A Hat Full Of Sky

Chapter Twelve The Egress

Tiffany stared up into a black hood. There was a skull in it, but the eye sockets glowed blue.

At least bones had never frightened Tiffany. They were only chalk that had walked around.

‘Are you—?’ she began, but Rob Anybody gave a yell and leaped straight for the hood.

There was a thud. Death took a step backwards and raised a skeletal hand to his cowl. He pulled out Rob Anybody by his hair and held him at arm’s length while the Nac Mac Feegle cursed and kicked.

IS THIS YOURS? Death asked Tiffany. The voice was heavy and all around her, like thunder.

‘No. Er… he’s his.’

I WAS NOT EXPECTING A NAC MAC FEEGLE TODAY, said Death, OTHERWISE I WOULD HAVE WORN PROTECTIVE CLOTHING, HA HA.

‘They do fight a lot,’ Tiffany admitted. ‘You are Death, aren’t you? I know this might sound a silly question.’

YOU ARE NOT AFRAID?

‘Not yet. But, er… which way to the egress, please?’

There was a pause. Then Death said, in a puzzled voice: ISN’T THAT A FEMALE EAGLE?

‘No,’ said Tiffany. ‘Everyone thinks that. Actually, it’s the way out. The exit.’

Death pointed, with the hand that still held the incandescently angry Rob Anybody.

THAT WAY. YOU HAVE TO WALK THE DESERT.

‘All the way to the mountains?’

YES. BUT ONLY THE DEAD CAN TAKE THAT WAY.

‘Ye’ve got ta’ let me go sooner or later, ye big ‘natomy!’ yelled Rob Anybody. ‘And then ye’re gonna get sich a kickin’!’

‘There was a door here!’ said Tiffany.

AH YES, said Death, BUT THERE ARE RULES, THAT WAS A WAY IN, YOU SEE.

‘What’s the difference?’

A FAIRLY IMPORTANT ONE, I’M SORRY TO SAY. YOU WILL HAVE TO SEE YOURSELVES OUT. DO NOT FALL ASLEEP HERE. SLEEP HERE NEVER ENDS.

Death vanished. Rob Anybody dropped to the sand and came up ready to fight, but they were alone.

‘Yell have to make a door oot,’ he said.

‘I don’t know how! Rob, I told you not to come with me. Can’t you get out?’

‘Aye. Probably. But I’ve got to see ye safe. The kelda put a geas on me. I must save the hag o’ the hills.’

‘Jeannie told you that?’

‘Aye. She was verra definite,’ said Rob Anybody.

Tiffany slumped down onto the sand again. It fountained up around her.

‘I’ll never get out,’ she said. How to get in, yes, that wasn’t hard…

She looked around. They weren’t obvious, but there were occasional changes in the light, and little puffs of dust.

People she couldn’t see were walking past her. People were crossing the desert. Dead people, going to find out what was beyond the mountains…

I’m eleven, she thought. People will be upset. She thought about the farm, and how her mother and father would react. But there wouldn’t be a body, would there? So people would hope and hope that she’d come back and was just… missing, like old Mrs Happens in the village, who lit a candle in the window every night for her son who’d been lost at sea thirty years ago.

She wondered if Rob could send a message, but what could she say? “I’m not dead, I’m just stuck?”

‘I should have thought of other people,’ she said aloud.

‘Aye, weel, ye did,’ said Rob, sitting down by her foot. ‘Yon Arthur went off happy, and ye saved other folk fra’ being killed. Ye did what ye had to do.’

Yes, thought Tiffany. That’s what we have to do. And there’s no one to protect you, because you’re the one who’s supposed to do that sort of thing.

But her Second Thoughts said: I’m glad I did it. I’d do it again. I stopped the hiver killing anyone else, even though we led it right into the Trials. And that thought was followed by a space. There should have been another thought, but she was too tired to have it. It had been important.

‘Thank you for coming, Rob,’ she said. ‘But when… you can leave, you must go straight back to Jeannie, understand? And tell her I’m grateful she sent you. Say I wish we’d had a chance to get to know one another better.’

‘Oh, aye. I’ve sent the lads back anyway. Hamish is waitin’ for me.’

At which point the door appeared, and opened.

Granny Weatherwax stepped through and beckoned urgently.

‘Some people don’t have the sense they were born with! Come on, right now!’ she commanded. Behind her, the door started to swing shut, but she swung round savagely and rammed her boot against the jamb, shouting, ‘Oh, no you don’t, you sly devil!’

‘But… I thought there were rules!’ said Tiffany, getting up and hurrying forward, all tiredness suddenly gone. Even a tired body wants to survive.

‘Oh? Really?’ said Granny. ‘Did you sign anything? Did you take any kind of oath? No? Then they weren’t your rules! Quickly, now! And you, Mr Anyone!’

Rob Anybody jumped onto her boot just before she pulled it away. The door shut with another click, disappeared and left them in… dead light, it seemed, a space of grey air.

‘Won’t take long,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘It doesn’t usually. It’s the world getting back into line. Oh, don’t look like that. You showed it the Way, right? Out of pity. Well, I know this path already. You’ll tread it again, no doubt, for some other poor soul, open the door for them as can’t find it. But we don’t talk about it, understand?’

‘Miss Level never—’

‘We don’t talk about it, I said,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘Do you know what a part of being a witch is? It’s making the choices that have to be made. The hard choices. But you did… quite well. There’s no shame in pity.’

She brushed some grass seed off her dress.

‘I hope Mrs Ogg has arrived,’ she said. ‘I need her recipe for apple chutney. Oh… when we arrive you might feel a bit dizzy. I’d better warn you.’

‘Granny?’ said Tiffany, as the light began to grow brighter. It brought back tiredness with it, too.

‘Yes?’

‘What exactly happened just then?’

‘What do you think happened?’

Light burst in upon them.

Someone was wiping Tiffany’s forehead with a damp cloth.

She lay, feeling the beautiful coolness. There were voices around her, and she recognized the chronic-complainer’s tones of Annagramma:

‘…And she was really making a fuss in Zakzak’s. Honestly, I don’t think she’s quite right in the head! I think she’s literally gone cuckoo! She was shouting things and using some kind of, oh, I don’t know, some peasant trick to make us think she’d turned that fool Brian into a frog. Well, of course, she didn’t fool me for one minute—’

Tiffany opened her eyes and saw the round pink face of Petulia, screwed up with concern.

‘Um, she’s awake!’ said the girl.

The space between Tiffany and the ceiling filled up with pointy hats. They drew back, reluctantly, as she sat up. From above, it must have looked like a dark daisy, closing and opening.

‘Where is this?’ she said.

‘Um, the First Aid and Lost Children’s Tent,’ said Petulia. ‘Um… you fainted when Mistress Weatherwax brought you back from… from wherever you’d gone. Everyone’s been in to see you!’

‘She said you’d, like, dragged the monster into, like, the Next World!’ Lucy Warbeck said, her eyes gleaming. ‘Mistress Weatherwax told everyone all about it!’

‘Well, it wasn’t quite—’ Tiffany began. She felt something prod her in the back. She reached behind her, and her hand came back holding a pointy hat. It was almost grey with age and quite battered. Zakzak wouldn’t have dared try to sell something like this, but the other girls stared it like starving dogs watching a butcher’s hand.

‘Um, Mistress Weatherwax gave you her hat,’ breathed Petulia. ‘Her actual hat.’

‘She said you were a born witch and no witch should be without a hat!’ said Dimity Hubbub, watching.

‘That’s nice,’ said Tiffany. She was used to secondhand clothes.

‘It’s only an old hat,’ said Annagramma.

Tiffany looked up at the tall girl and let herself smile slowly.

‘Annagramma?’ she said, raising a hand with the fingers open.

Annagramma backed away. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Don’t you do that! Don’t you do that! Someone stop her doing that!’

‘Do you want a balloon, Annagramma?’ said Tiffany, sliding off the table.

‘No! Please!’ Annagramma took another step back, holding her arms in front of her face, and fell over a bench. Tiffany picked her up and patted her cheerfully on a cheek.

‘Then I shan’t buy you one,’ she said. ‘But please learn what “literally” really means, will you?’

Annagramma smiled in a frozen kind of way. ‘Er, yes,’ she managed.

‘Good. And then we will be friends.’

She left the girl standing there, and went back to pick up the hat.

‘Um, you’re probably still a bit woozy,’ said Petulia. ‘You probably don’t understand.’

‘Ha, I wasn’t actually frightened, you know,’ said Annagramma. It was all for fun, of course.’ No one paid any attention.

‘Understand what?’ said Tiffany.

‘It’s her actual hat!’ the girls chorused.

‘It’s, like, if that hat could talk, what stories it would have to, you know, tell,’ said Lucy Warbeck.

‘It was just a joke,’ said Annagramma to anyone who was listening.

Tiffany looked at the hat. It was very battered, and not extremely clean. If that hat could talk, it would probably mutter.

‘Where’s Granny Weatherwax now?’ she said.

There was a gasp from the girls. This was nearly as impressive as the hat.

‘Um… she doesn’t mind you calling her that?’ said Petulia.

‘She invited me to,’ said Tiffany.

‘Only we heard you had to have known her for, like, a hundred years before she let you call her that…’ said Lucy Warbeck.

Tiffany shrugged. ‘Well, anyway,’ she said. ‘Do you know where she is?’

‘Oh, having tea with the other old witches and yakking on about chutney and how witches today aren’t what they were when she was a girl,’ said Lulu Darling.

‘What?’ said Tiffany. ‘Just having tea?’

The young witches looked at one another in puzzlement.

‘Um, there’s buns too,’ said Petulia. ‘If that’s important.’

‘But she opened the door for me. The door into—out of the… the desert! You can’t just sit down after that and have buns!’

‘Um, the ones I saw had icing on,’ Petulia ventured, nervously. ‘They weren’t just homemade—’

‘Look,’ said Lucy Warbeck, ‘we didn’t really, you know, see anything? You were just standing there with this, like, glow around you and we couldn’t get in and then Gran—Mistress Weatherwax walked up and stepped right in and you both, you know, stood there? And then the glow went zip and vanished and you, like, fell over.’

‘What Lucy’s failing to say very accurately,’ said Annagramma, ‘is that we didn’t actually see you go anywhere. I’m telling you this as a friend, of course. There was just this glow, which could have been anything.’

Annagramma was going to be a good witch, Tiffany considered. She could tell herself stories that she literally believed. And she could bounce back like a ball.

‘Don’t forget, I saw the horse,’ said Harrieta Bilk.

Annagramma rolled her eyes. ‘Oh yes, Harrieta thinks she saw some kind of horse in the sky. Except it didn’t look like a horse, she says. She says it looked like a horse would look if you took the actual horse away and just left the horsiness, right, Harrieta?’

‘I didn’t say that!’ snapped Harrieta.

‘Well, pardon me. That’s what it sounded like.’

‘Um, and some people said they saw a white horse grazing in the next field, too,’ said Petulia. ‘And a lot of the older witches said they felt a tremendous amount of—’

‘Yes, some people thought they saw a horse in a field but it isn’t there any more,’ said Annagramma in the singsong voice she used when she thought it was all stupid. ‘That must be very rare in the country, seeing horses in fields. Anyway, if there really was a white horse, it was grey.’

Tiffany sat on the edge of the table, staring at her knees. Anger at Annagramma had jolted her to life, but now the tiredness was creeping back.

‘I suppose none of you saw a little blue man, about six inches high, with red hair?’ she said quietly.

‘Anyone?’ said Annagramma, with malicious cheerfulness. There was a general mumbling of ‘no’.

‘Sorry, Tiffany,’ said Lucy.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Annagramma. ‘He probably just rode away on his white horse!’

This is going to be like Fairyland all over again, thought Tiffany. Even I can’t remember if it was real. Why should anyone believe me? But she had to try.

‘There was a dark doorway,’ she said slowly, ‘and beyond it was a desert of black sand and it was quite light although there were stars in the sky, and Death was there. I spoke to him…’

‘You spoke to him, did you?’ said Annagramma. ‘And what did he say, pray?’

‘He didn’t say “pray”,’ said Tiffany. ‘We didn’t talk about much. But he didn’t know what an egress was.’

‘It’s a small type of heron, isn’t it?’ said Harrieta.

There was silence, except for the noise of the Trials outside.

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Annagramma in what was, for her, almost a friendly voice. ‘It’s like I said: Mistress Weatherwax messes with people’s heads.’

‘What about the glow?’ said Lucy.

‘That was probably ball lightning,’ said Annagramma. ‘That’s very strange stuff.’

‘But people were, like, hammering on it! It was as hard as ice!’

‘Ah, well, it probably felt like that,’ said Annagramma, ‘but it was… probably affecting people’s muscles, maybe. I’m only trying to be helpful here,’ she added. ‘You’ve got to be sensible. She just stood there. You saw her. There weren’t any doors or deserts. There was just her.’

Tiffany sighed. She just felt tired. She just wanted to crawl off somewhere. She just wanted to go home. She’d walk there now if her boots weren’t suddenly so uncomfortable.

While the girls argued, she undid the laces and tugged one off.

Silver-black dust poured out. When it hit the ground it bounced, slowly, curving up into the air again like mist.

The girls turned, watching in silence. Then Petulia reached down and caught some of the dust. When she lifted her hand, the fine stuff flowed between her fingers. It fell as slowly as feathers.

‘Sometimes things go wrong,’ she said, in a faraway voice. ‘Mistress Blackcap told me. Haven’t any of you been there when old folk are dying?’ There were one or two nods, but everyone was watching the dust.

‘Sometimes things go wrong,’ said Petulia again. ‘Sometimes they’re dying but they can’t leave because they don’t know the Way. She said that’s when they need you to be there, close to them, to help them find the door so they don’t get lost in the dark.’

‘Petulia, we’re not supposed to talk about this,’ said Harrieta, gently.

‘No!’ said Petulia, her face red. ‘It is a time to talk about it, just here, just us! Because she said it’s the last thing you can do for someone. She said there’s a dark desert they have to cross, where the sand—’

‘Hah! Mrs Earwig says that sort of thing is black magic,’ said Annagramma, her voice as sharp and sudden as a knife.

‘Does she?’ said Petulia dreamily as the sand poured down. ‘Well, Mistress Blackcap said that sometimes the moon is light and sometimes it’s in shadow but you should always remember it’s the same moon. And… Annagramma?’

‘Yes?’

Petulia took a deep breath.

‘Don’t you ever dare interrupt me again as long as you live. Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare! I mean it.’