Equal Rites

Ruled by a queen, too,” she added, with a touch of approval.

“Don’t they sting you?” said Esk, standing back a little. Bees boiled out of the comb and overflowed the rough wooden sides of the box.

“Hardly ever,” said Granny. “You wanted magic. Watch.”

She put a hand into the struggling mass of insects and made a shrill, faint piping noise at the back of her throat. There was a movement in the mass, and a large bee, longer and fatter than the others, crawled on to her hand. A few workers followed it, stroking it and generally ministering to it.

“How did you do that?” said Esk.

“Ah,” said Granny, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Yes. I would. That’s why I asked, Granny,” said Esk, severely.

“Do you think I used magic?”

Esk looked down at the queen bee. She looked up at the witch.

“No,” she said, “I think you just know a lot about bees.”

Granny grinned.

“Exactly correct. That’s one form of magic, of course.”

“What, just knowing things?”

“Knowing things that other people don’t know,” said Granny. She carefully dropped the queen back among her subjects and closed the lid of the hive.

“And I think it’s time you learned a few secrets,” she added.

At last, thought Esk.

“But first, we must pay our respects to the Hive,” said Granny. She managed to sound the capital H.

Without thinking, Esk bobbed a curtsey.

Granny’s hand clipped the back of her head.

“Bow, I told you,” she said, without rancour. “Witches bow.” She demonstrated.

“But why?” complained Esk.

“Because witches have got to be different, and that’s part of the secret,” said Granny.

They sat on a bleached bench in front of the rimward wall of the cottage. In front of them the Herbs were already a foot high, a sinister collection of pale green leaves.

“Right,” said Granny, settling herself down. “You know the hat on the hook by the door? Go and fetch it.”

Esk obediently went inside and unhooked Granny’s hat. It was tall, pointed and, of course, black.

Granny turned it over in her hands and regarded it carefully.

“Inside this hat,” she said solemnly, “is one of the secrets of witchcraft. If you cannot tell me what it is, then I might as well teach you no more, because once you learn the secret of the hat there is no going back. Tell me what you know about the hat.”

“Can I hold it?”

“Be my guest.”

Esk peered inside the hat. There was some wire stiffening to give it a shape, and a couple of hatpins. That was all.

There was nothing particularly strange about it, except that no one in the village had one like it. But that didn’t make it magical. Esk bit her lip; she had a vision of herself being sent home in disgrace.

It didn’t feel strange, and there were no hidden pockets. It was just a typical witch’s hat. Granny always wore it when she went into the village, but in the forest she just wore a leather hood.

She tried to recall the bits of lessons that Granny grudgingly doled out. It isn’t what you know, it’s what other people don’t know. Magic can be something right in the wrong place, or something wrong in the right place. It can be—

Granny always wore it to the village. And the big black cloak, which certainly wasn’t magical, because for most of the winter it had been a goat blanket and Granny washed it in the spring.

Esk began to feel the shape of the answer and she didn’t like it much. It was like a lot of Granny’s answers. Just a word trick. She just said things you knew all the time, but in a different way so they sounded important.

“I think I know,” she said at last.

“Out with it, then.”

“It’s in sort of two parts.”

“Well?”

“It’s a witch’s hat because you wear it. But you’re a witch because you wear the hat. Um.”

“So—” prompted Granny.

“So people see you coming in the hat and the cloak and they know you’re a witch and that’s why your magic works?” said Esk.

“That’s right,” said Granny. “It’s called headology.” She tapped her silver hair, which was drawn into a tight bun that could crack rocks.

“But it’s not real!” Esk protested. “That’s not magic, it’s—it’s—”

“Listen,” said Granny, “If you give someone a bottle of red jollop for their wind it may work, right, but if you want it to work for sure then you let their mind make it work for them. Tell ’em it’s moonbeams bottled in fairy wine or something. Mumble over it a bit. It’s the same with cursing.”

“Cursing?” said Esk, weakly.

“Aye, cursing, my girl, and no need to look so shocked! You’ll curse, when the need comes. When you’re alone, and there’s no help to hand, and—”

She hesitated and, uncomfortably aware of Esk’s questioning eyes, finished lamely: “—and people aren’t showing respect. Make it loud, make it complicated, make it long, and make it up if you have to, but it’ll work all right. Next day, when they hit their thumb or they fall off a ladder or their dog drops dead, they’ll remember you. They’ll behave better next time.”

“But it still doesn’t seem like magic,” said Esk, scuffing the dust with her feet.

“I saved a man’s life once,” said Granny. “Special medicine twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I’d bought it from the dwarves. That’s the biggest part of doct’rin, really. Most people’ll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.”

She patted Esk’s hand as nicely as possible. “You’re a bit young for this,” she said, “but as you grow older you’ll find most people don’t set foot outside their own heads much. You too,” she added gnomically.

“I don’t understand.”

“I’d be very surprised if you did,” said Granny briskly, “but you can tell me five herbs suitable for dry coughs.”

* * *

Spring began to unfold in earnest. Granny started taking Esk on long walks that took all day, to hidden ponds or high on to the mountain scree to collect rare plants. Esk enjoyed that, high on the hills where the sun beat down strongly but the air was nevertheless freezing cold. Plants grew thickly and hugged the ground. From some of the highest peaks she could see all the way to the Rim Ocean that ran around the edge of the world; in the other direction the Ramtops marched into the distance, wrapped in eternal winter. They went all the way to the hub of the world where, it was generally agreed, the gods lived on a ten-mile high mountain of rock and ice.

“Gods are all right,” said Granny, as they ate their lunch and looked at the view. “You don’t bother gods, and gods don’t come bothering you.”

“Do you know many gods?”

“I’ve seen the thundergods a few times,” said Granny, “and Hoki, of course.”^{5}

“Hoki?”

Granny chewed a crustless sandwich. “Oh, he’s a nature god,” she said. “Sometimes he manifests himself as an oak tree, or half a man and half a goat, but mainly I see him in his aspect as a bloody nuisance. You only find him in the deep woods, of course. He plays the flute. Very badly, if you must know.”

Esk lay on her stomach and looked out across the lands below while a few hardy, self-employed bumblebees patrolled the thyme clusters. The sun was warm on her back but, up here, there were still drifts of snow on the hubside of rocks.