The Wee Free Men

'I got one! Hey, pal, can yer mammie sew? Stitch this! Aargh! He's got a held on him like a tree!'

'Crivens! There's a body here wi' no held at a' !'

'Aye, nae wonder, 'cos here's a bear! Feel ma boot, ye washoon!'

It seemed to Tiffany that although the owners of the three voices were fighting things that couldn't possibly fight back, including a teddy bear with only one leg, the fight still wasn't going all one way.

'I got 'im! I got 'im! I got 'im! Yer gonna get a gummer, yer wee hard disease!'

'Someone bit ma leg! Someone bit ma leg!'

'Come here! Ach, yer fightin' yersels, ye eejits! Ah 'm fed up wi' the pair a yees!'

Tiffany felt Ratbag stir. He might be fat and lazy, but he was lightning fast when it came to leaping on small creatures. She couldn't let him get the... whatever they were, however bad they sounded.

She coughed loudly.

'See?' said a voice from the doll's house. 'Yer woked them up! Ah 'm offski!'

Silence fell again and this time, Tiffany decided after a while, it was the silence of no one there rather than the silence of people being incredibly quiet. Ratbag went back to sleep, twitching occasionally as he disembowelled something in his fat cat dreams.

Tiffany waited a little while and then got out of bed and crept towards the bedroom door, avoiding the two squeaky floorboards. She went downstairs in the dark, found a chair by moonlight, fished the book of Faerie Tales off Granny's shelf, then lifted the latch on the back door and stepped out into the warm midsummer night.

There was a lot of mist around, but a few stars were visible overhead and there was a gibbous moon in the sky. Tiffany knew it was gibbous because she'd read in the Almanack that 'gibbous' meant what the moon looked like when it was just a bit fatter than half full, and so she made a point of paying attention to it around those times just so that she could say to herself: 'Ah, I see the moon's very gibbous tonight...'

It's possible that this tells you more about Tiffany than she would want you to know.

Against the rising moon the downs were a black wall that filled half the sky. For a moment she looked for the light of Granny Aching's lantern...

Granny never lost a lamb. That was one of Tiffany's first memories: of being held by her mother at the window one frosty night in early spring, with a million brilliant stars glinting over the mountains and, on the darkness of the downs, the one yellow star in the constellation of Granny Aching, zigzagging through the night. She wouldn't go to bed while a lamb was lost, however bad the weather...

There was only one place where it was possible for someone in a large family to be private, and that was in the privy. It was a three-holer, and it was where everyone went if they wanted to be alone for a while. There was a candle in there, and last year's Almanack hanging on a string. The printers knew their readership, and printed the Almanack on soft thin paper.

Tiffany lit the candle, made herself comfortable, and looked at the book of Faerie Tales. The moon gibbous'd at her through the crescent-shaped hole cut in the door.

She'd never really liked the book. It seemed to her that it tried to tell her what to do and what to think. Don't stray from the path, don't open that door, but hate the wicked witch because she is wicked. Oh, and believe that shoe size is a good way of choosing a wife.