“That’s beautiful!” Hayley said. “What are they?”
“Are your hands clean?” Grandpa answered absently. His light-pen steadily picked out a gold gleaming set of threads underneath the spirals and followed it in and out, here and there, through the gauzy mass. He seemed to take it for granted that Hayley had washed her hands because he went on, “This is the mythosphere. It’s made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it’s constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They’ve hardened off, you see.”
“Are they real, the same as atoms and planets?” Hayley asked.
“Quite as real – even realler in some ways,” Grandpa replied.
Hayley said the name of it to herself, in order not to forget it. “The mythosphere. And what are you doing with it?”
“Tracing the golden apples,” Grandpa said. “Wondering why they’ve never become a spiral of their own. They mix into other strands all the time. Look.” He did something to the keyboard to make Earth turn about and spread itself into a flat plain with continents slowly twirling across it. Golden threads rose from India, from the flatness north of the mountains, from the Mediterranean and from Sweden, Norway and Britain. “See here.” Grandpa’s big hairy hand pointed the light-pen this way and that as the threads arose. “This thread mingles with three different dragon stories. And this…” the line of light moved southward “…mixes with two quite different stories here. This one’s the judgement of Paris and here we have Atalanta, the girl who was distracted from winning a race by some golden apples. And there are hundreds of folk tales…” The pen moved northwards to golden threads growing like grass over Europe and Asia. Grandpa shook his head. “Golden apples all over. They cause death and eternal life and danger and choices. They must be important. But none of them combine. None of them spiral and harden. I don’t know why.”
“If they’re real,” Hayley said, “can a person go and walk in them, or are they like germs and atoms and too small to see?”
“Oh, yes,” Grandpa said, frowning at the threads. “Only I don’t advocate walking in the spirals. Everything gets pretty fierce out there.”
“But nearer in. Do you walk or float?” Hayley wanted to know.
“You could take a boat if you want,” Grandpa said, “or even a car sometimes. But I prefer to walk myself. It’s—”
But here Grandma came storming in and seized Hayley by one arm. “Really! Honest to goodness, Tas!” she said, dragging Hayley away from the screen. “You ought to know better than to let Hayley in among this stuff!”
“It’s not doing her any harm!” Grandpa protested.
“On the contrary. It could do immense harm – to us and Hayley too, if Jolyon gets to hear of it!” Grandma retorted. She dragged Hayley out of the room and shut the door with a bang. “Hayley, you are not to have anything to do with the mythosphere ever again!” she said. “Forget you ever saw it!”
Being ordered to forget about the mythosphere was like being ordered not to think of a blue elephant. Hayley could not forget those beautiful swirling, drifting, shining threads. She thought about the mythosphere constantly, almost as often as she stood on a chair and stared at the young, happy faces in her parents’ wedding photo. It was if the mythosphere had cast a spell on her. Something tugged at her chest whenever she remembered it and she felt a great sad longing that was almost like feeling sick.
It was a few days later that she met the musicians properly for the first time. Hayley was never sure whether or not the mythosphere had anything to do with it. But it seemed likely that it did.
She knew one of the musicians by sight anyway. She saw him every time the latest maid took her round by the shops instead of out on the common. Martya, the newest maid, always nodded and smiled at him. Martya was a big strong girl with hair like the white silk fringes on Grandma’s parlour furniture – soft, straight hair that was always swirling across her round pink face. Unfortunately, Martya’s face did not live up to her beautiful hair in any way. Grandma sniffed and called Martya “distressingly plain”, and then sighed and wished Martya spoke better English. When she sent Martya and Hayley round by the shops, Grandma always had to give Martya a list written in big capital letters because Martya didn’t read English very well either. This, Grandma explained to Hayley, was because Martya was from Darkest Russia, where they used different letters as well as different language. It was Martya’s bad English that first caused Hayley’s interest in the musician.
He was very tall and skinny and he always wore a dark suit with a blue scarf tucked in around the neck. He had stood for as long as Hayley could remember, rain or shine, in the exact same place outside the pub called The Star, playing high sweet notes on a shabby little violin that looked much too small for him. The case of the violin lay open on the pavement by his feet and people occasionally chucked coppers or 5p’s into it as they passed. Hayley always wondered why he never seemed to play any real tunes – just music, she thought of it.
Neither Hayley nor Martya ever had any coins to drop into the case, but Martya never failed to nod and smile at the man; whereupon he nodded back, violin and all, still playing away, and a large beaming smile would spread up his thin face, making his eyes gleam the same bright blue as his scarf. Up till then Hayley had always assumed he was old. But he had such a young smile that she now noticed that his hair, under the round black cap he always wore, was not old white, but the same sort of fine white hair as Martya’s.
“Is he some relation of yours?” she asked. “Is that why you nod?”
“No. Is polite,” Martya said. “He is musician.”
The way she said it, it sounded like “magician”. Hayley said, “Oh!” very impressed, and from then on she too nodded and smiled at the musician, with considerable awe. And he always smiled back.
Hayley longed to ask the musician about his magic powers, but Martya always hurried her past to the shops before she had a chance to ask.
Then one afternoon they were in the corner shop just beyond The Star – where Hayley could still hear the violin in the distance, so sad and sweet that she felt herself aching with the same longing she felt about the mythosphere – when Martya fell into an argument with Mr Ahmed who ran the shop. Both of them pointed to Grandma’s list and Mr Ahmed kept saying, “No, no, I assure you, this word is orangeade.” While Martya said, over and over, “Is oranges we need!”
Hayley waited for them to stop, idly kicking at the base of the ice-cream machine while she waited. And something tinkled beside her shoe. She looked down and saw it was a pound coin.
Without even having to think, she snatched it up and raced out of the shop, round the bulging steps of The Star, back to where the musician stood playing. There she dropped the coin into the violin case and waited breathlessly in front of him.
After a moment he seemed to realise that she wanted something. He took his bow off his violin and the violin down from his chin. “Thank you,” he said.
He had a nice, light kind of voice. Much encouraged by it, Hayley blurted out, “Please, I just wanted to know, are you a magician?”
He thought about it. “It depends what you mean by magician,” he said at length. “My ways are not your ways. But I have a brother who stands in the sun, who could tell you