"Diana Wynne Jones - The Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

won on the first day.
But they were there, and they led her among the trees to a tall
fence with a tall gate in it. Through its bars there wafted the most
intense fragrance of apples—not the dull, cidery scent apples have
when they have been picked, but that fresh, living smell apples
have when they are ripe but still growing on the tree.
“Now listen, love,” Erytheia said, with her hand on the latch of
the gate, “if anything goes wrong, or even starts to go wrong, go at
once to the very end of this strand of the mythosphere.”
“Everything hardens off there and turns into stars,”
Hesperethusa added. “You’ll probably be a star of some sort yourself
out there, but don’t be afraid. Nothing much can hurt our family
out at the edge there. Just alter your path a little and go home
another way.”
“All right,” Hayley said. Her voice had gone down to a whisper.
Both ladies bent and kissed her. Feeling so nervous that the skin
of her stomach tightened and jumped under the nearly healed
scratches from her first night in Ireland, Hayley slipped round the
gate and in amongst the apple trees. Apples hung all about her, just
above the level of her head. They did not look brightly gold. They
were more like ordinary apples, with their gold fuzzed over with
brown and some red streaks amid the brown. But they were
obviously gold, for all that, drooping heavy on the tree, just as they
were obviously growing and alive.
This looks too easy! Hayley thought suspiciously. But she
stretched up her hand to pick the nearest apple.
“Er—hem!” said the dragon Ladon.
He was coiled round the trunk of that tree. His scales were the
same crusty grey as the lichen there, which was why Hayley had
not seen him.



8
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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