Wyrd Sisters - Страница 44

‘They’re staging the play outside, in the big courtyard. We’ll get a lovely view from one of the gate towers, and no-one else will be there. I put some wine up there for us, and everything.’

When she still looked half-reluctant he added, ‘And there’s a cistern of water and a fireplace that the guards use sometimes. In case you want to wash your hair.’

——

The castle was full of people standing around in that polite, sheepish way affected by people who see each other all day and are now seeing each other again in unusual social circumstances, like an office party. The witches passed quite unremarked among them and found seats in the rows of benches in the main courtyard, set up before a hastily assembled stage.

Nanny Ogg waved her bag of walnuts at Granny.

‘Want one?’ she said.

An alderman of Lancre shuffled past her and pointed politely to the seat on her left.

‘Is anyone sitting here?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Nanny.

The alderman looked distractedly at the rest of the benches, which were filling up fast, and then down at the clearly empty space in front of him. He hitched up his robes with a determined expression.

‘I think that since the play is commencing to start, your friends must find a seat elsewhere, when they arrive,’ he said, and sat down.

Within seconds his face went white. His teeth began to chatter. He clutched at his stomach and groaned.

‘I told you,’ said Nanny, as he lurched away. ‘What’s the good of asking if you’re not going to listen?’ She leaned towards the empty seat. ‘Walnut?’

‘No, thank you,’ said King Verence, waving a spectral hand. ‘They go right through me, you know.’

‘Pray, gentles all, list to our tale …’

‘What’s this?’ hissed Granny. ‘Who’s the fellow in the tights?’

‘He’s the Prologue,’ said Nanny. ‘You have to have him at the beginning so everyone knows what the play’s about.’

‘Can’t understand a word of it,’ muttered Granny. ‘What’s a gentle, anyway?’

‘Type of maggot,’ said Nanny.

‘That’s nice, isn’t it? “Hallo maggots, welcome to the show.” Puts people in a nice frame of mind, doesn’t it?’

There was a chorus of ‘sshs’.

‘These walnuts are damn tough,’ said Nanny, spitting one out into her hand. ‘I’m going to have to take my shoe off to this one.’

Granny subsided into unaccustomed, troubled silence, and tried to listen to the prologue. The theatre worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.

The duke and duchess were sitting on their thrones right in front of the stage. As Granny glared at them the duke half turned, and she saw his smile.

I want the world the way it is, she thought. I want the past the way it was. The past used to be a lot better than it is now.

And the band struck up.

Hwel peered around a pillar and signalled to Wimsloe and Brattsley, who hobbled out into the glare of the torches.

OLD MAN (an Elder): ‘What hath befell the land?’

OLD WOMAN (a Crone): ‘’Tis a terror—’

The dwarf watched them for a few seconds from the wings, his lips moving soundlessly. Then he scuttled back to the guardroom where the rest of the cast were still in the last hasty stages of dressing. He uttered the stage manager’s traditional scream of rage.

‘C’mon,’ he ordered. ‘Soldiers of the king, at the double! And the witches—where are the blasted witches?’

Three junior apprentices presented themselves.

‘I’ve lost my wart!’

‘The cauldon’s all full of yuk!’

‘There’s something living in this wig!’

‘Calm down, calm down,’ screamed Hwel. ‘It’ll all be all right on the night!’

‘This is the night, Hwel!’

Hwel snatched a handful of putty from the make-up table and slammed on a wart like an orange. The offending straw wig was rammed on its owner’s head, livestock and all, and the cauldron was very briefly inspected and pronounced full of just the right sort of yuk, nothing wrong with yuk like that.

On stage a guard dropped his shield, bent down to pick it up, and dropped his spear. Hwel rolled his eyes and offered up a silent prayer to any gods that might be watching.

It was already going wrong. The earlier rehearsals had their little teething troubles, it was true, but Hwel had known one or two monumental horrors in his time and this one was shaping up to be the worst. The company was more jittery than a potful of lobsters. Out of the corner of his ear he heard the on-stage dialogue falter, and scurried to the wings.

‘—avenge the terror of thy father’s death—’ he hissed, and hurried back to the trembling witches. He groaned. Divers alarums. This lot were supposed to be terrorizing a kingdom. He had about a minute before the cue.

‘Right!’ he said, pulling himself together. ‘Now, what are you? You’re evil hags, right?’

‘Yes, Hwel,’ they said meekly.

‘Tell me what you are,’ he commanded.

‘We’re evil hags, Hwel.’

‘Louder!’

‘We’ve Evil Hags!’

Hwel stalked the length of the quaking line, then turned abruptly on his heel, ‘And what are you going to do?’

The 2nd Witche scratched his crawling wig.

‘We’re going to curse people?’ he ventured. ‘It says in the script—’

‘I-can’t-HEAR-you!’

‘We’re going to curse people!’ they chorused, springing to attention and staring straight ahead to avoid his gaze.

Hwel stumped back along the line.

‘What are you?’

‘We’re hags, Hwel!’

‘What kind of hags?’

‘We’re black and midnight hags!’ they yelled, getting into the spirit.

‘What kind of black and midnight hags?’

‘Evil black and midnight hags!’

‘Are you scheming?’

‘Yeah!’

‘Are you secret?’

‘Yeah!’

Hwel drew himself to his full height, such as it was.

‘What-are-you?’ he screamed.

‘We’re scheming evil secret black and midnight hags!’

‘Right!’ He pointed a vibrating finger towards the stage and lowered his voice and, at that moment, a dramatic inspiration dived through the atmosphere and slammed into his creative node, causing him to say, ‘Now I want you to get out there and give ’em hell. Not for me. Not for the goddam captain.’ He shifted the butt of an imaginary cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, and pushed back a nonexistent tin helmet, and rasped, ‘But for Corporal Walkowski and his little dawg.’

They stared at him in disbelief.

On cue, someone shook a sheet of tin and broke the spell.

Hwel rolled his eyes. He’d grown up in the mountains, where thunderstorms stalked from peak to peak on legs of lightning. He remembered thunderstorms that left mountains a different shape and flattened whole forests. Somehow, a sheet of tin wasn’t the same, no matter how enthusiastically it was shaken.

Just once, he thought, just once. Let me get it right just once.

He opened his eyes and glared at the witches.

‘What are you hanging around here for?’ he yelled. ‘Get out there and curse them!’

He watched them scamper on to the stage, and then Tomjon tapped him on the head.

‘Hwel, there’s no crown.’

‘Hmm?’ said the dwarf, his mind wrestling with ways of building thunder-and-lightning machines.

‘There’s no crown, Hwel. I’ve got to wear a crown.’

‘Of course there’s a crown. The big one with the red glass, very impressive, we used it in that place with the big square—’

‘I think we left it there.’

There was another tinny roll of thunder but, even so, the part of Hwel that was living the play heard a faltering voice on stage. He darted to the wings.

‘—I have smother’d many a babe—’ he hissed, and sprinted back.

‘Well, just find another one, then,’ he said vaguely. ‘In the props box. You’re the Evil King, you’ve got to have a crown. Get on with it, lad, you’re on in a few minutes. Improvise.’

Tomjon wandered back to the box. He’d grown up among crowns, big golden crowns made of wood and plaster, studded with finest glass. He’d cut his teeth on the hat-brims of Authority. But most of them had been left in the Dysk now. He pulled out collapsible daggers and skulls and vases, the strata of the years and, right at the bottom, his fingers closed on something thin and crown shaped, which no-one had ever wanted to wear because it looked so uncrownly.

It would be nice to say it tingled under his hand. Perhaps it did.

——

Granny was sitting as still as a statue, and almost as cold. The horror of realization was stealing over her.

‘That’s us,’ she said. ‘Round that silly cauldron. That’s meant to be us, Gytha.’

Nanny Ogg paused with a walnut halfway to her gums. She listened to the words.

‘I never shipwrecked anybody!’ she said. ‘They just said they shipwreck people! I never did!’

Up in the tower Magrat elbowed the Fool in the ribs.

‘Green blusher,’ she said, staring at the 3rd Witche. ‘I don’t look like that. I don’t, do I?’