Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett [69]
“Do you hear this, you wicked boy?” Aunt Danuta sounded triumphant. “Now it’s barred from this side too! Hah! This is for your own good, you know. You will stay in there until you are ready to apologize!”
—like hard work, to be honest. Worthy, though, visiting the sick and everything, but very busy and not very magical. He’d heard of “dancing around without your drawers on” and tried his best not to imagine it, but in any case there didn’t seem to be anything like that. Even broomstick rides sounded—
“And we know about your secret passage now, oh yes! It’s being walled up! No more thumbing your nose at people who are doing their very best for you!”
—dull. He paused for a moment, staring blankly at the carefully stacked piles of loaves and sausages beside his bed. I ought to get some onions tonight, he thought. General Tacticus says they are unsurpassable for the proper operation of the digestive system if you can’t find fresh fruit.
What to write, what to write…yes! He’d tell her about the party. He’d only gone because his father, in one of his good moments, had asked him to. It was important to keep in with the neighbors but not with the relatives! It’d been quite nice to get out, and he’d been able to leave his horse at Mr. Gamely’s stable, where the aunts wouldn’t think of looking for it. Yes…she’d enjoy hearing about the party.
The aunts were shouting again, about locking the door to his father’s room. And they were blocking the secret passage. That meant that all he was left with was the loose stone that came out behind the tapestry in the next room, the wobbly flagstone that could let him drop down into the room below, and, of course, the chain outside the window that let him climb all the way down to the ground. And on his desk, on top of General Tacticus’s book, was a complete set of shiny new castle keys. He’d got Mr. Gamely to make them for him. The blacksmith was a thoughtful man who could see the sense in being friendly to the next Baron.
He could come and go as he liked, whatever they did. They could bully his father, they could shout all they pleased, but they would never own him.
You could learn a lot from books.
The Wintersmith was learning. It was a hard, slow task when you had to make your brain out of ice. But he had learned about snowmen. They were built by the smaller kinds of humans. That was interesting. Apart from the ones in pointy hats, the bigger humans didn’t seem to hear him. They knew invisible creatures didn’t speak to them out of the air.
The small ones, though, hadn’t found out what was impossible.
In the big city was a big snowman.
Actually, it would be more honest to call it a slushman. Technically it was snow, but by the time it had spiraled down through the big city’s fogs, smogs, and smokes, it was already a sort of yellowish gray, and then most of what ended up on the pavement was what had been thrown up from the gutter by cart wheels. It was, at best, a mostly snowman. But three grubby children were building it anyway, because building something that you could call a snowman was what you did. Even if it was yellow.
They’d done their best with what they could find and had given him two horse droppings for eyes and a dead rat for a nose.
At which point the snowman spoke to them, in their heads.
Small humans, why do you do that?
The boy who might have been the older boy looked at the girl who might have been the older girl. “I’ll tell you I heard that if you say you heard it too,” he said.
The girl was still young enough not to think “snowmen can’t talk” when one of them had just spoken to her, so she said to it: “You have to put them in to make you a snowman, mister.”
Does that make me human?
“No, ’cuz…” She hesitated.
“You ain’t got innards,” said the third and smallest child, who might have been the younger boy or the younger girl, but who was spherical with so many layers of clothing that it was quite impossible to tell.