Lords And Ladies

by Pratchett, Terry

  The elf smiled, strode to the curtain, and pulled it aside.

  The oak lid was up.

  The elf looked down.

  Magrat rose up behind it like a white ghost and hit it hard across the back of the neck with the chair, which shattered.

  The elf tried to turn and keep its balance, but there was still enough chair left in Magrat’s hands for her to catch it on the desperate upswing. It toppled backwards, flailed at the lid, and only succeeded in pulling it shut behind it. Magrat heard a thump and a scream of rage as it dropped into the noisome darkness. It’d be too much to hope that the fall would kill it. After all, it’d land in something soft.

  ‘Not just high,’ said Magrat to herself, ‘but stinking.’

  Hiding under the bed is only good for about two seconds, but sometimes two seconds is enough.

  She let go of the chair. She was shaking. But she was still alive, and that felt good. That’s the thing about being alive. You’re alive to enjoy it.

  Magrat peered out into the passage.

  She had to move. She picked up a stricken chairleg for the little comfort that it gave, and ventured out.

  There was a scream again, from the direction of the Great Hall.

  Magrat looked the other way, towards the Long Gallery. She ran. There had to be a way out, somewhere, some gate, some window …

  Some enterprising monarch had glazed the windows some time ago. The moonlight shone through in big silver blocks, interspersed with squares of deep shadow.

  Magrat ran from light to shade, light to shade, down the endless room. Monarch after monarch flashed past, like a speeded-up film. King after king, all whiskers and crowns and beards. Queen after queen, all corsages and stiff bodices and Lappet-faced wowhawks and small dogs and—

  Some shape, some trick of moonlight, some expression on a painted face somehow cut through her terror and caught her eye.

  That was a portrait she’d never seen before. She’d never walked down this far. The idiot vapidity of the assembled queens had depressed her. But this one …

  This one, somehow, reached out to her.

  She stopped.

  It couldn’t have been done from life. In the days of this queen, the only paint known locally was a sort of blue, and generally used on the body. But a few generations ago King Lully I had been a bit of a historian and a romantic. He’d researched what was known of the early days of Lancre, and where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom32 and extrapolated from associated sources.33 He’d commissioned the portrait of Queen Ynci the Short-Tempered, one of the founders of the kingdom.

  She had a helmet with wings and a spike on it and a mass of black hair plaited into dreadlocks with blood as a setting lotion. She was heavily made-up in the woad-and-blood-and-spirals school of barbarian cosmetics. She had a 42 D-cup breastplate and shoulder pads with spikes. She had knee pads with spikes on, and spikes on her sandals, and a rather short skirt in the fashionable tartan and blood motif. One hand rested nonchalantly on a double-headed battle axe with a spike on it, the other caressed the hand of a captured enemy warrior. The rest of the captured enemy warrior was hanging from various pine trees in the background. Also in the picture was Spike, her favourite war pony, of the now extinct Lancre hill breed which was the same general shape and disposition as a barrel of gunpowder, and her war chariot, which picked up the popular spiky theme. It had wheels you could shave with.

  Magrat stared.

  They’d never mentioned this.

  They’d told her about tapestries, and embroidery, and farthingales, and how to shake hands with lords. They’d never told her about spikes.

  There was a sound at the end of the gallery, from back the way she’d come. She grabbed her skirts and ran.

  There were footsteps behind her, and laughter.

  Left down the cloisters, then along the dark passage above the kitchens, and past the—

  A shape moved in the shadows. Teeth flashed. Magrat raised the chairleg, and stopped in mid-strike.

  ‘Greebo?’

  Nanny Ogg’s cat rubbed against her legs. His hair was flat against his body. This unnerved Magrat even more. This was Greebo, undisputed king of Lancre’s cat population and father of most of it, in whose presence wolves trod softly and bears climbed trees. He was frightened.

  ‘Come here, you bloody idiot!’

  She grabbed him by the scruff of his scarred neck and ran on, while Greebo gratefully sank his claws into her arm to the bone34 and scrambled up to her shoulder.

  She must be somewhere near the kitchen now, because that was Greebo’s territory. This was an unknown and shadowy area, terror incognita, where the flesh of carpets and the plaster pillars ran out and the stone bone of the castle showed through.

  She was sure there were footsteps behind her, very fast and light.

  If she hurried around the next corner—

  In her arms, Greebo tensed like a spring. Magrat stopped.

  Around the next corner—

  Without her apparently willing it, the hand holding the broken wood came up, moving slowly back.

  She stepped to the corner and stabbed in one movement. There was a triumphant hiss which turned into a screech as the wood scraped down the side of the waiting elf’s neck. It reeled away. Magrat bolted for the nearest doorway, weeping in panic, and wrenched at the handle. It swung open. She darted through, slammed the door, flailed in the dark for the bars, felt them clonk home, and collapsed on to her knees.

  Something hit the door outside.

  After a while Magrat opened her eyes, and then wondered if she really had opened her eyes, because the darkness was no less dark. There was a feeling of space in front of her. There were all sorts of things in the castle, old hidden rooms, anything … there could be a pit there, there could be anything. She fumbled for the doorframe, guided herself upright, and then groped cautiously in the general direction of the wall.

  There was a shelf. This was a candle. And this was a bundle of matches.

  So, she insisted above her own heartbeat, this was a room that got used recently. Most people in Lancre still used tinderboxes. Only the king could afford matches all the way from Ankh-Morpork. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg got them too, but they didn’t buy them. They got given them. It was easy to get given things, if you were a witch.

  Magrat lit the stub of candle, and turned to see what kind of room she’d scuttled into.

  Oh, no …

  ‘Well, well,’ said Ridcully. There’s a familiar tree.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I thought someone said we just had to walk uphill,’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I remember once when we were in these woods you let me—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Granny Weatherwax sat down on a stump.

  ‘We’re being mazed,’ she said. ‘Someone’s playing tricks on us.’

  ‘I remember a story once,’ said Ridcully, ‘where these two children were lost in the woods and a lot of birds came and covered them with leaves.’ Hope showed in his voice like a toe peeking out from under a crinoline.

  ‘Yes, that’s just the sort of bloody stupid thing a bird would think of,’ said Granny. She rubbed her head.

  ‘She’s doing it,’ she said. ‘It’s an elvish trick. Leading travellers astray. She’s mucking up my head. My actual head. Oh, she’s good. Making us go where she wants. Making us go round in circles. Doing it to me.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve got your mind on other things,’ said Ridcully, not quite giving up hope.

  ‘Course I’ve got my mind on other things, with you falling over all the time and gabbling a lot of nonsense,’ said Granny. ‘If Mr Cleverdick Wizard hadn’t wanted to dredge up things that never existed in the first place I wouldn’t be here, I’d be in the centre of things, knowing what’s going on.’ She clenched her fists.

  ‘Well, you don’t ha
ve to be,’ said Ridcully. ‘It’s a fine night. We could sit here and—’

  ‘You’re falling for it too,’ said Granny. ‘All that dreamy-weamy, eyes-across-a-crowded-room stuff. Can’t imagine how you keep your job as head wizard.’

  ‘Mainly by checking my bed carefully and makin’ sure someone else has already had a slice of whatever it is I’m eating,’ said Ridcully, with disarming honesty. ‘There’s not much to it, really. Mainly it’s signin’ things and having a good shout—’

  Ridcully gave up.

  ‘Anyway, you looked pretty surprised when you saw me,’ he said. ‘Your face went white.’

  ‘Anyone’d go white, seeing a full-grown man standing there looking like a sheep about to choke,’ said Granny.

  ‘You really don’t let up, do you?’ said Ridcully. ‘Amazing. You don’t give an inch.’

  Another leaf drifted past.

  Ridcully didn’t move his head.

  ‘You know,’ he said, his voice staying quite level, ‘either autumn comes really early in these parts, or the birds here are the ones out of that story I mentioned, or someone’s in the tree above us.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Yes, because I’ve been paying attention while you were dodging the traffic in Memory Lane,’ said Granny. ‘There’s at least five of ’em, and they’re right above us. How’s those magic fingers of yours?’

  ‘I could probably manage a fireball.’

  ‘Wouldn’t work. Can you carry us out of here?’

  ‘Not both of us.’

  ‘Just you?’

  ‘Probably, but I’m not going to leave you.’

  Granny rolled her eyes. ‘It’s true, you know,’ she said. ‘All men are swains. Push off, you soft old bugger. They’re not intending to kill me. At least, not yet. But they don’t hardly know nothing about wizards and they’ll chop you down without thinking.’

  ‘Now who’s being soft?’

  ‘I don’t want to see you dead when you could be doin’ something useful.’

  ‘Running away isn’t useful.’

  ‘It’s going to be a lot more useful than staying here.’

  ‘I’d never forgive myself if I went.’

  ‘And I’d never forgive you if you stayed, and I’m a lot more unforgiving than you are,’ said Granny. ‘When it’s all over, try to find Gytha Ogg. Tell her to look in my old box. She’ll know what’s in there. And if you don’t go now—’

  An arrow hit the stump beside Ridcully.

  ‘The buggers are firing at me!’ he shouted. ‘If I had my crossbow—’

  ‘I should go and get it, then,’ said Granny.

  ‘Right! I’ll be back instantly!’

  Ridcully vanished. A moment later several lumps of castle masonry dropped out of the space he had just occupied.

  ‘That’s him out of the way, then,’ said Granny, to no-one in particular.

  She stood up, and gazed around at the trees.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘here I am. I ain’t running. Come and get me. Here I am. All of me,’

  Magrat calmed down. Of course it existed. Every castle had one. And of course this one was used. There was a trodden path through the dust to the rack a few feet away from the door, where a few suits of unravelling chain-mail hung on a rack, next to the pikes.

  Shawn probably came in here every day.

  It was the armoury.

  Greebo hopped down from Magrat’s shoulders and wandered off down the cobwebbed avenues, in his endless search for anything small and squeaky.

  Magrat followed him, in a daze.

  The kings of Lancre had never thrown anything away. At least, they’d never thrown anything away if it was possible to kill someone with it.

  There was armour for men. There was armour for horses. There was armour for fighting dogs. There was even armour for ravens, although King Gurnt the Stupid’s plan for an aerial attack force had never really got off the ground. There were more pikes, and swords, cutlasses, rapiers, epees, broadswords, flails, morningstars, maces, clubs and huge knobs with spikes. They were all piled together and, in those places where the roof had leaked, were rusted into a lump. There were longbows, short bows, pistol bows, stirrup bows and crossbows, piled like firewood and stacked with the same lack of care. Odd bits of armour were piled in more heaps, and were red with rust. In fact rust was everywhere. The whole huge room was full of the death of iron.

  Magrat went on, like some clockwork toy that won’t change direction until it bumps into something.

  The candlelight was reflected dully in helmets and breastplates. The sets of horse armour in particular were terrible, on their rotting wooden frames – they stood like exterior skeletons and, like skeletons, nudged the mind into thoughts of mortality. Empty eye sockets stared sightlessly down at the little candlelit figure.

  ‘Lady?’

  The voice came from outside the door, far behind Magrat. But it echoed around her, bouncing off the centuries of mouldering armaments.

  They can’t come in here, Magrat thought. Too much iron. In here, I’m safe.

  ‘If lady wants to play, we will fetch her friends.’

  As Magrat turned, the light caught the edge of something, and gleamed.

  Magrat pulled aside a huge shield.

  ‘Lady?’

  Magrat reached out.

  ‘Lady?’

  Magrat’s hands held a rusty iron helmet, with wings.

  ‘Come dance at the wedding, lady.’

  Magrat’s hands closed on a well-endowed breastplate, with spikes.

  Greebo, who had been tracking mice through a prone suit of armour, stuck his head out of a leg.

  A change had come over Magrat. It showed in her breathing. She’d been panting, with fear and exhaustion. Then, for a few seconds, there was no sound of her breathing at all. And finally it returned. Slowly. Deeply. Deliberately.

  Greebo saw Magrat, who he’d always put down as basically a kind of mouse in human shape, lift the hat with the wings on it and put it on her head.

  Magrat knew all about the power of hats.

  In her mind’s ear she could hear the rattle of the chariots.

  ‘Lady? We will bring your friends to sing to you.’

  She turned.

  The candlelight sparkled off her eyes.

  Greebo drew back into the safety of his armour. He recalled a particular time when he’d leapt out on a vixen. Normally Greebo could take on a fox without raising a sweat but, as it turned out, this one had cubs. He hadn’t found out until he chased her into her den. He’d lost a bit of one ear and quite a lot of fur before he’d got away.

  The vixen had a very similar expression to the one Magrat had now.

  ‘Greebo? Come here!’

  The cat turned and tried to find a place of safety in the suit’s breastplate. He was beginning to doubt he’d make it through the knight.

  Elves prowled the castle gardens. They’d killed the fish in the ornamental pond, eventually.

  Mr Brooks was perched on a kitchen chair, working at a crevice in the stable wall.

  He’d been aware of some sort of excitement, but it was involving humans and therefore of secondary importance. But he did notice the change in the sound from the hives, and the splintering of wood.

  A hive had already been tipped over. Angry bees clouded around three figures as feet ripped through comb and honey and brood.

  The laughter stopped as a white-coated, veiled figure appeared over the hedge. It raised a long metal tube.

  No-one ever knew what Mr Brooks put in his squirter. There was old tobacco in it, and boiled-up roots, and bark scrapings, and herbs that even Magrat had never heard of. It shot a glistening stream over the hedge which hit the middle elf between the eyes, and sprayed over the other two.

  Mr Brooks watched dispassionately until their struggles stopped.

  ‘Wasps,’ he said.

  Then he went and found a box, lit a lantern and, with great care
and delicacy, oblivious to the stings, began to repair the damaged combs.

  * * *

  Shawn couldn’t feel much in his arm any more, except in the hot dull way that indicated at least one broken bone, and he knew that two of his fingers shouldn’t be looking like that. He was sweating, despite being only in his vest and drawers. He should never have taken his chain-mail, off, but it’s hard to say no when an elf is pointing a bow at you. Shawn knew what, fortunately, many people didn’t – chain-mail isn’t much defence against an arrow. It certainly isn’t when the arrow is being aimed between your eyes.

  He’d been dragged along the corridors to the armoury. There were at least four elves, but it was hard to see their faces. Shawn remembered when the travelling Magic Lanthorn show had come to Lancre. He’d watched entranced as different pictures had been projected on to one of Nanny Ogg’s bedsheets. The elf faces put him in mind of that. There were eyes and a mouth in there somewhere, but everything else seemed to be temporary, the elves’ features passing across their faces like the pictures on the screen.

  They didn’t say much. They just laughed a lot. They were a merry folk, especially when they were twisting your arm to see how far it could go.

  The elves spoke to one another in their own language. Then one of them turned to Shawn, and indicated the armoury door.

  ‘We wish the lady to come out,’ it said. ‘You must say to her, if she does not come out, we will play with you some more.’

  ‘What will you do to us if she does come out?’ said Shawn.

  ‘Oh, we shall still play with you,’ said the elf. ‘That’s what makes it so much fun. But she must hope, must she not? Talk to her now.’

  He was pushed up to the door. He knocked on it, in what he hoped was a respectful way.

  ‘Um. Miss Queen?’

  Magrat’s voice was muffled.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me, Shawn.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m out here. Um. I think they’ve hurt Miss Tockley. Um. They say they’ll hurt me some more if you don’t come out. But you don’t have to come out because they daren’t come in there because of all the iron. So I shouldn’t listen to them if I was you.’

  There were some distant clankings, and then a twang.