Wintersmith

didn’t seem to hear him. They knew invisible creatures didn’t speak to them out of the air.
    The small ones, though, hadn’t found out what was impossible.
    In the big city was a big snowman.
    Actually, it would be more honest to call it a slushman. Technically it was snow, but by the time it had spiraled down through the big city’s fogs, smogs, and smokes, it was already a sort of yellowish gray, and then most of what ended up on the pavement was what had been thrown up from the gutter by cart wheels. It was, at best, a mostly snowman. But three grubby children were building it anyway, because building something that you could call a snowman was what you did. Even if it was yellow.
    They’d done their best with what they could find and had given him two horse droppings for eyes and a dead rat for a nose.
    At which point the snowman spoke to them, in their heads.
    Small humans, why do you do that?
    The boy who might have been the older boy looked at the girl who might have been the older girl. “I’ll tell you I heard that if you say you heard it too,” he said.
    The girl was still young enough not to think “snowmen can’t talk” when one of them had just spoken to her, so she said to it: “You have to put them in to make you a snowman, mister.”
    Does that make me human?
    “No, ’cuz…” She hesitated.
    “You ain’t got innards,” said the third and smallest child, who might have been the younger boy or the younger girl, but who was spherical with so many layers of clothing that it was quite impossible to tell. It did have a pink woolly hat with a bobble on it, but that didn’t mean anything. Someone did care about it, though, because they’d embroidered “R” and “L” on its mittens, “F” and “B” on the front and back of its coat, “T” on top of the bobble hat, and probably “U” on the underside of its rubber boots. That meant that while you couldn’t know what it was, you could be certain it was the right way up and which way it was facing.
    A cart went by, throwing up another wave of slush.
    Innards? said the secret voice of the snowman. Made of special dust, yes! But what dust?
    “Iron,” said the possibly older boy promptly. “Enough iron to make a nail.”
    “Oh, yeah, that’s right, that’s how it goes,” said the possibly older girl. “We used to skip to it. Er…‘Iron enough to make a nail…Water enough to drown a cow—’”
    “A dog,” said the possibly older boy. “It’s ‘Water enough to drown a dog, Sulfur enough to stop the fleas.’ It’s ‘Poison enough to kill a cow.’”
    What is this? the Wintersmith asked.
    “It’s…like…an old song,” said the possibly older boy.
    “More like a sort of poem. Everyone knows it,” said the possibly older girl.
    “’S called ‘These Are the Things That Make a Man,’” said the child who was the right way up.
    Tell me the rest of it, the Wintersmith demanded, and on the freezing pavement they did, as much as they knew.
    When they’d finished, the possibly older boy said hopefully, “Is there any chance you can take us flying?”
    No, said the Wintersmith. I have things to find! Things that make a man!

    One afternoon, when the sky was growing cold, there was a frantic knocking on Nanny’s door. It turned out to be caused by Annagramma, who almost fell into the room. She looked terrible, and her teeth were chattering.
    Nanny and Tiffany stood her by the fire, but she started talking before her teeth had warmed up.
    “Skkkkulls!” she managed.
    Oh dear, thought Tiffany.
    “What about them?” she said, as Nanny Ogg hurried in from the kitchen with a hot drink.
    “Mmmmmiss Trrreason’s Skkkkulls!”
    “Yes? What about them?”
    Annagramma took a swig from the mug. “What did you do with them?” she gasped, cocoa dribbling down her chin.
    “Buried them.”
    “Oh, no! Why?”
    “They were skulls. You can’t just leave skulls lying about!”
    Annagramma looked around wildly. “Can you lend me a shovel, then?”
    “Annagramma! You can’t dig up Miss Treason’s grave!”
    “But I need some skulls!” Annagramma insisted. “The people there—well, it’s like the olden days! I whitewashed that place with my own hands! Have you any idea how long it takes to whitewash over black? They complained! They won’t have anything to do with crystal therapy, they just frown and say Miss Treason gave them sticky black medicine that tasted horrible but worked! And they keep on asking me