‘It’s just that ever since we heard about the birth,’ Agnes waved a plump hand to indicate the general high-cholesterol celebration around them, ‘she’s been so … stretched, sort of. Twanging.’
Nanny Ogg thumbed some tobacco into her pipe and struck a match on her boot.
‘You certainly notice things, don’t you?’ she said, puffing away. ‘Notice, notice, notice. We’ll have to call you Miss Notice.’
‘I certainly notice you always fiddle around with your pipe when you’re thinking thoughts you don’t much like,’ said Agnes. ‘It’s displacement activity.’
Through a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke Nanny reflected that Agnes read books. All the witches who’d lived in her cottage were bookish types. They thought you could see life through books but you couldn’t, the reason being that the words got in the way.
‘She has been a bit quiet, that’s true,’ she said. ‘Best to let her get on with it.’
‘I thought perhaps she was sulking about the priest who’ll be doing the Naming,’ said Agnes.
‘Oh, old Brother Perdore’s all right,’ said Nanny. ‘Gabbles away in some ancient lingo, keeps it short and then you just give him sixpence for his trouble, fill him up with brandy and load him on his donkey and off he goes.’
‘What? Didn’t you hear?’ said Agnes. ‘He’s laid up over in Skund. Broke his wrist and both legs falling off the donkey.’
Nanny Ogg took her pipe out of her mouth.
‘Why wasn’t I told?’ she said.
‘I don’t know, Nanny. Mrs Weaver told me yesterday.’
‘Oo, that woman! I passed her in the street this morning! She could’ve said!’
Nanny poked her pipe back in her mouth as though stabbing all uncommunicative gossips. ‘How can you break both your legs falling off a donkey?’
‘It was going up that little path on the side of Skund Gorge. He fell sixty feet.’
‘Oh? Well … that’s a tall donkey, right enough.’
‘So the King sent down to the Omnian mission in Ohulan to send us up a priest, apparently,’ said Agnes.
‘He did what?’ said Nanny.
A small grey tent was inexpertly pitched in a field just outside the town. The rising wind made it flap, and tore at the poster which had been pinned on to an easel outside.
It read: GOOD NEWS! Om Welcomes You!!!
In fact no one had turned up to the small introductory service that Mightily Oats had organized that afternoon, but since he had announced one he had gone ahead with it anyway, singing a few cheerful hymns to his own accompaniment on the small portable harmonium and then preaching a very short sermon to the wind and the sky.
Now the Quite Reverend Oats looked at himself in the mirror.{9} He was a bit uneasy about the mirror, to be honest. Mirrors had led to one of the Church’s innumerable schisms, one side saying that since they encouraged vanity they were bad, and the other saying that since they reflected the goodness of Om they were holy. Oats had not quite formed his own opinion, being by nature someone who tries to see something in both sides of every question, but at least the mirrors helped him to get his complicated clerical collar on straight.
It was still very new. The Very Reverend Mekkle, who’d taken Pastoral Practice, had advised that the rules about starch were only really a guideline, but Oats hadn’t wanted to put a foot wrong and his collar could have been used as a razor.
He carefully lowered his holy turtle pendant into place, noting its gleam with some satisfaction, and picked up his finely printed graduation copy of the Book of Om. Some of his fellow students had spent hours carefully ruffling the pages to give them that certain straight-and-narrow credibility, but Oats had refrained from this as well. Besides, he knew most of it by heart.
Feeling rather guilty, because there had been some admonitions at the college against using holy writ merely for fortune telling, he shut his eyes and let the book flop open at random.
Then he opened his eyes quickly and read the first passage they encountered.
It was somewhere in the middle of Brutha’s Second Letter to the Omish, gently chiding them for not replying to the First Letter to the Omish.
‘… silence is an answer that begs three more questions. Seek and you will find, but first you should know what you seek …’
Oh, well. He shut the book.
What a place! What a dump. He’d had a short walk after the service and every path seemed to end in a cliff or a sheer drop. Never had he seen such a vertical country. Things had rustled at him in the bushes, and he’d got his shoes muddy. As for the people he’d met … well, simple ignorant country folk, salt of the earth, obviously, but they’d just stared at him carefully from a distance, as if they were waiting for something to happen to him and didn’t care to be too close to him when it did.
But still, he mused, it did say in Brutha’s Letter to the Simonites that if you wished the light to be seen you had to take it into dark places. And this was certainly a dark place.
He said a small prayer and stepped out into the muddy, windy darkness.
Granny flew high above the roaring treetops, under a half moon.
She distrusted a moon like that. A full moon could only wane, a new moon could only wax, but a half moon, balancing so precariously between light and dark … well, it could do anything.
Witches always lived on the edges of things. She felt the tingle in her hands. It was not just from the frosty air. There was an edge somewhere. Something was beginning.
On the other side of the sky the Hublights were burning around the mountains at the centre of the world, bright enough even to fight the pale light of the moon. Green and gold flames danced in the air over the central mountains. It was rare to see them at this time of the year, and Granny wondered what that might signify.
Slice was perched along the sides of a cleft in the mountains that couldn’t be dignified by the name of valley. In the moonlight she saw the pale upturned face waiting in the shadows of the garden as she came in to land.
‘Evening, Mr Ivy,’ she said, leaping off. ‘Upstairs, is she?’
‘In the barn,’ said Ivy flatly. ‘The cow kicked her … hard.’
Granny’s expression stayed impassive.
‘We shall see,’ she said, ‘what may be done.’
In the barn, one look at Mrs Patternoster’s face told her how little that might now be. The woman wasn’t a witch, but she knew all the practical midwifery that can be picked up in an isolated village, be it from cows, goats, horses or humans.
‘It’s bad,’ she whispered, as Granny looked at the moaning figure on the straw. ‘I reckon we’ll lose both of them … or maybe just one …’
There was, if you were listening for it, just the suggestion of a question in that sentence. Granny focused her mind.
‘It’s a boy,’ she said.
Mrs Patternoster didn’t bother to wonder how Granny knew, but her expression indicated that a little more weight had been added to a burden.
‘I’d better go and put it to John Ivy, then,’ she said.
She’d barely moved before Granny Weatherwax’s hand locked on her arm.
‘He’s no part in this,’ she said.
‘But after all, he is the—’
‘He’s no part in this.’
Mrs Patternoster looked into the blue stare and knew two things. One was that Mr Ivy had no part in this, and the other was that anything that happened in this barn was never, ever, going to be mentioned again.
‘I think I can bring ’em to mind,’ said Granny, letting go and rolling up her sleeves. ‘Pleasant couple, as I recall. He’s a good husband, by all accounts.’ She poured warm water from its jug into the bowl that the midwife had set up on a manger.