The Magician of Hoad (8 page)

He fell silent. Linnet stared back at him. For once she had nothing to say. He was telling a tall story, and yet at the same time she knew he was being serious. He was trusting her with his nightmare. Not only that, she found she was believing him.

“Go on,” she told him. “Tell me the rest.” For she knew there was more to tell.

And after a moment, Dysart did go on, telling her, yet telling himself at the same time, listening carefully to his own story. Perhaps it was the first time he had set it free in the outside air.

“I did try speaking to it sometimes, though not with words. I’d try to get its attention with squeaks and grunts… sounds that were sort of asking questions… that sort of thing. Sometimes Crespin would wake up and catch me acting in a strange way, and of course he told other people.” Dysart shrugged. “Once I was seriously ill, and my ghost suddenly appeared in full daylight, sliding in between Crespin and the doctors, who didn’t seem to see or hear as it spread its left-hand fingers across its own
face”—Dysart spread his long left-hand fingers over his own face as he told her this—“as it laid the right hand on mine. Its fingernails were odd lengths, a funny thing to remember. Anyhow, when it touched me the fever slowly drained away. I felt as if I’d been saved. Well, I
had
been saved, but I don’t know why.”

Dysart shrugged and stopped again, looking at her half-defiantly, as if he were expecting some derisive comment or question. Linnet still had nothing to say.

“So, anyhow,” said Dysart at last, “I’d wake and wait, like I told you, and sometimes if I was alone with it—no Crespin or anyone—I’d get impatient and scramble toward the window, yelling, ‘Here I am!” But I could never touch it. It would simply dissolve into air and shadow. So then I’d climb into the space where it had been and sit on that big sill and look out from my room up there at the top of Crow Tower, across the courtyards of Guard-on-the-Rock, and down into the city below. And I’d see what I suppose the ghost had been seeing… all that gilt and glass and wood and stone spread out like a parade. And somehow the sight of the city always drove my fear back into the place where it usually lived, tucked in, all cozy and calm, under my ribs. At times I wondered if the dissolving ghost might be the city itself, trying to get in touch with me.”

“Didn’t you ever tell anyone?” asked Linnet after a short silence.

Dysart shrugged again and gave an impatient sigh. “In the beginning I told them over and over again. But who would believe me? It sometimes seemed as if that demon was somehow my only true friend, watching me from that
windowsill, giving me nightmares but rescuing me from a different sort of nightmare, something I could feel building out there, and always dissolving when I tried to look at it closely. Morning after morning I saw it soak away into the city out beyond my window, just like water soaking into sand. I did try to tell. I did try to tell Crespin, and Dr. Feo. And a few others they brought to look after me. But they didn’t believe me. And anyhow, words collapsed when I tried to use them. They all became grunts and humming.”

Dysart stood up and walked restlessly about the room. Linnet knew he had still more to tell her, and she waited in silence.

At last Dysart burst out, “I’ve always felt I was made, not born… made accidentally. Betony… Luce… they feel like
intended
men. I feel like an afterthought. It took me a long time to accept that I was the only one who could see the ghost, but by then I’d become partly invisible myself. People began looking around me, and I wasn’t so much mentioned as muttered about. Sideways muttering!

“Mind you, in the beginning they really did try, in spite of my grunting and crying and pointing at empty air. Because—let’s face it—a mad son! Well, that’s the sign of a great imperfection in any King’s reign. They did their best with me, but none of it worked. If I was given any traditional task—as page boy, say, at one of my father’s feasts—things always went wrong. Flagons rattled. Glasses fell over. Wine climbed up the inside of goblets and spilled over all those lips of silver and crystal. Something uninvited was always walking along beside me, pushing into my space and twisting the world around me. Invisibly twisting it! Still does!”
He laughed, shaking his head. “No wonder the whole court sighed and looked away tactfully as I stumbled on by, plates and glasses falling to the floor. Even you heard the gossip up there among your mountains. Almost the first words I heard from you were, ‘They say you’re a fool.’”

“But you asked me if I had pointed teeth,” Linnet replied.

Dysart laughed again.

“Fair enough!” he said. “As for me, back then—well, I toughened up inside my haunted space and started making fun of the world around me. Because there’s always plenty to laugh at, thank goodness. And, in the end, a sort of conceit took over. You’ve probably worked that out for yourself, and I didn’t
want
to be believed. That demon came to be…” He hesitated, frowning, then said carefully, “… my inside certainty of my own special nature, if you know what I mean. It had something to tell me when the right time came, and when that right time comes I want whatever it says to be mine. Mine alone. I’m the one who’s done all that suffering for it. And the really strange thing—stranger than all the rest of it—is that sitting on the windowsill, huddled in the space where the ghost had been, I used to feel that down below me, down in that twisting old city, the crown might grow straight out of the skull of the King, and Princes, being made of legends, not meat, would never be digested by darkness… not even for a moment.

Linnet listened, confused, but fascinated too. Dysart looked sideways at her.

“Sorry!” he said, and shook his head as if he were trying to shake away some thought that turned into confusion
when he tried to put it into words. “So,” he went on, “every now and then I crouched there in ghost space, feeling a sort of triumph as I spied on the city, high above everyone else, except for my father in the Tower of the Lion. But then, he was a sort of ghost himself… still is, really.”

Dysart sighed and stared into space for a moment before going on briskly. “Anyhow, as I spied on Diamond, somehow I found I could feel it all… I mean
really
feel it all… everything… not just Diamond but out
beyond
Diamond… the whole land of Hoad—mountains and forests, salt pans, sand hills, herds of white deer in the woods and black horses on the plains… the lot. Long before our Hero, the great Carlyon”—Dysart sounded slightly sarcastic at the expense of the Hero—“long before he single-handedly avenged the massacre of Senlac, I knew as much about Senlac as if I had walked its street… and it only had one… it was all it ever needed… a village of about eighty people, with an ancient graveyard many times bigger than the whole village. Some crowd descended on them—probably Dannorad, though the Dannorad always denied it—and killed every one of them. And then the Hero swept in and killed the killers.”

As he said all this, Dysart had begun pacing backward and forward, a flood of words bursting out of him. Linnet could tell that he had stopped thinking of her. Now he was talking only to himself, reminding himself of who he was, and telling a story he had told himself over and over again.

“Of course, the wars were still going on back then, but I swear that over in the Tower of the Lion I could feel my way
into my father’s dream of peace, which was growing stronger. In the beginning he hadn’t thought he would ever be King—but war had killed his father and brothers, so when his turn came he grabbed the power of it and began striking back by declaring war on war itself. Sometimes I think his dream had something in common with my illness and that I caught it from him, though in another form.” Dysart paused, standing sideways in the doorway, staring out into the city of tents. Then he swung around to face Linnet, and his voice became suddenly passionate.

“I’ve wanted to tell all this to someone who… well, all of a sudden, over the last few days I’ve really wanted to explain it to you. I don’t want you to think I’m mad in the way everyone else does. Anyhow, in an odd sort of way I feel you just might believe in my ghost. And you might understand how it happened that, sitting in that haunted space, watching the city and dreaming of Hoad, I came to feel I had a magical life. All right… yes… perhaps I was the mad Prince, but secretly I thought I might be the
true
Prince… the one who finally becomes King, even though he has two older brothers with dreams of their own. But just thinking that sort of thing is close to treachery, isn’t it?”

Silence came in on them. Then the sides of the tent panted in and out. The outside world was reminding them that it was still there.

“Do you still see your ghost?” Linnet asked at last.

“No,” Dysart replied. “Well, not often. Not in the way I used to. But I feel it in the air around me at times. I feel it nudging at me… breathing in my ear. Feel it brushing against the thoughts in my head, and when it does that, it
throws me off balance. The day we met, the day they first brought you into the scholar-tent, something happened to my ghost. I felt the shock of it. Remember?”

Linnet suddenly remembered the pages flying up around him as if they were being whirled around by a wind that no one else could feel. Dysart seemed to see her remembering, and he nodded slowly. “No wonder they think I’m mad,” he said. “It’s hard to tell the difference between being mad and being haunted.”

A few hours before Dysart, Prince of Hoad, began telling his story to Linnet of Hagen, Heriot Tarbas began climbing a hill, hoping his ascent would be undetected. He climbed as quickly and quietly as he could, sliding through long grass, or dodging from bush to bush. When he reached the rock Draevo, he leaned against it for a little while, looking back down at the farm, feeling he might be seeing it for the last time.

At that time of day it was nothing but a series of black and gray masses, buildings, yards, orchard, and garden. Roosters crowed. The dew on certain angles of roof and wall was beginning to catch the light, and there was a suggestion of movement at one of the doors. It might simply have been Baba and Ashet setting out to bring the cows in, but Heriot wasn’t prepared to wait to find out. He realized he must have left tracks in the wet grass… tracks that, if followed, would zigzag remorselessly to his retreating heels. So, turning, he plunged down toward the sea and didn’t
stop until he had put the first of many little headlands between him and the top of the hill.

By now the sun was well risen. The light, flooding in over the sea and across the sand, was strong and yet somehow a little shy as well, just as if the sun had to reintroduce itself to the land. (Remember me? Shall we dance?) The coastline stretched ahead, unwinding like thread from a spool—a series of looping bays, some of them little more than creases in the series of hard, rocky faces the land turned to the sea. “What shall I do?” he asked himself. And then, “Well, here I am and I’m going somewhere.” And then, “Yes, but where am I going?” There was no answer to this question. He moved on steadily but in no great hurry now, for he imagined he had left the farm and the possibility of pursuit behind. All the same, he still walked above the tideline, first in the light, dry sand where he left no footprints, and then, after jumping from stone to stone down to the water’s edge, along firm, wet sand, certain that the waves would wash out his traces almost at once.

He had walked for a long time and around several headlands when he came to an abrupt stop. Somewhere someone was frying food, and Heriot found he was starving. Going silently from one patch of lupins to another, he came quite suddenly on a tethered horse, a huge animal, all of seventeen hands, sniffing from time to time without great enthusiasm at the coarse sea grass. And there beyond it was a naked man, sitting on a black cloak that he had spread out on the dry sand, and cooking himself a morning meal. The man’s back, half-turned toward Heriot, was as powerful as Radley’s, but Radley would have had black
wavy hair, the ends twisting into ringlets, falling down over copper-colored shoulders. This man had, instead, a wide, springing halo of red-gold hair, shedding drops that ran down his pale back in slow tears.

Beside him was a cloth set with a wineskin, a loaf of bread that looked very fresh, and thin slices of smoked beef, delicately veined with a little fat. There was also a sausage, which the man was cutting into rings, so that he could toast them on the end of a long stick. His clothes lay folded to one side of him. For all his nakedness and the campfire breakfast, Heriot knew he was not looking at a vagrant. The way the man’s hair was trimmed, the pure whiteness of the cloth, the elegant way the beef was sliced, the warm blush of light along the blade held out to the fire, all suggested someone used to money and style. Yet what Lord could he be, alone on this remote shore, naked in the late autumn morning, cooking sausage with a knife that looked beautiful, ancient, and wicked?

A piece of driftwood crumbled. The man shifted, half turning his head. Heriot opened his mouth to speak, feeling his intention fly out ahead of his words. Then, before he actually spoke, he had an overwhelming answer. Unhappiness poured into him, unhappiness shot through with a terrible ferocity, accompanied by another feeling, a twin to misery, a feeling he could not name though it made him shrink back among the lupins. These feelings were accompanied by a huge irritation. The man was deeply unhappy about something and, at the same time, angry with himself for his own unhappiness. Somewhere along the line, he had done something terrible, and though he
wasn’t sorry he had done it, the memory of doing it was infuriating him.

These wild emotions were flowing directly from the naked giant before him, and though Heriot was receiving them, they belonged to that man alone. Heriot stepped back as silently as he could, but the man turned sharply, teeth slightly bared. Then, seeing Heriot, he paused and relaxed; he smiled; he even laughed a little at his own momentary shock. His red-gold eyebrows arched with astonishment, his long, thin-lipped mouth turned up at the corners in a curling smile that reminded Heriot of the smiles on the faces of the carved lions in his garden at home. That tide of savage feeling seemed to sink rapidly away into the rocks and sand, though it did not totally disappear.