The shape bustled past Esk in a nasal kaleidoscope of fragrances and buttoned up the curtains at the front of the stall. Then the drapes at the back were thrown up, letting in the afternoon sunlight.
“Can’t stand the dark and fug myself,” said Hilta Goatfounder, “but the customers expect it. You know how it is.”
“Yes,” Esk nodded sagely. “Headology.”
Hilts, a small fat woman wearing an enormous hat with fruit on it, glanced from her to Granny and grinned.
“That’s the way of it,” she agreed. “Will you take some tea?”
They sat on bales of unknown herbs in the private corner made by the stall between the angled walls of the houses, and drank something fragrant and green out of surprisingly delicate cups. Unlike Granny, who dressed like a very respectable raven, Hilts Goatfounder was all lace and shawls and colours and earrings and so many bangles that a mere movement of her arms sounded like a percussion section falling off a cliff. But Esk could see the likeness.
It was hard to describe. You couldn’t imagine them curtseying to anyone.
“So,” said Granny, “how goes the life?”
The other witch shrugged, causing the drummers to lose their grip again, just when they had nearly climbed back up.
“Like the hurried lover, it comes and goe-” she began, and stopped at Granny’s meaningful glance at Esk.
“Not bad, not bad,” she amended hurriedly. “The council have tried to run me out once or twice, you know, but they all have wives and somehow it never quite happens. They say I’m not the right sort, but I say there’d be many a family in this town a good deal bigger and poorer if it wasn’t for Madame Goatfounder’s Pennyroyal Preventives. I know who comes into my shop, I do. I remember who buys buckeroo drops and ShoNuff Ointment, I do. Life isn’t bad. And how is it up in your village with the funny name?”
“Bad Ass,” said Esk helpfully. She picked a small clay pot off the counter and sniffed at its contents.
“It is well enough,” conceded Granny. “The handmaidens of nature are ever in demand.”
Esk sniffed again at the powder, which seemed to be pennyroyal with a base she couldn’t quite identify, and carefully replaced the lid. While the two women exchanged gossip in a kind of feminine code, full of eye contact and unspoken adjectives, she examined the other exotic potions on display. Or rather, not on display. In some strange way they appeared to be artfully half-hidden, as if Hilts wasn’t entirely keen to sell.
“I don’t recognise any of these,” she said, half to herself. “What do they give to people?”
“Freedom,” said Hilts, who had good hearing. She turned back to Granny. “How much have you taught her?”
“Not that much,” said Granny. “There’s power there, but what kind I’m not sure. Wizard power, it might be.”
Hilts turned around very slowly and looked Esk up and down.
“Ah,” she said, “That explains the staff. I wondered what the bees were talking about. Well, well. Give me your hand, child.”
Esk held out her hand. Hilta’s fingers were so heavy with rings it was like dipping into a sack of walnuts.
Granny sat upright, radiating disapproval, as Hilts began to inspect Esk’s palm.
“I really don’t think that is necessary,” she said sternly. “Not between us.”
“You do it, Granny,” said Esk, “in the village. I’ve seen you. And teacups. And cards.”
Granny shifted uneasily. “Yes, well,” she said. “It’s all according. You just hold their hand and people do their own fortune-telling. But there’s no need to go around believing it, we’d all be in trouble if we went around believing everything.”
“The Powers That Be have many strange qualities, and puzzling and varied are the ways in which they make their desires known in this circle of firelight we call the physical world,” said Hilts solemnly. She winked at Esk.
“Well, really,” snapped Granny.
“No, straight up,” said Hilts. “It’s true.”
“Hmph.”
“I see you going upon a long journey,” said Hilts.
“Will I meet a tall dark stranger?” said Esk, examining her palm. “Granny always says that to women, she says -”
“No,” said Hilts, while Granny snorted. “But it will be a very strange journey. You’ll go a long way while staying in the same place. And the direction will be a strange one. It will be an exploration.”
“You can tell all that from my hand?”
“Well, mainly I’m just guessing,” said Hilts, sitting back and reaching for the teapot /the lead drummer, who had climbed halfway back, fell on to the toiling cymbalists/. She looked carefully at Esk and added, “A female wizard, eh?”
“Granny is taking me to Unseen University,” said Esk.
Hilta raised her eyebrows. “Do you know where it is?”
Granny frowned. “Not in so many words,” she admitted. “I was hoping you could give me more explicit directions, you being more familiar with bricks and things.”
“They say it has many doors, but the ones in this world are in the city of Ankh-Morpork,” said Hilta. Granny looked blank. “On the Circle Sea,” Hilta added. Granny’s look of polite enquiry persisted. “Five hundred miles away,” said Hilta.
“Oh,” said Granny.
She stood up and brushed an imaginary speck of dust off her dress.
“We’d better be going, then,” she added.
Hilta laughed. Esk quite liked the sound. Granny never laughed, she merely let the corners of her mouth turn up, but Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.
“Start tomorrow, anyway,” she said. “I’ve got room at home, you can stay with me, and tomorrow you’ll have the light.”
“We wouldn’t want to presume,” said Granny.
“Nonsense. Why not have a look around while I pack up the stall?”
Ohulan was the market town for a wide sprawling countryside and the market day didn’t end at sunset. Instead, torches flared at every booth and stall and light blared forth from the open doorways of the inns. Even the temples put out coloured lamps to attract nocturnal worshippers.
Hilta moved through the crowd like a slim snake through dry grass, her entire stall and stock reduced to a surprisingly small bundle on her back, and her jewellery rattling like a sackful of flamenco dancers. Granny stumped along behind her, her feet aching from the unaccustomed prodding of the cobbles.
And Esk got lost.
It took some effort, but she managed it. It involved ducking between two stalls and then scurrying down a side alley. Granny had warned her at length about the unspeakable things that lurked in cities, which showed that the old woman was lacking in a complete understanding of headology, since Esk was- now determined to see one or two of them for herself.
In fact, since Ohulan was quite barbaric and uncivilised the only things that went on after dark to any degree were a little thievery, some amateurish trading in the courts of lust, and drinking until you fell over or started singing or both.
According to the standard poetic instructions one should move through a fair like the white swan at evening moves o’er the bay, but because of certain practical difficulties Esk settled for moving through the crowds like a small dodgem car, bumping from body to body with the tip of the staff waving a yard above her head. It caused some heads to turn, and not only because it had hit them; wizards occasionally passed through the town and it was the first time anyone had seen one four feet tall with long hair.
Anyone watching closely would have noticed strange things happening as she passed by.
There was, for example, the man with three upturned cups who was inviting a small crowd to explore with him the exciting world of chance and probability as it related to the position of a small dried pea. He was vaguely aware of a small figure watching him solemnly for a few moments, and then a sackful of peas cascaded out of every cup he picked up. Within seconds he was knee-deep in legumes. He was a lot deeper in trouble he suddenly owed everyone a lot of money.
There was a small and wretched monkey that for years had shuffled vaguely at the end of a chain while its owner played something dreadful on a pipe-organ. It suddenly turned, narrowed its little red eyes, bit its keeper sharply in the leg, snapped its chain and had it away over the rooftops with the night’s takings in a tin cup. History is silent about what they were spent on.
A boxful of marzipan ducks on a nearby stall came to life and whirred past the stallholder to land, quacking happily, in the river (where, by dawn, they had all melted: that’s natural selection for your.
The stall itself sidled off down an alley and was never seen again.
Esk, in fact, moved through the fair more like an arsonist moves through a hayfield or a neutron bounces through a reactor, poets notwithstanding, and the hypothetical watcher could have detected her random passage by tracing the outbreaks of hysteria and violence. But, like all good catalysts, she wasn’t actually involved in the processes she initiated, and by the time all the non-hypothetical potential watchers took their eyes off them she had been buffeted somewhere else.