The Wee Free Men

Page 13

And then there were the weird places, like Old Man’s Forge, which was just four big flat rocks placed so they made a kind of half-buried hut in the side of a mound. It was only a few feet deep. It didn’t look like anything special, but if you shouted your name into it, it was several seconds before the echo came back.
There were signs of people everywhere. The Chalk had been important.
Tiffany left the shearing sheds way behind. No one was watching. Sheared sheep took no notice at all of a girl moving without her feet touching the ground.
The lowlands dropped away behind her, and now she was properly on the downs. Only the occasional baa of a sheep or scream of a buzzard disturbed a busy silence, made up of bee buzzes and breezes and the sound of a ton of grass growing every minute.
On either side of Tiffany the Nac Mac Feegle ran in a spread out ragged line, staring grimly ahead.
They passed some of the mounds without stopping, and ran up and down the sides of shallow valleys without a pause. And it was then that Tiffany saw a landmark ahead.
It was a small flock of sheep. There were only a few, freshly sheared, but there were always a handful of sheep at this place. Strays would turn up there, and lambs would find their way to it when they’d lost their mothers.
This was a magic place.
There wasn’t much to see now, just the iron wheels sinking into the turf and the pot-bellied stove with its short chimney….
On the day Granny Aching died, the men had cut and lifted the turf around the hut and stacked it neatly some way away. Then they’d dug a deep hole in the chalk, six feet deep and six feet long, lifting out the chalk in great damp blocks.
Thunder and Lightning had watched them carefully. They didn’t whine or bark. They seemed more interested than upset.
Granny Aching had been wrapped in a woolen blanket, with a tuft of raw wool pinned to it. That was a special shepherd thing. It was there to tell any gods who might get involved that the person being buried there was a shepherd, and spent a lot of time on the hills, and what with lambing and one thing and another couldn’t always take much time out for religion, there being no churches or temples up there, and therefore it was generally hoped that the gods would understand and look kindly on them. Granny Aching, it had to be said, had never been seen to pray to anyone or anything in her life, and it was agreed by all that, even now, she wouldn’t have any time for a god who didn’t understand that lambing came first.
The chalk had been put back over her, and Granny Aching, who always said that the hills were in her bones, now had her bones in the hills.
Then they burned the hut. That wasn’t usual, but her father had said that there wasn’t a shepherd anywhere on the Chalk who’d use it now.
Thunder and Lightning wouldn’t come when he called, and he knew better than to be angry, so they were left sitting quite contentedly by the glowing embers of the hut.
Next day, when the ashes were cold and blowing across the raw chalk, everyone went up onto the downs and with very great care put the turf back, so all that was left to see were the iron wheels on their axles, and the pot-bellied stove.
At which point—so everyone said—the two sheepdogs had looked up, their ears pricking, and had trotted away over the turf and were never seen again.
The pictsies carrying her slowed down gently, and Tiffany flailed her arms as they dropped her onto the grass. The sheep lumbered away slowly, then stopped and turned to watch her.
“Why’re we stopping? Why’re we stopping here? We’ve got to catch her!”
“Got to wait for Hamish, mistress,” said Rob Anybody.
“Why? Who’s Hamish?”
“He might have the knowin’ of where the Quin went with your wee laddie,” said Rob Anybody soothingly. “We canna just rush in, ye ken.”
A big, bearded Feegle raised his hand. “Point ’o order, Big Man. Ye can just rush in. We always just rush in.”
“Aye, Big Yan, point well made. But ye gotta know where ye’re just gonna rush in. Ye canna just rush in anywhere. It looks bad, havin’ to rush oout again straight awa’.”
Tiffany saw that all the Feegles were staring intently upward and paying her no attention at all.
Angry and puzzled, she sat down on one of the rusty wheels and looked at the sky. It was better than looking around. There was Granny Aching’s grave somewhere around here, although you couldn’t find it now, not precisely. The turf had healed.
There were a few little clouds above her and nothing else at all, except the distant circling dots of the buzzards. There were always buzzards over the Chalk.
The shepherds had taken to calling them Granny Aching’s chickens, and some of them called clouds like those up there today “Granny’s little lambs.” And Tiffany knew that even her father called the thunder “Granny Aching cussin’.”
And it was said that some of the shepherds, if wolves were troublesome in the winter, or a prize ewe had got lost, would go to the site of the old hut in the hills and leave an ounce of Jolly Sailor tobacco, just in case….
Tiffany hesitated. Then she shut her eyes. I want that to be true, she whispered to herself. I want to know that other people think she hasn’t really gone too.
She looked under the wide rusted rim of the wheels and shivered. There was a brightly colored little packet there.
She picked it up. It looked quite fresh, so it had probably been there for only a few days. There was the Jolly Sailor on the front, with his big grin and big yellow rain hat and big beard, with big blue waves crashing behind him.
Tiffany had learned about the sea from Granny Aching and the Jolly Sailor wrappings. She’d heard it was big, and roared. There was a tower in the sea, which was a lighthouse that carried a big light on it at night to stop boats from crashing into the rocks. In the pictures the beam of the lighthouse was a brilliant white. She knew about it so well, she’d dreamed about it, and had woken up with the roar of the sea in her ears.
She’d heard one of her uncles say that if you looked at the tobacco label upside down, then part of the hat and the sailor’s ear and a bit of his collar made up a picture of a woman with no clothes on, but Tiffany had never been able to make it out and couldn’t see what the point would be in any case.
She carefully pulled the label off the packet and sniffed at it. It smelled of Granny. She felt her eyes begin to fill with tears. She’d never cried for Granny Aching before, never. She’d cried for dead lambs and cut fingers and for not getting her own way, but never for Granny. It hadn’t seemed right.
And I’m not crying now, she thought, carefully putting the label in her apron pocket. Not for Granny being dead….
It was the smell. Granny Aching smelled of sheep, turpentine, and Jolly Sailor tobacco. The three smells mixed together and become one smell, which was, to Tiffany, the smell of the Chalk. It followed Granny Aching like a cloud, and it meant warmth, and silence, and a space around which the whole world revolved….
A shadow passed overhead. A buzzard was diving down from the sky toward the Nac Mac Feegle.
She leaped up and waved her arms. “Run away! Duck! It’ll kill you!”
They turned and looked at her for a moment as though she’d gone mad.
“Dinna fash yersel’, mistress,” said Rob Anybody.
The bird curved up at the bottom of its dive, and as it climbed again a dot dropped from it. As it fell, it seemed to grow two wings and started to spin like a sycamore leaf, which slowed down the fall somewhat.
It was a pictsie, still spinning madly when he hit the turf a few feet away, where he fell over. He got up, swearing loudly, and fell over again. The swearing continued.
“A good landin’, Hamish,” said Rob Anybody. “The spinnin’ certainly slows ye doon. Ye didna drill right into the ground this time hardly at a’.”
Hamish got up more slowly this time and managed to stay upright. He had a pair of goggles over his eyes.
“I dinna think I can tak’ much more o’ this,” he said, trying to untie a couple of thin bits of wood from his arms. “I feel like a fairy wi’ the wings on.”
“How can you survive that?” Tiffany asked.
The very small pilot tried to look her up and down, but only managed to look her up and farther up.
“Who’s the wee bigjob who knows sich a lot aboot aviation?” he said.
Rob Anybody coughed. “She’s the hag, Hamish. Spawn o’ Granny Aching.”
Hamish’s expression changed to a look of terror. “I didna mean to speak out o’ turn, mistress,” he said, backing away. “O’ course, a hag’d have the knowing of anythin’. But ’tis nae as bad as it looks, mistress. I allus make sure I lands on my heid.”
“Aye, we’re very resilient in the heid department,” said Rob Anybody.
“Have you seen a woman with a small boy?” Tiffany demanded. She hadn’t much liked being called “spawn.”
Hamish gave Rob Anybody a panicky look, and Rob nodded.
“Aye, I did,” said Hamish. “Onna black horse. Riding up from the lowlan’s goin’ hell for—”
“We dinna use bad language in front o’ a hag!” Rob Anybody thundered.
“Begging your pardon, mistress. She was ridin’ heck for leather,” said Hamish, looking more sheepish than the sheep. “But she kenned I was spyin’ her and called up a mist. She’s gone to the other side, but I dinna ken where.”
“’Tis a perilous place, the other side,” said Rob Anybody slowly. “Evil things there. A cold place. Not a place to tak’ a wee babbie.”
It was hot on the downs, but Tiffany felt a chill. However bad it is, she thought, I’m going to have to go there. I know it. I don’t have a choice.
“The other side?” she said.
“Aye. The magic world,” said Rob Anybody. “There’s…bad things there.”
“Monsters?” said Tiffany.
“As bad as ye can think of,” said Rob Anybody. “Exactly as bad as ye can think of.”
Tiffany swallowed hard and closed her eyes. “Worse than Jenny? Worse than the headless horseman?” she said.
“Oh, aye. They were wee pussycats compared to the scunners over there. ’Tis an ill-fared country that’s come callin’, mistress. ’Tis a land where dreams come true. That’s the Quin’s world.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound too—” Tiffany began. Then she remembered some of the dreams she’d had, the ones where you were so glad to wake up…. “We’re not talking about nice dreams, are we?” she said.
Rob Anybody shook his head. “Nay, mistress. The other kind.”
And me with my frying pan and Diseases of the Sheep, thought Tiffany. And she had a mental picture of Wentworth among horrible monsters. They probably wouldn’t have any sweeties at all.
She sighed. “All right,” she said. “How do I get there?”
“Ye dinna ken the way?” said Rob Anybody.
It wasn’t what she’d been expecting. What she had been expecting was more like “Ach, ye canna do that, a wee lass like you, oh deary us no!” She wasn’t so much expecting that as hoping it, in fact. But, instead, they were acting as if it was a perfectly reasonable idea….