Hexwood

“I’m not doing that!” Ann almost screamed.

“Of course not.” Mordion smiled. The smile was brief and sad, but as wonderful as before. “I’ve learnt my lesson there. It took far too long, and it ended in misery. The Reigners eliminated the first race of people. The second time there were too many to kill, so they killed the best and put me in stass so that I was not there to guide the others. There must be hundreds of their descendants now with Reigner blood, here in this world. You, for instance. That’s what the paratypical field is showing us.” He pointed once more to the bright blood in the path.

In spite of her fear and disgust and complete disbelief, Ann could not help a twinge of pride that her blood was so special. “So what do you want it for this time?”

“To create a hero,” said Mordion, “safe from the Reigners inside this field, who is human and not human, who can defeat the Reigners because they will not know about him until it is too late.”

Ann thought about it – or, to be truthful, let her head fill with a mixed hurry of feelings. Disbelief and fear mixed with a terrible sadness for Mordion, who thought he was trying the same useless thing for a third time; and horror, because Mordion just might be right; while underneath ran urgent, ordinary, homely feelings, telling her she really did have to be back for lunch. “If I say yes,” she said, “you can’t touch me and you have to let me go home safe straight afterwards.”

“Agreed.” Mordion looked earnestly up at her. “You agree?”

“Yes, all right,” Ann said, and felt the most terrible coward saying it But what could she do, she asked herself, stuck up in a tree in a place where everything was mad, with Mordion prowling round its roots?

Mordion smiled at her again. Ann was lapped in the sweetness and friendliness of it and weakened in her already wobbly knees. But a small clinical piece of her said, he uses that smile. She watched him turn and stroll to the patch of blood, with his pleated robe swinging elegantly round him, and wondered how he thought he would create a hero. His knife was in his right hand. It caught the green woodland light as he made a swift, expert cut in the wrist of his other hand that was holding his staff. Blood ran freely, in the same unexpected quantity as Ann’s.

“Hey!” Ann said. Somehow she had not expected this.

Mordion did not seem to hear her. He was letting his blood trickle down his staff, round and among the strange carvings on it, guiding the thick flow to drip off the wooden end and mingle with Ann’s blood on the path. He was certainly also working on the paratypical field. Ann had a sense of things pulsing, and twisting a little, just out of sight.

Mordion finished and stood back. Everything was still. Not a tree moved. No birds sang. Ann was not sure she breathed.

A strange welling and mounding began on the path, on either side of the patch of blood. Ann had seen water behave that way when someone had thrown a log in deep and the log was rising to the surface. She leant forward and watched, still barely breathing, moss and black earth, stones and yellow roots pouring up and aside to let something rise up from underneath. There was a glimpse of white, bone white, about four feet long, and a snarl of what looked like hair at one end. Ann bit her lip till it hurt. Next second, a bare body had risen, lying face downwards in a shallow furrow in the path. A fairly small body.

“You must give him clothes,” she said, while she waited for the body to grow.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mordion nod and move his staff. The body grew clothes, the same way as Mordion had done, in a blue-purple flush spreading over the dented white back and thickening into what looked like a tracksuit. The bare feet turned grey and became feet wearing old sneakers. The body squirmed, shifted, and propped itself up on its elbows, facing down the path away from both of them. It had longish draggly hair the same camel colour as Mordion’s.

“Bump. Fell,” the body remarked in a high clear voice.

Then, obviously assuming he had tripped and fallen in the path, the boy in the tracksuit picked himself up and trotted out of sight beyond the pink blossoming tree.

Mordion stood back and looked up at Ann. His face had dragged into lines. Making the boy had clearly tired him out. “There, it’s done,” he said wearily, and went to sit among the primroses again.

“Aren’t you going to go after him?” Ann asked.

Mordion shook his head.

“Why not?” said Ann.

“I told you,” Mordion said, very tired, “that I learnt my lesson there. It’s between him and the Reigners now, when he grows up. I shall not need to appear in it.”

“And how long before he grows up?” Ann asked.

Mordion shrugged. “I’m not sure how time in this field relates to ordinary time. I suppose it will take a while.”

“And what happens if he goes out of the parathingummy field,” Ann demanded, “into real time?”

“He’ll cease to exist,” said Mordion, as if it were obvious.

“Then however is he supposed to conquer these Reigners? You told me they live light years away,” Ann said.

“He’ll have to fetch them here,” said Mordion. He lay back on the bank, looking worn out.

“Does he know that?” Ann demanded.

“Probably not,” Mordion said.

Ann looked down at him, spread on the bank preparing to go to sleep, and lost her temper. “Then you should go and tell him! You should look after him! He’s all alone in this wood, and he’s quite small, and he doesn’t even know he’s not supposed to go out of it. He probably doesn’t even know how to work the field to get food. You – you calmly make him up, out of blood and – and nothing, and you expect him to do your dirty work for you, and you don’t even tell him the rules! You can’t do that to a person!”

Mordion rose up on one elbow. “The field will take care of him. He belongs to it. Or you could. He’s half yours, after all.”

“I have to go home for lunch!” Ann snarled. “You know I do! Is there anyone else in this wood who could take care of him?”

Mordion was getting that look Dad had when Ann went on at him. “I’ll see,” he said, clearly hoping to shut her up. He sat up and raised his head in a listening way, turning slowly from left to right. Like radar operating, Ann thought. “There are others here,” he said slowly, “but they are a long way off and too busy to be spared.”

“Then get the field,” said Ann, “to make another person.”

“That,” said Mordion, “would take more blood – and that person would be a child too.”

“Then someone who isn’t real,” insisted Ann. “I know the field can do it. This whole wood isn’t real. You’re not real—”

She stopped, because Mordion turned and looked at her. The pain in his look almost rocked her backwards.

“Well, only half real,” she said. “And stop looking at me like that just because I’m telling you the truth. You think you’re a magician with godlike powers, and I know you’re just a man in a camelhair coat.”

“And you,” said Mordion, not quite angry, but getting that way, “are very brave because you think you’re safe up a tree. What makes you think my godlike powers can’t fetch you down?”

“You can’t touch me,” Ann said hastily. “You promised.”

The earlier grim look came back into Mordion’s face. “There are many ways,” he said, “to hurt a person without touching them. I hope you never find out about them.” He stared into grim thoughts for a while, with his eyebrow hooked above his strange flat nose. Then he sighed. “The boy is fine,” he said. “The field has obeyed you and produced an unreal person to care for him.” He lay back on the bank again and arranged the rolled blanket-thing at his shoulder as a pillow.

“Really?” said Ann.

“The field doesn’t like you shouting at it any more than I do,” Mordion replied sleepily. “Get down from your tree and go in peace.”

He rolled on his side and seemed to go to sleep, a strange bleached heap huddled on the bank. The only colour about him was the red gash on his wrist, above the hand clutching his staff.

Ann waited in her tree until his breathing was slow and regular and she was sure he was really asleep. Only then did she go round to the back of the tree and slide down as quietly as she knew how. She got to the path with long tiptoe strides and sprinted away down it, still on tiptoe. And she was still afraid that Mordion might be stealing after her. She looked back so frequently that after fifty yards she ran into a tree.

She met it with a bruising thump that seemed to shake reality back into place. When she looked forward, she found she could see the houses on the near side of Wood Street. When she looked backwards to check, she could see houses again, beyond the usual sparse trees of Banners Wood. And there was no sign of Mordion among them.

“Well, that’s that then!” she said. Her knees began to shake.

There were still hailstones under the big grey car, but they were melting as Ann hastened past on her way to the path to Banners Wood. She did not stop for fear Mum or Dad called her back. She admitted that setting out to climb a tree in a tight skirt probably was silly, but that was her own business. Besides, it was so hot. The path was steamy-warm, full of melting hailstones winking like diamonds in the grass. It was a relief to get into the shade of the wood.

Grass almost never grew on the trampled earth under the trees, but spring had been at work here all the same while Ann had been ill. Shiny green weeds grew at the edges of the trodden parts. Birds yelled in the upper branches and there was a glorious smell in here, part cool and earthy, part distant and sweet like the ghost of honey. The blackthorn thicket near the stream was actually trying to bloom, little white flowers all over the spiny leafless bushes. The path wound through them. Ann wound with the path, pushing through, with her arms up to cover her face. Before long, the path was completely blocked by the bushes, but when she dropped to a crouch, she could see a way through, snaking among the roots.

She crawled.

Spines caught her hair. She heard her anorak tear, but it seemed silly to go back, or at least just as spiny. She crawled on towards the light where the bushes ended.

She reached the light. It was a swimming, milky lightness, fogged with green. It took Ann a second of staring to recognise that the lightness was water. Water stretched to an impossible distance in front of her, in smooth grey-white ripples that vanished into fog. Dark trees beside her bowed over rippled copies of themselves, and there was one yellow-green willow beyond, smudging the lake with lime.

Ann looked from the foggy distance to the water gently rippling by her knees. Inside her black reflection there were old leaves, black as tea-leaves. The bank where she was kneeling was overgrown with violets, pale blue, white and dark purple, spread everywhere in impossible profusion, like a carpet. The scent made her quite giddy.

“Impossible,” she said aloud. “I don’t remember a lake?”

“I don’t either,” said Hume, kneeling under the willow. “It’s new.”

Hume’s tracksuit was so much the colour of the massed violets that Ann had not seen him before. She had a moment when she was not sure who he was. But his brown shaggy hair, his thin face and the way his cheekbones stuck out, were all quite familiar. Of course he was Hume. It was one of the times when he was about ten years old.

“What’s making the ripples?” Hume said. “There’s no wind.”

Hume never stops asking things, Ann thought. She searched out over the wide milky water. There was no way of telling how wide. Her eye stopped with a gentle white welling in the more distant water. She pointed. “There. There’s a spring coming up through the lake.”

“Where? Oh, I see it,” Hume said, pointing too.

They were both pointing out across the lake as the fog cleared, dimly. For just an instant, they were pointing to the milky grey silhouette of a castle, far off on a distant shore. Steep roof, pointed turrets and the square teeth of battlements rose beside the graceful round outline of a tower. The chalky shapes of flags flapped lazily from tower and roofs, all without colour. Then the fog rolled in again and hid it all.

“What was that?” asked Hume.

“The castle,” said Ann, “where the king lives with his knights and his ladies. The ladies wear beautiful clothes. The knights ride out in armour having adventures and fighting.”

Hume’s thin face glowed. “I know! The castle is where the real action is. I’m going to tell Mordion I’ve seen it.”

Hume had this way of knowing things before she told him, Ann thought, gathering a small bunch of the violets. Mum would love them, and there were so many. Sometimes it turned out that Hume had asked Yam, but sometimes, confusingly, Hume said she had told him before. “The castles not the only place where things happen,” she said.

“Yes, but I want to get there,” Hume said yearningly. “I’d wade out through the lake or try to swim, if I knew I could get there. But I bet it wouldn’t be there when I got across the lake.”

“It’s enchanted,” said Ann. “You have to be older to get there.”

“I know,” Hume said irritably. “But then I shall be a knight and kill the dragon.”

Ann’s private opinion was that Hume would do better being a sorcerer, like Mordion. Hume was good at that. She would have given a great deal, herself, to learn sorcery. “You might not enjoy it at the castle,” she warned him, plucking the best-shaped leaves to arrange round her violets. “If you want to fight, you’d be better off joining Sir Artegal and his outlaws. My dad says Sir Artegal’s a proper knight.”

“But they’re outlaws,” Hume said, dismissing Sir Artegal. “I’m going to be a lawful knight at the castle. Tell me what they say about the castle in the village.”

“I don’t know much,” Ann said. She finished arranging her leaves and wrapped a long piece of grass carefully round the stalks of her posy. “I think there are things they don’t want me to hear. They whisper when they talk about the king’s bride. You see, because the king is ill with his wound that won’t heal, some of the others are much too powerful. There’s quarrelling and secrecy and taking sides.”

“Tell me about the knights,” Hume said inexorably.

“There’s Sir Bors,” said Ann. “He prays a lot, they say. Nobody likes Sir Fors. But they quite like Sir Bedefer, even if he is hard on his soldiers. They say he’s honest. Sir Harrisoun is the one everyone really hates.”

Hume considered this, with one tracksuited knee up under his chin, staring into the mist across the rippling lake. “When I’ve killed the dragon, I’ll turn them all out and be the king’s Champion.

“You have to get there first,” Ann said, beginning to get up.

Hume sighed. “Sometimes,” he said, “I hate living in an enchanted wood.”

Ann sighed too. “You don’t know your own luck! I have to be home for lunch. Are you staying here?”

“For now,” said Hume. “The mist might clear again.”

Ann left him there, kneeling among the violets looking out into the fog as if that glimpse of the castle had somehow broken his heart. As she crawled through the thornbrake, carefully protecting her bunch of violets in one cupped hand, she felt fairly heartbroken herself. Something impossibly beautiful seemed to have been taken away from her. She was almost crying as she crawled out from the bushes on to the mud path and stood up to trot towards the houses. And, on top of it all, she had torn her anorak, and her skirt, and she seemed to have quite a large cut in her knee.

“Hey, wait a minute.” she said, halting in the passage between the houses. She had cut that knee running away from Mordion. She looked from the dried blood flaking off her shin to the small bunch of violets in her hand. “Did I go into the wood twice then?”

I don’t think so, said the Boy. I lost you.

You went out of touch when you went into that wood, explained the Prisoner.

Yes, hut did I go in and come out and go in again? Ann asked them.

No, they said, all four of her imaginary people, and the King added, You only went in once this morning.

“Hm.” Ann almost doubted them as she limped slowly up the passage and into Wood Street. But the big grey car was still in the parking bay. There were other cars around it now, but when Ann bent down she could still see just a few hailstones, fused into a melting lump behind the near front wheel where the sun had not been able to reach.

That much is real, she thought, crossing the street slantwise towards Stavely Greengrocer.

In front of the shop she stopped and looked at boxes of lettuces and bananas and flowers out on the pavement. One of the boxes was packed full of little posies of violets, just like the one in her hand. Very near to tears, Ann poked her own bunch in amongst them before she went inside for lunch.

Mordion was working hard, trying to build a shelter and keep a watch on Hume at the same time. Hume would keep scrambling down the steep rocks to the river. He seemed fascinated by the fish traps Mordion had made in the pool under the waterfall. Mordion was not sure how it had come about that he was in charge of such a small child, but he knew Hume was a great deal too young to be trusted not to fall into the river and drown. Every few minutes, Mordion was forced to go bounding down after Hume. Once, he was only just in time to catch Hume by one chubby arm as Hume cartwheeled slowly off a slippery stone at the edge of the deep pool.

“Play with the pretty stones I found you,” Mordion said.

“I did,” said Hume. “They went in the water.”

Mordion towed Hume up the rocks to the cave beneath the pine tree. This was where he was trying to build the shelter. It felt like the hundredth time he had towed Hume up here. “Stay up here, where it’s safe,” he said. “Here. Here’s some pieces of wood. Make a house.”

‘I’ll make a boat,” Hume offered.

And fall in the river for certain! Mordion thought. He tried cunning. “Why not make a cart? You can make roads for it in the earth here and – and – I’ll carve you a wooden horse for it when I’ve built this shelter.”

Hume considered this. “All right,” he said at last, doing Mordion a great favour.

For a time then there was peace, if you did not count the thumping as Hume endeavoured to beat his piece of wood into a cart shape. Mordion went back to building. He had planted a row of uprights in front of the cave, and hammered stakes in among the rocks above the cave. Now he was trying to lash beams between the two to make a roof. It was a good idea, but it did not seem to be working. Bracken and grass did not make good rope.

While he worked, Mordion wondered at the way he felt so responsible for Hume. A small child was a real nuisance. Centuries of stass had not prepared Mordion for this constant need to dash after Hume and stop him killing himself. He felt worn out. Several times he had almost given up and thought, oh let him drown!

But that was wrong and bad. Mordion was surprised how strongly he felt that. He could not let a small stray boy come to harm. Oh what does it matter why! he thought, angrily pushing his roof back upright. His poles showed a wilful desire to slant sideways. They did it oftener when Mordion tried to balance spreading fir boughs on top to make a roof. The whole thing would have collapsed by now, but for the long iron nails that, for some reason, kept turning up among his pile of wood. Though he felt this was cheating, Mordion took a nail and hammered it into the ground next to another pole every time his roof slanted. By now, each upright stood in a ring of nails. Suppose he were to lash the poles and nails around with bracken rope—

“Look,” Hume said happily. “I made my cart.”

Mordion turned round. Hume was beaming and holding out a lump of wood with two of the nails hammered through it. On both ends of each nail were round slices that Mordion had cut off the ends of his poles when he was getting them the right length. Mordion stared at it ruefully. It was far more like a cart than his building was like a house.

“Don’t carts look like this?” Hume asked doubtfully.

“Oh yes. Haven’t you ever seen one?” Mordion said.

“No,” Hume said. “I made it up. Is it very wrong?”

In that case, Mordion realised, Hume was a genius. He had just reinvented the wheel. This was certainly a good reason for caring for Hume. “No, it’s a beautiful cart,” Mordion said kindly. Hume beamed so happily at this that Mordion found himself almost as pleased as Hume was. To give such pleasure with so few words! “What made you think of the nails?” he asked.

“I just asked for something to fasten the rings of wood on with,” Hume explained.

“Asked?” said Mordion.

“Yes,” said Hume. “You can ask for things. They fall on the ground in front of you.”

So Hume had discovered this queer way you could cheat too, Mordion thought. This explained the nails in the woodpile – possibly. And while he thought about this, Hume said, “My cart’s a boat too,” and set off at a trot towards the river again.

Mordion dived and caught him by the back of his tracksuit just as Hume walked off the edge of the high rocks. “Can’t you be careful?” he said, trying to drag Hume more or less out of the sky. They were both hanging out over the river.

Hume windmilled his arms so that Mordion all but lost his grip on the tracksuit. “Hallo, Ann!” Hume yelled. “Ann, come and look at my cart! Mordion’s made a house!”

Down below, Mordion was surprised and pleased to see, Ann was jumping cautiously across the river from rock to rock. When Hume shouted, she balanced on a boulder and looked up. She seemed as surprised as Mordion, but not nearly so pleased. He felt rather hurt Ann shouted, but it was lost in the rushing of the waterfall.

“Can’t hear you, Ann!” Hume screamed.

Ann had realised that. She made the last two leaps across this foaming river where there had only been a trickling stream before, and came scrambling up the cliff. “What’s going on?” she panted, rather accusingly.

“What do you mean?” Mordion set Hume down at a safe distance from the drop-off. He had, Ann saw, grown a small curly camel-coloured beard. It made his face far less like a skull. With the beard and the pleated robe, he reminded her of a monk, or a pilgrim. But Hume—! Hume was so small – only five years old at the most!

Hume was clamouring for Ann to admire his cart, holding it up and wagging it in her face. Ann took it and looked at it. “It’s a stone-age rollerskate,” she said. “You ought to make two – unless it’s a very small skateboard.”

“He invented it himself,” Mordion said proudly.

“And Mordion invented a house!” Hume said, equally proudly.

Ann looked from the cart to the slanting poles of the house. To her mind, there was not much to choose between the two, but she supposed that Hume and Mordion were both having to learn.

“We started by sheltering in the cave,” Mordion explained, a little self-consciously, “but it was very cold and rather small. So I thought I’d build on to it.”

As he pointed to the dank little hole in the rocks behind the shelter, Ann saw that there was a dark red slash on his wrist, just beginning to look puckered and sore. That’s where he cut himself to make Hume, she thought. Then she thought, hey! – what’s going on? That cut was slightly less well healed than the cut on her own knee. Ann could feel the soreness and the drag of the sticking plaster under the jeans she had sensibly decided to wear this afternoon. But Mordion had had time to grow a beard.