The Discworld Series (№3) - Equal Rites

“A wizard?” he said; “You want to be a wizard?”

“Yes,” said Esk, pushing the dazed Simon into Trestle’s reluctant arms. “I’m the eighth son of an eighth son. I mean daughter.”

The wizards around her were looking at one another and whispering. Esk tried to ignore them.

“What did she say?”

“Is she serious?”

“I always think children are so delightful at that age, don’t you?”

“You’re the eighth son of an eighth daughter?” said Cutangle. “Really?”

“The other way around, only not exactly,” said Esk, defiantly.

Cutangle dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief.

“This is quite fascinating,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of something quite like this before. Eh?”

He looked around at his growing audience. The people at the back couldn’t see Esk and were craning to check if some interesting magic was going on. Cutangle was at a loss.

“Well, now,” he said. “You want to be a wizard?”

“I keep telling everyone but no one seems to listen,” said Esk.

“How old are you, little girl?”

“Nearly nine.”

“And you want to be a wizard when you grow up.”

“I want to be a wizard now,” said Esk firmly. “This is the right place, isn’t it?”

Cutangle looked at Trestle and winked.

“I saw that,” said Esk.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a lady wizard before,” said Cutangle. “I rather think it might be against the lore. Wouldn’t you rather be a witch? I understand it’s a fine career for girls.”

A minor wizard behind him started to laugh. Esk gave him a look.

“Being a witch is quite good,” she conceded. “But I think wizards have more fun. What do you think?”

“I think you are a very singular little girl,” said Cutangle.

“What does that mean?”

“It means there’s only one of you,” said Trestle.

“That’s right,” said Esk, “and I still want to be a wizard.”

Words failed Cutangle. “Well, you can’t,” he said. “The very idea!”

He drew himself up to his full width and turned away. Something tugged at his robe.

“Why not?” said a voice.

He turned.

“Because", he said, slowly and deliberately, “because . . . the whole idea is completely laughable, that’s why. And it’s absolutely against the lore!”

“But I can do wizard magic!” said Esk, the faintest suggestion of a tremble in her voice.

Cutangle bent down until his face was level with hers.

“No you can’t,” he hissed. “Because you are not a wizard. Women aren’t wizards, do I make myself clear?”

“Watch,” said Esk.

She extended her right hand with the fingers spread and sighted along it until she spotted the statue of Malich the Wise, the founder of the University. Instinctively the wizards between her and it edged out of the way, and then felt rather silly.

“I mean it,” she said.

“Go away, little girl,” said Cutangle.

“Right,” said Esk. She squinted hard at the statue and concentrated ….

The great doors of Unseen University are made of octiron, a metal so unstable that it can only exist in a universe saturated with raw magic. They are impregnable to all force save magic: no fire, no battering ram, no army can breach them.

Which is why most ordinary visitors to the University use the back door, which is made of perfectly normal wood and doesn’t go around terrorising people, or even stand still terrorising people. It had a proper knocker and everything.

Granny examined the doorposts carefully and gave a grunt of satisfaction when she spotted what she was looking for. She hadn’t doubted that it would be there, cunningly concealed by the natural grain of the wood.

She grasped the knocker, which was shaped like a dragon’s head, and rapped smartly, three times. After a while the door was opened by a young woman with her mouth full of clothespegs.

“Ot oo oo ont?” she enquired.

Granny bowed, giving the girl a chance to take in the pointy black hat with the batwing hatpins. It had an impressive effect: she blushed and, peering out into the quiet alley-way, hurriedly motioned Granny inside. There was a big mossy courtyard on the other side of the wall, crisscrossed with washing lines. Granny had the chance to become one of the very few women to learn what it really is that wizards wear under their robes, but modestly averted her eyes and followed the girl across the flagstones and down a wide flight of steps.

They led into a long, high tunnel lined with archways and, currently, full of steam. Granny caught sight of long lines of washtubs in the big rooms off to the sides; the air had the warm fat smell of ironing. A gaggle of girls carrying washbaskets pushed past her and hurried up the steps—then stopped, halfway up, and turned slowly to look at her.

Granny set her shoulders back and tried to look as mysterious as possible.

Her guide, who still hadn’t got rid of her clothes-pegs, led her down a side-passage into a room that was a maze of shelves piled with laundry. In the very centre of the maze, sitting at a table, was a very fat woman with a ginger wig. She had been writing in a very large laundry book-it was still open in front of her-but was currently inspecting a large stained vest.

“Have you tried bleaching?” she asked.

“Yes, m’m,” said the maid beside her.

“What about tincture of myrryt?”

“Yes, m’m. It just turned it blue, m’m.”

“Well, it’s a new one on me,” said the laundry woman. “And Ay’ve seen brimstone and soot and dragon blood and demon blood and Aye don’t know what else.” She turned the vest over and read the nametape carefully sewn inside. “Hmm. Granpone the White. He’s going to be Granpone the Grey if he doesn’t take better care of his laundry. Aye tell you, girl, a white magician is just a black magician with a good housekeeper. Take it—”

She caught sight of Granny, and stopped.

“Ee ocked hat hee oor,” said Granny’s guide, dropping a hurried curtsey. “Oo ed hat—”

“Yes, yes, thank you, Ksandra, you may go,” said the fat woman. She stood up and beamed at Granny, and with an almost perceptible click wound her voice up several social classes.

“Pray hexcuse us,” she said. “You find us hall at sixes and sevens, it being washing day and heverything. His this a courtesy call or may I make so bold as to ask—”she lowered her voice—” his there a message from the Hother Sade?”

Granny looked blank, but only a fraction of a second. The witchmarks on the doorpost had said that the housekeeper welcomed witches and was particularly anxious for news of her four husbands; she was also in random pursuit of a fifth, hence the ginger wig and, if Granny’s ears weren’t deceiving her, the creak of enough whalebone to infuriate an entire ecology movement. Gullible and foolish, the signs had said. Granny withheld judgment, because city witches didn’t seem that bright themselves.

The housekeeper must have mistaken her expression.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “May staff have distinct instructions to welcome witches, although of course they upstairs don’t approve. No doubt you would like a cup of tea and something to eat?”

Granny bowed solemnly.

“And Aye will see if we can’t find a nice bundle of old clothes for you, too,” the housekeeper beamed.

“Old clothes? Oh. Yes. Thank you, m’m.”

The housekeeper swept forward with a sound like an elderly tea clipper in a gale, and beckoned Granny to follow her.

“Aye’ll have the tea brought to my flat. Tea with a lot of tealeaves.”

Granny stumped along after her. Old clothes? Did this fat woman really mean it? The nerve! Of course, if they were good quality ….

There seemed to be a whole world under the University. It was a maze of cellars, coldrooms, stillrooms, kitchens and sculleries, and every inhabitant was either carrying something, pumping something, pushing something or just standing around and shouting. Granny caught glimpses of rooms full of ice, and others glowing with the heat from red-hot cooking stoves, wall-sized. Bakeries smelled of new bread and taprooms smelled of old beer. Everything smelled of sweat and woodsmoke:

The housekeeper led her up an old spiral staircase and unlocked the door with one of the large number of keys that hung from her belt.

The room inside was pink and frilly. There were frills on things that no one in their right mind would frill. It was like being inside candyfloss.

“Very nice,” said Granny. And, because she felt it was expected of her, “Tasteful.” She looked around for something unfrilly to sit on, and gave up.

“Whatever am Aye thinking of?” the housekeeper trilled. “Aye’m Mrs Whitlow but I expect you know, of course. And Aye have the honour to be addressing—?”

“Eh? Oh, Granny Weatherwax,” said Granny. The frills were getting to her. They gave pink a bad name.

“Ay’m psychic myself, of course,” said Mrs Whitlow.

Granny had nothing against fortune-telling provided it was done badly by people with no talent for it. It was a different matter if people who ought to know better did it, though. She considered that the future was a frail enough thing at best, and if people looked at it hard they changed it. Granny had some quite complex theories about space and time and why they shouldn’t be tinkered with, but fortunately good fortune-tellers were rare and anyway people preferred bad fortune-tellers, who could be relied upon for the correct dose of uplift and optimism.

Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real thing. You needed a good imagination.

She couldn’t help wondering if Mrs Whitlow was a born witch who somehow missed her training. She was certainly laying siege to the future. There was a crystal ball under a sort of pink frilly tea cosy, and several sets of divinatory cards, and a pink velvet bag of rune stones, and one of those little tables on wheels that no prudent witch would touch with a ten-foot broomstick, and -Granny wasn’t sure on this point—either some special dried monkey turds from a llamassary or some dried llama turds from a monastery, which apparently could be thrown in such a way as to reveal the sum total of knowledge and wisdom in the universe. It was all rather sad…

“Or there’s the tea-leaves, of course,” said Mrs Whitlow, indicating the big brown pot on the table between them. “Aye know witches often prefer them, but they always seem so, well, common to me. No offence meant.”

There probably wasn’t any offence meant, at that, thought Granny. Mrs Whitlow was giving her the sort of look generally used by puppies when they’re not sure what to expect next, and are beginning to worry that it may be the rolled-up newspaper.

She picked up Mrs Whitlow’s cup and had started to peer into it when she caught the disappointed expression that floated across the housekeeper’s face like a shadow across a snowfield. Then she remembered what she was doing, and turned the cup widdershins three times, made a few vague passes over it and mumbled a charm which she normally used to cure mastitis in elderly goats, but never mind. This display of obvious magical talent seemed to cheer up Mrs. Whitlow no end.

Granny wasn’t normally very good at tea-leaves, but she squinted at the sugar-encrusted mess at the bottom of the cup and let her mind wander. What she really needed now was a handy rat or even a cockroach that happened to be somewhere near Esk, so that she could Borrow its mind.

What Granny actually found was that the University had a mind of its own.

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they’ve got the time-span all wrong. From stone’s point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.

The rocks from which Unseen University was built, however, have been absorbing magic for several thousand years and all that random power has had to go somewhere.

The University has, in fact, developed a personality.

Granny could sense it like a big and quite friendly animal, just waiting to roll over on its roof and have its floor scratched. It was paying no attention to her, however. It was watching Esk.

Granny found the child by following the threads of the University’s attention and watched in fascination as the scenes unfolded in the Great Hall ….

“—in there?”

The voice came from a long way away.

“Mmph?”

“Aye said, what do you see in there?” repeated Mrs Whitlow.

“Eh?”

“Aye said, what do—”

“Oh.” Granny reeled her mind in, quite confused. The trouble with Borrowing another mind was, you always felt out of place when you got back to your own body, and Granny was the first person ever to read the mind of a building. Now she was feeling big and gritty and full of passages.

“Are you all right?”

Granny nodded, and opened her windows. She extended her east and west wings and tried to concentrate on the tiny cup held in her pillars.

Fortunately Mrs Whitlow put her plaster complexion and stony silence down to occult powers at work, while Granny found that a brief exposure to the vast silicon memory of the University had quite stimulated her imagination.

In a voice like a draughty corridor, which made the housekeeper very impressed, she wove a future full of keen young men fighting for Mrs Whitlow’s ample favours. She also spoke very quickly, because what she had seen in the Great Hall made her anxious to go around to the main gates again.

“There is another thing,” she added.

“Yes? Yes?”

“I see you hiring a new servant—you do hire the servants here, don’t you? Right—and this one is a young girl, very economical, very good worker, can turn her hand to anything.”

“What about her, then?” said Mrs Whitlow, already savouring Granny’s surprisingly graphic descriptions of her future and drunk with curiosity.

“The spirits are a little unclear on this point,” said Granny, “But it is very important that you hire her.”

“No problem there,” said Mrs Whitlow, “can’t keep servants here, you know, not for long. It’s all the magic. It leaks down here, you know. Especially from the library, where they keep all them magical books. Two of the top floor maids walked out yesterday, actually, they said they were fed up going to bed not knowing what shape they would wake up in the morning. The senior wizards turn them back, you know. But it’s not the same.”

“Yes, well, the spirits say this young lady won’t be any trouble as far as that is concerned,” said Granny grimly.

“If she can sweep and scrub she’s welcome, Aye’m sure,” said Mrs Whitlow, looking puzzled.

“She even brings her own broom. According to the spirits, that is.”

“How very helpful. When is this young lady going to arrive?”

“Oh, soon, soon—that’s what the spirits say.”

A faint suspicion clouded the housekeeper’s face. “This isn’t the sort of thing spirits normally say. Where do they say that, exactly?”

“Here,” said Granny. “Look, the little cluster of tea-leaves between the sugar and this crack here. Am I right?”

Their eyes met. Mrs Whitlow might have had her weaknesses but she was quite tough enough to rule the below-stairs world of the University. However, Granny could outstare a snake; after a few seconds the housekeeper’s eyes began to water.

“Yes, Aye expect you are,” she said meekly, and fished a handkerchief from the recesses of her bosom.

“Well then,” said Granny, sitting back and replacing the teacup in its saucer.

“There are plenty of opportunities here for a young woman willing to work hard,” said Mrs Whitlow. “Aye myself started as a maid, you know.”

“We all do,” said Granny vaguely. “And now I must be going.” She stood up and reached for her hat.

“But—”

“Must hurry. Urgent appointment,” said Granny over her shoulder as she hurried down the steps.

“There’s a bundle of old clothes—”

Granny paused, her instincts battling for mastery.

“Any black velvet?”

“Yes, and some silk.”

Granny wasn’t sure she approved of silk, she’d heard it came out of a caterpillar’s bottom, but black velvet had a powerful attraction. Loyalty won.

“Put it on one side, I may call again,” she shouted, and ran down the corridor.

Cooks and scullery maids darted for cover as the old woman pounded along the slippery flagstones, leapt up the stairs to the courtyard and skidded out into the lane, her shawl flying out behind her and her boots striking sparks from the cobbles. Once out into the open she hitched up her skirts and broke into a full gallop, turning the corner into the main square in a screeching two-boot drift that left a long white scratch across the stones.

She was just in time to see Esk come running through the gates, in tears.

“The magic just wouldn’t work! I could feel it there but it just wouldn’t come out!”

“Perhaps you were trying too hard,” said Granny. “Magic’s like fishing. Jumping around and splashing never caught any fish, you have to bide quiet and let it happen natural.”

“And then everyone laughed at me! Someone even gave me a sweet!”

“You got some profit out of the day, then,” said Granny.

“Granny!” said Esk accusingly.

“Well, what did you expect?” she asked. “At least they only laughed at you. Laughter don’t hurt. You walked up to chief wizard and showed off in front of everyone and only got laughed at? You’re doing well, you are. Have you eaten the sweet?”

Esk scowled. “Yes.”

“What kind was it?”

“Toffee.”

“Can’t abide toffee.”

“Huh,” said Esk, “I suppose you want me to get peppermint next time?”

“Don’t you sarky me, young-fellow-me-lass. Nothing wrong with peppermint. Pass me that bowl.”

Another advantage of city life, Granny had discovered, was glassware. Some of her more complicated potions required apparatus which either had to be bought from the dwarves at extortionate rates or, if ordered from the nearest human glassblower, arrived in straw and, usually, pieces. She had tried blowing her own and the effort always made her cough, which produced some very funny results. But the city’s thriving alchemy profession meant that there were whole shops full of glass for the buying, and a witch could always arrange bargain prices.

She watched carefully as yellow steam surged along a twisty maze of tubing and eventually condensed as one large, sticky droplet. She caught it neatly on the end of a glass spoon and very carefully tipped it into a tiny glass phial.

Esk watched her through her tears.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“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, mores 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. Woodworm 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). 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.

But yesterday had been different. Esk had been sitting in the dusty gloom, trying to do even some very simple magic, when she heard the door open and boots clump across the floor. That was surprising in itself. Esk knew the timetable, and the Second Year students who normally occupied this room were down for Beginners’ Dematerialisation with Jeophal the Spry in the gym. (Students of magic had little use for physical exercise; the gym was a large room lined with lead and rowan wood, where neophytes could work out at High magic without seriously unbalancing the universe, although not always without seriously unbalancing themselves. Magic had no mercy on the ham-fisted. Some clumsy students were lucky enough to walk out, others were removed in bottles.)

Esk peeped between the slats. These weren’t students, they were wizards. Quite high ones, to judge by their robes. And there was no mistaking the figure that climbed on to the lecturer’s dais like a badlystrung puppet, bumping heavily into the lectern and absent-mindedly apologising to it. It was Simon. No one else had eyes like two raw eggs in warm water and a dose bright red from blowing. For Simon, the pollen count always went to infinity.

It occurred to Esk that, minus his general allergy to the whole of Creation and with a decent haircut and a few lessons in deportment, the boy could look quite handsome. It was an unusual thought, and she squirrelled it away for future consideration.

When the wizards had settled down, Simon began to talk. He read from notes, and every time he stuttered over a word the wizards, as one man, without being able to stop themselves, chorused it for him.

After a while a stick of chalk rose from the lectern and started to write on the blackboard behind him. Esk had picked up enough about wizard magic to know that this was an astounding achievement— Simon had been at the University for a couple of weeks, and most students hadn’t mastered Light Levitation by the end of their second year.

The little white stub skittered and squeaked across the blackness to the accompaniment of Simon’s voice. Even allowing for the stutter, he was not a very good speaker. He dropped notes. He corrected himself. He ummed and ahhed. And as far as Esk was concerned he wasn’t saying anything very much. Phrases filtered down to her hiding place. “Basic fabric of the universe” was one, and she didn’t understand what that was, unless he meant denim, or maybe flannelette. “Mutability of the possibility matrix” she couldn’t guess at all.

Sometimes he seemed to be saying that nothing existed unless people thought it did, and the world was really only there at all because people kept on imagining it. But then he seemed to be saying that there was lots of worlds, all nearly the same and all sort of occupying the same place but all separated by the thickness of a shadow, so that everything that ever could happen would have somewhere to happen in.