Heriot Read Free

didn’t want to be forced into thinking of himself as anything but plain and mostly invisible.
    Somewhere on Cassio’s Island was a port where ships put in, and somewhere beyond the forests a city that held the castle of the Hero – one of the two great spirits of Hoad – at present alive in the person of Carlyon of County Doro. Somewhere on that Island lived a whole population of men and women who were loyal to the Hero first and King second. This was not only allowed, it was an ancient rule.
    â€˜It keeps the King just a little humble,’ Great-Great-Aunt Jen had once declared. ‘Once the Kings of Hoad used to be the Heroes as well, but it’s too much glory for one man to have both Hero and King alive in him at the same time. Sometimes they’re contrary spirits. They might tear him apart.’
    The causeway was still green, a quick arrow pointing out to the Island. On a day like this, a fine day when usual events were yielding to strange ones, someone might walk along the causeway and step on to Cassio’s Island, and stand in another country just for a little while. It was not forbidden; it was just something no one in the Tarbas family had ever done … at least not as far as Heriot knew.
    Two years earlier he had stood on that hilltop with his family, looking down on the causeway at glittering columns of men and women. According to the customs of Hoad, a young man called Carlyon had challenged the Hero, Link, and the King and hiscourt were carrying him to combat in the Hero’s Arena. To Heriot, looking down from above, the parade had seemed more than royal. It had seemed to him not a company of mere Kings and Princes, but one of sun-bears, centaurs and strange, stalking birds as beautiful and passing as dreams. Three days later they had returned, carrying Link’s body in great splendour, leaving young Carlyon, Hero by conquest, to discover the Island on his own and take possession of his hidden city. Heriot had believed the whole world was being paraded past the farm in a glittering thread so he could take note of it, but by now brambles and wild grasses were pushing in on either side of the narrow road which, on this particular day, at this particular time, was totally deserted.
    And now, as he walked along the causeway, with his whole family left behind him on the other side of the hill, Heriot was seized with a lonely elation, and began to run and leap and to fling up his arms, chanting under his breath, spinning wildly, shouting wordlessly. Feeling he could twist all the way to the island, he turned cartwheels, until he toppled over, laughing as he fell, only to sit up in the middle of the road, staring wildly around him.
    Then he relaxed, laughed at himself yet again, and breathed deeply, taking conscious pleasure in the smell of salt and seaweed, and the lap and rattle of water in the rocks on either side. The thought that the sound went on and on like that (water on rock, rock on water), whether there was anyone to listen to it or not, gave him a sort of relief. Free at last, he thought, without having the least idea just what it was he had been freed from, and set off once more along the wild road … the central seam of the causeway.
    Directly before him at the end of the road was a stone arch.
    At first it seemed enormously far away, and insignificant compared with the wide expanses of sea and sky, but suddenlyhe found he could not look around it or over it any more. Suddenly it had become the only thing the world had to show him.
    A great fountain of seawater erupted beyond it, and then another and another. Heriot approached it warily. Increasingly the arch seemed to drain colour and shape out of everything around it, even from the water and the autumn air.

4
The Dissolving Window
    A nd then, at last, he had reached it, was walking under it, then standing for a moment to read the inscribed names of the Heroes. Carlyon’s name was there, freshly cut into the