Witches Abroad (4 page)

‘Oh, all right.'

Nanny Ogg disappeared, muttering, into the scullery. After a few seconds there came the creaking of a pump handle.

Granny Weatherwax sidled towards a chair and felt quickly under the cushion.

There was a clatter from the next room. She straightened up hurriedly.

‘I shouldn't think it'd be under the sink, neither,' she shouted.

Nanny Ogg's reply was inaudible.

Granny waited a moment, and then crept rapidly over to the big chimney. She reached up and felt cautiously around.

‘Looking for something, Esme?' said Nanny Ogg behind her.

‘The soot up here is terrible,' said Granny, standing up quickly. ‘Terrible soot there is.'

‘
It's
not up there, then?' said Nanny Ogg sweetly.

‘Don't know what you're talking about.'

‘You don't have to pretend. Everyone knows she must have had one,' said Nanny Ogg. ‘It goes with the job. It practic'ly
is
the job.'

‘Well . . . maybe I just wanted a look at it,' Granny admitted. ‘Just hold it a while. Not
use
it. You wouldn't catch me using one of those things. I only ever saw it once or twice. There ain't many of 'em around these days.'

Nanny Ogg nodded. ‘You can't get the wood,' she said.

‘You don't think she's been buried with it, do you?'

‘Shouldn't think so. I wouldn't want to be buried with it. Thing like that, it's a bit of a responsibility. Anyway, it wouldn't stay buried. A thing like that wants to be used. It'd be rattling around your coffin the whole time. You know the trouble they are.'

She relaxed a bit. ‘I'll sort out the tea things,' she said. ‘You light the fire.'

She wandered back into the scullery.

Granny Weatherwax reached along the mantelpiece for the matches, and then realized that there wouldn't be any. Desiderata had always said she was much too busy not to use magic around the house. Even her laundry did itself.

Granny disapproved of magic for domestic purposes, but she was annoyed. She also wanted her tea.

She threw a couple of logs into the fireplace and glared at them until they burst into flame out of sheer embarrassment.

It was then that her eye was caught by the shrouded mirror.

‘Coverin' it over?' she murmured. ‘I didn't know old Desiderata was frightened of thunderstorms.'

She twitched aside the cloth.

She stared.

Very few people in the world had more self-control than Granny Weatherwax. It was as rigid as a bar of cast iron. And about as flexible.

She smashed the mirror.

Lilith sat bolt upright in her tower of mirrors.

The face was different, of course. Older. It had been a long time. But eyes don't change, and witches always look at the eyes.

Her!

Magrat Garlick, witch, was also standing in front of a mirror. In her case it was totally unmagical. It was also still in one piece, but there had been one or two close calls.

She frowned at her reflection, and then consulted the small, cheaply-woodcut leaflet that had arrived the previous day.

She mouthed a few words under her breath, straightened up, extended her hands in front of her, punched the air vigorously and said: ‘HAAAAiiiiieeeeeeehgh! Um.'

Magrat would be the first to admit that she had an open mind. It was as open as a field, as open as the sky. No mind could be more open without special surgical implements. And she was always waiting for something to fill it up.

What it was currently filling up with was the search for inner peace and cosmic harmony and the true essence of Being.

When people say ‘An idea came to me' it isn't just a metaphor. Raw inspirations, tiny particles of self-contained thought, are sleeting through the cosmos all the time. They get drawn to heads like Magrat's in the same way that water runs into a hole in the desert.

It was all due to her mother's lack of attention to spelling, she speculated. A caring parent would have spelled Margaret correctly. And then she could have been a Peggy, or a Maggie – big, robust names, full of reliability. There wasn't much you could do with a Magrat. It sounded like something that lived in a hole in a river bank and was always getting flooded out.

She considered changing it, but knew in her secret heart that this would not work. Even if she became a Chloe or an Isobel on top she'd still be a Magrat underneath. But it would be nice to try. It'd be nice not to be a Magrat, even for a few hours.

It's thoughts like this that start people on the road to Finding Themselves. And one of the earliest things Magrat had learned was that anyone Finding Themselves would be unwise to tell Granny Weatherwax, who thought that female emancipation was a women's complaint that shouldn't be discussed in front of men.

Nanny Ogg was more sympathetic but had a tendency to come out with what Magrat thought of as double-intenders, although in Nanny Ogg's case they were generally single entendres and proud of it.

In short, Magrat had despaired of learning anything at all from her senior witches, and was casting her net further afield. Much further afield. About as far afield as a field could be.

It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.
⁸

Currently Magrat was finding herself through the Path of The Scorpion, which offered cosmic harmony, inner one-ness and the possibility of knocking an attacker's kidneys out through his ears. She'd sent off for it.

There were problems. The author, Grand Master Lobsang Dibbler, had an address in Ankh-Morpork. This did not seem like a likely seat of cosmic wisdom. Also, although he'd put in lots of stuff about the Way not being used for aggression and only to be used for cosmic wisdom, this was in quite small print between enthusiastic drawings of people hitting one another with rice flails and going ‘Hai!'. Later on you learned how to cut bricks in half with your hand and walk over red hot coals and other cosmic things.

Magrat thought that Ninja was a nice name for a girl.

She squared up to herself in the mirror again.

There was a knock at the door. Magrat went and opened it.

‘Hai?' she said.

Hurker the poacher took a step backwards. He was already rather shaken. An angry wolf had trailed him part of the way through the forest.

‘Um,' he said. He leaned forward, his shock changing to concern. ‘Have you hurt your head, Miss?'

She looked at him in incomprehension. Then realization dawned. She reached up and took off the headband with the chrysanthemum pattern on it, without which it is almost impossible to properly seek cosmic wisdom by twisting an opponent's elbows through 360 degrees.

‘No,' she said. ‘What do you want?'

‘Got a package for you,' said Hurker, presenting it.

It was about two feet long, and very thin.

‘There's a note,' said Hurker helpfully. He shuffled around as she unfolded it, and tried to read it over her shoulder.

‘It's private,' said Magrat.

‘Is it?' said Hurker, agreeably.

‘Yes!'

‘I was tole you'd give me a penny for delivering it,' said the poacher. Magrat found one in her purse.

‘Money forges the chains which bind the labouring classes,' she warned, handing it over. Hurker, who had never thought of himself as a labouring class in his life, but who was prepared to listen to almost any amount of gibberish in exchange for a penny, nodded innocently.

‘And I hope your head gets better, Miss,' he said.

When Magrat was left alone in her kitchen-cum-dojo she unwrapped the parcel. It contained one slim white rod.

She looked at the note again. It said, ‘I niver had time to Trane a replaysment so youll have to Do. You must goe to the city of Genua. I would of done thys myself only cannot by reason of bein dead. Ella Saturday muste NOTTE marry the prins. PS This is importent.'

She looked at her reflection in the mirror.

She looked down at the note again.

‘PSPS Tell those 2 Olde Biddys they are Notte to come with Youe, they will onlie Ruine everythin.'

There was more.

‘PSPSPS It has tendincy to resett to pumpkins but you will gett the hange of it in noe time.'

Magrat looked at the mirror again. And then down at the wand.

One minute life is simple, and then suddenly it stretches away full of complications.

‘Oh, my,' she said. ‘I'm a fairy godmother!'

Granny Weatherwax was still standing staring at the crazily-webbed fragments when Nanny Ogg ran in.

‘Esme Weatherwax, what have you done? That's bad luck, that is . . . Esme?'

‘Her?
Her?
'

‘Are you all right?'

Granny Weatherwax screwed up her eyes for a moment, and then shook her head as if trying to dislodge an unthinkable thought.

‘What?'

‘You've gone all pale. Never seen you go all pale like that before.'

Granny slowly removed a fragment of glass from her hat.

‘Well . . . bit of a turn, the glass breaking like that . . .' she mumbled.

Nanny looked at Granny Weatherwax's hand. It was bleeding. Then she looked at Granny Weatherwax's face, and decided that she'd never admit that she'd looked at Granny Weatherwax's hand.

‘Could be a sign,' she said, randomly selecting a safe topic. ‘Once someone dies, you get that sort of thing. Pictures fallin' off walls, clocks stopping . . . great big wardrobes falling down the stairs . . . that sort of thing.'

‘I've never believed in that stuff, it's . . . what do you mean,
wardrobes
falling down the stairs?' said Granny. She was breathing deeply. If it wasn't well known that Granny Weatherwax was
tough
, anyone might have thought she had just had the shock of her life and was practically desperate to take part in a bit of ordinary everyday bickering.

‘That's what happened after my Great-Aunt Sophie died,' said Nanny Ogg. ‘Three days and four hours and six minutes
to the very minute
after she died, her wardrobe fell down the stairs. Our Darren and our Jason were trying to get it round the bend and it sort of slipped, just like that. Uncanny. Weeell, I wasn't going to leave it there for her Agatha, was I, only ever visited her mum on Hogswatchday, and it was me that nursed Sophie all the way through to the end—'

Granny let the familiar, soothing litany of Nanny Ogg's family feud wash over her as she groped for the teacups.

The Oggs were what is known as an extended family – in fact not only extended but elongated, protracted and persistent. No normal sheet of paper could possibly trace their family tree, which in any case was more like a mangrove thicket. And every single branch had a low-key, chronic vendetta against every other branch, based on such well-established
causes célèbres
as What Their Kevin Said About Our Stan At Cousin Di's Wedding and Who Got The Silver Cutlery That Auntie Em
Promised
Our Doreen Was To Have After She Died, I'd Like To Know, Thank You
Very
Much,
If
You Don't Mind.

Nanny Ogg, as undisputed matriarch, encouraged all sides indiscriminately. It was the nearest thing she had to a hobby.

The Oggs contained, in just one family, enough feuds to keep an entire Ozark of normal hillbillies going for a century.

And sometimes this encouraged a foolish outsider to join in and perhaps make an uncomplimentary remark about one Ogg to another Ogg. Whereupon
every single Ogg
would turn on him, every part of the family closing up together like the parts of a well-oiled, blue-steeled engine to deal instant merciless destruction to the interloper.

Ramtop people believed that the Ogg feud was a blessing. The thought of them turning their immense energy on the world in general was a terrible one. Fortunately, there was no-one an Ogg would rather fight than another Ogg. It was
family
.

Odd things, families, when you came to think of it . . .

‘Esme? You all right?'

‘What?'

‘You've got them cups rattling like nobody's business!
And
tea all over the tray.'

Granny looked down blankly at the mess, and rallied as best she could.

‘Not my damn fault if the damn cups are too small,' she muttered.

The door opened.

‘Morning, Magrat,' she added, without looking around. ‘What're you doing here?'

It was something about the way the hinges creaked. Magrat could even open a door apologetically.

The younger witch sidled speechlessly into the room, face beetroot red, arms held behind her back.

‘We'd just popped in to sort out Desiderata's things, as our duty to a sister witch,' said Granny loudly.

‘And not to look for her magic wand,' said Nanny.

‘Gytha Ogg!'

Nanny Ogg looked momentarily guilty, and then hung her head.

‘Sorry, Esme.'

Magrat brought her arms around in front of her.

‘Er,' she said, and blushed further.

‘You found it!' said Nanny.

‘Uh, no,' said Magrat, not daring to look Granny in the eyes. ‘Desiderata gave it to . . . me.'

The silence crackled and hummed.

‘
She
gave it to
you
?' said Granny Weatherwax.

‘Uh. Yes.'