Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett [89]
He said: “Tasbnlerizwip? Ggokyziofvva? Wiswip? Nananana…Nyip…nap…Ah…. Ah! It is to speak!” The Wintersmith threw back his head and sang the overture to Überwald Winter by the composer Wotua Doinov. He’d overheard it once when driving a roaring gale around the rooftops of an opera house, and had been astonished to find that a human being, nothing more really than a bag of dirty water on legs, could have such a wonderful understanding of snow.
“SNOVA POXOLODALO!” he sang to the freezing sky.
The only slight error the Wintersmith made, as his horse trotted through the pine trees, was in singing the instruments as well as the voices. He sang, in fact, the whole thing, and rode like a traveling orchestra, making the sounds of the singers, the drums, and the rest of the orchestra all at once.
To smell the trees! To feel the pull of the ground! To be solid! To feel the darkness behind your eyes and know it was you! To be—and know yourself to be—a man!
He had never felt like this before. It was exhilarating. There was so much of…of everything, coming at him from every direction. The thing with the ground, for example. It tugged, all the time. Standing upright took a lot of thinking about. And the birds! The Wintersmith had always seen them as nothing more than impurities in the air, interfering with the flow of the weather, but now they were living things just like him. And they played with the tug of the wind, and owned the sky.
The Wintersmith had never seen before, never felt before, never heard before. You could not do those things unless you were…apart, in the dark behind the eyes. Before, he hadn’t been apart; he’d been a part, a part of the whole universe of tug and pressure, sound and light, flowing, dancing. He’d run storms against mountains forever, but he’d never known what a mountain was until today.
The dark behind the eyes…what a precious thing. It gave you your…you-ness. Your hand, with those laughable waggly things on it, gave you touch; the holes on either side of your head let in sound; the holes at the front let in the wonderful smell. How clever of holes to know what to do! It was amazing! When you were an elemental, everything happened all together, inside and outside, in one big…thing.
Thing. That was a useful word…thing. Thing was anything the Wintersmith couldn’t describe. Everything was…things, and they were exciting.
It was good to be a man! Oh, he was mostly made of dirty ice, but that was just better-organized dirty water, after all.
Yes, he was human. It was so easy. It was just a matter of organizing things. He had senses, he could move among humans, he could…search. That was how to search for humans. You became one! It was so hard to do it as an elemental; it was hard even to recognize a human in the churning thing-ness of the physical world. But a human could talk to other humans with the holes for the sound. He could talk to them and they would not suspect!
And now that he was human, there would be no going back. King Winter!
All he needed was a queen.
Tiffany woke up because someone was shaking her.
“Tiffany!”
She’d gone to sleep in Nanny Ogg’s cottage with her head against the Cornucopia. From somewhere close there was a strange pif noise, like a dry drip. Pale-blue snowlight filled the room.
As she opened her eyes, Granny Weatherwax was gently pushing her back into her chair.
“You’ve been sleeping since nine o’clock, my girl,” she said. “Time to go home, I think.”
Tiffany looked around. “I am here, aren’t I?” she said, feeling dizzy.
“No, this is Nanny Ogg’s house. And this is a bowl of soup—”
Tiffany woke up. There was a blurry bowl of soup in front of her. It looked…familiar.
“When did you last sleep in a bed?” said a wavering, shadowy figure.
Tiffany yawned. “What day is this?”
“Tuesday,” said Granny Weatherwax.
“Mmm…what’s a Tuesday?”
Tiffany woke up for the third time and was grabbed and pulled upright.
“There,” said the voice of Granny Weatherwax. “This time stay awake. Drink soup. Get warm. You