The Wee Free Men

to go to the toilet, Tiffany walked slowly down the slope, across the snow, through the mist… and into summer.

Chapter 10 Master Stroke

The heat struck like a blowlamp, 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 her 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 round 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 towards 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. Farm work 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, worn raggedy-edged 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 underside of branches would never be bored enough to spend more than five seconds with that book.

The people around her looked either as though they’d been taken from that book, or had dressed for a fancy-dress party in the dark. One of 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 su’ 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 towards a clump of daisies twice the height of a man. That’s not a lot of help

‘Are you mad?’ said the daisies.

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

‘The horrible child who screams for sweeties 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?’