The Wee Free Men

boys.
    However, everyone also felt that there were a few other things that even the boys ought to know, to stop them wasting time wondering about details like “What’s on the other side of the mountains?” and “How come rain falls out of the sky?”
    Every family in the village bought a copy of the Almanack every year, and a sort of education came from that. It was big and thick and printed somewhere far off, and it had lots of details about things like phases of the moon and the right time to plant beans. It also contained a few prophesies about the coming year, and mentioned faraway places with names like Klatch and Hersheba. Tiffany had seen a picture of Klatch in the Almanack. It showed a camel standing in a desert. She’d only found out what both those names were because her mother had told her. And that was Klatch, a camel in a desert. She’d wondered if there wasn’t a bit more to it, but it seemed that “Klatch = camel, desert” was all anyone knew.
    And that was the trouble. If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions.
    The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth peddlers, fortune-tellers, and all the other travelers who sold things the people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful.
    They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travelers and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like corrugated iron . They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the math teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure, and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.
    People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing, after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.
    Today the brightly colored little booths and tents were pitched in a field just outside the village. Behind them small square areas had been fenced off with high canvas walls and were patrolled by apprentice teachers looking for anyone trying to overhear Education without paying.
    The first tent Tiffany saw had a sign that read:

    JOGRAFFY ! JOGRAFFY ! JOGRAFFY!
    FOR TODAY ONLY: ALL MAJOR LAND MASSES AND OCEANS
    PLUS EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNO ABOUT GLASSIERS !
    ONE PENNY , OR ALL MAJOR VEJTABLES ACSEPTED !

    Tiffany had read enough to know that, while he might be a whiz at major land masses, this particular teacher could have done with some help from the man running the stall next door:
THE WONDERS OF PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING
1 ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY ABOUT THE COMMA !
2 I BEFORE E COMPLETELY SORTED OUT !
3 THE MYSTERY OF THE SEMICOLON REVEALED !!!
4 SEE THE AMPERSAND ! ( SMALL EXTRA CHARGE )
5 FUN WITH BRACKETS !
** WILL ACCEPT VEGETABLES, EGGS, AND CLEAN USED CLOTHING **
    The next stall along was decorated with scenes out of history, generally of kings cutting one another’s heads off and similar interesting highlights. The teacher in front was dressed in ragged red robes with rabbit-skin trimmings and wore an old top hat with flags stuck in it. He had a small megaphone that he aimed at Tiffany.
    “The Death of Kings Through the Ages?” he said. “Very educational, lots of blood!”
    “Not really,” said Tiffany.
    “Oh, you’ve got to know where you’ve come from, miss,” said the teacher. “Otherwise how will you know where you’re going?”
    “I come from a long line of Aching people,” said Tiffany. “And I think I’m moving on.”
    She found what she was looking for at a booth hung with pictures of animals including, she was pleased to see, a camel. The sign said:

    USEFUL CREATURES—TODAY: OUR FRIEND THE HEDGEHOG !

    She wondered how useful the thing in the river had been, but this looked like the only place to find out. A few children were waiting on the benches inside the booth for the lesson to begin, but the teacher was still standing out in front, in the hope of filling up the empty spaces.
    “Hello, little girl,” he said, which was only his first big mistake. “I’m sure you want to know all