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 fact 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 leer.
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.