Tribute

There were heads on the back steps by four in the afternoon.

They were orange, and hollow, and had been given faces with a knife, and each of them had a fire lit inside it. They sat in a row up the seven steps, grinning at the green. Kit, who had been in the hollow twelve days and had been told about the mowing, and the bins, and the war with the sky, and had been starting to feel she had the measure of the Above, came up the path to the table rather faster than she usually goes anywhere.

"Heads," said Grizel, without looking up. "It is the last day of October. There are fourteen entries." She turned the book back and read from an earlier autumn in the voice she keeps for weather. "'Heads on the steps. At dark the small Aboves come out in the shapes of things they are not. They go up the Stair from door to door and demand tribute. It is paid.'"

"Every year?"

"Every year. They take it away in bags."

"What happens if it's not paid?"

Grizel turned several pages. "It has never not been paid," she said, and it was clear that she found this the most frightening fact of all.

The theology had the afternoon to itself. Nettie's position was that going from door to door with a bag and a threat was Gnomesby's idea from start to finish, and that the Above had picked it up from across the green like a cold. Wick went and looked at the nearest head from the top of the wall and came back impressed. He said that whoever had done the hollowing had taken all of the inside out through a hole in the top without breaking the walls, and that he would like to meet them. He was told it had also been given a face, with a knife. He said that was a design choice.

Mothy had found it before anybody. He sat on the coping as near to the bottom step as the wall goes, and looked at the lowest head, and his face did what it does, slowly, from the inside.

"Is that a lamp?"

"It's a head," said Kit, who had come up beside him.

Mothy considered this. "It's got a lamp in it."

"It has."

He was quiet for a time, working out whether a head with a lamp in it was better than a lamp or worse than a head. The ledger does not know what he concluded. "Hello," he said, to be on the safe side.

They came out at dark, as stated. The hollow watched from the hedge and the wall, in rows. There was a small Above in a sheet. There was one with a green face and one with its bones on the outside, and they went up the back steps to the first door and knocked, and the door opened, and tribute was paid into a bag. Then they went to the next door.

Lady Pettigrew ruled at once, and favourably. Here at last, she said, was something the Court would recognise: persons of small stature and magnificent dress, received at every door in order of precedence and given presents. She stood on the stool to see it better. It was from the stool that she saw the fourth of them, who came out late and ran to catch the others up. It was in pink. It had a stick with a star on the end. It had wings, on wire, fastened on with elastic, and they were on crooked.

The collar went entirely still.

"That," said Lady Pettigrew, "is a caricature."

"It's got a collar," said Nettie, peering. "Look. Round the neck."

"That is a ruff. A ruff is not a collar. A ruff is what a collar is accused of." She got down off the stool. "A complaint will be lodged."

It was into this, across the dark green, that somebody came walking towards the hollow with a basket.

He came in a dead straight line, the way a grumlin goes, and he was small, and he held the basket out in front of him in both hands. The whole hollow had spent the evening learning precisely what it means when a small figure comes to your door after dark holding out a basket.

"Nobody comes in," said Mungo.

"I'm not. I've only got to..." The figure stopped at the gate and found nine people looking at him. He had a thin beard and an anxious face, and the hollow knew him. He had carried the Treaty of the Mushroom Patch to the hearing a week before and had it taken off him by a beetle. "I've a basket," he said.

"We can see you've a basket," said Nettie. "We've nothing for it."

"It's full."

"Aye, that's how they do it. They show you a full one, so you feel behind."

"It's not for filling. It's for the heap. It's mushrooms." He held it out further, which did not help his case. "For the old keeper. For the winter, on account of the heap being damp. I bring it every year. Six years. I go through the long grass and leave it at the warm end and go home, and nobody's ever..." He looked at the green behind him, which the Above had mown to the roots eight days before. "There's usually grass," said Sandy, that being his name.

"Six years," said Nettie.

"Yes."

"Sent by who?"

"I'm not to say." He swallowed. "I'm to say it's from Gnomesby, if I'm asked. I'm not to say who in Gnomesby."

Nettie came down to the gate and looked into the basket. She looked for a good while. Then she took one out and turned it over and looked at the gills.

"That's one of mine," she said. "That's my strain. That's off my patch, the part of my patch that's on your side."

"It's a good mushroom," said Sandy, helplessly.

"I know it's a good mushroom, I'm its grandmother."

And then Nettie said "Gnomesby." It was not the first tone, which is the one she keeps for slugs. It was not the second, which is for weather, nor the third, which she used on the day the treaty was read. It was a fourth, and the ledger had no entry for it. Grizel tried three descriptions that night and settled on "as of a woman who finds that the door she has been leaning on for fourteen winters was never locked," and looked at it, and did not cross it out.

The basket went to the heap. Nettie carried it herself, and Sandy walked behind her at a distance he judged to be safe and was wrong about.

It was on his way out that the thing happened. Mungo, who had let him past on the ground that a basket is not a person, said "Nobody comes in," on general principle. Sandy said that he was not coming in, he was going out. Mungo said that was the same thing from the other side, and it looked like being a long night for all concerned.

"He's with me," said Kit.

She had not planned to say it. It came out in the voice of someone trying on a coat that belonged to somebody larger, and it felt like that. Mungo turned his head, which he does not do, and looked at her for exactly one Mungo, and stepped aside.

Sandy went home across the green in a straight line. The ledger notes that it was not quite straight, and that it bent, once, near the patch.

Up on the Stair the last door shut and the fires in the heads burned down. Tribute had been paid in full, for the fifteenth year. At the gate Mothy sat on beside the lantern, keeping half an eye on the steps, in case any of the heads should need anything in the night.