Lords And Ladies tds-14

by Terry David John Pratchett

  "Oh, well," he said, managing to stand up at the third attempt, "probably no harm done. Let's get on home and see what century it is."

  "What century is it, anyway?" said Thatcher. "Century of the Fruitbat, isn't it?" said Baker. "Might not be anymore," said Carter hopefully. It turned out that it was, indeed, the Century of the Fruitbat. Lancre didn't have much use for units of time any smaller than an hour or larger than a year, but people were clearly putting up bunting in the town square and a gang of men were erecting the Maypole. Someone was nailing up a very badly painted picture of Verence and Magrat under which was the slogan: God Bless Their Majestieys.

  With hardly a word exchanged, the men parted and staggered their separate ways.

  A hare lolloped through the morning mist until it reached the drunken, ancient cottage in its clearing in the woods.

  It reached a tree stump between the privy and The Herbs. Most woodland animals avoided The Herbs. This was because animals that didn't avoid The Herbs over the past fifty years had tended not to have descendants. A few tendrils waved in the breeze and this was odd because there wasn't any breeze.

  It sat on the stump.

  And then there was a sensation of movement. Something left the hare and moved across the air to an open upstairs window. It was invisible, at least to normal eyesight. ' The hare changed. Before, it had moved with purpose. Now it flopped down and began to wash its ears.

  After a while the back door opened and Granny Weatherwax walked out stiffly, holding a bowl of bread and milk. She put it down on the step and turned back without a second glance, closing the door again behind her.

  The hare hopped closer.

  It's hard to know if animals understand obligations, or the nature of transactions. But that doesn't matter. They're built into witchcraft. If you want to really upset a witch, do her a favour which she has no means of repaying. The unfulfilled obligation will nag at her like a hangnail.

  Granny Weatherwax had been riding the hare's mind all night. Now she owed it something. There's be bread and milk left outside for a few days.

  You had to repay, good or bad. There was more than one type of obligation. That's what people never really understood, she told herself as she stepped back into the kitchen. Magrat hadn't understood it, nor that new girl. Things had to balance. You couldn't set out to be a good witch or a bad witch. It never worked for long. All you could try to be was a witch, as hard as you could.

  She sat down by the cold hearth, and resisted a temptation to comb her ears.

  They had broken in somewhere. She could feel it in the trees, in the minds of tiny animals. She was planning something. Something soon. There was of course nothing special about midsummer in the occult sense, but there was in the minds of people. And the minds of people was where eleves were strong.

  Granny knew that sooner or later she'd have to face the Queen. Not Magrat, but the real Queen.

  And she would lose.

  She'd worked all her life on controlling the insides of her own head. She'd prided herself on being the best there was.

  But no longer. Just when she needed all her self reliance, she couldn't rely on her mind. She could sense the probing of the Queen — she could remember the feel of that mind, from all those decades ago. And she seemed to have her usual skill at Borrowing. But herself — if she didn't leave little notes for herself, she'd be totally at sea. Being a witch meant knowing exactly who you were and where you were, and she was losing the ability to know both. Last night she'd found herself setting the table for two people. She'd tried to walk into a room she didn't have. And soon she'd have to fight an elf.

  If you fought an elf and lost. . . then, if you were lucky, you would die.

  Magrat was brought breakfast in bed by a giggling Millie

  Chillum.

  "Guests are arriving already, ma'am. And there's flags and everything down in the square! And Shawn has found the coronation coach!"

  "How can you lose a coach?" said Magrat.

  "It was locked up in one of the old stables, ma'am. He's giving it a fresh coat of gold paint right now."

  "But we're going to be married here," said Magrat. "We don't have to go anywhere."

  "The king said perhaps you could both ride around a bit. Maybe as far as Bad Ass, he said. With Shawn Ogg as a military escort. So people can wave and shout hooray. And then come back here."

  Magrat put on her dressing gown and crossed to the tower window. She could see down over the outer walls and into Lancre town square, which was already quite full of people. It would have been a market day in any case, but people were erecting benches as well and the Maypole was already up. There were even a few dwarfs and trolls, politely maintaining a distance from one another.

  "I just saw a monkey walk across the square," said

  Magrat.

  "The whole world's coming to Lancre!" said Millie, who had once been as far as Slice.

  Magrat caught sight of the distant picture of herself and her fiance.

  "This is stupid," she said to herself, but Millie heard her and was shocked.

  "What can you mean, ma'am?"

  Magrat spun around.

  "All this! For me!"

  Millie backed away in sudden fright.

  "I'm just Magrat Garlick! Kings ought to marry princesses and duchesses and people like that! People who are used to it! I don't want people shouting hooray just because I've gone by in a coach! And especially not people who've known me all my life! All this — this," her frantic gesture took in the hated garderobe, the huge four-poster bed, and the dressing room full of stiff and expensive clothes, "this stuff . . . it's not for me! It's for some kind of idea. Didn't you ever get those cut-outs, those dolls, you know, when you were a girl . . . dolls you cut out, and there were cut-out clothes as well? And you could make her anything you wanted? That's me! It's . . . it's like the bees! I'm being turned into a queen whether I want to or not! That's what's happening to me!"

  "I'm sure the king bought you all those nice clothes because-"

  "I don't mean just clothes. I mean people'd be shouting hooray if — if anyone went past in the coach!"

  "But you were the one who fell in love with the king, ma'am," said Millie, bravely.

  Magrat hesitated for a moment. She'd never quite analysed that emotion. Eventually she said, "No. He wasn't king then. No one knew he was going to be king. He was just a sad, nice little man in a cap and bells who everyone ignored."

  Millie backed away a bit more.

  "I expect it's nerves, ma'am," she gabbled. "Everyone feels nervous on the day before their wedding. Shall I . . . shall I see if I can make you some herbal-"

  "I'm not nervous! And I can do my own herbal tea if I happen to want any!"

  "Cook's very particular who goes into the herb garden, ma'am," said Millie.

  "I've seen that herb garden! It's all leggy sage and yellowy parsley! If you can't stuff it up a chicken's bum, she doesn't think it's an herb! Anyway . . . who's queen in this vicinity?"

  "I thought you didn't want to be, ma'am?" said Millie.

  Magrat stared at her. For a moment she looked as if she was arguing with herself.

  Millie might not have been the best-informed girl in the world, but she wasn't stupid. She was at the door and through it just as the breakfast tray hit the wall.

  Magrat sat down on the bed with her head in her hands.

  She didn't want to be queen. Being a queen was like being an actor, and Magrat had never been any good at acting. She'd always felt she wasn't very good at being Magrat, if it came to that.

  The bustle of the pre-nuptial activities rose up from the town. There'd be folk dancing, of course — there seemed to be no way of preventing it — and probably folk singing would be perpetrated. And there'd be dancing bears and comic jugglers and the greasy pole competition, which for some reason Nanny Ogg always won. And bowling-with-a-pig. And the bran tub, which Nanny Ogg usually ran; it was a brave man who plunged his hand into a bran tub sto
cked by a witch with a broad sense of humour. Magrat had always liked the fairs. Up until now.

  Well, there were still some things she could do.

  She dressed herself in her commoner's clothes for the ' last time, and let herself out and down the back stairs to the widdershins tower and the room where Diamanda lay

  Magrat had instructed Shawn to keep a good fire going in the grate, and Diamanda was still sleeping, peacefully, the unwakeable sleep.

  Magrat couldn't help noticing that Diamanda was strikingly good-looking and, from what she'd heard, quite brave enough to stand up to Granny Weatherwax. She could hardly wait to get her better so that she could envy her properly.

  The wound seemed to be healing up nicely, but there seemed to be —

  Magrat strode to the bellpull in the comer and hauled on it.

  After a minute or two Shawn Ogg arrived, panting. There was gold paint on his hands.

  "What," said Magrat, "are all these things?"

  "Um. Don't like to say, ma'am . . ."

  "One happens to be . . . very nearly . . . the queen," said Magrat.

  "Yes, but the king said . . . well. Granny said-"

  "Granny Weatherwax does not happen to rule the kingdom," said Magrat. She hated herself when she spoke like this, but it seemed to work. "And anyway she's not here. One is here, however, and if you don't tell one what's going on I'll see to it that you do all the dirty jobs around the palace."

  "But I do all the dirty jobs anyway," said Shawn.

  "I shall see to it that there are dirtier ones."

  Magrat picked up one of the bundles. It was made up of strips of sheet wrapped around what turned out to be an iron bar.

  "They're all around her," she said. "Why?"

  Shawn looked at his feet. There was gold paint on his boots, too.

  "Well, our mum said . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "Our mum said I was to see to it that there was iron round her. So me and Millie got some bars from down the smithy and wrapped 'em up like this and Millie packed 'em round her."

  "Why?"

  "To keep away the . . . the Lords and Ladies, ma'am."

  "What? That's just old superstition! Anyway, everyone knows elves were good, whatever Granny Weatherwax says."

  Behind her, Shawn flinched. Magrat pulled the wrapped iron lumps out of the bed and tossed them into the comer.

  "No old wives' tales here, thank you very much. Is there anything else people haven't been telling me, by any chance?"

  Shawn shook his head, guiltily aware of the thing in the dungeon.

  "Huh! Well, go away. Verence wants the kingdom to be modem and efficient, and that means no horseshoes and stuff around the place. Go on, go away."

  "Yes, Miss Queen."

  At least I can do something positive around here, Magrat told herself.

  Yes. Be sensible. Go and see him. Talk. Magrat clung to the idea that practically anything could be sorted out if only people talked to one another.

  "Shawn?"

  He paused at the door.

  "Yes, ma'am?"

  "Has the king gone down to the Great Hall yet?"

  "I think he's still dressing, Miss Queen. He hasn't rung for me to do the trumpet, I know that."

  In fact, Verence, who didn't like going everywhere preceded by Shawn's idea of a fanfare, had already gone downstairs incognito. But Magrat slipped along to his room, and knocked on the door.

  Why be bashful? It'd be her room as well from tomorrow, wouldn't it? She tried the handle. It turned. Without quite willing it, Magrat went in.

  Rooms in the castle could hardly be said to belong to anyone in any case. They'd had too many occupants over the centuries. The very atmosphere was the equivalent of those walls scattered with outbreaks of drawing-pin holes where last term's occupants hung the posters of rock groups long disbanded. You couldn't stamp your personality on that stone. It stamped back harder.

  For Magrat, stepping into a man's bedroom was like an explorer stepping on to that part of the map marked Here Be Dragons[27].

  And it wasn't exactly what it ought to have been.

  Verence had arrived at the bedroom concept fairly late in life. When he was a boy, the entire family slept on straw in the cottage attic. As an apprentice in the Guild of Joculators, he'd slept on a pallet in a long dormitory of other sad, beaten young men. When he was a fully fledged Fool he'd slept, by tradition, curled up in front of his master's door. Suddenly, at a later age than is usual, he'd been introduced to the notion of soft mattresses.

  And now Magrat was privy to the big secret.

  It hadn't worked.

  There was the Great Bed of Lancre, which was said to be able to sleep a dozen people, although in what circumstances and why it should be necessary history had never made clear. It was huge and made of oak.

  It was also, very clearly, unslept in.

  Magrat pulled back the sheets, and smelled the scorched smell of linen. But it also smelled unaired, as if it hadn't been slept in.

  She stared around the room until her eye lit on the little still-life by the door. There was a folded nightshirt, a candlestick, and a small pillow.

  As far as Verence had been concerned, a crown merely changed which side of the door you slept.

  Oh, gods. He'd always slept in front of the door of his master. And now he was king, he slept in front of the door to his kingdom.

  Magrat felt her eyes fill with tears.

  You couldn't help loving someone as soppy as that.

  Fascinated, and aware that she was where she technically shouldn't be, Magrat blew her nose and explored further. A heap of discarded garments by the bed suggested that Verence had mastered the art of hanging up clothes as practiced by half the population of the world, and also that he had equally had difficulty with the complex topological manoeuvres necessary to turn his socks the right way out.

  There was a tiny dressing table and a mirror. Stuck to the mirror frame was a dried and faded flower that looked, to Magrat, very like the ones she habitually wore in her hair.

  She shouldn't have gone on looking. She admitted that to herself, afterward. But she seemed to have no self-control.

  There was a wooden bowl in the middle of the dresser table, full of odd coins, bits of string, and the general detritus of the nightly emptied pocket.

  And a folded paper. Much folded, as if it had stayed in said pocket for some time.

  She picked it up, and unfolded it.

  There were little kingdoms all over the hubward slopes of the Ramtops. Every narrow valley, every ledge that something other than a goat could stand on, was a kingdom. There were kingdoms in the Ramtops so small that, if they were ravaged by a dragon, and that dragon had been killed by a young hero, and the king had given him half his kingdom as per Section Three of the Heroic Code, then there wouldn't have been any kingdom left. There were wars of annexation that went on for years just because someone wanted a place to keep the coal.

  Lancre was one of the biggest kingdoms. It could actually afford a standing army[28].

  Kings and queens and various sub-orders of aristocracy were even now streaming over Lancre bridge, watched by a sulking and soaking-wet troll who had given up on bridge-keeping for the day.

  The Great Hall had been thrown open. Jugglers and fire-eaters strolled among the crowd. Up in the minstrels gallery a small orchestra were playing the Lancre one-string fiddle and famed Ramtop bagpipes, but fortunately they were more or less drowned out by the noise of the crowd.

  Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax moved through said crowd. In deference to this being a festive occasion, Nanny Ogg had exchanged her normal black pointy hat for one the same shape but in red, with wax cherries on it.

  "All the hort mond are here," Nanny observed, taking a drink off a passing tray. "Even some wizards from Ankh-Morpork, our Shawn said. One of them said I had a fine body, he said. Been tryin' to remember all morning who that could have been."

  "Spoilled for choice," said Granny, but
it was automatic nastiness, with no real heart to it. It worried Nanny Ogg. Her friend seemed preoccupied.

  "There's some gentry we don't want to see here," said Granny. "I won't be happy until all this is over."

  Nanny Ogg craned to try and see over the head of a small emperor.

  "Can't see Magrat around," she said. "There's Verence talking to some other kings, but can't see our Magrat at all. Our Shawn said Millie Chillum said she was just a bag of nerves this morning."

  "All these high-born folks," said Granny, looking around at the crowned heads. "I feel like a fish out of water."

  "Well, the way I see it, it's up to you to make your own water," said Nanny, picking up a cold roast chicken leg from the buffet and stuffing it up a sleeve.

  "Don't drink too much. We've got to keep alert, Gytha. Remember what I said. Don't let yourself get distracted-"

  "That's never the delectable Mrs. Ogg, is it?"

  Nanny turned.

  There was no one behind her.

  "Down here," said the voice.

  She looked down, into a wide grin.

  "Oh, blast," she said.

  "It's me, Casanunda," said Casanunda, who was dwarfed still further by an enormous[30] powdered wig. "You remember? We danced the night away in Genua?"

  "No we didn't."

  "Well, we could have done."

  "Fancy you turning up here," said Nanny, weakly. The thing about Casanunda, she recalled, was that the harder you slapped him down the faster he bounced back, often in an unexpected direction.

  "Our stars are entwined," said Casanunda. "We're fated for one another. I wants your body, Mrs. Ogg."

  "I'm still using it."

  And while she suspected, quite accurately, that this was an approach the world's second greatest lover used on anything that appeared to be even vaguely female, Nanny Ogg had to admit that she was flattered. She'd had many admirers in her younger days, but time had left her with a body that could only be called comfortable and a face like Mr. Grape the Happy Raisin. Long-banked fires gave off a little smoke.

  Besides, she'd rather liked Casanunda. Most men were oblique in their approach, whereas his direct attack was refreshing.