“True. That’s very true. And you ever seen ’em Morris dancing? “Muff to make you hang up your hanky.”
“What, Morris dancing in a city?”
“Well, down in Sto Helit, anyway. Bunch o’ soft wizards and merchants. I watched ’em a whole hour and there wasn’t even a groinin’.”
“Swish city bastards. Comin’ up here, takin’ our jobs. . .”
“Don’t be daft. They don’t know what a proper job is.”
The jug glugged, but with a deeper tone, suggesting that it contained a lot of emptiness.
“Bet they’ve never been up to the armpit-”
“The point is. The point is. The point. The point is. Hah. All laughin’ at decent rude artisans, eh? I mean. I mean. I mean. What’s it all about? I mean. I mean. I mean. Play’s all about some mechanical. . . rude buggers makin’ a pig’s ear out of doin’ a play about a bunch of lords and ladies-”
A chill in the air, sharp as icicles . . .
“It needs something else.”
“Right. Right.”
“A mythic element.”
“Right. My point. My point. My point. Needs a plot they can go home whistlin’. Exactly.”
“So it should be done here, in the open air. Open to the sky and the hills.”
Jason Ogg wrinkled his brows. They were always pretty wrinkled anyway, whenever he was dealing with the complexities of the world. Only when it came to iron did he know exactly what to do. But he held up a wavering finger and tried to count his fellow thespians. Given that the jug was now empty, this was an effort. There seemed, on average, to be seven other people. But he had a vague, nagging feeling that something wasn’t right.
“Out here,” he said, uncertainly.
“Good idea,” said Weaver.
“Wasn’t it your idea?” said Jason.
“I thought you said it.”
“I thought you did.”
“Who cares who said it?” said Thatcher. “‘S’a good idea. Seems . . . right.”
“What was that about the miffic quality?”
“What’s miffic?”
“Something you’ve got to have,” said Weaver, theatrical expert. “Very important, your miffics.”
“Me mam said no one was to go-” Jason began.
“We shan’t be doing any dancing or anything,” said Carter. “I can see you don’t want people skulking around up here by ’emselves, doin’ magic. But it can’t be wrong if everyone comes here. I mean, the king and everyone. Your mam, too. Hah, I’d like to see any girls with no drawers on get past her!”
“I don’t think it’s just-” Jason began.
“And the other one’ll be there, too,” said Weaver.
They considered Granny Weatherwax.
“Cor, she frightens the life out of me, her,” said Thatcher, eventually. “The way she looks right through you. I wouldn’t say a word against her, mark you, a fine figure of a woman,” he said loudly, and then added rather more quietly, “but they do say she creeps around the place o’nights, as a hare or a bat or something. Changes her shape and all. Not that I believes a word of it,” he raised his voice, then let it sink again, “but old Weezen over in Slice told me once he shot a hare in the leg one night and next day she passed him on the lane and said ‘Ouch’ and gave him a right ding across the back of his head.”
“My dad said,” said Weaver, “that one day he was leading our old cow to market and it took ill and fell down in the lane near her cottage and he couldn’t get it to move and he went up to her place and he knocked on the door and she opened it and before he could open his mouth she said, “Yer cow’s ill, Weaver” . . . just like that . . . And then she said-”
“Was that the old brindled cow what your dad had?” said Carter.
“No, it were my uncle had the brindled cow, we had the one with the crumpled horn,” said Weaver. “Anyway-”
“Could have sworn it was brindled,” said Carter. “I remember my dad looking at it over the hedge one day and saying, ‘That’s fine brindling on that cow, you don’t get brindling like that these days.’ That was when you had that old field alongside Cabb’s Well.”
“We never had that field, it was my cousin had that field,” said Weaver. “Anyway-”
“You sure?”
“Anyway,” said Weaver, she said, “You wait there, I’ll give you something for it,” and she goes out into her back kitchen and comes back with a couple of big red pills, and she-”
“How’d it get crumpled, then?” said Carter.
“-and she gave him one of the pills and said, ‘What you do, you raise the old cow’s tail and shove this pill where the sun don’t shine, and in half a minute she’ll be up and running as fast as she can,’ and he thanked her, and then as he was going out of the door he said, ‘What’s the other pill for?’ and she gave him a look and said, ‘Well, you want to catch her, don’t you?'”
“That’d be that deep valley up near Slice,” said Carter.
They looked at him.
“What, exactly, are you talking about?” said Weaver.
“It’s right behind the mountain,” said Carter, nodding knowingly. “Very shady there. That’s what she meant, I expect. The place where the sun doesn’t shine. Long way to go for a pill, but I suppose that’s witches for you.”
Weaver winked at the others.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m telling you she meant . . . well, where the monkey put his nut.”
Carter shook his head.
“No monkeys in Slice,” he said. His face became suffused with a slow grin. “Oh, I get it! She was daft!”
“Them playwriters down in Ankh,” said Baker, “boy, they certainly know about us. Pass me the jug.”
Jason turned his head again. He was getting more and more uneasy. His hands, which were always in daily contact with iron, were itching.
“Reckon we ought to be getting along home now, lads,” he managed.
“‘S’nice night,” said Baker, staying put. “Look at them stars a-twinklin’.”
“Turned a bit cold, though,” said Jason.
“Smells like snow,” said Carter.
“Oh, yeah,” said Baker. “That’s right. Snow at midsummer. That’s what they get where the sun don’t shine.”
“Shutup, shutup, shutup,” said Jason.
“What’s up with you?”
“It’s wrong! We shouldn’t be up here! Can’t you feel it?”
“Oh, sit down, man,” said Weaver. “It’s fine. Can’t feel nothing but the air. And there’s still more scumble in the jug.”
Baker leaned back.
“I remember an old story about this place,” he said. “Some man went to sleep up here once, when he was out hunting.”
The bottle glugged in the dusk.
“So what? I can do that,” said Carter. “I go to sleep every night, reg’lar.”
“Ah, but this man, when he woke up and went home, his wife was carrying on with someone else and all his children had grown up and didn’t know who he was.”
“Happens to me just about every day,” said Weaver gloomily.
Baker sniffed.
“You know, it does smell a bit like snow. You know? That kind of sharp smell.”
Thatcher leaned back, cradling his head on his arm.
“Tell you what,” he said, “if I thought my old woman’d marry someone else and my hulking great kids’d bugger off and stop eating up the larder every day I’d come up here with a blanket like a shot. Who’s got that jug?”
Jason took a pull out of nervousness, and found that he felt better as the alcohol dissolved his synapses.
But he made an effort.
“Hey, lads,” he slurred, “‘ve got ‘nother jug coolin’ in the water trough down in the forge, what d’you say? We could all go down there now. Lads? Lads?”
There was the soft sound of snoring.
“Oh, lads.”
Jason stood up.
The stars wheeled.
Jason fell down, very gently. The jug rolled out of his hands and bounced across the grass.
The stars twinkled, the breeze was cold, and it smelled of snow.
The king dined alone, which is to say, he dined at one end of the big table and Magrat dined at the other. But they managed to meet up for a last glass of wine in front of the fire.
They always found it difficult to know what to say at moments like this. Neither of them was used to spending what might be called quality time in the company of another person. The conversation tended toward the cryptic.
And mostly it was about the wedding. It’s different, for royalty. For one thing, you’ve already got everything. The traditional wedding list with the complete set of Tupperware and the twelve-piece dining set looks a bit out of place when you’ve already got a castle with so many furnished rooms that have been closed up for so long that the spiders have evolved into distinct species in accordance with strict evolutionary principles. And you can’t simply multiply it all up and ask for An Army in a Red and White Motif to match the kitchen wallpaper. Royalty, when they marry, either get very small things, like exquisitely constructed clockwork eggs, or large bulky items, like duchesses.