"Terry Pratchett. A Hat Full Of Sky " - читать интересную книгу автора

Sometimes Tiffany thought she ought to talk to Miss Tick about see me.
It felt as if she was stepping out of her body, but still had a sort of
ghost body that could walk around. It all worked as long as her ghost eyes
didnt look down and see that she was just a ghost body. If that happened,
some part of her panicked and she found herself back in her solid body
immediately. Tiffany had, in the end, decided to keep this to herself. You
didnt have to tell a teacher everything. Anyway, it was a good trick for
when you didnt have a mirror.
Miss Tick was a sort of witch-finder. That seemed to be how witchcraft
worked. Some witches kept a magical lookout for girls who showed promise,
and found them an older witch to help them along. They didnt teach you how
to do it. They taught you how to know what you were doing.
Witches were a bit like cats. They didnt much like one anothers
company, but they did like to know where all the other witches were, just in
case they needed them. And what you might need them for was to tell you, as
a friend, that you were beginning to cackle.
Witches didnt fear much, Miss Tick had said, but what the powerful ones
were afraid of, even if they didnt talk about it, was what they called going
to the bad. It was too easy to slip into careless little cruelties because
you had power and other people hadnt, too easy to think other people didnt
matter much, too easy to think that ideas like right and wrong didnt apply
to you. At the end of that road was you dribbling and cackling to yourself
all alone in a gingerbread house, growing warts on your nose.
Witches needed to know other witches were watching them.
And that, Tiffany thought, was why the hat was there. She could touch
it any time, provided she shut her eyes. It was a kind of reminder . . .
Tiffany! her mother shouted up the stairs. Miss Ticks here!

Yesterday, Tiffany had said goodbye to Granny Aching . . .
The iron wheels of the old shepherding hut were half buried in the
turf, high up on the hills. The potbellied stove, which still stood lopsided
in the grass, was red with rust. The chalk hills were taking them, just like
theyd taken the bones of Granny Aching.
The rest of the hut had been burned on the day shed been buried. No
shepherd would have dared to use it, let alone spend the night there. Granny
Aching had been too big in peoples minds, too hard to replace. Night and
day, in all seasons, she was the Chalk country: its best shepherd, its
wisest woman, and its memory. It was as if the green downland had a soul
that walked about in old boots and a sacking apron and smoked a foul old
pipe and dosed sheep with turpentine.
The shepherds said that Granny Aching had cussed the sky blue. They
called the fluffy little white clouds of summer Granny Achings little lambs.
And although they laughed when they said these things, part of them was not
joking.
No shepherd would have dared presume to live in that hut, no shepherd
at all.
So they had cut the turf and buried Granny Aching in the Chalk, watered
the turf afterwards to leave no mark, then they burned her hut.
Sheeps wool, Jolly Sailor tobacco and turpentine . . .
. . . had been the smells of the shepherding hut, and the smell of