Heriot

by Margaret Mahy

  Then he spun on the wet stones and walked away, rounding the headland without once looking back, leaving Heriot lying on the stones behind him.

  For an hour Heriot lay like this, his gaze so fixed, his breath so shallow, that anyone coming on him might have believed him dead. But then, suddenly, he sighed, sat up, looked at his scarlet side and the dark patch on the ground. He stood: he walked out from beneath the cliff, turned and, looking up at it, saw its entire face cracked into a puzzle of fine lines, an incoherent version of the ancient inscription in the kitchen at home.

  ‘Watch out!’ said Heriot in a new, hoarse voice. ‘Watch out, you! Watch out! I’m a sad, little monster.’ Bleeding, exclaiming, warning his shadow and threatening his recent murderous companion, he began wandering, caught up in a strange dream … a dream woven both of pain and the curious impression that the person feeling that pain was not a true person, but a figure in a story that had never been told before.

  He dragged himself through bushes, climbed a slope and came back, at last, on to a definite road. Home, he thought, was somehow behind him, but he must not go there. Instead he wandered on, swaying and mumbling, until he came to a place where the road divided, the wider and better-kept part of it swinging to the right, the narrower and more uneven track turning left. ‘I’m not going to their city,’ he said aloud. ‘I’m going the other way, whatever way that is. I’m going there.’

  And he stepped on to the left-hand path, limping along, curving around two bends, after which he found he had to stop, for everything hurt too much and since it seemed he must have saved himself by now, he had an inner permission to lie down peacefully.

  14

  The Battlefield

  How long he lay there, seeping blood and dreaming, he could not tell, but a sound made him look up. At the same time he felt an advancing shadow suddenly moving across him, and then stopping. He looked up and saw a cart had drawn up alongside him, and the man driving the cart was looking down at him with curiosity and concern.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ the man asked. Heriot felt it was a question he had been asking himself over and over again, and, since he didn’t really know the answer, he couldn’t tell anyone else. All the same he sat up, wincing as he did, inventing a possible reply.

  ‘I had a fall back there,’ he said, waving his hand vaguely. ‘I cut myself.’ His voice sounded strange and lost in his own ears. ‘I banged my head. Broke a rib, maybe.’

  ‘I’m on my way back to the plain,’ the man said. ‘I reckon there’s room for you to lie in the back of the cart, but don’t go bleeding on my trade goods.’

  Somehow Heriot scrambled into the back of the cart, and flopped down once more, filled with immediate relief, for he no longer had to think about direction or taking step after step. Moving onward and away was now the horse’s task, not his. Unexpectedly he found the world spinning away from him and, filled with relief because someone else had taken over, he did indeed fall into a sort of sleep.

  In this sleep he dreamed he was sitting on that high windowsill once more, but staring, now, into an empty room. The bed was there, straightened and somehow deserted. The fur coverlet was smoothed out for once. And that agile boy with the odd-coloured eyes who had always been there, staring back at him as if he was somehow expecting Heriot to give him a message, was gone.

  He woke with no real idea of how much time had passed. All he knew was that the cart had come to a standstill, and, tilting his head sideways, he could see the man had gone too. The horse was tied to a hitching hook in a stone wall, and was feeding from a nose-bag.

  Heriot sat up slowly. Ahead of him stretched a great plain cupped by hills. It seemed as if he was on the edge of a shallow bowl of open space, but that space was seething with an energetic life. He was surrounded by tents, some of them so large they looked like castles of canvas. And there were people coming and going … men for the most part … soldiers, perhaps, Heriot thought vaguely, men with hair cut very short and swords at their sides. A few of them were as dark as he was, but many more of them were marked by a fair stubble, and glanced indifferently at him out of blue eyes. He was in a world of strangers.

  15

  Overlapping Dreams

  Heriot breathed deeply and felt the breath go into him like a thrusting spear. The blood on his shirt was stiffening as well as staining. Under his thin cover he could still feel a movement, as if tiny insects were running down his side, but he took no notice of this faint trickling. Above everything else Heriot was consumed with raging thirst. He looked into the maze around him. Somewhere there must be a place where he could find something to drink.

  Moving gently, as if he were a fragile bubble-man who might burst at any moment, Heriot edged himself up, then slid down from the cart, to stand, looking around vaguely before setting off, unaware of the curious glances he was attracting, unaware of just how strange and out of place he looked with his long braid of hair and bloodstained shirt, wandering through a city of tents that was preparing to celebrate a great and powerful declaration of peace.

  He hadn’t gone very far before he was challenged. His arm was seized, and he thought, at first, it must be by one of the soldiers. But as he turned, wincing, he found himself face to face with a young man – not much more than a boy really – almost as ragged as Heriot knew himself to be. And there, behind this boy, was a group of other boys, all looking at him as if he were something to be eaten and enjoyed.

  ‘You! Who are you?’ the young man asked him. Heriot stared back, blinking.

  ‘Go on! Who are you?’ the youth asked him again, shaking him this time, looming over him.

  Heriot gasped a little, pierced through and through by the pain in his side. His name, even in his own head, no longer made any sense. It was nothing but an echoing sound. ‘Who are you?’ he had been asked. Well. Who was he?

  ‘I … I don’t know,’ he stammered at last. ‘I think I’m a dream man.’

  ‘A dream man?’ his captor cried derisively. ‘Dream this then!’ And, saying this, he raised his left hand and struck Heriot a swinging blow, before seizing him with his right. The other boys cheered. Heriot staggered in the savage grip.

  ‘Why?’ he yelped in protest. ‘Why? I’ve done nothing to you.’

  But in some vague way he understood that this gang had been skirmishing around, looking for something to torment, some stray dog perhaps, something that would suffer and die for their entertainment, and to them, bloodstained and alone as he was, he had become that stray dog, a dog that would never be missed.

  The grip on his shoulder was twisting him to the ground, and suddenly they all closed in on him, striking and kicking, while, beyond them, fair-haired soldiers marched by as if nothing was going on. He tried to connect himself to the power he knew to be lurking somewhere within him, but for some reason he couldn’t touch it. Perhaps he had used it up, protecting himself from the knife of the naked stranger. He remained nothing but a tired boy being beaten by others.

  Better to be killed by that other one, Heriot thought, swinging up his arms desperately, trying to protect his head. Better that knife than being kicked to death. Quicker!

  But suddenly another voice was shouting, shouting imperiously as if it expected to be obeyed. ‘Leave him alone! You there! Leave him.’ And his attackers fell back, while, bruised and bleeding yet again, but free from his enemies, Heriot, who had screwed his eyes tight, rolled over and opened them again.

  The first person he saw was a girl … a girl in rich clothes staring down at him, as shocked as if he were an animal being slaughtered in front of her. Then he looked at the person in the act of dropping on to his knees beside him, and found himself staring up into odd-coloured eyes, one blue and one green, blinking under a mop of mouse-coloured hair … someone Heriot recognised, even though they had never met before. And, as the boy stared down at him, Heriot saw his expression changing … saw him jerk back on his heels as if he, too, had been given a shock, looking so startled his startleme
nt was almost a form of fear.

  ‘You!’ the boy cried softly. ‘You! Hey! You’re my ghost. My ghost.’ He looked over his own shoulder at the girl standing behind him. ‘This is him! The one I told you about, the one who’s been sitting on my windowsill all these years.’ Then he looked back at Heriot. ‘I’m the only one who’s ever believed in you,’ he muttered.

  Heriot took a breath. ‘Fair enough,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t believe in myself, either. Not right now.’

  The boy began to recover from that first shock.

  ‘You can’t be a ghost,’ he said. ‘Ghosts don’t bleed. You’d better come with me and I’ll take you to our doctors. We’ll work it out later – that you-and-me of things I mean. The dream business.’

  Slowly, slowly Heriot stood up. He was glad to have someone friendly to talk to. The sound of his own voice began to make the places around him real. He was also glad to be with someone slightly smaller than he was, someone who could be leaned on easily, though, before he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, he looked rather doubtfully at those grand clothes.

  ‘Likely I’ll bleed on you,’ he said. ‘Most of the bleeding’s over, but it keeps on starting up again. And that kicking will have set it off.’

  ‘Forget it,’ the boy said. ‘They’ll clean any blood off me.’ He laughed. ‘It’s what they’re there for, to make me respectable.’ He laughed again, a curiously wild laugh as if he were joking with something beyond reason.

  ‘They won’t make me respectable, not ever,’ Heriot mumbled, still panting a little.

  Suddenly the boy, who was also his support, stopped. Heriot, head bent down, could feel that they were making way for others. Shadows moved across them. Horses’ feet drew alongside, shifting and shuffling in the mud. Feelings of apprehension flooded Heriot, but they were not altogether his own feelings. Somehow he was feeling his companion’s response to the world in front of them. Heriot looked up, expecting to see strangers but to his astonishment, an astonishment immediately touched with a kind of weary despair, three of the four riders were known to him, two because he had met them before and the other … Heriot let out a sound that was half a groan and half a growl.

  16

  The King, the Hero and the Magician

  The foremost rider, the stranger, was a man in blue and gold wearing a golden helmet that was also a crown. Lining himself up neatly on the left hand of this crowned figure rode Lord Glass, while on his right was the magnificent man who only a few hours ago had tried to kill him, dressed in velvet and lace now, but not too grand for Heriot to recognise. And he could feel the man’s inner shock, like some sort of echo of his own, as their eyes met. How did he get here? they were both asking themselves. But he dared not spend time staring back at his enemy. Instead he let his gaze slide on to the fourth rider … a white face looking out of the shadows of the black hood. As he met the eyes staring out of this white face, they blinked rapidly and the face seemed to shrink away from him, deeper in under the hood as if it were trying to hide in shadows.

  And now, in spite of his pain and his tiredness, something ferocious happened to Heriot. He’d never met the hooded man, yet he knew him at once. He recognised the quality of the power this man gave off, and knew – beyond all doubt – that since he had been a small child, perhaps from his very birth, this man, this creature, had been aware of him, had somehow hovered over him, had somehow fed on him, feasting on the power that now seemed to be so much part of him, and throwing him into huge disorder. At last he was confronting in a tangible form the consuming essence which had torn into him over and over again in his nightmares, triggering agonising headaches and the violent, twisting fits that had so disfigured his early childhood. He was face to face with the predator who had torn him in two and who had forced some part of himself to hide behind a black window in a lost part of his head. But up on the hillside, with Cassio’s Island on his right hand and his home on the left, that protecting division, that black glass, had dissolved. He might be confused. He might be troubled and exhausted, but, standing there in the city of tents he was almost a single man once more.

  ‘Dysart! Who is your friend?’ asked the crowned rider in a grave and formal voice.

  ‘He’s just – oh, someone I saved,’ the boy who had volunteered to be Heriot’s crutch answered, with something almost impudent in his voice. ‘As you would know, Lord King, the edge of a battlefield is a great place for saving people.’

  ‘Those others tried to kick me to death,’ Heriot mumbled, ‘but this one saved me. Maybe that’s why I’ve sat on his windowsill all those years – maybe I needed him to know me when the time came.’ The men on horseback stared down at them in silence. Their expressions didn’t change, yet Heriot felt an odd startlement thrilling through them, as if he’d just answered a riddle they’d been asking themselves for years … a riddle they had all largely derided. ‘I knew him straight off,’ Heriot said, then paused. ‘But I know only one of you,’ he added, lying quickly, somehow knowing that lying was the safest thing to do just then. ‘I know Lord Glass.’

  Now Lord Glass opened his mouth, but the boy called Dysart raced in to speak first, glancing sideways at Heriot.

  ‘You’re in grand company,’ he said. ‘This is my father, the King of Hoad. And that’s Carlyon the Hero of Hoad, and Izachel, the Magician of Hoad.’ He spoke the formal titles almost impudently as if he were making fun of them.

  There was no way of truly taking in everything he’d been told. For all that, Heriot felt himself straightening, and then, incredibly, he felt his battered face twisting into a smile – a smile he had smiled only once before. He felt that smile fly out from him … and felt the riders receive it … each one in a different way, though, momentarily, they all seemed to shrink from him.

  ‘Some Hero!’ Heriot said, directing his smile at Carlyon.

  ‘Just for a moment my breath was quite taken away from me, but I can clarify things,’ Lord Glass said quickly. ‘Lord King, this is none other than Heriot Tarbas, the boy who …’

  The crowned King turned sharply, interrupting him.

  ‘What? The one who …’

  ‘That very one, Lord King. Right at this moment he might look like a scrap left over from the battle, but, I promise you, he has the power. Dr Feo will confirm it. Heriot Tarbas, it seems as if you have had some adventures since I saw you last.’

  Still partly supported by Prince Dysart, Heriot continued to stare at Carlyon, Hero of Hoad. He dared not look at the Magician – that shadow of a creature – just a little beyond the King and the Hero.

  ‘Too many adventures,’ he said at last. ‘Too many to tell about. I’m nothing but a secret man.’ He saw the Hero’s tight expression alter, and saw his hand, which had moved to hover over the hilt of a sword that hung at his side, move back just a little. ‘I climbed and fell,’ Heriot said. ‘Broke a rib maybe.’

  He barely understood what he was saying or why he was saying it. It was partly because he feared that, even in that grand company, the Hero might strike him down. Yet, even as he lied, he felt the secret he shared with Carlyon suddenly twist and turn into a sort of power within him, for he knew something about the Hero of Hoad that no one else knew, and the knowledge was not to be carelessly spilled and wasted.

  ‘I think, perhaps, I should take Heriot Tarbas to the Doctors’ tent,’ Lord Glass said. ‘After all, he’s from my country. His family are my people.’

  ‘And I’m coming with him,’ said Prince Dysart quickly. ‘After all, I’m the one who found him. I rescued him.’

  ‘I’ve sat on his windowsill and looked in at him a thousand times,’ Heriot told them once again, but he was telling himself too.

  ‘Put him on my horse,’ Lord Glass told Dysart, and Dysart bent, cupping his hands so Heriot could put his foot on the small platform of locked fingers and hoist himself high into a saddle so grand that in a curious way it seemed to Heriot he had lifted himself into a safe room with invisible walls.

  ‘I’
ll take him on,’ Lord Glass said. ‘Prince Dysart, you’ve been a friend to him, so walk with us.’

  Heriot felt himself hunching forward, longing to lie along the horse’s neck. And as they left he heard Carlyon the Hero of Hoad saying, ‘Perhaps he is some sort of Magician, but did you see that smile he gave us? He’s a monster as well as a Magician.’

  By now Heriot thought he might be right.

  17

  On Being Protected

  Linnet would remember for ever the way Dysart behaved when he came upon Heriot being beaten and kicked by other boys. They had been walking together, arguing and joking, speculating about the possibilities of peace – a peace that would last. They had been arguing in a curious, light-hearted way, laughing at one another’s arguments, and it had seemed to Linnet that their voices were weaving a pattern of thought in the air around them as they danced along through a little forest of ideas.

  And then, within seconds it seemed, Dysart forgot her completely. He had leaped in to save the strange beggar boy as if the boy were a friend of his. And the beggar sat up, bleeding, bewildered and staring, covering one of his eyes as if seeing Dysart with both eyes was too much for him. Afterwards, though she followed them and even asked questions, it was as if she had ceased to exist. Linnet was taken aback to find how deeply this sudden exclusion hurt her feelings and how angry she was with Dysart, who was apparently able to forget her so easily. When, later that night, back in her parents’ tent, Linnet was told that she and her mother were to go home to Hagen in three days’ time, she was delighted.