A Hat Full Of Sky - Terry Pratchett [21]
When she spun around, the candlestick was back on the table.
Well…today was going to be a day when she got answers. Tiffany enjoyed the slightly angry feeling. It stopped her thinking about how much she wanted to go home.
She went to put her dress on and realized that there was something soft yet crackly in a pocket.
Oh, how could she have forgotten? But it had been a busy day, a very busy day, and maybe she’d wanted to forget, anyway.
She pulled out Roland’s present and opened the white tissue paper carefully.
It was a necklace.
It was the Horse.
Tiffany stared at it.
Not what a horse looks like, but what a horse be…. It had been carved in the turf back before history began, by people who had managed to convey in a few flowing lines everything a horse was: strength, grace, beauty, and speed, straining to break free of the hill.
And now someone—someone clever and, therefore, probably also someone expensive—had made it out of silver. It was flat, just like it was on the hillside, and just like the Horse on the hillside, some parts of it were not joined to the rest of the body. The craftsman, though, had joined these carefully together with tiny silver chain, so when Tiffany held it up in astonishment, it was all there, moving-while-standing-still in the morning light.
She had to put it on. And…there was no mirror, not even a tiny hand one. Oh, well…
“See me,” said Tiffany.
And far away, down on the plains, something that had lost the trail awoke. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the mist on the fields parted as something invisible started to move, making a noise like a swarm of flies….
Tiffany shut her eyes, took a couple of small steps sideways and a few steps forward, turned around, and carefully opened her eyes again. There she stood, in front of her, as still as a picture. The Horse looked very good on the new dress, silver against green.
She wondered how much it must have cost Roland. She wondered why.
“See me not,” she said. Slowly she took the necklace off, wrapped it up again in its tissue paper, and put it in the box with the other things from home. Then she found one of the postcards from Twoshirts and a pencil, and with care and attention, she wrote Roland a short thank-you note. After a flash of guilt she carefully used the other postcard to tell her parents that she was completely still alive.
Then, thoughtfully, she went downstairs.
It had been dark last night, so she hadn’t noticed the posters stuck up all down the stairs. They were from circuses, and were covered with clowns and animals and that old-fashioned poster lettering where no two lines of type are the same.
They said things like:
THRILLS GALORE! HURRY! HURRY! HURRY!
PROFESSOR MONTY BLADDER’S THREE-RING CIRCUS AND CABINET OF CURIOSITIES!!
SEE THE HORSE WITH HIS HEAD WHERE HIS TAIL SHOULD BE!
SEE THE AMAZING DISLOCATING JACK PUT A LION’S HEAD IN HIS ACTUAL MOUTH!!!
SEE THE EGRESS!!!!!
CLOWNS! CLOWNS! CLOWNS!
THE FLYING PASTRAMI BROTHERS WILL DEFY GRAVITY, THE GREATEST FORCE IN THE UNIVERSE *WITHOUT A NET!*
SEE CLARENCE THE TAP-DANCING MULE!
WONDER AT TOPSY AND TIPSY
*THE ASTOUNDING MIND-READING ACT*
And so it went on, right down to tiny print. They were strange, bright things to find in a little cottage in the woods.
She found her way into the kitchen. It was cold and quiet, except for the ticking of a clock on the wall. Both the hands had fallen off the clock face and lay at the bottom of the glass cover, so while the clock was still measuring time, it wasn’t inclined to tell anyone about it.
As kitchens went, it was very tidy. In the cupboard drawer under the sink, forks, spoons, and knives were all in neat sections, which was a bit worrying. Every kitchen drawer Tiffany had ever seen might have been meant to be neat but over the years had been crammed with things that didn’t quite fit, like big ladles and bent bottle openers, which meant that they always stuck unless you knew the trick of opening them.
Experimentally she took