‘You said that others have fought him?’ she said now to Miss Smith. ‘How did they manage it?’
‘That last cupcake was still in the bag with the baker’s name on it, I’m sure of it. You’re not sitting on it, are you?’ Miss Smith cleared her throat and said, ‘By being very powerful witches, by understanding what it means to be a powerful witch, and by taking every chance, using every trick and, I suspect, understanding the Cunning Man’s mind before he understands theirs. I have trudged through a long time to learn about the Cunning Man,’ she added, ‘and the one thing I can tell you for certain is that the way to kill the Cunning Man is with cunning. You will need to be more cunning than he is.’
‘He can’t be that cunning if he’s taken all this time to find me,’ said Tiffany.
‘Yes, that puzzles me,’ said Miss Smith. ‘And it should puzzle you. I would have expected it to have taken him a very long time. More than two years, anyway. He’s either been very clever – and frankly he has nothing to be clever with – or somehow something else has drawn you to his attention. Someone magical, I would guess. Do you know any witches who aren’t your friend?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Tiffany. ‘Are any of the witches who have defeated him still alive?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was wondering, if I found one – perhaps they could tell me how they did it?’
‘I’ve told you. He’s the Cunning Man. Why should he fall for the same trick twice? You have to find your own way. Those who have trained you would expect nothing less.’
‘This isn’t some kind of test, is it?’ said Tiffany, and then felt embarrassed at how lame that sounded.
‘Don’t you remember what Granny Weatherwax always says?’ said Miss Smith.
‘Everything is a test.’ They said it together with one voice, looked at one another and laughed.
At which point, there was a squawk. Miss Smith opened the door and a small white chicken walked in, looked around curiously and exploded. Where it had been was an onion, fully rigged with mast and sails.
‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ said Miss Smith. She sighed. ‘Happens all the time, I’m afraid. The Unreal Estate is never static, you see. All the magic, banging together, bits of spells winding themselves around other spells, whole new spells being created that nobody has ever thought of before … it’s a mess. It generates things quite randomly. Yesterday I found a book on growing chrysanthemums, printed in copper on water. You would think it would tend to slosh about a bit, but it all seemed to hang together until the magic ran out.’
‘That was bad luck for the chicken,’ said Tiffany nervously.
‘Well, I can guarantee that it wasn’t a chicken two minutes ago,’ said Miss Smith, ‘and now it’s probably enjoying being a seagoing vegetable. Now perhaps you can see why I don’t spend too much time down here. I had an incident with a toothbrush once that I will not forget in a hurry.’ She pushed open the door still further, and Tiffany saw the shambles.
There was no mistaking a shambles.21 Well, there was at first and she mistook it for a heap of rubbish.
‘It’s amazing what you can find in your pockets if you’re in a magical junk yard,’ said Miss Smith calmly.
Tiffany stared at the giant shambles again. ‘Isn’t that a horse’s skull?22 And isn’t that a bucket of tadpoles?’
‘Yes. Something alive always helps, don’t you find?’
Tiffany’s eyes narrowed. ‘But that is a wizard’s staff, isn’t it? I thought they stopped working if a woman touched one!’
Miss Smith smiled. ‘Well, I’ve had mine ever since I was in my cradle. If you know where to look, you can see the marks I made when I was teething. It’s my staff and it works, although I have to say it started to work better when I took the knob off the end. It didn’t do anything practical and it upsets the balance. Now, will you stop standing there with your mouth open?’
Tiffany’s mouth clamped shut, and then sprang open again. A penny had dropped and it felt as if it had dropped from the moon.
‘You’re her, aren’t you? You must be, you’re her! Eskarina Smith, right? The only woman who ever became a wizard!’
‘Somewhere inside, I suppose so, yes, but it seems such a long time ago, and you know, I never really felt like a wizard, so I never really worried about what anyone said. And anyway, I had the staff, and no one could take that away from me.’ Eskarina hesitated for a moment, and then went on, ‘That’s what I learned at university: to be me, just what I am, and not worry about it. That knowledge is an invisible magical staff, all by itself. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this. It brings back bad memories.’
‘Please forgive me,’ said Tiffany. ‘I just couldn’t stop myself. I’m very sorry if I have dredged up any scary recollections.’
Eskarina smiled. ‘Oh, the scary ones are never a problem. It’s good ones that can be difficult to deal with.’ There was a click from the shambles. Eskarina stood up and walked over to it. ‘Oh dear, of course, only the witch that makes it can read her own shambles, but trust me when I say that the way the skull has turned and the position of the pincushion along the axis of the spinning wheel mean that he is very close. Almost right on top of us, in fact. Or the random magic in this place may be confusing him, and you seem to be everywhere and nowhere, so he’ll go away soon and try to pick up the trail somewhere else. And, as I mentioned, somewhere on the trail he will eat. He’ll get into some fool’s head, and some old lady or some girl who is wearing quite dangerous cult symbols without an inkling of what they really mean will suddenly find herself hounded. Let us hope she can run.’
Tiffany looked around, bewildered. ‘And what happens will be my fault?’
‘Is that the sarcastic whine of a little girl or the rhetorical question of a witch with her own steading?’
Tiffany began to reply, and then stopped. ‘You can travel in time, can’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Then you know what I’m going to answer?’
‘Well, it’s not quite as simple as that,’ said Eskarina, and looked slightly uncomfortable for a moment, much to Tiffany’s surprise and, it has be said, delight. ‘I know, let me see, there are fifteen different replies you might make, but I don’t know which one it will be until you make it, because of the elasticated string theory.’
‘Then all I will say,’ said Tiffany, ‘is thank you very much. I am sorry to have taken up your time. But I need to be getting on; I have so many things to do. Do you know what the time is?’
‘Yes,’ said Eskarina. ‘It is a way of describing one of the notional dimensions of four-dimensional space. But for your purposes, it’s about ten forty-five.’
That seemed to Tiffany to be a bafflingly complicated way of answering the question, but as she opened her mouth to say so, the shambles collapsed and the door opened to let in a stampede of chickens – which did not, however, explode.
Eskarina grabbed Tiffany’s hand, shouting, ‘He has found you! I don’t know how!’
A chicken half jumped, half flapped and half tumbled onto the wreck of the shambles and crowed! Cock-a-doodle-crivens!
Then the chickens exploded; they exploded into Feegles.
On the whole there wasn’t a great deal of difference between the chickens and the Feegles, since both run around in circles making a noise. An important distinction, however, is that chickens are seldom armed. The Feegles, on the other hand, are armed all the time, and once they had shaken off the last of their feathers they fell to fighting one another out of embarrassment – and for something to do.
Eskarina took one look at them and kicked at the wall behind her, revealing a hole which a person might just be able to crawl through, and snapped at Tiffany: ‘Go! Get him away from here! Get on the stick as soon as you can and go! Don’t worry about me! Don’t be afraid, you will be all right! You just have to help yourself.’
Heavy, nasty smoke was filling the room. ‘What do you mean?’ Tiffany managed, struggling with the stick.
‘Go!’
Not even Granny Weatherwax could command Tiffany’s legs so thoroughly.
She went.
20 In truth, the Nac Mac Feegle believe that the world is such a wonderful place that in order to have got into it they must have been very good in another existence and had arrived in, as it were, heaven. Of course, they appeared to die sometimes, even here, but they like to think of it as going off to be born again. Numerous theologians had speculated that this was a stupid idea, but it was certainly more enjoyable than many other beliefs.
21 A witch made a shambles out of anything you happened to have in your pockets, but if you care about appearances, you paid attention to the things you ‘accidentally’ had in your pockets. It wouldn’t make any difference to how the shambles worked, but if there were going to be other people around, then a mysterious nut, or an interesting bit of wood, a piece of lace and a silver pin suggested ‘witch’ rather more flatteringly than did, say, a broken shoelace, a torn piece of paper bag, half a handful of miscellaneous and unspeakable fluff, and a handkerchief which had been used so many times that, dreadfully, it needed both hands to fold it. Tiffany generally kept one pocket just for shambles ingredients, but if Miss Smith had made this shambles the same way, then she had pockets larger than a wardrobe; it nearly touched the ceiling.
22 A horse’s skull always looks scary, even if someone has put lipstick on it.
Chapter 9
THE DUCHESS AND THE COOK
TIFFANY LIKED FLYING. What she objected to was being in the air, at least at a height greater than her own head. She did it anyway, because it was ridiculous and unbecoming to witchcraft in general to be seen flying so low that her boots scraped the tops off ant hills. People laughed, and sometimes pointed. But now, navigating the stick through the ruined houses and gloomy, bubbling pools, she ached for the open sky. It was a relief when she slid out from behind a stack of broken mirrors to see good clean daylight, despite the fact that she had emerged next to a sign which said: IF YOU ARE CLOSE ENOUGH TO READ THIS SIGN, YOU REALLY, REALLY, SHOULDN’T BE.
That was the last straw. She tipped the stick until it was leaving a groove in the mud behind it, and ascended like a rocket, clinging desperately to the strap, which was creaking, to avoid slipping off. She heard a small voice say, ‘We are experiencing some turbulence, ye ken. If ye look to the right and tae the left ye will see that there are no emergency exits—’
The speaker was interrupted by another voice, which said, ‘In point o’ fact, Rob, the stick has got emergency exits all round, ye ken.’
‘Oh aye,’ said Rob Anybody, ‘but there is such a thing as style, OK? Just waiting until ye have nearly hit the ground and stepping off makes us look like silly billys.’
Tiffany hung on, trying not to listen, and also trying not to kick Feegles, who had no sense of danger, feeling as they always did that they were more dangerous than anything else.
Finally she had the broomstick flying level and risked a look down. There seemed to be a fight going on outside whatever it was they were going to decide was the new name of the King’s Head, but you couldn’t see any sign of Mrs Proust. The witch of the city was a woman of resource, wasn’t she? Mrs Proust could look after herself.
Mrs Proust was looking after herself, by running very fast. She hadn’t waited a second once she sensed the danger, but headed for the nearest alley as the smog rose around her. The city was always full of smokes and smogs and fumes, easy work for a witch who had the knack. They were the breath of the city, and its halitosis, and she could play them like a foggy piano. And now she leaned against a wall and got some breath of her own.
She had felt it building up like a thunderstorm in a city that was normally remarkably easy-going. Any woman who even looked like a witch was becoming a target. She had to hope that old and ugly women everywhere were going to be as safe as she was.
A moment later, a couple of men burst out of the smog, one of them holding a large stick; the other one didn’t need a stick, because he was huge and therefore was his own stick.
As the man with the stick ran towards her, Mrs Proust tapped her foot on the pavement and the stone under the man’s feet tilted up, tripping him so that he landed safely on his chin with a crack, the stick rolling away.
Mrs Proust folded her arms and glared at the heavy man. He wasn’t as stupid as his friend, but his fists were opening and closing and she knew it would only be a matter of time. She tapped her foot on the stones again before he plucked up courage.
The big man was trying to work out what might happen next, but didn’t expect the equestrian statue23 of Lord Alfred Rust – famed for bravely and valiantly losing every military engagement in which he had ever taken part – to gallop out of the fog on bronze hooves and kick him so hard between the legs that he flew backwards and knocked his head on a lamppost before sliding to the ground.
Mrs Proust then recognized him as a customer who sometimes bought itching powder and exploding cigars from Derek; it didn’t do to kill customers. She picked him up, groaning, by his hair, and whispered into his ear, ‘You weren’t here. Nor was I. Nothing happened, and you did not see it.’ She thought for a moment and, because business is business added, ‘And when you next go past Boffo’s Joke Emporium, you will be taken with its range of extremely droll, practical jokes for all the family, and this week’s new “Pearls of the Pavement” naughty Fido jokes for the connoisseur who takes his laughter seriously. I look forward to the pleasure of your custom. P.S. our new range of “thunderbolt” exploding cigars are a laugh a minute, and please do try our hilariously funny rubber chocolate. Take a moment also to browse in our new gentlemen’s necessaries department for all that is best in moustache waxes, moustache cups, cut-throat razors, a range of first-class snuffs, ebony-backed nose-hair clippers and our ever-popular glandular trousers, supplied in a plain wrapper and limited to one pair per customer.’
Satisfied, Mrs Proust let the head fall backwards and was forced to accept that unconscious people don’t buy anything, so she turned her attention to the previous owner of the stick, who was groaning. Well, yes, it was the fault of the man with no eyes, she thought, and perhaps that might be an excuse, but Mrs Proust wasn’t known for her forgiving nature. ‘Poison goes where poison’s welcome,’ she said to herself. She snapped her fingers, then climbed onto the bronze horse, taking a cold but comfortable seat in the late Lord Rust’s metal lap. Clanking and groaning, the bronze horse walked away into the bank of smog that followed Mrs Proust all the way back to her shop.
