The Game

by Diana Wynne Jones

  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 further 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!”

  Chapter Eleven

  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, Grandpa 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 un
der 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.

  Chapter Twelve

  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.