The Wee Free Men (18 page)

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. “Dinna eat the canapés!”

“You’re a bit late!”

“Ach, weel, it’s a cunnin’ ol’ drome ye’re dealin’ with here,” said Rob Anybody. “The dream wouldna 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 redheaded 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 canna 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 and 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 dinna think!”

“Make my caviar deep fried, wilya?”

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 forever?”

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 toward 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 toward her, pudgy 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 treelike.

In front of Tiffany the drome fell backward. 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 Feegle.

“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 toward 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, except for her heartbeats.

Well, of
course
she’d fought things and won, hadn’t she? But the Nac Mac Feegle 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 anymore.

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 Feegle, hoping against hope that she’d hear a sudden cry, even of “Crivens!” (She was sure it was a swearword.)

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 spoonfull 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 toward 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 around, 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 center of the square formed by the dromes the air was full of mist. The hoof tracks, and the tracks of Roland, led down past the tame dromes and into the cloud.

Tiffany spun around. 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.

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.

T
he heat struck like a blowtorch, 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 here 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 around 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 toward 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. Farmwork 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.

“Sneebs!”
said the man, wringing his hands. And the words appeared, floating in her brain: “It’s terribly dangerous!”

He waved a pale hand as if to brush her away. Shaking her head, Tiffany walked on.

There were lords and ladies, people in fine clothes and even a few shepherds. But some of them had a pieced-together look. They looked, in fact, like a picture book back in her bedroom.

It was made of thick card, its edges worn raggedy by generations
of Aching children. Each page showed a character, and each was cut into four strips that could be turned over independently. The point of the whole thing was that a bored child could turn over parts of the pages and change the way the characters were dressed. You could end up with a soldier’s head on a baker’s chest wearing a maid’s dress and a farmer’s big boots.

Tiffany had never been bored enough. She considered that even things that spend their whole lives hanging from the undersides of branches would never be bored enough to spend more than five seconds with that book.

The people around here looked as though they’d either been taken from that book or had dressed for a fancy-dress party in the dark. One or two of them nodded to her as she passed but didn’t seem surprised to see her.

She ducked under a round leaf much bigger than she was and took out the toad again.

“Whap? It’s sti’ cooold,” said the toad, hunching down on her hand.

“Cold? The air’s baking!”

“There’s just snow,” said the toad. “Put me back, I’m freezing!”

Just a minute, thought Tiffany. “Do toads dream?” she said.

“No!”

“Oh…so it’s not really hot?”

“No! You just think it is!”

“Psst,” said a voice.

Tiffany put the toad away and wondered if she dared to turn her head.

“It’s me!” said the voice.

Tiffany turned toward a clump of daisies twice the height of a man. “That’s not a lot of help.”

“Are you crazy?” said the daisies.

“I’m looking for my brother,” said Tiffany sharply.

“The horrible child who screams for candy all the time?”

The daisy stems parted and the boy Roland darted out and joined her under the leaf.

“Yes,” she said, edging away and feeling that only a sister has a right to call even a brother like Wentworth horrible.

“And threatens to go to the toilet if he’s left alone?” said Roland.

“Yes! Where is he?”

“
That’s
your brother? The one who’s permanently sticky?”

“I told you!”

“And you really want him back?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

He’s my brother, Tiffany thought. What’s
why
got to do with it?

“Because he’s my brother! Now tell me where he is?”

“Are you sure you can get out of here?” said Roland.

“Of course,” Tiffany lied.

“And you can take me with you?”

“Yes.” Well, she hoped so.

“All right. I’ll let you do that,” said Roland, relaxing.

“Oh, you’ll
let
me, will you?” said Tiffany.

“Look, I didn’t know what you were, all right?” said Roland. “There’s always weird things in the forest. Lost people, bits of dreams that’re still lying around…you have to be careful. But if you really know the way, then I ought to get back before my father worries too much.”

Tiffany felt the Second Thoughts starting. They said: Don’t change your expression. Just…check.

“How long have you been here?” she asked carefully. “Exactly?”

“Well, the light doesn’t really change much,” said the boy. “It feels like I’ve been here…oh, hours. Maybe a day.”

Tiffany tried hard not to let her face give anything away, but it didn’t work. Roland’s eyes narrowed.

“I have, haven’t I?” he said.

“Er…why do you ask?” said Tiffany, desperately.

“Because in a way it…feels like…longer. I’ve only been hungry two or three times, and been to the…you know…twice, so it can’t be
very
long. But I’ve done all kinds of things…it’s been a busy day….” His voice trailed off.

“Um. You’re right,” said Tiffany. “Time goes slowly here. It’s been…a bit longer.”

“A hundred years? Don’t tell me it’s a hundred years! Something magical has happened and it’s a hundred years, yes?”

“What? No! Um…nearly a year.”

The boy’s reaction was surprising. This time he looked
really
frightened. “Oh, no! That’s worse than a hundred years!”

“How?” said Tiffany, bewildered.

“If it was a hundred years, I wouldn’t get a thrashing when I got home!”

Hmm, thought Tiffany. “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she said aloud. “Your father has been very miserable. Besides, it’s not your fault you were stolen by the Queen—” She hesitated, because this time it was
his
expression that gave it all away. “Was it?”

“Well, there was this fine lady on a horse with bells all over its harness, and she galloped past me when I was out hunting and she was laughing, so of
course
I spurred my horse and chased after her, and…” He fell silent.

“That probably wasn’t a good decision,” said Tiffany.

“It’s not…
bad
here,” said Roland. “It just keeps changing. There’s…doorways everywhere. I mean, entrances into other places…” His voice tailed off.

“You’d better start at the beginning,” said Tiffany.

“It was great at first,” said Roland. “I thought it was, you know, an adventure? She fed me sweetmeats—”

“What are they, exactly?” said Tiffany. Her dictionary hadn’t included that one. “Are they like sweetbreads?”

“I don’t know. What are sweetbreads?”

“The pancreas or thymus gland of a cow,” said Tiffany. “Not a very good name, I think.”

Roland’s face went red with the effort of thought. “These were more like nougat.”

“Right. Go on,” said Tiffany.

“And then she told me to sing and dance and skip and play,” said Roland. “She said that’s what children were supposed to do.”

“Did you?”

“Would you? I’d feel like an idiot. I’m twelve, you know.” Roland hesitated. “In fact, if what you say is true, I’m thirteen now, right?”

“Why did she want you to skip and play?” said Tiffany, instead of saying, “No, you’re still twelve and act like you’re eight.”

“She just said that’s what children do,” said Roland.

Tiffany wondered about this. As far as she could see, children mostly argued, shouted, ran around very fast, laughed loudly, picked their noses, got dirty, and sulked. Any seen dancing
and
skipping
and
singing had probably been stung by a wasp.

“Strange,” she said.

“And then when I wouldn’t, she gave me more sweets.”

“More nougat?”

“Sugarplums,” said Roland. “They’re like plums. You know? With sugar on? She’s always trying to feed me sugar! She thinks I like it!”

A small bell rang in Tiffany’s memory. “You don’t think she’s trying to fatten you up before she bakes you in an oven and eats you, do you?”

“Of course not. Only wicked witches do that.”

Tiffany’s eyes narrowed. “Oh yes,” she said carefully. “I forgot. So you’ve been living on sweeties?”

“No, I know how to hunt! Real animals get in here. I don’t know how. Sneebs thinks they find the doorways in by accident. And then they starve to death, because it’s always winter here. Sometimes the Queen sends out robbing parties if a door opens into an interesting world, too. This whole place is like…a pirate ship.”

“Yes, or a sheep tick,” said Tiffany, thinking aloud.

“What’re they?”

“They’re insects that bite sheep and suck blood and don’t drop off until they’re full,” said Tiffany.

“Yuck. I suppose that’s the kind of thing peasants have to know about,” said Roland. “I’m glad I don’t. I’ve seen through the doorways to one or two worlds. They wouldn’t let me out, though. We got potatoes from one, and fish from another. I think they frighten people into giving them stuff. Oh, and there was the world where the dromes come from. They laughed about that and said if I wanted to go in there, I was welcome. I didn’t! It’s all red, like a sunset. A great huge sun on the horizon, and a red sea that hardly moves, and red rocks, and long shadows. And those horrible creatures
sitting on the rocks. They live off crabs and spidery things and little scribbity creatures. It was awful. There was this sort of ring of little claws and shells and bones around every one of them.”

“Who are they?” said Tiffany, who had noted the word
peasants
.

“What do you mean?”

“You keep talking about ‘they,’” said Tiffany. “Who do you mean? The people out there?”

“Those? Most of them aren’t even real,” said Roland. “I mean the elves. The fairies. That’s who she’s queen of. Didn’t you know?”

“I thought they were small!”

“I think they can be any size they like,” said Roland. “They’re not exactly real. They’re like…dreams of themselves. They can be thin as air or solid as a rock. Sneebs says.”

“Sneebs?” said Tiffany. “Oh…the little man that just says
sneebs
but real words turn up in your head?”

“Yes, that’s him. He’s been here for
years.
That’s how I knew about the time being wrong. Sneebs got back to his own world once, and it was all different. He was so miserable, he found another doorway and came straight back.”

“He
came
back?” said Tiffany, astonished.

“He said it was better to belong where you don’t belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there,” said Roland. “At least, I think that’s what he said. He said it’s not too bad here if you keep out of the Queen’s way. He says you can learn a lot.”

Tiffany looked back at the hunched figure of Sneebs, who was still watching the nut cracking. He didn’t look as though he was learning anything. He just looked like someone who’d been frightened for so long, it had become part of his life, like freckles.