AHFOS 9

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is. OK, I'll grant you that she's wearing a hat with big stars on it,
but she makes good cheese
and she knows about lambing and she's Granny Aching's grand-daughter,
right? And they'd tap their
noses, knowingly. Granny Aching's grand-daughter. Remember what the
old woman could do? So if
witch she be, then she's our witch. She knows about sheep, she does.
Hah, and I heard they had a
big sort of trial for witches up in them mountains and our Tiffany
showed 'em what a girl from the
Chalk can do. It's modern times, right? We got a witch now, and she's
better'n anyone else's! No
one's throwing Granny Aching's granddaughter in a pond! Tomorrow she'd
go back to the mountains
again. It had been a busy three weeks, quite apart from the lambing.
Roland had invited her to tea
at the castle. It had been a bit awkward, as these things are, but it
was funny how, in a couple
of years, he'd gone from a lumbering oaf into a nervous young man who
forgot what he was talking
about when she smiled at him. And they had books in the castle! He'd
shyly presented her with a
Dictionary of Amazingly Uncommon Words, and she had been prepared
enough to bring him a hunting
knife made by Zakzak, who was excellent at blades even if he was
rubbish at magic. The hat wasn't
mentioned, very carefully. And when she'd got home she'd found a
bookmark in the P section and a
faint pencil underline under the words Plongeon: a small curtsy, about
one-third as deep as the
traditional one. No longer used.' Alone in her bedroom, she'd blushed.
It's always surprising to
be reminded that while you're watching and thinking about people, all
knowing and superior,
they're watching and thinking about you, right back at you. She
written it down in her diary,
which was a lot thicker now, what with all the pressed herbs and extra
notes and bookmarks. It had
been trodden on by cows, struck by lightning and dropped in tea. And
it didn't have an eye on it.
An eye would have got knocked off on day one. It was a real witch's
diary. Tiffany had stopped
wearing the hat, except in public, because it kept getting bent by low
doorways and completely
crushed by her bedroom ceiling. She was wearing it today, though,
clutching it occasionally
whenever a gust tried to snatch it off her head. She reached the place
where four rusty iron
wheels were half buried in the turf and a pot-bellied stove stood up
from the grass. It made a
useful seat. Silence spread out around Tiffany, a living silence,
while the sheep danced with
their lambs and the world turned. Why do you go away? So that you can
come back. So that you can
see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the
people there see you
differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as
never leaving. The words ran
through Tiffany's mind as she watched the sheep, and she found herself
fill up with joy- at the
new lambs, at life, at everything. Joy is to fun what the deep sea is
to a puddle. It's a feeling
inside that can hardly be contained. It came oul as laughter. 'I've
come back!' she announced, to
the hills. 'Better than I went!' She snatched off the hat with stars
on it. It wasn't a bad hat,
for show, although the stars made it look like a toy. But it was never
her hat. It couldn't be.
The only hat worth wearing was the one you made for yourself, not one
you bought, not one you were
given. Your own hat, for your own head. Your own future, not someone
else's. She hurled the starry
hat up as high as she could. The wind there caught it neatly. It
tumbled for a moment and then was
lifted by a gust and, swooping and spinning, sailed away across the
downs and vanished for ever.
Then Tiffany made a hat out of the sky and sat on the old pot-bellied
stove, listening to the wind
around the horizons while the sun went down. As the shadows
lengthened, many small shapes crept
out of the nearby mound and joined her in the sacred place, to watch.
The sun set, which is
everyday magic, and warm night came. The hat filled up with stars...
Author's Note The Doctrine of
Signatures mentioned on page 90 really exists in this world, although
now it's better known by
historians than doctors. For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands,
people believed that God, who
of course had made everything, had 'signed' each thing in a way that
showed humanity what it could
be used for. For example, goldenrod is yellow so 'must' be good for
jaundice, which turns the skin
yellow (a certain amount of guesswork was involved, but sometimes
patients survived). By an
amazing coincidence, the Horse carved on the Chalk is remarkably
similar to the Uffington White
Horse, which in this world is carved on the downlands near the village
of Uffington in southwest
Oxfordshire. It's 374 feet long, several thousand years old and carved
on the hill in such a way
that you can only see all of it in one go from the air. This suggests
that: a) it was carved for
the gods to see; or, b) flying was invented a lot earlier that we
thought; or, c) people used to
be much, much taller. Oh, and this world had Witch Trials, too. They
were not fun.