Terry Pratchett - The Sea and Little Fishes

Trouble began, and not for the first time, with an apple.

There was a bag of them on Granny Weatherwax’s bleached and spotless table. Red and round, shiny and fruity, if they’d known the future they should have ticked like bombs.

“Keep the lot, old Hopcroft said I could have as many as I wanted,” said Nanny Ogg. She gave her sister witch a sidelong glance. “Tasty, a bit wrinkled, but a damn good keeper.”

“He named an apple after you ?” said Granny. Each word was an acid drop on the air.

“Cos of my rosy cheeks,” said Nanny Ogg. “An’ I cured his leg for him after he fell off that ladder last year. An’ I made him up some jollop for his bald head.”

“It didn’t work, though,” said Granny. “That wig he wears, that’s a terrible thing to see on a man still alive.”

“But he was pleased I took an interest.”

Granny Weatherwax didn’t take her eyes off the bag. Fruit and vegetables grew famously in the mountains’ hot summers and cold winters. Percy Hopcroft was the premier grower and definitely a keen man when it came to sexual antics among the horticulture with a camel-hair brush.

“He sells his apple trees all over the place,” Nanny Ogg went on. “Funny, eh, to think that pretty soon thousands of people will be having a bite of Nanny Ogg.”

“Thousands more,” said Granny, tartly. Nanny’s wild youth was an open book, although only available in plain covers.

“Thank you, Esme.” Nanny Ogg looked wistful for a moment, and then opened her mouth in mock concern. “Oh, you ain’t jealous , are you, Esme? You ain’t begrudging me my little moment in the sun?”

“Me? Jealous? Why should I be jealous? It’s only an apple . It’s not as if it’s anything important.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s just a little frippery to humour an old lady,” said Nanny. “So how are things with you, then?”

“Fine. Fine.”

“Got your winter wood in, have you?”

“Mostly.”

“Good,” said Nanny. “Good.”

They sat in silence. On the windowpane a butterfly, awoken by the unseasonable warmth, beat a little tattoo in an effort to reach the September sun.

“Your potatoes ... got them dug, then?” said Nanny.

“Yes.”

“We got a good crop off ours this year.”

“Good.”

“Salted your beans, have you?”

“Yes.”

“I expect you’re looking forward to the Trials next week?”

“Yes.”

“I expect you’ve been practising?”

“No.”

It seemed to Nanny that, despite the sunlight, the shadows were deepening in the corners of the room. The very air itself was growing dark. A witch’s cottage gets sensitive to the moods of its occupant. But she plunged on. Fools rush in, but they are laggards compared to little old ladies with nothing left to fear.

“You coming over to dinner on Sunday?”

“What’re you havin’?”

“Pork.”

“With apple sauce?”

“Ye —”

“No,” said Granny.

There was a creaking behind Nanny. The door had swung open. Someone who wasn’t a witch would have rationalized this, would have said that of course it was only the wind. And Nanny Ogg was quite prepared to go along with this, but would have added: why was it only the wind, and how come the wind had managed to lift the latch?

“Oh, well, can’t sit here chatting all day,” she said, standing up quickly. “Always busy at this time of year, ain’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So I’ll be off, then.”

“Goodbye.”

The wind blew the door shut again as Nanny hurtled off down the path.

It occurred to her that, just possibly, she may have gone a bit too far. But only a bit.

The trouble with being a witch — at least, the trouble with being a witch as far as some people were concerned — was that you got stuck our here in the country. But that was fine by Nanny. Everything she wanted was out here. Everything she’d ever wanted was here, although in her youth she’d run out of men a few times. Foreign parts were all right to visit but they weren’t really serious. They had interestin’ new drinks and the grub was fun, but foreign parts was where you went to do what might need to be done and then you came back here, a place that was real. Nanny Ogg was happy in small places.

Of course, she reflected as she crossed the lawn, she didn’t have this view out of her window. Nanny lived down in the town, but Granny could look out across the forest and over the plains and all the way to the great round horizon of the Discworld.

A view like that, Nanny reasoned, could probably suck your mind right out of your head.

They’d told her the world was round and flat, which was common sense, and went through space on the back of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle, which didn’t have to make sense. It was all happening Out There somewhere, and it could continue to do so with Nanny’s blessing and disinterest so long as she could live in a personal world about ten miles across, which she carried around with her.

But Esme Weatherwax needed more than this little kingdom could contain. She was the other kind of witch.

And Nanny saw it as her job to stop Granny Weatherwax getting bored. The business with the apples was petty enough, a spiteful little triumph when you got down to it, but Esme needed something to make every day worthwhile and if it had to be anger and jealousy then so be it. Granny would now scheme for some little victory, some tiny humiliation that only the two of them would ever know about, and that’d be that. Nanny was confident that she could deal with her friend in a bad mood, but not when she was bored. A witch who is bored might do anything .

People said things like “we had to make our own amusements in those days” as if this signalled some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing. And Esme was undoubtedly the most powerful witch the mountains had seen for generations.

Still, the Trials were coming up, and they always set Esme Weatherwax all right for a few weeks. She rose to competition like a trout to a fly.

Nanny Ogg always looked forward to the Witch Trials. You got a good day out and of course there was a big bonfire. Whoever heard of a Witch Trial without a good bonfire afterwards?

And afterwards you could roast potatoes in the ashes.

The afternoon melted into the evening, and the shadows in corners and under stools and tables crept out and ran together.

Granny rocked gently in her chair as the darkness wrapped itself around her. She had a look of deep concentration.

The logs in the fireplace collapsed into the embers, which winked out one by one.

The night thickened.

The old clock ticked on the mantelpiece and, for some length of time, there was no other sound.

There came a faint rustling. The paper bag on the table moved and then began to crinkle like a deflating balloon. Slowly, the still air filled with a heavy smell of decay.

After a while the first maggot crawled out.

Nanny Ogg was back home and just pouring a pint of beer when there was a knock. She put down the jug with a sigh, and went and opened the door.

“Oh, hello, ladies. What’re you doing in these parts? And on such a chilly evening, too?”

Nanny backed into the room, ahead of three more witches. They wore the black cloaks and pointy hats traditionally associated with their craft, although this served to make each one look different. There is nothing like a uniform for allowing one to express one’s individuality. A tweak here and a tuck there are little details that scream all the louder in the apparent, well, uniformity.