The Wee Free Men (7 page)

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.

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.

N
othing 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.

And down the path Ratbag, archenemy of all baby birds, slunk closer, drooling. As Tiffany opened her mouth to yell, he leaped and landed with all four feet on the little man.

Or at least where the little man had been, because he had somersaulted in midair and was now right in front of Ratbag’s face and had grabbed a cat ear with each hand.

“Ach, see you, pussycat, scunner that y’are!” he yelled. “Here’s a giftie from the t’ wee burdies, yah schemie!”

He butted the cat hard on the nose. Ratbag spun in the air and landed on his back with his eyes crossed. He squinted in cold terror as the little man leaned down at him and shouted,
“CHEEP!”

Then he levitated in the way that cats do and became a ginger streak, rocketing down the path through the open door, and shooting past Tiffany to hide under the sink.

The Feegle looked up, grinning, and saw Tiffany.

“Please don’t go—” she began quickly, but he went, in a blur.

Tiffany’s mother was hurrying down the path. Tiffany picked up the toad and put it back in her apron pocket just in time. The door was flung open.

“Where’s Wentworth? Is he here?” her mother asked urgently. “Did he come back? Answer me!”

“Didn’t he go up to the shearing with you, Mum?” said Tiffany, suddenly nervous. She could feel the panic pouring off her mother like steam.

“We can’t find him!” There was a wild look in her mother’s eyes. “I turned my back for only a minute! Are you
sure
you haven’t seen him?”

“But he couldn’t come all the way back here—”

“Go and look in the house! Go on!”

Mrs. Aching hurried away. Hastily, Tiffany put the toad on the floor and urged him under the sink. She heard him croak, and Ratbag, mad with fear and bewilderment, came out from under the sink in a whirl of legs and rocketed out of the door.

She stood up. Her first, shameful thought was: He
wanted
to go up to watch the shearing. How could he get lost? He went with Mum and Hannah and Fastidia!

And how closely would Fastidia and Hannah watch him with all those young men up there?

She tried to pretend she hadn’t thought that, but she was treacherously good at spotting when she was lying. That’s the trouble with a brain—it thinks more than you sometimes want it to.

But he’s never interested in moving far away from people! It’s half a mile up to the shearing pens! And he doesn’t move that fast. After a few feet he flops down and demands sweets!

But it would be a bit more peaceful around here if he
did
get lost….

There it went again, a nasty, shameful thought, which she tried to drown out by getting busy. But first she took some candy out of the jar, as bait, and rustled the bag as she ran from room to room.

She heard boots in the yard as some of the men came down from the shearing sheds, but she got on with looking under beds and in cupboards, even ones so high that a toddler couldn’t possibly reach them, and then looked
again
under beds that she’d already looked under, because it was that kind of search. It was the kind of search where you go and look in the attic, even though the door is always locked.

After a few minutes there were two or three voices outside, calling for Wentworth, and she heard her father say, “Try down by the river!”

…and that meant he was frantic too, because Wentworth would never walk that far without a bribe. He was not a child who was happy away from people with sweets.

It’s your fault.

The thought felt like a piece of ice in her mind.

It’s
your
fault because you didn’t love him very much. He turned up and you weren’t the youngest anymore, and you had to have him trailing around after you, and you kept wishing, didn’t you, that he’d go away.

“That’s not true!” Tiffany whispered to herself. “I…quite liked him….”

Not very much, admittedly. Not all the time. He didn’t know how to play properly, and he never did what he was told.
You
thought it would be better if he
did
get lost.

Anyway
, she added in her head, you can’t love people all the time when they have a permanently runny nose. Any
anyway
…I wonder…

“I wish I could find my brother,” she said aloud.

This seemed to have no effect. But the house was full of people, opening and shutting doors and calling out and getting in one another’s way, and the…Feegles were shy, despite many of them having faces like a hatful of knuckles.

Don’t
wish
, Miss Tick had said.
Do
things.

She went downstairs. Even some of the women who’d been packing fleeces up at the shearing had come down. They were clustered around her mother, who was sitting at the table crying. No one noticed Tiffany. That often happened.

She slipped into the dairy, closed the door carefully behind her, and leaned down to peer under the sink.

The door burst open again and her father ran in. He stopped. Tiffany looked up guiltily.

“He can’t be under there, girl!” her father said.

“Well, er…” said Tiffany.

“Did you look upstairs?”

“Even the attic, Dad—”

“Well.” Her father looked panicky and impatient at the same time. “Go and…do something!”

“Yes, Dad.”

When the door had shut, Tiffany peered under the sink again.

“Are you there, toad?”

“Very poor pickings under here,” the toad answered, crawling out. “You keep it very clean. Not even a spider.”

“This is
urgent
!” snapped Tiffany. “My little brother has gone
missing. In broad daylight! Up on the downs, where you can see for miles!”

“Oh,
croap
,” said the toad.

“Pardon?” said Tiffany.

“Er, that was, er, swearing in Toad,” said the toad. “Sorry, but—”

“Has what’s going on got something to do with magic?” said Tiffany. “It has, hasn’t it…?”

“I hope it hasn’t,” said the toad, “but I think it has.”

“Have those little men stolen Wentworth?”

“Who, the Feegles?
They
don’t steal children!”

There was something in the way the toad said it.
They
don’t steal…

“Do you know who
has
taken my brother, then?” Tiffany demanded.

“No. But…they might,” said the toad. “Look, Miss Tick told me that you were not to—”

“My brother has been
stolen
,” said Tiffany sharply. “Are you going to tell me not to do anything about it?”

“No, but—”

“Good! Where are the Feegles now?”

“Lying low, I expect. The place is full of people searching, after all, but—”

“How can I bring them back? I
need
them!”

“Um, Miss Tick said—”

“How can I bring them back?”

“Er…you want to bring them back, then?” said the toad, looking mournful.

“Yes!”

“It’s just that’s something not many people have ever wanted to do,” said the toad. “They’re not like brownies. If you get Nac Mac
Feegle in the house, it’s usually best to move away.” He sighed. “Tell me, is your father a drinking man?”

“He has a beer sometimes,” said Tiffany. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Only beer?”

“Well, I’m not supposed to know about what my father calls the Special Sheep Liniment,” said Tiffany. “Granny Aching used to make it in the old cowshed.”

“Strong stuff, is it?”

“It dissolves spoons,” said Tiffany. “It’s for special occasions. Father says it’s not for women because it puts hairs on your chest.”

“Then if you want to be
sure
of finding the Nac Mac Feegle, go and fetch some,” said the toad. “It will work, believe me.”

Five minutes later Tiffany was ready. Few things are hidden from a quiet child with good eyesight, and she knew where the bottles were stored and she had one now. The cork was hammered in over a piece of rag, but it was old and she was able to lever it out with the tip of a knife. The fumes made her eyes water.

She went to pour some of the golden-brown liquid into a saucer—

“No! We’ll be trampled to death if you do that,” said the toad. “Just leave the cork off.”

Fumes rose from the top of the bottle, wavering like the air over rocks on a hot day.

She felt it—a sensation, in the dim, cool room, of riveted attention.

She sat down on a milking stool and said, “All right, you can come out now.”

There were
hundreds.
They rose up from behind buckets. They lowered themselves on string from the ceiling beams. They sidled
sheepishly from behind the cheese racks. They crept out from under the sink. They came out of places where you’d think a man with hair like an orange gone nova couldn’t possibly hide.

They were all about six inches tall and mostly colored blue, although it was hard to know if that was the actual color of their skins or just the dye from their tattoos, which covered every inch that wasn’t covered with red hair. They wore short kilts, and some wore other bits of clothing too, like skinny vests. A few of them wore rabbit or rat skulls on their heads, as a sort of helmet. And every single one of them carried, slung across his back, a sword nearly as big as he was.

However, what Tiffany noticed more than anything else was that they were scared of her. Mostly they were looking at their own feet, which was no errand for the faint-hearted because their feet were large, dirty, and half tied up with animal skins to make very bad shoes. None of them wanted to look her in the eye.

“You were the people who filled the water buckets?” she said.

There was a lot of foot shuffling and coughing and a chorus of ayes.

“And the wood box?”

There were more ayes.

Tiffany glared at them.

“And what about the sheep?”

This time they all looked down.