from
Lords and Ladies
by
Terry Pratchett

The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired*—but that’s not the start. The play, the game, the war is just a little window on a ribbon of events that may extend back thousands of years. The point is, there’s always something before. It’s always a case of Now Read On.

Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before.

The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus:

In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.

* Probably at the first pawn.

No one had ever told him how to be a king, so he had to find out for himself. He’d sent off for books on the subject. Verence was a great believer in the usefulness of knowledge derived from books.

He had formed the unusual opinion that the job of a king is to make the kingdom a better place for everyone to live in.

There’s nothing nastier to walk through than shoulder-high wet bracken. Well, there is. There are an uncountable number of things nastier to walk through, especially if they’re shoulder-high. But here and now, thought Nanny Ogg, it was hard to think of more than one or two.

“We taught her everything she knows,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“Yeah,” said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the bracken. “D’you think . . . maybe . . . ?”

“What?”

“D’you think maybe we ought to have taught her everything we know?”

“It’d take too long.”

“Yeah, right.”

“S’funny, royalty,” said Nanny. “It’s like magic. You take some girl with a bum like two pigs in a blanket and a head full of air and then she marries a king or a prince or someone and suddenly she’s this radiant right royal princess.”

“Don’t hold with schools,” said Granny Weatherwax. “They gets in the way of education. All them books. Books? What good are they? There’s too much reading these days. We never had time to read when we was young. I know that.”

“We were too busy makin’ our own entertainment.”

To see through other eyes . . .

. . . through the eyes of gnats, seeing the slow patterns of time in the fast pattern of one day, their minds traveling rapidly as lightning . . .

. . . to listen with the body of a beetle, so that the world is a three-dimensional pattern of vibrations . . .

. . . to see with the nose of a dog, all smells now colors . . .

But there was a price. No one asked you to pay it, but the very absence of demand was a moral obligation. You tended not to swat. You dug lightly. You fed the dog. You paid. You cared; not because it was kind or good, but because it was right. You left nothing but memories, you took nothing but experience.

You ain’t a witch if you ain’t got self-confidence. But we’re not getting any younger. It’s like being a hired swordfighter, being a top witch. You think you’re good, but you know there’s got to be someone younger, practicing every day, polishing up their craft, and one day you’re walkin’ down the road and you hears this voice behind you sayin’: go for your toad, or similar.

Even for Esme. Sooner or later, she’ll come up against someone faster on the craftiness than she is.

“I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult,” said Granny firmly. “Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.”

“But all them things exist,” said Nanny Ogg.

“That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ’em.”

People think that they live life as a moving dot traveling from the Past into the Future, with memory streaming out behind them like some kind of mental cometary tail. But memory spreads out in front as well as behind. It’s just that most humans aren’t good at dealing with it, and so it arrives as premonitions, forebodings, intuitions, and hunches. Witches are good at dealing with it, and to suddenly find a blank where these tendrils of the future should be has much the same effect on a witch as emerging from a cloud bank and seeing a team of sherpas looking down on him does on an airline pilot.

There was a unicorn on the lawn. The stink of it hit her.

“No! That’s cheating!”

“Well, you always cheat.”

“I cheat for myself. You can’t cheat for other people.”

The trouble with Nanny Ogg was that she always looked as if she was lying. Nanny Ogg had a pragmatic attitude to the truth; she told it if it was convenient and she couldn’t be bothered to make up something more interesting.

“Plus a hum-our-rus int-ter-lude with Comic Artisans . . .”

“What’s an artisan?” said Weaver the thatcher.

“Dunno. Type of well, I reckon.” Jason scratched his head. “Yeah. They’ve got ’em down on the plains. I repaired a pump for one once. Artisan wells.”

“What’s comic about them?”

“Maybe people fall down ’em in a funny way?”

There was something about the eyes. It wasn’t the shape or the color. There was no evil glint. But there was . . .

. . . a look. It was such a look that a microbe might encounter if it could see up from the bottom end of the microscope. It said: You are nothing. It said: You are flawed, you have no value. It said: You are animal. It said: Perhaps you may be a pet, or perhaps you may be a quarry. It said: And the choice is not yours.

“Oh, hello, Mum. Hello, Mistress Weatherwax.”

“Let us in, there’s a good boy.”

“Friend or foe?”

“What?”

“It’s what I’ve got to say, Mum. It’s official. And then you’ve got to say Friend.”

“I’m your mum.”

“You’ve got to do it properly, Mum,” said Shawn, in the wretched tones of one who knows he’s going to lose no matter what happens next, “otherwise what’s the point?”

“It’s going to be Foe in a minute, my lad.”

“Oooaaaww, Mum!”

“Oh, all right. Friend, then.”

“Yes, but you could just be saying that—”

“Let us in right now, Shawn Ogg.”

Shawn saluted, slightly stunning himself with the butt of his spear.

“Right you are, Mistress Weatherwax.”

His round, honest face disappeared from view. After a minute or two they heard the creaking of the portcullis.

“How did you do that?” said Nanny Ogg.

“Simple,” said Granny. “He knows you wouldn’t make his daft head explode.”

“Well, I know you wouldn’t, too.”

“No you don’t. You just know I ain’t done it up to now.”

It’s all very well a potion calling for Love-in-idleness, but which of the thirty-seven common plants called by that name in various parts of the continent was actually meant?

The reason that Granny Weatherwax was a better witch than Magrat was that she knew that in witchcraft it didn’t matter a damn which one it was, or even if it was a piece of grass.

The reason that Magrat was a better doctor than Granny was that she thought it did.

The bandit chieftain adjusted his eyepatch. He had two good eyes, but people respect uniforms.

“That’s an elf? But it’s . . . just a long, thin human with a foxy face. More or less. I thought they were supposed to be beautiful?”

“Oh, they are when they’re conscious,” said Granny, waving a hand vaguely. “They project this . . . this . . . when people look at them, they see beauty, they see something they want to please. They can look just like you want them to look. ’S’called glamour. You can tell when elves are around. People act funny. They stop thinking clear.”

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.

Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.

Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.

Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.

Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.

Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

Let’s be clear. Many authorities have tried to describe a hangover. Dancing elephants and so on are often employed for this purpose. The descriptions never work. [...]

Anyway, you can’t describe a scumble hangover. The best bit of it is a feeling that your teeth have dissolved and coated themselves on your tongue.

[...] “You haven’t got the morals of a cat, Gytha Ogg.”

“Now, Esme, you know that’s not true.”

“All right. You have got the morals of a cat, then.”

“That’s better.”

“Chateau Maison? Chat-eau . . . that’s foreign for cat’s water, you know, but that’s only their way, I know it ain’t real cat’s water. Real cat’s water is sharper.”

He’d researched what was known of the early days of Lancre, and where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* and extrapolated from associated sources.†

* Made it up.

† Had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.

People remember badly. But societies remember well, the swarm remembers, encoding the information to slip it past the censors of the mind, passing it on from grandmother to grandchild in little bits of nonsense they won’t bother to forget. Sometimes the truth keeps itself alive in devious ways despite the best efforts of the official keepers of information.

A crossbow is a very useful and usable weapon designed for speed and convenience and deadliness in the hands of the inexperienced, like a faster version of an out-of-code TV dinner. But it is designed to be used once, by someone who has somewhere safe to duck while they reload. Otherwise it is just so much metal and wood with a piece of string on it.

Then there was the sword. [...] You tried to stick it into the enemy by a vigorous arm motion, and the enemy tried to stop you. She was a little uncertain about what happened next. She hoped you were allowed another go.

She was also having doubts about her armor. The helmet and the breastplate were OK, but the rest of it was chain-mail. And, as Shawn Ogg knew, chain-mail from the point of view of an arrow can be thought of as a series of loosely connected holes.

“But look,” said Ponder, “the graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely.”

“Ook.”

“What’d he say?” said the Bursar [...]

“I think he said, ‘Sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody,’ ” said Ponder.

“No one could say I haven’t been decently modest all my life.”

“You’ve always been a bit of a shy violet, I’ve always said,” said Nanny Ogg. “I’m always telling people, when it comes to humility you won’t find anyone more humile than Esme Weatherwax.”

“Always keep myself to myself and minded my own business—”

“Barely known you were there half the time,” said Nanny Ogg.

“I was talking, Gytha.”

“Sorry.”