Witches Abroad (14 page)

‘I remember,' said Nanny Ogg, ‘when she come over our house for the party when King Verence got crowned and we played Chase My Neighbour Up the Passage with the kiddies for ha'pennies. She accused Jason's youngest of cheating and sulked for a week afterwards.'

‘Was he cheating?'

‘I expect so,' said Nanny proudly. ‘The trouble with Esme is that she don't know how to lose. She's never had much practice.'

‘Lobsang Dibbler says sometimes you have to lose in order to win,' said Magrat.

‘Sounds daft to me,' said Nanny. ‘That's Yen Buddhism, is it?'

‘No. They're the ones who say you have to have lots of money to win,' said Magrat.
¹⁴
‘In the Path of the Scorpion, the way to win is to lose every fight except the last one. You use the enemy's strength against himself.'

‘What, you get him to hit himself, sort of thing?' said Nanny. ‘Sounds daft.'

Magrat glowered.

‘What do you know about it?' she said, with uncharacteristic sharpness.

‘What?'

‘Well, I'm fed up!' said Magrat. ‘At least I'm making an effort to learn things! I don't go around just bullying people and acting bad-tempered all the time!'

Nanny took her pipe out of her mouth.

‘I'm not bad-tempered,' she said mildly.

‘I wasn't talking about you!'

‘Well, Esme's always been bad-tempered,' said Nanny. ‘It comes natural to her.'

‘And she hardly ever does real magic. What good is being a witch if you don't do magic? Why doesn't she use it to help people?'

Nanny peered at her through the pipe smoke.

‘'Cos she knows how good she'd be at it, I suppose,' she said. ‘Anyway, I've known her a long time. Known the whole family. All the Weatherwaxes is good at magic, even the men. They've got this magical streak in 'em. Kind of a curse. Anyway . . . she thinks you can't help people with magic. Not
properly
. It's true, too.'

‘Then what good –?'

Nanny prodded at the pipe with a match.

‘I seem to recall she come over and helped you out when you had that spot of plague in your village,' she said. ‘Worked the clock around, I recall. Never known her not treat someone ill who needed it, even when they, you know, were pretty oozy. And when the big ole troll that lives under Broken Mountain came down for help because his wife was sick and everyone threw rocks at him, I remember it was Esme that went back with him and delivered the baby. Hah . . . then when old Chickenwire Hopkins threw a rock at
Esme
a little while afterwards all his barns was mysteriously trampled flat in the night. She always said you can't help people with magic, but you can help them with skin. By doin' real things, she meant.'

‘I'm not saying she's not basically a nice person –' Magrat began.

‘Hah!
I
am. You'd have to go a long day's journey to find someone basically nastier than Esme,' said Nanny Ogg, ‘and this is
me
sayin' it. She knows exactly what she is. She was born to be good and she don't like it.'

Nanny tapped her pipe out on the rail and turned back to the saloon.

‘What you got to understand about Esme, my girl,' she said, ‘is that she's got a psycholology as well as a big eggo. I'm damn glad I ain't.'

Granny was twelve dollars ahead. Everything else in the saloon had stopped. You could hear the distant splash of the paddles and the cry of the leadman.

Granny won another five dollars with a three-card Onion.

‘What do you mean, a psycholology?' said Magrat. ‘Have you been reading books?'

Nanny ignored her.

‘The thing to watch out for now,' she said, ‘is when she goes “tch, tch, tch” under her breath. That comes after the ear-cleanin'. It gen'rally means she's plannin' somethin'.'

Mister Frank drummed his fingers on the table, realized to his horror that he was doing it, and bought three new cards to cover his confusion. The old baggage didn't appear to notice.

He stared at the new hand.

He ventured two dollars and bought one more card.

He stared again.

What were the odds, he thought, against getting a Great Onion twice in one day?

The important thing was not to panic.

‘I think,' he heard himself say, ‘that I may hazard another two dollars.'

He glanced at his companions. They obediently folded, one after another.

‘Well, I don't know,' said Granny, apparently talking to her cards. She cleaned her ear again. ‘Tch, tch, tch. What d'you call it when, you know, you want to put more money in, sort of thing?'

‘It's called raising,' said Mister Frank, his knuckles going white.

‘I'll do one of them raisins, then. Five dollars, I think.'

Mister Frank's knees ground together.

‘I'll see you and raise you ten dollars,' he snapped.

‘I'll do that too,' said Granny.

‘I can go another twenty dollars.'

‘I –' Granny looked down, suddenly crestfallen. ‘I've . . . got a broomstick.'

A tiny alarm bell rang somewhere at the back of Mister Frank's mind, but now he was galloping headlong to victory.

‘Right!'

He spread the cards on the table.

The crowd sighed.

He began to pull the pot towards him.

Granny's hand closed over his wrist.

‘I ain't put
my
cards down yet,' she said archly.

‘You don't need to,' snapped Mister Frank. ‘There's no chance you could beat that, madam.'

‘I can if I can Cripple it,' said Granny. ‘That's why it's called Cripple Mister Onion, ain't it?'

He hesitated.

‘But – but – you could only do that if you had a perfect nine-card run,' he burbled, staring into the depths of her eyes.

Granny sat back.

‘You know,' she said calmly, ‘I
thought
I had rather a lot of these black pointy ones. That's good, is it?'

She spread the hand. The collective audience made a sort of little gasping noise, in unison.

Mister Frank looked around wildly.

‘Oh, very well done, madam,' said an elderly gentleman. There was a round of polite applause from the crowd. The big, inconvenient crowd.

‘Er . . . yes,' said Mister Frank. ‘Yes. Well done. You're a very quick learner, aren't you.'

‘Quicker'n you. You owe me fifty-five dollars and a broomstick,' said Granny.

Magrat and Nanny Ogg were waiting for her as she swept out.

‘Here's your broom,' she snapped. ‘And I hopes you've got all your stuff together, 'cos we're leaving.'

‘Why?' said Magrat.

‘Because as soon as it gets quiet, some men are going to come looking for us.'

They scurried after her towards their tiny cabin.

‘You weren't using magic?' said Magrat.

‘No.'

‘And not cheating?' said Nanny Ogg.

‘No. Just headology,' said Granny.

‘Where did you learn to play like that?' Nanny demanded.

Granny stopped. They cannoned into her.

‘Remember last winter, when Old Mother Dismass was taken really bad and I went and sat up with her every night for almost a month?'

‘Yes?'

‘You sit up every night dealing Cripple Mister Onion with someone who's got a detached retina in her second sight and you soon learn how to play,' said Granny.

The moon was closer here.

The orbit of the Discworld's moon meant that it was quite high when it passed over the high Ramtops. Here, nearer to the Rim, it was bigger And more orange.

‘Like a pumpkin,' said Nanny Ogg.

‘I thought we said we weren't going to mention pumpkins,' said Magrat.

‘Well, we didn't have any supper,' said Nanny.

And there was another thing. Except during the height of summer the witches weren't used to warm nights. It didn't seem right, gliding along under a big orange moon over dark foliage that clicked and buzzed and whirred with insects.

‘We must be far enough from the river now,' said Magrat. ‘Can't we land, Granny? No-one could have followed us!'

Granny Weatherwax looked down. The river in this countryside meandered in huge glistening curves, taking twenty miles to cover five. The land between the snaking water was a patchwork of hillsides and woodlands. A distant glow might have been Genua itself.

‘Riding a broomstick all night is a right pain in the itinerant,' said Nanny.

‘Oh, all
right
.'

‘There's a town over there,' said Magrat. ‘And a castle.'

‘Oh, not another one . . .'

‘It's a nice little castle,' said Magrat. ‘Can't we just call in? I'm fed up with inns.'

Granny looked down. She had very good night vision.

‘Are you sure that's a castle?' she said.

‘I can see the turrets and everything,' said Magrat. ‘Of course it's a castle.'

‘Hmm. I can see more than turrets,' said Granny. ‘I think we'd better have a look at this, Gytha.'

There was never any noise in the sleeping castle, except in the late summer when ripe berries fell off the bramble vines and burst softly on the floor. And sometimes birds would try to nest in the thorn thickets that now filled the throne room from floor to ceiling, but they never got very far before they, too, fell asleep. Apart from that, you'd need very keen hearing indeed to hear the growth of shoots and the opening of buds.

It had been like this for ten years. There was no sound in the—

‘Open up there!'

‘Bony fidy travellers seeking sucker!'

—no sound in the—

‘Here, give us a leg up, Magrat. Right. Now . . .'

There was a tinkle of broken glass.

‘You've broken their window!'

—
not a sound
in the—

‘You'll have to offer to pay for it, you know.'

The castle gate swung open slowly. Nanny Ogg peered around it at the other two witches, while pulling thorns and burrs from her hair.

‘It's bloody disgusting in here,' she said. ‘There's people asleep all over the place with spiders' webs all over 'em. You were right, Esme. There's been magic going on.'

The witches pushed their way through the overgrown castle. Dust and leaves had covered the carpets. Young sycamores were making a spirited attempt to take over the courtyard. Vines festooned every wall.

Granny Weatherwax pulled a slumbering soldier to his feet. Dust billowed off his clothes.

‘Wake up,' she demanded.

‘Fzhtft,' said the soldier, and slumped back.

‘It's like that everywhere,' said Magrat, fighting her way through a thicket of bracken that was growing up from the kitchen regions. ‘There's the cooks all snoring and nothing but mould in the pots! There's even mice asleep in the pantry!'

‘Hmm,' said Granny. ‘There'll be a spinning wheel at the bottom of all this, you mark my words.'

‘A Black Aliss job?' said Nanny Ogg.

‘Looks like it,' said Granny. Then she added, quietly, ‘Or someone like her.'

‘Now
there
was a witch who knew how stories worked,' said Nanny. ‘She used to be in as many as three of 'em at once.'

Even Magrat knew about Black Aliss. She was said to have been the greatest witch who ever lived – not exactly
bad
, but so powerful it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. When it came to sending palaces to sleep for a hundred years or getting princesses to spin straw into Glod,
¹⁵
no-one did it better than Black Aliss.

‘I met her once,' said Nanny, as they climbed the castle's main staircase, which was a cascade of Old Man's Trousers. ‘Old Deliria Skibbly took me to see her once, when I was a girl. Of course, she was getting pretty . . . eccentric by then. Gingerbread houses, that kind of thing.' She spoke sadly, as one might talk about an elderly relative who'd taken to wearing her underwear outside her clothes.

‘That must have been before those two children shut her up in her own oven?' said Magrat, untangling her sleeve from a briar.

‘Yeah. Sad, that. I mean, she didn't really ever
eat
anyone,' said Nanny. ‘Well. Not often. I mean, there was talk, but . . .'

‘That's what happens,' said Granny. ‘You get too involved with stories, you get confused. You don't know what's really real and what isn't. And they get you in the end. They send you weird in the head. I don't like stories. They're not real. I don't like things that ain't real.'

She pushed open a door.

‘Ah. A chamber,' she said sourly. ‘Could even be a bower.'

‘Doesn't the stuff grow quickly!' said Magrat.

‘Part of the time spell,' said Granny. ‘Ah. There she is. Knew there'd be someone somewhere.'

There was a figure lying on a bed, in a thicket of rose bushes.