Equal Rites

“It’s a neveryoumind,” said Granny, sealing the phial’s cork with wax.

“A medicine?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Granny pulled her writing set towards her and selected a pen. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she very carefully wrote out a label, with much scratching and pausing to work out the spellings.

“Who’s it for?”

“Mrs Herapath, the glassblower’s wife.”

Esk blew her nose. “He’s the one who doesn’t blow much glass, isn’t he?”

Granny looked at her over the top of the desk.

“How do you mean?”

“When she was talking to you yesterday she called him Old Mister Once A Fortnight.”

“Mmph,” said Granny. She carefully finished the sentence: “Dylewt in won pint warter and won droppe in hys tee and be shure to wear loose clowthing allso that no vysitors exspected.”

One day, she told herself, I’m going to have to have that talk with her.

The child seemed curiously dense. She had already assisted at enough births and taken the goats to old Nanny Annaple’s billy without drawing any obvious conclusions. Granny wasn’t quite certain what she should do about it, but the time never seemed appropriate to bring up the subject. She wondered whether, in her hearts of hearts, she was too embarrassed; she felt like a farrier who could shoe horses, cure them, rear them and judge them, but had only the sketchiest idea about how one rode them.

She pasted the label on to the phial and wrapped it carefully in plain paper.

Now.

“There is another way into the University,” she said, looking sidelong at Esk, who was making a disgruntled job of mashing herbs in a mortar. “A witches’ way.”

Esk looked up. Granny treated herself to a thin smile and started work on another label; writing labels was always the hard part of magic, as far as she was concerned.

“But I don’t expect you’d be interested,” she went on. “It’s not very glamorous.”

“They laughed at me,” Esk mumbled.

“Yes. You said. So you won’t be wanting to try again, then. I quite understand.”

There was silence broken only by the scratching of Granny’s pen. Eventually Esk said: “This way—”

“Mmph?”

“It’ll get me into the University?”

“Of course,” said Granny haughtily. “I said I’d find a way, didn’t I? A very good way, too. You won’t have to bother with lessons, you can go all over the place, no one will notice you—you’ll be invisible really—and, well, you can really clean up. But of course, after all that laughing, you won’t be interested. Will you?”

* * *

“Pray have another cup of tea, Mrs Weatherwax?” said Mrs Whitlow.

“Mistress,” said Granny.

“Pardon?”

“It’s Mistress Weatherwax,” said Granny. “Three sugars, please.”

Mrs Whitlow pushed the bowl towards her. Much as she looked forward to Granny’s visits it came expensive in sugar. Sugar lumps never seemed to last long around Granny.

“Very bad for the figure,” she said. “And the teeth, so Aye hear.”

“I never had a figure to speak of and my teeth take care of themselves,” said Granny. It was true, more’s the pity. 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 lose all her teeth by the time she was twenty and had real crone-credibility. It meant you ate a lot of soup, but you also got a lot of respect. And then there was warts. Without any effort Nanny managed to get a face 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.

“Mmph?” she said, aware of Mrs Whitlow’s fluting.

“Aye said,” said Mrs Whitlow, “that young Eskarina is a real treasure. Quate the little find. She keeps the floors spotless, spotless. No task too big. Aye said to her yesterday, Aye said, that broom of yours might as well have a life of its own, and do you know what she said?”

“I couldn’t even venture a guess,” said Granny, weakly.

“She said the dust was afraid of it! Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” said Granny.

Mrs Whitlow pushed her teacup towards her and gave her an embarrassed smile.

Granny sighed inwardly and squinted into the none-too-clean depths of the future. She was definitely beginning to run out of imagination.

* * *

The broom whisked down the corridor raising a great cloud of dust which, if you looked hard at it, seemed somehow to be sucked back into the broomstick. If you looked even harder you’d see that the broom handle had strange markings on it, which were not so much carved as clinging and somehow changed shape as you watched.

But no one looked.

Esk sat at one of the high deep windows and stared out over the city. She was feeling angrier than usual, so the broom attacked the dust with unusual vigour. Spiders ran desperate eight-legged dashes for safety as ancestral cobwebs disappeared into the void. In the walls mice clung to each other, legs braced against the inside of their holes. Wood-worm scrabbled in the ceiling beams as they were drawn, inexorably, backwards down their tunnels.

“‘You can really clean up’,” said Esk. “Huh!”

There were some good points, she had to admit. The food was simple but there was plenty of it, and she had a room to herself somewhere in the roof and it was quite luxurious because here she could lie in until five A.M., which to Granny’s way of thinking was practically noon. The work certainly wasn’t hard. She just started sweeping until the staff realised what was expected of it, and then she could amuse herself until it was finished. If anyone came the staff would immediately lean itself nonchalantly against a wall.

But she wasn’t learning any wizardry. She could wander into empty classrooms and look at the diagrams chalked on the board, and on the floor too in the more advanced classes, but the shapes were meaningless. And unpleasant.

They reminded Esk of the pictures in Simon’s book. They looked alive.

She gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers of paper until they were fossilized (fossils were well known on the Discworld, great spiralled shells and badly constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn’t really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene).^{17} And the words people said were just shadows of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.

So it followed that some writing was actually trying to become things. Esk’s thoughts became confused things at this point, but she was certain that the really magic words were the ones that pulsed angrily, trying to escape and become real.

They didn’t look very nice.

But then she remembered the previous day.

It had been rather odd. The University classrooms were designed on the funnel principle, with tiers of seats —polished by the bottoms of the Disc’s greatest mages—looking precipitously down into a central area where there was a workbench, a couple of blackboards and enough floor space for a decent-sized instructional octogram. There was a lot of dead space under the tiers and Esk had found it a quite useful observation post, peering around between the apprentice wizards’ pointy boots at the instructor. It was very restful, with the droning of the lecturers drifting over her as gently as the buzzing of the slightly zonked bees in Granny’s special herb garden. There never seemed to be any practical magic, it always seemed to be just words. Wizards seemed to like words.