Wyrd Sisters

by Pratchett, Terry

  ‘Shall we have another try? I don’t think we got it quite right that time.’

  Magrat nodded.

  This time it lasted only fifteen seconds. It seemed longer.

  A tremor ran through the castle, shaking the breakfast tray from which the Duke Felmet, much to his relief, was eating porridge that wasn’t too salty.

  It was felt by the ghosts that now filled Nanny Ogg’s cottage like a rugby team in a telephone box.

  It spread to every henhouse in the kingdom, and a number of hands relaxed their grip. And thirty-two purple-faced cockerels took a deep breath and crowed like maniacs, but they were too late, too late . . .

  ‘I still reckon you were up to something,’ said Granny Weatherwax.

  ‘Have another cup of tea,’ said Nanny pleasantly.

  ‘You won’t go and put any drink in it, will you,’ Granny said flatly. ‘It was the drink what did it last night. I would never have put myself forward like that. It’s shameful.’

  ‘Black Aliss never done anything like it,’ said Nanny, encouragingly. ‘I mean, it was a hundred years, all right, but it was only one castle she moved. I reckon anyone could do a castle.’

  Granny’s frown puckered at the edge.

  ‘And she let all weeds grow over it,’ she observed primly.

  ‘Right enough.’

  ‘Very well done,’ said King Verence, eagerly. ‘We all thought it was superb. Being in the ethereal plane, of course, we were in a position to observe closely.’

  ‘Very good, your graciousness,’ said Nanny Ogg. She turned and observed the crowding ghosts behind him, who hadn’t been granted the privilege of sitting at, or partly through, the kitchen table.

  ‘But you lot can bugger off back to the outhouse,’ she said. ‘The cheek! Except the kiddies, they can stay,’ she added. ‘Poor little mites.’

  ‘I am afraid it feels so good to be out of the castle,’ said the king.

  Granny Weatherwax yawned.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to find the boy now. That’s the next step.’

  ‘We shall look for him directly after lunch.’

  ‘Lunch?’

  ‘It’s chicken,’ said Nanny. ‘And you’re tired. Besides, making a decent search will take a long time.’

  ‘He’ll be in Ankh-Morpork,’ said Granny. ‘Mark my words. Everyone ends up there. We’ll start with Ankh-Morpork. You don’t have to search for people when destiny is involved, you just wait for them in Ankh-Morpork.’

  Nanny brightened up. ‘Our Karen got married to an innkeeper from there,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen the baby yet. We could get free board and everything.’

  ‘We needn’t actually go. The whole point is that he should come here. There’s something about that city,’ said Granny. ‘It’s like a drain.’

  ‘It’s five hundred miles away!’ said Magrat. ‘You’ll be away for ages!’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ said the Fool. ‘The duke’s given me special instructions. He trusts me.’

  ‘Huh! To hire more soldiers, I expect?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that. Not as bad as that.’ The Fool hesitated. He’d introduced Felmet to the world of words. Surely that was better than hitting people with swords? Wouldn’t that buy time? Wouldn’t it be best for everybody, in the circumstances?

  ‘But you don’t have to go! You don’t want to go!’

  ‘That doesn’t have much to do with it. I promised to be loyal to him—’

  ‘Yes, yes, until you’re dead. But you don’t even believe that! You were telling me how much you hated the whole Guild and everything!’

  ‘Well, yes. But I still have to do it. I gave my word.’

  Magrat came close to stamping her foot, but didn’t sink so low.

  ‘Just when we were getting to know one another!’ she shouted. ‘You’re pathetic!’

  The Fool’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’d only be pathetic if I broke my word,’ he said. ‘But I may be incredibly ill-advised. I’m sorry. I’ll be back in a few weeks, anyway.’

  ‘Don’t you understand I’m asking you not to listen to him?’

  ‘I said I’m sorry. I couldn’t see you again before I go, could I?’

  ‘I shall be washing my hair,’ said Magrat stiffly.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Whenever!’

  Hwel pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted wearily at the wax-spattered paper.

  The play wasn’t going at all well.

  He’d sorted out the falling chandelier, and found a place for a villain who wore a mask to conceal his disfigurement, and he’d rewritten one of the funny bits to allow for the fact that the hero had been born in a handbag. It was the clowns who were giving him trouble again. They kept changing every time he thought about them. He preferred them in twos, that was traditional, but now there seemed to be a third one, and he was blowed if he could think of any funny lines for him.

  His quill moved scratchily over the latest sheet of paper, trying to catch the voices that had streamed through his dreaming mind and had seemed so funny at the time.

  His tongue began to stick out of the corner of his mouth. He was sweating.

  This iss My Little Study, he wrote. Hey, with a Little Study youe could goe a Long Way. And I wishe youed start now. Iffe You can’t leave yn a Cab then leave yn a Huff. Iff thates too soone, thenn leave yn a minute and a Huff. Say, have you Gott a Pensil? A crayon?—

  Hwel stared at this in horror. On the page it looked nonsensical, ridiculous. And yet, and yet, in the thronged auditorium of his mind . . .

  He dipped the quill in the inkpot, and chased the echoes further.

  Seconde Clown: Atsa right, Boss.

  Third Clowne: [businesse with bladder on stick] Honk. Honk.

  Hwel gave up. Yes, it was funny, he knew it was funny, he’d heard the laughter in his dreams. But it wasn’t right. Not yet. Maybe never. It was like the other idea about the two clowns, one fat, one thin . . . Thys ys amain Dainty Messe youe have got me into, Stanleigh . . . He had laughed until his chest ached, and the rest of the company had looked at him in astonishment. But in his dreams it was hilarious.

  He laid down the pen and rubbed his eyes. It must be nearly midnight, and the habit of a lifetime told him to spare the candles although, for a fact, they could afford all the candles they could eat now, whatever Vitoller might say.

  Hour gongs were being struck all across the city and nightwatchmen were proclaiming that it was indeed midnight and also that, in the face of all the evidence, all was well. Many of them got as far as the end of the sentence before being mugged.

  Hwel pushed open the shutters and looked out at Ankh-Morpork.

  It would be tempting to say the twin city was at its best this time of year, but that wouldn’t be entirely correct. It was at its most typical.

  The river Ankh, the cloaca of half a continent, was already pretty wide and silt laden when it reached the city’s outskirts. By the time it left it didn’t so much flow as exude. Owing to the accretion of the mud of centuries the bed of the river was in fact higher than some of the low lying areas and now, with the snow melt swelling the flow, many of the low-rent districts on the Morpork side were flooded, if you can use that word for a liquid you could pick up in a net. This sort of thing happened every year and would have caused havoc with the drains and sewage systems, so it is just as well that the city didn’t have very many. Its inhabitants merely kept a punt handy in the back yard and, periodically, built another storey on the house.

  It was reckoned to be very healthy there. Very few germs were able to survive.

  Hwel looked across a sort of misty sea in which buildings clustered like a sandcastle competition at high tide. Flares and lighted windows made pleasing patterns on the iridescent surface, but there was one glare of light, much closer to hand, which particularly occupied his attention.

  On a patch of slightly higher ground by the river, bought by Vitoller for a ruinous sum, a new building was rising. It was growing e
ven by night, like a mushroom – Hwel could see the cressets burning all along the scaffolding as the hired craftsmen and even some of the players themselves refused to let the mere shade of the sky interrupt their labours.

  New buildings were rare in Morpork, but this was even a new type of building.

  The Dysk.

  Vitoller had been aghast at the idea at first, but young Tomjon had kept at him. And everyone knew that once the lad had got the feel of it he could persuade water to flow uphill.

  ‘But we’ve always moved around, laddie,’ said Vitoller, in the desperate voice of one who knows that, at the end of it all, he’s going to lose the argument. ‘I can’t go around settling down at my time of life.’

  ‘It’s not doing you any good,’ said Tomjon firmly. ‘All these cold nights and frosty mornings. You’re not getting any younger. We should stay put somewhere, and let people come to us. And they will, too. You know the crowds we’re getting now. Hwel’s plays are famous.’

  ‘It’s not my plays,’ Hwel had said. ‘It’s the players.’

  ‘I can’t see me sitting by a fire in a stuffy room and sleeping on feather beds and all that nonsense,’ said Vitoller, but he’d seen the look on his wife’s face and had given in.

  And then there had been the theatre itself. Making water run uphill was a parlour trick compared to getting the cash out of Vitoller but, it was a fact, they had been doing well these days. Ever since Tomjon had been big enough to wear a ruff and say two words without his voice cracking.

  Hwel and Vitoller had watched the first few beams of the wooden framework go up.

  ‘It’s against nature,’ Vitoller had complained, leaning on his stick. ‘Capturing the spirit of the theatre, putting it in a cage. It’ll kill it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Hwel diffidently. Tomjon had laid his plans well, he’d devoted an entire evening to Hwel before even broaching the subject to his father, and now the dwarf’s mind was on fire with the possibilities of backdrops and scenery changes and wings and flies and magnificent engines that could lower gods from the heavens and trapdoors that could raise demons from hell. Hwel was no more capable of objecting to the new theatre than a monkey was of resenting a banana plantation.

  ‘Damn thing hasn’t even got a name,’ Vitoller had said. ‘I should call it the Golde Mine, because that’s what it’s costing me. Where’s the money going to come from, that’s what I’d like to know.’

  In fact they’d tried a lot of names, none of which suited Tomjon.

  ‘It’s got to be a name that means everything,’ he said. ‘Because there’s everything inside it. The whole world on the stage, do you see?’

  And Hwel had said, knowing as he said it that what he was saying was exactly right, ‘The Disc.’

  And now the Dysk was nearly done, and still he hadn’t written the new play.

  He shut the window and wandered back to his desk, picked up the quill, and pulled another sheet of paper towards him. A thought struck him. The whole world was a stage, to the gods . . .

  Presently he began to write.

  All the Disc it is but an Theater, he wrote, Ane alle men and wymmen are but Players. He made the mistake of pausing, and another inspiration sleeted down, sending his train of thought off along an entirely new track.

  He looked at what he had written and added: Except Those who selle popcorn.

  After a while he crossed this out, and tried: Like unto thee Staje of a Theater ys the World, whereon alle Persons strut as Players.

  This seemed a bit better.

  He thought for a bit, and continued conscientiously: Sometimes they walke on. Sometimes they walke off.

  He seemed to be losing it. Time, time, what he needed was an infinity . . .

  There was a muffled cry and a thump from the next room. Hwel dropped the quill and pushed open the door cautiously.

  The boy was sitting up in bed, white-faced. He relaxed when Hwel came in.

  ‘Hwel?’

  ‘What’s up, lad? Nightmares?’

  ‘Gods, it was terrible! I saw them again! I really thought for a minute that—’

  Hwel, who was absent-mindedly picking up the clothes that Tomjon had strewn around the room, paused in his work. He was keen on dreams. That was when the ideas came.

  ‘That what?’ he said.

  ‘It was like . . . I mean, I was sort of inside something, like a bowl, and there were these three terrible faces peering in at me.’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Yes, and then they all said, “All hail . . .” and then they started arguing about my name, and then they said, “Anyway, who shall be king hereafter?” And then one of them said, “Here after what?” and one of the other two said, “Just hereafter, girl, it’s what you’re supposed to say in these circumstances, you might try and make an effort”, and then they all peered closer, and one of the others said, “He looks a bit peaky, I reckon it’s all that foreign food”, and then the youngest one said, “Nanny, I’ve told you already, there’s no such place as Thespia”, and then they bickered a bit, and one of the old ones said, “He can’t hear us, can he? He’s tossing and turning a bit”, and the other one said, “You know I’ve never been able to get sound on this thing, Esme”, and then they bickered some more, and it went cloudy, and then . . . I woke up . . .’ he finished lamely. ‘It was horrible, because every time they came close to the bowl it sort of magnified everything, so all you could see was eyes and nostrils.’

  Hwel hoisted himself on to the edge of the narrow bed.

  ‘Funny old things, dreams,’ he said.

  ‘Not much funny about that one.’

  ‘No, but I mean, last night, I had this dream about a little bandy-legged man walking down a road,’ said Hwel. ‘He had a little black hat on, and he walked as though his boots were full of water.’

  Tomjon nodded politely.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘And—?’

  ‘Well, that was it. And nothing. He had this little cane which he twirled and, you know, it was incredibly . . .’

  The dwarf’s voice trailed off. Tomjon’s face had that familiar expression of polite and slightly condescending puzzlement that Hwel had come to know and dread.

  ‘Anyway, it was very amusing,’ he said, half to himself. But he knew he’d never convince the rest of the company. If it didn’t have a custard pie in it somewhere, they said, it wasn’t funny.

  Tomjon swung his legs out of bed and reached for his britches.

  ‘I’m not going back to sleep,’ he said. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘It’s after midnight,’ said Hwel. ‘And you know what your father said about going to bed late.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Tomjon, pulling on his boots. ‘I’m getting up early. Getting up early is very healthy. And now I’m going out for a very healthy drink. You can come too,’ he added, ‘to keep an eye on me.’

  Hwel gave him a doubting look.

  ‘You also know what your father says about going out drinking,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. He said he used to do it all the time when he was a lad. He said he’d think nothing of quaffing ale all night and coming home at 5 a.m., smashing windows. He said he was a bit of a roister-doister, not like these white-livered people today who can’t hold their drink.’ Tomjon adjusted his doublet in front of the mirror, and added, ‘You know, Hwel, I reckon responsible behaviour is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.’

  Hwel sighed. Tomjon’s memory for ill-judged remarks was legendary.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Just the one, though. Somewhere decent.’

  ‘I promise.’ Tomjon adjusted his hat. It had a feather in it.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘exactly how does one quaff?’

  ‘I think it means you spill most of it,’ said Hwel.

  If the water of the river Ankh was rather thicker and more full of personality than ordinary river water, so the air in the Mended Drum was more crowded than normal air. It was like dry fog.

&n
bsp; Tomjon and Hwel watched it spilling out into the street. The door burst open and a man came through backwards, not actually touching the ground until he hit the wall on the opposite side of the street.

  An enormous troll, employed by the owners to keep a measure of order in the place, came out dragging two more limp bodies which he deposited on the cobbles, kicking them once or twice in soft places.

  ‘I reckon they’re roistering in there, don’t you?’ said Tomjon.

  ‘It looks like it,’ said Hwel. He shivered. He hated taverns. People always put their drinks down on his head.

  They scurried in quickly while the troll was holding one unconscious drinker up by one leg and banging his head on the cobbles in a search for concealed valuables.

  Drinking in the Drum has been likened to diving in a swamp, except that in a swamp the alligators don’t pick your pockets first. Two hundred eyes watched the pair as they pushed their way through the crowd to the bar, a hundred mouths paused in the act of drinking, cursing or pleading, and ninety-nine brows crinkled with the effort of working out whether the newcomers fell into category A, people to be frightened of or B, people to frighten.

  Tomjon walked through the crowd as though it was his property and, with the impetuosity of youth, rapped on the bar. Impetuosity was not a survival trait in the Mended Drum.

  ‘Two pints of your finest ale, landlord,’ he said, in tones so carefully judged that the barman was astonished to find himself obediently filling the first mug before the echoes had died away.

  Hwel looked up. There was an extremely big man on his right, wearing the outside of several large bulls and more chains than necessary to moor a warship. A face that looked like a building site with hair on it glared down at him.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ it said. ‘It’s a bloody lawn ornament.’

  Hwel went cold. Cosmopolitan as they were, the people of Morpork had a breezy, no-nonsense approach to the non-human races, i.e. hit them over the head with a brick and throw them in the river. This did not apply to trolls, naturally, because it is very difficult to be racially prejudiced against creatures seven feet tall who can bite through walls, at least for very long. But people three feet high were absolutely designed to be discriminated against.