The Wee Free Men d(-2 Page 16

  It wasn’t just for eating, it was for show. It was piled up against mounds of greenery and enormous arrangements of flowers. Here and there huge transparent carvings were landmarks in this landscape of food. Tiffany reached up and touched a glittering cockerel. It was ice, damp under her fingertips. There were others, too… a jolly fat man, a bowl of fruits all carved in ice, a swan…

  Tiffany was, for a moment, tempted. It seemed a very long time since she had eaten anything. But the food was too obviously not food at all. It was bait. It was supposed to say: Hello, little kiddie. Eat me.

  I’m getting the hang of this, thought Tiffany. Good job the creature didn’t think of cheese—

  –and there was cheese. Suddenly, cheese had always been there.

  She’d seen pictures of lots of different cheeses in the Almanack. She was good at cheese and had always wondered what the others tasted like. They were faraway cheeses with strange sounding names, cheeses like Treble Wibbley, Waney Tastey, Old Argg, Red Runny and the legendary Lancre Blue, which had to be nailed to the table to stop it attacking other cheeses.

  Just a taste wouldn’t hurt, surely. It wasn’t the same as eating, was it? After all, she was in control, wasn’t she? She’d seen right through the dream straight away, hadn’t she? So it couldn’t have any effect, could it?

  And… well, cheese was hardly temptation for anyone…

  OK, the drome must’ve put the cheese in as soon as she’d thought of it, but…

  She was already holding the cheese knife. She didn’t quite remember picking it up.

  A drop of cold water landed on her hand. It made her glance up at the nearest glittering ice carving.

  Now it was a shepherdess, with a saddlebag dress and a big bonnet. Tiffany was sure it had been a swan when she’d looked at it before.

  The anger came back. She’d nearly been fooled! She looked at the cheese knife. ‘Be a sword,’ she said. After all, the drome was making her dream, but she was doing the dreaming. She was real. Part of her wasn’t asleep.

  There was a clang.

  ‘Correction,’ said Tiffany. ‘Be a sword that isn’t so heavy.’ And this time she got something she could actually hold.

  There was a rustling in the greenery and a red-haired face poked out.

  ‘Psst,’ it whispered. ‘Dinnae eat the canapes!’

  ‘You’re a bit late!’

  ‘Ach, weel, it’s a cunnin’ ol’ drome ye’re dealin’ with here,’ said Rob Anybody. ‘The dream wouldnae let us in unless we wuz properly dressed.’

  He stepped out, looking very sheepish in a black suit with a bow tie. There was more rustling and other pictsies pushed their way out of the greenery. They looked a bit like red-headed penguins.

  ‘Properly dressed?’ said Tiffany.

  ‘Aye,’ said Daft Wullie, who had a piece of lettuce on his head. ‘An’ these troosers are a wee bit chafin’ around the nethers, I don’t mind tellin’ ye.’

  ‘Have ye spotted the creature yet?’ said Rob Anybody.

  ‘No! It’s so crowded!’

  ‘We’ll help ye look,’ said Rob Anybody. The thing cannae hide if ye’re right up close. Be careful, mind you! If it thinks ye’re gonna whap it one, there’s nae tellin’ what it’ll try! Spread oot, lads, and pretend ye’re enjoying the cailey.’

  ‘Whut? D’ye mean get drunk an’ fight an’ that?’ said Daft Wullie.

  ‘Crivens, ye wouldna’ believe it,’ said Rob Anybody, rolling his eyes. ‘Nae, ye pudden’! This is a posh party, ye ken? That means ye mak’ small talk an’ mingle!’

  ‘Ach, I’m a famous mingler! They won’t even know we’re here!’ said Daft Wullie. ‘C’mon!’

  Even in a dream, even at a posh ball, the Nac Mac Feegle knew how to behave. You charged in madly, and you screamed… politely.

  ‘Lovely weather for the time o’ year, is it not, ye wee scunner!’

  ‘Hey, jimmy, ha’ ye no got a pommes frites for an ol’ pal?’

  ‘The band is playin’ divinely, I dinnae think!’

  ‘Make my caviar deep-fried, willy a?’

  There was something wrong with the crowd. No one was panicking or trying to run away, which was certainly the right response to an invasion of Feegles.

  Tiffany set off again through the crowd. The masked people at the party paid her no attention, either. And that’s because they’re background people, she thought, just like the background trees. She walked along the room to a pair of double doors, and pulled them open.

  There was nothing but blackness beyond it.

  So… the only way out was to find the drome. She hadn’t really expected anything else. It could be anywhere. It could be behind a mask, it could be a table. It could be anything.

  Tiffany stared at the crowd. And it was then she saw Roland.

  He was sitting at a table by himself. It was spread with food, and he had a spoon in his hand.

  She ran over and knocked it onto the floor. ‘Haven’t you got any sense at all?’ she said, pulling him upright. ‘Do you want to stay here for ever?’

  And then she felt the movement behind her. Later on, she was sure she hadn’t heard anything. She’d just known. It was a dream, after all.

  She glanced around, and there was the drome. It was almost hidden behind a pillar.

  Roland just stared at her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Tiffany desperately, trying to shake him. ‘Have you eaten anything?’

  ‘Fwa fwa faff,’ murmured the boy.

  Tiffany turned back to the drome. It was moving towards her, but very slowly, trying to stay in the shadows. It looked like a little snowman made of dirty snow.

  The music was getting louder. The candles were getting brighter. Out on the huge dance floor, the animal-headed couples whirled faster and faster. And the floor shook. The dream was in trouble.

  The Nac Mac Feegles were running to her from every part of the floor, trying to be heard above the din.

  The drome was lurching towards her, podgy white fingers grasping the air.

  ‘First Sight,’ breathed Tiffany.

  She cut Roland’s head off.

  The snow had melted all across the clearing, and the trees looked real and properly tree-like.

  In front of Tiffany, the drome fell backwards. She was holding the old frying pan in her hand, but it had cut beautifully. Odd things, dreams.

  She turned and faced Roland, who was staring at her with a face so pale he might as well have been a drome.

  ‘It was frightened,’ she said. ‘It wanted me to attack you instead. It tried to look like you and made you look like a drome. But it didn’t know how to speak. You do.’

  ‘You might have killed me!’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘No,’ said Tiffany. ‘I just explained. Please don’t run away. Have you seen a baby boy here?’

  Roland’s face wrinkled. ‘What?’ he said.

  The Queen took him,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’m going to fetch him home. I’ll take you too, if you like.’

  ‘You’ll never get away,’ whispered Roland.

  ‘I got in, didn’t I?’

  ‘Getting in is easy. No one gets out!’

  ‘I mean to find a way,’ said Tiffany, trying to sound a lot more confident than she felt.

  ‘She won’t let you!’ Roland started to back away again.

  ‘Please don’t be so… so stupid,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’m going to find the Queen and get my brother back, whatever you say. Understand? I’ve got this far. And I’ve got help, you know.’

  ‘Where?’ said Roland.

  Tiffany looked around. There was no sign of the Nac Mac Feegles.

  ‘They always turn up,’ she said. ‘Just when I need them.’

  It struck her that there was suddenly something very… empty about the forest. It seemed colder, too.

  ‘They’ll be here any minute,’ she added, hopefully.

  ‘They got trapped in the dream,’ said Roland flatly.

  ‘They can’t have. I
killed the drome!’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ said the boy. ‘You don’t know what it’s like here. There’s dreams inside dreams. There’s… other things that live inside dreams, horrible things. You never know if you’ve really woken up. And the Queen controls them all. They’re fairy people, anyway. You can’t trust them. You can’t trust anyone. I don’t trust you. You’re probably just another dream.’

  He turned his back and walked away, following the line of hoofprints.

  Tiffany hesitated. The only other real person was going away, leaving her here with nothing but the trees, and the shadows.

  And, of course, anything horrible that was running towards her through them…

  ‘Er…’ she said. ‘Hello? Rob Anybody? William? Daft Wullie?’

  There was no reply. There wasn’t even an echo. She was alone, apart from her heartbeats.

  Well, of course she’d fought things and won, hadn’t she? But the Nac Mac Feegles had been there and, somehow, that’d made it easy. They never gave up, they’d attack absolutely anything and they didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘fear’.

  Tiffany, who had read her way through the dictionary, had a Second Thought there. ‘Fear’ was only one of thousands of words the pictsies probably didn’t know the meaning of. Unfortunately, she did know what it meant. And the taste and feel of fear, too. She felt it now.

  She gripped the pan. It didn’t seem quite such a good weapon any more.

  The cold blue shadows between the trees seemed to be spreading out. They were darkest ahead of her, where the hoofprints led. Strangely enough the wood behind her seemed almost light and inviting.

  Someone doesn’t want me to go on, she thought. That was… quite encouraging. But the twilight was misty and shimmered unpleasantly. Anything could be waiting.

  She was waiting, too. She realized that she was waiting for the Nac Mac Feegles, hoping against hope that she’d hear a sudden cry, even of ‘Crivens!’ (She was sure it was a swear word.)

  She pulled out the toad, which lay snoring on the palm of her hand, and gave it a prod.

  ‘Whp?’ it croaked.

  I’m stuck in a wood of evil dreams and I’m all alone and I think it’s getting darker,’ said Tiffany. ‘What should I do?’

  The toad opened one bleary eye and said: ‘Leave.’

  That is not a lot of help!’

  ‘Best advice there is,’ said the toad. ‘Now put me back, the cold makes me lethargic.’

  Reluctantly, Tiffany put the creature back in her apron pocket, and her hand touched Diseases of the Sheep.

  She pulled it out and opened it at random. There was a cure for the Steams, but it had been crossed out in pencil. Written in the margin, in Granny Aching’s big, round, careful handwriting was:

  This dunt work. One desert Spoonful of terpentine do.

  Tiffany closed the book with care, and put it back gently so as not to disturb the sleeping toad. Then, gripping the pan’s handle tightly, she stepped into the long blue shadows.

  How do you get shadows when there’s no sun in the sky? she thought, because it was better to think about things like this than all the other, much worse things that were on her mind.

  But these shadows didn’t need light to create them. They crawled around on the snow of their own accord, and backed away when she walked towards them. That, at least, was a relief.

  They piled up behind her. They were following her. She turned and stamped her foot a few times and they scurried off behind the trees, but she knew they were flowing back when she wasn’t looking.

  She saw a drome in the distance ahead of her, standing half-hidden behind a tree. She screamed at it and waved the pan threateningly, and it lumbered off quickly.

  When she looked round she saw two more behind her, a long way back.

  The track led uphill a little, into what looked like a much thicker mist. It glowed faintly. She headed for it. There was no other way to go.

  When she reached the top of the rise, she looked down into a shallow valley.

  There were four dromes in it—big ones, bigger than any she’d seen so far. They were sitting down in a square, their dumpy legs stretched out in front of them. Each one had a gold collar around its neck, attached to a chain.

  Tame ones?’ Tiffany wondered, aloud. ‘But—’

  …who could put a collar around the neck of a drome? Only someone who could dream as well as they could.

  We tamed the sheepdogs to help us herd sheep, she thought. The Queen uses dromes to herd dreams…

  In the centre of the square formed by the dromes the air was full of mist. The hooftracks, and the tracks of Roland, led down past the tame dromes and into the cloud.

  Tiffany spun round. The shadows darted back.

  There was nothing else nearby. No birds sang, nothing moved in the woods. But she could make out three more dromes now, their big round soggy faces peering at her around tree trunks.

  She was being herded now.

  At a time like this it would be nice to have someone around to say something like ‘No! It’s too dangerous! Don’t do it!’

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t. She was going to commit an act of extreme bravery and no one would know if it all went wrong. That was frightening, but also… annoying. That was it… annoying. This place annoyed her. It was all stupid and strange.

  It was the same feeling she’d had when Jenny had leaped out of the river. Out of her river. And the Queen had taken her brother. Maybe it was selfish to think like that, but anger was better than fear. Fear was a damp cold mess, but anger had an edge. She could use it.

  They were herding her! Like a—a sheep!

  Well, an angry sheep could send a vicious dog away, whimpering.

  So…

  Four big dromes, sitting in a square.

  It was going to be a big dream…

  Raising the pan to shoulder height, to swipe at anything that came near, and suppressing a dreadful urge to go to the toilet, Tiffany walked slowly down the slope, across the snow, through the mist… and into summer.

  Chapter 10

  Master Stroke

  The heat struck like a blowlamp, so sharp and sudden that she gasped.

  She’d had sunstroke once, up on the downs, when she’d gone without a bonnet. And this was like that; the world around her was in worrying shades of dull green, yellow and purple, without shadows. The air was so full of heat that she felt she could squeeze smoke out of it.

  She was in… reeds, they looked like, much taller than her.

  …with sunflowers growing in them, except…

  …the sunflowers were white…

  …because they weren’t, in fact, sunflowers at all.

  They were daisies. She knew it. She’d stared at them dozens of times, in that strange picture in the Faerie Tales. They were daisies, and these weren’t giant reeds around her, they were blades of grass and she was very, very small.

  She was in the weird picture. The picture was the dream, or the dream was the picture. Which way round didn’t matter, because she was right in the middle of it. If you fell off a cliff, it wouldn’t matter if the ground was rushing up or you were rushing down. You were in trouble either way.

  Somewhere in the distance there was a loud crack! and a ragged cheer. Someone clapped and said, in a sleepy sort of voice, ‘Well done. Good man. Ver’ well done…’

  With some effort, Tiffany pushed her way between the blades of grass.

  On a flat rock, a man was cracking nuts half as big as he was, with a two-handed hammer. He was being watched by a crowd of people. Tiffany used the word ‘people’ because she couldn’t think of anything else that was suitable, but it was stretching the word a bit to make it fit all the… people.

  They were different sizes, for one thing. Some of the men were taller than her, even if you allowed for the fact that everyone was shorter than the grass. But others were tiny. Some of them had faces that you wouldn’t look at twice. Others had faces that
no one would want to look at even once.

  This is a dream, after all, Tiffany told herself. It doesn’t have to make sense, or be nice. It’s a dream, not a daydream. People who say things like ‘may all your dreams come true’ should try living in one for five minutes.

  She stepped out into the bright, stiflingly hot clearing just as the man raised his hammer again, and said, ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Is there a Queen around here?’ said Tiffany.

  The man wiped his forehead, and nodded towards the other side of the clearing.

  ‘Her Majesty has gone to her bower,’ he said.

  ‘That being a nook or resting place?’ said Tiffany.

  The man nodded and said, ‘Correct again, Miss Tiffany.’

  Don’t ask how he knows your name, Tiffany told herself.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and because she had been brought up to be polite she added, ‘Best of luck with the nut-cracking.’

  ‘This one’s the toughest yet,’ said the man.

  Tiffany walked off, trying to look as if this collection of strange nearly-people was just another crowd. Probably the scariest ones were the Big Women, two of them.

  Big women were valued on the Chalk. Farmers liked big wives. Farm work was hard and there was no call for a wife who couldn’t carry a couple of piglets or a bale of hay. But these two could have carried a horse each. They stared haughtily at her as she walked past.

  They had tiny, stupid little wings on their backs.

  ‘Nice day for watching nuts being cracked!’ said Tiffany cheerfully, as she went past. Their huge pale faces wrinkled, as if they were trying to work out what she was.

  Sitting down near them, watching the nut-cracker with an expression of concern, was a little man with a large head, a fringe of white beard and pointy ears. He was wearing very old-fashioned clothes, and his eyes followed Tiffany as she went past.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said.

  ‘Sneebs!’ he said, and in her head appeared the words: ‘Get away from here!’

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said.