The Wee Free Men
Page 8

There were no flying feathers, and nothing like the panic a fox would cause. But the chickens were clucking excitedly, and Prunes, the cockerel, was strutting nervously up and down. One of the hens looked a bit embarrassed. Tiffany lifted it up quickly.
There were two tiny blue, red-haired men underneath. They were each holding an egg clasped in their arms. They looked up with very guilty expressions.
“Ach, no!” said one. “It’s the bairn! She’s the hag…”
“You’re stealing our eggs,” said Tiffany. “How dare you! And I’m not a hag!”
The little men looked at one another, and then at the eggs.
“Whut eiggs?” said one.
“The eggs you are holding,” said Tiffany meaningfully.
“Whut? Oh, these? These are eiggs, are they?” said the one who’d spoken first, looking at the eggs as if he’d never seen them before. “There’s a thing. And there was us thinking they was, er, stones.”
“Stones,” said the other one nervously.
“We crawled under yon chookie for a wee bitty warmth,” said the first one. “And there was all these things, we though’ they was stones, which was why the puir fowl was clucking all the time…”
“Clucking,” said the second one, nodding vigorously.
“…so we took pity on the puir thing and—”
“Put…the…eggs…back,” said Tiffany slowly.
The one who hadn’t been doing much talking nudged the other one. “Best do as she says,” he said. “It’s a’ gang agley. Ye canna cross an Aching, an’ this one’s a hag. She dinged Jenny, an’ no one ha’ ever done that afore.”
“Aye, I didna think o’ that….”
Both of the tiny men put the eggs back very carefully. One of them even breathed on the shell of his and made a show of polishing it with the ragged hem of his kilt.
“No harm done, mistress,” he said. He looked at the other man. And then they vanished. But there was a suspicion of a red blur in the air, and some straw by the henhouse door flew up in the air.
“And I’m a miss!” shouted Tiffany. She lowered the hen back onto the eggs and went to the door. “And I’m not a hag! Are you fairies of some sort? And what about our ship? I mean, sheep?” she added.
There was no answer but a clanking of buckets near the house, which meant that other people were getting up.
She rescued the fairy tales, blew out the candle, and made her way into the house. Her mother was lighting the fire and asked what she was doing up, and she said that she’d heard a commotion in the henhouse and had gone out to see if it was the fox again. That wasn’t a lie. In fact, it was completely true.
Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn’t divide easily into “true” and “false,” but instead could be things that people needed to know at the moment and things that they didn’t need to know at the moment.
Besides, she wasn’t sure what she knew at the moment.
There was porridge for breakfast. She ate it hurriedly, meaning to get back out into the paddock and see about that sheep. There might be tracks in the grass, or something….
She looked up, not knowing why.
Ratbag had been asleep in front of the oven. Now he was sitting up, alert. Tiffany felt a prickling on the back of her neck and tried to see what the cat was looking at.
On the dresser was a row of blue-and-white jars that weren’t very useful for anything. They’d been left to her mother by an elderly aunt, and she was proud of them because they looked nice but were completely useless. There was little room on the farm for useless things that looked nice, so they were treasured.
Ratbag was watching the lid of one of them. It was rising very slowly, and under it was a hint of red hair and two beady, staring eyes.
It lowered again when Tiffany gave it a long stare. A moment later she heard a faint rattle, and when she looked up, the pot was wobbling back and forth and there was a little cloud of dust rising along the top of the dresser. Ratbag was looking around in bewilderment.
They certainly were very fast.
She ran out into the paddock and looked around. The mist was off the grass now, and skylarks were rising on the downs.
“If that sheep doesn’t come back this minute,” she shouted at the sky, “there will be a reckoning!”
The sound bounced off the hills. And then she heard, very faint but close by, the sound of small voices:
“Whut did the hag say?” said the first voice.
“She said there’d be a reck’ning’!”
“Oh, waily, waily, waily! We’re in trouble noo!”
Tiffany looked around, face red with anger.
“We have a duty,” she said, to the air and the grass.
It was something Granny Aching had said once, when Tiffany had been crying about a lamb. She’d said: “We are as gods to the beasts o’ the field, my jiggit. We order the time o’ their birth and the time o’ their death. Between times, we ha’ a duty.”
“We have a duty,” Tiffany repeated, more softly. She glared around the field. “I know you can hear me, whoever you are. If that sheep doesn’t come back, there will be…trouble….”
The larks sang over the sheepfolds, making the silence deeper.
Tiffany had to do the chores before she had any more time to herself. That meant feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs, and feeling slightly proud of the fact that there were two more than there might otherwise have been. It meant fetching six buckets of water from the well and filling the log basket by the stove, but she put those jobs off because she didn’t like doing them much. She did quite like churning butter, though. It gave her time to think.
When I’m a witch with a pointy hat and a broomstick, she thought as she pumped the handle, I’ll wave my hand and the butter will come just like that. And any little red-headed devils who even think about taking our beasts will be—
There was a slopping sound behind her, where she’d lined up the six buckets to take to the well.
One of them was now full of water, which was still sloshing backward and forward.
She went back to the churning as if nothing had happened but stopped after a while and went over to the flour bin. She took a small handful of flour and dusted it over the doorstep, and then went back to the churning.
A few minutes later there was another watery sound behind her. When she turned around, there was, yes, another full bucket. And in the flour on the stone doorstep were just two lines of footprints, one leading out of the dairy and one coming back.
It was all Tiffany could do to lift one of the heavy wooden buckets when it was full.
So, she thought, they are immensely strong as well as being incredibly fast. I’m really being very calm about this.
She looked up at the big wooden beams that ran across the room, and a little dust fell down, as if something had quickly moved out of the way.
I think I ought to put a stop to this right now, she thought. On the other hand, there’s no harm in waiting until all the buckets are filled up.
“And then I’ll have to fill the log box in the scullery,” she said aloud. Well, it was worth a try.
She went back to the churning and didn’t bother to turn her head when she heard four more sloshes behind her. Nor did she look around when she heard little whooshwhoosh noises and the clatter of logs in the box. She turned to see only when the noise stopped.
The log box was full up to the ceiling, and all the buckets were full. The patch of flour was a mass of footprints.
She stopped churning. She had a feeling that eyes were watching her, a lot of eyes.
“Er…thank you,” she said. No, that wasn’t right. She sounded nervous. She let go of the butter paddle and stood up, trying to look as fierce as possible.
“And what about our sheep?” she said. “I won’t believe you’re really sorry until I see the sheep come back!”
There was a bleating from the paddock. She ran out to the bottom of the garden and looked through the hedge.
The sheep was coming back, backward and at high speed. It jerked to a halt a little way from the hedge and dropped down as the little men let it go. One of the red-headed men appeared for a moment on its head. He huffed on a horn, polished it with his kilt, and vanished in a blur.
Tiffany walked back to the dairy looking thoughtful.
When she got back, the butter had been churned. Not just churned, in fact, but patted into a dozen fat golden oblongs on the marble she used when she did it. There was even a sprig of parsley on each one.
Are they brownies? she wondered. According to the Faerie Tales, brownies hung around the house doing chores in exchange for a saucer of milk. But in the picture they’d been cheery little creatures with long pointy hoods. The red-haired men didn’t look as if they’d ever drunk milk in their lives, but perhaps it was worth a try.
“Well,” she said aloud, still aware of the hidden watchers. “That’ll do. Thank you. I’m glad you’re sorry for what you did.”
She took one of the cat’s saucers from the pile by the sink, washed it in the sink, filled it with milk from today’s churn, then put it down on the floor and stood back. “Are you brownies?” she said.
The air blurred. Milk splashed across the floor, and the saucer spun around and around.
“I’ll take that as a no, then,” said Tiffany. “So what are you?”
There were unlimited supplies of no answer at all.
She lay down and looked under the sink, and then peered behind the cheese shelves. She stared up into the dark, spidery shadows of the room. It felt empty.
And she thought: I think I need a whole egg’s worth of education, in a hurry.
Tiffany had walked along the steep track from the farm into the village hundreds of times. It was less than half a mile long, and over the centuries the carts had worn it down so that it was more like a gully in the chalk and ran like a milky stream in wet weather.
She was halfway down when the susurrus started. The hedges rustled without a wind. The skylarks stopped singing, and while she hadn’t really noticed their song, their silence was a shock. Nothing’s louder than the end of a song that’s always been there.
When she looked up at the sky, it was like looking through a diamond. It sparkled, and the air went cold so quickly that it was like stepping into an icy bath.
Then there was snow underfoot, snow on the hedges. And the sound of hooves.
They were in the field beside her. A horse was galloping through the snow, behind the hedge that was now, suddenly, just a wall of white.
The hoofbeats stopped. There was a moment of silence and then a horse landed in the lane, skidding on the snow. It pulled itself upright, and the rider turned it to face Tiffany.
The rider himself couldn’t face Tiffany. He had no face. He had no head to hang it on.
She ran. Her boots slipped on the snow as she moved, but suddenly her mind was cold as the ice.
She had two legs, slipping on ice. A horse had twice as many legs to slip. She’d seen horses try to tackle this hill in icy weather. She had a chance.