More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Witches is a different thing altogether,” snapped Granny Weatherwax. “It’s magic out of the ground, not out of the sky, and men never could get
“If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.
She liked Borrowing birds best of all, using them to explore the high, hidden valleys where no one went, the secret lakes between black cliffs, the tiny walled fields on the scraps of flat ground, tucked on the sheer rock faces, that were the property of hidden and secretive beings.
Well? Who says women can’t be wizards? Granny hesitated. The tree might as well have asked why fish couldn’t be birds. She drew a deep breath, and started to speak. And stopped. She knew a cutting, incisive, withering and above all a self-evident answer existed. It was just that, to her extreme annoyance, she couldn’t quite bring it to mind.
Granny Weatherwax listened in impatient annoyance to phrases like Mother Goddesses and primitive moon worship and told herself that she was well aware of what being a witch was all about, it was about herbs and curses and flying around of nights and generally keeping on the right side of tradition, and it certainly didn’t involve mixing with goddesses, mothers or otherwise, who apparently got up to some very questionable tricks.
Wizards! They talked too much and pinned spells down in books like butterflies but, worst of all, they thought theirs was the only magic worth practicing.
“Most magic isn’t,” she said. “It’s just knowing the right herbs, and learning to watch the weather, and finding out the ways of animals. And the ways of people, too.”
“Do you think I used magic?” Esk looked down at the queen bee. She looked up at the witch. “No,” she said, “I think you just know a lot about bees.” Granny grinned. “Exactly correct. That’s one form of magic, of course.” “What, just knowing things?”
“So people see you coming in the hat and the cloak and they know you’re a witch and that’s why your magic works?” said Esk. “That’s right,” said Granny. “It’s called headology.” She tapped her silver hair, which was drawn into a tight bun that could crack rocks. “But it’s not real!” Esk protested. “That’s not magic, it’s—it’s—”
But you can’t make any creature do anything that is totally against its nature. Now try and find the eagle’s mind.”
Granny had heard that broomsticks were once again very much the fashion among younger witches, but she didn’t hold with it. There was no way a body could look respectable while hurtling through the air aboard a household implement. Besides, it looked decidedly draughty.
Esk had learned too late that mind shapes body, that Borrowing is one thing but that the dream of truly taking on another form had its built-in penalty.
Granny was no stranger to the uses of power, but she knew she relied on gentle pressure subtly to steer the tide of things. She didn’t put it like that, of course—she would have said that there was always a lever if you knew where to look. The power in the staff was harsh, fierce, the raw stuff of magic distilled out of the forces that powered the universe itself.
“You thought that Borrowing wasn’t enough. You thought it would be a fine thing to steal another’s body. But you must know that a body is like—like a jelly mold. It sets a shape on its contents, d’you see? You can’t have a girl’s mind in an eagle’s body. Not for long, at any rate.”
Esk, of course, had not been trained, and it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.
He had met a good many wizards in his time and considered himself a good judge and he had to admit that this boy looked like good wizard material. In other words, he was thin, gangling, pale from reading disturbing books in unhealthy rooms, and had watery eyes like two lightly poached eggs.
rang to the sound of hammers, although mainly for effect. Dwarves found it hard to think without the sound of hammers, which they found soothing, so well-off dwarves in the clerical professions paid goblins to hit small ceremonial anvils, just to maintain the correct dwarvish image.
“I’m not sure I like books,” said Esk conversationally. “How can paper know things? My granny says books are only good if the paper is thin.”
He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid, and maybe he had all the tact of an avalanche and was as self-centered as a tornado, but it would never have occurred to him that children were important enough to be unkind to.
Why was it that when she heard Granny ramble on about witchcraft she longed for the cutting magic of wizardry, but whenever she heard Treatle speak in his high-pitched voice she would fight to the death for witchcraft? She’d be both, or none at all. And the more they intended to stop her, the more she wanted it.
congregated in small jealous groups at parties. Not for them the coveted pointy hat with optional astrological symbols, or the impressive robes, or the staff of authority. But at least they could look down on conjurers, who tended to be jolly and fat and inclined to drop their aitches and drink beer and go around with sad thin women in spangly tights and really infuriate magicians by not realizing how lowly they were and kept telling them jokes.
She really envied Nanny Annaple, the witch over the mountain, who managed to lose all her teeth by the time she was twenty and had real crone-credibility.
At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.
One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he had resisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orangutan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from.
They both savored the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.
“You mean he’s bent?” said Granny. “All this hanging around wizards has made you take them seriously, my girl. They all call themselves the Lord High this and the Imperial That, it’s all part of the game. Even magicians do it, you’d think they’d be more sensible at least, but no, they call around saying they’re the Amazing-Bonko-and-Doris. Anyway, where is this High Rumtiddlypo?”
“But I haven’t been in a boat since I was a boy!” “I wasn’t actually asking you to come. Does the pointy bit go in front?”
“You felt left out,” said Granny. “There’s nothing strange in that. It happens to all of us. It was our choice.” “Wizards should never go home,” said Cutangle. “I don’t think they can go home,” agreed Granny. “You can’t cross the same river twice, I always say.”
He thought again how nice it would be to be the sort of wizard who lived in a little cave somewhere and collected herbs and thought significant thoughts and knew what the owls were saying. But probably the cave would be damp and the herbs would be poisonous and Treatle could never be sure, when all was said and done, exactly what thoughts were really significant.
Perhaps more importantly, the ants used all the sugar lumps they could steal to build a small sugar pyramid in one of the hollow walls, in which, with great ceremony, they entombed the mummified body of a dead queen. On the wall of one tiny hidden chamber they inscribed, in insect hieroglyphs, the true secret of longevity. They got it absolutely right and it would probably have important implications for the universe if it hadn’t, next time the University flooded, been completely washed away.
