‘I expect you’ve got things to marinate?’ said Mrs Gogol.
‘Yeah. Yeah.’ Mrs Pleasant backed out, but with reluctance. Then she halted. Mrs Pleasant, at rest, was not easily moved again until she wanted to be.
‘That Lilith woman says she can see the whole world in mirrors,’ she said, in slightly accusing tones.
Mrs Gogol shook her head.
‘All anyone gets in a mirror is themselves,’ she said. ‘But what you gets in a good gumbo is everything.’
Mrs Pleasant nodded. This was a well-known fact. She couldn’t dispute it.
Mrs Gogol shook her head sadly when the cook had gone. A voodoo woman was reduced to all sorts of stratagems in order to appear knowing, but she felt slightly ashamed of letting an honest woman believe that she could see the future in a pot of gumbo. Because all you could see in a pot of Mrs Gogol’s gumbo was that the future certainly contained a very good meal.
She’d really seen it in a bowl of jambalaya she’d prepared earlier.
Magrat lay with the wand under her pillow. She wobbled gently between sleep and wakefulness.
Certainly she was the best person for the wand. There was no doubt about that. Sometimes – and she hardly dared give the thought headroom, when she was under the same roof as Granny Weatherwax – she really wondered about the others’ commitment to witchcraft. Half the time they didn’t seem to bother.
Take medicine, for example. Magrat knew she was much better than them at herbs. She’d inherited several large books on the subject from Goodie Whemper, her predecessor in the cottage, and had essayed a few tentative notes of her own as well. She could tell people things about the uses of Devil’s Bit Scabious that would interest them so much they’d rush off, presumably to look for someone else to tell. She could fractionally distil, and double-distil, and do things that meant sitting up all night watching the colour of the flame under the retort. She worked at it.
Whereas Nanny just tended to put a hot poultice on everything and recommend a large glass of whatever the patient liked best on the basis that since you were going to be ill anyway you might as well get some enjoyment out of it. (Magrat forbade her patients alcohol, because of what it did to the liver; if they didn’t know what it did to the liver, she spent some time telling them.)
And Granny … she just gave people a bottle of coloured water and told them they felt a lot better.
And what was so annoying was that they often did.
Where was the witchcraft in that?
With a wand, though, things could be different. You could help people a lot with a wand. Magic was there to make life better. Magrat knew this in the pink fluttering boudoir of her heart.
She dipped under the surface of sleep again.
And there was an odd dream. She never mentioned it to anyone afterwards because, well, you didn’t. Not things like that.
But she thought she’d got up in the night, awakened by the silence, to get some more air. And as she passed the mirror she saw a movement in it.
It wasn’t her face. It looked a lot like Granny Weatherwax. It smiled at her – a much nicer and friendlier smile than she’d ever got from Granny, Magrat recalled – and then vanished, the cloudy silver surface closing over it.
She hurried back to bed and awoke to the sound of a brass band, engaged in unrelenting oompah. People were shouting and laughing.
Magrat got dressed quickly, went out into the corridor, and knocked on the door of the older witches. There was no reply. She tried the handle.
After she’d rattled it a couple of times there was a thump as the chair wedged under the handle on the other side, the better to deter ravishers, burglars and other nocturnal intruders, fell over.
Granny Weatherwax’s boots protruded from under the covers at one end of the bed. Nanny Ogg’s bare feet, Nanny being something of a night-time revolver, were beside them. Faint snores rattled the jug on the washbasin; these were no longer the full-nosed roars of a quick forty-winks catnapper, but the well-paced growls of someone who intends to make a night of it.
Magrat knocked on the sole of Granny’s boot.
‘Hey, wake up! Something’s going on.’
Granny Weatherwax waking up was quite an impressive sight, and one not seen by many people.
Most people, on waking up, accelerate through a quick panicky pre-consciousness check-up: who am I, where am I, who is he/she, good god, why am I cuddling a policeman’s helmet, what happened last night?
And this is because people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time – there’s that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from fast asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking.
She sniffed. ‘Something’s burning,’ she said.
‘They’ve got a bonfire, too,’ said Magrat.
Granny sniffed again.
‘They’re roasting garlic”?’ she said.
‘I know. I can’t imagine why. They’re ripping all the shutters off the windows and burning them in the square and dancing around the fire.’
Granny Weatherwax gave Nanny Ogg a vicious jab with her elbow.
‘Wake up, you.’
‘Wstph?’
‘I didn’t get a wink of sleep all night,’ said Granny reproachfully, ‘what with her snoring.’
Nanny Ogg raised the covers cautiously.
‘It’s far too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning,’ she said.
‘Come on,’ said Granny. ‘We needs your skill with languages.’
The owner of the inn flapped his arms up and down and ran around in circles. Then he pointed at the castle that towered over the forest. Then he sucked vigorously at his wrist. Then he fell over on his back. And then he looked expectantly at Nanny Ogg, while behind him the bonfire of garlic and wooden stakes and heavy window shutters burned merrily.
‘No,’ said Nanny, after a while. ‘Still non conprendy, mine hair.’
The man got up, and brushed some dust off his leather breeches.
‘I think he’s saying that someone’s dead,’ said Magrat. ‘Someone in the castle.’
‘Well, I must say, everyone seems very cheerful about it,’ said Granny Weatherwax severely.
In the sunlight of the new day the village looked far more cheerful. Everyone kept nodding happily at the witches.
‘That’s because it was probably the landlord,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Bit of a bloodsucker, I think he’s sayin’.’
‘Ah. That’d be it, then.’ Granny rubbed her hands together and looked approvingly at the breakfast table, which had been dragged out into the sunshine. ‘Anyway, the food has certainly improved. Pass the bread, Magrat.’
‘Everyone keeps smiling and waving at us,’ said Magrat. ‘And look at all this food!’
‘That’s only to be expected,’ said Granny, with her mouth full. “They’ve only had us here one night and already they’re learnin’ it’s lucky to be kind to witches. Now help me get the lid off this honey.’
Under the table, Greebo sat and washed himself. Occasionally he burped.
Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.
Dear Jason and all at No. 21, No. 34, No. 15, No. 87 and No. 61 but not at No. 18 until she gives back the bowl she definitly borrowed whatever she says,
Well here we are, cor what a lark so far, dont arsk ME about pumkins, still, no harm done. Im drawin a picture of where we stayed larst night I have put an X on our room where our room is. The weather –
‘What are you doing, Gytha? We’re ready to leave.’
Nanny Ogg looked up, her face still creased with the effort of composition.
‘I thought it would be nice to send something to our Jason. You know, to stop him worryin’. So I done a drawing of this place on a piece of card and Mine Hair here will give it to someone going our way. You never know, it might get there.’
– continues Fine.
Nanny Ogg sucked the end of her pencil. Not for the first time in the history of the universe, someone for whom communication normally came as effortlessly as a dream was stuck for inspiration when faced with a few lines on the back of a card.
Well that about wraps it up for now, will fight wright again soone MUM. P.S. the Cat is looking very Peeky I think he misses his Home.