Wyrd Sisters - Страница 4

Verence sniffed.

‘Sausages,’ he said dreamily. ‘Bacon. Eggs. Smoked fish.’ He stared at Champot. ‘Black pudding,’ he whispered.

‘You haven’t actually got a stomach,’ the old ghost pointed out. ‘It’s all in the mind. Just force of habit. You just think you’re hungry.’

‘I think I’m ravenous.’

‘Yes, but you can’t actually touch anything, you see,’ Champot explained gently. ‘Nothing at all.’

Verence lowered himself gently on to a bench, so that he did not drift through it, and sank his head in his hands. He’d heard that death could be bad. He just hadn’t realized how bad.

He wanted revenge. He wanted to get out of this suddenly horrible castle, to find his son. But he was even more terrified to find that what he really wanted, right now, was a plate of kidneys.

——

A damp dawn flooded across the landscape, scaled the battlements of Lancre Castle, stormed the keep and finally made it through the casement of the solar.

Duke Felmet stared out gloomily at the dripping forest. There was such a lot of it. It wasn’t, he decided, that he had anything against trees as such, it was just that the sight of so much of them was terribly depressing. He kept wanting to count them.

‘Indeed, my love,’ he said.

The duke put those who met him in mind of some sort of lizard, possibly the type that lives on volcanic islands, moves once a day, has a vestigial third eye and blinks on a monthly basis. He considered himself to be a civilized man more suited to the dry air and bright sun of a properly-organized climate.

On the other hand, he mused, it might be nice to be a tree. Trees didn’t have ears, he was pretty sure of this. And they seemed to manage without the blessed state of matrimony. A male oak tree—he’d have to look this up—a male oak tree just shed its pollen on the breeze and all the business with the acorns, unless it was oak apples, no, he was pretty sure it was acorns, took place somewhere else …

‘Yes, my precious,’ he said.

Yes, trees had got it all worked out. Duke Felmet glared at the forest roof. Selfish bastards.

‘Certainly, my dear,’ he said.

‘What?’ said the duchess.

The duke hesitated, desperately trying to replay the monologue of the last five minutes. There had been something about him being half a man, and … infirm on purpose? And he was sure there had been a complaint about the coldness of the castle. Yes, that was probably it. Well, those wretched trees could do a decent day’s work for once.

‘I’ll have some cut down and brought in directly, my cherished,’ he said.

Lady Felmet was momentarily speechless. This was by way of being a calendar event. She was a large and impressive woman, who gave people confronting her for the first time the impression that they were seeing a galleon under full sail; the effect was heightened by her unfortunate belief that red velvet rather suited her. However, it didn’t set off her complexion. It matched it.

The duke often mused on his good luck in marrying her. If it wasn’t for the engine of her ambition he’d be just another local lord, with nothing much to do but hunt, drink and exercise his droit de seigneur. Instead, he was now just a step away from the throne, and might soon be monarch of all he surveyed.

Provided that all he surveyed was trees.

He sighed.

‘Cut what down?’ said Lady Felmet, icily.

‘Oh, the trees,’ said the duke.

‘What have trees got to do with it?’

‘Well … there are such a lot of them,’ said the duke, with feeling.

‘Don’t change the subject!’

‘Sorry, my sweet.’

‘What I said was, how could you have been so stupid as to let them get away? I told you that servant was far too loyal. You can’t trust someone like that.’

‘No, my love.’

‘You didn’t by any chance consider sending someone after them, I suppose?’

‘Bentzen, my dear. And a couple of guards.’

‘Oh.’ The duchess paused. Bentzen, as captain of the duke’s personal bodyguard, was as efficient a killer as a psychotic mongoose. He would have been her choice. It annoyed her to be temporarily deprived of a chance to fault her husband, but she rallied quite well.

‘He wouldn’t have needed to go out at all, if only you’d listened to me. But you never do.’

‘Do what, my passion?’

The duke yawned. It had been a long night. There had been a thunderstorm of quite unnecessarily dramatic proportions, and then there had been all that messy business with the knives.

It has already been mentioned that Duke Felmet was one step away from the throne. The step in question was at the top of the flight leading to the Great Hall, down which King Verence had tumbled in the dark only to land, against all the laws of probability, on his own dagger.

It had, however, been declared by his own physician to be a case of natural causes. Bentzen had gone to see the man and explained that falling down a flight of steps with a dagger in your back was a disease caused by unwise opening of the mouth.

In fact it had already been caught by several members of the king’s own bodyguard who had been a little bit hard of hearing. There had been a minor epidemic.

The duke shuddered. There were details about last night that were both hazy and horrible.

He tried to reassure himself that all the unpleasantness was over now, and he had a kingdom. It wasn’t much of one, apparently being mainly trees, but it was a kingdom and it had a crown.

If only they could find it.

Lancre Castle was built on an outcrop of rock by an architect who had heard about Gormenghast but hadn’t got the budget. He’d done his best, though, with a tiny confection of cut-price turrets, bargain basements, buttresses, crenellations, gargoyles, towers, courtyards, keeps and dungeons; in fact, just about everything a castle needs except maybe reasonable foundations and the kind of mortar that doesn’t wash away in a light shower.

The castle leaned vertiginously over the racing white water of the Lancre river, which boomed darkly a thousand feet below. Every now and again a few bits fell in.

Small as it was, though, the castle contained a thousand places to hide a crown.

The duchess swept out to find someone else to berate, and left Lord Felmet looking gloomily at the landscape. It started to rain.

It was on this cue that there came a thunderous knocking at the castle door. It seriously disturbed the castle porter, who was playing Cripple Mister Onion with the castle cook and the castle’s Fool in the warmth of the kitchen.

He growled and stood up. ‘There is a knocking without,’ he said.

‘Without what?’ said the Fool.

‘Without the door, idiot.’

The Fool gave him a worried look. ‘A knocking without a door?’ he said suspiciously. ‘This isn’t some kind of Zen, is it?’

When the porter had grumbled off in the direction of the gatehouse the cook pushed another farthing into the kitty and looked sharply over his cards at the Fool.

‘What’s a Zen?’ he said.

The Fool’s bells tinkled as he sorted through his cards. Without thinking, he said: ‘Oh, a subsect of the Turnwise Klatch philosophical system of Sumtin, noted for its simple austerity and the offer of personal tranquillity and wholeness achieved through meditation and breathing techniques; an interesting aspect is the asking of apparently nonsensical questions in order to widen the doors of perception.’

‘How’s that again?’ said the cook suspiciously. He was on edge. When he’d taken the breakfast up to the Great Hall he’d kept getting the feeling that something was trying to take the tray out of his hands. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, this new duke had sent him back for … He shuddered. Oatmeal! And a runny boiled egg! The cook was too old for this sort of thing. He was set in his ways. He was a cook in the real feudal tradition. If it didn’t have an apple in its mouth and you couldn’t roast it, he didn’t want to serve it.

The Fool hesitated with a card in his hand, suppressed his panic and thought quickly.

‘I’faith, nuncle,’ he squeaked, ‘thou’t more full of questions than a martlebury is of mizzensails.’

The cook relaxed.

‘Well, OK,’ he said, not entirely satisfied. The Fool lost the next three hands, just to be on the safe side.

The porter, meanwhile, unfastened the hatch in the wicket gate and peered out.

‘Who dost knock without?’ he growled.

The soldier, drenched and terrified though he was, hesitated.

‘Without? Without what?’ he said.

‘If you’re going to bugger about, you can bloody well stay without all day,’ said the porter calmly.

‘No! I must see the duke upon the instant!’ shouted the guard. ‘Witches are abroad!’

The porter was about to come back with, ‘Good time of year for it’, or ‘Wish I was, too’, but stopped when he saw the man’s face. It wasn’t the face of a man who would enter into the spirit of the thing. It was the look of someone who had seen things a decent man shouldn’t wot of …

***

‘Witches?’ said Lord Felmet.

‘Witches!’ said the duchess.

In the draughty corridors, a voice as faint as the wind in distant keyholes said, with a note of hope, ‘Witches!’

The psychically inclined …

——

‘It’s meddling, that’s what it is,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘And no good will come of it.’