Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett [88]
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,