The Wee Free Men (6 page)

There was only one place where it was possible for someone in a large family to be private, and that was in the privy. It was a three-holer, and it was where everyone went if they wanted to be alone for a while.

There was a candle in there, and last year’s Almanack hanging on a string. The printers knew their readership and printed the Almanack on soft, thin paper.

Tiffany lit the candle, made herself comfortable, and looked at the book of fairy tales. The moon gibbous’d at her through the crescent-shaped hole cut in the door.

She’d never really liked the book. It seemed to her that it tried to tell her what to do and what to think. Don’t stray from the path, don’t open that door, but hate the wicked witch because she is
wicked.
Oh, and believe that shoe size is a good way of choosing a wife.

A lot of the stories were highly suspicious, in her opinion. There was the one that ended when the two good children pushed the wicked witch into her own oven. Tiffany had worried about that after all that trouble with Mrs. Snapperly. Stories like this stopped people thinking properly, she was sure. She’d read that one and thought, Excuse me?
No one
has an oven big enough to get a whole person in, and what made the children think they could just walk around eating people’s houses in any case? And why does some boy too stupid to know a cow is worth a lot more than five beans have the
right
to murder a giant and steal all his gold? Not
to mention commit an act of ecological vandalism? And some girl who can’t tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family. The stories
weren’t real
. But Mrs. Snapperly had died because of stories.

She flicked past page after page, looking for the right picture. Because although the stories made her angry, the pictures, ah, the pictures were the most wonderful things she’d ever seen.

She turned a page and there it was.

Most of the pictures of fairies were not very impressive. Frankly, they looked like a small girls’ ballet class that’d just had to run through a bramble patch. But this one…was different. The colors were strange, and there were no shadows. Giant grasses and daisies grew everywhere, so the fairies must have been quite small, but they
looked
big. They looked like rather strange humans. They certainly didn’t look much like fairies. Hardly any of them had wings. They were odd shapes, in fact. In fact, some of them looked like monsters. The girls in the tutus wouldn’t have stood much chance.

And the odd thing was that, alone of all the fairy pictures in the book,
this
one looked as if it had been done by an artist who had painted what was in front of him. The other pictures, the ballet girls and the romper-suit babies, had a made-up, syrupy look. This one didn’t. This one said that the artist had been there…

…at least in his head, Tiffany thought.

She concentrated on the bottom left-hand corner, and there it was. She’d seen it before, but you had to know where to look. It was definitely a little red-haired man, naked except for a kilt and a skinny vest, scowling out of the picture. He looked very angry. And…Tiffany moved the candle to see more clearly…he was
definitely
making a gesture with his hand.

Even if you didn’t know it was a rude one, it was easy to guess.

She heard voices. She pushed the door open with her foot to hear them better, because a witch always listens to other people’s conversations.

The sound was coming from the other side of the hedge, where there was a field that should have been full of nothing but sheep waiting to go to market. Sheep are not known for their conversation. She snuck out carefully in the misty dawn and found a small gap that had been made by rabbits, which just gave her a good enough view.

There was a ram grazing near the hedge, and the conversation was coming from it or, rather, somewhere in the long grass underneath it. There seemed to be at least four speakers, who sounded bad-tempered.

“Crivens! We wanna coo beastie, no’ a ship beastie!”

“Ach, one’s as goo’ as t’other! C’mon, lads, a’ grab aholt o’ a leg!”

“Aye, all the coos are inna shed, we tak what we can!”

“Keep it doon, keep it doon, will ya!”

“Ach, who’s listenin’? Okay, lads—yan…tan…teth’ra!”

The sheep rose a little in the air, and bleated in alarm as it started to go across the field backward. Tiffany thought she saw a hint of red hair in the grass around its legs, but that vanished as the ram was carried away into the mist.

She pushed her way through the hedge, ignoring the twigs that scratched at her. Granny Aching wouldn’t have let anyone get away with stealing a sheep, even if they
were
invisible.

But the mist was thick, and now Tiffany heard noises from the henhouse.

The disappearing-backward sheep could wait. Now the
hens
needed her. A fox had got in twice in the last two weeks, and the
hens that hadn’t been taken were barely laying.

Tiffany ran through the garden, catching her nightdress on pea sticks and gooseberry bushes, and flung open the henhouse door.

There were no flying feathers, and nothing like the panic a fox would cause. But the chickens were clucking excitedly, and Prunes, the cockerel, was strutting nervously up and down. One of the hens looked a bit embarrassed. Tiffany lifted it up quickly.

There were two tiny blue, red-haired men underneath. They were each holding an egg clasped in their arms. They looked up with very guilty expressions.

“Ach, no!” said one. “It’s the bairn!
She’s
the hag…”

“You’re stealing our eggs,” said Tiffany. “How dare you! And I’m
not
a hag!”

The little men looked at one another, and then at the eggs.

“Whut eiggs?” said one.

“The eggs you are holding,” said Tiffany meaningfully.

“Whut? Oh, these? These are
eiggs
, are they?” said the one who’d spoken first, looking at the eggs as if he’d never seen them before. “There’s a thing. And there was us thinking they was, er, stones.”

“Stones,” said the other one nervously.

“We crawled under yon chookie for a wee bitty warmth,” said the first one. “And there was all these things, we though’ they was stones, which was why the puir fowl was clucking all the time…”

“Clucking,” said the second one, nodding vigorously.

“…so we took pity on the puir thing and—”

“
Put
…the…eggs…
back
,” said Tiffany slowly.

The one who hadn’t been doing much talking nudged the other one. “Best do as she says,” he said. “It’s a’ gang agley. Ye canna cross an Aching, an’ this one’s a hag. She dinged Jenny, an’
no one ha’ ever done
that
afore.”

“Aye, I didna think o’ that….”

Both of the tiny men put the eggs back very carefully. One of them even breathed on the shell of his and made a show of polishing it with the ragged hem of his kilt.

“No harm done, mistress,” he said. He looked at the other man. And then they vanished. But there was a suspicion of a red blur in the air, and some straw by the henhouse door flew up in the air.

“And I’m a miss!” shouted Tiffany. She lowered the hen back onto the eggs and went to the door. “And I’m
not
a hag! Are you fairies of some sort? And what about our ship? I mean, sheep?” she added.

There was no answer but a clanking of buckets near the house, which meant that other people were getting up.

She rescued the fairy tales, blew out the candle, and made her way into the house. Her mother was lighting the fire and asked what she was doing up, and she said that she’d heard a commotion in the henhouse and had gone out to see if it was the fox again. That wasn’t a lie. In fact, it was completely true.

Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn’t divide easily into “true” and “false,” but instead could be things that people needed to know at the moment and things that they didn’t need to know at the moment.

Besides, she wasn’t sure what
she
knew at the moment.

There was porridge for breakfast. She ate it hurriedly, meaning to get back out into the paddock and see about that sheep. There might be tracks in the grass, or something….

She looked up, not knowing why.

Ratbag had been asleep in front of the oven. Now he was sitting
up, alert. Tiffany felt a prickling on the back of her neck and tried to see what the cat was looking at.

On the dresser was a row of blue-and-white jars that weren’t very useful for anything. They’d been left to her mother by an elderly aunt, and she was proud of them because they looked nice but were completely useless. There was little room on the farm for useless things that looked nice, so they were treasured.

Ratbag was watching the lid of one of them. It was rising very slowly, and under it was a hint of red hair and two beady, staring eyes.

It lowered again when Tiffany gave it a long stare. A moment later she heard a faint rattle, and when she looked up, the pot was wobbling back and forth and there was a little cloud of dust rising along the top of the dresser. Ratbag was looking around in bewilderment.

They certainly were
very
fast.

She ran out into the paddock and looked around. The mist was off the grass now, and skylarks were rising on the downs.

“If that sheep doesn’t come back
this minute
,” she shouted at the sky, “there will be a
reckoning
!”

The sound bounced off the hills. And then she heard, very faint but close by, the sound of small voices:

“Whut did the hag say?”
said the first voice.

“She said there’d be a reck’ning’!”

“Oh, waily, waily, waily! We’re in trouble noo!”

Tiffany looked around, face red with anger.

“We have a
duty
,” she said, to the air and the grass.

It was something Granny Aching had said once, when Tiffany had been crying about a lamb. She’d said: “We are as gods to the beasts o’ the field, my jiggit. We order the time o’ their birth and
the time o’ their death. Between times, we ha’ a duty.”

“We have a duty,” Tiffany repeated, more softly. She glared around the field. “I know you can hear me, whoever you are. If that sheep doesn’t come back, there will be…trouble….”

The larks sang over the sheepfolds, making the silence deeper.

Tiffany had to do the chores before she had any more time to herself. That meant feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs, and feeling slightly proud of the fact that there were two more than there might otherwise have been. It meant fetching six buckets of water from the well and filling the log basket by the stove, but she put those jobs off because she didn’t like doing them much. She did quite like churning butter, though. It gave her time to think.

When I’m a witch with a pointy hat and a broomstick, she thought as she pumped the handle, I’ll wave my hand and the butter will come just like
that
. And any little red-headed devils who even
think
about taking our beasts will be—

There was a slopping sound behind her, where she’d lined up the six buckets to take to the well.

One of them was now full of water, which was still sloshing backward and forward.

She went back to the churning as if nothing had happened but stopped after a while and went over to the flour bin. She took a small handful of flour and dusted it over the doorstep, and then went back to the churning.

A few minutes later there was another watery sound behind her. When she turned around, there was, yes, another full bucket. And in the flour on the stone doorstep were just two lines of footprints, one leading out of the dairy and one coming back.

It was all Tiffany could do to lift one of the heavy wooden
buckets when it was full.

So, she thought, they are immensely strong as well as being incredibly fast. I’m really being very calm about this.

She looked up at the big wooden beams that ran across the room, and a little dust fell down, as if something had quickly moved out of the way.

I think I ought to put a stop to this right now, she thought. On the other hand, there’s no harm in waiting until
all
the buckets are filled up.

“And then I’ll have to fill the log box in the scullery,” she said aloud. Well, it was worth a try.

She went back to the churning and didn’t bother to turn her head when she heard four more sloshes behind her. Nor did she look around when she heard little
whooshwhoosh
noises and the clatter of logs in the box. She turned to see only when the noise stopped.

The log box was full up to the ceiling, and all the buckets were full. The patch of flour was a mass of footprints.

She stopped churning. She had a feeling that eyes were watching her, a
lot
of eyes.

“Er…thank you,” she said. No, that wasn’t right. She sounded nervous. She let go of the butter paddle and stood up, trying to look as fierce as possible.

“And what about our sheep?” she said. “I won’t believe you’re really sorry until I see the sheep come back!”

There was a bleating from the paddock. She ran out to the bottom of the garden and looked through the hedge.

The sheep
was
coming back, backward and at high speed. It jerked to a halt a little way from the hedge and dropped down as the little men let it go. One of the red-headed men appeared for a
moment on its head. He huffed on a horn, polished it with his kilt, and vanished in a blur.