‘It’s very
‘Izzy wizzy wazzy, den.’
‘That other man brought him out here to save him!’ shouted Magrat. ‘He wanted us to keep him safe! It’s obvious! It’s destiny!’
‘Oh,
‘Yes, but the point is—’ Magrat began.
‘The point is,’ said Granny, ‘that people are going to come looking. Serious people. Serious looking. Pull-down-the-walls and burn-off-the-thatch looking. And—’
‘Howsa boy, den?’
‘—
‘You’re not after telling me how to look after a child,’ snapped Nanny Ogg mildly. ‘And me with fifteen of my own?’
‘I’m just saying that we ought to think about it,’ said Granny.
The other two watched her for some time.
‘Well?’ said Magrat.
Granny’s fingers drummed on the edge of the crown. She frowned.
‘First, we’ve got to take him away from here,’ she said, and held up a hand. ‘No, Gytha, I’m sure your cottage is ideal and everything, but it’s not safe. He’s got to be somewhere away from here, a long way away, where no-one knows who he is. And then there’s this.’ She tossed the crown from hand to hand.
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ said Magrat. ‘I mean, you just hide it under a stone or something. That’s easy. Much easier than babies.’
‘It ain’t,’ said Granny. ‘The reason being, the country’s full of babies and they all look the same, but I don’t reckon there’s many crowns. They have this way of being found, anyway. They kind of call out to people’s minds. If you bunged it under a stone up here, in a week’s time it’d get itself discovered by accident. You mark my words.’
‘It’s true, is that,’ said Nanny Ogg, earnestly. ‘How many times have you thrown a magic ring into the deepest depths of the ocean and then, when you get home and have a nice bit of turbot for your tea, there it is?’
They considered this in silence.
‘Never,’ said Granny irritably. ‘And nor have you. Anyway, he might want it back. If it’s rightfully his, that is. Kings set a lot of store by crowns. Really, Gytha, sometimes you say the most—’
‘I’ll just make some tea, shall I?’ said Magrat brightly, and disappeared into the scullery.
The two elderly witches sat on either side of the table in polite and prickly silence. Finally Nanny Ogg said, ‘She done it up nice, hasn’t she? Flowers and everything. What are them things on the walls?’
‘Sigils,’ said Granny sourly. ‘Or some such.’
‘Fancy,’ said Nanny Ogg, politely. ‘And all them robes and wands and things too.’
‘
own
Granny Weatherwax sniffed. Nanny Ogg had been married three times and ruled a tribe of children and grandchildren all over the kingdom. Certainly, it was not actually
‘What’s that smell?’ she snapped.
‘Ah,’ said Nanny Ogg, carefully repositioning the baby. ‘I expect I’ll just go and see if Magrat has any clean rags, shall I?’
And now Granny was left alone. She felt embarrassed, as one always does when left alone in someone else’s room, and fought the urge to get up and inspect the books on the shelf over the sideboard or examine the mantelpiece for dust. She turned the crown round and round in her hands. Again, it gave the impression of being bigger and heavier than it actually was.
She caught sight of the mirror over the mantelpiece and looked down at the crown. It was tempting. It was practically begging her to try it for size. Well, and why not? She made sure that the others weren’t around and then, in one movement, whipped off her hat and placed the crown on her head.
It seemed to fit. Granny drew herself up proudly, and waved a hand imperiously in the general direction of the hearth.
‘Jolly well do this,’ she said. She beckoned arrogantly at the grandfather clock. ‘Chop his head off, what ho,’ she commanded. She smiled grimly.
And froze as she heard the screams, and the thunder of horses, and the deadly whisper of arrows and the damp, solid sound of spears in flesh. Charge after charge echoed across her skull. Sword met shield, or sword, or bone—relentlessly. Years streamed across her mind in the space of a second. There were times when she lay among the dead, or hanging from the branch of a tree; but always there were hands that would pick her up again, and place her on a velvet cushion …
Granny very carefully lifted the crown off her head—it was an effort, it didn’t like it much—and laid it on the table.
‘So that’s being a king for you, is it?’ she said softly. ‘I wonder why they all want the job?’
‘Do you take sugar?’ said Magrat, behind her.
‘You’d have to be a born fool to be a king,’ said Granny.
‘Sorry?’
Granny turned. ‘Didn’t see you come in,’ she said. ‘What was it you said?’
‘Sugar in your tea?’
‘Three spoons,’ said Granny promptly. It was one of the few sorrows of Granny Weatherwax’s life that, despite all her efforts, she’d arrived at the peak of her career with a complexion like a rosy apple and all her teeth. No amount of charms could persuade a wart to take root on her handsome if slightly equine features, and vast intakes of sugar only served to give her boundless energy. A wizard she’d consulted had explained it was on account of her having a metabolism, which at least allowed her to feel vaguely superior to Nanny Ogg, who she suspected had never even seen one.
Magrat dutifully dug out three heaped ones. It would be nice, she thought wistfully, if someone could say ‘thank you’ occasionally.
She became aware that the crown was staring at her.
‘You can feel it, can you?’ said Granny. ‘I said, didn’t I? Crowns call out!’
‘It’s horrible.’
‘No, no. It’s just being what it is. It can’t help it.’
‘But it’s magic!’
‘It’s just being what it is,’ Granny repeated.
‘It’s trying to get me to try it on,’ said Magrat, her hand hovering.
‘It does that, yes.’
‘But I shall be strong,’ said Magrat.
‘So I should think,’ said Granny, her expression suddenly curiously wooden. ‘What’s Gytha doing?’
‘She’s giving the baby a wash in the sink,’ said Magrat vaguely. ‘How can we hide something like this? What’d happen if we buried it really deeply somewhere?’
‘A badger’d dig it up,’ said Granny wearily. ‘Or someone’d go prospecting for gold or something. Or a tree’d tangle its roots around it and then be blown over in a storm, and then someone’d pick it up and put it on—’
‘Unless they were as strong-minded as us,’ Magrat pointed out.
‘Unless that, of course,’ said Granny, staring at her fingernails. ‘Though the thing with crowns is, it isn’t the putting them on that’s the problem, it’s the taking them off.’
Magrat picked it up and turned it over in her hands.
‘It’s not as though it even looks much like a crown,’ she said.
‘You’ve seen a lot, I expect,’ said Granny. ‘You’d be an expert on them, naturally.’
‘Seen a fair few. They’ve got a lot more jewels on them, and cloth bits in the middle,’ said Magrat defiantly. ‘This is just a thin little thing—’
‘Magrat Garlick!’
‘I have. When I was being trained up by Goodie Whemper—’
‘—maysherestinpeace—’
‘—maysherestinpeace, she used to take me over to Razorback or into Lancre whenever the strolling players were in town. She was very keen on the theatre. They’ve got more crowns than you can shake a stick at although, mind—’ she paused —’Goodie did say they’re made of tin and paper and stuff. And just glass for the jewels. But they look more realler than this one. Do you think that’s strange?’
‘Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact,’ said Granny. ‘But I don’t hold with encouraging it. What do they stroll about playing, then, in these crowns?’
‘You don’t know about the theatre?’ said Magrat.
Granny Weatherwax, who never declared her ignorance of anything, didn’t hesitate. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It’s one of
‘I expect it would,’ said Granny, striking out. ‘Played properly, at any rate. Good people, are they, these theatre players?’
‘I think so.’
‘And they stroll around the country, you say?’ said Granny thoughtfully, looking towards the scullery door.
‘All over the place. There’s a troupe in Lancre now, I heard. I haven’t been because, you know.’ Magrat looked down. “Tis not right, a woman going into such places by herself.’
Granny nodded. She thoroughly approved of such sentiments so long as there was, of course, no suggestion that they applied to her.
She drummed her fingers on Magrat’s tablecloth.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘And why not? Go and tell Gytha to wrap the baby up well. It’s a long time since I heard a theatre played properly.’
After several piercing glares at the three-man orchestra to see if she could work out which instrument the theatre was, the old witch had finally paid attention to the stage, and it was beginning to become apparent to Magrat that there were certain fundamental aspects of the theatre that Granny had not yet grasped.
She was currently bouncing up and down on her stool with rage.
‘He’s killed him,’ she hissed. ‘Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it? He’s killed him! And right up there in front of everyone!’
Magrat held on desperately to her colleague’s arm as she struggled to get to her feet.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispered. ‘He’s not dead!’
‘Are you calling me a liar, my girl?’ snapped Granny. ‘I saw it all!’
‘Look, Granny, it’s not really real, d’you see?’
Granny Weatherwax subsided a little, but still grumbled under her breath. She was beginning to feel that things were trying to make a fool of her.
Up on the stage a man in a sheet was giving a spirited monologue. Granny listened intently for some minutes, and then nudged Magrat in the ribs.
‘What’s he on about now?’ she demanded.
‘He’s saying how sorry he was that the other man’s dead,’ said Magrat, and in an attempt to change the subject added hurriedly, ‘There’s a lot of crowns, isn’t there?’
Granny was not to be distracted. ‘What’d he go and kill him for, then?’ she said.
‘Well, it’s a bit complicated—’ said Magrat, weakly.
‘It’s shameful!’ snapped Granny. ‘And the poor dead thing still lying there!’
Magrat gave an imploring look to Nanny Ogg, who was masticating an apple and studying the stage with the glare of a research scientist.
‘I
The rest of the audience, who by now had already decided that this commentary was all part of the play, stared as one man at the corpse. It blushed.
‘And look at his boots, too,’ said Nanny critically. ‘A real king’d be ashamed of boots like that.’
The corpse tried to shuffle its feet behind a cardboard bush.
Granny, feeling in some obscure way that they had scored a minor triumph over the purveyors of untruth and artifice, helped herself to an apple from the bag and began to take a fresh interest. Magrat’s nerves started to unknot, and she began to settle down to enjoy the play. But not, as it turned out, for very long. Her willing suspension of disbelief was interrupted by a voice saying:
‘What’s this bit?’
Magrat sighed. ‘Well,’ she hazarded, ‘
he’s
Granny subjected the actor to a long analytical stare.
‘He
‘Why?’
‘They don’t allow no women on the stage,’ said Magrat in a small voice. She shut her eyes.
In fact, there was no outburst from the seat on her left. She risked a quick glance.
Granny was quietly chewing the same bit of apple over and over again, her eyes never leaving the action.
‘Don’t make a fuss, Esme,’ said Nanny, who also knew about Granny’s Views. ‘This is a good bit. I reckon I’m getting the hang of it.’
Someone tapped Granny on the shoulder and a voice said, ‘Madam, will you kindly remove your hat?’
Granny turned around very slowly on her stool, as though propelled by hidden motors, and subjected the interrupter to a hundred kilowatt diamond-blue stare. The man wilted under it and sagged back on to his stool, her face following him all the way down.
‘No,’ she said.
He considered the options. ‘All right,’ he said.
Granny turned back and nodded to the actors, who had paused to watch her.
‘I don’t know what you’re staring at,’ she growled. ‘Get on with it.’
Nanny Ogg passed her another bag.
‘Have a humbug,’ she said.
Silence again filled the makeshift theatre except for the hesitant voices of the actors, who kept glancing at the bristling figure of Granny Weatherwax, and the sucking sounds of a couple of boiled humbugs being relentlessly churned from cheek to cheek.
Then Granny said, in a piercing voice that made one actor drop his wooden sword, ‘There’s a man over on the side there whispering to them!’
‘He’s a prompter,’ said Magrat. ‘He tells them what to say.’
‘Don’t they know?’
‘I think they’re forgetting,’ said Magrat sourly. ‘For some reason.’
Granny nudged Nanny Ogg.
‘What’s going on now?’ she said. ‘Why’re all them kings and people up there?’
‘It’s a banquet, see,’ said Nanny Ogg authoritatively. ‘Because of the dead king, him in the boots, as was, only now if you look, you’ll see he’s pretending to be a soldier, and everyone’s making speeches about how good he was and wondering who killed him.’
‘Are they?’ said Granny, grimly. She cast her eyes along the cast, looking for the murderer.
She was making up her mind.
Then she stood up.
Her black shawl billowed around her like the wings of an avenging angel, come to rid the world of all that was foolishness and pretence and artifice and sham. She seemed somehow a lot bigger than normal. She pointed an angry finger at the guilty party.
‘He done it!’ she shouted triumphantly. ‘We all
The three witches sat alone on the edge of the stage.
‘I wonder how they get all them kings and lords to come here and do this?’ said Granny, totally unabashed. ‘I’d have thought they’d been too busy. Ruling and similar.’
‘No,’ said Magrat, wearily. ‘I still don’t think you quite understand.’
‘Well, I’m going to get to the bottom of it,’ snapped Granny. She got back on to the stage and pulled aside the sacking curtains.
‘You!’ she shouted. ‘You’re dead!’
The luckless former corpse, who was eating a ham sandwich to calm his nerves, fell backwards off his stool.
Granny kicked a bush. Her boot went right through it.
‘See?’ she said to the world in general in a strangely satisfied voice. ‘Nothing’s real! It’s all just paint, and sticks and paper at the back.’
‘May I assist you, good ladies?’
It was a rich and wonderful voice, with every diphthong gliding beautifully into place. It was a golden brown voice. If the Creator of the multiverse had a voice, it was a voice such as this. If it had a drawback, it was that it wasn’t a voice you could use, for example, for ordering coal. Coal ordered by this voice would become diamonds.
It apparently belonged to a large fat man who had been badly savaged by a moustache. Pink veins made a map of quite a large city on his cheeks; his nose could have hidden successfully in a bowl of strawberries. He wore a ragged jerkin and holey tights with an aplomb that nearly convinced you that his velvet-and-vermine robes were in the wash just at the moment. In one hand he held a towel, with which he had clearly been removing the make-up that still greased his features.
‘I know you,’ said Granny. ‘You done the murder.’ She looked sideways at Magrat, and admitted, grudgingly, ‘Leastways, it looked like it.’