The Shepherd's Crown (14 page)

Apart from the delicate tinkling of myriad bells attached to the harnesses of the raiding party’s black horses, there was silence as the elves waited for their Queen to give the signal.

She raised her arm.

But before she could do anything, suddenly, screaming through the air, there came a noise as though someone was killing a gigantic pig.

It was a sound which enveloped the whole of the Chalk.
A screaming whistle which screeched around the hills, setting everyone’s teeth on edge. Down in the valley, the air now seemed to be full of fire as a huge iron monster tore along the silvery trail towards the town, clouds of steam marking its path.

The elves reeled, panic spreading rapidly from elf to elf as they shrank from the noise. From the sound. From the very
scent
of iron in the air.

Nonchalantly Of the Lathe the Swarf jumped down from the saddle, used his teeth to steal a stone knife from the guard, whose hands were now covering his pointy ears in an effort to block out the sound, and swiftly sliced through his bonds.

‘Told you. Iron Horse, that is,’ he said importantly. ‘Last train into Twoshirts is that. That’s where goblins work. With steel and iron.’

The Queen hadn’t
flinched. She knew that. Some of the others had, but she could deal with them later – no elf should show fear in front of his queen. But in her mind, she thought:
Train?
It’s big. It’s iron, and we don’t know about it. And what we don’t know about it could get us killed. ‘How can we tame it?’ she demanded. ‘More importantly, can we make it ours? What grief we could make with something like that!’

Peaseblossom – a calm Peaseblossom, seemingly impervious to the general sense of terror among the elves – was at her elbow and smiled; a smile the Queen didn’t like. It cut through the dramatic style of the face he had chosen to wear, his eyes cold and merciless. He said, ‘We can torment the goblins until they tell us how to control it. Then they can do it for us.’

‘They won’t,’ said Of the Lathe
the Swarf, giving Peaseblossom a dirty look. ‘Why should they?’

Peaseblossom reached down to grab the goblin, and Of the Lathe the Swarf reacted quickly, thrusting his small hands into his pockets and throwing a shower of silvery scraps over the elf. Peaseblossom screamed in pain as he fell from his horse.

The goblin laughed as the other elves hastily backed away. ‘Forgot what’s in my pockets,
Mr Pee-pee flower? Told you about swarf, I did. Part of my name. Hurts, does it? Touch clever goblin these days, nasty things happens. Especially to elves.’ He pointed down at Peaseblossom, whose glamour had completely deserted him under the onslaught of the shower of iron filings.

The elf lay writhing on the grass, a small, weak, pathetic creature, crying from the pain.

‘Funny, no?’ said the
goblin. ‘In this new world, little things like swarf – and goblins –
do
matter.’

^fn1
And heard her. For Mrs Earwig’s copious amount of jewellery announced the witch with such a cheerful jangle that it was as if it had ambitions to move from being a set of charms and amulets to being a full instrumental fanfare.

^fn2
Though a Feegle will cheerfully lie about almost anything, so Tiffany still went into any privy with her eyes peeled for flashes of Feegle; she had even once had a nightmare about a Feegle popping up out of the other hole of her parents’ two-holer.

CHAPTER 8

The Baron’s Arms

THE BARON’S ARMS
was the kind of pub where John Parsley, hereditary landlord and bartender, was happy for the locals to mind the pumps when there was a rush or he needed to answer the call of nature. The kind of pub where men would arrive proudly carrying a huge cucumber or any other humorously shaped or suggestive vegetable from the garden just to show it off to all
their friends.

Quite often there would be arguments, but arguments for the truth and not for a fight. Occasionally someone would try to wager money but this was frowned on by John Parsley. Although smoking was allowed – lots and lots of smoking – spitting was not tolerated. And, of course, there was swearing, with language as ripe as the humorous vegetables. After all, there were no women there
except for Mrs Parsley, who turned a blind ear and would certainly put up with language such as ‘bugger’, it being considered nothing more than a colourful expression, used plentifully in this context as ‘How are you, you old bugger?’ and, more carefully, ‘Bugger me!’

The Barons, knowing the value of a thriving pub and not being above dropping in from time to time, had over the generations added
improvements for the entertainment of their tenants. Soon after his marriage, for instance, the new young Baron had given the pub everything needful for playing darts. This hadn’t been a total success – in one enthusiastic match Shake Gently, widely acknowledged as the best ploughman on the Chalk, but not known for his intellectual acumen, had almost lost an eye. The darts were therefore now looked
upon as deadly by all the locals, and the shove ha’penny board had been carefully put back into favour.

After a long day’s slog in the fields or sheds, the pub was a welcome refuge to many. Joe Aching, tenant farmer of Home Farm, had been promising himself a quiet pint throughout a day which had been beset by obstreperous animals and broken equipment. A pint, he had told himself, would put him
in a better frame of mind for the discussion which he knew awaited him over supper about his wedding anniversary, which to his dark dismay he had forgotten. From long experience, he knew that this meant at least a week of cold dinners and cold shoulders, even the risk of a cold bed.

It was Saturday, a warm late summer evening, a clear night. The pub was full, though not as full as John Parsley
would like. Joe took a seat at the long oak table outside the pub with his dog Jester curled around his ankles.

Coming from a long line of Achings who had farmed on the Chalk, Joe Aching knew every man who lived in the area and their families; he knew who worked and who didn’t work much, and he knew who was silly and who was smart. Joe himself wasn’t smart, but he was clever and a good farmer
and, above all things, every Saturday night, wherever he actually sat, he held
the
chair in the pub. Here he was the fount of all knowledge.

At a smaller table just outside the door, he could hear two of the local men arguing about the difference between the paw prints of the cat and of the fox. One of them moved his hands in a slow pavane and said, ‘Look, I tell you this again, the cat, she
walk like this, you old bugger, but Reynard, he do walk like this.’ Once again fox and cat were demonstrated by the other man. I wonder, Joe thought, if we might be one of the last generations to think of a fox as Reynard.

It had been a long day for all the men, working as they were with horses, pigs and sheep, not to mention the scores of chores that faced any countryman. They had a dialect
that creaked, and they knew the names of all the songbirds throughout the valleys, and every snake and every fox and where it could be found, and all the places where the Baron’s men generally didn’t go. In short, they knew a large number of things unknown to scholars in universities. Usually, when one of them spoke, it was done after some cogitation and very slowly, and in this interlude they would
put the world to rights until a boy was sent to tell the men their dinners were going cold if they didn’t hurry.

Then Dick Handly – a fat man with a wispy fluff of a beard that should be ashamed to call itself a beard in this company – quite abruptly said, ‘This ale is as weak as maiden’s water!’

‘What are you calling my beer?’ said John Parsley, clearing the empties from the table. ‘It’s as
clean as anything. I opened the cask only this morning.’

Dick Handly said, ‘I’m not saying maiden’s water is all that bad.’ That got a laugh, albeit a small one. For they all remembered the time when curmudgeonly old Mr Tidder, putting his faith in a traditional cure, had asked his daughter to save some of her widdle to pour over his sore leg, and young Maisie – a sweet girl, but somewhat lacking
in the brains department – had misunderstood the request and poured her father out a drink with a very unusual flavour. Amazingly, his leg had still got better.

But another pint was pulled, from a new cask, and Dick Handly pronounced it satisfactory. And John Parsley wondered. But not much. For what was a pint among friends?

The landlord sat down with his customers now, and said to Joe, ‘How
do you think the young Baron is settling in?’

The relationship between the Baron and Mr Aching, his tenant, was not that unusual in the countryside. The Baron owned the land. Everyone knew that. He also owned all the farms in the neighbourhood, and the farmers, his tenants, farmed the land for him, paying rent every quarter day. He could, if he chose, take a farm back and throw a farmer and his
family out. In the past, there had been barons who had occasionally indulged in displays of authority such as burning down cottages and throwing out whole families, sometimes just on a whim, but mostly as a daft way of showing who had the real power. They soon learned. Power means nothing without a decent harvest in the barn, and a flock of Sunday dinners grazing on the hills.

Roland, the young
Baron, had made a bit of a rocky start – made worse, it has to be said, by his new mother-in-law, a duchess who made sure that everyone knew it too. But he soon learned. Knowing that he wasn’t yet experienced at farming the land, he had followed his father’s general practice of wisely leaving his farmers to run their farms and their workers as they saw fit. Now everyone was happy.

Also wisely,
Roland would from time to time talk to Joe Aching, as had his father before him, and Joe, a kindly man, would offer to speak about the things the Baron’s land agent and rent collectors might not see, such as a widow who had fallen on bad times or a mother struggling to cope after her husband had been trampled by a bad-tempered young bull. Joe Aching would point out that a certain amount of charity
would be a good thing and, to give the young Baron his due, he would do what he was told in a strange sort of way, and the widow would find that somehow she had managed to pay her rent in advance, so owed nothing for the time being, and a helpful young lad from the estate who needed to learn farming might turn up at the young mother’s little holding.

‘I don’t like to judge too soon,’ said Joe,
leaning back on the bench and looking solemn in a way only a man who had the right to
the
chair on a Saturday had the right to look. ‘But to tell you the truth, he’s doing rather well. Picking it up as he goes along, you might say.’

‘That’s good then,’ said Thomas Greengrass. ‘Looks like he’s going to follow in the footsteps of his old man.’

‘We’ll be lucky then. The old Baron was a good man
– tough on the outside, but he knew what was what.’

Parsley smiled. ‘His young lady, the Baroness, has learned a lot of lessons without being taught them – have you noticed that? She’s always around the place talking to people, not putting on airs. The wife likes her,’ he added with a sage nod. If the wife approved, well, that was good. It meant peace at home, and every countryman wanted
that
after a day’s hard work. ‘I heard tell she’d been round to say well done whenever a man’s wife was having kids.’

On that subject, Robert Thick said, ‘My Josephine will be having another one shortly.’

Somebody laughed and said, ‘That’s pints all round, you know.’

‘Be sure to have a word with Joe’s Tiffany then,’ said Thomas Greengrass. ‘When it comes to birthing a child, I’ve never seen better.’

Over his pint, Thomas added, ‘I saw her whizzing past yesterday. It made me right proud, it really did, a girl of the Chalk. I’m sure you must be just as proud, Joe.’

Everyone knew Tiffany Aching, of course; had done ever since she was very small and played with their own children. They didn’t much like witches up on the Chalk, but Tiffany was
their
witch. And a good witch to boot. Most importantly,
she was a girl of the Chalk. She knew the worth of sheep, and they’d seen her running around in her pants when she was growing up. So that was all right then.

Tiffany’s father tried to smile as he reached down and gave his dog a pork scratching. ‘A present for you, Jester.’ He looked up. ‘Of course, Tiffany’s mother would like to see her here more often, though she’s made up about our Tiff; can’t
stop telling people about what she does, and neither can I.’ He looked over at the landlord. ‘Another pint for me when you’ve time please, John.’

‘Of course, Joe,’ said John Parsley, heading into the bar and returning with the foaming tankard in his hand.

As the pint was passed down to its destination, Joe said, ‘It’s strange, you know, when I think about how much time our Tiffany spends over
in Lancre these days.’

‘Be a shame if she moved up there,’ Dick Handly commented. And the thought was there, floating in the air, though nobody said anything further. Not to Joe Aching, not on a Saturday.