I Shall Wear Midnight
Page 33
Amber bounced up and down at his side. ‘Put it on, miss! Go on, miss! Put it on!’
‘What? In front of all these people?’ said Tiffany, embarrassed and intrigued at the same time.
Amber was not to be denied. ‘There’s the mother-and-baby tent, miss! No men in there, miss, no fear! They’d be afraid that they would have to burp somebody, miss!’
Tiffany gave in. The package had a rich feel to it; it felt soft, like a glove. Mothers and babies watched her as she slid into the dress and she heard the envious sighs that interspersed burps.
Amber, on fire with enthusiasm, pushed her way in through the flap, and gasped.
‘Oh, miss, oh, miss, it does suit you so! Oh, miss! If only you could see yourself, miss! Do come and show William, miss, he’ll be as proud as a king! Oh, miss!’
You couldn’t disappoint Amber. You just couldn’t. It would be like, well, kicking a puppy.
Tiffany felt different without the hat. Lighter, perhaps. And William gasped and said, ‘I wish my master was here, Miss Aching, because you are a masterpiece. I just wish you could see yourself … miss?’
And just for a moment, because people shouldn’t get too suspicious, Tiffany stood outside herself and watched herself twirl the beautiful dress as black as a cat full of sixpences, and she thought: I shall wear midnight, and I will be good at it …
She hurried back to her body and shyly thanked the young tailor. ‘It’s wonderful, William, and I will happily fly over to show your master. The cuffs are wonderful!’
Amber was jumping up and down again. ‘We’d better hurry if we’re going to see the tug-of-war, miss – it’s Feegles versus humans! It’s going to be fun!’
And in fact, they could hear the roar of the Feegles warming up, though they had made a slight alteration to their traditional chant: ‘Nae king, nae quin, nae laird! One baron – and underrr mutually ag-rreeeed arrr-angement, ye ken!’
‘You go on ahead,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’m waiting for somebody.’ Amber paused for a moment. ‘Don’t wait too long, miss, don’t wait too long!’
Tiffany walked slowly in the wonderful dress, wondering if she would dare wear it every day and … hands came past her ears and covered her eyes.
A voice behind her said, ‘A nosegay for the pretty lady? You never know, it might help you find your beau.’
She spun round. ‘Preston!’
They talked as they strolled away from the noise, and Tiffany listened to news about the bright young lad that Preston had trained to take over as the school’s new teacher; and about exams and doctors and the Lady Sybil Free Hospital who had – and this was the really important part – just taken on one new apprentice, this being Preston, possibly because since he could talk the hind leg off a donkey, he might have a talent for surgery.
‘I don’t reckon I’ll get many holidays,’ he said. ‘You don’t get many when you’re an apprentice and I shall have to sleep under the autoclave every night and look after all the saws and scalpels, but I know all the bones by heart!’
‘Well, it’s not too far by broomstick, after all,’ said Tiffany.
Preston’s expression changed as he reached into his pocket and pulled out something wrapped in fine tissue, which he handed to her without saying a word.
Tiffany unwrapped it, knowing – absolutely knowing – that it would be the golden hare. There was no possibility in the world that it wouldn’t have been. She tried to find the words, but Preston always had an adequate supply.
He said, ‘Miss Tiffany, the witch … would you be so good as to tell me: what is the sound of love?’
Tiffany looked at his face. The noise from the tug-of-war was silenced. The birds stopped singing. In the grass, the grasshoppers stopped rubbing their legs together and looked up. The earth moved slightly as even the chalk giant (perhaps) strained to hear, and the silence flowed over the world until all there was was Preston, who was always there.
And Tiffany said, ‘Listen.’
A FEEGLE GLOSSARY
adjusted for those of a delicate disposition
(A Work In Progress By Miss Perspicacia Tick, witch)
Bigjobs: human beings
Big Man: chief of the clan (usually the husband of the kelda)
Blethers: rubbish, nonsense
Boggin: to be desperate, as in ‘I’m boggin for a cup of tea’
Bunty: a weak person Carlin: old woman Cludgie: the privy
Crivens!: a general exclamation that can mean anything from ‘My goodness!’ to ‘I’ve just lost my temper and there is going to be trouble’
Dree your/my/his/her weird: facing the fate that is in store for you/me/him/her
Een: eyes
Eldritch: weird, strange; sometimes means oblong too, for some reason
Fash: worry, upset
Geas: a very important obligation, backed up by tradition and magic. Not a bird
Gonnagle: the bard of the clan, skilled in musical instruments, poems, stories and songs
Hag: a witch, of any age
Hag o’ hags: a very important witch
Hagging/Haggling: anything a witch does
Hiddlins: secrets
Kelda: the female head of the clan, and eventually the mother of most of it. Feegle babies are very small, and a kelda will have hundreds in her lifetime
Lang syne: long ago
Last World: the Feegles believe that they are dead. This world is so nice, they argue, that they must have been really good in a past life and then died and ended up here. Appearing to die here means merely going back to the Last World, which they believe is rather dull
Mudlin: useless person
Pished: I am assured that this means ‘tired’
Schemie: an unpleasant person Scuggan: a really unpleasant person Scunner: a generally unpleasant person
Ships: woolly things that eat grass and go baa. Easily confused with the other kind
Spavie: see Mudlin
Special Sheep Liniment: probably moonshine whisky, I am very sorry to say. No one knows what it’d do to sheep, but it is said that a drop of it is good for shepherds on a cold winter’s night and for Feegles at any time at all. Do not try to make this at home
Spog: a small leather bag at the front of a Feegle’s kilt, which covers whatever he presumably thinks needs to be hidden, and generally holds things like something he is halfway through eating, something he’d found that now therefore belongs to him, and quite often – because even a Feegle can catch a cold – it might hold whatever he was using as a handkerchief, which might not necessarily be dead
Steamie: only found in the big Feegle mounds in the mountains, where there’s enough water to allow regular bathing; it’s a kind of sauna. Feegles on the Chalk tend to rely on the fact that you can only get so much dirt on you before it starts to fall off of its own accord
Waily: a general cry of despair
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My job is to make things up, and the best way to make things up is to make them out of real things …
When I was a small boy, just after the last Ice Age, we lived in a cottage that Tiffany Aching would recognize: we had cold water, no electricity, and took a bath once a week, because the tin bath had to be brought in from its nail, which was outside on the back of the kitchen wall; and it took a long time to fill it, when all my mother had to heat water with was one kettle. Then I, as the youngest, had the first bath, followed by Mum and then Dad, and finally the dog if Dad thought it was getting a bit niffy.
There were old men in the village who had been born in the Jurassic period and looked, to me, all the same, with flat caps and serious trousers held up with very thick leather belts. One of them was called Mr Allen, who wouldn’t drink water from a tap because, he said, ‘It’s got neither taste nor smell.’ He drank water from the roof of his house, which fed a rain barrel.
Presumably he drank more than rainwater, because he had a nose that looked like two strawberries that had crashed into one another.31
Mr Allen used to sit out in the sun in front of his cottage on an old kitchen chair, watching the world go by, and we kids used to watch his nose, in case it exploded. One day I was chatting to him, and out of the blue he said to me, ‘You seen stubbles burning, boy?’
I certainly had: not near our home, but when we drove down to the coast on holiday, though sometimes the smoke from the burning stubbles was so thick that it looked like a fog. The stubbles were what was left in the ground after most of the corn stems had been cut. The burning was said to be good for getting rid of pests and diseases, but the process meant lots of small birds and animals were burned. The practice has long since been banned, for that very reason.
One day, when the harvest wagon went down our lane, Mr Allen said to me, ‘You ever seen a hare, boy?’
I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ (If you haven’t seen a hare, then imagine a rabbit crossed with a greyhound, one that can leap magnificently.) Mr Allen said, ‘The hare ain’t afraid of fire. She stares it down, and jumps over it, and lands safe on the other side.’
I must have been about six or seven years old, but I remembered it, because Mr Allen died not long afterwards. Then when I was much older, I found in a second-hand bookshop a book called The Leaping Hare written by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson, and I learned things that I would not have dared to make up.
Mr Evans, who died in 1988, spoke – during his long life – to the men who worked on the land: not from the cab of a tractor, but with horses, and they saw the wildlife around them. I suspect that maybe they had put a little bit of a shine on the things they told him, but everything is all the better for a little bit of shine, and I have not hesitated to polish up the legend of the hare for you. If it is not the truth, then it is what the truth ought to be.
I dedicate this book to Mr Evans, a wonderful man who helped many of us of us to learn about the depths of history over which we float. It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.
Terry Pratchett
Wiltshire
27 May 2010
31 My dad told me it’s called ‘Drinker’s Nose’, but he was probably wrong, as the condition, I’m told, is a type of adult acne (called Rhinophyma, but I suspect that this is too much information).