Wintersmith

abandoned. And there was, in the rotted planks, a nail. If the Wintersmith had had fingers, they would have been shaking.
    This was the last thing! There had been so much to learn! It had been so hard, so hard! Who would have thought a man was made of stuff like chalk and soot and gases and poisons and metals? But now ice formed under the rusty nail, and the wood groaned and squeaked as the ice grew and forced it out.
    It spun gently in the air, and the voice of the Wintersmith could be heard in the wind that froze the treetops: “IRON ENOUGH TO MAKE A MAN!”
    High up in the mountains the snow exploded. It mounded up into the air as if dolphins were playing under it, shapes forming and disappearing….
    Then, as suddenly as it had risen, the snow settled again. But now there was a horse there, white as snow, and on its back a rider, glittering with frost. If the greatest sculptor the world had ever known had been told to build a snowman, this is what it would have looked like.
    Something was still going on. The shape of the horse and man still crawled with movement as they grew more and more lifelike. Details settled. Colors crept in, always pale, never bright.
    And there was a horse, and there was a rider, shining in the comfortless light of the midwinter sun.
    The Wintersmith extended a hand and flexed his fingers. Color is, after all, merely a matter of reflection; the fingers took on the color of flesh.
    The Wintersmith spoke. That is, there were a variety of noises, from the roar of a gale to the rattle of the sucking of the surf on a pebble shore after a wrecking storm at sea. Somewhere among them all was a tone that seemed right. He repeated it, stretched it, stirred it around, and turned it into speech, playing with it until it sounded right.
    He said: “Tasbnlerizwip? Ggokyziofvva? Wiswip? Nananana…Nyip…nap…Ah…. Ah! It is to speak!” The Wintersmith threw back his head and sang the overture to Überwald Winter by the composer Wotua Doinov. He’d overheard it once when driving a roaring gale around the rooftops of an opera house, and had been astonished to find that a human being, nothing more really than a bag of dirty water on legs, could have such a wonderful understanding of snow.
    “ SNOVA POXOLODALO !” he sang to the freezing sky.
    The only slight error the Wintersmith made, as his horse trotted through the pine trees, was in singing the instruments as well as the voices. He sang, in fact, the whole thing, and rode like a traveling orchestra, making the sounds of the singers, the drums, and the rest of the orchestra all at once.
    To smell the trees! To feel the pull of the ground! To be solid! To feel the darkness behind your eyes and know it was you! To be—and know yourself to be—a man!
    He had never felt like this before. It was exhilarating. There was so much of…of everything, coming at him from every direction. The thing with the ground, for example. It tugged, all the time. Standing upright took a lot of thinking about. And the birds! The Wintersmith had always seen them as nothing more than impurities in the air, interfering with the flow of the weather, but now they were living things just like him. And they played with the tug of the wind, and owned the sky.
    The Wintersmith had never seen before, never felt before, never heard before. You could not do those things unless you were…apart, in the dark behind the eyes. Before, he hadn’t been apart; he’d been a part, a part of the whole universe of tug and pressure, sound and light, flowing, dancing. He’d run storms against mountains forever, but he’d never known what a mountain was until today.
    The dark behind the eyes…what a precious thing. It gave you your…you-ness. Your hand, with those laughable waggly things on it, gave you touch; the holes on either side of your head let in sound; the holes at the front let in the wonderful smell. How clever of holes to know what to do! It was amazing! When you were an elemental, everything happened all together, inside and outside, in one big…thing.
    Thing. That was a useful word…thing. Thing was anything the Wintersmith couldn’t describe. Everything was…things, and they were exciting.
    It was good to be a man! Oh, he was mostly made of dirty ice, but that was just better-organized dirty water, after all.
    Yes, he was human. It was so easy. It was just a matter of organizing things. He had senses, he could move among humans, he could…search. That was how to