Witches Abroad

Terry Pratchett

Summary

Death waits for no one -- not even a fairy godmother. So when Desiderata waited a little too long to find a successor, it was up to Magrat Garlick, Granny Weatherwax, and Nanny Ogg to grab their broomsticks and keep Desiderata's appointment in far-distant Genua and save Princess Emberella.

Along the way, the three witches face all the usual travelers' woes -- foreign food, languages, and accomodations, plus the occassional vampire, werewolf, and falling house. But their troubles wouldn't really begin until they got to lovely, law-abiding Genua -- where they're up against the malignant power of the Godmother herself, who has made Destiny an offer it can't refuse.

Servant girls have to marry the Prince. That's what life is all about.

You can't fight a Happy Ending.

At least -- up until now...

Quotes

...the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos itself -- partially because it was a lot easier to be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt.

Compared to all this, a large turtle with a world on its back is practically mundane. At least it doesn't pretend it doesn't exist, and no one on the Discworld ever tried to prove it didn't exist in case they turned out to be right and found themselves suddenly floating in empty space.

Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been. This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

From the trees around the clearing the snakes and birds watched silently. In the swamp the alligators drifted like patches of bad-assed water.

All across the multiverse there are backward tribes who distrust mirrors [Footnote: Considered backward, that is, by people who wear more clothes than they do.]

Local people called it the Bear Mountain. This was because it was a bare mountain, not because it had a lot of bears on it. This caused a certain amount of profitable confusion, though; people often strode into the nearest village with heavy duty crossbows, traps and nets and called haughtily for native guides to lead them to the bears. Since everyone locally was making quite a good living out of this, what with the sale of guide books, maps of bear caves, ornamental cuckoo-clocks with bears on them, bear walking-sticks and cakes baked in the shape of a bear, somehow no one had time to go and correct the spelling.

Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy Seriph of Al-Yabi was cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Yabi are renowned for being remarkably short and bad-tempered.

...one of the minor benefits of being a witch is that you know exactly when you're going to die and can wear what underwear you like. [Footnote: Which explains a lot about witches.]

That had been eighty years earlier, when the idea of knowing exactly when you were going to die had seemed quite attractive because secretly, of course, you knew you were going to live forever.

"It's a big responsibility, fairy godmothering. Knowing when to stop, I mean. People whose wishes get granted often don't turn out to be very nice people. So should you give them what they want -- or what they need?"

Death said, YOU SURELY ARE NOT ASKING ME TO GRANT A WISH?

"Hah! No one grants a fairy godmother's wishes."

Artists and writers have always had a rather exaggerated idea about what goes on at a witches' sabbat. This comes from spending too much time in small rooms with the curtains drawn, instead of getting out in the healthy fresh air.

Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occassionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.

The worst you can say about the eating habits of the older type of witch is that they tend to like ginger biscuits dipped in tea with so much sugar in it that the spoon won't move and will drink it out of the saucer if they think it's too hot. And do so with appreciative noises more generally associated with the cheaper type of plumbing system. Legs of toad and so on might be better than this.

...at least two of those present tonight were wearing Granny Weatherwax's famous goose-grease-and-sage chest liniment. This didn't make you fly and see visions, but it did prevent colds, if only because the distressing smell that developed around about the second week kept everyone else so far away you couldn't catch anything from them.

There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is "Don't do what you will, do what I say."

Desiderata had sent a note via Old Mother Dismass asking to be excused on account of being dead. Second sight enables you to keep a very tight rein on your social engagements.

The four witches stared gloomily at the fire. Well, three of them did. Nanny Ogg, who tended to look on the cheerful side, made toast.

Gammer Brevis: "And Gammer Peavey passed on."
Nanny Ogg: "Did she? Old Mabel Peavey? How old was she?"
Gammer Brevis: "One hundred and ninteen. I said to her, 'You don't want to go climbing mountains at your age' but she wouldn't listen. ... I actually heard her very last words."
Granny Weatherwax: "What did she say?"
Gammer Brevis: "As I recall, 'oh bugger.'"

"[Magrat Garlick] said she wanted to relate to herself."

"That's what I said," said Granny Weatherwax. "I told her: Simplicity Garlick was your mother, Araminta Garlick was your granny. Yolande Garlick is your aunt and you're your ... you're your me."

She sat back with the satisfied look of someone who has solved everything anyone could ever want to know about a personal identity crisis.

"You can be as self-assertive as you like, I said, just so long as you do what you're told."

"...what's that she's running, Gytha?" said Granny.

"Self-defence classes," said Nanny.

"But she's a witch," Gammer Brevis pointed out.

"I told her that," said Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was.

Nanny Ogg: "But you know Magrat. She tends to be open to Ideas. Now she says she refuses to be a sex object."
Gammer Brevis: "But she's never been a sex object."
Granny Weatherwax: "I'm pleased to say I don't even know what a sex object is."
Nanny Ogg: "I do."

"A squint looks good on a witch," said Granny Weatherwax.

"But you have to know how to use it," said Nanny Ogg. "Old Gertie Simmons used to have a squint and she was always putting the evil influence on the end of her own nose. We can't have people thinkin' that if you upsets a witch she curses and mutters and then her own nose drops off."

"Foreign's where they gabble at you in heathen lingo and eat foreign muck and worship, you know, objects," said Granny Weatherwax, goodwill diplomat.

Nanny Ogg: "By gor', that's a bloody enormous cat."
Granny Weatherwax: "It's a lion."
Nanny Ogg: "Must've hit the wall at a hell of a speed, whatever it was."
Granny Weatherwax: "Someone killed it."
Nanny Ogg: "Should think so. If I'd seen something like that eatin' its way through the wall I'd of hit it myself with the poker."

Granny disapproved of magic for domestic purposes, but she was annoyed. She also wanted her tea.

She threw a couple of logs into the fireplace and glared at them until they burst into flame out of sheer embarassment.

Magrat would be the first to admit that she had an open mind. It was as open as a field, as open as the sky. No mind could be more open without special surgical implements.

A caring parent would have spelled Margaret correctly. And then she could have been a Peggy, or a Maggie -- big, robust names, full of reliability. There wasn't much you could do with a Magrat. It sounded like something that lived in a hole in a river bank and was always getting flooded out.

...one of the earliest things Magrat had learned was that anyone Finding Themselves would be unwise to tell Granny Weatherwax, who thought that female emacipation was a woman's complaint that shouldn't be discussed in front of men.

Nanny Ogg ... had a tendency to come out with what Magrat thought of as double-intenders, although in Nanny Ogg's case them were generally single entendres and proud of it.

It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

Disdaining the utterances of their own saffron-clad, prayer-wheel-spinning elders, [young monks] occassionally travel all the way to No. 3 Quirm Street in flat and foggy Ankh-Morpork, to seek wisdom at the feet of Mrs. Marietta Cosmopolite, a seamstress. ... Many a bald young monk returns to his high fastness to meditate on the strange mantra vouchsafed to him, such as "Push off, you!" and "If I see one more of you little orange devils peering in at me he'll feel the edge of my hand, all right?" and "Why are you buggers all coming round here staring at my feet?" They have even developed a special branch of martial arts based on their experiences, where they shout incomprehensibly at one another and then hit their opponent with a broom.

Currently Magrat was finding herself through the Path of The Scorpion, which offered cosmic harmony, inner one-ness and the possibility of knocking an attacker's kidneys out through his ears.

Magrat thought that Ninja was a nice name for a girl.

[Magrat] reached up and took off the headband with the chrysanthemum pattern on it, without which it is almost impossible to properly seek cosmic wisdom by twisting an opponent's elbows through 360 degrees.

"Money forges the chains which bind the labouring classes," she warned, handing [the penny] over. Hurker, who had never thought of himself as a labouring class in his life, but who was prepared to listen to almost any amount of gibberish in exchange for a penny, nodded innocently.

Nanny Ogg: "Could be a sign. Once someone dies, you get that sort of thing. Pictures fallin' off walls, clocks stopping ... great big wardrobes falling down the stairs ... that sort of thing."
Granny Weatherwax: "I've never believed in that stuff, it's ... what do you mean, wardrobes falling down the stairs?"
Nanny Ogg: "That's what happened after my Great-Aunt Sophie died. Three days and four hours and six minutes to the very minute after she died, her wardrobe fell down the stairs. Our Darren and our Jason were trying to get it round the bend and it sort of slipped, just like that. Uncanny."

The Oggs were what is known as an extended family -- in fact not only extended but elongated, protracted and persistent. No normal sheet of paper could possibly trace their family tree, which in any case was more like a mangrove thicket.

...every single branch [of the Ogg family] had a low-key, chronic vendetta against every other branch, based on such well-established causes celebres as What Their Kevin Said About Our Stan At Cousin Di's Wedding and Who Got The Silver Cutlery That Auntie Em Promised Our Doreen Was To Have After She Died, I'd Like To Know, Thank You Very Much, If You Don't Mind.

The Oggs contained, in just one family, enough feuds to keep an entire Ozark of normal hillbillies going for a century.

Ramtop people believed the Ogg feud to be a blessing. The thought of them turning their immense energy on the world in general was a terrible one. Fortunately, there was no one an Ogg would rather fight than another Ogg. It was family.

"I used to come over here quite often to look at her books," Magrat confessed. "And... and she liked to cook foreign food and no-one else round here would eat it, so I'd come up to keep her company."

"Ah-hal Curryin' favour!" snapped Granny.

"A fairy godmother stopping a girl from marryin' a prince?" said Nanny. "Sounds a bit ... contrary."

"Should be an easy enough wish to grant, anyway," said Granny. "Millions of girls don't marry a prince."

Magrat: "Look, why don't I go by myself?"
Granny Weatherwax: "'Cos you ain't experienced at fairy godmothering."
Magrat: "Well, nor are you."
Granny Weatherwax: "That's true. But the point is ... the point is ... the point is we've not been experienced for a lot longer than you."
Nanny Ogg: "We've got a lot of experience of not having any experience."

To his glowing forge were brought the stud stallions, the red-eyed and foam-flecked kings of the horse nation, the soup-plate-hoofed beasts that had kicked lesser men through walls. But Jason Ogg knew the secret of the mystic Horseman's Word, and he would go alone into the forge, politely shut the door, and lead the creature out again after half an hour, newly shod and strangely docile.

[Footnote: Granny Weatherwax had once pressed him about this, and since there are no secrets from a witch, he'd shyly replied, "Well, ma'am, what happens is, I gets hold of 'un and smacks 'un between the eyes with hammer before 'un knows what's 'appening, and then I whispers in his ear. I sez, 'Cross me, you bugger, and I'll have thy goodies on t'anvil, thou knows I can.'"]

Magrat: "This sort of thing happens all the time. You know, after a woman's raised a family and so on, she wants to start living her own life."
Jason: "Whose life she bin living, then?"

It was one of the weak spots of Granny Weatherwax's otherwise well-developed character that she'd never bothred to get the hang of steering things. It was alien to her nature. She took the view that it was her job to move and the rest of the world to arrange itself so that she arrived at her destination.

"I'll write you letters if you promise to find someone to read them to you."

To Nanny Ogg Greebo was still the cute little kitten that chased balls of wool around the floor.

To the rest of the world he was an enormous tomcat, a parcel of incredibly indestructive life forces in a skin that looked less like a fur than a piece of bread that had been left in a damp place for a fortnight.

...Greebo, as a matter of feline pride, would attempt to fight or rape absolutely anything, up to and including a four-horse logging wagon. Ferocious dogs would whine and hide under the stairs when Greebo sauntered down the street. Foxes kept away from the village. Wolves made a detour.

Greebo was possibly the only cat who could snigger in purr.

Jason: "Our Sean read to me in the almanac where there's all these fearsome wild beasts in foreign parts. Huge hairy things that leap out on travellers, it said. I'd hate to think what'd happen if they leapt out on mum and Granny. You will see no harm comes to them, won't you?"
Magrat: "Don't you worry. I'll do my best."
Jason: "Only it said in the almanac that some of them were nearly extinct anyway."

No one ski'd in the high Ramtops, at least for more than a few feet and a disappearing scream.

The witches flew along a maze of twisty little canyons, all alike.

"I ain't blaming you," she said, "but I know you'll have a King in there, so just you go and tell him Granny Weatherwax is here, will you?"

"He's very busy," said the voice. "We've just had a bit of trouble."

"Then I'm sure he don't want any more," said Granny.

Magrat: "I don't see any invisible runes."
Nanny Ogg: "'Corse not. That's 'cos they're invisible."

"I spoke to the King," said the voice.

"And what did he say?" said Granny expectantly.

"He said, 'Oh, no! Not on top of everything else!'"

Granny beamed. "I knew 'e would have heard of me," she said.

There aren't any Queen of the Dwarfs. Dwarfs are very reticent about revealing their sex, which most of them don't consider to be very important compared to things like metallurgy and hydraulics.

Most dwarfs were off earning big money in the cities down in the lowlands, where it was much easier to be a dwarf -- for one thing, you didn't have to spend most of your time underground hitting your thumb with a hammer and worrying about fluctuations in the international metal markets.

Granny Weatherwax had nothing against trolls but she felt instinctively that if more trolls stopped wearing suits and walking upright, and went back to living under bridges and jumping out and eating people as nature intended, then the world would be a happier place.

It's often said that eskimos have fifty words for snow. [Footnote: Well, not often. Not on a daily basis, anyway. At least, not everywhere. But probably in some cold countries people say, "Hey, those eskimos! What a people! Fifty words for snow! Can you believe that? Amazing!" quite a lot.]

[Dwarfs] have no word for rock, in the same way that fish have no words for water. They do have words for igneous rock, sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, rock underfoot, rock dropping on your helmet from above, and rock which looked interesting and which they could have sworn they left here yesterday. But what they don't have is a word meaning "rock." Show a dwarf a rock and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphite of barytes.

"Excuse me," said Magrat, "there are dwarfs [trapped] behind all that stuff, are there?"

"Oh, yes," said the King. His tone suggested that this was merely a regrettable side-effect of the disaster, because getting fresh dwarfs was only a matter of time whereas decent gold-bearing rock was a finite resource.

"If the Creator had meant us to shift rocks by witchcraft, he wouldn't have invented shovels. Knowing when to use a shovel is what being a witch is all about."

Granny Weatherwax: "Whoever heard of a fairy godmother in a mine?"
Magrat: "If I was stuck behind a load of rocks under a mountain I'd want to hear of one."

[Magrat] tried to make her mind a serene picture of cosmic harmony. It was all very well for monks to go on about cosmic harmony, she reflected, when they were nicely tucked away on snowy mountains with only yetis to worry about. They never tried seeking inner peace with Granny Weatherwax glaring at them.

"Can't help noticing you seem to have struck pumpkin."

"I thought it was an odd kind of sandstone, dad."

Magrat: "Do you know how to row a boat?"
Granny Weatherwax: "We don't have to."
Magrat: "I don't think I do, too."
Nanny Ogg: "That's all right. If we sees you doing anything wrong, we'll be sure to tell you."

In the dim light she could see Granny's face which seemed to be suggesting that if Magrat was at her wits' end, it was a short stroll.

Nanny Ogg: "You know, whenever I deals with dwarfs, the phrase 'Duck's arse' swims across my mind."
Granny Weatherwax: "Mean little devils. You should see the prices they tries to charge me when I takes my broom to be repaired."
Magrat: "Yes, but you never pay."
Granny Weatherwax: "That's not the point. They shouldn't be allowed to charge that sort of money."

"It's only a folk song, Esme," said Nanny Ogg.

"Hah!" said Granny Weatherwax. "I should just say it is a folk song! I knows all about folk songs. Hah! You think you're listenin' to a nice song about ... about cuckoos and fiddlers and nightingales and whatnot, and then it turns out to be about ... about something else entirely."

[The waterfall] was the second highest anywhere on the Disc and had been discovered in the Year of the Revolving Crab by the noted explorer Guy de Yoyo [Footnote: Of course, lots of dwarfs, trolls, native people, trappers, hunters, and the merely badly lost had discovered it on an almost daily basis for thousands of years. But they weren't explorers and didn't count.]

Magrat unfolded a map. ... "I think we're here," she said.

"My word," said Nanny Ogg, whose grasp of the principles of cartography was even shakier than Granny's. "Amazing how we can all fit on that little bit of paper."

It was the kind of landscape that had a particular type of story attached to it, featuring wolves and garlic and frightened women.

"Openny vous, gunga din, chop-chop, pretty damn quick."

"Nothing to it. I just cussed at him until he understood."

-- Nanny Ogg speaks with foreigners

Nanny Ogg: "Garlic sausage and garlic bread. My favourite."
Magrat: "You ought to have got some fresh vegetables."
Nanny Ogg: "I did. There's some garlic. And I think I definitely saw something like pickled onions on one of the shelves."
Granny Weatherwax: "Yes? Then we're going to need at least two rooms for tonight."
Magrat: "Three."

"Have you brushed your tooth?"

"That Lilith woman says she can see the whole world in mirrors," she said, in slightly accusing tones.

Mrs. Gogol shook her head.

"All anyone gets in a mirror is themselves," she said. "But what you gets in a good gumbo is everything."

...[Mrs. Gogol] felt slightly ashamed of letting an honest woman believe that she could see the future in a pot of gumbo. Because all you could see in a pot of Mrs. Gogol's gumbo was that the future certainly contained a very good meal.

...Nanny just tended to put a hot poultice on everything and recommend a large glass of whatever the patient liked best on the basis that since you were going to be ill anyway you might as well get some enjoyment out of it.

Granny ... she just gave people a bottle of coloured water and told them they felt a lot better.

And what was so annoying was that they often did.

Faint snores rattled the jug on the washbasin; these were no longer the full-nosed roars of a quick forty-winks catnapper, but the well-paced growls of someone who intends to make a night of it.

"It's far too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning."

Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.

Not for the first time in the history of the universe, someone for whom communication normally came as effortlessly as a dream was stuck for inspiration when faced with a few lines on the back of a card.

Nanny Ogg sent a number of cards home to her family, not a single one of which got back before she did. This is traditional, and happens everywhere in the universe.

Granny Weatherwax: "My landlord hasn't done a hand's turn on my cottage the whole time I've been there. It's shameful. And me an old woman, too."
Magrat: "I thought you owned your place."
Nanny Ogg: "She just ain't paid no rent for sixty years."
Granny Weatherwax: "Is that my fault? It's not my fault. I'd be quite willin' to pay. All he has to do is ask."

"What shall I do, then?" said Granny Weatherwax suspiciously.

""Oh ... well ... there ought to be someone to, you know, welcome people onto the stick and give them their meals," said Magrat. "And tell them what to do if the magic fails, for example."

"If the magic fails everyone'll crash into the ground and die," Granny pointed out.

-- Proposing a Discworld airline

"And we could call ourselves ... Three Witches Airborne."

"And I don't hold with all this giving things funny names so people don't know what they're eating," said Granny, determined to explore the drawbacks of international cookery to the full. "I like stuff that tells you plain what it is, like ... well ... Bubble and Squeak, or ... or..."

"Spotted Dick," said Nanny absently.

...Magrat says she will write a book called Travelling on One Dollar a Day, and it's always the same dollar.

Granny Weatherwax's approach to foreign tongues was to repeat herself loudly and slowly.

"D'you know what?" said Nanny Ogg, "I barricaded meself in my room last night and a man didn't even try to break in."

"You know what this river's called?" she said.

"No."

"'S called the Vieux River."

"Yes?"

"Know what that means?"

"No."

"The Old (Masculine) River," said Nanny.

"Yes?"

"Words have sex in foreign parts," said Nanny hopefully.

"Well, it's not gambling," said Nanny. "I didn't see it was gambling. They were no good when I started playing. It's not gambling to play against someone who's no good. It's common sense."

The phrase "card sharp" had never reached her side of the Ramtops, where people were friendly and direct and, should they encounter a professional cheat, tended to nail his hand to the table in an easy and outgoing manner without asking him what he called himself.

All witches are very conscious of stories. They can feel stories, in the same way that a bather in a little pool can feel the unexpected trout.

Knowing how stories work is almost all the battle.

For example, when an obvious innocent sits down with three experienced card sharpers and says "How do you play this game, then?", someone is about to be shaken down until their teeth fall out.

Granny Weatherwax was not a good loser. From her point of view, losing was something that happened to other people.

After twenty-five minutes [Granny Weatherwax] was down one dollar and Mister Frank was sweating. Granny had already helpfully pointed out three times that he'd accidentally dealt cards off the bottom of the deck, and she'd asked for another pack "because, look, this one's got all little marks on the back."

Magrat: "Lobsang Dibbler says sometimes you have to lose in order to win."
Nanny Ogg: "Sounds daft to me. That's Yen Buddhism, is it?"
Magrat: "No. They're the ones who say you have to have lots of money to win."

The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and a burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.

"And when the big ole troll that lives under Broken Mountain came down for help because his wife was sick and everyone threw rocks at him, I remember it was Esme that went back with him and delivered the baby. Hah ... then when old Chickenwire Hopkins threw a rock at Esme a little while afterwards all his barns was mysteriously trampled flat in the night. She always said you can't help people with magic, but you can help them with skin. By doin' real things, she meant."

Magrat: "I wonder if we did the right thing? I'm sure it was a job for a handsome prince."
Granny Weatherwax: "Hah! And what good would that be? Cutting your way through a bit of bramble is how you can tell he's going to be a good husband, is it?"

Magrat: "There's nothing wrong with happy endings."
Granny Weatherwax: "Listen, happy endings is fine if they turn out happy. But you can't make 'em for other people. Like the only way you could make a happy marriage is by cuttin' their heads off as soon as they say 'I do,' yes?"

"You can't make happiness ... All you can do is make an ending."

But it was miraculous, the dwarf bread. No one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you'd rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot.

Witches usually had few secrets from one another, if only because they were all so nosy that there was never any chance to have secrets.

Magrat leaned down and set her face in the idiot grimace generally used by adults who'd love to be good with children and don't stand a dog's chance of ever achieving it.

Little Girl: "You're not the wicked witch, are you?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Me? No. We're -- we're--"
Magrat: "Fairies."
Little Girl: "Only my mummy warned me about the wicked witch too. What kind of fairies?"
Magrat: "Er, flower fairies? Look, I've got a wand--"
Little Girl: "Which ones?"
Magrat: "What?"
Little Girl: "Which flowers?"
Magrat: "Er. Well. I'm ... Fairy Tulip and that's ... Fairy ... Daisy ... and this is..."
Nanny Ogg: "Fairy Hedgehog."

In the middle of the garden was what had to be a thatched cottage because no one would build a haystack that badly.

Grandmother: "Are you the taxgatherers, dear?"
Granny Weatherwax: "No, ma'am, we're--"
Nanny Ogg: "--fairies."

Granny Weatherwax: "Put it like this, ma'am, how would you like to be eaten alive by a wolf?"
Grandmother: "I don't think I would like that, dear, no."
Granny Weatherwax: "The alternative's us."

Little Girl: "Bet you a million trillion zillion dollars you can't turn that bush into a pumpkin."
Magrat: "But, look, all the others got turned into pumpkins."
Little Girl: "It's bound not to work sooner or later."

Granny Weatherwax looked around the cave-like room. The rushes on the floor were well on the way to composthood. Soot encrusted the cobwebs on the ceiling.

The only way housework could be done in this place was with a shovel or, for preference, a match.

Magrat might always be trying to find herself, but Granny didn't even understand the idea of the search.

...Granny Weatherwax was walking around the clearing with the head woodcutter, a barrel-chested young man who clearly thought he looked better in his studded leather wristlets than was, in fact, the case.

Magrat: "There used to be a family of bears living not far away."
Nanny Ogg: "Nothing unusual about a family of bears living together. They're very convival animals."
Magrat: "In a cottage?"
Nanny Ogg: "That's unusual. ... You'd definitely feel a bit awkward about going round to borrow a cup of sugar."

Nanny Ogg went chilly. This was the kind of emotional countryside with which she was, as head Ogg, extremely familiar. That sort of comment at this sort of time was like the tiny sliding of snow at the top branch of a tall tree high in the mountains during the thaw season. It was one end of a process that, without a doubt, would end with a dozen villages being engulfed.

Magrat plunged on with the brave desperation of someone dancing in the light of their burning bridges.

Asking someone to repeat a phrase you'd not only heard very clearly but were also exceedingly angry about was around Defcon II in the lexicon of squabble.

"Haven't you got any romance in your soul?" said Magrat plaintively.

"No," said Granny. "I ain't. And stars don't care what you wish, and magic don't make things better, and no one doesn't get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, youy got to learn three things. What's real, what's not real, and what's the difference--"

"And always get the young man's name and address," said Nanny. "It worked for me every time."

The row cooled a bit, simply because both sides were not talking to each other. Not simply not exchanging vocal communication -- that's just an absence of speaking. This went right through that and out the other side, into the horrible glowering worlds of Not Talking to One Another.

"Yellow bricks," said Nanny. "Whoever heard of anyone making a road out of yellow bricks?"

"What some people need," said Magrat, to the world in general, "is a bit more heart."

"What some people need," said Granny Weatherwax, to the stormy sky, "is a lot more brain."

What I need, thought Nanny Ogg fervently, is a drink.

-- Thoughts for a yellow brick road

"Wha' happened?" she said. "Wha' happened?"

"A farmhouse dropped on your head," said Magrat.

"Oh. One o' them things," said Nanny vaguely.

People didn't hit you over the head with farmhouses back home.

"They singing, Magrat?"

"I can hear something," said Magrat. "Sounds like 'Dingdong, dingdong.'"

"That's a dwarf song all right," said Nanny. "They're the only people who can make a hiho last all day."

[Nanny had] found a stale loaf in a cupboard and was industriously chewing. It was amazing what you'd eat if the alternative was dwarf bread.

"Maybe they want to drink out of them. ... that's what they do in foreign parts," said Nanny. "They drink fizzy wine out of ladies' boots."

They all looked down at Nanny's boots.

Not even Nanny could imagine what anyone would want to drink out of them, or what they would do afterwards.

"Proper dwarf bread's got to be dropped in rivers and dried out and sat on and left and looked at every day and put away again. You just can't get it down here."

"This could be," said Granny Weatherwax, "your lucky day."

"To be frank," said Nanny Ogg, "I think the cat pissed on some of it."

The spokesdwarf looked up, his eyes aglow.

"Hot damn!"

It would have done anyone's heart good to see the way [the dwarfs] just sat and stared at the dwarf bread, as if consuming it with their eyes, which was the best way to consume dwarf bread.

In Genua, stories came to life. In Genua, someone set out to make dreams come true.

Remember some of your dreams?

Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government, and therefore sound economics and perfectly all right.

There were only six suits of chain mail in the whole of Lancre, made on the basis of one-size-doesn't-quite-fit-all. Bits of string and wire had to be employed to take in the slack, since in Lancre the role of palace guard was generally taken by any citizen who hadn't got much to do at the moment.

The sight of Ankh-Morpork's city guard made thoughtful people wonder who could possibly attack that was worse.

"Excuse me," said Granny, empowering the words with much the same undertones as are carried by words like "Charge!" and "Kill!"

Granny Weatherwax always held that you ought to count up to ten before losing your temper. No-one knew why, because the only effect of this was to build up the pressure and make the ensuing explosion a whole lot worse.

"I could just go a bath too," said Nanny.

"My word, doesn't autumn roll around quickly," said Granny sourly.

"Yeah? When did you last have a bath, Esme?"

"What do you mean, last?"

"Baths is unhygienic," Granny declared. "You know I've never agreed with baths. Sittin' around in your own dirt like that."

Granny Weatherwax: "The very next place we see, we're goin' in. What's that inn over there?"
Nanny Ogg: "Hotel ... No ... Va ... cancies. Hotel Nova Cancies. That means 'new, er, Cancies' in foreign."

Despite many threats, Granny Weatherwax had never turned anyone into a frog. The way she saw it, there was a technically less cruel but cheaper and much more satisfying thing you could do. You could leave them human and make them think they were a frog, which also provided much innocent entertainment for passers-by.

[Nanny Ogg] always prided herself on being as ordinary as muck, but there was ordinary and there was ordinary. It was like being that Prince Whatsisname, in the nursery story, who liked to wander around his kingdom dressed up as a commoner; she'd always had a shrewd suspicion that the little pervert made sure people know who he was beforehand, just in case anyone tried to get too common.

Anywey one good thing is the drink here is v. cheap theres this one called a Bananana dakry which is basicly Rum with a banananana in it.

[Footnote: Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling "banana," but didn't know how you stopped.]

The one thing you could be sure of, if you told Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg not to help, was that they would rush to help if only out of spite.

Nanny Ogg, one of life's great optimists, stepped out to take whatever the future had to offer.

Preferably with rum and bananas in it.

...there was a raised platform. And a small man in chains. And some bright-uniformed guards. One of them was holding an axe.

You did not have to be a great world traveller to understand that the purpose of this tableau was not to give the chained man a signed testimonial and a collection from everyone at the office.

There were countries in foreign parts, Granny had heard, where they chopped off the hands of thieves so that they wouldn't steal again. And she'd never been happy with that idea.

They didn't do that in Genua. They cut their heads off so they wouldn't think of stealing again.

The two not-exactly-women weren't evil, in the same way that a dagger or a sheer cliff isn't evil. Being evil means being able to make choices.

People like Nanny Ogg turn up everywhere. It's as if there's some special morphic generator dedicated to the production of old women who like a laugh and aren't adverse to the odd pint, especially of some drink normally sold in very small glasses. You find them all over the place, often in pairs. [Footnote:Always in front of you in any queue, for a start.]

Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because -- what with trolls and dwarfs and so on -- speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.

"This stuff? It's nothing but pork and beef and lamb and rubbish for them that never tasted anything better. The only thing on four legs that's worth eating is alligator. I mean real food."

Nanny Ogg quite liked cooking, provided there were other people around to do things like chop up the vegetables and wash the dishes afterwards.

Cooking anywhere outside Genua was just heating up things like bits of animals and birds and fish and vegetables until they went brown.

The point was that a good Genuan cook could more or less take the squeezings of a handful of mud, a few dead leaves and a pinch or two of some unpronounceable herbs and produce a meal to make a gourmet burst into tears of gratitude and swear to be a better person for the rest of their entire life if they could just have one more plateful.

Nanny Ogg would try anything once. Some things she'd try several thousand times.

Nanny Ogg: "Where I come from, we call it witchcraft."
Mrs. Gogol: "Where I come from, we call it voodoo."
Nanny Ogg: "Ain't that all messin' wirh dolls and dead people and stuff?"
Mrs. Gogol: "Ain't witchcraft all runnin' around with no clothes on and stickin' pins in people?"

The largest and blackest cockerel Nanny had ever seen had settled on Mrs. Gogol's shoulder. It turned on her the most intelligent stare she had ever seen on a bird.

"My word," she said, taken aback. "That's the biggest cock I've ever seen, and I've seen a few in my time."

"This is Greebo. Between you and me, he's a fiend from hell."

"Well, he's a cat," said Mrs. Gogol, generously. "It's only to be expected."

A jam-jar contained flowers that had been arranged by the simple method of grabbing a handful of them and ramming them in.

Ella looked slightly puzzled for a moment, as if trying to work out why -- if Magrat could look like whatever she wanted -- she'd chosen to look like Magrat.

Ella turned to the fireplace, where a blackened kettle hung over what Granny Weatherwax always called an optimist's fire. [Footnote: Two logs and hope.]

Emberella, thought Magrat. I'm fairy godmothering a girl who sounds like something you put up in the rain.

"My hat! It ate my hat! One of your alleygators ate my hatl It was my hat! Make it give it back!"

She snatched a length of creeper off the nearest tree and flailed at the water.

Nanny Ogg backed away. "You shouldn't do that, Esme! You shouldn't do that!" she quavered. The alligator backed water.

"I can hit cheeky lizards if I want!"

"Yes, you can, you can," said Nanny soothingly, "but not... with a... snake..."

Every trade, every craft had its hat. That's why kings had hats. Take the crown off a king and all you had was someone good at having a weak chin and waving to people.

Nanny Ogg: "You always used to say I was wanton, when we was younger."
Granny Weatherwax: "You was, of course. But you never used magic for it, did you?"
Nanny Ogg: "Din't have to. An off-the-shoulder dress did the trick most of the time."
Granny Weatherwax: "Right off the shoulder and onto the grass, as I recall."

Magrat was annoyed. She was also frightened, which made her even more annoyed. It was hard for people when Magrat was annoyed. It was like being attacked by damp tissue.

The coachmen and the footmen were sitting in their shed at one side of the stable yard, eating their dinner and complaining about having to work on Dead Night. They were also engaging in the time-honoured rituals that go therewith, which largely consist of finding out what their wives have packed for them today and envying the other men whose wives obviously cared more.

It is a universal fact that any innocent comment made by any recently-married young member of any workforce is an instant trigger for coarse merriment among his or her older and more cynical colleagues. This happens even if everyone concerned has nine legs and lives at the bottom of an ocean of ammonia on a huge cold planet.

It had taken many years under the tutelage of Granny Weatherwax for Magrat to learn that the common kitchen breadknife was better than the most ornate of magical knives. It could do all that the magical knife could do, plus you could also use it to cut bread.

The coach lit up like a glitter ball.

It was excessively ornate, as if someone had taken a perfectly ordinary coach and then gone insane with fretwork and gold paint.

A lot of the dances in the parade had this in common: they expressed explicitly what things like maypoles only hinted at. They covered it with sequins, too.

"Besides," said Magrat virtuously, "it can't be bad if we're doing it. We're the good ones."

"Oh yes, so we is," said Granny, "and there was me forgetting it for a minute there."

She felt a bit ashamed of the thought. But not much.

Granny Weatherwax: "Magrat, you can open your eyes."
Magrat: "I hadn't got them closed."
Granny Weatherwax: "Well, you should have had."

Greebo turned slowly, a faint, lazy smile on his scarred face. As a human, his nose was broken and a black patch covered his bad eye. But the other one glittered like the sins of angels, and his smile was the downfall of saints. Female ones, anyway.

Magrat: "Everyone'll know I'm not her!"
Granny Weatherwax: "Not with the mask on they won't."
Magrat: "But my hair's the wrong colour!"
Nanny Ogg: "I can tint that up a treat, no problem."
Magrat: "I'm the wrong shape!"
Granny Weatherwax: "We can-- Can you, you know, puff yourself out a bit more?"
Magrat: "No!"

A couple of flunkies bustled forward to open the door, and were nearly thrown back by the sheer force of the arrogance that emanated from within.

The tiny inner Magrat struggling to keep its balance on the surge of arrogant self-confidence wondered if this was how Granny Weatherwax felt all the time.

Then she reached around and down to try and adjust her bustle, an exercise guaranteed to produce the most ridiculous female gymnastics on every world except those where the panty girdle had been invented.

Nanny Ogg: "Got any pickles?"
Waiter: "I'm afraid not, ma'am."
Nanny Ogg: "Well, got any relish?"
Waiter: "No, ma'am."
Nanny Ogg: "Tomato ketchup?"
Waiter: "No, ma'am."
Nanny Ogg: "And they call this a gormay paradise."

"My name's Casanunda," he said. "I'm reputed to be the world's greatest lover. What do you think?"

Nanny Ogg looked him up and down or, at least, down and further down.

"You're a dwarf," she said.

"Size isn't important."

The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.

Granny Weatherwax wouldn't know what a pattern of quantum inevitability was if she found it eating her dinner. If you mentioned the words "paradigm of space-time" to her she'd just say "What?" But that didn't mean she was ignorant. It just meant that she didn't have truck with words, especially gibberish.

Just twist the first thing you can grab, as the High Priest said to the vestal virgin. [Footnote: This is the last line of a Discworld joke lost, alas, to posterity.]

...Nanny Ogg's voyages on the sea of inter-sexual dalliance had gone rather further than twice around the lighthouse, and she saw nothing demeaning in getting a man to help her.

Stories are not, on the whole, interested in swineherds that remain swineherds and poor and humble shoemakers whose destiny is to die slightly poorer and much humbler.

...when all people had was practically nothing, then anything could be almost everything.

He hadn't been a kind ruler. But he'd fitted. And when he'd been arbitrary or arrogant or just plain wrong, he'd never suggested that this was justified by anything other than the fact that he was bigger and stronger and occassionally nastier than other people. He'd never suggested that it was because he was better.

Genuan cooking, like the best cooking everywhere in the multiverse, had been evolved by people who had to make desperate use of ingredients their masters didn't want. No one would even try a bird's nest unless they had to. Only hunger would make a man taste his first alligator. No one would eat a shark's fin if they were allowed to eat the rest of the shark.

Cats gravitate to kitchens like rocks gravitate to gravity.

"Fish heads?" said Mrs. Pleasant. They were technically garbage, although what she was planning with some rice and a few special sauces would turn them into the sort of dish kings fight for.

Lily: "...it is the right slipper. So all we have to do is find the girl whose foot it fits--"
Nanny Ogg: "If it's a five-and-a-half narrow fit, I'm your man. Just let me get these boots off..."
Lily: "I wasn't referring to you, old woman."
Nanny Ogg: "Oh, yes you was. We know how this bit goes, see. The Prince goes all round the city with the slipper, trying to find the girl whose foot fits. That's what you was plannin'. So I can save you a bit of trouble, how about it?"
Lily: "A girl of marriageable age."
Nanny Ogg: "No problem there."

It had occurred to [Nanny Ogg] that a husband who was a man all night and a frog all day might be almost acceptable; you wouldn't get the wage packet, but there'd be less wear and tear on the furniture. She also couldn't put out of her mind certain private speculations about the length of his tongue.

"Look at the three of you," she said. "Bursting with inefficient good intentions. The maiden, the mother, and the crone."

"Who are you calling a maiden?" said Nanny Ogg.

"Who are you calling a mother?" said Magrat.

Granny Weatherwax glowered briefly like the person who has discovered that there is only one straw left and everyone else has drawn a long one.

Granny Weatherwax: "I don't trust anyone who drinks rum and smokes a pipe."
Magrat: "Nanny Ogg smokes a pipe and drinks anything."
Granny Weatherwax: "Yes, but that's because she's a disgustin' old baggage."
Nanny Ogg: "That's right. You ain't nothing if you don't maintain an image."

"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage."

Nanny Ogg: "I heard this story once, where this bloke got locked up for years and years and he learned amazin' stuff about the universe and everythin' from another prisoner who was incredibly clever, and then he escaped and got his revenge."
Granny Weatherwax: "What incredibly clever stuff do you know about the universe, Gytha Ogg?"
Nanny Ogg: "Bugger all."
Granny Weatherwax: "Then we'd better bloody well escape right now."

"I can speak foreign like a native, you know that."

Nanny Ogg: "How come you're in the palace guard, Casanunda?"
Casanunda: "Soldier of fortune takes whatever jobs are going, Mrs. Ogg."
Nanny Ogg: "But all the rest of 'em are six foot tall and you're-- of the shorter persuasion."
Casanunda: "I lied about my height, Mrs. Ogg. I'm a world-famous liar."
Nanny Ogg: "Is that true?"
Casanunda: "No."

Nanny Ogg: "Or maybe we could get Magrat to seduce one of the guards."
Magrat: "Why don't you?"
Nanny Ogg: "All right. I'm game."

One of the men was bright enough to raise his crossbow but stupid enough to do it with Nanny Ogg standing behind him with a hatpin. Her hand moved so swiftly that any wisdom-seeking saffron-clad youth would have started The Way of Mrs. Ogg there and then.

Cats are like witches. They don't fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference. There's no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won't know they've lost, and to be a real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows it. There's no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure.

Greebo's technique was unscientific and wouldn't have stood a chance against any decent swordmanship, but on his side was the fact that it is almost impossible to develop decent swordmanship when you seem to have run into a food mixer that is biting your ear off.

"You can't make things right by magic. You can only stop making them wrong."

"But you hate godmothers, Mistress Weatherwax," said Mrs. Gogol.

"We're the other kind," said Granny. "We're the kind that gives people what they know they really need, not what we think they ought to want."

"I don't want to hurt you, Mistress Weatherwax," said Mrs. Gogol.

"That's good," said Granny. "I don't want you to hurt me either."

"You don't have to keep your word!"

"I do. I have to keep something."

Death put down his drink and stepped forward. Baron Saturday straightened up. 'I am ready to go with you,' he said.

Death shrugged. Ready or not, he seemed to indicate, was all the same to him.

"Will she live happily ever after?" he said.

NOT FOREVER. BUT PERHAPS FOR LONG ENOUGH.

Stories want to end. They don't care what happens next...

It wasn't a blow that featured in any Way or Path. No one ever drew this one as a diagram or practised it in front of a mirror with a bandage tied round their head. It was straight out of the lexicon of inherited, terrified survival reflexes.

The trouble with witches is that they'll never run away from things they really hate.

And the trouble with small furry animals in a corner is that, just occasionally, one of them's a mongoose.

"I'm goin' to give you the hidin' our Mam never gave you, Lily Weatherwax. Not with magic, not with headology, not with a stick like our Dad had, aye, and used a fair bit as I recall -- but with skin. And not because you was the bad one. Not because you meddled with stories. Everyone has a path they got to tread. But because, and I wants you to understand this prop'ly, after you went I had to be the good one."

Nanny Ogg and Magrat came up onto the roof like avenging angels after a period of lax celestial quality control.

"It's got snakes' heads in it," said Nanny Ogg.

"Don't you try to upset me," said Magrat. "I know the Snake's Head is a kind of flower. A fritillary, I think. It's amazing what you can do with flowers, you know."

Nanny Ogg, who had in fact spent an instructive if gruesome half-hour watching Mrs. Gogol make the stuff, hadn't the heart to say so.

And stories just want happy endings. They don't give a damn who they're for.

...they say travel broadens the mind, I reckon I could pull mine out my ears now and knot it under my chin...

They were of course used to the concept of fruit on a hat... But this one had rather more than just cherries. About the only fruit not on it somewhere was a melon.

"Good and bad is tricky," said said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face."

Nanny kicked her red boots together idly.

"Well, I suppose there's no place like home," she said.

"No," said Granny Weatherwax, still looking thoughtful. "No. There's a billion places like home. But only one of 'em's where you live."