Lords and Ladies (Discworld #14)

Lords and Ladies (Discworld #14) Page 41

“I'll just stroll along behind,” said Nanny.

“Oh. Well. Maybe as far as the jaws of hell, then.”

“Amazing,” said Casanunda to Nanny, as the crowd filed reluctantly toward the armoury.

“You just got to know how to deal with people.”

“They'll follow where an Ogg leads?”

“Not exactly,” said Nanny, “but if they know what's good for 'em they'll go where an Ogg follows.”

Magrat stepped out from under the trees, and the moor land lay ahead of her.

A whirlpool of cloud swirled over the Dancers, or at least, over the place where the Dancers had been. She could make out one or two stones by the flickering light, lying on their side or rolled down the slope of the hill.

The hill itself glowed. Something was wrong with the landscape. It curved where it shouldn't curve. Distances weren't right. Magrat remembered a woodcut shoved in as a place marker in one of her old books. It showed the face of an old crone but, if you stared at it, you saw it was also the head of a young woman; a nose became a neck, an eyebrow became a necklace. The images seesawed back and forth. And like everyone else, she'd squinted herself silly trying to see them both at the same time.

The landscape was doing pretty much the same thing. What was a hill was also at the same time a vast snowbound panorama. Lancre and the land of the elves were trying to occupy the same space.

The intrusive country wasn't having it all its own way. Lancre was fighting back.

There was a circle of tents just on the cusp of the warring landscapes, like a beachhead on an alien shore. They were brightly collared. Everything about the elves was beautiful, until the image tilted, and you saw it from the other side. . .

Something was happening. Several elves were on horseback, and more horses were being led between the tents.

It looked as though they were breaking camp.

The Queen sat on a makeshift throne in her tent. She sat with her elbow resting on one arm of the throne and her fingers curling pensively around her mouth.

There were other elves seated in a semicircle, except that “seated” was a barely satisfactory word. They lounged; elves could make themselves at home on a wire. And here there was more lace and velvet and fewer feathers, although it was hard to know if it meant that these were aristocrats-elves seemed to wear whatever they felt like wearing, confident of looking absolutely stunning.[42]

Every one of them watched the Queen, and was a mirror of her moods. When she smiled, they smiled. When she said something she thought was amusing, they laughed.

Currently the object of her attention was Granny Weatherwax.

“What is happening, old woman?” she said.

“It ain't easy, is it?” said Granny. “Thought it would be easy, didn't you?”

“You've done some magic, haven't you? Something is fighting us.”

“No magic,” said Granny. “No magic at all. It's just that you've been away too long. Things change. The land belongs to humans now.”

“That can't be the case,” said the Queen. “Humans take. They plough with iron. They ravage the land.”

“Some do, I'll grant you that. Others put back more'n they take. They put back love. They've got soil in their bones. They tell the land what it is. That's what humans are for. Without humans, Lancre'd just be a bit of ground with green bits on it. They wouldn't even know they're trees. We're all down here together, madam - us and the land. It's not just land anymore, it's a country. It's like a horse that's been broken and shod or a dog that's been tamed. Every time people put a plough in the soil or planted a seed they took the land further away from you,” said Granny. “Things change.”

Verence sat beside the Queen. His pupils were tiny pinpoints; he smiled faintly, permanently, in a way very reminiscent of the Bursar.

“Ah. But when we are married,” said the Queen, “the land must accept me. By your own rules. I know how it works. There's more to being a king than wearing a crown. The king and the land are one. The king and the queen are one. And I shall be queen.”

She smiled at Granny. There was an elf on either side of her and. Granny knew, at least one behind her. Elves were not given to introspection; if she moved without permission, she'd die.

“What you shall be is something I have yet to decide,” said the Queen. She held up an exquisitely thin hand and curled the thumb and forefinger into a ring, which she held up to her eye.

“And now someone comes,” she said, “with armour that doesn't fit and a sword she cannot use and an axe she can hardly even lift, because it is so romantic, is it not? What is her name?”

“Magrat Garlick,” said Granny.

“She is a mighty enchantress, is she?”

“She's good with herbs.”

The Queen laughed.

“I could kill her from here.”

“Yes,” said Granny, “but that wouldn't be much fun, would it? Humiliation is the key.”

The Queen nodded.

“You know, you think very much like an elf.”

“I think it will soon be dawn,” said Granny. “A fine day. Clear light.”

“Not soon enough,” The Queen stood up. She glanced at King Verence for a moment, and changed. Her dress went from red to silver, catching the torchlight like glittering fish scales. Her hair unraveled and reshaped itself, became corn blond. And a subtle ripple of alterations flowed across her face before she said, “What do you think?”

She looked like Magrat. Or, at least, like Magrat wished she looked and maybe as Verence always thought of her. Granny nodded. As one expert to another, she recognized accomplished nastiness when she saw it.

“And you're going to face her like that,” she said.

“Certainly. Eventually. At the finish. But don't feel sorry for her. She's only going to die. Would you like me to show you what you might have been?”

“No.”

“I could do it easily. There are other times than this. I could show you grandmother Weatherwax.”

“No.”

“It must be terrible, knowing that you have no friends. That no one will care when you die. That you never touched a heart.”

“Yes.”

“And I'm sure you think about it. . . in those long evenings when there's no company but the ticking of the clock and the coldness of the room and you open the box and look at-”

The Queen waved a hand vaguely as Granny tried to break free.

“Don't kill her,” she said. “She is much more fun alive.”

Magrat stuck the sword in the mud and hefted the battleaxe.

Woods pressed in on either side. The elves would have to come this way There looked like hundreds of them and there was only one Magrat Garlick.

She knew there was such a thing as heroic odds. Songs and ballads and stories and poems were full of stories about one person single-handedly taking on and defeating a vast number of enemies.

Only now was it dawning on her that the trouble was that they were songs and ballads and stories and poems because they dealt with things that were, not to put too fine a point on it, untrue.

She couldn't, now she had time to think about it, ever remember an example from history.

In the woods to one side of her an elf raised its bow and took careful aim.

A twig snapped behind it. It turned.

The Bursar beamed. “Whoopsy daisy, old trouser, my bean's all runny.”

The elf swung the bow.

A pair of prehensile feet dropped out of the greenery, gripped it by the shoulders, and pulled it upward sharply. There was a crack as its head hit the underside of a branch.

“Oook.”

“Move right along!”

On the other side of the path another elf took aim. And then its world flowed away from it. . .

This is the inside of the mind of an elf:

Here are the normal five senses but they are all subordinate to the sixth sense. There is no formal word for it on the Discworld, because the force is so weak that it is only ever encountered by observant blacksmiths, who call it the Love of Iron. Navigators might have discovered it were it not that the Disc's standing magical field is much more reliable. But bees sense it, because bees sense everything. Pigeons navigate by it. And everywhere in the multiverse elves use it to know exactly where they are.

It must be hard for humans, forever floundering through inconvenient geography. Humans are always slightly lost. It's a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.

Elves are never lost at all. It's a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.

Elves have absolute position. The flow of the silvery force dimly outlines the landscape. Creatures generate small amounts of it themselves, and become perceptible in the flux. Their muscles crackle with it, their minds buzz with it. For those who learn how, even thoughts can be read by the tiny local changes in the flow.

For an elf, the world is something to reach out and take. Except for the terrible metal that drinks the force and deforms the flux universe like a heavy weight on a rubber sheet and blinds them and deafens them and leaves them rudderless and more alone than most humans could ever be. . .

The elf toppled forward.

Ponder Stibbons lowered the sword.

Almost everyone else would not have thought much about it. But Ponder's wretched fate was to look for patterns in an uncaring world.

“But I hardly touched him,” he said, to no one except himself.

“-And I kissed her in the shrubbery where the nightingales sing it, you bastards! Two, three!”

They didn't know where they were. They didn't know where they'd been. They were not fully certain who they were. But the Lancre Morris Men had reached some sort of state now where it was easier to go on than stop. Singing attracted elves, but singing also fascinated them . . .

The dancers whirled and hopped, gyrated and skipped along the paths. They pranced through isolated hamlets, where elves left whoever they were torturing to draw closer in the light of the burning buildings. . .

“'With a WACK foladiddle-di-do, sing too-rah-li-ay!'”

Six sticks did their work, right on the beat.

“Where're we goin', Jason?”

“I reckon we've gone down Slippery Hollow and're circling back toward the town,” said Jason, hopping past Baker. “Keep goin'. Carter!”

“The rain's got in the keys, Jason!”

“Don't matter! They don't know the difference! It's good enough for folk music!”

“I think I broke my stick on that last one, Jason!”

“Just you keep dancing, Tinker! Now, lads . . . how about Gathering Peasecods? We might as well get some practice in, since we're here . . .”

“There's some people up ahead,” said Tailor, as he skipped past, “I can see torches an' that.”

“Human, two, three, or more elves?”

“Dunno!”

Jason spun and danced back.

“Is that you, our Jason?”

Jason cackled as the voice echoed among the dripping trees.

“It's our mam! And our Shawn. And - and lots of people! We've made it, lads!”

“Jason,” said Carter.

“Yes?”

“I ain't sure I can stop!”

The Queen examined her face in a mirror attached to the tent pole.

“Why?” said Granny. “What is it you see?”