The Wee Free Men

And the odd thing was that, alone of all the pictures in the book, this one looked as if it had been done by an artist who had painted what was in front of him. The other pictures, the ballet girls and the romper-suit babies, had a made-up, syrupy look. This one didn’t. This one said that the artist had been there…

…at least in his head, Tiffany thought.

She concentrated on the bottom left-hand corner, and there it was. She’d seen it before, but you had to know where to look. It was definitely a little red-haired man, naked except for a kilt and a skinny waistcoat, scowling out of the picture. He looked very angry. And… Tiffany moved the candle to see more clearly… he was definitely making a gesture with his hand.

Even if you didn’t know it was a rude one, it was easy to guess.

She heard voices. She pushed the door open with her foot to hear them better, because a witch always listens to other people’s conversations.

The sound was coming from the other side of the hedge, where there was a field that should have been full of nothing but sheep, waiting to go to market. Sheep are not known for their conversation. She snuck out carefully in the misty dawn and found a small gap that had been made by rabbits, which just gave her a good enough view.

There was a ram grazing near the hedge and the conversation was coming from it or, rather, somewhere in the long grass underneath it. There seemed to be at least four speakers, who sounded bad-tempered.

‘Crivens! We wanna coo beastie, no’ a ship beastie!’

‘Ach, one’s as goo’ as t’other! C’mon, lads, a’ grab a holt o’ aleg!’

‘Aye, all the coos are inna shed, we tak’ what we can!’

‘Keep it doon, keep it doon, will ya!’

‘Ach, who’s listnin’? OK, lads—yan… tan… teth ‘ra!’

The sheep rose a little in the air, and bleated in alarm as it started to go across the field backwards. Tiffany thought she saw a hint of red hair in the grass around its legs, but that vanished as the ram was carried away into the mist.

She pushed her way through the hedge, ignoring the twigs that scratched at her. Granny Aching wouldn’t have let anyone get away with stealing a sheep, even if they were invisible.

But the mist was thick and, now, Tiffany heard noises from the henhouse.

The disappearing-backwards sheep could wait. Now the hens needed her. A fox had got in twice in the last two weeks and the hens that hadn’t been taken were barely laying.

Tiffany ran through the garden, catching her nightdress on pea sticks and gooseberry bushes, and flung open the henhouse door.

There were no flying feathers, and nothing like the panic a fox would cause. But the chickens were clucking excitedly and Prunes, the cockerel, was strutting nervously up and down. One of the hens looked a bit embarrassed. Tiffany lifted it up quickly. There were two tiny blue, red-haired men underneath. They were each holding an egg, clasped in their arms. They looked up with very guilty expressions.

‘Ach, no!’ said one. ‘It’s the bairn! She’s the hag…’

‘You’re stealing our eggs,’ said Tiffany. ‘How dare you! And I’m not a hag!’

The little men looked at one another, and then at the eggs.

‘Whut eiggs?’ said one.

The eggs you are holding,’ said Tiffany, meaningfully.

‘Whut? Oh, these? These are eiggs, are they?’ said the one who’d spoken first, looking at the eggs as if he’d never seen them before. There’s a thing. And there was us thinking they was, er, stones.’

‘Stones,’ said the other one nervously.

‘We crawled under yon chookie for a wee bitty warmth,’ said the first one. ‘And there was all these things, we thought they was stones, which was why the puir fowl was clucking all the time

‘Clucking,’ said the second one, nodding vigorously.

‘…so we took pity on the puir thing and—’ ‘Put… the… eggs… back,’ said Tiffany, slowly.

The one who hadn’t been doing much talking nudged the other one. ‘Best do as she says,’ it said. ‘It’s a’ gang agley. Ye canna cross an Aching an’ this one’s a hag. She dinged Jenny an’ no one ha’ ever done that afore.’

‘Aye, I didnae think o’ that.’

Both of the tiny men put the eggs back very carefully. One of them even breathed on the shell of his and made a show of polishing it with the ragged hem of his kilt.

‘No harm done, mistress,’ he said. He looked at the other man. And then they vanished. But there was a suspicion of a red blur in the air and some straw by the henhouse door flew up in the air.

‘And I’m a miss!’ shouted Tiffany. She lowered the hen back onto the eggs, and went to the door. ‘And I’m not a hag! Are you fairies of some sort? And what about our ship—I mean, sheep?’ she added.

There was no answer but a clanking of buckets near the house, which meant that other people were getting up.

She rescued the Faerie Tales, blew out the candle and made her way into the house. Her mother was lighting the fire and asked what she was doing up, and she said that she’d heard a commotion in the henhouse and had gone out to see if it was the fox again. That wasn’t a lie. In fact, it was completely true, even if it wasn’t exactly accurate.

Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn’t divide easily into ‘true’ and ‘false’, but instead could be ‘things that people needed to know at the moment’ and ‘things that they didn’t need to know at the moment’.

Besides, she wasn’t sure what she knew at the moment.

There was porridge for breakfast. She ate it hurriedly, meaning to get back out into the paddock and see about that sheep. There might be tracks in the grass, or something…

She looked up, not knowing why.

Ratbag had been asleep in front of the oven. Now he was sitting up, alert. Tiffany felt a prickling on the back of her neck, and tried to see what the cat was looking at.

On the dresser was a row of blue and white jars which weren’t very useful for anything. They’d been left to her mother by an elderly aunt, and she was proud of them because they looked nice but were completely useless. There was little room on the farm for useless things that looked nice, so they were treasured.

Ratbag was watching the lid of one of them. It was rising very slowly, and under it was a hint of red hair and two beady, staring eyes.

It lowered again when Tiffany gave it a long stare. A moment later she heard a faint rattle and, when she looked up, the pot was wobbling back and forth and there was a little cloud of dust rising along the top of the dresser. Ratbag was looking around in bewilderment.

They certainly were very fast.

She ran out into the paddock and looked around. The mist was off the grass now, and skylarks were rising on the downs.

‘If that sheep doesn’t come back this minute,’ she shouted at the sky, ‘there will