Wyrd Sisters

And thus it was that Granny, her hat and iron-grey hair dripping with moisture, her boots shedding lumps of ice, heard the distant and muffled sound of a voice enthusiastically explaining to the invisible sky that the hedgehog had less to worry over than just about any other mammal. Like a hawk that has spotted something small and fluffy in the grass, like a wandering interstellar flu germ that has just seen a nice blue planet drifting by, Granny turned the stick and plunged down through the choking billows.

‘Come on!’ she screamed, drunk with speed and exhilaration, and the sound from five hundred feet overhead put a passing wolf severely off its supper. ‘This minute, Gytha Ogg!’

Nanny Ogg caught her hand with considerable reluctance and the pair of broomsticks swept up again and into the clear, starlit sky.

The Disc, as always, gave the impression that the Creator has designed it specifically to be looked at from above. Streamers of cloud in white and silver stretched away to the Rim, stirred into thousand-mile swirls by the turning of the world. Behind the speeding brooms the sullen roof of the fog was dragged up into a curling tunnel of white vapour, so that the watching gods—and they were certainly watching—could see the terrible flight as a furrow in the sky.

A thousand feet and rising fast into the frosty air, the two witches were bickering again.

‘It was a bloody stupid idea,’ moaned Nanny. ‘I never liked heights.’

‘Did you bring something to drink?’

‘Certainly. You said.’

‘Well?’

‘I drank it, didn’t I,’ said Nanny. ‘Sitting around up there at my age. Our Jason would have a fit.’

Granny gritted her teeth. ‘Well, let’s have the power,’ she said. ‘I’m running out of up. Amazing how—’

Granny’s voice ended in a scream as, without any warning at all, her broomstick pinwheeled sharply across the clouds and dropped from sight.

——

The Fool and Magrat sat on a log on a small outcrop that looked out across the forest. The lights of Lancre town were in fact not very far away, but neither of them had suggested leaving.

The air between them crackled with unspoken thoughts and wild surmisings.

‘You’ve been a Fool long?’ said Magrat, politely. She blushed in the darkness. In that atmosphere it sounded the most impolite of questions.

‘All my life,’ said the Fool bitterly. ‘I cut my teeth on a set of bells.’

‘I suppose it gets handed on, from father to son?’ said Magrat.

‘I never saw much of my father. He went off to be Fool for the Lords of Quirm when I was small,’ said the Fool. ‘Had a row with my grandad. He comes back from time to time, to see my mam.’

‘That’s terrible.’

There was a sad jingle as the Fool shrugged. He vaguely recalled his father as a short, friendly little man, with eyes like a couple of oysters. Doing something as brave as standing up to the old boy must have been quite outside his nature. The sound of two suits of bells shaken in anger still haunted his memory, which was full enough of bad scenes as it was.

‘Still,’ said Magrat, her voice higher than usual and with a vibrato of uncertainty, ‘it must be a happy life. Making people laugh, I mean.’

When there was no reply she turned to look at the man. His face was like stone. In a low voice, talking as though she was not there, the Fool spoke.

He spoke of the Guild of Fools and Joculators in Ankh-Morpork.

Most visitors mistook it at first sight for the offices of the Guild of Assassins, which in fact was the rather pleasant, airy collection of buildings next door (the Assassins always had plenty of money); sometimes the young Fools, slaving at their rote in rooms that were always freezing, even in high summer, heard the young Assassins at play over the wall and envied them, even though, of course, the number of piping voices grew noticeably fewer towards the end of them (the Assassins also believed in competitive examination).

In fact all sorts of sounds managed to breach the high grim windowless walls, and from keen questioning of servants the younger Fools picked up a vision of the city beyond. There were taverns out there, and parks. There was a whole bustling world, in which the students and apprentices of the various Guilds and Colleges took a full ripe part, either by playing tricks on it, running through it shouting, or throwing parts of it up. There was laughter which paid no attention to the Five Cadences or Twelve Inflections. And—although the students debated this news in the dormitories at night—there was apparently unauthorized humour, delivered freestyle, with no reference to the Monster Fun Book or the Council or anyone.

Out there, beyond the stained stonework, people were telling jokes without reference to the Lords of Misrule.

It was a sobering thought. Well, not a sobering thought in actual fact, because alcohol wasn’t allowed in the Guild. But if it was, it would have been.

There was nowhere more sober than the Guild.