She laughed. They’d made a witch of bees in front of her, thousands of them all
holding station in the air. She raised her right hand. With a rise in the level of buzzing,
the bee-witch raised its right hand. She turned around. It turned around, the bees
carefully copying every swirl and flutter of her dress, the ones on the very edge buzzing
desperately because they had furthest to fly.
She carefully put down the big sack and reached out towards the figure. With another
roar of wings it went shapeless for a moment, and then re-formed a little way away,
but with a hand outstretched towards her. The bee that was the tip of its forefinger
hovered just in front of Tiffany’s fingernail.
‘Shall we dance?’ said Tiffany.
In the clearing full of spinning seeds, she circled the swarm. It kept up pretty well,
moving fingertip to buzzing tip, turning when she turned, although there were
always a few bees racing to catch up.
Then it raised both its arms and twirled in the opposite direction, the bees in the
‘skirt’ spreading
out again as it spun. It was learning.
Tiffany laughed and did the same thing. Swarm and girl whirled across the clearing.
She felt happy and wondered if she’d ever felt this happy before. The gold light, the
falling bracts, the dancing bees . . . it was all one thing. This was the opposite of
the dark desert. Here, light was everywhere and filled her up inside. She could feel
herself here but see herself from above, twirling with a buzzing shadow that sparkled
golden as the light struck the bees. Moments like this paid for it all.
Then the witch made of bees leaned closer to Tiffany, as if staring at her with its
thousands of little jewelled eyes. There was a faint piping noise from inside the figure
and the bee-witch exploded into a spreading, buzzing cloud of insects which raced away
across the clearing and disappeared. The only movement now was the whirring fall of
the sycamore seeds.
Tiffany breathed out.
‘Now, some people would have found that scary,’ said a voice behind her.
Tiffany didn’t turn round immediately. First she said, ‘Good afternoon, Granny
Weatherwax.’ Then she turned round.
‘Have you ever done this?’ she demanded, still half-drunk with delight.
‘It’s rude to start with questions. You’d better come in and have a cup of tea,’ said
Granny Weatherwax.
You’d barely know that anyone lived in the
cottage. There were two chairs by the fire, one of them a rocking chair, and by the
table were two chairs that didn’t rock but did wobble because of the uneven stone floor.
There was a dresser, and a rag-rug in front of the huge hearth. A broomstick leaned
against the wall in one corner, next to something mysterious and pointy, under a cloth.
There was a very narrow and dark flight of stairs. And that was it. There was nothing shiny, nothing new and nothing unnecessary.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?’ said Granny Weatherwax, taking a sooty
black kettle off the fire and filling an equally black teapot.
Tiffany opened the sack she had brought with her. ‘I’ve come to bring you your hat
back,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘Have you? And why?’
‘Because it’s your hat,’ said Tiffany, putting it on the table. ‘Thank you for the loan
of it, though.’
‘I dare say there’s plenty of young witches who’d give their high teeth for an ol’ hat
of mine,’ said Granny, lifting up the battered hat.
‘There are,’ said Tiffany, and did not add ‘and it’s eye teeth, actually’. What she did add was: ‘But I think everyone has to find their own hat. The right hat for them, I
mean.’
‘I see you’re now wearing a shop-bought one, then,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘One
of them Sky Scrapers. With stars,’ she added, and there was so much acid in the word
‘stars’ that it would’ve melted
copper and then dropped through the table and the floor and melted more copper in
the cellar below. ‘Think that makes it more magical, do you? Stars?’
‘I. . . did when I bought it. And it’ll do for now.’
‘Until you find the right hat,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
‘Yes.’
‘Which ain’t mine?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
The old witch walked across the room and tugged the cloth off the thing in the corner.
It turned out to be a big wooden spike, just about the size of a pointy hat on a tall stand. A
hat was being … constructed on it, with thin strips of willow and pins and stiff black doth.
‘I make my own,’ she said. ‘Every year. There’s no hat like the hat you make yourself.
Take my advice. I stiffens the calico and makes it waterproof with special jollop. It’s
amazing what you can put into a hat you make yourself. But you didn’t come to talk
about hats.’
Tiffany let the question out at last.
‘Was it real?’.
Granny Weatherwax poured the tea, picked up her cup and saucer, then carefully
poured some of the tea out of the cup and into the saucer. She held this up and, with
care, like someone dealing with an important and delicate task, blew gently on it. She
did this slowly and calmly, while Tiffany tried hard to conceal her impatience.
down the cup and saucer. ‘Child, you’ve come here to learn what’s true and what’s not
but there’s little I can teach you that you don’t already know. You just don’t know you
know it, and you’ll spend the rest of your life learning what’s already in your bones. And
that’s the truth.’
She stared at Tiffany’s hopeful face and sighed.
‘Come outside then,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you lesson one. It’s the only lesson there is. It
don’t need writing down in no book with eyes on.’
She led the way to the well in her back garden, looked around on the ground and
picked up a stick.
‘Magic wand,’ she said. ‘See?’ A green flame leaped out of it, making Tiffany jump.
‘Now you try.’
It didn’t work for Tiffany, no matter how much she shook it.
‘Of course not,’ said Granny. ‘It’s a stick. Now, maybe I made a flame come out of
it, or maybe I made you think it did. That don’t matter. It was me is what I’m sayin’, not the stick. Get your mind right and you can make a stick your wand and the sky your
hat and a puddle your magic . . . your magic . . . er, what’re them fancy cups called?’
‘Er . . . goblet,’ said Tiffany.
‘Right. Magic goblet. Things aren’t important. People are.’ Granny Weatherwax
looked sidelong at Tiffany. ‘And I could teach you how to run across those hills of
yours with the hare, I could teach you how to fly above them with the buzzard. I could
tell you the secrets of the bees. I could teach you all this
and much more besides if you’d do just one thing, right here and now. One simple
thing, easy to do.’
Tiffany nodded, eyes wide.
‘You understand, then, that all the glittery stuff is just toys, and toys can lead you
astray?’
‘Yes!’
‘Then take off that shiny horse you wear around your neck, girl, and drop it in the
well.’
Obediently, half-hypnotized by the voice, Tiffany reached behind her neck and undid
the clasp.
The pieces of the silver horse shone as she held it over the water.
She stared at it as if she was seeing it for the first time. And then . . .
She tests people, she thought. All the time.
‘Well?’ said the old witch.
‘No,’ said Tiffany. ‘I can’t.’
‘Can’t or won’t?’ said Granny sharply.
‘Can’t,’ said Tiffany and stuck out her chin. ‘And won’t!’
She drew her hand back and fastened the necklace again, glaring defiantly at Granny
Weatherwax
The witch smiled. ‘Well done,’ she said quietly. ‘If you don’t know when to be a
human being, you don’t know when to be a witch. And if you’re too afraid of goin’
astray, you won’t go anywhere. May I see it, please?’
Tiffany looked into those blue eyes. Then she undid the clasp and handed over
the necklace. Granny held it up.
‘Funny, ain’t it, that it seems to gallop when the light hits it,’ said the witch, watching
it twist this way and that. ‘Well-made thing. O’course, it’s not what a horse looks like,
but it’s certainly what a horse is.’
Tiffany stared at her with her mouth open. For a moment Granny Aching stood there
grinning, and then Granny Weatherwax was back. Did she do that, she wondered, or did
I do it myself? And do I dare find out?
‘I didn’t just come to bring the hat back,’ she managed to say. ‘I brought you a
present, too.’