‘I’ve seen that herb garden! It’s all leggy sage and yellowy parsley! If you can’t stuff it up a chicken’s bum, she doesn’t think it’s a herb! Anyway … who’s queen in this vicinity?’
‘I thought you didn’t want to be, ma’am?’ said Millie.
Magrat stared at her. For a moment she looked as if she was arguing with herself.
Millie might not have been the best-informed girl in the world, but she wasn’t stupid. She was at the door and through it just as the breakfast tray hit the wall.
Magrat sat down on the bed with her head in her hands.
She didn’t want to be queen. Being a queen was like being an actor, and Magrat had never been any good at acting. She’d always felt she wasn’t very good at being Magrat, if it came to that.
The bustle of the pre-nuptial activities rose up from the town. There’d be folkdancing, of course – there seemed to be no way of preventing it – and probably folksinging would be perpetrated. And there’d be dancing bears and comic jugglers and the greasy pole competition, which for some reason Nanny Ogg always won. And bowling-with-a-pig. And the bran tub, which Nanny Ogg usually ran; it was a brave man who plunged his hand into a bran tub stocked by a witch with a broad sense of humour. Magrat had always liked the fairs. Up until now.
Well, there were still some things she could do.
She dressed herself in her commoner’s clothes for the last time, and let herself out and down the back stairs to the widdershins tower and the room where Diamanda lay.
Magrat had instructed Shawn to keep a good fire going in the grate, and Diamanda was still sleeping, peacefully, the unwakeable sleep.
Magrat couldn’t help noticing that Diamanda was strikingly good-looking and, from what she’d heard, quite brave enough to stand up to Granny Weatherwax. She could hardly wait to get her better so that she could envy her properly.
The wound seemed to be healing up nicely, but there seemed to be—
Magrat strode to the bellpull in the corner and hauled on it.
After a minute or two Shawn Ogg arrived, panting. There was gold paint on his hands.
‘What,’ said Magrat, ‘are all these things?’
‘Um. Don’t like to say, ma’am …’
‘One happens to be … very nearly … the queen,’ said Magrat.
‘Yes, but the king said … well, Granny said—’
‘Granny Weatherwax does not happen to rule the kingdom,’ said Magrat. She hated herself when she spoke like this, but it seemed to work. ‘And anyway she’s not here. One is here, however, and if you don’t tell one what’s going on I’ll see to it that you do all the dirty jobs around the palace.’
‘But I do all the dirty jobs anyway,’ said Shawn.
‘I shall see to it that there are dirtier ones.’
Magrat picked up one of the bundles. It was made up of strips of sheet wrapped around what turned out to be an iron bar.
‘They’re all around her,’ she said. ‘Why?’
Shawn looked at his feet. There was gold paint on his boots, too.
‘Well, our mum said …’
‘Yes?’
‘Our mum said I was to see to it that there was iron round her. So me and Millie got some bars from down the smithy and wrapped ’em up like this and Millie packed ’em round her.’
‘Why?’
‘To keep away the … the Lords and Ladies, ma’am.’
‘What? That’s just old superstition! Anyway, everyone knows elves were good, whatever Granny Weatherwax says.’
Behind her, Shawn flinched. Magrat pulled the wrapped iron lumps out of the bed and tossed them into the corner.
‘No old wives’ tales here, thank you very much. Is there anything else people haven’t been telling me, by any chance?’
Shawn shook his head, guiltily aware of the thing in the dungeon.
‘Huh! Well, go away. Verence wants the kingdom to be modern and efficient, and that means no horseshoes and stuff around the place. Go on, go away.’
‘Yes, Miss Queen.’
At least I can do something positive around here, Magrat told herself.
Yes. Be sensible. Go and see him. Talk. Magrat clung to the idea that practically anything could be sorted out if only people talked to one another.
‘Shawn?’
He paused at the door.
‘Yes, ma’am?’
‘Has the king gone down to the Great Hall yet?’
‘I think he’s still dressing, Miss Queen. He hasn’t rung for me to do the trumpet, I know that.’
In fact, Verence, who didn’t like going everywhere preceded by Shawn’s idea of a fanfare, had already gone downstairs incognito. But Magrat slipped along to his room, and knocked on the door.
Why be bashful? It’d be her room as well from tomorrow, wouldn’t it? She tried the handle. It turned. Without quite willing it, Magrat went in.
Rooms in the castle could hardly be said to belong to anyone in any case. They’d had too many occupants over the centuries. The very atmosphere was the equivalent of those walls scattered with outbreaks of drawing-pin holes where last term’s occupants hung the posters of rock groups long disbanded. You couldn’t stamp your personality on that stone. It stamped back harder.
For Magrat, stepping into a man’s bedroom was like an explorer stepping on to that part of the map marked Here Be Dragons.26
And it wasn’t exactly what it ought to have been.
Verence had arrived at the bedroom concept fairly late in life. When he was a boy, the entire family slept on straw in the cottage attic. As an apprentice in the Guild of Joculators, he’d slept on a pallet in a long dormitory of other sad, beaten young men. When he was a fully-fledged Fool he’d slept, by tradition, curled up in front of his master’s door. Suddenly, at a later age than is usual, he’d been introduced to the notion of soft mattresses.
And now Magrat was privy to the big secret.
It hadn’t worked.
There was the Great Bed of Lancre, which was said to be able to sleep a dozen people, although in what circumstances and why it should be necessary history had never made clear. It was huge and made of oak.
It was also, very clearly, unslept in.
Magrat pulled back the sheets, and smelled the scorched smell of linen. But it also smelled unaired, as if it hadn’t been slept in.
She stared around the room until her eye lit on the little still-life by the door. There was a folded nightshirt, a candlestick and a small pillow.
As far as Verence had been concerned, a crown merely changed which side of the door you slept.
Oh, gods. He’d always slept in front of the door of his master. And now he was king, he slept in front of the door to his kingdom.
Magrat felt her eyes fill with tears.
You couldn’t help loving someone as soppy as that.
Fascinated, and aware that she was where she technically shouldn’t be, Magrat blew her nose and explored further. A heap of discarded garments by the bed suggested that Verence had mastered the art of hanging up clothes as practised by half the population of the world, and also that he had equally had difficulty with the complex topological manoeuvres necessary to turn his socks the right way out.
There was a tiny dressing table and a mirror. Stuck to the mirror frame was a dried and faded flower that looked, to Magrat, very like the ones she habitually wore in her hair.
She shouldn’t have gone on looking. She admitted that to herself, afterwards. But she seemed to have no self-control.
There was a wooden bowl in the middle of the dressing table, full of odd coins, bits of string and the general detritus of the nightly emptied pocket.
And a folded paper. Much folded, as if it had stayed in said pocket for some time.
She picked it up, and unfolded it.
There were little kingdoms all over the hubward slopes of the Ramtops. Every narrow valley, every ledge that something other than a goat could stand on, was a kingdom. There were kingdoms in the Ram
tops so small that, if they were ravaged by a dragon, and that dragon had been killed by a young hero, and the king had given him half his kingdom as per Section Three of the Heroic Code, then there wouldn’t have been any kingdom left. There were wars of annexation that went on for years just because someone wanted a place to keep the coal.
Lancre was one of the biggest kingdoms. It could actually afford a standing army.27
Kings and queens and various sub-orders of aristocracy were even now streaming over Lancre bridge, watched by a sulking and soaking-wet troll who had given up on bridge-keeping for the day.
The Great Hall had been thrown open. Jugglers and fire-eaters strolled among the crowd. Up in the minstrels gallery a small orchestra were playing the Lancre one-string fiddle and famed Ramtop bagpipes, but fortunately they were more or less drowned out by the noise of the crowd.
Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax moved through said crowd. In deference to this being a festive occasion, Nanny Ogg had exchanged her normal black pointy hat for one the same shape but in red, with wax cherries on it.
‘All the hort mond are here,’ Nanny observed, taking a drink off a passing tray. ‘Even some wizards from Ankh-Morpork, our Shawn said. One of them said I had a fine body, he said. Been tryin’ to remember all morning who that could have been.’
‘Spoilt for choice,’ said Granny, but it was automatic nastiness, with no real heart to it. It worried Nanny Ogg. Her friend seemed preoccupied.
‘There’s some gentry we don’t want to see here,’ said Granny. ‘I won’t be happy until all this is over.’
Nanny Ogg craned to try and see over the head of a small emperor.
‘Can’t see Magrat around,’ she said. ‘There’s Verence talking to some other kings, but can’t see our Magrat at all. Our Shawn said Millie Chillum said she was just a bag of nerves this morning.’
‘All these high-born folks,’ said Granny, looking around at the crowned heads. ‘I feel like a fish out of water.’
‘Well, the way I see it, it’s up to you to make your own water,’ said Nanny, picking up a cold roast chicken leg from the buffet and stuffing it up a sleeve.
‘Don’t drink too much. We’ve got to keep alert, Gytha. Remember what I said. Don’t let yourself get distracted—’
‘That’s never the delectable Mrs Ogg, is it?’
Nanny turned.
There was no-one behind her.
‘Down here,’ said the voice.
She looked down, into a wide grin.
‘Oh, blast,’ she said.
‘It’s me, Casanunda,’ said Casanunda, who was dwarfed still further by an enormous28 powdered wig. ‘You remember? We danced the night away in Genua?’
‘No we didn’t.’
‘Well, we could have done.’
‘Fancy you turning up here,’ said Nanny, weakly. The thing about Casanunda, she recalled, was that the harder you slapped him down the faster he bounced back, often in an unexpected direction.
‘Our stars are entwined,’ said Casanunda. ‘We’re fated for one another. I wants your body, Mrs Ogg.’
‘I’m still using it.’
And while she suspected, quite accurately, that this was an approach the world’s second greatest lover used on anything that appeared to be even vaguely female, Nanny Ogg had to admit that she was flattered. She’d had many admirers in her younger days, but time had left her with a body that could only be called comfortable and a face like Mr Grape the Happy Raisin. Long-banked fires gave off a little smoke.
Besides, she’d rather liked Casanunda. Most men were oblique in their approach, whereas his direct attack was refreshing.
‘It’d never work,’ she said. ‘We’re basically incompatible. When I’m 5 ′4″ you’ll still only be 3′9″. Anyway, I’m old enough to be your mother.’
‘You can’t be. My mother’s nearly 300, and she’s got a better beard than you.’
And of course that was another point. By dwarf standards, Nanny Ogg was hardly more than a teenager.
‘La, sir,’ she said, giving him a playful tap that made his ears ring, ‘you do know how to turn a simple country girl’s head and no mistake!’
Casanunda picked himself up and adjusted his wig happily.
‘I like a girl with spirit,’ he said. ‘How about you and me having a little tête-à-tête when this is over?’
Nanny Ogg’s face went blank. Her cosmopolitan grip of language had momentarily let her down.
‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said. She put her drink down on his head and pushed through the crowd until she found a likely-looking duchess, and prodded her in the bustle regions.
‘Hey, your grace, what’s a tater tate?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘A tater tate? Do you do it with your clothes on or what?’
‘It means an intimate meeting, my good woman.’
‘Is that all? Oh. Ta.’
Nanny Ogg elbowed her way back to the vibrating dwarf.
‘You’re on,’ she said.
‘I thought we could have a little private dinner, just you and me,’ said Casanunda. ‘In one of the taverns?’
Never, in a long history of romance, had Nanny Ogg ever been taken out for an intimate dinner. Her courtships had been more noted for their quantity than their quality.
‘Okay,’ was all she could think of to say.
‘Dodge your chaperone and meet me at six o’clock?’
Nanny Ogg glanced at Granny Weatherwax, who was watching them disapprovingly from a distance.
‘She’s not my—’ she began.
Then it dawned on her that Casanunda couldn’t possibly have really thought that Granny Weatherwax was chaperoning her.
Compliments and flattery had also been very minor components in the machinery of Nanny Ogg’s courtships.
‘Yes, all right,’ she said.
‘And now I shall circulate, so that people don’t talk and ruin your reputation,’ said Casanunda, bowing and kissing Nanny Ogg’s hand.
Her mouth dropped open. No-one had ever kissed her hand before, either, and certainly no-one had ever worried about her reputation, least of all Nanny Ogg.
As the world’s second greatest lover bustled off to accost a countess, Granny Weatherwax – who had been watching from a discreet distance29 – said, in an amiable voice: ‘You haven’t got the morals of a cat, Gytha Ogg.’
‘Now, Esme, you know that’s not true.’
‘All right. You have got the morals of a cat, then.’
‘That’s better.’
Nanny Ogg patted her mass of white curls and wondered if she had time to go home and put her corsets on.
‘We must stay on our guard, Gytha.’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Can’t let other considerations turn our heads.’
‘No, no.’
‘You’re not listening to a word I say, are you?’
‘What?’
‘You could at least find out why Magrat isn’t down here.’
‘All right.’
Nanny Ogg wandered off, dreamily.
Granny Weatherwax turned—
—there should have been violins. The murmur of the crowd should have faded away, and the crowd itself should have parted in a quite natural movement to leave an empty path between her and Ridcully.
There should have been violins. There should have been something.
There shouldn’t have been the Librarian accidentally knuckling her on the toe on his way to the buffet, but this, in fact, there was.
She hardly noticed.
‘Esme?’ said Ridcully.
‘Mustrum?’ said Granny Weatherwax.
Nanny Ogg bustled up.
‘Esme, I saw Millie Chillum and she said—’
Granny Weatherwax’s vicious elbow jab winded her. Nanny took in the scene.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I’ll just, I’ll just … I’ll just go away, then.’
The gazes locked again.
The Librarian knuck
led past again with an entire display of fruit.
Granny Weatherwax paid him no heed.
The Bursar, who was currently on the median point of his cycle, tapped Ridcully on the shoulder.
‘I say, Archchancellor, these quails’ eggs are amazingly go—’
‘DROP DEAD. Mr Stibbons, fish out the frog pills and keep knives away from him, please.’
The gazes locked again.
‘Well, well,’ said Granny, after a year or so.
‘This must be some enchanted evening,’ said Ridcully.
‘Yes. That’s what I’m afraid of.’
‘That really is you, isn’t it?’
‘It’s really me,’ said Granny.
‘You haven’t changed a bit, Esme.’
‘Nor have you, then. You’re still a rotten liar, Mustrum Ridcully.’
They walked towards one another. The Librarian shuttled between them with a tray of meringues. Behind them, Ponder Stibbons grovelled on the floor for a spilled bottle of dried frog pills.
‘Well, well,’ said Ridcully.
‘Fancy that.’
‘Small world.’
‘Yes indeed.’
‘You’re you and I’m me. Amazing. And it’s here and now.’
‘Yes, but then was then.’
‘I sent you a lot of letters,’ said Ridcully.
‘Never got ’em.’
There was a glint in Ridcully’s eye.
‘That’s odd. And there was me putting all those destination spells on them too,’ he said. He gave her a critical up-and-down glance. ‘How much do you weigh, Esme? Not a spare ounce on you, I’ll be bound.’
‘What do you want to know for?’
‘Indulge an old man.’
‘Nine stones, then.’
‘Hmm … should be about right … three miles hubwards … you’ll feel a slight lurch to the left, nothing to worry about …’
In a lightning movement, he grabbed her hand. He felt young and light-headed. The wizards back at the University would have been astonished.
‘Let me take you away from all this.’
He snapped his fingers.
There has to be at least an approximate conservation of mass. It’s a fundamental magical rule. If something is moved from A to B, something that was at B has got to find itself at A.
Lords And Ladies Page 17