Witches Abroad

Page 7

'Hmm,' she said.
A few snow crystals landed on her hat.
'Well, well,' she said.
'What're you doing, Granny?' said Magrat.
'Cogitatin'.'
Granny walked to the valley's steep side and strolled along it, peering at the rock. Nanny Ogg joined her.
'Up here?' said Nanny.
'I reckon.'
' 'S a bit high for 'em, ain't it?'
'Little devils get everywhere. Had one come up in my kitchen once,' said Granny.' “Following a seam”, he said.'
'They're buggers for that,' said Nanny.
'Would you mind telling me,' said Magrat, 'what you're doing? What's so interesting about heaps of stones?'
The snow was falling faster now.
'They ain't stones, they're spoil,' said Granny. She reached a flat wall of ice-covered rock, no different in Magrat's eyes from the rock available in a range of easy-to-die-on sizes everywhere in the mountains, and paused as if listening.
Then she stood back, hit the rock sharply with her broomstick, and spake thusly:
'Open up, you little sods!'
Nanny Ogg kicked the rock. It made a hollow boom.
'There's people catching their death of cold out here!' she added.
Nothing happened for a while. Then a section of rock swung in a few inches. Magrat saw the glint of a suspicious eye.
'Yes?'
'Dwarfs?' said Magrat.
Granny Weatherwax leaned down until her nose was level with the eye.
'My name,' she said, 'is Granny Weatherwax.'
She straightened up again, her face glowing with self-satisfaction.
'Who's that, then?' said a voice from somewhere below the eye. Granny's expression froze.
Nanny Ogg nudged her partner.
'We must be more'n fifty miles away from home,' she said. 'They might not have heard of you in these parts.'
Granny leaned down again. Accumulated snowflakes cascaded off her hat.
'I ain't blaming you,' she said, 'but I know you'll have a King in there, so just you go and tell him Granny Weatherwax is here, will you?'
'He's very busy,' said the voice. 'We've just had a bit of trouble.'
'Then I'm sure he don't want any more,' said Granny.
The invisible speaker appeared to give this some consideration.
'We put writing on the door,' it said sulkily. 'In invisible runes. It's really expensive, getting proper invisible runes done.'
'I don't go around readin' doors,' said Granny.
The speaker hesitated.
'Weatherwax, did you say?'
'Yes. With a W. As in “witch”.'
The door slammed. When it was shut, there was barely a visible crack in the rock.
The snow was falling fast now. Granny Weatherwax jiggled up and down a bit to keep warm.
'That's foreigners for you,' she said, to the frozen world in general.
'I don't think you can call dwarfs foreigners,' said Nanny Ogg.
'Don't see why not,' said Granny. 'A dwarf who lives a long way off has got to be foreign. That's what foreign means.'
'Yeah? Funny to think of it like that,' said Nanny.
They watched the door, their breath forming three little clouds in the darkening air. Magrat peered at the stone door.
'I didn't see any invisible runes,' she said.
' 'Corse not,' said Nanny. 'That's 'cos they're invisible.'
'Yeah,' said Granny Weatherwax. 'Don't be daft.'
The door swung open again.
'I spoke to the King,' said the voice.
'And what did he say?' said Granny expectantly.
'He said, “Oh, no! Not on top of everything else!”'
Granny beamed. 'I knew 'e would have heard of me,' she said.
In the same way that there are a thousand Kings of the Gypsies, so there are a thousand Kings of the Dwarfs. The term means something like 'senior engineer'. There aren't
any Queens of the Dwarfs. Dwarfs are very reticent about revealing their sex, which most of them don't consider to be very important compared to things like metallurgy and hydraulics.
This king was standing in the middle of a crowd of shouting miners. He* looked up at the witches with the expression of a drowning man looking at a drink of water.
'Are you really any good?' he said.
Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax looked at one another.
'I think 'e's talking to you, Magrat,' said Granny.
'Only we've had a big fall in gallery nine,' said the King. 'It looks bad. A very promising vein of gold-bearing quartz is irretrievably trapped.'
One of the dwarfs beside him muttered something.
'Oh, yeah. And some of the lads,' said the King vaguely. 'And then you turn up. So the way I look at it, it's probably fate.'
Granny Weatherwax shook the snow off her. hat and looked around.
She was impressed, despite herself. You didn't often see proper dwarf halls these days. Most dwarfs were off earning big money in the cities down in the lowlands, where it was much easier to be a dwarf - for one thing, you didn't have to spend most of your time underground hitting your thumb with a hammer and worrying about fluctuations in the international metal markets. Lack of respect for tradition, that was the trouble these days. And take trolls. There were more trolls in Ankh-Morpork now than in the whole mountain range. Granny Weatherwax had nothing against trolls but she felt instinctively that if more trolls stopped wearing suits and walking upright, and went back to living under bridges and jumping out
* Many of the more traditional dwarf tribes have no female pronouns, like 'she' or 'her'. It follows that the courtship of dwarfs is an incredibly tactful affair.
and eating people as nature intended, then the world would be a happier place.
'You'd better show us where the problem is,' she said. 'Lots of rocks fallen down, have they?'
'Pardon?' said the King.
It's often said that eskimos have fifty words for snow.*
This is not true.
It's also said that dwarfs have two hundred words for rock.
They don't. They have no words for rock, in the same way that fish have no words for water. They do have words for igneous rock, sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, rock underfoot, rock dropping on your helmet from above, and rock which looked interesting and which they could have sworn they left here yesterday. But what they don't have is a word meaning 'rock'. Show a dwarf a rock and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphite of barytes.
Or, in this case, about two hundred tons of lowgrade shale. When the witches arrived at the disaster site dozens of dwarfs were working feverishly to prop the cracked roof and cart away the debris. Some of them were in tears.
'It's terrible . . . terrible,' muttered one of them. 'A terrible thing.'
Magrat lent him her handkerchief. He blew his nose noisily.
'Could mean a big slippage on the fault line and then we've lost the whole seam,' he said, shaking his head. Another dwarf patted him on the back.
'Look on the bright side,' he said. 'We can always drive a horizontal shaft off gallery fifteen. We're bound to pick it up again, don't you worry.'
* Well, not often. Not on a daily basis, anyway. At least, not everywhere. But probably in some cold countries people say, 'Hey, those eskimos! What a people! Fifty words for snow! Can you believe that? Amazing!' quite a lot.
L
'Excuse me,' said Magrat, 'there are dwarfs behind all that stuff, are there?'
'Oh, yes,' said the King. His tone suggested that this was merely a regrettable side-effect of the disaster, because getting fresh dwarfs was only a matter of time whereas decent gold-bearing rock was a finite resource.
Granny Weatherwax inspected the rockfall critically.
'We shall have to have everyone out of here,' she said. 'This is goin' to have to be private."
'I know how it is,' said the King. 'Craft secrets, I expect?'
'Something like that,' said Granny.
The King shooed the other dwarfs out of the tunnel, leaving the witches alone in the lantern light. A few bits of rock fell out of the ceiling.
'Hmm,' said Granny.
'You've gone and done it now,' said Nanny Ogg.
'Anything's possible if you set your mind to it,' said Granny vaguely.
'Then you'd better set yours good and hard, Esme. If the Creator had meant us to shift rocks by witchcraft, he wouldn't have invented shovels. Knowing when to use a shovel is what being a witch is all about. And put down that wheelbarrow, Magrat. You don't know nothing about machinery.'
'All right, then,' said Magrat. 'Why don't we try the wand?'
Granny Weatherwax snorted. 'Hah! Here? Whoever heard of a fairy godmother in a mine?'
'If I was stuck behind a load of rocks under a mountain I'd want to hear of one,' said Magrat hotly.
Nanny Ogg nodded. 'She's got a point there, Esme. There's no rule about where you fairy godmother.'
'I don't trust that wand,' said Granny. 'It looks wizardly to me.'
'Oh, come on,' said Magrat, 'generations of fairy godmothers have used it.'
Granny flung her hands in the air.
'All right, all right, all right,' she snapped. 'Go ahead! Make yourself look daft!'
Magrat took the wand out of her bag. She'd been dreading this moment.
It was made of some sort of bone or ivory; Magrat hoped it wasn't ivory. There had been markings on it once, but generations of plump fairy godmotherly hands had worn them almost smooth. Various gold and silver rings were set into the wand. Nowhere were there any instructions. Not so much as a rune or a sigil anywhere on its length indicated what you were supposed to do with it.
'I think you're supposed to wave it,' said Nanny Ogg. 'I'm pretty sure it's something like that.'
Granny Weatherwax folded her arms. 'That's not proper witching,' she said.
Magrat gave the wand an experimental wave. Nothing happened.
'Perhaps you have to say something?' said Nanny.
Magrat looked panicky.
'What do fairy godmothers say?' she wailed.
'Er,' said Nanny, 'dunno.'
'Huh!' said Granny.
Nanny Ogg sighed. 'Didn't Desiderata tell you anything?
'Nothing!'
Nanny shrugged.
'Just do your best, then,' she said.
Magrat stared at the pile of rocks. She shut her eyes. She took a deep breath. She tried to make her mind a serene picture of cosmic harmony. It was all very well for monks to go on about cosmic harmony, she reflected, when they were nicely tucked away on snowy mountains with only yetis to worry about. They never tried seeking inner peace with Granny Weatherwax glaring at them.
She waved the wand in a vague way and tried to put pumpkins out of her mind.
She felt the air move. She heard Nanny gasp.
She said, 'Has anything happened?'
After a while Nanny Ogg said, 'Yeah. Sort of. I hope they're hungry, that's all.'
And Granny Weathenvax said, "That's fairy godmother-ing, is it?'
Magrat opened her eyes.
There was still a heap, but it wasn't rock any more.
'There's a, wait for it, there's a bit of a squash in here,' said Nanny.
Magrat opened her eyes wider.
'Still pumpkins?'
'Bit of a squash. Squash,' said Nanny, in case anyone hadn't got it.
The top of the heap moved. A couple of small pumpkins rolled down almost to Magrat's feet, and a small dwarfish face appeared in the hole.
It stared down at the witches.
Eventually Nanny Ogg said, 'Everything all right?'
The dwarf nodded. Its attention kept turning to the pile of pumpkins that filled the tunnel from floor to ceiling.
'Er, yes,' it said. 'Is dad there?'
'Dad?'
"The King.'
'Oh.' Nanny Ogg cupped her hands around her mouth and turned to face up the tunnel. 'Hey, King!'
The dwarfs appeared. They looked at the pumpkins, too. The King stepped forward and stared up into the face of his son.
'Everything all right, son?'
'It's all right, dad. No faulting or anything.'