A Hat Full Of Sky - Terry Pratchett [29]
“Aye, and he’ll come wi’ us, but he canna tak’ more’n one passenger,” shouted Rob over the din.
“Can we swim it?” said Daft Wullie, ducking as a stunned Feegle hurtled over his head.
The others looked at him. “Swim it? How can we swim there fra’ here, yer daftie?” said Rob Anybody.
“It’s just worth consid’ring, that’s all,” said Wullie, looking hurt. “I wuz just tryin’ to make a contribution, ye ken? Just wanted to show willin’.”
“The big wee hag left in a cart,” said Big Yan.
“Aye, so what?” said Rob.
“Weel, mebbe we could?”
“Ach, no!” said Rob. “Showin’ oursels tae hags is one thing, but not to other folks! You remember what happened a few years back when Daft Wullie got spotted by that lady who wuz painting the pretty pichoors doon in the valley? I dinna want to have them Folklore Society bigjobs pokin’ aroound again!”
“I have an idea, Mister Rob. It’s me, Awf’ly Wee Billy Bigchin Mac Feegle. We could disguise oursels.”
Awf’ly Wee Billy Bigchin Mac Feegle always announced himself in full. He seemed to feel that if he didn’t tell people who he was, they’d forget about him and he’d disappear. When you’re half the size of most grown pictsies, you’re really short; much shorter and you’d be a hole in the ground.
He was the new gonnagle. A gonnagle is the clan’s bard and battle poet, but they don’t spend all their lives in the same clan. In fact, they’re a sort of clan all by themselves. Gonnagles move around among the other clans, making sure the songs and stories get spread around all the Feegles. Awf’ly Wee Billy had come with Jeannie from the Long Lake clan, which often happens. He was very young for a gonnagle, but as Jeannie had said, there was no age limit to gonnagling. If the talent was in you, you gonnagled. And Awf’ly Wee Billy knew all the songs and could play the mousepipes so sadly that outside it would start to rain.
“Aye, lad?” said Rob Anybody, kindly. “Speak up, then.”
“Can we get hold o’ some human clothes?” said Awf’ly Wee Billy. “Because there’s an old story about the big feud between the Three Peaks clan and the Windy River clan and the Windy River boys escaped by making a tattiebogle walk, and the men o’ Three Peaks thought it was a bigjob and kept oot o’ its way.”
The others looked puzzled, and Awf’ly Wee Billy remembered that they were men of the Chalk and had probably never seen a tattiebogle.
“A scarecrow?” he said. “It’s like a bigjob made o’ sticks, wi’ clothes on, for to frighten away the birdies fra’ the crops? Now, the song says the Windy River’s kelda used magic to make it walk, but I reckon it was done by cunnin’ and strength.”
He sang about it. They listened.
He explained how to make a human that would walk. They looked at one another. It was a mad, desperate plan, which was very dangerous and risky and would require tremendous strength and bravery to make it work.
Put like that, they agreed to it instantly.
Tiffany found that there was more than chores and the research, though. There was what Miss Level called “filling what’s empty and emptying what’s full.”
Usually only one of Miss Level’s bodies went out at a time. People thought Miss Level was twins, and she made sure they continued to do so, but she found it a little bit safer all around to keep the bodies apart. Tiffany could see why. You only had to watch both of Miss Level when she was eating. The bodies would pass plates to one another without saying a word, sometimes they’d eat off one another’s forks, and it was rather strange to see one person burp and the other one say “Oops, pardon me.”
“Filling what’s empty and emptying what’s full” meant wandering around the local villages and the isolated farms and, mostly, doing medicine. There were always bandages to change or expectant mothers to talk to. Witches did a lot of midwifery, which is a kind of “emptying what’s full,” but Miss Level wearing her pointy hat had only to turn up at a cottage for other people to suddenly come visiting, by sheer accident. And there was an awful lot of gossip and tea drinking. Miss Level moved in a