They rested together on the snow, their normal culinary relationships entirely forgotten, trying to outstare her.
Two things were immediately apparent to Granny. One was that this seemed to represent a pretty accurate cross-section of the forest life.
The other she couldn't help saying aloud.
'I don't know what this spell is,' she said. 'But I'll tell you this for nothing – when it wears off, some of you little buggers had better get moving.'
None of them stirred. There was no sound except for an elderly badger relieving itself with an embarrassed expression.
'Look,' said Granny. 'What can I do about it? It's no good you coming to me. He's the new lord. This is his kingdom. I can't go meddling. It's not right to go meddling, on account of I can't interfere with people ruling. It has to sort itself out, good or bad. Fundamental rule of magic, is that. You can't go round ruling people with spells, because you'd have to use more and more spells all the time.' She sat back, grateful that long-standing tradition didn't allow the Crafty and the Wise to rule. She remembered what it had felt like to wear the crown, even for a few seconds.
No, things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it.
She added, 'People have to sort it out for themselves. Well-known fact.'
She felt that one of the larger stags was giving her a particularly doubting look.
'Yes, well, so he killed the old king,' she conceded. That's nature's way, ain't it? Your lot know all about this. Survival of the wossname. You wouldn't know what an heir was, unless you thought it was a sort of rabbit.'
She drummed her fingers on her knees.
'Anyway, the old king wasn't much of a friend to you, was he? All that hunting, and such.'
Three hundred pairs of dark eyes bored in at her.
'It's no good you all looking at me,' she tried. 'I can't go around mucking about with kings just because you don't like them. Where would it all end? It's not as if he's done me any harm.'
She tried to avoid the gaze of a particularly cross-eyed stoat.
'All right, so it's selfish,' she said. 'That's what bein' a witch is all about. Good day to you.'
She stamped inside, and tried to slam the door. It stuck once or twice, which rather spoiled the effect.
Once inside she drew the curtains and sat down in the rocking chair and rocked fiercely.
'That's the whole point,' she said. 'I can't go around meddling. That's the whole point.'
The lattys lurched slowly over the rutted roads, towards yet another little city whose name the company couldn't quite remember and would instantly forget. The winter sun hung low over the damp, misty cabbage fields of the Sto Plains, and the foggy silence magnified the creaking of the wheels.
Hwel sat with his stubby legs dangling over the backboard of the last latty.
He'd done his best. Vitoller had left the education of Tomjon in his hands; 'You're better at all that business,' he'd said, adding with his usual tact, 'Besides, you're more his height.'
But it wasn't working.
'Apple,' he repeated, waving the fruit in the air.
Tomjon grinned at him. He was nearly three years old, and hadn't said a word anyone could understand. Hwel was harbouring dark suspicions about the witches.
'But he seems bright enough,' said Mrs Vitoller, who was travelling inside the latty and darning the chain mail. 'He knows what things are. He does what he's told. I just wish you'd speak,' she said softly, patting the boy on the cheek.
Hwel gave the apple to Tomjon, who accepted it gravely.
'I reckon them witches did you a bad turn, missus,' said the dwarf. 'You know. Changelings and whatnot. There used to be a lot of that sort of thing. My great-great-grandmother said it was done to us, once. The fairies swapped a human and a dwarf. We never realised until he started banging his head on things, they say—'
'They say this fruit be like unto the world
So sweet. Or like, say I, the heart of man
So red without and yet within, unclue'd,
We find the worm, the rot, the flaw.
However glows his bloom the bite
Proves many a man be rotten at the core.'
The two of them swivelled around to stare at Tomjon, who nodded to them and proceeded to eat the apple.
'That was the Worm speech from The Tyrant,' whispered Hwel. His normal grasp of the language temporarily deserted him. 'Bloody hell,' he said.
'But he sounded just like—'
'I'm going to get Vitoller,' said Hwel, and dropped off the tailboard and ran through the frozen puddles to the front of die convoy, where the actor-manager was whistling tunelessly and, yes, strolling.
'What ho, b'zugda-hiara[8] ,' he said cheerfully.
'You've got to come at once! He's talking!'
Talking?'
Hwel jumped up and down. 'He's quoting!' he shouted. 'You've got to come! He sounds just like—'
'Me?' said Vitoller, a few minutes later, after they had pulled the lattys into a grove of leafless trees by the roadside. 'Do I sound like that?'
'Yes,' chorused the company.
Young Willikins, who specialised in female roles, prodded Tomjon gently as he stood on an upturned barrel in the middle of the clearing.
'Here, boy, do you know my speech from Please Yourself!' he said.
Tomjon nodded. ' "He is not dead, I say, who lies beneath the stone. For if Death could but hear—" '
They listened in awed silence as the endless mists rolled across the dripping fields and the red ball of the sun floated down the sky. When the boy had finished hot tears were streaming down Hwel's face.
'By all the gods,' he said, when Tomjon had finished, 'I must have been on damn good form when I wrote that.' He blew his nose noisily.
'Do I sound like that?' said Willikins, his face pale.
Vitoller patted him gently on the shoulder.
'If you sounded like that, my bonny,' he said, 'you wouldn't be standing arse-deep in slush in the middle of these forsaken fields, with nothing but liberated cabbage for thy tea.'
He clapped his hands.
'No more, no more,' he said, his breath making puffs of steam in the freezing air. 'Backs to it, everybody. We must be outside the walls of Sto Lat by sunset.'
As the grumbling actors awoke from the spell and wandered back to the shafts of the lattys Vitoller beckoned to the dwarf and put his arm around his shoulders, or rather around the top of his head.
'Well?' he said. 'You people know all about magic, or so it is said. What do you make of it?'
'He spends all his time around the stage, master. It's only natural that he should pick things up,' said Hwel vaguely.
Vitoller leaned down.
'Do you believe that?'
'I believe I heard a voice that took my doggerel and shaped it and fired it back through my ears and straight into my heart,' said Hwel simply. 'I believe I heard a voice that got behind the crude shape of the words and said the things I had meant them to say, but had not the skill to achieve. Who knows where such things come from?'
He stared impassively into Vitoller's red face. 'He may have inherited it from his father,' he said.
'But-'
'And who knows what witches may achieve?' said the dwarf.
Vitoller felt his wife's hand pushed into his. As he stood up, bewildered and angry, she kissed him on the back of the neck.
'Don't torture yourself,' she said. 'Isn't it all for the best? Your son has declaimed his first word.'
Spring came, and ex-King Verence still wasn't taking being dead lying down. He prowled the castle relentlessly, seeking for a way in which its ancient stones would release their grip on him.
He was also trying to keep out of the way of the other ghosts.
Champot was all right, if a bit tiresome. But Verence had backed away at
the first sight of the Twins, toddling hand in hand along the midnight corridors, their tiny ghosts a memorial to a deed darker even than the usual run of regicidal unpleasantness.
And then there was the Troglodyte Wanderer, a rather faded monkeyman in a furry loincloth who apparently happened to haunt the castle merely because it had been built on his burial mound. For no obvious reason a chariot with a screaming woman in it occasionally rumbled through the laundry room. As for the kitchen . . .
One day he'd given in, despite everything old Champot had said, and had followed the smells of cooking into the big, hot, high domed cavern that served the castle as kitchen and abattoir. Funny thing, that. He'd never been down there since his childhood. Somehow kings and kitchens didn't go well together.
It was full of ghosts.
But they weren't human. They weren't even proto-human.
They were stags. They were bullocks. They were rabbits, and pheasants, and partridges, and sheep, and pigs. There were even some round blobby things that looked unpleasantly like the ghosts of oysters. They were packed so tightly that in fact they merged and mingled, turning the kitchen into a silent, jostling nightmare of teeth and fur and horns, half-seen and misty. Several noticed him, and there was a weird blarting of noises that sounded far-off, tinny and unpleasantly out of register. Through them all the cook and his assistants wandered quite unconcernedly, making vegetarian sausages.
Verence had stared for half a minute and then fled, wishing that he still had a real stomach so that he could stick his fingers down his throat for forty years and bring up everything he'd eaten.
He'd sought solace in the stables, where his beloved hunting dogs had whined and scratched at the door and had generally been very ill-at-ease at his sensed but unseen presence.
Now he haunted – and how he hated the word – the Long Gallery, where paintings of long-dead kings looked down at him from the dusty shadows. He would have felt a lot more kindly towards them if he hadn't met a number of them gibbering in various parts of the premises.
Verence had decided that he had two aims in death. One was to get out of the castle and find his son, and the other was to get his revenge on the duke. But not by killing him, he'd decided, even if he could find a way, because an eternity in that giggling idiot's company would lend a new terror to death.
He sat under a painting of Queen Bemery (670-722), whose rather stern good looks he would have felt a whole lot happier about if he hadn't seen her earlier that morning walking through the wall.
Verence tried to avoid walking through walls. A man had his dignity.
He became aware that he was being watched.
He turned his head.
There was a cat sitting in the doorway, subjecting him to a slow blink. It was a mottled grey and extremely fat . . .
No. It was extremely big. It was covered with so much scar tissue that it looked like a fist with fur on it. Its ears were a couple of perforated stubs, its eyes two yellow slits of easygoing malevolence, its tail a twitching series of question marks as it stared at him.
Greebo had heard that Lady Felmet had a small white female cat and had strolled up to pay his respects.
Verence had never seen an animal with so much built-in villainy. He didn't resist as it waddled across the floor and tried to rub itself against his legs, purring like a waterfall.
'Well, well,' said the king, vaguely. He reached down and made an effort to scratch it behind the two ragged bits on top of its head. It was a relief to find someone else besides another ghost who could see him, and Greebo, he couldn't help feeling, was a distinctly unusual cat. Most of the castle cats were either pampered pets or flat-eared kitchen and stable habitue's who generally resembled the very rodents they lived on. This cat, on the other hand, was its own animal. All cats give that impression, of course, but instead of the mindless animal self-absorption that passes for secret wisdom in the creatures. Greebo radiated genuine intelligence. He also radiated a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox.
Only one type of person kept a cat like this.
The king tried to hunker down, and found he was sinking slightly into the floor. He pulled himself together and drifted upwards. Once a man allowed himself to go native in the ethereal world there would be no hope for him, he felt.
Only close relatives and the psychically inclined, Death had said. There weren't many of either in the castle. The duke qualified under the first heading, but his relentless self-interest made him about as psychically useful as a carrot. As for the rest, only the cook and the Fool seemed to qualify, but the cook spent a lot of his time weeping in the pantry because he wasn't being allowed to roast anything more bloody than a parsnip and the Fool was already such a bundle of nerves that Verence had given up his attempts to get through.
A witch, now. If a witch wasn't psychically inclined, then he, King Verence, was a puff of wind. He had to get a witch into the castle. And then . . .
He'd got a plan. In fact, it was more than that; it was a Plan. He spent months over it. He hadn't got anything else to do, except think. Death had been right about that. All that ghosts had were thoughts, and although thoughts in general had always been alien to the king the absence of any body to distract him with its assorted humours had actually given him the chance to savour the joys of cerebration. He'd never had a Plan before, or at least one that went much further than 'Let's find something and kill it'. And here, sitting in front of him washing itself, was the key.
'Here, pussy,' he ventured. Greebo gave him a penetrating yellow stare.
'Cat,' the king amended hastily, and backed away, beckoning. For a moment it seemed that the cat wouldn't follow and then, to his relief, Greebo stood up, yawned, and padded towards him. Greebo didn't often see ghosts, and was vaguely interested in this tall, bearded man with the see-through body.
The king led him along a dusty side corridor and towards a lumber room crammed with crumbling tapestries and portraits of long-dead kings. Greebo examined it critically, and then sat down in the middle of the dusty floor, looking at the king expectantly.
'There's plenty of mice and things in here, d'you see,' said Verence. 'And the rain blows in through the broken window. Plus there's all these tapestries to sleep on.'
'Sorry,' the king added, and turned to the door.
This was what he had been working on all these months. When he was alive he had always taken a lot of care of his body, and since being dead he had taken care to preserve its shape. It was too easy to let yourself go and become all fuzzy around the edges; there were ghosts in the castle who were mere pale blobs. But Verence had wielded iron self-control and exercised – well, had thought hard about exercise – and fairly bulged with spectral muscles. Months of pumping ectoplasm had left him in better shape than he had ever been, apart from being dead.
Then he'd started out small, with dust motes. The first one had nearly killed him[9] , but he'd persevered and progressed to sand grains, then whole dried peas; he still didn't dare venture into the kitchens, but he had amused himself by oversalting Felmet's food a pinch at a time until he pulled himself together and told himself that poisoning wasn't honourable, even against vermin.
Now he leaned all his weight on the door, and with every microgramme of his being forced himself to become as heavy as possible. The sweat of auto-suggestion dripped off his nose and vanished before it hit the floor. Greebo watched with interest as ghostly muscles moved on the king's arms like footballs mating.
The door began to move, creaked, then accelerated and hit the doorway with a thump. The latch clicked into place.
It bloody well had to work now, Verence told himself. He'd never be able to lift the latch by himself. But a witch would certainly come looking for her cat – wouldn't she?
In the hills beyond the castle the Fool lay on his stomach and stared into the depths of a little lake. A couple of trout stared back at him.
Somewhere on the Disc, reason told him, there must b
e someone more miserable than he was. He wondered who it was.
He hadn't asked to be a Fool, but it wouldn't have mattered if he had, because he couldn't recall anyone in his family ever listening to anything he said after Dad ran away.
Certainly not Grandad. His earliest memory was of Grandad standing over him making him repeat the jokes by rote, and hammering home every punchline with his belt; it was thick leather, and the fact that it had bells on didn't improve things much.
Grandad was credited with seven official new jokes. He'd won the honorary cap and bells of the Grand Prix des Idiots Blithering at Ankh-Morpork four years in a row, which no-one else had ever done, and presumably they made him the funniest man who ever lived. He had worked hard at it, you had to give him that.
The Fool recalled with a shudder how, at the age of six.
he'd timidly approached the old man after supper with a joke he'd made up. It was about a duck.
It had earned him the biggest thrashing of his life, which even then must have presented the old joker with a bit of a challenge.
'You will learn, my lad—' he recalled, with every sentence punctuated by jingling cracks – 'that there is nothing more serious than jesting. From now on you will never—' the old man paused to change hands – 'never, never, ever utter a joke that has not been approved by the Guild. Who are you to decide what is amusing? Marry, let the untutored giggle at unskilled banter; it is the laughter of the ignorant. Never. Never. Never let me catch you joculating again.'
After that he'd gone back to learning the three hundred and eighty-three Guild-approved jokes, which was bad enough, and the glossary, which was a lot bigger and much worse.
And then he'd been sent to Ankh, and there, in the bare, severe rooms, he'd found there were books other than the great heavy brass-bound Monster Fun Book. There was a whole circular world out there, full of weird places and people doing interesting things, like ...
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