Whereas Nanny just tended to put a hot poultice on everything and recommend a large glass of whatever the patient liked best on the basis that since you were going to be ill anyway you might as well get some enjoyment out of it. (Magrat forbade her patients alcohol, because of what it did to the liver; if they didn’t know what it did to the liver, she spent some time telling them.)

And Granny … she just gave people a bottle of coloured water and told them they felt a lot better.

And what was so annoying was that they often did.

Where was the witchcraft in that?

With a wand, though, things could be different. You could help people a lot with a wand. Magic was there to make life better. Magrat knew this in the pink fluttering boudoir of her heart.

She dipped under the surface of sleep again.

And there was an odd dream. She never mentioned it to anyone afterwards because, well, you didn’t. Not things like that.

But she thought she’d got up in the night, awakened by the silence, to get some more air. And as she passed the mirror she saw a movement in it.

It wasn’t her face. It looked a lot like Granny Weatherwax. It smiled at her — a much nicer and friendlier smile than she’d ever got from Granny, Magrat recalled — and then vanished, the cloudy silver surface closing over it.

She hurried back to bed and awoke to the sound of a brass band, engaged in unrelenting oompah. People were shouting and laughing.

Magrat got dressed quickly, went out into the corridor, and knocked on the door of the older witches. There was no reply. She tried the handle.

After she’d rattled it a couple of times there was a thump as the chair wedged under the handle on the other side, the better to deter ravishers, burglars and other nocturnal intruders, fell over.

Granny Weatherwax’s boots protruded from under the covers at one end of the bed. Nanny Ogg’s bare feet, Nanny being something of a night-time revolver, were beside them. Faint snores rattled the jug on the washbasin; these were no longer the full-nosed roars of a quick forty-winks catnapper, but the well-paced growls of someone who intends to make a night of it.

Magrat knocked on the sole of Granny’s boot.

‘Hey, wake up! Something’s going on.’

Granny Weatherwax waking up was quite an impressive sight, and one not seen by many people.

Most people, on waking up, accelerate through a quick panicky pre-consciousness check-up: who am I, where am I, who is he/she, good god, why am I cuddling a policeman’s helmet, what happened last night?

And this is because people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time — there’s that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from fast asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking.

She sniffed. ‘Something’s burning,’ she said.

‘They’ve got a bonfire, too,’ said Magrat.

Granny sniffed again.

‘They’re roasting garlic?’ she said.

‘I know. I can’t imagine why. They’re ripping all the shutters off the windows and burning them in the square and dancing around the fire.’

Granny Weatherwax gave Nanny Ogg a vicious jab with her elbow.

‘Wake up, you.’

‘Wstph?’

‘I didn’t get a wink of sleep all night,’ said Granny reproachfully, ‘what with her snoring.’

Nanny Ogg raised the covers cautiously.

‘It’s far too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning,’ she said.

‘Come on,’ said Granny. ‘We needs your skill with languages.’

The owner of the inn flapped his arms up and down and ran around in circles. Then he pointed at the castle that towered over the forest. Then he sucked vigorously at his wrist. Then he fell over on his back. And then he looked expectantly at Nanny Ogg, while behind him the bonfire of garlic and wooden stakes and heavy window shutters burned merrily.

‘No,’ said Nanny, after a while. ‘Still non conprendy, mine hair.’

The man got up, and brushed some dust off his leather breeches.

‘I think he’s saying that someone’s dead,’ said Magrat. ‘Someone in the castle.’

‘Well, I must say, everyone seems very cheerful about it,’ said Granny Weatherwax severely.

In the sunlight of the new day the village looked far more cheerful. Everyone kept nodding happily at the witches.

‘That’s because it was probably the landlord,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘Bit of a bloodsucker, I think he’s sayin’.’

‘Ah. That’d be it, then.’ Granny rubbed her hands together and looked approvingly at the breakfast table, which had been dragged out into the sunshine. ‘Anyway, the food has certainly improved. Pass the bread, Magrat.’

‘Everyone keeps smiling and waving at us,’ said Magrat. ‘And look at all this food!’

‘That’s only to be expected,’ said Granny, with her mouth full. ‘They’ve only had us here one night and already they’re learnin’ it’s lucky to be kind to witches. Now help me get the lid off this honey.’

Under the table, Greebo sat and washed himself. Occasionally he burped.

Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.

‘What are you doing, Gytha? We’re ready to leave.’

Nanny Ogg looked up, her face still creased with the effort of composition.

‘I thought it would be nice to send something to our Jason. You know, to stop him worryin’. So I done a drawing of this place on a piece of card and Mine Hair here will give it to someone going our way. You never know, it might get there.’

Nanny Ogg sucked the end of her pencil. Not for the first time in the history of the universe, someone for whom communication normally came as effortlessly as a dream was stuck for inspiration when faced with a few lines on the back of a card.

‘Will you come on, Gytha? Magrat’s getting my broom started for me.’

Nanny Ogg sat back, content in the knowledge of a job well done.^[13]

Magrat reached the end of the town square and stopped to rest.

Quite an audience had gathered to see a woman with legs. They were very polite about it. Somehow, that made it worse.

‘It doesn’t fly unless you run really fast,’ she explained, aware even as she spoke how stupid this sounded, especially if you were listening in a foreign language. ‘I think it’s called hump starting.’

She took a deep breath, scowled in concentration, and ran forward again.

This time it started. It jolted in her hands. The bristles rustled. She managed to slip it into neutral before it could drag her along the ground. One thing about Granny Weatherwax’s broomstick — it was one of the very old-fashioned ones, built in the days when broomsticks were built to last and not fall apart with woodworm after ten years — was that while it might take some starting, when it went it didn’t hang about.

Magrat had once considered explaining the symbolism of the witches’ broomstick to Granny Weatherwax, and decided not to. It would have been worse than the row about the significance of the maypole.

Departure took some time. The villagers insisted on giving them little gifts of food. Nanny Ogg made a speech which no-one understood but which was generally cheered. Greebo, hiccuping occasionally, oozed into his accustomed place among the bristles of Nanny’s broomstick.

As they rose above the forest a thin plume of smoke also rose from the castle. And then there were flames.

‘I see people dancing in front of it,’ said Magrat.

‘Always a dangerous business, rentin’ property,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘I expect he was a bit lax when it came to redecoratin’ and repairin’ the roof and suchlike. People take against that kind of thing. My landlord hasn’t done a hand’s turn on my cottage the whole time I’ve been there,’ she added. ‘It’s shameful. And me an old woman, too.’

‘I thought you owned your place,’ said Magrat, as the broomsticks set off over the forest.

‘She just ain’t paid no rent for sixty years,’ said Nanny Ogg.

‘Is that my fault?’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘It’s not my fault. I’d be quite willin’ to pay.’ She smiled a slow, self-confident smile. ‘All he has to do is ask,’ she added.

This is the Discworld, seen from above, its cloud formations circling in long curved patterns.

Three dots emerged from the cloud layer.

‘I can see why travellin’ doesn’t catch on. I call this boring. Nothing but forest for hours and hours.’

‘Yes, but flying gets you to places quickly, Granny.’

‘How long’ve we been flying, anyway?’

‘About ten minutes since you last asked, Esme.’

‘You see? Boring.’

‘It’s sitting on the sticks I don’t like. I reckon there ought to be a special broomstick for going long distances, right? One you could stretch out on and have a snooze.’

They all considered this.

‘And have your meals on,’ added Nanny. ‘Proper meals, I mean. With gravy. Not just sandwiches and stuff.’ An experiment in aerial cookery on a small oil burner had been hastily curtailed after it threatened to set fire to Nanny’s broomstick.

‘I suppose you could do it if you had a really big broomstick,’ said Magrat. ‘About the size of a tree, perhaps. Then one of us could do the steering and another one could do the cooking.’

‘It’d never happen,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘The reason being, the dwarfs would make you pay a fortune for a stick that big.’

‘Yes, but what you could do,’ said Magrat, warming to her subject, ‘is get people to pay you to give them rides. There must be lots of people fed up with highwaymen and … and being seasick and that sort of thing.’

‘How about it, Esme?’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘I’ll do the steering and Magrat’ll do the cooking.’

‘What shall I do, then?’ said Granny Weatherwax suspiciously.

‘Oh … well … there ought to be someone to, you know, welcome people onto the stick and give them their meals,’ said Magrat. ‘And tell them what to do if the magic fails, for example.’

‘If the magic fails everyone’ll crash into the ground and die,’ Granny pointed out.

‘Yes, but someone will have to tell them how to do that,’ said Nanny Ogg, winking at Magrat. ‘They won’t know how to, not being experienced in flying.’

‘And we could call ourselves …’ she paused. As always on the Discworld, which was right on the very edge of unreality, little bits of realness crept in whenever someone’s mind was resonating properly. This happened now.

‘… Three Witches Airborne,’ she said. ‘How about that?’

‘Broomsticks Airborne,’ said Magrat. ‘Or Pan … air …’

‘There’s no need to bring religion into it,’ sniffed Granny.

Nanny Ogg looked slyly from Granny to Magrat.

‘We could call it Vir — ’ she began.^{24}

A gust of wind caught all three sticks and whirled them up. There was a brief panic as the witches brought them under control.

‘Load of nonsense,’ muttered Granny.

‘Well, it passes the time,’ said Nanny Ogg.

Granny looked morosely at the greenery below.

‘You’d never get people to do it,’ she said. ‘Load of nonsense.’

Several days passed.

In a quiet little inn in a tiny country Granny Weatherwax sat and regarded the food with deep suspicion. The owner hovered with the frantic expression of one who knows, even before he starts, that he’s not going to come out of this ahead of the game.

‘Good simple home cooking,’ said Granny. ‘That’s all I require. You know me. I’m not the demanding sort. No-one could say I’m the demanding sort. I just want simple food. Not all grease and stuff. It comes to something when you complain about something in your lettuce and it turns out to be what you ordered.’

Nanny Ogg tucked her napkin into the top of her dress and said nothing.

‘Like that place last night,’ said Granny. ‘You’d think you’d be all right with sandwiches, wouldn’t you? I mean … sandwiches? Simplest food there is in the whole world. You’d think even foreigners couldn’t get sandwiches wrong. Hah!’

‘They didn’t call them sandwiches, Granny,’ said Magrat, her eyes dwelling on the owner’s frying pan. ‘They called them … I think they called them smorgy’s board.’

‘They was nice,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘I’m very partial to a pickled herring.’

‘But they must think we’re daft, not noticing they’d left off the top slice,’ said Granny triumphantly. ‘Well, I told them a thing or two! Another time they’ll think twice before trying to swindle people out of a slice of bread that’s theirs by rights!’

‘I expect they will,’ said Magrat darkly.

‘And I don’t hold with all this giving things funny names so people don’t know what they’re eating,’ said Granny, determined to explore the drawbacks of international cookery to the full. ‘I like stuff that tells you plain what it is, like … well … Bubble and Squeak, or … or …’

‘Spotted Dick,’^{25} said Nanny absently. She was watching the progress of the pancakes with some anticipation.

‘That’s right. Decent honest food. I mean, take that stuff we had for lunch. I’m not saying it wasn’t nice,’ said Granny graciously. ‘In a foreign sort of way, of course. But they called it Cwuissses dee Grenolly, and who knows what that means?’

‘Frogs’ legs,’ translated Nanny, without thinking.

The silence was filled with Granny Weatherwax taking a deep breath and a pale green colour creeping across Magrat’s face. Nanny Ogg now thought quicker than she had done for a very long time.

‘Not actual frogs’ legs,’ she said hurriedly. ‘It’s like Toad-in-the-Hole is really only sausage and batter puddin’. It’s just a joke name.’

‘It doesn’t sound very funny to me,’ said Granny. She turned to glare at the pancakes.

‘At least they can’t muck up a decent pancake,’ she said. ‘What’d they call them here?’