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.
There weren’t just the chalk pits. Men had been everywhere on the Chalk. There were stone circles, half fallen down, and burial mounds like green pimples where, it was said, chieftains of the olden days had been buried with their treasure. No one fancied digging into them to find out.
There were odd carvings in the chalk, too, which the shepherds sometimes weeded when they were out on the downs with the flocks and there was not a lot to do. The chalk was only a few inches under the turf. Hoofprints could last a season, but the carvings had lasted for thousands of years. They were pictures of horses and giants, but the strange thing was that you couldn’t see them properly from anywhere on the ground. They looked as if they’d been made for viewers in the sky.
And then there were the weird places, like Old Man’s Forge, which was just four big flat rocks placed so they made a kind of half-buried hut in the side of a mound. It was only a few feet deep. It didn’t look like anything special, but if you shouted your name into it, it was several seconds before the echo came back.
There were signs of people everywhere. The Chalk had been important.
Tiffany left the shearing sheds way behind. No one was watching. Sheared sheep took no notice at all of a girl moving without her feet touching the ground.
The lowlands dropped away behind her, and now she was properly on the downs. Only the occasional baa of a sheep or scream of a buzzard disturbed a busy silence, made up of bee buzzes and breezes and the sound of a ton of grass growing every minute.
On either side of Tiffany the Nac Mac Feegle ran in a spread out ragged line, staring grimly ahead.
They passed some of the mounds without stopping, and ran up and down the sides of shallow valleys without a pause. And it was then that Tiffany saw a landmark ahead.
It was a small flock of sheep. There were only a few, freshly sheared, but there were always a handful of sheep at this place. Strays would turn up there, and lambs would find their way to it when they’d lost their mothers.
This was a magic place.
There wasn’t much to see now, just the iron wheels sinking into the turf and the pot-bellied stove with its short chimney….
On the day Granny Aching died, the men had cut and lifted the turf around the hut and stacked it neatly some way away. Then they’d dug a deep hole in the chalk, six feet deep and six feet long, lifting out the chalk in great damp blocks.
Thunder and Lightning had watched them carefully. They didn’t whine or bark. They seemed more interested than upset.
Granny Aching had been wrapped in a woolen blanket, with a tuft of raw wool pinned to it. That was a special shepherd thing. It was there to tell any gods who might get involved that the person being buried there was a shepherd, and spent a lot of time on the hills, and what with lambing and one thing and another couldn’t always take much time out for religion, there being no churches or temples up there, and therefore it was generally hoped that the gods would understand and look kindly on them. Granny Aching, it had to be said, had never been seen to pray to anyone or anything in her life, and it was agreed by all that, even now, she wouldn’t have any time for a god who didn’t understand that lambing came first.
The chalk had been put back over her, and Granny Aching, who always said that the hills were in her bones, now had her bones in the hills.
Then they burned the hut. That wasn’t usual, but her father had said that there wasn’t a shepherd anywhere on the Chalk who’d use it now.
Thunder and Lightning wouldn’t come when he called, and he knew better than to be angry, so they were left sitting quite contentedly by the glowing embers of the hut.
Next day, when the ashes were cold and blowing across the raw chalk, everyone went up onto the downs and with very great care put the turf back, so all that was left to see were the iron wheels on their axles, and the pot-bellied stove.