Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, #6; Witches, #2)

by Terry Pratchett

“Man just went past with a cat on his head,” one of them remarked, after a minute or two’s reflection. “See who it was?” “The Fool, I think.” There was a thoughtful pause. The second guard shifted his grip on his halberd. “It’s a rotten job,” he said. “But I suppose someone’s got to do it.”

A minute later the moor was deserted, as the witches hurried to their tasks. It was silent for a while, apart from the squeak of bats and the occasional rustle of the wind in the heather. Then there was a bubbling from the nearby peat bog. Very slowly, crowned with a thicket of sphagnum moss, the standing stone surfaced and peered around the landscape with an air of deep distrust.

High ground seemed a good idea. The ground he was on at the moment appeared to be trembling. He was sure it shouldn’t do that.

“What are you doing here?” “Marry, I was walking along the ground,” said the Fool. “A lot of people do, you know. I mean, I know it’s been done before. It’s not original. It probably lacks imagination but, well, it’s always been good enough for me.”

The mist, never far away in the mountains, was back again, but this time it was making a fight of it and had become a thick, silver sea in front of her.

Like a hawk that has spotted something small and fluffy in the grass, like a wandering interstellar flu germ that has just seen a nice blue planet drifting by,

“And that? What was that, then?” demanded Granny. “Fowl pest. Careful, I’m bringing us down.” “Are you laughing at me?” “Just pleased for you, Esme. You’ll go down in history for this, you know.”

“You know, Hwel, I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.”

“By the way,” he said, “exactly how does one quaff?” “I think it means you spill most of it,” said Hwel.

When the giant growled, and turned around, an arm like a couple of broom handles strung together with elastic and covered with red fur unfolded itself in a complicated motion and smacked him across the jaw so hard that he rose several inches in the air and landed on a table.

What would the last King of Ankh have said to a pack of ragged men who knew they were outnumbered, outflanked and outgeneralled? Something with bite, something with edge, something like a drink of brandy to a dying man; no logic, no explanation, just words that would reach right down through a tired man’s brain and pull him to his feet by his testicles.

I made these words, Hwel thought. But they don’t belong to me. They belong to him.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn’t want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it.

The road, Hwel felt, had to go somewhere. This geographical fiction has been the death of many people. Roads don’t necessarily have to go anywhere, they just have to have somewhere to start.

It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.

Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.

No wonder everyone needed prompting all the time. The play was writhing under their hands, trying to change itself.

He pushed it shut behind him, cutting off the sounds of the stage and replacing them by a velvet hush. There was a livid sunset imprisoned behind bars of cloud, but the air was as still as a mill pond and as hot as a furnace.

There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet . . . and yet . . .

Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.

“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.

The weak banded together can be pretty despicable, but it dawned on the duchess that an alliance of the strong can be more of an immediate problem. There was total silence for a few seconds, broken only by a faint panting, and then the duchess grinned, raised her knife, and charged the lot of them. The front ranks of the massed creatures opened to let her pass, and then closed in again. Even the rabbits. The kingdom exhaled.

And, as the new day wound across the landscape, each one busy with her own thoughts, each one a witch alone, they went home.*

Quaffing is like drinking, but you spill more.

A killing insult in Dwarfish, but here used as a term of endearment. It means “lawn ornament.”

Someone has to do it. It’s all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested? Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out of the cauldron? Goodie Whemper’s curiosity about such things was huge and insatiable.* * Nearly insatiable. It was probably satiated in her last flight to test whether a broomstick could survive having its bristles pulled out one by one in midair. According to the small black raven she had trained as a flight recorder, the answer was almost certainly no.

There is a school of thought that says that witches and wizards can never go home. They went, though, just the same.