Granny lurked by the wall and noted the details. Plaster was dropping off the house walls, and even the knocker had fallen off the door.
Granny Weatherwax did not believe in atmospheres.
She did not believe in psychic auras. Being a witch, she’d always thought, depended more on what you didn’t believe. But she was prepared to believe that there was something very unpleasant in that house. Not evil. The two not-exactly-women weren’t evil, in the same way that a dagger or a sheer cliff isn’t evil. Being evil means being able to make choices. But the hand wielding a dagger or pushing a body over a cliff could be evil, and something like that was going on.
She really wished that she didn’t know who was behind it.
People like Nanny Ogg turn up everywhere. It’s as if there’s some special morphic generator dedicated to the production of old women who like a laugh and aren’t averse to the odd pint, especially of some drink normally sold in very small glasses. You find them all over the place, often in pairs.*
They tend to attract one another. Possibly they broadcast inaudible signals indicating that here is someone who could be persuaded to go ‘Ooo’ at pictures of other people’s grandchildren.
Nanny Ogg had found a friend. Her name was Mrs Pleasant, she was a cook, and she was the first black person Nanny had ever spoken to.* She was also a cook of that very superior type who spends most of the time holding court in a chair in the centre of the kitchen, apparently taking very little heed of the activity going on around her.
Occasionally she’d give an order. And they’d only need to be occasionally, because she’d seen to it over the years
* Always in front of you in any queue, for a start.
* Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because – what with trolls and dwarfs and so on – speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.
that people either did things her way or not at all. Once or twice, with some ceremony, she’d get up, taste something, and maybe add a pinch of salt.
Such people are always ready to chat to any wandering pedlars, herbalists, or little old women with cats on their shoulders. Greebo rode on Nanny’s shoulder as though he’d just eaten the parrot.
‘You be a-comin’ here for Fat Lunchtime, then?’ said Mrs Pleasant.
‘Helping a friend with a bit of business,’ said Nanny. ‘My, these biscuits are tasty.’
‘I means, I see by your eye,’ said Mrs Pleasant, pushing the plate nearer to her, ‘that you are of a magical persuasion.’
‘Then you sees a lot further than most people in these parts,’ said Nanny. ‘Y’know, what’d improve these biscuits no end’d be something to dip ‘em in, what d’you think?’
‘How “bout something with bananas in it?’
‘Bananas would be just the thing,’ said Nanny happily. Mrs Pleasant waved imperiously at one of the maids, who set to work.
Nanny sat on her chair, swinging her stumpy legs and looking around the kitchen with interest. A score of cooks were working with the single-mindedness of an artillery platoon laying down a barrage. Huge cakes were being constructed. In the fireplaces whole carcasses of animals were being roasted; turnspit dogs galloped in their treadmills. A huge man with a bald head and a scar right across his face was patiently inserting little sticks into sausages.
Nanny hadn’t had any breakfast. Greebo had had some breakfast, but this didn’t make any difference. They were both undergoing a sort of exquisite culinary torture.
They both turned, as if hypnotized, to watch two maids stagger by under a tray of canapes.
‘I can see you is a very observant woman, Mrs Ogg,’ said Mrs Pleasant.
‘Just a slice,’ said Nanny, without thinking.
‘I also determines,’ Mrs Pleasant said, after a while, ‘that you have a cat of no usual breed upon your shoulder there.’
‘You’re right there.’
‘I knows I’m right.’
A brimming glass of yellow foam was slid in front of Nanny. She looked at it reflectively and tried to get back to the matter in hand.
‘So,’ she said, ‘where would I go, do you think, to find out about how you do magic in – ‘
‘Would you like somethin’ to eat?’ said Mrs Pleasant.
‘What? My word!’
Mrs Pleasant rolled her eyes.
‘Not this stuff. I wouldn’t eat this stuff,’ she said bitterly.
Nanny’s face fell.
‘But you cook it,’ she pointed out.
‘Only ‘cos I’m told to. The old Baron knew what good food was. This stuff? It’s nothing but pork and beef and lamb and rubbish for them that never tasted anything better. The only thing on four legs that’s worth eating is alligator. I mean real food.’
Mrs Pleasant looked around at the kitchen.
‘Sara!’ she shouted.
One of the sub-cooks turned around.
‘Yes, ‘m?’
‘Me and this lady is just going out. Just you see to everything, okay?’
‘Yes, ‘m.’
Mrs Pleasant stood up and nodded meaningfully at Nanny Ogg.
‘Walls have ears,’ she said.
‘Coo! Do they?’
‘We goin’ to go for a little stroll.’
There were, it now seemed to Nanny Ogg, two cities in Genua. There was the white one, all new houses and blue-roofed palaces, and around it and even under it was the old one. The new one might not like the presence of the old one, but it couldn’t quite ever do without it. Someone, somewhere, has to do the cooking.
Nanny Ogg quite liked cooking, provided there were other people around to do things like chop up the vegetables and wash the dishes afterwards. She’d always reckoned that she could do things to a bit of beef that the bullock had never thought of. But now she realized that wasn’t cooking. Not compared to cooking in Genua. It was just staying alive as pleasantly as possible. Cooking anywhere outside Genua was just heating up things like bits of animals and birds and fish and vegetables until they went brown.
And yet the weird thing was that the cooks in Genua had nothing edible to cook; at least, not what Nanny would have thought of as food. To her mind, food went around on four legs, or possibly one pair of legs and one pair of wings. Or at least it had fins on. The idea of food with more than four legs was an entirely new kettle of fi-of miscellaneous swimming things.
They didn’t have much to cook in Genua. So they cooked everything. Nanny had never heard of prawns or crawfish or lobsters; it just looked to her as though the citizens of Genua dredged the river bottom and boiled whatever came up.
The point was that a good Genuan cook could more or less take the squeezings of a handful of mud, a few dead leaves and a pinch or two of some unpronounceable herbs and produce a meal to make a gourmet burst into tears of gratitude and swear to be a better person for the rest of their entire life if they could just have one more plateful.
Nanny Ogg ambled along as Mrs Pleasant led her through the market. She peered at cages of snakes, and racks of mysteriously tendrilled herbs. She prodded trays of bivalves. She stopped for a chat to the Nanny Ogg-shaped ladies who ran the little stalls that, for a couple of pennies, dispensed strange chowders and shellfish in a bun. She sampled everything. She was enjoying herself immensely. Genua, city of cooks, had found the appetite it deserved.
She finished a plate of fish and exchanged a nod and a grin with the little old woman who ran the fish stall.
‘Well, all this is – ‘ she began, turning to Mrs Pleasant.
Mrs Pleasant had gone.
Some people would have bustled off to look for her in the crowds, but Nanny Ogg just stood and thought.
I asked about magic, she thought, and she brought me here and left me. Because of them walls with ears in, I expect. So maybe I got to do the rest myself.
She looked around her. There was a very rough tent a little way from the stalls, right by the river. There was no sign outside it, but there was a pot bubbling gently over a fire. Rough clay bowls were stacked beside the pot. Occasionally someone would step out of the crowd, help themselves to a bowlful of whatever was in the pot, and then throw a handful of coins into the plate in front of the tent.
Nanny wandered over and looked into the pot. Things came to the surface and sank again. The general colour was brown. Bubbles formed, grew, and burst stickily with an organic ‘blop’. Anything could be happening in that pot. Life could be spontaneously creating.
Nanny Ogg would try anything once. Some things she’d try several thousand times.