But at least Hodgesaargh had a job to do. The castle was full of people doing jobs. Everyone had something useful to do except Magrat. She just had to exist. Of course, everyone would talk to her, provided she talked to them first. But she was always interrupting something important. Apart from ensuring the royal succession, which Verence had sent off for a book about, she-
“You just keep back there, girl. You don’t want to come no further,” said a voice. Magrat bridled.
“Girl? One happens to be very nearly of the royal blood by marriage!”
“Maybe, but the bees don’t know that,” said the voice. Magrat stopped.
She’d stepped out beyond what were the gardens from the point of view of the royal family and into what were the gardens from the point of view of everyone else – beyond the world of hedges and topiary and herb gardens and into the world of old sheds, piles of flowerpots, compost and, just here, beehives.
One of the hives had the lid off. Beside it, in the middle of a brown cloud, smoking his special bee pipe, was Mr. Brooks.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s you, Mr. Brooks.” Technically, Mr. Brooks was the Royal Beekeeper. But the relationship was a careful one. For one thing, although most of the staff were called by their last names Mr. Brooks shared with the cook and the butler the privilege of an honorific. Because Mr. Brooks had secret powers. He knew all about honey flows and the mating of queens. He knew about swarms, and how to destroy wasps’ nests. He got the general respect shown to those, like witches and blacksmiths, whose responsibilities are not entirely to the world of the humdrum and everyday-people who, in fact, know things that others don’t about things that others can’t fathom. And he was generally found doing something fiddly with the hives, ambling across the kingdom in pursuit of a swarm, or smoking his pipe in his secret shed which smelled of old honey and wasp poison. You didn’t offend Mr. Brooks, not unless you wanted swarms in your privy while he sat cackling in his shed.
He carefully replaced the lid on the hive and walked away. A few bees escaped from the gaping holes in his beekeeping veil.
“Afternoon, your ladyship,” he conceded.
“Hello, Mr. Brooks. What’ve you been doing?”
Mr. Brooks opened the door of his secret shed, and rummaged about inside.
“They’re late swarming,” said the beekeeper. “I was just checking up on ’em. Fancy a cup of tea, girl?”
You couldn’t stand on ceremony with Mr. Brooks. He treated everyone as an equal, or more often as a slight inferior; it probably came of ruling thousands, every day and at least she could talk to him. Mr. Brooks had always seemed to her as close to a witch as it was possible to be while still being male.
The shed was stuffed full of bits of hive, mysterious torture instruments for extracting honey, old jars, and a small stove on which a grubby teapot steamed next to a huge saucepan.
He took her silence for acceptance, and poured out two mugs.
“Is it herbal?” she quavered.
“Buggered if I know. It’s just brown leaves out of a tin.”
Magrat looked uncertainly into a mug which pure tannin was staining brown. But she rallied. One thing you had to do when you were queen, she knew, was Put Commoners at their Ease. She cast around for some easeful question.
“It must be very interesting, being a beekeeper,” she said.
“Yes. It is.”
“One’s often wondered-”
“What?”
“How do you actually milk them?”
The unicorn prowled through the forest. It felt blind, and out of place. This wasn’t a proper land. The sky was blue, not flaming with all the colours of the aurora. And time was passing. To a creature not born subject to time, it was a sensation not unakin to falling.
It could feel its mistress inside its head, too. That was worse even than the passing of time.
In short, it was mad.
Magrat sat with her mouth open.
“I thought queens were born,” she said.
“Oh, no,” said Mr. Brooks. “There ain’t no such thing as a queen egg. The bees just decides to feed one of ’em up as a queen. Feeds ’em royal jelly”
“What happens if they don’t?”
“Then it just becomes an ordinary worker, your ladyship,” said Mr. Brooks, with a suspiciously republican grin.
Lucky for it, Magrat thought.
“So they have a new queen, and then what happens to the old one?”
“Usually the old girl swarms,” said Mr. Brooks. “Pushes off and takes some of the colony with her. I must’ve seen a thousand swarms, me. Never seen a Royal swarm, though.”
“What’s a Royal swarm?”
“Can’t say for sure. It’s in some of the old bee books. A swarm of swarms. It’s something to see, they say.” The old ‘ beekeeper looked wistful for a moment.
‘”Course,” he went on, righting himself, “the real fun starts if the weather’s bad and the ole queen can’t swarm, right?” He moved his hand in a sly circular motion. “What happens then is, the two queens – that’s the old queen, right? And the new queen – the two queens start astalkin’ one another among the combs, with the rain adrummin’ on the roof of the hive, and the business of the hive agoin’ on all around them,” Mr. Brooks moved his hands graphically, and Magrat leaned forward, “all among the combs, the drones all hummin’, and all the time they can sense one another, ‘cos they can tell, see, and then they spots one another and-”
“Yes? Yes?” said Magrat, leaning forward.
“Slash! Stab!”
Magrat hit her head on the wall of the hut.
“Can’t have more’n one queen in a hive,” said Mr. Brooks calmly.
Magrat looked out at the hives. She’d always liked the look of beehives, up until now.
“Many’s the time I’ve found a dead queen in front of the hive after a spell of wet weather,” said Mr. Brooks, happily. “Can’t abide another queen around the place, you know. And it’s a right old battle, too. The old queen’s more cunnin’. But the new queen, she’s really got everything to fight for.”
“Sorry?”
“If she wants to be mated.”
“Oh.”
“But it gets really interestin’ in the autumn,” said Mr. Brooks. “Hive don’t need any dead weight in the winter, see, and there’s all these drones hangin’ around not doing anything, so the workers drag all the drones down to the hive entrance, see, and they bite their-”
“Stop! This is horrible!” said Magrat. “I thought beekeeping was, well, nice.”
“Of course, that’s around the time of year when the bees wear out,” said Mr. Brooks. “What happens is, see, your basic bee, why, it works ’til it can’t work no more, and you’ll see a lot of old workers acrawlin’ around in front of the hive ‘cos-”
“Stop it! Honestly, this is too much. I’m queen, you know. Almost.”
“Sorry, miss,” said Mr. Brooks. “I thought you wanted to know a bit about beekeeping.”
“Yes, but note this!”
Magrat swept out.
“Oh, I dunno,” said Mr. Brooks. “Does you good to get close to Nature.”
He shook his head cheerfully as she disappeared among the hedges.
“Can’t have more than one queen in a hive,” he said. “Slash! Stab! Hehheh!” From somewhere in the distance came the scream of Hodgesaargh as nature got close to him.
Crop circles opened everywhere.
Now the universes swung into line. They ceased their boiling spaghetti dance and, to pass through this chicane of history, charged forward neck and neck in their race across the rubber sheet of incontinent Time.
At such time, as Ponder Stibbons dimly perceived, they had an effect on one another – shafts of reality crackled back and forward as the universes jostled for position.
If you were someone who had trained their mind to be the finest of receivers, and were running it at the moment with the gain turned up until the knob broke, you might pick up some very strange signals indeed . . .
The clock ticked.
Granny Weatherwax sat in front of the open box, reading. Occasionally she stopped and closed her eyes and pinched her nose.
Not knowing the future was bad enough, but at least she understood why. Now she was getting flashes of deja vu. It had been going on all week. But they weren’t her deja vus. She was getting them for the first time, as it were – flashes of memory that couldn’t have existed. Couldn’t have existed. She was Esme Weatherwax, sane as a brick, always had been, she’d never been-
There was a knock at the door.
She blinked, glad to be free of those thoughts. It took her a second or two to focus on the present. Then she folded up the paper, slipped it into its envelope, pushed the envelope back into its bundle, put the bundle into the box, locked the box with a small key which she hung over the fireplace, and walked to the door. She did a last-minute check to make sure she hadn’t absentmindedly taken all her clothes off, or something, and opened it.