The Shepherd's Crown (27 page)

And, incidentally, giving Tiffany a chance to go round the houses without worrying about what the Feegles might do in her absence. I might even have time to fly to Lancre and check on Geoffrey if I do it once more,
she thought. She knew the Feegles would never hurt a sleeping elf, but one awake? Well, their instincts might just take over if Nightshade should put a single dainty finger wrong. And, of course, she didn’t trust the elf either . . .

‘Time for a walk,’ she said as Nightshade stretched her limbs and looked around her as she woke. ‘I think it is time you saw a few more humans.’ For how else could
she teach Nightshade about how this world worked if Nightshade mostly only saw the inside of the barn and a few ready-to-boil-over Feegles?

So she took Nightshade down into the village, past the pub where the men were sitting looking glumly at their beer, fishing the occasional barrel gushie out of it, past the small shops, picking her way carefully over the debris outside Mrs Tumble’s Plates
for All Seasons, down the road and back up into the downs. Tiffany had asked her dad to let people know she was trying out a girl to help mix her medicines, so nobody really looked
directly
at her, but Tiffany had no doubt that they would all have taken in every single detail as she passed. It was why she had insisted on Nightshade’s dairymaid’s dress being toned down, so there were now no bows,
no ribbons, no buckles, and a decent pair of boots rather than dainty slippers.

‘I have been watching humans,’ said Nightshade as they were clumping back up the road. ‘And I can’t understand them. I saw a woman giving an old tramp a couple of pennies. He was nothing to do with her, so why would she do that? How does it help her? I don’t understand.’

‘It’s what we do,’ said Tiffany. ‘The wizards
call it empathy. That means putting yourself in the place of the other person and seeing the world from their point of view. I suppose it’s because in the very olden days, when humans had to fight for themselves every day, they needed to find people who would fight with them too, and together we lived – yes, and prospered. Humans need other humans – it’s as simple as that.’

‘Yes, but what good
would the old lady get from giving away her money?’

‘Well,’ said Tiffany, ‘she will probably feel what we call
a little glow
, because she has helped someone who needed help. It will mean that she is glad that she is not in his circumstances. You could say that she can see what his world is like, and – what can I say? – she comes away feeling hopeful.’

‘But the tramp looked as if he could do
a job of some sort, to earn his own pennies, but nevertheless she gave him hers.’ Nightshade was still struggling to understand the human concept of money – the elves, of course, could simply make it appear whenever they willed.
^fn5

‘Well, yes,’ said Tiffany, ‘that sort of thing does happen, but not always, and the old lady will still feel she has done the right thing. He may be a bit of a scamp
but she tells herself that she is a good person.’

‘I saw a king in your land before – Verence – and I watched him and he didn’t tell people what they should do,’ Nightshade continued.

‘Well, he has a wife to tell him what to do,’ laughed Tiffany. ‘That’s what humans are. Right up to our kings and queens, our barons and lords. Our rulers rule by consent, which means that we like having them as
rulers, if they do what we want them to do. There were a lot of battles long ago, but there again everyone finally realized that it was better to work peacefully with everyone else. For one person alone cannot survive. We humans definitely need other people to keep us human.’

‘I notice that you don’t use magic very much either,’ Nightshade added. ‘Yet you are a witch. You are powerful.’

‘Well,
what we witches have found is that power is best left at home. Magic is tricky anyway, and it can turn and twist and get things wrong. But if you surround yourself with other humans you will have what we call
friends
– people who like you, and people you like.’

‘Friends.’ Nightshade rolled the word, and the idea, around in her head and then asked, ‘Am I your friend?’

‘Yes,’ said Tiffany. ‘You
could be.’ She looked at the people passing by and said to Nightshade, ‘Look, try this. There’s an old woman trying to carry a very heavy basket up the hill. Go and help her, will you, and see what happens.’

The elf looked horrified. ‘What do I say to her?’

‘You say, “Can I help you, mistress?”’

Nightshade gulped, but she crossed the road and spoke to the old woman, and Tiffany listened and
heard the old woman saying, ‘What a kind girl you are, thank you very much. Bless you for helping an old lady.’

To Tiffany’s surprise, Nightshade carried the basket not only over the hill but also along the next stretch of the road, and she heard her ask, ‘How do you live, lady?’

The old lady sighed. ‘Little by little. My husband died years ago, but I am good with the needle and so I make things.
I don’t need charity. I get along and I have still got my home. As we say, worse things happen at sea . . .’

As Nightshade watched the woman go away, she said to Tiffany, ‘Can you give me some money, please?’

‘Well,’ said Tiffany, ‘witches seldom have money about their person – we don’t live in that kind of world.’

Nightshade brightened up. ‘I can help then,’ she said. ‘I’m an elf and I am
sure I could get into a place where the money is.’

‘Please do not try that,’ said Tiffany. ‘There would be a lot of trouble.’

She ignored a grumble from the side of the road, ‘Nae if you don’t get caught.’

‘We is guid at gettin’ intae places, ye ken,’ another Feegle muttered.
^fn6

Nightshade paid the Feegles no heed. She was still puzzling. ‘That old woman had absolutely nothing, but she was
still cheerful. What did she have to be cheerful about?’

‘Being alive,’ said Tiffany. ‘What you are seeing, Nightshade, is someone making the best of things, which is something else humans do. And sometimes the best of it is good.’ She paused. ‘How did it make you feel?’ she asked. ‘Carrying that basket.’

Nightshade looked puzzled. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said slowly. ‘But I’m not sure I felt like
an elf should . . . is that a good thing?’

‘Look,’ Tiffany said, ‘the wizards tell us that in the very, very olden days, humans were more like monkeys, and being a monkey was a very clever thing to be as monkeys like to see into everything. And then the monkeys realized that if one monkey tried to kill a large wolf, he would soon be a
dead
monkey, but if two monkeys could get together they would
be very happy monkeys, and happy monkeys create more happy monkeys so they would have lots of monkeys, which chatter and gibber and talk all the time until, in the end, they became
us
. So too could an elf change.’

‘When I get my kingdom back . . .’ Nightshade began.

‘Stop there,’ said Tiffany. ‘Why do you want your kingdom back? What good has it done you? Think about it, for I am the human who
has looked after you, the only person you might call a friend.’ She looked seriously at the elf. ‘I have told you that I – we – would be happy if you were to be Queen of the Elves again, but only if you can truly learn from your time here. Be prepared to live in peace, teach your elves that the world has changed and that there is no space for them here.’

There was hope in her voice now, a hope
that human and elf might be able to
change
the stories of humans and elves.

A princess doesn’t have to be blonde and blue-eyed and have a shoe size smaller than her age, she thought.

People
can
trust witches, and not fear the old woman in the woods, the poor old woman whose only crime was to have no teeth and to talk to herself.

And perhaps an elf could learn to know mercy, to discover humanity
 . . .

‘If you learn things,’ she finished softly, ‘you might find yourself building a different kind of kingdom.’

^fn1
Nanny’s friend on that occasion had been Count Casanunda the lowwayman – a highwayman who carried a stepladder on his horse, on account of his being a dwarf, and was most gallant towards the ladies he encountered.

^fn2
A thought that she would most certainly grow out of, assuming she survived long enough.

^fn3
It has in fact been said that elves are
like
cats; but cats will work together – for instance, when sharing a kill – while elves squabble and fight so that a third party may go home with the food.

^fn4
It looked a rather poisonous green before it was heated up, but in most cases the end certainly justified the greens.

^fn5
It disappeared pretty quickly too, as anyone given fairy gold soon discovered. Usually by the morning, which often meant a lively evening in the pub. And an even livelier evening the following night if visiting the same establishment.

^fn6
Very true, though getting out again was sometimes trickier, especially if there was strong drink about.

CHAPTER 16

Mr Sideways

THE OLD BOYS
in the villages around Granny Weatherwax’s cottage had swiftly taken a liking to Geoffrey. They respected Nanny Ogg and Tiffany, of course, but they really
liked
Geoffrey.

They would taunt him sometimes; after all, he was in a woman’s business, but when he got on his broomstick – sometimes even with his goat perched behind him rather than harnessed to its
little cart – and whizzed away to the horizon, they were speechless.

Even when he was really busy, he always had time to stop and chat and there was always a brew on in any shed when he came by, and a broken biscuit for Mephistopheles. The old boys were fascinated by the goat, but wary nonetheless after the day when someone gave it a drink of ale just to see what would happen and, to their astonishment,
Mephistopheles danced like a ballerina and then kicked a young tree so hard that its trunk split in two.

‘It’s like those folk who do mushi,’ said Stinky Jim.

‘I don’t think that’s the right word,’ said Smack Tremble. ‘Ain’t mushi something you eat? Out in . . . foreign parts.’

‘
You
mean One-man-he-go-up, he-go-down,’ Captain Makepeace said. ‘A way of fighting.’

‘That’s it!’ said Stinky Jim.
‘There was a fellow at the market in Slice who could do that.’

‘There’s a
lot
of people in Slice who can do that kind of thing,’ Smack Tremble added with a shiver. ‘Odd place, Slice.’
^fn1

They sat and thought about Slice for a moment. You could find anything at Slice market if you looked hard enough. Famously a man once sold his wife there, where the phrase ‘bring and buy’ was taken literally,
and he went home with a second-hand wheelbarrow and felt he had the best of the bargain. Then they looked at the remains of the sapling and agreed that Mephistopheles was indeed a remarkable goat, but perhaps it would be best to leave his diet alone.

The remarkable goat himself stoically chewed his way through the long grass by the pub fence as though nothing untoward had happened and then trotted
off to find Geoffrey.

On this particular fine morning, Geoffrey was at Laughing Boy Sideways’s house. Tiffany had been treating a particularly troublesome bunion of his which had resisted her ministrations for weeks. She had been considering breaking her rule and using magic on the thing, just to be done with it, when Geoffrey decided to pop in to see Mr Sideways on a day when Tiffany was away
at the Chalk. He found the old man by the back door of his cottage, just about to hobble down the path to the old barn. Instead of heading back into the cottage as he would have done if Tiffany had called, Mr Sideways beckoned to Geoffrey to follow him down the path towards the rickety barn. And it was as Geoffrey watched the old boy struggling painfully along in his old army boots that he noticed
something very wrong.

‘Well, dang me!’ Mr Sideways said when Geoffrey prised the offending hobnail from his left boot. ‘If I’d known that was what the trouble was, I’d have dealt with the bugger meself!’ He looked at Geoffrey with bright eyes. ‘Thank ’ee, lad.’

Old Mr Sideways lived on his own and had done so for as long as anyone could remember. He was meticulously dressed and in the city might
have been described as ‘dapper’. Apart from his work overalls, which were washed regularly but were streaked with paint and oil, he was always spick and span. So was his little cottage. The living room, which he kept immaculately tidy, had paintings of people in old-fashioned dress on the wall – Geoffrey assumed these were portraits of Mr Sideways’s parents, although he never spoke of them. Everything
the man did he did carefully. Geoffrey liked him, and even though he was a very private man, he had taken to Geoffrey.