Wyrd Sisters

Granny, feeling in some obscure way that they had scored a minor triumph over the purveyors of untruth and artifice, helped herself to an apple from the bag and began to take a fresh interest. Magrat’s nerves started to unknot, and she began to settle down to enjoy the play. But not, as it turned out, for very long. Her willing suspension of disbelief was interrupted by a voice saying:

‘What’s this bit?’

Magrat sighed. ‘Well,’ she hazarded, ‘he thinks that he is the prince, but he’s really the other king’s daughter, dressed up as a man.’

Granny subjected the actor to a long analytical stare.

‘He is a man,’ she said. ‘In a straw wig. Making his voice squeaky.’

Magrat shuddered. She knew a little about the conventions of the theatre. She had been dreading this bit. Granny Weatherwax had Views.

‘Yes, but,’ she said wretchedly, ‘it’s the Theatre, see. All the women are played by men.’^{15}

‘Why?’

‘They don’t allow no women on the stage,’ said Magrat in a small voice. She shut her eyes.

In fact, there was no outburst from the seat on her left. She risked a quick glance.

Granny was quietly chewing the same bit of apple over and over again, her eyes never leaving the action.

‘Don’t make a fuss, Esme,’ said Nanny, who also knew about Granny’s Views. ‘This is a good bit. I reckon I’m getting the hang of it.’

Someone tapped Granny on the shoulder and a voice said, ‘Madam, will you kindly remove your hat?’

Granny turned around very slowly on her stool, as though propelled by hidden motors, and subjected the interrupter to a hundred kilowatt diamond-blue stare. The man wilted under it and sagged back on to his stool, her face following him all the way down.

‘No,’ she said.

He considered the options. ‘All right,’ he said.

Granny turned back and nodded to the actors, who had paused to watch her.

‘I don’t know what you’re staring at,’ she growled. ‘Get on with it.’

Nanny Ogg passed her another bag.

‘Have a humbug,’ she said.

Silence again filled the makeshift theatre except for the hesitant voices of the actors, who kept glancing at the bristling figure of Granny Weatherwax, and the sucking sounds of a couple of boiled humbugs being relentlessly churned from cheek to cheek.

Then Granny said, in a piercing voice that made one actor drop his wooden sword, ‘There’s a man over on the side there whispering to them!’

‘He’s a prompter,’ said Magrat. ‘He tells them what to say.’

‘Don’t they know?’

‘I think they’re forgetting,’ said Magrat sourly. ‘For some reason.’

Granny nudged Nanny Ogg.

‘What’s going on now?’ she said. ‘Why’re all them kings and people up there?’

‘It’s a banquet, see,’ said Nanny Ogg authoritatively. ‘Because of the dead king, him in the boots, as was, only now if you look, you’ll see he’s pretending to be a soldier, and everyone’s making speeches about how good he was and wondering who killed him.’

‘Are they?’ said Granny, grimly. She cast her eyes along the cast, looking for the murderer.

She was making up her mind.

Then she stood up.

Her black shawl billowed around her like the wings of an avenging angel, come to rid the world of all that was foolishness and pretence and artifice and sham. She seemed somehow a lot bigger than normal. She pointed an angry finger at the guilty party.

‘He done it!’ she shouted triumphantly. ‘We all seed ‘im! He done it with a dagger!’

***

The audience filed out, contented. It had been a good play on the whole, they decided, although not very easy to follow. But it had been a jolly good laugh when all the kings had run off, and the woman in black had jumped up and did all the shouting. That alone had been well worth the ha’penny admission.

The three witches sat alone on the edge of the stage.

‘I wonder how they get all them kings and lords to come here and do this?’ said Granny, totally unabashed. ‘I’d have thought they’d been too busy. Ruling and similar.’

‘No,’ said Magrat, wearily. ‘I still don’t think you quite understand.’

‘Well, I’m going to get to the bottom of it,’ snapped Granny. She got back on to the stage and pulled aside the sacking curtains.

‘You!’ she shouted. ‘You’re dead!’

The luckless former corpse, who was eating a ham sandwich to calm his nerves, fell backwards off his stool.

Granny kicked a bush. Her boot went right through it.

‘See?’ she said to the world in general in a strangely satisfied voice. ‘Nothing’s real! It’s all just paint, and sticks and paper at the back.’

‘May I assist you, good ladies?’

It was a rich and wonderful voice, with every diphthong gliding beautifully into place. It was a golden brown voice. If the Creator of the multiverse had a voice, it was a voice such as this. If it had a drawback, it was that it wasn’t a voice you could use, for example, for ordering coal. Coal ordered by this voice would become diamonds.