The Merlin Conspiracy (Magids 2) - Page 46

Strange that Maxwell Hyde had turned out to be a Magid and come looking for me. I supposed he meant to take me back to Dad. In a way I was relieved, because that definitely meant I’d have to wait before I did anything to help that girl, Roddy. But after th

at dream I’d had, I wasn’t sure that I was allowed to wait—and that made me nervous and excited in about equal shares, and it also made it awkward if Maxwell Hyde was determined to run me back home the way he had dealt with the goat. It was funny the way I always had to call him by both his names—Maxwell and Hyde—in my mind. If I thought of him as Mr. Hyde, I found I was calling him Dr. Jekyll. If I tried thinking Maxwell, it made me think of silver hammers …

It was here I realized that my thoughts had gone all small and silly. It is maddening the way your mind sheers off into silly ideas when you try to think seriously—or I know my mind does. I got up in exasperation and went outside. I was too annoyed with myself not to.

The island was definitely smaller. There was only a short bank between the house door and the garden wall, and the trees had moved closer. There was an odd, ragged look to everything, so that I could actually see the lines between the different slices of grass, raying inward toward the garden. The garden wall was mostly made of stone now, with low, tumbled-down places in it. Mini looked huge beside it. She snatched her trunk back guiltily as I came outside and stood swinging it, rubbing one back leg up the other, looking really embarrassed.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said.

The goat distracted me then by bouncing up to me as if it thought I wanted it there. Besides, I realized that there was a mass of food in that garden. Maxwell Hyde could have strawberries for lunch. I went to the rickety gate in the collapsing wall and forced it open. And stood staring dismally. It was like a small, tangled allotment in there, with bushy apple trees round the walls and weeds everywhere. While I stared at it, the goat bundled in past me and began eating barren-looking Brussels sprouts just as if it wasn’t full of loaf and armchair. Mini’s trunk snaked slyly over my shoulder and fastened on a green apple in the nearest tree.

“I love these things,” she said, “even though they give me a funny tummy.”

I suddenly remembered—from telly, I think—that elephants have quite delicate digestions. And I was furious. It was everything, really, from the phone call first thing in the morning onward. But I took it out on Mini.

“Leave it!” I shouted at her. “You stupid elephant! You’ll ruin your stomach! And I’ll have you ill as well as everything else! Anyway, it’s stealing!”

She was really hurt. Her trunk whipped back, and she gave me a shocked look. I shall never forget the way those wonderful gray eyes looked at me. “I thought you were kind,” she said. Then she turned round with that sudden nimbleness that elephants can produce and went away.

I felt beastly. All I could think of to do was to wade in among the weeds and search moodily for anything I knew how to cook. There wasn’t much. I found brown-edged lettuce, little greenish tomatoes on a starved vine, and a handful of rubbery plums. I was just coming out with this sorry lot bundled up in my sweatshirt when Mini came galloping back again.

“Oh, do come! I’ve found something horrible! Please come!”

Her ears were folding and unfolding, her trunk was tossing, and she was trampling from foot to foot. Her eyes were beginning to roll. I could see she was in a right state. “Okay,” I said. “With you in a second.”

I charged into the house, dumped the veg, and even remembered to shut the door against the goat. Then I followed Mini at a run to the other end of the island. It was only about a hundred yards by then, across line after line of different kinds of grass.

Mini stopped beyond the clump of trees, shaking all over. “Down there,” she said. Her trunk gave a short jab in the right direction. “I can’t go down there again! I can’t!”

The island was quite high above the waters on that side. I had to go over a steep, grassy lip and down two sloping shelves of crunchy white pebbles to get near the sea. Mini had left deep sliding footprints in them, going down, and even deeper ones going up. It was easy to see why she had gone here. The slice of water facing the pebbles was a lovely tropical green-blue, rocked by calm ripples. Warm air blew off it. Just the place an elephant would choose to swim. Except …

I stopped dead.

Someone else was in the water, rolling gently in the shallow ripples. He was brown and red and shiny. At first I thought he was alive and trying to roll out of the water. He worked about so. Then the ripples turned him so that an eye stared at me out of a cracked gold-rimmed lens. Above and below the eye was a horrible red and white mess. Then I hoped he was dead. No one should be alive with his head smashed like that. The clear water was red-brown around him in clouds. Lots of little flies were sort of sizzling this way and that on him as he rolled. And he rolled the other way, letting me see the embroidery on his back all chopped open and red, and a white glimpse of shoulder blade as the flies went down on him again.

I made myself creep a step nearer. My foot knocked wood, and I looked away from the Prayermaster for a moment to see the spade and the ax that had done this to him lying on the pebbles. The metal parts were red and gummy, with hairs sticking to them. I thought of Japheth running to the flier covered in what I’d taken for red embroidery. I gagged. I couldn’t help it. I’m ashamed, but I’m no good at this kind of thing at all. I made one frantic scramble into the water to touch the Prayermaster’s staring, tepid face and knew for sure that he was dead. Then I went crashing and crunching up the pebbles until he was out of sight, and threw up. By the time I crawled up over the grass lip with the taste of sicky coffee in my nose, I was shaking worse than Mini.

“Is someone dead there?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Dreadfully. Let’s go somewhere else. There’s nothing we can do until Maxwell Hyde wakes up.”

We went back to the sunny place by the garden wall, and I sat there like a sack. Mini kept curling her trunk half round me, then taking it away. I think she was making sure I was still alive.

After a long time I said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I was in a bad mood.”

“I know,” she said. “You keep having to feed people. I, er, I’d eaten a lot of apples anyway before you came out.”

“That could be a mistake,” I said. I watched the hens pecking about for a while, and then I said, “There’s a triangle of sea near where we came in that had a tropical look. You could have your swim there.”

“I’ve lost the urge,” she said sadly.

We were still there when the house door opened and Maxwell Hyde came out looking very much awake. He was all trim and neat and shaved, though his clothes still seemed damp. “Can’t you pull yourself together?” he said to me. “You’re filling the air with doom and gloom. You and the elephant. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’ll show you,” I said. I got up and reached up to give Mini a pat. “You needn’t come,” I said to her, “unless you want to.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I think I’ll go and have that swim instead.”

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Magids Fantasy
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