Diana Wynne Jones’s Magic and Myths Collection

Oh yes I will! Hayley thought. “Be ready to hold my feet!” she shouted and thought she heard someone say “OK.” Then, clutching the torch in her right hand, she began to inch herself down the sloping tiles outside. Rain pelted across her. Before long, she had the feeling it was raining upwards into her pants. The skylight bit into her shins, the tiles scraped her front. The only comforting thing was that she could feel Troy’s hands warm and strong on her left leg and Aunt May’s hands, softer but just as strong, holding her right calf.

They were paying her out of the window like a rope.

The hands had reached her ankles before Hayley could even touch the water. Left, she thought. She had to stretch and ooze and extend herself sideways before her hand could go into the rippling flood. It was surprisingly un-cold to her fingers. The hands were holding her shoes by then. And she stretched and oozed and tried to lengthen herself again, until finally her fingertips met a rough, leaded bottom. She couldn’t feel any kind of drain. Rather desperately, she swished her hand further to the left. Here there was the faintest feeling that the water was pulling at her fingers. Almost shrieking with the effort, she managed to move her hand that way.

The tips of her fingers touched something thick and rubbery-feeling. With another desperate stretch, Hayley somehow got one finger under it, and then her thumb on top. Then she could pick whatever-it-was up.

It came up with a gurgle. Hayley was so surprised at how quickly things happened then that she nearly screamed. Water thundered past her nose from right to left and tried to take her hair with it. To the left, it became a whirlpool, fairly whizzing round and round, and gargled away down the unblocked drain so fast that by the time Troy and Aunt May, thoroughly alarmed at the noises Hayley was making, had started to haul on her ankles, the gutter was empty.

Troy and Aunt May went on hauling. Hayley scraped rapidly and painfully up over the tiles, and agonisingly across the spike, and landed on the stool in the bath again, soaking wet and with her dress torn completely open down the middle.

Someone shouted, “She did it!”

There were cheers from the crowded bathroom behind her. Someone else said, “What was it? What is she holding?”

Blinking in the lantern light, Hayley turned herself around on the stool. Cousins and aunts were packed into the tiny space, dimly lit and staring, with Cousin Mercer ducking his wet head in through the door at the back and Tollie squashed up against the bath in front. Troy gently prised the torch out of Hayley’s right hand and switched it off. Aunt May seized Hayley’s left wrist. “Good heavens!” she said.

Hayley looked that way to find that her fingers were clamped round a pork chop. It was large. It was raw, and whitish with waterlogging, and sort of triangular, but there was no doubt what it was. It was almost exactly the right size and shape to block a drain.

“It’s a pork chop!” Aunt Alice exclaimed. “However did that get into the gutter?”

Hayley looked at Tollie, down near her soaking shoes, and knew at once. If ever she saw guilt and annoyance, it was in Tollie’s face at that moment. No doubt Tollie had hoped to be the one who went heroically out through the window. But when Aunt May said, “We have crows and seagulls here all the time – one of them must have dropped it,” Hayley did not contradict her. Even though Tollie looked up at her with scorn and dislike, for being too feeble to tell, Hayley did not say a word. She was shivering all over and her front hurt.

Aunt Celia said, “Poor child! She’s bleeding!”

Hayley was seized and carried away. The pork chop was taken from her like a trophy and she was carried over marshy carpets, first to somebody’s bedroom, where Harmony bathed her scraped front and spread soothing ointment there, while cousins ran about finding her some fur slippers and a large fluffy dressing gown. Then, wrapped in these luxuries, she was carried downstairs again. “I can walk!” Hayley protested.

“Yes, but you’re not going to – you’ve saved the day,” Aunt May told her.

She ended up in the kitchen, which was still dry and beautifully warm, where the aunts made quarts of cocoa. There Hayley sat in a wooden armchair, surrounded by relatives who were all praising her – except for Tollie, who sat in a corner and glowered at her – sipping cocoa and gradually warming up. Some of the warmth was from the unusual feeling of being the centre of everyone’s admiration – apart from Tollie’s of course. When Troy appeared, in a red dressing gown, he said, “Well done! You’re a brave one, aren’t you!” And Aunt May, now wearing a musty-smelling fur coat, hugged her mightily and said, “You courageous child! We won’t forget this in a hurry!”

Hayley had never known anything like this. The warmth from it was still with her when Cousin Mercer carried her up to bed and she fell asleep, into warm, sunny, contented dreams.

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

The next day, it was hard to believe that it had ever rained. Hayley woke to find the sky a bright heavenlike blue with great snowy clouds hustling across it. Aunt May woke her by coming in with an armload of clothes.

“Here, dear. Most of these should fit you. Try them on and make sure you’re warm enough. The wind’s chilly today. Breakfast in half an hour.” Aunt May’s hair, because it had been soaked last night, was wilder than ever that morning. Half of it fell down as she crossed the room. And she seemed to have found a whole lot of new necklaces. Red amber beads dangled clacking on her shapeless maroon dress when she threw the clothes on Hayley’s bed and went dashing away downstairs.

Hayley got up and examined the clothes. There were shorts with pockets, trousers with pockets, jeans, socks, T-shirts, jackets with pockets, sweatshirts with both hoods and pockets, knitted things, but not a single dress or skirt. Hayley could feel her face settling into a beaming smile. She made a careful selection: trousers with pockets, because those were like the ones Troy wore, a T-shirt that said “HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE”, thick yellow socks, because the trainers were rather big, and a red cardigan, because she suddenly discovered that red was her favourite colour. Feeling baggy and strange and comfortable, she looked in the mirror to do her hair and wondered what Grandma would say. Her hair had gone right out of control in the night. It radiated from her head in curls, tendrils, ringlets and long feathery locks. Hayley had a moment of terrible guilt. She was never going to get it neat! Then she thought of Aunt May and realised there was no need to bother here. She dragged a hairbrush through the wildness and went downstairs.

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.