Equal Rites
She was a witch. That was quite acceptable in the Ramtops, and no one had a bad word to say about witches. At least, not if he wanted to wake up in the morning the same shape as he went to bed.
...although she was aware that somewhere under here complicated strata of vests and petticoats there was some skin, that didn't mean to say she approved of it.
'What is an elephant?' 'A kind of badger,' Said Granny. She hadn't maintained forest-credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance.
On the way home Granny met a hungry bear. Granny's back was giving her gyp and she was in no mood being growled at. She muttered a few words under her breath and the bear, to its brief amazement, walked heavily into a tree and didn't regain consciousness for several hours.
'...You just hold their hand and people do their own fortune-telling. But there is no need to go around believing it, we'd all be in trouble if we went around believing everything'
She (granny) was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.
Her expression wasn't perhaps as vicious as thumbscrews, but is did seem to suggest that thumbscrews were a real possibility.
Granny smiled, but as a lizard would smile.
Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.
By nightfall Granny's description was circulated to all the chapter houses of the guild of Thieves, Cutpurses, Housebreakers and Allied Trades, with strict instructions to avoid her at all costs. Thieves being creatures of the night themselves, know trouble when it stares them in the face.
Granny had nothing against fortune-telling provided it was done badly by people with no talent for it.............Granny knew all about fortune-telling. It was harder then the real thing. You needed a good imagination.
Granny suffered from robustly healthy teeth, which she considered a big drawback in a witch. She really envied Nanny Annaple, the witch over the mountain, who managed to loose all her teeth by the time she was twenty and had real crone-credibility. It meant you had to eat a lot of soup, but you also got a lot of respect. And then there was warts. Without an effort Nanny managed to get a face which looked like a sockful of marbles, while Granny had tried every reputable wart-causer and failed to raise even the obligatory nose wart. Some witches had all the luck.
'I, madam, am the Archchancellor! And I happen to run this University! And you, madam, are trespassing in very dangerous territory indeed! I warn you that - stop looking at me like that!'
......Granny's habit of wearing her entire wardrobe in one go.
'Right,' She said. Cutangle swayed. The tone off voice cut through him like a diamond saw. He could dimly remember being scolded by his mother when he was small; well, this was that voice, only refined and concentrated and edged with little bits of carborundum, a tone of command that would have a corpse standing to attention and probably have it marched halfway across it's cemetery before it remembered it was dead.
Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don't have leaders. Granny Weatherwax was the most highly regarded of the leaders they didn't have.
'Oh, obvious,' said Granny. 'I'll grant you it is obvious. Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true.'
It was one of the few sorrows of Granny Weatherwax's life that, despite all her efforts she'd arrive at the peak of her career with a complexion like a rosy apple and all her teeth. No amount of charms could persuade a wart to take root on her handsome is slightly equine features, and vast intakes of sugar only served to give her boundless energy. A wizard she'd consulted had explained it was on account of her having a metabolism, which at least allowed her to feel vaguely superior to Nanny Ogg, who she suspected had never even seen one.
'Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well known fact.'
'This not right, a woman going into such places by herself'. Granny nodded. She thoroughly approved of such sentiments so long as there was, of course, no suggestion that they applied to here.
'It's a long time since I heard a theatre played properly.'
'Let him be whoever he thinks he is,' she said. 'That's all anybody could hope for in this world.'
Granny's cottage was a fungoid shape in the mist. Her unruly herb garden seemed to move, even in the still air.
.........Granny hurtling down the path with the broomstick held stiff-armed beside her. At last the magic caught, and she managed to vault clumsily on to it before it trundled into the night sky as gracefully as a duck with one wing missing. From above the tree came a muffled curse against all dwarfish mechanics.
She had never mastered the talent for apologizing, but she appreciated it in other people.
'Well, being assasinated is natural causes for a king,' Said Granny.
'I wouldn't trust any king a burgher could trust.'
Granny Weatherwax was not lost. She wasn't the kind of people who ever became lost. it was that, just at the moment, shile she new exactly where SHE was, she didn't know the position of anywhere else.
Granny Weatherwax strecthed out her legs and looked at her boots. they were good strong boots, with hobnails and crescent-shaped scads; you couldn't believe a cobbler had made them, someone had laid down a sole and built up from there.
The old witch's broomstick was known and feared throughout the skies of Lancre. Granny had been introduced to flying quite late in life, and after some initial suspicion had taken to it like a bluebottle to an ancient fishhead. A problem, however, was that Granny saw every flight simple as a straight line from A to B and was unable to get alongside the idea that other users of the air might have any rights whatsoever; the flight migration patterns of an entire continent had been changed because of that simple fact.
'Oh dear', thought Magrat. 'I hope she hasn't happen to someone'.
...there was possibly something complimentary in the way Granny Weatherwax resolutely refused to consider other people's problems. It implied that , in her considerable opinion, they were quite capable of sorting them out by themselves.
"Double, hubble, stubble trouble, Fire burn and cauldron bub-" WHY isn't the cauldron bubbling Magrat?'
Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered in one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world greatests creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. it meant you damned it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was abaout to collapse, openend a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.
'We're bound to be truthfull,' She said. 'But there is no call to be honest.'
'......You can be as self-asservative as you like, I said, just so long as you do what you're told.'
....Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was.
Granny Weatherwax disaproved off magic for domestic purposes,
but she was annoyed. She also wanted her tea.
She threw a couple of logs into the fireplace and glared at them
until they burst into flame out of sheer embarressment
Very few people in the world had more self-control than Granny Weatherwax. It was as rigid as a bar of cast iron. And about as flexible.
....Granny Weatherwax, who thought that femal emancipation was a women's complaint that shouldn't be discussed in front of men.
It was on of the weak spots of Granny Weatherwax's welldevolped character that she'd never bothered to get the hang of steering things. It was alien to her nature.She took the view that it was her job to move and the rest off the world to arrange itself so that she arrived at her destination. This meant that she occasionally had to climb down trees she'd never climbed up
'....Everyone's naked under their clothes.' Said Magrat.
'Magrat Garlick, may you be forgiven.' Said Granny Wheatherwax.
'Well, it is true!'
'I'm not,' said Granny flatly, 'I got three vests on.'
Then she stood back, hit the rock sharply with her broomstick,
and spake thusly:
'Open up, you little sods!' <Granny opens a
hidden dwarf door with the secret words>
Grany 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 and eating people,as nature intended, then the world would be a happier place.
'I never pay for anything,' said Garnny.' People never let me pay. I can't help it if people gives me things the whole time, Can I? When I walks down the treet people are always running out with cakes they've just baked, and fresh beer, and old clothes that've been hardly been worn at all. "Oh, mistress Weatherwax, pray take this basket of eggs", they say. People are always very kind. Treat people right and they'll treat you right. That's respect. Not having to pay,' she finished sternly, 'is what bein' a witch is all about.
' 'Ullo,' it said. 'It'sss my birthday.'
All three of them stared at it for a while. Then Granny
Weatherwax picked up an oar and hit firmly over the head.
Granny's approach to foreign tongues was to repeat herself loudly and slowly
...Granny Weatherwax was an old woman only when it suited her purposes.
'The trouble with Esme is that she don't know how to lose. She's never had much practise' (Nanny Ogg)
'.....You'd have to go a long day's journey to find someone basically nastier than Esme,' said Nanny Ogg, 'and this is me saying it. She knows exactly what she is. She was born to be good and she don't like it.'
'Hah,' said Granny. 'Yes. Of course. There's always got to be' - she spat the words out- 'a happy ending'
'Haven't you got any romance in your soul?' said Magrat
plaintively.
'No,' said Granny. 'I ain't. And stars don't care what you wish,
and magic don't make things better, and no one doesn't get burned
who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to
anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three
things. What's real, what's not real, and what's the difference-'
'Baths is unhygienic,' Granny declared. 'You know I've never
agreed with baths. Sittin' around in your own dirt like that.'
'What do you do, then?' Said Magrat.
'I just washes,' said Granny. 'All the bits. You know. As and
when they becomes available.'
Despite many threats ,Granny Weatherwax had never turned anyone into a frog. The way she saw it, there was a technically less cruel and much more satisfying thing you could do. You could leave them human and make them think they were a frog, which also provided a much innocent entertainment for passers-by.
.....'asleep' was too moderate a word for the sounds Granny was making.
The one thing you could be sure of if you told Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg not to help, was that they would rush to help if only out of spite.
'this man went into an inn. Yes. It was an inn. And he saw a sign. The sign said "We serve any kind of sandwich." So he said "Get me an alligator sandwich - and make it quick!" '
'this man went into an inn,' said Granny Weatherwax, trying to ignore the rising uneasiness. 'And he saw this sign. The sign said "We serve all kinds of sandwiches." So he said "Get me an alligator sandwich - and I want it right away!" '
'There was a man, and he went an inn and he said "Do you sell sandwiches?" and the other man said "Yes" and he said, "Then give me an alligator sandwich - and don't be a long time about it?" '
Somewhere in the genetics of the Weatherwaxes was a piece of sapphire. Maybe generations of them.
Granny Wheaterwax wouldn't know what a pattern off of quantum inevitability was if she found it eating her dinner. If you mentioned the words 'paradigms of space-time' to her she'd just say 'What?'. But that didn't mean she was ignorant. It just meant she didn't have any truck with words, especially gibberish. She just knew that there were certain things that happened continually in human history, like three-dimensional clichés. Stories.
She hated everything that predestinated people, that fooled them, that made them slightly less then human.
'You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it is just a cage...'
Cats are like witches. They don't fight to kill but to win. There is a difference. There's no point in killing a opponent. that way, they won't know they have lost, and to be a real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows it. There is no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched live, is something to treasure.
'We're the other kind,' said Granny. 'We're the kind that gives people what they know they really need, not what they think they ought to want.'
'..... when Esme uses words like "everyone" and " No one" she doesn't include herself.'
'Good and bad is trickey,' she said. 'I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is wich way you face.'
... There's a billion places like home. But only one of 'em's where you live.'
Granny in her normal state of barely-controlled anger was far more her self.
Other people would probebly say:I wasn't myself. But Granny Weatherwax didn't have anyone else to be.
'Blessings be upon this house,' Said Granny Weatherwax.
In much the same tone of voice have people said, 'Eat hot lead,
Kincaid,' and, 'I expect you're wondering after all that
excitement wether I have got any balloons and lampshades left.'
{about believing in spirits,demons and gods}
'But all then things excist,' said Nanny Ogg,
'That's no call to go around believing in them. It only
encourage's 'em.'
She disliked all small childeren, which is why she got on with them so well.
'You mean you weren't chosen?'
'Me? No. I chose,' Said Granny.
The first elf reached her, hauled her up by het shoulder, and got a doubled-handed, bony-knuckled punch in an area that Nany Ogg would be surprised that Esme Wheaterwax even knew about.
Granny swept a candlestick and some crockry on to the floor with a dramatic motion and laid Diamanda on the table. In fact there were several acres of table totally free of any obstruction, but there's no sense in making an entrance unless you're prepared to make a mess.
Granny Weatherwax seemed to generate a gyroscopic field - if you started out off-balance she saw to it that you remained there.
'.......you stupid man!'
'I do happen to be king, you know,' said Verence
reproachfully.
'You stupid king, your majesty.'
'Thank you.'
You couldn't set out to be a good witch or a bad witch. It never worked for long. All you could try to be was a witch, as hard as you could.
Of course Granny Wheaterwax made a great play of her independence and self-reliance. But the point about that kind of stuff was that you needed someone around to be proudly independent and self-reliant at. People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.
The trouble was that Granny Wheaterwax combined all three in one. She was a maiden, as far as Nanny knew, and she was at least in the right age bracket for a crone; and, as for the third, well... cross Granny wheaterwax on a bad day and you'd be like a blossom in the frost.
She'd (granny) long ago been resigned to the fact that people expected a bottle of something funny-coloured and sticky. It wasn't the medicine that did the trick, though. It was, in a way, the spoon.
'Oh, I don't wan't payin',' said Granny ''S bad luck, taking
money.'
'Oh. Right.' Jarge brightened up.
'But maybe ... if your wife's got any old clothes, p'raps, I'm a
size 12, black for preference, or bakes the odd cake, no plums,
they give me wind,or got a bit of old meat put by, could be, or
p'raps you'll be killing a hog about now, best back's my
favorite, maybe some ham, a few pig knuckles ... anything you can
spare, really. No obligation. I wouldn't go around puttin' anyone
under obligation, just 'cos I'm a witch. Everyone all right in
your house, are they? Blessed with good health, I hope?'
They'd much rather went 'oo' when she seemed to know who was
approaching ger cottage then work out that it conveniently
overlooked a bend in the track, and as for the door-latch trick
with the length of blach thread...*
{footnote..}* Not that she sat looking out of the window
. She'd been watching the fire when she picked up the approach of
Jarge Weaver. But that wasn't the point.
Next thing it'd be cackling and gibbering and luring childeren into the oven. And it wasn't as if she even liked Childeren.
Granny Weatherwax was grudgingly litererate but keenly numerate. She assumed that anything written down was probebly a lie, and that aplied to numbers too. Numbers were used only by people who wanted to put one over on you.
Granny Weatherwax was not a jouster in the lists of love but, as an intelligent onlooker, she knew how the game was played
'No on could say I interfere where I'm not wanted. You won't find anyone callin' me a busybody'
'Have you got any special low terms for witches?'
'Yeah, how about "Meddling, interfering old baggages"?'
Cuttoff felt that he must have missed part of the conversation ,
because the next exchange went like this:
'What was that again young man?'
'Two complementary tickets to Ankh-Morpork, ma'am. No problem.'
'Inside seats, mind. No traveling on the top.'
'Certainly ma'am. Eccuse me while I just kneel in the dirt so's
you can step up ma'am.'
The coaching Inn was a run-down shack with only two bedrooms for guests. As helpless old ladies traveling alone, the witches got one. Simply because all hell would have been let loose if the hadn't.
At home Granny Weatherwax slept with open windows and an unlocked door, secure in the knowledge that the Ramtops' various creatures would rather eat their own ears then break in. In dangerous Civilized lands, however, she took a different view.
...she..attempted to play Patience, a game she'd never been able to master.
'I have Faith'
REALLY ? IN WHAT PARTICULAR DEITY?
'Oh, none of them'
THEN FAITH IN WHAT ?
'Just faith, you know. In general.'
'Well, well said Granny, smiling in a way that everyone except Nanny Ogg would think of as innocent.
'Gytha, you haven't got a conservatory. it's just a big windowsill.'
Granny was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough
without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.
And because the theatre was fiction made flesh, she hated the
theatre most of all. But that was it - hate was exactly
the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love
with his back turned
She didn't loathe the theatre, because, had she doen so,
she would have avoided it completely. Granny now took every
opportunity to visit the travelling theatre that came to Lancre,
and sat bold upright in the front row of evry performance,
staring fiercly. even honest Punch and Judy men found her sitting
among the childeren snapping things like ''Tain's so!' and
"Is that any way to behave?'
And she (Nanny Ogg) knew that Granny Weatherwax, whatever her other qualities, had an even bigger tin ear for languages then she had for music.
Nanny rather liked the theatrical world. It was his own kind of magic. That was why Esme disliked it, she reckoned. It was the magic of illusions and misdirection and foolery, amd that was fine by Nanny Ogg, because you couldn't be married three times without a little fooling. But is was just close enough to Granny's own kind of magic to make Granny uneasy. Which meant she couldn't leave it alone. It was like scratching an itch.
'Oh, you patronize the opera?'
'Lady Esmerelda patronizes everything ' said Nanny Ogg
stoudly.
'Shall I do madam's feet?' said the manicurist. She stared at Granny's boot and wondered if it might be necessary to use a hammer.
Nanny Ogg stared. She'd seen many strange things in her life, some of them twice. She'd seen elves and walking stones and the shoeing of a unicorn. She'd had a farmhouse dropped on her head. But she'd never seen Granny Weatherwax in rouge.
'...Like the lie about masks.'
'What lie about masks?'
'The way people say they hide faces.'
'The do hide faces,' said Nanny Ogg.
'Only the one on the outside.'
Granny Weatherwax had never heard of psychiatry and would have had no truck with it even if she had. There are some arts too black even for a witch. ....... A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don't excist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick.
She gave a deprecating little chuckle. And if Nanny Ogg had been listening, she would have resolved as follows: that no maddened cackle from Black Allis of infamous memory, no evil little giggle from some crazed vampyre whose morals were worse then his spelling , no side-splitting guffaw from the most inventive torturer, was quite so unnerving as a happy little chuckle from a Granny Weatherwax about to do what's best.
Granny slapped her hands together like the crack of doom.
'Right! Let's do some good!' she said, to the universe at large.
Granny Weatherwax lived in a cottage with a tatch so old there was quite a springly young tree growing in it, and got up and went to bed alone, and washed in a rain barrel
The Weatherwax women have always had one foot in shadow. It's in the blood. And most of their power comes from denying it.
...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.
(Queen Margaret) I've never caught her actually waiting for a dramatic moment, not in all the, well, things we've been involved in. I mean, if it was you or me, we'd been hanging around in the hall or something, but she just walks in and it's the right time.
...it was unnerving to turn up at Granny's cottage and find her stretched out in the floor as stiff as a stick and holding, in fingers that were alomst blue, a card with the words: I ATEN'T DEAD.
The villagers had said justice had been done, and she'd lost patience and told them to go home, then, and pray to whatever gods they believed in that is whas never done to them.
If you needed smoke and a veil to deal with your bees, what was the point of being a witch?
'Granny? But she is as moral as--'
'Oh, yes she is. But that's because
she's got Granny Wheaterwax glaring over her shoulder the whole time.' She'd changed as soon as the others had entered, Before, she'd been bowed
and tired. Now she was standing tall and haugth, supported by a scaffolding of
pride.
'Mistress Wheaterwax, you are a natural disputant.'
'No I ain't.'
'There's no greys. Only white that's got grubby.'
'When people say thing are a lot more complicated then that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.'
'I reckon Om helps those who helps themselves,' Said Granny.
he (Oats) thought: my god, is she ever finds a religion, what would come out of these mountains and sweep across the plains?
'If I've got a fault,' she said, contriving to suggest this was only a theoratical possibility, 'it's not knowing when to turn and run. And I tends to bluff on a weak hand.'
'Don't go spilling allegory all down your shirt.'
