‘Look, if it makes you any happier,’ she muttered, surprised at herself. She waved her hands vaguely over the image of the departing carts. ‘What’s it to be – wealth, beauty?’
‘Well, money isn’t everything, and if he takes after his father he’ll be handsome enough,’ Magrat said, suddenly serious. ‘Wisdom, do you think?’
‘That’s something he’ll have to learn for himself,’ said Granny.
‘Perfect eyesight? A good singing voice?’ From the lawn outside came Nanny Ogg’s cracked but enthusiastic voice telling the night sky that A Wizard’s Staff Has A Knob On The End.
‘Not important,’ said Granny loudly. ‘You’ve got to think headology, see? Not muck about with all this beauty and. wealth business. That’s not important.’
She turned back to the ball and gestured half-heartedly. ‘You’d better go and get Nanny, then, seeing as there should be three of us.’
Nanny was helped in, eventually, and had to have things explained to her.
‘Three gifts, eh?’ she said. ‘Haven’t done one of them things since I was a gel, it takes me back – what’re you doing?’
Magrat was bustling around the room, lighting candles.
‘Oh, we’ve got to create the right magical ambience,’ she explained. Granny shrugged, but said nothing, even in the face of the extreme provocation. All witches did their magic in their own way, and this was Magrat’s house.
‘What’re we going to give him, then?’ said Nanny.
‘We was just discussing it,’ said Granny.
‘I know what he’ll want,’ said Nanny. She made a suggestion, which was received in frozen silence.
‘I don’t see what use that would be,’ said Magrat, eventually. ‘Wouldn’t it be rather uncomfortable?’
‘He’ll thank us when he grows up, you mark my words,’ said Nanny. ‘My first husband, he always said—’
‘Something a bit less physical is generally the style of things,’ interrupted Granny, glaring at Nanny Ogg. ‘There’s no need to go and spoil everything, Gytha. Why do you always have to—’
‘Well, at least I can say that I—’ Nanny began.
Both voices faded to a mutter. There was a long edgy silence.
‘I think,’ said Magrat, with brittle brightness, ‘that perhaps it would be a good idea if we all go back to our little cottages and do it in our own way. You know. Separately. It’s been a long day and we’re all rather tired.’
‘Good idea,’ said Granny firmly, and stood up. ‘Come, Nanny Ogg,’ she snapped. ‘It’s been a long day and we’re all rather tired.’
Magrat heard them bickering as they wandered down the path.
She sat rather sadly amidst the coloured candles, holding a small bottle of extremely thaumaturgical incense that she had ordered from a magical supplies emporium in faraway Ankh-Morpork. She had been rather looking forward to trying it. Sometimes, she thought, it would be nice if people could be a bit kinder . . .
She stared at the ball.
Well, she could make a start.
‘He will make friends easily,’ she whispered. It wasn’t much, she knew, but it was something she’d never been able to get the hang of.
Nanny Ogg, sitting alone in her kitchen with her huge tomcat curled up on her lap, poured herself a nightcap and through the haze tried to remember the words of verse seventeen of the Hedgehog song. There was something about goats, she recalled, but the details eluded her. Time abraded memory.
She toasted the invisible presence.
‘A bloody good memory is what he ought to have,’ she said.
‘He’ll always remember the words.’
And Granny Weatherwax, striding home alone through the midnight forest, wrapped her shawl around her and considered. It had been a long day, and a trying one. The theatre had been the worst part. All people pretending to be other people, things happening that weren’t real, bits of countryside you could put your foot through . . . Granny liked to know where she stood, and she wasn’t certain she stood for that sort of thing. The world seemed to be changing all the time.
It didn’t use to change so much. It was bewildering.
She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.
‘Let him be whoever he minks he is,’ she said. ‘That’s all anybody could hope for in this world.’
Like most people, witches are unfocused in time. The difference is that they dimly realise it, and make use of it. They cherish the past because part of them is still living there, and they can see the shadows the future casts before it.
Granny could feel the shape of the future, and it had knives in it.
It began at five the next morning. Four men rode through the woods near Granny’s cottage, tethered the horses out of earshot, and crept very cautiously through the mists.
The sergeant in charge was not happy in his work. He was a Ramtops man, and wasn’t at all certain about how you went about arresting a witch. He was pretty certain, though, that the witch wouldn’t like the idea. He didn’t like the idea of a witch not liking the idea.
The men were Ramtoppers as well. They were following him very closely, ready to duck behind him at the first sign of anything more unexpected than a tree.
Granny’s cottage was a fungoid shape in the mist. Her unruly herb garden seemed to move, even in the still air. It contained plants seen nowhere else in the mountains, their roots and seeds traded across five thousand miles of the Discworld, and the sergeant could swear that one or two blooms turned towards him. He shuddered.
‘What now, sarge?’
‘We – we spread out,’ he said. ‘Yes. We spread out, That’s what we do.’
They moved carefully through the bracken. The sergeant crouched behind a handy log, and said, ‘Right. Very good. You’ve got the general idea. Now let’s spread out again, and this time we spread out separately.’
The men grumbled a bit, but disappeared into the mist. The sergeant gave them a few minutes to take up positions, then said, ‘Right. Now we—’
He paused.
He wondered whether he dared shout, and decided against it.
He stood up. He removed his helmet, to show respect, and sidled through the damp grass to the back door. He knocked, very gently.
After a wait of several seconds he clamped his helmet back on his head, said, ‘No-one in. Blast’, and started to stride away.
The door opened. It opened very slowly, and with the maximum amount of creak. Simple neglect wouldn’t have caused that depth of groan; you’d need careful work with hot water over a period of weeks. The sergeant stopped, and then turned round very slowly while contriving to move as few muscles as possible.
He had mixed feelings about the fact that there was nothing in the doorway. In his experience, doors didn’t just open themselves.
He cleared his throat nervously.
Granny Weatherwax, right by his ear, said, ‘That’s a nasty cough you’ve got there. You did right in coming to me.’
The sergeant looked up at her with an expression of mad gratitude. He said, ‘Argle.’
‘She did what?’ said the duke.
The sergeant stared fixedly at an area a few inches to the right of the duke’s chair.
‘She give me a cup of tea, sir,’ he said.
‘And what about your men?’
‘She give them one too, sir.’
The duke rose from his chair and put his arms around the sergeant’s rusting chain mail shoulders. He was in a bad mood. He had spent half the night washing his hands. He kept thinking that something was whispering in his ear. His breakfast oatmeal had been served up too salty and roasted with an apple in it, and the cook had hysterics in the kitchen. You could tell the duke was extremely annoyed. He was polite. The duke was the kind of man who becomes more and more agreeable as his temper drains away, until the point is reached where the words ‘Thank you so much’ have the cutting edge of a guillotine.
‘Sergeant,’ he said, walking the man slowly across the floor.
‘Sir?’
‘I’m not sure I made your orders clear, sergeant,’ said the duke, in snake tones.
‘Sir?’
‘I mean, it is possible I may have confused you. I meant to say “Bring me a witch, in chains if necessary”, but perhaps what I really said was “Go and have a cup of tea”. Was this in fact the case?’
The sergeant wrinkled his forehead. Sarcasm had not hitherto entered his life. His experience of people being annoyed with him generally involved shouting and occasional bits of wood.
‘No, sir,’ he said.
‘I wonder why, then, you did not in fact do this thing that I asked?’
‘Sir?’
‘I expect she said some magic words, did she? I’ve heard about witches,’ said the duke, who had spent the night before reading, until his bandaged hands shook too much, some of the more excitable works on the subject.[3] ‘I imagine she offered you visions of unearthly delight? Did she show you—’ the duke shuddered – ‘dark fascinations and forbidden raptures, the like of which mortal men should not even think of, and demonic secrets that took you to the depths of man’s desires?’