Wintersmith (4 page)

The wind died down as she took the forest track, still towing the floating Miss Treason. But the wind had brought cold air with it and then left it behind. Tiffany was glad of the cloak, even if it was black.

She trudged on, taking different tracks when Miss Treason told her to, until she saw firelight through the trees, in a little dip in the land.

“Stop here and help me down, girl,” said the old witch. “And listen carefully. There are rules. One, you will not talk; two, you will look only at the dancers; three,
you will not move until the dance is finished
. I will not tell you twice!”

“Yes, Miss Treason. It’s very cold up here.”

“And will get colder.”

They headed for the distant light. What good is a dance you can only watch? Tiffany wondered. It didn’t sound like much fun.

“It isn’t meant to be fun,” said Miss Treason.

Shadows moved across the firelight, and Tiffany heard the sound of men’s voices. Then, as they reached the edge of the sunken ground, someone threw water over the fire.

There was a hiss, and a cloud of smoke and steam rose among the trees. It happened in a moment and left a shock behind. The only thing that had seemed alive here had died.

Dry fallen leaves crunched under her feet. The moon, in a sky swept clean now of clouds, made little silver shapes on the forest floor.

It was some time before Tiffany realized that there were six men standing in the middle of the clearing. They must have been wearing black; against the moonlight they looked like man-shaped
holes into nothing. They were in two lines of three, facing each other, but were so still that after a while Tiffany wondered if she was imagining them.

There was the thud of a drumbeat:
bom
…
bom
…
bom
.

It went on for half a minute or so, and then stopped. But in the silence of the cold woods the beat went on inside Tiffany’s head, and perhaps that wasn’t the only head it thundered in, because the men were gently nodding their heads, to keep the beat.

They began to dance.

The only noise was of their boots hitting the ground as the shadow men wove in and out. But then Tiffany, her head full of the silent drum, heard another sound. Her foot was tapping, all by itself.

She’d heard this beat before; she’d seen men dancing like this. But it had been on warm days in bright sunshine. They’d worn little bells on their clothes.

“This is a Morris dance!” she said, not quite under her breath.

“Shush!” hissed Miss Treason.

“But this isn’t the right—”

“Be silent!”

Blushing and angry in the dark, Tiffany took her eyes off the dancers and defiantly looked around the clearing. There were other shadows crowding in, human or at least human shaped, but she couldn’t see them clearly and maybe that was just as well.

It was getting colder, she was sure. White frost was crackling across the leaves.

The beat went on. But it seemed to Tiffany that it wasn’t alone now, but had picked up other beats, and echoes from inside her head.

Miss Treason could shush all she liked. It was a Morris dance. But it was out of time!

The Morris men came to the village sometime in May. You could never be sure when, because they had to call at lots of villages along the Chalk, and every village had a pub, which slowed them down.

They carried sticks and wore white clothes with bells on them, to stop them from creeping up on people. No one likes an unexpected Morris dancer. Tiffany would wait outside the village with the other children and dance behind them all the way in.

And then they used to dance on the village green to the beat of a drum, banging their sticks together in the air, and then everyone would go to the pub and summer would come.

Tiffany hadn’t been able to work out how that last bit happened. The dancers danced, and then summer came—that was all anybody seemed to know. Her father said that there had once been a year when the dancers hadn’t turned up, and a cold wet spring had turned into a chilly autumn, with the months between being filled with mists and rain and frosts in August.

The sound of the drums filled her head now, making her feel dizzy. They were wrong; there was something wrong—

And then she remembered the seventh dancer, the one they called the Fool. He was generally a small man, wearing a battered top hat and bright rags sewn all over his clothes. Mostly he wandered around holding out the hat and grinning at people until they gave him money for beer. But sometimes he’d put the hat down and whirl off into the dancers. You’d expect there to be a massive collision of arms and legs, but it never happened. Jumping and twirling among the sweating men, he always managed to be where the other dancers weren’t.

The world was moving around her. She blinked. The drums in her head were like thunder now, and there was one beat as deep as
oceans. Miss Treason was forgotten. So was the strange, mysterious crowd. Now there was only the dance itself.

It twisted in the air like a living thing. But there was a space in it, moving around. It was where she should be, she knew it. Miss Treason had said no, but that had been a long time ago and how could Miss Treason understand? What could she know? When did
she
last dance? The dance was in Tiffany’s bones now, calling to her. Six dancers were not enough!

She ran forward and jumped into the dance.

The eyes of the dancing men glared at her as she skipped and danced between them, always being where they weren’t. The drums had her feet, and they went where the beat sent them.

And then……there was someone else there.

It was like the feeling of someone behind her—but it was also the feeling of someone in front of her, and beside her, and above her, and below her, all at once.

The dancers froze, but the world spun. The men were just black shadows, darker outlines in the darkness. The drumbeats stopped, and there was one long moment as Tiffany turned gently and silently, arms out, feet not touching the ground, her face turned toward stars that were as cold as ice and sharp as needles. It felt…wonderful.

A voice said: “Who Are You?” It had an echo, or perhaps two people had said it at almost the same time.

The beat came back, suddenly, and six men crashed into her.

A few hours later, in the small town of Dogbend, down on the plains, the citizens threw a witch into the river with her arms and legs tied together.

This sort of thing never happened in the mountains, where witches had respect, but down on the wide plains there were still people dumb enough to believe the nastier stories. Besides, there wasn’t much to do in the evenings.

However, it probably wasn’t often that the witch was given a cup of tea and some biscuits before her ducking.

It had happened here because the people of Dogbend Did It By The Book.

The book was called:
Magavenatio Obtusis
.
*

The townspeople didn’t know how the book had arrived. It had just turned up one day, on a shelf in one of the shops.

They knew how to read, of course. You had to have a certain amount of reading and writing to get on in the world, even in Dogbend. But they didn’t trust books much, or the kind of people who read them.

This one, though, was a book on how to deal with witches. It looked pretty authoritative, too, without too many long (and therefore untrustworthy) words, like “marmalade.” At last, they told one another, this is what we need. This is a sensible book. Okay, it isn’t what you’d expect, but remember that witch last year? We ducked her in the river and then tried to burn her alive? Only she was too soggy, and got away? Let’s not go through that again!

They paid particular attention to this bit:

Of course, this time some people did. And what they saw was the witch sinking and not coming up again, while her wicked
pointy hat floated away. Then they went home for breakfast.

In this particular river, nothing much happened for several minutes more. Then the pointy hat started to move toward a thick patch of reeds. It stopped there, and rose very slowly. A pair of eyes peered out from underneath the brim….

When she was sure that there was no one about, Miss Perspicacia Tick, teacher and witch finder, crawled up the bank on her stomach and then legged it away at high speed into the woods just as the sun came up. She’d left a bag with a clean dress and some fresh underwear stuck in a badger’s sett, along with a box of matches (she never carried matches in her pocket if there was a danger of being caught, in case it gave people ideas).

Well, she thought, as she dried out in front of a fire, things could have been worse. Thank goodness the village still had someone left who could read, or else she would have been in a pretty pickle. Maybe it was a good idea that she’d had the book printed in big letters.

It was in fact Miss Tick who had written
Witch Hunting for Dumb People
, and she made sure that copies of it found their way into those areas where people still believed that witches should be burned or drowned.

Since the only witch ever likely to pass through these days was Miss Tick herself, it meant that if things did go wrong, she’d get a good night’s sleep and a decent meal before being thrown into the water. The water was no problem at all to Miss Tick, who had been to the Quirm College for Young Ladies, where you had to have an icy dip every morning to build Moral Fiber. And a No. 1 Bosun’s knot was very easy to undo with your teeth, even underwater.

Oh, yes, she thought, as she emptied her boots, and she’d got two silver sixpences, too. Really, the people of the village of Dogbend were getting very stupid indeed. Of course, that’s what
happened when you got rid of your witches. A witch was just someone who knew a bit more than you did. That’s what the name meant. And some people didn’t like anyone who knew more than they did, so these days the wandering teachers and the traveling librarians steered clear of the place. The way things were going, if the people of Dogbend wanted to throw stones at anyone who knew more than them, they’d soon have to throw them at the pigs.

The place was a mess. Unfortunately there was a girl aged eight there who was definitely showing promise, and Miss Tick dropped in sometimes to keep an eye on her. Not as a witch, obviously, because although she liked a cold dip in the morning, you could have too much of a good thing. She disguised herself as a humble apple seller, or a fortune-teller. (Witches don’t usually do fortune-telling, because if they did, they’d be too good at it. People don’t want to know what’s really going to happen, only that it’s going to be nice. But witches don’t add sugar.)

Unfortunately the spring on Miss Tick’s stealth hat had gone wrong while she was walking down the main street and the point had popped up. Even Miss Tick hadn’t been able to talk her way out of that one. Oh well, she’d have to make other arrangements now. Witch finding was always dangerous. You had to do it, though. A witch growing up all alone was a sad and dangerous child….

She stopped, and stared at the fire. Why had she just thought about Tiffany Aching? Why now?

Working quickly, she emptied her pockets and started a shamble.

Shambles worked. That was about all you could say about them for certain. You made them out of some string and a couple of sticks and anything you had in your pocket at the time. They were a witch’s equivalent of those knives with fifteen blades and three screwdrivers and a tiny magnifying glass and a thing for
extracting earwax from chickens.

You couldn’t even say precisely what they did, although Miss Tick thought they were a way of finding out what things the hidden bits of your own mind somehow knew. You had to make a shamble from scratch every time, and only from things in your pockets. There was no harm in having interesting things in your pockets, though, just in case.