Diana Wynne Jones’s Magic and Myths Collection

“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 under 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.”