Wintersmith

Nanny Ogg’s garden, throwing up a shower of dirt and leaving a big hole.
    “Well, that’s good-bye to the cabbages,” said Nanny, looking out the window.
    Steam was rising from the hole when they went outside, and there was a strong smell of sprouts.
    Tiffany peered through the steam. Dirt and stalks covered the thing, but she could make out something rounded.
    She let herself slide farther into the hole, right down amid the mud and steam and the mysterious thing. It wasn’t very hot now, and as she scraped stuff away, she began to have a nasty feeling that she knew what it was.
    It was, she was sure, the “thingy” that Anoia had talked about. It looked mysterious enough. And as it emerged from the mud, she knew she’d seen it before.
    “Are you all right down there? I can’t see you for all this steam!” Nanny Ogg called. By the sound of it, the neighbors had come running; there was some excited chattering.
    Tiffany quickly scraped mud and mashed cabbages over the arrival and called up, “I think this might explode. Tell everyone to get indoors! And then reach down and grab my hand, will you?”
    There was some shouting above her and the sound of running feet. Nanny Ogg’s hand appeared, waving around in the fog, and between them they got Tiffany out of the hole.
    “Shall we hide under the kitchen table?” said Nanny as Tiffany tried to brush mud and cabbage off her dress. Then Nanny winked. “If it is going to explode?”
    Her son Shawn came around the house with a bucket of water in each hand and stopped, looking disappointed that there was nothing to do with them.
    “What was it, Mum?” he panted.
    Nanny looked at Tiffany, who said: “Er…a giant rock fell out of the sky.”
    “Giant rocks can’t stay up in the sky, miss!” said Shawn.
    “I expect that’s why this one fell down, lad,” said Nanny briskly. “If you want to do something useful, you can stand guard and make sure nobody comes near it.”
    “What shall I do if it explodes, Mum?”
    “Come and tell me, will you?” said Nanny.
    She hurried Tiffany into the cottage, shut the door behind them, and said: “I’m a dreadful ol’ liar, Tiff, and it takes one to know one. What’s down there?”
    “Well, I don’t think it’s going to explode,” said Tiffany. “And if it did, I think the worse that’d happen is that we’d be covered in coleslaw. I think it’s the Cornucopia.”
    There was the sound of voices outside and the door was flung open.
    “Blessings be upon this house,” said Granny Weatherwax, stamping snow off her boots. “Your boy said I shouldn’t come in, but I think he was wrong. I came as quick as I could. What’s happened?”
    “We’ve got cornucopias,” said Nanny Ogg, “whatever they are.”

    It was later that evening. They’d waited until it was dark before pulling the Cornucopia out of the hole. It was a lot lighter than Tiffany had expected; in fact it had an air about it of something very, very heavy which, for reasons of its own, had become light just for a while.
    Now it was on the kitchen table, wiped clean of mud and cabbages. Tiffany thought it looked vaguely alive. It was warm to the touch and seemed to vibrate slightly under her fingers.
    “According to Chaffinch,” she said, with the Mythology open on her lap, “the god Blind Io created the Cornucopia from a horn of the magical goat Almeg to feed his two children by the Goddess Bisonomy, who was later turned into a shower of oysters by Epidity, God of Things Shaped like Potatoes, after insulting Resonata, Goddess of Weasels, by throwing a mole at her shadow. It is now the badge of office of the summer goddess.”
    “I always said there used to be far too much of that sort of thing in the old days,” said Granny Weatherwax.
    The witches stared at the thing. It did look a bit like a goat horn, but much larger.
    “How does it work?” said Nanny Ogg. She stuck her head inside it and shouted “Hello!” Helloes came back, echoing for a long time, as if they had gone much farther than you would expect them to.
    “Looks like a great big seashell to me ,” was the opinion of Granny Weatherwax. The kitten You padded around the giant thing, sniffing daintily at it. (Greebo was hiding behind the saucepans on the top shelf. Tiffany checked.)
    “I don’t think anyone knows,” she said. “But the other name for it is The Horn of Plenty.”
    “A horn? Can you play a tune on it?” asked Nanny.
    “I don’t think so,” said