‘They were running around when I came up!’ he said. ‘Are they usual?’
‘I’ve never seen them before,’ said Agnes. ‘I think they’re from Uberwald.’
‘And the horrible little blue goblins? One of them made a very unpleasant gesture at me!’
‘Don’t know about them at all.’
‘And the vampires? I mean, I knew that things were different here, but really-‘
‘Vampires?!’ shouted Agnes. ‘You saw the vampires? Last night?’
‘Well, I mean, yes, I studied them at length at the seminary, but I never thought I’d see them standing around talking about drinking blood and things, really, I’m surprised the King allows it-‘
‘And they didn’t . . . affect your mind?’
‘I did have that terrible migraine. Does that count? I thought it was the prawns.’
A cry rang through the woods. It seemed to
have many components, but mostly it sounded as though a turkey was being throttled at the other end of a tin tube.
‘And what the heck was that?’ shouted Oats.
Agnes looked around, bewildered. She’d grown up in the Lancre woods. Oh, you got strange things sometimes, passing through, but generally they contained nothing more dangerous than other people. Now, in this tarnished light, even the trees were starting to look suspicious.
‘Let’s at least get down to Bad Ass,’ she said, tugging at Oats’s hand.
‘You what?’
Agnes sighed. ‘It’s the nearest village.’
‘Bad Ass?’
‘Look, there was a donkey, and it stopped in the middle of the river, and it wouldn’t go backwards or forwards,’ said Agnes, as patiently as possible. Lancre people got used to explaining this. ‘Bad Ass. See? Yes, I know that “Disobedient Donkey” might have been more . . . acceptable, but-‘
The horrible cry echoed around the woods again. Agnes thought of all the things that were rumoured to be in the mountains, and dragged Oats after her like a badly hitched cart.
Then the sound was right in front of them and, at a turn in the lane, a head emerged from a bush.
Agnes had seen pictures of an ostrich.
So . . . start with one of them, but make the head and neck in violent yellow, and give the head a huge ruff of red and purple feathers and two big round eyes, the pupils of which jiggled drunkenly as the head moved back and forth . . .
‘Is that some sort of local chicken?’ warbled Oats.
‘I doubt it,’ said Agnes. One of the long feathers had a tartan pattern.
The cry started again, but was strangled halfway through when Agnes stepped forward, grabbed the thing’s neck and pulled.
A figure rose from the undergrowth, dragged up by his arm.
‘Hodgesaargh?’
He quacked at her.
‘Take that thing out of your mouth,’ said Agnes. ‘You sound like Mr Punch.’
He removed the whistle. ‘Sorry, Miss Nitt.’
‘Hodgesaargh, why – and I realize I might not like the answer – why are you hiding in the woods with your arm dressed up like Hetty the Hen and making horrible noises through a tube?’
‘Trying to lure the phoenix, miss.’
‘The phoenix? That’s a mythical bird, Hodgesaargh.’
‘That’s right, miss. There’s one in Lancre, miss. It’s very young, miss. So I thought I might be able to attract it.’
She looked at the brightly coloured glove. Oh, yes – if you raised chicks, you had to let them know what kind of bird they were, so you used a sort of glove-puppet. But. . .
‘Hodgesaargh?’
‘Yes, miss?’
‘I’m not an expert, of course, but I seem to recall that according to the commonly accepted
legend of the phoenix it would never see its parent. You can only have one phoenix at a time. It’s automatically an orphan. You see?’
‘Um, may I add something?’ said Oats. ‘Miss Nitt is right, I have to say. The phoenix builds a nest and bursts into flame and the new bird arises from the ashes. I’ve read that. Anyway, it’s an allegory.’
Hodgesaargh looked at the puppet phoenix on his arm and then looked bashfully at his feet.
‘Sorry about that, miss.’
‘So, you see, a phoenix can never see another phoenix,’ said Agnes.
‘Wouldn’t know about that, miss,’ said Hodgesaargh, still staring at his boots.
An idea struck Agnes. Hodgesaargh was always out of doors. ‘Hodgesaargh?’
‘Yes, miss?’
‘Have you been out in the woods all morning?’
‘Oh, yes, miss.’
‘Have you seen Granny Weatherwax?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘You have?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Where?’
‘Up in the woods over towards the border, miss. At first light, miss.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Er . . . did you want to know, miss?’
‘Oh. Yes, sorry . . . What were you doing up there?’
Hodgesaargh blew a couple of quacks on his phoenix lure by way of explanation.
Agnes grabbed the priest again.
‘Come on, let’s get to the road and find Nanny-‘
Hodgesaargh was left with his glove puppet and his lure and his knapsack and a deeply awkward feeling. He’d been brought up .to respect witches, and Miss Nitt was a witch. The man with her hadn’t been a witch, but his manner fitted him into that class of people Hodgesaargh mentally pigeonholed as ‘my betters’, although in truth this was quite a large category. He wasn’t about to disagree with his betters. Hodgesaargh was a one-man feudal system.
On the other hand, he thought, as he packed up and prepared to move on, books that were all about the world tended to be written by people who knew all about books rather than all about the world. All that stuff about birds hatching from ashes must have been written by someone who didn’t know anything about birds. As for there only ever being one phoenix, well, that’d obviously been written down by a man who ought to get out in the fresh air more and meet some ladies. Birds came from eggs. Oh, the phoenix was one of those creatures that had learned to use magic, had built it right into its very existence, but magic was tricky stuff and nothing used any more of it than it needed to. So there’d be an egg, definitely. And eggs needed warmth, didn’t they?
Hodgesaargh had been thinking about this a lot during the morning, as he tramped through damp bushes making the acquaintance of several disappointed ducks. He’d never bothered much
about history, except the history of falconry, but he did know that there were once places – and in some cases still were – with a very high level of background magic, which made them rather exciting and not a good place to raise your young.
Maybe the phoenix, whatever it really looked like, was simply a bird who’d worked out a way of making incubation work very, very fast.
Hodgesaargh had actually got quite a long way, and if he’d had a bit more time he’d have worked out the next step, too.
It was well after noon before Granny Weatherwax came off the moor, and a watcher might have wondered why it took such a long time to cross a little patch of moor land.
They’d have wondered even more about the little stream. It had cut a rock-studded groove in the peat that a healthy woman could have leapt across, but someone had placed a broad stone across it for a bridge.
She looked at it for a while and then reached into her sack. She took out a long piece of black material and blindfolded herself. Then she walked out across the stone, taking tiny steps with her arms flung. out wide for balance. Halfway across she fell on to her hands and knees and stayed there, panting, for several minutes. Then she crawled forward again, by inches.
A few feet below, the peaty stream rattled happily over the stones.
The sky glinted. It was a sky with blue patches and bits of cloud, but it had a strange look, as though a picture painted on glass had been fractured and then the shards reassembled wrongly. A drifting cloud disappeared against some invisible line and began to emerge in another part of the sky altogether.
Things were not what they seemed. But then, as Granny always said, they never were.
Agnes practically had to pull Oats into Nanny Ogg’s house, which was in fact so far away from the concept of a witch’s cottage that it, as it were, approached it from the other side. It tended towards jolly clashing colours rather than black, and smelled of polish. There were no skulls or strange candles, apart from the pink novelty one that Nanny had once bought in Ankh-Morpork and only brought out to show to guests with the right sense of humour. There were lots of tables, mainly in order to display the vast number of drawings and iconographs of the huge Ogg clan. At first sight these looked randomly placed, until you worked out the code. In reality, pictures were advanced or retarded around the room as various family members temporarily fell in or out of favour, and anyone ending up on the small wobbly table near the cat’s bowl had some serious spadework to do. What made it worse was that you could fall down the pecking order not because you’d done something bad, but because everyone else had done something better. This was why what space wasn’t taken up with family pictures was occupied by ornaments, because no Ogg who travelled more than ten miles from Ankh-Morpork would dream of returning without a present. The Oggs loved Nanny Ogg and, well, there were even worse places than the wobbly table. A distant cousin had once ended up in the hall.