Tiffany Aching Complete Collection, page 129
Tiffany swallowed. “Yes, your majesty. You will let me leave.”
“You are so sure?”
“Yes.” Tiffany wrapped her hand around the shepherd’s crown once again, and felt the flint at its center give her strength, draw her back to her own land, to her land above the wave. She stepped backward slowly.
And nearly tripped over something on the floor behind her.
The King was staring too. It was a white cat and she heard the King’s voice, surprised for the first time: “You!”
And then there was an end to it, and Tiffany and You spiraled back the way they had come, and the Feegles were outside, patrolling up and down and enjoying the happy opportunity of fighting a tree or two, since no elves had turned up, but these trees were still right scunners, stickin’ their barbs as they did into Feegle heads and beards. They deserved a guid kickin’.
“Well, I’m not sure that did any good,” Tiffany said to Rob as she emerged from the tunnel.
“Weel,” said Rob Anybody, “let them come. Ye will always have your Feegles. We Feegles are everlasting.”
“Everlasting if there is enough to drink!” Wee Dangerous Spike added.
“Rob,” said Tiffany firmly. “Right now, not one of you needs a drink. We need a plan.” She thought for a moment. “The King will not help—yet. But he is looking for new entertainments. Perhaps if we offer him something of that ilk, then he will think more kindly upon us and at least leave us alone?” Leave us to kill his elves, she thought to herself. He did say he wouldn’t mind. Would he change his mind?
“Ach, nae problem,” said Rob proudly, confident of his ability to find a PLN. “That King of the Elves, he needs somethin’ tae do, ye say.”
“Like the men of Lancre!” Tiffany said suddenly. “Rob, you know how Geoffrey has them all building sheds. . . . Well, you built a pub once. How difficult would a shed be?”
“Nae trouble at all, right, lads?” said Rob, happy now. For he had his PLN. “Let’s offski.” He looked down at You. “How come your pussycat follows you around, mistress?”
“I don’t know,” said Tiffany. “She’s a cat. They can go anywhere. And after all, she was Granny Weatherwax’s cat and that means quite a lot.”
But Rob wasn’t listening. Not now. He was thinking of his PLN. And the following day, at the mouth of the Long Man there was a shed replete with everything a gentleman could require, including fishing line and every tool you could think of, all made of wood or stone. Tiffany thought that might make the King of the Elves happy. But she did not feel it would get his help. . . .
Lord Peaseblossom lounged on a velvet-covered couch in Fairyland, idly fingering the ruff of feathers around his neck, swigging from a goblet of rich wine.
Lord Lankin had just entered the chamber. He bowed before his new king, a glorious red broom of a tail slung casually round his neck, a memento of a recent raid. “I believe, my lord,” he said lazily, silkily, “that our warriors will soon wish for . . . greater enjoyments in the human world. The barriers seem weak, and those of us who slip through to hunt are finding no real opposition.”
Peaseblossom smiled. He knew that his elves had been testing the gates, some skipping through the red stones of Lancre while others had gamboled near the villages of the Chalk, wary only of the little red-haired men who liked nothing more than a fight with an elf. The elves were like the Feegles in one respect—if there was nobody to fight, they would fight among themselves. And squabbling was de rigueur in Fairyland—not even cats were as bad.*
And elves could take umbrage. They loved umbrage, and as for sulking, that was a top entertainment. But everywhere they had been, they had stirred up little pockets of trouble, being nuisances, causing damage for damage’s sake. Stealing sheep, cows, even the occasional dog. Only yesterday Mustardseed had gleefully snatched a ram from its flock on the hills and then loosed it in a small china shop, laughing as it had lowered its horns and—yes—rammed the shelves.
But there was no rhyme nor reason to it. They needed to show what they could really do. Perhaps, Peaseblossom mused, the time was afoot to lead his elves on a raid that all elves would sing about for a long time to come.
A smile flickered across his thin, sharp face, and he waved a hand in the air, changing his tunic instantly to one of leather and fur, a crossbow tucked into his belt.
“We will put a girdle of glamour around their world,” he laughed. “Go, my elves, go make your mischief. But when this still-bent moon swells to her full glory, we will go together in force. That land will be ours once more!”
In her father’s barn, Tiffany was watching Nightshade wake up. She had mixed up a new tonic for her yesterday: a good strong dose of reciprocal greens,* which had made the elf sleep deeply for a whole day, giving her body a chance to regain its strength.
And, incidentally, giving Tiffany a chance to go round the houses without worrying about what the Feegles might do in her absence. I might even have time to fly to Lancre and check on Geoffrey if I do it once more, she thought. She knew the Feegles would never hurt a sleeping elf, but one awake? Well, their instincts might just take over if Nightshade should put a single dainty finger wrong. And, of course, she didn’t trust the elf either. . . .
“Time for a walk,” she said as Nightshade stretched her limbs and looked around her as she woke. “I think it is time you saw a few more humans.” For how else could she teach Nightshade about how this world worked if Nightshade mostly only saw the inside of the barn and a few ready-to-boil-over Feegles?
So she took Nightshade down into the village, past the pub where the men were sitting looking glumly at their beer, fishing the occasional barrel gushie out of it, past the small shops, picking her way carefully over the debris outside Mrs. Tumble’s Plates for All Seasons, down the road and back up into the downs. Tiffany had asked her dad to let people know she was trying out a girl to help mix her medicines, so nobody really looked directly at her, but Tiffany had no doubt that they would all have taken in every single detail as she passed. It was why she had insisted on Nightshade’s dairymaid’s dress being toned down, so there were now no bows, no ribbons, no buckles, and a decent pair of boots rather than dainty slippers.
“I have been watching humans,” said Nightshade as they were clumping back up the road. “And I can’t understand them. I saw a woman giving an old tramp a couple of pennies. He was nothing to do with her, so why would she do that? How does it help her? I don’t understand.”
“It’s what we do,” said Tiffany. “The wizards call it empathy. That means putting yourself in the place of the other person and seeing the world from their point of view. I suppose it’s because in the very olden days, when humans had to fight for themselves every day, they needed to find people who would fight with them too, and together we lived—yes, and prospered. Humans need other humans—it’s as simple as that.”
“Yes, but what good would the old lady get from giving away her money?”
“Well,” said Tiffany, “she will probably feel what we call a little glow, because she has helped someone who needed help. It will mean that she is glad that she is not in his circumstances. You could say that she can see what his world is like, and—what can I say?—she comes away feeling hopeful.”
“But the tramp looked as if he could do a job of some sort, to earn his own pennies, but nevertheless she gave him hers.” Nightshade was still struggling to understand the human concept of money—the elves, of course, could simply make it appear whenever they willed.*
“Well, yes,” said Tiffany, “that sort of thing does happen, but not always, and the old lady will still feel she has done the right thing. He may be a bit of a scamp, but she tells herself that she is a good person.”
“I saw a king in your land before—Verence—and I watched him and he didn’t tell people what they should do,” Nightshade continued.
“Well, he has a wife to tell him what to do,” laughed Tiffany. “That’s what humans are. Right up to our kings and queens, our barons and lords. Our rulers rule by consent, which means that we like having them as rulers, if they do what we want them to do. There were a lot of battles long ago, but there again everyone finally realized that it was better to work peacefully with everyone else. For one person alone cannot survive. We humans definitely need other people to keep us human.”
“I notice that you don’t use magic very much either,” Nightshade added. “Yet you are a witch. You are powerful.”
“Well, what we witches have found is that power is best left at home. Magic is tricky anyway, and it can turn and twist and get things wrong. But if you surround yourself with other humans, you will have what we call friends—people who like you, and people you like.”
“Friends.” Nightshade rolled the word, and the idea, around in her head and then asked, “Am I your friend?”
“Yes,” said Tiffany. “You could be.” She looked at the people passing by and said to Nightshade, “Look, try this. There’s an old woman trying to carry a very heavy basket up the hill. Go and help her, will you, and see what happens.”
The elf looked horrified. “What do I say to her?”
“You say, ‘Can I help you, mistress?’”
Nightshade gulped, but she crossed the road and spoke to the old woman, and Tiffany listened and heard the old woman saying, “What a kind girl you are, thank you very much. Bless you for helping an old lady.”
To Tiffany’s surprise, Nightshade carried the basket not only over the hill but also along the next stretch of the road, and she heard her ask, “How do you live, lady?”
The old lady sighed. “Little by little. My husband died years ago, but I am good with the needle and so I make things. I don’t need charity. I get along and I have still got my home. As we say, worse things happen at sea. . . .”
As Nightshade watched the woman go away, she said to Tiffany, “Can you give me some money, please?”
“Well,” said Tiffany, “witches seldom have money about their person—we don’t live in that kind of world.”
Nightshade brightened up. “I can help then,” she said. “I’m an elf and I am sure I could get into a place where the money is.”
“Please do not try that,” said Tiffany. “There would be a lot of trouble.”
She ignored a grumble from the side of the road. “Nae if you don’t get caught.”
“We is guid at gettin’ intae places, ye ken,” another Feegle muttered.*
Nightshade paid the Feegles no heed. She was still puzzling. “That old woman had absolutely nothing, but she was still cheerful. What did she have to be cheerful about?”
“Being alive,” said Tiffany. “What you are seeing, Nightshade, is someone making the best of things, which is something else humans do. And sometimes the best of it is good.” She paused. “How did it make you feel?” she asked. “Carrying that basket.”
Nightshade looked puzzled. “I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “But I’m not sure I felt like an elf should . . . is that a good thing?”
“Look,” Tiffany said, “the wizards tell us that in the very, very olden days, humans were more like monkeys, and being a monkey was a very clever thing to be, as monkeys like to see into everything. And then the monkeys realized that if one monkey tried to kill a large wolf, he would soon be a dead monkey, but if two monkeys could get together, they would be very happy monkeys, and happy monkeys create more happy monkeys so they would have lots of monkeys, which chatter and gibber and talk all the time until, in the end, they became us. So too could an elf change.”
“When I get my kingdom back . . . ,” Nightshade began.
“Stop there,” said Tiffany. “Why do you want your kingdom back? What good has it done you? Think about it, for I am the human who has looked after you, the only person you might call a friend.” She looked seriously at the elf. “I have told you that I—we—would be happy if you were to be Queen of the Elves again, but only if you can truly learn from your time here. Be prepared to live in peace, teach your elves that the world has changed and that there is no space for them here.”
There was hope in her voice now, a hope that human and elf might be able to change the stories of humans and elves.
A princess doesn’t have to be blond and blue-eyed and have a shoe size smaller than her age, she thought.
People can trust witches, and not fear the old woman in the woods, the poor old woman whose only crime was to have no teeth and to talk to herself.
And perhaps an elf could learn to know mercy, to discover humanity. . . .
“If you learn things,” she finished softly, “you might find yourself building a different kind of kingdom.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mr. Sideways
The old boys in the villages around Granny Weatherwax’s cottage had swiftly taken a liking to Geoffrey. They respected Nanny Ogg and Tiffany, of course, but they really liked Geoffrey.
They would taunt him sometimes; after all, he was in a woman’s business, but when he got on his broomstick—sometimes even with his goat perched behind him rather than harnessed to its little cart—and whizzed away to the horizon, they were speechless.
Even when he was really busy, he always had time to stop and chat, and there was always a brew on in any shed when he came by, and a broken biscuit for Mephistopheles. The old boys were fascinated by the goat, but wary nonetheless after the day when someone gave it a drink of ale just to see what would happen and, to their astonishment, Mephistopheles danced like a ballerina and then kicked a young tree so hard that its trunk split in two.
“It’s like those folk who do mushi,” said Stinky Jim.
“I don’t think that’s the right word,” said Smack Tremble. “Ain’t mushi something you eat? Out in . . . foreign parts.”
“You mean One-man-he-go-up, he-go-down,” Captain Makepeace said. “A way of fighting.”
“That’s it!” said Stinky Jim. “There was a fellow at the market in Slice who could do that.”
“There’s a lot of people in Slice who can do that kind of thing,” Smack Tremble added with a shiver. “Odd place, Slice.”*
They sat and thought about Slice for a moment. You could find anything at Slice market if you looked hard enough. Famously a man once sold his wife there, where the phrase “bring and buy” was taken literally, and he went home with a secondhand wheelbarrow and felt he had the best of the bargain. Then they looked at the remains of the sapling and agreed that Mephistopheles was indeed a remarkable goat, but perhaps it would be best to leave his diet alone.
The remarkable goat himself stoically chewed his way through the long grass by the pub fence as though nothing untoward had happened and then trotted off to find Geoffrey.
On this particular fine morning, Geoffrey was at Laughing Boy Sideways’s house. Tiffany had been treating a particularly troublesome bunion of his, which had resisted her ministrations for weeks. She had been considering breaking her rule and using magic on the thing, just to be done with it, when Geoffrey decided to pop in to see Mr. Sideways on a day when Tiffany was away at the Chalk. He found the old man by the back door of his cottage, just about to hobble down the path to the old barn. Instead of heading back into the cottage as he would have done if Tiffany had called, Mr. Sideways beckoned to Geoffrey to follow him down the path toward the rickety barn. And it was as Geoffrey watched the old boy struggling painfully along in his old army boots that he noticed something very wrong.
“Well, dang me!” Mr. Sideways said when Geoffrey prized the offending hobnail from his left boot. “If I’d known that was what the trouble was, I’d have dealt with the bugger meself!” He looked at Geoffrey with bright eyes. “Thank ’ee, lad.”
Old Mr. Sideways lived on his own and had done so for as long as anyone could remember. He was meticulously dressed and in the city might have been described as “dapper.” Apart from his work overalls, which were washed regularly but were streaked with paint and oil, he was always spick-and-span. So was his little cottage. The living room, which he kept immaculately tidy, had paintings of people in old-fashioned dress on the wall—Geoffrey assumed these were portraits of Mr. Sideways’s parents, although he never spoke of them. Everything the man did he did carefully. Geoffrey liked him, and even though he was a very private man, he had taken to Geoffrey.
The shed Mr. Sideways had constructed adjacent to the old barn was also immaculate. Every shelf was neatly stacked with carefully labeled old tobacco tins and jars. His tools were hung against the walls, neatly ranked by size. They were clean and sharp too. Tiffany had never been allowed beyond Mr. Sideways’s living room, but Geoffrey had soon been welcomed to share a mug of tea and a biscuit in the shed by the barn.
Each one of the sheds Geoffrey visited on his rounds of the old boys was different, expressing the personality of the occupant, unfettered by female intervention. Some were chaotic, with piles of scrap and half-made objects scattered about; others were tidier—like Captain Makepeace’s shed, which was full of paints, brushes, and canvases, but still had a clear sense of order.
But no one was as tidy as Mr. Sideways. And then Geoffrey noticed something missing. All the other sheds had at least one work in progress visible, whether it was a half-made bird table, or a stripped-down wheelbarrow with a new shaft, but there was nothing like that to be seen in Mr. Sideways’s shed. And he evaded the question when Geoffrey asked what he was working on.
“What are you up to, Mr. Sideways?” Geoffrey asked. “You look like a man who has been thinking, and I know you are a canny man at that.”
Mr. Sideways cleared his throat. “Well, you see, lad, I am building a machine. I’ve no interest in bird tables or mug trees and the like. But machines now . . .” He paused, then looked carefully at Geoffrey. “I’ve been thinking that it might be useful, what with the troubles folks are having.”
Geoffrey sat calmly, waiting for the old boy to finish his tea and reach a conclusion. Eventually Mr. Sideways put down his mug and stood up, brushing the crumbs off his lap. He swept them up with a small pan and brush he clearly kept just for that purpose, washed out the mugs, dried and stacked them neatly on a shelf, then opened the door.
