The Wee Free Men (14 page)

She stared at the thorn trees for a moment. Hmm, she thought.

She slid back down the hole.

The pictsies were waiting nervously, every scarred and bearded face watching hers.

“I accept
you
, Rob Anybody,” she said.

Rob Anybody’s face became a mask of terror. She heard him mutter, “Aw crivens!” in a tiny voice.

“But of course, it’s the bride who names the day, isn’t it?” said Tiffany cheerfully. “Everyone knows that.”

“Aye,” Rob Anybody quavered. “That’s the tradition, right enough.”

“Then I shall.” Tiffany took a deep breath. “At the end of the world is a great big mountain of granite rock a mile high,” she said. “And every year, a tiny bird flies all the way to the rock and wipes its beak on it. Well, when the little bird has worn the mountain down to the size of a grain of sand…that’s the day I’ll marry you, Rob Anybody Feegle!”

Rob Anybody’s terror turned to outright panic, but then he hesitated and, very slowly, started to grin.

“Aye, guid idea,” he said slowly. “It doesna do tae rush these things.”

“Absolutely,” said Tiffany.

“And that’d gi’ us time tae sort oout the guest list an a’ that,” the pictsie went on.

“That’s right.”

“Plus there’s a’ that business wi’ the wedding dress and buckets o’ flowers and a’ that kind of stuff,” said Rob Anybody, looking more cheerful by the second. “That sort thing can tak’ forever, ye ken.”

“Oh yes,” said Tiffany.

“But she’s really just said no!” Fion burst out. “It’d take millions of years for the bird to—”

“She said aye!” Rob Anybody shouted. “Ye a’ heard her, lads! An’ she’s named the day! That’s the rules!”

“Nae problem aboot the mountain, neither,” said Daft Wullie, still holding out the flowers. “Just ye tell us where it is and I reckon we could ha’ it doon a lot faster than any wee burdie—”

“It’s got to be the bird!” yelled Rob Anybody desperately. “Okay? The wee burdie! Nae more arguin’! Anyone feelin’ like arguin’ will feel ma boot! Some o’ us ha’ got a wee laddie to steal back fra’ the Quin!” He drew his sword and waved it in the air. “Who’s coming wi’ me?”

That seemed to work. The Nac Mac Feegle liked clear goals. Hundreds of swords and battleaxes, and one bunch of battered flowers in the case of Daft Wullie, were thrust into the air, and the war cry of the Nac Mac Feegle echoed around the chamber. The period of time it takes a pictsie to go from normal to mad fighting mood is so tiny, it can’t be measured on the smallest clock.

Unfortunately, since the pictsies were very individualistic, each one had his own cry and Tiffany could only make out a few over the din:

“They can tak’ oour lives but they canna tak’ oour troousers!”

“Ye’ll tak’ the high road an’ I’ll tak’ yer wallet!”

“There can only be one t’ousand!”

“Ach, stick it up yer trakkans!”

But the voices gradually came together in one roar that shook the walls:

“Nae King! Nae Quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna be fooled again!”

This died away, a cloud of dust dropped from the roof, and there was silence.

“Let’s gae!” cried Rob Anybody.

As one Feegle, the pictsies swarmed down the galleries and across the floor and up the slope to the hole. In a few seconds the chamber was empty, except for the gonnagle and Fion.

“Where have they gone?” said Tiffany.

“Ach, they just go,” said Fion, shrugging. “I’m going tae stay here and look after the fire.
Someone
ought to act like a proper kelda.” She glared at Tiffany.

“I do hope you find a clan for yourself soon, Fion,” said Tiffany sweetly. The pictsie scowled at her.

“They’ll run arroond for a while, mebbe stun a few bunnies and fall over a few times,” said William. “They’ll slow down when they find oout they don’t ken what they’re supposed to do yet.”

“Do they always just run off like this?” said Tiffany.

“Ach, well, Rob Anybody disna want too much talk about marryin’,” said William, grinning.

“Yes, we have a lot in common in that respect,” said Tiffany.

She pulled herself out of the hole and found the toad waiting for her.

“I listened in,” he said. “Well done. Very clever. Very diplomatic.”

Tiffany looked around. There were a few hours to sunset, but the shadows were already lengthening.

“We’d better be going,” she said, tying on her apron. “And you’re coming, toad.”

“Well, I don’t know much about how to get into—” the toad began, trying to back away. But toads can’t back up easily, and Tiffany grabbed him and put him in her apron pocket.

She headed for the mounds and stones. My brother will never
grow up, she thought, as she ran across the turf. That’s what the old lady said. How does that work? What kind of a place is it where you never grow up?

The mounds got nearer. She saw William and Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock running along beside her, but there was no sign of the rest of the Nac Mac Feegle.

And then she was among the mounds. Her sisters had told her that there were more dead kings buried under there, but it had never frightened her. Nothing on the downs had ever frightened her.

But it was cold here. She’d never noticed that before.

Find a place where the time doesn’t fit
. Well, the mounds were history. So were the old stones. Did they fit here? Well, yes, they belonged to the past, but they’d ridden on the hills for thousands of years. They’d grown old here. They were part of the landscape.

The low sun made the shadows lengthen. That was when the Chalk revealed its secrets. At some places, when the light was right, you could see the edges of old fields and tracks. The shadows showed up what brilliant noonlight couldn’t see.

Tiffany had made up
noonlight
.

She couldn’t even see hoof prints. She wandered around the trilithons, which looked a bit like huge stone doorways, but even when she tried walking through them both ways, nothing happened.

This wasn’t according to plan. There should have been a magic door. She was sure of that.

A bubbling feeling in her ear suggested that someone was playing the mousepipes. She looked around and saw William the gonnagle standing on a fallen stone. His cheeks were bulging, and
so was the bag of the mousepipes.

She waved at him. “Can you see anything?” she called.

William took the pipe out of his mouth, and the bubbling stopped. “Oh, aye,” he said.

“The way to the Queen’s land?”

“Oh, aye.”

“Well, would you care to
tell
me?”

“I dinna need to tell a kelda,” said William. “A kelda would see the clear way hersel’.”

“But you
could
tell me!”

“Aye, and you coulda said please,” said William. “I’m ninety-six years old. I’m nae a dolly in yer dolly hoose. Yer granny was a fiiine wuman, but I’ll no’ be ordered about by a wee chit of a girl.”

Tiffany stared for a moment and then lifted the toad out of her apron pocket.

“Chit?” she said.

“It means something very small,” said the toad. “Trust me.”

“
He’s
calling
me
small!”

“I’m biggerrr on the inside!” said William. “And I daresay your da’ wouldna be happy if a big giant of a wee girl came stampin’ aroound ordering
him
aboout!”

“The old kelda ordered people about!”

“Aye! Because she’d earned rrrespect!” The gonnagle’s voice seemed to echo around the stones.

“Please, I don’t know what to
do
!” wailed Tiffany.

William stared at her. “Ach, weel, yer no’ doin’ too badly so far,” he said, in a nicer tone of voice. “Ye got Rob Anybody out of marryin’ ye wi’oout breakin’ the rules, and ye’re a game lass, I’ll gi’ ye that. Ye’ll find the way if ye tak’ yer time. Just don’t stamp yer foot and expect the world to do yer biddin’. A’ ye’re doing is shoutin’
for sweeties, ye ken. Use yer eyes. Use yer heid.”

He put the pipe back in his mouth, puffed his cheeks until the skin bag was full, and made Tiffany’s ears bubble again.

“What about you, toad?” said Tiffany.

“You’re on your own, I’m afraid,” said the toad. “Whoever I used to be, I didn’t know much about finding invisible doors. And I resent being press-ganged, too, I may say.”

“But…I don’t know what to do! Is there a magic word I should say?”

“I don’t know,
is
there a magic word you should say?” said the toad, and turned over.

Tiffany was aware that the Nac Mac Feegle were turning up. They had a nasty habit of being really quiet when they wanted to.

Oh, no, she thought. They think I know what to do! This isn’t
fair
! I haven’t got any training for this. I haven’t been to the witch school! I can’t even find
that
! The opening must be somewhere around here, and there must be clues, but I don’t know what they are!

They’re watching me to see if I’m any good. And I’m good at cheese, and that’s all.
But a witch deals with things….

She put the toad back in her pocket and felt the weight of the book
Diseases of the Sheep
.

When she pulled it out, she heard a sigh go up from the assembled pictsies.

They think words are magical….

She opened the book at random, and frowned.

“Cloggets,” she said aloud. Around her, the pictsies nodded their heads and nudged one another.

“Cloggets are a trembling of the greebs in hoggets,” she read, “which can lead to inflammation of the lower pasks. If untreated,
it may lead to the more serious condition of Sloke. Recommended treatment is the daily dosing with turpentine until there is no longer either any trembling, or turpentine, or sheep.”

She risked looking up. Feegles were watching her from every stone and mound. They looked impressed.

However, the words in
Diseases of the Sheep
cut no ice with magic doorways.

“Scrabbity,” said Tiffany. There was a ripple of anticipation.

“Scrabbity is a flaky skin condition, particularly around the lollets. Turpentine is a useful remedy—”

And then she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the teddy bear.

It was very small, and the kind of red you don’t quite get in nature. Tiffany knew what it was. Wentworth loved the teddy-bear candies. They tasted like glue mixed with sugar and were made of 100% Artificial Additives.

“Ah,” she said aloud. “My brother was certainly brought here…”

This caused a stir.

She walked forward, reading aloud about Garget of the Nostrils and the Staggers but keeping an eye on the ground. And there was another teddy bear, green this time and quite hard to see against the turf.

O-kay
, Tiffany thought.

There was one of the three-stone arches a little way away; two big stones with another one laid across the top of them. She’d walked through it before and nothing had happened.

But nothing
should
happen, she thought. You can’t leave a doorway into your world that
anyone
can walk through, otherwise people would wander in and out by accident. You’d have to know it was there.

Perhaps that’s the only way it would work.

Fine. Then I’ll believe that this is the entrance.

She stepped through and saw an astonishing sight: green grass, blue sky becoming pink around the setting sun, a few little white clouds late for bed, and a general warm, honey-colored look to everything. It was amazing that there could be a sight like this. The fact that Tiffany had seen it nearly every day of her life didn’t make it any less fantastic. As a bonus, you didn’t even have to look through any kind of stone arch to see it. You could see it by standing practically
anywhere
.

Except…

…something was wrong. Tiffany walked through the arch several times and still wasn’t quite sure. She held up a hand at arm’s length, trying to measure the sun’s height against the horizon.

And then she saw the bird. It was a swallow, hunting flies, and a swoop took it behind the stones.

The effect was…odd, and almost upsetting. It passed behind the stone and she felt her eyes move to follow the swoop…but it was late. There was a moment when the swallow should have appeared, and it didn’t.

Then it passed across the gap
and for a moment was on both sides of the other stone at the same time
.

Seeing it made Tiffany feel that her eyeballs had been pulled out and turned around.

Look for a place where the time doesn’t fit….

“The world seen through that gap is at least one second behind the time here,” she said, trying to sound as certain as possible. “I thi—I
know
this is the entrance.”

There was some whooping and clapping from the Nac Mac Feegle, and they surged across the turf toward her.

“That was
great
, a’ that reading’ ye did!” said Rob Anybody. “I
didna understand a single word o’ it!”

“Aye, it must be powerful language if you canna make oout what the heel it’s goin’ on aboot!” said another pictsie.

“Ye definitely ha’ got the makin’s of a kelda, mistress,” said Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock.

“Aye!” said Daft Wullie. “It was smashin’ the way you spotted them candies and didna let on! We didna think you’d see the wee green one, too!”

The rest of the pictsies stopped cheering and glared at him.

“What did I say? What did I say?” he said.

Tiffany sagged. “You all knew that was the way through, didn’t you,” she said.

“Oh, aye,” said Rob Anybody. “We ken that kind of stuff. We used tae live in the Quin’s country, ye ken, but we rebelled against her evil rule—”