Free The Game by Diana Wynne Jones Page B

there was a man driving a tractor – or maybe a digger – up a steep slope. Hayley set out towards him to ask if he had seen Troy go past.
    There seemed to be something wrong with the digger – or tractor. It would get some way up the hill and then its engine would stop and the machine would go sliding backwards downhill. Hayley could see the man bobbing about, trying to put on the brake and start the engine again. Before long, she could hear him swearing. But before she got near enough to hear actual swearwords, Tollie came racing up and stopped in front of her.
    â€œYou’re going wrong !” he cried out. “You can’t go this way!”
    He sounded as if he was desperate for her to believe him. But Hayley, like Harmony, felt she had had enough of Tollie. “Oh, go away !” she said. “Go and find your roc’s egg and stop trying to cheat!” She pushed past Tollie and marched on across the field.
    She could hear Tollie shouting behind her, but by then, in the strange way of the mythosphere, the hill and the stalled digger were not there any more. Hayley found herself instead stumbling among loose rocks in some kind of mountain pass. The pass very shortly opened out into a stony valley, bare and barren except for small yellowing bushes that smelt like turkey stuffing. There were steep mountains on either side and not a sign of Troy anywhere.
    Hayley faltered. Tollie must have been right and she really had gone the wrong way. But then she thought how Tollie was always trying to put people off and marched on, sliding and stumbling among the stones.
    There was a particularly huge mountain over to her left, very strangely shaped. The top of it was covered in grey, smoky, shifting clouds, but the lower part – the part she could see – looked almost like a pair of greatstone feet, with a sort of hump beyond that. This hump, for some reason, made Hayley very uneasy. She kept her eyes on it as she hurried and stumbled through the valley. At first it was simply an odd-shaped crag, with clouds streaming across it, dimming it, veiling it, and then showing it again, but it changed shape as Hayley moved on. By the time she came level with it, it was looking remarkably like an enormous stone woman, crouching on the mountainside and peering out at the valley. Hayley was just below it when the clouds suddenly smoked away from the rocky nose, for a moment unveiling piercing eyes and a stern mouth. Hayley almost screamed. It looked exactly like Grandma’s face made of stone.
    â€œOh, heavens!” Hayley said. “No, no, no !”
    She put her hands to the sides of her face and ran. Her feet clattered and slipped on stones and then shortly slapped on water. She was among trees after that, where her hair caught painfully on twigs. She crouched over and went on running, terrified that great stone feet were coming tramping after her, to tell her she was forbidden to be here and certainly notwith her hair all loose and wearing a loud red cardigan. Her panic took her through snow next and then through rain, and after that along a windy seashore where her trainers filled with sand and slowed her almost to a walk. But she did not stop trying to run until she came into a green place full of sunshine. People were playing music there.
    The music made Hayley feel safe – very safe, because it was one of the tunes Fiddle used to play beside the pub, on the shady side of the street. Hayley sat down on the grass, half hidden by a tree, to empty the sand out of her shoes and get her breath back, and stared out into the glade with great interest. There was a bit of a feast going on out there. There was a table made of logs, with wineglasses and bread and fruit on it and a large leather pitcher to hold the wine. Three very pretty ladies in floaty dresses were sitting along a garden seat beyond the table, entertaining an old man and two more ladies who had their backs to Hayley. One musical