The Game (6 page)

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. Grandpa 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 made of stars. Much nearer to the left, an enormous woman stood still as a statue – except for her hair that was trails of blowing stars – and stared at them with huge, disapproving star eyes.

Unfortunately, Hayley was still remembering the things Grandpa 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 – hello?” 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 at 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.”

F
or the next few days, Hayley enjoyed herself more than she had ever done in her entire life. 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 went 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'd 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, that 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 shortly 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 a 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 Grandpa – Grandpa wearing a loose grey-blue robe, but Grandpa 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.

Grandpa 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,” Grandpa 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,” Grandpa 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 the other of these five pretty ladies. There was a strong family likeness between 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 Grandpa's other family that he goes to see. “Now I've got
nine
aunts!” she said wonderingly.

“Well, actually you've got eleven really,” Grandpa 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 is 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 Grandpa, 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.”