Страница:
She was also beginning to tire. While Granny Weatherwax approved of night on general principles, she certainly didn’t hold with promiscuous candlelight—if she had any reading to do after dark she generally persuaded the owl to come and sit on the back of her chair, and read through its eyes. So Esk expected to go to bed around sunset, and that was long past.
There was a doorway ahead of her that looked friendly. Cheerful sounds were sliding out on the yellow light, and pooling on the cobbles. With the staff still radiating random magic like a demon lighthouse she headed for it, weary but determined.
The landlord of The Fiddler’s Riddle considered himself to be a man of the world, and this was right, because he was too stupid to be really cruel, and too lazy to be really mean and although his body had been around quite a lot his mind had never gone further than the inside of his own head.
He wasn’t used to being addressed by sticks. Especially when they spoke in a small piping voice, and asked for goat’s milk.
Cautiously, aware that everyone in the inn was looking at him and grinning, he pulled himself across the bar top until he could see down. Esk stared up at him. Look ’em right in the eye, Granny had always said: focus your power on ’em, stare ’em out, no one can outstare a witch, ’cept a goat, of course.
The landlord, whose name was Skiller, found himself looking directly down at a small child who seemed to be squinting.
“What?” he said.
“Milk,” said the child, still focussing furiously. “You get it out of goats. You know?”
Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats. No self-respecting goat would have endured the smell in the Fiddler’s Riddle.
“We haven’t got any,” he said. He looked hard at the staff and his eyebrows met conspiratorially over his nose.
“You could have a look,” said Esk.
Skiller eased himself back across the bar, partly to avoid the gaze, which was causing his eyes to water in sympathy, and partly because a horrible suspicion was congealing in his mind.
Even second-rate barmen tend to resonate with the beer they serve, and the vibrations coming from the big barrels behind him no longer had the twang of hop and head. They were broadcasting an altogether more lactic note.
He turned a tap experimentally, and watched a thin stream of milk curdle in the drip bucket.
The staff still poked up over the edge of the counter, like a periscope. He could swear that it was staring at him too.
“Don’t waste it,” said a voice. “You’ll be grateful for it one day.”
It was the same tone of voice Granny used when Esk was less than enthusiastic about a plateful of nourishing sallet greens, boiled yellow until the last few vitamins gave in, but to Skiller’s hypersensitive ears it wasn’t an injunction but a prediction. He shivered. He didn’t know where he would have to be to make him grateful for a drink of ancient beer and curdled milk. He’d rather be dead first.
Perhaps he would be dead first.
He very carefully wiped a nearly clean mug with his thumb and filled it from the tap. He was aware that a large number of his guests were quietly leaving. No one liked magic, especially n the hands of a woman. You never could tell what they might take it into their heads to do next.
“Your milk,” he said, adding, “Miss.”
“I’ve got some money,” Esk said. Granny had always told her: always be ready to pay and you won’t have to, people always like you to feel good about them, it’s all headology.
“No, wouldn’t dream of it,” said Skiller hastily. He leaned over the bar. “If you could see, er, your way clear to turning the rest back, though? Not much call for milk in these parts.”
He sidled along a little way. Esk had leaned the staff against the bar while she drank her milk, and it was making him uncomfortable.
Esk looked at him over a moustache of cream.
“I didn’t turn it into milk, I just knew it would be milk because I wanted milk,” she said. “What did you think it was?”
“Er. Beer.”
Esk thought about this. She vaguely remembered trying beer once, and it had tasted sort of second-hand. But she could recall something which everyone in Bad Ass reckoned was much better than beer. It was one of Granny’s most guarded recipes. It was good for you, because there was only fruit in it, plus lots of freezing and boiling and careful testing of little drops with a lighted flame.
Granny would put a very small spoonful in her milk if it was a really cold night. It had to be a wooden spoon, on account of what it did to metal.
She concentrated. She could picture the taste in her mind, and with the little skills that she was beginning to accept but couldn’t understand she found she could take the taste apart into little coloured shapes ….
Skiller’s thin wife came out of their back room to see why it had all gone so quiet, and he waved her into shocked silence as Esk stood swaying very slightly with her eyes closed and her lips moving .
… little shapes that you didn’t need went back into the great pool of shapes, and then you found the extra ones you needed and put them together, and then there was a sort of hook thing which meant that they would turn anything suitable into something just like them, and then ….
Skiller turned very carefully and regarded the barrel behind him. The smell of the room had changed, he could feel the pure gold sweating gently out of that ancient woodwork.
With some care he took a small glass from his store under the counter and let a few splashes of the dark golden liquid escape from the tap. He looked at it thoughtfully in the lamplight,
turned the glass around methodically, sniffed it a few times, and tossed its contents back in one swallow.
His face remained unchanged, although his eyes went moist and his throat wobbled somewhat. His wife and Esk watched him as a thin beading of sweat broke out on his forehead. Ten seconds passed, and he was obviously out to break some heroic record. There may have been steam curling out of his ears, but that could have been a rumour. His fingers drummed a strange tattoo on the bartop.
At last he swallowed, appeared to reach a decision, turned solemnly to Esk, and said, “Hwarl,ish finish saaarghs ishghs oorgsh?”
His brow wrinkled as he ran the sentence past his mind again and made a second attempt.
“Aargh argh shaah gok?”
He gave up.
“Bharrgsh nargh!”
His wife snorted and took the glass out of his unprotesting hand. She sniffed it. She looked at the barrels, all ten of them. She met his unsteady eye. In a private paradise for two they soundlessly calculated the selling price of six hundred gallons of triple-distilled white mountain peach brandy and ran out of numbers.
Mrs Skiller was quicker on the uptake than her husband. She bent down and smiled at Esk, who was too tired to squint back. It wasn’t a particularly good smile, because Mrs Skiller didn’t get much practice.
“How did you get here, little girl?” she said, in a voice that suggested gingerbread cottages and the slamming of big stove doors.
“I got lost from Granny.”
“And where’s Granny now, dear? " Clang went the oven doors again; it was going to be a tough night for all wanderers in metaphorical forests.
“Just somewhere, I expect.”
“Would you like to go to sleep in a big feather bed, all nice and warm?”
Esk looked at her gratefully, even while vaguely realizing that the woman had a face just like an eager ferret, and nodded.
You’re right. It’s going to take more than a passing woodchopper to sort this out.
Granny, meanwhile, was two streets away. She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn’t.
It has already been mentioned that it is much harder to detect a human mind than, say, the mind of a fox. The human mind, seeing this as some kind of a slur, wants to know why. This is why.
Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they’ve missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, /c/ run away from, and /d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband—and some of those stations aren’t reputable, they’re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.
Granny, trying to locate Esk by mind magic alone, was trying to find a straw in a haystack.
She was not succeeding, but enough blips of sense reached her through the heterodyne wails of a thousand brains all thinking at once to convince her that the world was, indeed, as silly as she had always believed it was.
She met Hilta at the corner of the street. She was carrying her broomstick, the better to conduct an aerial search (with great stealth, however; the men of Ohulan were right behind Stay Long Ointment but drew the line at flying women). She was distraught.
“Not so much as a hint of her,” said Granny.
“Have you been down to the river? She might have fallen in!”
“Then she’d have just fallen out again. Anyway, she can swim. I think she’s hiding, drat her.”
“What are we going to do?”
Granny gave her a withering look. “Hilta Goatfounder, I’m ashamed of you, acting like a cowin. Do I look worried?”
Hilta peered at her.
“You do. A bit. Your lips have gone all thin.”
“I’m just angry, that’s all.”
“Gypsies always come here for the fair, they might have taken her.”
Granny was prepared to believe anything about city folk but here she was on firmer ground.
“Then they’re a lot dafter than I’d give them credit for,” she snapped. “Look, she’s got the staff.”
“What good would that do?” said Hilta, who was close to tears.
“I don’t think you’ve understood anything I’ve told you,” said Granny severely. “All we need to do is go back to your place and wait.”
“What for?”
“The screams or the bangs or the fireballs or whatever,” Granny said vaguely.
“That’s heartless!”
“Oh, I expect they’ve got it coming to them. Come on, you go on ahead and put the kettle on.”
Hilta gave her a mystified look, then climbed on her broom and rose slowly and erratically into the shadows among the chimneys. If broomsticks were cars, this one would be a split window Morris Minor.
Granny watched her go, then stumped along the wet streets after her. She was determined that they wouldn’t get her up in one of those things.
Esk lay in the big, fluffy and slightly damp sheets of the spare bed in the attic room of the Riddle. She was tired, but couldn’t sleep. The bed was too chilly, for one thing. She wondered uneasily if she dared try to warm it up, but thought better of it. She couldn’t seem to get the hang of fire spells, no matter how carefully she experimented. They either didn’t work at all or worked only too well. The woods around the cottage were becoming treacherous with the holes left by disappearing fireballs; at least, if the wizardry thing didn’t work then Granny said she’d have a fine future as a privy builder or well sinker.
She turned over and tried to ignore the bed’s faint smell of mushrooms. Then she reached out in the darkness until her hand found the staff, propped against the bedhead. Mrs Skiller had been quite insistent about taking it downstairs, but Esk had hung on like grim death. It was the only thing in the world she was absolutely certain belonged to her.
The varnished surface with its strange carvings felt oddly comforting. Esk went to sleep, and dreamed bangles, and strange packages, and mountains. And distant stars above the mountains, and a cold desert where strange creatures lurched across the dry sand and stared at her through insect eyes ….
There was a creak on the stairs. Then another. Then a silence, the sort of choking, furry silence made by someone standing as still as possible.
The door swung open. Skiller made a blacker shadow against the candlelight on the stairs, and there was a faintly whispered conversation before he tiptoed as silently as he could towards the bedhead. The staff slipped sideways as his first cautious grope dislodged it, but he caught it quickly and let his breath out very slowly.
So he hardly had enough left to scream with when the staff moved in his hands. He felt the scaliness, the coil and muscle of it ….
Esk sat bolt upright in time to see Skiller roll backwards down the steep stairladder, still flailing desperately at something quite invisible that coiled around his arms. There was another scream from below as he landed on his wife.
The staff clattered to the floor and lay surrounded by a faint octarine glow.
Esk got out of the bed and padded across the floor. There was a terrible cursing; it sounded unhealthy. She peered around the door and looked down on the face of Mrs Skiller.
“Give me that staff!”
Esk reached down behind her and gripped the polished wood. “No,” she said. “It’s mine.”
“It’s not the right sort of thing for little girls,” snapped the barman’s wife.
“It belongs to me,” said Esk, and quietly closed the door. She listened for a moment to the muttering from below and tried to think of what to do next. Turning the couple into something would probably only cause a fuss and, anyway, she wasn’t quite certain how to do it.
The fact was the magic only really worked when she wasn’t thinking about it. Her mind seemed to get in the way.
She padded across the room and pushed open the tiny window. The strange night-time smells of civilization drifted in—the damp smell of streets, the fragrance of garden flowers, the distant hint of an overloaded privy. There were wet tiles outside.
As Skiller started back up the stairs she pushed the staff out on to the roof and crawled after it, steadying herself on the carvings above the window. The roof dipped down to an outhouse and she managed to stay at least vaguely upright as she half-slid, half-scrambled down the uneven tiles. A six-foot drop on to a stack of old barrels, a quick scramble down the slippery wood, and she was trotting easily across the inn yard.
As she kicked up the street mists she could hear the sounds of argument coming from the Riddle.
Skiller rushed past his wife and laid a hand on the tap of the nearest barrel. He paused, and then wrenched it open.
The smell of peach brandy filled the room, sharp as knives. He shut off the flow and relaxed.
“Afraid it would turn into something nasty?” asked his wife. He nodded.
“If you hadn’t been so clumsy—”she began.
“I tell you it bit me!”
“You could have been a wizard and we wouldn’t have to bother with all this. Have you got no ambition?”
Skiller shook his head. “I reckon it takes more than a staff to make a wizard,” he said. “Anyway, I heard where it said wizards aren’t allowed to get married, they’re not even allowed to—” He hesitated.
“To what? Allowed to what?”
Skiller writhed. “Well. You know. Thing.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mrs Skiller briskly.
“No, I suppose not.”
He followed her reluctantly out of the darkened bar-room. It seemed to him that perhaps wizards didn’t have such a bad life, at that.
He was proved right when the following morning revealed that the ten barrels of peach brandy had, indeed, turned into something nasty.
Esk wandered aimlessly through the grey streets until she reached Ohulan’s tiny river docks. Broad flat-bottomed barges bobbed gently against the wharves, and one or two of them curled wisps of smoke from friendly stovepipes. Esk clambered easily on to the nearest, and used the staff to lever up the oilcloth that covered most of it.
A warm smell, a mixture of lanolin and midden, drifted up. The barge was laden with wool.
It’s silly to go to sleep on an unknown barge, not knowing what strange cliffs may be drifting past when you awake, not knowing that bargees traditionally get an early start (setting out before the sun is barely up), not knowing what new horizons might greet one on the morrow ….
You know that. Esk didn’t.
Esk awoke to the sound of someone whistling. She lay quite still, reeling the evening’s events across her mind until she remembered why she was here, and then rolled over very carefully and raised the oilcloth a fraction.
Here she was, then. But “here” had moved.
“This is what they call sailing, then,” she said, watching the far bank glide past, “It doesn’t seem very special.”
It didn’t occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn’t about to act ungrateful.
The distant whistler was joined by a barking dog. Esk lay back in the wool and reached out until she found the animal’s mind, and Borrowed it gently. From its inefficient and disorganised brain she learned that there were at least four people on this barge, and many more on the others that were strung out in line with it on the river. Some of them seemed to be children.
She let the animal go and looked out at the scenery again for a long time—the barge was passing between high orange cliffs now, banded with so many colours of rock it looked as though some hungry God had made the all-time record club sandwich—and tried to avoid the next thought. But it persisted, arriving in her mind like the unexpected limbo dancer under the lavatory door of Life. Sooner or later she would have to go out. It wasn’t her stomach that was pressing the point, but her bladder brooked no delay.
Perhaps if she
The oilcloth over her head was pulled aside swiftly and a big bearded head beamed down at her.
“Well, well,” it said. “What have we here, then? A stowaway, yesno?”
Esk gave it a stare. “Yes,” she said. There seemed no sense in denying it. “Could you help me out please?”
“Aren’t you afraid I shall throw you to the—the pike?” said the head. It noticed her perplexed look. “Big freshwater fish,” it added helpfully. “Fast. Lot of teeth. Pike.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to her at all. “No,” she said truthfully. “Why? Will you?”
“No. Not really. There’s no need to be frightened.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh.” A brown arm appeared, attached to the head by the normal arrangements, and helped her out of her nest in the fleeces.
Esk stood on the deck of the barge and looked around. The sky was bluer than a biscuit barrel, fitting neatly over a broad valley through which the river ran as sluggishly as a planning inquiry.
Behind her the Ramtops still acted as a hitching rail for clouds, but they no longer dominated as they had done for as long as Esk had known them. Distance had eroded them.
“Where’s this?” she said, sniffing the new smells of swamp and sedge.
“The Upper Valley of the River Ankh, " said her captor. “What do you think of it?”
Esk looked up and down the river. It was already much wider than it had been at Ohulan.
“I don’t know. There’s certainly a lot of it. Is this your ship?”
“Boat,” he corrected. He was taller than her father, although not quite so old, and dressed like a gypsy. Most of his teeth had turned gold, but Esk decided it wasn’t the time to ask why. He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day. His brow crinkled.
“Yes, it’s mine,” he said, determined to regain the initiative. “And what are you doing on it, I would like to know? Running away from home, yesno? If you were a boy I’d say are you going to seek your fortune?”
“Can’t girls seek their fortune?”
“I think they’re supposed to seek a boy with a fortune,” said the man, and gave a Zoo-carat grin. He extended a brown hand, heavy with rings. “Come and have some breakfast.”
“I’d actually like to use your privy,” she said. His mouth dropped open.
“This is a barge, yesno?”
“Yes?”
“That means there’s only the river.” He patted her hand. “Don’t worry,” he added. “It’s quite used to it.”
Granny stood on the wharf, her boot tap-tap-tapping on the wood. The little man who was the nearest thing Ohulan had to a dockmaster was being treated to the full force of one of her stares, and was visibly wilting. Her expression wasn’t perhaps as vicious as thumbscrews, but it did seem to suggest that thumbscrews were a real possibility.
“They left before dawn, you say,” she said.
“Yes-ss,” he said. “Er. I didn’t know they weren’t supposed to.”
“Did you see a little girl on board?” Tap-tap went her boot.
“Um. No. I’m sorry.” He brightened. “They were Zoons,” he said; “If the child was with them she won’t come to harm. You can always trust a Zoon, they say. Very keen on family life.”
Granny turned to Hilta, who was fluttering like a bewildered butterfly, and raised her eyebrows.
“Oh, yes,” Hilta trilled. “The Zoons have a very good name.”
“Mmph,” said Granny. She turned on her heel and stumped back towards the centre of the town. The dockmaster sagged as though a coathanger had just been removed from his shirt.
Hilta’s lodgings were over a herbalist’s and behind a tannery, and offered splendid views of the rooftops of Ohulan. She liked it because it offered privacy, always appreciated by, as she put it, “my more discerning clients who prefer to make their very special purchases in an atmosphere of calm where discretion is forever the watchword".
Granny Weatherwax looked around the sitting room with barelyconcealed scorn. There were altogether too many tassels, bead curtains, astrological charts and black cats in the place. Granny couldn’t abide cats. She sniffed.
“Is that the tannery?” she said accusingly.
“Incense,” said Hilta. She rallied bravely in the face of Granny’s scorn. “The customers appreciate it,” she said. “It puts them in the right frame of mind. You know how it is.”
“I would have thought one could carry out a perfectly respectable business, Hilta, without resorting to parlour tricks,” said Granny, sitting down and beginning the long and tricky business of removing her hatpins.
“It’s different in towns,” said Hilta. “One has to move with the times.”
“I’m sure I don’t know why. Is the kettle on?” Granny reached across the table and took the velvet cover off Hilta’s crystal ball, a sphere of quartz as big as her head.
“Never could get the hang of this damn silicon stuff,” she said. “A bowl of water with a drop of ink in it was good enough when I was a girl. Let’s see, now …”
She peered into the dancing heart of the ball, trying to use it to focus her mind on the whereabouts of Esk. A crystal was a tricky thing to use at the best of times, and usually staring into it meant that the one thing the future could be guaranteed to hold was a severe migraine. Granny distrusted them, considering them to smack of wizardry; for two pins, it always seemed to her, the wretched thing would suck your mind out like a whelk from a shell.
“Damn thing’s all sparkly,” she said, huffing on it and wiping it with her sleeve. Hilta peered over her shoulder.
“That’s not sparkle, that means something,” she said slowly.
“What?”
“I’m not sure. Can I try? It’s used to me.” Hilta pushed a cat off the other chair and leaned forward to peer into the glass depths.
“Mnph. Feel free,” said Granny, “but you won’t find—”
“Wait. Something’s coming through.”
“Looks all sparkly from here,” Granny insisted. “Little silver lights all floating around, like in them little snowstorm-in-abottle toys. Quite pretty, really.”
“Yes, but look beyond the flakes …”
Granny looked.
This was what she saw.
The viewpoint was very high up and a wide swathe of country lay below her, blue with distance, through which a broad river wriggled like a drunken snake. There were silver lights floating in the foreground but they were, in a manner of speaking, just a few flakes in the great storm of lights that turned in a great lazy spiral, like a geriatric tornado with a bad attack of snow, and funnelled down, down to the hazy landscape. By screwing up her eyes Granny could just make out some dots on the river.
Occasionally some sort of lighting would sparkle briefly inside the gently turning funnel of motes.
Granny blinked and looked up. The room seemed very dark.
“Odd sort of weather,” she said, because she couldn’t really think of anything better. Even with her eyes shut the glittering motes still danced across her vision.
“I don’t think it’s weather,” said Hilta. “I don’t actually think people can see it, but the crystal shows it. I think it’s magic, condensing out of the air.”
“Into the staff?”
“Yes. That’s what a wizard’s staff does. It sort of distils magic.”
Granny risked another glance at the crystal.
“Into Esk,” she said, carefully.
“Yes.”
“There looks like quite a lot of it.”
“Yes.”
Not for the first time, Granny wished she knew more about how wizards worked their magic. She had a vision of Esk filling up with magic, until every tissue and pore was bloated with the stuff. Then it would start leaking—slowly at first, arcing to ground in little bursts, but then building up to a great discharge of occult potentiality. It could do all kinds of damage.
“Drat,” she said. “I never did like that staff.”
“At least she’s heading towards the University place,” said Hilta. “They’ll know what to do.”
“That’s as may be. How far down river do you reckon they are?”
“Twenty miles or so. Those barges only go at walking pace. The Zoons aren’t in any hurry.”
“Right.” Granny stood up, her jaw set defiantly. She reached for her hat and picked up her sack of possessions.
“Reckon I can walk faster than a barge,” she said. “The river’s all bendy but I can go in straight lines.”
“You’re going to walk after her?” said Hilta, aghast. “But there’s forests and wild animals!”
“Good, I could do with getting back to civilisation. She needs me. That staff is taking over. I said it would, but did anyone listen?”
“Did they?” said Hilta, still trying to work out what Granny meant by getting back to civilisation.
“No,” said Granny coldly.
His name was Amschat B’hal Zoon. He lived on the raft with his three wives and three children. He was a Liar.
What always annoyed the enemies of the Zoon tribe was not simply their honesty, which was infuriatingly absolute, but their total directness of approach. The Zoons had never heard about a euphemism, and wouldn’t understand what to do with it if they had one, except that they would certainly have called it “a nice way of saying something nasty".
Their rigid adherence to the truth was apparently not enjoined on them by a god, as is usually the case, but appeared to have a genetic base. The average Zoon could no more tell a lie than breathe underwater and, in fact, the very concept was enough to upset them considerably; telling a Lie meant no less than totally altering the universe.
This was something of a drawback to a trading race and so, over the millennia, the elders of the Zoon studied this strange power that everyone else had in such abundance and decided that they should possess it too.
Young men who showed faint signs of having such a talent were encouraged, on special ceremonial occasions, to bend the Truth ever further on a competitive basis. The first recorded Zoon proto-lie was: “Actually my grandfather is quite tall,” but eventually they got the hang of it and the office of tribal Liar was instituted.
It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, which the average Zoon long ago gave up trying to understand. Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars.
Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer". They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.
“Is all that true?” said Esk suspiciously, looking around the barge’s crowded cabin.
“No,” said Amschat firmly. His junior wife, who was cooking porridge over a tiny ornate stove, giggled. His three children watched Esk solemnly over the edge of the table.
“Don’t you ever tell the truth?”
“Do you?” Amschat grinned his goldmine grin, but his eyes were not smiling. “Why do I find you on my fleeces? Amschat is no kidnapper. There will be people at home who will worry, yesno?”
“I expect Granny will come looking for me,” said Esk, “but I don’t think she will worry much. Just be angry, I expect. Anyway, I’m going to Ankh-Morpork. You can put me off the ship—”
“—boat—”
“—if you like. I don’t mind about the pike.”
“I can’t do that,” said Amschat.
“Was that a lie?”
“No! There is wild country around us, robbers and—things.”
Esk nodded brightly. “That’s settled, then,” she said. “I don’t mind sleeping in the fleeces. And I can pay my way. I can do—” She hesitated; her unfinished sentence hung like a little curl of crystal in the air while discretion made a successful bid for control of her tongue. “—helpful things,” she finished lamely.
She was aware that Amschat was looking slightly sideways at his senior wife, who was sewing by the stove. By Zoon tradition she wore nothing but black. Granny would have thoroughly approved.
“What sort of helpful things?” he asked. “Washing and sweeping, yesno?”
“If you like,” said Esk, “or distillation using the bifold or triple alembic, the making of varnishes, glazes, creams, zuumchats and punes, the rendering of waxes, the manufacture of candles, the proper selection of seeds, roots and cuttings, and most preparations from the Eighty Marvellous Herbs; I can spin, card, rett, Hallow and weave on the hand, frame, harp and Noble looms and I can knit if people start the wool on for me, I can read soil and rock, do carpentry up to the three-way mortise and tenon, predict weather by means of beastsign and skyreck, make increase in bees, brew five types of mead, make dyes and mordants and pigments, including a fast blue, I can do most types of whitesmithing, mend boots, cure and fashion most leathers, and if you have any goats I can look after them. I like goats.”
Amschat looked at her thoughtfully. She felt she was expected to continue.
“Granny never likes to see people sitting around doing nothing,” she offered. “She always says a girl who is good with her hands will never want for a living,” she added, by way of further explanation.
“Or a husband, I expect,” nodded Amschat, weakly.
“Actually, Granny had a lot to say about that—”
“I bet she did,” said Amschat. He looked at the senior wife, who nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Very well,” he said. “If you can make yourself useful you can stay. And can you play a musical instrument?”
Esk returned his steady gaze, not batting an eyelid. “Probably.”
And so Esk, with the minimum of difficulty and only a little regret, left the Ramtops and their weather and joined the Zoons on their great trading journey down the Ankh.
There were at least thirty barges with at least one sprawling Zoon family on each, and no two vessels appeared to be carrying the same cargo; most of them were strung together, and the Zoons simply hauled on the cable and stepped on to the next deck if they fancied a bit of socialising.
Esk set up home in the fleeces. It was warm, smelled slightly of Granny’s cottage and, much more important, meant that she was undisturbed.
She was getting a bit worried about magic.
It was definitely getting out of control. She wasn’t doing magic, it was just happening around her. And she sensed that people probably wouldn’t be too happy if they knew.
It meant that if she washed up she had to clatter and splash at length to conceal the fact that the dishes were cleaning themselves. If she did some darning she had to do it on some private part of the deck to conceal the fact that the edges of the hole ravelled themselves together as if . . . as if by magic. Then she woke up on the second day of her voyage to find that several of the fleeces around the spot where she had hidden the staff had combed, carded and spun themselves into neat skeins during the night.
She put all thoughts of lighting fires out of her head.
There were compensations, though. Every sluggish turn of the great brown river brought new scenes. There were dark stretches hemmed in with deep forest, through which the barges traveled in the dead centre of the river with the men armed and the women below—except for Esk, who sat listening with interest to the snortings and sneezings that followed them through the bushes on the banks. There were stretches of farmland. There were several towns much larger than Ohulan. There were even some mountains, although they were old and flat and not young and frisky like her mountains. Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.
The barges stopped at some of the towns. By tradition only the men went ashore, and only Amschat, wearing his ceremonial Lying hat, spoke to non-Zoons. Esk usually went with him. He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.
Anyway, it seemed to Amschat that when Esk was with him he always got a very good price. There was something about a small child squinting determinedly at them from behind his legs that made even market-hardened merchants hastily conclude their business.
In fact, it began to worry him. When a market broker in the walled town of Zemphis offered him a bag of ultramarines in exchange for a hundred fleeces a voice from the level of his pockets said: “They’re not ultramarines.”
“Listen to the child!” said the broker, grinning. Amschat solemnly held one of the stones to his eye.
“I am listening,” he said, “and they do indeed look like ultramarines. They have the glit and shimmy.”
Esk shook her head. “They’re just spircles,” she said. She said it without thinking, and regretted it immediately as both men turned to stare at her.
Amschat turned the stone over in his palm. Putting the chameleon spircle stones into a box with some real gems so that they appeared to change their hue was a traditional trick, but these had the true inner blue fire. He looked up sharply at the broker. Amschat had been finely trained in the art of the Lie. He recognised the subtle signs, now that he came to think about it.
“There seems to be a doubt,” he said, “but ’tis easily resolved, we need only take them to the assayer in Pine Street because the world knows that spircles will dissolve in hypactic fluid, yesno?”
The broker hesitated. Amschat had changed position slightly, and the set of his muscles suggested that any sudden movement on the broker’s part would see him flat in the dust. And that damn child was squinting at him as though she could see through to the back of his mind. His nerve broke.
“I regret this unfortunate dispute,” he said. “I had accepted the stones as ultramarines in good faith but rather than cause disharmony between us I will ask you to accept them as—as a gift, and for the fleeces may I offer this roseatte of the first sorting?”
He took a small red stone from a tiny velvet pouch. Amschat hardly looked at it but, without taking his eyes off the man, passed it down to Esk. She nodded.
When the merchant had hurried off Amschat took Esk’s hand and half-dragged her to the assayer’s stall, which was little more than a niche in the wall. The old man took the smallest of the blue stones, listened to Amschat’s hurried explanation, poured out a saucerful of hypactic fluid and dropped the stone in. It frothed into nothingness.
“Very interesting,” he said. He took another stone in a tweezer and examined it under a glass.
“They are indeed spircles, but remarkably fine specimens in their own right,” he concluded. “They are by no means worthless, and I for example would be prepared to offer you—is there something wrong with the little girl’s eyes?”
Amschat nudged Esk, who stopped trying out another Look.
“—I would offer you, shall we say, two zats of silver?”
“Shall we say five?” said Amschat pleasantly.
“And I would like to keep one of the stones,” said Esk. The old man threw up his hands.
“But they are mere curios!” he said. “Of value only to a collector!”
“A collector may yet sell them to an unsuspecting purchaser as finest roseattes or ultramarines,” said Amschat, “especially if he was the only assayer in town.”
The assayer grumbled a bit at this, but at last they settled on three zats and one of the spircles on a thin silver chain for Esk.
When they were out of earshot Amschat handed her the tiny silver coins and said: “These are yours. You have earned them. But—” he hunkered down so that his eyes were on a level with hers, “—you must tell me how you knew the stones were false.”
He looked worried, but Esk sensed that he wouldn’t really like the truth. Magic made people uncomfortable. He wouldn’t like it if she said simply: spircles are spircles and ultramarines are ultramarines, and though you may think they look the same that is because most people don’t use their eyes in the right way. Nothing can entirely disguise its true nature.
Instead she said: “The dwarves mine spircles near the village where I was born, and you soon learn to see how they bend light in a funny way.”
Amschat looked into her eyes for some time. Then he shrugged.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Well, I have some further business here. Why don’t you buy yourself some new clothes, or something? I’d warn you against unscrupulous traders but, somehow, I don’t know, I don’t think you will have any trouble.”
Esk nodded. Amschat strode off through the market place. At the first corner he turned, looked at her thoughtfully, and then disappeared among the crowds.
Well, that’s the end of sailing, Esk told herself. He’s not quite sure but he’s going to be watching me now and before I know what’s happening the staff will be taken away and there’ll be all sorts of trouble. Why does everyone get so upset about magic?
She gave a philosophical sigh and set about exploring the possibilities of the town.
There was the question of the staff, though. Esk had rammed it deep among the fleeces, which were not going to be unloaded yet. If she went back for it people would start asking questions, and she didn’t know the answers.
She found a convenient alleyway and scuttled down it until a deep doorway gave her the privacy she required.
If going back was out of the question then only one thing remained. She held out a hand and closed her eyes.
She knew exactly what she wanted to do-it lay in front of her eyes. The staff mustn’t come flying through the air, wrecking the barge and drawing attention to itself. All she wanted, she told herself, was for there to be a slight change in the way the world was organised. It shouldn’t be a world where the staff was in the fleeces, it should be a world where it was in her hand. A tiny change, an infinitesimal alteration to the Way Things Were.
If Esk had been properly trained in wizardry she would have known that this was impossible. All wizards knew how to move things about, starting with protons and working upwards, but the important thing about moving something from A to Z, according to basic physics, was that at some point it should pass through the rest of the alphabet. The only way one could cause something to vanish at A and appear at Z would be to shuffle the whole of Reality sideways. The problems this would cause didn’t bear thinking about.
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.
As Esk tried to work out how to move the staff the ripples spread out in the magical ether, changing the Discworld in thousands of tiny ways. Most went entirely unnoticed. Perhaps a few grains of sand lay on their beaches in a slightly different position, or the occasional leaf hung on its tree in a marginally different way. But then the wavefront of probability struck the edge of Reality and rebounded like the slosh off the side of the pond which, meeting the laggard ripples coming the other way, caused small but important whirlpools in the very fabric of existence. You can have whirlpools in the fabric of existence, because it is a very strange fabric.
Esk was completely ignorant of all this, of course, but was quite satisfied when the staff dropped out of thin air into her hand.
It felt warm.
She looked at it for some time. She felt that she ought to do something about it; it was too big, too distinctive, too inconvenient. It attracted attention.
“If I’m taking you to Ankh-Morpork,” she said thoughtfully, “You’ve got to go in disguise.”
A few late flickers of magic played around the staff, and then it went dark.
Eventually Esk solved the immediate problem by finding a stall in the main Zemphis marketplace that sold broomsticks, buying the largest, carrying it back to her doorway, removing the handle and ramming the staff deep into the birch twigs. It didn’t seem right to treat a noble object in this way, and she silently apologised to it.
It made a difference, anyway. No one looked twice at a small girl carrying a broom.
There was a doorway ahead of her that looked friendly. Cheerful sounds were sliding out on the yellow light, and pooling on the cobbles. With the staff still radiating random magic like a demon lighthouse she headed for it, weary but determined.
The landlord of The Fiddler’s Riddle considered himself to be a man of the world, and this was right, because he was too stupid to be really cruel, and too lazy to be really mean and although his body had been around quite a lot his mind had never gone further than the inside of his own head.
He wasn’t used to being addressed by sticks. Especially when they spoke in a small piping voice, and asked for goat’s milk.
Cautiously, aware that everyone in the inn was looking at him and grinning, he pulled himself across the bar top until he could see down. Esk stared up at him. Look ’em right in the eye, Granny had always said: focus your power on ’em, stare ’em out, no one can outstare a witch, ’cept a goat, of course.
The landlord, whose name was Skiller, found himself looking directly down at a small child who seemed to be squinting.
“What?” he said.
“Milk,” said the child, still focussing furiously. “You get it out of goats. You know?”
Skiller sold only beer, which his customers claimed he got out of cats. No self-respecting goat would have endured the smell in the Fiddler’s Riddle.
“We haven’t got any,” he said. He looked hard at the staff and his eyebrows met conspiratorially over his nose.
“You could have a look,” said Esk.
Skiller eased himself back across the bar, partly to avoid the gaze, which was causing his eyes to water in sympathy, and partly because a horrible suspicion was congealing in his mind.
Even second-rate barmen tend to resonate with the beer they serve, and the vibrations coming from the big barrels behind him no longer had the twang of hop and head. They were broadcasting an altogether more lactic note.
He turned a tap experimentally, and watched a thin stream of milk curdle in the drip bucket.
The staff still poked up over the edge of the counter, like a periscope. He could swear that it was staring at him too.
“Don’t waste it,” said a voice. “You’ll be grateful for it one day.”
It was the same tone of voice Granny used when Esk was less than enthusiastic about a plateful of nourishing sallet greens, boiled yellow until the last few vitamins gave in, but to Skiller’s hypersensitive ears it wasn’t an injunction but a prediction. He shivered. He didn’t know where he would have to be to make him grateful for a drink of ancient beer and curdled milk. He’d rather be dead first.
Perhaps he would be dead first.
He very carefully wiped a nearly clean mug with his thumb and filled it from the tap. He was aware that a large number of his guests were quietly leaving. No one liked magic, especially n the hands of a woman. You never could tell what they might take it into their heads to do next.
“Your milk,” he said, adding, “Miss.”
“I’ve got some money,” Esk said. Granny had always told her: always be ready to pay and you won’t have to, people always like you to feel good about them, it’s all headology.
“No, wouldn’t dream of it,” said Skiller hastily. He leaned over the bar. “If you could see, er, your way clear to turning the rest back, though? Not much call for milk in these parts.”
He sidled along a little way. Esk had leaned the staff against the bar while she drank her milk, and it was making him uncomfortable.
Esk looked at him over a moustache of cream.
“I didn’t turn it into milk, I just knew it would be milk because I wanted milk,” she said. “What did you think it was?”
“Er. Beer.”
Esk thought about this. She vaguely remembered trying beer once, and it had tasted sort of second-hand. But she could recall something which everyone in Bad Ass reckoned was much better than beer. It was one of Granny’s most guarded recipes. It was good for you, because there was only fruit in it, plus lots of freezing and boiling and careful testing of little drops with a lighted flame.
Granny would put a very small spoonful in her milk if it was a really cold night. It had to be a wooden spoon, on account of what it did to metal.
She concentrated. She could picture the taste in her mind, and with the little skills that she was beginning to accept but couldn’t understand she found she could take the taste apart into little coloured shapes ….
Skiller’s thin wife came out of their back room to see why it had all gone so quiet, and he waved her into shocked silence as Esk stood swaying very slightly with her eyes closed and her lips moving .
… little shapes that you didn’t need went back into the great pool of shapes, and then you found the extra ones you needed and put them together, and then there was a sort of hook thing which meant that they would turn anything suitable into something just like them, and then ….
Skiller turned very carefully and regarded the barrel behind him. The smell of the room had changed, he could feel the pure gold sweating gently out of that ancient woodwork.
With some care he took a small glass from his store under the counter and let a few splashes of the dark golden liquid escape from the tap. He looked at it thoughtfully in the lamplight,
turned the glass around methodically, sniffed it a few times, and tossed its contents back in one swallow.
His face remained unchanged, although his eyes went moist and his throat wobbled somewhat. His wife and Esk watched him as a thin beading of sweat broke out on his forehead. Ten seconds passed, and he was obviously out to break some heroic record. There may have been steam curling out of his ears, but that could have been a rumour. His fingers drummed a strange tattoo on the bartop.
At last he swallowed, appeared to reach a decision, turned solemnly to Esk, and said, “Hwarl,ish finish saaarghs ishghs oorgsh?”
His brow wrinkled as he ran the sentence past his mind again and made a second attempt.
“Aargh argh shaah gok?”
He gave up.
“Bharrgsh nargh!”
His wife snorted and took the glass out of his unprotesting hand. She sniffed it. She looked at the barrels, all ten of them. She met his unsteady eye. In a private paradise for two they soundlessly calculated the selling price of six hundred gallons of triple-distilled white mountain peach brandy and ran out of numbers.
Mrs Skiller was quicker on the uptake than her husband. She bent down and smiled at Esk, who was too tired to squint back. It wasn’t a particularly good smile, because Mrs Skiller didn’t get much practice.
“How did you get here, little girl?” she said, in a voice that suggested gingerbread cottages and the slamming of big stove doors.
“I got lost from Granny.”
“And where’s Granny now, dear? " Clang went the oven doors again; it was going to be a tough night for all wanderers in metaphorical forests.
“Just somewhere, I expect.”
“Would you like to go to sleep in a big feather bed, all nice and warm?”
Esk looked at her gratefully, even while vaguely realizing that the woman had a face just like an eager ferret, and nodded.
You’re right. It’s going to take more than a passing woodchopper to sort this out.
Granny, meanwhile, was two streets away. She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn’t.
It has already been mentioned that it is much harder to detect a human mind than, say, the mind of a fox. The human mind, seeing this as some kind of a slur, wants to know why. This is why.
Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they’ve missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, /c/ run away from, and /d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband—and some of those stations aren’t reputable, they’re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.
Granny, trying to locate Esk by mind magic alone, was trying to find a straw in a haystack.
She was not succeeding, but enough blips of sense reached her through the heterodyne wails of a thousand brains all thinking at once to convince her that the world was, indeed, as silly as she had always believed it was.
She met Hilta at the corner of the street. She was carrying her broomstick, the better to conduct an aerial search (with great stealth, however; the men of Ohulan were right behind Stay Long Ointment but drew the line at flying women). She was distraught.
“Not so much as a hint of her,” said Granny.
“Have you been down to the river? She might have fallen in!”
“Then she’d have just fallen out again. Anyway, she can swim. I think she’s hiding, drat her.”
“What are we going to do?”
Granny gave her a withering look. “Hilta Goatfounder, I’m ashamed of you, acting like a cowin. Do I look worried?”
Hilta peered at her.
“You do. A bit. Your lips have gone all thin.”
“I’m just angry, that’s all.”
“Gypsies always come here for the fair, they might have taken her.”
Granny was prepared to believe anything about city folk but here she was on firmer ground.
“Then they’re a lot dafter than I’d give them credit for,” she snapped. “Look, she’s got the staff.”
“What good would that do?” said Hilta, who was close to tears.
“I don’t think you’ve understood anything I’ve told you,” said Granny severely. “All we need to do is go back to your place and wait.”
“What for?”
“The screams or the bangs or the fireballs or whatever,” Granny said vaguely.
“That’s heartless!”
“Oh, I expect they’ve got it coming to them. Come on, you go on ahead and put the kettle on.”
Hilta gave her a mystified look, then climbed on her broom and rose slowly and erratically into the shadows among the chimneys. If broomsticks were cars, this one would be a split window Morris Minor.
Granny watched her go, then stumped along the wet streets after her. She was determined that they wouldn’t get her up in one of those things.
Esk lay in the big, fluffy and slightly damp sheets of the spare bed in the attic room of the Riddle. She was tired, but couldn’t sleep. The bed was too chilly, for one thing. She wondered uneasily if she dared try to warm it up, but thought better of it. She couldn’t seem to get the hang of fire spells, no matter how carefully she experimented. They either didn’t work at all or worked only too well. The woods around the cottage were becoming treacherous with the holes left by disappearing fireballs; at least, if the wizardry thing didn’t work then Granny said she’d have a fine future as a privy builder or well sinker.
She turned over and tried to ignore the bed’s faint smell of mushrooms. Then she reached out in the darkness until her hand found the staff, propped against the bedhead. Mrs Skiller had been quite insistent about taking it downstairs, but Esk had hung on like grim death. It was the only thing in the world she was absolutely certain belonged to her.
The varnished surface with its strange carvings felt oddly comforting. Esk went to sleep, and dreamed bangles, and strange packages, and mountains. And distant stars above the mountains, and a cold desert where strange creatures lurched across the dry sand and stared at her through insect eyes ….
There was a creak on the stairs. Then another. Then a silence, the sort of choking, furry silence made by someone standing as still as possible.
The door swung open. Skiller made a blacker shadow against the candlelight on the stairs, and there was a faintly whispered conversation before he tiptoed as silently as he could towards the bedhead. The staff slipped sideways as his first cautious grope dislodged it, but he caught it quickly and let his breath out very slowly.
So he hardly had enough left to scream with when the staff moved in his hands. He felt the scaliness, the coil and muscle of it ….
Esk sat bolt upright in time to see Skiller roll backwards down the steep stairladder, still flailing desperately at something quite invisible that coiled around his arms. There was another scream from below as he landed on his wife.
The staff clattered to the floor and lay surrounded by a faint octarine glow.
Esk got out of the bed and padded across the floor. There was a terrible cursing; it sounded unhealthy. She peered around the door and looked down on the face of Mrs Skiller.
“Give me that staff!”
Esk reached down behind her and gripped the polished wood. “No,” she said. “It’s mine.”
“It’s not the right sort of thing for little girls,” snapped the barman’s wife.
“It belongs to me,” said Esk, and quietly closed the door. She listened for a moment to the muttering from below and tried to think of what to do next. Turning the couple into something would probably only cause a fuss and, anyway, she wasn’t quite certain how to do it.
The fact was the magic only really worked when she wasn’t thinking about it. Her mind seemed to get in the way.
She padded across the room and pushed open the tiny window. The strange night-time smells of civilization drifted in—the damp smell of streets, the fragrance of garden flowers, the distant hint of an overloaded privy. There were wet tiles outside.
As Skiller started back up the stairs she pushed the staff out on to the roof and crawled after it, steadying herself on the carvings above the window. The roof dipped down to an outhouse and she managed to stay at least vaguely upright as she half-slid, half-scrambled down the uneven tiles. A six-foot drop on to a stack of old barrels, a quick scramble down the slippery wood, and she was trotting easily across the inn yard.
As she kicked up the street mists she could hear the sounds of argument coming from the Riddle.
Skiller rushed past his wife and laid a hand on the tap of the nearest barrel. He paused, and then wrenched it open.
The smell of peach brandy filled the room, sharp as knives. He shut off the flow and relaxed.
“Afraid it would turn into something nasty?” asked his wife. He nodded.
“If you hadn’t been so clumsy—”she began.
“I tell you it bit me!”
“You could have been a wizard and we wouldn’t have to bother with all this. Have you got no ambition?”
Skiller shook his head. “I reckon it takes more than a staff to make a wizard,” he said. “Anyway, I heard where it said wizards aren’t allowed to get married, they’re not even allowed to—” He hesitated.
“To what? Allowed to what?”
Skiller writhed. “Well. You know. Thing.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mrs Skiller briskly.
“No, I suppose not.”
He followed her reluctantly out of the darkened bar-room. It seemed to him that perhaps wizards didn’t have such a bad life, at that.
He was proved right when the following morning revealed that the ten barrels of peach brandy had, indeed, turned into something nasty.
Esk wandered aimlessly through the grey streets until she reached Ohulan’s tiny river docks. Broad flat-bottomed barges bobbed gently against the wharves, and one or two of them curled wisps of smoke from friendly stovepipes. Esk clambered easily on to the nearest, and used the staff to lever up the oilcloth that covered most of it.
A warm smell, a mixture of lanolin and midden, drifted up. The barge was laden with wool.
It’s silly to go to sleep on an unknown barge, not knowing what strange cliffs may be drifting past when you awake, not knowing that bargees traditionally get an early start (setting out before the sun is barely up), not knowing what new horizons might greet one on the morrow ….
You know that. Esk didn’t.
Esk awoke to the sound of someone whistling. She lay quite still, reeling the evening’s events across her mind until she remembered why she was here, and then rolled over very carefully and raised the oilcloth a fraction.
Here she was, then. But “here” had moved.
“This is what they call sailing, then,” she said, watching the far bank glide past, “It doesn’t seem very special.”
It didn’t occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn’t about to act ungrateful.
The distant whistler was joined by a barking dog. Esk lay back in the wool and reached out until she found the animal’s mind, and Borrowed it gently. From its inefficient and disorganised brain she learned that there were at least four people on this barge, and many more on the others that were strung out in line with it on the river. Some of them seemed to be children.
She let the animal go and looked out at the scenery again for a long time—the barge was passing between high orange cliffs now, banded with so many colours of rock it looked as though some hungry God had made the all-time record club sandwich—and tried to avoid the next thought. But it persisted, arriving in her mind like the unexpected limbo dancer under the lavatory door of Life. Sooner or later she would have to go out. It wasn’t her stomach that was pressing the point, but her bladder brooked no delay.
Perhaps if she
The oilcloth over her head was pulled aside swiftly and a big bearded head beamed down at her.
“Well, well,” it said. “What have we here, then? A stowaway, yesno?”
Esk gave it a stare. “Yes,” she said. There seemed no sense in denying it. “Could you help me out please?”
“Aren’t you afraid I shall throw you to the—the pike?” said the head. It noticed her perplexed look. “Big freshwater fish,” it added helpfully. “Fast. Lot of teeth. Pike.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to her at all. “No,” she said truthfully. “Why? Will you?”
“No. Not really. There’s no need to be frightened.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh.” A brown arm appeared, attached to the head by the normal arrangements, and helped her out of her nest in the fleeces.
Esk stood on the deck of the barge and looked around. The sky was bluer than a biscuit barrel, fitting neatly over a broad valley through which the river ran as sluggishly as a planning inquiry.
Behind her the Ramtops still acted as a hitching rail for clouds, but they no longer dominated as they had done for as long as Esk had known them. Distance had eroded them.
“Where’s this?” she said, sniffing the new smells of swamp and sedge.
“The Upper Valley of the River Ankh, " said her captor. “What do you think of it?”
Esk looked up and down the river. It was already much wider than it had been at Ohulan.
“I don’t know. There’s certainly a lot of it. Is this your ship?”
“Boat,” he corrected. He was taller than her father, although not quite so old, and dressed like a gypsy. Most of his teeth had turned gold, but Esk decided it wasn’t the time to ask why. He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day. His brow crinkled.
“Yes, it’s mine,” he said, determined to regain the initiative. “And what are you doing on it, I would like to know? Running away from home, yesno? If you were a boy I’d say are you going to seek your fortune?”
“Can’t girls seek their fortune?”
“I think they’re supposed to seek a boy with a fortune,” said the man, and gave a Zoo-carat grin. He extended a brown hand, heavy with rings. “Come and have some breakfast.”
“I’d actually like to use your privy,” she said. His mouth dropped open.
“This is a barge, yesno?”
“Yes?”
“That means there’s only the river.” He patted her hand. “Don’t worry,” he added. “It’s quite used to it.”
Granny stood on the wharf, her boot tap-tap-tapping on the wood. The little man who was the nearest thing Ohulan had to a dockmaster was being treated to the full force of one of her stares, and was visibly wilting. Her expression wasn’t perhaps as vicious as thumbscrews, but it did seem to suggest that thumbscrews were a real possibility.
“They left before dawn, you say,” she said.
“Yes-ss,” he said. “Er. I didn’t know they weren’t supposed to.”
“Did you see a little girl on board?” Tap-tap went her boot.
“Um. No. I’m sorry.” He brightened. “They were Zoons,” he said; “If the child was with them she won’t come to harm. You can always trust a Zoon, they say. Very keen on family life.”
Granny turned to Hilta, who was fluttering like a bewildered butterfly, and raised her eyebrows.
“Oh, yes,” Hilta trilled. “The Zoons have a very good name.”
“Mmph,” said Granny. She turned on her heel and stumped back towards the centre of the town. The dockmaster sagged as though a coathanger had just been removed from his shirt.
Hilta’s lodgings were over a herbalist’s and behind a tannery, and offered splendid views of the rooftops of Ohulan. She liked it because it offered privacy, always appreciated by, as she put it, “my more discerning clients who prefer to make their very special purchases in an atmosphere of calm where discretion is forever the watchword".
Granny Weatherwax looked around the sitting room with barelyconcealed scorn. There were altogether too many tassels, bead curtains, astrological charts and black cats in the place. Granny couldn’t abide cats. She sniffed.
“Is that the tannery?” she said accusingly.
“Incense,” said Hilta. She rallied bravely in the face of Granny’s scorn. “The customers appreciate it,” she said. “It puts them in the right frame of mind. You know how it is.”
“I would have thought one could carry out a perfectly respectable business, Hilta, without resorting to parlour tricks,” said Granny, sitting down and beginning the long and tricky business of removing her hatpins.
“It’s different in towns,” said Hilta. “One has to move with the times.”
“I’m sure I don’t know why. Is the kettle on?” Granny reached across the table and took the velvet cover off Hilta’s crystal ball, a sphere of quartz as big as her head.
“Never could get the hang of this damn silicon stuff,” she said. “A bowl of water with a drop of ink in it was good enough when I was a girl. Let’s see, now …”
She peered into the dancing heart of the ball, trying to use it to focus her mind on the whereabouts of Esk. A crystal was a tricky thing to use at the best of times, and usually staring into it meant that the one thing the future could be guaranteed to hold was a severe migraine. Granny distrusted them, considering them to smack of wizardry; for two pins, it always seemed to her, the wretched thing would suck your mind out like a whelk from a shell.
“Damn thing’s all sparkly,” she said, huffing on it and wiping it with her sleeve. Hilta peered over her shoulder.
“That’s not sparkle, that means something,” she said slowly.
“What?”
“I’m not sure. Can I try? It’s used to me.” Hilta pushed a cat off the other chair and leaned forward to peer into the glass depths.
“Mnph. Feel free,” said Granny, “but you won’t find—”
“Wait. Something’s coming through.”
“Looks all sparkly from here,” Granny insisted. “Little silver lights all floating around, like in them little snowstorm-in-abottle toys. Quite pretty, really.”
“Yes, but look beyond the flakes …”
Granny looked.
This was what she saw.
The viewpoint was very high up and a wide swathe of country lay below her, blue with distance, through which a broad river wriggled like a drunken snake. There were silver lights floating in the foreground but they were, in a manner of speaking, just a few flakes in the great storm of lights that turned in a great lazy spiral, like a geriatric tornado with a bad attack of snow, and funnelled down, down to the hazy landscape. By screwing up her eyes Granny could just make out some dots on the river.
Occasionally some sort of lighting would sparkle briefly inside the gently turning funnel of motes.
Granny blinked and looked up. The room seemed very dark.
“Odd sort of weather,” she said, because she couldn’t really think of anything better. Even with her eyes shut the glittering motes still danced across her vision.
“I don’t think it’s weather,” said Hilta. “I don’t actually think people can see it, but the crystal shows it. I think it’s magic, condensing out of the air.”
“Into the staff?”
“Yes. That’s what a wizard’s staff does. It sort of distils magic.”
Granny risked another glance at the crystal.
“Into Esk,” she said, carefully.
“Yes.”
“There looks like quite a lot of it.”
“Yes.”
Not for the first time, Granny wished she knew more about how wizards worked their magic. She had a vision of Esk filling up with magic, until every tissue and pore was bloated with the stuff. Then it would start leaking—slowly at first, arcing to ground in little bursts, but then building up to a great discharge of occult potentiality. It could do all kinds of damage.
“Drat,” she said. “I never did like that staff.”
“At least she’s heading towards the University place,” said Hilta. “They’ll know what to do.”
“That’s as may be. How far down river do you reckon they are?”
“Twenty miles or so. Those barges only go at walking pace. The Zoons aren’t in any hurry.”
“Right.” Granny stood up, her jaw set defiantly. She reached for her hat and picked up her sack of possessions.
“Reckon I can walk faster than a barge,” she said. “The river’s all bendy but I can go in straight lines.”
“You’re going to walk after her?” said Hilta, aghast. “But there’s forests and wild animals!”
“Good, I could do with getting back to civilisation. She needs me. That staff is taking over. I said it would, but did anyone listen?”
“Did they?” said Hilta, still trying to work out what Granny meant by getting back to civilisation.
“No,” said Granny coldly.
His name was Amschat B’hal Zoon. He lived on the raft with his three wives and three children. He was a Liar.
What always annoyed the enemies of the Zoon tribe was not simply their honesty, which was infuriatingly absolute, but their total directness of approach. The Zoons had never heard about a euphemism, and wouldn’t understand what to do with it if they had one, except that they would certainly have called it “a nice way of saying something nasty".
Their rigid adherence to the truth was apparently not enjoined on them by a god, as is usually the case, but appeared to have a genetic base. The average Zoon could no more tell a lie than breathe underwater and, in fact, the very concept was enough to upset them considerably; telling a Lie meant no less than totally altering the universe.
This was something of a drawback to a trading race and so, over the millennia, the elders of the Zoon studied this strange power that everyone else had in such abundance and decided that they should possess it too.
Young men who showed faint signs of having such a talent were encouraged, on special ceremonial occasions, to bend the Truth ever further on a competitive basis. The first recorded Zoon proto-lie was: “Actually my grandfather is quite tall,” but eventually they got the hang of it and the office of tribal Liar was instituted.
It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, which the average Zoon long ago gave up trying to understand. Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars.
Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer". They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.
“Is all that true?” said Esk suspiciously, looking around the barge’s crowded cabin.
“No,” said Amschat firmly. His junior wife, who was cooking porridge over a tiny ornate stove, giggled. His three children watched Esk solemnly over the edge of the table.
“Don’t you ever tell the truth?”
“Do you?” Amschat grinned his goldmine grin, but his eyes were not smiling. “Why do I find you on my fleeces? Amschat is no kidnapper. There will be people at home who will worry, yesno?”
“I expect Granny will come looking for me,” said Esk, “but I don’t think she will worry much. Just be angry, I expect. Anyway, I’m going to Ankh-Morpork. You can put me off the ship—”
“—boat—”
“—if you like. I don’t mind about the pike.”
“I can’t do that,” said Amschat.
“Was that a lie?”
“No! There is wild country around us, robbers and—things.”
Esk nodded brightly. “That’s settled, then,” she said. “I don’t mind sleeping in the fleeces. And I can pay my way. I can do—” She hesitated; her unfinished sentence hung like a little curl of crystal in the air while discretion made a successful bid for control of her tongue. “—helpful things,” she finished lamely.
She was aware that Amschat was looking slightly sideways at his senior wife, who was sewing by the stove. By Zoon tradition she wore nothing but black. Granny would have thoroughly approved.
“What sort of helpful things?” he asked. “Washing and sweeping, yesno?”
“If you like,” said Esk, “or distillation using the bifold or triple alembic, the making of varnishes, glazes, creams, zuumchats and punes, the rendering of waxes, the manufacture of candles, the proper selection of seeds, roots and cuttings, and most preparations from the Eighty Marvellous Herbs; I can spin, card, rett, Hallow and weave on the hand, frame, harp and Noble looms and I can knit if people start the wool on for me, I can read soil and rock, do carpentry up to the three-way mortise and tenon, predict weather by means of beastsign and skyreck, make increase in bees, brew five types of mead, make dyes and mordants and pigments, including a fast blue, I can do most types of whitesmithing, mend boots, cure and fashion most leathers, and if you have any goats I can look after them. I like goats.”
Amschat looked at her thoughtfully. She felt she was expected to continue.
“Granny never likes to see people sitting around doing nothing,” she offered. “She always says a girl who is good with her hands will never want for a living,” she added, by way of further explanation.
“Or a husband, I expect,” nodded Amschat, weakly.
“Actually, Granny had a lot to say about that—”
“I bet she did,” said Amschat. He looked at the senior wife, who nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Very well,” he said. “If you can make yourself useful you can stay. And can you play a musical instrument?”
Esk returned his steady gaze, not batting an eyelid. “Probably.”
And so Esk, with the minimum of difficulty and only a little regret, left the Ramtops and their weather and joined the Zoons on their great trading journey down the Ankh.
There were at least thirty barges with at least one sprawling Zoon family on each, and no two vessels appeared to be carrying the same cargo; most of them were strung together, and the Zoons simply hauled on the cable and stepped on to the next deck if they fancied a bit of socialising.
Esk set up home in the fleeces. It was warm, smelled slightly of Granny’s cottage and, much more important, meant that she was undisturbed.
She was getting a bit worried about magic.
It was definitely getting out of control. She wasn’t doing magic, it was just happening around her. And she sensed that people probably wouldn’t be too happy if they knew.
It meant that if she washed up she had to clatter and splash at length to conceal the fact that the dishes were cleaning themselves. If she did some darning she had to do it on some private part of the deck to conceal the fact that the edges of the hole ravelled themselves together as if . . . as if by magic. Then she woke up on the second day of her voyage to find that several of the fleeces around the spot where she had hidden the staff had combed, carded and spun themselves into neat skeins during the night.
She put all thoughts of lighting fires out of her head.
There were compensations, though. Every sluggish turn of the great brown river brought new scenes. There were dark stretches hemmed in with deep forest, through which the barges traveled in the dead centre of the river with the men armed and the women below—except for Esk, who sat listening with interest to the snortings and sneezings that followed them through the bushes on the banks. There were stretches of farmland. There were several towns much larger than Ohulan. There were even some mountains, although they were old and flat and not young and frisky like her mountains. Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.
The barges stopped at some of the towns. By tradition only the men went ashore, and only Amschat, wearing his ceremonial Lying hat, spoke to non-Zoons. Esk usually went with him. He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.
Anyway, it seemed to Amschat that when Esk was with him he always got a very good price. There was something about a small child squinting determinedly at them from behind his legs that made even market-hardened merchants hastily conclude their business.
In fact, it began to worry him. When a market broker in the walled town of Zemphis offered him a bag of ultramarines in exchange for a hundred fleeces a voice from the level of his pockets said: “They’re not ultramarines.”
“Listen to the child!” said the broker, grinning. Amschat solemnly held one of the stones to his eye.
“I am listening,” he said, “and they do indeed look like ultramarines. They have the glit and shimmy.”
Esk shook her head. “They’re just spircles,” she said. She said it without thinking, and regretted it immediately as both men turned to stare at her.
Amschat turned the stone over in his palm. Putting the chameleon spircle stones into a box with some real gems so that they appeared to change their hue was a traditional trick, but these had the true inner blue fire. He looked up sharply at the broker. Amschat had been finely trained in the art of the Lie. He recognised the subtle signs, now that he came to think about it.
“There seems to be a doubt,” he said, “but ’tis easily resolved, we need only take them to the assayer in Pine Street because the world knows that spircles will dissolve in hypactic fluid, yesno?”
The broker hesitated. Amschat had changed position slightly, and the set of his muscles suggested that any sudden movement on the broker’s part would see him flat in the dust. And that damn child was squinting at him as though she could see through to the back of his mind. His nerve broke.
“I regret this unfortunate dispute,” he said. “I had accepted the stones as ultramarines in good faith but rather than cause disharmony between us I will ask you to accept them as—as a gift, and for the fleeces may I offer this roseatte of the first sorting?”
He took a small red stone from a tiny velvet pouch. Amschat hardly looked at it but, without taking his eyes off the man, passed it down to Esk. She nodded.
When the merchant had hurried off Amschat took Esk’s hand and half-dragged her to the assayer’s stall, which was little more than a niche in the wall. The old man took the smallest of the blue stones, listened to Amschat’s hurried explanation, poured out a saucerful of hypactic fluid and dropped the stone in. It frothed into nothingness.
“Very interesting,” he said. He took another stone in a tweezer and examined it under a glass.
“They are indeed spircles, but remarkably fine specimens in their own right,” he concluded. “They are by no means worthless, and I for example would be prepared to offer you—is there something wrong with the little girl’s eyes?”
Amschat nudged Esk, who stopped trying out another Look.
“—I would offer you, shall we say, two zats of silver?”
“Shall we say five?” said Amschat pleasantly.
“And I would like to keep one of the stones,” said Esk. The old man threw up his hands.
“But they are mere curios!” he said. “Of value only to a collector!”
“A collector may yet sell them to an unsuspecting purchaser as finest roseattes or ultramarines,” said Amschat, “especially if he was the only assayer in town.”
The assayer grumbled a bit at this, but at last they settled on three zats and one of the spircles on a thin silver chain for Esk.
When they were out of earshot Amschat handed her the tiny silver coins and said: “These are yours. You have earned them. But—” he hunkered down so that his eyes were on a level with hers, “—you must tell me how you knew the stones were false.”
He looked worried, but Esk sensed that he wouldn’t really like the truth. Magic made people uncomfortable. He wouldn’t like it if she said simply: spircles are spircles and ultramarines are ultramarines, and though you may think they look the same that is because most people don’t use their eyes in the right way. Nothing can entirely disguise its true nature.
Instead she said: “The dwarves mine spircles near the village where I was born, and you soon learn to see how they bend light in a funny way.”
Amschat looked into her eyes for some time. Then he shrugged.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Well, I have some further business here. Why don’t you buy yourself some new clothes, or something? I’d warn you against unscrupulous traders but, somehow, I don’t know, I don’t think you will have any trouble.”
Esk nodded. Amschat strode off through the market place. At the first corner he turned, looked at her thoughtfully, and then disappeared among the crowds.
Well, that’s the end of sailing, Esk told herself. He’s not quite sure but he’s going to be watching me now and before I know what’s happening the staff will be taken away and there’ll be all sorts of trouble. Why does everyone get so upset about magic?
She gave a philosophical sigh and set about exploring the possibilities of the town.
There was the question of the staff, though. Esk had rammed it deep among the fleeces, which were not going to be unloaded yet. If she went back for it people would start asking questions, and she didn’t know the answers.
She found a convenient alleyway and scuttled down it until a deep doorway gave her the privacy she required.
If going back was out of the question then only one thing remained. She held out a hand and closed her eyes.
She knew exactly what she wanted to do-it lay in front of her eyes. The staff mustn’t come flying through the air, wrecking the barge and drawing attention to itself. All she wanted, she told herself, was for there to be a slight change in the way the world was organised. It shouldn’t be a world where the staff was in the fleeces, it should be a world where it was in her hand. A tiny change, an infinitesimal alteration to the Way Things Were.
If Esk had been properly trained in wizardry she would have known that this was impossible. All wizards knew how to move things about, starting with protons and working upwards, but the important thing about moving something from A to Z, according to basic physics, was that at some point it should pass through the rest of the alphabet. The only way one could cause something to vanish at A and appear at Z would be to shuffle the whole of Reality sideways. The problems this would cause didn’t bear thinking about.
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.
As Esk tried to work out how to move the staff the ripples spread out in the magical ether, changing the Discworld in thousands of tiny ways. Most went entirely unnoticed. Perhaps a few grains of sand lay on their beaches in a slightly different position, or the occasional leaf hung on its tree in a marginally different way. But then the wavefront of probability struck the edge of Reality and rebounded like the slosh off the side of the pond which, meeting the laggard ripples coming the other way, caused small but important whirlpools in the very fabric of existence. You can have whirlpools in the fabric of existence, because it is a very strange fabric.
Esk was completely ignorant of all this, of course, but was quite satisfied when the staff dropped out of thin air into her hand.
It felt warm.
She looked at it for some time. She felt that she ought to do something about it; it was too big, too distinctive, too inconvenient. It attracted attention.
“If I’m taking you to Ankh-Morpork,” she said thoughtfully, “You’ve got to go in disguise.”
A few late flickers of magic played around the staff, and then it went dark.
Eventually Esk solved the immediate problem by finding a stall in the main Zemphis marketplace that sold broomsticks, buying the largest, carrying it back to her doorway, removing the handle and ramming the staff deep into the birch twigs. It didn’t seem right to treat a noble object in this way, and she silently apologised to it.
It made a difference, anyway. No one looked twice at a small girl carrying a broom.