Wintersmith

Page 28

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!