A Hat Full Of Sky - Terry Pratchett [76]
They were treated like royalty—not the sort who get dragged off to be beheaded or have something nasty done with a red-hot poker, but the other sort, when people walk away dazed saying, “She actually said hello to me, very graciously! I will never wash my hand again!”
Not that many people they dealt with washed their hands at all, Tiffany thought with the primness of a dairy worker. But people crowded around outside the cottage doors, watching and listening, and they sidled up to Tiffany to say things like “Would she like a cup of tea? I’ve cleaned our cup!” And in the garden of every cottage they passed, Tiffany noticed, the beehives were suddenly bustling with activity.
She worked away, trying to stay calm, trying to think about what she was doing. You did the doctoring work as neatly as you could, and if it was on something oozy, then you just thought about how nice things would be when you’d stopped doing it. She felt Mistress Weatherwax wouldn’t approve of this attitude. But Tiffany didn’t much like hers either. She lied all the—She didn’t tell the truth all the time.
For example, there was the Raddles’ privy. Miss Level had explained carefully to Mr. and Mrs. Raddle several times that it was far too close to the well, and so the drinking water was full of tiny, tiny creatures that were making their children sick. They’d listened very carefully, every time they heard the lecture, and still they never moved the privy. But Mistress Weatherwax told them it was caused by goblins who were attracted to the smell, and by the time they left that cottage, Mr. Raddle and three of his friends were already digging a new well the other end of the garden.
“It really is caused by tiny creatures, you know,” said Tiffany, who’d once handed over an egg to a traveling teacher so she could line up and look through his “**ASTOUNDING MIKROSCOPICAL DEVICE! A ZOO IN EVERY DROP OF DITCHWATER!**” She’d almost collapsed the next day from not drinking. Some of those creatures were hairy.
“Is that so?” said Mistress Weatherwax sarcastically.
“Yes. It is. And Miss Level believes in telling them the truth!”
“Good. She’s a fine, honest woman,” said Mistress Weatherwax. “But what I say is you have to tell people a story they can understand. Right now I reckon you’d have to change quite a lot of the world, and maybe bang Mr. Raddle’s stupid fat head against the wall a few times, before he’d believe that you can be sickened by drinking tiny invisible beasts. And while you’re doing that, those kids of theirs will get sicker. But goblins, now, they makes sense today. A story gets things done. And when I see Miss Tick tomorrow, I’ll tell her it’s about time them wandering teachers started coming up here.”
“All right,” said Tiffany reluctantly, “but you told Mr. Umbril the shoemaker that his chest pains will clear up if he walks to the waterfall at Tumble Crag every day for a month and throws three shiny pebbles into the pool for the water sprites! That’s not doctoring!”
“No, but he thinks it is. The man spends too much time sitting hunched up. A five-mile walk in the fresh air every day for a month will see him as right as rain,” said Mistress Weatherwax.
“Oh,” said Tiffany. “Another story?”
“If you like,” said Mistress Weatherwax, her eyes twinkling. “And you never know, maybe the water sprites will be grateful for the pebbles.”
She glanced sidelong at Tiffany’s expression and patted her on the shoulder.
“Never mind, miss,” she said. “Look at it this way. Tomorrow, your job is to change the world into a better place. Today, my job is to see that everyone gets there.”
“Well, I think—” Tiffany began, then stopped. She looked up at the line of woods between the small fields of the valleys and the steep meadows of the mountains.
“It’s still there,” she said.
“I know,” said Mistress Weatherwax.
“It’s moving around, but it’s keeping away from us.”
“I know,