The Game (9 page)

“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, 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.”

“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 mind missing two days. We're going to catch the plane we were going to catch 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 wine shop 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 on to 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. Grandpa 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 ask for 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 prince 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 on to 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 on to 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.”