Chapter One
Harriet sat up, suddenly wide-awake. Whatever was that noise?
It was a rushing, tearing, swishing noise – just the sound a rocket makes on Guy Fawkes Night, yet much much louder. But this was the start of a midsummer day and – she looked at her watch – early too, not five o’clock yet.
She leaped out of bed and ran to the window.
The farmhouse and its buildings were tucked into the side of a gentle hill, and in the little flat valley below were two large fields, the nearer one green, the further one gold.
In the first, her father’s cows would normally have been waiting around the gateway for him to come and fetch them in for morning milking. But now the whole herd was galloping and buck-jumping around the pasture as though something had scared the wits out of them.
The second field was of wheat, almost ready for harvesting, that looked from the house above like a square golden blanket, glowing in the morning sunlight. But there seemed to be a hole in the blanket. In one corner of the wheatfield, Harriet could see, there was a perfect circle of flattened corn.
It took Harriet a quarter of an hour to dress and slip out of the house and run down the dewy hillside. By now the cows had quietened, and she ran through them to the wheatfield beyond, climbed over its gate and pushed through the standing corn to step into that perfect circle.
What had made it? What had made the noise that had woken her and terrified the cows? Whatever had happened in the field called Ten Acre on Longhanger Farm at the start of this July day?
Harriet walked into the middle of the circle. It was big, perhaps twenty metres across, and all the corn in it was squashed down to the ground, flat, as though an enormously heavy weight had rested there.
As she stood there now, in the stillness, with no sound but distant birdsong, a hare suddenly came out into the corn circle and stopped and sat up. It turned its head a little sideways, the better to see her.
Harriet stood stock-still. Aren’t you handsome, she thought, with your tawny coat and your black-tipped ears and your long hind legs. Don’t run away. I won’t hurt you.
For a moment the hare stayed where it was, watching her. Then, to her great surprise, it lolloped right up to her.
Surprise is one thing, but total amazement is quite another, and that was what Harriet next felt when all of a sudden the hare said, loudly and clearly, ‘Good morning.’
Harriet pinched herself, hard. Wake up, she thought. This whole thing is a dream, hares don’t talk, and then she said it aloud: ‘Hares don’t talk.’
‘I’m sure they don’t as a general rule,’ said the hare, ‘but I’m a rather unusual hare.’
‘You certainly are,’ said Harriet. ‘Are you anything to do with this corn circle?’
For a moment the hare didn’t answer but fell to grooming its face. Then it said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Harriet.’
‘Can you keep a secret, Harriet?’
‘Yes.’
‘I,’ said the hare, ‘am a visitor from outer space.’
‘You mean . . . this circle was made by your spacecraft?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you come from another planet?’
‘Yes. I come from Pars.’
‘Pars?’ said Harriet. ‘Is that near Mars?’
‘Oh no,’ said the hare. ‘Much much further away.’
‘But,’ said Harriet, ‘I thought that aliens were . . . well, little green men with four arms and eyes on stalks.’
‘Not far wrong,’ said the hare. ‘But you see, Harriet, we Partians have the ability to change. Imagine how strange your modern world here would seem to a caveman. Whatever would he make of microsurgery and satellite television and supersonic flight? You have to understand that on Pars we are as far ahead of you people on Earth as you are now ahead of the cavemen. One of the things we can do, for example, is to speak all earthly languages. But perhaps to you our most astonishing skill is that we have perfected the ability to change our shapes. When my colleagues left me here in this cornfield, I could, for instance, have decided to become a tiger (though that might have caused a bit of a stir in deepest Wiltshire) or a dog or a sheep or anything else you like. But I chose to change myself into a hare.’
‘Why?’ asked Harriet.
‘Because in this world the hare has always been thought to be a beast of magic. People said that hares were witches and could melt away and reappear, to dance and play in the light of the moon. (Incidentally some still say that if you look at the full moon, it is not a man’s face that you see there, but the shape of a hare.) And others believed that hares could change their sex at will.’
‘Oh,’ said Harriet. ‘Which are you at the moment?’
‘I,’ said the hare, ‘am a buck and fully intend to remain so, for the length of my stay on Earth.’
Harriet felt suddenly dreadfully disappointed. Here she was, in her father’s wheatfield, deep in conversation with a magic hare, but perhaps he would only be around for a very short time.
‘How long are you staying?’ she said.
‘It depends,’ said the hare, ‘on how much I like it here. This is actually my first Earth holiday.’
‘You’ve come here for a holiday?’ asked Harriet.
‘Oh yes,’ said the hare.
‘Everyone on Pars takes a holiday abroad every so often. Interplanetary travel is so quick and easy nowadays, you know – to anywhere in the solar system that you fancy. I’ve been to a number of heavenly bodies but never to Earth. I just fancied going somewhere quite different this year, somewhere rather primitive, where the technology was not very far advanced and one could relax among the simple, ignorant natives. So I came here. But that’s enough about me, Harriet. Tell me a bit about yourself. All I know is your name.’
‘Well,’ said Harriet, ‘I’m nearly eight and I go to the village school, and my dad’s a farmer and we’ve got cows and some sheep and some chickens, and Dad works the farm all by himself except sometimes he gets a relief milker in so that we can have a bit of a holiday.’
‘But your mother helps with the animals, I expect?’ said the hare.
‘My mother’s dead,’ said Harriet. ‘She died when I was quite little. I don’t really remember her. But I help Dad. I look after the hens, and I feed the calves, and this year I bottled three lambs. They’d lost their mother too.’
‘You like animals,’ said the hare.
‘Oh yes. Specially my pony. She’s a strawberry roan, twelve and a half hands. She’s called Breeze. By the way, I don’t know your name.’
‘Nor do I,’ said the hare, ‘if you see what I mean. On Pars I had a perfectly good name, but I really haven’t given a thought about what to be called now that I am a specimen of Lepus europaeus occidentalis.’
‘What?’
‘Latin name for a hare.’
‘You speak Latin too?’
‘I told you. Partians are omnilingual.’
‘Oh,’ said Harriet. ‘Well, what am I going to call you?’
‘Whatever you like,’ said the hare. ‘You choose.’
Harriet thought.
A visitor from outer space that speaks all languages, that can transform itself into any shape, a creature of witchcraft, a magician. He’s a wizard, that’s what he is.
‘Wiz,’ she said.
The hare, who had remained sitting in the middle of the corn circle throughout the whole of this conversation, stood up on his long hind legs. His ears raised, his large brown eyes enquiring, he looked the very picture of astonishment.
‘Wiz?’ he said.
‘Yes. That’s what I shall call you.’
‘Oh, very well,’ sighed Harriet’s hare. ‘Wiz it is.’
