Wyrd Sisters

by Pratchett, Terry

  ‘Yes, there are a hundred things you could do,’ he said. ‘But the ending would always be the same.’ He drew back. ‘I’m not an unreasonable man, I hope,’ he added, in cheerful tones. ‘Perhaps, if you persuade the people to be calm, I may be prevailed upon to moderate my rule somewhat. I make no promises, of course.’

  Granny said nothing.

  ‘Smile and wave,’ commanded the duke.

  Granny raised one hand in a vague motion and produced a brief rictus that had nothing whatsoever to do with humour. Then she scowled and nudged Nanny Ogg, who was waving and mugging like a maniac.

  ‘No need to get carried away,’ she hissed.

  ‘But there’s our Reet and our Sharleen and their babbies,’ said Nanny. ‘Coo-eee!’

  ‘Will you shut up, you daft old besom!’ snapped Granny. ‘And pull yourself together!’

  ‘Jolly good, well done,’ said the duke. He raised his hands, or at least his hand. The other still ached. He’d tried the grater again last night, but it hadn’t worked.

  ‘People of Lancre,’ he cried, ‘do not be afeared! I am your friend. I will protect you from the witches! They have agreed to leave you in peace!’

  Granny stared at him as he spoke. He’s one of these here maniac depressives, she said. Up and down like a wossname. Kill you one minute and ask you how you’re feeling the next.

  She became aware that he was looking at her expectantly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, I’ll now call upon the respected Granny Weatherwax to say a few words, ha ha,’ he said.

  ‘You said that, did you?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You’ve gone a long way too far,’ said Granny.

  ‘I have, haven’t I!’ The duke giggled.

  Granny turned to the expectant crowds, which went silent.

  ‘Go home,’ she said.

  There was a further long silence.

  ‘Is that all?’ said the duke.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about pledges of eternal allegiance?’

  ‘What about them? Gytha, will you stop waving at people!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And now we are going to go, too,’ said Granny.

  ‘But we were getting on so well,’ said the duke.

  ‘Come, Gytha,’ said Granny icily. ‘And where’s Magrat got to?’

  Magrat looked up guiltily. She had been deep in conversation with the Fool, although it was the kind of conversation where both parties spend a lot of time looking at their feet and picking at their fingernails. Ninety per cent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ said Granny.

  ‘Friday afternoon, remember,’ hissed the Fool.

  ‘Well, if I can,’ said Magrat.

  Nanny Ogg leered.

  And so Granny Weatherwax swept down the steps and through the crowds, with the other two running behind her. Several of the grinning guards caught her eye and wished they hadn’t, but here and there, among the watching crowd, was a barely suppressed snigger. She hurtled through the gateway, across the drawbridge and through the town. Granny walking fast could beat most other people at a run.

  Behind them the duke, who had crested the latest maniac peak on the switchback of his madness and was coasting speedily towards the watersplash of despair, laughed.

  ‘Ha ha.’

  Granny didn’t stop until she was outside the town and under the welcoming eaves of the forest. She turned off the road and flumped down on a log, her face in her hands.

  The other two approached her carefully. Magrat patted her on the back.

  ‘Don’t despair,’ she said. ‘You handled it very well, we thought.’

  ‘I ain’t despairing, I’m thinking,’ said Granny. ‘Go away.’

  Nanny Ogg raised her eyebrows at Magrat in a warning fashion. They backed off to a suitable distance although, with Granny in her present mood, the next universe might not be far enough, and sat down on a moss-grown stone.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Magrat. ‘They didn’t do anything, did they?’

  ‘Never laid a finger on me,’ said Nanny. She sniffed. ‘They’re not your real royalty,’ she added. ‘Old King Gruneweld, for one, he wouldn’t have wasted time waving things around and menacing people. It’d been bang, needles right under the fingernails from the word go, and no messing. None of this evil laughter stuff. He was a real king. Very gracious.’

  ‘He was threatening to burn you.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t of stood for it. I see you’ve got a follower,’ said Nanny.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Magrat.

  ‘The young fellow with the bells,’ said Nanny. ‘And the face like a spaniel what’s just been kicked.’

  ‘Oh, him.’ Magrat blushed hotly under her pale makeup. ‘Really, he’s just this man. He just follows me around.’

  ‘Can be difficult, can that,’ said Nanny sagely.

  ‘Besides, he’s so small. And he capers all over the place,’ said Magrat.

  ‘Looked at him carefully, have you?’ said the old witch.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You haven’t, have you? I thought not. He’s a very clever man, that Fool. He ought to have been one of them actor men.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Next time you have a look at him like a witch, not like a woman,’ said Nanny, and gave Magrat a conspiratorial nudge. ‘Good bit of work with the door back there,’ she added. ‘Coming on well, you are. I hope you told him about Greebo.’

  ‘He said he’d let him out directly, Nanny.’

  There was a snort from Granny Weatherwax.

  ‘Did you hear the sniggering in the crowd?’ she said. ‘Someone sniggered!’

  Nanny Ogg sat down beside her.

  ‘And a couple of them pointed,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s not to be borne!’

  Magrat sat down on the other end of the log.

  ‘There’s other witches,’ she said. ‘There’s lots of witches further up the Ramtops. Maybe they can help.’

  The other two looked at her in pained surprise.

  ‘I don’t think we need go that far,’ sniffed Granny. ‘Asking for help.’

  ‘Very bad practice,’ nodded Nanny Ogg.

  ‘But you asked a demon to help you,’ said Magrat.

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ said Granny.

  ‘Right. We didn’t.’

  ‘We ordered it to assist.’

  ‘S’right.’

  Granny Weatherwax stretched out her legs and looked at her boots. They were good strong boots, with hobnails and crescent-shaped scads; you couldn’t believe a cobbler had made them, someone had laid down a sole and built up from there.

  ‘I mean, there’s that witch over Skund way,’ she said. ‘Sister Whosis, wossname, her son went off to be a sailor – you know, Gytha, her who sniffs and puts them antimassacres on the backs of chairs soon as you sits down—’

  ‘Grodley,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Sticks her little finger out when she drinks her tea and drops her Haitches all the time.’

  ‘Yes. Hwell. I haven’t hlowered myself to talk to her hever since that business with the gibbet, you recall. I daresay she’d just love to come snooping haround here, running her fingers over heverything and sniffling, telling us how to do things. Oh, yes. Help. We’d all be in a fine to-do if we went around helping all the time.’

  ‘Yes, and over Skund way the trees talk to you and walk around of night,’ said Nanny. ‘Without even asking permission. Very poor organization.’

  ‘Not really good organization, like we’ve got here?’ said Magrat.

  Granny stood up purposefully.

  ‘I’m going home,’ she said.

  There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesn’t rule the world. They’re called witches and wizards, Magrat reflected, as she followed the other two back to the road.

  It was probably some wonderful organization on the part of Nature to protect itself. It saw to it
that everyone with any magical talent was about as ready to co-operate as a she-bear with toothache, so all that dangerous power was safely dissipated as random bickering and rivalry. There were differences in style, of course. Wizards assassinated each other in draughty corridors, witches just cut one another dead in the street. And they were all as self-centred as a spinning top. Even when they help other people, she thought, they’re secretly doing it for themselves. Honestly, they’re just like big children.

  Except for me, she thought smugly.

  ‘She’s very upset, isn’t she,’ said Magrat to Nanny Ogg.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Nanny. ‘There’s the problem, see. The more you get used to magic, the more you don’t want to use it. The more it gets in your way. I expect, when you were just starting out, you learned a few spells from Goodie Whemper, maysherestinpeace, and you used them all the time, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes. Everyone does.’

  ‘Well-known fact,’ agreed Nanny. ‘But when you get along in the Craft, you learn that the hardest magic is the sort you don’t use at all.’

  Magrat considered the proposition cautiously. ‘This isn’t some kind of Zen, is it?’ she said.

  ‘Dunno. Never seen one.’

  ‘When we were in the dungeons, Granny said something about trying the rocks. That sounded like pretty hard magic.’

  ‘Well, Goodie wasn’t much into rocks,’ said Nanny. ‘It’s not really hard. You just prod their memories. You know, of the old days. When they were hot and runny.’

  She hesitated, and her hand flew to her pocket. She gripped the lump of castle stone and relaxed.

  ‘Thought I’d forgotten it, for a minute,’ she said, lifting it out. ‘You can come out now.’

  He was barely visible in the brightness of day, a mere shimmer in the air under the trees. King Verence blinked. He wasn’t used to daylight.

  ‘Esme,’ said Nanny. ‘There’s someone to see you.’

  Granny turned slowly and squinted at the ghost.

  ‘I saw you in the dungeon, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘Who’re you?’

  ‘Verence, King of Lancre,’ said the ghost, and bowed. ‘Do I have the honour of addressing Granny Weatherwax, doyenne of witches?’

  It has already been pointed out that just because Verence came from a long line of kings didn’t mean that he was basically stupid, and a year without the distractions of the flesh had done wonders as well. Granny Weatherwax considered herself totally unsusceptible to buttering up, but the king was expertly applying the equivalent of the dairy surplus of quite a large country. Bowing was a particularly good touch.

  A muscle twitched at the corner of Granny’s mouth. She gave a stiff little bow in return, because she wasn’t quite sure what ‘doyenne’ meant.

  ‘I’m her,’ she conceded.

  ‘You can get up now,’ she added, regally.

  King Verence remained kneeling, about two inches above the actual ground.

  ‘I crave a boon,’ he said urgently.

  ‘Here, how did you get out of the castle?’ said Granny.

  ‘The esteemed Nanny Ogg assisted me,’ said the king. ‘I reasoned, if I am anchored to the stones of Lancre, then I can also go where the stones go. I am afraid I indulged in a little trickery to arrange matters. Currently I am haunting her apron.’

  ‘Not the first, either,’ said Granny, automatically.

  ‘Esme!’

  ‘And I beg you, Granny Weatherwax, to restore my son to the throne.’

  ‘Restore?’

  ‘You know what I mean. He is in good health?’

  Granny nodded. ‘The last time we looked at him, he was eating an apple,’ she said.

  ‘It is his destiny to be King of Lancre!’

  ‘Yes, well. Destiny is tricky, you know,’ said Granny.

  ‘You will not help?’

  Granny looked wretched. ‘It’s meddling, you see,’ she said. ‘It always goes wrong if you meddle in politics. Like, once you start, you can’t stop. Fundamental rule of magic, is that. You can’t go around messing with fundamental rules.’

  ‘You’re not going to help?’

  ‘Well . . . naturally, one day, when your lad is a bit older . . .’

  ‘Where is he now?’ said the king, coldly.

  The witches avoided one another’s faces.

  ‘We saw him safe out of the country, you see,’ said Granny awkwardly.

  ‘Very good family,’ Nanny Ogg put in quickly.

  ‘What kind of people?’ said the king. ‘Not commoners, I trust?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Granny with considerable firmness as a vision of Vitoller floated across her imagination. ‘Not common at all. Very uncommon. Er.’

  Her eyes implored Magrat for help.

  ‘They were Thespians,’ said Magrat firmly, her voice radiating such approval that the king found himself nodding automatically.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Good.’

  ‘Were they?’ whispered Nanny Ogg. ‘They didn’t look it.’

  ‘Don’t show your ignorance, Gytha Ogg,’ sniffed Granny. She turned back to the ghost of the king. ‘Sorry about that, your majesty. It’s just her showing off. She don’t even know where Thespia is.’

  ‘Wherever it is, I hope that they know how to school a man in the arts of war,’ said Verence. ‘I know Felmet. In ten years he’ll be dug in here like a toad in a stone.’

  The king looked from witch to witch. ‘What kind of kingdom will he have to come back to? I hear what the kingdom is becoming, even now. Will you watch it change, over the years, become shoddy and mean?’ The king’s ghost faded.

  His voice hung in the air, faint as a breeze.

  ‘Remember, good sisters,’ he said, ‘the land and the king are one.’

  And he vanished.

  The embarrassed silence was broken by Magrat blowing her nose.

  ‘One what?’ said Nanny Ogg.

  ‘We’ve got to do something,’ said Magrat, her voice choked with emotion. ‘Rules or no rules!’

  ‘It’s very vexing,’ said Granny, quietly.

  ‘Yes, but what are you going to do?’ she said.

  ‘Reflect on things,’ said Granny. ‘Think about it all.’

  ‘You’ve been thinking about it for a year,’ Magrat said.

  ‘One what? Are one what?’ said Nanny Ogg.

  ‘It’s no good just reacting,’ said Granny. ‘You’ve got to—’

  A cart came bouncing and rumbling along the track from Lancre. Granny ignored it.

  ‘—give these things careful consideration.’

  ‘You don’t know what to do, do you?’ said Magrat.

  ‘Nonsense. I—’

  ‘There’s a cart coming, Granny.’

  Granny Weatherwax shrugged. ‘What you youngsters don’t realize—’ she began.

  Witches never bothered with elementary road safety. Such traffic as there was on the roads of Lancre either went around them or, if this was not possible, waited until they moved out of the way. Granny Weatherwax had grown up knowing this for a fact; the only reason she didn’t die knowing that it wasn’t was that Magrat, with rather better reflexes, dragged her into the ditch.

  It was an interesting ditch. There were jiggling corkscrew things in it which were direct descendants of things which had been in the primordial soup of creation. Anyone who thought that ditchwater was dull could have spent an instructive half-hour in that ditch with a powerful microscope. It also had nettles in it, and now it had Granny Weatherwax.

  She struggled up through the weeds, incoherent with rage, and rose from the ditch like Venus Anadyomene, only older and with more duckweed.

  ‘T-t-t,’ she said, pointing a shaking finger at the disappearing cart.

  ‘It was young Nesheley from over Inkcap way,’ said Nanny Ogg, from a nearby bush. ‘His family were always a bit wild. Of course, his mother was a Whipple.’

  ‘He ran us down!’ said Granny.

  ‘You could have got out of the way,
’ said Magrat.

  ‘Get out of the way?’ said Granny. ‘We’re witches! People get out of our way!’ She squelched on to the track, her finger still pointing at the distant cart. ‘By Hoki, I’ll make him wish he’d never been born—’

  ‘He was quite a big baby, I recall,’ said the bush. ‘His mother had a terrible time.’

  ‘It’s never happened to me before, ever,’ said Granny, still twanging like a bowstring. ‘I’ll teach him to run us down as though, as though, as though we was ordinary people!’

  ‘He already knows,’ said Magrat. ‘Just help me get Nanny out of this bush, will you?’

  ‘I’ll turn his—’

  ‘People haven’t got any respect any more, that’s what it is,’ said Nanny, as Magrat helped her with the thorns. ‘It’s all due to the king being one, I expect.’

  ‘We’re witches!’ screamed Granny, turning her face towards the sky and shaking her fists.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Magrat. ‘The harmonious balance of the universe and everything. I think Nanny’s a bit tired.’

  ‘What’ve I been doing all this time?’ said Granny, with a rhetorical flourish that would have made even Vitoller gasp.

  ‘Not a lot,’ said Magrat.

  ‘Laughed at! Laughed at! On my own roads! In my own country!’ screamed Granny. ‘That just about does it! I’m not taking ten more years of this! I’m not taking another day of it!’

  The trees around her began to sway and the dust from the road sprang up into writhing shapes that tried to swirl out of her way. Granny Weatherwax extended one long arm and at the end of it unfolded one long finger and from the tip of its curving nail there was a brief flare of octarine fire.

  Half a mile down the track all four wheels fell off the cart at once.

  ‘Lock up a witch, would he?’ Granny shouted at the trees.

  Nanny struggled to her feet.

  ‘We’d better grab her,’ she whispered to Magrat. The two of them leapt at Granny and forced her arms down to her sides.

  ‘I’ll bloody well show him what a witch could do!’ she yelled.

  ‘Yes, yes, very good, very good,’ said Nanny. ‘Only perhaps not just now and not just like this, eh?’

  ‘Wyrd sisters, indeed!’ Granny yelled. ‘I’ll make his—’

  ‘Hold her a minute, Magrat,’ said Nanny Ogg, and rolled up her sleeve.

  ‘It can be like this with the highly-trained ones,’ she said, and brought her plam round in a slap that lifted both witches off their feet. On such a flat, final note the universe might have ended.