Wyrd Sisters - Страница 12

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And then there were these witches. They haunted him.

‘Fool!’

The Fool, who had been having a quiet doze behind the throne, awoke in terror.

‘Yes!’

‘Come hither, Fool.’

The Fool jingled miserably across the floor.

‘Tell me, Fool, does it always rain here?’

‘Marry, nuncle—’

‘Just answer the question,’ said Lord Felmet, with iron patience.

‘Sometimes it stops, sir. To make room for the snow. And sometimes we get some right squand’ring orgulous fogs,’ said the Fool.

‘Orgulous?’ said the duke, absently.

The Fool couldn’t stop himself. His horrified ears heard his mouth blurt out: ‘Thick, my lord. From the Latatian orgulum, a soup or broth.’

But the duke wasn’t listening. Listening to the prattle of underlings was not, in his experience, particularly worthwhile.

‘I am bored, Fool.’

‘Let me entertain you, my lord, with many a merry quip and lightsome jest.’

‘Try me.’

The Fool licked his dry lips. He hadn’t actually expected this. King Verence had been happy enough just to give him a kick, or throw a bottle at his head. A real king.

‘I’m waiting. Make me laugh.’

The Fool took the plunge.

‘Why, sirrah,’ he quavered, ‘why may a caudled fillhorse be deemed the brother to a hiren candle in the night?’

The duke frowned. The Fool felt it better not to wait.

‘Withal, because a candle may be greased, yet a fillhorse be without a fat argier,’ he said and, because it was part of the joke, patted Lord Felmet lightly with his balloon on a stick and twanged his mandolin.

The duke’s index finger tapped an abrupt tattoo on the arm of the throne.

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘And then what happened?’

‘That, er, was by way of being the whole thing,’ said the Fool, and added, ‘My grandad thought it was one of his best.’

‘I daresay he told it differently,’ said the duke. He stood up. ‘Summon my huntsmen. I think I shall ride out on the chase. And you can come too.’

‘My lord, I cannot ride!’

For the first time that morning Lord Felmet smiled.

‘Capital!’ he said. ‘We will give you a horse that can’t be ridden. Ha. Ha.’

He looked down at his bandages. And afterwards, he told himself, I’ll get the armourer to send me up a file.

——

A year went past. The days followed one another patiently. Right back at the beginning of the multiverse they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn’t worked.

Tomjon sat under Hwel’s rickety table, watching his father as he walked up and down between the lattys, waving one arm and talking. Vitoller always waved his arms when he spoke; if you tied his hands behind his back he would be dumb.

‘All right,’ he was saying, ‘how about The King’s Brides?’

‘Last year,’ said the voice of Hwel.

‘All right, then. We’ll give them Mallo, the Tyrant of Klatch,’ said Vitoller, and his larynx smoothly changed gear as his voice became a great rolling thing that could rattle the windows across the width of the average town square. ‘“In blood I came, And by blood rule, That none will dare assay these walls of blood—”’

‘We did it the year before,’ said Hwel calmly. ‘Anyway, people are fed up with kings. They want a bit of a chuckle.’

‘They are not fed up with my kings,’ said Vitoller. ‘My dear boy, people do not come to the theatre to laugh, they come to Experience, to Learn, to Wonder—’

‘To laugh,’ said Hwel, flatly. ‘Have a look at this one.’

Tomjon heard the rustle of paper and the creak of wickerwork as Vitoller lowered his weight on to a props basket.

‘A Wizard of Sorts,’ Vitoller read. ‘Or, Please Yourself.’

Hwel stretched his legs under the table and dislodged Tomjon. He hauled the boy out by one ear.

‘What’s this?’ said Vitoller. ‘Wizards? Demons? Imps? Merchants?’

‘I’m rather pleased with Act II, Scene IV,’ said Hwel, propelling the toddler towards the props box. ‘Comic Washing Up with Two Servants.’

‘Any death-bed scenes?’ said Vitoller hopefully.

‘No-o,’ said Hwel. ‘But I can do you a humorous monologue in Act III.’

‘A humorous monologue!’

‘All right, there’s room for a soliloquy in the last act,’ said Hwel hurriedly. ‘I’ll write one tonight, no problem.’

‘And a stabbing,’ said Vitoller, getting to his feet. ‘A foul murder. That always goes down well.’

He strode away to organize the setting up of the stage.

Hwel sighed, and picked up his quill. Somewhere behind the sacking walls was the town of Hangdog, which had somehow allowed itself to be built in a hollow perched in the nearly sheer walls of a canyon. There was plenty of flat ground in the Ramtops. The problem was that nearly all of it was vertical.

Hwel didn’t like the Ramtops, which was odd because it was traditional dwarf country and he was a dwarf. But he’d been banished from his tribe years ago, not only because of his claustrophobia but also because he had a tendency to daydream. It was felt by the local dwarf king that this is not a valuable talent for someone who is supposed to swing a pickaxe without forgetting what he is supposed to hit with it, and so Hwel had been given a very small bag of gold, the tribe’s heartfelt best wishes, and a firm goodbye.

It had happened that Vitoller’s strolling players had been passing through at the time, and the dwarf had ventured one small copper coin on a performance of The Dragon of the Plains. He had watched it without a muscle moving in his face, gone back to his lodgings, and in the morning had knocked on Vitoller’s latty with the first draft of King Under the Mountain. It wasn’t in fact very good, but Vitoller had been perceptive enough to see that inside the hairy bullet head was an imagination big enough to bestride the world and so, when the strolling players strolled off, one of them was running to keep up.

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.

Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all.

Such a one was Hwel. Enough inspirations to equip a complete history of the performing arts poured continuously into a small heavy skull designed by evolution to do nothing more spectacular than be remarkably resistant to axe blows.

He licked his quill and looked bashfully around the camp. No-one was watching. He carefully lifted up the Wizard and revealed another stack of paper.

It was another potboiler. Every page was stained with sweat and the words themselves scrawled across the manuscript in a trellis of blots and crossings-out and tiny scribbled insertions. Hwel stared at it for a moment, alone in a world that consisted of him, the next blank page and the shouting, clamouring voices that haunted his dreams.

He began to write.

Free of Hwel’s never-too-stringent attention, Tomjon pushed open the lid of the props hamper and, in the methodical way of the very young, began to unpack the crowns.

The dwarf stuck out his tongue as he piloted the errant quill across the ink-speckled page. He’d found room for the star-crossed lovers, the comic grave-diggers and the hunchback king. It was the cats and the roller skates that were currently giving him trouble …

A gurgle made him look up.

‘For goodness sake, lad,’ he said. ‘It hardly fits. Put it back.’

——

The Disc rolled into winter.

Winter in the Ramtops could not honestly be described as a magical frosty wonderland, each twig laced with confections of brittle ice. Winter in the Ramtops didn’t mess about; it was a gateway straight through to the primeval coldness that lived before the creation of the world. Winter in the Ramtops was several yards of snow, the forests a mere collection of shadowy green tunnels under the drifts. Winter meant the coming of the lazy wind, which couldn’t be bothered to blow around people and blew right through them instead. The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow.

The ghost of King Verence prowled the battlements, bereft and hungry, and stared out across his beloved forests and waited his chance.

It was a winter of portents. Comets sparkled against the chilled skies at night. Clouds shaped mightily like whales and dragons drifted over the land by day. In the village of Razorback a cat gave birth to a two-headed kitten, but since Greebo, by dint of considerable effort, was every male ancestor for the last thirty generations this probably wasn’t all that portentous.

However, in Bad Ass a cockerel laid an egg and had to put up with some very embarrassing personal questions. In Lancre town a man swore he’d met a man who had actually seen with his own eyes a tree get up and walk. There was a short sharp shower of shrimps. There were odd lights in the sky. Geese walked backwards. Above all of this flared the great curtains of cold fire that were the Aurora Coriolis, the Hublights, whose frosty tints illuminated and coloured the midnight snows.

There was nothing the least unusual about any of this. The Ramtops, which as it were lay across the Disc’s vast magical standing wave like an iron bar dropped innocently across a pair of subway rails, were so saturated with magic that it was constantly discharging itself into the environment. People would wake up in the middle of the night, mutter, ‘Oh, it’s just another bloody portent’, and go back to sleep.