A Hat Full Of Sky (5 page)

She said: “See me.”

…and stepped out of herself and walked away toward Miss Tick and Miss Level, in her invisible ghost body. She didn’t dare look down, in case she saw her feet weren’t there. When she turned and looked back at her solid body, she saw it standing demurely by the holly bushes, clearly too far away to be listening to anyone’s conversation.

As Tiffany stealthily drew nearer, she heard Miss Tick say:

“—but quite frighteningly precocious.”

“Oh dear. I’ve never got on very well with clever people,”
said Miss Level.

“Oh, she’s a good child at heart,”
said Miss Tick, which annoyed Tiffany rather more than “frighteningly precocious” had.

“Of course, you know my situation,”
said Miss Level, as the invisible Tiffany inched closer.

“Yes, Miss Level, but your work does you great credit. That’s why Mistress Weatherwax suggested you.”

“But I am afraid I’m getting a bit absentminded,”
Miss Level worried.
“It was terrible flying down here, because like a big silly I left my long-distance spectacles on my other nose….”

Her
other
nose? thought Tiffany.

Both witches froze, exactly at the same time.

“I’m without an egg!” said Miss Tick.

“I have a beetle in a matchbox against just such an emergency!” squeaked Miss Level.

Their hands flew to their pockets and pulled out string and feathers and bits of colored cloth—

They know I’m here! thought Tiffany, and whispered, “See me not!”

She blinked and rocked on her heels as she arrived back in the patient little figure by the holly bushes. In the distance Miss Level was fran
tically making a shamble and Miss Tick was staring around the woods.

“Tiffany, come here at once!” she shouted.

“Yes, Miss Tick,” said Tiffany, trotting forward like a good girl.

They spotted me somehow, she thought. Well, they
are
witches, after all, even if in my opinion they’re not very good ones—

Then the pressure came. It seemed to squash the woods flat and filled it with the horrible feeling that something is standing right behind you. Tiffany sank to her knees with her hands over her ears and a pain like the worst earache squeezing her head.

“Finished!” shouted Miss Level. She held up a shamble. It was quite different from Miss Tick’s, made up of string and crow feathers and glittery black beads and, in the middle, an ordinary matchbox.

Tiffany yelled. The pain was like red-hot needles and her ears filled with the buzz of flies.

The matchbox exploded.

And then there was silence, and birdsong, and nothing to show that anything had happened apart from a few pieces of matchbox spiraling down, along with iridescent fragments of wing case.

“Oh dear,” said Miss Level. “He was quite a good beetle, as beetles go….”

“Tiffany, are you all right?” said Miss Tick. Tiffany blinked. The pain had gone as fast as it has arrived, leaving only a burning memory. She scrambled to her feet.

“I think so, Miss Tick!”

“Then a word, if you please!” said Miss Tick. She marched over to a tree and stood there looking stern.

“Yes, Miss Tick?” said Tiffany.

“Did you…
do
anything?” said Miss Tick. “You haven’t been summoning things, have you?”

“No! Anyway, I don’t know how to!” said Tiffany.

“It’s not your little men then, is it?” said Miss Tick doubtfully.

“They’re not mine, Miss Tick. And they don’t do that sort of thing. They just shout ‘Crivens!’ and then start kicking people on the ankle. You definitely know it’s them.”

“Well, whatever it was, it seems to have gone,” said Miss Level. “And we should go too—otherwise we’ll be flying all night.” She reached behind another tree and picked up a bundle of firewood. At least, it looked exactly like that, because it was supposed to. “My own invention,”
she said, modestly. “One never knows down here on the plains, does one? And the handle shoots out by means of this button—oh, I’m so sorry, it sometimes does that. Did anyone see where it went?”

The handle was located in a bush and screwed back in.

Tiffany, a girl who
listened
to what people said, watched Miss Level closely. She definitely had only one nose on her face, and it was sort of uncomfortable to imagine where anyone might have another one and what’d they use it for.

Then Miss Level pulled some rope out of her pocket and passed it to someone who wasn’t there.

That’s what she did, Tiffany was sure. She didn’t drop it, she didn’t throw it, she just held it out and let go, as though she’d thought she was hanging it on an invisible hook.

It landed in a coil on the moss. Miss Level looked down, then saw Tiffany staring at her and laughed nervously.

“Silly me,” she said. “I thought I was over there! I’ll forget my own head next!”

“Well…if it’s the one on top of your neck,” said Tiffany cautiously, still thinking about the other nose, “you’ve still got it.”

The old suitcase was roped to the bristle end of the broomstick, which now floated calmly a few feet above the ground.

“There, that’ll make a nice comfy seat,” said Miss Level, now the bag of nerves that most people turned into when they felt Tiffany staring at them. “If you’d just hang on behind me. Er. That’s what I normally do.”

“You normally hang on
behind
you?” said Tiffany. “How can—”

“Tiffany, I’ve always encouraged your forthright way of asking questions,” said Miss Tick loudly. “And now, please, I would love to congratulate you on your mastery of silence! Do climb on behind Miss Level. I’m sure she’ll want to leave while you’ve still got some daylight.”

The stick bobbed a little as Miss Level climbed onto it. She patted it invitingly.

“You’re not frightened of heights, are you, dear?” she asked as Tiffany climbed on.

“No,” said Tiffany.

“I shall drop in when I come up for the Witch Trials,” said Miss Tick as Tiffany felt the stick rise gently under her. “Take care!”

It turned out that when Miss Level had asked Tiffany if she was scared of heights, it had been the wrong question. Tiffany was not afraid of
heights at all. She could walk past tall trees without batting an eyelid. Looking up at huge towering mountains didn’t bother her a bit.

What she
was
afraid of, although she hadn’t realized it until this point, was depths. She was afraid of dropping such a long way out of the sky that she’d have time to run out of breath screaming before hitting the rocks so hard that she’d turn to a sort of jelly and all her bones would break into dust. She was, in fact, afraid of the ground. Miss Level should have thought before asking the question.

Tiffany clung to Miss Level’s belt and stared at the cloth of her dress.

“Have you ever flown before, Tiffany?” asked the witch as they rose.

“Gnf!” squeaked Tiffany.

“If you like, I could take us round in a little circle,” said Miss Level. “We should have a fine view of your country from up here.”

The air was rushing past Tiffany now. It was a lot colder. She kept her eyes fixed firmly on the cloth.

“Would you like that?” said Miss Level, raising her voice as the wind grew louder. “It won’t take a moment!”

Tiffany didn’t have time to say no and, in any
case, was sure she’d be sick if she opened her mouth. The stick lurched under her, and the world went sideways.

She didn’t want to look but remembered that a witch is always inquisitive to the point of nosiness. To stay a witch, she
had
to look.

She risked a glance and saw the world under her. The red-gold light of sunset was flowing across the land, and down there were the long shadows of Twoshirts and, farther away, the woods and villages all the way back to the long curved hill of the Chalk—

—which glowed red, and the white carving of the chalk Horse burned gold like some giant’s pendant. Tiffany stared at it; in the fading light of the afternoon, with the shadows racing away from the sliding sun, it looked alive.

At that moment she wanted to jump off, fly back, get there by closing her eyes and clicking her heels together, do
anything
—

No! She’d bundled those thoughts away, hadn’t she? She had to learn, and there was no one on the hills to teach her!

But the Chalk was her world. She walked on it every day. She could feel its ancient life under her feet. The land was in her bones, just as Granny Aching had said. It was in her name, too; in the old language of
the Nac Mac Feegle, her name sounded like “Land Under Wave,” and in the eye of her mind she’d walked in those deep prehistoric seas when the Chalk had been formed, in a million-year rain made of the shells of tiny creatures. She trod a land made of life, and breathed it in, and listened to it, and thought its thoughts for it. To see it now, small, alone, in a landscape that stretched to the end of the world, was too much. She had to go back to it—

For a moment the stick wobbled in the air.

No! I know I must go!

It jerked back, and there was a sickening feeling in her stomach as the stick curved away toward the mountains.

“A little bit of turbulence there, I think,” said Miss Level over her shoulder. “By the way, did Miss Tick warn you about the thick wooly pants, dear?”

Tiffany, still shocked, mumbled something that managed to sound like “no.” Miss Tick had mentioned the pants, and how a sensible witch wore at least three pairs to stop ice forming, but she had forgotten about them.

“Oh dear,” said Miss Level. “Then we’d better hedgehop.”

The stick dropped like a stone.

Tiffany never forgot that ride, though she
often tried to. They flew just above the ground, which was the blur just below her feet. Every time they came to a fence or a hedge, Miss Level would jump it with a cry of “Here we go!” or “Ups-a-daisy!” which was probably meant to make Tiffany feel better. It didn’t. She threw up twice.

Miss Level flew with her head bent so far down as to be almost level with the stick, thus getting the maximum aerodynamic advantage from the pointy hat. It was quite a stubby one, only about nine inches high, rather like a clown hat without the bobbles; Tiffany found out later that this was so that she didn’t have to take it off when entering low-ceilinged cottages.

After a while—an eternity from Tiffany’s point of view—they left the farmlands behind and started to fly through foothills. Before long they’d left trees behind, too, and the stick was flying above the fast white waters of a wide river studded with boulders. Spray splashed over their boots.

She heard Miss Level yell above the roar of the river and the rush of the wind: “Would you mind leaning back? This bit’s a little tricky!”

Tiffany risked peeking over the witch’s shoulder and gasped.

There was not much water on the Chalk, except for the little streams that people called bournes, which flowed down the valleys in late winter and dried up completely in the summer. Big rivers flowed around it, of course, but they were slow and tame.

The water ahead wasn’t slow and tame. It was
vertical
.

The river ran up into the dark-blue sky, soared up to the early stars. The broom followed it.

Tiffany leaned back and screamed, and went on screaming as the broomstick tilted in the air and climbed up the waterfall. She’d known the
word
, certainly, but the word hadn’t been so big, so wet, and above all it hadn’t been so
loud
.

The mist of it drenched her. The noise pounded in her ears. She held on to Miss Level’s belt as they climbed though spray and thunder and felt that she’d slip at any minute—

—and then she was thrown forward, and the noise of the falls died away behind her as the stick, now once again going “along” rather than “up,” sped across the surface of a river that, while still leaping and foaming, at least had the decency to do it on the ground.

There was a bridge high above, and walls of cold rock hemmed the river in on either side,
but the walls got lower and the river got slower and the air got warmer again until the broomstick skimmed across calm fat water that probably didn’t know what was going to happen to it. Silver fish zigzagged away as they passed over the surface.

After a while Miss Level sent them curving up across new fields, smaller and greener than the ones at home. There were trees again, and little woods in deep valleys. But the last of the sunlight was draining away, and soon all there was below was darkness.

Tiffany must have dozed off, clinging to Miss Level, because she felt herself jerk awake as the broomstick stopped in midair. The ground was some way below, but someone had set out a ring of what turned out to be candle ends, burning in old jars.

Delicately, turning slowly, the stick settled down until it stopped just above the grass.

At this point Tiffany’s legs decided to untwist, and she fell off.

“Up we get!” said Miss Level cheerfully, picking her up. “You did very well!”

“Sorry about screaming and being sick,” Tiffany mumbled, tripping over one of the jars and knocking the candle out. She tried to make
out anything in the dark, but her head was spinning. “Did you light these candles, Miss Level?”

“Yes. Let’s get inside, it’s getting chilly—” Miss Level began.

“Oh, by magic,” said Tiffany, still dizzy.

“Well, it
can
be done by magic, yes,” said Miss Level. “But I prefer matches, which are of course a lot less effort and quite magical in themselves, when you come to think about it.” She untied the suitcase from the stick and said: “Here we are, then! I do hope you’ll like it here!”

There was that cheerfulness again. Even when she felt sick and dizzy, and quite interested in knowing where the privy was as soon as possible, Tiffany still had ears that worked and a mind that, however much she tried, wouldn’t stop thinking. And it thought: That cheerfulness has got cracks around the edges. Something isn’t right here….