Every family in the village bought a copy of the Almanack every year, and a sort of education came from that. It was big and thick and printed somewhere far off, and it had lots of details about things like phases of the moon and the right time to plant beans. It also contained a few prophecies about the coming year, and mentioned faraway places with names like Klatch and Hersheba. Tiffany had seen a picture of Klatch in the Almanack. It showed a camel standing in a desert. She’d only found out what both those things were because her mother had told her. And that was Klatch, a camel in a desert. She’d wondered if there wasn’t a bit more to it, but it seemed that ‘Klatch = camel, desert’ was all anyone knew.
And that was the trouble. If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go
The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth pedlars, fortune-tellers and all the other travellers who sold things people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful.
They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travellers, and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like ‘corrugated iron’. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the maths teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.
People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.
Today the brightly coloured little booths and tents were pitched in a field just outside the village. Behind them small square areas had been fenced off with high canvas walls and were patrolled by apprentice teachers looking for anyone trying to overhear Education without paying. The first tent Tiffany saw had a sign which said:
Jograffy!
Jograffy!
Jograffy!
For today only: all major land masses and oceans
PLUS everything you need to know about glassiers!
One penny or All Major Vejtables Acsepted!
Tiffany had read enough to know that, while he might be a whiz at major land masses, this particular teacher could have done with some help from the man running the stall next door:
The Wonders of Punctuation and Spelling
1 – Absolute Certainty about the Comma
2 – I before E Completely Sorted Out
3 – The Mystery of the Semi-Colon Revealed
4 – See the Ampersand (Small extra charge)
5 – Fun with Brackets
Will accept vegetables, eggs and clean used clothing
The next stall along was decorated with scenes out of history, generally of kings cutting one another’s heads off and similar interesting highlights. The teacher in front was dressed in ragged red robes, with rabbitskin trimmings, and wore an old top hat with flags stuck in it. He had a small megaphone which he aimed at Tiffany.
‘The Death of Kings Through the Ages?’ he said. ‘Very educational, lots of blood!’
‘Not really,’ said Tiffany.
‘Oh, you’ve
‘I come from a long line of Aching people,’ said Tiffany. ‘And I think I’m moving on.’
She found what she was looking for at a booth hung with pictures of animals including, she was pleased to see, a camel.
The sign said:
Useful Creatures. Today: Our Friend the Hedgehog.
She wondered how useful the thing in the river had been, but this looked like the only place to find out. A few children were waiting on the benches inside the booth for the lesson to begin, but the teacher was still standing out in front, in the hope of filling up the empty spaces.
‘Hello, little girl,’ he said, which was only his first big mistake. ‘I’m sure
‘I did this one last summer,’ said Tiffany.
The man looked closer, and his grin faded. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I remember. You asked all those… little questions.’
‘I would like a question answered today,’ said Tiffany.
‘Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,’ said the man.
‘No,’ said Tiffany, patiently. ‘It’s about zoology.’
‘Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.’
‘No, actually it isn’t,’ said Tiffany. ‘
The teacher’s eyes narrowed further. Children like Tiffany were bad news. ‘I can see you’re a clever one,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know any teachers of zoology in these parts. Vetin’ry, yes, but not zoology. Any particular animal?’
‘Jenny Green-Teeth. A water-dwelling monster with big teeth and claws and eyes like soup plates,’ said Tiffany.
