Witches Abroad (26 page)

‘Reckon,' said the senior footman, ‘we should be gettin' the coesshe ready, what say?'

‘Reckon you've got time for one more yet,' said Nanny Ogg.

‘Ver' generous,' said the coachman. ‘Ver' generous. Here's lookin' at you, Mrsrsrs Goo . . .'

Magrat had dreamed of dresses like this. In the pit of her soul, in the small hours of the night, she'd danced with princes. Not shy, hardworking princes like Verence back home, but real ones, with crystal blue eyes and white teeth. And she'd
worn
dresses like this. And they had
fitted
.

She stared at the ruched sleeves, the embroidered bodice, the fine white lace. It was all a world away from her . . . well . . . Nanny Ogg kept calling them ‘Magrats', but they were trousers, and very practical.

As if being practical mattered at all.

She stared for a long time.

Then, with tears streaking her face and changing colour as they caught the light of the fireworks, she took the knife and began to cut the dress into very small pieces.

The senior coachman's head bounced gently off his sandwiches.

Nanny Ogg stood up, a little unsteadily. She placed the junior footman's wig under his slumbering head, because she was not an unkind woman. Then she stepped out into the night.

A figure moved near the wall.

‘Magrat?' hissed Nanny.

‘Nanny?'

‘Did you see to the dress?'

‘Have you seen to the footmen?'

‘Right, then,' said Granny Weatherwax, stepping out of the shadows. ‘Then there's just the coach.'

She tiptoed theatrically to the coachhouse and opened the door. It grated loudly on the cobbles.

‘Shsss!' said Nanny.

There was a stub of candle and some matches on a ledge. Magrat fumbled the candle alight.

The coach lit up like a glitter ball.

It was excessively ornate, as if someone had taken a perfectly ordinary coach and then gone insane with fretwork and gold paint.

Granny Weatherwax walked around it.

‘A bit showy,' she said.

‘Seems a real shame to smash it up,' said Nanny sadly. She rolled up her sleeves and then, as an afterthought, tucked the hem of her skirt into her drawers.

‘Bound to be a hammer somewhere around here,' she said, turning to the benches along the walls.

‘Don't! That'd make too much noise!' hissed Magrat. ‘Hang on a moment . . .'

She pulled the despised wand out of her belt, gripped it tightly, and waved it towards the coach.

There was a brief inrush of air.

‘Blow me down,' said Nanny Ogg. ‘I never would have thought of that.'

On the floor was a large orange pumpkin.

‘It was nothing,' said Magrat, risking a touch of pride.

‘Hah! That's one coach that'll never roll again,' said Nanny.

‘Hey . . . can you do that to the horses too?' said Granny.

Magrat shook her head. ‘Um, I think that would be very cruel.'

‘You're right. You're right,' said Granny. ‘No excuse for cruelty to dumb animals.'

The two stallions watched her with equine curiosity as she undid the loose-box gates.

‘Off you go,' she said. ‘Big green fields out there somewhere.' She glanced momentarily at Magrat. ‘You have been em-horse-sipated.'

This didn't seem to have much effect.

Granny sighed. She climbed up onto the wooden wall that separated the boxes, reached up, grabbed a horse ear in either hand, and gently dragged their heads down level with her mouth.

She whispered something.

The stallions turned and looked one another in the eye.

Then they looked down at Granny.

She grinned at them, and nodded.

Then . . .

It is impossible for a horse to go instantly from a standing start to a gallop, but they almost managed it.

‘What on earth did you say to them?' said Magrat.

‘Mystic horseman's word,' said Granny. ‘Passed down to Gytha's Jason, who passed it up to me. Works every time.'

‘He told you it?' said Nanny.

‘Yes.'

‘What, all of it?'

‘Yes,' said Granny, smugly.

Magrat tucked the wand back into her belt. As she did so, a square of white material fell on to the floor.

White gems and silk glimmered in the candlelight as she reached down hurriedly to pick it up, but there wasn't a lot that escaped Granny Weatherwax.

She sighed.

‘Magrat Garlick . . .' she began.

‘Yes,' said Magrat meekly. ‘Yes. I know. I'm a wet hen.'

Nanny patted her gently on the shoulder.

‘Never mind,' she said. ‘We've done a good night's work here. That Ella has about as much chance of being sent to the ball tonight as I have of . . . of becoming queen.'

‘No dress, no footmen, no horses and no coach,' said Granny. ‘I'd like to see
her
get out of
that
one. Stories? Hah!'

‘So what're we going to do now?' said Magrat, as they crept out of the yard.

‘It's Fat Lunchtime!' said Nanny. ‘Hot diggety pig!' Greebo wandered out of the darkness and rubbed against her legs.

‘I thought Lily was trying to stamp it out,' said Magrat.

‘May as well try to stamp out a flood,' said Nanny. ‘Kick out a jam!'

‘I don't agree with dancing in the streets,' said Granny. ‘How much of that rum did you drink?'

‘Oh, come
on
, Esme,' said Nanny. ‘They say if you can't have a good time in Genua you're probably dead.' She thought about Saturday. ‘You can probably have a bit of quiet fun even if you
are
dead, in Genua.'

‘Hadn't we better stay here, though?' said Magrat. ‘Just to make sure?'

Granny Weatherwax hesitated.

‘What do you think, Esme?' said Nanny Ogg. ‘You think she's going to be sent to the ball in a
pumpkin
, eh? Get a few mice to pull it, eh? Heheh!'

A vision of the snake women floated across Granny Weatherwax's mind, and she hesitated. But, after all, it had been a long day. And it was ridiculous, when you came to think about it . . .

‘Well, all right,' she said. ‘But I'm not going to kick any jam, you understand.'

‘There's dancing and all sorts,' said Nanny.

‘And banana drinks, I expect,' said Magrat.

‘It's a million to one chance, yes,' said Nanny Ogg happily.

Lilith de Tempscire smiled at herself in the double mirror.

‘Oh deary me,' she said. ‘No coach, no dress, no horses. What
is
a poor old godmother to do? Deary me. And probably lawks.'

She opened a small leather case, such as a musician might use to carry his very best piccolo.

There was a wand in there, the twin of the one carried by Magrat. She took it out and gave it a couple of twists, moving the gold and silver rings into a new position.

The clicking sounded like the nastiest pump-action mechanism.

‘And me with nothing but a pumpkin, too,' said Lilith.

And of course the difference between sapient and non-sapient things was that while it was hard to change the shape of the former it was not actually impossible. It was just a matter of changing a mental channel. Whereas a non-sapient thing like a pumpkin, and it was hard to imagine anything less sapient than a pumpkin, could not be changed by any magic short of sourcery.

Unless its molecules remembered a time when they weren't a pumpkin . . .

She laughed, and a billion reflected Liliths laughed with her, all around the curve of the mirror universe.

Fat Lunchtime was no longer celebrated in the centre of Genua. But in the shanty town around the high white buildings it strutted its dark and torchlit stuff. There were fireworks. There were dancers, and fire-eaters, and feathers, and sequins. The witches, whose idea of homely entertainment was a Morris dance, watched open-mouthed from the crowded sidewalk as the parades strutted by.

‘There's dancing skeletons!' said Nanny, as a score of bony figures whirred down the street.

‘They're not,' said Magrat. ‘They're just men in black tights with bones painted on.'

Someone nudged Granny Weatherwax. She looked up into the large, grinning face of a black man. He passed her a stone jug.

‘There you go, honey.'

Granny took it, hesitated for a moment, and then took a swig. She nudged Magrat and passed on the bottle.

‘Frgtht!! Gizeer!' she said.

‘What?' shouted Magrat, above the noise of a marching band.

‘The man wants us to pass it on,' said Granny.

Magrat looked at the bottle neck. She tried surreptitiously to wipe it on her dress, despite the self-evident fact that germs on it would have burned off long ago. She ventured a brief nip, and then nudged Nanny Ogg.

‘Kwizathugner!' she said, and dabbed at her eyes.

Nanny up-ended the bottle. After a while Magrat nudged her again.

‘I think we're meant to pass it on?' she ventured.

Nanny wiped her mouth and passed the now rather lighter jug randomly to a tall figure on her left.

‘Here you go, mister,' she said.

T
HANK YOU
.

‘Nice costume you got there. Them bones are painted on really good.'

Nanny turned back to watch a procession of juggling fire-eaters. Then a connection appeared to be made somewhere in the back of her mind. She looked up. The stranger had wandered off.

She shrugged.

‘What shall we do next?' she said.

Granny Weatherwax was staring fixedly at a group of ground-zero limbo dancers. A lot of the dances in the parades had this in common: they expressed explicitly what things like maypoles only hinted at. They covered it with sequins, too.

‘You'll never feel safe in the privy again, eh?' said Nanny Ogg. At her feet Greebo sat primly watching some dancing women wearing nothing but feathers, trying to work out what to do about them.

‘No. I was thinkin' of something else. I was thinkin' about . . . how stories work. And now . . . I think I'd like something to eat,' said Granny weakly. She rallied a bit. ‘And I mean some proper food, not somethin' scraped off the bottom of a pond. And I don't want any of this
cuisine
stuff, neither.'

‘You ought to be more adventurous, Granny,' said Magrat.

‘I ain't against adventure, in moderation,' said Granny, ‘but not when I'm eatin'.'

‘There's a place back there that does alligator sandwiches,' said Nanny, turning away from the parade. ‘Can you believe that? Alligators in a sandwich?'

‘That reminds me of a joke,' said Granny Weatherwax. Something was nagging at her consciousness.

Nanny Ogg started to cough, but it didn't work.

‘This man went into an inn,' said Granny Weatherwax, trying to ignore the rising uneasiness. ‘And he saw this sign. And it said “We serve all kinds of sandwiches.” And he said, “Get me an alligator sandwich – and I want it right away!”'

‘I don't think alligator sandwiches is very kind to alligators,' said Magrat, dropping the observation into the leaden pause.

‘I always say a laugh does you good,' said Nanny.

Lilith smiled at the figure of Ella, standing forlornly between the snake women.

‘And such a raggedy dress, too,' she said. ‘And the door to the room was locked. Tut-tut. However can it have happened?'

Ella stared at her feet.

Lilith smiled at the sisters. ‘Well,' she said, ‘we'll just have to do the best we can with what we've got. Hmm? Fetch me . . . fetch me two rats and two mice. I
know
you can always find rats and mice. And bring in the big pumpkin.'

She laughed. Not the mad, shrill laughter of the bad fairy who's been defeated, but the rather pleasant laughter of someone who's just seen the joke.

She looked reflectively at the wand.

‘But first,' she said, transferring her gaze to Ella's pale face, ‘you'd better bring in those
naughty
men who let themselves get so drunk. That's not respectful. And if you haven't got respect, you haven't got anything.'

The clicking of the wand was the only sound in the kitchen.

Nanny Ogg poked at the tall drink in front of her.

‘Beats me why they puts an umbrella in it,' she said, sucking the cocktail cherry off the stick. ‘I mean, do they want to stop it getting wet or something?'

She grinned at Magrat and Granny, who were both staring gloomily at the passing celebrations.

‘Cheer up,' she said. ‘Never seen such a pair of long faces in all my puff.'

‘That's neat rum you're drinking,' said Magrat.

‘You're telling me,' said Nanny, taking a swig. ‘Cheers!'

‘It was too easy,' said Granny Weatherwax.

‘It was only easy 'cos
we
done it,' said Nanny. ‘You want something done, we're the girls to do it, eh? You show me anyone else who could have nipped in there and done all that in the nick of time, eh? Especially the coach bit.'

‘It doesn't make a good story,' said Granny.

‘Oh, bugger stories,' said Nanny loftily. ‘You can always change a story.'

‘Only at the right places,' said Granny. ‘Anyway, maybe they could get her a new dress and horses and a coach and everything.'

‘Where? When?' said Nanny. ‘It's a holiday. And there's no
time
, anyway. They'll be starting the ball at any moment.'