The Wee Free Men (Discworld 30)

“We didna ken it was thee we were lookin’ for, mistress. Lots of bigjob women walkin’ aroond this farm. We didna ken it was thee until you caught Daft Wullie.”

It might not be, thought Tiffany.

“Yes, but stealing the sheep and the eggs, there was no need for that,” she said sternly.

“But they wasna nailed doon, mistress,” said Rob Anybody, as if that was an excuse.

“You can’t nail down an egg!” snapped Tiffany.

“Ach, well, you’d have the kennin’ o’ wise stuff like that, mistress,” said Rob Anybody. “I see you’s done wi’ the writin’, so we’d best be goin’. Ye hae a besom?”

“Broomstick,” murmured the toad.

“Er, no,” said Tiffany. “The important thing about magic,” she added haughtily, “is to know when not to use it.”

“Fair enough,” said Rob Anybody, sliding back down the table leg. “Come here, Daft Wullie.” One of the Feegles who looked very much like that morning’s egg thief came and stood by Rob Anybody, and they both bent over slightly. “If you’d care to step on us, mistress,” said Rob Anybody.

Before Tiffany could open her mouth, the toad said out of the corner of its mouth, and being a toad that means quite a lot of corner, “One Feegle can lift a grown man. You couldn’t squash one if you tried.”

“I don’t want to try!”

Tiffany very cautiously raised a big boot. Daft Wullie ran underneath it, and she felt the boot being pushed upward. She might as well have trodden on a brick.

“Now t’other wee bootie,” said Rob Anybody.

“I’ll fall over!”

“Nae, we’re good at this….”

And then Tiffany was standing up on two pictsies. She felt them moving backward and forward underneath her, keeping her balanced. She felt quite secure, though. It was just like wearing really thick soles.

“Let’s gae,” said Rob Anybody, down below. “An’ don’t worry about yon pussycat scraffin’ the wee burdies. Some of the lads is stayin’ behind to mind things!”

Ratbag crept along a branch. He wasn’t a cat who was good at changing the ways he thought. But he was good at finding nests. He’d heard the cheeping from the other end of the garden, and even from the bottom of the tree he’d been able to see three little yellow beaks in the nest. Now he advanced, drooling. Nearly there…

Three Nac Mac Feegle pulled off their straw beaks and grinned happily at him.

“Hello, Mister Pussycat,” said one of them. “Ye dinna learn, do ye? Cheep!”

CHAPTER 5

The Green Sea

Tiffany flew a few inches above the ground, standing still. Wind rushed around her as the Feegles sped out of the farmyard’s top gate and onto the turf of the downs….

This is the girl, flying. At the moment there’s a toad on her head, holding on to her hair.

Pull back, and here is the long green whaleback of the downs. Now she’s a pale-blue dot against the endless grass, mowed by the sheep to the height of a carpet. But the green sea isn’t unbroken. Here and there humans have been.

Last year Tiffany had spent three carrots and an apple on half an hour of geology, although she’d been refunded a carrot after explaining to the teacher that ‘Geology’ shouldn’t be spelled on his sign as “G olly G.” He said that the chalk had been formed underwater millions of years before from tiny seashells.

That made sense to Tiffany. Sometimes you found little fossils in the chalk. But the teacher didn’t know much about the flint. You found flints, harder than steel, in chalk, the softest of rocks. Sometimes the shepherds chipped the flints, one flint against another, into knives. Not even the best steel knives could take an edge as sharp as flint.

And men in what was called on the Chalk “the olden days” had dug pits for it. They were still there, deep holes in the rolling green, filled with thickets of thorn and brambles.

Huge, knobbly flints still turned up in the village gardens. Sometimes they were larger than a man’s head. They often looked like heads, too. They were so melted and twisted and curved that you could look at a flint and see almost anything—a face, a strange animal, a sea monster. Sometimes the more interesting ones would be put on garden walls, for show.

The old people called those calkins, which meant “chalk children.” They’d always seemed…odd to Tiffany, as if the stone was striving to become alive. Some flints looked like bits of meat, or bones, or something off a butcher’s slab. In the dark, under the sea, it looked as though the chalk had been trying to make the shapes of living creatures.