Nanny Ogg sighed.
‘We’d better have a look, then,’ she said, and took the lid off the copper.
Nanny Ogg never used her washhouse, since all her washing was done by the daughters-in-law, a tribe of grey-faced, subdued women whose names she never bothered to remember. It had become, therefore, a storage place for dried-up old bulbs, burnt-out cauldrons and fermenting jars of wasp jam. No fire had been lit under the copper for ten years. Its bricks were crumbling, and rare ferns grew around the firebox. The water under the lid was inky black and, according to rumour, bottomless; the Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.
In summer she used it as a beer cooler.
‘It’ll have to do. I think perhaps we should join hands,’ she said. ‘And you, Magrat, make sure the door’s shut.’
‘What are you going to try?’ said Granny. Since they were on Nanny’s territory, the choice was entirely up to her.
‘I always say you can’t go wrong with a good Invocation,’ said Nanny. ‘Haven’t done one for years.’
Granny Weatherwax frowned. Magrat said, ‘Oh, but you can’t. Not here. You need a cauldron, and a magic sword. And an octogram. And spices, and all sorts of stuff.’
Granny and Nanny exchanged glances.
‘It’s not her fault,’ said Granny. ‘It’s all them grimmers she was bought.’ She turned to Magrat.
‘You don’t need none of that,’ she said. ‘You need headology.’ She looked around the ancient washroom.
‘You just use whatever you’ve got,’ she said.
She picked up the bleached copper stick, and weighed it thoughtfully in her hand.
The waters in the boiler rippled gently.
‘
‘Silence! Now you, Gytha.’
‘
‘You listen to me, my girl,’ said Granny. ‘Demons don’t care about the outward shape of things. It’s what
Granny was also a little uneasy. She didn’t much care for demons in any case, and all this business with incantations and implements whiffed of wizardry. It was pandering to the things, making them feel important. Demons ought to come when they were called.
But protocol dictated that the host witch had the choice, and Nanny quite liked demons, who were male, or apparently so.
At this point Granny was alternately cajoling and threatening the nether world with two feet of bleached wood. She was impressed at her own daring.
The waters seethed a little, became very still and then, with a sudden movement and a little popping noise, mounded up into a head. Magrat dropped her soap.
It was a good-looking head, maybe a little cruel around the eyes and beaky about the nose, but nevertheless handsome in a hard kind of way. There was nothing surprising about this; since the demon was only extending an image of itself into this reality, it might as well make a good job of it. It turned slowly, a gleaming black statue in the fitful moonlight.
‘
,’ it said.
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ warned Granny, and added, ‘Don’t you call me woman.’
‘
,’ said the demon smugly.
‘Where were you when the vowels were handed out? Behind the door?’ said Nanny Ogg.
‘Well, Mr—’ Granny hesitated only fractionally —’WxrtHltl-jwlpklz, I expect you’re wondering why we called you here tonight.’
‘
,’ said the demon. ‘
’
‘Shut up. We have the sword of Art and the octogram of Protection, I warn you.’
‘
,’ sneered the demon.
Granny glanced sideways. The corner of the washroom was stacked with kindling wood, with a big heavy sawhorse in front of it. She stared fixedly at the demon and, without looking, brought the stick down hard across the thick timber.
The dead silence that followed was broken only by the two perfectly-sliced halves of the sawhorse teetering backwards and forwards and folding slowly into the heap of kindling.
The demon’s face remained impassive.
‘
‘And no lying,’ said Magrat earnestly. ‘Otherwise it’ll be the scrubbing brush for you.’
‘
exactly
‘Is there something in the kingdom that wasn’t there before?’ she hazarded.
‘
‘What the hell’s going on?’ she said carefully. ‘And no mucking about trying to wriggle out of it, otherwise I’ll boil you.’
The demon appeared to hesitate. This was obviously a new approach.
‘Magrat, just kick that kindling over here, will you?’ said Granny.
‘
,’ said the demon, its voice tinged with uncertainty.
‘Yes, well, we haven’t got time to bandy legs with you all night,’ said Granny. ‘These word games might be all right for wizards, but we’ve got other fish to fry.’
‘Or boil,’ said Nanny.
‘
.’
‘There’s some old oil in the can on the shelf, Magrat,’ said Nanny.
‘
—’ the demon began.
‘Yes?’ said Granny, encouragingly.
‘
‘Not a word,’ promised Granny.
‘Lips are sealed,’ said Magrat.
‘
.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Granny.
‘
.’
‘How—’ Magrat began, but Granny waved her into silence.
‘You don’t mean people, do you?’ she said. The glistening head shook. ‘No, I didn’t think so.’
‘What—’ Nanny began. Granny put a finger to her lips.
She turned and walked to the washhouse’s window, a dusty spiderweb graveyard of faded butterfly wings and last summer’s bluebottles. A faint glow beyond the frosted panes suggested that, against all reason, a new day would soon dawn.
‘Can you tell us why?’ she said, without turning round. She’d felt the mind of a whole country …
She was rather impressed.
‘
‘Oh. Yes. Run along,’ she said distractedly. ‘Thank you.’
The head didn’t move. It hung around, like a hotel porter who has just carried fifteen suitcases up ten flights of stairs, shown everyone where the bathroom is, plumped up the pillows, and feels he has adjusted all the curtains he is going to adjust.
‘
,’ said the head.
‘Oh. Well, if it gives you any pleasure. Magrat!’
‘Yes?’ said Magrat, startled.
Granny tossed the copper stick to her.
‘Do the honours, will you?’ she said.
Magrat caught the stick by what she hoped Granny was imagining as the handle, and smiled.
‘Certainly. Right. OK. Um. Begone, foul fiend, unto the blackest pit—’
The head smiled contentedly as the words rolled over it. This was more like it.
It melted back into the waters of the copper like candlewax under a flame. Its last contemptuous comment, almost lost in the swirl, was, ‘
The goats were uneasy in their outhouse. The starlings muttered and rattled their false teeth under the roof. The mice were squeaking behind the kitchen dresser.
She made a pot of tea, conscious that every sound in the kitchen seemed slightly louder than it ought to be. When she dropped the spoon into the sink it sounded like a bell being hit with a hammer.
She always felt uncomfortable after getting involved in organized magic or, as she would put it, out of sorts with herself. She found herself wandering around the place looking for things to do and then forgetting them when they were half-complete. She paced back and forth across the cold flagstones.
It is at times like this that the mind finds the oddest jobs to do in order to avoid its primary purpose,
Animals had minds. People had minds, although human minds were vague foggy things. Even insects had minds, little pointy bits of light in the darkness of non-mind.
Granny considered herself something of an expert on minds. She was pretty certain things like countries didn’t have minds.
They weren’t even
There was a way in which those brooding forests could have a mind. Granny sat up, a piece of antique loaf in her hand, and gazed speculatively at the fireplace. Her mind’s eye looked through it, out at the snow-filled aisles of trees. Yes. It had never occurred to her before. Of course, it’d be a mind made up of all the other little minds inside it; plant minds, bird minds, bear minds, even the great slow minds of the trees themselves …
She sat down in her rocking chair, which started to rock all by itself.
She’d often thought of the forest as a sprawling creature, but only metterforically, as a wizard would put it; drowsy and purring with bumblebees in the summer, roaring and raging in autumn gales, curled in on itself and sleeping in the winter. It occurred to her that in addition to being a collection of other things, the forest was a thing in itself. Alive, only not alive in the way that, say, a shrew was alive.
And
And it was at about this point that Granny bit her lip.
She’d just thought the word ‘systolic’, and it certainly wasn’t in her vocabulary.
Somebody was inside her head with her.
Some thing.
Had she just thought all those thoughts, or had they been thought
Granny Weatherwax got to her feet and opened the curtains.
And they were out there on what—in warmer months—was the lawn. And every single one of them was staring at her.
After a few minutes Granny’s front door opened. This was an event in its own right; like most Ramtoppers Granny lived her life via the back door. There were only three times in your life when it was proper to come through the front door, and you were carried every time.
It opened with considerable difficulty, in a series of painful jerks and thumps. A few flakes of paint fell on to the snowdrift in front of the door, which sagged inward. Finally, when it was about halfway open, the door wedged.
Granny sidled awkwardly through the gap and out on to the hitherto undisturbed snow.
She had put her pointed hat on, and the long black cloak which she wore when she wanted anyone who saw her to be absolutely clear that she was a witch.
There was an elderly kitchen chair half buried in snow. In summer it was a handy place to sit and do whatever hand chores were necessary, while keeping one eye on the track. Granny hauled it out, brushed the snow off the seat, and sat down firmly with her knees apart and her arms folded defiantly. She stuck out her chin.
The sun was well up but the light on this Hogswatchday was still pink and slanting. It glowed on the great cloud of steam that hung over the assembled creatures. They hadn’t moved, although every now and again one of them would stamp a hoof or scratch itself.
Granny looked up at a flicker of movement. She hadn’t noticed before, but every tree around her garden was so heavy with birds that it looked as though a strange brown and black spring had come early.
Occupying the patch where the herbs grew in summer were the wolves, sitting or lolling with their tongues hanging out. A contingent of bears was crouched behind them, with a platoon of deer beside them. Occupying the metterforical stalls was a rabble of rabbits, weasels, vermine, badgers, foxes and miscellaneous creatures who, despite the fact that they live their entire lives in a bloody atmosphere of hunter and hunted, killing or being killed by claw, talon and tooth, are generally referred to as woodland folk.
They rested together on the snow, their normal culinary relationships entirely forgotten, trying to outstare her.
Two things were immediately apparent to Granny. One was that this seemed to represent a pretty accurate cross-section of the forest life.
The other she couldn’t help saying aloud.
‘I don’t know what this spell is,’ she said. ‘But I’ll tell you this for nothing—when it wears off, some of you little buggers had better get moving.’
None of them stirred. There was no sound except for an elderly badger relieving itself with an embarrassed expression.
‘Look,’ said Granny. ‘What can I do about it? It’s no good you coming to me. He’s the new lord. This is his kingdom. I can’t go meddling. It’s not
No, things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it.
She added, ‘People have to sort it out for themselves. Well-known fact.’
She felt that one of the larger stags was giving her a particularly doubting look.
‘Yes, well, so he killed the old king,’ she conceded. ‘That’s nature’s way, ain’t it? Your lot know all about this. Survival of the wossname. You wouldn’t know what an heir was, unless you thought it was a sort of rabbit.’
She drummed her fingers on her knees.
‘Anyway, the old king wasn’t much of a friend to you, was he? All that hunting, and such.’
Three hundred pairs of dark eyes bored in at her.
‘It’s no good you all looking at me,’ she tried. ‘I can’t go around mucking about with kings just because you don’t like them. Where would it all end? It’s not as if he’s done me any harm.’
She tried to avoid the gaze of a particularly cross-eyed stoat.
‘All right, so it’s selfish,’ she said. ‘That’s what bein’ a witch is all about. Good day to you.’
She stamped inside, and tried to slam the door. It stuck once or twice, which rather spoiled the effect.
Once inside she drew the curtains and sat down in the rocking chair and rocked fiercely.
‘That’s the whole point,’ she said. ‘I can’t go around meddling. That’s the whole point.’
Hwel sat with his stubby legs dangling over the backboard of the last latty.
He’d done his best. Vitoller had left the education of Tomjon in his hands; ‘You’re better at all that business,’ he’d said, adding with his usual tact, ‘Besides, you’re more his height.’
But it wasn’t working.
‘Apple,’ he repeated, waving the fruit in the air.
Tomjon grinned at him. He was nearly three years old, and hadn’t said a word anyone could understand. Hwel was harbouring dark suspicions about the witches.
‘But he seems bright enough,’ said Mrs Vitoller, who was travelling inside the latty and darning the chain mail. ‘He knows what things are. He does what he’s told. I just wish you’d speak,’ she said softly, patting the boy on the cheek.