The Wee Free Men
Page 16

What had Granny Aching thought about it? Tiffany couldn’t guess. She’d seemed happy, because it’s the job of grandmothers to be happy when grandchildren give them things. She’d put it up on her shelf and then taken Tiffany on her knee and called her “my little jiggit” in a nervous sort of way, which she did when she was trying to be grandmotherly.
Sometimes, in the rare times Granny was down at the farm, Tiffany would see her take down the statue and stare at it. But if she saw Tiffany watching, she’d put it back quickly and pretend she’d meant to pick up the sheep book.
Perhaps, Tiffany thought wretchedly, the old lady had seen it as a sort of insult. Perhaps she thought she was being told that this was what a shepherdess should look like. She shouldn’t be an old lady in a muddy dress and big boots, with an old sack around her shoulders to keep the rain off. A shepherdess should sparkle like a starry night. Tiffany hadn’t meant to, she’d never meant to, but perhaps she had been telling Granny that she wasn’t… right.
And then a few months after that Granny had died, and in the years since then everything had gone wrong. Wentworth had been born, and then the Baron’s son had vanished, and then there had been that bad winter when Mrs. Snapperly died in the snow.
Tiffany kept worrying about the statue. She couldn’t talk about it. Everyone else was busy, or not interested. Everyone was edgy. They’d have said that worrying about a silly statue was…silly.
Several times she nearly smashed the shepherdess, but she didn’t because people would notice.
She wouldn’t have given something as wrong as that to Granny Aching now, of course. She’d grown up.
She remembered that the old lady would smile oddly, sometimes, when she looked at the statue. If only she’d said something. But Granny liked silence.
And now it turned out that she made friends with a lot of little blue men, who walked the hills looking after the sheep, because they liked her, too. Tiffany blinked.
It made a kind of sense. In memory of Granny Aching, the men left the tobacco. And in memory of Granny Aching, the Nac Mac Feegle minded the sheep. It all worked, even if it wasn’t magic. But it took Granny away.
“Daft Wullie?” she said, staring hard at the struggling pictsie and trying not to cry.
“Mmph?”
“Is it true what Rob Anybody told me?”
“Mmph!” Daft Wullie’s eyebrows went up and down furiously.
“Mr. Feegle, you can please take your hand away from his mouth,” said Tiffany. Daft Wullie was released. Rob Anybody had looked worried, but Daft Wullie was terrified. He dragged his hat off and stood holding it in his hands, as if it was some kind of shield.
“Is all that true, Daft Wullie?” said Tiffany.
“Oh waily waily—”
“Just a simple yes or—a simple aye or nay, please.”
“Aye! It is!” blurted out Daft Wullie. “Oh waily waily—”
“Yes, thank you,” said Tiffany, sniffing and trying to blink the tears away. “All right. I understand.”
The Feegles eyed her cautiously.
“Ye’re nae gonna get nasty aboot it?” said Rob Anybody.
“No. It all…works.”
She heard it echo around the cavern, the sound of hundreds of little men sighing with relief.
“She didna turn me intae a pismire!” said Daft Wullie, grinning happily at the rest of the pictsies. “Hey, lads, I talked wi’ the hag and she didna e’en look at me crosswise! She smiled at me!” He beamed at Tiffany and went on: “An’ d’ye ken, mistress, that if’n you hold the baccy label upside-doon, then part o’ the sailor’s bonnet and his ear became a lady wi’ nae mmph mmph…”
“Ach, there I goes again, accidentally nearly throttlin’ ye,” said Rob Anybody, his hand clamping over Wullie’s mouth.
Tiffany opened her mouth, but stopped when her ears tickled strangely.
In the roof of the cave, several bats woke up and hastily flew out of the smoke hole.
Some of the Feegles were busy on the far side of the chamber. What Tiffany had thought was a strange round stone was being rolled aside, revealing a large hole.
Now her ears squelched and felt as though all the wax was running out. The Feegles were forming up in two rows, leading to the hole.
Tiffany prodded the toad. “Do I want to know what a pismire is?” she whispered.
“It’s an ant,” said the toad.
“Oh? I’m…slightly surprised. And this sort of high-pitched noise?”
“I’m a toad. We’re not good at ears. But it’s probably him over there.”
There was a Feegle walking out of the hole from which came, now that Tiffany’s eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, a faint golden light.
The newcomer’s hair was white instead of red, and while he was tall for a pictsie, he was as skinny as a twig. He was holding some sort of fat skin bag, bristling with pipes.
“Now there’s a sight I don’t reckon many humans have seen and lived,” said the toad. “He’s playing the mousepipes!”
“They make my ears tingle!” Tiffany tried to ignore the two little ears still on the bag of pipes.
“High-pitched, see?” said the toad. “Of course, the pictsies hear sounds differently than humans do. He’s probably their battle poet, too.”
“You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?”
“No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy. Remember how important words are to the Nac Mac Feegle? Well, when a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy’s ears explode. Ah, it looks as though they’re ready for you.”
In fact Rob Anybody was tapping politely on Tiffany’s toecap. “The kelda will see you now, mistress,” he said.
The piper had stopped playing and was standing respectfully beside the hole. Tiffany felt hundreds of bright little eyes watching her.
“Special Sheep Liniment,” whispered the toad.
“Pardon?”
“Take it in with us,” the toad said insistently. “It’d be a good gift!”
The pictsies watched her carefully as she lay down again and crawled through the hole behind the stone, the toad hanging on tightly. As she got closer, she realized that what she’d thought was a stone was an old round shield, green-blue and corroded with age. The hole it had covered was indeed wide enough for her to go through, but she had to leave her legs outside because it was impossible to get all of her into the room beyond. One reason was the bed, small though it was, which held the kelda. The other reason was that what the room was mostly full of, piled up around the walls and spilling across the floor, was gold.
CHAPTER 7
First Sight and Second Thoughts
Glint, glisten, glitter, gleam…
Tiffany thought a lot about words, in the long hours of churning butter. “Onomatopoeic,” she’d discovered in the dictionary, meant words that sounded like the noise of the thing they were describing, like cuckoo. But she thought there should be a word meaning a word that sounds like the noise a thing would make if that thing made a noise even though, actually, it doesn’t, but would if it did.
Glint, for example. If light made a noise as it reflected off a distant window, it’d go glint! And the light of tinsel, all those little glints chiming together, would make a noise like glitterglitter. Gleam was a clean, smooth noise from a surface that intended to shine all day. And glisten was the soft, almost greasy sound of something rich and oily.
The little cave contained all of these at once. There was only one candle, which smelled of sheep fat, but gold plates and cups gleamed, glistened, glinted, and glittered the light back and forth until the one little flame filled the air with a light that even smelled expensive.
The gold surrounded the bed of the kelda, who was sitting up against a pile of pillows. She was much, much fatter than the male pictsies; she looked as if she’d been made of round balls of slightly squashy dough, and was the color of chestnuts.
Her eyes were closed as Tiffany slid in, but they flicked open the moment she’d stopped pulling herself forward. They were the sharpest eyes she’d ever seen, much sharper even than Miss Tick’s.
“Soo…you’ll be Sarah Aching’s wee girl?” said the kelda.
“Yes. I mean, aye,” said Tiffany. It wasn’t very comfortable lying on her stomach. “And you’re the kelda?”
“Aye. I mean, yes,” said the kelda, and the round face became a mass of lines as the kelda smiled. “What was your name, now?”
“Tiffany, er, kelda.” Fion had turned up from some other part of the cave and was sitting down on a stool by the bed, watching Tiffany intently with a disapproving expression.
“A good name. In our tongue you’d be Tir-far-thóinn, Land Under Wave,” said the kelda. It sounded like “Tiffan.”
“I don’t think anyone meant to name—”
“Ach, what people mean to do and what is done are two different things,” said the kelda. Her little eyes shone. “Your wee brother is…safe, child. Ye could say he’s safer where he is noo than he has ever been. No mortal ills can touch him. The Quin wouldna harm a hair o’ his heid. And there’s the evil o’ it. Help me up here, girl.”
Fion leaped up immediately and helped the kelda struggle up higher among her cushions.
“Where wuz I?” the kelda continued. “Ah, the wee laddie. Aye, ye could say he bides well where he is, in the Quin’s own country. But I daresay there’s a mother grievin’?”
“And our father, too,” said Tiffany.
“An’ his wee sister?” said the kelda.
Tiffany felt the words yes, of course trot automatically onto her tongue. She also knew that it would be very stupid to let them go any further. The little old woman’s dark eyes were seeing right into her head.
“Aye, you’re a born hag, right enough,” said the kelda, holding her gaze. “Ye got that little bitty bit inside o’ you that holds on, right? The bitty bit that watches the rest o’ ye. ’Tis the First Sight and Second Thoughts ye have, and ’tis a wee gift an’ a big curse to ye. You see and hear what others canna, the world opens up its secrets to ye, but ye’re always like the person at the party with the wee drink in the corner who canna join in. There’s a little bitty bit inside ye that willna melt and flow. Ye’re Sarah Aching’s line, right enough. The lads fetched the right one.”
Tiffany didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything. The kelda watched her, eyes twinkling, until Tiffany felt awkward.
“Why would the Queen take my brother?” she asked eventually. “And why is she after me?”
“Ye think she is?”
“Well, yes, actually! I mean, Jenny might have been a coincidence, but the horseman? And the grimhounds? And taking Wentworth?”
“She’s bending her mind to ye,” said the kelda. “When she does, something of her world passes into this one. Mebbe she just wants to test you.”