering of self… but he had no idea how he should respond. Stunned, he listened to them over and over again, unable to hold the song at bay; listened transformed and transforming.

  “Heriot,” said a voice, and he looked up, blinking, to find Dysart standing at the end of his garden, looking at him cautiously, no longer certain which face would look up at him over the handle of the spade.

  “You were in your other place, weren’t you?” Dysart said, with just a little accusation in his voice. “That place you go to. That place you get lost in.”

  “I was totally in your place,” Heriot said. “Your city took me over. It does from time to time.”

  “Are you drunk?” Dysart asked.

  “I don’t think so. Just a little lifted up,” Heriot said. “What about you?”

  “I think I am drunk,” Dysart said. “And it’s only halfway through the morning.”

  “Well, then,” said Heriot, and he propped his spade against an apple tree, and then flopped down into a patch of sunlight. Dysart, just a little unsteadily, took a few steps, then sank down beside him. They sat there, side by side in the same shaft of warm light, both illuminated but in contrasting ways.

  “It’s strange the way things are turning out,” Dysart said reflectively. “When Luce was killed, before I could stop it, I felt a burst of joy, and I was horrified at myself. I had seen my brother killed and felt a sort of grief, but it was a symbolic grief. When you mention your brother, there’s passion in your voice, but Luce was just a bright shadow to me. We’d been held apart, probably because I was a mad Prince back then, I suppose, but also because of our family. We’re treated as if we’re devices, not people. We’re the King’s signs, not his sons. What was
truest in that gruesome arena was that burst of guilt mixed in with joy. Because I thought Linnet would be mine—she thought so too. But it turns out her father is determined to marry her into the Dannorad, which is a sort of treachery to Hoad. She’s fighting against her father… she tells me so in the letters she smuggles out, and I know she is, or she’d be well and truly married off by now. And here am I, sitting here with my father’s Magician, confessing to guilt about that moment of joy. Isn’t it all mad? Mad to be several people all at once. Prince! Man! Thinker! Feeler! And what about you? You miss your boy Cayley… not that he was a boy anymore; he was becoming a grown man, quick and strong.”

  “He saved me, no doubt about it. He took on those three men so neatly,” Heriot said. “And I’m told they’d had a lot of practice at what they’d been ordered to do to me.”

  “They were after money,” Dysart said sharply. “They thought you had money hidden in your hut.”

  “Dream on!” said Heriot derisively. “You know Dr. Feo sent them, either to beat me unconscious and take me somewhere or kill me outright. But I don’t know why, and I don’t know who stood behind Dr. Feo. Someone did. I can tell so much about a lot of secret things, but I still can’t tell about that.”

  Dysart was silent for a moment.

  “Well, you’re the Magician,” he said at last. “I’ll have to take your word for it that you’re a faulty Magician. Anyhow, how are you finding it with Betony in charge?”

  Heriot looked around the orchard as if the very trees he trusted might have suddenly become treacherous… might be taking in his words in order to report back to some hidden authority.

  “I’m finding it dangerous,” he said at last. “Something’s going on. I can feel the danger, but I don’t know what it is. It’s so mixed up. Why has your father taken off like this? Why has he left your mad brother—whose madness is entirely more serious than any madness of yours and mine— in charge? He knows Betony isn’t fit—he’s not to be trusted as a King should be trusted. Betony works on an entirely different plane from your father.”

  “I’ve wondered too,” said Dysart slowly. “But I think it’s a test for Betony. Maybe my father hopes a taste of kingship will turn out to be something of that marvelous life Betony says he longs for. And it may even be a trap. If he tries anything too impulsive, you’ll be able to report to Lord Glass. The men of County Glass will be there to protect Diamond, and the King would then be able to displace Betony as heir to the throne. And…”

  Heriot interrupted him, exclaiming incredulously. “You mean he’d have his own son executed?”

  “If his son tried to cut him down, he’d be entitled to,” Dysart said. “It’s happened before. But I think he’d probably exile him to an island prison off the coast, and Betony would have to live out his days on his own. It might suit him. He might find that extremity he longs for in being solitary on a solitary island.”

  “That’s not the sort of extremity he longs for,” Heriot said contemptuously. “You Kings and Princes! Isn’t there any sort of ordinary kindness left in any of you?”

  Dysart was silent, as if he was puzzling something out. “You go on about kindness and family life,” he said at last. “But what about the life of Hoad itself? There’s life there and a different set of rights and wrongs. You’ve read the histories. You know there’s always been shifting and sliding, and maneuvering, treachery and death around the throne. Everyone wants to be a King. Everyone wants to be as powerful as it’s possible for an ordinary person to be. It’s a longing lodged in the human brain.”

  “Not every brain. Your father didn’t want it—well, not to begin with,” Heriot argued. “He had to give up certain possibilities… a certain sort of happiness… children— children other than you and your brothers—other children who were never born.”

  “But he was obedient. A new sort of longing moved in on him,” Dysart replied. “Now he has to make do with the children who were born. And he wants to be infinitely powerful on behalf of his peace. Peace is his truest child, it’s melted into his dreams.”

  “And, deep down, you think you’re the only one who’d look after the King’s Peace for him, don’t you?” Heriot asked.

  Dysart said stoutly, “Not until after my father. If I was King after him I’d try to look after his peace and the changes he’s made. Whereas Betony would take pleasure in destroying it all, burning it up, and burning himself along with it.”

  “That feels about right,” Heriot agreed, nodding slowly.

  “You read that in him?” asked Dysart curiously.

  “I get close to reading it,” Heriot said. “Sometimes his moods come out to meet me, and then linger on in my head, like flavors of despair. But since Cayley disappeared, it’s as if that reading part of me has stepped back.”

  He didn’t want to talk about his occupant even to Dysart, didn’t want to admit he was living through days when his occupant had retreated back into some deep crack in his head and was unwilling to reveal itself, even to him. At the same time he was astonished to find he had become so proud of his power and his difference he didn’t want to acknowledge its incomprehensible diminishment. He had not only lost Cayley, he seemed to have lost something of that extra sense that might have enabled him to find her. Fleetingly he wondered if this had happened to Izachel, and if it was from that despair he had been driven to steal power from the child Heriot had once been. And, as he felt this, he also felt himself flooded by Dysart’s despair over losing Linnet.

  “I don’t think Linnet will let her father marry her into the Dannorad,” he said. “I think she’ll fight against it, even if she beats herself to death in the battle.”

  “Maybe,” said Dysart, “but are you guessing as a Magician or a peasant or a family man? Now, Linnet and I—we’re not just people. We’re noble, signs of Hoad and Hagen, and it’s part of our tradition to be loyal to the Lord of the land and to the King. Being noble isn’t the same as being free. And what if Linnet gets worn out by it all and gives in? I couldn’t blame her, could I?”

  ***

  Later that afternoon Heriot set out, as he had set out every day when he had had the freedom to do so, to wander into the Second Ring, hoping to pick up some echo of Cayley’s wild laughter, or catch the reflection of her brilliant smile on some shining surface, hoping his occupant might dissolve into a mist of awareness, eager to seize on any clue. But these days when he went out into the city the occupant refused to blossom out. If anything, it shrank deeper into him, forcing itself into some sort of hibernation. Sometimes it seemed to Heriot that it had received a sign from the outer world and was saving itself for something. Sometimes it seemed as if he had unconsciously cut himself away from its contradictory powers. He could not tell. There was a certain freedom in his new isolation, but most of the time he felt he had been lessened, that his occupant had turned its back on him.

  Heriot was to be betrayed. Returning at last to his shed in the shadowed evening, he received no warning and no protection.

  Once again a blow fell, but this time Heriot fell too, toppling forward not only into the grass under the apple trees, but into a darkness stabbed every now and then with daggers of white lightning. And when he woke once again, he woke into darkness of an entirely different kind.

  HANGING FROM THE WALL

  At first Heriot thought he was lying on his back, hands clasped somewhere over his head. Then his aching arms spoke to him urgently, and he realized he was hanging by his wrists, unconsciously trying to brace his back against a stone wall. Scrabbling with desperate feet, he found a floor, balancing himself on his first and second toes, believing, for a moment, he might be standing. Pain shot up through his calves and into his hips. Was he standing?

  Yes, he was definitely standing—or at least he was able to touch an invisible floor. He tried adjusting his arching feet, groaning at the cramps that immediately took over, knotting him into himself. Yes. But those feet had been wearing laced boots only a moment ago. Why were they b
are now? Why was he was bare all over, hanging naked in the dark? He was chained to a wall, and only trying to stand. Standing, then slumping, swinging by his chained wrists.

  “Magician,” said a voice out of the darkness. “You’re waking up.”

  “Lord Prince,” Heriot replied automatically, a picture of Betony Hoad framing itself around that voice. “I can’t see you.”

  “I can’t see you,” Betony replied. “But I can hear you groaning.”

  “No surprise there,” Heriot replied, gasping. “I’ve always been a coward. Where am I?”

  “You know where you are. Chained to the wall in a dungeon under Hoad’s Pleasure,” Betony replied. “Can you set yourself free? Be a Magician! Try!”

  “I don’t think I can,” Heriot answered, testing himself. “It’s like… like something in me has decided to sleep until the King comes home.”

  “But what King? For now I am the King. You know that,” said Betony Hoad.

  “Standing in for the King isn’t the same as being the King,” Heriot mumbled, hearing his own voice, faint and dreary, drifting back to him from some other space.

  “I am being what my father has declared me to be,” exclaimed Betony Hoad. He was invisible, but the intense triumph in his voice brought its own reality with it. Heriot was able to imagine him, blotted out by blackness, yet flinging his arms wide with a vivid intensity. “My father has left Diamond. I am King. Think that over as you hang there. And think about saving yourself if you can. I strongly advise it. You know I long for wonderful extremity, and what could be more wonderfully extreme than killing the Magician of Hoad… even eating him. Digesting him and feeling his power dissolving into my blood and becoming part of me. Now, there’s something for you to think about as you swing there in the dark.”