The Game (12 page)

Everyone knew it was Uncle Jolyon. Troy and Harmony looked at one another, 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 on to 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 on to 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 on to 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 striplights 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 further 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 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 dipleased me,” rumbled Uncle Joylon. “The man's a womaniser.”

“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 shirt front.

“
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 a 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 on to 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. “I don't think you'll be a king there any more. 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 started on that chocolate cake.” He began 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.