Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 (37 page)

And not only was there no longer any support from the mountain witches like Nanny Ogg, Granny Weatherwax, and Miss Level, but the people of the Chalk weren’t very familiar with witches. Other witches would probably come and help if she asked,
of course,
but although they wouldn’t say so, this might mean that you couldn’t cope with responsibility, weren’t up to the task, weren’t sure,
weren
’
t good enough.

“Excuse me, miss?” There was a nervous giggle. Tiffany looked round, and there were two little girls in their best new frocks and straw hats. They were watching her eagerly, with perhaps just a hint of mischief in their eyes. She thought quickly and smiled at them.

“Oh, yes, Becky Pardon and Nancy Upright, yes? What can I do for the two of you?’’

Becky Pardon shyly produced a small bouquet from behind her back and held it out. Tiffany recognized it, of course. She had made them herself for the older girls when she was younger, simply because it was what you did, it was part of the scouring: a little bunch of wildflowers picked from the down-land, tied in a bunch with—and this was the important bit, the magic bit— some of the grass pulled up as the fresh chalk was exposed.

“If you put this under your pillow tonight, you will dream of your beau,” said Becky, her face quite serious now.

Tiffany took the slightly wilting bunch of flowers with care. “Let me see…” she said. “We have here sweet mumbles, ladies’ pillows, seven-leaf clover—very lucky—a sprig of old man’s trousers, jack-in-the-wall, oh— love-lies-bleeding, and . . .” She stared at the little white-and-red flowers.

The girls said, “Are you all right, miss?”

“Forget-me-lots!” [
The forget-me-lots is a pretty red-and-white flower usually given by young ladies to signal to their young men that they never want to see them again ever, or at least until they’ve learned to wash properly and gotten a job.
] said Tiffany, more sharply than she had intended. But the girls hadn’t noticed, so she continued to say, brightly, “Quite unusual to see it here. It must be a garden escapee. And, as I’m sure you both know, you have bound them all together with strips of candle rush, which once upon a time people used to make into rush lights. What a lovely surprise. Thank you both very much. I hope you have a lovely time at the fair. . . .”

Becky raised her hand. “Excuse me, miss?”

“Was there something else, Becky?”

Becky went pink, and had a hurried conversation with her friend. She turned back to Tiffany, looking slightly more pink but nevertheless determined to see things through.

“You can’t get into trouble for asking a question, can you, miss? I mean, just asking a question?”

It’s going to be “How can I be a witch when I’m grown up?” Tiffany thought, because it generally was. The young girls saw her on her broomstick and thought that was what being a witch was. Out loud she said, “Not from me, at least. Do ask your question.”

Becky Pardon looked down at her boots. “Do you have any passionate parts, miss?”

Another talent needful in a witch is the ability not to let your face show what you’re thinking, and especially not allowing it, no matter what, to go as stiff as a board. Tiffany managed to say, without a single wobble in her voice and no trace of an embarrassed smirk, “That is a very interesting question, Becky. Can I ask you why you want to know?”

The girl looked a lot happier now that the question was, as it were, out in the public domain.

“Well, miss, I asked my granny if I could be a witch when I was older, and she said I shouldn’t want to, because witches have no passionate parts, miss.”

Tiffany thought quickly in the face of the two solemn owlish stares. These are farm girls, she thought, so they had certainly seen a cat have kittens and a dog have puppies. They’d have seen the birth of lambs, and probably a cow have a calf, which is always a noisy affair that you can hardly miss. They know what they are asking me about.

At this point Nancy chimed in with “Only, if that is so, miss, we would quite like to have the flowers back, now that we’ve shown them to you, because perhaps it might be a bit of a waste, meaning no offense.” She stepped back quickly.

Tiffany was surprised at her own laughter. It had been a long time since she had laughed. Heads turned to see what the joke was, and she managed to grab both the girls before they fled, and spun them round.

“Well done, the pair of you,” she said. “I like to see some sensible thinking every now and again. Never hesitate to ask a question. And the answer to your question is that witches are the same as everybody else when it comes to passionate parts, but often they are so busy rushing around that they never have time to think about them.”

The girls looked relieved that their work had not been entirely in vain, and Tiffany was ready for the next question, which came from Becky again. “So do you have a beau, miss?”

“Not right at the moment,” Tiffany said briskly, clamping down on her expression lest it give anything away. She held up the little bouquet. “But who knows—if you’ve made this properly, then I’ll get another one, and in that case you will be better witches than me, that is for certain.” They both beamed at this dreadful piece of outright fluff, and it stopped the questions.

“And now,” said Tiffany, “the cheese rolling will be starting at any minute. I’m sure you won’t want to miss that.”

“No, miss,” they said in unison. Just before they left, full of relief and self-importance, Becky patted Tiffany on her hand. “Beaus can be very difficult, miss,” she said with the assurance of, to Tiffany’s certain knowledge, eight years in the world.

“Thank you,” said Tiffany. “I shall definitely bear that in mind.”

When it came to the entertainments offered at the fair, such as people making faces through a horse collar or fighting with pillows on the greasy pole or even the bobbing for frogs, well, Tiffany could take them or leave them alone, and in fact much preferred to leave them alone. But she always liked to see a good cheese roll—that is to say, a good cheese roll all the way down a slope of the hill, although not across the giant because no one would want to eat the cheese afterward.

They were hard cheeses, sometimes specially made for the cheese-rolling circuit, and the winning maker of the cheese that reached the bottom unscathed won a belt with a silver buckle and the admiration of all.

Tiffany was an expert cheesemaker, but she had never entered. Witches couldn’t enter that sort of competition because if you won—and she knew she had made a cheese or two that
could
win—everyone would say that was unfair because you were a witch; well, that’s what they would think, but very few would
say
it. And if you didn’t win, people would say, “What kind of witch can’t make a cheese that could be beat by simple cheeses made by simple folk like we?”

There was a gentle movement of the crowd to the start of the cheese rolling, although the frog-bobbing stall still had a big crowd, it being a very humorous and reliable source of entertainment, especially to those people who weren’t actually bobbing. Regrettably, the man who put weasels down his trousers, and apparently had a personal best of nine weasels, hadn’t been there this year, and people were wondering if he had lost his touch. But sooner or later everyone would drift over to the start line for the cheese rolling. It was a tradition.

The slope here was very steep indeed, and there was always a certain amount of boisterous rivalry between the cheese owners, which led to pushing and shoving and kicking and bruises; occasionally you got a broken arm or leg. All was going as normal as the waiting men lined up their cheeses, until Tiffany saw, and seemed to be the only one to see, a dangerous cheese roll up all by itself. It was black under the dust, and there was a piece of grubby blue-and-white cloth tied to it.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Horace. And where you are, trouble can’t be far behind.” She spun around, carefully searching for signs of what should not be there. “Now you just listen to me,” she said under her breath. “I know at least one of you must be somewhere near. This isn’t for you; it’s just about people. Understand?”

But it was too late. The Master of the Revels, in his big floppy hat with lace around the brim, blew his whistle and the cheese rolling, as he put it,
commenced
—which is a far grander word than “started.” And a man with lace around his hat was never going to use a short word where a long word would do.

Tiffany hardly dared to look. The runners didn’t so much run as roll and skid behind their cheeses. But she could hear the cries that went up when the black cheese not only shot into the lead but occasionally turned round and went back uphill again in order to bang into one of the ordinary innocent cheeses. She could just hear a faint grumbling noise coming from it as it almost shot to the top of the hill.

Cheese runners shouted at it, tried to grab at it, and flailed at it with sticks, but the piratical cheese scythed onward, reaching the bottom again just ahead of the terrible carnage of men and cheeses as they piled up. Then it rolled back up to the top and sat there demurely while still gently vibrating.

At the bottom of the slope, fights were breaking out among the cheese jockeys who were still capable of punching somebody, and since everyone was now watching that, Tiffany took the opportunity to snatch up Horace and shove him into her bag. After all, he was hers. Well, that was to say, she had made him, although something odd must’ve gotten into the mix since Horace was the only cheese that would eat mice and, if you didn’t nail him down, other cheeses as well. No wonder he got on so well with the Nac Mac Feegles, [
If you do not yet know who the Nac Mac Feegles are: 1) Be grateful for your uneventful life; and 2) Be prepared to beat a retreat if you hear anyone about as high as your ankle shout
“Crivens!” They are, strictly speaking, one of the faerie folk, but it is probably not a good idea to tell them this if you are looking forward to a future in which you still have your teeth.
] who had made him an honorary member of the clan. He was their kind of cheese.

Surreptitiously, hoping that no one would notice, Tiffany held the bag up to her mouth and said, “Is this any way to behave? Aren’t you ashamed?” The bag wobbled a little bit, but she knew that the word “shame” was not in Horace’s vocabulary, and neither was anything else. She lowered the bag and moved a little way from the crowd and said, “I know you are here, Rob Anybody.”

There he was, sitting on her shoulder. She could smell him. Despite the fact that they generally had little to do with bathing, except when it rained, the Nac Mac Feegles always smelled something like slightly drunk potatoes. “The kelda wanted me tae find out how ye were biding,” said the Feegle chieftain. “You havena bin tae the mound to see her these past two weeks,” he went on, “and I think she is afeared that a harm may come tae ye, ye are working sae hard an’ all.”

Tiffany groaned, but only to herself. She said, “That is very kind of her. There is always so much to do; surely the kelda knows this. It doesn’t matter what I do, there is always more to be done. There is no end to the wanting. But there is nothing to worry about. I am doing fine. And please don’t take Horace out again in public—you know he gets excited.”

“Well, in point of fact, it says up on that banner over there that this is for the folk of these hills, and we is more than folk. We is
folklore
!
Ye canna argue with the lore! Besides, I wanted tae come and pay my ain respects to the big yin without his breeks. He is a fine big wee laddie and nae mistake.” Rob paused, and then said quietly, “So I can tell her that ye are quite well in yourself, aye?” There was a certain nervousness to him, as if he would have liked to say more but knew it wouldn’t be welcome.

“Rob Anybody, I would be very grateful if you would do just that,” said Tiffany, “because I have a lot of people to bandage, if I’m any judge.”

Rob Anybody, suddenly looking like a man on a thankless errand, frantically said the words he had been told by his wife to say: “The kelda says there’s plenty more fish in the sea, miss!”

And Tiffany stood perfectly still for a moment and then, without looking at Rob, said quietly, “Do thank the kelda for her angling information. I have to get on, if you don’t mind, Rob.
Do
thank the kelda.”

Most of the crowd was reaching the bottom of the slope by now, to gawk or rescue or possibly attempt some amateur first aid on the groaning cheese runners. For the onlookers, of course, it was just another show; you didn’t often see a satisfying pileup of men and cheeses, and—who knew?—there might be some really interesting casualties.

Tiffany, glad of something to do, did not have to push her way through; the pointy black hat could create a path through a crowd faster than a holy man through a shallow sea. She waved the happy crowd away, with one or two forceful shoves for those of slow uptake. As a matter of fact, as it turned out, the butcher’s bill wasn’t too high this year, with one broken arm, one broken wrist, one broken leg, and an enormous number of bruises, cuts, and rashes being caused by people sliding most of the way down—grass isn’t always your friend. There were several young men clearly in distress as a result, but they were absolutely definite that they were not going to discuss their injuries with a lady, thank you all the same. So she told them to put a cold compress on the afflicted area, wherever it was, when they got home, and watched them walk unsteadily away.

Well, she’d done all right, hadn’t she? She had used her skills in front of the rubbernecking crowd and, according to what she overheard from the old men and women, had performed well enough. Perhaps she imagined that one or two people were embarrassed when an old man with a beard to his waist said with a grin, “A girl who can set bones would have no trouble finding a husband,” but that passed, and with nothing else to do, people started the long climb back up the hill… and then the coach came past, and then, which was worse, it stopped.