Since anything might be worth trying, he’d also adapted a duck lure, trying to achieve a sound described by a long dead falconer as ‘like unto the cry of a buzzard yet of a lower pitch’. He wasn’t too happy about the result but, on the other hand, maybe a young phoenix didn’t know what a phoenix was meant to sound like, either. It might work, and if he didn’t try it he’d always be wondering.
He set out.
Soon a cry like a duck in a power dive was heard among the damp, dark hills.
The pre-dawn light was grey on the horizon and a shower of sleet had made the leaves sparkle when Granny Weatherwax left her cottage. There had been so much to do.
What she’d chosen to take with her was slung in a sack tied across her back with string. She’d left the broomstick in the corner by the fire.
She wedged the door open with a stone and then, without once looking back, strode off through the woods.
Down in the villages, the cocks crowed in response to a sunrise hidden somewhere beyond the clouds.
An hour later, a broomstick settled gently on the lawn. Nanny Ogg alighted and hurried to the back door.
Her foot kicked something holding it open. She glared at the stone as if it was something dangerous, and then edged round it and into the gloom of the cottage.
She came out a few minutes later, looking worried.
Her next move was towards the water butt. She broke the film of ice with her hand and pulled out a piece, looked at it for a moment and then tossed it away.
People often got the wrong idea about Nanny Ogg, and she took care to see that they did. One thing they often got wrong was the idea that she never thought further than the bottom of the glass.
Up in a nearby tree a magpie chattered at her. She threw a stone at it.
Agnes arrived half an hour later. She preferred to go on foot whenever possible. She suspected that she overhung too much.
Nanny Ogg was sitting on a chair just inside the door, smoking her pipe. She took it out of her mouth and nodded.
‘She’s gorn,’ she said.
‘Gone? Just when we need her?’ said Agnes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She ain’t here,’ Nanny expanded.
‘Perhaps she’s just out?’ said Agnes.
‘Gorn,’ said Nanny. ‘These past two hours, if I’m any judge.’
‘How do you know that?’
Once – probably even yesterday – Nanny would have alluded vaguely to magical powers. It was a measure of her concern that, today, she got right to the jelly.
‘First thing she does in the mornings, rain or shine, is wash her face in the water butt,’ she said. ‘Someone broke the ice two hours ago. You can see where it’s frozed over again.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ said Agnes. ‘Well, perhaps she’s got business-‘
‘You come and see,’ said Nanny, standing up.
The kitchen was spotless. Every flat surface had been scrubbed. The fireplace had been swept-and a new fire laid.
Most of the cottage’s smaller contents had been laid out on the table. There were three cups, three plates, three knives, a cleaver, three forks, three spoons, two ladles, a pair of scissors and three candlesticks. A wooden box was packed with needles and thread and pins . . .
If it was possible for anything to be polished, it had been. Someone had even managed to buff up a shine on the old pewter candlesticks.
Agnes felt the little knot of tension grow inside her. Witches didn’t own much. The cottage owned things. They were not yours to take away.
This looked like an inventory.
Behind her, Nanny Ogg was opening and shutting drawers in the ancient dresser.
‘She’s left it all neat,’ Nanny said. ‘She’s even chipped all the rust off the kettle. The larder’s all bare except for some hobnailed cheese and suicide biscuits. It’s the same in the bedroom. Her “I ATE’NT DEAD” card is hanging behind the door. And the guzunda’s so clean you could eat your tea out of it, if the fancy took you that way. And she’s taken the box out of the dresser.’
‘What box?’
‘Oh, she keeps stuff in it,’ said Nanny. ‘Memororabililia.’
‘Mem-?’
‘You know . . . keepsakes and whatnot. Stuff that’s hers-‘
‘What’s this?’ said Agnes, holding up a green glass ball.
‘Oh, Magrat passed that on to her,’ said Nanny, lifting up a corner of the rug and peering under it. ‘It’s a float our Wayne brought back from the seaside once. It’s a buoy for the fishing nets.’
‘I didn’t know buoys had glass balls,’ said Agnes.
She groaned inwardly, and felt the blush unfold. But Nanny hadn’t noticed. It was then she realized how really serious this was. Nanny would normally leap on such a gift like a cat on a feather. Nanny could find an innuendo in ‘Good morning.’ She could certainly find one in ‘innuendo’. And ‘buoys with glass balls’ should have lasted her all week. She’d be accosting total strangers and saying, ‘You’ll never guess what Agnes Nitt said. . .’
She ventured ‘I said-‘
‘Dunno much about fishing, really,’ said Nanny. She straightened up, biting her thumbnail thoughtfully. ‘Something’s wrong with all this,’ she said. ‘The box . . . she wasn’t going to leave anything behind. . .’
‘Granny wouldn’t go, would she?’ said Agnes nervously. ‘I mean, not actually leave. She’s always here.’
‘Like I told you last night, she’s been herself lately,’ said Nanny vaguely. She sat down in the rocking chair.
‘You mean she’s not been herself, don’t you?’ said Agnes.
‘I knows exactly what I means, girl. When she’s herself she snaps at people and sulks and makes herself depressed. Ain’t you ever heard of taking people out of themselves? Now shut up, ‘cos I’m thinkin’.’
Agnes looked down at the green ball in her hands. A glass fishing float, five hundred miles from the sea. An ornament, like a shell. Not a crystal ball. You could use it like a crystal ball but it wasn’t a crystal ball . . . and she knew why that was important.
Granny was a very traditional witch. Witches hadn’t always been popular. There might even be times – there had been times, long ago – when it was a good idea not to advertise what you were, and that was why all these things on the table didn’t betray their owner at all. There was no need for that any more, there hadn’t been in Lancre for hundreds of years, but some habits get passed down in the blood.
In fact things now worked the other way. Being a witch was an honourable trade in the mountains, but only the young ones invested in real crystal balls and coloured knives and dribbly candles. The old ones . . . they stuck with simple kitchen cutlery, fishing floats, bits of wood, whose very ordinariness subtly advertised their status. Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple-corer.
A sound she hadn’t been hearing stopped abruptly, and the silence echoed.
Nanny glanced up.
‘Clock’s stopped,’ she said.
‘It’s not even telling the right time,’ said Agnes, turning to look at it.
‘Oh, she just kept it for the tick,’ said Nanny.
Agnes put down the glass ball.
‘I’m going to look around some more,’ she said.
She’d learned to look around when she visited someone’s home, because in one way it was a piece of clothing and had grown to fit their shape. It might show not just what they’d been doing, but what they’d been thinking. You might be visiting someone who expected you to know everything about everything, and in those circumstances you took every advantage you could get.
Someone had told her that a witch’s cottage was her second face. Come to think of it, it had been Granny.
It should be easy to read this place. Granny’s thoughts had the strength of hammer blows and they’d pounded her personality into the walls. If her cottage had been any more organic it would have had a pulse.
Agnes wandered through to the dank little scullery. The copper washpot had been scoured. A fork and a couple of shining spoons lay beside it, along with the washboard and scrubbing brush. The slop bucket gleamed, although the fragments of a broken cup in the bottom said that the recent intensive housework hadn’t been without its casualties.
She pushed open the door into the old goat shed. Granny was not keeping goats at the moment, but her home-made beekeeping equipment was neatly laid out on a bench. She’d never needed much. If you needed smoke and a veil to deal with your bees, what was the point of being a witch?
Bees. . .