Lords And Ladies

She'd show them.

Ahead of her, the Dancers were dark against the moonlit clouds.

Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.

She was going to have an early night. It had been a busy day

There was a jar of boiled sweets by her bed, and a thick glass bottle of the clear fluid from her complicated still out behind the woodshed. It wasn't exactly whiskey, and it wasn't exactly gin, but it was exactly 90° proof, and a great comfort during those worrying moments that sometimes occurred around 3 A.M. when you woke up and forgot who you were. After a glass of the clear liquid you still didn't remember who you were, but that was all right now because you were someone else anyway.

She plumped up the four pillows, kicked her fluffy slippers into the comer, and pulled the blankets over her head, creating a small, warm, and slightly rank cave. She sucked a boiled sweet; Nanny had only one tooth left, and that had taken all she could throw at it for many years, so a sweet at bedtime wasn't going to worry it much.

After a few seconds a sense of pressure on her feet indicated that the cat Greebo had taken up his accustomed place on the end of the bed. Greebo always slept on Nanny's bed; the way he'd affectionately try to claw your eyeballs out in the morning was as good as an alarm clock. But she always left a window open all night in case he wanted to go out and disembowel something, bless him.

Well, well. Elves. (They couldn't hear you say the word inside your head, anyway. At least, not unless they were real close.) She really thought they'd seen the last of them. How long was it, now? Must be hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Witches didn't like to talk about it, because they'd made a big mistake about the elves. They'd seen through the buggers in the end, of course, but it had been a close thing. And there'd been a lot of witches in those days. They'd been able to stop them at every turn, make life in this world too hot for them. Fought them with iron. Nothing elvish could stand iron. It blinded them, or something. Blinded them all over.

There weren't many witches now. Not proper witches. More of a problem, though, was that people didn't seem to be able to remember what it was like with the elves around. Life was certainly more interesting then, but usually because it was shorter. And it was more colourful, if you liked the colour of blood. It got so people didn't even dare talk openly about the bastards.

You said: The Shining Ones. You said: The Fair Folk. And you spat, and touched iron. But generations later, you forgot about the spitting and the iron, and you forgot why you used those names for them, and you remembered only that they were beautiful.

Yes, there'd been a lot of witches in them days. Too many women found an empty cradle, or a husband that never came home from the hunt. Had been the hunt.

Elves! The bastards . . . and yet . . . and yet . . . somehow, yes, they did things to memory.

Nanny Ogg turned over in bed. Greebo growled in protest.

Take dwarfs and trolls, for e.g. People said: Oh, you can't trust 'em, trolls are OK if you've got 'em in front of you, and some of 'em are decent enough in their way, but they're cowardly and stupid, and as for dwarfs, well, they're greedy and devious devils, all right, fair enough, sometimes you meet one of the clever little sods that's not too bad, but overall they're no better'n trolls, in fact—

—they're just like us.

But they ain't any prettier to look at and they've got no style. And we're stupid, and the memory plays tricks, and we remember the elves for their beauty and the way they move, and forget what they were. We're like mice saying, 'Say what you like, cats have got real style.'

People never quaked in their beds for fear of dwarfs. They never hid under the stairs from trolls. They might have chased 'em out of the henhouse, but trolls and dwarfs were never any more than a bloody nuisance. They were never a terror in the night.

We only remembers that the elves sang. We forgets what it was they were singing about.

Nanny Ogg turned over again. There was a slithering noise from the end of the bed, and a muffled yowl as Greebo hit the floor.

And Nanny sat up.

'Get your walking paws on, young fella-me-lad. We're going out.'

As she passed through the midnight kitchen she paused, took one of the big black flatirons from the hob by the fire, and attached it to a length of clothesline.

For all her life she'd walked at night through Lancre with no thought of carrying a weapon of any sort. Of course, for most of that time she'd recognizably been a witch, and any importunate prowler would've ended up taking his essentials away in a paper bag, but even so it was generally true of any woman in Lancre. Man too, come to that.

Now she could sense her own fear.

The elves were coming back all right, casting their shadows before them.

Diamanda reached the crest of the hill.

She paused. She wouldn't put it past that old Weatherwax woman to have followed her. She felt sure there had been something tracking her in the woods.

There was no one else around.

She turned.

'Evenin', miss.'

'You? You did follow me!'

Granny got to her feet from the shadow of the Piper, where she had been sitting quite invisibly in the blackness.

'Learned that from my dad,' she said. 'When he went hunting. He always used to say a bad hunter chases, a good hunter waits.'

'Oh? So you're hunting me now?'

'No. I was just waiting. I knew you'd come up here. You haven't got anywhere else to go. You've come to call her, haven't you? Let me see your hands.'

It wasn't a request, it was a command. Diamanda found her hands moving of their own accord. Before she could pull them back the old woman had grabbed them and held them firmly; her skin felt like sacking.

'Never done a hard day's work in your life, have you?' said Granny, pleasantly. 'Never picked cabbages with the ice on 'em, or dug a grave, or milked a cow, or laid out a corpse.'

'You don't have to do all that to be a witch!' Diamanda snapped.

'Did I say so? And let me tell you something. About beautiful women in red with stars in their hair. And probably moons, too. And voices in your head when you slept. And power when you came up here. She offered you lots of power, I expect. All you wanted. For free.'

Diamanda was silent.

'Because it happened before. There's always someone who'll listen.' Granny Weatherwax's eyes seemed to lose their focus.

'When you're lonely, and people around you seem too stupid for words, and the world is full of secrets that no one'll tell you . . . '

'Are you reading my mind?'

'Yours?' Granny's attention snapped back, and her voice lost its distant quality. 'Hah! Flowers and suchlike. Dancing about without yer drawers on. Mucking about with cards and bits of string. And it worked, I expect. She gave you power, for a while. Oh, she must have laughed. And then there is less power and more price. And then no power, and you're payin' every day. They always take more than they give. And what they give has less than no value. And they end up taking everything. What they like to get from us is our fear. What they want from us most of all is our belief. If you call them, they will come. You'll give them a channel if you call them here, at circle time, where the world's thin enough to hear. The power in the Dancers is weak enough now as it is. And I'm not having the . . . the Lords and Ladies back.'

Diamanda opened her mouth.