Diana Jones - Hexwood

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.

“I know it gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘lean-to’,” Mordion said apologetically. He was hurt and puzzled. Just like Hume, he thought of Ann as a good friend from the castle estate. Yet here she was looking grave, unfriendly and decidedly sarcastic. “What’s the matter?” he asked her. “Have I offended you?”

“Well—” said Ann. “Well, last time I saw Hume he was twice the size he is now.”

Mordion pulled his beard, wrestling with a troublesome itch of memory when he looked at Hume. Hume was pulling Ann’s sleeve and saying, like the small boy he was, “Ann, come and see my sword Mordion made me, and my funny log. And the nets in the water to catch fish.”

“Hush, Hume,” Mordion told him. “Ann, he was this size when I found him wandering in the wood.”

“But you said, if I remember rightly, that you weren’t going to bother to look after him,” Ann said. “What changed your mind?”

“Surely I never would have said—” Mordion began. But the itch of memory changed to a stab. He knew he had said something like that, though it seemed now as if he must have said it in another time and place entirely. The stab of memory brought with it sunlit spring woodland, a flowering Judas tree, and Ann’s face, smudged and green-lit, staring at him with fear, horror and anger. From somewhere high up. “Forgive me,” he said. “I never meant to frighten—You know, something seems to be playing tricks with my memory.”

“The paratypical field,” Ann said, staring up at him expectantly.

“Oh!” said Mordion. She was right. Both fields were very strong, and one was also very subtle and so deft at keeping itself unnoticed that, with the passing of the weeks, he had forgotten it was there. “I let myself get caught in it,” he confessed. “As to – as to what I said about Hume – well – I’d never in my life had to care for anyone—” He stopped, because now Ann had made him aware his memory was wrong, he knew this was not quite the case. At some time, somewhere, he had cared for someone, several someones, children like Hume. But this stab of memory hurt so deeply that he was not prepared to think of it, except to be honest with Ann. “That’s not quite true,” he admitted. “But I knew what it would be like. He can be a perfect little pest.”

Hume just then cast down a bundle of his treasures at Ann’s feet, shouting at her to look at them. Ann laughed. “I see what you mean!” She squatted down beside Hume and inspected the wooden sword, and the log that looked rather like a crocodile – a dragon, Hume insisted – and fingered the stones with holes in. As she inspected the doll-thing that Mordion had dressed with a piece torn from his robe, she realised that she approved of Mordion far more than she had expected to. Mum had tried to make her stay at home to rest, but Ann had set out to find Hume and look after him. It had been a shock to find Mordion was already doing so. But she had to admit that Mordion had really been trying. There were still strange – and frightening – things about him, but some of that was his looks, and the rest was probably the paratypical field at work. It made things queer, this field.

“Tell you what, Hume,” she said. “Let’s us two go for a walk and give Mordion a bit of a holiday.”

It was as if she had given Mordion a present. The smile lit his face as she got up and led Hume away. Hume was clamouring that he knew a real place to walk to. “I could use a holiday,” Mordion said through the clamour. It was heartfelt. Ann felt undeserving, because she knew that, as presents go, it was not much better than a log that looked like a crocodile.

As soon as Ann had towed Hume out of sight, Mordion, instead of getting on with his house, sat on one of the smooth brown rocks under the pine tree. He leant back on the tree’s rough, gummy trunk, feeling like someone who had not had a holiday in years. Absurd! Centuries of half-life in stass were like a long night’s sleep – but he was sure he had had dreams, appalling dreams. And the one thing he was certain of was that he had longed, with every fibre of his body, to be free. But the way he felt now, bone-tired, mind-tired, was surely the result of looking after Hume.

Yes, Ann was right. Hume had been bigger at one time. When? How? Mordion groped after it. The subtler of the two paratypical fields kept pushing in and trying to spread vagueness over his mind. He would remember this. Woodland – Ann looking horrified—

It came to him. First it was blood, splashed on moss and dripping down his hand. Then it was the furrow in the ground, opening to show bone-white body and a tangle of hair. Mordion contemplated it. What had he done? True, the field had pushed him to it, but it was one of the few things he knew he could have resisted. He must have been a little mad, coming from that coffin to find himself a skeleton, but that was no excuse. And he had a very real grudge against the Reigners, but that was no excuse either. It was not right to create another human being to do one’s dirty work. He had been mad, playing God.

He looked at the cut on his wrist. He shuddered and was about to heal it with an impatient thought, but he stopped himself. This had better stay – had to stay – to remind him what he owed to Hume. He owed it to Hume to bring him up as a normal person. Even when Hume was grown up, he must never, never know that Mordion had made him as a sort of puppet. And, Mordion thought, he would have to find a way to deal with the Reigners for himself. There had to be a way.