The Wee Free Men
Page 15

“Ach, ye prob’ly ken the place well,” said Rob Anybody. As they grew nearer to the mound, Tiffany thought she could smell smoke in the air.
“Do I?” she said.
“Aye. But it’s no’ a name I’ll say in open air. It’s a name to be whispered in a safe place. I’ll no’ say it under this sky.”
It was too big to be a rabbit hole and badgers didn’t live up here, but the entrance to the mound was tucked among the thorn roots, and no one would have thought it was anything but the home of some kind of animal.
Tiffany was slim, but even so she had to take off her apron and crawl on her stomach under the thorns to reach it, dragging the apron behind her. And it still needed several Feegles to push her through.
At least it didn’t smell bad and, once you were through the hole, it opened up a lot. Really, the entrance was just a disguise. Underneath, the space was the size of quite a large room, open in the center but with Feegle-sized galleries around the walls from floor to ceiling. They were crowded with pictsies of all sizes, washing clothes, arguing, sewing and, here and there, fighting, and doing everything as loudly as possible. Some had hair and beards tinged with white. Much younger ones, only a few inches tall, were running around with no clothes on, and yelling at one another at the tops of their little voices. After a couple of years of helping to bring up Wentworth, Tiffany knew what that was all about.
There were no girls, though. No Wee Free Women.
No…there was one.
The squabbling, bustling crowds parted to let her through. She came up to Tiffany’s ankle. She was prettier than the male Feegles, although the world was full of things prettier than, say, Daft Wullie. But, like them, she had red hair and an expression of determination.
She curtsied, then said, “Are ye the bigjob hag, mistress?”
Tiffany looked around. She was the only person in the cavern who was over seven inches tall.
“Er, yes,” she said. “Er…more or less. Yes.”
“I am Fion. The kelda says to tell you the wee boy will come to nae harm yet.”
“She’s found him?” said Tiffany quickly. “Where is he?”
“Nae, nae, but the kelda knows the way of the Quin. She didna want you to fash yersel’ on that score.”
“But she stole him!”
“Aye. ’Tis comp-li-cate-ed. Rest a wee while. The kelda will see you presently. She is…not strong now.”
Fion turned around with a swirl of skirts, strode back across the chalk floor as if she was a queen herself, and disappeared behind a large round stone that leaned against the far wall.
Tiffany, without looking down, carefully lifted the toad out of her pocket and held it close to her lips. “Am I fashing myself?” she whispered.
“No, not really,” said the toad.
“You would tell me if I was, wouldn’t you?” said Tiffany urgently. “It’d be terrible if everyone could see I was fashing and I didn’t know.”
“You haven’t a clue what it means, have you…?” said the toad.
“Not exactly, no.”
“She just doesn’t want you to get upset, that’s all.”
“Yes, I thought it was probably something like that,” lied Tiffany. “Can you sit on my shoulder? I think I might need some help here.”
The ranks of the Nac Mac Feegle were watching her with interest, but at the moment it appeared that she had nothing to do but hurry up and wait. She sat down carefully, drumming her fingers on her knees.
“Whut d’ye think of the wee place, eh?” said a voice from below. “It’s great, yeah?”
She looked down. Rob Anybody Feegle and a few of the pictsies she’d already met were lurking there, watching her nervously.
“Very…cozy,” said Tiffany, because that was better than saying “how sooty” or “how delightfully noisy.” She added: “Do you cook for all of you on that little fire?”
The big space in the center held a small fire, under a hole in the roof that let the smoke get lost in the bushes above and in return brought in a little extra light.
“Aye, mistress,” said Rob Anybody.
“The small stuff, bunnies an’ that,” added Daft Wullie. “The big stuff we roasts in the chalk pi—mmph mmph…”
“Sorry, what was that?” said Tiffany.
“What?” said Rob Anybody innocently, his hand firmly over the mouth of the struggling Wullie.
“What was Wullie saying about roasting ‘big stuff’?” Tiffany demanded. “You roast ‘big stuff’ in the chalk pit? Is this the kind of big stuff that goes ‘baa’? Because that’s the only big stuff you’ll find in these hills!”
She knelt down on the grimy floor and brought her face to within an inch of Rob Anybody’s face, which was grinning madly and sweating.
“Is it?”
“Ach…ah…weel…in a manner o’ speakin’…”
“It is?”
“’Tis not thine, mistress!” shrieked Rob Anybody. “We ne’er took an Aching ship wi’out the leave o’ Granny!”
“Granny Aching let you have sheep?”
“Aye, she did, did, did that! As p-payment!”
“Payment? For what?”
“No Aching ship ever got caught by wolves!” Rob Anybody gabbled. “No foxes took an Aching lamb, right? Nor no lamb e’er had its een pecked out by corbies, not wi’ Hamish up in the sky!”
Tiffany looked sideways at the toad.
“Crows,” said the toad. “They sometimes peck out the eyes of—”
“Yes, yes, I know what they do,” said Tiffany. She calmed down a little. “Oh. I see. You kept away the crows and wolves and foxes for Granny, yes?”
“Aye, mistress! No’ just kept ’em awa’, neither!” said Rob Anybody triumphantly. “There’s good eatin’ on a wolf.”
“Aye, they kebabs up a treat, but they’re no’ as good as a ship, tho…mmph mmph…” Wullie managed, before a hand was clamped over his mouth again.
“From a hag ye only tak’ what ye’s given,” said Rob Anybody, holding his struggling brother firmly. “Since she’s gone, though, weel…we tak’ the odd old ewe that would’ve deid anywa’, but ne’er one wi’ the Aching mark, on my honor.”
“On your honor as a drunken rowdy thief?” said Tiffany.
Rob Anybody beamed. “Aye!” he said. “An’ I got a lot of good big reputation to protect there! That’s the truth o’ it, mistress. We keeps an eye on the ships of the hills, in mem’ry o’ Granny Aching, an’ in return we tak’ what is hardly worth a thing.”
“And the baccy too, o’ course…mmph mmph…” and then, once again, Daft Wullie was struggling to breathe.
Tiffany took a deep breath, not a wise move in a Feegle colony. Rob Anybody grinned nervously.
“You take the tobacco? The tobacco the shepherds leave for…my grandmother?”
“Ach, I forgot about that,” squeaked Rob Anybody. “But we allus wait a few days in case she comes to collect it hersel’. Ye can ne’er tell wi a hag, after all. And we do mind the ships, mistress. And she wouldna grudge us, mistress! Many’s a night she’d share a pipe wi’ the kelda outside o’ her house on the wheelies! She’d not be one to let good baccy get all rainy! Please, mistress!”
Tiffany felt intensely angry, and what made it worse was that she was angry with herself.
“When we find lost lambs and suchlike, we drives ’em here for when the shepherds come lookin’,” Rob Anybody added anxiously.
What did I think happened? Tiffany thought. Did I think she’d come back for a packet of Jolly Sailor? Did I think she was still somehow walking the hills, looking after the sheep? Did I think she…was still here, watching for lost lambs?
Yes! I want that to be true. I don’t want to think she’s just…gone. Someone like Granny Aching can’t just…not be there anymore. And I want her back so much, because she didn’t know how to talk to me and I was too scared to talk to her, and so we never talked and we turned silence into something to share.
I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn’t understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once. She was Sarah Grizzel. She got married and had children, two of them in the shepherding hut. She must’ve done all sorts of things I don’t know about.
And into Tiffany’s mind, as it always did sooner or later, came the figure of the blue-and-white china shepherdess, swirling in red mists of shame….
Tiffany’s father took her to the fair at the town of Yelp one day not long before her seventh birthday, when the farm had some rams to sell. That was a ten-mile journey, the farthest she’d ever been. It was off the Chalk. Everything looked different. There were far more fenced fields and lots of cows and the buildings had tiled roofs instead of thatch. She considered that this was foreign travel.
Granny Aching had never been there, said her father on the way. She hated leaving the Chalk, he said. She said it made her dizzy.
It was a great day. Tiffany was sick on cotton candy, had her fortune told by a little old lady who said that many, many men would want to marry her, and won the shepherdess, which was made of china painted white and blue.
She was the star prize on the hoop-la stall, but Tiffany’s father had said that it was all cheating, because the base was so wide that not one throw in a million could ever drop the hoop right over it.
She’d thrown the ring any old how, and it had been the one in a million. The stall holder hadn’t been very happy about it landing over the shepherdess rather than the gimcrack rubbish in the rest of the stall. He handed it over when her father spoke sharply to him, though, and she’d hugged it all the way home on the cart, while the stars came out.
Next morning she’d proudly presented it to Granny Aching. The old woman had taken it very carefully in her wrinkled hands and stared at it for some time.
Tiffany was sure, now, that it had been a cruel thing to do.
Granny Aching had probably never heard of shepherdesses. People who cared for sheep on the Chalk were all called shepherds, and that was all there was to it. And this beautiful creature was as much unlike Granny Aching as anything could be.
The china shepherdess had an old-fashioned long dress, with the bulgy bits at the side that made it look as though she had saddlebags in her knickers. There were blue ribbons all over the dress, and all over the rather showy straw bonnet, and on the shepherd’s crook, which was a lot more curly than any crook Tiffany had ever seen.
There were even blue bows on the dainty foot poking out from the frilly hem of her dress.
This wasn’t a shepherdess who’d ever worn big old boots stuffed with wool and tramped the hills in the howling wind with the sleet being driven along like nails. She’d never tried in that dress to pull out a ram who’d got his horns tangled in a thorn patch. This wasn’t a shepherdess who’d kept up with the champion shearer for seven hours, sheep for sheep, until the air was hazy with grease and wool and blue with cussing, and the champion gave up because he couldn’t cuss sheep as well as Granny Aching. No self-respecting sheepdog would ever “come by” or “walk up” for a simpering girl with saddlebags in her pants. It was a lovely thing but it was a joke of a shepherdess, made by someone who’d probably never seen a sheep up close.