A Hat Full Of Sky - Terry Pratchett [44]
And there she was, and so was the hat, as clear as it had ever been.
And the image of Tiffany below, a young girl in a green dress, opened its eyes and smiled at her and said:
“We see you. Now we are you.”
Tiffany tried to shout, “See me not!” But there was no mouth to shout….
Lightning struck somewhere nearby. The window blew in. The candle flame flew out in a streamer of fire and died.
And then there was only darkness, and the hiss of the rain.
CHAPTER 6
The Hiver
Thunder rolled across the Chalk.
Jeannie carefully opened the package that her mother had given her on the day she’d left the Long Lake mound. It was a traditional gift, one that every young kelda got when she went away, never to return. Keldas could never go home. Keldas were home.
The gift was this: memory.
Inside the bag were a triangle of tanned sheepskin, three wooden stakes, a length of string twisted out of nettle fibers, a tiny leather bottle, and a hammer.
She knew what to do, because she’d see her mother do it many times. The hammer was used to bang in the stakes around the smoldering fire. The string was used to tie the three corners of the leather triangle to the stakes so that it sagged in the center, just enough to hold a small bucketful of water, which Jeannie had drawn herself from the deep well.
She knelt down and waited until the water very slowly began to seep though the leather, then built up the fire.
She was aware of all the eyes of the Feegles in the shadowy galleries around and above her. None of them would come near her while she was boiling the cauldron. They’d rather chop their own legs off. This was pure hiddlins.
And this was what a cauldron really was, back in the days before humans had worked copper or poured iron. It looked like magic. It was supposed to. But if you knew the trick, you could see how the cauldron would boil dry before the leather burned.
When the water in the skin was steaming, she damped down the fire and added to the water the contents of the little leather bottle, which contained some of the water from her mother’s cauldron. That’s how it had always gone, from mother to daughter, since the very beginning.
Jeannie waited until the cauldron had cooled some more, then took up a cup, filled it, and drank. There was a sigh from the shadowy Feegles.
She lay back and closed her eyes, waiting. Nothing happened except that the thunder rattled the land and the lightning turned the world black and white.
And then, so gently that it had already happened before she realized that it was starting to happen, the past caught up with her. There, around her, were all the old keldas, starting with her mother, her grandmothers, their mothers…back until there was no one to remember…one big memory, carried for a while by many, worn and hazy in parts but old as a mountain.
But all the Feegles knew about that. Only the kelda knew about the real hiddlin, which was this: The river of memory wasn’t a river, it was a sea.
Keldas yet to be born would remember, one day. On nights yet to come, they’d lie by their cauldron and become, for a few minutes, part of the eternal sea. By listening to unborn keldas remembering their past, you remember your future….
You needed skill to find those faint voices, and Jeannie did not have all of it yet, but something was there.
As lightning turned the world to black and white again, she sat bolt upright.
“It’s found her,” she whispered. “Oh, the puir wee thing!”
Rain had soaked into the rug when Tiffany woke up. Damp daylight spilled into the room.
She got up and closed the window. A few leaves had blown in.
O-kay.
It hadn’t been a dream. She was certain of that. Something…strange had happened. The tips of her fingers were tingling. She felt…different. But not, now that she took stock, in a bad way. No. Last night she’d felt awful, but now, now she felt…full of life.
Actually, she felt happy. She was going to take charge. She was going to take control of her