Deep Secret (Magids 1) - Page 92

“‘Oh God!’ I said. ‘Look, isn’t there any chance of you letting us through as we are?’

“‘No,’ he said. ‘Go back and ask for another verse.’

“‘All right then,’ I said. I was annoyed and in a panic, because the candles would be burning down, and Maree was so slow. ‘Then I’ll have to leave Maree here while I go back,’ I said, ‘or we’ll be all night. You won’t hurt her while I’m gone, will you?’

“He was furious that I thought he might hurt Maree – I could tell, sort of feel it raging through the grille at me like cold wind. ‘Nothing will touch her,’ he said scornfully. ‘Go away.’

“So I made Maree sit down just outside the shadow where it was warmer, and I wasted a lot of time telling her to stay there and not to wander away, and then getting her to promise she wouldn’t move from the spot. In the end she said, ‘You run. I’m fine,’ as if she’d understood after all.

“So I turned round and ran. That part, going back, was awful. I hated being all alone, and I was scared stiff Maree would wander off, and I kept thinking how this was wasting the candles, and I was afraid I wouldn’t see the hotel room and go straight past it or something. I went as fast as I could, but I had to go slower after I twisted my ankle down in the dead river. And in some ways I remember it as endless. Yet at the same time it was over quite quickly. It was really only a few minutes before I saw a spreading, winking light at the top of the hill in front, and when I was down at the bottom of this hill, I saw that the light was two of the candles. They looked surprisingly big from there.

“I went panting up that hill and there I was, inside the room again.

“They looked pretty stunned to see me. I could tell Rupert thought at first that we’d been to Babylon and Maree hadn’t come back. So I told them how they wouldn’t let us across the bridge without something more. Rupert kind of sagged with relief that that was all it was.

“He wants me to tell what happened while he was off fetching Zinka.

“Not a lot, at first. I went round to the three-cornered space by the bed. I meant to sit on the bed beside Rob, but I was so impatient that I just kept walking up and down and fidgeting with the bottles on the fridge and so on. Rob went up on one elbow and watched me anxiously. Will said to sit down, I was disturbing the quack chicks, but I couldn’t. So they began running about and cheeping, and I think Rob caught the restlessness too, because he sat up and slid his hooves to the floor and asked me what it was like out there.

“Rob is someone I can talk to. There aren’t many other people, bar Maree, that I can tell real stuff to, but Rob’s always going to be one. I’ve been over to see him quite a lot since all this happened and we’ve talked of everything. (Rob wants to come to Bristol to see me, but we know he’d cause a bit of a sensation there.) This time I told him a bit of what I’ve put down here, mostly about being down in the stones of the dry river, because it was the worst. I didn’t say much. I could tell Will just thought, Oh, it’s hard going out there, but Rob understood what it was like being all alone with Maree behaving strangely and not being able to see.

“Next thing I knew, Rob was out of bed. He said, ‘Yowch!’ because his side hurt, and trampled with his hooves and made faces. His face went all white and twisted for a bit. Then he found his shirt and started putting it on.

“Will said, ‘What the hell are you doing, Rob?’

“Rob said, ‘Getting ready to go to Babylon with Nick. They need my help.’

“‘Don’t be a damned fool!’ Will said. ‘You’ve got one side stitched up. It’s hard going. You’d tear it open again. And it’s dangerous in other ways.’

“Rob stuck his head up proudly, hair flying all over, and said, ‘Bother the danger!’ He said he owed it to Maree. She’d stitched him up and he’d lured her into getting stripped in return. And Will said, really very snidely, I thought, that oh yes, Rob had gone from worm to hero in one bound, and why didn’t he stop posing and lie down? And Rob more or less roared, ‘I am not posing!’ After that they really yelled at one another and the chicks got pretty frightened.

“I didn’t say anything. I wanted Rob along. It was a real relief to think I’d have company, as long as Rob could stand it. And I could see his wound was beginning to feel easier as he trampled about shouting. In the midst of it, Rob whirled round on me and asked if I had a piece of string. I found a rubber band in my pocket. Rob took it and put his hair back in it. For a second it looked exactly like a horse’s mane, until the rubber band snapped and his hair all came tumbling round his face again.

“Rob twiddled the broken rubber in his fingers gloomily. ‘Centaurs always tie their hair back when they’re going into battle,’ he said.

“Will laughed. That made Rob so mad he turned round and went back to bed again. I was feeling really depressed and wanting to hit Will – only he’s bigger than me all over – when Will realised that the door had come open and the quack chicks had run away out into the corridor. Will went leaping after them, swearing a blue streak, and shouted at me to come and help round them up. So I climbed over the candlesticks and went out there.

The chicks were really frightened. They were running every which way, and I could have sworn there were

at least twenty of them, instead of just the two. And you know how when you’re chasing something that small you run all bent over with your arms out like a baboon. Well, I was doing that when I ran slap into Gram White. Thunk. I looked up and found Mum was with him.

“I remember thinking, I wish she wouldn’t go around with him! They don’t make a nice pair.

“Mum said, ‘Oh, there you are at last, Nick! I want you to come along with me now.’

“I shooed one of the chicks back in round the door and said, ‘OK.’ I tried to give Will a look under my arm to tell him I wouldn’t be long, but he may not have seen. He was into serious chick-chasing. Then I went along the corridor with Mum and Gram.

“You see, after Maree’s parents-as-it-were took her off to London, I was left on my own and I had to work out a way to deal with Mum. I know that sounds unfeeling. But I had to. I used to sit and blame myself about it, and then go on and work it out quite coldly. The week after Maree left I realised I wasn’t going to be able to call my soul my own unless I did. Mum wanted me to do everything with her – not my things, her things – and to tell her everything I was thinking. And she looked through my pockets and read my computer files and all my school exercise books. Another thing about Mum is that she enjoys it if you fight with her. Maree always went wrong there, fighting Mum. It gives Mum a real buzz to get you under. But she gets – no, I mean ‘enjoyed’ and ‘got’, I keep forgetting – she got bored if you gave her her own way, and even more bored if you told her lots and lots of thoughts and stuff that was not her kind of ideas.

“My very first cold thought after Maree left was: Mum isn’t interested in me, she’s only interested in me belonging to her. So I invented Bristolia. She got more and more bored with that, though I got more and more into it. Stupid really. I’d only invented it to cover up other things I wanted to think about. I filled my computer with Bristolia and she very soon stopped looking at it. Then I worked out how not to fight her. I just said OK quite pleasantly whenever she wanted me to do anything with her, and waited until she stopped noticing me and then went away. She almost never checked up on what I was doing. She wasn’t interested enough.

“That was what I did that evening. Only they were marching along on either side of me like police and the candles were burning down and Maree was waiting out there, and I was still scared she’d wander off, so I thought I’d hurry it up a bit. I said, ‘What did you want me for then?’

“I hope that was not what sent Gram White following after me. It was out of character for me. I usually wait quite patiently for Mum to issue her orders once she’s found me. But Rupert thinks Gram was after Rob really. Could be. After the fuss and the trail of blood Rob left all through the hotel when he came, everyone knew there was a centaur there, even if most of them seemed to think it was me in disguise.

“I could see Mum hadn’t actually got any orders. She just wanted me where she could see me. Gram White said, ‘We don’t want you consorting with those people in that room, young man. They’re not nice to know.’

“I said they were harmless in there, only rather boring. I yawned a bit.

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Magids Fantasy
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