‘Don’t you want to die nobly for a just cause?’ ‘I’d much rather live quietly for one.
The castle was full of people standing around in that polite, sheepish way affected by people who see each other all day and are now seeing each other again in unusual social circumstances, like an office party.
‘You know, Hwel, I reckon responsible behaviour is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.’
Hwel was no more capable of objecting to the new theatre than a monkey was of resenting a banana plantation.
Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn’t trust it. Often you couldn’t even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else – coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.
‘Pretty weak stuff,’ said Nanny, eventually. She fumbled in her apron pocket for her tobacco pouch. ‘Has anyone got a light?’ she enquired. A couple of actors produced bundles of matches. Nanny nodded, and put the pouch away. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now, has anyone got any tobacco?’
‘If you could see inside your colon you’d be horrified.’ ‘I think I would,’ muttered Hwel.
It was a landscape of describable beauty.
‘Act, then. Being a king is, is—’ Granny hesitated, and snapped her fingers at Magrat. ‘What do you call them things, there’s always a hundred of them in anything?’ Magrat looked bewildered. ‘Do you mean per cents?’ she said. ‘Them,’ agreed Granny. ‘Most of the per cents in being a king is acting, if you ask me. You ought to be good at it.’
Tomjon tried to get an early night, but sleep was murdered by the sound of creativity from the next room.
Granny Weatherwax squinted irritably into Nanny Ogg’s crystal ball. It wasn’t a particularly good one, being a greenish glass fishing float brought back from forn seaside parts by one of her sons. It distorted everything including, she suspected, the truth.
It was reckoned to be very healthy there. Very few germs were able to survive.
In a certain light and from a carefully chosen angle, Magrat was not unattractive. Whether any of these preparations did anything for her is debatable, but they did mean that a thin veneer of confidence overlaid her trembling heart.
‘When you break rules, break ‘em good and hard,’
The face was particularly worrying. Magrat had used a lot of powder to make her face pale and interesting. It combined with the lavishly applied mascara to give the guard the impression that he was looking at two flies that had crashed into a sugar bowl. He found his fingers wanted to make a sign to ward off the evil eyeshadow.
‘A man could go far, knowing his rights like you do,’ said Granny. ‘But right now he should go home.’
‘Doesn’t seem to be her normal self,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Yes. Could be an improvement,’
You can’t go round ruling people with spells, because you’d have to use more and more spells all the time.’
There was plenty of flat ground in the Ramtops. The problem was that nearly all of it was vertical.
So far round the twist you could use him to open wine bottles.
The Fool held his breath. On long nights on the hard flagstones he had dreamed of women like her. Although, if he really thought about it, not much like her; they were better endowed around the chest, their noses weren’t so red and pointed, and their hair tended to flow more. But the Fool’s libido was bright enough to tell the difference between the impossible and the conceivably attainable, and hurriedly cut in some filter circuits.
Winter meant the coming of the lazy wind, which couldn’t be bothered to blow around people and blew right through them instead.
A year went past. The days followed one another patiently. Right back at the beginning of the multiverse they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn’t worked.
‘Where’s Nanny?’ she said. ‘She’s lying out on the lawn,’ said Granny. ‘She felt a bit poorly.’ And from outside came the sound of Nanny Ogg being poorly at the top of her voice.
It apparently belonged to a large fat man who had been badly savaged by a moustache. Pink veins made a map of quite a large city on his cheeks; his nose could have hidden successfully in a bowl of strawberries.
‘Ah, well, we’ve all passed a lot of water since then,’ said Nanny Ogg sagely.
The door opened. It opened very slowly, and with the maximum amount of creak. Simple neglect wouldn’t have caused that depth of groan; you’d need careful work with hot water over a period of weeks.
The men were Ramtoppers as well. They were following him very closely, ready to duck behind him at the first sign of anything more unexpected than a tree.
‘Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact,’
The wind howled. Lightning stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin.
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