The Game
       Diana Wynne Jones



               A 3S digital back-up edition v1.0
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                       Contents
            |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|


                          FIREBIRD
      AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.


                   “I SWEAR NOT TO SAY
              A WORD ABOUT WHAT WE DO
                IN THIS GAME TO ANYONE
                         OUTSIDE…”
  Hayley’s parents disappeared when she was a baby.
Since then, she has been raised and homeschooled by her
grandparents. Grandad is overworked and travels a lot;
Grandma is much too strict, and never lets her meet any
children her own age. When Hayley does something
wrong— she is not quite sure what—-her grandmother
packs her off to her aunts in Ireland. To Hayley’s shock,
her family is much bigger than she thought; to her
delight, the children all play what they call “the game,”
where they visit a place called “the mythosphere.” And
while she plays the game, Hayley learns more about her
    own place in the world than she could have expected.
       This original novella by Diana Wynne Jones is sharply
    funny, fast-paced, and surprising until its very end—like
    all of the acclaimed author’s work.




   “Diana Wynne Jones is, quite simply, the best writer of magic there
is, for readers of any age.”
                                                        —Neil Gaiman
  “I love Diana Wynne Jones.”
                                                     —Robin McKinley


   “Diana Wynne Jones chooses the most outlandish subjects and
treats them with such aplomb that the reader never blinks. She always
gives you characters you believe in from top to bottom and a world
whose details you recognize inside and out.”
                                               —Megan Whalen Turner


      BOOKS BY DIANA WYNNE JONES
      THE DALEMARK QUARTET
      Cart and Cwidder
      Drowned Ammet
      The Spellcoats
      The Crown of Dalemark
      THE CHRESTOMANCI BOOKS
      Charmed Life
      The Magicians of Caprona
      Witch Week
      The Lives of Christopher Chant
      Conrad’s Fate
      The Pinhoe Egg
      OTHER WORKS
      Changeover
      Wilkin’s Tooth (USA: Witch’s Business)
      The Ogre Downstairs
Eight Days of Luke
Dogsbody
Power of Three
Who Got Rid of Angus Flint?
The Four Grannies
The Time of the Ghost
The Homeward Bounders
Archer’s Goon
Fire and Hemlock
Warlock at the Wheel (short stories)
The Skiver’s Guide
The Thirteenth Enchanter
Howl’s Moving Castle
A Tale of Time City
Chair Person
Wild Robert
Hidden Turnings (editor)
Castle in the Air
Black Maria (USA: Aunt Maria)
A Sudden Wild Magic
Yes, Dear (picture book)
Hexwood
Fantasy Stories (editor)
Everard’s Ride (short stories)
Stopping for a Spell (short stories)
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
Minor Arcana (short stories)
Deep Secret
Believing Is Seeing (short stories)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Puss in Boots (retelling)
Mixed Magics (short stories)
The Year of the Griffin
The Merlin Conspiracy
Unexpected Magic (short stories)
The Game (novella)


FIREBIRD
   Published by the Penguin Group
   Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New
York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
   Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East,
Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division
of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
   Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,
England
   Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,
Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
   Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of
Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
   Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India
   Penguin Group (NZ), 61 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bayn,
Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New
Zealand Ltd)
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Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
   Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,
London WC2R 0RL, England
   Published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group
(USA) Inc., 2007

  Copyright © Diana Wynne Jones, 2007
  CIP data is available.
  ISBN 978-0-14-240718-9

   Printed in the United States of America
   Except in the United States of America, this book is
sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it
is published and without a similar condition including
this condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.
      The publisher does not have any control over and does
    not assume any responsibility for author or third-party
    Web sites or their content.



                This one is for Frances


                                 1
                                                                ^»
When Hayley arrived at the big house in Ireland, bewildered and in
disgrace, rain was falling and it was nearly dark. Her cousin
Mercer had called the place just “the Castle.” As far as Hayley could
see, peering up at the place while Cousin Mercer was paying the
taxi, the building was a confusing mixture of house and castle and
barn. She could see turrets and sharply sloping roofs, tall chimneys,
a wooden wall, and a stone part at one side that seemed to have
been patched up with new bricks. Then the taxi drove off in a spurt
of mud. Cousin Mercer—who had confused Hayley all along by
turning out to be a grown-up youngish man and not a cousin her
own age—picked up Hayley’s small old-fashioned suitcase and
hurried her into the house, where it was more than ever confusing.
  They came into a large stone-floored dining room full of people
milling about around the enormous dining table, or in and out of
the big kitchen beyond. Most of them were children, but all
older-seeming and larger than Hayley, while distracted-looking
ladies, who were probably aunts, pushed this way and that among
them with piles of plates and baskets of bread.
  Nobody took any notice of Hayley at all. True, somebody said,
“Good. She’s here. Now we can eat at last,” but nobody really
looked at her. Cousin Mercer left Hayley standing beside her
suitcase and threaded his way to the kitchen, shouting, “Mother!
Sorry about this. The plane was late and the taxi driver lost the
way!”
  Hayley stood. Her arms hung slightly outwards from the rest of
her and her hands dangled, useless and floppy with strangeness.
She had never been in the same room with so many people in her
life. She was used to the hushed and sequestered way Grandma and
Grandad lived, where nobody ran about, or laughed much, and
nobody ever shouted. These people were so lively and so loud . She
didn’t know who any of them were, apart from Cousin Mercer who
had brought her here from England, and she missed her friend
Flute acutely, even though it was probably Flute’s fault that she
was here and in disgrace. She still didn’t understand how she had
made Grandma so angry.
  Hayley sighed. The other main thing about these tall, rushing,
shouting children was that they all wore jeans or long baggy
trousers with lots of pockets down the sides and bright stripy tops.
Hayley sadly realised that her neat floral dress and her shiny
patent leather shoes were quite wrong for this place. She wished
she had jeans and trainers too, but Grandma disapproved of
trousers for girls.
   To add to the strangeness, there were more boys here than girls.
Most of the boys were fair and skinny, like the girls—and the girls
were so pretty and so confident that Hayley sighed again—but two
of the boys stood out by being dark. One was a tall, calm boy who
didn’t seem to shout as much as the others. He was obviously
popular, because the others were always trying to get his attention.
“Troy !” they shouted. “Come and look at my new trick!” or “Troy!
What do you think of this?” Troy always grinned and went
obligingly over to look.
  The other dark boy was smaller, and he struck Hayley as a
perfect little beast. He spent his time slyly pulling the beautiful
streaming hair of the girls, or stamping on people’s feet, or trying to
steal things out of the pockets in the baggy trousers. Hayley learnt
his name too, because every minute or so someone screamed,
“Tollie, do that again and you’ll die !”
  These people are all my cousins! Hayley thought wonderingly.
And I didn’t know about any of them until this moment!
   Here she found that Tollie had come to stand in front of her,
jeeringly, with his hands hanging in exactly the same useless
position that Hayley’s were and his feet planted the same uncertain
six inches apart. “Yuk!” he said. “You dirty outcast!”
  “You’re my cousin,” Hayley said. Her voice came out small and
prim with nerves.
  “Nim-pim!” Tollie mimicked her. “I am not so your cousin!
Mercer’s my dad, and he’s your cousin. But you’re only a dirty
outcast in a frilly dress.”
   Hayley felt things boiling in her that she would rather not know.
She wanted to leap on Tollie and pull pieces off him—ears, nose,
fingers, hair, she scarcely cared which, so long as they came away
with lots of blood —but, luckily, at that moment a large lady bustled
up and enfolded Hayley against her big soft bosom hung with many
hard strings of beads.
  “My dear!” the lady said. “Forgive me. I was making the sauce
and you know how it goes all lumpy if you leave it. I’m your aunt
May. Tollie, go away and stop being a pain. You have to forgive
Tollie, my dear. Most of the year he’s the only child here, but this is
the week we have all the family to stay and he feels outnumbered.
Now come and be introduced to everyone.”
  Hayley, who had gone limp with relief against Aunt May’s many
necklaces, found herself tensing up again at this. Now they were all
going to despise her.
  Although nobody did seem to despise her, the introductions left
Hayley almost as confused as before. The loud, fair cousins were
the children of two different aunts. But, beyond gathering that
some were Laxtons and belonged to Aunt Geta and that the rest
were Tighs, which made them sons and daughters of Aunt Celia,
Hayley had no idea which were which—let alone what all their
names were.
  Aunt Geta stood out a bit by being tall and fair, with an
impeccable neatness about her, like a picture painted very strictly
inside the lines. Grandma would approve of Aunt Geta, Hayley
thought. But Aunt Celia was a blurred sort of person. Aunt Alice,
who didn’t seem to have any children, was like a film star, almost
unreal she was so perfect. And the tall, calm Troy turned out to be
the son of another aunt who had stayed at home in Scotland. Most
confusingly of all, the slender brown lady, whose little pearl
earrings echoed the curves of her long cheeks and the shine of her
big dark eyes, turned out not to be an aunt at all, but Troy’s elder
sister, Harmony. Since Harmony had been bustling about just like
the aunts, setting the table and telling Tollie and the Tighs and
Laxtons to behave themselves, Hayley supposed it was a natural
mistake. But it made her feel stupid all the same.
  “Supper’s ready,” Aunt May announced, tucking her flying grey
hair back into its uncoiling loose bun. “You sit here, Hayley my
dear.”
   Everyone dived for the great table. Chairs squawked on the stone
floor and the noise was louder than ever. Harmony and Aunt Alice
raced to the kitchen and came back with bowls and casseroles and
dishes, while Aunt May bustled behind them with an enormous
brown turkey on a huge plate. Aunt May’s hair came uncoiled
completely as she put the bird down and she had to stand back from
the table and pin it up again. Meanwhile Cousin Mercer came back
from wherever he had disappeared to and set to work to carve the
turkey.
   Aunt May was the untidiest person she had ever seen, Hayley
thought, sliding nervously into the chair Aunt May had said was
hers. Aunt May’s clothes were flapping, fraying, overlapping layers
of homespun wool, decorated in front by at least three necklaces
and a lot of gravy stains. Her feet were in worn-out fur slippers,
and as for her hair…! Remembering that Cousin Mercer had told
her Aunt May was Grandma’s eldest daughter, Hayley wondered
how on earth Grandma had managed with Aunt May as a child.
Grandma always said Hayley was untidy and spent hours trying to
make the curly tendrils of Hayley’s hair lie flat and neat. “I despair
of you, Hayley,” Grandma always said. “I really do!” With Aunt
May, Grandma must have despaired even more. Still, Hayley
thought, looking from neat Aunt Geta to beautiful Aunt Alice, the
younger daughters must have pleased Grandma quite a lot.
   But Aunt May was kind. She sat next to Hayley and, while
Hayley struggled with a plate full of more food than she could
possibly eat, Aunt May explained that the Castle had once belonged
to Uncle Jolyon, but now it was a guesthouse, except for this one
week of the year. “I give the staff a holiday,” she said, “and have all
the family to stay. Even your aunt Ellie comes over some years.
And of course we have heaps of rooms. I’ve given you the little room
on the half-landing, my dear. I thought you’d feel a little strange if
I put you in with the other girls, not being used to it. Just tell me if
you’re not happy, won’t you?”
  As Aunt May chatted on in this way, Hayley looked round the
table and noticed that Cousin Mercer, sitting behind the remains of
the turkey, was the only grown-up man there. All the family? she
thought. Shouldn’t there be some uncles? But she was afraid it
might be rude to ask.
  The turkey was followed by treacle pudding that Hayley was far
too full to eat. While everyone else was devouring it down to the
last few sticky golden crumbs, the rain got worse. Hayley could
hear it battering on the windows and racing through pipes outside
the walls. The Laxton cousins were very put out by it. It seemed
that there was some game that they always played when they were
at the Castle and they had wanted to start playing it that very
evening.
 “We couldn’t have played tonight anyway,” Troy said in his calm
way. “It’s too dark to see, even if it wasn’t raining.”
  Then the Tigh cousins wanted to know if they could play the
game indoors instead. The Laxtons thought this was a splendid
notion, and said so at the tops of their voices. “We could use the big
drawing room for it, couldn’t we?” they demanded of Harmony, who
seemed to be in charge of the game.
   “No way,” Harmony said. “It has to be done out of doors. We’ll do
it tomorrow, when the grass in the paddock has dried.”
  This raised such a shout of disappointment that Harmony said,
“We can do hide-and-seek indoors, if you like.”
   There were cheers. Aunt Geta murmured, “Bless you, Harmony.
Keep them organised till bedtime if you can and we’ll let you off
clearing the dishes.”
  So while the aunts cleared away the stacks of plates, everyone
except Hayley rushed away into other parts of the house. Aunt May
picked up Hayley’s suitcase and showed her up a flight of stairs into
a small white bedroom with a fluffy bedspread which Hayley much
admired. There Aunt May drew the curtains—which flapped and
billowed in the gusts of rainy wind outside—and then helped
Hayley unpack the suitcase.
  “Are these all the clothes you’ve got, my dear?” Aunt May asked,
shaking out the other two floral dresses. “These are not very
practical—or very warm.”
   Hayley felt hugely ashamed. “Grandma said Aunt Ellie was going
to buy me clothes in Scotland,” she said. “To go to school in.”
   “Hm,” said Aunt May. “I’ll have a look and see if I can dig you out
something to wear while you’re here.” She carefully spread Hayley’s
pink-and-white pajamas out over the white bed. “Hm,” she said
again. “Hayley, if you don’t mind my asking, just what did you do
to make your grandmother so angry?”
   Hayley knew she would never be able to explain, when she
hardly knew what had happened herself. Aunt May would surely
not understand about Flute and Fiddle. Besides, Grandma had
never seen either of them. She had only seen the boy with the dogs,
but why that had made her so very angry Hayley had no idea. All
she could manage to say was, “Grandma said I was romancing at
first. Then she said I was bringing the strands here and destroying
all Grandad’s work. She said Uncle Jolyon wouldn’t forgive me for
it.”
  “So she dumps the problem on us,” Aunt May said in a harsh, dry
voice. “How typical of my mother! As if we could stand up to Jolyon
any more than she can! Didn’t your grandfather object at all?”
  “Yes, but he was upset too,” Hayley said. “He said I might grow
out of it, but Grandma said I wasn’t going to get the chance. She
phoned for Cousin Mercer to come and fetch me. She said you’d
know what to do.”
  “Blowed if I do!” Aunt May replied. “I’d better ask Geta how she
manages, I suppose—or Ellie would be more help. Harmony must
have been the same kind of handful when she was younger.
Anyway, you run off downstairs and play with the others, and don’t
bother about it any more.”
   Hayley would have liked to stay in the small room. It felt safe,
even with its creepily billowing curtains. But she had been brought
up by Grandma to do as she was told. So she went obediently
downstairs and found the big drawing room in the centre of the
house. There were at least five doors to this room. Hayley arrived
to find cousins rushing in and out, shrieking, while Troy stood in
the middle of it with his hands over his eyes, counting to a hundred,
and Harmony shouting, “Don’t forget! Kitchen’s out of bounds and
so is the office!”
 After that everyone thundered away. Shortly Troy bellowed, “
One hundred ! Coming, ready or not!” and raced away too.
  Hayley stood where she was, bewildered again. She had never
played this kind of game with lots of people in it and she had no
idea what the rules were. She stayed standing there until Tollie
rolled out from under a sofa and looked at her jeeringly.
  “You’re a wimp,” he said, “even for an outcast. And a wuss. And
you’re not to tell anyone you saw me.” And before Hayley could
think of anything to say in reply, Tollie climbed to his feet and
hurried out of the nearest door.
  Hayley went to sit on a different sofa, beside a very realistic
stuffed cat, where she stayed, sadly trying to decide if the stuffed
cat was a cushion, or a toy, or just an ornament.
  Being brought up by Grandma and Grandad simply did not
prepare a person for life, she thought.
  From time to time, cousins tiptoed through the room, giggling,
but none of them took the slightest notice of Hayley. They all know
I’m a wimp and an outcast, she thought.



                                  2
                                                               «^»
Hayley was an orphan. All she knew of her parents was the
wedding photograph in a silver frame that Grandma propped in the
middle of Hayley’s bedroom mantelpiece and warned Hayley not to
touch. Hayley naturally spent long hours standing on a chair
carefully studying the photo. The two people in it looked so happy.
Her mother had the same kind of fair good looks as Aunt Alice,
except that she seemed more human than Aunt Alice, less perfect.
She laughed, with her head thrown back and her veil flying, a
lopsided, almost guilty laugh at Hayley’s father. He laughed
proudly back, proud of Hayley’s mother, proud in himself. There
was pride in the set of his curly black head, in his gleaming dark
eyes and in the way his big brown hand clasped Hayley’s mother’s
white one. He was the one Hayley had her obstinately curly hair
and brown complexion from. But, since Hayley’s mother was so fair,
Hayley’s hair had come out a sort of whitish brown and her eyes big
and grey. She thought of herself as an exact mixture of both of
them and wished with all her strength that they were alive so that
she could know them.
   Grandma and Grandad lived in a large house on the edge of
London, one of those houses that have a mass of dark shrubs back
and front and stained glass in most of the windows, so that it was
always rather dark. It had a kitchen part, where a cook and a maid
lived. Hayley only ever saw this part when the latest maid took her
for walks on the common and they came back in through the
kitchen. She was forbidden to go there at any other time in case she
disturbed the cook.
   The rest of the large dark rooms were mostly devoted to
Grandad’s work. Hayley had no idea what Grandad’s work was,
except that it seemed to involve keeping up with the whole world.
One entire room was devoted to newspapers and magazines in
many languages—most of them the closely printed, learned
kind—and another room was full of maps: maps pinned to walls,
piled on shelves in stacks, or spread on sloping work benches ready
to be studied. The big globe in the middle of this room always
fascinated Hayley. The other rooms were crowded to the ceilings
with books and strewn with papers, telephones and radios of all
colours, except for the room in the basement that was full of
computers. The only downstairs room Hayley was officially allowed
into was the parlour—and then only if she washed first—where she
was allowed to sit in one of its stiff chairs to watch programmes on
television that Grandma thought were suitable. Hayley did not go
to school. Grandma gave her lessons upstairs in the
schoolroom—which was where Hayley had her meals too—and
those lessons were a trial to both of them. Just as Hayley’s
feathery, flyaway curls continually escaped from Grandma’s careful
combing and plaiting, so Hayley’s attempts to read, write, do sums
and paint pictures were always sliding away from the standards
Grandma thought correct. Grandma kept a heavy flat ruler on her
side of the table with which she rapped Hayley’s knuckles whenever
Hayley painted outside the lines in the painting book, or wrote
something that made her laugh, or got the answer in bags of cheese
instead of in money.
  Hayley sighed a little as she sat in the Castle drawing room
beside the pretend cat. She had learnt very early on that she could
never live up to Grandma’s standards. Grandma disapproved of
running and shouting and laughing and singing as well as painting
outside the lines. Her ideas took in the whole world, and Hayley
was always overflowing Grandma’s edges. It occurred to Hayley
now, as she sat on the drawing room sofa, that Grandma must have
had four daughters— no, six, if you counted Mother and the Aunt
Ellie who was in Scotland—and she wondered how on Earth they
had all managed when they were girls.
   Luckily, Grandad was never this strict. Unless he was on a phone
to someone important, like Uncle Jolyon or the Prime Minister, he
never really minded Hayley sneaking into one of his work rooms.
“Are your hands clean?” he would say, looking round from whatever
he was doing. And Hayley would nod and smile, knowing this was
Grandad’s way of saying she could stay. She smiled now, and patted
the unreal cat, thinking of her grandfather, huge and bearded, with
his round stomach tightly buttoned into a blue-check shirt, turning
from his screens to point to a book he had found for her, or to put a
cartoon up on another screen for her. Grandad was kind, although
he never seemed to have much idea what was suitable for small
girls. Hayley had several frustrated memories about this. Before
she could read, Grandad had given her a book full of grey drawings
of prisons, thinking she would enjoy looking at it. Hayley had not
enjoyed it at all. Nor, when she had only just learned to read, had
she enjoyed the book called At the Back of the North Wind which
Grandad had pushed into her hands. The print in it was close and
tiny and Hayley could not understand the story.
  But Grandad had given her many other books later that she did
enjoy. And he often—and quite unpredictably— showed Hayley
peculiar things on one or other of his computers. The first time he
did this, Hayley was decidedly disappointed. She had been
expecting another cartoon, and here Grandad was, showing her a
picture of a large round rotating football. Light fell on it sideways
as it spun and also fell on the golf ball that was whizzing
energetically round the football, going from round to half-lighted to
invisible as it whizzed.
  “This isn’t Tom and Jerry ,” Hayley said.
  “No, it’s the earth and the moon,” Grandad said. “It’s time you
learnt what makes day and night.”
  “But I know that,” Hayley objected. “Day is when the sun comes
up.”
  “And I suppose you think the sun goes round the earth?” Grandad
said.
  Hayley thought about this. She knew from the globe in the map
room that the earth was probably round—though she thought
people might well be wrong about that—so it stood to reason that
the sun had to circle round it or people in Australia would have
night all the time. “Yes,” she said.
  She was hugely indignant when Grandad explained that the
earth went round the sun, and rather inclined to think Grandad
had got it wrong. Even when Grandad zoomed the football into the
distance and showed her the sun, like a burning beach ball, and the
earth circling it along with some peas and several tennis balls,
Hayley was by no means convinced. When he told her that it was
the earth spinning that made day and night, and the earth circling
the sun that made winter and summer, Hayley still thought he
might be wrong. Because it was just pictures on a screen, she
suspected they were no more real than Donald Duck or Tom and
Jerry. And when Grandad told her that the peas and tennis balls
were other planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Neptune, Pluto—like Earth, and that the tiny things shooting
around them in orbits the shape of safety pins were comets, Hayley
felt indignant and jealous for Earth, for not being the only one. It
took her months to accept that this was the way things were.
   She only really accepted it when Grandad began showing her
other things. He showed her the slow growth of Earth from a bare
ball of rock, through agelong changes of climate, during which the
lands moved about on its surface like leaves floating on a pond, and
rocks grew and turned to sand. He showed her dinosaurs and tiny
creatures in the sea bed. Then he showed her atoms, molecules and
germs—after which Hayley for a long time confused all three with
planets going round the sun and, when Grandma insisted that you
washed to get rid of germs, wondered if Grandma was trying to
clean the universe off her.
   Grandad showed her the universe too, where the Milky Way was
like a silver scarf of stars, and other stars floated in shapes that
were supposed to be people, swans, animals, crosses and crowns. He
also showed Hayley the table of elements, which seemed to her to
be something small but heavy, fixed into the midst of all the other
floating, spinning, shining strangeness. She thought the elements
were probably little number-shaped tintacks that pegged the rest in
place.
  Grandma had a tendency to object to Grandad showing Hayley
such things. Grandma was liable to march in when Hayley was
peacefully settled in front of a cartoon or a plan of the universe and
snap the OFF button, saying it was not suitable for Hayley to
watch. She always went through the books Grandad gave Hayley
too, and took away things like Fanny Hill and The Rainbow and
Where the Rainbow Ends and Pilgrim’s Progress . Hayley never
understood quite why these were unsuitable. But the time when
Grandma came close to banning all computer displays was when
Grandad showed Hayley the mythosphere.
   This was an accident really. It was raining, so that Hayley could
not go out for her usual afternoon walk on the common. Grandma
went to have her rest. Grandad had just come home that morning
from one of his mysterious absences. Grandad usually vanished two
or three times a year. When Hayley asked where he was, Grandma
looked forbidding and answered, “He’s gone to visit his other family.
Don’t be nosy.” Grandad never talked about this at all. When
Hayley asked where he had been, he pretended not to hear. But she
was always truly glad when he came back. The house felt very
dreary without the background hum of the computers and the
constant ringing or beeping of all the phones. So as soon as
Grandma’s bedroom door shut, Hayley raced softly downstairs to
the computer room.
  Grandad was there, sitting massively in front of a screen,
carefully following something on it with a light-pen. Hayley tiptoed
up to look over his shoulder. It was a picture of Earth, slowly
spinning in dark blue emptiness. She saw Africa rotating past as
she arrived. But Africa was quite hard to see because it, and the
whole globe, was swathed in a soft, multicoloured mist. The mist
seemed to be made up of thousands of tiny pale threads, all of them
moving and swirling outwards. Each thread shone as it moved,
gentle and pearly, so the effect was as if Earth spun in a luminous
rainbow veil. While Hayley watched, some of the threads wrapped
themselves together into a shining skein, and this grew on
outwards, growing brighter and harder looking as it grew, and then
got thrown gently sideways with the turning of the world, so that it
became a silver red spiral. There were dozens of these skeins, when
Hayley looked closely, in dozens of silvery colours. But underneath
these were thousands of other shining threads which busily drifted
and wove and plaited close to Earth.
  “That’s beautiful !” Hayley said. “What are they?”
   “Are your hands clean?” Grandad answered absently. His
light-pen steadily picked out a gold gleaming set of threads
underneath the spirals and followed it in and out, here and there,
through the gauzy mass. He seemed to take it for granted that
Hayley had washed her hands, because he went on, “This is the
mythosphere. It’s made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs,
legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you
can see, it’s constantly growing and moving as people invent new
tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move
out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite
crude and dangerous. They’ve hardened off, you see.”
  “Are they real, the same as atoms and planets?” Hayley asked.
  “Quite as real—even realer in some ways,” Grandad replied.
  Hayley said the name of it to herself, in order not to forget it.
“The mythosphere. And what are you doing with it?”
   “Tracing the golden apples,” Grandad said. “Wondering why
they’ve never become a spiral of their own. They mix into other
strands all the time. Look.” He did something to the keyboard to
make Earth turn about and spread itself into a flat plain with
continents slowly twirling across it. Golden threads rose from India,
from the flatness north of the mountains, from the Mediterranean,
and from Sweden, Norway, and Britain. “See here.” Grandad’s big
hairy hand pointed the light-pen this way and that as the threads
arose. “This thread mingles with three different dragon stories. And
this” —the line of light moved southward— “mixes with two quite
different stories here. This one’s the judgement of Paris and here
we have Atalanta—the girl who was distracted from winning a race
by some golden apples. And there are hundreds of folktales—” The
pen moved northwards to golden threads growing like grass over
Europe and Asia. Grandad shook his head. “Golden apples all over.
They cause death and eternal life and danger and choices. They
must be important. But none of them combine. None of them spiral
and harden. I don’t know why.”
  “If they’re real,” Hayley said, “can a person go and walk in them,
or are they like germs and atoms and too small to see?”
  “Oh, yes,” Grandad said, frowning at the threads. “Only I don’t
advocate walking in the spirals. Everything gets pretty fierce out
there.”
  “But nearer in. Do you walk or float?” Hayley wanted to know.
  “You could take a boat if you want,” Grandad said, “or even a car
sometimes. But I prefer to walk myself. It’s—”
  But here Grandma came storming in and seized Hayley by one
arm. “Really! Honest to goodness, Tas!” she said, dragging Hayley
away from the screen. “You ought to know better than to let
Hayley in among this stuff!”
  “It’s not doing her any harm!” Grandad protested.
  “On the contrary. It could do immense harm—to us and Hayley
too, if Jolyon gets to hear of it!” Grandma retorted. She dragged
Hayley out of the room and shut the door with a bang. “Hayley, you
are not to have anything to do with the mythosphere, ever again!”
she said. “Forget you ever saw it!”



                                 3
                                                             «^»
Being ordered to forget about the mythosphere was like being
ordered not to think of a blue elephant. Hayley could not forget
those beautiful swirling, drifting, shining threads. She thought
about the mythosphere constantly, almost as often as she stood on a
chair and stared at the young, happy faces in her parents’ wedding
photo. It was as if the mythosphere had cast a spell on her.
Something tugged at her chest whenever she remembered it, and
she felt a great sad longing that was almost like feeling sick.
  It was a few days later that she met the musicians properly for
the first time.
   She knew one of the musicians by sight anyway. She saw him
every time the latest maid took her round by the shops instead of
out on the common. Martya, the newest maid, always nodded and
smiled at him. Martya was a big strong girl with hair like the white
silk fringes on Grandma’s parlour furniture—soft, straight hair
that was always swirling across her round pink face.
Unfortunately, Martya’s face did not live up to her beautiful hair in
any way. Grandma sniffed and called Martya “distressingly plain,”
and then sighed and wished Martya spoke better English. When she
sent Martya and Hayley round by the shops, Grandma always had
to give Martya a list written in big capital letters because Martya
didn’t read English very well either. This, Grandma explained to
Hayley, was because Martya was from Darkest Russia, where they
used different letters as well as different language. It was Martya’s
bad English that first caused Hayley’s interest in the musician.
  He was very tall and skinny, and he always wore a dark suit
with a blue scarf tucked in around the neck. He had stood, for as
long as Hayley could remember, rain or shine, in the exact same
place outside the pub called The Star, playing high sweet notes on a
shabby little violin that looked much too small for him. The case of
the violin lay open on the pavement by his feet and people
occasionally chucked coppers or 5p’s into it as they passed. Hayley
always wondered why he never seemed to play any real tunes—just
music, she thought of it.
  Neither Hayley nor Martya ever had any coins to drop into the
case, but Martya never failed to nod and smile at the man;
whereupon he nodded back, violin and all, still playing away, and a
large beaming smile would spread up his thin face, making his eyes
gleam the same bright blue as his scarf. Up till then Hayley had
always assumed he was old. But he had such a young smile that she
now noticed that his hair, under the round black cap he always
wore, was not old white, but the same sort of fine white hair as
Martya’s.
  “Is he some relation of yours?” she asked. “Is that why you nod?”
  “No. Is polite,” Martya said. “He is musician.”
  The way she said it, it sounded like “magician.” Hayley said,
“Oh!” very impressed, and from then on she too nodded and smiled
at the musician, with considerable awe. And he always smiled back.
  Hayley longed to ask the musician about his magic powers, but
Martya always hurried her past to the shops before she had a
chance to ask.
   Then one afternoon they were in the corner shop just beyond The
Star—where Hayley could still hear the violin in the distance, so
sad and sweet that she felt herself aching with the same longing
she felt about the mythosphere—when Martya fell into an
argument with Mr Ahmed who ran the shop. Both of them pointed
to Grandma’s list and Mr Ahmed kept saying, “No, no, I assure you,
this word is orangeade.” While Martya said, over and over, “Is
oranges we need!”
  Hayley waited for them to stop, idly kicking at the base of the ice
cream machine while she waited. And something tinkled beside her
shoe. She looked down and saw it was a pound coin.
  Without even having to think, she snatched it up and raced out of
the shop, round the bulging steps of The Star, back to where the
musician stood playing. There she dropped the coin into the violin
case and waited breathlessly in front of him.
  After a moment he seemed to realise that she wanted something.
He took his bow off his violin and the violin down from his chin.
“Thank you,” he said.
  He had a nice, light kind of voice. Much encouraged by it, Hayley
blurted out, “Please, I just wanted to know, are you a magician?”
  He thought about it. “It depends what you mean by magician,” he
said at length. “My ways are not your ways. But I have a brother
who stands in the sun, who could tell you more.”
  Hayley looked across the street, where the sunlight blazed on
shoppers and glinted off shop windows. She had often vaguely
wondered why the musician always stood here, on the shady side of
the street. She turned back to ask if the brother was a musician as
well.
  But here Martya dashed up in a panic and seized Hayley’s arm.
“You don’t go, you don’t go! Your baba kills me! So sorry,” she
gasped at the musician. “She bother you.”
  He smiled his blue-eyed smile. “Not at all,” he said.
  Martya gave him a flustered glare and dragged Hayley back to
the shop, where she and Mr Ahmed had settled the argument by
getting Grandma both oranges and orangeade. Grandma was not
pleased when they got home. She had wanted orange juice.
   Thereafter, whenever they went to the shops, Hayley always
tried to tempt Martya to walk on the sunny side of the street, in
hopes of meeting the musician’s brother. Martya nodded and smiled
as if she quite understood and then stayed on the usual side of the
road. Nodding and smiling turned out to be a habit with Martya.
She used it instead of understanding English. She used it
particularly when Grandma told her to clean the silver or sweep the
stairs. Grandma soon began saying Martya was a lazy slattern.
   “Now let us see,” Grandma said, one afternoon a few days later,
“if you can manage to do one simple thing, Martya. No, don’t nod,
don’t smile. Just look at Hayley’s shoes.” She pointed. Martya and
Hayley both looked down at Hayley’s neat black shiny shoes. “Now
go to the shoe shop,” Grandma said, “with this note and this money,
and get Hayley another pair just the same but half a size larger.
Can you do that?”
 “I can do that, Grandma,” Hayley said joyfully. The shoe shop
was on the sunny side of the street.
  “I’m talking to Martya,” Grandma said. “Martya is doing the
buying. I want the same kind exactly, Martya. No other colour, no
fancy bits. Have you understood?”
   Martya nodded and smiled vigorously, and the pair of them set
off towards the shops. On the way, Martya said, rather helplessly,
“I don’t know how is shoes. What is fancy bits?”
  “I’ll show you,” Hayley said.
  The shoe shop was quite a long way down the road from The
Star, where the musician was playing as usual. Hayley waved to
him across the street, but she was not sure he saw her. When they
reached the shoe shop, Hayley led Martya in front of the window
and pointed to the various different shoes inside it. “Look—those
pink ones with cowboy fringes have the fancy bits, and so do those
with a flower on front. Do you see?”
   While Martya pulled her hair aside in order to bend down and
stare at the shoes, and then did her usual nodding and smiling,
Hayley suddenly began hearing sweet distant snatches of music. It
was not violin music. She was not sure what instrument it was, but
it flowed and stopped and flowed again, in some of the loveliest
sounds she had ever heard. “It’s his brother,” she said to Martya.
Martya just nodded and smiled and looked at shoes. Hayley said,
“I’ll be back in a minute,” and walked sideways away along the
fronts of the shops, tracking the music. “Like the Pied Piper or
something,” she said aloud, as the sounds led her on, and on, and
then round a corner into a small side street.
  The musician was there, standing in blazing sunlight and, to
Hayley’s delight, he was actually playing a pipe, the kind you held
sideways to play. Hayley dimly thought it might be a flute. She had
never heard such lovely sounds as those that came pouring out of it,
although she did wish that he would keep to one tune, instead of
playing in snatches. One moment he would be playing something
wild and jolly. Then he would break off and start another tune, this
one melting and sad. Then it would be music you could march to.
She stood and surveyed him and rejoiced.
   He had hair like Martya’s, quite long but not as long as Martya’s,
that blew around his head in fine white strands, and he was as tall
and thin as the violin player, though nothing like so neat. His
clothes were green and baggy and a green, green scarf fluttered
from his neck. A baggy green hat lay on the ground by his bare
feet, waiting for money.
  He was watching Hayley watching him while he played. His eyes
were the same green as his scarf. Hayley had never seen eyes that
colour before, nor had she ever looked into eyes that were so direct
and interested and kind. It was as if he and Hayley knew one
another already.
  “I’m sorry I haven’t any money,” she said.
  You couldn’t play a flute and talk. He took the flute away from
his mouth to smile and say, “That doesn’t matter.”
  “Are you the violin man’s brother?” she asked.
  “That’s right,” he said. “Who are you?”
  “I’m Hayley Foss,” Hayley said. “What are you called?”
  He grinned, the same sort of youthful grin as his brother’s, and
asked, “What do you want to call me?”
  All sorts of names flooded through Hayley’s mind, so many that
she was surprised into taking a deep, gasping breath. “Flute,” she
said, in the end.
  He laughed. “That’ll do. And I suppose that makes my brother’s
name Fiddle. One of us had better warn him. What can I do for
you?”
  “Are you a magician?” Hayley asked.
  “In many ways, yes,” he said. “I don’t live by the usual rules.”
  “I have to live by rules all the time,” Hayley said wistfully. “Can
you show me some magic?”
  Flute looked at her consideringly—and quite sympathetically, she
thought. He seemed to be going to agree, but then he looked up
over Hayley’s head and said, “Some other time, perhaps.”
  Martya was rushing up the small street, waving a pair of large
pink shoes with cowboy fringes, and a lady from the shoe shop was
rushing after her. Martya was so agitated at losing Hayley that she
forgot to speak English at all and shouted a torrent of her own
language, while the shop lady kept saying, “I don’t care where you
come from. You haven’t paid for those shoes.”
   Flute twisted up one side of his face, so that half of it seemed to
be smiling at Hayley and the other half looking seriously at the
shop lady, and said, “I think I’d better sort this out for you.” He said
to the lady, “It’s all right. She thought this little girl had gone
missing, you see.” Then he spoke to Martya in what was clearly her
own language.
  Martya replied with a gush of Darkest Russian, clapping the pink
shoes together in front of her bosom, as a substitute for wringing
her hands. They were very big shoes, much more Martya’s size
than Hayley’s. Flute spoke to her soothingly while he collected his
hat and shut his flute into a long case. By the time they were all
walking back to the shoe shop, he was wearing rather battered
green boots that Hayley had certainly not seen him put on.
  He did do some magic! Hayley thought. Quite a lot of it! she
added to herself, as she watched Flute calming everyone in the shop
down and making sure that Martya counted out enough of
Grandma’s money to pay for the large pink shoes. Then he smiled
at Hayley, said, “I’ll see you,” and left.
  Martya and Hayley went home, where Grandma was far from
pleased. Hayley said repeatedly, “It wasn’t her fault, or Flute’s,
Grandma. They both thought you meant the shoes were for her .”
While Martya nodded and smiled and hugged the shoes happily.
  “Be quiet, Hayley,” Grandma snapped. “Martya, I have had
enough of this nodding and smiling. It’s just an excuse for laziness
and dishonesty. You’ll have to leave. Now.”
  Martya’s ugly face contorted inside her beautiful hair. “Laziness I
am?” she said to Grandma. “Then of you, what? You do nothing all
day but give orders and make rules! I go and pack now—and take
my shoes!” She went stumping up the stairs, scowling. “Your baba
is a monster!” she said as she stamped past Hayley. “You I pity
from the depths of my chest!”
  It startled Hayley. She had not thought of Grandma as a
monster—she had just thought life was like that: long and boring
and full of rules and things you mustn’t do. Now here was Martya
actually pitying her for it. She wondered if it made sense.
   But there were no more walks, to the shops or out on the
common, for a while after that. Until a new maid was found to
clean things and take Hayley out in the afternoons, Hayley was
sent into the back garden instead. There she wandered about
among the dark, crowding laurel bushes, thinking about her
parents, longing for the mythosphere, and wondering if Grandma
really was a monster. Sometimes, when she was right in the midst
of the laurels and knew she could not be seen from any of the
windows, she crouched down—careful not to get her knees
dirty—and secretly built bowers out of twigs, castles made of
pebbles and gardens from anything she could find. “Mythosphere
things,” she called them to herself.
  She was building a particularly elaborate rock garden about a
week later, made of carefully piled gravel and ferns, when she
looked up to see Flute standing among the laurels with his hands in
his pockets. He was staring up at the house as if he were wondering
about it. Hayley could not think how Flute had got in. There was a
high brick wall round the garden and no way in except through the
house.
  “Hallo,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
  Flute had obviously not known she was there. He whirled round,
thoroughly startled, and his green scarf blew tastefully out among
his hair. “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t see you. I was wondering what
went on in this house.”
  “Nothing much does,” Hayley told him, rather dryly. “Grandad
works and Grandma makes rules.”
   Flute frowned and shook his head slightly. The green scarf
fluttered. His eyes stared into Hayley’s, green and steady. “I know
you,” he said. “You were with the Russian lady and the shoes.”
  “Martya. She left,” Hayley said.
   “That doesn’t surprise me,” Flute said. “This house isn’t for the
likes of her. Why are you in it?”
  “I’m an orphan,” Hayley explained. “They bring me up.” Flute
nodded, taking this in, and then smiled at her, with some little
doubtful creases beside his mouth. Hayley found herself adoring
him, in a way she never adored even Grandad. “How did you get in
here?” she said. “Over the wall?”
  Flute shook his head. “I don’t do walls,” he said. “I’ll show you, if
you’ll just follow me for a few steps.” He turned and walked, with a
soft clatter of leaves, in among the laurel trees.
  Hayley sprang up from her rock garden—it was finished
anyway—and followed the swishing and the glimpses of green scarf
among the dark leaves. There had to be a gate in the wall that she
had never found. But she never saw the wall. She followed Flute
out of the laurels into a corner of the common. Really the common.
She saw cars on the road in the distance and Grandad’s familiar red
house in the row beyond the road. “Good heavens!” she said, and
looked up at Flute with respect. “That’s more magic, isn’t it? Can
you show me some more more?”
  Flute thought about it. “What do you want to see?”
  There was no question about that. “The mythosphere,” Hayley
said.
   Flute was rather taken aback. He put his hands into his baggy
pockets and looked down at her seriously. “Are you sure? Someone
has warned you, have they, that things in the mythosphere are
often harder and—well—fiercer than they are here?”
  Hayley nodded. “Grandad said the strands harden off when they
get farther out.”
  “All right,” Flute said. “We’ll take a look at some of the nearest
parts then. It’ll have to be just a short look, because I wasn’t
expecting to see you and I have things to do today. Follow me then.”
                                 4
                                                              «^»
Flute turned and strode back among the laurels, green scarf
streaming. Hayley pattered after him in the greatest excitement.
Not much happened at first, except that they came out into proper
woodland where paths seemed to run in several directions. Flute
looked this way and that and finally chose a path that was lightly
strewn with brown and yellow autumn leaves. After a short way,
the leaves were in thick drifts and the trees overhead were yellow
and brown and apricot, and rattled in a sad, small autumn breeze.
Hayley—and Flute too—began to enjoy shuffling the leaves into
heaps and then kicking them, until Flute put a hand out for Hayley
to stop.
 Someone was coming along a path that crossed theirs, whistling
merrily.
   Hayley stood nearly knee-deep in leaves and watched a splendid
young man go striding past, crunching coloured leaves under his
sandals. He was obviously a hunter. His main clothing was a big
spotted leopard skin that draped over one shoulder and fastened
around his hips to make a sort of skirt, and he carried an enormous
longbow almost as tall as himself. The arrows for it hung in a long
leather box over his left shoulder. His muscles bulged and gleamed.
Grandma would have called him a dirty savage, but to Hayley he
looked neat and crisp, like an actor dressed up as a hunter for a
film. She could see that his neat little beard and his chestnut curls
were shining and clean.
  “Who is he?” she whispered.
  “Orion,” Flute whispered back. “He’s a hunter.”
  There seemed to be a group of ladies in long dresses suddenly, in
among the trees. The hunter stopped whistling, peered, and
whipped an arrow, long and wickedly sharp, out from his arrow
holder. Then, holding it ready beside his bow, he broke into a fast,
striding run. The ladies all screamed and ran away.
  Hayley did not blame them. “Can’t he see they’re not animals?”
she said.
  “Not always,” Flute said, as hunter and ladies all disappeared
among the trees.
  Flute and Hayley turned a corner and came out beside a lake
then, where it seemed to be nearly winter. All the trees and bushes
around the bleak little stretch of water were brown and almost
empty of leaves. A young lady in a white dress came down the bank
towards the shore. When she was right beside the water, she looked
around, grinning mischievously, and crouched down. Her white
dress melted into her all over and she was suddenly a swan. Off she
launched, white and stately, and sailed across the lake.
   Hayley saw a hunter then. She thought he was not the same
hunter as the first one, but it was hard to be sure. He was in dark
clothes, but he had the same sort of huge bow and a case of arrows.
He was coming stealthily down to the lakeside with an arrow ready
beside his bow. When he saw the swan lady, he put the arrow in
the bow, raised it and, very slowly and carefully, drew the arrow
back until the bow was a great arc.
  Hayley cried out, “Oh no! Don’t !”
  The hunter did not seem to hear her. He let the arrow fly. Out in
the lake, the swan collapsed into a white, spouting turmoil.
  “Let’s move on,” Flute said sadly. He took Hayley’s hand and
pulled her away from the lakeside. But before the bushes hid the
lake, Hayley had to look back. She saw the hunter wading in the
water, dragging the white floppy shape of the lady to the shore. He
seemed to be crying his eyes out.
   The next part they went through had swans in it everywhere.
Three swans with crowns on their heads glided on a sudden sea. A
group of young women ran down to the beach a bit farther on and
then took off as swans in a white beating of huge wings. More
wings beat, and some swans came in to land beside a big bonfire. As
they landed, they turned into young men. This happened several
times. Sometimes there was just one swan, sometimes a whole
flock. Then Flute and Hayley arrived at a place where a young
woman timidly held out her hand to a huge swan, as big as she
was. There was something about that big swan that Hayley did not
like at all.
   “I think,” Flute said, “that we’ll take another strand now. All
right?” When Hayley nodded, he turned off along a way that was
greener, where the sun shone among forest trees that seemed to be
putting out new spring leaves.
   They passed through a sunny clearing where golden midges
circled under a big oak tree. When Hayley looked at the midges
closely, they were very small winged people. She cried out with
pleasure.
  “More like it, eh?” Flute said, grinning.
   The midge people all flew away as he said it. They seemed to
have been frightened by a growing noise, over to the left. It was a
sound of yelping, pattering and panting. Shortly a whole crowd of
dogs burst into the clearing, excited, long-legged hunting dogs with
their tongues hanging out. Hayley could see that they were all little
more than puppies. They saw Hayley and Flute and rushed towards
them, so that in seconds they were surrounded by curved, waving
tails, big floppy ears, and wide panting mouths with long pink
tongues draping out of them. One puppy reared up to put both paws
on Flute’s stomach. Flute laughed and rubbed its ears. Hayley, a
little timidly, stroked the head of the nearest hound. This caused all
the rest to clamour for attention too. Hayley had to laugh. It was
like being in a warm, boisterous bath, full of excitement and
affection.
   A boy came panting into the clearing, trailing a long whip. He
stopped and laughed when he saw them surrounded in happy dogs.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to teach them to follow a scent. You
wouldn’t believe how easily they get distracted!” He was a
good-looking boy, not much older than Hayley, and he seemed as
happy and excited as his dogs. He cracked his whip in the air.
“Down, Chaser! Come on, Snuffer! Bell and Doom, get away, get on
!” He cracked his whip again. Hayley saw that he was careful not to
hit any of the dogs. “Come on, all of you!” he shouted.
  It took a while, and a lot more shouting and whip cracking, but
at length the dogs turned away from these interesting new humans
they had found. One or two put noses to the ground. One gave an
excited yelp. And finally they all rushed away into the forest with
the boy running and bounding behind them.
  “Oh, I liked him!” Hayley said. “Who is he?”
   “Another huntsman,” Flute said. “One of many. We’re on the
hunters’ strand here. But I think we ought to be getting back now.
I’ve got a busy afternoon, and I suspect that your grandmother will
be wanting you by now.” He strode off through the sunlit forest in
the same direction that the boy and his dogs had gone.
   Hayley said, “Bother!” as she trudged after him. The midge
people had come back again to circle in the sun and she had wanted
to watch them.
  Just as she caught up with Flute, the boy came racing back
towards them. He was older now, with a little curl of beard on his
chin, and he ran as if he was running for his life. If he noticed Flute
or Hayley as he tore past them, he gave no sign of it. His eyes were
set with terror and he just ran. Behind him came all the dogs, older
too now, and a bit gaunt and grizzled. They were all snarling. One
or two had foam coming from their mouths and all their eyes
glared. As the boy crashed past Flute and Hayley the foremost dog
almost caught him and then lost ground because it had a
bloodstained piece of the boy’s trousers in its mouth. The rest
chased on furiously.
  Hayley clutched Flute’s hand. “Do they catch him?”
  Flute nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
  Hayley was horrified. “ Why ?”
  “He managed to be really offensive to a goddess,” Flute told her.
“Things like this happen on every strand, you know. The
mythosphere is not an entirely happy place.”
  “But it looks so beautiful!” Hayley protested.
  Flute laughed a little. “Beauty isn’t made of sugar,” he said.
“Through this way now.”
   They pushed their way through some thick laurels and came out
into the common again. Hayley stared from the bushes behind her
to the still impossible sight of her grandparents’ house beyond the
road, over there .
  Flute said, “Do you think you can find your own way back, or do
you want me to take you?”
  “I’d rather stay with you,” Hayley said. She felt raw with sorrow
over the fate of the nice boy.
  “Not possible, I’m afraid,” Flute said. “But I’ll show you some
more magic quite soon if you like. See you.” He plunged back
among the laurels and was gone.
   Definitely gone, Hayley knew. She stood and wondered what
Grandma might say if Hayley simply went across the road and rang
the doorbell, and Grandma opened the door. It hardly bore thinking
of. No, she had to get back to the garden somehow.
  She pushed her way dubiously in among the laurels. And pushed
and rustled and plunged and rattled, and for a while wondered if
she was going to have to just stand there and yell for help, or even
stay in the bushes forever. Then she was quite suddenly through
them and into the garden, almost treading on her rock garden. She
was about to kick it moodily to bits—it was only a heap of stones
with wilting ferns stuck in it, and that nice boy was being ripped
apart by his own dogs—when she heard Grandma calling her. At
which Hayley forgot that she was not supposed to run and rushed
frantically up the path to the garden door.
  “I think Flute is an ancient supernatural being,” she panted
unwisely to Grandma.
  “Oh, just look at you!” Grandma exclaimed. “How did you get so
untidy?”
  “In the bushes. Flute is just what I call him because I don’t know
his real name,” Hayley babbled. “He has a green scarf and hair like
Martya’s.”
   Grandma stiffened. “Will you stop romancing this instant,
Hayley! Uncle Jolyon’s here. He wants to see you for tea in the
parlour. If it wasn’t for that, I’d send you to bed without supper for
telling stories. Go and comb your hair and put on a clean dress this
moment. I want you back downstairs and looking respectable in ten
minutes! So hurry!”
  Hayley sobered up. She saw she had been stupid to mention Flute
to Grandma. Flute was—if ever anyone was—a person who
overflowed Grandma’s boundaries. Flute didn’t do walls. And
Grandma did walls all the time, Hayley thought as she scurried
away down the passage to the stairs. She was halfway up the stairs
when she heard Grandad and Uncle Jolyon coming out of the map
room, arguing. It was funny, she thought, peeping over the
bannisters, the way unusual things always seemed to happen in
clusters. Uncle Jolyon only visited here about once a year and when
he did, Grandad was always very, very polite to him. But now
Grandad was shouting at him.
  “You just watch yourself!” Grandad bellowed. “Any more of this
control-freak nonsense and I shall walk away! Then where will you
be?”
  As Hayley scudded on upwards, Uncle Jolyon was making
peace-keeping sort of noises. She took another peep at them on the
next turn of the stairs. They were both big, stout men, but where
Grandad was grey, Uncle Jolyon had a fine head of curly white hair
and a white beard and moustache to go with it. He backed away as
Grandad positively roared, “ Oh yes, I can do it ! I did it before and
you didn’t like it one bit, did you?”
  “Hayley!” Grandma called. “Are you changed yet?”
  Hayley called out, “Nearly, Grandma!” and pelted on up to her
room. There she flung off her grubby dress, flung on a new one and
managed to make her hair lie flat by pasting it down with the
water she had scrubbed her muddy knees in. Then she went
demurely down to the parlour, where Grandma was pouring tea
and Grandad and Uncle Jolyon were drinking it, all smiles, as if
neither of them had just been quarrelling in the hall.
   Nobody took much notice of Hayley. She sat on an embroidered
chair nibbling at a rock cake—which made her feel like a rather
small squirrel—and listened to the three adults talk about world
affairs, and Science, and the Stock Market, and some prehistoric
carvings someone had found in a cave near Nottingham. If Uncle
Jolyon had specially wanted to see Hayley, he showed few signs of
it. He only looked at her once. Hayley was struck then by how
dishonest the crinkles round his eyes made him look. She thought it
must be because she had just seen Flute. Flute’s green eyes looked
at you direct and straight, without any disguising of his feelings.
Uncle Jolyon’s eyes calculated and concealed things. Hayley found
she distrusted him very much.
   When the tea was drunk, Uncle Jolyon leaned over, grunting a
little, and pinched Hayley’s chin. “You be a good girl now,” he said
to her, “and do what your grandparents say.”
  The way he smiled, full of false kindness and hidden meanings,
truly grated on Hayley. And the pinch hurt. “Why are you so
dishonest?” she said.
  Grandma went stiff as a post. Grandad seemed to curl up a little,
as if he expected someone to hit him. Uncle Jolyon, however, leant
his head back and laughed heartily.
   “Because I have to be,” he said. “Nobody expects a businessman
to be honest , child.” And he shouted with laughter again.
  Uncle Jolyon went away after that—with Grandad seeing him
into his waiting taxi in the friendliest possible way— and Hayley
was left to face Grandma’s anger.
   “How dare you be so rude to poor Uncle Jolyon!” she said. “Go up
to your room and stay there! I don’t want to set eyes on you until
you’ve remembered how to behave properly.”
  Hayley was quite glad to go. She wanted to be alone to digest all
the things she had seen that afternoon. But she could not resist
turning round halfway upstairs. “Uncle Jolyon isn’t poor,” she said.
“And he orders Grandad around.”
  “Go!” Grandma commanded, pointing a strong finger upstairs.
   Hayley went. She went into her room and sat there for a long
time, staring at the photo of her parents on the mantelpiece. So
happy. That was what Hayley had expected the mythosphere to be
like, full of happiness, but it seemed to be full of tragic things
instead.
   After a while, though, it occurred to her that in a way it was full
of happiness. The hunter in the leopard skin had been happy, until
he saw the ladies and turned all mean. The ladies who turned into
swans had been happy as they ran down to the water. And that boy
with the dogs had been happiest of all until he was stupid enough to
annoy a goddess.
  “It’s silly to let the bad things come out on top!” Hayley said
aloud. “You want to catch things at their best and keep them if you
can.”
   She looked hard at the photo and wished she had another photo
to put beside it, of the boy and his dogs. They had been having such
fun chasing through the budding green woods. She began to
imagine them, not as she had seen them, but before that, running
in an eager line, with the boy at the back of them, cracking his
whip and laughing at their mistakes. She remembered that each
dog was slightly different from the others. Snuffer had one brown
ear. Chaser was all white, while Doom was nearly black, with
yellow speckles. Bell had a pale brown patch, like a saddle, on her
back. The brown-and-yellow one was Pickles, the one with the
white ears was Flags, and the other dark-coloured one was Genius.
Then there were Rags, Noser, Wag, and Petruvia, all of whom were
greyish with black bits in different places. As for the boy, he had
been wearing baggy clothes rather like Flute’s, only in brighter
colours, blues and reds. His whip had red patterns on the handle.
  Hayley could really almost see them, rushing along, tails up and
waving. She could hear their pattering and panting, the occasional
yelp, and the boy laughing as he cracked his whip. She could smell
dog and leafy forest. So happy—
  Grandma came in just then, saying, “Well? Have you
remembered— Hayley !”
  Hayley came to herself with a jump to find the boy and his dogs
really and truly rushing through her room in front of her, soundless
now, and fading as they ran, while Grandma stared at them in grey
outrage.
  “I have had enough of you, Hayley,” Grandma said. “You’re a
wicked little girl—quite uncontrollable! Haven’t I taught you not to
mix There with Here?”
  The dogs faded silently away and the boy melted off after them.
Hayley turned miserably to Grandma. “They were happy. They
weren’t doing any harm.”
  “If that’s all you can say—” Grandma began.
  “It is,” Hayley interrupted defiantly. “It’s what I say. Happy!”



                                  5
                                                               «^»
Hayley hated to remember the next bit. Grandma refused to
explain or speak to Hayley. She simply rammed Hayley’s clothes
into a suitcase and made Grandad phone Aunt May to send Cousin
Mercer to fetch Hayley away. Hayley was locked into her room
until Cousin Mercer arrived the following morning and nobody
came near her, even to bring food. That was bad enough. So was
the journey that followed, long and confusing and full of delays and
rain. But the worst was that Hayley was sure that Flute would
turn up in the garden and find her gone, and be terribly puzzled.
She was sure she would never see Flute again.
  She sat beside the pretend cat, trying not to think at all. She
could hear the running and shouting again in the distance but it did
not seem very important.
  For a moment, she thought she was crying. Drops were falling
heavily on the pretend cat and then splashing onto her leg. It was
only when more drops fell on her head that Hayley realised the
water must be coming from somewhere else. She looked up. The
ceiling above her sofa was covered in upside-down puddles, with big
dewy yellow drops forming in the middle of them and then plopping
down. At almost the moment when she turned her face up, the
puddles all became too big to hold together and water began coming
down in streams, nearly as hard as it was raining outside.
   Hayley jumped up. “Oh dear,” she said, collecting cushions and
the pretend cat and dumping them into a dry chair. She tried to
push the sofa out from under the flood, but it was too heavy for her
to move. She simply got sprayed with water splattering up off the
carpet. “I think I’d better tell someone,” she said doubtfully.
  She ran out into the hall. No one seemed to be down there, but
there was a lot of shouting and running about going on somewhere
upstairs. Hayley rather timidly climbed the stairs, past the small
safe room she had been given, and on up to the right.
  A river of water met her near the top, coming down like a
waterfall from stair to stair. The landing, when she came to it, was
a small oblong lake, and the corridor off to the right, which must
have been above the lounge, was a dark tunnel filled with rain.
Someone screamed, “Turn off that light! It’s dangerous !” Footsteps
thundered and splashed somewhere out of sight, and voices from
unseen cousins and aunts yelled, “Tollie! Where are you? We need
you!” and “Bring that bucket here, quick !” and “Throw all the
towels down there!” and in between, everyone yelled for Tollie
again.
   “I think they know,” Hayley said to herself. She stood to the side
of the waterfall at the top of the stairs, wondering what she ought
to do.
  Aunt May and Troy, both of them soaking wet, burst out from
the rain in the dark corridor and splashed to a stop when they saw
Hayley.
  “She’ll do!” Troy cried out. “She’s a lot smaller than Tollie.”
  “Oh, so she will!” Aunt May gasped. Sheets of water sprayed
round her wet slippers as she dived on Hayley and took hold of her
arm. “ Do you mind helping us, dear? One of the gutters is blocked
and we’re all too big to get out of the window.”
  Troy seized Hayley’s other arm and the two of them towed her
across the landing. The lake soaked Hayley’s shoes and socks
instantly. She was rather surprised to find that the water was not
really cold. But then the whole of Ireland was not really as cold as
London.
  “Mercer’s tried getting to it from outside with a ladder,” Troy
explained, switching on the big electric torch he was carrying, “but
the wind blew him down, so it has to be unblocked by someone
small enough to get out through the top bathroom window.”
  “Will you do that for us, dear?” Aunt May said as they all
plunged into the downpour inside the corridor. “We’ll hang on to
you. You’ll be quite safe.”
  “Yes,” Hayley said, “of course,” thinking that there didn’t seem to
be much choice.
  “Of course you will!” Troy said warmly.
   With rain thumping and pattering on their heads and backs, the
three of them rushed up a flight of stairs that was exactly like a
waterfall, to where Troy’s torch glinted on choppy waves in another
flooded corridor. Dark shapes of people churned about in it,
shouting to one another to “Keep that door shut!” and then,
“Where is Tollie?”
  Aunt May and Troy wheeled sideways from here and pounded up
another flight of stairs which were—confusingly—completely dry.
Both of them yelled over their shoulders, “It’s all right. We don’t
need Tollie. We’ve got Hayley instead!” and then wheeled sideways
again into a little bathroom with a sloping ceiling. Someone had put
a big flickering lantern in the washbasin there. By its light, Hayley
saw a bath wedged in under the slope of the ceiling and above the
bath a small square skylight propped open on a thin metal bar.
Rain was spattering viciously in through the opening. Hayley
looked up at it and thought, How do I get up there !
  “Don’t worry, we’ll lift you,” Troy said. He picked up a bath stool
and banged it down in the bath. “Hop up there and I’ll boost you,”
he said.
  Before Hayley could move, Aunt May scrambled into the bath,
saying, “I’ll keep it steady.” Whereupon her sopping slippers shot
out from under her and she sat down with a splash, sending the
stool clanging into the bath taps.
  “Oh, not again , Auntie!” Troy said. He put his shoulder under
Aunt May’s waving arm and helped her flounder to her feet again.
Somehow, in the course of the vast scrambling that followed, Aunt
May’s necklace burst. Beads clattered into the bath and rolled about
on the dimly lit floor. “Last necklace to go,” Troy said cheerfully.
“Don’t tread on a bead, Hayley. The floor’s covered with them now.”
He put the stool back under the skylight and squelched into the
bath beside it. He held out both hands to Hayley. “Up you get,” he
said. “Take my torch and get on the stool.”
  “You’ll need the torch to see the drain,” Aunt May panted. Her
hair was now out of whatever had held it together and fanned over
her big shoulders like a lion’s mane. “The drain’s down to the left of
the window.”
  Hayley took hold of the torch and found herself being hauled up
onto the stool. She stood there, wobbling rather, feeling Troy grab
her from one side and Aunt May from the other, and cautiously
took the metal bar off its spike and pushed the tiny window open
with her head.
   It was horrible out there. Windy rain stormed into her face.
Worse still, when she worked the torch through beside her face and
got it pointed downwards, all she could see was a sort of trench full
of turbulent water just below her and the square shapes of the
castle parapet beyond that. The drain was obviously deep under
water. She was going to have to guess where it was. The only way
Hayley could see to get near it was to ooze herself out of the
window headfirst. And then grope.
  “We’ve got you,” Troy said encouragingly as Hayley began to
wriggle herself forward.
   The frame of the skylight was only just big enough for her to get
through. As Hayley wriggled onwards, the spike that the metal bar
hooked onto scraped its way agonisingly down the middle of her
chest, while the bar itself hung down and poked her in the head. By
the time her feet had left the stool and she was hanging half in and
half out, she was still a foot away from the murky ditch of water
and being stabbed in the navel by the spike. She was going to have
to get all of her outside.
  Behind her, she could hear the little bathroom filling up with
people. Someone said, “She’ll never get to it like that!”
   Oh yes I will ! Hayley thought. “Be ready to hold my feet!” she
shouted and thought she heard someone say “OK.” Then, clutching
the torch in her right hand, she began to inch herself down the
sloping tiles outside. Rain pelted across her.
  Before long, she had the feeling it was raining upwards into her
knickers. The skylight bit into her shins, the tiles scraped her front.
The only comforting thing was that she could feel Troy’s hands
warm and strong on her left leg and Aunt May’s hands, softer but
just as strong, holding her right calf. They were paying her out of
the window like a rope.
   The hands had reached her ankles before Hayley could even
touch the water. Left, she thought. She had to stretch and ooze and
extend herself sideways before her hand could go into the rippling
flood. It was surprisingly un-cold to her fingers. The hands were
holding her shoes by then. And she stretched and oozed and tried to
lengthen herself again, until finally her fingertips met a rough,
leaded bottom. She couldn’t feel any kind of drain. Rather
desperately, she swished her hand further to the left. Here there
was the faintest feeling that the water was pulling at her fingers.
Almost shrieking with the effort, she managed to move her hand
that way.
   The tips of her fingers touched something thick and rubbery
feeling. With another desperate stretch, Hayley somehow got one
finger under it, and then her thumb on top. Then she could pick
whatever-it-was up.
  It came up with a gurgle. Hayley was so surprised at how quickly
things happened then that she nearly screamed. Water thundered
past her nose from right to left and tried to take her hair with it. To
the left, it became a whirlpool, fairly whizzing round and round,
and gargled away down the unblocked drain so fast that, by the
time Troy and Aunt May, thoroughly alarmed at the noises Hayley
was making, had started to haul on her ankles, the gutter was
empty.
  Troy and Aunt May went on hauling. Hayley scraped rapidly and
painfully up over the tiles, and agonisingly across the spike, and
landed on the stool in the bath again, soaking wet and with her
dress torn completely open down the middle.
  Someone shouted, “She did it!”
  There were cheers from the crowded bathroom behind her.
Someone else said, “What was it? What is she holding?”
   Blinking in the lantern light, Hayley turned herself around on
the stool. Cousins and aunts were packed into the tiny space, dimly
lit and staring, with Cousin Mercer ducking his wet head in
through the door at the back and Tollie squashed up against the
bath in front. Troy gently prised the torch out of Hayley’s right
hand and switched it off. Aunt May seized Hayley’s left wrist.
“Good heavens!” she said.
   Hayley looked that way to find that her fingers were clamped
round a pork chop. It was large. It was raw, and whitish with
waterlogging, and sort of triangular, but there was no doubt what
it was. It was almost exactly the right size and shape to block a
drain.
  “It’s a pork chop!” Aunt Alice exclaimed. “However did that get
into the gutter?”
  Hayley looked at Tollie, down near her soaking shoes, and knew
at once. If ever she saw guilt and annoyance, it was in Tollie’s face
at that moment. No doubt Tollie had hoped to be the one who went
heroically out through the window. But when Aunt May said, “We
have crows and seagulls here all the time—one of them must have
dropped it,” Hayley did not contradict her. Even though Tollie
looked up at her with scorn and dislike, for being too feeble to tell,
Hayley did not say a word. She was shivering all over and her front
hurt.
  Aunt Celia said, “Poor child ! She’s bleeding!”
   Hayley was seized and carried away. The pork chop was taken
from her like a trophy and she was carried over marshy carpets,
first to somebody’s bedroom, where Harmony bathed her scraped
front and spread soothing ointment there, while cousins ran about
finding her some fur slippers and a large fluffy dressing gown.
Then, wrapped in these luxuries, she was carried downstairs again.
“I can walk!” Hayley protested.
   “Yes, but you’re not going to—you’ve saved the day,” Aunt May
told her.
  She ended up in the kitchen, which was still dry and beautifully
warm, where the aunts made quarts of cocoa. There Hayley sat in a
wooden armchair, surrounded by relatives who were all praising
her—except for Tollie, who sat in a corner and glowered at
her—sipping cocoa and gradually warming up. Some of the warmth
was from the unusual feeling of being the centre of everyone’s
admiration—apart from Tollie’s of course. When Troy appeared, in
a red dressing gown, he said, “Well done! You’re a brave one, aren’t
you!” And Aunt May, now wearing a musty-smelling fur coat,
hugged her mightily and said, “You courageous child! We won’t
forget this in a hurry!”
  Hayley had never known anything like it. The warmth from it
was still with her when Cousin Mercer carried her up to bed and
she fell asleep, into warm, sunny, contented dreams.



                                 6
                                                             «^»
The next day, it was hard to believe that it had ever rained. Hayley
woke to find the sky a bright heavenlike blue with great snowy
clouds hustling across it. Aunt May woke her by coming in with an
armload of clothes.
  “Here, dear. Most of these should fit you. Try them on and make
sure you’re warm enough. The wind’s chilly today. Breakfast in half
an hour.” Aunt May’s hair, because it had been soaked last night,
was wilder than ever that morning. Half of it fell down as she
crossed the room. And she seemed to have found a whole lot of new
necklaces. Red amber beads dangled clacking on her shapeless
maroon dress when she threw the clothes on Hayley’s bed and went
dashing away downstairs.
  Hayley got up and examined the clothes. There were shorts with
pockets, trousers with pockets, jeans, socks, T-shirts, jackets with
pockets, sweatshirts with both hoods and pockets, knitted things,
but not a single dress or skirt. Hayley could feel her face settling
into a beaming smile. She made a careful selection: trousers with
pockets, because those were like the ones Troy wore, a T-shirt that
said heads i win, tails you lose, thick yellow socks, because the
trainers were rather big, and a red cardigan, because she suddenly
discovered that red was her favourite colour. Feeling baggy and
strange and comfortable, she looked in the mirror to do her hair
and wondered what Grandma would say. Her hair had gone right
out of control in the night. It radiated from her head in curls,
tendrils, ringlets, and long feathery locks. Hayley had a moment of
terrible guilt. She was never going to get it neat! Then she thought
of Aunt May and realised there was no need to bother. She dragged
a hairbrush through the wildness and went downstairs.
   There she was greeted as if she was the most important person in
the place. It was almost overwhelming. Aunts jumped up from the
big table and bent over her asking anxiously if she was all right and
would she like sausages with her bacon and egg or just beans and
fried bread. Harmony hurried over with a glass of orange juice for
her, and cousins crowded forward with packets of different cereals.
“These chocolate ones are gorgeous !” one of the girls said. “No, try
the nutty kind,” someone else persuaded her. “Or would you prefer
porridge?” asked Aunt Geta.
  “I bet she wouldn’t,” said Cousin Mercer.
  He was right. Grandma had always insisted on porridge. Hayley
looked round at the faces leaning eagerly towards her. She gave a
beaming smile. “The chocolate ones, please,” she said. “And I’d like
bacon and egg and sausages and beans and fried bread, please.”
  Tollie was the only person not anxious to look after her. He
looked up from a vast bowl of cereal and scowled.
  Hayley turned her smile on him. “And fried tomato,” she added.
  Tollie said, “Greedy pig,” and went back to his cereal.
   “Yes, but I’m hungry,” Hayley said. She was too. She had no
trouble at all in packing away the biggest breakfast of her life, with
toast and marmalade and tea as well. When it was over she
sighed—a comfortable sigh of regret that she could manage no
more—and got up with the others to help carry plates and cups
back to the kitchen.
   Meanwhile, the aunts were discussing what needed to be done to
clean up after the flood. Cousin Mercer said he would drive over to
the Golf Club and borrow the rollers they used to dry the greens
there.
   “That’ll help with the carpets,” Aunt May said, “but we’re going
to need some of their big blow-dryers too for the walls and ceilings.
You can’t repaint those until they’re dry, Mercer. And we’ll have to
polish the floors and the stairs— it’s going to take days ! Harmony,
be an angel and keep the children out of the way while we work.”
  “The game,” said the eldest Tigh boy.
  Everyone else clamoured, “Yes! The game, the game! You
promised!”
  “OK, OK!” Harmony said, laughing. “Wellies on, everyone. The
paddock’s bound to be soaking wet.”
   There was a rush for the hall and the big cupboard under the
stairs, which seemed to contain every possible size of rubber
boots—though not many actual pairs. Troy ended up with one red
and one blue boot. Someone found Hayley a pink boot with a white
flower on it and someone else came up with another that was plain
black. Then everyone galloped, in a stampede of different-coloured
feet, out through the front door and round the house, to a sort of
sloping meadow at one side, where they milled around in the wet
grass, impatiently waiting for Harmony.
  When Harmony appeared—in knee-high green boots that must
have been her own—she was carrying a folding card table and a
large plastic shopping bag with an eye-splitting swirly design on it.
Everyone cheered and crowded up to her while she opened the table
and set it up firmly by digging its legs into the slope. Then she put
the bag on it and fetched out of it a big bundle of the kind of pointed
plastic tags gardeners use to label plants. As she put those down on
the table, she said, “OK, let’s recap the vow first, since you haven’t
played for a year. Everyone say after me: ‘I swear not to say a word
about what we do in this game to anyone outside this paddock.’ You
say it too, Tollie, and you, Hayley.”
  Wondering very much about this, Hayley obediently chorused
with the rest, “I swear not to say a word about what we do in this
game to anyone outside this paddock.” Everyone was saying it,
quite devoutly, even Tollie.
  “Good,” Harmony said. “We don’t want Uncle Jolyon to know, do
we?” Everyone nodded, equally devoutly. “Now I’ll go over the rules.
First, I put one of these tags into the ground for each of you and
that is where you have to start from. It makes a lot of difference
where you start, remember? Then I give you each one of these
cards.” She brought out of the bag a big bundle of cardboard
squares held together with a rubber band. There must have been
nearly a hundred of them. Some of them were old and tattered and
grey, some were quite new. Harmony put the bundle on the table
and said, “You stand there and read your card and—” She dug into
the bag again and brought out a large clock with Mickey Mouse on
the front and put that on the table too. “When the clock starts, you
get going and do exactly what it says on your card. And you have to
get back before it stops or you’ll be stuck out there. And—” She
fished in the bag again. “The first one back successfully , without
cheating , Tollie, gets this prize.” She brought out what was clearly
a Christmas tree ornament, made of plastic, in the shape of a
golden apple, and put it down with a flourish in the middle of the
table. “There.”
  “Harmony,” said the youngest Laxton girl, “I can go on my own
this year, can’t I? I’m quite old now.”
   “Well, Lucy—” Harmony looked from Lucy to Hayley. “Yes, I
suppose you are. You’d make two of Hayley. All right then.” While
Lucy was dancing about delightedly, making heavy rubbery flurps
with her boots, Harmony said, “Hayley, I was going to suggest you
went with Troy, as this is the first time you’ve played. Is that all
right, Troy?” Troy nodded in his good-humoured way. Tollie said,
“And me —I go alone too.”
  “You know you always do,” Harmony said. “Now—”
  “Let’s start !” Tollie whined. “I’m getting bored.”
   “Yes,” Harmony said. She picked up the bundle of gardener’s
tags. Hayley saw that each of them had someone’s name written on
it. There was even one marked with HAYLEY. Harmony hurried up
and down the paddock with the bundle, digging each one into the
ground in a different place and calling out, “Lucy, you’re down here.
James, up here beside this bush, right? Tollie, off to the left here,”
and so on. Finally, she stuck two tags into the ground together, out
to one side. “Troy and Hayley, over here, see?” Then she came back
to the table, a bit breathless, and solemnly took the rubber band off
the cards. She shuffled the pack, the way you shuffle playing cards.
Everyone’s eyes fixed on her hands as if this was the most exciting
moment of the game. When she started passing the cards out, they
were snatched from her and everyone except Troy and Hayley raced
away to the markers.
  “Harmony,” Troy said, lingering. “This is a bit fierce for
someone’s first go. Look. Can’t you change it?”
  Harmony glanced at the card Troy was holding out. It was
obvious that she saw what Troy meant, but she shook her head.
“Sorry. No. I can’t make it work with a change. The only thing you
can do is not to play.”
  “If we do play,” Troy said, “what sign of the Zodiac are we under
now?”
  Harmony looked up at the sky with its scudding clouds. “Virgo,”
she said. “Just passed the cusp with Leo. Make up your mind, Troy.
Everyone’s waiting.”
  “I suppose Virgo’s not so bad,” Troy said. “ You decide,” he said,
passing the card to Hayley.
  The card was old and worn and floppy, and fawn-coloured with
age. When Hayley took it, she found it had once been a plain
postcard on which someone had written— a long time ago, to judge
by the way the ink had faded—in large, firm capitals: FETCH A
SCALE FROM THE DRAGON THAT CIRCLES THE ZODIAC.
  “What do you think?” Troy said to her.
  Hayley had no idea what they were supposed to do in the game
anyway, and the card made her very curious to find out. Besides,
everyone else was standing by the markers jigging with impatience.
James, who was nearest, said, “Hurry it up, can’t you!” and Tollie,
in the distance, was jumping up and down shouting, “Cowards,
cowards, cowards!”
  “I think we’d better try,” she said.
   “Great!” said Troy. He seized her by one arm and towed her over
to the double marker. “Leave the card on the grass for Harmony to
collect.”
  Back by the table, Harmony wound up the clock. It seemed to be
a musical box as well as a clock. When Harmony set it down on the
table, ticking loudly, it began to play a small tinkly tune. Grandad
had played the same tune to Hayley once and told her it was by
Mozart.
  “ ‘A Little Night Music’?” she said to Troy.
  He nodded. “We all hear different tunes,” he said. “Harmony’s
good at that. Start walking.”
  All over the paddock, the others were setting off. James charged
downhill towards the orchard. Tollie came rushing back up the hill.
Lucy was walking rather carefully in a straight line, looking
nervous. Most of the rest were running towards the house.
  “Some of them are cheating,” Troy said, pulling Hayley forwards.
“Tollie always does.”
  Hayley hastily dropped the card by the markers and let herself be
pulled towards the garden shed at the side of the paddock.
  It was a simple brick-built shed with a pointed roof, but when
they came to it, Hayley was highly delighted to find that the top
half of the door was of panes of stained glass, in nine different
colours. As Troy pulled the door shut behind them, Hayley saw
Lucy pass slowly across outside, from thundery yellow, to stormy
red, and then to twilight purple as she walked out of sight. Inside,
the old lawn mowers and the stack of deck chairs were in a sort of
rainbow dusk. Troy, keeping hold of Hayley’s wrist, edged them
past the lawn mowers—and through some thick, dusty cobwebs
that caught unpleasantly on Hayley’s hair—and on into coloured,
twilight beyond. Shortly, it was almost dark. But there seemed to
be a passage there, or perhaps even a path, and Troy led her firmly
along it.
   Path, Hayley decided, as they brushed among leaves and out into
some kind of cold dry place. It was very dark here, but Tollie was
clearly visible when he rushed suddenly and jeeringly across their
way.
  “Stupids!” he called out. “You’re on the wrong strand!”
  Hayley stopped.
  “Take no notice,” Troy said, pulling at her. “He’s always trying to
put people off.”
  “Yes, but where are we?” Hayley said.
  “Out in the mythosphere by now,” Troy answered. “I think we’re
nearly halfway, but it’s bound to get more difficult as we go on.”
  “Then that’s all right,” Hayley said. “I’ve been out here before
with Flute. How can you and Tollie do it too?”
 “Oh, we can all do it,” Troy said. “All our family belongs to the
mythosphere, didn’t you know?”
  “What? Even Grandma?” Hayley exclaimed.
 “Of course,” Troy said. “But she’s one of the ones, like Mercer,
who does what Uncle Jolyon says and—”
   Here Tollie rushed across their path again, coming the other way.
“I’m telling on you!” he shouted, and vanished away into the dark.
  Hayley almost stopped again.
  “Don’t you believe it!” Troy said, hauling her onwards. “If he tells
tales, he couldn’t play. Uncle Jolyon would stop this game like a
shot if he knew we were playing it. And,” he added, “Harmony
would get it in the neck worse than any of us, for inventing it.”
  Hayley hoped Troy was right. She did not trust Tollie one bit.
  They could see the strand they were on now, a silvery, slithery
path, coiling away up ahead. The worst part, to Hayley’s mind, was
the way it didn’t seem to be fastened to anything at the sides. Her
feet, in their one pink boot and one black, kept slipping. She was
quite afraid that she was going to pitch off the edge. It was like
trying to climb a strip of tinsel. She hung on hard to Troy’s warmer,
larger hand and wished it were not so cold. The deep chilliness
made the scrapes on the front of her ache.
   To take her mind off it, she stared around. The rest of the
mythosphere was coming into view overhead and far away, in dim,
feathery streaks. Some parts of it were starry swirls, like the Milky
Way, only white, green, and pale pink, and other more distant parts
flickered and waved like curtains of light blowing in the wind.
Hayley found her chest filling with great admiring breaths at its
beauty, and she stared and stared as more and more streaks and
strands came into view.
  She was taken completely by surprise when a comet came fizzing
past her face, with its tail roaring out behind like a rocket. “I’m
telling, I’m telling!” it shouted in Tollie’s voice. And Hayley went
sideways with the shock of it. She had to save herself by clutching
the sharp, icy edge of the strand.
  Troy hauled her upright. “Oh, go away and play your own game!”
he shouted after the comet. “Are you OK, Hayley?”
  “Perfectly, thanks.” Hayley stood up, shaking her icy hand, and
stared scornfully after the comet as it roared away. Grandad had
told her about comets. “He’s got it all wrong,” she said. “Comets go
tail first . Not like rockets.”
  Troy laughed as if he couldn’t help it. “So much for you, Tollie!”
he said. “Come on. We’re nearly there.”
  He was right. They laboured up round another slithery curve,
which took them through a copse of silvery trees that rattled as
they passed, and then brought them out into black night filled with
stars. Everything was made of stars there. Over to the right, a
huge lion prowled away from them, shaking a mane that was all
stars, pacing on great starry paws, and twitching a long tail of
stars. Much nearer to the left, an enormous woman stood still as a
statue—except for her hair, which was trails of blowing stars—and
stared at them with huge, disapproving star eyes.
  Unfortunately, Hayley was still remembering the things Grandad
had taught her. “We oughtn’t to be able to breathe here!” she cried
out. “There’s no air!” Her lungs heaved in and out, but nothing
happened. She knew she was suffocating.
   Troy shook her arm. “Don’t be silly! This is the mythosphere. I
told you we both belong to it! Of course you can breathe!”
   Hayley was rather ashamed to find that he was quite right. As
soon as Troy spoke, she stood there breathing in a perfectly normal
way. “What do we do now?” she asked, a little sulkily, because she
felt stupid.
  “Wait for the dragon to arrive, I suppose,” Troy said. “I’ve never
been here either.”
  He looked over to the left, beyond the starry woman, where a
huge set of weighing scales was just coming into view. Hayley
looked right, towards the lion, hoping it would go on walking away
and not notice them. And something swam slowly towards her from
beyond the lion. It was a bulky, complicated mass of stars, but, as
the lion swung its huge head round to look at it, it uncoiled a little
and produced a long spiky tail, like a lashing river of stars, and
seemed to be warning the lion not to mess with it. The lion lashed
its own tail contemptuously and went pacing on, and the dragon
floated onwards. It was surrounded in fiery flakes now, like burning
snow, that its movements seemed to have dislodged from its tail.
 “It’s coming,” Hayley said, nudging Troy. “It’s going the other
way.”
  Troy whirled round, just as the dragon floated level with them. It
was coming surprisingly fast, in spite of being all coiled up. It was
made of stars fitted together like a mosaic or a jigsaw puzzle and
quite blindingly bright. It looked at them as it glided by, out of an
eye that was like a small sun deep inside a glass ball.
  “Er—hallo?” Troy said.
   The dragon went on looking and did not answer. But then the
huge starry woman noticed it. Slow icy anger came into her remote
face and she waved an arm the way a human woman might try to
swat a bat. The dragon uncoiled menacingly at her and she
snatched her arm back. Next moment the darkness was filled with
more burning flakes from the dragon, all blowing towards Troy and
Hayley in the wind from the woman’s movements. Troy grabbed
one as it sailed past his face and stood holding it while the dragon
floated away beyond the huge woman.
  “I’ve got one,” he said, looking rather stunned. “We’ve done it.
Come on, let’s get back. We might even win.”
   He took Hayley’s hand, and together they went sliding and
scrambling down the silvery strip. Sometimes they sat down and
slid, sometimes they stood up and ran along the flatter parts, while
around them great misty swatches of the mythosphere turned and
arched and rippled. Troy hauled Hayley along so fast that she had
little time to notice anything they were passing, but she did notice
that the star-shaped flake in Troy’s other hand grew dimmer as
they went. And now that Tollie did not seem to be around to
distract her, she caught glimpses of planets whirling in the
distance, and saw a centaur—unless it was a man on a horse—and
a person who seemed to be half goat, and several odd-looking ladies,
and a man with a bull’s head. After that she kept glimpsing people,
who seemed more like ordinary humans as they went downwards,
until Troy dragged her between some bushes and they were once
more in the garden shed. By then the thing in Troy’s hand was a
shiny curved oval that looked like a metal seashell.
  Up at the top of the paddock, where Harmony was standing by
the table, the clock was still chiming out its tune. Harmony smiled
as Troy and Hayley came panting up to her. “Any luck?”
  “We got one!” Troy gasped.
  “It kept shaking them loose,” Hayley explained.
  Before Harmony could answer, Lucy came dashing up, pink and
proud and pleased. “I got it! I picked it up when it fell off her foot,”
she panted, and held out a little glass shoe. “This truly is
Cinderella’s slipper! Have I won?”
  James raced in from one side, equally out of breath, and held out
something clenched in his fist. “Prester John’s beard is
seventy-seven centimetres long and he says we’re to stop coming
and asking him for hairs all the time.” He looked at Lucy, Troy and
Hayley. “Damn! Didn’t I win? Who did?”
  By this time, the clock’s little tune was slowing down. Tighs and
Laxtons began arriving from all directions. Harmony was soon
surrounded by people waving strange objects at her and saying
things like “This is Blind Pugh’s stick!” or “I got the firebird feather!
Look!” or “One Aladdin’s lamp, as ordered!”
   Harmony picked each object up as it was pushed at her and
looked at it very closely. She nodded at the curly grey hair James
was holding and at Troy’s dragon scale and Lucy’s shoe. “Those are
genuine,” she agreed. “They can go in the trophy cabinet. So can
this lamp. Put it down on the table, Charlie, and be careful not to
rub it. But you got this feather from the vase in the lounge, didn’t
you, Sarah? Go and put it back. Yes, this says DRINK ME—it’s
from Alice all right. But this isn’t a walking stick, Oliver. It looks
like a broom handle to me.”
  “But I was in the inn when Blind Pugh arrived!” Oliver protested.
   “Then he must have fooled you,” Harmony replied. “He may be
blind, but he is a pirate, you know. Yes, the drinking horn truly
was used by Beowulf. That can go in the cabinet and so can this
One Ring. No, don’t put it on, you fool! It’s dangerous!”
   All this time, the tune from the clock was going slower and
slower. Just as the last three notes were dragging out, Tollie came
staggering up, looking exhausted but pleased with himself. “Here
you are,” he said. “Bowl of porridge from the Three Bears!” and he
dumped it on the table.
  Harmony looked at it and sighed. “That’s from the kitchen here,”
she said. “Why must you always cheat, Tollie?”
   “Because he wastes his time rushing about the strands trying to
put the rest of us off!” James said. “I don’t think he should be
allowed to play.”
  “Hear, hear!” said almost everybody else. “He’s a pest!”
  “We’ll see,” Harmony said soothingly. “Everyone come indoors to
the cabinet for the presentation.”
  As they all trooped towards the house, where Sarah joined them,
looking decidedly ashamed of herself, Hayley whispered to Troy,
“Why did she let Tollie get away with it?”
  Troy made a face. “Because he’s quite capable of telling his
dad—Mercer, you know—and Mercer would tell Uncle Jolyon at
once. It’s blackmail really.”
   The trophy cabinet was in a small room off the lounge. Although
the lounge was now dry and polished, nobody had yet got round to
the small room. On its wet and muddy floor stood a tall
glass-fronted cupboard which Harmony unlocked with a special key
from the plastic bag. Inside, on the rather dirty shelves, were little
heaps of tiny objects: quite a pile of inch-long glass shoes, almost a
nest of grey curly hairs, six miniature Aladdin’s lamps, a bunch of
tiny bright feathers and a cluster of little bottles, among other
things. Harmony ceremoniously put the new objects beside the old,
small ones, where they sat dwarfing them. Last of all, she put
Troy’s big gleaming dragon scale beside the three tiny ones already
there. Then she locked the cupboard and turned to give the plastic
apple into Hayley’s hands.
  “There,” she said. “I’m giving the prize to Hayley because she was
pretty brave to go. Is that OK, Troy?”
  “Fine,” Troy said, in his calm way. “I’ve won a hundred times
anyway.”



                                 7
                                                             «^»
For the next few days, Hayley enjoyed herself more than she had
ever done. Once the aunts had finished drying and cleaning the
house and Mercer was able to set up ladders and start the
repainting, Troy explained the rules of hide-and-seek and the other
indoor games. Hayley rushed shrieking through the rooms and
corridors with her cousins as if she had been doing it all her life.
She ate huge meals. She went with the rest of them in a convoy of
cars to the seaside, where the sea took her breath away, first by its
size and strength, and again when Troy and Harmony tried to
teach her to swim and an enormous wave rolled in and swamped all
three of them.
  “Getting quite rosy and plump, isn’t she?” beautiful Aunt Alice
said to Aunt May as the two of them lay stretched on towels,
watching. And Aunt May agreed, rather proudly, feeling personally
responsible for the change in Hayley.
  Apart from that one day by the sea, the young ones played the
game most mornings and Hayley soon began to feel a veteran of the
mythosphere. Harmony always insisted that Hayley go with Troy
for safety, but Hayley did not mind, even when Tollie chanted,
“Baby, baby! Has to have her hand held!”
  “Take no notice,” Harmony said. “He’s a brat.”
  “I know,” said Hayley. “Harmony, why do you always manage
the game? Don’t you ever want to play too?”
  A thoughtful, amused look came over Harmony’s face. “Well,” she
said, “for one thing, I’m the only one who can manage it. And for
another, when I was small, I used to ramble all over the
mythosphere, until my mother caught me at it and threatened to
tell Uncle Jolyon.”
  “Daren’t you go now?” Hayley asked anxiously, thinking of how
angry Grandma had been.
  Harmony laughed. “Don’t worry. I still go out there a lot—but
mostly when I’m away at Music College, so that I won’t get Mother
into trouble.” She took up the bundle of markers and looked around
the paddock, where everyone was waiting to start that morning’s
game. “Where’s Troy got to?”
 Troy came into the paddock as Harmony asked this. He said to
Harmony, “Mercer’s going to finish the painting today.”
  Hayley was surprised. She had grown so used to seeing Cousin
Mercer up a ladder painting water-stained ceilings that it almost
seemed like his permanent occupation—and from the number of
ceilings needing painting, anyone would have thought Cousin
Mercer would be up a ladder at least for the next year.
  Harmony looked musingly down at the card table, with the clock
and the bundle of cards on it. “I think we’d better make this the last
game then,” she said.
  Everybody groaned.
  Harmony simply fixed Tollie with a meaning stare. “Isn’t that so,
Tollie?”
   Tollie shuffled his trainers in the trampled grass. “I told him all
about the game. He’s going to phone Uncle Jolyon as soon as he’s
finished,” he admitted.
  “You little sneak,” Harmony said to him, in a dangerously kind,
cheerful voice. “I hope you realise you’ve spoilt your own fun too.”
  Tollie pointed at Hayley. “It’s her fault. She shouldn’t be playing.”
  Harmony tossed her hair back angrily. “ None of us should be
playing,” she said. “Don’t you understand, you silly little brat? No,
you don’t, do you? Right, everyone. As this is our last game, we’ll
add a bit of variety. Each of you take your own marker and plant it
where you like. That should change the strands you use quite
radically. Then come back and get your card.” She spread the
markers out in a fan on the table and then picked up the cards and
shuffled them, still staring at Tollie. “If I didn’t know you’d cheat,”
she said, as Hayley picked up her marker and went off beside Troy
to plant it, “I’d make sure you got the Slough of Despond or the
Cave of Polyphemus, Tollie. Polyphemus is a man-eating giant and
just what you deserve.”
   Tollie gave Harmony a smirk. He planted his marker right beside
the card table and held out his hand for a card. Harmony handed it
to him with a sugary smile. “There you are, dear Tollie. Fetch a
roc’s egg and I hope it chokes you. And I warn you—if you bring me
the ostrich egg from Aunt May’s office, I shall break all my
promises to Mercer and spank you.”
  She handed cards out to everyone else. From the looks on all
their faces, the instructions on the cards were not the usual ones.
Lucy went quite white as she read hers. “I’m afraid of witches!” she
whispered to James.
  “Bad luck,” James said unsympathetically. “You’re lucky— I’ve
got to get through a dirty great thorn hedge, and I don’t even know
what a spindle looks like! What happens if I wake Sleeping Beauty
up?” he asked Harmony.
  She handed a card to Hayley. “Why, you get married and live
happily ever after, James my sweetheart,” she said. “Look on the
bright side. You’ll be safe away from Uncle Jolyon if that happens.”
  It was evident that Harmony was very angry indeed. As they
went back to their markers, Troy said nervously to Hayley, “What
does she want us to do?”
   Hayley looked at her card. It said, FETCH A GOLDEN APPLE
FROM THE ORCHARD OF THE HESPERIDES. Though it was as
used and battered-looking as any of the other cards, when she
showed it to Troy, he said, “I’ve never seen that one before! But it
doesn’t look too bad. Last time she got this angry, I had to go to
Mercury and bring her a mad robot. And the time before that, I had
to pinch Arthur’s sword out of the stone. I couldn’t pull it out and he
came along and hit me for trying to steal it. And before that—Oh,
forget it. Let’s go.”
  Behind them, the clock started to tinkle. This time its tune was
“Over the Rainbow,”which made Hayley laugh, because it seemed
exactly right. She followed Troy down to the bottom of the paddock,
where there was a small gate that led into the orchard. That struck
her as exactly right too.
   The next moment she was wondering if it was right. Troy pushed
the gate open and walked in among all the bushy apple trees.
Hayley followed him before the gate swung closed again, but there
was no sign of Troy when she was in the orchard. Since there was a
clear path trodden through the long grass, Hayley followed it,
expecting all the time to see Troy ahead of her beyond the next
tree. Instead, she came to another fence with a gate in it, which led
out into a wide field. She could not see Troy anywhere in the field.
But in the distance there was a man driving a tractor—or maybe a
digger—up a steep slope. Hayley set out towards him to ask if he
had seen Troy go past.
  There seemed to be something wrong with the digger— or
tractor. It would get some way up the hill and then its engine would
stop and the machine would go sliding backwards downhill. Hayley
could see the man bobbing about, trying to put on the brake and
start the engine again. Before long, she could hear him swearing.
But before she got near enough to hear actual swearwords, Tollie
came racing up and stopped in front of her.
  “You’re going wrong !” he cried out. “You can’t go this way!”
  He sounded as if he was desperate for her to believe him. But
Hayley, like Harmony, felt she had had enough of Tollie. “Oh, go
away !” she said. “Go and find your roc’s egg and stop trying to
cheat!” She pushed past Tollie and marched on across the field.
  She could hear Tollie shouting behind her, but by then, in the
strange way of the mythosphere, the hill and the stalled digger
were not there any more. Hayley found herself instead stumbling
among loose rocks in some kind of mountain pass. The pass very
shortly opened out into a stony valley, bare and barren except for
small yellowing bushes that smelt like turkey stuffing. There were
steep mountains on either side and not a sign of Troy anywhere.
  Hayley faltered. Tollie must have been right and she really had
gone the wrong way. But then she thought how Tollie was always
trying to put people off and marched on, sliding and stumbling
among the stones.
   There was a particularly huge mountain over to her left, very
strangely shaped. The top of it was covered in grey, smoky, shifting
clouds, but the lower part—the part she could see—looked almost
like a pair of great stone feet, with a sort of hump beyond that. This
hump, for some reason, made Hayley very uneasy. She kept her
eyes on it as she hurried and stumbled through the valley. At first
it was simply an odd-shaped crag, with clouds streaming across it,
dimming it, veiling it, and then showing it again, but it changed
shape as Hayley moved on. By the time she came level with it, it
was looking remarkably like an enormous stone woman, crouching
on the mountainside and peering out at the valley. Hayley was just
below it when the clouds suddenly smoked away from the rocky
nose, for a moment unveiling piercing eyes and a stern mouth.
Hayley almost screamed. It looked exactly like Grandma’s face
made of stone.
  “Oh, heavens!” Hayley said. “No, no, no!”
   She put her hands to the sides of her face and ran. Her feet
clattered and slipped on stones and then slapped on water. She was
among trees after that, where her hair caught painfully on twigs.
She crouched over and went on running, terrified that great stone
feet were coming tramping after her, to tell her she was forbidden
to be here and certainly not with her hair all loose and wearing a
loud red cardigan. Her panic took her through snow next and then
through rain, and after that along a windy seashore where her
trainers filled with sand and slowed her almost to a walk. But she
did not stop trying to run until she came into a green place full of
sunshine. People were playing music there.
   The music made Hayley feel safe—very safe, because it was one
of the tunes Fiddle used to play beside the pub, on the shady side of
the street. Hayley sat down on the grass, half hidden by a tree, to
empty the sand out of her shoes and get her breath back, and
stared out into the glade with great interest. There was a bit of
feast going on out there. There was a table made of logs, with
wineglasses and bread and fruit on it and a large leather pitcher to
hold the wine. Three very pretty ladies in floaty dresses were
sitting along a garden seat beyond the table, entertaining an old
man and two more ladies who had their backs to Hayley. One
musical lady played the flute, the one in the middle had a sort of
banjo, and the third one kept the beat with a sort of tinkly rattle.
When they finished the tune, the three people at the table clapped
and raised their wineglasses. The musical ladies laughed. The one
playing the flute said, “I think we have a visitor, Papa.” And she
pointed at Hayley with her flute.
  The old man whirled round in his seat. “Who?” he said.
  To Hayley’s astonishment, he was Grandad—Grandad wearing a
loose grey-blue robe, but Grandad all the same, and looking much
more cheerful than he usually did at home on the edge of London.
He stared at Hayley and burst out laughing.
   “Well, I’ll be— Hayley !” he said. “I hardly knew you in those
clothes! Come over here and be introduced to your aunts.” And,
again most unlike his usual self, he held out both arms to her.
  Hayley slowly stood up. “Is Grandma here?” she asked cagily.
  Grandad shook his head. “No, no, she never comes here. It’s
much too free and easy for her—and much too full of strange
things.”
  He continued to hold out his arms to her, so Hayley went over to
him and let herself be folded into a hearty hug.
  “Merope’s daughter,” Grandad explained to the ladies across her
head.
  “Oh, I remember!” said the lady Hayley could see out of her left
eye. She wore a gown the blue of hyacinths and she had two deep
dimples when she smiled. “Merope got into trouble for marrying a
mortal, didn’t she?”
   “And so did the mortal, poor fellow,” Grandad said. He swung
Hayley round into the crook of his left arm. “This one in blue,” he
told her, “is your aunt Arethusa, and the one in green is your aunt
Hespere. That one with the flute is Aigley, and the one with the
sistrum is Hesperethusa. Erytheia is our string player. If you want
to talk about them all together, you call them the Hesperides.”
  Hayley looked from one to another of these five pretty ladies.
There was a strong family likeness among them all, although
Arethusa was fair and rounded and Erytheia thin and dark, with
the others in between in various ways. They were each wearing a
different coloured gown and all smiled at Hayley as if they were
delighted to meet her. So many aunts! Hayley thought. Oh, I
understand! This is Grandad’s other family that he goes to see.
“Now I’ve got nine aunts!” she said wonderingly.
  “Well, actually you’ve got eleven really,” Grandad said. “There
are seven of the Pleiades, you know. There must be two you haven’t
met yet.”
   “Oh, yes. There’s Harmony and Troy’s mother,” Hayley
remembered. “None of them are as beautiful as you,” she said to the
five new aunts.
  They laughed, and laughed again when Grandad protested, “Oh, I
don’t know! Alcyone is quite a looker, don’t you think? Even Maia
could be if she tried. And Asterope would be prettiest of all if she
wasn’t such a mouse. I love and admire all my daughters, Hayley.”
Then he turned a little stern and asked, “Now what are you doing
here? Did you just wander along, or did you come for a reason?”
  “We were wondering that too,” said Hespere, the one in green.
  “For a reason,” Hayley said. “For Harmony’s game. I have to
bring back a golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides.
That’s from you, isn’t it?”
  The new aunts looked at one another and then at Grandad,
anxiously. “That’s not as easy as you’d think,” said Arethusa, the
one in blue. “We’d give you an apple, gladly, if it was only up to us.”
  Aigley, the flute player, who wore a dress like a daffodil,
explained, “The apple trees are very well guarded, you see, by a
dragon called Ladon.”
  “And they all belong to the king,” Erytheia said, propping her
banjolike instrument against the garden seat, “who knows exactly
how many apples there are.”
  “You, Grandad?” Hayley asked hopefully. “Are you king here?”
  Grandad shook his head. “Not me, my love. I’m only a Titan. I’m
not that grand.”
   Erytheia stood up and straightened her white dress. “I’ll take her
to the gate and show her,” she said. “I can advise her at least.”
  “I’ll come too,” Hesperethusa said, laying down her rattle.
  “Good. Bless you both,” Grandad said. “Tell her what to do. And
come back in one piece, Hayley, even if you have to do it without an
apple.” He gave her another hug and pushed her towards her two
aunts.
   Feeling very nervous now, Hayley set off with Erytheia rippling
along in her white dress on one side and Hesperethusa floating
gracefully on the other. Hesperethusa’s dress was a lovely blushing
pink, like the best kind of sunset. Hayley was sure that, if her
aunts had not been there, she would have run away and cheated
like Tollie, probably by bringing Harmony the plastic apple she had
won on the first day.
  But they were there, and they led her among the trees to a tall
fence with a tall gate in it. Through its bars there wafted the most
intense fragrance of apples—not the dull, cidery scent apples have
when they have been picked, but that fresh, living smell apples
have when they are ripe but still growing on the tree.
  “Now listen, love,” Erytheia said, with her hand on the latch of
the gate, “if anything goes wrong, or even starts to go wrong, go at
once to the very end of this strand of the mythosphere.”
  “Everything hardens off there and turns into stars,”
Hesperethusa added. “You’ll probably be a star of some sort yourself
out there, but don’t be afraid. Nothing much can hurt our family
out at the edge there. Just alter your path a little and go home
another way.”
  “All right,” Hayley said. Her voice had gone down to a whisper.
   Both ladies bent and kissed her. Feeling so nervous that the skin
of her stomach tightened and jumped under the nearly healed
scratches from her first night in Ireland, Hayley slipped round the
gate and in amongst the apple trees. Apples hung all about her, just
above the level of her head. They did not look brightly gold. They
were more like ordinary apples, with their gold fuzzed over with
brown and some red streaks amid the brown. But they were
obviously gold, for all that, drooping heavy on the tree, just as they
were obviously growing and alive.
  This looks too easy! Hayley thought suspiciously. But she
stretched up her hand to pick the nearest apple.
  “Er—hem!” said the dragon Ladon.
  He was coiled round the trunk of that tree. His scales were the
same crusty grey as the lichen there, which was why Hayley had
not seen him.



                                  8
                                                               «^»
Hayley froze, with her arm up and her fingers curled round ready
to pick the apple, and simply did not dare to move. She hardly
dared breathe. She was too scared even to think.
  “What do you think you’re doing?” the dragon said. His steamy
breath wafted round Hayley as he spoke. It smelt like a wood fire,
sooty and woody at once.
 Hayley thought she had lost her voice. It took a real effort to
whisper, “Please, sir, I need a golden apple.”
   “You can’t have one,” said the dragon. “Do you think I’m going to
let you loose in the mythosphere with something that precious?” He
rolled an eye at her, while his breath coiled up among the leaves of
the tree, filling it with fog. Hayley stared at his eye. It was like
looking into a far distant sun deep inside a glass ball. “Don’t I know
you?” the dragon said, filling the tree with fog again. “A tasty
morsel—lots of hair and a body that’s half red?” His long face left
the tree trunk and began to stretch out towards Hayley. “Didn’t
you come with a friend and steal one of my old scales the other
day?” The tip of his nose was nearly on Hayley’s chest by then.
  He’s going to eat me! Hayley thought.
  The realisation unfroze her mind, and she remembered Erytheia’s
advice. “Yes, I was there,” she said. She managed to bend her stiff
body and jackknife herself away to the outer edge of the
mythosphere.
  Everywhere was stars suddenly.
  At least that meant that the dragon was quite a long way off.
Hayley could see his starry jigsaw puzzle shape drifting in the
distance, just beyond the huge starry woman, who seemed to have
turned herself round to watch him as he glided towards the mighty
weighing scales. Beyond the weighing scales, an enormous starry
insect with an arched-up tail was just coming into view. When
Hayley looked the other way, she could see the lion, and a crab
receding into the distance beyond the lion.
  I suppose it’s better to be safe and not have an apple, she thought
sadly.
  Something rustled tinnily above and beside her.
   Hayley was sure the dragon had somehow crept up behind her.
She froze again. But when she managed to make herself turn
slowly round towards the noise, she discovered it was made by
starry leaves rattling on a silver tree. It was the wood where she
had come with Troy. She was still in an orchard of sorts, except
that this one was made of stars. Trees stood all around her, gently
quivering in the solar wind, each one heavy with round, moony
fruit. Some of the fruits were blue, some silver-white, and some
gently shining a faint, peachy gold.
  “Heaventrees!” Hayley whispered, and wondered who had told
her or where she had read of the trees of heaven.
   It doesn’t matter, she thought. Moving very slowly and gently,
she carefully chose the nearest, most golden looking of the fruit and
crept her hand out towards it. As soon as her fingers were around
it, she plucked it off its starry twig. It went twing .
   The head of the distant dragon whipped round towards her in a
cloud of fiery flakes, but by then it was too late. Hayley clutched
the golden apple in both hands and became a comet.
  She was a proper comet, not like Tollie’s pretend one. Her hair
gathered together and flung itself out ahead of her like the flame on
a blowtorch. Behind it, her body was a small, curled-up, icy ball.
But because she was clutching the golden apple, she knew she was
carrying with her all the seeds of life—all excitement, joy, growth,
and adventure. She could go anywhere in the universe with this
and still be alive.
   She forged off on her strange, eccentric comet’s path. She felt as
if she was going crazily fast, bombing along—and yet, at the same
time, it felt like a slow, stately progress. She wheeled away from
the zodiac, and that fell slowly behind, the woman, the lion, the
crab, and two starry men who seemed to be twins, all swinging
aside and away like the view from a train window when the train is
going really fast. And as soon as the zodiac was out of sight, Hayley
discovered that being a comet was more fun than she had ever had
in her life. She zoomed along, laughing.
  Her comet course, she knew, was a long thin oval. Since she was
outward-bound at the moment, in order to get back to Earth, she
knew she was going to have to rush out to her very limit and then
turn a hairpin bend before she could head back sunwards. That
meant at least a lightyear of rushing. “Whoopee!” she shrieked as
she sped outwards.
  It was bliss. It went on for ages. But at last she felt her speed
dropping, as if she was coming near the end of her orbit. Turn the
corner, she thought. Now!
   She swooped herself sideways. If she had had wheels, they would
have squealed and smoked with her speed. Hayley shrieked again
at the joy and danger of it. And, as she careered madly right, and
right and right again, she remembered Hesperethusa’s advice, to
alter her path and go home a different way. Or that dragon will be
waiting, she thought. So when she came to the last bit of her turn,
she swooped herself just a little bit more to the right and went
rushing off again not quite the way she had come.
  And it was still bliss. Stars streaked past, pale, bright, red, blue,
and greenish yellow, forming themselves into starry animals, birds,
and people as they whirled by. Hayley bombed happily onwards,
until one set of stars turned itself slowly into an enormous bear.
The Great Bear, she thought, and knew she was almost home.
   Sure enough, if she peered forwards and down through the veils
of her own hair, she could see the solar system, looking just like it
did on Grandad’s computer. There was the sun in the middle and all
the planets sedately circling it. She saw big Neptune and heavy,
white Uranus, ringed Saturn and Jupiter looking sultry and yellow,
with red blotches on it. Pluto was lurking somewhere out in the
dark, while little Mercury and cloudy Venus seemed much too near
the sun and likely to fry in its heat. And there circled red Mars and
blue Earth—
  Hayley began to hope she was aimed properly at Earth, but as
she hurtled onwards, it began to look much more as if she was
heading straight for the sun. Comets did sometimes plunge into the
sun, she knew. Grandad had told her. She tried to sidle herself
more into a line for Earth, but she couldn’t. The sun was actually
pulling her.
  “Oh, help!” she said. “I’m going to die . What a waste, now I’ve
discovered I can do this !”
  Then, before she had totally panicked, it seemed as if she was
only going to pass very near the sun—to slide by perhaps a mere
million miles away. She could already feel the blazing heat from it.
When she looked at it, she could clearly see the twirling sunspots
and the hissing, leaping lumps of flame. And she could see the
person in green clothes standing in the hard, hot midst of it.
  “What ?” Hayley thought. “People can’t— ”
  She was still only halfway through that thought, when the
person in the sun waved at her and shouted. “ Stop!” he yelled.
“Match velocities now !”
  Hayley found herself—not exactly slowing—gliding beside the
sun at about the same speed and much too near for comfort. The
heat of it uncurled her, melting her from around her apple. “Don’t
do that!” she shouted. And found herself looking across at Flute.
“Oh, of course,” she said. “Fiddle said you stood in the sun.”
  Flute stood with his arms folded, surrounded in leaping hissing
heat. He did not look entirely friendly. “Until this morning,” he
said, “I had a thousand and one golden apples. Now I’ve only got a
thousand.”
  “Are they yours ?” Hayley said. “I didn’t know—”
  Flute nodded, his hair leaping among the white hot flames. “And
you’ve got another one in your pocket,” he said.
 Up until then, Hayley had clean forgotten that she had zipped
Harmony’s prize apple into one of her trouser pockets.
   She would have liked to pat that pocket to make sure the plastic
apple there was still safe, but she was a little too icy and curled up
to do that. She said airily, “Oh, that’s only a plastic apple Harmony
gave me for a prize in the game.”
   Flute grinned a little. “ Is it? That girl Harmony has stolen more
of my apples than I care to think of. She now has the run of the
universe, probably the whole multiverse . She’s everywhere , in spite
of your uncle Jolyon’s orders. Don’t go giving her that new one.”
  “I won’t then,” Hayley said. “I want to keep it.”
 Flute lost his grin. “Do you? Then you realise you’ll have to pay
me for it, don’t you? My apples are never free.”
   “Oh,” said Hayley. It was a relief, in a way, to know that she
need not be a thief. She hated the idea that she had been stealing
from Flute of all people. But it had never occurred to Grandma to
give Hayley any money before sending her away. Glumly, knowing
she was penniless, Hayley asked, “How much do you want for it?”
 “I’ll take,” said Flute, “one of the stars from Orion’s bow. We
want that quite urgently, as it happens.”
  “Er—” Hayley began.
 “I know you haven’t got it now,” said Flute. “You can give it me
when you next see me. And I want your promise that you will.”
  “I promise,” Hayley said, feeling small and sad. She thought, I’ll
have to ask Harmony what I do about that. Oh, dear .
  “Very well,” said Flute. “Off you go then.”
   Hayley peered through the cloudy spout of her hair and tried to
turn herself towards Earth, which had moved quite a way farther
in its orbit while they talked. She would never have managed it, if
Flute had not reached out and given her a shove. This sent her
gliding off on a course that would meet Earth as it went on round.
  “See you soon,” he called as Hayley headed away.
   She was still moving quite fast, but to her disappointment not
hurtling along anymore. She was simply travelling on her own
inertia and getting cooler again as she moved. She went from hot,
to warm, to balmy, to lukewarm, and, in spite of this, she melted
steadily. Even when she glided into truly cold air somewhere on the
night side of Earth, she was still melting. Dripping and distressed,
she came uncurled in darkness, and her hair fell back again around
her shoulders as she landed and knew she was a human girl again.
It was a dreadful loss. Hayley could not help sobbing a little as she
stood still and carefully stowed the golden apple in another pocket
with a zip. She sniffed and wondered which way to go.
  Someone came up to her in the near dark and said, “You need to
take this strand here.”
  Hayley peered. She could see the strand, if she strained, like a
path made of coal. “It doesn’t look very inviting,” she said.
  “Well, you are on the dark side here,” the man said.
  Hayley was sure she recognised his voice. She turned and peered
up at his face. Under a black cap, his hair seemed white, and it
blew about rather. “You’re Fiddle!” she said. “I’ve just met your
brother again. And,” she added miserably, “I’m not a comet any
more.”
  “I know,” Fiddle said. “You can always be one again later.”
  Hayley’s eyes seemed to have got keener for her time as a comet.
She could pick out Fiddle’s face quite clearly now. Although it was a
sad face, it really was remarkably like Flute’s. “Are you and Flute
twins, by any chance?” she asked him.
  “That’s right,” he said. “We take it in turns to stand in the sun.”



                                  9
                                                                «^»
Fiddle came a little way along the coaly path with Hayley. He said
he wanted to make sure she didn’t miss the way, but Hayley was
fairly sure he was being kinder than that. There seemed to be
horrible things going on on either side of the path. There were
screams and groans, and somewhere someone who sounded to be
dying kept saying, “Water! Water ! Oh, please, water !” Fiddle
hurried Hayley along and Hayley tried not to look, until they came
to a place where the air was full of desperate panting and a sort of
grinding sound. Hayley could not help looking here.
  There was a hill to one side, and she could dimly see someone
trying to heave a boulder up it. All she could really see was a pair of
straining legs in ragged trousers, some way above her head. But
just as she looked, the person lost control of the boulder and it came
rolling and crashing down, bringing the man with it. “Oh, curses !”
he cried out, ending up in a heap, half under the boulder, almost at
Hayley’s feet.
  “Is he all right?” Hayley said to Fiddle. She thought the man
might be crying.
  Fiddle pushed her on. “Not really,” he said. “But there are no
bones broken. He has to get up and push the stone again until he
gets it to the top of the hill.”
  “Why ?” said Hayley.
  “Because your uncle Jolyon says so,” Fiddle said. “He’s in charge
here. This is what happens to people who offend him.”
  Hayley was glad to think she had never liked Uncle Jolyon.
“Can’t anyone stop him?” she said.
  “Not very easily,” Fiddle said, “though they tell me that a seer
called the Pythoness said it could be done. We’re trying to find a
way. Now this is where I have to leave you. You’ll find things
become more and more normal from here on, but do try to keep
going whatever you see.”
  “Will I see you again?” Hayley said.
  “Quite probably,” Fiddle answered. He waved to her and turned
back up the path.
   Hayley sadly watched him go. Even though she had only talked
to him once and nodded to him with Martya, she always thought of
Fiddle as her first real friend. She sighed and walked on.
  The path became a passage with barred prison cells on either side
of it. Behind one of the thick doors, someone was yelling out, “I hate
the lot of you! The whole lot of you!” From behind other doors,
chains clinked.
  I suppose this is more normal, Hayley thought, shivering.
  She marched on. The passage went from arched stone to dingy
brick and then to modern-looking concrete with strip lights in the
ceiling, but there were still prison cells on either side. She came to
a squarer part, where soldiers with guns were kicking someone who
was writhing about on the floor. This was more normal, Hayley
supposed. There had been scenes like this on Grandad’s telly. But
seen up close, it was very nasty.
  “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” she told the soldiers.
  Only one of them took any notice. He swivelled his gun round to
point at Hayley. “Get out!” he said to her. And the woman soldier
who seemed to be in charge snapped, “Shoot her,” without looking
up from kicking.
   Hayley moved on in a hurry. There seemed to be nothing else she
could do. Next moment, she was in a huge office, very brightly
lighted, where people sat at desks in rows, all hard at work with
computers and telephones. Hayley pattered quickly down the space
at the side of the desks, hoping not to be noticed, until she came to
the desk at the very end, where there was a man who seemed to be
working harder than all the others put together.
  Here something made Hayley stop and look. This man had a
large tray marked IN on one side of his desk, piled with papers,
forms, and plastic files. He was snatching these out at the rate of
two a minute, studying them swiftly, marking some with a pen,
putting some in a copier and then snatching them out, making
notes about them on his computer, signing both copies, and slapping
them into a smaller tray marked OUT. Then he snatched up
another set. He was going so quickly that Hayley was sure that he
was going to get the IN tray empty any second. But just as he was
down to one file and two forms, someone came along and dumped
another huge pile on top of them. The man groaned, and started
working on those.
  What had made Hayley stop and stare, however, was not how
hard the man was working: it was the look of him. He had black
curly hair and a brownish skin. The curly hair was receding from
his wrinkled forehead and there were rays of further wrinkles
fanning from the sides of his big black eyes. He looked familiar. The
way he moved was a way Hayley knew. In fact, although he was
not young, he looked extraordinarily like the young man in the
wedding photo that Grandma kept on Hayley’s mantelpiece.
  “Excuse me,” she said to him. The man looked up. The moment
he did, Hayley was absolutely sure who he was. “What’s your
name?” she asked him.
  “Foss,” he said. “Cyrus Foss. Forgive me—-I’ve got so much
work—”
  “Then you’re my dad!” Hayley said. “I’m Hayley Foss.”
  The man had bent over his papers again, but now he put them
down and stared. “Hayley?” he said. “We had a baby girl called
Hayley.”
  “That’s me!” Hayley said delightedly. They stared at each other
wonderingly. “Why are you here?” Hayley asked.
   “Being punished,” her father said glumly, “for marrying Merope.
It was forbidden. I never understood why, but I knew there was
some kind of prophecy. So you’re Hayley? You don’t look much like
your mother, but you’ve grown up very pretty. Where have you
been all this time? Were you being punished too?”
   “I’m all right,” Hayley assured him. “I had to live with Grandad.
He’s all right, but Grandma isn’t. Can’t you leave here now, so that
I can live with you?”
   “No,” said her father sadly. “I’ve tried to leave over and over, but
I always find myself back at this desk, whatever I do.”
  “But it looks awful !” Hayley said.
  “It is,” he said. “You know what it feels like? It feels as if I’m
rolling a huge stone up a hill, and every time I get it nearly to the
top, it rolls straight down to the bottom again.”
  Hayley thought of the man she had seen crashing down the hill
under the boulder. That had been her father too. This was the way
the mythosphere worked. Things got harsher and stranger the
farther out you were in it. “Oh!” she cried out. “Isn’t there any way
I can rescue you from here?”
  Cyrus Foss smiled at her. It was a harassed smile, but Hayley
had seldom seen a nicer one. “I don’t think you can,” he said. “But
maybe your mother could.”
  “So where is she?” Hayley demanded.
  “Somewhere else in this hell,” he said. “She—”
  He was interrupted by an office lady carrying a neat pile of shiny
plastic files. “These are all wrong,” this lady said. ‘“They all have to
be done again.” She dumped the files on top of the stack already in
the IN tray. The stack was too high to take them. Every one of
them slithered off sideways and fell on the floor, taking half the
rest of the papers with them.
  Cyrus Foss gave a moan of despair and bent down to collect
them. Hayley dived down under the desk to help. Face-to-face down
there, her father whispered, “She’ll be in a women’s strand,
somewhere much wilder than here, I think.”
  “Right,” Hayley whispered back. She crawled across under the
desk and stuck her head out beside the office lady’s neat feet. “Can’t
you help?” she said.
  “Not my job,” the lady said coldly.
  “But you made them fall down,” Hayley pointed out.
  “I don’t want to ladder my tights,” the lady retorted. “And you
shouldn’t be here. You’re interrupting this prisoner in his work.
You’d better leave here before the manager finds you.”
  “Cow!” Hayley’s father murmured, with his face still under the
desk. He added loudly, “Yes, better leave, Hayley. We don’t want
you in trouble too.”
  “All right,” Hayley said. “See you.” She scrambled violently out
past the lady’s neat feet, hoping she would ladder the tights as she
went, and stood up among the other desks. “I’ll be back,” she told
the lady. “So watch out.” But the lady simply turned and walked
away.
  Hayley threaded her way between the busy desks and came to a
door. She turned round there to wave to her father, but he was
frantically at work again and did not look up. Hayley sighed—the
kind of sigh you seem to drag up from near your knees—and pushed
her way out through the door.
   Outside, the strand leading away in front of her was cloudily
transparent now, like smoked glass. Hayley hurried along it,
blinking back tears and refusing to look at any of the dreary scenes
happening on either side of her, until the strand suddenly turned
almost as clear as air underneath her feet. She found herself
walking high above the jumbled roofs and turrets of Aunt May’s
guesthouse. She could see the gutter and the window she had
squeezed out of the day she arrived. Ahead of her and below her
were the grounds of the place, full of racing figures as the Tighs
and the Laxtons all hurried towards the paddock, where Harmony
was standing by the card table. Hayley could hear the clock,
chiming out “Over the Rainbow,” but very slowly, as if it had
almost run down. And Tollie had almost won. He was halfway up
the paddock, pushing and rolling an immense egg. This reminded
Hayley so of the man pushing the boulder that she stood still and
shuddered.
  Then, Hey! she thought. I can win!
   She ran. She came charging down the almost unseeable glassy
strand, brushed past Tollie and his egg and landed panting in front
of the card table. Tollie screamed with fury.
  “That does it!” he yelled. “I’m telling!”
  “I’ve got one—a golden apple!” Hayley panted to Harmony.
  Harmony seemed to have got over her bad temper. She smiled
and said, “Let’s see it, then.”
  Hayley unzipped her pocket and fetched the apple out. For a
moment it glowed bright as a small sun and smelled wonderfully of
apple. But as Hayley held it out towards Harmony, it was a plastic
Christmas ornament just like the ones Harmony gave out as prizes.
“Oh!” Hayley said. “But it was ! It really is !”
  “I know,” Harmony said. “They go like that here.” And she passed
Hayley another apple just the same. “Your prize,” she said.
   “I hate you both!” Tollie snarled, leaning both arms on his vast
egg. “Still,” he added smugly, “I stole a lot of diamonds too. And I’m
still telling on Hayley.”
  James arrived then, waving what looked like a spike with
threads of silk streaming off one end. “Is this it?” he asked
Harmony. “It was on her spinning wheel. But it was a real closie.
She sort of half woke up and said ‘Kiss me!’ and I just ran!”
  Lucy pushed up from the other side with a dry-looking slice of
cake in one hand. “Out of her cottage wall,” she panted. “She saw
me and she chased me all the way back here. I don’t think I want to
play this game again.”
  “I’ve got a roc’s egg!” Tollie said loudly.
  He went on saying this as the others began arriving, waving
peculiar objects and jostling Hayley about as she carefully zipped
both apples into her pockets. “Do these look like thumbscrews?” she
heard someone ask.
  “I know it looks like a handful of jelly,” said someone else, “but it
really is an eyeball.”
  “I’ve got a roc’s egg!”
  “This card really was the Queen of Hearts, honestly. It’s alive. It
sort of squiggles.”
  “I caught the fox, but he bit me and got away. Do I need an
injection, Harmony?”
  “I’ve got a roc’s egg!”
  “Sorry about the blood, Harmony. He’d just killed her when I got
there. It was horrible.”
  “I’ve got a roc’s egg!”
  “Oh, be quiet, Tollie!” Harmony snapped. “What’s the matter,
Troy?”
  “And I’m telling,” Tollie mumbled, as Troy arrived last of all, very
quiet and dejected.
  “I couldn’t find that garden anywhere,” Troy said. “So I came
back, and the strand took me through the house for some reason.
Mercer’s on the phone in the hall. He’s telling Uncle Jolyon all
about the game.”
  “Isn’t that all we need!” Harmony said. She scooped the cards,
the markers, and the clock into her coloured bag and snapped the
table together. “Everyone go and put their stuff in the trophy
cabinet. It’ll be open for you. Tollie, you’ll have to leave that egg
there and hope Uncle Jolyon doesn’t notice it. Troy, Hayley, come
with me. We’d better find Aunt May.”
   Aunt May was hurrying out of the house as they came to it. She
let Tollie, followed by the crowd of Tighs and Laxtons, rush indoors
past her and stopped Harmony, Troy and Hayley.
  “Quick,” she said. “Jolyon’s on his way here already. I wish
Mercer wasn’t so damn dutiful, but Jolyon is his father, you know.
Jolyon had no idea that Hayley was here with us, and he’s furious.
We’ve got to get her away.”
  “Does he know about the game?” Harmony asked.
  “No—if he knew she’d been playing that, he’d go berserk!” Aunt
May said distractedly. “But I’d get her away even if she hadn’t
been. Hayley, you’re a darling and you saved us from the flood and
what’s been done to you is a shame . Harmony, Troy, think what to
do, quickly .”
  “We were supposed to be taking her to Mum when we left,” Troy
said. “To go to school in Scotland, Pleone said. We could take her
now.”
  “Yes, yes, take her to Ellie. At once,” Aunt May gasped. “Go
upstairs and pack your things, all of you.”
   Troy and Harmony wasted no time. They dashed indoors and
raced up the stairs in long strides. Aunt May, looking perfectly
distracted, with her hair unrolling in long lumps, seized Hayley’s
hand and rushed her upstairs in a rattle of necklaces. When they
reached Hayley’s room, Aunt May dragged Hayley’s little suitcase
from under her bed, shook her head—causing more hair to
unroll—and hunted in a cupboard until she found a big duffel bag.
Into this she crammed all Hayley’s new old clothes as fast as
Hayley could pass them to her. She was just forcing Hayley’s brush
and comb in on top of Hayley’s washing things, when Troy and
Harmony arrived at a gallop, Troy with a huge backpack and
Harmony carrying a bulging airline bag.
  “Got everything?” Aunt May said.
  “Not quite,” Harmony said. “I had to leave my good dress. Can
you hang—?”
  She was interrupted by the crunching of wheels on the driveway
outside.
  “Oh, my God!” gasped Aunt May. “He’s here already!”
   She tore aside the blowing white curtains. They all looked down
from Hayley’s window at a taxi drawing up by the front door and at
Mercer and Tollie going out to meet it, followed by Aunt Alice, Aunt
Geta and Aunt Celia. Somehow they all managed to look like
important people coming to meet a visiting president. Mercer
actually bowed as the taxi door slammed open and Uncle Jolyon
climbed out. Uncle Jolyon’s blue eyes glared and, among his white
beard, his mouth was almost a snarl. Hayley had never seen
anyone look so thunderously angry. She backed away as Aunt May
gently let the curtain fall back across the window.
  “I’ll go down and hold him up as long as I can,” Aunt May said.
“Do your best, Harmony.” Necklaces clashing, hair flying, she ran
out of the room.
  Hayley listened to Aunt May’s slippers thudding away down the
stairs and wondered what they could do. At the very least, Uncle
Jolyon was going to send her back to Grandma. But now she knew
some of the things Uncle Jolyon had done and could do, and she was
quite sure she was going to be punished in a worse way than that.
  “It’s too late to get to the back door,” Troy said. “He’ll see us
coming downstairs.”



                                  10
                                                                 «^»
I know what,” Harmony said. “We need a science fiction strand.
Find me one, Troy, quickly.”
  “The one I came back on just now,” Troy said. “It was all
futuristic stuff. Some of it’s out on the upstairs landing.”
  Harmony said, “Right!” and seized Hayley’s hand. Troy heaved up
the duffel bag and they all three scurried out of the room and up
the next flight of stairs. There at the top, almost exactly where the
waterfall had started the night Hayley had arrived, stood a tall
glass thing like a telephone box—or, even more, like a shower stall.
Harmony pulled open its door and helped the other two to cram
themselves and their luggage inside with her.
  “A transportation booth?” Troy said. “Clever!”
   “More than that,” Harmony said, pressing away at a set of
buttons beside the glass door. “It’s a time booth too. I hope neither
of you minds missing two days. We’re going to catch the plane we
were going to catch it anyway, and I hope we can do it before Uncle
Jolyon realises. I’m hoping he doesn’t know how good I am with the
mythosphere and spends the next two days hunting for us. There!”
Harmony said, pressing the large green button marked ENTER.
   Without any feeling of change or movement, the view outside the
glass door became the busy airport concourse that Hayley
remembered from when she came to Ireland with Cousin Mercer.
Troy slammed the door open and they ran. From then on it was all
running, to the check-in, then up to Security and through the X-ray
machine, on into the departure lounges and from there a race to the
gates. As Harmony explained, waving their boarding passes as they
pelted to where a loudspeaker was telling them that the flight to
Edinburgh was now boarding, she had brought them here at the
last minute to give Uncle Jolyon the smallest possible chance of
finding them.
  “And let’s hope he’s not waiting at the gate,” she panted.
  Hayley was terrified. Though she didn’t at all understand why, it
was clear to her that she was the one Uncle Jolyon wanted to catch.
She was so frightened that she somehow put on comet speed and
arrived at the desk in front of the gate long before the other two.
  “They’re coming! They’re just coming!” she told the man behind
the desk. Then she was forced to wait, hopping from one leg to the
other and anxiously scanning the little rows of seats and the
wineshop opposite, in case Uncle Jolyon came storming along to get
her. She was not happy until Harmony and Troy arrived and they
were all allowed to hurry through a gangway and onto the plane
itself. Then she did not dare move from the doorway until she had
looked along the length of the plane and made sure that Uncle
Jolyon was not sitting in one of the seats, waiting.
   An embittered-looking stewardess hurried them along to the
front, where there were two pairs of seats facing one another.
Harmony and Troy sat together with their backs to the pilot’s
cabin. Hayley sat opposite them, next to the empty seat, beside the
tiny window. While the plane thrummed and hummed and started
slowly rumbling out towards the runway, Hayley kept looking at
that empty seat, expecting any moment to see Uncle Jolyon sitting
in it. While the pilot spoke to them—something about going north
to avoid a thunderstorm over the Irish Sea—Hayley could hardly
listen.
   Then, to Hayley’s terror, the plane stopped, waltzing in place
somewhere out in the middle of the airport. The stewardess came
and stood by their seats and told everyone how to use the oxygen
and the life jackets. Oh, go, go, go! Hayley thought, clenching her
hands so that her nails dug in. She craned backwards out of the
tiny window, expecting any second to see a taxi with Uncle Jolyon
in it racing after the plane. She was still craning when the plane
started to move again, rushing along the widest strip of concrete. It
took her quite by surprise when she found she was looking down at
the concrete and down at trees and tiny fields, and realised they
were in the air.
  “So far so good,” Harmony said, unbuckling her safety belt.
  The stewardess came round and contemptuously gave them each
a cup of orange juice and a bun.
  “I wish I could have wine,” Troy said, looking at the bottles on
the stewardess’s trolley.
  “Don’t provoke her,” Harmony said. “She’ll say we’re all too
young.”
  Troy bit into his bun, grumbling, “I’m a thousand times older
than she is.”
  “Hush,” Harmony said. “Are you all right, Hayley?”
   “Scared,” said Hayley. She did not feel like eating her bun. “Why
is Uncle Jolyon so angry about me?”
 “Because you were supposed to stay with our grandparents,”
Harmony said.
 “For ever, I think,” Troy said. “Can I have your bun if you don’t
want it?”
  Hayley handed it to him. “Why?” she asked. “ Really for ever?”
  Harmony nodded, with her smooth pretty face screwed up in
distaste. “A long time ago,” she said, “thousands of years ago, in
fact, around the time your parents decided to get married, Uncle
Jolyon went to a seer called the Pythoness and asked what would
happen if they did get married. He disapproved, you see, because
your father was a mortal man—”
  “Just as if he wasn’t having love affairs with mortal women all
the time!” Troy said, tearing the wrapper off the bun as if he were
skinning it alive. “Old hypocrite! He has love affairs all over the
place, mortals, immortals, you name them! He’s my father, you
know, and Harmony’s, and the father of all the cousins—Old goat!”
  “Yes, well,” said Harmony. “Let me tell her the story. The
Pythoness said that if Merope—your mother—ever married a
mortal man, their offspring would strip Jolyon of his power. Jolyon
was horrified and went storming back to stop the wedding. But he
was too late. Your parents had been married while he was away
seeing the Pythoness and gone to Cyprus for their honeymoon.
Jolyon couldn’t get at them there—”
  “Cyprus belongs to Aunt Venus,” Troy put in, munching.
   “So he had to wait until they came home to Greece,” Harmony
said. “And while he waited, he made plans. He knew that
nine-tenths of his power came from the mythosphere, but he also
knew that our power comes from the mythosphere too, and he
knew that we were all going to be on Merope’s side, all Merope’s
sisters and their children and our grandfather, Atlas. Between us,
we have almost as much power as Jolyon does. So the first thing he
did was to order all of us to leave the mythosphere and live the way
we do now, as ordinary people, and we obeyed him, because we
didn’t understand what he was after—”
  “Jupiter, bringer of joy!” Troy said bitterly. “We’ve been pinned
down like this for more than two thousand years now. And all
because he was afraid of a baby! ” He crunched the bun paper up
savagely.
  “Well, he was head god in those days,” Harmony said. She sighed.
“Nowadays, his power is in money as much as in the mythosphere.
Grandad has to hold up the world economy for him and Jolyon
makes sure we’re all in debt to him.”
  “But what about me?” Hayley demanded.
  “The moment your parents came home with you,” Harmony said,
“he took you and planted you on your grandparents, with orders
that you were not to grow up and not to know anything about your
family. Grandma always does what Jolyon says—it’s part of her
strict outlook. And at the same time, he shoved Merope and your
father off into the mythosphere and told everyone they were being
punished for disobedience.”
 “Though, in actual fact,” Troy said, “he never did forbid them to
marry—or not that we ever heard.”
   Hayley thought, in a stunned way, about all her time living
under Grandma’s strict discipline. It had seemed like years and
years and years. And this was not surprising, since it had been
years and years. And she had thought it was just life. “I met my
dad in the mythosphere,” she said. “Being punished. He looked so
tired , Harmony. I wanted to rescue him, but he said only my mum
could do that. He thinks she’s in a women’s strand, somewhere
wild.”
  “Then I think we should do our best to find her,” Harmony said.
“We could hardly be in much more trouble now Tollie and Mercer
have told Uncle Jolyon about the game. Blast Tollie!”
  “That Autolycus,” Troy said gloomily. “He really hates Hayley,
doesn’t he? He stole stuff from your father, Hayley, and your father
caught him at it. I think that’s why.”
  Harmony said, equally gloomily, “I don’t think Tollie needs a
reason to do the things he does. So if we look for Merope—”
  “I have to have a star off Orion’s bow too,” Hayley said. “Flute
said I had to give him one for stealing the apple.”
   Troy whistled. Harmony said, “Flute?” with her smooth forehead
all wrinkled. Then the wrinkles cleared away and she said, “Oh,
you mean one of those two who own the apples?”
  Hayley nodded. “They’re twins. They take turns at standing in
the sun. I call them Flute and Fiddle, but who are they really,
Harmony?”
  Harmony looked at Troy, who shook his head, shrugged and said,
“No idea.”
  “No more have I,” Harmony confessed. “I’ve always called them
Yin and Yang, because you have to call them something, and
sometimes I wondered if they might be angels, but I really don’t
know. And I’ll tell you this, Hayley. They always make you give
them a fee for one of the apples, but I’ve never known them to ask
anything as important as a star. The most I’ve had to give them is
my old flute—or once they asked for the Old Soldier’s violin—but
otherwise it’s just a blue bead or a farthing or a shoelace. Nothing
really. If they’ve asked for one of Orion’s stars, it must be serious.
We’ll look into that. But let’s get back to Merope. What are the
women’s strands?”
  “Witches,” Troy suggested. “Suffragettes, Amazons, the
Pythoness, Saint Ursula?”
   “Or all those boring ladies who waited in towers for their princes
to come,” Harmony added. “Rapunzel— you know. Oh Lord! There’s
hundreds! What about that girl who went about making prophecies
that no one believed?”
  “None of those are wild,” Troy pointed out. “Go back to witches.”
  “There are thousands of those,” Harmony said. “And what about
Boadicea? Jezebel?”
  They were still making suggestions to one another when the
plane landed in Edinburgh.
  It took ages to get off the plane and into the airport building.
Hayley became nervous all over again. There seemed ample time
for Uncle Jolyon to pounce on them while they shuffled along to
collect their baggage, or while they stood for minute after minute
watching the empty luggage carousel go round and round.
   “I’ve just thought,” Troy said, as Hayley’s duffel bag pushed the
flaps aside and toppled onto the metal surface. “Uncle Jolyon knows
where we’re going. What’s to stop him marching in on Mother and
simply waiting for us at home?”
  “I’m hoping,” Harmony said, as her bag, followed by Troy’s
backpack, flopped out onto the carousel as well, “that it’ll take him
more than these two days to realise that. He’s quite slow-witted,
you know. Grab those, Troy, and let’s get going.”
   Hayley followed them out through the building, fatalistically
expecting Uncle Jolyon to be waiting outside for them. But the only
person there was Aunt Ellie. Hayley would have known who she
was, even without the way the other two dropped their bags and
flung their arms round her. Aunt Ellie looked like Aunt May gone
respectable.
  “Mother!” Harmony cried out, nestling her smooth dark head
against Aunt Ellie’s carefully curled grey one.
  “Good to see you, Mum!” Troy said, wrapping his arms around
her neat grey suit. “This is Hayley. Hayley, meet my mother,
Electra.”
  Just like Aunt May, Aunt Ellie dived forward and hugged Hayley.
“My dear,” she said. She sounded very Scottish. “I’m so glad you’re
here! Come along, all of you. The car’s away over there, and you
wouldn’t believe how much it costs to park in this place, so please
hurry. Besides, your Aunt Aster’s waiting in it.”
  Harmony and Troy both groaned.
   “I know, I know,” Aunt Ellie said, hurrying them across the road.
“I had to bring Aster. Jolyon said I wasn’t to let her out of my sight.
She’s gone and formed a most unfortunate attachment to a great
rough Highlander—at her time of life, I ask you! Even if Jolyon
hadn’t told me to keep them apart, I would have put my foot down
about it. The whole town’s talking. To think of my sister causing all
this scandal—it keeps me awake at nights! The man haunts the
place!”
  “Who is he?” Troy asked, trying to hitch the duffel bag on his
shoulder alongside his backpack.
  “The Lorrd knows!” said his mother, more Scottish than ever. “I
think him to be some gamekeeper from one of those shooting
preserves in the North. He carries a gun. Eats with his knife!
Jolyon thinks him unspeakable.”
  “Was Uncle Jolyon here?” Harmony asked anxiously. “When?”
  “Two days ago,” Aunt Ellie said. “He seemed to think young
Hayley was with me.” At this, Troy and Harmony exchanged
pleased, relieved smiles. “Hayley, what have you done to put Jolyon
in this terrible mood?”
  “I think,” Hayley said timidly, “I wasn’t supposed to have gone to
Ireland.”
  “Now that is unreasonable of Jolyon,” Aunt Ellie said. “Why ever
not, you poor child?”
  They had by then arrived beside a neat grey car. Aunt Ellie bent
down and shouted through its window at the dim figure sitting in
the back seat. “Aster! Hayley’s here! Open this window and say
hallo to her. Asterope ! Do you hear me?”
   The window went down to reveal a pale-faced little lady with a
fluffy mass of faded fair hair. She fixed washed-out blue eyes on
Hayley and quavered, “Pleased to meet you, Hayley. Your hair is
very untidy.”
  Hayley stared at her. It was quite impossible to believe that this
faded-out little woman could cause great rough Highlanders to
haunt her. It just did not seem likely. “How do you do, Aunt Aster?”
she said politely.
  “Oh, not so bad,” Aunt Aster quavered. “I’m a poor traveller, you
know, and Electra does drive so dangerously.”
  When Troy had slung the bags into the boot and climbed into the
back seat beside Hayley, and Harmony had settled in the front, the
car set off so sedately that Hayley knew Aunt Aster had been
talking nonsense. Aunt Ellie must have been one of the world’s
most cautious drivers. But Aunt Aster continued to talk nonsense.
While they drove through the city, she kept quavering, “There’s a
red light on the other road, Electra. You have to stop.” And when at
last they came out into the country, she quavered, “Not so fast,
Electra! You’re doing nearly thirty!” or “There’s a car coming,
Electra. It’s going to hit us. Stop until it’s gone by!” or “Electra,
here’s a bus!”
   Aunt Ellie took no notice and drove slowly on—although once or
twice Hayley distinctly heard her mutter, “Silly bizzom!”—while
the countryside became more and more beautiful around them.
First it was sloping green fields with blue hills above, and then it
was real mountains. Hayley leant forward to look at a long narrow
loch surrounded in pine trees, among great brown and purple
mountains swathed in drifting cloud. Whereupon Aunt Aster
quavered, “Sit back, poor child. You’ll get hurt if we stop.”
  Troy whispered into Hayley’s other ear, “Isn’t she a pain?”
  Hayley said, “This country’s lovely !”
   “I agree,” said Troy, at the same time as Aunt Aster quavered,
“Oh, no, town is so much nicer! I can’t wait to get back to town. It’s
civilization.”
   Civilization, when they came to it, was in the form of neat streets
of harsh grey houses, looking quite small under a huge brown
shoulder of mountain. Each house had different sharp corners and
precisely spiked roofs, which seemed to say, We are civilized , we
are respectable . Take no notice of this mountain.
  “Ah!” Aunt Aster said happily.
  Aunt Ellie’s house was down the end, up a slight hill. As soon as
the car had crunched upwards beyond its gates and stopped by the
door, Aunt Aster hopped out of it with surprising speed.
  “Thank you for the drive, dear,” she called out. “I’ll be getting
along to my house now.”
  Aunt Ellie shot out of the car even faster and grabbed Aunt Aster
by the arm. “No, dear. You’re staying to have supper with us.
Remember?”
  “But I was only going to look in case the post has come,” Aunt
Aster quavered. “I’ll come straight back.”
  “You’ll stay with me ,” Aunt Ellie said grimly. “I need your help in
the kitchen.” She more or less dragged the protesting Aunt Aster in
through the pointed front door, saying, “The children will be
starving by now.”
  “Good,” said Troy as they followed the aunts indoors. “I’m hollow
inside.” He led Hayley into one of the front rooms, where
everything was as neat and heathery grey as Aunt Ellie’s tweed
suit. “Hey, Mum!” he called out. “What have you done with my
models?”
  Aunt Ellie put her face round the door, looking righteous, with
just a hint of guilt underneath. “I tidied them away, Troy. This
room looked like a tip.”
  “But you promised me you wouldn’t !” Troy said. “You haven’t
thrown them away , have you?”
  Aunt Ellie looked even more righteous. “Of course not. You’ll find
them all in the cupboard in boxes.”
  Harmony said to Hayley, “Come upstairs and I’ll show you your
bedroom.”
   She was obviously removing Hayley from the midst of two
growing rows, one between Aunt Ellie and Aunt Aster and the other
between Aunt Ellie and Troy. As they went upstairs, Aunt Aster
was loudly quavering that she was expecting an important letter
and Aunt Ellie had no right to keep her from it, while Troy was
shouting, “You broke them! You broke them all up!” Troy must care
a lot about his models, Hayley thought. She had never heard him
shout before.
  But when Hayley came downstairs again after unpacking her
duffel bag, both rows seemed to be over. She could hear Aunt Ellie’s
voice and Harmony’s from the kitchen, chatting happily, mixed in
with the occasional dreary little quaver from Aunt Aster. When she
went and peeped into the front room, she found the heathery grey
floor covered with tiny little clay bricks, small square blocks of
stone, parts of houses—cottagey buildings and tall town
mansions—and tiny marble columns. Troy was kneeling in the
midst of it all busily assembling what looked like a marble palace.
  “What are you making?” Hayley asked.
   “The city of Troy,” Troy answered. “The most ancient and famous
city of antiquity. Want to help? You can do me some walls.” He
tipped up the cardboard box next to him and held out a lump of wall
with fortifications on top. It was beautifully built of little blocks of
granite all somehow slotted together. “On second thoughts,” Troy
said, as Hayley looked doubtfully at the piece of wall, “you’d
probably prefer to make the palace gardens. I know I called in a
designer to do those.” He tipped up another cardboard box. Little
pointed trees, patches of grass, minute hedges, and thousands of
tiny tiny flowers came tumbling out at Hayley’s feet.
   Hayley no longer wondered why Aunt Ellie had tidied everything
away. There was hardly room to walk on the carpet now. Grandma
would have had a fit. She stared down at the heaps of trees and
tiny flowers with delight. “Oh, may I?” she said, and plunged to her
knees beside the heaps. This was even better than making the rock
garden she had built the day Flute first took her to the
mythosphere. “A mythosphere garden!” she said.
  “Exactly right,” Troy said.
  They worked away busily for a while. Hayley made an avenue of
trees leading down to a pool that was going to be surrounded by
banks of flowers, and borrowed some of Troy’s marble pillars for the
fountain in the middle. Troy carefully fitted a roof onto his palace.
  “I hope you do get the better of Uncle Jolyon,” Troy said at
length. “Soon. I’m supposed to be the one who founded Troy, you
know. I can’t wait to get back out into the mythosphere and build it
properly. It was one of the most beautiful cities ever . I was busy
marking out all the foundations when Uncle Jolyon stuck us all
down on Earth like this.”
  Hayley thought that the city might be even better now Troy had
spent hundreds of years building models of it. She was just going to
suggest this to him when Aunt Ellie called out, “Come along, both
of you. Supper’s ready. Wash your hands.” And they had to get up
and leave the entrancing heaps of houses, walls, and gardens.
  The dining room was at the back of the house, where there was a
big, low window open onto Aunt Ellie’s garden and the misty,
purple mountains beyond. The sweet, moist scent of Scotland blew
in through it, across large oval plates of mixed grill that Harmony
was putting down in each place. Those smelled equally lovely, but
in quite a different way.
  All in all, it was one of the most marvellous meals Hayley had
ever had. The chief marvel was the tall cake stand in the middle of
the table. It had four round shelves, each one covered with a lace
doily, and on each doily there was a loaded plate. The top layer held
thin bread and butter, which you ate with the mixed grill and then
with honey if you wanted to. Then you worked your way down to
shiny currant teacakes and butter, and after that to scones, which
you had with jam and cream. Hayley ate cautiously, pacing herself,
with one eye on the bottom layer, where there was a large
chocolate cake iced in squashy, thick chocolate. After the scones,
she was wondering if she would have room for that cake.
   “No cake for me,” Aunt Aster said in a fading voice. “It’s far too
rich, Ellie.”
   As she spoke, the open window went dark. Hayley looked round
to see the middle section of what must have been a huge man
standing outside it. All she could see at first was a vast faded kilt
with a battered and grubby sporran dangling on it and, below that,
a glimpse of sharp, hairy knees. Then the man put his huge hands
on the windowsill and bent down to push his big, bearded face into
the room. The gun he had slung on one shoulder clattered on the
window and made everybody jump.
  “Wumman !” he bawled. “Wumman, you said you’d be doon at the
hoose! Are you no coming?”
  His voice made the whole room rattle. Its effect on Aunt Aster
was extraordinary. She jumped to her feet with a shriek, crying
out, “Oh! Ryan! So sorry! They will try to keep me from you!” and
rushed towards the window. She was no longer a faded, moaning
aunt, but a lovely young woman with a cloudy mass of bright
golden hair. She looked almost as beautiful as Aunt Alice. When she
reached the window, the huge Highlander held out both arms and
Aunt Aster jumped into them as nimbly as an athlete. The
Highlander gave a huge laugh and strode away with her, carrying
her like a baby.
  It happened so quickly that everyone was stunned, Aunt Ellie
most of all. It was several seconds before Aunt Ellie sprang to her
feet. “ Stop her!” she said. “Stop him! Jolyon’s forbidden it!” When no
one else moved, she began dithering about. “What shall we do?” she
said. “I’d better go after her. Oh, where did I put my handbag? He’ll
be carrying her down the street! What will the neighbours say!”
  Harmony, Troy and Hayley stood up uncertainly.
  Aunt Ellie glared at them. “Don’t just stand there!” she said.
“Come and help me fetch her back!” She raced out into the hallway,
rummaged for a desperate second or so among the things on the
hall stand, found the handbag with a yell of relief and, with the bag
held on high, crashed out through the front door.
  By the time the other three reached the top of the drive, Aunt
Ellie was already in the street, waving her handbag and shouting.
Ahead of her, striding along with Aunt Aster in his arms, the huge
Highlander was already halfway through the town.
  “Stop!” shrieked Aunt Ellie, rushing after them. “Put her down !
Aster, I forbid you to do this! Jolyon won’t allow it! Think of the
neighbours !”
  “If she wants the whole town to know, she’s going the right way
about it,” Troy remarked.
  “Yes, she’s lost her head, but we’d better do something to help, I
suppose,” Harmony said.
  They set off at a trot after Aunt Ellie.
  Far ahead of them, the huge Highlander strode purposefully on,
taking absolutely no notice of Aunt Ellie’s screaming pursuit. About
halfway along a row of small grey houses, he veered off at a right
angle and marched towards the middle house in the row. When he
reached its shiny front door, he put out a huge foot, kicked the door
open and bore Aunt Aster away inside. The front door shut with a
slam in Aunt Ellie’s face as she came pounding up. Aunt Ellie
jumped up and down in frustration. She kicked the door, but it
remained shut. Then she seized the little polished knocker and
clattered it violently.
  “Aster!” she screamed. “Asterope, let me in at once !” Hayley
trotted after Troy and Harmony, trying not to giggle. They passed
house after house, some with lace curtains twitching and others
frankly full of staring faces. While she gulped back her giggles,
Hayley wrestled with her memory. She was sure she had seen this
huge, bearded man before. His face, as it had loomed through the
window, was definitely familiar, beard and all. She tried thinking of
him as a more normal human size—and he was even more familiar.
She tried him in different clothes. A suit? No. A robe then? No. How
about fur then? Yes ! She had seen him when Flute first took her
into the mythosphere. He was that hunter in a leopard skin with
the mighty bow, who looked so like a film star. Now how, why was
he important?
   Hayley had got as far as this when they reached the little house.
Aunt Ellie was now kneeling on the sidewalk, shouting through the
letterbox. “Aster, this is your sister! Let me in! How could you do
such a wicked thing? Think of your family , Aster! Let me in !”
  “Er, Mum,” Harmony said gently, “don’t you have Aunt Aster’s
spare key?”
  Aunt Ellie swivelled round on her knees to look up at her. “Of
course I have. That’s why I brought my handbag.”
  “Then couldn’t you let yourself in?” Harmony suggested.
  Aunt Ellie came out of her frenzy a little, enough to climb to her
feet and open her handbag. “Yes, yes indeed,” she said. “I can go in
and drag her away, can’t I?”
  “If you think this Ryan will let you,” Troy muttered.
  Ryan ! Hayley thought. That’s it! “Not Ryan,” she said. “His
name’s Orion.”
   Troy and Harmony stared at Hayley. Aunt Ellie fumbled up a
jingling bunch of keys and found the one that fitted Aunt Aster’s
door. “There!” she said, turning it in the lock. “Now we shall see!”
With her grey hair standing wildly out all over her head and almost
seeming to give off electric sparks, Aunt Ellie barged the door open
and dived inside the house. “Come along!” her voice came back to
them.
   Rather hesitantly, Troy, Harmony, and Hayley followed her
indoors, into a tiny dark hallway. Harmony said, “Then you need to
find his bow, don’t you? I wonder if it’s—”
  A door slammed farther inside the house. Uproar broke out. They
could hear Aunt Ellie shrieking, Aunt Aster yelling, and huge,
rumbling shouts from the Highlander.
  “Do you think we can do any good in there?” Troy asked.
   “We’d only add to the noise,” Harmony said. “Let’s go home. We
left supper on the table and the front door wide open.”
  “Poor old Aster,” said Troy. “Why hasn’t she the right to be
happy? Yes, let’s go.”
  “But his bow—” Hayley began as she turned unwillingly to go
outside again. And stopped.
   The front door had swung almost shut after they came in.
Propped behind it, beside the hinges, where anyone might leave an
umbrella or a walking stick—or even a gun, Hayley supposed—was
a six-foot-tall thing . All she could see of it in the dim light was that
it was very slightly bent and most beautifully made, with elaborate
decorations down the flatter side, leading into the silver wire of the
handgrip in the middle. But the advantage of the dim light was that
Hayley could see that the middle of each coiled decoration held a
small twinkling light, making a whole row of tiny twinkles.
  “Look!” she said.
  “Quick!” said Troy. “Get one off.”
  He and Harmony held the tall longbow steady while Hayley
picked and peeled at one of the lower twinkles. To her relief, it
came free quite easily and rolled into her palm like a small loose
diamond. Very carefully, she zipped it away into the smallest of her
trouser pockets.
  “Now let’s get out,” Harmony said, whispering even though the
shouting in the back part of the house was louder than ever.
  One by one, they slid themselves round the edge of the front door
and out into the street.
   As Troy slid out after Hayley, a taxi thundered to a stop in the
road beside them. Its rear door burst open and Uncle Jolyon
climbed swiftly out, glaring with anger. His belly heaved, his white
beard bristled sparks like Aunt Ellie’s hair, and his eyes were blue
pits you did not like to look into.
  All three of them backed against the wall of the house, where
Harmony somehow managed a faint smile. “Hallo, Jolyon,” she
said.
  The blue eye-pits blazed at her. “I’ll deal with you in a moment,”
Uncle Jolyon said. “ All of you.” His head bent sideways to listen to
the yelling from inside the house. “Orion’s in there now with her,
isn’t he?” he said, and to the taxi, “Wait.” To Hayley’s extreme
relief, he marched straight past her into the house, ducking his
head to get through the door, and the door slammed shut after him.
  “Run!” said Harmony. “Run for your lives to the mythosphere!”



                                11
                                                              «^»
They ran. Harmony took the lead at first, across the road and up
along the other side, until she came to a steep alley between the
houses that plainly led upwards to the mountains. Hayley was so
terrified that, as soon as the alley led them among moist slabs of
granite and tufts of heather, she put on comet speed and sprinted
ahead, with Troy and Harmony pelting to catch up.
  “Wait!” Harmony panted. “Look where you’re going , Hayley!”
  Hayley did not care where she was going. All she wanted was
somewhere to hide from Uncle Jolyon. She fled up a steep stony
path and round several sharp bends until blessedly, blindingly,
damp white fog began to blow around her. She slowed down a little
so as not to lose the others. “Trees!” she said frantically, more or
less to herself. “I want trees to hide in.”
  “He can blast trees,” Troy panted.
  “Trees—somewhere where Flute and Fiddle are,” Hayley insisted,
and ran on.
   The fog, very thick now, and still blowing in gusts around her,
began to grow darker, as if night was coming on. Well, I suppose we
did just have supper, Hayley thought. She ran on upwards into
increasingly blue-dark mist, where she thought she could just
glimpse streaks and flickers of sunset up ahead.
  In her terror, she almost didn’t notice the trees when she did find
some. What came to her first was their smell. Pine trees, she
thought. A tarry, spicy smell. Thank goodness! Oddly enough, the
streaks and flickers of red light were brighter now, and they had a
smell too. Wood smoke.
  Here Harmony stopped her by grabbing both her shoulders.
“Slow down , Hayley! I think we’re on a really dangerous strand
here. We have to be careful !”
   Hayley found that they were standing on dry grass in a thick
forest of pine trees. In the misty near-dark it was hard to see the
pines except as great black cone shapes in all directions. Most of
them had wide lower branches that swept right to the ground. But
something was definitely burning up ahead, and it gave enough
light for Hayley to see just how dense and green and prickly those
lower branches were.
  Several long-legged dog shapes went trotting lightly and springily
across the path ahead.
  Wolves! Hayley thought—unless they’re something worse! She
hardly dared move.
  “See what I mean?” Harmony whispered.
  “What’s that noise?” said Troy.
  It was screaming, but it was singing too—very bad, discordant
singing, as if a large choir of ladies had each decided to sing a
different song as loudly as they could. It seemed to be coming down
the slope towards them. There were shrieks of joy and shrieks of
something worse. “Eye-oh, eye-oh,” sang the choirs.
  “Oh dear,” Harmony said. “I think these are the Maenads.”
  For some reason, Grandad had never told Hayley anything about
the Maenads, but she had no need to ask what they were. They
arrived as Harmony spoke, under a blinding mass of crackling pine
torches. They were a horde of mad women in tattered clothes,
screaming, singing, imitating cats, dogs and eagle cries, dancing
and galloping downhill. Their hair was loose and streaming. All of
them were splashed with blood; some of them were covered in it.
The wood smoke from the torches was suddenly overwhelmed by a
smell like a butcher’s shop where somebody had spilt a barrel of
wine, and by the thick, sweaty smell of dirty women.
  Harmony took hold of Hayley’s arm and Troy’s and dived with
them under the trailing branches of the nearest pine tree. “Don’t
move, Troy,” she whispered. “They kill men.”
  They did too. Hayley could not resist putting out one finger and
pushing aside one prickly pine frond. The first thing she saw was a
woman carrying a bearded man’s head on a pole. Blood from the
head was rolling down the pole, dripping on the woman’s face and
hands and plopping into her laughing mouth. “Look what I’ve got!
Look what I did!” the woman yelled. She was crying as well as
laughing. Tears were making white lines through the blood on her
face.
  Another woman came along with a huge earthenware jar of wine
and tipped it into the first woman’s face. “Drink up!” she shrieked.
“Drown your sorrows!”
   Someone behind those two screamed, “There’s a man here! A man
, everybody! I can smell him. He’s under that tree!”
  Next second, the entire screaming crowd was rushing down upon
the pine tree where Troy, Harmony and Hayley were hiding.
Torches fizzed against the pine needles. Wine showered through the
overhanging boughs, and dozens of sticky, bloody hands reached
through the branches to grab unerringly at Troy. He was seized by
his hair and his shirt and his hands, even by his legs, and dragged
out into the open.
  “Pull him apart! Pull him to pieces!” all the women shouted.
  Harmony plunged out after Troy and grabbed the back of his
shirt. “No! Don’t! Stop!” she shouted back. “You mustn’t! He’s the
one who’s going to build the great town of Troy!”
  Hayley plunged out after her and tried to help pull Troy away,
but by this time several women had hold of each of Troy’s arms and
were hauling on him like a tug-o-war. Troy screamed.
  “Help!” Hayley yelled. “Oh, please, someone help!”
  Somebody came up beside Hayley and said, “Is no good, not now
they got him.”
  Hayley turned and saw fine white hair, lurid under the torchlight
and spattered with blood. The hair surrounded an ugly pink face. “
Martya !” Hayley said, and threw her arms round Martya. “Oh,
Martya, I’m so glad to see you!”
  Martya’s pale eyebrows went up. “Is most unusual,” she said. “No
one is glad me to see, ever.”
  “I am,” Hayley said. “ Please help us rescue Troy.”
  “But this is not why I come,” Martya protested. “I am here for
telling you your mama is one of these soaked-in-wine women. She
up here, up the hill. Come.”
   “But Troy—” Hayley said. She felt torn in two, almost as badly as
Troy was being torn. She looked over at him to see that he was
fighting back now, kicking women’s shins and bucking about to get
his arms free. But more and more shrieking women were piling in
on him and on Harmony too. Other women laughingly held their
torches high, lighting the struggle into wild, flickering shadows.
  Martya watched the fight in a morose, critical way. She
shrugged. “They got him,” she said. “Only way would take their
mind off him was be a person threw golden apples in their middles.”
  “Oh, why didn’t you say so before !” Hayley gasped, frantically
unzipping pockets. “I’ve got three—-somewhere.” She finally found
an apple by feel, feather light and plastic, and dragged it out. As
she drew back her arm to throw it, it felt heavier somehow and
gave out a strong smell of live apple, as strong as the smell of wine
and blood and wood smoke. She hurled it as hard as she could into
the mass of struggling women. It arced among the flames, shining
pure strong gold, and thumped off someone’s back.
   The effect was instant. That woman, and at least six others,
turned round at once and scrambled to grab it as it rolled downhill
among everyone’s feet. Much encouraged, Hayley found the second
apple and hurled it, with a smack, into someone’s face. This woman
went down under the rush of the rest trying to catch it before it
rolled under a tree. Hayley threw the third, simply into the remains
of the fighting. It seemed even heavier and more golden than the
first two. And it was as if all three apples had a will of their own.
No matter how many hands grabbed for them, they bobbled out of
reach, tumbling, dodging, and rolling away, faster and faster,
flashing in the torchlight. In seconds, every single woman had left
Troy alone in order to chase the apples away downhill. He was left
standing by the pine tree, with Harmony kneeling beside him.
  “Thank goodness!” said Hayley. “Now show me my mum, Martya,
quick.”
   “Can do,” Martya said. She took Hayley’s hand and pulled her
uphill to another place among the pine trees, where another gaggle
of crazy women were galloping round and round a huge wine jar.
Nearly all of these women had dark hair, flying loose and sticky
with wine and blood, but, as the howling crowd whirled past her for
the second time, Hayley saw that one of them had fair hair. She
was not easy to spot. Her hair was yellower than Martya’s and
mostly drenched in wine and—yes—quite a lot of blood too. Who
cares? Hayley thought. She rushed up to that one and grasped her
firmly by one flailing arm.
  The woman staggered to a stop in front of her and put one hand
up to her head. “Huh?” she said vaguely.
  Hayley looked eagerly up into her face and—even in the
uncertain light of the torches—she had no doubt. This was the
woman in the wedding photograph. She was filthy and she was
drunk and she looked rather older, but she was the same one.
“Mother,” she said. “Mum. I’m Hayley.”
  “Huh?” the woman said again.
  “Patience I lose!” Martya said. “Patience I never have much.” She
marched up to the woman and clapped her hands loudly in front of
the vague face. “ Merope !” she bawled. “Here your daughter is.
Wake up and get pies out of eyes now !”
  Merope blinked. Her face began slowly to wake up into the
expressions of someone alive and attentive. “Did you say—?” she
began.
  Before she could say any more, the person in charge of the riot
arrived, striding up to them in rather a hurry. He was a tall man
dressed in animal skins, and he had a big hat on that seemed to be
made of vine leaves. “Hey, girls!” he said merrily. “You three are
forgetting to dance.”
  Martya just stared at him, looking uglier than usual. Hayley
found she could not meet his eyes and looked down instead at his
knee-high sandals and his big dirty toes sticking out of the front of
them. Merope started to pull her arm away from Hayley in order to
turn back into the dancing. Hayley hung on to her in a panic. She
was not going to lose her mother as soon as she had found her.
  “Did you know,” she said to the man, in a high panicky voice, “did
you know that there’s three golden apples from the star trees down
there?”
  He was very interested. “Really?” he said. “Where would those
be?”
  Hayley pointed, in probably quite the wrong direction. The man
laughed gladly and set off that way, first in big strides and then
almost running.
  “Good done,” Martya said as he disappeared in the darkness
among the trees. “That is how to get rid of a god quick.”
  “What are you talking about?” Merope said. “What god?”
  “Bacchus,” Martya said. “Is god of booze. He got you tight.”
  “Never mind him,” Hayley said. “Mother, I’ve found Dad, but he
says only you can rescue him. He’s in a place where they make him
do unending work.”
  “What? My poor Sisyphus!” Merope said. “How long have I been
here?”
  “Centuries,” said Martya. “This way, come. I have transport.”
  They set off downhill again. Hayley still hung on to Merope’s
arm, but now it was less to keep her from rejoining the riot and
more because she had a mother at last, which was a thing more
wonderful than the mythosphere. With every step, Merope seemed
to become more awake and more of a person. At first she smiled
down at Hayley in a bewildered way. Then she said, “I can’t believe
this!” and wiped her hand down her tattered skirt. “I’m so filthy
and sticky. I can hardly believe you’re really Hayley—though I
know you are. I remember you as a tiny baby. And,” she said to
Martya, “I don’t understand about you at all.”
   “I help Hayley,” Martya said. “I go adventuring to the Pleiades
and they try to make me work. Hayley buys me lovely shoes. Look.”
She stopped and held one foot up. In the murky light Hayley could
just see that Martya was wearing the pink shoes with cowboy
fringes.
   They went on, and the light grew better. Someone had stuck one
of the flaring torches in the ground and, by its light, two tall people
with white hair were anxiously examining Troy. “I’m all right,”
Troy was telling them. “None of this blood is mine. Honestly.”
 “Are you sure? Your face is pretty scratched,” Harmony said. She
was standing next to Troy, shivering. “I hate those Maenads!”
  Hayley cried out with relief and dragged her mother over to
them. There she risked letting go of Merope so that she could hug
the two tall men. “Flute!” she said. “Fiddle! I knew you were around
here somewhere!”
  Flute patted Hayley’s shoulder. “Did you get my star?” he asked.
   While Hayley was nodding and saying to Flute, “It’s in my
smallest pocket,” Fiddle spoke to Martya over Hayley’s head. “Nice
to see you again, Yaga. Don’t tell me you’re doing good deeds now!”
  “Only to Hayley,” Martya said. “Her mother is this sticky Merope
here.”
  “Oh, wonderful!” Harmony said. She took hold of both Merope’s
blood- and wine-covered hands. “I’m so glad to see you again, Aunt
Merry.”
  “Hey, listen!” Troy said. “Look.”
  From downhill came a sound that was definitely from a car
fighting its way up the mountain in low gear. The beams from its
headlights swung this way and that among the trees as the car
turned the corners of the steep track. They almost could have been
searchlights hunting for someone.
  “That’s Uncle Jolyon’s taxi,” Hayley said.



                                 12
                                                                «^
Everyone knew it was Uncle Jolyon. Troy and Harmony looked at
each other, wondering what to do. “Is no problem.” Martya said.
She clicked her fingers towards a dark clump of trees on the other
side of the path. Part of the clump immediately rose up into a tall,
square shape. It unfolded two long legs like chicken legs and
stalked towards them. When it reached Martya, it stopped and let
down a ladder from the balcony on its front. “Is my hut,” Martya
said. “Up, all! Up, up, up!”
   Flute took hold of Hayley and pushed her up the ladder. The rest
followed, Fiddle pushing Merope, who kept getting her legs
wrapped up in the rags of her dress, and Harmony helping Troy
because Troy was still shaky. Martya came up last, and the ladder
came up with her. As soon as Martya was on the balcony, the hut
turned and started walking away, creaking all over from the weight
of seven people.
  “You must show the way,” Martya said to Fiddle.
  Fiddle nodded and pointed more to the left. The hut turned again
and went crashing and swishing across the mountainside. Before
the trees quite closed in behind it, Hayley and Troy, craning
anxiously from a corner of the balcony, saw the taxi arrive in the
glade beside the flaring torch and go roaring on past, as if the
driver had not realised that anyone had been there.
  “Oh good!” said Hayley.
  “He’ll catch up in the end,” Flute said to her. “Be ready with your
star when he does. I’ll tell you what to do.”
  The hut paced onwards. Fiddle kept pointing the way, and the
hut walked where his finger pointed. Hayley looked down at the
toes of its big bird feet and then up to see that Fiddle was taking
them across the mythosphere. The great feet goose-stepped from
pine needles to rock, then into a desert, then onto a busy motorway,
where they miraculously missed all the cars, and from there to a
floaty pink strand.
   Here one of the great feet nearly went straight through the
floatiness, but the hut saved itself with a twist and a twitch and
strode onto a much firmer blue strand. Finally it marched into some
kind of industrial estate full of cars parked beside low white
buildings. The hut tramped straight across this place, kicking cars
aside and crunching through the corners of buildings, until it came
to a low white block labelled STONE BROS LTD in big red letters.
Hayley somehow expected it to stop here, but instead it simply kept
on and stamped on the building. Half the wall fell in and the hut
came to a halt, marching in place and creaking and groaning all
over, while glass tinkled and lumps of concrete and flat pieces of
wall fell this way and that. When it had made a big hole in the
building, the hut stopped trampling and let down its ladder.
  “Come on,” Flute said. “Quickly.” He pushed Merope and Hayley
onto the ladder. “The rest of you had better stay here,” he said over
his shoulder as he followed Hayley and Merope down.
  Hayley seized her mother’s hand and they ducked in together
through the crumpled, sagging hole. Inside, the strip lights were on
and everyone was working away at their desks, just as if nothing
had happened at all—except that the nearest people wearily slapped
their hands down on their piles of paper as the wind from the
broken wall threatened to blow them away, and people farther from
the damage irritably blew and waved at the dust from the
breakage. Hayley spotted her father at his desk in the far corner,
working harder than anyone else there, and began dragging her
mother towards him. But, halfway there, Merope saw him too, let
go of Hayley’s hand, and rushed across between the desks. She
knocked several trays of paper flying, but people simply sighed and
bent to pick them up, without seeming to notice anything else.
  “Cyrus!” Merope shouted. “My Sisyphus!”
  It rang round the room, and several people actually looked up.
Hayley’s father looked up among the rest. When he saw Merope
bearing down on him, filthy hair flying, rags streaming, he stopped
working, leant back, and smiled. And smiled. Merope put both
sticky hands down on his IN tray and smiled back. They both
smiled and gazed as if there was nothing else in the world.
   “Oh, come on! Come on!” Hayley said to them, hopping from foot
to foot.
   She could see the woman who did not want to ladder her tights
marching towards them from the other end of the room. The
woman had been carrying a massive pile of folders, but she dumped
those angrily on the nearest desk and strode swiftly down the aisle
to the desk in the corner.
  “We have to go !” Hayley said.
  But her parents took not the slightest notice, until the woman
came right up to them and shoved Hayley aside. “Leave here at
once,” she said to Merope. “You’re interrupting this prisoner in his
work.”
  Merope turned to look at her, slow and astonished. “I’m what?”
she said.
  “Distracting the prisoner. Trespassing,” the woman said. “You’ve
no business to be here. You must have escaped from another
strand.”
  “That’s right,” Merope said. “And I’ve come to fetch my husband
away from this one.”
  “You can’t do that,” the woman said.
  Merope stood up to her full height, inches taller than the neat
woman. Despite her torn and filthy dress, she was suddenly
majestic. Her hair, clotted with blood and stained with wine,
swirled outwards from her head and became bright gold, brighter
even than the golden apples had been. Hayley stared, awed and
admiring. My mother really is a sort of goddess! she thought.
   “How dare you!” Merope said. “How dare you speak like that to a
daughter of Atlas! No one here is a prisoner. They are all in
unlawful captivity.” Her voice rose, like a powerful singer’s. “You’re
all free,” she cried out. “Get up and leave, all of you.”
   The people at the desks looked up, astonished and unbelieving at
first; but when Merope held out her hand to Hayley’s father and he
got up and came to her, still smiling, the rest began to stand up,
hesitantly, in ones and twos. As Merope held out her other hand to
Hayley and began to sweep the pair of them across the room,
everyone seemed to see that she meant what she said. They jumped
up and made for the doors.
  “Stop!” the neat woman called out. And when no one took any
notice, she wailed, “How am I going to get all the forms filled in?”
  “Try filling them in yourself,” Merope said over her shoulder.
   They reached the break in the wall and there was the ladder into
the hut and Flute standing beside it. He was looking very impatient
by then. He more or less hurled Hayley up the rungs and then
hoisted Cyrus after her. Hayley’s father had evidently become very
stiff from sitting at the desk for so long. Merope seemed to float up,
and Flute scrambled after her.
  “We’ve got him!” Hayley said joyfully to Fiddle as she reached the
balcony.
  “Good,” Fiddle said. He looked at Martya. “Shall we go?”
  “Instant,” Martya agreed.
  The hut tramped its feet and smartly goose-stepped itself into
facing the other way.
  And stopped.
  Uncle Jolyon was standing in the way, with his taxi throbbing
behind him. He seemed huge, and solid as a mountain. As everyone
clutched the balcony rail and stared, he grew even vaster, until he
was gazing down at them, with a sort of dishonest, implacable pity.
His voice was as large as the rest of him.
  “Shame,” he thundered. “You all thought you were so clever,
didn’t you? But nobody ever really gets the better of me . And I’m
very good at devising punishments for people who don’t do what I
want. You are all going to have a very nasty time, now and until
the end of time. Trust me.”
 “I am not yours,” Martya said. “There is nothing you can do to
me.”
  “What makes you so sure of that?” Uncle Jolyon thundered back.
   Hayley gazed up at his vast bulging shirt front in despair. Just as
everything seemed to be coming right! she thought. But as Martya
said angrily, “Because I am the greatest witch that ever lives!”
Hayley’s attention was pulled that way. She saw Flute’s big hand,
down by Flute’s side, making gestures to her to fetch out the star
from Orion’s bow. Hayley didn’t dare nod. She dipped her chin at
Flute and, furtively, gently, she put her hand to her smallest pocket
and began unzipping it.
  “What have you done to Orion?” Harmony asked suddenly and
made Hayley’s heart stutter, in case Uncle Jolyon noticed what she
was doing.
   “Orion?” Uncle Jolyon boomed. “I put him back amongst the stars
of course—for keeps this time. Asterope’s up there too, as far away
from him as she can be.”
  “But why shouldn’t they get together?” Troy said.
  “Because they displeased me,” rumbled Uncle Jolyon. “The man’s
a womanizer.”
  “So are you,” Troy pointed out.
  “Exactly. And I don’t want any rivals,” Uncle Jolyon boomed.
“You, my boy, are now going to spend eternity being punished for
your cheek. I haven’t decided what to do to you yet, but I know
you’ll never, ever get to build your city.”
  While they talked, Hayley got her pocket unzipped and felt the
star, tiny, warm and faintly fizzing, roll into the palm of her hand.
Flute gently edged up on one side of her and Fiddle on the other.
“When I say ‘ Now ,’ ” Flute murmured, in the faintest of whispers,
“push it into him as high up as you can reach.”
  Merope said loudly, “This is entirely unjust. I think we’ve all been
punished enough.”
  “I don’t,” Uncle Jolyon retorted. “You, my good woman, are going
back where you were, and so are you, Sisyphus, only this time it
will hurt . As for that Hayley— Where is Hayley?”
  Hayley was so much smaller than everyone else and Uncle Jolyon
now so huge that he evidently had trouble picking her out from
among the crowd on the balcony. Flute grinned at Fiddle and Fiddle
nodded at Flute, and they both obligingly seized Hayley and boosted
her upwards towards Uncle Jolyon’s vast face. Hayley found herself
travelling up what seemed half a mile of shirtfront.
  “Now !” said Flute.
   Hayley put out her hand with the star in it and pressed it with
all her strength into the middle of Uncle Jolyon’s bulging chest. It
twinkled there for just a second and then seemed to dissolve into
his enormous body.
  Uncle Jolyon made a strange noise, like a very deep organ pipe,
and began to spread. He spread and he spread, and grew fainter
and more gaseous as he enlarged, and moved away backwards as he
grew fainter. Stinging coldness came off him. After that he moved
away so rapidly that Hayley could soon see that he had now become
a globe, a vast, sulky, yellowish thing, that spread and backed away
and spread as it receded, until it was a yellow disc, blotched and
banded with dreary red. Then it was shining circle, and finally it
became a large bright star up in the sky.
  “Ah,” said Harmony. “The planet Jupiter.”
  “Yes,” said Flute. “He can’t do much harm to anyone as a planet.”
  “Or only the usual sidereal influences,” Fiddle said. “And those
are generally rather jolly.”
  They both grinned at Hayley as they lowered her back to the
balcony.
  “We go now,” Martya announced. “I need my forest.”
  The hut at once jolted into its goose-step stride and took them
away through the industrial estate—which now had a seedy,
abandoned look—and then, in remarkably few strides, out onto a
mountainside scattered with pine trees. After a few more strides, it
stopped in a level place where they could look down on the
respectable grey town where Aunt Ellie lived.
  Everybody except Martya climbed down the ladder. Hayley was
last because she stopped to hug Martya. Martya once again looked
extremely surprised, as if nobody else had ever wanted to hug her.
  “I’ll come and visit you in the mythosphere,” Hayley called as she
too climbed down. She ran over and took hold of both her parents’
hands. I can live with them now! she thought blissfully. No more
Grandma. And whenever I want to, I can go and be a comet.
  “We shall be leaving now,” Flute said to her. “This phase is over,
so my brother and I change places again.”
   “I’ve always wondered when you did that,” Harmony said. “Is it
often?”
   “Whenever we complete a new strand in the mythosphere,”
Fiddle told her. His sober dark suit, as he stood there, was slowly
flushing green in the grey evening light. But his eyes still shone
blue. Flute’s baggy green clothes were fading to a severe grey,
although they remained baggy and his white hair still blew about
on his shoulders.
  Hayley thought, I’ll still be able to tell them apart in future. She
watched the brothers smile at each other and then walk past one
another, Fiddle striding to the left and Flute going to the right. A
moment later, they were gone.
  Everyone let the hut stride away too and began to walk, rather
aimlessly, down the mountain.
  “Where would you like the three of us to live?” Hayley’s father
said to Merope. “I fancy going back to Greece myself.”
   “Greece will have changed quite a lot since you were last there,”
Merope said. “1 don’t think you’ll be a king there anymore. Let’s go
to Cyprus again.” She shivered in the quiet evening air. “It’s just as
warm as Greece there.”
  “Oh but!” Hayley cried out. “If we live abroad, how can I see Troy
and Harmony?”
   Troy laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll always find me in the
mythosphere. I shall be working on my city there and I’ll need you
to design the gardens. And you’ll run into Harmony all the time.
She goes everywhere.”
  “All the same,” Harmony said, watching Merope shiver, “I think
we should go home first. Mother will be fussing, and Merope needs
a bath and some better clothes.”
   “Oh yes,” said Troy. “And we never even began on that chocolate
cake.” He started to run downhill, but stopped at the next bend in
the path, pointing downwards and laughing. When Hayley nosily
ran along to see what was amusing him so, she found she could see
down into the main street of the town. Strolling down the middle of
it was the enormous Highlander, with Aunt Aster clinging lovingly
to his arm.
  “See that, Hayley?” Troy said. “This is what happens now you’ve
pinned Uncle Jolyon to the sky. We can all do what we want to do.
At last!”
                          —«»—«»—«»—


                    A NOTE
             ABOUT THE CHARACTERS
   The aunts are the PLEIADES, often known as the Seven Sisters,
a star cluster in the general region of the Great Bear. It is possible
to count seven of them only out of the corner of your eye. In
Ancient Greece, the Pleiades seemed to mingle freely with both
mortals and gods, and at least three of them had a love affair with
Zeus (Jupiter), chief of the gods of both Greece and Ancient Rome.
Uncle Jolyon is JUPITER. The Pleiades are:
 • MAIA, whose son by Jupiter is MERCURY (Mercer), the
messenger of the gods
  • ELECTRA, whose children by Jupiter are Harmonia (Harmony)
and the man who built and founded the great city of Troy and
became its first king
  • ALCYONE, known to astronomers as Beta Tauri, who seems to
have been too lofty to have a love affair with anyone
  • TAYGETA, whose children by Jupiter became the Spartans
  • CELAENO, one of the fainter stars, whose children by Jupiter
became many of the other peoples of Ancient Greece
  • ASTEROPE, very much fainter than her sister stars
  • MEROPE, who married SISYPHUS, a mortal king in Ancient
Greece. Sisyphus was later punished by having to roll a stone
eternally up a hill. As soon as he got near the top, the stone would
roll back down to the bottom of the hill again
   The parents of the Pleiades are PLEONE, known to astonomers
as “a shell star,” and ATLAS. Atlas was the last of the race of
Titans, gigantic beings whom Jupiter defeated when he first came
to power as chief of the gods. Some of the Titans were once gods
themselves until Jupiter destroyed them. Atlas was spared on
condition that he held the world up on his shoulders (although some
versions say it was the sky he carried).
  In spite of his mighty task, Atlas seems to have had time to fall
in love with the nymph Hespera, by whom he had five daughters,
known together as the HESPERIDES. These ladies guarded the
golden apples in the Western Isles.
 AUTOLYCUS (Tollie) is the son of Mercury by a mortal woman.
He grew up to be a thief, trickster, cattle rustler and general bad
man. Some of the cattle he stole belonged to Sisyphus.
  ORION was a mighty hunter in Ancient Greece, who chased
women as often as he chased animals. He seems to have gone after
both the Pleiades and the Hesperides and ended up by being placed
in the heavens as a constellation which, to this day, is one of the
most notable in the winter skies.
  As for HAYLEY (Halley’s Comet), it seems to me that the child of
a star and a mortal king would almost certainly be a comet.
                                 —Diana Wynne Jones, Bristol, 2006
                            —«»—«»—«»—
   Diana Wynne Jones was born in London, England. At the age
of eight, she suddenly knew she was going to be a writer, although
she was too dyslexic to start until she reached age twelve. There
were very few books for children in the house, so Diana wrote
stories for herself and her two younger sisters. She received her
B.A. at St. Anne’s College in Oxford before she began to write
full-time.
  Her many remarkable novels include the award-winning Archer’s
Goon, Howl’s Moving Castle (made into a major animated feature
by Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki), Fire and Hemlock , the
Dalemark Quartet, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (also available
from Firebird), Dark Lord of Derkholm, Year of the Griffin, The
Merlin Conspiracy , and the Chrestomanci books (Charmed Life,
Witch Week, The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Magicians of
Caprona, Conrad’s Fate , and her most recent novel, The Pinhoe
Egg) .
  Diana Wynne Jones lives with her husband, the medievalist J. A.
Burrow, in Bristol, England, the setting of many of her books. They
have three grown sons and five grandchildren.
  Her Web site is www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk
                         —«»—«»—«»—
        [scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
        [A 3S Release— v1, html]
        [September 11, 2007]