The Wee Free Men d(-2 Read online

  ‘She disnae know our ways!’ Fion protested. ‘Ye’re overtired, Mother!’

  ‘Aye, I am,’ said the kelda. ‘But a daughter cannae run her mother’s clan, ye know that. Ye’re a dutiful girl, Fion, but it’s time ye were pickin’ your bodyguard and going awa’ seeking a clan of your own. Ye cannae stay here.’ The kelda looked up at Tiffany again. ‘Will ye, Tiffan?’ She held up a thumb the size of a match head and waited.

  ‘What will I have to do?’ said Tiffany.

  ‘The thinkin’,’ said the kelda, still holding up her thumb. ‘My lads are good lads, there’s none braver. But they think their heids is most useful as weapons. That’s lads for ye. We pictsies aren’t like you big folk, ye ken. Ye have many sisters? Fion here has none. She’s my only daughter. A kelda might be blessed wi’ only one daughter in her whole life, but she’ll have hundreds and hundreds o’ sons.’

  They are all your sons?’ said Tiffany, aghast.

  ‘Oh aye,’ said the kelda, smiling. ‘Except for a few o’ my brothers who travelled here with me when I came to be kelda. Oh, dinna look so astonished. The bairns are really wee when they’re borned, like little peas in a pod. And they grow up fast.’ She sighed. ‘But sometimes I think all the brains is saved for the daughters. They’re good boys, but they’re no’ great thinkers. You’ll have to help them help ye.’

  ‘Mother, she cannae carry oot the duties o’ a kelda!’ Fion protested.

  ‘I don’t see why not, if they’re explained to me,’ said Tiffany.

  ‘Oh, do you not?’ said Fion sharply. ‘Weel, that’s gonna be most interesting.’

  ‘I recall Sarah Aching talkin’ aboot ye,’ said the kelda. ‘She said ye were a strange wee one, always watchin’ and listenin’. She said ye had a heid full o’ words that ye ne’er spoke aloud. She wondered what’d become o’ ye. Time for ye to find out, aye?’

  Aware of Fion glaring at her, and maybe because of Fion glaring at her, Tiffany licked her thumb and touched it gently against the kelda’s tiny thumb.

  ‘It is done, then,’ said the kelda. She lay back suddenly, and just as suddenly seemed to shrink. There were more lines in her face now. ‘Never let it be said I left my sons wi’oot a kelda to mind them,’ she muttered. ‘Now I can go back to the Last World. Tiffan is the kelda for now, Fion. In her hoose, ye’ll do what she says.’

  Fion looked down at her feet. Tiffany could see that she was angry.

  The kelda sagged. She beckoned Tiffany closer, and in a weaker voice said: ‘There. ‘Tis done. And now for my part o’ the bargain. Listen. Find… the place where the time disnae fit. There’s the way in. It’ll shine out to ye. Bring him back to ease yer puir mother’s heart and mebbe also your ain head—’

  Her voice faltered, and Fion leaned quickly towards the bed.

  The kelda sniffed.

  She opened one eye.

  ‘Not quite yet,’ she murmured to Fion. ‘Do I smell a wee drop of Special Sheep Liniment on yez, Kelda?’

  Tiffany looked puzzled for a moment and then said: ‘Oh, me. Oh. Yes. Er… here…’

  The kelda struggled to sit up again. ‘The best thing humans ever made,’ she said. ‘I’ll just have a large wee drop, Fion.’

  ‘It puts hairs on your chest,’ Tiffany warned.

  ‘Ach, weel, for a drop of Sarah Aching’s Special Sheep Liniment I’ll risk a curl or two,’ said the old kelda. She took from Fion a leather cup about the size of a thimble, and held it up.

  ‘I dinnae think it would be good for ye, Mother,’ said Fion.

  ‘I’ll be the judge o’ that at this time,’ said the kelda. ‘One drop afore I go, please, Kelda Tiffan.’

  Tiffany tipped the bottle slightly. The kelda shook the cup irritably.

  ‘It was a larger drop I had in mind, Kelda,’ she said. ‘A kelda has a generous heart.’

  She took something too small to be a gulp but too large to be a sip.

  ‘Aye, it’s a lang time since I tasted this brose,’ she said. ‘Your granny and I used to ha’ a sip or two in front o’ the fire on cold nights…’

  Tiffany saw it clearly in her head, Granny Aching and this little fat woman, sitting around the potbellied stove in the hut on wheels, while the sheep grazed under the stars…

  ‘Ah, ye can see it,’ said the kelda. ‘I can feel yer eyes on me. That’s the First Sight workin’.’ She lowered the cup. ‘Fion, go and fetch Rob Anybody and William the gonnagle.’

  The bigjob is blockin’ the hole,’ said Fion sulkily.

  ‘I dare say there’s room to wriggle past,’ said the old kelda in the kind of calm voice that said a stormy voice could follow if people didn’t do what they were told.

  With a smouldering glance at Tiffany, Fion squeezed past.

  ‘Ye ken anyone who keeps bees?’ said the kelda. When Tiffany nodded the little old woman went on, Then you’ll know why we dinnae have many daughters. You cannae ha’ two quins in one hive wi’oot a big fight. Fion must take her pick o’ them that will follow her and seek a clan that needs a kelda. That is our way. She thinks there’s another way, as gels sometimes do. Be careful o’ her.’

  Tiffany felt something move past her, and Rob Anybody and the bard came into the room. There was more rustling and whispering, too. An unofficial audience was gathering outside.

  When things had settled down a little, the old kelda said: ‘It is a bad thing for a clan to be left wi’oot a kelda to watch o’er it e’en for an hour. So Tiffan will be your kelda until a new one can be fetched

  There was a murmur beside and behind Tiffany. The old kelda looked at William the gonnagle.

  ‘Am I right that this has been done before?’ she said.

  ‘Aye. The songs say twice before,’ said William. He frowned, and added: ‘Or you could say it was three times if you include the time when the Quin was—’

  He was drowned out by the cry that went up behind Tiffany:

  ‘Nae quin! Nae king! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna’ be fooled again!’

  The old kelda raised a hand. ‘Tiffan is the spawn of Granny Aching,’ she said. ‘Ye all ken of her.’

  ‘Aye, and ye saw the wee hag stare the heidless horseman in the eyes he hasnae got,’ said Rob Anybody. ‘Not many people can do that!’

  ‘And I have been your kelda for seventy years and my words cannae be gainsaid,’ said the old kelda. ‘So the choice is made. I tell ye, too, that ye’ll help her steal back her wee baby brother. That is the fate I lay on you all in memory of me and Sarah Aching.’

  She lay back in her bed, and in a quieter voice added, ‘An’ now I would have the gonnagle play The Bonny Flowers, and hope to see yez all again in the Last World. To Tiffan, I say, be wary.’ The kelda took a deep breath. ‘Somewhere, a’ stories are real, a’ songs are true…’

  The old kelda fell silent. William the gonnagle inflated the bag of his mousepipes and blew into one of the tubes. Tiffany felt the bubbling in her ears of music too high-pitched to hear.

  After a few moments Fion leaned over the bed to look at her mother, then started to cry.

  Rob Anybody turned and looked up at Tiffany, his eyes running with tears. ‘Could I just ask ye to go out intae the big chamber, Kelda?’ he said, quietly. ‘We ha’ things to do, ye ken how it is…’

  Tiffany nodded and, with great care, feeling pictsies scuttle out of her way, backed out of the room. She found a corner where she didn’t seem to be in anyone’s way and sat there with her back to the wall.

  She’d expected a lot of ‘waily waily waily’ but it seemed the death of the kelda was too serious for that. Some Feegles were crying, and some were staring at nothing and, as the news spread, the tiered hall filled up with a wretched, sobbing silence…

  …the hills had been silent on the day Granny Aching died.

  Someone went up every day with fresh bread and milk and scraps for the dogs. It didn’t need to be quite so often, but Tiffany had heard her parents talking and her father had said, ‘We ought to keep an eye on M
am now.’

  Today had been Tiffany’s turn, but she’d never thought of it as a chore. She liked the journey.

  But she‘d noticed the silence. It was no longer the silence of many little noises, but a dome of quiet all around the hut.

  She knew then, even before she went in at the open door and found Granny lying on the narrow bed.

  She’d felt coldness spread though her. It even had a sound—it was like a thin, sharp musical note. It had a voice, too. Her own voice. It was saying: It’s too late, tears are no good, no time to say anything, there are things to be done…

  And… then she fed the dogs, who were waiting patiently for their breakfast. It would have helped if they’d done something soppy, like whine or lick Granny’s face, but they hadn’t. And still Tiffany heard the voice in her mind: No tears, don’t cry. Don’t cry for Granny Aching.

  Now, in her head, she watched the slightly smaller Tiffany move around the hut like a little puppet…

  She’d tidied up the shed. Besides the bed and the stove there really wasn’t much there. There was the clothes sack and the big water barrel and the food box, and that was it. Oh, stuff to do with sheep was all over the place—pots and bottles and sacks and knives and shears—but there was nothing there that said a person lived here, unless you counted the hundreds of blue and yellow Jolly Sailor wrappers pinned on one wall.

  She’d taken one of them down—it was still underneath her mattress at home—and she remembered the Story.

  It was very unusual for Granny Aching to say more than a sentence. She used words as if they cost money. But there’d been one day when she’d taken food up to the hut, and Granny had told her a story. A sort of a story. She’d unwrapped the tobacco, and looked at the wrapper, and then looked at Tiffany with that slightly puzzled look she used, and said: ‘I must’ve looked at a thousand o’ these things, and I never once saw his bo-ut.’ That was how she pronounced ‘boat’.

  Of course Tiffany had rushed to have a look at this label, but she couldn’t see any boat, any more than she could see the naked lady.

  ‘That’s ‘cos the bo-ut is just where you can’t see it,’ Granny had said. ‘He’s got a bo-ut for chasin’ the great white whale fish on the salt sea. He’s always chasing it, all round the world. It’s called Mopey. It’s a beast like a big cliff of chalk, I heard tell. In a book.’ ‘Why’s he chasing it?’ Tiffany had asked. ‘To catch it,’ Granny had said. ‘But he never will, the reason being, the world is round like a big plate and so is the sea and so they ‘re chasing one another, so it is almost like he is chasing hisself. Ye never want to go to sea, jiggit. That’s where worse things happen. Everyone says that. You stop along here, where’s the hills is in yer bones.’

  And that was it. It was one of the very few times Granny Aching had ever said anything to Tiffany that wasn’t, in some way, about sheep. It was the only time she ever acknowledged that there was a world beyond the Chalk. Tiffany used to dream about the Jolly Sailor chasing the whale fish in his boat. And sometimes the whale fish would chase her, but the Jolly Sailor always arrived in his mighty ship just in time and their chase would start again.

  Sometimes she’d run to the lighthouse, and wake up just as the door swung open. She’d never seen the sea, but one of the neighbours had an old picture on the wall that showed a lot of men clinging to a raft in what looked like a huge lake full of waves. She hadn’t been able to see the lighthouse at all.

  And Tiffany had sat by the narrow bed and thought about Granny Aching, and about the little girl Sarah Grizzel very carefully painting the flowers in the book, and about the world losing its centre.

  She missed the silence. What there was now wasn’t the same kind of silence there had been before. Granny’s silence was warm, and brought you inside. Granny Aching might sometimes have had trouble remembering the difference between children and lambs, but in her silence you were welcome and belonged. All you had to bring was a silence of your own.

  Tiffany wished that she’d had a chance to say sorry about the shepherdess.

  Then she’d gone home and told everyone that Granny was dead. She was seven, and the world had ended.

  Someone was tapping politely on her boot. She opened her eyes and saw the toad. It was holding a small rock in its mouth. It spat it out.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ it said. I’d have used my arms but we’re a very soggy species.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ said Tiffany.

  ‘Well, if you hit your head on this low ceiling you would have a definite claim for damages,’ said the toad. ‘Er… did I just say that?’

  ‘Yes, and I hope you wish you hadn’t,’ said Tiffany. ‘Why did you say it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ moaned the toad. ‘Sorry, what were we talking about?’

  ‘I meant, what do the pictsies want me to do now?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it works like that,’ said the toad. ‘You’re the kelda. You say what’s to be done.’

  ‘Why can’t Fion be kelda? She’s a pictsie!’

  ‘Can’t help you there,’ said the toad.

  ‘Can I be of serrrvice?’ said a voice by Tiffany’s ear.

  She turned her head and saw, on one of the galleries that ran around the cave, William the gonnagle.

  Up close, he was noticeably different from the other Feegles. His hair was neater, and plaited into one pigtail. He didn’t have as many tattoos. He spoke differently too, more clearly and slowly than the others, sounding his Rs like a drumroll.

  ‘Er, yes,’ said Tiffany. ‘Why can’t Fion be kelda here?’

  William nodded. ‘A good question,’ he said politely. ‘But, ye ken, a kelda cannot wed her brrrrotherrrr. She must go to a new clan and wed a warrrrior there.’

  ‘Well, why couldn’t that warrior come here?’

  ‘Because the Feegles here would not know him. They’d have no rrrrespect for him.’ William made ‘respect’ sound like an avalanche.

  ‘Oh. Well… what was that about the Queen? You were going to say something and they stopped you.’

  William looked embarrassed. ‘I don’t think I can tell you aboout—’

  ‘I am the temporary kelda,’ said Tiffany, stiffly.

  ‘Aye. Well… there was a time when we lived in the Queen’s world and served her, before she grew so cold. But she tricked us, and we rrrrebelled. It was a dark time. She does not like us. And that is all I will say,’ William added.

  Tiffany watched Feegles going in and out of the kelda ‘s chamber. Something was going on in there.

  They’re burying her in the other part of the mound,’ said William, without being asked. ‘Wi’ the other keldas o’ this clan.’

  ‘I thought they would be more… noisy,’ said Tiffany.

  ‘She was their motherrr,’ said William. They do not want to shout. Their hearts are too full for worrrrds. In time we will hold a wake to help her back to the land o’ the living, and that’ll be a loud one, I can promise ye. We’ll dance the FiveHundredAndTwelvesome Reel to the tune o’ “The Devil Among The Lawyers” and eat and drink, and I dare say my nephews will ha’ headaches the size o’ a sheep.’ The old Feegle smiled briefly. ‘But, for now, each Feegle remembers her in silence. We dinnae mourn like ye do, ye ken. We mourn for them that has tae stay behind.’

  ‘Was she your mother too?’ said Tiffany quietly.

  ‘Nay. She was my sister. Did she no’ tell ye that when a kelda goes to a new clan she takes a few o’ her brothers with her? To be alone amongst strangers would be too much for a heart to bear.’ The gonnagle sighed. ‘Of course, in time, after the kelda weds, the clan is full of her sons and is no’ so lonely for her.’

  ‘It must be for you, though,’ said Tiffany.

  ‘You’re a quick one, I’ll grant ye that,’ said William. ‘I am the last o’ those who came. When this is o’er I’ll seek the leave of the next kelda to return to my ain folk in the mountains. This is a fiiine fat country and this is a fiiine bonny clan my ne
phews have, but I would like to die in the heather where I was borrrned. If you will excuse me, Kelda.’

  He walked away and was lost in the shadows of the mound.

  Tiffany suddenly wanted to go home. Perhaps it was just William’s sadness, but now she felt shut up in the mound.

  ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ she muttered.

  ‘Good idea,’ said the toad. ‘You’ve got to find the place where the time is different, for one thing.’

  ‘But how can I do that?’ wailed Tiffany. ‘You can’t see time!’

  She stuck her arms through the entrance hole and pulled herself up into the fresh air…

  There was a big old clock in the farmhouse, and the time on it got set once a week. That is, when her father went to the market in Creel Springs he made a note of the position of the hands on the big clock there, and when he got home he moved the hands on their clock to the same position. It was really just for show, anyway. Everyone took their time from the sun, and the sun couldn’t go wrong.

  Now Tiffany lay amongst the trunks of the old thorn bushes, whose leaves rustled continuously in the breeze. The mound was like a little island in the endless turf; late primroses and even a few ragged foxgloves grew up here in the shelter of the thorn roots. Her apron lay beside her where she had left it earlier.

  ‘She could have just told me where to look,’ she said.

  ‘But she didn’t know where it would be,’ said the toad. ‘She just knew the signs to look for.’

  Tiffany rolled over carefully and stared up at the sky between the low branches. It’ll shine out, the kelda had said…

  ‘I think I ought to talk to Hamish,’ she said.

  ‘Right ye are, mistress,’ said a voice by her ear. She turned her head.

  ‘How long have you been there?’ she said.