Carpe Jugulum - Terry Pratchett [8]
Feeling rather guilty, because there had been some admonitions at the college against using holy writ merely for fortune telling, he shut his eyes and let the book flop open at random.
Then he opened his eyes quickly and read the first passage they encountered.
It was somewhere in the middle of Brutha’s Second Letter to the Omish, gently chiding them for not replying to the First Letter to the Omish.
“…silence is an answer that begs three more questions. Seek and you will find, but first you should know what you seek…”
Oh well. He shut the book.
What a place! What a dump. He’d had a short walk after the service, and every path seemed to end in a cliff or a sheer drop. Never had he seen such a vertical country. Things had rustled at him in the bushes, and he’d got his shoes muddy. As for the people he’d met…well, simple ignorant country folk, salt of the earth, obviously, but they’d just stared at him carefully from a distance, as if they were waiting for something to happen to him and didn’t care to be too close to him when it did.
But still, he mused, it did say in Brutha’s Letter to the Simonites that if you wished the light to be seen you had to take it into dark places. And this was certainly a dark place.
He said a small prayer and stepped out into the muddy, windy darkness.
Granny flew high above the roaring treetops, under a half moon.
She distrusted a moon like that. A full moon could only wane, a new moon could only wax, but a half moon, balancing so precariously between light and dark…well, it could do anything.
Witches always lived on the edges of things. She felt the tingle in her hands. It was not just from the frosty air. There was an edge somewhere. Something was beginning.
On the other side of the sky the Hublights were burning around the mountains at the center of the world, bright enough even to fight the pale light of the moon. Green and gold flames danced in the air over the central mountains. It was rare to see them at this time of the year, and Granny wondered what that might signify.
Slice was perched along the sides of a cleft in the mountains that couldn’t be dignified by the name of valley. In the moonlight she saw the pale upturned face waiting in the shadows of garden as she came into land.
“Evening, Mr. Ivy,” she said, leaping off. “Upstairs, is she?”
“In the barn,” said Ivy, flatly. “The cow kicked her…hard.”
Granny’s expression stayed impassive.
“We shall see,” she said, “what may be done.”
In the barn, one look at Mrs. Patternoster’s face told her how little that might now be. The woman wasn’t a witch, but she knew all the practical midwifery that can be picked up in an isolated village, be it from cows, goats, horses or humans.
“It’s bad,” she whispered, as Granny looked at the moaning figure on the straw. “I reckon we’ll lose both of them…or maybe just one…”
There was, if you were listening for it, just the suggestion of a question in that sentence. Granny focused her mind.
“It’s a boy,” she said.
Mrs. Patternoster didn’t bother to wonder how Granny knew, but her expression indicated that a little more weight had been added to a burden.
“I’d better go and put it to John Ivy, then,” she said.
She’d barely moved before Granny Weatherwax’s hand locked on her arm.
“He’s no part in this,” she said.
“But after all, he is the—”
“He’s no part in this.”
Mrs. Patternoster looked into the blue stare and knew two things. One was that Mr. Ivy had no part in this, and the other was that anything that happened in this barn was never, ever, going to be mentioned again.
“I think I can bring ’em to mind,” said Granny, letting go and rolling up her sleeves. “Pleasant couple, as I recall. He’s a good husband, by all accounts.” She poured warm water from its jug into the bowl that the midwife had set up on a manger.
Mrs.