Wintersmith (Discworld 35)

"Well, they're not fooling me," said Granny Weatherwax. "Go on, Tiff, give it a go," said Nanny Ogg, walking around the table. "I don't know how!" said Tiffany. "There aren't any instructions!" And then, too late, Granny shouted: "You! Come out of there!" But with a flick of her tail the white kitten trotted inside. They banged on the horn. They held it upside down and shook it. They tried shouting down it. They put a saucer of milk in front of it and waited. The kitten didn't return. Then Nanny Ogg prodded gently inside the Cornucopia with a mop, which to no one's great surprise went farther inside the Cornucopia than there was Cornucopia on the outside. "She'll come out when she's hungry," she said reassuringly. "Not if she finds something to eat in there," said Granny Weatherwax, peering into the dark. "I shouldn't think she'll find cat food," said Tiffany, examining the picture closely. "There may be milk, though."

"You! Come out of there this minute!" Granny commanded in a voice fit to shake mountains. There was a distant meep. "Perhaps she's got stuck?" said Nanny. "I mean, it's like a spiral, growing smaller at the end, right? Cats ain't very big at goin' backward." Tiffany saw the look on Granny's face and sighed. "Feegles?" she said to the room in general. "I know there are some of you in this room. Come out, please!" Feegles appeared from behind every ornament. Tiffany tapped the Cornucopia. "Can you get a little kitten out of here?" she asked. "Just that? Aye, nae problemo," said Rob Anybody. "I wuz hopin' it was gonna be something difficult!" The Nac Mac Feegles disappeared into the Horn at a trot. Their voices died away. The witches waited. They waited some more. And some more. "Feegles!" shouted Tiffany into the hole. She thought she heard a very distant, very faint "Crivens!"

"If it can produce grain, they might have found beer in there," said Tiffany. "And that means they'll only run out when the beer runs out too!"

"Cats can't feed on beer!" snapped Granny Weatherwax. "Well, I'm fed up with waiting," said Nanny. "Look, there's a little hole in the pointy end, too. I'm going to blow into it!" She tried to, at least. Her cheeks went big and red and her eyes bulged, and it was pretty clear that if the horn didn't blow, then she would—at which point, the horn gave up. There was a distant and unmistakably curly rumbling noise, which got louder and louder. "I can't see anything yet," said Granny, looking into the wide mouth of the horn. Tiffany pulled her away just as You galloped out of the Cornucopia with her tail straight out and her ears flattened. She skidded across the table, leaped onto Granny Weatherwax's dress, scrambled onto her shoulder, and turned and spat defiance. With a cry of "Crivvvvvvvvens!" Feegles poured out of the horn. "Behind the sofa, everyone!" yelled Nanny. "Run!" Now the rumble was like thunder. It grew and grew and then— —stopped. In the silence, three pointy hats rose from behind the sofa. Small blue faces rose from behind everything. Then there was a noise very similar to pwat! and something small and wizened rolled out of the mouth of the Horn and dropped onto the floor. It was a very dried-up pineapple. Granny Weatherwax brushed some dust off her dress. "You'd better learn to use this," she said to Tiffany. "How?"

"Don't you have any idea?"

"No!"

"Well, it's turned up for you, madam, and it's dangerous!" Tiffany gingerly picked up the Cornucopia, and again there was that definite feeling of some hugely heavy thing pretending, very successfully, to be light. "Maybe it needs some magic word," suggested Nanny Ogg. "Or there's somewhere special that you press…." As Tiffany turned it in the light, something gleamed for a moment. "Hold on, these look like words," she said. She read: All that you desire, I give upon a name, murmured the memory of Dr. Bustle. The next line said: I grow, I shrink, Dr. Bustle translated. "I think I might have an idea," she said, and in memory of Miss Treason she declared: "Ham sandwich!" Nothing happened. Then Dr. Bustle lazily translated, and Tiffany said: With a fwlap a ham sandwich sailed out of the mouth of the Cornucopia and was expertly caught by Nanny, who bit into it. "Not bad at all!" she announced. "Try a few more." said Tiffany, and there was the kind of sound you get when you disturb a cave full of bats. "Stop!" she yelled, but nothing stopped. Then Dr. Bustle whispered and she shouted: There were a…lot of sandwiches. The pile reached the ceiling, in fact. Only the tip of Nanny Ogg's hat was visible, but there were some muffled noises farther down the heap. An arm thrust out, and Nanny Ogg forced her way through the wall of bread and sliced pig, chewing thoughtfully. "No mustard, I notice. Hmm. Well, we can see that everyone around here has a good supper tonight," she said. "And I can see I'm going to have to make an awful lot of soup, too. Best not to try it again in here, though, all right?"

"I don't like it at all," snapped Granny Weatherwax. "Where does all that stuff come from, eh? Magic food never fed anyone properly!"

"It's not magic, it's a god thing," said Nanny Ogg. "Like manners from heaven, that sort of stuff. I expect it's made out of raw firmament." In fact it's merely a living metaphor for the boundless fecundity of the natural world, whispered Dr. Bustle in Tiffany's head. "You don't get manners from heaven," said Granny. "This was in foreign parts, a long time ago," said Nanny, turning to Tiffany. "If I was you, dear, I'd take it out into the woods tomorrow and see what it can do. Although, if you don't mind, I could really do with some fresh grapes right now."

"Gytha Ogg, you can't use the Cornucopia of the Gods as a…a larder!" said Granny. "The feet business was bad enough!"

"But it is one," said Nanny Ogg innocently. "It's the larder. It's, like, everything waiting to grow next spring." Tiffany put it down very carefully. There was something…alive about the Cornucopia. She wasn't at all sure that it was just some magical tool. It seemed to be listening. As it touched the tabletop, it began to shrink until it was the size of a small vase. "'Scuse me?" said Rob Anybody. "But does it do beer?"

"Beer?" said Tiffany, without thinking. There was a trickling noise. All eyes turned to look at the vase. Brown liquid was foaming over the lip. Then all the eyes turned to Granny Weatherwax, who shrugged. "Don't look at me," she said sourly. "You're going to drink it anyway!" It is alive, Tiffany thought, as Nanny Ogg hurried off to find some more mugs. It learns. It's learned my language…. Around midnight, Tiffany woke up because a white chicken was standing on her chest. She pushed it off and reached down for her slippers, and found only chickens. When she got the candle alight, she saw half a dozen chickens on the end of the bed. The floor was covered in chickens. So were the stairs. So was every room down below. In the kitchen, chickens had overflowed into the sink. They weren't making much noise, just the occasional werk a chicken makes when it's a bit uncertain about things, which is more or less all the time. The chickens were shuffling along patiently to make room. Werk. They were doing this because the Cornucopia, now grown just a bit bigger than a full-grown chicken, was gently firing out a chicken every eight seconds. Werk. As Tiffany watched, another one landed on the mountain of ham sandwiches. Werk. Marooned on top of the Cornucopia was You, looking very puzzled. Werk. And in the middle of the floor Granny Weatherwax snored gently in the big armchair, surrounded by fascinated hens. Werk. Apart from the snoring, the chorus of werks, and the rustle of shuffling chickens, it was all very peaceful in the candlelight. Werk. Tiffany glared at the kitten. She rubbed up against things when she wanted to be fed, didn't she? Werk. And made meep noises? Werk. And the Cornucopia could work out languages, couldn't it? Werk. Now she whispered: "No more chickens," and after a few seconds the flow of chickens ceased. Werk. But she couldn't really leave it like that. She shook Granny by the shoulder and, as the old woman awoke, she said: "The good news is a lot of the ham sandwiches have gone…er…." Werk.

CHAPTER NINE

Green Shoots I t was much colder the next morning, a numb dull coldness that could practically freeze the flames on a fire. Tiffany let the broomstick settle between the trees a little way from Nanny Ogg's cottage. The snow hadn't drifted much here, but it came up to her knees, and cold had put a crispness on it that crackled like a stale loaf when Tiffany trod it. In theory she was out in the woods to get the hang of the Cornucopia, but really she was there to keep it out of the way. Nanny Ogg hadn't been too upset about the chickens. After all, she now owned five hundred hens, which were currently standing around in her shed going werk. But the floors were a mess, there were chicken doo-dahs even on the banisters, and as Granny had pointed out (in a whisper), supposing someone had said "sharks"?

The Cornucopia lay on her lap while she sat on a stump among snow-covered trees. Once the forest had been pretty. Now it was hateful. Dark trunks against snowdrifts, a striped world of black and white, bars against the light. She longed for horizons. Funny…the Cornucopia was always very slightly warm, even out here, and seemed to know in advance what size it ought to be. "I grow, I shrink," thought Tiffany. And I'm feeling pretty small. What next? What now? She'd kept hoping that the…the power would drop on her, just like the Cornucopia had done. It hadn't. There was life under the snow. She felt it in her fingertips. Somewhere down there, out of reach, was the real Summer. Using the Cornucopia as a scoop, she scraped away at the snow until she reached dead leaves. There was life down there in the white webs of fungi and pale, new roots. A half-frozen worm crawled slowly away and burrowed under a leaf skeleton, fine as lace. Beside it was an acorn. The woods weren't silent. They were holding their breath. They were all waiting for her, and she didn't know what to do. I'm not the Summer Lady, she told herself. I can never be her. I'm in her shoes, but I can never be her. I might be able to make a few flowers grow, but I can never be her. She'll walk across the world and oceans of sap will rise in these dead trees and a million tons of grass will grow in a second. Can I do that? No. I'm a stupid child with a handful of tricks, that's all. I'm just Tiffany Aching, and I'm aching to go home. Feeling guilty about the worm, she breathed some warm air on the soil and then pushed the leaves back to cover it. As she did so, there was a wet little sound, like the snapping of a frog's fingers, and the acorn split.

A white shoot escaped from it and grew more than half an inch as she watched it. Hurriedly she made a hole in the mold with her fingers, pushed the acorn in, and patted the soil back again. Someone was watching her. She stood up and turned around quickly. There was no one to be seen, but that didn't mean a thing. "I know you're there!" she said, still turning around. "Whoever you are!" Her voice echoed among the black trees. Even to her it sounded thin and scared. She found herself raising the Cornucopia. "Show yourself," she quavered, "or—" What? she wondered. I'll fill you full of fruit? Some snow fell off a tree with a thump, making her jump and then feel even more foolish. Now she was flinching at the fall of a handful of snowflakes! A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her. She raised the Cornucopia and said, half-heartedly: "Strawberry…."

Something shot out of the Cornucopia with a pfut and made a red stain on a tree twenty feet away. Tiffany didn't bother to check; it always delivered what you asked for. Which was more than she could say for herself. And on top of everything else, it was her day to visit Annagramma. Tiffany sighed deeply. She'd probably get that wrong too. Slowly, astride her broomstick, she disappeared among the trees. After a minute or two, a green shoot thrust up from the patch of soil that she had breathed on, grew to a height of about six inches, and put out two green leaves. Footsteps approached. They were not as crunchy as footsteps on frozen snow usually are. There was a crunch now, though, of someone kneeling on the frosted leaves. A pair of skinny but powerful hands gently dragged and sculpted the snow and leaves together to make a tall, thin wall around the shoot, enclosing it and protecting it from the wind like a soldier in a castle. A small white kitten tried to nuzzle at it and was carefully lifted out of the way. Then Granny Weatherwax walked back into the woods, leaving no footprints. You never teach anyone else everything you know. Days went by. Annagramma learned, but it was a struggle. It was hard to teach someone who wouldn't admit that there was anything she didn't know, so there were conversations like this: "You know how to prepare placebo root, do you?"

"Of course. Everyone knows that." And this was not the time to say, "Okay then, show me," because she'd mess around for a while and then say she had a headache. This was the time to say, "Good, watch me to see if I'm doing it right," and then do it perfectly. And you'd add things like: "As you know, Granny Weatherwax says that practically anything works instead of placebo root, but it's best to use the real thing if you can get it.

If prepared in syrup, it's an amazing remedy for minor illnesses, but of course you already know this." And Annagramma would say: "Of course." A week later, in the forests, it was so cold some older trees exploded in the night. They hadn't seen that for a long time, the older people said. It happened when the sap froze, then tried to expand. Annagramma was as vain as a canary in a room full of mirrors and panicked instantly when faced with anything she didn't know, but she was sharp at picking things up, and very good at appearing to know more than she really did, which is a valuable talent for a witch. Once, Tiffany noticed the Boffo catalogue open on the table with some things circled. She asked no questions. She was too busy. A week after that, wells froze. Tiffany went around the villages with Annagramma a few times and knew that she would make it, eventually. She'd got built-in Boffo. She was tall and arrogant and acted as if she knew everything even when she didn't have a clue. That would get her a long way. People listened to her. They needed to. There were no roads open now; between cottages, people had cut tunnels full of cold blue light.

Anything that needed to be moved was moved by broomstick. That included old people. They were lifted, bedclothes, walking sticks, and all, and moved into other houses. People packed together stayed warmer, and could pass the time by reminding one another that, however cold this was, it wasn't as cold as the cold you got when they were young. After a while, they stopped saying that. Sometimes it would thaw, just a little, and then freeze again. That fringed every roof with icicles. At the next thaw, they stabbed the ground like daggers. Tiffany didn't sleep; at least, she didn't go to bed. None of the witches did. The snow got trampled down into ice that was like rock, so a few carts could be moved about, but there still weren't enough witches to go around or enough hours in the day. There weren't enough hours in the day and the night put together. Petulia had fallen asleep on her stick and ended up in a tree two miles away. Tiffany slid off once and landed in a snowdrift.

Wolves entered the tunnels. They were weak with hunger, and desperate. Granny Weatherwax put a stop to them and never told anyone how she'd done it. The cold was like being punched, over and over again, day and night. All over the snow were little dark dots that were dead birds, frozen out of the air. Other birds had found the tunnels and filled them with twittering, and people fed them scraps because they brought a false hope of spring to the world… …because there was food. Oh, yes, there was food. The Cornucopia ran day and night. And Tiffany thought: I should have said no to snowflakes…. There was a shack, old and abandoned. And there was, in the rotted planks, a nail. If the Wintersmith had had fingers, they would have been shaking. This was the last thing! There had been so much to learn! It had been so hard, so hard! Who would have thought a man was made of stuff like chalk and soot and gases and poisons and metals? But now ice formed under the rusty nail, and the wood groaned and squeaked as the ice grew and forced it out. It spun gently in the air, and the voice of the Wintersmith could be heard in the wind that froze the treetops: "IRON ENOUGH TO MAKE A MAN!"

High up in the mountains the snow exploded. It mounded up into the air as if dolphins were playing under it, shapes forming and disappearing…. Then, as suddenly as it had risen, the snow settled again. But now there was a horse there, white as snow, and on its back a rider, glittering with frost. If the greatest sculptor the world had ever known had been told to build a snowman, this is what it would have looked like. Something was still going on. The shape of the horse and man still crawled with movement as they grew more and more lifelike. Details settled. Colors crept in, always pale, never bright. And there was a horse, and there was a rider, shining in the comfortless light of the midwinter sun. The Wintersmith extended a hand and flexed his fingers. Color is, after all, merely a matter of reflection; the fingers took on the color of flesh. The Wintersmith spoke. That is, there were a variety of noises, from the roar of a gale to the rattle of the sucking of the surf on a pebble shore after a wrecking storm at sea. Somewhere among them all was a tone that seemed right.

He repeated it, stretched it, stirred it around, and turned it into speech, playing with it until it sounded right. He said: "Tasbnlerizwip? Ggokyziofvva? Wiswip? Nananana…Nyip…nap…Ah…. Ah! It is to speak!" The Wintersmith threw back his head and sang the overture to Überwald Winter by the composer Wotua Doinov. He'd overheard it once when driving a roaring gale around the rooftops of an opera house, and had been astonished to find that a human being, nothing more really than a bag of dirty water on legs, could have such a wonderful understanding of snow. "SNOVA POXOLODALO!" he sang to the freezing sky. The only slight error the Wintersmith made, as his horse trotted through the pine trees, was in singing the instruments as well as the voices. He sang, in fact, the whole thing, and rode like a traveling orchestra, making the sounds of the singers, the drums, and the rest of the orchestra all at once. To smell the trees! To feel the pull of the ground! To be solid!

To feel the darkness behind your eyes and know it was you! To be—and know yourself to be—a man! He had never felt like this before. It was exhilarating. There was so much of…of everything, coming at him from every direction. The thing with the ground, for example. It tugged, all the time. Standing upright took a lot of thinking about. And the birds! The Wintersmith had always seen them as nothing more than impurities in the air, interfering with the flow of the weather, but now they were living things just like him. And they played with the tug of the wind, and owned the sky. The Wintersmith had never seen before, never felt before, never heard before. You could not do those things unless you were…apart, in the dark behind the eyes. Before, he hadn't been apart; he'd been a part, a part of the whole universe of tug and pressure, sound and light, flowing, dancing. He'd run storms against mountains forever, but he'd never known what a mountain was until today. The dark behind the eyes…what a precious thing. It gave you your…you-ness. Your hand, with those laughable waggly things on it, gave you touch; the holes on either side of your head let in sound; the holes at the front let in the wonderful smell. How clever of holes to know what to do! It was amazing!

ER NINE

Green Shoots I t was much colder the next morning, a numb dull coldness that could practically freeze the flames on a fire. Tiffany let the broomstick settle between the trees a little way from Nanny Ogg's cottage. The snow hadn't drifted much here, but it came up to her knees, and cold had put a crispness on it that crackled like a stale loaf when Tiffany trod it. In theory she was out in the woods to get the hang of the Cornucopia, but really she was there to keep it out of the way. Nanny Ogg hadn't been too upset about the chickens. After all, she now owned five hundred hens, which were currently standing around in her shed going werk. But the floors were a mess, there were chicken doo-dahs even on the banisters, and as Granny had pointed out (in a whisper), supposing someone had said "sharks"?

The Cornucopia lay on her lap while she sat on a stump among snow-covered trees. Once the forest had been pretty. Now it was hateful. Dark trunks against snowdrifts, a striped world of black and white, bars against the light. She longed for horizons. Funny…the Cornucopia was always very slightly warm, even out here, and seemed to know in advance what size it ought to be. "I grow, I shrink," thought Tiffany. And I'm feeling pretty small. What next? What now? She'd kept hoping that the…the power would drop on her, just like the Cornucopia had done. It hadn't. There was life under the snow. She felt it in her fingertips. Somewhere down there, out of reach, was the real Summer. Using the Cornucopia as a scoop, she scraped away at the snow until she reached dead leaves. There was life down there in the white webs of fungi and pale, new roots. A half-frozen worm crawled slowly away and burrowed under a leaf skeleton, fine as lace. Beside it was an acorn. The woods weren't silent. They were holding their breath. They were all waiting for her, and she didn't know what to do. I'm not the Summer Lady, she told herself. I can never be her. I'm in her shoes, but I can never be her. I might be able to make a few flowers grow, but I can never be her. She'll walk across the world and oceans of sap will rise in these dead trees and a million tons of grass will grow in a second. Can I do that? No. I'm a stupid child with a handful of tricks, that's all. I'm just Tiffany Aching, and I'm aching to go home. Feeling guilty about the worm, she breathed some warm air on the soil and then pushed the leaves back to cover it. As she did so, there was a wet little sound, like the snapping of a frog's fingers, and the acorn split.

A white shoot escaped from it and grew more than half an inch as she watched it. Hurriedly she made a hole in the mold with her fingers, pushed the acorn in, and patted the soil back again. Someone was watching her. She stood up and turned around quickly. There was no one to be seen, but that didn't mean a thing. "I know you're there!" she said, still turning around. "Whoever you are!" Her voice echoed among the black trees. Even to her it sounded thin and scared. She found herself raising the Cornucopia. "Show yourself," she quavered, "or—" What? she wondered. I'll fill you full of fruit? Some snow fell off a tree with a thump, making her jump and then feel even more foolish. Now she was flinching at the fall of a handful of snowflakes! A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her. She raised the Cornucopia and said, half-heartedly: "Strawberry…."

Something shot out of the Cornucopia with a pfut and made a red stain on a tree twenty feet away. Tiffany didn't bother to check; it always delivered what you asked for. Which was more than she could say for herself. And on top of everything else, it was her day to visit Annagramma. Tiffany sighed deeply. She'd probably get that wrong too. Slowly, astride her broomstick, she disappeared among the trees. After a minute or two, a green shoot thrust up from the patch of soil that she had breathed on, grew to a height of about six inches, and put out two green leaves. Footsteps approached. They were not as crunchy as footsteps on frozen snow usually are. There was a crunch now, though, of someone kneeling on the frosted leaves. A pair of skinny but powerful hands gently dragged and sculpted the snow and leaves together to make a tall, thin wall around the shoot, enclosing it and protecting it from the wind like a soldier in a castle. A small white kitten tried to nuzzle at it and was carefully lifted out of the way. Then Granny Weatherwax walked back into the woods, leaving no footprints. You never teach anyone else everything you know. Days went by. Annagramma learned, but it was a struggle. It was hard to teach someone who wouldn't admit that there was anything she didn't know, so there were conversations like this: "You know how to prepare placebo root, do you?"

"Of course. Everyone knows that." And this was not the time to say, "Okay then, show me," because she'd mess around for a while and then say she had a headache. This was the time to say, "Good, watch me to see if I'm doing it right," and then do it perfectly. And you'd add things like: "As you know, Granny Weatherwax says that practically anything works instead of placebo root, but it's best to use the real thing if you can get it.