Wyrd Sisters (34 page)

‘What, him?'

‘Who, me?'

‘Ridiculous,' said the duchess. ‘He's a mummer, of sorts.'

‘She's right, miss,' said Tomjon, on the edge of panic. ‘My father runs a theatre, not a kingdom.'

‘He is the true king. We can prove it,' said Granny.

‘Oh, no,' said the duchess. ‘We're not having that. There's no mysterious returned heirs in this kingdom. Guards – take him.'

Granny Weatherwax held up a hand. The soldiers lurched from foot to foot, uncertainly.

‘She's a witch, isn't she?' said one of them, tentatively.

‘Certainly,' said the duchess.

The guards shifted uneasily.

‘We seen where they turn people into newts,' said one.

‘And then shipwreck them.'

‘Yeah, and alarum the divers.'

‘Yeah.'

‘We ought to talk about this. We ought to get extra for witches.'

‘She could do anything to us, look. She could be a drabe, even.'

‘Don't be foolish,' said the duchess. ‘Witches don't do that sort of thing. They're just stories to frighten people.'

The guard shook his head.

‘It looked pretty convincing to me.'

‘Of course it did, it was
meant
—' the duchess began.
She sighed, and snatched a spear out of the guard's hand.

‘I'll show you the power of these witches,' she said, and hurled it at Granny's face.

Granny moved her hand across at snakebite speed and caught the spear just behind the head.

‘So,' she said, ‘and it comes to this, does it?'

‘You don't frighten me, wyrd sisters,' said the duchess.

Granny stared her in the eye for a few seconds. She gave a grunt of surprise.

‘You're right,' she said. ‘We really don't, do we . . .'

‘Do you think I haven't studied you? Your witchcraft is all artifice and illusion, to amaze weak minds. It holds no fears for me. Do your worst.'

Granny studied her for a while.

‘My worst?' she said, eventually. Magrat and Nanny Ogg shuffled gently out of her way.

The duchess laughed.

‘You're clever,' she said. ‘I'll grant you that much. And quick. Come on, hag. Bring on your toads and demons, I'll . . .'

She stopped, her mouth opening and shutting a bit without any words emerging. Her lips drew back in a rictus of terror, her eyes looked beyond Granny, beyond the world, towards something else. One knuckled hand flew to her mouth and she made a little whimpering noise. She froze, like a rabbit that has just seen a stoat and knows, without any doubt, that it is the last stoat that it will ever see.

‘What have you done to her?' said Magrat, the first to dare to speak. Granny smirked.

‘Headology,' said Granny, and smirked. ‘You don't need any Black Aliss magic for it.'

‘Yes, but what have you
done
?'

‘No-one becomes like she is without building walls inside their head,' she said. ‘I've just knocked them down. Every scream. Every plea. Every pang of guilt. Every twinge of conscience. All at once. There's a little trick to it.'

She gave Magrat a condescending smile. ‘I'll show you one day, if you like.'

Magrat thought about it. ‘It's horrible,' she said.

‘Nonsense,' Granny smiled terribly. ‘Everyone wants to know their true self. Now, she does.'

‘Sometimes, you have to be kind to be cruel,' said Nanny Ogg approvingly.

‘I think it's probably the worst thing that could happen to anyone,' said Magrat, as the duchess swayed backwards and forwards.

‘For goodness' sake use your imagination, girl,' said Granny. ‘There are far worse things. Needles under the fingernails, for one. Stuff with pliers.'

‘Red-hot knives up the jacksie,' said Nanny Ogg. ‘Handle first, too, so you cut your fingers trying to pull them out—'

‘This is simply the worst that I can do,' said Granny Weatherwax primly. ‘It's all right and proper, too. A witch should act like that, you know. There's no need for any dramatic stuff. Most magic goes on in the head. It's headology. Now, if you'd—'

A noise like a gas leak escaped from the duchess's lips. Her head jerked back suddenly. She opened her eyes, blinked, and focused on Granny. Sheer hatred suffused her features.

‘Guards!' she said. ‘I told you to take them!'

Granny's jaw sagged. ‘What?' she said. ‘But – but I showed you your true self . . .'

‘I'm supposed to be upset by that, am I?' As the soldiers sheepishly grabbed Granny's arms the duchess pressed her face close to Granny's, her tremendous eyebrows a V of triumphant hatred. ‘I'm supposed to grovel on the floor, is that it? Well, old woman, I've seen exactly what I am, do you understand, and I'm proud of it! I'd do it all again, only hotter and longer! I enjoyed it, and I did it because I wanted to!'

She thumped the vast expanse of her chest.

‘You gawping idiots!' she said. ‘You're so
weak
. You really think that people are basically decent underneath, don't you?'

The crowd on the stage backed away from the sheer force of her exultation.

‘Well, I've looked underneath,' said the duchess. ‘I know what drives people. It's fear. Sheer, deep-down fear. There's not one of you who doesn't fear me, I can make you widdle your drawers out of terror, and now I'm going to take—'

At this point Nanny Ogg hit her on the back of the head with the cauldron.

‘She does go on, doesn't she?' she said conversationally, as the duchess collapsed. ‘She was a bit eccentric, if you ask me.'

There was a long, embarrassed silence.

Granny Weatherwax coughed. Then she treated the soldiers holding her to a bright, friendly smile, and pointed to the mound that was now the duchess.

‘Take her away and put her in a cell somewhere,' she commanded. The men snapped to attention, grabbed the duchess by her arms, and pulled her upright with considerable difficulty.

‘Gently, mind,' said Granny.

She rubbed her hands together and turned to Tomjon, who was watching her with his mouth open.

‘Depend on it,' she hissed. ‘Here and now, my lad, you don't have a choice. You're the King of Lancre.'

‘But I don't know how to be a king!'

‘We all seed you! You had it down just right, including the shouting.'

‘That's just acting!'

‘Act, then. Being a king is, is—' Granny hesitated, and snapped her fingers at Magrat. ‘What do you call them things, there's always a hundred of them in anything?'

Magrat looked bewildered. ‘Do you mean per cents?' she said.

‘Them,' agreed Granny. ‘Most of the per cents in being a king is acting, if you ask me. You ought to be good at it.'

Tomjon looked for help into the wings, where Hwel should have been. The dwarf was in fact there, but he wasn't paying much attention. He had the script in front of him, and was rewriting furiously.

B
UT
I
ASSURE YOU, YOU ARE NOT DEAD
. T
AKE IT FROM ME
.

The duke giggled. He had found a sheet from somewhere and had draped it over himself, and was sidling along some of the castle's more deserted corridors. Sometimes he would go ‘whoo-oo' in a low voice.

This worried Death. He was used to people claiming that they were
not
dead, because death always came as a shock, and a lot of people had some trouble getting over it. But people claiming that they were
dead with every breath in their body was a new and unsettling experience.

‘I shall jump out on people,' said the duke dreamily. ‘I shall rattle my bones all night, I shall perch on the roof and foretell a death in the house—'

T
HAT
'
S BANSHEES.

‘I shall if I want,' said the duke, with a trace of earlier determination. ‘And I shall float through walls, and knock on tables, and drip ectoplasm on anyone I don't like. Ha. Ha.'

I
T WON'T WORK.
L
IVING PEOPLE AREN'T ALLOWED TO BE GHOSTS.
I'
M SORRY.

The duke made an unsuccessful attempt to float through a wall, gave up, and opened a door out on to a crumbling section of the battlements. The storm had died away a bit, and a thin rind of moon lurked behind the clouds like a ticket tout for eternity.

Death stalked through the wall behind him.

‘Well then,' said the duke, ‘if I'm
not
dead, why are you here?'

He jumped up on to the wall and flapped his sheet.

W
AITING.

‘Wait for ever, bone face!' said the duke triumphantly. ‘I shall hover in the twilight world, I shall find some chains to shake, I shall—'

He stepped backwards, lost his balance, landed heavily on the wall and slid. For a moment the remnant of his right hand scrabbled ineffectually at the stonework, and then it vanished.

Death is obviously potentially everywhere at the same time, and in one sense it is no more true to say that he was on the battlements, picking vaguely at non-existent particles of glowing metal on the edge of his scythe blade, than that he was waist-deep in the
foaming, rock-toothed waters in the depths of Lancre gorge, his calcareous gaze sweeping downwards and stopping abruptly at a point where the torrent ran a few treacherous inches over a bed of angular pebbles.

After a while the duke sat up, transparent in the phosphorescent waves.

‘I shall haunt their corridors,' he said, ‘and whisper under the doors on still nights.' His voice grew fainter, almost lost in the ceaseless roar of the river. ‘I shall make basket chairs creak most alarmingly, just you wait and see.'

Death grinned at him.

N
OW YOU'RE TALKING
.

It started to rain.

Ramtop rain has a curiously penetrative quality which makes ordinary rain seem almost arid. It poured in torrents over the castle roofs, and somehow seemed to go right through the tiles and fill the Great Hall with a warm, uncomfortable moistness.
²⁴

The hall was crowded with half the population of Lancre. Outside, the rushing of the rain even drowned out the distant roar of the river. It soaked the stage. The colours ran and mingled in the painted backdrop, and one of the curtains sagged away from its rail and flapped sadly into a puddle.

Inside, Granny Weatherwax finished speaking.

‘You forgot about the crown,' whispered Nanny Ogg.

‘Ah,' said Granny. ‘Yes, the crown. It's on his head, d'you see? We hid it among the crowns when the actors left, the reason being, no-one would look for it there. See how it fits him so perfectly.'

It was a tribute to Granny's extraordinary powers of persuasion that everyone did see how perfectly it fitted Tomjon. In fact the only one who didn't was Tomjon himself, who was aware that it was only his ears that were stopping it becoming a necklace.

‘Imagine the sensation when he put it on for the first time,' she went on. ‘I expect there was an eldritch tingling sensation.'

‘Actually, it felt rather—' Tomjon began, but no-one was listening to him. He shrugged and leaned over to Hwel, who was still scribbling busily.

‘Does eldritch mean uncomfortable?' he hissed.

The dwarf looked at him with unfocused eyes.

‘What?'

‘I said, does eldritch mean uncomfortable?'

‘Eh? Oh. No. No, I shouldn't think so.'

‘What
does
it mean then?'

‘Dunno. Oblong, I think.' Hwel's glance returned to his scrawls as though magnetized. ‘Can you remember what he said after all those tomorrows? I didn't catch the bit after that . . .'

‘And there wasn't any need for you to tell everyone I was – adopted,' said Tomjon.

‘That's how it was, you see,' said the dwarf vaguely. ‘Best to be honest about these things. Now then, did he actually stab her, or just accuse her?'

‘I don't want to be a king!' Tomjon whispered hoarsely. ‘Everyone says I take after dad!'

‘Funny thing, all this taking after people,' said the dwarf vaguely. ‘I mean, if I took after
my
dad, I'd be a hundred feet underground digging rocks, whereas—' His voice died away. He stared at the nib of his pen as though it held an incredible fascination.

‘Whereas what?'

‘Eh?'

‘Aren't you even
listening
?'

‘I knew it was wrong when I wrote it, I knew it was the wrong way round . . . What? Oh, yes. Be a king. It's a good job. It seems there's a lot of competition, at any rate. I'm very happy for you. Once you're a king, you can do anything you want.'

Tomjon looked at the faces of the Lancre worthies around the table. They had a keen, calculating look, like the audience at a fatstock show. They were weighing him up. It crept upon him in a cold and clammy way that once he was king, he could do anything he wanted. Provided that what he wanted to do was be king.

‘You could build your own theatre,' said Hwel, his eyes lighting up for a moment. ‘With as many trapdoors as you wanted, and magnificent costumes. You could act in a new play every night. I mean, it would make the Dysk look like a shed.'

‘Who would come to see me?' said Tomjon, sagging in his seat.

‘Everyone.'

‘What, every night?'

‘You could order them to,' said Hwel, without looking up.

I knew he was going to say that, Tomjon thought. He can't really mean it, he added charitably. He's got his play. He doesn't really exist in this world, not right now at the moment.

He took off the crown and turned it over and over in his hands. There wasn't much metal in it, but it felt heavy. He wondered how heavy it would get if you wore it all the time.

At the head of the table was an empty chair
containing, he had been assured, the ghost of his real father. It would have been nice to report that he had experienced anything more, when being introduced to it, than an icy sensation and a buzzing in the ears.