The Wee Free Men
Page 10

And down the path Ratbag, archenemy of all baby birds, slunk closer, drooling. As Tiffany opened her mouth to yell, he leaped and landed with all four feet on the little man.
Or at least where the little man had been, because he had somersaulted in midair and was now right in front of Ratbag’s face and had grabbed a cat ear with each hand.
“Ach, see you, pussycat, scunner that y’are!” he yelled. “Here’s a giftie from the t’ wee burdies, yah schemie!”
He butted the cat hard on the nose. Ratbag spun in the air and landed on his back with his eyes crossed. He squinted in cold terror as the little man leaned down at him and shouted, “CHEEP!”
Then he levitated in the way that cats do and became a ginger streak, rocketing down the path through the open door, and shooting past Tiffany to hide under the sink.
The Feegle looked up, grinning, and saw Tiffany.
“Please don’t go—” she began quickly, but he went, in a blur.
Tiffany’s mother was hurrying down the path. Tiffany picked up the toad and put it back in her apron pocket just in time. The door was flung open.
“Where’s Wentworth? Is he here?” her mother asked urgently. “Did he come back? Answer me!”
“Didn’t he go up to the shearing with you, Mum?” said Tiffany, suddenly nervous. She could feel the panic pouring off her mother like steam.
“We can’t find him!” There was a wild look in her mother’s eyes. “I turned my back for only a minute! Are you sure you haven’t seen him?”
“But he couldn’t come all the way back here—”
“Go and look in the house! Go on!”
Mrs. Aching hurried away. Hastily, Tiffany put the toad on the floor and urged him under the sink. She heard him croak, and Ratbag, mad with fear and bewilderment, came out from under the sink in a whirl of legs and rocketed out of the door.
She stood up. Her first, shameful thought was: He wanted to go up to watch the shearing. How could he get lost? He went with Mum and Hannah and Fastidia!
And how closely would Fastidia and Hannah watch him with all those young men up there?
She tried to pretend she hadn’t thought that, but she was treacherously good at spotting when she was lying. That’s the trouble with a brain—it thinks more than you sometimes want it to.
But he’s never interested in moving far away from people! It’s half a mile up to the shearing pens! And he doesn’t move that fast. After a few feet he flops down and demands sweets!
But it would be a bit more peaceful around here if he did get lost….
There it went again, a nasty, shameful thought, which she tried to drown out by getting busy. But first she took some candy out of the jar, as bait, and rustled the bag as she ran from room to room.
She heard boots in the yard as some of the men came down from the shearing sheds, but she got on with looking under beds and in cupboards, even ones so high that a toddler couldn’t possibly reach them, and then looked again under beds that she’d already looked under, because it was that kind of search. It was the kind of search where you go and look in the attic, even though the door is always locked.
After a few minutes there were two or three voices outside, calling for Wentworth, and she heard her father say, “Try down by the river!”
…and that meant he was frantic too, because Wentworth would never walk that far without a bribe. He was not a child who was happy away from people with sweets.
It’s your fault.
The thought felt like a piece of ice in her mind.
It’s your fault because you didn’t love him very much. He turned up and you weren’t the youngest anymore, and you had to have him trailing around after you, and you kept wishing, didn’t you, that he’d go away.
“That’s not true!” Tiffany whispered to herself. “I…quite liked him….”
Not very much, admittedly. Not all the time. He didn’t know how to play properly, and he never did what he was told. You thought it would be better if he did get lost.
Anyway, she added in her head, you can’t love people all the time when they have a permanently runny nose. Any anyway…I wonder…
“I wish I could find my brother,” she said aloud.
This seemed to have no effect. But the house was full of people, opening and shutting doors and calling out and getting in one another’s way, and the…Feegles were shy, despite many of them having faces like a hatful of knuckles.
Don’t wish, Miss Tick had said. Do things.
She went downstairs. Even some of the women who’d been packing fleeces up at the shearing had come down. They were clustered around her mother, who was sitting at the table crying. No one noticed Tiffany. That often happened.
She slipped into the dairy, closed the door carefully behind her, and leaned down to peer under the sink.
The door burst open again and her father ran in. He stopped. Tiffany looked up guiltily.
“He can’t be under there, girl!” her father said.
“Well, er…” said Tiffany.
“Did you look upstairs?”
“Even the attic, Dad—”
“Well.” Her father looked panicky and impatient at the same time. “Go and…do something!”
“Yes, Dad.”
When the door had shut, Tiffany peered under the sink again.
“Are you there, toad?”
“Very poor pickings under here,” the toad answered, crawling out. “You keep it very clean. Not even a spider.”
“This is urgent!” snapped Tiffany. “My little brother has gone missing. In broad daylight! Up on the downs, where you can see for miles!”
“Oh, croap,” said the toad.
“Pardon?” said Tiffany.
“Er, that was, er, swearing in Toad,” said the toad. “Sorry, but—”
“Has what’s going on got something to do with magic?” said Tiffany. “It has, hasn’t it…?”
“I hope it hasn’t,” said the toad, “but I think it has.”
“Have those little men stolen Wentworth?”
“Who, the Feegles? They don’t steal children!”
There was something in the way the toad said it. They don’t steal…
“Do you know who has taken my brother, then?” Tiffany demanded.
“No. But…they might,” said the toad. “Look, Miss Tick told me that you were not to—”
“My brother has been stolen,” said Tiffany sharply. “Are you going to tell me not to do anything about it?”
“No, but—”
“Good! Where are the Feegles now?”
“Lying low, I expect. The place is full of people searching, after all, but—”
“How can I bring them back? I need them!”
“Um, Miss Tick said—”
“How can I bring them back?”
“Er…you want to bring them back, then?” said the toad, looking mournful.
“Yes!”
“It’s just that’s something not many people have ever wanted to do,” said the toad. “They’re not like brownies. If you get Nac Mac Feegle in the house, it’s usually best to move away.” He sighed. “Tell me, is your father a drinking man?”
“He has a beer sometimes,” said Tiffany. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Only beer?”
“Well, I’m not supposed to know about what my father calls the Special Sheep Liniment,” said Tiffany. “Granny Aching used to make it in the old cowshed.”
“Strong stuff, is it?”
“It dissolves spoons,” said Tiffany. “It’s for special occasions. Father says it’s not for women because it puts hairs on your chest.”
“Then if you want to be sure of finding the Nac Mac Feegle, go and fetch some,” said the toad. “It will work, believe me.”
Five minutes later Tiffany was ready. Few things are hidden from a quiet child with good eyesight, and she knew where the bottles were stored and she had one now. The cork was hammered in over a piece of rag, but it was old and she was able to lever it out with the tip of a knife. The fumes made her eyes water.
She went to pour some of the golden-brown liquid into a saucer—
“No! We’ll be trampled to death if you do that,” said the toad. “Just leave the cork off.”
Fumes rose from the top of the bottle, wavering like the air over rocks on a hot day.
She felt it—a sensation, in the dim, cool room, of riveted attention.
She sat down on a milking stool and said, “All right, you can come out now.”
There were hundreds. They rose up from behind buckets. They lowered themselves on string from the ceiling beams. They sidled sheepishly from behind the cheese racks. They crept out from under the sink. They came out of places where you’d think a man with hair like an orange gone nova couldn’t possibly hide.
They were all about six inches tall and mostly colored blue, although it was hard to know if that was the actual color of their skins or just the dye from their tattoos, which covered every inch that wasn’t covered with red hair. They wore short kilts, and some wore other bits of clothing too, like skinny vests. A few of them wore rabbit or rat skulls on their heads, as a sort of helmet. And every single one of them carried, slung across his back, a sword nearly as big as he was.
However, what Tiffany noticed more than anything else was that they were scared of her. Mostly they were looking at their own feet, which was no errand for the faint-hearted because their feet were large, dirty, and half tied up with animal skins to make very bad shoes. None of them wanted to look her in the eye.
“You were the people who filled the water buckets?” she said.
There was a lot of foot shuffling and coughing and a chorus of ayes.
“And the wood box?”
There were more ayes.
Tiffany glared at them.
“And what about the sheep?”
This time they all looked down.
“Why did you steal the sheep?”
There was a lot of muttering and nudging, and then one of the tiny men removed his rabbit-skull helmet and twiddled it nervously in his hands.
“We wuz hungerin’, mistress,” he muttered. “But when we kenned it was thine, we did put the beastie back in the fold.”
They looked so crestfallen that Tiffany took pity on them.
“I expect you wouldn’t have stolen it if you weren’t so hungry, then,” she said.
There were several hundred astonished looks.
“Oh, we would, mistress,” said the helmet twiddler.
“You would?”
Tiffany sounded so surprised that the twiddler looked around at his colleagues for support. They all nodded.
“Yes, mistress. We have tae. We are a famously stealin’ folk. Aren’t we, lads? Whut’s it we’re famous for?”
“Stealin’!” shouted the blue men.
“And what else, lads?”
“Fightin’!”
“And what else?”
“Drinkin’!”
“And what else?”