Hexwood

“The field is waiting to work with it,” Mordion told her. “It was the first thing I noticed after you ran away.”

“What for? How?” Ann said. “I don’t agree to anything!”

“Perhaps if I explain.” Mordion stood up and strolled over to a spot just under Ann’s branch. She felt sick, and tried to back even further. She could see the buds on the end of her branch shaking in front of Mordion’s upturned face. She felt as if she was making the whole tree shake. “What was done in the past,” Mordion said, “was to get round the Reigners’ ban by breeding a race of men and women who were not under the ban and could go against the Reigners—”

“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.