Discworld 03 - Equal Rites

by Terry Pratchett

  “Cursing?” said Esk, weakly.

  “Aye, cursing, my girl, and no need to look so shocked! You’ll curse, when the need comes. When you’re alone, and there’s no help to hand, and—”

  She hesitated and, uncomfortably aware of Esk’s questioning eyes, finished lamely: “—and people aren’t showing respect. Make it loud, make it complicated, make it long, and make it up if you have to, but it’ll work all right. Next day, when they hit their thumb or they fall off a ladder or their dog drops dead they’ll remember you. They’ll behave better next time.”

  “But it still doesn’t seem like magic,” said Esk, scuffing the dust with her feet.

  “I saved a man’s life once,” said Granny. “Special medicine twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I’d bought it from the dwarves. That’s the biggest part of doct’rin, really. Most people’ll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.”

  She patted Esk’s hand as nicely as possible. “You’re a bit young for this,” she said, “but as you grow older you’ll find most people don’t set foot outside their own heads much. You too,” she added gnomically.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’d be very surprised if you did,” said Granny briskly, “but you can tell me five herbs suitable for dry coughs.”

  Spring began to unfold in earnest. Granny started taking Esk on long walks that took all day, to hidden ponds or high on to the mountain scree to collect rare plants. Esk enjoyed that, high on the hills where the sun beat down strongly but the air was nevertheless freezing cold. Plants grew thickly and hugged the ground. From some of the highest peaks she could see all the way to the Rim Ocean that ran around the edge of the world; in the other direction the Ramtops marched into the distance, wrapped in eternal winter. They went all the way to the hub of the world where, it was generally agreed, the gods lived on a ten-mile high mountain of rock and ice.

  “Gods are all right,” said Granny, as they ate their lunch and looked at the view. “You don’t bother gods, and gods don’t come bothering you.”

  “Do you know many gods?”

  “I’ve seen the thundergods a few times,” said Granny, “and Hoki, of course.”

  “Hoki?”

  Granny chewed a crustless sandwich. “Oh, he’s a nature god,” she said. “Sometimes he manifests himself as an oak tree, or half a man and half a goat, but mainly I see him in his aspect as a bloody nuisance. You only find him in the deep woods, of course. He plays the flute. Very badly, if you must know.”

  Esk lay on her stomach and looked out across the lands below while a few hardy, self-employed bumblebees patrolled the thyme clusters. The sun was warm on her back but, up here, there were still drifts of snow on the hubside of rocks.

  “Tell me about the lands down there,” she said lazily.

  Granny peered disapprovingly at ten thousand miles of landscape.

  “They’re just other places,” she said. “Just like here, only different.”

  “Are there cities and things?”

  “I daresay.”

  “Haven’t you ever been to look?”

  Granny sat back, gingerly arranging her skirt to expose several inches of respectable flannelette to the sun, and let the heat caress her old bones.

  “No,” she said. “There’s quite enough troubles around here without going to look for them in forn parts.”

  “I dreamed of a city once,” said Esk. “It had hundreds of people in it, and there was this building with big gates, and they were magical gates—”

  A sound like tearing cloth came from behind her. Granny had fallen asleep.

  “Granny!”

  “Mhnf?”

  Esk thought for a moment. “Are you having a good time?” she said artfully.

  “Mnph.”

  “You said you’d show me some real magic, all in good time,” said Esk, “and this is a good time.”

  “Mnph.”

  Granny Weatherwax opened her eyes and looked straight up at the sky; it was darker up here, more purple than blue. She thought: why not? She’s a quick learner. She knows more herblore than I do. At her age old Gammer Tumult had me Borrowing and Shifting and Sending all the hours of the day. Maybe I’m being too cautious.

  “Just a bit?” pleaded Esk.

  Granny turned it over in her mind. She couldn’t think of any more excuses. I’m surely going to regret this, she told herself, displaying considerable foresight.

  “All right,” she said shortly.

  “Real magic?” said Esk. “Not more herbs or headology?”

  “Real magic, as you call it, yes.”

  “A spell?”

  “No. A Borrowing.”

  Esk’s face was a picture of expectation. She looked more alive, it seemed to Granny, than she had ever been before.

  Granny looked over the valleys stretching out before them until she found what she was after. A gray eagle was circling lazily over a distant blue-hazed patch of forest. Its mind was currently at ease. It would do nicely.

  She Called it gently, and it began to circle toward them.

  “The first thing to remember about Borrowing is that you must be comfortable and somewhere safe,” she said, smoothing out the grass behind her. “Bed’s best.”

  “But what is Borrowing?”

  “Lie down and hold my hand. Do you see the eagle up there?”

  Esk squinted into the dark, hot sky.

  There were…two doll figures on the grass below as she pivoted on the wind…

  She could feel the whip and wire of the air through her feathers. Because the eagle was not hunting, but simply enjoying the feel of the sun on its wings, the land below was a mere unimportant shape. But the air, the air was a complex, changing three-dimensional thing, an interlocked pattern of spirals and curves that stretched away into the distance, a switchback of currents built around thermal pillars. She…

  …felt a gentle pressure restraining her.

  “The next thing to remember,” said Granny’s voice, very close, “is not to upset the owner. If you let it know you’re there it’ll either fight you or panic, and you won’t stand a chance either way. It’s had a lifetime of being an eagle, and you haven’t.”

  Esk said nothing.

  “You’re not frightened, are you?” said Granny. “It can take you that way the first time, and—”

  “I’m not frightened,” said Esk, and “How do I control it?”

  “You don’t. Not yet. Anyway, controlling a truly wild creature isn’t easily learned. You have to—sort of suggest to it that it might feel inclined to do things. With a tame animal, of course, it’s all different. But you can’t make any creature do anything that is totally against its nature. Now try and find the eagle’s mind.”

  Esk could sense Granny as a diffuse silver cloud at the back of her own mind. After some searching she found the eagle. She almost missed it. Its mind was small, sharp and purple, like an arrowhead. It was concentrating entirely on flying, and took no notice of her.

  “Good,” said Granny approvingly. “We’re not going to go far. If you want to make it turn, you must—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Esk. She flexed her fingers, wherever they were, and the bird leaned against the air and turned.

  “Very good,” said Granny, taken aback. “How did you do that?”

  “I—don’t know. It just seemed obvious.”

  “Hmph.” Granny gently tested the tiny eagle mind. It was still totally oblivious of its passengers. She was genuinely impressed, a very rare occurrence.

  They floated over the mountain, while Esk excitedly explored the eagle’s senses. Granny’s voice droned through her consciousness, giving instructions and guidance and warnings. She listened with half an ear. It sounded far too complicated. Why couldn’t she take over the eagle’s mind? It wouldn’t hurt it.

  She could see how to do it, it was just a knack, like snapping your fingers—which in fa
ct she had never managed to achieve—and then she’d be able to experience flying for real, not at second hand.

  Then she could—

  “Don’t,” said Granny calmly. “No good will come of it.”

  “What?”

  “Do you really think you’re the first, my girl? Do you think we haven’t all thought what a fine thing it would be, to take on another body and tread the wind or breathe the water? And do you really think it would be as easy as that?”

  Esk glowered at her.

  “No need to look like that,” said Granny. “You’ll thank me one day. Don’t you start playing around before you know what you’re about, eh? Before you get up to tricks you’ve got to learn what to do if things go wrong. Don’t try to walk before you can run.”

  “I can feel how to do it, Granny.”

  “That’s as maybe. It’s harder than it seems, is Borrowing, although I’ll grant you’ve got a knack. That’s enough for today, bring us in over ourselves and I’ll show you how to Return.”

  The eagle beat the air over the two recumbent forms and Esk saw, in her mind’s eye, two channels open for them. Granny’s mindshape vanished.

  Now—

  Granny had been wrong. The eagle mind barely fought, and didn’t have time to panic. Esk held it wrapped in her own mind. It writhed for an instant, and then melted into her.

  Granny opened her eyes in time to see the bird give a hoarse cry of triumph, curve down low over the grass-grown scree, and skim away down the mountainside. For a moment it was a vanishing dot and then it had gone, leaving only another echoing shriek.

  Granny looked down at Esk’s silent form. The girl was light enough, but it was a long way home and the afternoon was dwindling.

  “Drat,” she said, with no particular emphasis. She stood up, brushed herself down and, with a grunt of effort, hauled Esk’s inert body over her shoulder.

  High in the crystal sunset air above the mountains the eagle-Esk sought more height, drunk with the sheer vitality of flight.

  On the way home Granny met a hungry bear. Granny’s back was giving her gyp, and she was in no mood to be growled at. She muttered a few words under her breath and the bear, to its brief amazement, walked heavily into a tree and didn’t regain consciousness for several hours.

  When she reached the cottage Granny put Esk’s body to bed and drew up the fire. She brought the goats in and milked them, and finished the chores of the evening.

  She made sure all the windows were open and, when it began to grow dark, lit a lantern and put it on the windowsill.

  Granny Weatherwax didn’t sleep more than a few hours a night, as a rule, and woke again at midnight. The room hadn’t changed, although the lantern had its own little solar system of very stupid moths.

  When she woke again at dawn the candle had long burned down and Esk was still sleeping the shallow, unwakable sleep of the Borrower.

  When she took the goats out to their paddock she looked intently at the sky.

  Noon came, and gradually the light drained out of another day. She paced the floor of the kitchen aimlessly. Occasionally she would throw herself into frantic bouts of housework; ancient crusts were unceremoniously dug out of the cracks in the flagstones, and the fireback was scraped free of the winter’s soot and blackleaded to within an inch of its life. A nest of mice in the back of the dresser were kindly but firmly ejected into the goatshed.

  Sunset came.

  The light of the Discworld was old and slow and heavy. From the cottage door Granny watched as it drained off the mountains, flowing in golden rivers through the forest. Here and there it pooled in hollows until it faded and vanished.

  She drummed her fingers sharply on the doorpost, humming a small and bitter little tune.

  Dawn came, and the cottage was empty except for Esk’s body, silent and unmoving on the bed.

  But as the golden light flowed slowly across the Discworld like the first freshing of the tide over mudflats the eagle circled higher into the dome of heaven, beating the air down with slow and powerful wingbeats.

  The whole of the world was spread out beneath Esk—all the continents, all the islands, all the rivers and especially the great ring of the Rim Ocean.

  There was nothing else up here, not even sound.

  Esk gloried in the feel of it, willing her flagging muscles into greater effort. But something was wrong. Her thoughts seemed to be chasing around beyond her control, and disappearing. Pain and exhilaration and weariness poured into her mind, but it was as if other things were spilling out at the same time. Memories dwindled away on the wind. As fast as she could latch on to a thought it evaporated, leaving nothing behind.

  She was losing chunks of herself, and she couldn’t remember what she was losing. She panicked, burrowing back to the things she was sure of…

  I am Esk, and I have stolen the body of an eagle and the feel of wind in feathers, the hunger, the search of the not-sky below…

  She tried again. I am Esk and seeking the windpath, the pain of muscle, the cut of the air, the cold of it…

  I am Esk high over air-damp-wet-white, above everything, the sky is thin…

  I am I am.

  Granny was in the garden, among the beehives, the early morning wind whipping at her skirts. She went from hive to hive, tapping on their roofs. Then, in the thickets of borage and beebalm that she had planted around them, she stood with her arms outstretched in front of her and sang something in tones so high that no normal person could have heard them.

  But a roar went up from the hives, and then the air was suddenly thick with the heavy, big-eyed, deep-voiced shapes of drone bees. They circled over her head, adding their own bass humming to her chant.

  Then they were gone, soaring into the growing light over the clearing and streaming away over the trees.

  It is well known—at least, it is well known to witches—that all colonies of bees are, as it were, just one part of the creature called the Swarm, in the same way that individual bees are component cells of the hivemind. Granny didn’t mingle her thoughts with the bees very often, partly because insect minds were strange, alien things that tasted of tin, but mostly because she suspected that the Swarm was a good deal more intelligent than she was.

  She knew that the drones would soon reach the wild bee colonies in the deep forest, and within hours every corner of the mountain meadows would be under very close scrutiny indeed. All she could do was wait.

  At noon the drones returned, and Granny read in the sharp acid thoughts of the hivemind that there was no sign of Esk.

  She went back into the cool of the cottage and sat down in the rocking chair, staring at the doorway.

  She knew what the next step was. She hated the very idea of it. But she fetched a short ladder, climbed up creakily on to the roof, and pulled the staff from its hiding place in the thatch.

  It was icy cold. It steamed.

  “Above the snowline, then,” said Granny.

  She climbed down, and rammed the staff into a flowerbed. She glared at it. She had a nasty feeling that it was glaring back.

  “Don’t think you’ve won, because you haven’t,” she snapped. “It’s just that I haven’t got the time to mess around. You must know where she is. I command you to take me to her!”

  The staff regarded her woodenly.

  “By—” Granny paused, her invocations were a little rusty, “—by stock and stone I order it!”

  Activity, movement, liveliness—all these words would be completely inaccurate descriptions of the staff’s response.

  Granny scratched her chin. She remembered the little lesson all children get taught: what’s the magic word?

  “Please?” she suggested.

  The staff trembled, rose a little way out of the ground, and turned in the air so that it hung invitingly at waist height.

  Granny had heard that broomsticks were once again very much the fashion among younger witches, but she didn’t hold with it. There was no way a body could look respec
table while hurtling through the air aboard a household implement. Besides, it looked decidedly draughty.

  But this was no time for respectability. Pausing only to snatch her hat from its hook behind the door she scrambled up on to the staff and perched as best she could, sidesaddle of course, and with her skirts firmly gripped between her knees.

  “Right,” she said. “Now wha-aaaaaaaaa—”

  Across the forest animals broke and scattered as the shadow passed overhead, crying and cursing. Granny clung on with whitened knuckles, her thin legs kicking wildly as, high above the treetops, she learned important lessons about centers of gravity and air turbulence. The staff shot onward, heedless of her yells.

  By the time it had come out over the upland meadows she had come to terms with it somewhat, which meant that she could just about hang on with knees and hands provided she didn’t mind being upside down. Her hat, at least, was useful, being aerodynamically shaped.

  The staff plunged between black cliffs and along high bare valleys where, it was said, rivers of ice had once flowed in the days of the Ice Giants. The air became thin and sharp in the throat.

  They came to an abrupt halt over a snowdrift. Granny fell off, and lay panting in the snow while she tried to remember why she was going through all this.

  There was a bundle of feathers under an overhang a few feet away. As Granny approached it a head rose jerkily, and the eagle glared at her with fierce, frightened eyes. It tried to fly, and toppled over. When she reached out to touch it, it took a neat triangle of flesh out of her hand.

  “I see,” said Granny quietly, to no one in particular. She looked around, and found a boulder of about the right size. She disappeared behind it for a few seconds, for the sake of respectability, and reappeared with a petticoat in her hand. The bird thrashed around, ruining several weeks of meticulous petit-point embroidery, but she managed to bundle it up and hold it so that she could avoid its sporadic lunges.

  Granny turned to the staff, which was now upright in the snowdrift.