‘What level?’ said Diamanda.
Nanny Ogg looked around for something to hide behind. Granny Weatherwax’s eyebrow twitched.
‘Levels, eh?’ she said. ‘Well, I suppose I’m level one.’
‘Just starting?’ said Diamanda.
‘Oh dear. Tell you what,’ said Nanny Ogg quietly to Perdita, ‘if we was to turn the table over, we could probably hide behind it, no problem.’
But to herself she was thinking: Esme can never resist a challenge. None of us can. You ain’t a witch if you ain’t got self-confidence. But we’re not getting any younger. It’s like being a hired swordfighter, being a top witch. You think you’re good, but you know there’s got to be someone younger, practising every day, polishing up their craft, and one day you’re walkin’ down the road and you hears this voice behind you sayin’: go for your toad, or similar.
Even for Esme. Sooner or later, she’ll come up against someone faster on the craftiness than she is.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Granny, quietly. ‘Just starting. Every day, just starting.’
Nanny Ogg thought: but it won’t be today.
‘You stupid old woman,’ said Diamanda, ‘you don’t frighten me. Oh, yes. I know all about the way you old ones frighten superstitious peasants, actually. Muttering and squinting. It’s all in the mind. Simple psychology. It’s not real witchcraft.’
‘I’ll, er, I’ll just go into the scullery and, er, see if I can fill any buckets with water, shall I?’ said Nanny Ogg, to no-one in particular.
‘I ‘spect you’d know all about witchcraft,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
‘I’m studying, yes,’ said Diamanda.
Nanny Ogg realized that she had removed her own hat and was biting nervously at the brim.
‘I 'spect you’re really good at it,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
‘Quite good,’ said Diamanda.
‘Show me.’
She is good, thought Nanny Ogg. She’s been facing down Esme’s stare for more’n a minute. Even snakes generally give up after a minute.
If a fly had darted through the few inches of space between their stares it would have flashed into flame in the air.
‘I learned my craft from Nanny Gripes,’ said Granny Weatherwax, ‘who learned it from Goody Heggety, who got it from Nanna Plumb, who was taught it by Black Aliss, who—’
‘So what you’re saying is.’ said Diamanda, loading the words into the sentence like cartridges in a chamber, ‘that no-one has actually learned anything new?’
The silence that followed was broken by Nanny Ogg saying: ‘Bugger, I’ve bitten right through the brim. Right through.’
‘I see.’ said Granny Weatherwax.
‘Look.’ said Nanny Ogg hurriedly, nudging the trembling Perdita, ‘right through the lining and everything. Two dollars and curing his pig that hat cost me. That’s two dollars and a pig cure I shan’t see again in a hurry.’
‘So you can just go away, old woman.’ said Diamanda.
‘But we ought to meet again.’ said Granny Weatherwax.
The old witch and the young witch weighed one another up.
‘Midnight?’ said Diamanda.
‘Midnight? Nothing special about midnight. Practic’ly anyone can be a witch at midnight,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘How about noon?’
‘Certainly. What are we fighting for?’ said Diamanda.
‘Fighting? We ain’t fighting. We’re just showing each other what we can do. Friendly like,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
She stood up.
‘I’d better be goin’,’ she said. ‘Us old people need our sleep, you know how it is.’
‘And what does the winner get?’ said Diamanda. There was just a trace of uncertainty in her voice now. It was very faint, on the Richter scale of doubt it was probably no more than a plastic teacup five miles away falling off a low shelf on to a carpet, but it was there.
‘Oh, the winner gets to win,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘That’s what it’s all about. Don’t bother to see us out. You didn’t see us in.’
The door slammed back.
‘Simple psychokinesis,’ said Diamanda.
‘Oh, well. That’s all right then,’ said Granny Weatherwax, disappearing into the night. ‘Explains it all, that does.’
There used to be such simple directions, back in the days before they invented parallel universes – Up and Down, Right and Left, Backward and Forward, Past and Future …
But normal directions don’t work in the multiverse, which has far too many dimensions for anyone to find their way. So new ones have to be invented so that the way can be found.
Like: East of the Sun, West of the Moon.
Or: Behind the North Wind.
Or: At the Back of Beyond.
Or: There and Back Again.
Or: Beyond the Fields We Know.
And sometimes there’s a short cut. A door or a gate. Some standing stones, a tree cleft by lightning, a filing cabinet.
Maybe just a spot on some moorland somewhere …
A place where there is very nearly here.
Nearly, but not quite. There’s enough leakage to make pendulums swing and psychics get nasty headaches, to give a house a reputation for being haunted, to make the occasional pot hurl across a room. There’s enough leakage to make the drones fly guard.
Oh, yes. The drones.
There are things called drone assemblies. Sometimes, on fine summer days, the drones from hives for miles around will congregate in some spot, and fly circles in the air, buzzing like tiny early-warning systems, which is what they are.
Bees are sensible. It’s a human word. But bees are creatures of order, and programmed into their very genes is a hatred of chaos.
If some people once knew where such a spot was, if they had experience of what happens when here and there become entangled, then they might – if they knew how – mark such a spot with certain stones.
In the hope that enough daft buggers would take it as a warning, and keep away.
‘Well, what’d you think?’ said Granny, as the witches hurried home.
‘The little fat quiet one’s got a bit of natural talent,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘I could feel it. The rest of ’em are just along for the excitement, to my mind. Playing at witches. You know, ooh-jar boards and cards and wearing black lace gloves with no fingers to ’em and paddlin’ with the occult.’
‘I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult,’ said Granny firmly. ‘Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.’
‘But all them things exist,’ said Nanny Ogg.
‘That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ’em.’
Granny Weatherwax slowed to a walk.
‘What about her?’ she said.
‘What exactly about her do you mean?’
‘You felt the power there?’
‘Oh, yeah. Made my hair stand on end.’
‘Someone gave it to her, and I know who. Just a slip of a gel with a head full of wet ideas out of books, and suddenly she’s got the power and don’t know how to deal with it. Cards! Candles! That’s not witchcraft, that’s just party games. Paddlin’ with the occult. Did you see she’d got black fingernails?’
‘Well, mine ain’t so clean—’
‘I mean painted.’
‘I used to paint my toenails red when I was young,’ said Nanny, wistfully.
‘Toenails is different. So’s red. Anyway,’ said Granny, ‘you only did it to appear allurin’.’
‘It worked, too.’
‘Hah!’
They walked along in silence for a bit.
‘I felt a lot of power there,’ Nanny Ogg said, eventually.
‘Yes. I know.’
‘A lot.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not saying you couldn’t
beat her,’ said Nanny quickly. ‘I’m not saying that. But I don’t reckon I could, and it seemed to me it’d raise a bit of a sweat even on you. You’ll have to hurt her to beat her.’
‘I’m losin’ my judgement, aren’t I?’
‘Oh, I—’
‘She riled me, Gytha. Couldn’t help myself. Now I’ve got to duel with a gel of seventeen, and if I wins I’m a wicked bullyin’ old witch, and if I loses …’
She kicked up a drift of old leaves.
‘Can’t stop myself, that’s my trouble.’
Nanny Ogg said nothing.
‘And I loses my temper over the least little—’
‘Yes, but—’
‘I hadn’t finished talkin.’
‘Sorry, Esme.’
A bat fluttered by. Granny nodded to it.
‘Heard how Magrat’s getting along?’ she said, in a tone of voice which forced casualness embraced like a corset.
‘Settling in fine, our Shawn says.’
‘Right.’
They reached a crossroads; the white dust glowed very faintly in the moonlight. One way led into Lancre, where Nanny Ogg lived. Another eventually got lost in the forest, became a footpath, then a track, and eventually reached Granny Weatherwax’s cottage.
‘When shall we … two … meet again?’ said Nanny Ogg.
‘Listen,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘She’s well out of it, d’you hear? She’ll be a lot happier as a queen!’
‘I never said nothing,’ said Nanny Ogg mildly.
‘I know you never! I could hear you not saying anything! You’ve got the loudest silences I ever did hear from anyone who wasn’t dead!’
‘See you about eleven o’clock, then?’
‘Right!’
The wind got up again as Granny walked along the track to her cottage.
She knew she was on edge. There was just too much to do. She’d got Magrat sorted out, and Nanny could look after herself, but the Lords and the Ladies … she hadn’t counted on them.
The point was …
The point was that Granny Weatherwax had a feeling she was going to die. This was beginning to get on her nerves.
Knowing the time of your death is one of those strange bonuses that comes with being a true magic user. And, on the whole, it is a bonus.
Many a wizard has passed away happily drinking the last of his wine cellar and incidentally owing very large sums of money.
Granny Weatherwax had always wondered how it felt, what it was that you suddenly saw looming up. And what it turned out to be was a blankness.
People think that they live life as a moving dot travelling from the Past into the Future, with memory streaming out behind them like some kind of mental cometary tail. But memory spreads out in front as well as behind. It’s just that most humans aren’t good at dealing with it, and so it arrives as premonitions, forebodings, intuitions and hunches. Witches are good at dealing with it, and to suddenly find a blank where these tendrils of the future should be has much the same effect on a witch as emerging from a cloud bank and seeing a team of sherpas looking down on him does on an airline pilot.
She’d got a few days, and then that was it. She’d always expected to have a bit of time to herself, get the garden in order, have a good clean up around the place so that whatever witch took over wouldn’t think she’d been a sloven, pick out a decent burial plot, and then spend some time sitting out in the rocking chair, doing nothing at all except looking at the trees and thinking about the past. Now … no chance.
And other things were happening. Her memory seemed to be playing up. Perhaps this is what happened. Perhaps you just drained away towards the end, like old Nanny Gripes, who ended up putting the cat on the stove and the kettle out for the night.
Granny shut the door behind her and lit a candle.
There was a box in the dresser drawer. She opened it on the kitchen table and took out the carefully folded piece of paper. There was a pen and ink in there, too.
After some thought, she picked up where she had left off:
… and to my freind Gytha Ogg I leave my bedde and the rag rugge the smith in Bad Ass made for me, and the matchin jug and basin and wos∫name sett she always had her eye on, and my broomstick what will be Right as Rain with a bit of work.
To Magrat Garlick I leave the Contentes elsewhere in this box, my silver tea service with the milk jug in the shape of a humerous cow what is an Heir Loom, also the Clocke what belonged to my mother, but I charge her alwayes to keep it wound, for when the clocke stops—
There was a noise outside.
If anyone else had been in the room with her Granny Weatherwax would have thrown open the door boldly, but she was by herself. She picked up the poker very carefully, moved surprisingly soundlessly to the door given the nature of her boots, and listened intently.
There was something in the garden.
It wasn’t much of a garden. There were the Herbs, and the soft fruit bushes, a bit of lawn and, of course, the beehives. And it was open to the woods. The local wildlife knew better than to invade a witch’s garden.
Granny opened the door carefully.
The moon was setting. Pale silver light turned the world into monochrome.
There was a unicorn on the lawn. The stink of it hit her.
Granny advanced, holding the poker in front of her. The unicorn backed away, and pawed at the ground.
Granny saw the future plain. She already knew the when. Now she was beginning to apprehend the how.
‘So,’ she said, under her breath, ‘I knows where you came from. And you can damn well get back there.’
The thing made a feint at her, but the poker swung towards it.
‘Can’t stand the iron, eh? Well, just you trot back to your mistress and tell her that we know all about iron in Lancre. And I knows about her. She’s to keep away, understand? This is my place!’
Then it was moonlight. Now it was day.
There was quite a crowd in what passed for Lancre’s main square. Not much happened in Lancre anyway, and a duel between witches was a sight worth seeing.
Granny Weatherwax arrived at a quarter to noon. Nanny Ogg was waiting on a bench by the tavern. She had a towel around her neck, and was carrying a bucket of water in which floated a sponge.
‘What’s that for?’ said Granny.
‘Half time. And I done you a plate of oranges.’
She held up the plate. Granny snorted.
‘You look as if you could do with eating something, anyway,’ said Nanny. ‘You don’t look as if you’ve had anything today …’
She glanced down at Granny’s boots, and the grubby hem of her long black dress. There were scraps of bracken and bits of heather caught on it.
‘You daft old besom!’ she hissed. ‘What’ve you been doing!’
‘I had to—’
‘You’ve been up at the stones, haven’t you! Trying to hold back the Gentry.’
‘Of course,’ said Granny. Her voice wasn’t faint. She wasn’t swaying. But her voice wasn’t faint and she wasn’t swaying, Nanny Ogg could see, because Granny Weatherwax’s body was in the grip of Granny Weatherwax’s mind.
‘Someone’s got to,’ she added.
‘You could have come and asked me!’
‘You’d have talked me out of it.’
Nanny Ogg leaned forward.
‘You all right, Esme?’
‘Fine! I’m fine! Nothing wrong with me, all right?’
‘Have you had any sleep at all?’ she said.
‘Well—’
‘You haven’t, have you? And then you think you can just stroll down here and confound this girl, just like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
Nanny Ogg looked hard at her.
‘You don’t, do you?’ she said, in a softer tone of voice. ‘Oh, well … you better sit down here, before you fall down. Suck an orange. They’ll be here in a few minutes.’
‘No she won’t,’ said G
ranny. ‘She’ll be late.’
‘How d’you know?’
‘No good making an entrance if everyone isn’t there to see you, is it? That’s headology.’
In fact the young coven arrived at twenty past twelve, and took up station on the steps of the market pentangle on the other side of the square.
‘Look at ’em,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘All in black, again.’
‘Well, we wear black too,’ said Nanny Ogg the reasonable.
‘Only ’cos it’s respectable and serviceable,’ said Granny morosely. ‘Not because it’s romantic. Hah. The Lords and Ladies might as well be here already.’
After some eye contact, Nanny Ogg ambled across the square and met Perdita in the middle. The young would-be witch looked worried under her make-up. She held a black lace handkerchief in her hands, and was twisting it nervously.
‘Morning, Mrs Ogg,’ she said.
‘Afternoon, Agnes.’
‘Um. What happens now?’
Nanny Ogg took out her pipe and scratched her ear with it.
‘Dunno. Up to you, I suppose.’
‘Diamanda says why does it have to be here and now?’
‘So’s everyone can see,’ said Nanny Ogg. That’s the point, ain’t it? Nothing hole and corner about it. Everyone’s got to know who’s best at witchcraft. The whole town. Everyone sees the winner win and the loser lose. That way there’s no argument, eh?’
Perdita glanced towards the tavern. Granny Weatherwax had dozed off.
‘Quietly confident,’ said Nanny Ogg, crossing her fingers behind her back.
‘Um, what happens to the loser?’ said Perdita.
‘Nothing, really,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Generally she leaves the place. You can’t be a witch if people’ve seen you beat.’
‘Diamanda says she doesn’t want to hurt the old lady too much,’ said Perdita. ‘Just teach her a lesson.’
‘That’s nice. Esme’s a quick learner.’
‘Um. I wish this wasn’t happening, Mrs Ogg.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Diamanda says Mistress Weatherwax has got a very impressive stare, Mrs Ogg.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘So the test is … just staring, Mrs Ogg.’
Nanny put her pipe in her mouth.
‘You mean the old first-one-to-blink-or-look-away challenge?’
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