Discworld 03 - Equal Rites Read online

  “No,” said Smith firmly, rubbing his ear. “Whatever it is you’re going to suggest, no. Leave it. I’ll pile some stuff around it. No one’ll notice. Leave it. It’s just a stick.”

  “Just a stick?”

  “Have you got any better ideas? Ones that won’t take my head off?”

  She glared at the staff, which appeared not to notice.

  “Not right now,” she admitted. “But you just give me time—”

  “All right, all right. Anyway, I’ve got things to do, wizards to bury, you know how it is.”

  Smith took a spade from beside the back door and hesitated.

  “Granny.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know how wizards like to be buried?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, how?”

  Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Reluctantly.”

  Later, night fell gently as the last of the world’s slow light flowed out of the valley, and a pale, rain-washed moon shone down in a night studded with stars. And in a shadowy orchard behind the forge there was the occasional clink of a spade or a muffled curse.

  In the cradle upstairs the world’s first female wizard dreamed of nothing much.

  The white cat lay half-asleep on its private ledge near the furnace. The only sound in the warm dark forge was the crackle of the coals as they settled down under the ash.

  The staff stood in the corner, where it wanted to be, wrapped in shadows that were slightly blacker than shadows normally are.

  Time passed, which, basically, is its job.

  There was a faint tinkle, and a swish of air. After a while the cat sat up and watched with interest.

  Dawn came. Up here in the Ramtops dawn was always impressive, especially when a storm had cleared the air. The valley occupied by Bad Ass overlooked a panorama of lesser mountains and foothills, colored purple and orange in the early morning light that flowed gently over them (because light travels at a dilatory pace in the Disc’s vast magical field) and far off the great plains were still a puddle of shadows. Even further off the sea gave an occasional distant sparkle.

  In fact, from here you could see right to the edge of the world.

  That wasn’t poetic imagery but plain fact, since the world was quite definitely flat and was, furthermore, known to be carried through space on the backs of four elephants that in turn stood on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the Great Sky Turtle.

  Back down there in Bad Ass the village is waking up. The smith has just gone into the forge and found it tidier than it has been for the last hundred years, with all the tools back in their right places, the floor swept and a new fire laid in the furnace. He is sitting on the anvil, which has been moved right across the room, and is watching the staff and is trying to think.

  Nothing much happened for seven years, except that one of the apple trees in the smithy orchard grew perceptibly taller than the others and was frequently climbed by a small girl with brown hair, a gap in her front teeth, and the sort of features that promised to become, if not beautiful, then at least attractively interesting.

  She was named Eskarina, for no particular reason other than that her mother liked the sound of the word, and although Granny Weatherwax kept a careful watch on her she failed to spot any signs of magic whatsoever. It was true that the girl spent more time climbing trees and running around shouting than little girls normally did, but a girl with four older brothers still at home can be excused a lot of things. In fact, the witch began to relax and started to think the magic had not taken hold after all.

  But magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass.

  Winter came round again, and it was a bad one. The clouds hung around the Ramtops like big fat sheep, filling the gulleys with snow and turning the forests into silent, gloomy caverns. The high passes were closed and the caravans wouldn’t come again until spring. Bad Ass became a little island of heat and light.

  Over breakfast Esk’s mother said: “I’m worried about Granny Weatherwax. She hasn’t been around lately.”

  Smith looked at her over his porridge spoon.

  “I’m not complaining,” he said. “She—”

  “She’s got a long nose,” said Esk.

  Her parents glared at her.

  “There’s no call to make that kind of remark,” said her mother sternly.

  “But father said she’s always poking her—”

  “Eskarina!”

  “But he said—”

  “I said—”

  “Yes, but, he did say that she had—”

  Smith reached down and slapped her. It wasn’t very hard, and he regretted it instantly. The boys got the flat of his hand and occasionally the length of his belt whenever they deserved it. The trouble with his daughter, though, was not ordinary naughtiness but the infuriating way she had of relentlessly pursuing the thread of an argument long after she should have put it down. It always flustered him.

  She burst into tears. Smith stood up, angry and embarrassed at himself, and stumped off to the forge.

  There was a loud crack, and a thud.

  They found him out cold on the floor. Afterward he always maintained that he’d hit his head on the doorway. Which was odd, because he wasn’t very tall and there had always been plenty of room before, but he was certain that whatever happened had nothing to do with the blur of movement from the forge’s darkest corner.

  Somehow the events set the seal on the day. It became a broken crockery day, a day of people getting under each other’s feet and being peevish. Esk’s mother dropped a jug that had belonged to her grandmother and a whole box of apples in the loft turned out to be moldy. In the forge the furnace went sullen and refused to draw. Jaims, the oldest son, slipped on the packed ice in the road and hurt his arm. The white cat, or possibly one of its descendants, since the cats led a private and complicated life of their own in the hayloft next to the forge, went and climbed up the chimney in the scullery and refused to come down. Even the sky pressed in like an old mattress, and the air felt stuffy, despite the snow.

  Frayed nerves and boredom and bad temper made the air hum like thunderstorm weather.

  “Right! That’s it. That’s just about enough!” shouted Esk’s mother. “Cern, you and Gulta and Esk can go and see how Granny is and—where’s Esk?”

  The two youngest boys looked up from where they were halfheartedly fighting under the table.

  “She went out to the orchard,” said Gulta. “Again.”

  “Go and fetch her in, then, and be off.”

  “But it’s cold!”

  “It’s going to snow again!”

  “It’s only a mile and the road is clear enough and who was so keen to be out in it when we had the first snowfall? Go on with you, and don’t come back till you’re in a better temper.”

  They found Esk sitting in a fork of the big apple tree. The boys didn’t like the tree much. For one thing, it was so covered in mistletoe that it looked green even in midwinter, its fruit was small and went from stomach-twisting sourness to wasp-filled rottenness overnight, and although it looked easy enough to climb it had a habit of breaking twigs and dislodging feet at inconvenient moments. Cern once swore that a branch had twisted just to spill him off. But it tolerated Esk, who used to go and sit in it if she was annoyed or fed up or just wanted to be by herself, and the boys sensed that every brother’s right to gently torture his sister ended at the foot of its trunk. So they threw a snowball at her. It missed.

  “We’re going to see old Weatherwax.”

  “But you don’t have to come.”

  “Because you’ll just slow us down and probably cry anyway.”

  Esk looked down at them solemnly. She didn’t cry a lot, it never seemed to achieve much.

  “If you don’t want me to come then I’ll come,” she said. This sort of thing passes for logic among siblings.

  “Oh, we want you to come,” said Gulta quickly.

  “Very pleas
ed to hear it,” said Esk, dropping on to the packed snow.

  They had a basket containing smoked sausages, preserved eggs and—because their mother was prudent as well as generous—a large jar of peach preserve that no one in the family liked very much. She still made it every year when the little wild peaches were ripe, anyway.

  The people of Bad Ass had learned to live with the long winter snows and the roads out of the village were lined with boards to reduce drifting and, more important, stop travelers from straying. If they lived locally it wouldn’t matter too much if they did, because an unsung genius on the village council several generations previously had come up with the idea of carving markers in every tenth tree in the forest around the village, out to a distance of nearly two miles. It had taken ages, and re-cutting markers was always a job for any man with spare time, but in winters where a blizzard could lose a man within yards of his home many a life had been saved by the pattern of notches found by probing fingers under the clinging snow.

  It was snowing again when they left the road and started up the track where, in summer, the witch’s house nestled in a riot of raspberry thickets and weird witch-growth.

  “No footprints,” said Cern.

  “Except for foxes,” said Gulta. “They say she can turn herself into a fox. Or anything. A bird, even. Anything. That’s how she always knows what’s going on.”

  They looked around cautiously. A scruffy crow was indeed watching them from a distant tree stump.

  “They say there’s a whole family over Crack Peak way that can turn themselves into wolves,” said Gulta, who wasn’t one to leave a promising subject, “because one night someone shot a wolf and next day their auntie was limping with an arrow wound in her leg, and…”

  “I don’t think people can turn themselves into animals,” said Esk, slowly.

  “Oh yes, Miss Clever?”

  “Granny is quite big. If she turned herself into a fox what would happen to all the bits that wouldn’t fit?”

  “She’d just magic them away,” said Cern.

  “I don’t think magic works like that,” said Esk. “You can’t just make things happen, there’s a sort of—like a seesaw thing, if you push one end down, the other end goes up…” Her voice trailed off.

  They gave her a look.

  “I can’t see Granny on a seesaw,” said Gulta. Cern giggled.

  “No, I mean every time something happens, something else has to happen too—I think,” said Esk uncertainly, picking her way around a deeper than usual snowdrift. “Only in the…opposite direction.”

  “That’s silly,” said Gulta, “because, look, you remember when that fair came last summer and there was a wizard with it and he made all those birds and things appear out of nothing? I mean it just happened, he just said these words and waved his hands, and it just happened. There weren’t any seesaws.”

  “There was a swing,” said Cern. “And a thing where you had to throw things at things to win things.”

  “And you didn’t hit anything, Gul.”

  “Nor did you, you said the things were stuck to the things so you couldn’t knock them off, you said…”

  Their conversation wandered away like a couple of puppies. Esk listened with half an ear. I know what I mean, she told herself. Magic’s easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There’s nothing magical about it. All the funny words and waving the hands is just…it’s only for…

  She stopped, surprised at herself. She knew what she meant. The idea was right up there in the front of her mind. But she didn’t know how to say it in words, even to herself.

  It was a horrible feeling to find things in your head and not know how they fitted. It…

  “Come on, we’ll be all day.”

  She shook her head and hurried after her brothers.

  The witch’s cottage consisted of so many extensions and lean-tos that it was difficult to see what the original building had looked like, or even if there had ever been one. In the summer it was surrounded by dense beds of what Granny loosely called “the Herbs”—strange plants, hairy or squat or twining, with curious flowers or vivid fruits or unpleasantly bulging pods. Only Granny knew what they were all for, and any wood-pigeon hungry enough to attack them generally emerged giggling to itself and bumping into things (or, sometimes, never emerged at all).

  Now everything was deep under the snow. A forlorn windsock flapped against its pole. Granny didn’t hold with flying but some of her friends still used broomsticks.

  “It looks deserted,” said Cern.

  “No smoke,” said Gulta.

  The windows look like eyes, thought Esk, but kept it to herself.

  “It’s only Granny’s house,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  The cottage radiated emptiness. They could feel it. The windows did look like eyes, black and menacing against the snow. And no one in the Ramtops let their fire go out in the winter, as a matter of pride.

  Esk wanted to say “Let’s go home,” but she knew that if she did the boys would run for it. Instead she said, “Mother says there’s a key on a nail in the privy,” and that was nearly as bad. Even an ordinary unknown privy held minor terrors like wasps’ nests, large spiders, mysterious rustling things in the roof and, one very bad winter, a small hibernating bear that caused acute constipation in the family until it was persuaded to bed down in the haybarn. A witch’s privy could contain anything.

  “I’ll go and look, shall I?” she added.

  “If you like,” said Gulta airily, almost successfully concealing his relief.

  In fact, when she managed to get the door open against the piled snow, it was neat and clean and contained nothing more sinister than an old almanack, or more precisely about half an old almanack, carefully hung on a nail. Granny had a philosophical objection to reading, but she’d be the last to say that books, especially books with nice thin pages, didn’t have their uses.

  The key shared a ledge by the door with a chrysalis and the stump of a candle. Esk took it gingerly, trying not to disturb the chrysalis, and hurried back to the boys.

  It was no use trying the front door. Front doors in Bad Ass were used only by brides and corpses, and Granny had always avoided becoming either. Around the back the snow was piled in front of the door and no one had broken the ice on the water butt.

  The light was starting to pour out of the sky by the time they dug through to the door and managed to persuade the key to turn.

  Inside, the big kitchen was dark and chilly and smelled only of snow. It was always dark, but they were used to seeing a big fire in the wide chimney and smelling the thick fumes of whatever it was she was boiling up this time, which sometimes gave you a headache or made you see things.

  They wandered around uncertainly, calling, until Esk decided they couldn’t put off going upstairs any longer. The clonk of the thumb-latch on the door to the cramped staircase sounded a lot louder than it ought to.

  Granny was on the bed, with her arms tightly folded across her chest. The tiny window had blown open. Fine snow had blown in across the floor and over the bed.

  Esk stared at the patchwork quilt under the old woman, because there were times when a little detail could expand and fill the whole world. She barely heard Cern start to cry: she remembered her father, strangely enough, making the quilt two winters before when the snow was almost as bad and there wasn’t much to do in the forge, and how he’d used all kinds of rags that had found their way to Bad Ass from every part of the world, like silk, dilemma leather, water cotton and tharga wool and, of course, since he wasn’t much good at sewing either, the result was a rather strange lumpy thing more like a flat tortoise than a quilt, and her mother had generously decided to give it to Granny last Hogswatchnight, and…

  “Is she dead?” asked Gulta, as if Esk was an expert in these things.

  Esk stared up at Granny Weatherwax. The old woman’s face looked thin and gray. Was that how dead people looked? Sho
uldn’t her chest be going up and down?

  Gulta pulled himself together.

  “We ought to go and get someone and we ought to go now because it will get dark in a minute,” he said flatly. “But Cern will stay here.”

  His brother looked at him in horror.

  “What for?” he said.

  “Someone has got to stay with dead people,” said Gulta. “Remember when old Uncle Derghart died and Father had to go and sit up with all the candles and things all night? Otherwise something nasty comes and takes your soul off to…to somewhere,” he ended lamely. “And then people come back and haunt you.”

  Cern opened his mouth to start to cry again. Esk said hurriedly, “I’ll stay. I don’t mind. It’s only Granny.”

  Gulta looked at her in relief.

  “Light some candles or something,” he said. “I think that’s what you’re supposed to do. And then—”

  There was a scratching from the windowsill. A crow had landed, and stood there blinking suspiciously at them. Gulta shouted and threw his hat at it. It flew off with a reproachful caw and he shut the window.

  “I’ve seen it around here before,” he said. “I think Granny feeds it. Fed it,” he corrected himself. “Anyway, we’ll be back with people, we’ll be hardly any time. Come on, Ce.”

  They clattered down the dark stairs. Esk saw them out of the house and bolted the door behind them.

  The sun was a red ball above the mountains, and there were already a few early stars out.

  She wandered around the dark kitchen until she found a scrap of dip candle and a tinderbox. After a great deal of effort she managed to light the candle and stood it on the table, although it didn’t really light the room, it simply peopled the darkness with shadows. Then she found Granny’s rocking chair by the cold fireplace, and settled down to wait.

  Time passed. Nothing happened.

  Then there was a tapping at the window. Esk took up the candle stub and peered through the thick round panes.

  A beady yellow eye blinked back at her.

  The candle guttered, and went out.

  She stood stock still, hardly breathing. The tapping started again, and then stopped. There was a short silence, and then the door-latch rattled.