'I think that since the play is commencing to start, your friends must find a seat elsewhere, when they arrive,' he said, and sat down.
Within seconds his face went white. His teeth began to chatter. He clutched at his stomach and groaned[20].
'I told you,' said Nanny, as he lurched away. 'What's the good of asking if you're not going to listen?' She leaned towards the empty seat. 'Walnut?'
'No, thank you,' said King Verence, waving a spectral hand. 'They go right through me, you know.'
'Pray, gentles all, list to our tale ...'
'What's this?' hissed Granny. 'Who's the fellow in the tights?'
'He's the Prologue,' said Nanny. 'You have to have him at the beginning so everyone knows what the play's about.'
'Can't understand a word of it,' muttered Granny. 'What's a gentle, anyway?'
'Type of maggot,' said Nanny.
'That's nice, isn't it? "Hallo maggots, welcome to the show." Puts people in a nice frame of mind, doesn't it?'
There was a chorus of 'sshs'.
'These walnuts are damn tough,' said Nanny, spitting one out into her hand. 'I'm going to have to take my shoe off to this one.'
Granny subsided into unaccustomed, troubled silence, and tried to listen to the prologue. The theatre worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn't belong to her, one that wasn't in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn't belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn't know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.
The duke and duchess were sitting on their thrones right in front of the stage. As Granny glared at them the duke half turned, and she saw his smile.
I want the world the way it is, she thought. I want the past the way it was. The past used to be a lot better than it is now.
And the band struck up.
Hwel peered around a pillar and signalled to Wimsloe and Brattsley, who hobbled out into the glare of the torches.
OLD MAN (an Elder): 'What hath befell the land?'
OLD WOMAN (a Crone): ' 'Tis a terror—'
The dwarf watched them for a few seconds from the wings, his lips moving soundlessly. Then he scuttled back to the guardroom where the rest of the cast were still in the last hasty stages of dressing. He uttered the stage manager's traditional scream of rage.
'C'mon,' he ordered. 'Soldiers of the king, at the double! And the witches – where are the blasted witches?'
Three junior apprentices presented themselves.
'I've lost my wart!'
'The cauldron's all full of yuk!'
'There's something living in this wig!'
'Calm down, calm down,' screamed Hwel. 'It'll all be all right on the night!'
'This is the night, Hwel!'
Hwel snatched a handful of putty from the makeup table and slammed on a wart like an orange. The offending straw wig was rammed on its owner's head, livestock and all. and the cauldron was very briefly inspected and pronounced full of just the right sort of yuk, nothing wrong with yuk like that.
On stage a guard dropped his shield, bent down to pick it up, and dropped his spear. Hwel rolled his eyes and offered up a silent prayer to any gods that might be watching.
It was already going wrong. The earlier rehearsals had their little teething troubles, it was true, but Hwel had known one or two monumental horrors in his time and this one was shaping up to be the worst. The company was more jittery than a potful of lobsters. Out of the corner of his ear he heard the on-stage dialogue falter, and scurried to the wings.
'—avenge the terror of thy father's death—' he hissed, and hurried back to the trembling witches. He groaned. Divers alarums. This lot were supposed to be terrorising a kingdom. He had about a minute before the cue.
'Right!' he said, pulling himself together. 'Now, what are you? You're evil hags, right?'
'Yes, Hwel,' they said meekly.
'Tell me what you are,' he commanded.
'We're evil hags, Hwel.'
'Louder!'
'We're Evil Hags!'
Hwel stalked the length of the quaking line, then turned abruptly on his heel, 'And what are you going to do?'
The 2nd Witche scratched his crawling wig.
'We're going to curse people?' he ventured. 'It says in the script—'
'I-can't-HEAR-you!'
'We're going to curse people!' they chorused, springing to attention and staring straight ahead to avoid his gaze.
Hwel stumped back along the line.
'What are you?'
'We're hags, Hwel!'
'What kind of hags?'
'We're black and midnight hags!' they yelled, getting into the spirit.
'What kind of black and midnight hags?'
'Evil black and midnight hags!'
'Are you scheming?'
'Yeah!'
'Are you secret?'
'Yeah!'
Hwel drew himself to his full height, such as it was.
'What-are-you?' he screamed.
'We're scheming evil secret black and midnight hags!'
'Right!' He pointed a vibrating finger towards the stage and lowered his voice and, at that moment, a dramatic inspiration dived through the atmosphere and slammed into his creative node, causing him to say, 'Now I want you to get out there and give 'em hell. Not for me. Not for the goddam captain.' He shifted the butt of an imaginary cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, and pushed back a non-existent tin helmet, and rasped, 'But for Corporal Walkowski and his little dawg.'
They stared at him in disbelief.
On cue, someone shook a sheet of tin and broke the spell.
Hwel rolled his eyes. He'd grown up in the mountains, where thunderstorms stalked from peak to peak on legs of lightning. He remembered thunderstorms that left mountains a different shape and flattened whole forests. Somehow, a sheet of tin wasn't the same, no matter how enthusiastically it was shaken.
Just once, he thought, just once. Let me get it right just once.
He opened his eyes and glared at the witches.
'What are you hanging around here for?' he yelled. 'Get out there and curse them!'
He watched them scamper on to the stage, and then Tomjon tapped him on the head.
'Hwel, there's no crown.'
'Hmm?' said the dwarf, his mind wrestling with ways of building thunder-and-lightning machines.
'There's no crown, Hwel. I've got to wear a crown.'
'Of course there's a crown. The big one with the red glass, very impressive, we used it in that place with the big square—'
'I think we left it there.'
There was another tinny roll of thunder but, even so, the part of Hwel that was living the play heard a faltering voice on stage. He darted to the wings.
'—I have smother'd many a babe—' he hissed, and sprinted back.
'Well, just find another one, then,' he said vaguely. 'In the props box. You're the Evil King, you've got to have a crown. Get on with it, lad, you're on in a few minutes. Improvise.'
Tomjon wandered back to the box. He'd grown up among crowns, big golden crowns made of wood and plaster, studded with finest glass. He'd cut his teeth on the hat-brims of Authority. But most of them had been left in the Dysk now. He pulled out collapsible daggers and skulls and vases, the strata of the years and, right at the bottom, his fingers closed on something thin and crown shaped, which no-one had ever wanted to wear because it looked so uncrownly.
It would be nice to say it tingled under his hand. Perhaps it did.
Granny was sitting as still as a statue, and almost as cold. The horror of realisation was stealing over her.
'That's us,' she said. 'Round that silly cauldron. That's meant to be us, Gytha.'
Nanny Ogg paused with a walnut halfway to her gums. She listened to the words.
'I never shipwrecked anybody!' she said. 'They just said they shipwreck people! I never did!'
'Green blusher,' she said, staring at the 3rd Witche. 'I don't look like that. I don't, do I?'
'Absolutely not,' said the Fool.
'And that hair!'
The Fool peered through the crenellations like an over-eager gargoyle.
'It looks like straw,' he said. 'Not very clean, either.'
He hesitated, picking at the lichened stonework with his fingers; Before he'd left the city he'd asked Hwel for a few suitable words to say to a young lady, and he had been memorising them on the way home. It was now or never.
'I'd like to know if I could compare you to a summer's day. Because – well, June 12th was quite nice, and . . .Oh. You've gone . . .'
King Verence gripped the edge of his seat; his fingers went through it. Tomjon had strutted on to the stage.
'That's him, isn't it? That's my son?'
The uncracked walnut fell from Nanny Ogg's fingers and rolled on to the floor. She nodded.
Verence turned a haggard, transparent face towards her.
'But what is he doing? What is he saying?'
Nanny shook her head. The king listened with his mouth open as Tomjon, lurching crabwise across the stage, launched into his major speech.
'I think he's meant to be you,' said Nanny, distantly.
'But I never walked like that! Why's he got a hump on his back? What's happened to his leg?' He listened some more, and added, in horrified tones, 'And I certainly never did that! Or that. Why is he saying I did that?'
The look he gave Nanny was full of pleading. She shrugged.
The king reached up, lifted off his spectral crown, and examined it.
'And it's my crown he's wearing! Look, this is it! And he's saying I did all those—' He paused for a minute, to listen to the latest couplet, and added, 'All right. Maybe I did that. So I set fire to a few cottages. But everyone does that. It's good for the building industry, anyway.'
He put the ghostly crown back on his head.
'Why's he saying all this about me?' he pleaded.
'It's art,' said Nanny. 'It wossname, holds a mirror up to life.'
Granny turned slowly in her seat to look at the audience. They were staring at the performance, their faces rapt. The words washed over them in the breathless air. This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.
Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.
That's us down there, she thought. Everyone knows who we really are, but the things down there are what they'll remember – three gibbering old baggages in pointy hats. All we've ever done, all we've ever been, won't exist any more.
She looked at the ghost of the king. Well, he'd been no worse than any other king. Oh, he might burn down the odd cottage every now and again, in a sort of absent-minded way, but only when he was really angry about something, and he could give it up any time he liked. Where he wounded the world, he left the kind of wounds that healed.
Whoever wrote this Theatre knew about the uses of magic. Even I believe what's happening, and I know there's no truth in it.
This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That's why everything is exactly the wrong way round.
We've lost. There is nothing we can do against this without becoming exactly what we aren't.
Nanny Ogg gave her a violent nudge in the ribs.
'Did you hear that?' she said. 'One of 'em said we put babbies in the cauldron! They've done a slander on me! I'm not sitting here and have 'em say we put babbies in a cauldron!'
Granny grabbed her shawl as she tried to stand up.
'Don't do anything!' she hissed. 'It'll make things worse.'
' "Ditch-delivered by adrabe", they said. That'll be young Millie Hipwood, who didn't dare tell her mum and then went out gathering firewood. I was up all night with that one,' Nanny muttered. 'Fine girl she produced. It's a slander! What's a drabe?' she added.
'Words,' said Granny, half to herself. 'That's all that's left. Words.'
'And now there's a man with a trumpet come on. What's he going to do? Oh. End of Act One,' said Nanny.
The words won't be forgotten, thought Granny. They've got a power to them. They're damn good words, as words go.
There was yet another rattle of thunder, which ended with the kind of crash made, for example, by a sheet of tin escaping from someone's hands and hitting the wall.
In the world outside the stage the heat pressed down like a pillow, squeezing the very life out of the air. Granny saw a footman bend down to the duke's ear. No, he won't stop the play. Of course he won't. He wants it to run its course.
The duke must have felt the heat of her gaze on the back of his neck. He turned, focused on her, and gave her a strange little smile. Then he nudged his wife. They both laughed.
Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.
She felt the land below her, even through several feet of foundations, flagstones, one thickness of leather and two thicknesses of sock. She felt it waiting.
She heard the king say, 'My own flesh and blood? Why has he done this to me? I'm going to confront him!'
She gently took Nanny Ogg's hand.
'Come, Gytha,' she said.
Lord Felmet sat back in his throne and beamed madly at the world, which was looking good right at the moment. Things were working out better than he had dared to hope. He could feel the past melting behind him, like ice in the spring thaw.
On an impulse he called the footman back.
'Call the captain of the guard,' he said, 'and tell him to find the witches and arrest them.'
The duchess snorted.
'Remember what happened last time, foolish man?'
'We left two of them loose,' said the duke. 'This time . . . all three. The tide of public feeling is on our side. That sort of thing affects witches, depend upon it.'
The duchess cracked her knuckles to indicate her view of public opinion.
'You must admit, my treasure, that the experiment seems to be working.'
'It would appear so.'
'Very well. Don't just stand there, man. Before the play ends, tell him. Those witches are to be under lock and key.'
Death adjusted his cardboard skull in front of the mirror, twitched his cowl into a suitable shape, stood back and considered the general effect. It was going to be his first speaking part. He wanted to get it right.
'Cower now, Brief Mortals,' he said. 'For I am Death, 'Gainst Whom No . . . no . . . no . . . Hwel, 'gainst whom no?'
'Oh, good grief, Dafe. " 'Gainst whom no lock will hold nor fasten'd portal bar", I really don't see why you have difficulty with . . . not that way up, you idiots!' Hwel strode off through the backstage melee in pursuit of a pair of importunate scene shifters.
'Right,' said Death, to no-one in particular. He turned back to the mirror.
' 'Gainst Whom No . . . Tumpty-Tum . . . nor Tumpty-Tumpty bar,' he said, uncertainly, and flourished his scythe. The end fell off.
'Do you think I'm fearsome enough?' he said, as he tried to fix it on again.
Tomjon, who was sitting on his hump and trying to drink some tea, gave him an encouraging nod.
'No problem, my friend,' he said. 'Compared to a visit from you, even Death himself would hold no fears. But you could try a bit more hollow
ness.'
'How d'you mean?'
Tomjon put down his cup. Shadows seemed to move across his face; his eyes sank, his lips drew back from his teeth, his skin stretched and paled.
' I HAVE COME TO GET YOU, YOU TERRIBLE ACTOR, ' he intoned, each syllable falling into place like a coffin lid. His features sprang back into shape.
'Like that,' he said.
Dafe, who had flattened himself against the wall, relaxed a bit and gave a nervous giggle.
'Gods, I don't know how you do it,' he said. 'Honestly, I'll never be as good as you.'
'There really isn't anything to it. Now run along, Hwel's fit to be tied as it is.'
Dafe gave him a look of gratitude and ran off to help with the scene shifting.
Tomjon sipped his tea uneasily, the backstage noises whirring around him like so much fog. He was worried.
Hwel had said that everything about the play was fine, except for the play itself. And Tomjon kept thinking that the play itself was trying to force itself into a different shape. His mind had been hearing other words, just too faint for hearing. It was almost like eavesdropping on a conversation. He'd had to shout more to drown out the buzzing in his head.
This wasn't right. Once a play was written it was, well, written. It shouldn't come alive and start twisting itself around.
No wonder everyone needed prompting all the time. The play was writhing under their hands, trying to change itself.
Ye gods, he'd be glad to get out of this spooky castle, and away from this mad duke. He glanced around, decided that it would be some time before the next act was called, and wandered aimlessly in search of fresher air.
A door yielded to his touch and he stepped out on to the battlements. He pushed it shut behind him, cutting off the sounds of the stage and replacing them by a velvet hush. There was a livid sunset imprisoned behind bars of cloud, but the air was as still as a mill pond and as hot as a furnace. In the forest below some night bird screamed.
He walked to the other end of the battlements and peered down into the sheer depths of the gorge. Far beneath, the Lancre boiled in its eternal mists.
He turned, and walked into a draught of such icy coldness that he gasped.
Unusual breezes plucked at his clothing. There was a strange muttering in his ear, as though someone was-trying to talk to him but couldn't get the speed right. He stood rigid for a moment, getting his breath, and then fled for the door.
Wyrd Sisters tds-6 Page 23
