Diana Wynne Jones - The Homeward Bounders

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The Homeward

Bounders

Diana Wynne Jones

A 3S digital back-up edition v1.0

click for scan notes and proofing history

Contents

|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|

A Greenwillow Book

Also by Diana Wynne Jones

Archer’s Goon

Aunt Maria

Believing Is Seeing: Seven Stories

Castle in the Air

Dark Lord of Derkholm

Dogsbody

Eight Days of Luke

Fire and Hemlock

Hexwood

Hidden Turnings: A Collection of Stories Through

Time and Space

Howl’s Moving Castle

The Ogre Downstairs

Power of Three

Stopping for a Spell

A Tale of Time City

The Time of the Ghost

Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories

Year of the Griffin

THE WORLDS OF CHRESTOMANCI

Book 1: Charmed Life

Book 2: The Lives of Christopher Chant

Book 3: The Magicians of Caprona

Book 4: Witch Week

Mixed Magics: Four Tales of Chrestomanci

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1 (Contains

books 1 and 2)

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 2 (Contains

books 3 and 4)

THE DALEMARK QUARTET

Book 1: Cart and Cwidder

Book 2: Drowned Ammet

Book 3: The Spellcoats

Book 4: The Crown of Dalemark

It isn’t true what they say about your life passing

before you. You’re too busy. You’re at it full time, bashing

at the water with your arms and screaming “Help!” to

nothing and nobody. And too busy keeping afloat. I

hadn’t the least idea how to swim. What I did was a sort

of crazy jumping up and down, standing in the water,

with miles more water down underneath me, bending

and stretching like a mad frog, and it kept me up. It also

turned me round in a circle. Every way was water, with

sky at the end of it. Nothing in sight at all, except flaring

sunlit water on one side and heaving gray water on the

other.

Harper Trophy® is a registered trademark of

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

The Homeward Bounders

reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written

permission except in the case of brief quotations

embodied in critical articles and reviews. Printed in the

United States of America. For information address

HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of

HarperCollins Publishers, 1360 Avenue of the Americas,

New York, NY 10019.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jones, Diana Wynne.

The homeward bounders-

p. cm.

“Greenwillow Books.”

Summary: Once he becomes a pawn in a game played

by a powerful group he calls Them, 12-year-old Jamie is

repeatedly catapulted through space and time.

ISBN 0-06-029886-3 – ISBN 0-06-447353-8 (pbk. )

[1. Space and time—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7. J684Ho 81-1905

[Fic] AACR2

First Harper Trophy edition, 2002

Visit us on the World Wide Web!

www.harperteen.com

To Thomas Tuckett,

with thanks for advice

about War Gaming

^ »

Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman? No? Nor of the

Wandering Jew? Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you about them in

the right place; and about Helen and Joris, Adam and Konstam,

and Vanessa, the sister Adam wanted to sell as a slave. They were

all Homeward Bounders like me. And I’ll tell about Them too, who

made us that way.

All in good time. I’ll tell about this machine I’m talking into first.

It’s one of Theirs. They have everything. It has a high piece in front

that comes to a neat square with a net over it. You talk into that.

As soon as you talk, a little black piece at the back starts hopping

and jabbering up and down like an excited idiot, and paper starts

rolling over a roller from somewhere underneath. The hopping bit

jabbers along the paper, printing out exactly the words you say as

fast as you can say them. And it puts in commas and full-stops and

things of its own accord. It doesn’t seem to worry it what you say. I

called it some rude words when I was trying it out, just to see, and

it wrote them all down, with exclamation marks after them.

When it’s written about a foot of talk, it cuts that off and shoots

it out into a tray in front, so that you can read it over, or take it

away if you want. And it does this without ever stopping jabbering.

If you stop talking, it goes on hopping up and down for a while, in

an expectant sort of way, waiting for you to go on. If you don’t go

on, it slows down and stops, looking sad and disappointed. It put me

off at first, doing that. I had to practice with it. I don’t like it to

stop. The silence creeps in then. I’m the only one in the Place now.

Everyone has gone, even him—the one whose name I don’t know.

My name is Jamie Hamilton and I was a perfectly ordinary boy

once. I am still, in a way. I look about thirteen. But you wouldn’t

believe how old I am. I was twelve when this happened to me. A

year is an awful long time to a Homeward Bounder.

I really enjoyed my twelve years of ordinary life. Home to me is a

big city, and always will be. We lived in a really big, dirty, slummy

city. The back of our house looked out on to a lovely cosy courtyard,

where everyone came out and talked in fine weather, and everyone

knew everyone else. The front of our house was our grocery shop,

and all the neighbors shopped there. We were open every day,

including Sunday. My mother was a bit of a sharp woman. She was

always having rows in the courtyard, usually about credit. She used

to say the neighbors expected to buy things for nothing just because

they lived in the court, and she told them so to their faces. But no

one could have been kinder than my mother when a neighbor’s

daughter was run over by a brewer’s wagon. I often hope they were

as kind to her over me.

My father was big and soft-spoken and kind all the time. He used

to let people buy things for nothing. When my mother objected, he

used to say, “Now, Margaret, they needed it.” And usually that

stopped the argument.

The arguments my father couldn’t seem to stop were always over

me. The main one was because I was in my last year at school.

School cost money. My school cost rather more than my father

could afford, because it had pretensions to grandeur. It was called

Churt House, and it was in a dreary building like a chapel, and I

remember it as if it were yesterday. We had all sorts of

pretend-posh customs—like calling our teachers Dominies and a

School Song—and that was why my mother liked it.

My mother desperately wanted me to grow up to be something

better than a grocer. She was convinced I was clever, and she

wanted a doctor in the family. She saw me as a famous surgeon,

consulted by Royalty, so she naturally wanted me to stay on at

school. My father was dead against it. He said he hadn’t the money.

He wanted me at home, to help in the shop. They argued about it

all the last year I was at home.

Me—I don’t know which side I was on. School bored me stiff. All

that sitting and learning lists: lists of spelling, lists of tables, lists of

History dates, lists of Geography places. I’d rather do anything else,

even now, than learn a list. About the only part of school I enjoyed

was the feud we had with the really posh school up the road. It was

called Queen Elizabeth Academy, and the boys there wore shiny

hats and learned music and things. They despised us—rightly—for

pretending to be better than we were, and we despised them just as

much for the silly hats and the music. We used to have some really

good fights on the way home. But the rest of school bored me solid.

On the other hand, the shop bored me almost as much. I’d always

rather leave the shop to my brother, Rob. He was younger than me.

He thought it was the greatest treat on earth to count change and

put up sugar in blue paper bags. My little sister, Elsie, liked the

shop too, only she’d always rather play football with me.

Football was the thing I really loved. We used to play in the back

alley, between our court and the one behind, our court stick the

kids from the other one. That usually boiled down to me and Elsie

against the two Macready boys. We were the ones who always

played. We had to have special rules because the space was so

small, and more special rules for washing days, because people’s

coppers in the wash-houses on either side filled the whole alley with

steam. It was like playing in fog. I was forever landing the ball in

someone’s washing. That made the other arguments my mother

had that my father couldn’t settle. She was always having rows

about what I’d done with the ball this time, or with Mrs. Macready

because I’d led her boys into bad ways. I never was a saint. If it

wasn’t football, it was something else that was a laugh to do. My

mother always tried to stick up for me, but it was a lost cause.

The other thing I used to love was exploring round the city. I

used to do it on my way to school, or coming home, so that my

mother wouldn’t know. This is where They come in, so don’t get

impatient.

That year I was taking a new bit of the city every week and

going round it till I knew it. Then I’d move on. I told you a city is

Home to me. Most of it was just like it was round our court,

crowded and cheery and grimy. But I used to love the market.

Everyone shouting like mad, and oranges to nick off every barrow,

and big gas flares over all the stalls. I saw one catch fire one time.

Then there was the canal and the railway. They used to go out of

their way to crisscross one another, it always seemed to me. Trains

were clanking over the water every hundred yards, or else barges

were getting dragged under iron bridges—except for one bit, where

the canal went over the railway for a change on a line of high

arches like stilts, with houses packed underneath the arches. Near

that was the smart bit with the good shops. I used to love the smart

bit in winter in the dark, when there were lights all wriggling down

into the wet road, and posh people in carriages going up and down.

Then there were the quiet bits. You’d come upon them suddenly,

round a corner—gray, quiet parts that everyone seemed to have

forgotten.

The quiet bit that was the end of me was right near the center. It

was round behind the smart bit, almost under the place where the

canal went up on its stilts. I came at it through a sort of park first.

It was a private park. I wasn’t particular about trespassing. I

suppose you’d call the place a garden. But I was really ignorant in

those days. The only other grass I’d seen was in a park, so I thought

of this place as a park when I came over the wall into it.

It was a triangular green place. Though it was right in the heart

of the city, it had more trees—and bushes—in it than I’d ever seen

all together in those days. It creased down to a hollow in the

middle, where there was grass, smooth mown grass. The moment I

landed over the wall, the quiet shut me in. It was peaceful in a way,

but it was more like going deaf. I couldn’t hear so much as a

whisper from the railway or the roads.

Funny! I thought, and looked up to make sure the canal was still

there. And it was there, striding across the sky in front of me. I was

glad, because the place was so strange that I wouldn’t have been

surprised to find the whole city had vanished.

Which goes to show you should always trust your instincts. I

didn’t know a thing about Them then, or the ways of the worlds,

but I had got it right. By instinct.

What I should have done was climb back over that wall at once. I

wish I had. But you know a bit what I was like by now, and I don’t

think you would have gone away either. It was so strange, this

silence. And there seemed no harm in it. I knew I was scared stiff,

really, but I told myself that was just the way you feel when you’re

trespassing. So, with my back like a mass of soft little creeping

caterpillars, I went down through the trees to the mown grass at

the bottom.

There was a little white statue there. Now, I’m not artistic. I saw

it was of a fellow with no clothes on—I always wonder why it’s Art

to take your clothes off: they never put in the goose pimples—and

this fellow was wrapped in chains. He didn’t look as if he was

enjoying himself, and small wonder. But the thing that really

interested me was the way the artist had managed to carve the

chains out of stone, all linked together in one piece, just as if they

were real chains. I moved one to see, and it was just like a real

chain, only made of stone. When I lifted it, I found it was fastened

to the same place as all the other chains, down at one side, into the

ring of what looked like a ship’s anchor, and this anchor was carved

half buried in the white stone the statue was standing on.

That was all I noticed, not being artistic, because by that time I

could see a stone building up among the trees at the wide end of the

park. I went there, very softly, hiding among the trees and bushes.

My back was still creeping, but I’d got used to that by then.

When I got there, I found it was quite a big building, like a small

castle, built out of pinkish gray stone. It was triangular, like the

park. The part I was looking at was the pointed end. It had

battlements along the top, and some quite big windows in the

ground floor. You could see it had been modernized. I slithered

round until I could look in one of the big windows. I couldn’t get

close, because there was a neat gravel terrace running round it

under the windows. So what I did see was sort of smeary and dark,

with the reflections of trees over it. I thought that was because I

was ten feet away. I know better now.

I saw a fellow inside who seemed to be wearing a sort of cloak.

Anyway, it was long and grayish and flowing, and it had a hood.

The hood was not up. It was bunched back round his neck, but even

so I couldn’t see much of his face. You never do see Their faces. I

thought it was just the reflections in the window then, and I craned

forward to see. He was leaning over a sort of slope covered with

winking lights and buttons. I knew it was a machine of some sort. I

might have been ignorant, but I had climbed up into the signal box

on the railway under the canal arch, and I had been shown the

printing press in the court up the street, so I knew it must be a

kind of machine I didn’t know, but a bit like both and a lot

smoother-looking. As I looked, the fellow put out a hand and very

firmly and deliberately punched several buttons on the machine.

Then he turned and seemed to say something across his bunched

hood. Another fellow in the same sort of cloak came into sight. They

stood with Their backs to me, watching something on the machine.

Watching like anything. There was a terrible intentness to the way

They stood.

It made me hold my breath. I nearly burst before one of Them

nodded, then the other. They moved off then, in a cheerful busy

way, to somewhere out of sight of the window. I wished I could see.

I knew They were going to do something important. But I never

saw. I only felt. The ground suddenly trembled, and the trees, and

the triangular castle. They sort of shook, the way hot air does. I

trembled too, and felt a peculiar twitch, as if I’d been pulled to one

side all over. Then the feeling stopped. Nothing more happened.

After a moment, I crept away, until I came to the wall round the

park. I was scared—yes—but I was furiously interested too. I kept

wondering what made that twitch, and why everything had

trembled.

As soon as I was over the wall again, it was as if my ears had

popped. I could hear trains clanking and traffic rumbling—almost a

roar of city noise — and that made me more interested than ever. I

dropped down into the side street beyond the wall and went along

to the busy street where the front of the castle was. On this side

the castle was blacker-looking and guarded from the pavement by

an iron paling like a row of harpoons. Behind the railings, the

windows were all shuttered, in dark steel shutters. The upper

windows were just slits, but they had harpoons across them too.

I looked up and I thought. No way to get in here. Yes, I was

thinking of getting in from the moment I felt that twitch. I had to

know what strange silent thing was going on inside. I went along

the railings to the front door. It was shut, and black, and not very

big. But I could tell, somehow, that it was massively heavy. There

was an engraved plate screwed to the middle of the door. I didn’t

dare go up the four steps to the door, but I could see the plate quite

well from the pavement. It was done in gold, on black, and it said:

THE OLD FORT

MASTERS Of THE REAL AND ANCIENT GAME

And underneath was the stamped-out shape of a ship’s anchor.

That was all. It had me almost dancing with interest and

frustration.

I had to go home then, or my mother would have known I was

out. She never did like me to hang around in the streets. Of course

I couldn’t tell her where I’d been, but I was so curious that I did ask

a few casual questions.

“I was reading a book today, ” I said to her. “And there was

something in it I didn’t know. What’s Masters of the Real and

Ancient Game?”

“Sounds like deer hunting to me, ” my mother said, pouring out

the tea. “Take this cup through to your father in the shop.”

I took the tea through and asked my father. He had a different

theory. “Sounds like one of those secret societies, ” he said. My hair

began to prickle and try to stand up. “You know—silly stuff, ” my

father said. “Grown men swearing oaths and acting daft

mumbo-jumbo.”

“This one’s at the Old Fort, ” I said.

“Where’s that?” said my father. “Never heard of it.”

Mumbo-jumbo, I thought. Well, those cloaks were that all right,

but it doesn’t explain the machines and the twitch. Next morning,

for a wonder, I went straight to school and asked my teacher before

lessons. He didn’t know either. I could tell he didn’t, because he

gave me a long talk, until the bell went, all about how real meant

royal and that could apply both to tennis and to deer hunting, and

how the old kings kept whole lumps of country to themselves to

hunt deer in, and then on about Freemasons, in case that was what

it meant. When the bell went, I asked him quickly about the Old

Fort. And he had never heard of it, but he told me to go and ask at

the Public Library, if I was interested.

I went to the Library on the way home from school. The

Librarian there might have been my teacher’s twin. He wore the

same sort of beard and half-moon spectacles and went on and on in

the same way. And he didn’t know either. He gave me a book on

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