Heriot

by Margaret Mahy

  ‘I needn’t hesitate to tell you,’ he murmured, ‘that Carlyon has been very difficult. Oh, very inexorable. Only the most unremitting diplomacy has saved us from an exchange of personalities and a rehashing of old incidents and insults, quite out of keeping with the season of rejoicing we hope to celebrate tonight. He is too intelligent for me to think he’s simply being tactless. I cannot speak too highly of the efforts of my Camp Hyot counterpart further down the table, who has appeared on some occasions to have been quite deaf. We have been most fortunate that he has more in common with Hoad, the same sympathies and ambitions, than you might think possible.’ Lord Glass stopped speaking to sip his wine.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Heriot, ‘once Carlyon thought being Hero would be enough for him. But by now it isn’t. Maybe he wants to be King of Hoad too. Wants to be both.’ He spoke in an absentminded way, but felt Lord Glass looking at him intently. Servants were passing around the table with jugs of rosewater and napkins. Heriot was momentarily entranced by a jug of rock crystal, with a rim and lip and handle of engraved gold.

  Let me through … the occupant was saying within him. Make a guest of me.

  Soon! Heriot promised, speaking back into his own head. We’ll share ourselves soon.

  ‘Well, we all have our theories,’ Lord Glass said at last, ‘but I do hope that you won’t let us down. I just know Carlyon is planning something. There is a certain entertained restraint about his provocation, as if he was distracting us with one effect while secretly preparing another. I feel it might be demonstrated here tonight. This is a grand occasion and …’

  ‘We will now have the Dance of the Clown,’ announced the steward of the hall, and out came dancers, one of whom, the clown, was dressed as a parody of the Assassin Cloud, with a red mop-head wig sewn over with glass beads.

  ‘In festivity we try to deflect what we fear,’ Lord Glass said, turning and looking at last into Heriot’s eyes. His expression slowly changed, as the dance proceeded, and he divined Heriot’s other, inner face imposing its alterations on familiar flesh and bone.

  ‘There is another Magician in this room,’ Heriot said very quietly. ‘What are you playing at, Lord Glass? You’d better tell me.’

  Lord Glass frowned, silently shook his head, then slowly looked across the dancers to the Hero and the dark figure behind his chair.

  Heriot nodded. ‘He’s strong. He recognised me when I came in, though he didn’t see me and I don’t think he’s put a face to me quite yet, but it won’t be long. He’s so public there, standing behind the Hero. Something’s intended.’

  Lord Glass said nothing.

  ‘You know him then?’ Heriot asked. ‘Or do you think there’s no face in the hood?’

  ‘I think there is a face,’ said Lord Glass ‘and that, if it is revealed, I’ll recognise it, but to find there was no face might be preferable.’

  Heriot watched the acrobatic clown weaving through the dance, nervously mocking the King’s Assassins. Carlyon looked over at Heriot with a suddenly arrested expression. Heriot didn’t know that the top half of his face was entirely hidden by a little explosion of light reflecting from his glasses, but he stared out of the disruptive glare and the shadow of his womanish hair, with an expression so inimical that the Hero, if he had been able to read it, might have looked more cautious.

  A moment later the dance ended, and Carlyon rose to his feet and addressed Hoad, praising the hospitality, the food, the wine and the entertainment, in a warm, embracing voice. Nevertheless, as he spoke, he also seemed to be mocking the very things he was praising, with a secret derision. ‘I, too, shall honour Prince Betony Hoad and his bride with an entertainment,’ he said. ‘I am not without facilities. You have many entertainers, and I have brought only one, but though he is a single man he has a strange gift. He can appear to be many.’

  In spite of these troubling words, however, it was still Heriot Lord Glass studied in the light of the dove-shaped lamp that trembled above them, hoping, it seemed, that Heriot might explain just what the Hero had in mind.

  ‘We will receive your entertainment with delight,’ Hoad was saying to Carlyon. The Hero raised his hand, the hooded figure stepped forward, and the lights went out. Suddenly the air seemed to tremble, not with any sort of joy or celebration, but with a curious savagery. A murmur arose from the crowded tables … a wave of apprehension filled the room. A dark possibility was making itself felt.

  ‘Oh dear,’ sighed Lord Glass. ‘It’s doom!’

  ‘It’s Izachel then?’ Heriot asked. A face swam out of the darkness, bearded with a straggly beard, grey around the lips. The eyes were so black the pupils were swallowed up in them, which made them seem undirected. They moved constantly, pacing like caged animals anxious to escape the confines of a head that no longer suited them. If they stood still for a moment those eyes became so round they seemed completely circular, the white showing all around the dark iris. Stillness seemed to confront them with an unbearable view.

  Heriot had seen this face before, years ago on the edge of the battlefield. And he had other, more curious memories. ‘What did you do to him?’ he hissed to Lord Glass. ‘What’s happened to him?’

  ‘It would seem we mourned him too soon,’ Lord Glass replied. ‘I haven’t talked about him I must confess. I didn’t want to depress you.’ The face began to withdraw into the blackness. ‘We all believed he must be dead, but apparently he simply crawled away and changed masters. What is that sound?’

  Light quickened. Incredibly the tables seemed to have become as remote from each other as branches in a mountain range, the spaces between them expanding to contain a rough, stony land, a plain set with distant forests. Out of those forests came the horses, heavily harnessed, even armoured, bringing the light with them. Out from among the rocks rose men armed with bows and arrows, and along the top of the nearest ridge, barely visible in the gloom that bordered Izachel’s magical stage, came even more riders. Voices cried from afar. The cries were faint but clear, coming out of the past at the Magician’s bidding. Made thin and sinuous by weight of time, they had to struggle to reach listening ears. Then battle was joined, and the merciful faintness of the sound of it was more than compensated for by the visible clash of men and horses. At first the figures seemed flat and simple, but then, taking breath from the tide of memory that began to surge around them, they swelled out with approximate life. Men of Diamond, the Dannorad and Camp Hyot clashed violently and the air was filled with those threadlike but nonetheless terrible cries, for, unlike the suspended figures on the wall of the study room, these men fell pierced through, chopped down, hacking each other with a graceless skill.

  Confronted with spouting, twitching, screaming men, Heriot’s stomach twitched with its own violence, wanting to volunteer its own comment on the spectacle the Hero was providing, but he was not sick, for, almost at once, he noted a new fact with considerable interest. The moment any man began to die, he assumed a new, different kind of reality. The fighting men were approximately real, but at odd moments they might blur or sag, one eye might swell up and burst, one ear might grow larger than its partner, or a hand detach itself, not because of any blow but according to some whim of its own, and go floating across the field like a disembodied emblem.

  Izachel couldn’t entirely control such a complex creation, and details were subject to strange variations. But the moment a man began to die his reality became intense, beautifully held for the duration of his ending, every detail displayed with loving skill. Bloody bubbles swelled out of nostrils, eyes turned up until only bloodshot whites showed, fingers clutched and scrabbled convulsively while bodies demonstrated hysterical angles among the stones. Death was so vivid and painful it could not be turned away, and all were bound to witness the true horror of the hundreds of terminations that inevitably marked Hoad’s success in the battle. The armies fought, irrationally disintegrating, while the true entertainment offered, there under the feet of the illusory horses, was the galvanic extremities o
f death in battle. Men of the three kingdoms lay crushed and oozing among the stones, or twitched in grass that was not grass, but a dim green mist the Magician had not been interested in resolving into its constituent blades and seed heads.

  After the first shock Heriot was interested in seeing what another Magician might do, and must have been the only person in the room not directly considering the effect that this re-creation of an old battle might have on a touchy company, some of whom had fought and lost friends in such battles … battles still well within the living memory. The time of the friendship was a brief season; enmity was a glorious tradition.

  At last Hoad triumphed. The men from Camp Hyot and the Dannorad were either dead or fled, and one of the warriors turned to the company showing the vivid face of young Carlyon, bloody and exultant, the age, perhaps, of Luce, who was standing entranced behind the older Carlyon’s chair. But then the visionary Carlyon faded, and they were left in darkness with the violated dead before them, beginning to pass into shocking and accelerated decay under the Magician’s power.

  ‘Alas, for our past!’ the living Carlyon now said, his leisurely voice coming from somewhere beyond the borders of the battlefield. ‘Let us all hope, on behalf of the happy bride and groom, for future tranquillity.’ And his words were accompanied by a soft voiceless laugh, trembling with breathless pleasure.

  ‘Dear life, he’s got to be fed with blood, that poor old Izachel,’ Heriot muttered more to himself than Lord Glass, as darkness became absolute.

  There was a moment of stillness then an angry scraping. Chairs were pushed back and visiting men were on their feet shouting and hissing with outrage. Hoad and Carlyon were being reminded of other reciprocal atrocities and defeats, of old grievances and broken promises of safe conduct. Then, as if a pause must be made to accommodate any answer Hoad might have to give, silence fell, and into the new silence Heriot laughed as his occupant came pouring out of the space in his head, interpenetrating his bones and overflowing out into the darkness. I’m giving myself over, he promised it. You can be free to play a bit.

  At the sound of his laughter, the first stillness that had seeped back into the room extended itself. Heriot fastened on the silence, taking it industriously away from King, from Hero, from angry Lords alike. Then, exaggerating his country voice, he spoke into the air of the banqueting hall, making his drawling accent a message to the Hero.

  ‘I am the Magician of Hoad,’ he declared, restoring the scene in the centre of the room. The dead men lay in grass, each blade of which now became discernible while Izachel struggled vainly to hold down the concealing dark. Speaking steadily, if rather absentmindedly, Heriot used his sense of Izachel’s struggle to locate him precisely. The Hero’s Magician was tired and shocked by the huge power Heriot was suddenly revealing. Fight as he would, Izachel could not regain any control over the dream he had set loose in the King’s Hall.

  24

  Setting the Forest Free

  ‘I am the farmer, the uniter, the twist in the air …’ Heriot said, improvising and inventing such phrases as he thought would be enigmatic and healing to the consternation and anger boiling in the shadows around him. ‘I am the resolution of Hoad, both the child and the brother of Draevo who records births, deaths and unexpected meetings.’

  He felt Carlyon twitch unexpectedly at the mention of Draevo, twitch like a fish caught on a line. He felt Izachel fighting on, trying to regain some power over the minds of the company, but Heriot, having the advantage of surprise, of variety and of sheer power, filled the watchers easily, letting his occupant free to flow through him, and out into the world, touching them all, gathering them up like threads he would shortly weave into some new tapestry. Everyone in the room, the King and his sons, the guests from the Dannorad and Camp Hyot, all began to dream Heriot’s dream, Izachel and Carlyon, however unwillingly, among them.

  ‘There is no last word,’ said Heriot. Slowly the blood that had crept over the stones became a grassy stain, the twisted bodies relaxed, then gently mossed over as if a green blush was creeping through and through them. Their stiffening grimaces relaxed, their expressions were dazed into gentleness, a slow vegetable vision reanimating their dead minds. Heriot’s memory of connection with the inner life of apple trees, in winter, spring, and early summer became part of his spell. Slowly, slowly the dead men rose up again, arboreal men turning faces as mild as a green spring up to the sky. A Dannorad man held out his arms, becoming a living tree, supporting flowering vines, his wounded side putting out crimson flowers, the chains that hung like a shifting metal curtain from the sides and back of his helmet transformed into leaves and tendrils.

  ‘The mystery of the changes of Hoad,’ Heriot said, entranced himself by the images moving through him in answer to his occupant’s call. ‘They enter upon a pure vocation, take in air once more, offer out brightness to the world.’ The faces, restful and at ease, became part of the mosaic of the bark. ‘Their green children grow around them,’ said Heriot, and up from the grass and stones came little saplings, each one completely true, for he had been there and he knew the nature of trees.

  There were no words in the language of Hoad for the layers of cells or the busy, inner life of the tree, but he could make others feel, as he felt, that each tree was not only a changing object, but a process of spirit. At that moment he could make each blade of grass live, each leaf, each root hair reveal itself as both one and many. The outrage of guests and hosts alike began to surrender as they were invaded by that verdant tide, remorseless but tender too, turning them always towards the source of light, which, in that dark room, was nothing other than Heriot himself.

  ‘Our tears have made it all grow green again,’ Heriot suggested, and tears obediently slid down under the silver rims of his glasses, down his cheek as, for the first time in his life he allowed himself to fade away and his occupant to inhabit without any restraint that carefully maintained fortress they shared … the fortress of his head.

  Trees so tall their tops were now lost in distance, their smooth trunks brocaded with tiny luminous mosses, shed tears of gold that ran down the bark and then fell, burning harmlessly, into the perpetual twilight under their branches, while the forest retreated without visible end. The space between the tables, between the people sitting at them, grew vast beyond understanding. Each man and woman in the hall was alone with the trees. A wind composed of light and the breath of dragons, beat through the company, rustling careful clothes and tangling hair, and there in the dimness Heriot began to shine, the broad planes of cheek and forehead remaining dark, the lines from nose to mouth the creases of his eyelids etched on the night with fine lines of fire, each hair a thread of silver lifting with reluctant grace when the wind blew. He appeared to be not so much contained by the air as embroidered on it.

  ‘They have become the quiet heart of the world,’ he said, and, though the words were his own and were gentle, the voice which uttered them was filled with unappeasable longing. A moony shine burst through him as if he had become nothing more than a human skin, while everything within him dissolved into light. And now, he felt an echoing awe and kindness, a new resolution taking form in the hall around him.

  ‘Our brothers have blended and become the heart of the first silence and the last silence. They have gone beyond us. The old treacheries are grey dust, and only dust bothers to remember them.’

  He moved away from the table as he spoke, leaving the whole company, including Izachel, his prisoners, caught in his transformation so that they themselves were transformed like the fabulous dead into a woven vision of peace and gentle resolution. But unexpectedly he felt his arm seized, and turning found Dysart beside him, trying to hold him back. Something in Dysart – some secret necessity, some element of friendship perhaps, was enabling him to fight again Heriot’s spell.

  ‘Let me go!’ Heriot cried. His everyday self was coming back to him, but his occupant was still dominant, raging with the energy of its release. ‘Let me go! I’m not saf
e.’

  ‘Don’t …’ began Dysart. ‘Don’t go! Forget anything you ever promised me and just …’ And then his expression changed, as the occupant surged through Heriot to overwhelm him. ‘Don’t … go!’ Dysart mumbled. ‘Be nothing but a friend, not a promise.’ He was crumpling as he spoke.

  ‘I’m not safe!’ Heriot cried again. His voice seemed to come from some distant and barely connected place within him. All the same he could hear his warning echo in the outside world.

  But it was too late. Dysart fell on to his knees, then tumbled sideways. Heriot stared down at him, certain that anything he might try to do could only make things worse. Wildly he turned and made for the door.

  The door opened before him. Unchallenged by the guards, who were all caught up in the same vision as their masters, he paused in the doorway and spoke into the mind of Hoad the King.

  ‘Lord King, move now. The vision will begin to fade and me – I am already fading. Share grief. Share the mystery. Move on into reconciliation and joy. Speak before the Hero moves. And Dysart’s fallen. Look after him!’ At the same time as sending these inner orders to the King, Heriot touched Izachel into deep sleep, and felt Hoad begin to rise, still half-dreaming, preparing to follow his instructions.

  At once he began to break his connections, releasing the audience, sure that he was leaving Hoad strengthened and able to correct any damage the Hero’s invocation of that violent past might have done. And, if Carlyon should try to challenge the new mood, Heriot knew he would not succeed.

  But Heriot himself was in an intolerable condition. Kindled by his own force, he thought he might burst into incandescence through attempting to control that raging occupant, who was still burning through him, feeding on him as flames might feed on a living tree. Trying to give himself some necessary pattern to work with, he began to run out through the main doors, across the courtyard beyond, then along a familiar path towards the castle gardens. A summer wind came to meet him, leaping up like a welcoming dog, rubbing itself against him, pushing his heavy hair aside, while his forest continued to swarm out of him, endlessly reproducing, until it seemed impossible he could run himself free of it. Heriot shouted as he ran, or thought he did. He felt the cry go out of him, but couldn’t hear it in the outside air and didn’t know which part of him was doing the crying.