Hexwood: Killing Joke

Disclaimer: this is a not-for-profit tribute to the work of the late Diana Wynne Jones

This page uses images which re-size to maintain a constant appearance across all browsers and resolutions. Please allow scripts or ActiveX controls to run if asked.

Hexwood filk: Mordion considers various senses of humour, including his own – one of a set of four filk-songs I wrote in the mid 1990s to accompany the book Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones. This one is possibly the least ose of the four, on the traditional fannish scale of ose, morose and more morose. For those who have come here because you are following me as a writer, rather than because you have read Hexwood (although if you haven't, you really should), a summary of the background to the story can be found here.

Killing Joke
Tune: traditional, The Rambling Sailor

When I was a slave I longed to laugh though I knew what followed after;
Though I was bred for sorrow still my heart was made for laughter.
Though they trapped my mind with sickness vile –
With dizzy cold and the taste of bile –
So great I could not even smile
Yet I still found my masters amusing.

Orm Pender thought it was a joke to take his rival's descendants;
To warp our souls in childhood and use us as his Servants.
He felt it very sweet to breed
For the strength and skill in his rival's seed,
Then break our wills to suit his need
And he found our pain amusing.

Though I have found it hard to see this joke had much to recommend it,
I suppose it could be funny if your sense of humour tended
To irony and "Pride before a fall",
For in me he made so strong a tool
That I have had his life and rule
And I guess it's true that is quite amusing.

Orm sent the old machine to Earth and thought he had it confined,
But the Bannus knew a joke or two and he would not care for the punch-line.
It tricked us all into its field:
Though it scorned the magics I could wield
Through me Orm Pender's fate was sealed
By a cyborg with a sense of humour.

The Bannus thought it a good game to take the game it was asked for
And put us through a parody of the high tales of King Arthur,
With a sword-inna-stone and a Grail/Bannus Quest
But the rex futuris is no jest;
The Land called him from his long rest
And it did not seem to me to be joking.

Now the Bannus thought it set us up for no cause but to "get" Orm Pender.
It despised all hint of magic: but the Wood had its own agenda.
It drew us in, my masters and me,
To enact an ancient Mystery
And serve the cause of magery
And I think the joke is on the Bannus.

My masters saw me as a thing, with no use but what served their glory,
But from birth to grave my every move is bound into the ancient story.
Though I've paid in pain and suffering,
Though I have cried for laughing
And I've nearly died of laughing,
That really is the best damn joke
Of all.