Hogfather

all.”
    Susan ran her hands over the thin leather. The…shapes flowed around her fingers.
    She couldn’t read them but she could feel them. There was the sharp smell of snow, so vivid that her breath condensed in the air. There were sounds, hooves, the snap of branches in a freezing forest—
    A bright shining ball…
    Susan jerked awake and thrust the scroll aside. She unrolled the next one, which looked as though it was made of strips of bark. Characters hovered over the surface. Whatever they were, they had never been designed to be read by the eye; you could believe they were a Braille for the touching mind. Images ribboned across her senses—wet fur, sweat, pine, soot, iced air, the tang of damp ash, pig…manure, her governess mind hastily corrected. There was blood…and the taste of…beans? It was all images without words. Almost…animal.
    “But none of this is right! Everyone knows he’s a jolly old fat man who hands out presents to kids!” she said aloud.
    “ Is. Is . Not was . You know how it is,” said the raven.
    “Do I?”
    “It’s like, you know, industrial retraining,” said the bird. “Even gods have to move with the times, am I right? He was probably quite different thousands of years ago. Stands to reason. No one wore stockings, for one thing.” He scratched at his beak.
    “Yersss,” he continued expansively, “he was probably just your basic winter demi-urge. You know…blood on the snow, making the sun come up. Starts off with animal sacrifice, y’know, hunt some big hairy animal to death, that kind of stuff. You know there’s some people up on the Ramtops who kill a wren at Hogswatch and walk around from house to house singing about it? With a whack-fol-oh-diddle-dildo. Very folkloric, very myffic.”
    “A wren ? Why?”
    “I dunno. Maybe someone said, hey, how’d you like to hunt this evil bastard of an eagle with his big sharp beak and great ripping talons, sort of thing, or how about instead you hunt this wren, which is basically about the size of a pea and goes “twit”? Go on, you choose. Anyway, then later on it sinks to the level of religion and then they start this business where some poor bugger finds a special bean in his tucker, oho, everyone says, you’re king , mate, and he thinks “This is a bit of all right” only they don’t say it wouldn’t be a good idea to start any long books, ’cos next thing he’s legging it over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasing him with holy sickles so’s the earth’ll come to life again and all this snow’ll go away. Very, you know… ethnic . Then some bright spark thought, hey, looks like that damn sun comes up anyway , so how come we’re giving those druids all this free grub? Next thing you know, there’s a job vacancy. That’s the thing about gods. They’ll always find a way to, you know…hang on.”
    “The damn sun comes up anyway,” Susan repeated. “How do you know that?”
    “Oh, observation. It happens every morning. I seen it.”
    “I meant all that stuff about holy sickles and things.”
    The raven contrived to look smug.
    “Very occult bird, your basic raven,” he said. “Blind Io the Thunder God used to have these myffic ravens that flew everywhere and told him everything that was going on.”
    “Used to?”
    “Weeelll…you know how he’s not got eyes in his face, just these, like, you know, free-floating eyeballs that go and zoom around…” The raven coughed in species embarrassment. “Bit of an accident waiting to happen, really.”
    “Do you ever think of anything except eyeballs?”
    “Well…there’s entrails.”
    S QUEAK .
    “He’s right, though,” said Susan. “Gods don’t die. Never completely die…”
    There’s always somewhere, she told herself. Inside some stone, perhaps, or the words of a song, or riding the mind of some animal, or maybe in a whisper on the wind. They never entirely go, they hang onto the world by the tip of a fingernail, always fighting to find a way back. Once a god, always a god. Dead, perhaps, but only like the world in winter—
    “All right,” she said. “Let’s see what happened to him…”
    She reached out for the last book and tried to open it at random…
    The feeling lashed at her out of the book, like a whip…
    … hooves, fear, blood, snow, cold, night …
    She dropped the scroll. It slammed shut.
    S QUEAK ?
    “I’m…all right.”
    She looked down at the book and knew that she’d been given a friendly warning,