Lords and Ladies - Terry Pratchett [40]
“If you say so, Esme.”
What is magic?
There is the wizards’ explanation, which comes in two forms, depending on the age of the wizard. Older wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes, and the importance of having at least four good meals every day. Younger wizards, particularly the pale ones who spend most of their time in the High Energy Magic building,* chatter at length about fluxes in the morphic nature of the universe, the essentially impermanent quality of even the most apparently rigid time-space framework, the implausibility of reality, and so on: what this means is that they have got hold of something hot and are gabbling the physics as they go along…
It was almost midnight. Diamanda ran up the hill toward the Dancers, the briars and heather tearing at her dress.
The humiliation banged back and forth in her skull. Stupid malicious old women! And stupid people, too! She’d won. According to the rules, she’d won! But everyone had laughed at her.
That stung. The recollection of those stupid faces, all grinning. And everyone supporting those horrible old women, who had no idea about the meaning of witchcraft and what it could become.
She’d show them.
Ahead of her, the Dancers were dark against the moonlit clouds.
Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.
She was going to have an early night. It had been a busy day.
There was a jar of boiled sweets by her bed, and a thick glass bottle of the clear fluid from her complicated still out behind the woodshed. It wasn’t exactly whiskey, and it wasn’t exactly gin, but it was exactly 90° proof, and a great comfort during those worrying moments that sometimes occurred around 3 A.M. when you woke up and forgot who you were. After a glass of the clear liquid you still didn’t remember who you were, but that was all right now because you were someone else anyway.
She plumped up the four pillows, kicked her fluffy slippers into the corner, and pulled the blankets over her head, creating a small, warm, and slightly rank cave. She sucked a boiled sweet; Nanny had only one tooth left, and that had taken all she could throw at it for many years, so a sweet at bedtime wasn’t going to worry it much.
After a few seconds a sense of pressure on her feet indicated that the cat Greebo had taken up his accustomed place on the end of the bed. Greebo always slept on Nanny’s bed; the way he’d affectionately try to claw your eyeballs out in the morning was as good as an alarm clock. But she always left a window open all night in case he wanted to go out and disembowel something, bless him.
Well, well. Elves. (They couldn’t hear you say the word inside your head, anyway. At least, not unless they were real close.) She really thought they’d seen the last of them. How long was it, now? Must be hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Witches didn’t like to talk about it, because they’d made a big mistake about the elves. They’d seen through the buggers in the end, of course, but it had been a close thing. And there’d been a lot of witches in those days. They’d been able to stop them at every turn, make life in this world too hot for them. Fought them with iron. Nothing elvish could stand iron. It blinded them, or something. Blinded them all over.
There weren’t many witches now. Not proper witches. More of a problem, though, was that people didn’t seem to be able to remember what it was like with the elves around. Life was certainly more interesting then, but usually because it was shorter. And it was more colorful, if you liked the color of blood. It got so people didn’t even dare talk openly about the bastards.
You said: The Shining Ones. You said: The Fair Folk. And you spat, and touched iron. But generations later, you forgot about the spitting and the iron, and you forgot why you used those names for them, and you remembered only that they were beautiful.
Yes, there’d been a lot of witches in them days. Too many women found an empty