Heriot

by Margaret Mahy

  ‘Let’s get him inside!’ shouted Nesbit. ‘Here comes the rain.’ And, at that, the clouds seemed to split open and rain poured down, soaking them in seconds.

  As Radley carried him towards the house, Heriot lifted his eyes at last, and looked frantically over his brother’s shoulder, through the veil of tumbling raindrops, at Carron, whose face, alight with interest, was quite unmarked by a single smear of blood. Big splashes of rain shone for a moment like silver coins pulled out of shape, and were blotted out, almost immediately, by the downpour. A door opened and closed. Then the kitchen embraced them all, its air thick with smells of cooking and another ancient smell – the smell of time, which no scrubbing or rubbing could totally clean away.

  ‘Take him through into the big room,’ Great-Great-Aunt Jen was ordering, and he heard the familiar creak of a heavy door, a sound which had always made him think the house was asking a question over and over again.

  Light dimmed. As Radley laid him on the long table that ran down the centre of the room, Heriot found himself staring up into a series of interlocking arches carrying a ceiling which had once been painted to look like an evening sky.

  ‘He was terrified,’ Radley was saying in a puzzled voice. ‘But there was nothing to be frightened of, was there?’ There was a ragged chorus of agreement. Heads bending over Heriot turned and nodded.

  ‘Here’s his mother,’ said Great-Great-Aunt Jen, and Heriot’s trembling grew less at the sound of her calm voice. ‘Maybe he started out trying to trick us, and tricked himself into this state. He must have known I’d be cross with him, vanishing for ages just when we’re busy.’ But Heriot knew that, if it was a trick, he was the tricked one, not the trickster.

  ‘He’s bitten his lip almost through,’ said Radley. ‘That’s not acting.’

  ‘He’s had one of his fits,’ Carron said. ‘He’ll get over it. He always does.’

  Radley now became angry, something that almost never happened. ‘He hasn’t had one for three years, and when he did it was different from this, so just forget it, Carron!’

  There was a burst of confused conversation as every other Tarbas in the room expressed an opinion, mostly agreeing with Carron, but sympathising with Radley. Heriot felt relieved at the thought that it might be his old trouble in a new form. But there had been no pain, only one inexplicable shock following sharply on another. His mother took his hand, but, as she did so, another face showed up beside hers, vivid, amused, a little sympathetic, a little scornful. It was Azelma, pushing in through the family.

  ‘He’s had a vision,’ she said. ‘I told you! He’s one of those.’

  And she peered at him, interested in his fear, but untouched by it. This time the chorus was made up of Traveller voices, all agreeing with Azelma.

  ‘Anna,’ said Great-Great-Aunt Jen to Heriot’s mother. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Don’t ask her, ask him! He’s the only one who can tell you!’ Azelma said. And she flashed a triumphant smile down at Heriot.

  ‘Ask him!’ repeated the voices. ‘Yes! Come on, Heriot! Pull yourself together. Why? What happened? What did you see?’

  Heriot pushed himself up on his elbows, and stared at Azelma.

  ‘Come on! It’s not an illness!’ Azelma said impatiently. ‘More likely a talent!’ Heriot spoke, but he hardly recognised his own voice, it was so roughened by the force of his screaming.

  ‘I saw a man in black standing right behind Carron,’ he said. ‘Face blacked out – hands too. But his hair was red, and braided tight.’ Everyone waited critically for him to continue. ‘He was still as stone – and Carron was talking on and on …’

  ‘I’ll bet!’ muttered Radley.

  ‘… And then the red-headed one smiled and … and stabbed Carron, and Carron just – his eyes filled with blood, all his teeth were …’ Heriot made a waving movement with his hand, ‘when he smiled there was blood round every tooth but he kept on talking …’

  ‘He would too!’ Radley agreed.

  There was an outburst of comment, as every Tarbas and every Traveller had something to say.

  ‘Oh come on! Don’t you recognise what the boy’s just told you?’ Azelma’s voice sounded above the others.

  Great-Great-Aunt Jen came round from behind him to look directly into his face. When she spoke next it was in a voice he had never heard her use before. ‘All in black?’ she asked him. ‘With braided hair?’

  Heriot hesitated, touching his swelling lip gingerly with the back of his hand. ‘It was red, his hair,’ he said at last. ‘Not ginger! Red! Done up like a plaited cap. Dyed.’

  Great-Great-Aunt Jen stepped back from him as if he had tried to spit poison at her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard they dye it that colour.’

  She turned to Heriot’s mother. ‘Anna, your son appears to have seen one of the King’s Assassins giving Carron what they call the King’s Mercy. Mostly they have their faces painted white, but for Assassinations they blacken-up.’

  For once the family fell silent. They huddled together a little, while, at the end of the table, the Travellers drew slightly apart from them. Great-Great-Aunt Jen went on.

  ‘I’ve heard stories about those Assassins … Wellwishers, people call them, giving a good name to a wicked shape. It mightn’t mean anything. Perhaps it’s nothing but his old illness after all, but with the pain turned into bad dreams.’

  ‘Maybe Carron’s talk brought it on,’ suggested Nesbit. ‘He’s been sounding off about the King. Boys’ talk! Silly stuff.’

  ‘Get Heriot to bed,’ said Jen. ‘Then we’ll talk about it.’

  ‘Maybe he’s jealous that I’m the one who’s going to Diamond,’ shouted Carron, as Radley carried Heriot out of the room. ‘Maybe he’s jealous because I’m moving on. Well, it’ll take more than Heriot’s babbling to frighten me.’

  ‘But how could he get a picture of the King’s Assassin if he didn’t even know they existed?’ Azelma was asking.

  Radley carried Heriot upstairs, his mother coming up behind them, to the narrow room Heriot had shared, first with Radley until Radley married, and then with Carron, until Carron grew too important to share a room with a younger boy.

  ‘It’s probably a pinch of the old people in you somewhere,’ Radley told him, helping him take off his shirt. ‘It showed up in Ma’s family from time to time. Didn’t it?’ He looked over at their mother.

  ‘In the Tarbas family too!’ she replied. ‘I’ve always suspected Wish had it.’

  ‘Wish?’ Radley protested. ‘Not Wish! He’s straight enough!’

  ‘Maybe!’ she agreed. ‘After all he’s a farmer, and they don’t make farmers – the ones who are taken that way. They beat themselves against the world trying to get deeper and deeper into it. They don’t settle.’

  Heriot was shocked – they were speaking together as if he couldn’t hear them –as if he wasn’t there.

  ‘I am settled,’ he cried. ‘I’m settled here.’

  His mother started and looked down at him a little guiltily.

  ‘Of course you are. I was just running on,’ she said.

  – ± –

  In the end Heriot slept and dreamed riotous, unwieldy dreams that slid away from him as the rain roared all night on the roof above his head. By the time he woke the day was half over, and watery sunlight was slanting on to the floor. In spite of the storm the Travellers had moved on, and the farm was just the farm, a map that seemed to be inscribed on a parchment, a parchment that just happened to match up with Heriot’s skin.

  7

  No Return

  Heriot wasn’t really ill, in spite of the two waking nightmares which had come at him so quickly, one smashing in on top of the other. He lay in bed, feeling as consumed as cold ashes, trying to will himself into being his earlier self once more. The whole family knew about his vision of death and blood, but the moments on the causeway, the dissolving of that black window in his head and the feeling that some alternative self had crept out from behin
d it to work its way into him in some different way – all this he kept secret. He didn’t want to add to the rumour of his own strangeness. And besides, he felt that if he didn’t share the memory, it might somehow shrivel and die away. Deciding this, he felt suddenly hopeful, as if, by some wonderful chance, he might be allowed to live through recent days again and do everything right the second time round.

  The inevitable morning came. He watched the ceiling of his room lighten, then got up, dressed himself and went downstairs, intending to enjoy everyday life as completely as he could … intending to take it in and use it to drive the strangeness out.

  – ± –

  For Heriot there was to be no return to everyday life. His place in the world had been part of a compact that was now dissolved. He knew it at once when he stepped into the noisy kitchen, and an unaccustomed silence fell.

  Heriot stared around at the women and children, at his great-great-aunt, his sister Baba, at Nesbit’s wife, Ashet, with her twin daughters, at Radley’s Nella holding her baby against her shoulder, and at Joan, Wish’s wife, moving to stand between Heriot and her little son.

  ‘You think I’d hurt him?’ Heriot shouted.

  ‘I know it’s not your fault,’ she answered nervously, ‘but if you see anything bad I don’t want him to know about it.’ Heriot stared from one to the other.

  ‘Well, come on, Heriot,’ said Ashet, who had always liked him. ‘Get yourself something to eat. There’s a bit of porridge left and some buttermilk.’

  He sat in the homely kitchen. Masks of beasts and men carved on an ancient bit of wall looked out over his head, and below was a long inscription in a language so old that nobody could understand it any more.

  His family talked around him and over his head, but now Heriot was excluded when glances were exchanged, left outside of the magical flashing of eye to eye by which the family constantly kept in touch with itself. And later in the evening when the Tarbas men came home and they all came together for dinner, there was a space around Heriot that no one seemed willing, or even able, to share with him.

  Slowly over the next few days of advances and retreats, he came to understand that he was no longer a simple, gardening brother. He had become someone through whom a prophetic beast might bleat or bray, making pronouncements of doom. At the kindest, he was now a presence with which even his family could no longer feel easy. Nesbit, Ashet and Joan accepted him without complaint, as an injury they could not heal and must endure, protecting themselves by looking around him as often as they could. He began to imagine that, as he walked by, their flesh actually crept, and he tried to spare them, by looking away. On the other hand, Wish began to single him out, but this only made him nervous for Wish seemed nervous too, struggling to say something, without knowing quite what it was he had to say. Even Radley’s warmth was touched with sadness, as if he were mourning a brother whose place Heriot had unfairly taken.

  The only person in his entire family who seemed at ease with him was Baba, who was quite happy to share her kitchen work, such as peeling old potatoes, skimming cream and churning butter. Her teasing and complaining was one of the few familiar things that did not change, so, for a while, he welcomed it and kneeled beside her in the kitchen, helping her chop onions for the soup pot that constantly simmered on the back of the fire bed. Heriot did most of the chopping and Baba did all the talking.

  ‘Well, I think you’re lucky,’ she told him. ‘You’ll get away from here. They’ll do something … put you to work in Diamond, perhaps, though they’re not letting Carron go, not until he learns to talk a bit more carefully. But you – you’ll get clean away. Something’s happened to you, but nothing will ever happen to me.’

  The despair in her voice astonished him.

  ‘Everything in the world’s going on out there,’ she cried, waving her hand at the kitchen door, and the view of the hills beyond, ‘and I’m stuck here. It’s not fair.’

  Heriot realised his difference had set Baba free to talk about her own differences as if they must now share a view of the world. But Baba wanted desperately to leave the very place Heriot wanted to get back to.

  After a while the kitchen and the dairy and her pacing dissatisfaction worried him too much, and he took to wandering in the fields, edged out but unwilling to move away from the farm which contained all warmth, all food, all the companionship he knew. He would get up in the morning, cut bread and cheese and walk up on to hillsides where sheep grazed. There he would hide himself in a copse or under a hedge, staring intently down into the grass, or out to the blue tracery of mountains barely distinguishable from the sky. His silences became longer and deeper and his visits to the house more furtive.

  He took food up to his room where his mother sometimes joined him. She talked very little, but she had always been cool. Besides, Heriot knew, without resentment, that Radley, her oldest and simplest child, had always been her favourite, while he would always be linked in her mind with the death of his father.

  He took to plaiting his long thick hair in fine braids, just as the old travelling men sometimes did. He’d always admired this ancient style, and, after all, he had plenty of time these days. Out in the hills he sometimes pressed himself desperately against the earth’s rough skin, trying to force it to acknowledge him as its true child, commanding it to feed ease back into him. He felt acknowledgement, but of a strange, dry kind somehow beyond comfort. There was to be no simple way back.

  It was quite by accident that he was at home one grey day in early summer when Lord Glass, the King’s Devisor, rode into the courtyard, searching for a Magician.

  8

  Kings and Fathers

  Late one afternoon, on the very day that Heriot Tarbas felt the black window in his head dissolve and the huge possessing fragment of himself sweep out and over him, Linnet of Hagen, her mother, her nurse, her father’s marshal and a small guard of campaigners came riding out of a winding pass and on to the edge of a high plain set around with mountains.

  There, far in the distance, Linnet could make out the southernmost boundary of Hoad trembling with cold, yet bleeding fire out of its mountains, and between her party and those distant fires lay a battlefield. Fourteen days earlier, the seven counties of Hoad, including her own county, Hagen, had fought their eastern enemies, the Hosts of the Dannorad to a standstill, and now the noble families were coming together to celebrate the victory and to witness the beginning of what was already being called the King’s Peace. History was being made, and they were to be part of it all.

  Linnet and her party made their way along a track that wound between mounds of broken wheels and weapons, strips of shredded canvas, piles of dirt flung up to make temporary frantic defences … debris of the last battle. Among the trenches and mounds Linnet saw a drifting population of shabby men and women picking fragments over, searching for anything valuable that might have been left by the first wave of searchers, and she wondered, with a sort of captivated horror, just how it would feel to come unexpectedly on a little piece of someone … an eye staring up at the sky, or a hand with a wedding ring on it.

  As they rode towards the city of tents another party came riding to meet them, bathed in the rich light of the late afternoon. Linnet made out a pointed helmet lined with blond fur, and a robe of golden velvet embroidered with roses set in delicate medallions of black. For the first time in her life, she was seeing the King of Hoad, and the man beside him must be Carlyon, the Hero of Hoad. His handsome face sat squarely above a finely pleated, almost womanish, white silk shirt; a long white coat fell in swooping folds from his huge shoulders. It seemed that Linnet and her mother were to be greeted by both the King and the Hero, twin emblems of the land, both more myths than men. But Linnet looked eagerly past these legends, searching for her own father among the men who followed the King. His face, harsh yet smiling, made her forget all others, so that, later, when she tried to recall the welcome all she could remember was a glittering shape, golden but blurred, riding beside a shinin
g, white one. Later, she was to find herself half-believing the King’s clothes might ride and rule on their own, without anyone inside them.

  Then Linnet stared at two young men, neither of whom looked back at her with any interest whatever. The handsome one, being the taller of the two, seemed as if he must also be the older, but he was so good-looking he had to be Prince Luce, which meant he was a year younger than the slighter, round-faced fair brother beside him, Betony Hoad, the King’s heir. Linnet knew she was considered a possible bride for Luce, so it was Luce she studied most intently, until her nurse, Lila, nudged her. She realised that, just when she most wanted to be regal, she had been gazing and gaping like a simple girl who had never seen such glory before.

  ‘My oldest son … Prince Betony Hoad,’ the King was saying to her mother from somewhere under his helmet, gesturing with a pale hand, while the round-faced Prince smiled a curious, wincing smile, as if, by naming him, his father had struck him a blow. Linnet wondered about the third Prince, the mad one. Was he out among the tents somewhere? He was almost never seen … indeed some stories said he ran on all fours, like a dog, and Linnet’s father had told her, sounding slyly triumphant, that the Prince’s madness was a sign of some sort of flaw in the King’s power.

  They had arrived in a city of tents and pavilions whose streets and landmarks were constantly changing. They passed through a series of shelters made of rags and sticks put up by poor camp followers, who included women and little children, and then through a whole market of booths for pedlars and moneychangers, burning torches and braziers flaring dangerously in the early evening. Temporary smithies … kitchens … painted wagons and herds of horses … everything enchanted Linnet as they rode into Tent City. The gypsies of Hoad, the mysterious Orts (called Orts because they were the left-over scraps of a people who had lived in Hoad before the King’s people took command of the land), stood braiding ribbons into the manes of the horses they had already sold. They looked up as the newcomers rode by but did not smile. The wind, lifting strands of rusty hair from Linnet’s forehead, smelt of freshly bruised grass, but under this innocent smell there was a taint that made her wrinkle her nose a little, an edge of decay that came and went, so that, sometimes, she thought she must be imagining it.