The Wee Free Men

The thing wasn’t just trying to kill her, it was insulting her.



William was watching her.



“Aye, ye’re lookin’ mighty fierce,” he said. “Ye must love your wee brother to face a’ these monsters for him.”



And Tiffany couldn’t stop her thoughts. I don’t love him. I know I don’t. He’s just so…sticky, and can’t keep up, and I have to spend too much time looking after him, and he’s always screaming for things. I can’t talk to him. He just wants all the time.



But her Second Thinking said: He’s mine. My place, my home, my brother! How dare anything touch what’s mine!



She’d been brought up not to be selfish. She knew she wasn’t, not in the way people meant. She tried to think of other people. She never took the last slice of bread. This was a different feeling.



She wasn’t being brave or noble or kind. She was doing this because it had to be done, because there was no way that she could not do it. She thought of:



…Granny Aching’s light, weaving slowly across the downs, on freezing, sparkly nights or in storms like a raging war, saving lambs from the creeping frost or rams from the precipice. She froze and struggled and tramped through the night for idiot sheep that never said thank you and would be just as stupid tomorrow, and get into the same trouble again. And she did it because not doing it was unthinkable.



There had been the time when they met the peddler and the donkey in the lane. It was a small donkey and could hardly be seen under the pack piled on it. And the peddler was thrashing it because it had fallen over.



Tiffany had cried to see that, and Granny had looked at her and then said something to Thunder and Lightning.



The peddler had stopped when he heard the growling. The sheepdogs had taken up positions on either side of the man, so that he couldn’t quite see them both at once. He raised his stick as if to hit Lightning, and Thunder’s growl grew louder.



“I’d advise ye not to do that,” said Granny.



He wasn’t a stupid man. The eyes of the dogs were like steel balls. He lowered his arm.



“Now throw down the stick,” said Granny. The man did so, dropping it into the dust as though it had suddenly grown red-hot.



Granny Aching walked forward and picked it up. Tiffany remembered that it was a willow twig, long and whippy.



Suddenly, so fast that her hand was a blur, Granny sliced it across the man’s face twice, leaving two long red marks. He began to move, and some desperate thought must have saved him, because now the dogs were almost frantic for the command to leap.



“Hurts, don’t it?” said Granny, pleasantly. “Now, I knows who you are, and I reckon you knows who I am. You sell pots and pans and they ain’t bad, as I recall. But if I put out the word, you’ll have no business in my hills. Be told. Better to feed your beast than whip it. You hear me?”



With his eyes shut and his hands shaking, the man nodded.



“That’ll do,” said Granny Aching, and instantly the dogs became, once more, two ordinary sheepdogs, who came and sat on either side of her with their tongues hanging out.



Tiffany watched the man unpack some of the load and strap it to his own back and then, with great care, urge the donkey on along the road. Granny watched him go while filling her pipe with Jolly Sailor. Then, as she lit it, she said, as if the thought had just occurred to her:



“Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.”



Tiffany thought: Is this what being a witch is? It wasn’t what I expected! When do the good bits happen?



She stood up. “Let’s keep going,” she said.



“Aren’t ye tired?” said Rob.



“We’re going to keep going!”



“Aye? Weel, she’s probably headed for her place beyond the wood. If we dinna carry ye, it’ll tak’ aboout a coupla hours—”



“I’ll walk!” The memory of the huge dead face of the drome was trying to come back into her mind, but fury gave it no space. “Where’s the frying pan? Thank you! Let’s go!”



She set off through the strange trees. The hoofprints almost glowed in the gloom. Here and there other tracks crossed them, tracks that could have been bird feet, rough round footprints that could have been made by anything, squiggly lines that a snake might make, if there were such things as snow snakes.



The pictsies were running in line with her on either side.



Even with the edge of the fury dying away, it was hard looking at things here without her head aching. Things that seemed far off got closer too quickly, trees changed shape as she passed them.



Almost unreal, William had said. Nearly a dream. This world didn’t have enough reality in it for distances and shapes to work properly. Once again the magic artist was painting madly. If she looked hard at a tree, it changed and became more treelike and less like something drawn by Wentworth with his eyes shut.



This is a made-up world, Tiffany thought. Almost like a story. The trees don’t have to be very detailed because who looks at trees in a story?



She stopped in a small clearing and stared hard at a tree. It seemed to know it was being watched. It became more real. The bark roughened, and proper twigs grew on the ends of the branches.



The snow was melting around her feet, too. Although melting was the wrong word. It was just disappearing, leaving leaves and grass.



If I was a world that didn’t have enough reality to go around, Tiffany thought, then snow would be quite handy. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. It’s just white stuff. Everything looks white and simple. But I can make it complicated. I’m more real than this place.



She heard a buzzing overhead and looked up.



And suddenly the air was filling with small people, smaller than the Feegle, with wings like dragonflies’. There was a golden glow around them. Tiffany, entranced, reached out a hand—



At the same moment what felt like the entire clan of Nac Mac Feegle landed on her back and sent her sliding into a snowdrift.



When she struggled out, the clearing was a battlefield. The pictsies were jumping and slashing at the flying creatures, which buzzed around them like wasps. As she stared, two of them dived onto Rob Anybody and lifted him off his feet by his hair.



He rose in the air, yelling and struggling. Tiffany leaped up and grabbed him around the waist, flailing at the creatures with her other hand. They let go of the pictsie and dodged easily, zipping through the air as fast as hummingbirds. One of them bit her on the finger before buzzing away.



Somewhere a voice went: “Oooooooooooooeeerrrrrr…”



Rob struggled in Tiffany’s grip. “Quick, put me doon!” he yelled. “There’s gonna be poetry!”



CHAPTER 9



Lost Boys



The moan rolled around the clearing, as mournful as a month of Mondays.



“…rrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaoooooooo…”



It sounded like some animal in terrible pain. But it was, in fact, Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock, who was standing on a snowdrift with one hand pressed to his heart and the other outstretched, very theatrically.



He was rolling his eyes, too.



“…oooooooooooooooooooooo…”



“Ach, the muse is a terrible thing to have happen to ye,” said Rob Anybody, putting his hands over his ears.



“…oooooiiiiiit is with grreat lamentation and much worrying dismay,” the pictsie groaned, “That we rrregard the doleful prospect of Fairyland in considerrrable decay…”



In the air the flying creatures stopped attacking and began to panic. Some of them flew into one another.



“…With quite a large number of drrrrrrreadful incidents happening everrry day,” Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock recited, “Including, I am sorrrry to say, an aerial attack by the otherwise quite attractive fey…”



The fliers screeched. Some crashed into the snow, but the ones still capable of flight swarmed off among the trees.



“…Witnessed by all of us at this time, and celebrated in this hasty rhyme!” Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock shouted after them.



And they were gone.



Feegles were picking themselves up off the ground. Some were bleeding where the fairies had bitten them. Several were lying curled up and groaning.



Tiffany looked at her own finger. The bite of the fairy had left two tiny holes.



“It isna too bad,” Rob Anybody shouted up from below. “No one taken by them, just a few cases where the lads didna put their hands o’er their ears in time.”



“Are they all right?”



“Oh, they’ll be fine wi’ counsellin’.”



On the mound of snow William clapped Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock on the shoulder in a friendly way.



“That, lad,” he said proudly, “was some of the worst poetry I have heard for a long time. It was offensive to the ear and a torrrture to the soul. The last couple of lines need some work, but ye has the groanin’ off fiiine. All in all, a verrry commendable effort! We’ll make a gonnagle out of ye yet!”



Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock blushed happily.



In Fairyland words really have power, Tiffany thought. And I am more real. I’ll remember that.



The pictsies assembled into battle order again, although it was pretty disorderly, and set off. Tiffany didn’t rush too far ahead this time.



“That’s yer little people wi’ wings,” said Rob, as Tiffany sucked at her finger. “Are ye happier now?”



“Why were they trying to carry you away?”



“Ach, they carries their victims off to their nest, where their young ones—”



“Stop!” said Tiffany. “This is going to be horrible, right?”



“Oh, aye. Gruesome,” said Rob, grinning.



“And you used to live here?”



“Ah, but it wasna so bad then. It wasna perfect, mark you, but the Quin wasna as cold in them days. The King was still aroound. She was always happy then.”



“What happened? Did the King die?”



“No. They had words, if ye tak’ my meanin’,” said Rob.



“Oh, you mean like an argument—”



“A bit, mebbe,” said Rob. “But they was magical words. Forests destroyed, mountains explodin’, a few hundred deaths, that kind of thing. And he went off to his own world. Fairyland was never a picnic, ye ken, even in the old days. But it was fine if you kept alert, an’ there was flowers and burdies and summertime. Now there’s the dromes and the hounds and the stinging fey and such stuff creepin’ in from their own worlds, and the whole place has gone doon the tubes.”



Things taken from their own worlds, thought Tiffany, as she tramped through the snow. Worlds all squashed together like peas in a sack, or hidden inside one another like bubbles inside other bubbles.



She had a picture in her head of things creeping out of their own world and into another, in the same way that mice invaded the larder. Only there were worse things than mice.



What would a drome do if it got into our world? You’d never know it was there. It’d sit in the corner and you’d never see it, because it wouldn’t let you. And it’d change the way you saw the world, give you nightmares, make you want to die.