Lords And Ladies

by Pratchett, Terry

  ‘Just wind, I promise.’

  ‘It’s completely different with her. No-one’s ever been able to say I wasn’t open to new ideas.’

  ‘Well known for being open to new ideas, you are,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘I’m always saying, that Esme Weatherwax, she’s always open to new ideas.’

  ‘Right.’ Granny Weatherwax looked up at the forested hills around the town, and frowned.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘girls these days don’t know how to think with a clear mind. You’ve got to think clearly and not be distracted. That’s Magrat for you, always being distracted. It gets in the way of doing the proper thing.’ She stopped. ‘I can feel her, Gytha. The Queen of the Fairies. She can get her mind past the stones. Blast that girl! She’s got a way in. She’s everywhere. Everywhere I look with my mind, I can smell her.’

  ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ said Nanny, patting her on the shoulder. ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘She’s looking for a way,’ Granny repeated.

  ‘Good morrow, brothers, and wherehap do we whist this merry day?’ said Carter the baker.

  The rest of the Lancre Morris Men looked at him.

  ‘You on some kind of medication or what?’ said Weaver the thatcher.

  ‘Just trying to enter into the spirit of the thing,’ said Carter. ‘That’s how rude mechanicals talk.’

  ‘Who’re rude mechanicals?’ said Baker the weaver.

  ‘They’re the same as Comic Artisans, I think,’ said Carter the baker.

  ‘I asked my mum what artisans are,’ said Jason.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘They’re us.’

  ‘And we’re Rude Mechanicals as well?’ said Baker the weaver.

  ‘I reckon.’

  ‘Bum!’

  ‘Well, we certainly don’t talk like these buggers in the writing,’ said Carter the baker. ‘I never said “fol-de-rol” in my life. And I can’t understand any of the jokes.’

  ‘You ain’t supposed to understand the jokes, this is a play,’ said Jason.

  ‘Drawers!’ said Baker the weaver.

  ‘Oh, shut up. And push the cart.’

  ‘Don’t see why we couldn’t do the Stick and Bucket Dance …’ mumbled Tailor the other weaver.

  ‘We’re not doing the Stick and Bucket dance! I never want to hear any more ever about the Stick and Bucket dance! I still get twinges in my knee! So shut up about the Stick and Bucket dance!’

  ‘Belly!’ shouted Baker, who wasn’t a man to let go of an idea.

  The cart containing the props bumped and skidded on the rutted track.

  Jason had to admit that Morris dancing was a lot easier than acting. People didn’t keep turning up to watch and giggle. Small children didn’t stand around jeering. Weaver and Thatcher were in almost open rebellion now, and mucking up the words. The evenings were becoming a constant search for somewhere to rehearse.

  Even the forest wasn’t private enough. It was amazing how people would just happen to be passing.

  Weaver stopped pushing, and wiped his brow.

  ‘You’d have thought the Blasted Oak would’ve been safe,’ he said. ‘Half a mile from the nearest path, and damn me if after five minutes you can’t move for charcoal burners, hermits, trappers, tree tappers, hunters, trolls, bird-limers, hurdle-makers, swineherds, truffle hunters, dwarfs, bodgers and suspicious buggers with big coats on. I’m surprised there’s room in the forest for the bloody trees. Where to now?’

  They’d reached a crossroads, if such it could be called.

  ‘Don’t remember this one,’ said Carpenter the poacher. ‘Thought I knew all the paths around here.’

  ‘That’s ’cos you only ever sees ’em in the dark,’ said Jason.

  ‘Yeah, everyone knows ’tis your delight on a shining night,’ said Thatcher the carter.

  ‘’Tis his delight every night,’ said Jason.

  ‘Hey,’ said Baker the weaver, ‘we’re getting really good at this rude mechanism, ain’t we?’

  ‘Let’s go right,’ said Jason.

  ‘Nah, it’s all briars and thorns that way.’

  ‘All right, then, left then.’

  ‘It’s all winding,’ said Weaver.

  ‘What about the middle road?’ said Carter.

  Jason peered ahead.

  There was a middle track, hardly more than an animal path, which wound away under shady trees. Ferns grew thickly alongside it. There was a general green, rich, dark feel to it, suggested by the word ‘bosky’.21

  His blacksmith’s senses stood up and screamed.

  ‘Not that way,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, come on,’ said Weaver. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Goes up to the Dancers, that path does,’ said Jason. ‘Me mam said no-one was to go up to the Dancers ’cos of them young women dancing round ’em in the nudd.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’ve been stopped from that,’ said Thatcher. ‘Old Granny Weatherwax put her foot down hard and made ’em put their drawers on.’

  ‘And they ain’t to go there any more, neither,’ said Carter. ‘So it’ll be nice and quiet for the rehearsing.’

  ‘Me mam said no-one was to go there,’ said Jason, a shade uncertainly.

  ‘Yeah, but she probably meant … you know … with magical intent,’ said Carter. ‘Nothing magical about prancing around in wigs and stuff.’

  ‘Right,’ said Thatcher. ‘And it’ll be really private.’

  ‘And,’ said Weaver, ‘if any young women fancies sneaking back up there to dance around without their drawers on, we’ll be sure to see ’em.’

  There was a moment of absolute, introspective silence.

  ‘I reckon,’ said Thatcher, voicing the unspoken views of nearly all of them, ‘we owes it to the community.’

  ‘We-ell,’ said Jason, ‘me mam said …’

  ‘Anyway, your mum’s a fine one to talk,’ said Weaver. ‘My dad said that when he was young, your mum hardly ever had—’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Jason, clearly outnumbered. ‘Can’t see it can do any harm. We’re only actin’. It’s … it’s make-believe. It’s not as if it’s anything real. But no-one’s to do any dancing. Especially, and I want everyone to be absolutely def’nite about this, the Stick and Bucket dance.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be acting all right,’ said Weaver. ‘And keeping watch as well, o’course.’

  ‘It’s our duty to the community,’ said Thatcher, again.

  ‘Make-believe is bound to be all right,’ said Jason, uncertainly.

  Clang boinng clang ding …

  The sound echoed around Lancre.

  Grown men, digging in their gardens, flung down their spades and hurried for the safety of their cottages …

  Clang boinnng goinng ding …

  Women appeared in doorways and yelled desperately for their children to come in at once …

  … BANG buggrit Dong boinng …

  Shutters thundered shut. Some men, watched by their frightened families, poured water on the fire and tried to stuff sacks up the chimney …

  Nanny Ogg lived alone, because she said old people needed their pride and independence. Besides, Jason lived on one side, and he or his wife whatsher-name could easily be roused by means of a boot applied heavily to the wall, and Shawn lived on the other side and Nanny had got him to fix up a long length of string with some tin cans on it in case his presence was required. But this was only for emergencies, such as when she wanted a cup of tea or felt bored.

  Bong drat clang …

  Nanny Ogg had no bathroom but she did have a tin bath, which normally hung on a nail on the back of the privy. Now she was dragging it indoors. It was almost up the garden, after being bounced off various trees, walls and garden gnomes on the way.

  Three large black kettles steamed by her fireside. Beside them were half a dozen towels, the loofah, the pumice stone, the soap, the soap for when the first soap got lost, the ladle for fishing spiders out, the waterlogged rubber duck with the p
rolapsed squeaker, the bunion chisel, the big scrubbing brush, the small scrubbing brush, the scrubbing brush on a stick for difficult crevices, the banjo, the thing with the pipes and spigots that no-one ever really knew the purpose of and a bottle of Klatchian Nights bath essence, one drop of which could crinkle paint.

  Bong clang slam …

  Everyone in Lancre had learned to recognize Nanny’s pre-ablutive activities, out of self-defence.

  ‘But it ain’t April!’ neighbours told themselves, as they drew the curtains.

  In the house just up the hill from Nanny Ogg’s cottage Mrs Skindle grabbed her husband’s arm.

  ‘The goat’s still outside!’

  ‘Are you mad? I ain’t going out there! Not now!’

  ‘You know what happened last time! It was paralysed all down one side for three days, man, and we couldn’t get it down off the roof!’

  Mr Skindle poked his head out of the door. It had all gone quiet. Too quiet.

  ‘She’s probably pouring the water in,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got a minute or two,’ said his wife. ‘Go on, or we’ll be drinking yoghurt for weeks.’

  Mr Skindle took down a halter from behind the door, and crept out to where his goat was tethered near the hedge. It too had learned to recognize the bathtime ritual, and was rigid with apprehension.

  There was no point in trying to drag it. Eventually he picked it up bodily.

  There was a distant but insistent sloshing noise, and the bonging sound of a floating pumice stone bouncing on the side of a tin bath.

  Mr Skindle started to run.

  Then there was the distant tinkle of a banjo being tuned.

  The world held its breath.

  Then it came, like a tornado sweeping across a prairie.

  ‘AAaaaaeeeeeee—’

  Three flowerpots outside the door cracked, one after the other. Shrapnel whizzed past Mr Skindle’s ear.

  ‘—wizzaaardsah staaafff has a knobontheend, knobontheend—’

  He threw the goat through the doorway and leapt after it. His wife was waiting, and slammed the door shut behind him.

  The whole family, including the goat, got under the table.

  It wasn’t that Nanny Ogg sang badly. It was just that she could hit notes which, when amplified by a tin bath half full of water, ceased to be sound and became some sort of invasive presence.

  There had been plenty of singers whose high notes could smash a glass, but Nanny’s high C could clean it.

  The Lancre Morris Men sat glumly on the turf, passing an earthenware jug between them. It had not been a good rehearsal.

  ‘Don’t work, does it?’ said Thatcher.

  ‘’S’not funny, that I do know,’ said Weaver. ‘Can’t see the king killing himself laughing at us playing a bunch of mechanical artisans not being very good at doin’ a play.’

  ‘You’re just no good at it,’ said Jason.

  ‘We’re sposed to be no good at it,’ said Weaver.

  ‘Yeah, but you’re no good at acting like someone who’s no good at acting,’ said Tinker. ‘I don’t know how, but you ain’t. You can’t expect all the fine lords and ladies—’

  A breeze blew over the moor, tasting of ice at midsummer.

  ‘—to laugh at us not being any good at being no good at acting.’

  ‘I don’t see what’s funny about a bunch of rude artisans trying to do a play anyway,’ said Weaver.

  Jason shrugged.

  ‘It says all the gentry—’

  A tang on the wind, the sharp tin taste of snow …

  ‘—in Ankh-Morpork laughed at it for weeks and weeks,’ he said. ‘It was on Broad Way for three months.’

  ‘What’s Broad Way?’

  ‘That’s where all the theatres are. The Dysk, Lord Wynkin’s Men, the Bearpit …’

  ‘They’d laugh at any damn thing down there,’ said Weaver. ‘Anyway, they all think we’m all simpletons up here. They all think we say oo-aah and sings daft folk songs and has three brain cells huddlin’ together for warmth ’cos of drinking scumble all the time.’

  ‘Yeah. Pass that jug.’

  ‘Swish city bastards.’

  ‘They don’t know what it’s like to be up to the armpit in a cow’s backside on a snowy night. Hah!’

  ‘And there ain’t one of ’em that – what’re you talking about? You ain’t got a cow.’

  ‘No, but I know what it’s like.’

  ‘They don’t know what it’s like to get one wellie sucked off in a farmyard full of gyppoe and that horrible moment where you waves the foot around knowin’ that wherever you puts it down it’s going to go through the crust.’

  The stoneware jug glugged gently as it was passed from hand to unsteady hand.

  ‘True. That’s very true. And you ever seen ’em Morris dancing? ‘Nuff to make you hang up your hanky.’

  ‘What, Morris dancing in a city?’

  ‘Well, down in Sto Helit, anyway. Bunch o’ soft wizards and merchants. I watched ’em a whole hour and there wasn’t even a groinin’.’

  ‘Swish city bastards. Comin’ up here, takin’ our jobs …’

  ‘Don’t be daft. They don’t know what a proper job is.’

  The jug glugged, but with a deeper tone, suggesting that it contained a lot of emptiness.

  ‘Bet they’ve never been up to the armpit—’

  ‘The point is. The point is. The point. The point is. Hah. All laughin’ at decent rude artisans, eh? I mean. I mean. I mean. What’s it all about? I mean. I mean. I mean. Play’s all about some mechanical … rude buggers makin’ a pig’s ear out of doin’ a play about a bunch of lords and ladies—’

  A chill in the air, sharp as icicles …

  ‘It needs something else.’

  ‘Right. Right.’

  ‘A mythic element.’

  ‘Right. My point. My point. My point. Needs a plot they can go home whistlin’. Exactly.’

  ‘So it should be done here, in the open air. Open to the sky and the hills.’

  Jason Ogg wrinkled his brows. They were always pretty wrinkled anyway, whenever he was dealing with the complexities of the world. Only when it came to iron did he know exactly what to do. But he held up a wavering finger and tried to count his fellow thespians. Given that the jug was now empty, this was an effort. There seemed, on average, to be seven other people. But he had a vague, nagging feeling that something wasn’t right.

  ‘Out here,’ he said, uncertainly.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Weaver.

  ‘Wasn’t it your idea?’ said Jason.

  ‘I thought you said it.’

  ‘I thought you did.’

  ‘Who cares who said it?’ said Thatcher. ‘’S’a good idea. Seems … right.’

  ‘What was that about the miffic quality?’

  ‘What’s miffic?’

  ‘Something you’ve got to have,’ said Weaver, theatrical expert. ‘Very important, your miffics.’

  ‘Me mam said no-one was to go—’ Jason began.

  ‘We shan’t be doing any dancing or anything,’ said Carter. ‘I can see you don’t want people skulking around up here by ’emselves, doin’ magic. But it can’t be wrong if everyone comes here. I mean, the king and everyone. Your mam, too. Hah, I’d like to see any girls with no drawers on get past her!’

  ‘I don’t think it’s just—’ Jason began.

  ‘And the other one’ll be there, too,’ said Weaver.

  They considered Granny Weatherwax.

  ‘Cor, she frightens the life out of me, her,’ said Thatcher, eventually. ‘The way she looks right through you. I wouldn’t say a word against her, mark you, a fine figure of a woman,’ he said loudly, and then added rather more quietly, ‘but they do say she creeps around the place o’nights, as a hare or a bat or something. Changes her shape and all. Not that I believes a word of it,’ he raised his voice, then let it sink again, ‘but old Weezen over in Slice told me once he shot a hare in the leg one night and next day she pas
sed him on the lane and said “Ouch” and gave him a right ding across the back of his head.’

  ‘My dad said,’ said Weaver, ‘that one day he was leading our old cow to market and it took ill and fell down in the lane near her cottage and he couldn’t get it to move and he went up to her place and he knocked on the door and she opened it and before he could open his mouth she said, “Yer cow’s ill, Weaver” … just like that … And then she said—’

  ‘Was that the old brindled cow what your dad had?’ said Carter.

  ‘No, it were my uncle had the brindled cow, we had the one with the crumpled horn,’ said Weaver. ‘Anyway—’

  ‘Could have sworn it was brindled,’ said Carter. ‘I remember my dad looking at it over the hedge one day and saying, “That’s fine brindling on that cow, you don’t get brindling like that these days”. That was when you had that old field alongside Cabb’s Well.’

  ‘We never had that field, it was my cousin had that field,’ said Weaver. ‘Anyway—’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Weaver, ‘she said, “You wait there, I’ll give you something for it”, and she goes out into her back kitchen and comes back with a couple of big red pills, and she—’

  ‘How’d it get crumpled, then?’ said Carter.

  ‘—and she gave him one of the pills and said, “What you do, you raise the old cow’s tail and shove this pill where the sun don’t shine, and in half a minute she’ll be up and running as fast as she can”, and he thanked her, and then as he was going out of the door he said, “What’s the other pill for?” and she gave him a look and said, “Well, you want to catch her, don’t you?”’

  ‘That’d be that deep valley up near Slice,’ said Carter.

  They looked at him.

  ‘What, exactly, are you talking about?’ said Weaver.

  ‘It’s right behind the mountain,’ said Carter, nodding knowingly. ‘Very shady there. That’s what she meant, I expect. The place where the sun doesn’t shine. Long way to go for a pill, but I suppose that’s witches for you.’

  Weaver winked at the others.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m telling you she meant … well, where the monkey put his nut.’

  Carter shook his head.