The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett [2]
Then there is Tiffany’s face. Light pink, with brown eyes, and brown hair. Nothing special. Her head might strike anyone watching—in a saucer of black water, for example—as being just slightly too big for the rest of her, but perhaps she’ll grow into it.
And then go farther up, and farther, until the track becomes a ribbon and Tiffany and her brother two little dots, and there is her country.
They call it the Chalk. Green downlands roll under the hot midsummer sun. From up here the flocks of sheep, moving slowly, drift over the short turf like clouds on a green sky. Here and there sheepdogs speed over the grass like shooting stars.
And then, as the eyes pull back, it is a long green mound, lying like a great whale on the world…
…surrounded by the inky rainwater in the saucer.
Miss Tick looked up.
“That little creature in the boat was a Nac Mac Feegle!” she said. “The most feared of all the fairy races! Even trolls run away from the Wee Free Men! And one of them warned her!”
“She’s the witch, then, is she?” said the voice.
“At that age? Impossible!” said Miss Tick. “There’s been no one to teach her! There’re no witches on the Chalk! It’s too soft. And yet…she wasn’t scared….”
The rain had stopped. Miss Tick looked up at the Chalk, rising above the low, wrung-out clouds. It was about five miles away.
“This child needs watching,” she said. “But chalk’s too soft to grow a witch on….”
Only the mountains were higher than the Chalk. They stood sharp and purple and gray, streaming long trails of snow from their tops even in summer. “Brides o’ the sky,” Granny Aching had called them once, and it was so rare that she ever said anything at all, let alone anything that didn’t have to do with sheep, that Tiffany had remembered it. Besides, it was exactly right. That’s what the mountains looked like in the winter, when they were all in white and the snow streams blew like veils.
Granny used old words and came out with odd, old sayings. She didn’t call the downland the Chalk, she called it “the wold.” Up on the wold the wind blows cold, Tiffany had thought, and the word had stuck that way.
She arrived at the farm.
People tended to leave Tiffany alone. There was nothing particularly cruel or unpleasant about this, but the farm was big and everyone had their jobs to do, and she did hers very well and so she became, in a way, invisible. She was the dairymaid, and good at it. She made better butter than her mother did, and people commented about how good she was with cheese. It was a talent. Sometimes, when the wandering teachers came to the village, she went and got a bit of education. But mostly she worked in the dairy, which was dark and cool. She enjoyed it. It meant she was doing something for the farm.
It was actually called the Home Farm. Her father rented it from the Baron, who owned the land, but there had been Achings farming it for hundreds of years and so, her father said (quietly, sometimes, after he’d had a beer in the evenings), as far as the land knew, it was owned by the Achings. Tiffany’s mother used to tell him not to speak like that, although the Baron was always very respectful to Mr. Aching since Granny had died two years ago, calling him the finest shepherd in these hills, and was generally held by the people in the village to be not too bad these days. It paid to be respectful, said Tiffany’s mother, and the poor man had sorrows of his own.
But sometimes her father insisted that there had been Achings (or Akins, or Archens, or Akens, or Akenns—spelling had been optional) mentioned in old documents about the area for hundreds and hundreds of years. They had these hills in their bones, he said, and they’d always been shepherds.
Tiffany felt quite proud of this, in an odd way, because it might also be nice to be proud of the fact that your ancestors moved around a bit, too, or occasionally