Diana Wynne Jones’s Magic and Myths Collection

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 (#u96a28334-2f6d-550c-823d-2c51b8ac69e8)

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.

“Come on,” Flute said. “Quickly.” He pushed Merope and Hayley on to the ladder. “The rest of you had better stay here,” he said over his shoulder as he followed Hayley and Merope down.

Hayley seized her mother’s hand and they ducked in together through the crumpled, sagging hole. Inside, the striplights were on and everyone was working away at their desks, just as if nothing had happened at all “ except that the nearest people wearily slapped their hands down on their piles of paper as the wind from the broken wall threatened to blow them away and people further from the damage irritably blew and waved at the dust from the breakage. Hayley spotted her father at his desk in the far corner, working harder than anyone else there, and began dragging her mother towards him. But, halfway there, Merope saw him too, let go of Hayley’s hand and rushed across between the desks. She knocked several trays of paper flying, but people simply sighed and bent to pick them up, without seeming to notice anything else.

“Cyrus!” Merope shouted. “My Sisyphus!”

It rang round the room and several people actually looked up. Hayley’s father looked up among the rest. When he saw Merope bearing down on him, filthy hair flying, rags streaming, he stopped working, leant back and smiled. And smiled. Merope put both sticky hands down on his IN-tray and smiled back. They both smiled and gazed as if there was nothing else in the world.

“Oh, come on! Come on!” Hayley said to them, hopping from foot to foot.

She could see the woman who did not want to ladder her tights marching towards them from the other end of the room. The woman had been carrying a massive pile of folders, but she dumped those angrily on the nearest desk and strode swiftly down the aisle to the desk in the corner.

“We have to go!” Hayley said.

But her parents took not the slightest notice, until the woman came right up to them and shoved Hayley aside. “Leave here at once,” she said to Merope. “You’re interrupting this prisoner in his work.”

Merope turned to look at her, slow and astonished. “I’m what?” she said.

“Distracting the prisoner. Trespassing,” the woman said. “You’ve no business to be here. You must have escaped from another strand.”

“That’s right,” Merope said. “And I’ve come to fetch my husband away from this one.”

“You can’t do that,” the woman said.

Merope stood up to her full height, inches taller than the neat woman. Despite her torn and filthy dress, she was suddenly majestic. Her hair, clotted with blood and stained with wine, swirled outwards from her head and became bright gold, brighter even than the golden apples had been. Hayley stared, awed and admiring. My mother really is a sort of goddess! she thought.

“How dare you!” Merope said. “How dare you speak like that to a daughter of Atlas! No one here is a prisoner. They are all in unlawful captivity.” Her voice rose, like a powerful singer’s. “You’re all free,” she cried out. “Get up and leave, all of you.”

The people at the desks looked up, astonished and unbelieving at first; but when Merope held out her hand to Hayley’s father and he got up and came to her, still smiling, the rest began to stand up, hesitantly in ones and twos. As Merope held out her other hand to Hayley and began to sweep the pair of them across the room, everyone seemed to see that she meant what she said. They jumped up and made for the doors.

“Stop!” the neat woman called out. And when no one took any notice, she wailed, “How am I going to get all the forms filled in?”

“Try filling them in yourself,” Merope said over her shoulder.

They reached the break in the wall and there was the ladder into the hut and Flute standing beside it. He was looking very impatient by then. He more or less hurled Hayley up the rungs and then hoisted Cyrus after her. Hayley’s father had evidently become very stiff from sitting at the desk for so long. Merope seemed to float up and Flute scrambled after her.

“We’ve got him!” Hayley said joyfully to Fiddle as she reached the balcony.

“Good,” Fiddle said. He looked at Martya. “Shall we go?”

“Instant,” Martya agreed.

The hut tramped its feet and smartly goose-stepped itself into facing the other way.

And stopped.

Uncle Jolyon was standing in the way, with his taxi throbbing behind him. He seemed huge, and solid as a mountain. As everyone clutched the balcony rail and stared, he grew even vaster, until he was gazing down at them, with a sort of dishonest, implacable pity. His voice was as large as the rest of him.

“Shame,” he thundered. “You all thought you were so clever, didn’t you? But nobody ever really gets the better of me. And I’m very good at devising punishments for people who don’t do what I want. You are all going to have a very nasty time, now and until the end of time. Trust me.”

“I am not yours,” Martya said. “There is nothing you can do to me.”

“What makes you so sure of that?” Uncle Jolyon thundered back.

Hayley gazed up at his vast bulging shirt front in despair. Just as everything seemed to coming right! she thought. But as Martya said angrily, “Because I am the greatest witch that ever lives!” Hayley’s attention was pulled that way. She saw Flute’s big hand, down by Flute’s side, making gestures to her to fetch out the star from Orion’s bow. Hayley didn’t dare nod. She dipped her chin at Flute and, furtively, gently, she put her hand to her smallest pocket and began unzipping it.

“What have you done to Orion?” Harmony asked suddenly and made Hayley’s heart stutter, in case Uncle Jolyon noticed what she was doing.