Wyrd Sisters

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!’^{68}

‘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.^{69} ‘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?’

‘Absolutely not,’ said the Fool.

‘And that hair!’

The Fool peered through the crenellations like an over-eager gargoyle.

‘It looks like straw,’ he said. ‘Not very clean, either.’

He hesitated, picking at the lichened stonework with his fingers. Before he’d left the city he’d asked Hwel for a few suitable words to say to a young lady, and he had been memorizing them on the way home. It was now or never.

‘I’d like to know if I could compare you to a summer’s day. Because—well, June 12th was quite nice, and … Oh. You’ve gone …’^{70}

——

King Verence gripped the edge of his seat; his fingers went through it. Tomjon had strutted on to the stage.

‘That’s him, isn’t it? That’s my son?’

The uncracked walnut fell from Nanny Ogg’s fingers and rolled on to the floor. She nodded.

Verence turned a haggard, transparent face towards her.

‘But what is he doing? What is he saying?’

Nanny shook her head. The king listened with his mouth open as Tomjon, lurching crabwise across the stage, launched into his major speech.

‘I think he’s meant to be you,’ said Nanny, distantly.

‘But I never walked like that! Why’s he got a hump on his back? What’s happened to his leg?’^{71} He listened some more, and added, in horrified tones, ‘And I certainly never did that! Or that. Why is he saying I did that?’

The look he gave Nanny was full of pleading. She shrugged.

The king reached up, lifted off his spectral crown, and examined it.

‘And it’s my crown he’s wearing! Look, this is it! And he’s saying I did all those—’ He paused for a minute, to listen to the latest couplet, and added, ‘All right. Maybe I did that. So I set fire to a few cottages. But everyone does that. It’s good for the building industry, anyway.’

He put the ghostly crown back on his head.

‘Why’s he saying all this about me?’ he pleaded.

‘It’s art,’ said Nanny. ‘It wossname, holds a mirror up to life.’^{72}