The Game

by Diana Wynne Jones

  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 driers 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-length 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 those 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 the 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 them. There was even one with “HAYLEY” on it. 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 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. Grandpa had playe
d 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 lawnmowers and the stack of deckchairs were in a sort of rainbow dusk. Troy, keeping hold of Hayley’s wrist, edged them past the lawnmowers – 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 of you!” he shouted, and vanished away into the dark.

  Hayley almost stopped again.

  “Don’t you believe it!” Troy said, hauling her onward. “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 was 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. 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?”