Terry Pratchett - Carpe Jugulum

As a witch, of course, she’d be welcome anywhere and it was always a good idea to remind the nobs of this, in case they forgot. It was a hard choice, but she decided to stay outside and have a good dinner of venison because, like many old ladies, Nanny Ogg was a bottomless pit for free food. Then she’d go inside and fill the gaps with the fiddly dishes. Besides, they probably had that expensive fizzy wine in there and Nanny had quite a taste for it, provided it was served in a big enough mug. But you needed a good depth of beer before you loaded up on the fancy stuff.

She picked up a tankard, ambled to the front of the queue at the beer barrel, gently nudged aside the head of a man who’d decided to spend the evening lying under the tap, and drew herself a pint.

As she turned back she saw the splay-footed figure of Agnes approaching, still slightly uneasy with the idea of wearing the new pointy hat in public.

‘Wotcha, girl,’ said Nanny. ‘Try some of the venison, it’s good stuff.’

Agnes looked doubtfully at the roasting meat. Lancre people looked after the calories and let the vitamins go hang.

‘Do you think I could get a salad?’ she ventured.

‘Hope not,’ said Nanny happily.

‘Lot of people here,’ said Agnes.

‘ Everyone got a invite,’ said Nanny. ‘Magrat was very gracious about that, I thought.’

Agnes craned her head. ‘Can’t see Granny around anywhere, though.’

‘She’ll be inside, tellin’ people what to do.’

‘I haven’t seen her around much at all lately,’ said Agnes. ‘She’s got something on her mind, I think.’

Nanny narrowed her eyes.

‘You think so?’ she said, adding to herself: you’re getting good , miss.

‘It’s just that ever since we heard about the birth,’ Agnes waved a plump hand to indicate the general high-cholesterol celebration around them, ‘she’s been so … stretched, sort of. Twanging.’

Nanny Ogg thumbed some tobacco into her pipe and struck a match on her boot.

‘You certainly notice things, don’t you?’ she said, puffing away. ‘Notice, notice, notice. We’ll have to call you Miss Notice.’

‘I certainly notice you always fiddle around with your pipe when you’re thinking thoughts you don’t much like,’ said Agnes. ‘It’s displacement activity.’

Through a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke Nanny reflected that Agnes read books. All the witches who’d lived in her cottage were bookish types. They thought you could see life through books but you couldn’t, the reason being that the words got in the way.

‘She has been a bit quiet, that’s true,’ she said. ‘Best to let her get on with it.’

‘I thought perhaps she was sulking about the priest who’ll be doing the Naming,’ said Agnes.

‘Oh, old Brother Perdore’s all right,’ said Nanny. ‘Gabbles away in some ancient lingo, keeps it short and then you just give him sixpence for his trouble, fill him up with brandy and load him on his donkey and off he goes.’

‘What? Didn’t you hear?’ said Agnes. ‘He’s laid up over in Skund. Broke his wrist and both legs falling off the donkey.’

Nanny Ogg took her pipe out of her mouth.

‘Why wasn’t I told?’ she said.

‘I don’t know, Nanny. Mrs Weaver told me yesterday.’

‘Oo, that woman! I passed her in the street this morning! She could’ve said!’

Nanny poked her pipe back in her mouth as though stabbing all uncommunicative gossips. ‘How can you break both your legs falling off a donkey?’

‘It was going up that little path on the side of Skund Gorge. He fell sixty feet.’

‘Oh? Well … that’s a tall donkey, right enough.’

‘So the King sent down to the Omnian mission in Ohulan to send us up a priest, apparently,’ said Agnes.

‘He did what ?’ said Nanny.

A small grey tent was inexpertly pitched in a field just outside the town. The rising wind made it flap, and tore at the poster which had been pinned on to an easel outside.

It read: GOOD NEWS! Om Welcomes You!!!

In fact no one had turned up to the small introductory service that Mightily Oats had organized that afternoon, but since he had announced one he had gone ahead with it anyway, singing a few cheerful hymns to his own accompaniment on the small portable harmonium and then preaching a very short sermon to the wind and the sky.

Now the Quite Reverend Oats looked at himself in the mirror. {9} 9 In the Anglican church, a priest is known as ‘Reverend’, a dean is ‘Very Reverend’, a bishop is ‘Right Reverend’, an archbishop ‘Most Reverend’. Oats’s name may be a reference to Titus Oates, a 17th-century English clergyman who in 1678 alleged that Jesuits were planning to assassinate Charles II and place his Roman Catholic brother James, Duke of York (later James II), on the throne. In the subsequent wave of anti-Catholic hysteria, Oates was gratefully rewarded, and about 35 innocent people were executed. In 1685, after James acceded to the throne, Oates was convicted of perjury, flogged, and imprisoned. He was released and given a pension after James was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was a bit uneasy about the mirror, to be honest. Mirrors had led to one of the Church’s innumerable schisms, one side saying that since they encouraged vanity they were bad, and the other saying that since they reflected the goodness of Om they were holy. Oats had not quite formed his own opinion, being by nature someone who tries to see something in both sides of every question, but at least the mirrors helped him to get his complicated clerical collar on straight.

It was still very new. The Very Reverend Mekkle, who’d taken Pastoral Practice, had advised that the rules about starch were only really a guideline, but Oats hadn’t wanted to put a foot wrong and his collar could have been used as a razor.

He carefully lowered his holy turtle pendant into place, noting its gleam with some satisfaction, and picked up his finely printed graduation copy of the Book of Om . Some of his fellow students had spent hours carefully ruffling the pages to give them that certain straight-and-narrow credibility, but Oats had refrained from this as well. Besides, he knew most of it by heart.

Feeling rather guilty, because there had been some admonitions at the college against using holy writ merely for fortune telling, he shut his eyes and let the book flop open at random.

Then he opened his eyes quickly and read the first passage they encountered.

It was somewhere in the middle of Brutha’s Second Letter to the Omish, gently chiding them for not replying to the First Letter to the Omish.

‘… silence is an answer that begs three more questions. Seek and you will find, but first you should know what you seek …’

Oh, well. He shut the book.

What a place! What a dump . He’d had a short walk after the service and every path seemed to end in a cliff or a sheer drop. Never had he seen such a vertical country. Things had rustled at him in the bushes, and he’d got his shoes muddy. As for the people he’d met … well, simple ignorant country folk, salt of the earth, obviously, but they’d just stared at him carefully from a distance, as if they were waiting for something to happen to him and didn’t care to be too close to him when it did.

But still, he mused, it did say in Brutha’s Letter to the Simonites that if you wished the light to be seen you had to take it into dark places. And this was certainly a dark place.

He said a small prayer and stepped out into the muddy, windy darkness.

Granny flew high above the roaring treetops, under a half moon.