The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett [44]
The old kelda fell silent. William the gonnagle inflated the bag of his mousepipes and blew into one of the tubes. Tiffany felt the bubbling in her ears of music too high-pitched to hear.
After a few moments Fion leaned over the bed to look at her mother, then started to cry.
Rob Anybody turned and looked up at Tiffany, his eyes running with tears. “Could I just ask ye to go out intae the big chamber, kelda?” he said, quietly. “We ha’ things to do, ye ken how it is….”
Tiffany nodded and, with great care, feeling pictsies scuttle out of her way, backed out of the room. She found a corner where she didn’t seem to be in anyone’s way and sat there with her back to the wall.
She’d expected a lot of “waily waily waily,” but it seemed the death of the kelda was too serious for that. Some Feegles were crying, and some were staring at nothing, and as the news spread, the tiered hall filled up with a wretched, sobbing silence….
…The hills had been silent on the day Granny Aching died.
Someone went up every day with fresh bread and milk and scraps for the dogs. It didn’t need to be quite so often, but Tiffany had heard her parents talking and her father had said, “We ought to keep an eye on Mam now.”
Today had been Tiffany’s turn, but she’d never thought of it as a chore. She liked the journey.
But she’d noticed the silence. It was no longer the silence of many little noises, but a dome of quiet all around the hut.
She knew then, even before she went in at the open door and found Granny lying on the narrow bed.
She’d felt coldness spread though her. It even had a sound—it was like a thin, sharp musical note. It had a voice, too. Her own voice. It was saying: It’s too late, tears are no good, no time to say anything, there are things to be done.
And…then she fed the dogs, who were waiting patiently for their breakfast. It would have helped if they’d done something soppy, like whine or lick Granny’s face, but they hadn’t. And still Tiffany heard the voice in her mind: No tears, don’t cry. Don’t cry for Granny Aching.
Now, in her head, she watched the slightly smaller Tiffany move around the hut like a little puppet.
She’d tidied up the hut. Besides the bed and the stove there really wasn’t much there. There was the clothes sack and the big water barrel and the food box, and that was it. Oh, stuff to do with sheep was all over the place—pots and bottles and sacks and knives and shears—but there was nothing there that said a person lived here, unless you counted the hundreds of blue-and-yellow Jolly Sailor wrappers pinned on one wall.
She’d taken one of them down—it was still underneath her mattress at home—and remembered the Story.
It was very unusual for Granny Aching to say more than a sentence. She used words as if they cost money. But there’d been one day when she’d taken food up to the hut, and Granny had told her a story. A sort of a story. She’d unwrapped the tobacco, and looked at the wrapper, and then looked at Tiffany with that slightly puzzled look she used, and said: “I must’ve looked at a thousand o’ these things, and I never once saw his bo-ut.” That was how she pronounced boat.
Of course Tiffany had rushed to have a look at this label, but she couldn’t see any boat, any more than she could see the naked lady.
“That’s ’cause the bo-ut is just where you can’t see it,” Granny had said. “He’s got a bo-ut for chasin’ the great white whale fish on the salt sea. He’s always chasing it, all round the world. It’s called Mopey. It’s a beast like a big cliff of chalk, I heard tell. In a book.”
“Why’s he chasing it?” Tiffany had asked.
“To catch it,” Granny had said. “But he never will, the reason being, the world is round like a big plate and so is the sea, and so they’re chasing one another, so it is almost like he is chasing hisself. Ye never want to go to sea, jiggit. That’s where worse things happen. Everyone says that. You stop along here, where’s the hills is in yer bones.”
And that was it. It was one of the very few times Granny Aching had ever said anything to Tiffany that