The Wee Free Men (2 page)

Next to the book on sheep was a thin little volume called
Flowers of the Chalk
. The turf of the downs was full of tiny, intricate flowers, like cowslips and harebells, and even smaller ones that somehow survived the grazing. On the Chalk flowers had to be
tough and cunning to survive the sheep and the winter blizzards.

Someone had colored in the flowers a long time ago. On the flyleaf of the book was written in neat handwriting
Sarah Grizzel
, which had been Granny’s name before she was married. She had probably thought that Aching was at least better than Grizzel.

And finally there was
The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales
, so old that it belonged to an age when there were far more
e
’s around.

Tiffany stood on a chair and took it down. She turned the pages until she found the one she was looking for and stared at it for a while. Then she put the book back, replaced the chair, and opened the crockery cupboard.

She found a soup plate, went over to a drawer, took out the tape measure her mother used for dressmaking, and measured the plate.

“Hmm,” she said. “Eight inches. Why didn’t they just
say
?”

She unhooked the largest frying pan, the one that could cook breakfast for half a dozen people all at once, and took some candies from the jar on the dresser and put them in an old paper bag. Then, to Wentworth’s sullen bewilderment, she took him by a sticky hand and headed back down toward the stream.

Things still looked very normal down there, but she was not going to let
that
fool her. All the trout had fled, and the birds weren’t singing.

She found a place on the riverbank with the right-sized bush. Then she found a stone and hammered a piece of wood into the ground as hard as she could, close to the edge of the water, and tied the bag of sweets to it. Tiffany was the kind of child who always carried a piece of string.

“Candy, Wentworth,” she shouted.

She gripped the frying pan and stepped smartly behind the bush.

Wentworth trotted over to the sweets and tried to pick up the bag. It wouldn’t move.

“I wanna go-a
toy-lut
!” he yelled, because it was a threat that usually worked. His fat fingers scrabbled at the knots.

Tiffany watched the water carefully. Was it getting darker? Was it getting greener? Was that just waterweed down there? Were those bubbles just a trout, laughing?

No.

She ran out of her hiding place with the frying pan swinging like a bat. The screaming monster, leaping out of the water, met the frying pan coming the other way with a clang.

It was a good clang, with the
oiyoiyoioioioioioinnnnnggggggg
that is the mark of a clang well done.

The creature hung there for a moment, a few teeth and bits of green weed splashing into the water, then slid down slowly and sank with some massive bubbles.

The water cleared and was once again the same old river, shallow and icy cold and floored with pebbles.

“Wanna wanna
sweeties
!” screamed Wentworth, who never noticed anything else in the presence of sweets.

Tiffany undid the string and gave them to him. He ate them far too quickly, as he always did with sweets. She waited until he was sick, then went back home in a thoughtful state of mind.

In the reeds, quite low down, small voices whispered:

“Crivens, Wee Bobby, did yer no’ see that?”

“Aye. We’d better offski an’ tell the Big Man we’ve found the hag.”

Miss Tick was running up the dusty road. Witches don’t like to be seen running. It looks unprofessional. It’s also not done to be seen carrying things, and she had her tent on her back.

She was also trailing clouds of steam. Witches dry out from the inside.

“It had all those teeth!” said the mystery voice, this time from her hat.

“I know!” snapped Miss Tick.

“And she just hauled off and hit it!”

“Yes. I
know
.”

“Just like that!”

“Yes. Very impressive,” said Miss Tick. She was getting out of breath. Besides, they were already on early slopes of the downs now, and she wasn’t good on chalk. A wandering witch likes firm ground under her, not a rock so soft you could cut it with a knife.

“Impressive?” said the voice. “She used her
brother
as
bait
!”

“Amazing, wasn’t it?” said Miss Tick. “Such quick thinking…oh, no…” She stopped running and leaned against a field wall as a wave of dizziness hit her.

“What’s happening? What’s happening?” said the voice from the hat. “I nearly fell off!”

“It’s this wretched chalk! I can feel it already! I can do magic on honest soil, and rock is always fine, and I’m not too bad on clay, even…but chalk’s neither one thing nor the other! I’m very
sensitive
to geology, you know.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” said the voice.

“Chalk…is a hungry soil. I don’t really have much power on chalk.”

The owner of the voice, who was hidden, said: “Are you going to fall over?”

“No, no! It’s just the magic that doesn’t work.”

Miss Tick did not look like a witch. Most witches don’t, at least the ones who wander from place to place. Looking like a witch
can be dangerous when you walk among the uneducated. And for that reason she didn’t wear any occult jewelry, or have a glowing magical knife or a silver goblet with a pattern of skulls all around it, or carry a broomstick with sparks coming out of it, all of which are tiny hints that there may be a witch around. Her pockets never carried anything more magical than a few twigs, maybe a piece of string, a coin or two, and, of course, a lucky charm.

Everyone in the country carried lucky charms, and Miss Tick had worked out that if you didn’t have one, people would suspect that you
were
a witch. You had to be a bit cunning to be a witch.

Miss Tick did have a pointy hat, but it was a stealth hat and pointed only when she wanted it to.

The one thing in her bag that might have made anyone suspicious was a very small, grubby booklet entitled
An Introduction to Escapology, by the Great Williamson
. If one of the risks of your job is being thrown into a pond with your hands tied together, then the ability to swim thirty yards underwater, fully clothed, plus the ability to lurk under the weeds breathing air through a hollow reed, count as nothing if you aren’t also
amazingly
good with knots.

“You can’t do magic here?” said the voice in the hat.

“No, I can’t,” said Miss Tick.

She looked up at the sounds of jingling. A strange procession was coming up the white road. It was mostly made up of donkeys pulling small carts with brightly painted covers on them. People walked alongside the carts, dusty to the waist. They were all men, they wore bright robes—or robes, at least, that had been bright before being trailed through mud and dust for years—and every one of them wore a strange black square hat.

Miss Tick smiled.

They looked like tinkers, but there wasn’t one among them, she
knew, who could mend a kettle. What they did was sell invisible things. And after they’d sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but often didn’t want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked.

“I can’t
do
,” said Miss Tick, straightening up. “But I
can
teach!”

Tiffany worked for the rest of the morning in the dairy. There was cheese that needed doing.

There was bread and jam for lunch. Her mother said, “The teachers are coming to town today. You can go, if you’ve done your chores.”

Tiffany agreed that, yes, there were one or two things she’d quite like to know more about.

“Then you can have half a dozen carrots and an egg. I daresay they could do with an egg, poor things,” said her mother.

Tiffany took them with her after lunch and went to get an egg’s worth of education.

Most boys in the village grew up to do the same jobs as their fathers or, at least, some other job somewhere in the village where someone’s father would teach them as they went along. The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody’s wife. They were also expected to be able to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys.

However, everyone also felt that there were a few other things that even the boys ought to know, to stop them wasting time wondering about details like “What’s on the other side of the mountains?” and “How come rain falls out of the sky?”

Every family in the village bought a copy of the Almanack every year, and a sort of education came from that. It was big and thick and printed somewhere far off, and it had lots of details about
things like phases of the moon and the right time to plant beans. It also contained a few prophesies about the coming year, and mentioned faraway places with names like Klatch and Hersheba. Tiffany had seen a picture of Klatch in the Almanack. It showed a camel standing in a desert. She’d only found out what both those names were because her mother had told her. And that was Klatch, a camel in a desert. She’d wondered if there wasn’t a bit more to it, but it seemed that “Klatch = camel, desert” was all anyone knew.

And that was the trouble. If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go
on
asking questions.

The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth peddlers, fortune-tellers, and all the other travelers who sold things the people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful.

They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travelers and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like
corrugated iron
. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the math teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure, and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.

People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing, after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.

Today the brightly colored little booths and tents were pitched
in a field just outside the village. Behind them small square areas had been fenced off with high canvas walls and were patrolled by apprentice teachers looking for anyone trying to overhear Education without paying.

The first tent Tiffany saw had a sign that read:

JOGRAFFY
!
JOGRAFFY
!
JOGRAFFY!

FOR TODAY ONLY: ALL MAJOR LAND MASSES AND OCEANS

PLUS EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNO ABOUT GLASSIERS
!

ONE PENNY
,
OR ALL MAJOR VEJTABLES ACSEPTED
!

Tiffany had read enough to know that, while he might be a whiz at major land masses, this particular teacher could have done with some help from the man running the stall next door:

THE WONDERS OF PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING

1
ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY ABOUT THE COMMA
!

2
I BEFORE E COMPLETELY SORTED OUT
!

3
THE MYSTERY OF THE SEMICOLON REVEALED
!!!

4
SEE THE AMPERSAND
! (
SMALL EXTRA CHARGE
)

5
FUN WITH BRACKETS
!

**
WILL ACCEPT VEGETABLES, EGGS, AND CLEAN USED CLOTHING
**

The next stall along was decorated with scenes out of history, generally of kings cutting one another’s heads off and similar interesting highlights. The teacher in front was dressed in ragged red robes with rabbit-skin trimmings and wore an old top hat with flags stuck in it. He had a small megaphone that he aimed at Tiffany.

“The Death of Kings Through the Ages?” he said. “Very educational, lots of blood!”

“Not really,” said Tiffany.

“Oh, you’ve
got
to know where you’ve come from, miss,” said the teacher. “Otherwise how will you know where you’re going?”

“I come from a long line of Aching people,” said Tiffany. “And I think I’m moving on.”

She found what she was looking for at a booth hung with pictures of animals including, she was pleased to see, a camel. The sign said:

USEFUL CREATURES—TODAY: OUR FRIEND THE HEDGEHOG
!

She wondered how useful the thing in the river had been, but this looked like the only place to find out. A few children were waiting on the benches inside the booth for the lesson to begin, but the teacher was still standing out in front, in the hope of filling up the empty spaces.

“Hello, little girl,” he said, which was only his first big mistake. “I’m sure
you
want to know all about hedgehogs, eh?”

“I did this one last summer,” said Tiffany.

The man looked closer, and his grin faded. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember. You asked all those…little questions.”

“I would like a question answered today,” said Tiffany.