The Wee Free Men

Page 3

And that was the trouble. If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions.
The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth peddlers, fortune-tellers, and all the other travelers who sold things the people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful.
They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travelers and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like corrugated iron. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the math teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure, and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.
People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing, after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.
Today the brightly colored little booths and tents were pitched in a field just outside the village. Behind them small square areas had been fenced off with high canvas walls and were patrolled by apprentice teachers looking for anyone trying to overhear Education without paying.
The first tent Tiffany saw had a sign that read:
JOGRAFFY! JOGRAFFY! JOGRAFFY!
FOR TODAY ONLY: ALL MAJOR LAND MASSES AND OCEANS
PLUS EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNO ABOUT GLASSIERS!
ONE PENNY, OR ALL MAJOR VEJTABLES ACSEPTED!
Tiffany had read enough to know that, while he might be a whiz at major land masses, this particular teacher could have done with some help from the man running the stall next door:
THE WONDERS OF PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING
1 ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY ABOUT THE COMMA!
2 I BEFORE E COMPLETELY SORTED OUT!
3 THE MYSTERY OF THE SEMICOLON REVEALED!!!
4 SEE THE AMPERSAND! (SMALL EXTRA CHARGE)
5 FUN WITH BRACKETS!
** WILL ACCEPT VEGETABLES, EGGS, AND CLEAN USED CLOTHING **
The next stall along was decorated with scenes out of history, generally of kings cutting one another’s heads off and similar interesting highlights. The teacher in front was dressed in ragged red robes with rabbit-skin trimmings and wore an old top hat with flags stuck in it. He had a small megaphone that he aimed at Tiffany.
“The Death of Kings Through the Ages?” he said. “Very educational, lots of blood!”
“Not really,” said Tiffany.
“Oh, you’ve got to know where you’ve come from, miss,” said the teacher. “Otherwise how will you know where you’re going?”
“I come from a long line of Aching people,” said Tiffany. “And I think I’m moving on.”
She found what she was looking for at a booth hung with pictures of animals including, she was pleased to see, a camel. The sign said:
USEFUL CREATURES—TODAY: OUR FRIEND THE HEDGEHOG!
She wondered how useful the thing in the river had been, but this looked like the only place to find out. A few children were waiting on the benches inside the booth for the lesson to begin, but the teacher was still standing out in front, in the hope of filling up the empty spaces.
“Hello, little girl,” he said, which was only his first big mistake. “I’m sure you want to know all about hedgehogs, eh?”
“I did this one last summer,” said Tiffany.
The man looked closer, and his grin faded. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember. You asked all those…little questions.”
“I would like a question answered today,” said Tiffany.
“Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,” said the man.
“No,” said Tiffany patiently. “It’s about zoology.”
“Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.”
“No, actually it isn’t,” said Tiffany. “Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.”
The teacher’s eyes narrowed further. Children like Tiffany were bad news. “I can see you’re a clever one,” he said. “But I don’t know any teachers of zoology in these parts. Vetin’ry, yes, but not zoology. Any particular animal?”
“Jenny Green-Teeth. A water-dwelling monster with big teeth and claws and eyes like soup plates,” said Tiffany.
“What size of soup plates? Do you mean big soup plates, a whole full-portion bowl with maybe some biscuits, possibly even a bread roll, or do you mean the little cup you might get if, for example, you just ordered soup and a salad?”
“The size of soup plates that are eight inches across,” said Tiffany, who’d never ordered soup and a salad anywhere in her life. “I checked.”
“Hmm, that is a puzzler,” said the teacher. “Don’t think I know that one. It’s certainly not useful, I know that. It sounds made-up to me.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought,” said Tiffany. “But I’d still like to know more about it.”
“Well, you could try her. She’s new.”
The teacher jerked his thumb toward a little tent at the end of the row. It was black and quite shabby. There weren’t any posters, and absolutely no exclamation marks.
“What does she teach?” Tiffany asked.
“Couldn’t say,” said the teacher. “She says it’s thinking, but I don’t know how you teach that. That’ll be one carrot, thank you.”
When she went closer, Tiffany saw a small notice pinned to the outside of the tent. It said, in letters that whispered rather than shouted:
I CAN TEACH YOU A LESSON YOU WON’T FORGET IN A HURRY.
CHAPTER 2
Miss Tick
Tiffany read the sign and smiled.
“Aha,” she said. There was nothing to knock on, so she added “Knock, knock” in a louder voice.
A woman’s voice from within said: “Who’s there?”
“Tiffany,” said Tiffany.
“Tiffany who?” said the voice.
“Tiffany who isn’t trying to make a joke.”
“Ah. That sounds promising. Come in.”
She pushed aside the flap. It was dark inside the tent, as well as stuffy and hot. A skinny figure sat behind a small table. She had a very sharp, thin nose and was wearing a large black straw hat with paper flowers on it. It was completely unsuitable for a face like that.
“Are you a witch?” said Tiffany. “I don’t mind if you are.”
“What a strange question to spring on someone,” said the woman, looking slightly shocked. “Your Baron bans witches in this country, you know that, and the first thing you say to me is ‘Are you a witch?’ Why would I be a witch?”
“Well, you’re wearing all black,” said Tiffany.
“Anyone can wear black,” said the woman. “That doesn’t mean a thing.”
“And you’re wearing a straw hat with flowers in it,” Tiffany went on.
“Aha!” said the woman. “That proves it, then. Witches wear tall pointy hats. Everyone knows that, foolish child.”
“Yes, but witches are also very clever,” said Tiffany calmly. There was something about the twinkle in the woman’s eyes that told her to continue. “They sneak about. Probably they often don’t look like witches. And a witch coming here would know about the Baron, and so she’d wear the kind of hat that everyone knows witches don’t wear.”
The woman stared at her. “That was an incredible feat of reasoning,” she said at last. “You’d make a good witch finder. You know they used to set fire to witches? Whatever kind of hat I’ve got on, you’d say it proves I’m a witch, yes?”
“Well, the frog sitting on your hat is a bit of a clue, too,” said Tiffany.
“I’m a toad, actually,” said the creature, which had been peering at Tiffany from between the paper flowers.
“You’re very yellow for a toad.”
“I’ve been a bit ill,” said the toad.
“And you talk,” said Tiffany.
“You only have my word for it,” said the toad, disappearing into the paper flowers. “You can’t prove anything.”
“You don’t have matches on you, do you?” said the woman to Tiffany.
“No.”
“Fine, fine. Just checking.”
Again there was a pause while the woman gave Tiffany a long stare, as if making up her mind about something.
“My name,” she said at last, “is Miss Tick. And I am a witch. It’s a good name for a witch, of course.”
“You mean blood-sucking parasite?” said Tiffany, wrinkling her forehead.
“I’m sorry?” said Miss Tick, coldly.
“Ticks,” said Tiffany. “Sheep get them. But if you use turpentine—”
“I meant that it sounds like ‘mystic,’” said Miss Tick.
“Oh, you mean a pune, or play on words,” said Tiffany.* “In that case it would be even better if you were Miss Teak, a dense foreign wood, because that would sound like ‘mystique,’ or you could be Miss Take, which would—”
“I can see we’re going to get along like a house on fire,” said Miss Tick. “There may be no survivors.”
“You really are a witch?”
“Oh, puh-lease,” said Miss Tick. “Yes, yes, I am a witch. I have a talking animal, a tendency to correct other people’s pronunciation—it’s pun, by the way, not ‘pune’—and a fascination for poking my nose into other people’s affairs and, yes, a pointy hat.”
“Can I operate the spring now?” said the toad.
“Yes,” said Miss Tick, her eyes still on Tiffany. “You can operate the spring.”
“I like operating the spring,” said the toad, crawling around to the back of the hat.
There was a click, and a slow thwap-thwap noise, and the center of the hat rose slowly and jerkily up out of the paper flowers, which fell away.
“Er…” said Tiffany.
“You have a question?” said Miss Tick.
With a last thwop, the top of the hat made a perfect point.
“How do you know I won’t run away right now and tell the Baron?” said Tiffany.
“Because you haven’t the slightest desire to do so,” said Miss Tick. “You’re absolutely fascinated. You want to be a witch, am I right? You probably want to fly on a broomstick, yes?”
“Oh, yes!” She’d often dreamed of flying. Miss Tick’s next words brought her down to earth.
“Really? You like having to wear really, really thick pants? Believe me, if I’ve got to fly, I wear two pairs of woolen ones and a canvas pair on the outside which, I may tell you, are not very feminine no matter how much lace you sew on. It can get cold up there. People forget that. And then there’s the bristles. Don’t ask me about the bristles. I will not talk about the bristles.”