The Wee Free Men (16 page)

The terror took her. But because she was Tiffany, she ran toward it, raising the pan. She had to get through the forest, find the Queen, get her brother, leave this place!

Somewhere behind her, voices started to shout—

She woke up.

There was no snow, but there
was
the whiteness of the bedsheet and the plaster ceiling of her bedroom. She stared at it for a while, then leaned down and peered under the bed.

There was nothing there but the guzunder. When she flung open the door of the doll’s house, there was no one inside but the two toy soldiers and the teddy bear and the headless dolly.

The walls were solid. The floor creaked as it always did. Her slippers were the same as they always were: old, comfortable, and with all the pink fluff worn off.

She stood in the middle of the floor and said, very quietly, “Is there anybody there?”

Sheep baa’d on the distant hillside, but they probably hadn’t heard her.

The door squeaked open and the cat, Ratbag, came in. He rubbed up against her legs, purring like a distant thunderstorm, and then went and curled up on her bed.

Tiffany got dressed thoughtfully, daring the room to do something strange.

When she got downstairs, breakfast was cooking. Her mother was busy at the sink.

Tiffany darted out through the scullery and into the dairy. She scrambled on hands and knees around the floor, peering under the sink and behind cupboards.

“You can come out now, honestly,” she said.

No one came. She was alone in the room. She’d often been alone in the room, and had enjoyed it. It was almost her private territory. But now, somehow, it was too empty, too clean.

When she wandered back into the kitchen, her mother was still standing by the sink, washing dishes, but a plate of steaming porridge had been put down in the one set place on the table.

“I’ll make some more butter today,” said Tiffany carefully, sitting down. “I might as well, while we’re getting all this milk.”

Her mother nodded and put a plate on the drainboard beside the sink.

“I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?” said Tiffany.

Her mother shook her head.

Tiffany sighed. “And then she woke up and it was all a dream.” It was just about the worst ending you could have to any story. But it had all seemed so
real
. She could remember the smoky smell in the pictsies’ cave, and the way…who was it…oh, yes, he’d been called Rob Anybody…the way Rob Anybody had always been so nervous about talking to her.

It was strange, she thought, that Ratbag had rubbed up against her. He’d sleep on her bed if he could get away with it, but during the day he kept well out of Tiffany’s way. How odd.

There was a rattling noise near the mantelpiece. The china shepherdess on Granny’s shelf was moving sideways of its own accord, and as Tiffany watched with her porridge spoon halfway to her mouth, it slid off and smashed on the floor.

The rattling went on. Now it was coming from the big oven. She could see the door actually shaking on its hinges.

She turned to her mother and saw her put another plate down by the sink. But it wasn’t being held in a hand.

The oven door burst off the hinges and slid across the floor.

“Dinna eat the porridge!”

Nac Mac Feegles spilled out into the room, hundreds of them, pouring across the tiles.

The walls were shifting. The floor moved. And now the thing turning around at the sink was not even human but just…stuff, no more human than a gingerbread man, gray as old dough,
changing shape as it lumbered toward Tiffany.

The pictsies surged past her in a flurry of snow.

She looked up at the thing’s tiny black eyes.

The scream came from somewhere deep inside. There was no Second Thought, no First Thought, just a scream. It seemed to spread out as it left Tiffany’s mouth until it became a black tunnel in front of her, and as she fell into it, she heard, in the commotion behind her:

“Who d’yer think ye’re lookin’ at, pal? Crivens, but ye’re gonna get sich a kickin’!”

Tiffany opened her eyes.

She was lying on damp ground in the snowy, gloomy wood. Pictsies were watching her carefully but, she saw, there were others behind them staring outward, into the gloom among the tree trunks.

There was…stuff in the trees. Lumps of stuff. It was gray, and it hung there like old cloth.

She turned her head and saw William standing beside her, looking at her with concern.

“That was a dream, wasn’t it?” she said.

“Weel, noo,” said William. “It was, ye ken, and therrre again, it wasna….”

Tiffany sat up suddenly, causing the pictsies to leap back.

“But that…thing was in it, and then you all came out of the oven!” she said. “You were
in
my dream! What is—
was
that creature?”

William the gonnagle stared at her as if trying to make up his mind.

“That was what we call a drome,” he said. “Nothing here really
belongs here, remember? Everything is a reflection from outside, or something kidnaped from another worrrld, or mebbe something the Quin has made outa magic. It was hidin’ in the trees, and ye was goin’ so fast, ye didna see it. Ye ken spiders?”

“Of course!”

“Well, spiders spin webs. Dromes spin dreams. It’s easy in this place. The world you come from is nearly real. This place is nearly unreal, so it’s almost a dream anywa’. And the drome makes a dream for ye, wi’ a trap in it. If ye eats anything in the dream, ye’ll never want tae’ leave it.”

He looked as though Tiffany should have been impressed.

“What’s in it for the drome?” she asked.

“It likes watchin’ dreams. It has fun watching
ye
ha’ fun. An’ it’ll watch ye eatin’ dream food, until ye starve to death. Then the drome’ll eat ye. Not right away, o’ course. It’ll wait until ye’ve gone a wee bit runny, because it hasna teeth.”

“So how can anyone get out?”

“The best way is to find the drome,” said Rob Anybody. “It’ll be in the dream with you, in disguise. Then ye just gives it a good kickin’.”

“By kicking you mean—?”

“Choppin’ its heid off generally works.”

Now, Tiffany thought, I am impressed. I wish I wasn’t. “And this is Fairyland?” she said.

“Aye. Ye could say it’s the bit the tourists dinna see,” said William. “An’ ye did well. Ye were fightin’ it. Ye knew it wasna right.”

Tiffany remembered the friendly cat, and the falling shepherdess. She’d been trying to send messages to herself. She should have listened.

“Thank you for coming after me,” she said, meekly. “How did you do it?”

“Ach, we can generally find a way intae
anywhere
, even a dream,” said William, smiling. “We’re a stealin’ folk, after all.” A piece of the drome fell out of the tree and flopped onto the snow.

“One of them won’t get me again!” said Tiffany.

“Aye. I believe you. Ye have murrrder in yer eyes,” said William, with a touch of admiration. “If I was a drome, I’d be pretty fearful noo, if I had a brain. There’ll be more of them, mark you, and some of ’em are cunning. The Quin uses ’em as guards.”

“I won’t be fooled!” Tiffany remembered the horror of the moment when the thing had lumbered around changing shape. It was worse because it was in her house, her
place.
She’d felt real terror as the big shapeless thing crashed across the kitchen, but the anger had been there too. It was invading
her place
.

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.