The Wee Free Men (9 page)

Things were a lot easier after that. The bailiff was a little less unpleasant when rents were late, the Baron was a little more polite to people, and Tiffany’s father said one night after two beers that the Baron had been shown what happens when sheep rise up, and things might be different one day, and her mother hissed at him not to talk like that because you never knew who was listening.

And one day Tiffany heard him telling her mother, quietly: “’Twas an old shepherds’ trick, that’s all. An old ewe will fight like a lion for her lamb, we all know that.”

That was how it worked. No magic at all. But that time it had been magic. And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done….

The Nac Mac Feegle were watching Tiffany carefully, with occasional longing glances at the bottle of Special Sheep Liniment.

I haven’t even found the witches’ school, she thought. I don’t know a single spell. I don’t even have a pointy hat. My talents are an instinct for making cheese and not running around panicking when things go wrong. Oh, and I’ve got a toad.

And I don’t understand half of what these little men are saying. But they know who’s taken my brother.

Somehow I don’t think the Baron would have a clue how to deal with this. I don’t, either, but I think I can be clueless in more sensible ways.

“I…remember a lot of things about Granny Aching,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

“The kelda sent us,” said Rob Anybody. “She sensed the Quin comin’. She kenned there wuz going to be trouble. She tole us, it’s gonna be bad, find the new hag who’s kin to Granny Aching, she’ll ken what to do.”

Tiffany looked at the hundreds of expectant faces. Some of the Feegle had feathers in their hair and necklaces of mole teeth. You couldn’t tell someone with half his face dyed dark blue and a sword as big as he was that you weren’t really a witch. You couldn’t disappoint someone like that.

“And will you help me get my brother back?” she said. The Feegles’ expressions didn’t change. She tried again. “Can you help me steal my brother back from the Quin?”

Hundred of small yet ugly faces brightened up considerably.

“Ach,
noo
yer talkin’
oour
language,” said Rob Anybody.

“Not…quite,” said Tiffany. “Can you all just wait a moment? I’ll just pack some things,” she said, trying to sound as if she knew what she was doing. She put the cork back on the bottle of Special
Sheep Liniment. The Nac Mac Feegle sighed.

She darted back into the kitchen, took some bandages and ointments out of the medicine box, put the bottle of Special Sheep Liniment into her apron pocket, because her father said it always did
him
good, and, as an afterthought, added the book
Diseases of the Sheep
and picked up the frying pan. Both might come in useful.

The little men were nowhere to be seen when she went back into the dairy.

She knew she ought to tell her parents what was happening. But it wouldn’t work. It would be “telling stories.” Anyway, with any luck she could get Wentworth back before she was even missed. But, just in case…

She kept a diary in the dairy. Cheese needed to be kept track of, and she always wrote down details of the amount of butter she’d made and how much milk she’d been using.

She turned to a fresh page, picked up her pencil, and, with her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, began to write.

The Nac Mac Feegle gradually reappeared. They didn’t obviously step out from behind things, and they certainly didn’t pop magically into existence. They appeared in the same way that faces appear in clouds and fires; they seemed to turn up if you just looked hard enough and wanted to see them.

They watched the moving pencil in awe, and she could hear them murmuring.

“Look at that writin’ stick noo, will ye, bobbin’ along. That’s hag business.”

“Ach, she has the kenning o’ the writin’, sure enough.”

“But you’ll no’ write doon oour names, eh, mistress?”

“Aye, a body can be put in the pris’n if they have written evidence.”

Tiffany stopped writing and read the note:

Dear Mum and Dad, I have gone to look for Wentworth. I am
perfectly probably
quite safe, because I am with some
friends acquaintances
people who knew Granny. PS The cheeses on rack three will need turning tomorrow if I’m not back.

Love, Tiffany

Tiffany looked up at Rob Anybody, who had shinned up the table leg and was watching the pencil intently, in case it wrote something dangerous.

“You could have just come and asked me right at the start,” she said.

“We didna ken it was thee we were lookin’ for, mistress. Lots of bigjob women walkin’ aroond this farm. We didna ken it was thee until you caught Daft Wullie.”

It might not be, thought Tiffany.

“Yes, but stealing the sheep and the eggs, there was no need for that,” she said sternly.

“But they wasna nailed doon, mistress,” said Rob Anybody, as if that was an excuse.

“You can’t nail down an egg!” snapped Tiffany.

“Ach, well, you’d have the kennin’ o’ wise stuff like that, mistress,” said Rob Anybody. “I see you’s done wi’ the writin’, so we’d best be goin’. Ye hae a besom?”

“Broomstick,” murmured the toad.

“Er, no,” said Tiffany. “The important thing about magic,” she added haughtily, “is to know when not to use it.”

“Fair enough,” said Rob Anybody, sliding back down the table leg. “Come here, Daft Wullie.” One of the Feegles who looked very much like that morning’s egg thief came and stood by Rob
Anybody, and they both bent over slightly. “If you’d care to step on us, mistress,” said Rob Anybody.

Before Tiffany could open her mouth, the toad said out of the corner of its mouth, and being a toad that means quite a lot of corner, “One Feegle can lift a grown man. You couldn’t squash one if you tried.”

“I don’t
want
to try!”

Tiffany very cautiously raised a big boot. Daft Wullie ran underneath it, and she felt the boot being pushed upward. She might as well have trodden on a brick.

“Now t’other wee bootie,” said Rob Anybody.

“I’ll fall over!”

“Nae, we’re
good
at this….”

And then Tiffany was standing up on two pictsies. She felt them moving backward and forward underneath her, keeping her balanced. She felt quite secure, though. It was just like wearing really
thick
soles.

“Let’s gae,” said Rob Anybody, down below. “An’ don’t worry about yon pussycat scraffin’ the wee burdies. Some of the lads is stayin’ behind to mind things!”

Ratbag crept along a branch. He wasn’t a cat who was good at changing the ways he thought. But he was good at finding nests. He’d heard the cheeping from the other end of the garden, and even from the bottom of the tree he’d been able to see three little yellow beaks in the nest. Now he advanced, drooling. Nearly there…

Three Nac Mac Feegle pulled off their straw beaks and grinned happily at him.

“Hello, Mister Pussycat,” said one of them. “Ye dinna learn, do ye?
Cheep!
”

T
iffany flew a few inches above the ground, standing still. Wind rushed around her as the Feegles sped out of the farmyard’s top gate and onto the turf of the downs….

This is the girl, flying. At the moment there’s a toad on her head, holding on to her hair.

Pull back, and here is the long green whaleback of the downs. Now she’s a pale-blue dot against the endless grass, mowed by the sheep to the height of a carpet. But the green sea isn’t unbroken. Here and there humans have been.

Last year Tiffany had spent three carrots and an apple on half an hour of geology, although she’d been refunded a carrot after explaining to the teacher that ‘Geology’ shouldn’t be spelled on his sign as “G olly G.” He said that the chalk had been formed underwater millions of years before from tiny seashells.

That made sense to Tiffany. Sometimes you found little fossils in the chalk. But the teacher didn’t know much about the flint. You found flints, harder than steel, in chalk, the softest of rocks. Sometimes the shepherds chipped the flints, one flint against another, into knives. Not even the best steel knives could take an edge as sharp as flint.

And men in what was called on the Chalk “the olden days” had dug pits for it. They were still there, deep holes in the rolling green, filled with thickets of thorn and brambles.

Huge, knobbly flints still turned up in the village gardens. Sometimes they were larger than a man’s head. They often looked like heads, too. They were so melted and twisted and curved that you could look at a flint and see almost anything—a face, a strange animal, a sea monster. Sometimes the more interesting ones would be put on garden walls, for show.

The old people called those
calkins
, which meant “chalk children.” They’d always seemed…odd to Tiffany, as if the stone was striving to become alive. Some flints looked like bits of meat, or bones, or something off a butcher’s slab. In the dark, under the sea, it looked as though the chalk had been trying to make the shapes of living creatures.

There weren’t just the chalk pits. Men had been everywhere on the Chalk. There were stone circles, half fallen down, and burial mounds like green pimples where, it was said, chieftains of the olden days had been buried with their treasure. No one fancied digging into them to find out.

There were odd carvings in the chalk, too, which the shepherds sometimes weeded when they were out on the downs with the flocks and there was not a lot to do. The chalk was only a few inches under the turf. Hoofprints could last a season, but the carvings had lasted for thousands of years. They were pictures of horses and giants, but the strange thing was that you couldn’t see them properly from anywhere on the ground. They looked as if they’d been made for viewers in the sky.

And then there were the weird places, like Old Man’s Forge, which was just four big flat rocks placed so they made a kind of
half-buried hut in the side of a mound. It was only a few feet deep. It didn’t look like anything special, but if you shouted your name into it, it was several seconds before the echo came back.

There were signs of people everywhere. The Chalk had been
important
.

Tiffany left the shearing sheds way behind. No one was watching. Sheared sheep took no notice at all of a girl moving without her feet touching the ground.

The lowlands dropped away behind her, and now she was properly on the downs. Only the occasional baa of a sheep or scream of a buzzard disturbed a busy silence, made up of bee buzzes and breezes and the sound of a ton of grass growing every minute.

On either side of Tiffany the Nac Mac Feegle ran in a spread out ragged line, staring grimly ahead.

They passed some of the mounds without stopping, and ran up and down the sides of shallow valleys without a pause. And it was then that Tiffany saw a landmark ahead.

It was a small flock of sheep. There were only a few, freshly sheared, but there were always a handful of sheep at this place. Strays would turn up there, and lambs would find their way to it when they’d lost their mothers.

This was a magic place.

There wasn’t much to see now, just the iron wheels sinking into the turf and the pot-bellied stove with its short chimney….

On the day Granny Aching died, the men had cut and lifted the turf around the hut and stacked it neatly some way away. Then they’d dug a deep hole in the chalk, six feet deep and six feet long, lifting out the chalk in great damp blocks.

Thunder and Lightning had watched them carefully. They didn’t whine
or bark. They seemed more interested than upset.

Granny Aching had been wrapped in a woolen blanket, with a tuft of raw wool pinned to it. That was a special shepherd thing. It was there to tell any gods who might get involved that the person being buried there was a shepherd, and spent a lot of time on the hills, and what with lambing and one thing and another couldn’t always take much time out for religion, there being no churches or temples up there, and therefore it was generally hoped that the gods would understand and look kindly on them. Granny Aching, it had to be said, had never been seen to pray to anyone or anything in her life, and it was agreed by all that, even now, she wouldn’t have any time for a god who didn’t understand that lambing came first.

The chalk had been put back over her, and Granny Aching, who always said that the hills were in her bones, now had her bones in the hills.

Then they burned the hut. That wasn’t usual, but her father had said that there wasn’t a shepherd anywhere on the Chalk who’d use it now.

Thunder and Lightning wouldn’t come when he called, and he knew better than to be angry, so they were left sitting quite contentedly by the glowing embers of the hut.

Next day, when the ashes were cold and blowing across the raw chalk, everyone went up onto the downs and with very great care put the turf back, so all that was left to see were the iron wheels on their axles, and the pot-bellied stove.

At which point—so everyone said—the two sheepdogs had looked up, their ears pricking, and had trotted away over the turf and were never seen again.

The pictsies carrying her slowed down gently, and Tiffany flailed her arms as they dropped her onto the grass. The sheep lumbered away slowly, then stopped and turned to watch her.

“Why’re we stopping? Why’re we stopping
here
? We’ve got to catch her!”

“Got to wait for Hamish, mistress,” said Rob Anybody.

“Why? Who’s Hamish?”

“He might have the knowin’ of where the Quin went with your wee laddie,” said Rob Anybody soothingly. “We canna just rush in, ye ken.”

A big, bearded Feegle raised his hand. “Point ’o order, Big Man. Ye
can
just rush in. We
always
just rush in.”

“Aye, Big Yan, point well made. But ye gotta know
where
ye’re just gonna rush in. Ye canna just rush in
anywhere
. It looks bad, havin’ to rush oout again straight awa’.”

Tiffany saw that all the Feegles were staring intently upward and paying her no attention at all.

Angry and puzzled, she sat down on one of the rusty wheels and looked at the sky. It was better than looking around. There was Granny Aching’s grave somewhere around here, although you couldn’t find it now, not precisely. The turf had healed.

There were a few little clouds above her and nothing else at all, except the distant circling dots of the buzzards. There were always buzzards over the Chalk.

The shepherds had taken to calling them Granny Aching’s chickens, and some of them called clouds like those up there today “Granny’s little lambs.” And Tiffany
knew
that even her father called the thunder “Granny Aching cussin’.”

And it was said that some of the shepherds, if wolves were troublesome in the winter, or a prize ewe had got lost, would go to the site of the old hut in the hills and leave an ounce of Jolly Sailor tobacco, just in case….

Tiffany hesitated. Then she shut her eyes. I want that to be true, she whispered to herself. I want to know that other people
think she hasn’t really gone too.

She looked under the wide rusted rim of the wheels and shivered. There was a brightly colored little packet there.

She picked it up. It looked quite fresh, so it had probably been there for only a few days. There was the Jolly Sailor on the front, with his big grin and big yellow rain hat and big beard, with big blue waves crashing behind him.

Tiffany had learned about the sea from Granny Aching and the Jolly Sailor wrappings. She’d heard it was big, and roared. There was a tower in the sea, which was a lighthouse that carried a big light on it at night to stop boats from crashing into the rocks. In the pictures the beam of the lighthouse was a brilliant white. She knew about it so well, she’d dreamed about it, and had woken up with the roar of the sea in her ears.

She’d heard one of her uncles say that if you looked at the tobacco label upside down, then part of the hat and the sailor’s ear and a bit of his collar made up a picture of a woman with no clothes on, but Tiffany had never been able to make it out and couldn’t see what the point would be in any case.

She carefully pulled the label off the packet and sniffed at it. It smelled of Granny. She felt her eyes begin to fill with tears. She’d never cried for Granny Aching before, never. She’d cried for dead lambs and cut fingers and for not getting her own way, but never for Granny. It hadn’t seemed right.

And I’m not crying now, she thought, carefully putting the label in her apron pocket. Not for Granny being dead….

It was the smell. Granny Aching smelled of sheep, turpentine, and Jolly Sailor tobacco. The three smells mixed together and become one smell, which was, to Tiffany, the smell of the Chalk. It followed Granny Aching
like a cloud, and it meant warmth, and silence, and a space around which the whole world revolved….

A shadow passed overhead. A buzzard was diving down from the sky toward the Nac Mac Feegle.

She leaped up and waved her arms. “Run away! Duck! It’ll kill you!”

They turned and looked at her for a moment as though she’d gone mad.

“Dinna fash yersel’, mistress,” said Rob Anybody.

The bird curved up at the bottom of its dive, and as it climbed again a dot dropped from it. As it fell, it seemed to grow two wings and started to spin like a sycamore leaf, which slowed down the fall somewhat.

It was a pictsie, still spinning madly when he hit the turf a few feet away, where he fell over. He got up, swearing loudly, and fell over again. The swearing continued.

“A good landin’, Hamish,” said Rob Anybody. “The spinnin’ certainly slows ye doon. Ye didna drill right into the ground this time hardly at a’.”

Hamish got up more slowly this time and managed to stay upright. He had a pair of goggles over his eyes.

“I dinna think I can tak’ much more o’ this,” he said, trying to untie a couple of thin bits of wood from his arms. “I feel like a fairy wi’ the wings on.”

“How can you survive that?” Tiffany asked.

The very small pilot tried to look her up and down, but only managed to look her up and farther up.

“Who’s the wee bigjob who knows sich a lot aboot aviation?” he said.

Rob Anybody coughed. “She’s the hag, Hamish. Spawn o’ Granny Aching.”

Hamish’s expression changed to a look of terror. “I didna mean to speak out o’ turn, mistress,” he said, backing away. “O’ course, a hag’d have the knowing of anythin’. But ’tis nae as bad as it looks, mistress. I allus make sure I lands on my heid.”

“Aye, we’re very resilient in the heid department,” said Rob Anybody.

“Have you seen a woman with a small boy?” Tiffany demanded. She hadn’t much liked being called “spawn.”

Hamish gave Rob Anybody a panicky look, and Rob nodded.

“Aye, I did,” said Hamish. “Onna black horse. Riding up from the lowlan’s goin’ hell for—”

“We dinna use bad language in front o’ a hag!” Rob Anybody thundered.

“Begging your pardon, mistress. She was ridin’ heck for leather,” said Hamish, looking more sheepish than the sheep. “But she kenned I was spyin’ her and called up a mist. She’s gone to the other side, but I dinna ken where.”

“’Tis a perilous place, the other side,” said Rob Anybody slowly. “Evil things there. A cold place. Not a place to tak’ a wee babbie.”

It was hot on the downs, but Tiffany felt a chill. However bad it is, she thought, I’m going to have to go there. I know it. I don’t have a choice.

“The
other
side?” she said.

“Aye. The magic world,” said Rob Anybody. “There’s…bad things there.”

“Monsters?” said Tiffany.

“As bad as ye can think of,” said Rob Anybody. “
Exactly
as bad as ye can think of.”

Tiffany swallowed hard and closed her eyes. “Worse than Jenny? Worse than the headless horseman?” she said.

“Oh, aye. They were wee pussycats compared to the scunners over there. ’Tis an ill-fared country that’s come callin’, mistress. ’Tis a land where dreams come true. That’s the Quin’s world.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound too—” Tiffany began. Then she remembered some of the dreams she’d had, the ones where you were so glad to wake up…. “We’re not talking about nice dreams, are we?” she said.

Rob Anybody shook his head. “Nay, mistress. The other kind.”

And me with my frying pan and
Diseases of the Sheep
, thought Tiffany. And she had a mental picture of Wentworth among horrible monsters. They probably wouldn’t have any sweeties at all.

She sighed. “All right,” she said. “How do I get there?”

“Ye dinna ken the way?” said Rob Anybody.

It wasn’t what she’d been expecting. What she
had
been expecting was more like “Ach, ye canna do that, a wee lass like you, oh deary us no!” She wasn’t so much expecting that as hoping it, in fact. But, instead, they were acting as if it was a perfectly reasonable idea….