The Wee Free Men
Page 12

It lay still. Perhaps it had learned what would happen if it tried to get up again.
Granny Aching had nodded to the men, who picked the sheep up and dragged it back into the barn.
The Baron had been watching with his mouth open.
“He killed a wild boar last year!” he said. “What did you do to him?”
“He’ll mend,” said Granny Aching, carefully ignoring the question. “’Tis mostly his pride that’s hurt. But he won’t look at a sheep again, you have my thumb on that.” And she licked her right thumb and held it out.
After a moment’s hesitation, the Baron licked his thumb, reached down, and pressed it against hers. Everyone knew what it meant. On the Chalk, a thumb bargain was unbreakable.
“For you, at a word, the law was brake,” said Granny Aching. “Will ye mind that, ye who sit in judgment? Will ye remember this day? Ye’ll have cause to.”
The Baron nodded to her.
“That’ll do,” said Granny Aching, and their thumbs parted.
Next day the Baron technically did give Granny Aching gold, but it was only the gold-colored foil on an ounce of Jolly Sailor, the cheap and horrible pipe tobacco that was the only one Granny Aching would ever smoke. She was always in a bad mood if the peddlers were late and she’d run out. You’d couldn’t bribe Granny Aching for all the gold in the world, but you could definitely attract her attention with an ounce of Jolly Sailor.
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!”
CHAPTER 5
The Green Sea
Tiffany 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.