‘I don’t recognize any of these,’ she said, half to herself. ‘What do they give to people?’
‘Freedom,’ said Hilta, who had good hearing. She turned back to Granny. ‘How much have you taught her?’
‘Not that much,’ said Granny. ‘There’s power there, but what kind I’m not sure. Wizard power, it might be.’
Hilta turned around very slowly and looked Esk up and down.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That explains the staff. I wondered what the bees were talking about. Well, well. Give me your hand, child.’
Esk held out her hand. Hilta’s fingers were so heavy with rings it was like dipping into a sack of walnuts.
Granny sat upright, radiating disapproval, as Hilta began to inspect Esk’s palm.
‘I really don’t think that is necessary,’ she said sternly. ‘Not between us.’
‘ You do it, Granny,’ said Esk, ‘in the village. I’ve seen you. And teacups. And cards.’
Granny shifted uneasily. ‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘It’s all according. You just hold their hand and people do their own fortune-telling. But there’s no need to go around believing it, we’d all be in trouble if we went around believing everything.’
‘The Powers That Be have many strange qualities, and puzzling and varied are the ways in which they make their desires known in this circle of firelight we call the physical world,’ said Hilta solemnly. She winked at Esk.
‘Well, really,’ snapped Granny.
‘No, straight up,’ said Hilta. ‘It’s true.
‘Hmph.’
‘I see you going upon a long journey,’ said Hilta.
‘Will I meet a tall dark stranger?’ said Esk, examining her palm. ‘Granny always says that to women, she says—’
‘No,’ said Hilta, while Granny snorted. ‘But it will be a very strange journey. You’ll go a long way while staying in the same place. And the direction will be a strange one. It will be an exploration.’
‘You can tell all that from my hand?’
‘Well, mainly I’m just guessing,’ said Hilta, sitting back and reaching for the teapot (the lead drummer, who had climbed halfway back, fell on to the toiling cymbalists). She looked carefully at Esk and added, ‘A female wizard, eh?’
‘Granny is taking me to Unseen University,’ said Esk.
Hilta raised her eyebrows. ‘Do you know where it is?’
Granny frowned. ‘Not in so many words,’ she admitted. ‘I was hoping you could give me more explicit directions, you being more familiar with bricks and things.’
‘They say it has many doors, but the ones in this world are in the city of Ankh-Morpork,’ said Hilta. Granny looked blank. ‘On the Circle Sea,’ Hilta added. Granny’s look of polite enquiry persisted. ‘Five hundred miles away,’ said Hilta.
‘Oh,’ said Granny.
She stood up and brushed an imaginary speck of dust off her dress.
‘We’d better be going, then,’ she added.
Hilta laughed. Esk quite liked the sound. Granny never laughed, she merely let the corners of her mouth turn up, but Hilta laughed like someone who had thought hard about Life and had seen the joke.
‘Start tomorrow, anyway,’ she said. ‘I’ve got room at home, you can stay with me, and tomorrow you’ll have the light.’
‘We wouldn’t want to presume,’ said Granny.
‘Nonsense. Why not have a look around while I pack up the stall?’
Ohulan was the market town for a wide sprawling countryside and the market day didn’t end at sunset. Instead, torches flared at every booth and stall and light blared forth from the open doorways of the inns. Even the temples put out coloured lamps to attract nocturnal worshippers.
Hilta moved through the crowd like a slim snake through dry grass, her entire stall and stock reduced to a surprisingly small bundle on her back, and her jewellery rattling like a sackful of flamenco dancers. Granny stumped along behind her, her feet aching from the unaccustomed prodding of the cobbles.
And Esk got lost.
It took some effort, but she managed it. It involved ducking between two stalls and then scurrying down a side alley. Granny had warned her at length about the unspeakable things that lurked in cities, which showed that the old woman was lacking in a complete understanding of headology, since Esk was now determined to see one or two of them for herself.
In fact, since Ohulan was quite barbaric and uncivilized the only things that went on after dark to any degree were a little thievery, some amateurish trading in the courts of lust, and drinking until you fell over or started singing or both.
According to the standard poetic instructions one should move through a fair like the white swan at evening moves o’er the bay,{6} but because of certain practical difficulties Esk settled for moving through the crowds like a small dodgem car, bumping from body to body with the tip of the staff waving a yard above her head. It caused some heads to turn, and not only because it had hit them; wizards occasionally passed through the town and it was the first time anyone had seen one four feet tall with long hair.
Anyone watching closely would have noticed strange things happening as she passed by.
There was, for example, the man with three upturned cups who was inviting a small crowd to explore with him the exciting world of chance and probability as it related to the position of a small dried pea. He was vaguely aware of a small figure watching him solemnly for a few moments, and then a sackful of peas cascaded out of every cup he picked up. Within seconds he was knee-deep in legumes. He was a lot deeper in trouble — he suddenly owed everyone a lot of money.
There was a small and wretched monkey that for years had shuffled vaguely at the end of a chain while its owner played something dreadful on a pipe-organ. It suddenly turned, narrowed its little red eyes, bit its keeper sharply in the leg, snapped its chain and had it away over the rooftops with the night’s takings in a tin cup. History is silent about what they were spent on.
A boxful of marzipan ducks on a nearby stall came to life and whirred past the stallholder to land, quacking happily, in the river (where, by dawn, they had all melted: that’s natural selection for you).
The stall itself sidled off down an alley and was never seen again.
Esk, in fact, moved through the fair more like an arsonist moves through a hayfield or a neutron bounces through a reactor, poets notwithstanding, and the hypothetical watcher could have detected her random passage by tracing the outbreaks of hysteria and violence. But, like all good catalysts, she wasn’t actually involved in the processes she initiated, and by the time all the non-hypothetical potential watchers took their eyes off them she had been buffeted somewhere else.
She was also beginning to tire. While Granny Weatherwax approved of night on general principles, she certainly didn’t hold with promiscuous candlelight — if she had any reading to do after dark she generally persuaded the owl to come and sit on the back of her chair, and read through its eyes. So Esk expected to go to bed around sunset, and that was long past.
There was a doorway ahead of her that looked friendly. Cheerful sounds were sliding out on the yellow light, and pooling on the cobbles. With the staff still radiating random magic like a demon lighthouse she headed for it, weary but determined.
The landlord of the Fiddler’s Riddle considered himself to be a man of the world, and this was right, because he was too stupid to be really cruel, and too lazy to be really mean and although his body had been around quite a lot his mind had never gone further than the inside of his own head.