I Shall Wear Midnight

And Tiffany was a witch. ‘I must tell you something, Wee Mad Arthur,’ she said, ‘and you must understand what I say. You have come home, Wee Mad Arthur.’

The shield dropped out of his hand. ‘Aye, miss, I ken that now. A policeman should not say the words I just said. He should talk about judges and juries and prisons and sentences, and he would say ye cannae take the law intae your own hands. So I will hand in my badge, indeed, and stay here among my own folk, although I have to say, with better standards o’ hygiene.’

This got a round of applause from the assembled Feegles, although Tiffany wasn’t sure that most of them fully understood the concept of hygiene or, for that matter, obeying the law.

‘You have my word,’ said Tiffany, ‘that the mound will not be touched again. I will see to it, do you understand?’

‘Och, weel,’ said Wee Mad Arthur tearfully. ‘That might be all very well, miss, but what will happen behind your back when ye are a-flying and a-whizzing aboot your verrae important business across the hills? What will happen then?’

All eyes turned to Tiffany, including those of the goats. She didn’t do this kind of thing any more because she knew it was bad manners, but Tiffany picked up Wee Mad Arthur bodily and held him at eye level. ‘I am the hag o’ the hills,’ she said. ‘And I will vow to you and all other Feegles that the home of the Feegles will never be threatened with iron again. It will never be behind my back but will always be in front of my eyes. And while this is so, no living man will touch it if he wants to remain a living man. And if I fail the Feegles in this, may I be dragged through the seven hells on a broomstick made of nails.’

Strictly speaking, Tiffany admitted to herself, these were pretty much empty threats, but the Feegles did not think an oath was an oath if it didn’t have lots of thunder and lightning and boasting and blood in it. Blood, somehow, made it official. I will see to it that the mound is never touched again, she thought. There is no way that Roland can refuse me now. And besides, I have a secret weapon: I have the trust and confidence of a young lady who is soon going to be his wife. No man can be safe in those circumstances.

In the glow of reassurance Wee Mad Arthur said happily, ‘Well spoken, mistress, and may I take the opportunity on behalf of my new friends and relatives tae thank ye for explaining all aboot the business of the wedding nuptials the noo. It was verrae interesting to those of us who have little to do with such things. Some of us was wondering if we could ask questions?’

Being threatened by a spectral horror was terrible enough right now, but somehow the thought of the Nac Mac Feegle asking questions about the facts of married life among humans was even worse. There was no point in explaining why she wasn’t going to explain; Tiffany simply said ‘No’ in a tone of voice like steel and very carefully put him back down on the ground. She added, ‘You shouldn’t have been listening.’

‘Why not?’ said Daft Wullie.

‘You just shouldn’t! I’m not going to explain. You just shouldn’t. And now, gentlemen, I’d like a bit of time to myself, if it’s all the same to you.’

Some of them would follow her, of course, she thought. They always did. She went back up to the hall and sat down as close as possible to the huge fire. Even in late summer, the hall was cold. It was hung with tapestries as insulation from the chill of the stone walls. They were the usual sort of thing: men in armour waving swords and bows and axes at other men in armour. Given that battle is very fast and noisy, they presumably had to stop fighting every couple of minutes to give the ladies who were making the tapestry a little time to catch up. Tiffany knew the one nearest the fire by heart. All the kids did. You learned your history off the tapestries, if there was some old man around to explain what was going on. But generally, when she was a lot younger, it had been more fun to make up stories about the different knights, like the one who was desperately running to catch up with his horse, and the one who had been thrown by his horse, and, because he had a helmet with a point on it, was now upright head first in the ground, which, even as children, they had recognized was not a good position to be in on the battle-field. They were like old friends, frozen in a war whose name nobody on the Chalk could remember.

And … suddenly there was another one, one that had never been there before, running towards Tiffany through the battle. She stared at him, her body demanding that she get some sleep right now, and whatever bits were still working in her brain insisting that she did something. In the middle of this her hand gripped a log on the edge of the fire and she raised it purposefully towards the tapestry.

The cloth had practically crumbled with age as it was. It would burn like dry grass.

The figure was walking cautiously now. She couldn’t see any details yet and didn’t want to. The knights on the tapestry had been woven in without any perspective; they were as flat as a child’s nursery painting.

But the man in black, who had begun as a distant streak, was getting bigger as he approached and now … She could see the face and the empty eyeholes, which even from here changed colour as he walked past the painted armour of knight after knight, and now he had started running again, getting bigger. And the smell was oozing towards her again … How much was the tapestry worth? Did she have any right to destroy it? With that thing stepping out of it? Oh yes, oh yes!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be a wizard and to conjure up those knights to fight one last battle!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be a witch who wasn’t here! She raised the crackling log and glared into the holes where the eyes should be. You had to be a witch to be prepared to stare down a stare that wasn’t there, because somehow you felt that it was sucking your own eyeballs out of your head.

Those tunnels in the skull were hypnotic, and now he moved from side to side slowly, like a snake.

‘Please don’t.’

She wasn’t expecting that; the voice was urgent but quite friendly — and it belonged to Eskarina Smith.

The wind was silver and cold.

Tiffany, lying on her back, looked up into a white sky; at the edge of her vision, dried grasses shook and rattled in the wind but, curiously, behind this little bit of countryside there was the big fireplace and the battling knights.

‘It is really quite important that you don’t move,’ said the same voice behind her. ‘The place where you are now has been, as we say, cobbled together for this conversation and did not exist until you arrived here, and will cease to exist the moment you leave. Strictly speaking, by the standards of most philosophical disciplines, it cannot be said to have any existence at all.’

‘So it’s a magic place, yes? Like the Unreal Estate?’

‘Very sensible way of putting it,’ said the voice of Eskarina. ‘Those of us who know about it call it the travelling now. It’s an easy way to talk to you in private; when it closes, you will be exactly where you were and no time will have passed. Do you understand?’

‘No!’

Eskarina sat down on the grass next to her. ‘Thank goodness for that. It would be rather disturbing if you did. You are, you know, an extremely unusual witch. As far as I can tell, you have a natural talent for making cheese, and as talents go, it is a pretty good talent to have. The world needs cheese-makers. A good cheese-maker is worth her weight in, well, cheese. So you were not born with a talent for witchcraft.’

Tiffany opened her mouth to reply before she had any idea what she was going to say, but that is not unusual among human beings. The first thing to push through the throng of questions was: ‘Hang on, I was holding a burning brand. But now you have brought me here, wherever here is exactly. What happened?’ She looked at the fire. The flames were frozen. ‘People will notice me,’ she said, and then, given the nature of the situation, she added, ‘Won’t they?’

‘The answer is no; the reason is complicated. The travelling now is … tame time. It’s time that is on your side. Believe me, there are stranger things in the universe. Right now, Tiffany, we are truly living on borrowed time.’

The flames were still frozen. Tiffany felt that they should be cold, but she could feel the warmth. And she had time to think too. ‘And when I go back?’

‘Nothing will have changed,’ said Eskarina, ‘except the contents of your head, which are, at the moment, very important.’

‘And you’ve gone to all this trouble to tell me I have no talent for witchcraft?’ Tiffany said flatly. ‘That was very kind of you.’

Eskarina laughed. It was her young laugh, which seemed strange when you saw the wrinkles on her face.