[Fanfiction] Wake
5 Jul 2010 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
belphegor1982Wow, hey, look at that – my first (and only, at least for the moment) Discworld fanfiction completed after maybe a year of writer’s block (although only a few paragraphs were missing). I hope you like it.
Thanks to SpaceAnJL for the Brit check and the encouragement – and for the second ‘d’ in ‘hiddlins’ :o)
Fandom: Discworld (the Chalk)
Title: Wake
Rating: G
Characters: Tiffany Aching, Kelda Jeannie, the Nac Mac Feegle
Genre: drama
Summary: Being the witch of the Chalk meant taking care of the dead as well as the living. Even when the dead was a Feegle, and more importantly a friend.
Wake
It struck Tiffany, as she stared at Rob Anybody through the not-quite-darkness of the mound, that she had hardly ever seen a Nac Mac Feegle motionless. Even when they were listening hard for some unlucky prey to jump on, there was a sort of tautness to their bodies that could not quite be called ‘standing still’.
When she got angry at them because they had yet again rummaged through her chest of drawers – particularly the one with her personal underthings – they shuffled, looked much too innocent, stared up uncertainly (occasionally scratching or picking their nose), or just patiently waited until she was done being angry with them. Most of the time, though, they still threw their arms over their heads and went ‘Waily waily waily …’
But they never just stood still.
For Tiffany, a Feegle was the contrary of ‘standing still’. Even the idea of a Feegle (a lot of people’s idea of things were often more real than the things themselves, but Tiffany always thought you couldn’t get much realer than a Nac Mac Feegle) was all about movement. With lots of fighting and boozing and dancing and greeting and feasting and boozing.
There would be no fighting today, or at least not the usual amount. But all of the other things – especially boozing, since Tiffany had always heard it at least twice in such lists – would be done later.
At the wake.
Tiffany Aching had been one of the very few humans to witness the funeral of a kelda. She had never stopped to wonder what it would be like for the Big Man of the clan. It didn’t seem like a thing to do, anyway.
She kept her eyes on Rob, however hard it was, because the alternative was looking at Jeannie’s face. Tiffany was a witch, and witches don’t back away from anything, but right now she’d rather look at anything but the kelda’s expression.
“How did it happen?” she asked when she was absolutely sure her voice would sound level and calm and certainly not shaking one bit.
She heard a messy sob somewhere near her left ankle, and when she looked down, she saw Daft Wullie wiping his nose on his grubby kilt. She also spotted Awf’ly Wee Billy Bigchin a few inches away, and although he looked pale under the blue tattoos and gripped his mousepipes more forcefully than usual, he returned her glance steadily enough.
And he told her. It was short, ugly, and surprisingly not very bloody by Feegle standards. She’d expected the gonnagle to weave a big story from it, since words were what he lived on.
People need stories – a healthy, daily dose of the stuff – to get them through the day. Tiffany had learned that much through her years of witching. You could tell them things in the simple, reasonable way – about small bags of air in coffins changing over the years and making strange lights when they reached the surface in cemeteries – but they will see spirits or goblins. Usually they made their own goblins; sometimes, though, they didn’t, and you had to make them yourself, because they needed it. It was one of the things a witch did. The Rugg family had needed to know that their Bert had died defending the lost ewe that got lost in the woods from the wolves, even if it was not quite right, really (the ewe had found him after the wolves had finished with him). It didn’t matter. Tiffany had not exactly lied, even though she had not exactly told them the truth.
Being a witch meant that nobody told you this kind of ‘not-quite-lies’.
Her First Thoughts said, He deserved a more glorious death than that.
Her Second Thoughts said, You’re a witch. You don’t want stories to make you feel better.
And her Third Thoughts whispered, Want is not the same as need.
All of her Thoughts, however, seemed the agree on one point: I’ll miss him. It was strange that a fully-grown woman – and a fully-fledged witch, at that – should miss a six-inch-tall, red-haired, blue-skinned man whose main goals in life were to fight, drink, and steal things (often at the same time) but the fact remained that she felt something irreplaceable would be lost when Rob Anybody Feegle was buried.
You couldn’t judge a Nac Mac Feegle by the same standards you did men. Rob Anybody hadn’t been a bad man, but Tiffany knew she couldn’t rightly say he was – had been – a good one.
Stealing anything, drinking everything with or without alcohol in it (provided that the bottle looked interesting) and stealing the rest (even cows and sheep) could hardly fit the definition of a ‘good man’, she reckoned.
But Rob Anybody was a good Feegle. Had been. No doubt about that.
He’d appointed himself (or been appointed, but in the end it amounted to the same thing) her guardian of sorts, on account of her having been – albeit only for a few days – the kelda of the Nac Mac Feegle of the Chalk. This meant that they watched over her, constantly, would do so until she died, and would probably keep an eye on her grave too, just in case. Of course, most of the time for her it also meant plugging the holes underneath the privy door and being nervous whenever she got into her nightshirt, but there was something oddly flattering about it. The Big Man of the Chalk clan certainly did take his geasan (Tiffany had searched long and hard for the plural of ‘geas’, once she found out it was not some kind of bird after all) seriously.
She had actually been engaged to Rob Anybody during her time as a kelda. Of course the idea of marrying a little blue man at nine years old had been a bit laughable – once she’d got past the burning embarrassment, anyway. She had thought up a way out of it then, while still abiding by the rules to the letter. Right now, though, laughter was very far from her mind.
Last time Rob Anybody had met Death, he had nutted him squarely in the skull. Tiffany could remember the thud.
Even though she had passed the ‘He can’t be dead’ stage the second she had laid eyes on his battered body, there was still some small part of her brain that thought the words together made no sense.
There was a noise like a slug being squished through the eye of a knitting needle. When she glanced back down at her left, Daft Wullie was wiping his nose on his kilt again. Tiffany tried not to look at the cloth. It was grimy and drippy and really did not bear a closer look.
The news spread through the mound like a cold draft as it gradually grew silent. It wasn’t the loud, heavy hush she remembered settling around her when the old kelda had died, though; this silence didn’t have so much of a ‘What are we goin’ to do now?’ undertone. The kelda was the mother of most of them – when she died they’d seemed a little lost for a while.
But Rob was one of the lads, and she knew that, once the shock and grief had worn off, the Feegles would put words around their sorrow and alcohol around their words to make ‘em loud and clear enough (well, loud, at any rate) for the dead to hear.
The Nac Mac Feegle believed, to a man, that they were already dead and currently in a sort of heaven; when one died, the others buried him and drank to his memory (generally to a stupor), sad that one of them had gone to the Last World, but they seemed to recover quicker than most humans. Which did not mean that a death didn’t come as a nasty shock.
Tiffany became aware of her Second Thoughts metaphorically chewing on her metaphorical ankle, trying to get her attention and muttering, Well, it’s time for you to do what you do! Are you a witch or not?
“I’ll go get my bag,” she said quietly, this time not carefully keeping her voice from wavering. It did, a little bit. Jeannie looked up at that and the glint in her eyes told her that in front of Tiffany was the kelda, through and through. The wife and the woman were both … currently unavailable.
“Aye,” she said, and the edge in her voice made several Feegles standing nearby take a small retreating step unconsciously, as a precautionary measure. “’Tis fittin’. You’re oor hag. You sit by him with us an’ watch over him with us.”
Tiffany nodded, and made for the fake rabbit hole, stepping carefully as usual around the Feegle children, who often scuttled about fighting and playing all over the place. Today they were remarkably subdued.
There was a slight wind outside, enough to make the grass on the wold ripple, like in the book about the sea Roland had given her. The sun was at his usual afternoon place in the sky, small clouds stretched lazily in the blue until they ripped apart, and Rob Anybody Feegle was dead.
It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, but it was so.
Tiffany didn’t slow her pace down when she began to cry, but when she arrived in sight of the Home Farm she waited a little while for her tears to stop and her eyes to dry.
Her father didn’t ask questions when he saw her grab the bag she kept by the door in case of emergencies. He never did. Tiffany supposed he was proud of her, in a slightly less awkward way than that of the people of the Chalk, but the most pride he had shown was a glance she had caught the first time she had sat all night with a dead man and come back in the morning, silent and her eyes prickling from the lack of sleep. Lambing and cheese were difficult, but those Joe Aching could understand. Witching, now, was an altogether different business. Not exactly a secret, but something that set her apart, even from her own family.
Hiddlins, the Feegles would say.
Tiffany also took a bottle of Special Sheep Liniment from the barn, the one she kept hidden from beady Feegle eyes behind the churns and the bottles of milk, for special occasions.
On her way back, she spotted a lone figure across the downs, holding on the reins of a horse. She didn’t have to see his face clearly to know it was Roland – nobody else owned a horse in the Chalk.
Roland de Chumsfanleigh (pronounced Chuffley – it wasn’t his fault) had been ‘sweet on her’, as they said, for years. The new Baron had grown into a good-tempered, if a bit nervous young man, who wore glasses and had an unfortunate tendency to go red to the tip of his nose and shuffle a bit each time he spoke to her. But at least, when he did, he looked at her in the eyes, not at her pointy hat all the time, which was a nice change from most of the people down in the village.
The fact that he seemed to bring out the very same reaction from her almost every time did nothing to help build meaningful conversations, but when they finally did manage to, any amount of time spent with him seemed to fly and suddenly there appeared to be a hundred things she had forgotten to do in the meantime. These alternating silences and jumbled words often took place in the open space of the Chalk, since Tiffany rarely went up to the castle and Roland often said that, having spent an unhealthy amount of time locked up there when he was a boy, he was not exactly anxious to stay indoors for a long time.
Today, however, was not to be one of those days.
Roland waved at her, not close enough to see the expression on her face.
“Er … Hello,” he called, his usual small smile looking wider in the distance. “I’m on my way to the village – Durendal needs re-shoeing – but you’re not going that way, are you?” he asked when he drew level with her, sounding deflated.
She shook her head, and he peered at her.
“Are you all right?”
She felt she ought to give him a reassuring smile, but decided not to. There would be nothing behind it today, and he would notice it.
“There’s been a death among the Nac Mac Feegle,” she said, her face set. “I’m going to lay out the body –” she afforded herself half a second’s pause – “and stay for the wake.”
Roland looked a little puzzled. “Do you have to do that for them, too? I thought it was just, you know, for … er … people. Ours. Er.”
Sharp anger flared inside her through the slight haze the future task of taking care of the dead always put her in.
“I’m the witch of the Chalk. They are part of the Chalk – this means I’m their witch, too. They’ve probably been here for longer than us anyway.” She just stopped short of a withering glare. “Of course they’re people.”
She ought not to have let herself snap at him, she realised that. Her anger burned itself out quickly, and her Second Thoughts remarked pointedly that the real reason behind this little outburst had actually been Rob Anybody being dead – or rather, letting himself be killed so unthinkingly. Or so soon.
In the meantime, Roland had gone a bit white, a stark contrast with the red usually tingeing his cheeks. Maybe her voice had been more icy than cold, which had been what she actually meant it to be.
“S–sorry,” he said, twiddling his fingers in a decidedly un-Baronish way. “I mean, it was stupid. I – I know they’re a people – well, apart.” Here he stopped to look at her the way he sometimes did, the one that almost made her forget she was a witch and wish she had more time to be a human being. “Do you … Do you want me to come too? To pay my respects?”
The image of Roland trying to burrow his way down the fake rabbit hole, mucking himself up all over and getting stuck rose, unbidden, in Tiffany’s mind, striking a tiny spark of laughter. She stored it for later.
“No, thank you for asking. You wouldn’t fit.”
“Oh.” Roland sagged a bit, visibly dispirited. “Of course, I mean – it’s your business and everything – ”
“I mean you wouldn’t fit down the entrance. You’re too … large.”
The young Baron, while not as well-built as some of the lads in the village, had grown into his body (albeit somewhat late) and now sported a pair of shoulders befitting a healthy young man his age. Tiffany herself had to squirm in a rather undignified way if she wanted to go down the hole, and it had been so for quite a few years now. She didn’t like to imagine the damage those shoulders would cause the fake burrow.
He did brighten at that, obviously emboldened enough to venture, “Can I see you? After – after the wake?”
Tiffany did think a bit about it, and finally nodded. The smile he bestowed on her (as the Baron, he was entitled to bestow instead of just give, after all) was warm and almost surprised, but there was no trace of his ordinary indecision.
She didn’t get upset that he didn’t offer her a ride on Durendal, like he sometimes did. The mare was in need of new shoes, after all. But she felt his gaze follow her until she walked down the other side of the small hill, and in spite of all her efforts, she found it rather distracting.
When Tiffany wriggled herself and her bag of tricks down the hole again, the silence was louder than it had been. She dusted herself up a minimum, and after her eyes grew accustomed to the dim underground light, saw that Rob’s body had been laid out on a table, with Jeannie standing nearby with the same steely glint in her eyes.
“I’m ready,” she said, her words ringing in the silence. Tiffany nodded, and both women set to work.
Laying out a corpse was cleaning it and getting it ready and fit for the wake and the burial, but it meant more than that. Generally it meant helping the family along the way of accepting that their loved one is dead and not coming back. Give a witch enough time with a bloody mangled body and she’ll have it all clean and proper and presentable.
Actually, cleaning it up and putting its best clothes on took the best part of the whole thing. Sometimes, Tiffany didn’t have to do the squidgy business of washing the various fluids that meant that whoever had inhabited this body had left for good.
In this case, taking care of the blood and grime was unavoidable.
Tiffany stuck to the task, her fingers too awkwardly big and clumsy to do much more than tearing small strips of clean linen, dampen them with clear water and gingerly washing the blood away. It was starting to go brown in places, making it more difficult to get the stains off, but she kept working, her head bent low and her hand gentle and steady, as Jeannie stitched the gaping wounds closed. All the while trying not to pay too much attention to the blood thumping behind her ears and the barely audible whispering around her.
She did step aside when she reached the kilt, though. There are some things that are better left to a wife rather than a friend, even if the friend is a witch, and especially if the wife is practically a witch herself. Jeannie understood, and something other than steel flickered for a second in her eyes.
When the two women were done, Rob Anybody looked cleaner than he had ever had in human memory. Granted, the only human present was Tiffany, so the “memory” wasn’t longer than a couple of decades, but the effect was striking. Even the spaces between his toes were spotless.
Tiffany could now see all the tattoos that weren’t covered by the kilt. A kilt made of real tartan, for once, folded the proper way, the striped cloth fine under her fingers.
She felt something crack slightly in the small of her back when she straightened up, and blinked, surprised. She would never have thought that laying out so small a corpse, with so little surface to wash, would prove so exhausting. Her legs and wrists felt drained of muscle, which was absurd.
Then again, it was the first time Tiffany had to take care of a body in front of the whole family. And it certainly was the first time that “the whole family” meant several hundreds of people. Maybe this was the reason she felt so tired – the weight of twice as many eyes hadn’t left her since she started working.
Jeannie looked like she was feeling it, too. The hard glint in her eyes was fading, slowly replaced by a hint of something Tiffany was accustomed to seeing on the face of new widows once the inescapable truth sank in. She looked away to the other Feegles to see Big Yan whispering earnestly to Wee Dangerous Spike, who was roughly half his size, and Daft Wullie, his wide open eyes dry but red and puffy, standing there with his arms dangling and looking helpless. Or as helpless as a Feegle can look, anyway.
Tiffany gritted her teeth against the prickling behind her eyes and reached into her bag. She saw Wullie’s round eyes shrink back to their usual size when she pulled out the full bottle of Special Sheep Liniment.
Quite a few grins unveiled uneven teeth and there was a half-hearted cheer from the red and blue crowd. But it was genuine.
A few minutes later, Granny Aching’s Special Sheep Liniment, along with every drop of alcohol the pictsies had found, had worked its usual magic. Tiffany knew that the little bottle didn’t really have powers – as she knew there wasn’t really goblins in the forest – but the fact remained that as it emptied, some of the heavy grief lifted off, and the talking grew louder. Most of the Feegles seemed to be recovering quickly as they drank to the Big Man, who had gone back to the Land of the Living, which was a right shame, but there you go.
In the end, Tiffany, having saved a few drops from her bottle in a cup for Jeannie, found the kelda sitting silently on the sidelines. She had to duck to keep her head from banging on the sheer rock.
“Thank you,” said Jeannie quietly, taking the cup with both hands. “Ye did good.”
Tiffany refrained from saying that she hardly did anything apart from washing the bits that needed washing. Usually she spent the night at the wake, alone with the body, but the Feegles believed in a grand send-off for important people. They would not shut an eye until the second they keeled over from too much drink.
Silence fell again between the two of them, slightly awkward and tentative, punctuated by raucous voices and laughter as Big Yan finished telling a story involving himself, Rob and a cow-that-was-definitely-not-from-the-Aching-farm, said his furtive glance at Tiffany. Even Daft Wullie joined in, laughing his head off while big fat tears splashed on his chest, and if Tiffany was any judge he had swilled a lot of the contents of her bottle. Awf’ly Wee Billy was hastily moving his mousepipes out of the way of a good-natured brawl that had broken out just behind him.
Things were going back to normal. For the moment, though, fighting and boozing and dancing and greeting and feasting and boozing were in order.
“We didnae have a hag in the Long Lake,” Jeannie eventually said levelly, her eyes still in front of her at the cheerful, howling ball of dust, fists and feet. Tiffany looked down, slightly taken aback. She hadn’t heard the kelda talk about her old clan for years – if, indeed, she ever had.
“Oh, there was fine hags around, nae mistake – the hag o’ hags didnae live far off – but no hag wuz oor hag, ye ken.”
Tiffany nodded. She had understood that was had been a bit more to that tense-jawed “Thank you”, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was at the time.
“Ye’re a fine hag, Tiffany Aching,” the kelda said, finally looking up to meet Tiffany’s eyes. Something heavy and rough that had nestled in Tiffany’s throat since she crawled down into the Feegles’ mound began to fade at that look. “Ye mak’ the hills proud.”
Tiffany knew from experience that silence often was what was needed from a witch in cases like this, so she kept her mouth shut, the heavy and rough something in her throat still taking up a lot of room. She was good at being quiet anyway, having learned from Granny Aching the secret of shared, companionable silence, the kind that you wrapped around yourself tightly like a oilskin coat against the falling rain.
Even if, in the present situation, the silence was a canvas of yells, swear words and laughter. It wasn’t quite the ever-present, unobtrusive sounds of sheep, bells going clonk and the wind in the grass, but it was a familiar, homely kind of not-quite-silence.
And Daft Wullie was still crying and laughing at the same time.
The cold, hard look had completely gone out of Jeannie’s eyes now, and for a second she laid the kelda aside and fully gave in to the wife and the woman, both of them struggling hard against tears that would inevitably fall at one point when she allowed them to. Tiffany watched her stand up and raise the cup in silent toast.
Most of the still standing Feegles did the same. Daft Wullie chose this very second to keel over, the tracks the tears had made on his grimy face framing the same ear-splitting grin. Big Yan made a fumbled attempt to catch him before he hit the ground, but ended up staring down at him in a slightly dazed way.
Somehow, Tiffany knew it was her cue to leave. They’d had their cup of kindness, in a manner of speaking, and would have some more later, but her job here was finished. A Feegle wake was different from a human one in many respects, and the fact that everyone – not just the witch – was keeping the recently dead company as they crossed over to the Land of the Living was one of them.
As she took her leave from Jeannie and made her way out of the rabbit hole, she found herself thinking about Roland, and the way he had looked slightly stunned when she had agreed to see him later, but not unsure of himself at all, as was usually the case.
Her Second Thoughts said that this was not the right moment to think about things like that.
Her Third Thoughts pointed out that life, in the form of unwanted or inappropriate thoughts, had a knack for creeping up on people when they expected it the least.
The sun was going down on the wold when she caught sight of the lone figure walking towards the castle, now without the horse.
Roland stopped where he was and waited for her as her path crossed his.
Time went on, who stopped for no-one – except for a few special people, but that’s what exceptions are for – no matter how you felt it stopped, or wanted to, or even needed to.
And only the wind that whispered through the tall grass of the hills heard what Tiffany Aching and Roland de Chumsfanleigh talked about that day.
I’m glad I finished that one. It was hard to write (and it’s fortunate that I wrote most of it so long ago, because with my grandfather's death two weeks ago I don’t think I could have written this story now – too personal), especially since it was the first time I killed (so to speak) a canon character, and one of my very favourite ones in all the Discworld books, at that – it’s not something I feel I can do again lightly, if at all. And getting in Tiffany’s head, writing her perception of people and things (especially Roland, who I hope came across the way I wanted, which is awkward, prone to saying things the wrong way but as genuine as you can get) and her interaction with Jeannie in particular was equally hard but so interesting and challenging, storytelling-wise.
On a culture-related note, Durandal was the name of Roland de Roncevaux’ sword. A great many French schoolkids know the story of how the rear of Charlemagne’s army was ambushed, and how its commander Roland blew and blew his horn to call for help, but too late. Thought it’d be a good name for our Baron’s horse.
Oh, and the plural of ‘geas’ is ‘geasan’. I checked. Twice :D
Thanks to SpaceAnJL for the Brit check and the encouragement – and for the second ‘d’ in ‘hiddlins’ :o)
Fandom: Discworld (the Chalk)
Title: Wake
Rating: G
Characters: Tiffany Aching, Kelda Jeannie, the Nac Mac Feegle
Genre: drama
Summary: Being the witch of the Chalk meant taking care of the dead as well as the living. Even when the dead was a Feegle, and more importantly a friend.
_____________________________________________________________________
Wake
It struck Tiffany, as she stared at Rob Anybody through the not-quite-darkness of the mound, that she had hardly ever seen a Nac Mac Feegle motionless. Even when they were listening hard for some unlucky prey to jump on, there was a sort of tautness to their bodies that could not quite be called ‘standing still’.
When she got angry at them because they had yet again rummaged through her chest of drawers – particularly the one with her personal underthings – they shuffled, looked much too innocent, stared up uncertainly (occasionally scratching or picking their nose), or just patiently waited until she was done being angry with them. Most of the time, though, they still threw their arms over their heads and went ‘Waily waily waily …’
But they never just stood still.
For Tiffany, a Feegle was the contrary of ‘standing still’. Even the idea of a Feegle (a lot of people’s idea of things were often more real than the things themselves, but Tiffany always thought you couldn’t get much realer than a Nac Mac Feegle) was all about movement. With lots of fighting and boozing and dancing and greeting and feasting and boozing.
There would be no fighting today, or at least not the usual amount. But all of the other things – especially boozing, since Tiffany had always heard it at least twice in such lists – would be done later.
At the wake.
Tiffany Aching had been one of the very few humans to witness the funeral of a kelda. She had never stopped to wonder what it would be like for the Big Man of the clan. It didn’t seem like a thing to do, anyway.
She kept her eyes on Rob, however hard it was, because the alternative was looking at Jeannie’s face. Tiffany was a witch, and witches don’t back away from anything, but right now she’d rather look at anything but the kelda’s expression.
“How did it happen?” she asked when she was absolutely sure her voice would sound level and calm and certainly not shaking one bit.
She heard a messy sob somewhere near her left ankle, and when she looked down, she saw Daft Wullie wiping his nose on his grubby kilt. She also spotted Awf’ly Wee Billy Bigchin a few inches away, and although he looked pale under the blue tattoos and gripped his mousepipes more forcefully than usual, he returned her glance steadily enough.
And he told her. It was short, ugly, and surprisingly not very bloody by Feegle standards. She’d expected the gonnagle to weave a big story from it, since words were what he lived on.
People need stories – a healthy, daily dose of the stuff – to get them through the day. Tiffany had learned that much through her years of witching. You could tell them things in the simple, reasonable way – about small bags of air in coffins changing over the years and making strange lights when they reached the surface in cemeteries – but they will see spirits or goblins. Usually they made their own goblins; sometimes, though, they didn’t, and you had to make them yourself, because they needed it. It was one of the things a witch did. The Rugg family had needed to know that their Bert had died defending the lost ewe that got lost in the woods from the wolves, even if it was not quite right, really (the ewe had found him after the wolves had finished with him). It didn’t matter. Tiffany had not exactly lied, even though she had not exactly told them the truth.
Being a witch meant that nobody told you this kind of ‘not-quite-lies’.
Her First Thoughts said, He deserved a more glorious death than that.
Her Second Thoughts said, You’re a witch. You don’t want stories to make you feel better.
And her Third Thoughts whispered, Want is not the same as need.
All of her Thoughts, however, seemed the agree on one point: I’ll miss him. It was strange that a fully-grown woman – and a fully-fledged witch, at that – should miss a six-inch-tall, red-haired, blue-skinned man whose main goals in life were to fight, drink, and steal things (often at the same time) but the fact remained that she felt something irreplaceable would be lost when Rob Anybody Feegle was buried.
You couldn’t judge a Nac Mac Feegle by the same standards you did men. Rob Anybody hadn’t been a bad man, but Tiffany knew she couldn’t rightly say he was – had been – a good one.
Stealing anything, drinking everything with or without alcohol in it (provided that the bottle looked interesting) and stealing the rest (even cows and sheep) could hardly fit the definition of a ‘good man’, she reckoned.
But Rob Anybody was a good Feegle. Had been. No doubt about that.
He’d appointed himself (or been appointed, but in the end it amounted to the same thing) her guardian of sorts, on account of her having been – albeit only for a few days – the kelda of the Nac Mac Feegle of the Chalk. This meant that they watched over her, constantly, would do so until she died, and would probably keep an eye on her grave too, just in case. Of course, most of the time for her it also meant plugging the holes underneath the privy door and being nervous whenever she got into her nightshirt, but there was something oddly flattering about it. The Big Man of the Chalk clan certainly did take his geasan (Tiffany had searched long and hard for the plural of ‘geas’, once she found out it was not some kind of bird after all) seriously.
She had actually been engaged to Rob Anybody during her time as a kelda. Of course the idea of marrying a little blue man at nine years old had been a bit laughable – once she’d got past the burning embarrassment, anyway. She had thought up a way out of it then, while still abiding by the rules to the letter. Right now, though, laughter was very far from her mind.
Last time Rob Anybody had met Death, he had nutted him squarely in the skull. Tiffany could remember the thud.
Even though she had passed the ‘He can’t be dead’ stage the second she had laid eyes on his battered body, there was still some small part of her brain that thought the words together made no sense.
There was a noise like a slug being squished through the eye of a knitting needle. When she glanced back down at her left, Daft Wullie was wiping his nose on his kilt again. Tiffany tried not to look at the cloth. It was grimy and drippy and really did not bear a closer look.
The news spread through the mound like a cold draft as it gradually grew silent. It wasn’t the loud, heavy hush she remembered settling around her when the old kelda had died, though; this silence didn’t have so much of a ‘What are we goin’ to do now?’ undertone. The kelda was the mother of most of them – when she died they’d seemed a little lost for a while.
But Rob was one of the lads, and she knew that, once the shock and grief had worn off, the Feegles would put words around their sorrow and alcohol around their words to make ‘em loud and clear enough (well, loud, at any rate) for the dead to hear.
The Nac Mac Feegle believed, to a man, that they were already dead and currently in a sort of heaven; when one died, the others buried him and drank to his memory (generally to a stupor), sad that one of them had gone to the Last World, but they seemed to recover quicker than most humans. Which did not mean that a death didn’t come as a nasty shock.
Tiffany became aware of her Second Thoughts metaphorically chewing on her metaphorical ankle, trying to get her attention and muttering, Well, it’s time for you to do what you do! Are you a witch or not?
“I’ll go get my bag,” she said quietly, this time not carefully keeping her voice from wavering. It did, a little bit. Jeannie looked up at that and the glint in her eyes told her that in front of Tiffany was the kelda, through and through. The wife and the woman were both … currently unavailable.
“Aye,” she said, and the edge in her voice made several Feegles standing nearby take a small retreating step unconsciously, as a precautionary measure. “’Tis fittin’. You’re oor hag. You sit by him with us an’ watch over him with us.”
Tiffany nodded, and made for the fake rabbit hole, stepping carefully as usual around the Feegle children, who often scuttled about fighting and playing all over the place. Today they were remarkably subdued.
There was a slight wind outside, enough to make the grass on the wold ripple, like in the book about the sea Roland had given her. The sun was at his usual afternoon place in the sky, small clouds stretched lazily in the blue until they ripped apart, and Rob Anybody Feegle was dead.
It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, but it was so.
Tiffany didn’t slow her pace down when she began to cry, but when she arrived in sight of the Home Farm she waited a little while for her tears to stop and her eyes to dry.
Her father didn’t ask questions when he saw her grab the bag she kept by the door in case of emergencies. He never did. Tiffany supposed he was proud of her, in a slightly less awkward way than that of the people of the Chalk, but the most pride he had shown was a glance she had caught the first time she had sat all night with a dead man and come back in the morning, silent and her eyes prickling from the lack of sleep. Lambing and cheese were difficult, but those Joe Aching could understand. Witching, now, was an altogether different business. Not exactly a secret, but something that set her apart, even from her own family.
Hiddlins, the Feegles would say.
Tiffany also took a bottle of Special Sheep Liniment from the barn, the one she kept hidden from beady Feegle eyes behind the churns and the bottles of milk, for special occasions.
On her way back, she spotted a lone figure across the downs, holding on the reins of a horse. She didn’t have to see his face clearly to know it was Roland – nobody else owned a horse in the Chalk.
Roland de Chumsfanleigh (pronounced Chuffley – it wasn’t his fault) had been ‘sweet on her’, as they said, for years. The new Baron had grown into a good-tempered, if a bit nervous young man, who wore glasses and had an unfortunate tendency to go red to the tip of his nose and shuffle a bit each time he spoke to her. But at least, when he did, he looked at her in the eyes, not at her pointy hat all the time, which was a nice change from most of the people down in the village.
The fact that he seemed to bring out the very same reaction from her almost every time did nothing to help build meaningful conversations, but when they finally did manage to, any amount of time spent with him seemed to fly and suddenly there appeared to be a hundred things she had forgotten to do in the meantime. These alternating silences and jumbled words often took place in the open space of the Chalk, since Tiffany rarely went up to the castle and Roland often said that, having spent an unhealthy amount of time locked up there when he was a boy, he was not exactly anxious to stay indoors for a long time.
Today, however, was not to be one of those days.
Roland waved at her, not close enough to see the expression on her face.
“Er … Hello,” he called, his usual small smile looking wider in the distance. “I’m on my way to the village – Durendal needs re-shoeing – but you’re not going that way, are you?” he asked when he drew level with her, sounding deflated.
She shook her head, and he peered at her.
“Are you all right?”
She felt she ought to give him a reassuring smile, but decided not to. There would be nothing behind it today, and he would notice it.
“There’s been a death among the Nac Mac Feegle,” she said, her face set. “I’m going to lay out the body –” she afforded herself half a second’s pause – “and stay for the wake.”
Roland looked a little puzzled. “Do you have to do that for them, too? I thought it was just, you know, for … er … people. Ours. Er.”
Sharp anger flared inside her through the slight haze the future task of taking care of the dead always put her in.
“I’m the witch of the Chalk. They are part of the Chalk – this means I’m their witch, too. They’ve probably been here for longer than us anyway.” She just stopped short of a withering glare. “Of course they’re people.”
She ought not to have let herself snap at him, she realised that. Her anger burned itself out quickly, and her Second Thoughts remarked pointedly that the real reason behind this little outburst had actually been Rob Anybody being dead – or rather, letting himself be killed so unthinkingly. Or so soon.
In the meantime, Roland had gone a bit white, a stark contrast with the red usually tingeing his cheeks. Maybe her voice had been more icy than cold, which had been what she actually meant it to be.
“S–sorry,” he said, twiddling his fingers in a decidedly un-Baronish way. “I mean, it was stupid. I – I know they’re a people – well, apart.” Here he stopped to look at her the way he sometimes did, the one that almost made her forget she was a witch and wish she had more time to be a human being. “Do you … Do you want me to come too? To pay my respects?”
The image of Roland trying to burrow his way down the fake rabbit hole, mucking himself up all over and getting stuck rose, unbidden, in Tiffany’s mind, striking a tiny spark of laughter. She stored it for later.
“No, thank you for asking. You wouldn’t fit.”
“Oh.” Roland sagged a bit, visibly dispirited. “Of course, I mean – it’s your business and everything – ”
“I mean you wouldn’t fit down the entrance. You’re too … large.”
The young Baron, while not as well-built as some of the lads in the village, had grown into his body (albeit somewhat late) and now sported a pair of shoulders befitting a healthy young man his age. Tiffany herself had to squirm in a rather undignified way if she wanted to go down the hole, and it had been so for quite a few years now. She didn’t like to imagine the damage those shoulders would cause the fake burrow.
He did brighten at that, obviously emboldened enough to venture, “Can I see you? After – after the wake?”
Tiffany did think a bit about it, and finally nodded. The smile he bestowed on her (as the Baron, he was entitled to bestow instead of just give, after all) was warm and almost surprised, but there was no trace of his ordinary indecision.
She didn’t get upset that he didn’t offer her a ride on Durendal, like he sometimes did. The mare was in need of new shoes, after all. But she felt his gaze follow her until she walked down the other side of the small hill, and in spite of all her efforts, she found it rather distracting.
When Tiffany wriggled herself and her bag of tricks down the hole again, the silence was louder than it had been. She dusted herself up a minimum, and after her eyes grew accustomed to the dim underground light, saw that Rob’s body had been laid out on a table, with Jeannie standing nearby with the same steely glint in her eyes.
“I’m ready,” she said, her words ringing in the silence. Tiffany nodded, and both women set to work.
Laying out a corpse was cleaning it and getting it ready and fit for the wake and the burial, but it meant more than that. Generally it meant helping the family along the way of accepting that their loved one is dead and not coming back. Give a witch enough time with a bloody mangled body and she’ll have it all clean and proper and presentable.
Actually, cleaning it up and putting its best clothes on took the best part of the whole thing. Sometimes, Tiffany didn’t have to do the squidgy business of washing the various fluids that meant that whoever had inhabited this body had left for good.
In this case, taking care of the blood and grime was unavoidable.
Tiffany stuck to the task, her fingers too awkwardly big and clumsy to do much more than tearing small strips of clean linen, dampen them with clear water and gingerly washing the blood away. It was starting to go brown in places, making it more difficult to get the stains off, but she kept working, her head bent low and her hand gentle and steady, as Jeannie stitched the gaping wounds closed. All the while trying not to pay too much attention to the blood thumping behind her ears and the barely audible whispering around her.
She did step aside when she reached the kilt, though. There are some things that are better left to a wife rather than a friend, even if the friend is a witch, and especially if the wife is practically a witch herself. Jeannie understood, and something other than steel flickered for a second in her eyes.
When the two women were done, Rob Anybody looked cleaner than he had ever had in human memory. Granted, the only human present was Tiffany, so the “memory” wasn’t longer than a couple of decades, but the effect was striking. Even the spaces between his toes were spotless.
Tiffany could now see all the tattoos that weren’t covered by the kilt. A kilt made of real tartan, for once, folded the proper way, the striped cloth fine under her fingers.
She felt something crack slightly in the small of her back when she straightened up, and blinked, surprised. She would never have thought that laying out so small a corpse, with so little surface to wash, would prove so exhausting. Her legs and wrists felt drained of muscle, which was absurd.
Then again, it was the first time Tiffany had to take care of a body in front of the whole family. And it certainly was the first time that “the whole family” meant several hundreds of people. Maybe this was the reason she felt so tired – the weight of twice as many eyes hadn’t left her since she started working.
Jeannie looked like she was feeling it, too. The hard glint in her eyes was fading, slowly replaced by a hint of something Tiffany was accustomed to seeing on the face of new widows once the inescapable truth sank in. She looked away to the other Feegles to see Big Yan whispering earnestly to Wee Dangerous Spike, who was roughly half his size, and Daft Wullie, his wide open eyes dry but red and puffy, standing there with his arms dangling and looking helpless. Or as helpless as a Feegle can look, anyway.
Tiffany gritted her teeth against the prickling behind her eyes and reached into her bag. She saw Wullie’s round eyes shrink back to their usual size when she pulled out the full bottle of Special Sheep Liniment.
Quite a few grins unveiled uneven teeth and there was a half-hearted cheer from the red and blue crowd. But it was genuine.
A few minutes later, Granny Aching’s Special Sheep Liniment, along with every drop of alcohol the pictsies had found, had worked its usual magic. Tiffany knew that the little bottle didn’t really have powers – as she knew there wasn’t really goblins in the forest – but the fact remained that as it emptied, some of the heavy grief lifted off, and the talking grew louder. Most of the Feegles seemed to be recovering quickly as they drank to the Big Man, who had gone back to the Land of the Living, which was a right shame, but there you go.
In the end, Tiffany, having saved a few drops from her bottle in a cup for Jeannie, found the kelda sitting silently on the sidelines. She had to duck to keep her head from banging on the sheer rock.
“Thank you,” said Jeannie quietly, taking the cup with both hands. “Ye did good.”
Tiffany refrained from saying that she hardly did anything apart from washing the bits that needed washing. Usually she spent the night at the wake, alone with the body, but the Feegles believed in a grand send-off for important people. They would not shut an eye until the second they keeled over from too much drink.
Silence fell again between the two of them, slightly awkward and tentative, punctuated by raucous voices and laughter as Big Yan finished telling a story involving himself, Rob and a cow-that-was-definitely-not-from-the-Aching-farm, said his furtive glance at Tiffany. Even Daft Wullie joined in, laughing his head off while big fat tears splashed on his chest, and if Tiffany was any judge he had swilled a lot of the contents of her bottle. Awf’ly Wee Billy was hastily moving his mousepipes out of the way of a good-natured brawl that had broken out just behind him.
Things were going back to normal. For the moment, though, fighting and boozing and dancing and greeting and feasting and boozing were in order.
“We didnae have a hag in the Long Lake,” Jeannie eventually said levelly, her eyes still in front of her at the cheerful, howling ball of dust, fists and feet. Tiffany looked down, slightly taken aback. She hadn’t heard the kelda talk about her old clan for years – if, indeed, she ever had.
“Oh, there was fine hags around, nae mistake – the hag o’ hags didnae live far off – but no hag wuz oor hag, ye ken.”
Tiffany nodded. She had understood that was had been a bit more to that tense-jawed “Thank you”, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was at the time.
“Ye’re a fine hag, Tiffany Aching,” the kelda said, finally looking up to meet Tiffany’s eyes. Something heavy and rough that had nestled in Tiffany’s throat since she crawled down into the Feegles’ mound began to fade at that look. “Ye mak’ the hills proud.”
Tiffany knew from experience that silence often was what was needed from a witch in cases like this, so she kept her mouth shut, the heavy and rough something in her throat still taking up a lot of room. She was good at being quiet anyway, having learned from Granny Aching the secret of shared, companionable silence, the kind that you wrapped around yourself tightly like a oilskin coat against the falling rain.
Even if, in the present situation, the silence was a canvas of yells, swear words and laughter. It wasn’t quite the ever-present, unobtrusive sounds of sheep, bells going clonk and the wind in the grass, but it was a familiar, homely kind of not-quite-silence.
And Daft Wullie was still crying and laughing at the same time.
The cold, hard look had completely gone out of Jeannie’s eyes now, and for a second she laid the kelda aside and fully gave in to the wife and the woman, both of them struggling hard against tears that would inevitably fall at one point when she allowed them to. Tiffany watched her stand up and raise the cup in silent toast.
Most of the still standing Feegles did the same. Daft Wullie chose this very second to keel over, the tracks the tears had made on his grimy face framing the same ear-splitting grin. Big Yan made a fumbled attempt to catch him before he hit the ground, but ended up staring down at him in a slightly dazed way.
Somehow, Tiffany knew it was her cue to leave. They’d had their cup of kindness, in a manner of speaking, and would have some more later, but her job here was finished. A Feegle wake was different from a human one in many respects, and the fact that everyone – not just the witch – was keeping the recently dead company as they crossed over to the Land of the Living was one of them.
As she took her leave from Jeannie and made her way out of the rabbit hole, she found herself thinking about Roland, and the way he had looked slightly stunned when she had agreed to see him later, but not unsure of himself at all, as was usually the case.
Her Second Thoughts said that this was not the right moment to think about things like that.
Her Third Thoughts pointed out that life, in the form of unwanted or inappropriate thoughts, had a knack for creeping up on people when they expected it the least.
The sun was going down on the wold when she caught sight of the lone figure walking towards the castle, now without the horse.
Roland stopped where he was and waited for her as her path crossed his.
Time went on, who stopped for no-one – except for a few special people, but that’s what exceptions are for – no matter how you felt it stopped, or wanted to, or even needed to.
And only the wind that whispered through the tall grass of the hills heard what Tiffany Aching and Roland de Chumsfanleigh talked about that day.
THE END. Somewhat.
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I’m glad I finished that one. It was hard to write (and it’s fortunate that I wrote most of it so long ago, because with my grandfather's death two weeks ago I don’t think I could have written this story now – too personal), especially since it was the first time I killed (so to speak) a canon character, and one of my very favourite ones in all the Discworld books, at that – it’s not something I feel I can do again lightly, if at all. And getting in Tiffany’s head, writing her perception of people and things (especially Roland, who I hope came across the way I wanted, which is awkward, prone to saying things the wrong way but as genuine as you can get) and her interaction with Jeannie in particular was equally hard but so interesting and challenging, storytelling-wise.
On a culture-related note, Durandal was the name of Roland de Roncevaux’ sword. A great many French schoolkids know the story of how the rear of Charlemagne’s army was ambushed, and how its commander Roland blew and blew his horn to call for help, but too late. Thought it’d be a good name for our Baron’s horse.
Oh, and the plural of ‘geas’ is ‘geasan’. I checked. Twice :D
