Lords And Ladies

this thing?'

'A ruff, m'm. Um. They're all the rage in Sto Helit, my brother says.'

'You mean they make people angry? And what's this?'

'Brocade, I think.'

'It's like cardboard. Do I have to wear this sort of thing every day?'

'Don't know, I'm sure, m'm.'

'But Verence just trots around in leather gaiters and an old jacket!'

'Ah, but you're queen. Queens can't do that sort of thing. Everyone knows that, m'm. It's all right for kings to go wandering around with their arse half out their trous-'

She rammed her hand over her mouth.

'It's all right,' said Magrat. 'I'm sure even kings have . . . tops to their legs just like everyone else. Just go on with what you were saying.'

Millie had gone bright red.

'I mean, I mean, I mean, queens has got to be ladylike,' she managed. 'The king got books about it. Etti- quetty and stuff.'

Magrat surveyed herself critically in the mirror.

'It really suits you, your soon-going-to-be-majesty,' said Millie.

Magrat turned this way and that.

'My hair's a mess,' she said, after a while.

'Please m'm, the king said he's having a hairdresser come all the way from Ankh-Morpork, m'm. For the wedding.'

Magrat patted a tress into place. It was beginning to dawn on her that being a queen was a whole new life.

'My word,' she said. 'And what happens now?'

'Dunno, m'm.'

'What's the king doing?'

'Oh, he had breakfast early and buggered off over to Slice to show old Muckloe how to breed his pigs out of a book.'

'So what do I do? What's my job?'

Millie looked puzzled although this did not involve much of a change in her general expression.

'Dunno, m'm. Reigning, I suppose. Walking around in the garden. Holding court. Doin' tapestry. That's very popular among queens. And then. . . er. . . later on there's the royal succession. . .'

'At the moment,' said Magrat firmly, 'we'll have a go at the tapestry.'

Ridcully was having difficulty with the Librarian.

'I happen to be your Archchancellor, sir!'

'Oook.'

'You'll like it up there! Fresh air! Bags of trees! More woods than you can shake a stick at!'

'Oook!'

'Come down this minute!'

'Oook!'

'The books'll be quite safe here during the holidays. Good grief, it's hard enough to get students to come in here at the best of times-'

'Oook!'

Ridcully glared at the Librarian, who was hanging by his toes from the top shelf of Parazoology Ba to Mn.

'Oh, well,' he said, his voice suddenly low and cunning, 'it's a great shame, in the circumstances. They've got a pretty good library in Lancre castle, I heard. Well, they call it a library — it's just a lot of old books. Never had a catalogue near 'em, apparently.'

'Oook?'

'Thousands of books. Someone told me there's incunibles, too. Shame, really, you not wanting to see them.' Ridcully's voice could have greased axles.

'Oook?'

'But I can see your mind is quite made up. So I shall be going. Farewell.'

Ridcully paused outside the Library door, counting under his breath. He'd reached 'three' when the Librarian knuckled through at high speed, caught by the incunibles.

'So that'll be four tickets, then?' said Ridcully.

Granny Weatherwax set about finding out what had been happening around the stones in her own distinctive way.

People underestimate bees.

Granny Weatherwax didn't. She had half a dozen hives of them and knew, for example, there is no such creature as an individual bee. But there is such a creature as a swarm, whose component cells are just a bit more mobile than those of, say, the common whelk. Swarms see everything and sense a lot more, and they can remember things for years, although their memory tends to be external and built out of wax. A honeycomb is a hive's memory — the placement of egg cells, pollen cells, queen cells, honey cells, different types of honey, are all part of the memory array.

And then there are the big fat drones. People think all they do is hang around the hive all year, waiting for those few brief minutes when the queen even notices their existence, but that doesn't explain why they've got more sense organs than the roof of the CIA building.

Granny didn't really keep bees. She took some old wax every year, for candles, and the occasional pound of honey that the hives felt they could spare, but mainly she had them for someone to talk to.

For the first time since she'd returned home, she went to the hives.

And stared.

Bees were boiling out of the entrances. The thrum of wings filled the normally calm little patch behind the raspberry bushes. Brown bodies zipped through the air like horizontal hail.

She wished she knew why.

Bees were her one failure. There wasn't a mind in Lancre she couldn't Borrow. She could even see the world through the eyes of earthworms[9] But a swarm, a mind made up of thousands of mobile parts, was beyond her. It was the toughest test of all. She'd tried over and over again to ride on one, to see the world through ten thousand pairs of multifaceted eyes all at once, and all she'd ever got was a migraine and an inclination to make love to flowers.

But you could tell a lot from just watching bees. The activity, the direction, the way the guard bees acted. . .

They were acting extremely worried.

So she went for a lie down, as only Granny Weatherwax knew how.

Nanny Ogg tried a different way, which didn't have much to do with witchcraft but did have a lot to do with her general Oggishness.

She sat for a while in her spotless kitchen, drinking rum and smoking her foul pipe and staring at the paintings on the wall. They had been done by her youngest grandchildren in a dozen shades of mud, most of them of blobby stick figures with the word GRAN blobbily blobbed in underneath in muddy blobby letters.

In front of her the cat Greebo, glad to be home again, lay on his back with all four paws in the air, doing his celebrated something-found-in-the-gutter impersonation.

Finally Nanny got up and ambled thoughtfully down to Jason Ogg's smithy.

A smithy always occupied an important position in the villages, doing the duty of town hall, meeting room,