Читать книгу Diana Wynne Jones’s Magic and Myths Collection - Diana Wynne Jones - Страница 16

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hayley froze, with her arm up and her fingers curled round ready to pick the apple, and simply did not dare to move. She hardly dared breathe. She was too scared even to think.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the dragon said. His steamy breath wafted round Hayley as he spoke. It smelt like a wood fire, sooty and woody at once.

Hayley thought she had lost her voice. It took a real effort to whisper, “Please, sir, I need a golden apple.”

“You can’t have one,” said the dragon. “Do you think I’m going to let you loose in the mythosphere with something that precious?” He rolled an eye at her, while his breath coiled up among the leaves of the tree, filling it with fog. Hayley stared at his eye. It was like looking into a far distant sun deep inside a glass ball. “Don’t I know you?” the dragon said, filling the tree with fog again. “A tasty morsel – lots of hair and a body that’s half red?” His long face left the tree trunk and began to stretch out towards Hayley. “Didn’t you come with a friend and steal one of my old scales the other day?” The tip of his nose was nearly on Hayley’s chest by then.

He’s going to eat me! Hayley thought.

The realisation unfroze her mind and she remembered Erytheia’s advice. “Yes, I was there,” she said. She managed to bend her stiff body and jacknife herself away to the outer edge of the mythosphere.

Everywhere was stars suddenly.

At least that meant that the dragon was quite a long way off. Hayley could see his starry jigsaw puzzle shape drifting in the distance, just beyond the huge starry woman, who seemed to have turned herself round to watch him as he glided towards the mighty weighing scales. Beyond the weighing scales, an enormous starry insect with an arched up tail was just coming into view. When Hayley looked the other way, she could see the lion, and a crab receding into the distance beyond the lion.

I suppose it’s better to be safe and not have an apple, she thought sadly.

Something rustled tinnily above and beside her.

Hayley was sure the dragon had somehow crept up behind her. She froze again. But when she managed to make herself turn slowly round towards the noise, she discovered it was made by starry leaves rattling on a silver tree. It was the wood where she had come with Troy. She was still in an orchard of sorts, except that this one was made of stars. Trees stood all around her, gently quivering in the solar wind, each one heavy with round, moony fruit. Some of the fruits were blue, some silver-white, and some gently shining a faint, peachy gold.

“Heaventrees!” Hayley whispered, and wondered who had told her or where she had read of the trees of heaven.

It doesn’t matter, she thought. Moving very slowly and gently, she carefully chose the nearest, most golden looking of the fruit and crept her hand out towards it. As soon as her fingers were around it, she plucked it off its starry twig. It went twing.

The head of the distant dragon whipped round towards her in a cloud of fiery flakes, but by then it was too late. Hayley clutched the golden apple in both hands and became a comet.

She was a proper comet, not like Tollie’s pretend one. Her hair gathered together and flung itself out ahead of her like the flame on a blowtorch. Behind it, her body was a small, curled-up, icy ball. But because she was clutching the golden apple, she knew she was carrying with her all the seeds of life – all excitement, joy, growth and adventure. She could go anywhere in the universe with this and still be alive.

She forged off on her strange, eccentric comet’s path. She felt as if she was going crazily fast, bombing along – and yet, at the same time, it felt like a slow, stately progress. She wheeled away from the zodiac and that fell slowly behind, the woman, the lion, the crab, and two starry men who seemed to be twins, all swinging aside and away like the view from a train window when the train is going really fast. And as soon as the zodiac was out of sight, Hayley discovered that being a comet was more fun than she had ever had in her life. She zoomed along, laughing.

Her comet course, she knew, was a long thin oval. Since she was outward bound at the moment, in order to get back to Earth, she knew she was going to have to rush out to her very limit and then turn a hairpin bend before she could head back sunwards. That meant at least a light year of rushing. “Whoopee!” she shrieked as she sped outwards.

It was bliss. It went on for ages. But at last she felt her speed dropping, as if she was coming near the end of her orbit. Turn the corner, she thought. Now!

She swooped herself sideways. If she had had wheels, they would have squealed and smoked with her speed. Hayley shrieked again at the joy and danger of it. And, as she careered madly right, and right, and right again, she remembered Hesperethusa’s advice, to alter her path and go home a different way. Or that dragon will be waiting, she thought. So, when she came to the last bit of her turn, she swooped herself just a little bit more to the right and went rushing off again not quite the way she had come.

And it was still bliss. Stars streaked past, pale, bright, red, blue and greenish yellow, forming themselves into starry animals, birds and people as they whirled by. Hayley bombed happily onwards, until one set of stars turned itself slowly into an enormous bear. The Great Bear, she thought, and knew she was almost home.

Sure enough, if she peered forward and down through the veils of her own hair, she could see the Solar System looking just like it did on Grandpa’s computer. There was the sun in the middle and all the planets sedately circling it. She saw big Neptune and heavy, white Uranus, ringed Saturn and Jupiter looking sultry and yellow, with red blotches on it. Pluto was lurking somewhere out in the dark, while little Mercury and cloudy Venus seemed much too near the sun and likely to fry in its heat. And there circled red Mars and blue Earth.

Hayley began to hope she was aimed properly at Earth, but as she hurtled onwards, it began to look much more as if she was heading straight for the sun. Comets did sometimes plunge into the sun, she knew. Grandpa had told her. She tried to sidle herself more into a line for Earth, but she couldn’t. The sun was actually pulling her.

“Oh, help!” she said. “I’m going to die. What a waste, now I’ve discovered I can do this!”

Then, before she had totally panicked, it seemed as if she was only going to pass very near the sun – to slide by perhaps a mere million miles away. She could already feel the blazing heat from it. When she looked at it, she could clearly see the twirling sunspots and the hissing, leaping lumps of flame. And she could see the person in green clothes standing in the hard, hot midst of it.

“What?” Hayley thought. “People can’t—”

She was still only halfway through that thought, when the person in the sun waved at her and shouted. “Stop!” he yelled. “Match velocities now!”

Hayley found herself – not exactly slowing – gliding beside the sun at about the same speed and much too near for comfort. The heat of it uncurled her, melting her from around her apple. “Don’t do that!” she shouted. And found herself looking across at Flute. “Oh, of course,” she said. “Fiddle said you stood in the sun.”

Flute stood with his arms folded, surrounded in leaping hissing heat. He did not look entirely friendly. “Until this morning,” he said, “I had a thousand and one golden apples. Now I’ve only got a thousand.”

“Are they yours?” Hayley said. “I didn’t know—”

Flute nodded, his hair leaping among the white hot flames. “And you’ve got another one in your pocket,” he said.

Up until then, Hayley had clean forgotten that she had zipped Harmony’s prize apple into one of her trouser pockets. She would have liked to pat that pocket to make sure the plastic apple there was still safe, but she was a little too icy and curled up to do that. She said airily, “Oh, that’s only a plastic apple Harmony gave me for a prize in the game.”

Flute grinned a little. “Is it? That girl Harmony has stolen more of my apples than I care to think of. She now has the run of the universe, probably the whole multiverse. She’s everywhere, in spite of your uncle Jolyon’s orders. Don’t go giving her that new one.”

“I won’t then,” Hayley said. “I want to keep it.”

Flute lost his grin. “Do you? Then you realise you’ll have to pay me for it, don’t you? My apples are never free.”

“Oh,” said Hayley. It was a relief, in a way, to know that she need not be a thief. She hated the idea that she had been stealing from Flute of all people. But it had never occurred to Grandma to give Hayley any money before sending her away. Glumly, knowing she was penniless, Hayley asked, “How much do you want for it?”

“I’ll take,” said Flute, “one of the stars from Orion’s bow. We want that quite urgently, as it happens.”

“Er—” Hayley began.

“I know you haven’t got it now,” said Flute. “You can give it me when you next see me. And I want your promise that you will.”

“I promise,” Hayley said, feeling small and sad. She thought, I’ll have to ask Harmony what I do about that. Oh, dear.

“Very well,” said Flute. “Off you go then.”

Hayley peered through the cloudy spout of her hair and tried to turn herself towards Earth, which had moved quite a way further in its orbit while they talked. She would never have managed it, if Flute had not reached out and given her a shove. This sent her gliding off on a course that would meet Earth as it went on round.

“See you soon,” he called as Hayley headed away.

She was still moving quite fast, but to her disappointment not hurtling along any more. She was simply travelling on her own inertia and getting cooler again as she moved. She went from hot, to warm, to balmy, to lukewarm and, in spite of this, she melted steadily. Even when she glided into truly cold air somewhere on the night side of Earth, she was still melting. Dripping and distressed, she came uncurled in darkness and her hair fell back again around her shoulders as she landed and knew she was a human girl again. It was a dreadful loss. Hayley could not help sobbing a little as she stood still and carefully stowed the golden apple in another pocket with a zip. She sniffed and wondered which way to go.

Someone came up to her in the near dark and said, “You need to take this strand here.”

Hayley peered. She could see the strand, if she strained, like a path made of coal. “It doesn’t look very inviting,” she said.

“Well, you are on the dark side here,” the man said.

Hayley was sure she recognised his voice. She turned and peered up at his face. Under a black cap, his hair seemed white, and it blew about rather. “You’re Fiddle!” she said. “I’ve just met your brother again. And,” she added miserably, “I’m not a comet any more.”

“I know,” Fiddle said. “You can always be one again later.”

Hayley’s eyes seemed to have got keener for her time as a comet. She could pick out Fiddle’s face quite clearly now. Although it was a sad face, it really was remarkably like Flute’s. “Are you and Flute twins, by any chance?” she asked him.

“That’s right,” he said. “We take it in turns to stand in the sun.”