Terry Pratchett - The Wee Free Men

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2024-12-03 0 0 658.75KB 234 页 5.9玖币
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THE WEE FREE MEN
BY
TERRY PRATCHETT
A DISWORLD NOVEL
Chapter 1
A Clang Well Done
Some things start before other things.
It was a summer shower but didn’t appear to know it, and it was
pouring rain as fast as a winter storm.
Miss Perspicacia Tick sat in what little shelter a raggedy hedge could
give her and explored the universe. She didn’t notice the rain. Witches
dried out quickly.
The exploring of the universe was being done with a couple of twigs
tied together with string, a stone with a hole in it, an egg, one of Miss
Tick’s stockings which also had a hole in it, a pin, a piece of paper and a
tiny stub of pencil. Unlike wizards, witches learn to make do with a little.
The items had been tied and twisted together to make a . . . device. It
moved oddly when she prodded it. One of the sticks seemed to pass right
through the egg, for example, and came out the other side without leaving
a mark.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, as rain poured off the rim of her hat. There it is.
A definite ripple in the walls of the world. Very worrying. There’s
probably another world making contact. That’s never good. I ought to go
there. But . . . according to my left elbow, there’s a witch there already
‘She’ll sort it out, then,’ said a small and, for now, mysterious voice
from somewhere near her feet.
‘No, it can’t be right. That’s chalk country over that way,’ said Miss
Tick. ‘You can’t grow a good witch on chalk. The stuff’s barely harder
than clay. You need good hard rock to grow a witch, believe me.’ Miss
Tick shook her head, sending raindrops flying. ‘But my elbows are
generally very reliable.’*
‘Why talk about it? Let’s go and see,’ said the voice. ‘We’re not doing
very well around here, are we?’
That was true. The lowlands weren’t good to witches. Miss Tick was
making pennies by doing bits of medicine and misfortune-telling, † and
slept in barns most nights. She’d twice been thrown in ponds.
‘I can’t barge in,’ she said. ‘Not on another witch’s territory. That
never, ever works. But . . .’ she paused, ‘witches don’t just turn up out of
nowhere. Let’s have a look . . .’
* People say things like ‘listen to your heart’, but witches
learn to listen to other things too. It’s amazing what your
kidneys can tell you.
† Ordinary fortune-tellers tell you what you want to
happen; witches tell you what’s going to happen whether
you want it to or not. Strangely enough, witches tend to be
more accurate but less popular.
She pulled a cracked saucer out of her pocket, and tipped into it the
rainwater that had collected on her hat. Then she took a bottle of ink out of
another pocket and poured in just enough to turn the water black.
She cupped it in her hands to keep the raindrops out, and listened to her
eyes.
Tiffany Aching was lying on her stomach by the river, tickling trout.
She liked to hear them laugh. It came up in bubbles.
A little way away, where the river bank became a sort of pebble beach,
her brother Wentworth was messing around with a stick, and almost
certainly making himself sticky.
Anything could make Wentworth sticky. Washed and dried and left in
the middle of a clean floor for five minutes, Wentworth would be sticky. It
didn’t seem to come from anywhere. He just got sticky. But he was an
easy child to mind, provided you stopped him eating frogs.
There was a small part of Tiffany’s brain that wasn’t too certain about
the name Tiffany. She was nine years old and felt that Tiffany was going
to be a hard name to live up to. Besides, she’d decided only last week that
she wanted to be a witch when she grew up, and she was certain Tiffany
just wouldn’t work. People would laugh.
Another and larger part of Tiffany’s brain was thinking of the word
‘susurrus’. It was a word that not many people have thought about, ever.
As her fingers rubbed the trout under its chin she rolled the word round
and round in her head.
Susurrus . . . according to her grandmother’s dictionary, it meant ‘a low
soft sound, as of whispering or muttering’. Tiffany liked the taste of the
word. It made her think of mysterious people in long cloaks whispering
important secrets behind a door: susurrususssurrusss . . .
She’d read the dictionary all the way through. No one told her you
weren’t supposed to.
As she thought this, she realized that the happy trout had swum away.
But something else was in the water, only a few inches from her face.
It was a round basket, no bigger than half a coconut shell, coated with
something to block up the holes and make it float. A little man, only six
inches high, was standing up in it. He had a mass of untidy red hair, into
which a few feathers, beads and bits of cloth had been woven. He had a
red beard, which was pretty much as bad as the hair. The rest of him that
wasn’t covered with blue tattoos was covered with a tiny kilt. And he was
waving a fist at her, and shouting:
‘Crivens! Gang awa’ oot o’ here, ye daft wee ninny! ‘Ware the green
heid!’
And with that he pulled at a piece of string that was hanging over the
side of his boat and a second red-headed man surfaced, gulping air.
‘Nae time for fishin’!’ said the first man, hauling him aboard. The
green heid’s coming!’
‘Crivens!’ said the swimmer, water pouring off him. ‘Let’s offski!’
And with that he grabbed one very small oar and, with rapid back and
forth movements, made the basket speed away.
‘Excuse me!’ Tiffany shouted. ‘Are you fairies?’
But there was no answer. The little round boat had disappeared in the
reeds.
Probably not, Tiffany decided.
Then, to her dark delight, there was a susurrus. There was no wind, but
the leaves on the alder bushes by the river bank began to shake and rustle.
So did the reeds. They didn’t bend, they just blurred. Everything blurred,
as if something had picked up the world and was shaking it. The air fizzed.
People whispered behind closed doors . . .
The water began to bubble, just under the bank. It wasn’t very deep
here - it would only have reached Tiffany’s knees if she’d paddled - but it
was suddenly darker and greener and, somehow, much deeper . . .
She took a couple of steps backwards just before long skinny arms
fountained out of the water and clawed madly at the bank where she had
been. For a moment she saw a thin face with long sharp teeth, huge round
eyes and dripping green hair like water-weed, and then the thing plunged
back into the depths.
By the time the water closed over it Tiffany was already running along
the bank to the little beach where Wentworth was making frog pies. She
snatched up the child just as a stream of bubbles came around the curve in
the bank. Once again the water boiled, the green-haired creature shot up,
and the long arms clawed at the mud. Then it screamed, and dropped back
into the water.
‘I wanna go-a toy-lut!’ screamed Wentworth.
Tiffany ignored him. She was watching the river with a thoughtful
expression.
I’m not scared at all, she thought. How strange. I ought to be scared,
but I’m just angry. I mean, I can feel the scared, like a red-hot ball, but the
angry isn’t letting it out. . .
‘Wenny wanna wanna wanna go-a toy-lut!’ Wentworth shrieked.
‘Go on, then.’ said Tiffany, absent-mindedly. The ripples were still
sloshing against the bank.
There was no point in telling anyone about this. Everyone would just
say ‘What an imagination the child has’ if they were feeling in a good
mood, or ‘Don’t tell stories!’ if they weren’t.
She was still very angry. How dare a monster turn up in the river?
Especially one so . . . so . . . ridiculous! Who did it think she was?
This is Tiffany, walking back home. Start with the boots. They are big
and heavy boots, much repaired by her father and they’d belonged to
various sisters before her; she wore several pairs of socks to keep them on.
They are big. Tiffany sometimes feels she is nothing more than a way of
moving boots around.
Then there is the dress. It has been owned by many sisters before her
and has been taken up, taken out, taken down and taken in by her mother
so many times that it really ought to have been taken away. But Tiffany
rather likes it. It comes down to her ankles and, whatever colour it had
been to start with, is now a milky blue which is, incidentally, exactly the
same colour as the butterflies skittering beside the path.
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’d grow into it.
And then go further up, and further, 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
turf like comets.
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 grey, 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 wasn’t
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 tried new things. But you’ve got to be proud of something.
And for as long as she could remember she’d heard her father, an
otherwise quiet, slow man, make the Joke, the one that must have been
handed down from Aching to Aching for hundreds of years.
He’d say, ‘Another day of work and I’m still Aching’, or ‘I get up
Aching and I go to bed Aching’, or even ‘I’m Aching all over’. They
weren’t particularly funny after about the third time, but she’d miss it if he
didn’t say at least one of them every week. They didn’t have to be funny,
they were father jokes. Anyway, however they were spelled, all her
ancestors had been Aching to stay, not Aching to leave.
There was no one around in the kitchen. Her mother had probably gone
up to the shearing pens with a bite of lunch for the men, who were
shearing this week. Her sisters Hannah and Fastidia were up there too,
rolling fleeces and paying attention to some of the younger men. They
were always quite keen to work during shearing.
Near the big black stove was the shelf that was still called Granny
Aching’s Library by her mother, who liked the idea of having a library.
Everyone else called it Granny’s Shelf.
It was a small shelf, since the books were wedged between a jar of
crystallized ginger and the china shepherdess that Tiffany had won at a
fair when she was six.
There were only five books if you didn’t include the big farm diary,
which in Tiffany’s view didn’t count as a real book because you had to
write it yourself. There was the dictionary. There was the Almanack,
which got changed every year. And next to that was Diseases of the Sheep,
which was fat with the bookmarks that her grandmother had put there.
Granny Aching had been an expert on sheep, even though she called
them ‘just bags of bones, eyeballs and teeth, lookin’ for new ways to die’.
Other shepherds would walk miles to get her to come and cure their beasts
of ailments. They said she had the Touch, although she just said that the
best medicine for sheep or man was a dose of turpentine, a good cussin’
and a kick. Bits of paper with Granny’s own recipes for sheep cures stuck
out all over the book. Mostly they involved turpentine, but some included
cussin’.
Next to the book on sheep was a thin little volume called Flowers of the
Chalk. The turf of the downs was full of tiny, intricate flowers, like
cowslips and harebells, and even smaller ones that somehow survived the
grazing. On the Chalk, flowers had to be tough and cunning to survive the
sheep and the winter blizzards.
Someone had coloured in the pictures of the flowers, a long time ago.
On the flyleaf of the book was written in neat handwriting ‘Sarah Grizzel’,
which had been Granny’s name before she was married. She probably
thought that Aching was at least better than Grizzel.
And finally there was The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales, so
old that it belonged to an age when there were far more ‘e’s around.
Tiffany stood on a chair and took it down. She turned the pages until
she found the one she was looking for, and stared at it for a while. Then
she put the book back, replaced the chair, and opened the crockery
cupboard.
She found a soup plate, went over to a drawer, took out the tape
measure her mother used for dressmaking, and measured the plate.
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Eight inches. Why didn’t they just say!’
She unhooked the largest frying pan, the one that could cook breakfast
for half a dozen people all at once, and took some sweets from the jar on
the dresser and put them in an old paper bag. Then, to Wentworth’s sullen
bewilderment, she took him by a sticky hand and headed back down
towards the stream.
Things still looked very normal down there, but she was not going to
let that fool her. All the trout had fled and the birds weren’t singing.
She found a place on the river bank with the right-sized bush. Then she
hammered a piece of wood into the ground as hard as she could, close to
the edge of the water, and tied the bag of sweets to it.
‘Sweeties, Wentworth,’ she shouted.
She gripped the frying pan and stepped smartly behind the bush.
Wentworth trotted over to the sweets and tried to pick up the bag. It
wouldn’t move.
‘I wanna go-a toy-lut!’ he yelled, because it was a threat that usually
worked. His fat fingers scrabbled at the knots.
Tiffany watched the water carefully. Was it getting darker? Was it
getting greener? Was that just water-weed down there? Were those
bubbles just a trout, laughing?
No.
She ran out of her hiding place with the frying pan swinging like a bat.
The screaming monster, leaping out of the water, met the frying pan
coming the other way with a clang.
It was a good clang, with the oiyoiyoioioioioioi-nnnnnggggggg that is
the mark of a clang well done.
The creature hung there for a moment, a few teeth and bits of green
weed splashing into the water, then slid down slowly and sank with some
massive bubbles.
The water cleared and was once again the same old river, shallow and
icy cold and floored with pebbles.
‘Wanna wanna sweeties,' screamed Wentworth, who never noticed
anything else in the presence of sweets.
Tiffany undid the string and gave them to him. He ate them far too
quickly, as he always did with sweets. She waited until he was sick, and
then went back home in a thoughtful state of mind.
In the reeds, quite low down, small voices whispered:
‘Crivens, Wee Bobby, didyer no’ see that?
‘Aye. We’d better offski an’ tell the Big Man we’ve found the hag.’
摘要：

THEWEEFREEMENBYTERRYPRATCHETTADISWORLDNOVELChapter1AClangWellDoneSomethingsstartbeforeotherthings.Itwasasummershowerbutdidn’tappeartoknowit,anditwaspouringrainasfastasawinterstorm.MissPerspicaciaTicksatinwhatlittleshelteraraggedyhedgecouldgiveherandexploredtheuniverse.Shedidn’tnoticetherain.Witchesd...

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