Witches Abroad - Terry Pratchett [77]
“Oh, come on, Esme,” said Nanny. “They say if you can’t have a good time in Genua you’re probably dead.” She thought about Saturday. “You can probably have a bit of quiet fun even if you are dead, in Genua.”
“Hadn’t we better stay here, though?” said Magrat. “Just to make sure?”
Granny Weatherwax hesitated.
“What do you think, Esme?” said Nanny Ogg. “You think she’s going to be sent to the ball in a pumpkin, eh? Get a few mice to pull it, eh? Heheh!”
A vision of the snake women floated across Granny Weatherwax’s mind, and she hesitated. But, after all, it had been a long day. And it was ridiculous, when you came to think about it…
“Well, all right,” she said. “But I’m not going to kick any jam, you understand.”
“There’s dancing and all sorts,” said Nanny.
“And banana drinks, I expect,” said Magrat.
“It’s a million to one chance, yes,” said Nanny Ogg happily.
Lilith de Tempscire smiled at herself in the double mirror.
“Oh deary me,” she said. “No coach, no dress, no horses. What is a poor old godmother to do? Deary me. And probably lawks.”
She opened a small leather case, such as a musician might use to carry his very best piccolo.
There was a wand in there, the twin of the one carried by Magrat. She took it out and gave it a couple of twists, moving the gold and silver rings into a new position.
The clicking sounded like the nastiest pump-action mechanism.
“And me with nothing but a pumpkin, too,” said Lilith.
And of course the difference between sapient and non-sapient things was that while it was hard to change the shape of the former it was not actually impossible. It was just a matter of changing a mental channel. Whereas a non-sapient thing like a pumpkin, and it was hard to imagine anything less sapient than a pumpkin, could not be changed by any magic short of sorcery.
Unless its molecules remembered a time when they weren’t a pumpkin…
She laughed, and a billion reflected Liliths laughed with her, all around the curve of the mirror universe.
Fat Lunchtime was no longer celebrated in the center of Genua. But in the shanty town around the high white buildings it strutted its dark and torchlit stuff. There were fireworks. There were dancers, and fire-eaters, and feathers, and sequins. The witches, whose idea of homely entertainment was a Morris dance, watched openmouthed from the crowded sidewalk as the parades strutted by.
“There’s dancing skeletons!” said Nanny, as a score of bony figures whirred down the street.
“They’re not,” said Magrat. “They’re just men in black tights with bones painted on.”
Someone nudged Granny Weatherwax. She looked up into the large, grinning face of a black man. He passed her a stone jug.
“There you go, honey.”
Granny took it, hesitated for a moment, and then took a swig. She nudged Magrat and passed on the bottle.
“Frgtht!! Gizeer!” she said.
“What?” shouted Magrat, above the noise of a marching band.
“The man wants us to pass it on,” said Granny.
Magrat looked at the bottle neck. She tried surreptitiously to wipe it on her dress, despite the self-evident fact that germs on it would have burned off long ago. She ventured a brief nip, and then nudged Nanny Ogg.
“Kwizathugner!” she said, and dabbed at her eyes.
Nanny up-ended the bottle. After a while Magrat nudged her again.
“I think we’re meant to pass it on?” she ventured.
Nanny wiped her mouth and passed the now rather lighter jug randomly to a tall figure on her left.
“Here you go, mister,” she said.
THANK YOU.
“Nice costume you got there. Them bones are painted on really good.”
Nanny turned back to watch a procession of juggling fire-eaters. Then a connection appeared to be made somewhere in the back of her mind. She looked up. The stranger had wandered off.
She shrugged.
“What shall we do next?” she said.
Granny Weatherwax was staring fixedly at a group of ground-zero limbo dancers. A lot of the dances in the parades had this in common: they expressed explicitly what things like maypoles only hinted at. They covered it with sequins, too.
“You’ll never feel safe in the