Equal Rites

Smith nodded reluctantly, crossed over to the forge, and pumped the bellows until the sparks flew. He went back for the staff.

It wouldn’t move.

“It won’t move!”

Sweat stood out of his brow as he tugged at the wood. It remained uncooperatively immobile.

“Here, let me try,” said Granny, and reached past him. There was a snap and a smell of scorched tin.

Smith ran across the forge, whimpering slightly, to where Granny had landed upside down against the opposite wall.

“Are you all right?”

She opened two eyes like angry diamonds and said, “I see. That’s the way of it, is it?”

“The way of what?” said Smith, totally bewildered.

“Help me up, you fool. And fetch me a chopper.”

The tone of her voice suggested that it would be a very good idea not to disobey. Smith rummaged desperately among the junk at the back of the forge until he found an old double-headed axe.

“Right. Now take off your apron.”

“Why? What do you intend to do?” said the smith, who was beginning to lose his grip on events. Granny gave an exasperated sigh.

“It’s leather, you idiot. I’m going to wrap it around the handle. It’ll not catch me the same way twice!”

Smith struggled out of the heavy leather apron and handed it to her very gingerly. She wrapped it around the axe and made one or two passes in the air. Then, a spiderlike figure in the glow of the nearly incandescent furnace, she stalked across the room and with a grunt of triumph and effort brought the heavy blade sweeping down right in the centre of the staff.

There was a click. There was a noise like a partridge. There was a thud.

There was silence.

Smith reached up very slowly, without moving his head, and touched the axe blade. It wasn’t on the axe any more. It had buried itself in the door by his head, taking a tiny nick out of his ear.

Granny stood looking slightly blurred from hitting an absolutely immovable object, and stared at the stub of wood in her hands.

“Rrrrightttt,” she stuttered. “Iiiinnn tthhatttt cccasseee—”

“No,” said Smith firmly, rubbing his ear. “Whatever it is you’re going to suggest, no. Leave it. I’ll pile some stuff around it. No one’ll notice. Leave it. It’s just a stick.”

“Just a stick?”

“Have you got any better ideas? Ones that won’t take my head off?”

She glared at the staff, which appeared not to notice.

“Not right now,” she admitted. “But you just give me time—”

“All right, all right. Anyway, I’ve got things to do, wizards to bury, you know how it is.”

Smith took a spade from beside the back door and hesitated.

“Granny.”

“What?”

“Do you know how wizards like to be buried?”

“Yes!”

“Well, how?”

Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs.

“Reluctantly.”

Later, night fell gently as the last of the world’s slow light flowed out of the valley, and a pale, rain-washed moon shone down in a night studded with stars. And in a shadowy orchard behind the forge there was the occasional clink of a spade or a muffled curse.

In the cradle upstairs the world’s first female wizard dreamed of nothing much.

The white cat lay half-asleep on its private ledge near the furnace. The only sound in the warm dark forge was the crackle of the coals as they settled down under the ash.

The staff stood in the corner, where it wanted to be, wrapped in shadows that were slightly blacker than shadows normally are.

Time passed, which, basically, is its job.

There was a faint tinkle, and a swish of air. After a while the cat sat up and watched with interest.

* * *

Dawn came. Up here in the Ramtops dawn was always impressive, especially when a storm had cleared the air. The valley occupied by Bad Ass overlooked a panorama of lesser mountains and foothills, coloured purple and orange in the early morning light that flowed gently over them (because light travels at a dilatory pace in the Disc’s vast magical field) and far off the great plains were still a puddle of shadows. Even further off the sea gave an occasional distant sparkle.

In fact, from here you could see right to the edge of the world.

That wasn’t poetic imagery but plain fact, since the world was quite definitely flat and was, furthermore, known to be carried through space on the backs of four elephants that in turn stood on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the Great Sky Turtle.

Back down there in Bad Ass the village is waking up. The smith has just gone into the forge and found it tidier than it has been for the last hundred years, with all the tools back in their right places, the floor swept and a new fire laid in the furnace. He is sitting on the anvil, which has been moved right across the room, and is watching the staff and is trying to think.

* * *

Nothing much happened for seven years, except that one of the apple trees in the smithy orchard grew perceptibly taller than the others and was frequently climbed by a small girl with brown hair, a gap in her front teeth, and the sort of features that promised to become, if not beautiful, then at least attractively interesting.