The Wee Free Men

Page 9

She heard a breathy, whistling noise behind her, and a whinny from the horse. She risked a glance. The horse was coming after her, but slowly, half walking and half sliding. Steam poured off it.
About halfway down the slope the lane passed under an arch of trees, looking like crashed clouds now under their weight of snow. And beyond them, Tiffany knew, the lane flattened out. The headless man would catch her on the flat. She didn’t know what would happen after that, but she was sure it would be unpleasantly short.
Flakes of snow dropped on her as she passed under the trees, and she decided to make a run for it. She might reach the village. She was good at running.
But if she got there, then what? She’d never reach a door in time. And people would shout, and run about. The dark horseman didn’t look like someone who’d take much notice of that. No, she had to deal with it.
If only she’d brought the frying pan.
“Here, wee hag! Stannit ye still, right noo!”
She stared up.
A tiny blue man had poked his head up out of the snow on top of the hedge.
“There’s a headless horseman after me!” she shouted.
“He’ll no’ make it, hinny. Stand ye still! Look him in the eye!”
“He hasn’t got any eyes!”
“Crivens! Are ye a hag or no’? Look him in the eyes he hasna got!”
The blue man disappeared into the snow.
Tiffany turned around. The horseman was trotting under the trees now, the horse more certain as the ground leveled. He had a sword in his hand, and he was looking at her, with the eyes he didn’t have. There was the breathy noise again, not good to hear.
The little men are watching me, she thought. I can’t run. Granny Aching wouldn’t have run from a thing with no head.
She folded her arms and glared.
The horseman stopped, as if puzzled, and then urged the horse forward.
A blue-and-red shape, larger than the other little men, dropped out of the trees. He landed on the horse’s forehead, between its eyes, and grabbed an ear in each hand.
Tiffany heard the man shout: “Here’s a face full o’ dandruff for ye, yer bogle, courtesy of Big Yan!” and then the man hit the horse between the eyes with his head.
To her amazement the horse staggered sideways.
“Aw right?” shouted the tiny fighter. “Big toughie, is ye? Once more wi’ feelin’!”
This time the horse danced uneasily the other way, and then its back legs slid from under it and it collapsed in the snow.
Little blue men erupted from the hedge. The horseman, trying to get to his feet, disappeared under a blue-and-red storm of screaming creatures—
And vanished. The snow vanished. The horse vanished.
The blue men, for a moment, were in a pile on the hot, dusty road. One of them said, “Aw, crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!” And then they, too, vanished, but for a moment Tiffany saw blue-and-red blurs disappearing into the hedge.
Then the skylarks were back. The hedges were green and full of flowers. Not a twig was broken, not a flower disturbed. The sky was blue, with no flashes of diamond.
Tiffany looked down. On the toes of her boots, snow was melting. She was, strangely, glad about that. It meant that what had just happened was magical, not madness. Because if she closed her eyes, she could still hear the wheezy breathing of the headless man.
What she needed right now was people, and ordinary things happening. But more than anything else, she wanted answers.
Actually, what she wanted more than anything else was not to hear the wheezy breathing when she shut her eyes….
The tents had gone. Except for a few pieces of broken chalk, apple cores, some stamped-down grass, and, alas, a few chicken feathers, there was nothing at all to show that the teachers had ever been there.
A small voice said, “Psst!”
She looked down. A toad crept out from under a dock leaf.
“Miss Tick said you’d be back,” it said. “I expect there’s some things you need to know, right?”
“Everything,” said Tiffany. “We’re swamped with tiny men! I can’t understand half of what they say! They keep calling me a hag!”
“Ah, yes,” said the toad. “You’ve got Nac Mac Feegles!”
“It snowed, and then it hadn’t! I was chased by a horseman with no head! And one of the…what did you say they were?”
“Nac Mac Feegles,” said the toad. “Also known as pictsies. They call themselves the Wee Free Men.”
“Well, one of them head-butted the horse! It fell over! It was a huge horse, too!”
“Ah, that sounds like a Feegle,” said the toad.
“I gave them some milk and they tipped it over!”
“You gave the Nac Mac Feegle milk?”
“Well, you said they’re pixies!”
“Not pixies, pictsies. They certainly don’t drink milk!”
“Are they from the same place as Jenny?” Tiffany demanded.
“No. They’re rebels,” said toad.
“Rebels? Against who?”
“Everyone. Anything,” said the toad. “Now pick me up.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a woman at the well over there giving you a funny look. Put me in your apron pocket, for goodness’ sake.”
Tiffany snatched up the toad and smiled at the woman. “I’m making a collection of pressed toads,” she said.
“That’s nice, dear,” said the woman, and hurried away.
“That wasn’t very funny,” said the toad from her apron.
“People don’t listen anyway,” said Tiffany.
She sat down under a tree and took the toad out of her pocket.
“The Feegles tried to steal some of our eggs and one of our sheep,” she said. “But I got them back.”
“You got something back from the Nac Mac Feegle?” said the toad. “Were they ill?”
“No. They were a bit…well, sweet, actually. They even did the chores for me.”
“The Feegle did chores?” said the toad. “They never do chores! They’re not helpful at all!”
“And then there was the headless horseman!” said Tiffany. “He had no head!”
“Well, that is the major job qualification,” said the toad.
“What’s going on, toad?” said Tiffany. “Is it the Feegles who are invading?”
The toad looked a bit shifty. “Miss Tick doesn’t really want you to handle this,” it said. “She’ll be back soon with help—”
“Is she going to be in time?” Tiffany demanded.
“I don’t know. Probably. But you shouldn’t—”
“I want to know what is happening!”
“She’s gone to get some other witches,” said the toad. “Uh…she doesn’t think you should—”
“You’d better tell me what you know, toad,” said Tiffany. “Miss Tick isn’t here. I am.”
“Another world is colliding with this one,” said the toad. “There. Happy now? That’s what Miss Tick thinks. But it’s happening faster than she expected. All the monsters are coming back.”
“Why?”
“There’s no one to stop them.”
There was silence for a moment.
“There’s me,” said Tiffany.
CHAPTER 4
The Wee Free Men
Nothing happened on the way back to the farm. The sky stayed blue, none of the sheep in the home paddocks appeared to be traveling backward very fast, and an air of hot emptiness lay over everything.
Ratbag was on the path leading up to the back door, and he had something trapped in his paws. As soon as he saw Tiffany, he picked it up and exited around the corner of the house urgently, legs spinning in the high-speed slink of a guilty cat. Tiffany was too good a shot with a clod of earth.
But at least there wasn’t something red-and-blue in his mouth.
“Look at him,” she said. “Great cowardly blob! I really wish I could stop him catching baby birds—it’s so sad!”
“You haven’t got a hat you can wear, have you?” said the toad, from her apron pocket. “I hate not being able to see.”
They went into the dairy, which Tiffany normally had to herself for most of the day.
In the bushes by the door there was a muffled conversation. It went like this:
“Whut did the wee hag say?”
“She said she wants yon cat to stop scraffin’ the puir wee burdies.”
“Is that a’? Crivens! Nae problemo!”
Tiffany put the toad on the table as carefully as possible.
“What do you eat?” she said. It was polite to offer guests food, she knew.
“I’ve got used to slugs and worms and stuff,” said the toad. “It wasn’t easy. Don’t worry if you don’t have any. I expect you weren’t expecting a toad to drop in.”
“How about some milk?”
“You’re very kind.”
Tiffany fetched some and poured it into a saucer. She watched while the toad crawled in.
“Were you a handsome prince?” she asked.
“Yeah, right, maybe,” said the toad, dribbling milk.
“So why did Miss Tick put a spell on you?”
“Her? Huh, she couldn’t do that,” said the toad. “It’s serious magic, turning someone into a toad but leaving them thinking they’re human. No, it was a fairy godmother. Never cross a woman with a star on a stick, young lady. They’ve got a mean streak.”
“Why did she do it?”
The toad looked embarrassed. “I don’t know,” it said. “It’s all a bit…foggy. I just know I’ve been a person. At least, I think I know. It gives me the willies. Sometimes I wake up in the night and I think, was I ever really human? Or was I just a toad that got on her nerves and she made me think I was human once? That’d be a real torture, right? Supposing there’s nothing for me to turn back into?” The toad turned worried yellow eyes on her. “After all, it can’t be very hard to mess with a toad’s head, yeah? It must be much simpler than turning, oh, a one-hundred-and-sixty-pound human into eight ounces of toad, yes? After all, where’s the rest of the mass going to go, I ask myself? Is it just sort of, you know, left over? Very worrying. I mean, I’ve got one or two memories of being a human, of course, but what’s a memory? Just a thought in your brain. You can’t be sure it’s real. Honestly, on nights when I’ve eaten a bad slug, I wake up screaming, except all that comes out is a croak. Thank you for the milk, it was very nice.”
Tiffany stared in silence at the toad.
“You know,” she said, “magic is a lot more complicated than I thought.”
“Flappitty-flappitty flap! Cheep, cheep! Ach, poor wee me, cheepitty-cheep!”
Tiffany ran over to the window.
There was a Feegle on the path. It had made itself some crude wings out of a piece of rag, and a kind of beaky cap out of straw, and was wobbling around in a circle like a wounded bird.
“Ach, cheepitty-cheep! Fluttery-flutter! I certainly hope dere’s no’ a pussycat aroound! Ach, dearie me!” it yelled.