Hexwood

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Well, that’s something at least,” La Trey said, with satisfaction.

  Behind her the gates were shut, in hideous haste, only inches in front of the dragons staring eyes.

  Night fell. The net of pain that held Mordion pricked slowly into points of light against the darkness, until his entire huge body was a web of cold sparks stretched half across the night sky. Each speck of fire pierced like a diamond knife, keen as frost and biting as acid. His only choice was to slip from point to fiery point and let each diamond stab him to the soul, or to remain still and experience the blinding pain of all his memories at once. There was no avoiding the memories. They were there, and they existed, implacable and everlasting as stars.

  “What did I do,” he said aloud, after many centuries of pain, “to deserve what is in my mind?” True, he had walked the galaxy killing many people, but that seemed like earning his punishment afterwards. He had earned it fully, he knew. The form he was in now was his true form. He had known it for years. And the moment he had entered the field of the Bannus, and felt the compulsions of the Reigners marginally lifted from his mind, this same form had come upon him – a low, ugly form, smaller than this, and so nasty that he had hidden himself deep in a patch of thorns. Someone had disturbed him there, he remembered. Wanting only peace, he had crawled forward and tried to smile at the boy standing there to show him he wanted only peace. The boy had been Hume, he realised now – Hume before Mordion had created him. That was odd. And Hume had mistaken the smile, taken it for a threat and thrown a log into his mouth. It had taken Mordion hours to rid himself of that log, and all the while he was spitting and coughing and pawing at it, he had told himself that it was no more than he had deserved. He had earned this form and this punishment, but he had earned them afterwards, and that did not make sense. “I must have done something early on,” he said.

  “You did nothing,” said the Bannus. Mordion was aware of it nearby as the outline of a chalice made of stars. He had some thoughts of stretching out his starry tail and wrapping it round the chalice, taking it prisoner and telling it to put him out of his misery, but he saw that would be useless. Here in the sky where they were was in some way also inside the Bannus. The chalice was only an illusion of the Bannus, as empty as the sky behind it, which was also the Bannus. “I can see nothing in your memories that deserves their presence,” the Bannus said to him. “Examine them and see.”

  Mordion wanted to refuse, but since he had only the two choices, he reluctantly exchanged one pain for another, and let his consciousness move until he had impaled himself upon the nearest diamond spike. Six children. There had been six children, twin boys, twin girls, and Kessalta. And Mordion. They were all the same age. Mordion had no idea if they were children of the same parents or not. They were all desperately attached to one another, because the others were all each had in the world, but since four were twins and Kessalta and Mordion the odd ones out, he and Kessalta were special to one another. She was next to him in abilities. But it was not fair. It never was fair. Mordion had always seemed like the eldest. He was bigger and stronger than the others and could do more things. It was never fair. And the others had looked up to him and depended on him, just as if he was really the eldest.

  Always defending children! he thought, and slipped on to the spike of that memory. The six of them were quite small and shut in a room. It was an empty room where they spent much time. Sometimes it was wet and cold in there, sometimes wet and hot. They thought they were put in there to be punished, but they were not sure. This time, it was cold and dry, but, as always, there were voices whispering in the air. “You are nothing. You are low. Love the Reigners and make yourselves worth something. Honour the Reigners. Please the Reigners.” On and on. None of them listened. Mordion, as usual, was keeping them from being too miserable by making up songs and doing magic tricks. One reason he had entered the castle in such a flourish of magic-making, he realised now, was the sheer joy of being able to do tricks again.

  They were all laughing because Mordion had made a silly image of a Reigner. It was dancing in the air saying, “I’ve got you! I’ve got you!” while they all shouted back, “Oh no you haven’t!” when the door opened and one of the robots that mostly looked after them burst into the room flailing a strap.

  “You have displeased the Reigners,” it intoned and went for them with the strap. They all screamed. For a moment they did not know what to do. They were used to robots neglecting them, and robots ordering them about, but this was the first time one had attacked them. But when Cation had been quite badly hurt, Mordion pulled himself together and managed to drive the robot into a corner, where he and Kessalta kicked its feet out from under it. But it kept getting up and flailing at them. And it was so strong. In the end Mordion had to pierce its brain with a magic bolt-thing he invented in frantic haste, and then tear out some of its works before it would stop.

  Their human keepers punished him for destroying a robot, but that had not hurt nearly so much as the memory of those five lost children he had spent his childhood defending.

  “Why did you defend them?” the Bannus wondered.

  “Somebody had to,” Mordion said. He thought the reason he was able to was not so much, in those days, that he was taller and cleverer – which was not fair anyway – but because there were three voices that sometimes spoke in his head. They told him that what was happening was wrong. Better still, they made him aware of wider, happier worlds than the six children knew. Mordion, with intense excitement, learnt that these voices came from people many light years away and that he was speaking with people whose voices had set out for his mind centuries before. He was always sorry that neither the twins nor Kessalta could hear them. They usually spoke, the voices, when Mordion’s mind was busy learning all the things they were made to learn. They had lessons and physical training eight or more hours a day. The Reigners wanted their Servants properly educated, they were told. If any of them got restive, robots came. They were all terrified of robots after that one with the strap. And always the whispering in the air that the children were nothing and must love the Reigners. Mordion’s voices helped to make all that bearable. But the voices gradually faded away after the Helmets were introduced.

  “I am not thinking of those!” Mordion groaned. “How often have I been up here, being made to remember?”

  “Only this once,” the Bannus told him. “My actions ceased to be multiple when you finally decided to come to the castle. You feel you have been here often, because those memories were always in your mind. You have been quite a problem to me. I have had to keep much of the action marking time while I induced you to remove the blocks that had been put upon you. It has taken so long that feeding everyone became quite difficult.”

  “Why did you bother?” Mordion groaned.

  “Because you showed yourself able to take command of my actions,” the Bannus told him. “First you insisted on taking the form of a reptile. Then, when I induced the Wood to make you become a man again, you insisted on looking after Hume yourself. That was not my plan. Hume was to grow up in the Wood under Yam’s care.”

  He had kept to the pattern of looking after children, Mordion thought. Perhaps it was because it was the only happy thing he had known. But it could have been that he was determined Hume should have a better childhood than his own. Not difficult, Mordion thought. “But I still don’t see why you bothered with me.”

  “I believe I have developed greatly,” said the Bannus, “since the days when the present Reigner One cheated me. I had the full use of a large library and learnt even while dormant, and when my power was restored I found the Reigners had done me a great service by constructing portals and message lines throughout half the galaxy. I learnt through those, much and quickly. But I still have to abide by the rules of my designers. These state that I have to provide everyone capable of it a chance to lay hands on me and take command. I am, as I saw you realised during your conversations with Reigner Two, a device for selectin
g Reigners. The other candidates are all now prepared to take their chance. Only Hume and Artegal among them caused any difficulty. But you have been so unwilling to come to the point that I had, reluctantly, to decide on this as a sort of crash-measure, and was forced to exercise considerable chicanery to achieve it.”

  “Oh, go away!” said Mordion.

  He had no idea whether the Bannus went or stayed. He was for a long time stretched out along the black interstellar spaces of himself, sliding from point to agonising point.

  Reigner One visited the children often. They adored him. Mordion flinched along his star spaces to think how much they had adored him. When he came, they were allowed good clothes and nice surroundings. He smiled and patted their heads and gave them sweets – they never otherwise had anything sweet to eat. Often, the sweets were taken away when Reigner One had gone.

  “You displeased Reigner One very much,” they were told. “You must try harder to be worthy of him.” Then Mordion had to comfort the sobbing twins and tell them that they were worthy. And they all tried to be worthy of Reigner One. How they tried.

  They were given battle-training from very early on. Both pairs of twins were slower at this than Kessalta or Mordion, and Mordion was often forced to be very swift indeed to defend the twins from the robots they all so much dreaded. He supposed this was why he eventually lost his fear of robots. He had to disable his own attacker and then turn to help Bellie or Corto with theirs, while Kessalta, slightly slower, helped the other two. And it was the same with instrument detection. Mordion learnt to discover what was being used on the others before he even looked at what was attacking him. Then he could shoot the words “spy monitor” or “needle flier” in the minds of Cation and Sassal, quick, while he looked at his own, and those two could stop the instrument before it got to them.

  There was another piercing diamond alongside this. When Reigner One later dressed Mordion in scarlet, with the rolled cloak upon one shoulder, and told Mordion he was the Servant now, Reigner One did not seem to know this extreme skill of Mordion’s with instruments. He told Mordion that his every act from now on would be monitored. Mordion looked, and found that there were times when Reigner One did not bother to do so. But by then there was not a thing Mordion could do about it.

  They were not allowed to miss training unless they had bones broken, and they were forbidden to complain of any sickness. They were all forced, to some extent, to learn to heal themselves. Mordion had quite acute asthma whenever the few trees they could see over the walls put out dusty new leaves, and this he could never cure. He learnt to ignore it. Cation’s twin Corto likewise tried to ignore sudden terrible pains in his stomach. They all tried to cure him, but they did not know how. Mordion and Kessalta sat with him all night, helping him ignore it, until, around dawn, Corto died of a burst appendix.

  Reigner One arrived in great anger. “You wicked little children,” he told them, “this is your fault. You should have told someone he was ill.”

  They did not dare tell him they had been forbidden to. They felt awful. They blamed themselves bitterly. They were made to attend the post-mortem on Corto. Anatomy was something they were supposed to know about. They were all sick afterwards, and ever after that Cation was slower at things than before. He needed all Kessalta’s help, as well as Mordion’s.

  The grief – but not the guilt – they felt about Corto seemed to get smudged out by longer and longer sessions under the Helmets. “I meant not to think about those!” Mordion groaned, but he was impaled on that spike by then.

  They all hated the Helmets. The things gave you a headache. But Mordion hated them more than the others because, slowly, slowly, they shut out his three voices, shut out his ability to do magic, shut down the songs and stories he used to make up. He was forced to console himself with the knowledge that the Helmets did improve the things he was supposed to do, like love the Reigners, and fight swiftly and accurately, and obey their instructors’ orders, but it was hard. He did not realise that the Helmets could be dangerous until Bellie’s twin Sassal suddenly went into convulsions under hers and died.

  They were not blamed for this death, but they all four kicked and fought and were punished next time they had to put on the Helmets. And there were now two lonely, grief-stricken twins for Mordion and Kessalta to comfort. Mordion thought he might have given up and let himself die in convulsions too, if it had not been for a sudden new voice that came to him. He called this one the Girl Child. She called him the Slave. She seemed to have got past the Helmets because she was younger than the other voices and came in on a later waveband. She was very young at first. Her cheerful chatter was like a lifeline to Mordion. And she introduced a new notion, almost a new hope. She was very indignant about the life he led. Why don’t you run away? she said.

  Mordion wondered why he had not thought of this himself. The Helmets, probably. He started planning to get free. The idea of getting free obsessed him from then on. Naturally, he shared the idea with Cation, Bellie and Kessalta.

  Cation went over the wall that same night. He was brought back, horribly mangled. Reigner One came with him. “This is what happens,” he said, smiling and pulling his beard, “to naughty children who try to run away. Don’t you three even think of it.”

  Cation died two days later. Here was one more thing Mordion blamed himself for. None of them ran away, but Bellie contrived to hang herself from a pipe in the washroom a month later. Reigner One blamed Mordion and Kessalta for that, but they had expected he would. It was only one more misery on top of grief.

  The Girl Child told him not to mind. She was certain he would be free one day. Mordion wished he had never believed her. His captivity and his misery were so much worse after that, that he tried to wrench his consciousness away, and only succeeded in falling on another icy spike. Vierran. When he had walked into that basement for clothes, expecting only a robot, and found Vierran there instead, there had been something about the way she spoke. Something about her energy and her sense of humour. He felt he knew it. He became convinced, almost straight away, that Vierran was his Girl Child. He longed to ask her. Several times he had actually started to do so. But he never dared. If he did, and he was wrong, then he knew that Vierran would recoil from him like all the other people in the House of Balance. Mordion knew the reason they avoided him, and it was not, as the Reigners thought, because he killed to their orders. It was because they suspected – rightly – that his training had driven him mad. It was meant to, after all. And he could not bear Vierran to think he was mad, which she would if he babbled to her of voices.

  “I don’t want to know any more!” he said.

  “I have some fellow feeling for you,” observed the Bannus, now in the form of a starry urn. “I am what Earth people would call a cyborg. I was constructed around four thousand years ago from the half-lifed brains of a deceased Hand of Reigners. Five different brains are not easy to assort or assimilate. Meshing them together, and then meshing the human parts with the machinery cost me much the same pain as you now feel. Take courage from the fact that I survived it, sanely. Then, like you, I have spent much time closed right down, allowed only to act as a security guard. To judge by my feelings, you have been raging within.”

  “Yes,” said Mordion. “The worst was being forced to be so respectful.”

  “I am surprised you pick out that!” said the Bannus.

  “You try being sick every time you want to laugh at someone,” Mordion said.

  “I understand,” said the Bannus. “I suspect you do not believe me, but I do. I have promised myself for centuries this joke I am now playing. I would have allowed myself to rot, had I not. And, again like you, I am still considerably frustrated. You are held against your will in my field of actions. I am besieged and manipulated by the Wood.”

  “The wood!” Mordion was truly surprised.

  “The Wood,” said the Bannus. “The Wood has me in its field. To some extent, I have the Wood in mine also. I was placed in it, and
over the centuries, our two fields have mingled. Maybe I have helped to make this Wood more animate than many, but the fact remains that I am in its power.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mordion said.

  “The Wood,” explained the Bannus, “is, like all woods in this country, and maybe like woods all over Earth, part of the great Forest that once covered this land. At the merest nudge, it forms its own theta-space and becomes the great Forest again. Ask any Earthman. He will tell you how, in this country, he has been lost in the smallest spinney. He can hear traffic on the road, but the road is not there, while there are sounds behind him of a great beast crawling through the undergrowth. This is the great Forest. You can deal with the Wood better than I can, for it is magic.”

  “Can’t you control it at all?” Mordion asked.

  There was a note of real bitterness in the melodious voice of the Bannus. “I can only compromise. It is ridiculous. I can tap information all over the galaxy, but I cannot communicate with the Wood. It is voiceless, yet it has a will at least as strong as yours. I could only learn, by trial and error, what it would let me do. Most of what has happened here, including your present form, is according to the desires of the Wood.”

  “But your field is surely much wider than the Wood’s,” Mordion said.

  “For sure,” agreed the Bannus. “It has been quite useful to suggest that the theta-space of the Wood was mine, where in fact mine was far wider and more subtle. Do not tell me that you have not done the same. You have taken pains to seem all Servant, yet I detect you have kept one portion of your mind almost entirely free of this training you were forced to undergo.”