Tiffany Aching Complete Collection, page 110
Amber, on fire with enthusiasm, pushed her way in through the flap and gasped.
“Oh, miss, oh, miss, it does suit you so! Oh, miss! If only you could see yourself, miss! Do come and show William, miss, he’ll be as proud as a king! Oh, miss!”
You couldn’t disappoint Amber. You just couldn’t. It would be like, well, kicking a puppy.
Tiffany felt different without the hat. Lighter, perhaps. And William gasped and said, “I wish my master was here, Miss Aching, because you are a masterpiece. I just wish you could see yourself . . . miss?”
And just for a moment, because people shouldn’t get too suspicious, Tiffany stood outside herself and watched herself twirl the beautiful dress as black as a cat full of sixpences, and she thought: I shall wear midnight, and I will be good at it. . . .
She hurried back to her body and shyly thanked the young tailor. “It’s wonderful, William, and I will happily fly over to show your master. The cuffs are wonderful!”
Amber was jumping up and down again. “We’d better hurry if we’re going to see the tug-of-war, miss—it’s Feegles versus humans! It’s going to be fun!”
And in fact, they could hear the roar of the Feegles warming up, though they had made a slight alteration to their traditional chant: “Nae king, nae quin, nae laird! One baron—and underrr mutually ag-rreeeed arrr-angement, ye ken!”
“You go on ahead,” said Tiffany. “I’m waiting for somebody.”
Amber paused for a moment. “Don’t wait too long, miss, don’t wait too long!”
Tiffany walked slowly in the wonderful dress, wondering if she would dare wear it every day and . . . hands came past her ears and covered her eyes.
A voice behind her said, “A nosegay for the pretty lady? You never know—it might help you find your beau.”
She spun round. “Preston!”
They talked as they strolled away from the noise, and Tiffany listened to news about the bright young lad that Preston had trained to take over as the school’s new teacher; and about exams and doctors and the Lady Sybil Free Hospital, which had—and this was the really important part—just taken on one new apprentice, this being Preston, possibly because since he could talk the hind leg off a donkey, he might have a talent for surgery.
“I don’t reckon I’ll get many holidays,” he said. “You don’t get many when you’re an apprentice, and I shall have to sleep under the autoclave every night and look after all the saws and scalpels, but I know all the bones by heart!”
“Well, it’s not too far by broomstick, after all,” said Tiffany.
Preston’s expression changed as he reached into his pocket and pulled out something wrapped in fine tissue, which he handed to her without saying a word.
Tiffany unwrapped it, knowing—absolutely knowing—that it would be the golden hare. There was no possibility in the world that it wouldn’t have been. She tried to find the words, but Preston always had an adequate supply.
He said, “Miss Tiffany, the witch . . . would you be so good as to tell me: What is the sound of love?”
Tiffany looked at his face. The noise from the tug-of-war was silenced. The birds stopped singing. In the grass, the grasshoppers stopped rubbing their legs together and looked up. The earth moved slightly as even the chalk giant (perhaps) strained to hear, and the silence flowed over the world until all there was was Preston, who was always there.
And Tiffany said, “Listen.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My job is to make things up, and the best way to make things up is to make them out of real things. . . .
When I was a small boy, just after the last Ice Age, we lived in a cottage that Tiffany Aching would recognize: We had cold water, no electricity, and took a bath once a week, because the tin bath had to be brought in from its nail, which was outside on the back of the kitchen wall; and it took a long time to fill it, when all my mother had to heat water with was one kettle. Then I, as the youngest, had the first bath, followed by Mum and then Dad, and finally the dog if Dad thought it was getting a bit whiffy.
There were old men in the village who had been born in the Jurassic period and looked, to me, all the same, with flat caps and serious trousers held up with very thick leather belts. One of them was called Mr. Allen, who wouldn’t drink water from a tap because, he said, “It’s got neither taste nor smell.” He drank water from the roof of his house, which fed a rain barrel.
Presumably he drank more than rainwater, because he had a nose that looked like two strawberries that had crashed into each other.*
Mr. Allen used to sit out in the sun in front of his cottage on an old kitchen chair, watching the world go by, and we kids used to watch his nose, in case it exploded. One day I was chatting to him, and out of the blue he said to me, “You seen stubbles burning, boy?”
I certainly had: not near our home, but when we drove down to the coast on holiday, though sometimes the smoke from the burning stubbles was so thick that it looked like a fog. The stubbles were what was left in the ground after most of the corn stems had been cut. The burning was said to be good for getting rid of pests and diseases, but the process meant lots of small birds and animals were burned. The practice has long since been banned, for that very reason.
One day when the harvest wagon went down our lane, Mr. Allen said to me, “You ever seen a hare, boy?”
I said, “Yes, of course.” (If you haven’t seen a hare, then imagine a rabbit crossed with a greyhound, one that can leap magnificently.) Mr. Allen said, “The hare ain’t afraid of fire. She stares it down, and jumps over it, and lands safe on the other side.”
I must have been about six or seven years old, but I remembered it, because Mr. Allen died not long afterward. Then when I was much older, I found in a secondhand bookshop a book called The Leaping Hare, written by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson, and I learned things that I would not have dared to make up.
Mr. Evans, who died in 1988, spoke—during his long life—to the men who worked on the land—not from the cab of a tractor, but with horses—and they saw the wildlife around them. I suspect that maybe they had put a little bit of a shine on the things they told him, but everything is all the better for a little bit of shine, and I have not hesitated to polish up the legend of the hare for you. If it is not the truth, then it is what the truth ought to be.
I dedicate this book to Mr. Evans, a wonderful man who helped many of us to learn about the depths of history over which we float. It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.
Terry Pratchett
Wiltshire
27 May 2010
Appendix
A Feegle Glossary, adjusted for
those of a delicate disposition
(A Work In Progress By Miss Perspicacia Tick, witch)
Bigjobs: Human beings.
Big Man: Chief of the clan (usually the husband of the kelda).
Blethers: Rubbish, nonsense.
Boggin’: To be desperate, as in “I’m boggin’ for a cup of tea.”
Bunty: A weak person.
Carlin: Old woman.
Cludgie: The privy.
Crivens!: A general exclamation that can mean anything from “My goodness!” to “I’ve just lost my temper and there is going to be trouble.”
Dree your/my/his/her weird: Facing the fate that is in store for you/me/him/her.
Een: Eyes.
Eldritch: Weird, strange; sometimes means oblong too, for some reason.
Fash: Worry, upset.
Geas: A very important obligation, backed up by tradition and magic. Not a bird.
Gonnagle: The bard of the clan, skilled in musical instruments, poems, stories, and songs.
Hag: A witch, of any age.
Hag o’ hags: A very important witch.
Hagging/Haggling: Anything a witch does.
Hiddlins: Secrets.
Kelda: The female head of the clan, and eventually the mother of most of it. Feegle babies are very small, and a kelda will have hundreds in her lifetime.
Lang syne: Long ago.
Last World: The Feegles believe that they are dead. This world is so nice, they argue, that they must have been really good in a past life and then died and ended up here. Appearing to die here means merely going back to the Last World, which they believe is rather dull.
Mudlin: Useless person.
Pished: I am assured that this means “tired.”
Schemie: An unpleasant person.
Scuggan: A really unpleasant person.
Scunner: A generally unpleasant person.
Ships: Woolly things that eat grass and go baa. Easily confused with the other kind.
Spavie: See Mudlin.
Special Sheep Liniment: Probably moonshine whisky, I am very sorry to say. No one knows what it’d do to sheep, but it is said that a drop of it is good for shepherds on a cold winter’s night and for Feegles at any time at all. Do not try to make this at home.
Spog: A small leather bag at the front of a Feegle’s kilt, which covers whatever he presumably thinks needs to be hidden and generally holds things like something he is halfway through eating, something he’s found that now therefore belongs to him, and quite often—because even a Feegle can catch a cold—it might hold whatever he was using as a handkerchief, which might not necessarily be dead.
Steamie: Only found in the big Feegle mounds in the mountains, where there’s enough water to allow regular bathing; it’s a kind of sauna. Feegles on the Chalk tend to rely on the fact that you can only get so much dirt on you before it starts to fall off of its own accord.
Waily: A general cry of despair.
CREDITS
Cover art and design © 2015
by Jim Tierney
COPYRIGHT
I SHALL WEAR MIDNIGHT. Copyright © 2010 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pratchett, Terry.
I shall wear midnight / Terry Pratchett.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Fifteen-year-old Tiffany Aching, the witch of the Chalk, seeks her place amid a troublesome populace and tries to control the ill-behaved, six-inch-high Wee Free Men who follow her as she faces an ancient evil that agitates against witches.
ISBN 978-0-06-143306-1
EPub Edition © May 2015 ISBN 9780062012715
[1. Witches—Fiction. 2. Fairies—Fiction. 3. Ghosts—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P8865Ial 2010 2010024442
[Fic]—dc22 CIP
AC
* * *
11 12 13 14 15 CG/BV 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First paperback edition, 2011
*This was done blindfolded.
*Speaking as a witch, she knew them very well.
*Later on, Tiffany realized that all the witches had probably flown across the giant, especially since you could hardly miss him if you were flying from the mountains to the big city. He kind of stood out, in any case. But in Nanny Ogg’s case, she would probably turn round to look at him again.
*Obviously, Tiffany thought, when jumping over a fire together, one ought to be concerned about wearing protective clothing and having people with a bucket of water on hand, just in case. Witches may be a lot of things, but first and foremost, they are practical.
*Possibly Petulia’s romantic ambitions had been helped by the mysterious way the young man’s pigs were forever getting sick and requiring treatment for the scours, the blind heaves, brass neck, floating teeth, scribbling eyeball, grunge, the smarts, the twisting screws, swiveling, and gone knees. This was a terrible misfortune, since more than half of those ailments are normally never found in pigs, and one of them is a disease known only in freshwater fish. But the neighbors were impressed at the amount of work Petulia put in to relieve their stress. Her broomstick was coming and going at all hours of the day and night. Being a witch, after all, was about dedication.
*First Sight means that you can see what really is there, and Second Thoughts mean thinking about what you are thinking. And in Tiffany’s case, there were sometimes Third Thoughts and Fourth Thoughts, although these were quite difficult to manage and sometimes led her to walk into doors.
*The forget-me-lots is a pretty red-and-white flower usually given by young ladies to signal to their young men that they never want to see them again ever, or at least until they’ve learned to wash properly and gotten a job.
*If you do not yet know who the Nac Mac Feegles are: 1) Be grateful for your uneventful life; and 2) Be prepared to beat a retreat if you hear anyone about as high as your ankle shout “Crivens!” They are, strictly speaking, one of the faerie folk, but it is probably not a good idea to tell them this if you are looking forward to a future in which you still have your teeth.
*Whatever sex a hare is, to a true countryman, all hares are referred to as her.
*The old cloth makers used urine as a mordant for the dyes used in making woolen clothes, so that the colors would be fixed and not run; as a result, they could be a bit smelly for years. Not even Miss Tick could have explained it better and stayed so calm, although she would probably have used the term “evacuated bodily juices.”
*The soil and the salt were an ancient tradition to keep ghosts away. Tiffany had never seen a ghost, so they probably worked, but in any case they worked on the minds of people, who felt better for knowing that they were there, and once you understood that, you understood quite a lot about magic.
*The Toad had no other name but that of the Toad and had joined the Feegle clan some years previously, and found life in the mound much to be preferred over his former existence as a lawyer or, to be precise, as a lawyer who had gotten too smart in the presence of a fairy godmother. The kelda had offered several times to turn him back, but he always refused. The Feegles themselves considered him the brains of the outfit, since he knew words that were longer than he was.
*That was to say, from Tiffany’s point of view, that meant a couple of years younger than Tiffany.
*See Glossary.
*She kept to herself any thought about the fact that what they were most good at finding was things that belonged to other people. It was true, though, that the Feegles could hunt like dogs, as well as drink like fish.
*Tiffany had earned the admiration of other witches by persuading the Feegles to do chores. The unfortunate fact was that Feegles would do any chore, provided it was loud, messy, and flamboyant. And, if possible, included screams.
*A message from the author. Not all cauldrons are metal. You can boil water in a leather cauldron, if you know what you are doing. You can even make tea in a paper bag if you are careful and know how to do it. But please don’t, or if you do, don’t tell anyone I told you.
*Jeannie, a modern kelda, had encouraged literacy among her sons and brothers. With Rob Anybody’s example to follow, they had found the experience very worthwhile, because now they could read the labels on bottles before they drank them, although this didn’t make too much of a difference, because unless there was a skull and crossbones on it, a Feegle would probably drink it anyway, and even then it would have to be a very scary skull and crossbones.
*Most people who cook with cauldrons use them as a kind of double boiler, with small saucepans filled with water around the edge, picking up the heat of the big cauldron, into which perhaps you might put a leg of pork weighted down, and possibly a few dumplings in a bag. This way, quite a large meal for several people can be cooked cheaply all in one go, including the pudding. Of course, it meant you had to stomach a lot of boiled food—but eat it up, it’s good for you!
*In truth, the Nac Mac Feegle believe that the world is such a wonderful place that in order to have gotten into it, they must have been very good in another existence and now have arrived in, as it were, heaven. Of course, they appear to die sometimes, even here, but they like to think of it as going off to be born again. Numerous theologians have speculated that this is a stupid idea, but it is certainly more enjoyable than many other beliefs.
*A witch made a shambles out of anything you happened to have in your pockets, but if you care about appearances, you paid attention to the things you “accidentally” had in your pockets. It wouldn’t make any difference to how the shambles worked, but if there were going to be other people around, then a mysterious nut, or an interesting bit of wood, a piece of lace, and a silver pin suggested “witch” rather more flatteringly than did, say, a broken shoelace, a torn piece of paper bag, half a handful of miscellaneous and unspeakable fluff, and a handkerchief that had been used so many times that, dreadfully, it needed both hands to fold it. Tiffany generally kept one pocket just for shambles ingredients, but if Miss Smith had made this shambles the same way, then she had pockets larger than a wardrobe; it nearly touched the ceiling.
