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the-light-followed · 4 years

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WYRD SISTERS (1988) [DISC. #6; WITCHES #2]

“‘No one would come up here this time of night.’ Magrat peered around timidly. Here and there on the moor were huge standing stones, their origins lost in time, which were said to lead mobile and private lives of their own. She shivered. ‘What’s to be afraid of?’ she managed. ‘Us,’ said Granny Weatherwax, smugly.”

Rating: 6/10

Standalone Okay: Yes

Read First: Yeah!

Discworld Books Masterpost: [x]

* * * * * * * * * *

I’m just going to jump right in with this one: the best part about the Witches sub-series of the Discworld is that they are all, in their own way, stories about stories. They’re stories that follow other stories, the tropes and archetypes and established narrative structure, but they’re also stories that subvert that structure at just the right moment to make something that feels much more truthful, and often, much more real.

Stories about stories.

This is sometimes very literal: Wyrd Sisters, for example, has very obvious Shakespearean roots, notably from Hamlet and Macbeth, and seems to gleefully delight in throwing around references—three witches meeting to cast spells, blood on the murderer’s hands that won’t wash away, the ghost of a murdered father begging his son to seek revenge, a theater called The Dysk that mimics Shakespeare’s Globe, etc., etc., etc.—that then get turned over on their heads. We’ll see it done again with the fairy tale elements of Witches Abroad, and the Phantom of the Opera parody that is Maskerade. These books are, in a very real sense, skipping the setup and instead using cultural touchstones as framework. The books starring the witches are literally new stories being told about stories we, the audience, already know and recognize.

But sometimes it isn’t literal at all: witches, after all, work magic most often through psychology and metaphor. “Headology,” as the witches call it, is the basis of witchcraft, and it’s all about the stories being told. It’s in the things the witches do for respect, like their hats and black outfits and their out-of-the-way cottages they pass down from one witch to the next, or the way they bow instead of curtsey. It’s in the things they call magic even when it isn’t, like using real herbs and medicines to cure illnesses, or waving their hands over a pot of tea and chanting nonsense before ‘reading the future’ in the leaves, all of it only for the look of the thing from the outside.

And it’s also in the things they tell themselves. For example, when Magrat’s broomstick stops working in Wyrd Sisters, she does what she calls a Change spell—which simply means that the rest of the world remains the same, but she changes the way she sees herself. Before, she was a young woman on a broom rapidly falling out of the sky, and now she’s a confident young witch who can deal with any disaster that comes her way, so she’s therefore a lot less worried about it.

And it works. That’s the thing: Magrat is just fine. Witches do magic in and on themselves, it’s all nothing more than a thought, and yet it works.

None of the Witches books are particularly subtle about the point they’re trying to make with the whole deal, either. In Wyrd Sisters, it seems like everyone is talking about the power of words and stories, the way that the things we tell ourselves and each other can shape the reality of the world we inhabit. There are some negatives you can pull out of that message—history is malleable and written by the victors, propaganda triumphs over the truth, etc., etc. But there are a lot of more interesting, thought-provoking ideas to consider, instead. For example: just because narrative structure has already delivered us the broad strokes of the plot (anyone who’s studied any Shakespeare, which can reasonably be assumed to be any native English speaker older than about sixteen, can probably guess the general course of Wyrd Sisters by about page twenty), it doesn’t mean there can’t be originality and meaning in the specifics.

And that originality and meaning is what makes all the Discworld books work so well. Pratchett is parodying, sure, but he’s also creating something very new and earnest and sincere, and that just doesn’t work if the story is an exact beat-for-beat retelling of an already-told tale.

Wyrd Sisters agrees with that idea. Destiny is all well and good—it’s nice to think that what’s to come is pre-planned, easy to predict, and impossible to subvert—but the world just doesn’t work like that. The story isn’t plotted out in advance.

As Pratchett says later in the book: “Destiny was funny stuff…You couldn’t trust it. Often you couldn’t even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else—coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.”

The witches certainly don’t truck with destiny. Or, well, it may be a tool in their storytelling arsenal, but they don’t see it as a concrete thing. Destiny is what you make of it, and Granny and Nanny are movers and shakers. That makes it especially ironic that the book is called Wyrd Sisters—the word “wyrd” is an old Anglo-Saxon concept referring to fate or personal destiny, so the “wyrd sisters” themselves typically would be the three Fates, a la Greek mythology, rather than three women who tend to grab Fate and Destiny by the ears and twist until they decide to agree that the witches have the right of it.

Honestly, though, if Granny Weatherwax looked at me like that, I’d do whatever she wanted, too.

I just want to bring up something I really like about Pratchett’s writing style: despite the fantastical setting, despite how far from reality he can get, he’s not afraid to switch to Roundworld concepts or just flat-out break the fourth wall in exchange for better, more impactful descriptions. I like to call this cinematic writing, and sometimes that’s actually very literal. There are quite a few passages in various Discworld books where he starts to write in an almost movie-script style. After Moving Pictures, which is still a good four books away at this point, I think that becomes less notable. Here, and in the previous few Discworld books (Mort, Sourcery, Equal Rites), when Discworld does not have any parallel equivalent to Roundworld’s Hollywood, it’s pretty damn unusual for an author to just outright throw aside their own fantasy setting to make a description in real-world terms.

My favorite example of this from Wyrd Sisters:

“It is almost impossible to convey the sudden passage of fifteen years and two months in words. It’s a lot easier in pictures, when you just use a calendar with lots of pages blowing off, or a clock with hands moving faster and faster until they blur, or trees bursting into blossom and fruiting in a matter of seconds… Well, you know. Or the sun becomes a fiery streak across the sky, and days and nights flicker past jerkily like a bad zoetrope, and the fashions visible in the clothes shop across the road whip on and off faster than a lunchtime stripper with five pubs to do. There are any amount of ways, but they won’t be required because, in fact, none of this happened.”

You can practically imagine the way that scene would look in a blockbuster movie, and it’s wonderful that Pratchett describes it crystal clear just to let us know that it is not, in fact, how it looked at all.

There’s a lot more to like about Wyrd Sisters, too, for all that it isn’t one of my favorite Discworld books. It’s a far better introduction to the witches—specifically Granny Weatherwax—than Equal Rites is, even though Equal Rites is technically the first book in the Witches sub-series. It introduces some characters we’ll see a lot more of later, like King Verence and the greater Ogg family, but also characters that will go on to become staples of the Discworld, like Nanny Ogg and Magrat. We also have some lovely cameos from already established characters: notably Death and his interactions during the play at the castle, but there are some good Ankh-Morpork moments, like the Librarian’s appearance at a barfight.

And we get to see the good old Discworld humor really click—it’s all about that balance between absurdism and realism, or between established tropes and self-awareness. One of my favorite examples of this comes right at the beginning of the book:

“As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’ There was a pause. Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well, I can do next Tuesday.’”

Pratchett’s really got a sense for it by this point, and he can deliver zinger after unexpectedly delightful zinger. Discworld books are always beautifully funny, of course, even though after a while you really get a feel for when a good joke is coming. Some people might think that knowing the punchline is coming might make it less funny: it absolutely does not. All it does is make the unexpected, sneaky moments—when the humor Pratchett has been secretly setting up for ages finally creeps up to smack you in the face—hit harder. Maybe others disagree, but I can read Discworld novels again and again, and they always get me just as much as they did the first time through. In my opinion, that’s real comedic talent.

Up next in the series we have Pyramids, our first unconnected one-off story, which is wonderfully weird even for a Discworld book! Stay tuned!

* * * * * * * * * *

Side Notes:

Every time that oh-so popular Ankh-Morporkian dive bar, the Drum, pops up, it’s fun to note where it’s at these days: Mended Drum, Broken Drum, etc. In Wyrd Sisters, Tomjon and Hwel go drinking in the Mended Drum.

There are several adaptations of Wyrd Sisters, including a 4-part BBC radio show, an animated film, and a stageplay.

As I go over my highlighted quotes and annotations from each book, putting these posts together, I learn more and more about myself. What I like, what I find funny, what I care to notice. For example, Vetinari shows up exactly ONCE in this book, and just in a footnote, and yet I still highlighted it and wrote a note next to it that contained mostly exclamation points. There’s no real point to this; I just want everyone to know how much I love Vetinari.

Favorite Quotes:

“Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don’t have leaders. Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn’t have.”

“Now, just when a body would have been useful, it had let him down. Or out.”

“‘How many times have you thrown a magic ring into the deepest depths of the ocean and then, when you get home and have a nice bit of turbot for your tea, there it is?’ They considered this in silence. ‘Never,’ said Granny irritably. ‘And nor have you.’”

“His body was standing to attention. Despite all his efforts his stomach stood at ease.”

“Back down on the plains, when you kicked people they kicked back. Up here, when you kicked people they moved away and just waited patiently for your leg to fall off.”

“The Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.”

“She gave the guards a nod as she went through. It didn’t occur to either of them to stop her because witches, like beekeepers and big gorillas, went where they liked. In any case, an elderly lady banging a bowl with a spoon was probably not the spearhead of an invasion force.”

“‘You’re wondering whether I really would cut your throat,’ panted Magrat. ‘I don’t know either. Think of the fun we could have together, finding out.’”

“Wizards assassinated each other in drafty corridors, witches just cut one another dead in the street. And they were all as self-centered as a spinning top. Even when they help other people, she thought, they’re secretly doing it for themselves. Honestly, they’re just like big children. Except for me, she thought smugly.”

“‘Man just went past with a cat on his head,’ one of them remarked, after a minute or two’s reflection. ‘See who it was?’ ‘The Fool, I think.’ There was a thoughtful pause. The second guard shifted his grip on his halberd. ‘It’s a rotten job,’ he said. ‘But I suppose someone’s got to do it.’”

“Granny’s implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains.”

“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”

“Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.”

“‘Witches just aren’t like that,’ said Magrat. ‘We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.’”

“‘I shall haunt their corridors,’ he said, ‘and whisper under the doors on still nights.’ His voice grew fainter, almost lost in the ceaseless roar of the river. ‘I shall make basket chairs creak most alarmingly, just you wait and see.’ Death grinned at him. NOW YOU’RE TALKING.”

#discworld #wyrd sisters

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marypsue · 6 years

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That Old Black Magic

I have no idea what the overlap is between these two fandoms, if there even is any besides me, but I wrote nearly five thousand words of Beth as a Discworld witch and by god I'm gonna share them.

Warning for major injury - nothing too graphic, but it's a big part of one scene.

I'm also on AO3 as MaryPSue!

...

It has been said, by educated men, that no two snowflakes are ever exactly alike.

This may be true*. It's also true, however, that every snowflake is made of the same stuff.

The witches of the Discworld are as many and varied as snowflakes**. Like snowflakes, though, no matter how unique, they share a few things in common. Magic, for one. And a tendency to wear black.

It isn’t a rule, exactly. Such things rarely are. Plenty of witches don’t wear black, and plenty of people who wear black aren’t witches. But it's understood, in much the same way as babies are understood to cry, that wearing black comes with the job.

In the recorded history of the Discworld, there have been five witches noted for wearing white. Three of them have been Weatherwaxes.

Miss Elizabeth Sanchez wasn't one of them, yet, though it wasn't for lack of trying.

The village of Lower Bottom, nestled in the foothills of the formidable Ramtops, had been proud to say it had steaded a witch since the Century of the Desiccated Armadillo, if not before. Its inhabitants had seen their share of witches, their own and their neighbours', and many of them liked to fancy they knew a thing or two about the profession***. Miss Sanchez, with her white robes, foreign-sounding name, and city education, defied all of them. She didn't even wear the hat.

_____

*At least, no one's going to check their work.

**Although, like snowflakes, too many of them in one place end up looking like an indistinguishable mass, and prevent innocent bystanders from getting to work on time.

***In much the same way as anyone at a California cocktail party fancies they know a thing or two about writing.

_____

"It ain't right, Gytha," was the verdict delivered by an unimpressed Granny Weatherwax, at the Witch Trials the first year Miss Sanchez deigned to attend. "Her puttin' on airs like that. It'll draw...attention." She nodded, once, and settled back in the comfortable chair she'd located in a shady spot and glared at its former inhabitants for until they'd suddenly remembered they had urgent business elsewhere.

Gytha Ogg, also known as Nanny, opened her mouth to remind her best friend about a certain ball they'd both attended under false pretences, thought better of it, and took a big bite of the pickle she was holding instead*.

"She says it's for doctorin'," she said, at last, spraying bits of pickle flesh at the world at large. "So if she's tendin' to a sick cow what's got tiny demons in its blood, you can see she don't wear that same blood in to doctor your wean." She took another thoughtful gnaw on her pickle, her sharp eyes looking past the pen where two witches were throwing punes, or plays on words, back and forth at each other, to the distinct pale shape leaning against the fence on the other side. Nanny knew, from personal observation, that Beth Sanchez' white duds were at least as worn, stained, and well-scrubbed as the black dresses and robes of any other witch at the Trials, but from a distance, against all that black, the figure she cut was certainly impressive.

"Hmph," Granny said, folding her arms across her chest. "What, she's sayin' we ain't clean?"

"I...don't think that was it, Esme," Nanny said, carefully. "She's got a bit of that Magrat about her, all that messin' with herbs and potions. Wants things to be scientific."

The snort Granny let out said, it seemed, everything she thought on the matter.

"Science," she said, at last, as the pune-battle ended and the two witches were led off to a smattering of applause. "Huh. What good's that ever done anyone?"

_____

*Which, considering the state of Nanny's teeth, was no mean feat.

_____

Beth Sanchez, as Nanny Ogg had observed, was a great believer in science.

Not necessarily in practising it, or in exercising its methodology. She held a firm and unswayable belief in Science, like some people believe in gods or the moon or the innate worthiness of the rich, as an essential truth of the universe. Beth Sanchez believed in Science the way children believe in the Hogfather.

In any other person, this might have been a character flaw. But Beth was a witch, and, being a witch, she knew a thing or two about belief.

The potions she dosed out to the people of Lower Bottom for various ailments had a tendency to be poisonous colours, and occasionally glowed. But they worked, almost instantly, which was something even Granny Weatherwax couldn’t always say. Often with unexpected side-effects, but no one could say that what they’d got from their witch was anything other than exactly what they’d asked for*.

It had taken time for Lower Bottom to come around to their new witch’s...unconventional habits, but for the most part, come around they had. Old Goody Whitmore, who had held the stead for as long as anyone still living could remember, had been a traditional witch in every sense of the word, but her idea of doctoring had consisted mostly of ‘put a poultice on it and call me in the morning’. The inhabitants of Lower Bottom had quickly decided that they could put up with the idiosyncrasies of the new witch in exchange for a near-50% increase in recovery rates**.

Beth, for her part, had been lucky to land the steading in Lower Bottom. One of the strikes against her in the eyes of the townsfolk was that she hadn’t, as her name suggested, grown up around Lancre. She hadn’t apprenticed under a local witch, or even a witch close enough by to call ‘local’ to an Ankh-Morporkian.

She had not, in point of fact, even intended to go into witchcraft.

Beth had been interested in magic, since long before she’d been sent to the Quirm College for Young Ladies, where a string of teachers had all done their best to stifle that interest and had all failed miserably. She'd devoured books and articles on magical theory, asked probing questions of the maths teachers, and spent inordinate amounts of time doing unspeakable things involving doves and white rabbits. But her application to Unseen University had been summarily rejected. Wizarding, even after all that messy business with the girl and the staff, was still considered no proper occupation for a woman***.

And so Beth had found herself in the last place she'd ever expected to end up, living in a ramshackle cottage in a flyspeck of a village in the back end of nowhere, wiping runny noses and bandaging boo-boos for the entire village. In a way, it was like having children, if you had upward of a hundred of them and all of them, even the fully-grown ones, came running to you at the slightest stirring of trouble, expecting you to fix it as a matter of course and ask nothing in return. Some days Beth had to ask herself why she even bothered.

But then, sometimes, when she least expected it, the job reminded her.

_____

*Well, they could say it, but...

**Though anyone who had been a frequent purchaser of Goody Whitmore’s famous love potions quickly learned not to broach the subject with their new witch.

***There were, of course, a few enlightened thinkers among the faculty, but given that their push to include female students had included a lot of caveats involving tight sweaters and the placement of closures on official department robes, hedge-witchcraft started to look very good in comparison. No-one really cared if a witch wore a tight sweater while she stuck both arms up a cow's most personal parts to haul a particularly recalcitrant calf out into the world or reattached an unlucky lumberjack's severed limb, and most people would take one look at Granny Weatherwax or Nanny Ogg and agree that the best placement for closures on official robes was 'as high up and as often as possible'.

_____

"Miss! Come quick!"

Beth looked up from the patch of weeds she was still, in the face of all the evidence, calling a garden. Ronnie Beetham's oldest was flying up her garden path, gangly limbs flapping all over, so that the impression was of quite a bit more frantic motion than one adolescent boy should be able to produce on his own.

He skidded to a stop beside Beth's turnips, or at least the place where she'd planted turnips, breathing hard and leaning heavily against his knees with both hands. Beth rose to her feet and stepped over what had once been rows of strawberries and now could, perhaps, be generously called a strawberry patch. "What's the matter, Ollie?"

"You got - to come - miss," Oliver Beetham panted out. "Da - the threshing machine - it's his arm -"

Beth didn't need to hear any more. "Ollie," she said, placing a steadying hand on the boy's shoulder and mustering all the clarity and confidence she had to her voice, "go run back and tell them I'm coming. Get your ma to put a pot of water on to boil. Then find me some towels or clean rags. Can you do that?"

Ollie, still gulping air like it was water, looked up and met Beth's eyes. After a moment, he seemed to gather the presence of mind to nod.

Beth smiled.

"Good," she said. "Go. I'm right behind you."

Ollie tore off back down the garden path, elbows flailing, and Beth hiked up her skirts and ran for the cottage. Her big black bag sat just behind the door, beside the umbrella stand, for occasions just such as this one. Beth didn't stop for longer than it took to scoop the bag up, not bothering even to check that the cottage door banged shut behind her. Anyone stupid enough to try to steal from a witch - even an odd one - deserved whatever they got*.

Ronnie Beetham, Beth knew, considered himself something of an inventor. The rest of Lower Bottom mostly considered him a damn fool, but Beth liked him. She really hoped that whichever of his inventions he'd fallen afoul of this time hadn't done any damage she couldn't repair.

_____

*Usually, a couple of badly-tarnished silver teaspoons, the odd trinket or two, and sometimes a root vegetable. Witchcraft wasn't a profession that anyone went into expecting to get rich.

_____

Ronnie Beetham's arm had, in fact, been caught in his threshing machine. This would have been less of a problem if the threshing machine were anything more than a row of very large spinning blades.

There was blood all over the walls.

Someone had, thankfully, had the presence of mind to turn the machine off, so Beth wasn't also spattered with blood as she came through the door. Ronnie was on the floor in the middle of the room, back leaned against the leg of his workbench, looking as pale as Beth's dress and cradling his right arm in his left. There was a cloth wrapped around it that Beth was fairly sure hadn't started the day that shade of crimson. It glistened obscenely.

"Let me see," Beth said, kneeling in the sawdust next to him, heedless of the red soaking into her skirt. Her hands were still dripping from the quick wash she'd done at the pump, and she absently dried them on her skirts.

Ronnie Beetham looked up, met her eyes, and, mutely, unwrapped the cloth from his right arm.

Even Beth couldn't help but wince. Fingers weren't meant to flap loose like that.

"All right," she said, turning to dig in her big black bag and swallowing the bile that rose in her throat. "Ollie, how's your mother coming with that boiling water?"

With impeccable narrative timing, Euphemia Beetham chose that moment to step into the workshop with a big copper pot under one arm, looking almost as pale as her husband.

"It happened so fast," she babbled, as she set the pot down on the anvil by Ronnie's little forge, where Beth knew he built and adjusted the fiddly bits of inventions he didn't trust the smith with. "He just reached to calibrate a wobbly blade - we'll have to scrub this whole room, how will I ever get all the blood off of everything is what I want to know, if we leave it it'll just rust -"

"Mrs. Beetham," Beth said, firmly, but Mrs. Beetham went on like she hadn't heard.

"...and I'll have to replace all this sawdust, of course..."

"Euphemia," Beth said, sternly, in her best, most authoritative voice. Finally, the woman stopped talking, blinking at Beth like a trapped animal. Beth took a deep breath in, deliberately softening her voice. It wouldn't help anyone to have Mrs. Beetham melt down into tears right now. "Thank you for the water. I need you to do one more thing for me. Go out and find me a stone about the size and shape of your husband's fist. Take your time if you must, but find one as close to the real thing as you can. Once you've found it, go and bury it in the dead centre of your garden, as deep as you can manage. Can you do that?"

Mrs. Beetham blinked a few times more, and for a second, Beth thought she might dissolve into tears anyway. But she held Beth's gaze, and after a moment, nodded, before turning and practically sprinting for the door.

"Are you..." Ronnie Beetham asked, through gritted teeth, and Beth turned back to him, startled. She hadn't thought he was in any shape to follow what was going on, let alone speak. "Are you...going to put...the pain...into the stone...?"

"Ronnie, that's a damn good idea," Beth said, drawing needle and thread from her big black bag. She didn't tell him that she'd sent Euphemia Beetham on a fool's errand to get her out of the sickroom and give her something to occupy her mind, some purpose to make her feel useful, to keep her from having the hysterics she'd clearly been ready to fall into. If she did tell him, Ronnie might not trust her, and then all of this would be a great deal harder than necessary. Especially the part where she put his pain into the stone. "If you hadn't been an inventor, you might've made a fine witch. Now, hold still there for me for a moment."

Ollie was busy wringing out rags into the copper pot. He started when Beth came up behind him with her needle and thread, dropping a rag into the sawdust. "Miss! I boiled the rags, miss, like I seen you done when you delivered our Charlotte." He held out the bowl they lay in like an offering, and Beth couldn't help but smile as she took it.

"Very well done, Ollie, that'll help keep - uh - 'tiny demons' from getting into your father's blood." She took the rags, and then, feeling a sudden rush of something she couldn't quite name, "Go get your father some good thick blankets, will you? I can manage here."

"I've got a strong stomach, miss," Oliver Beetham said, looking so solemn that for a moment Beth almost caved.

Instead, she patted him on the shoulder with the hand holding needle and thread. "I'm sure you do, Ollie. Thank you for all your help. But none of us should have to have a strong stomach when it comes to our own parents. Go get the blankets, then run and help your ma. I'm sure she could use your strong young arms to help dig that hole."

Ollie still didn't look convinced, so Beth added, "I'll yell if I need you."

"You really will, miss?" Ollie asked, sounding doubtful, and Beth barely suppressed the urge to roll her eyes.

"I really will, Ollie. I may be a witch, but even witches have only so many hands. Now go."

She watched as Ollie raced for the door, then turned back to considering the best way to sterilise needle and thread without scalding her fingers.

Ronnie, who had been watching her the whole time with the peculiar blank expression of someone sitting atop a plateau of pain, said, "Am I...going to lose...my hand?"

"Not if I can help it," Beth said, finally settling for holding the ends of the thread and using it to dangle the needle in the pot point-first. "And, Ronnie, I can help it."

She pulled the needle from the pot. It glinted sharp in the workshop's golden light as Beth settled it atop the freshly-washed rags. Ronnie Beetham took one look at it, and his good left hand went scrabbling for his breast pocket.

Beth crossed the room and knelt back down beside him, carefully unwrapping the blood-soaked cloth from around his right hand. The damage was bad, almost more startling now that she could get a proper look at it, but already she could see where and how the repairs needed to be done.

She held a hand out for the flask Ronnie had found in the depths of his vest, and he handed it to her with a gentleness that was either reverence or weakness from blood loss and shock. "Gonna...use it...t'clean th'wound?" he slurred, and Beth smiled in his direction before tossing back a slug of Euphemia Beetham's horrible homebrew.

"In a manner of speaking," she said, once the taste had been sufficiently burned out of her mouth by the alcohol. "Oh, don't look so worried, Ronnie, you know me. You know how good I am at this."

She handed the flask back to him, and picked up a rag with her left hand, the needle with her right.

"This will hurt," she said.

_____

Oliver found Beth out by the pump, where she was washing her hands. The blood had got under her fingernails and dried there. It always seemed to do that, no matter how short she kept her nails. Perhaps once Ronnie was back on his feet she'd ask him to mock up something like a little brush for scrubbing underneath them.

"That was some fine stitching you done there, miss," Ollie said, so quiet that at first Beth didn't hear him over the water.

"Wh- oh. Thank you, Ollie." Beth was almost too tired to smile at the boy. She wasn't sure how long she'd been in that workshop, stitching, but she did know it had been hours. All she wanted was her own bed.

It was because she was so tired that it took her longer than usual to notice the way Ollie was fidgeting. "Your da will be fine," she said, already dreaming about a hot cup of tea. "He might have to leave the fine needlework to your ma from now on, but he'll use his hand again. Don't worry."

"I'm not, miss. I know you're the best," Ollie stated, matter-of-factly, not seeming to notice that he'd just become Beth's new favourite person. He wrung the bottom of his shirt in both hands as he said, "I was wondering, miss, how it was that you became a witch, miss?"

Beth blinked at him.

"When the steading came open, a friend recommended me," she said. And then, with an idea of what this was really about slowly creeping up on her, added, "But the usual way is to apprentice yourself to another witch."

Ollie twisted and twisted the bottom of his shirt until Beth worried it might tear.

"Would you consider taking an apprentice, miss?" he asked the dirt at his feet.

"I'm barely more than an apprentice myself, Ollie," Beth said. "But - there may be someone around with an opening. The best place to start asking would be at the Witch Trials next summer, but I can start to put the word out that someone around here is looking."

Ollie's smile was incandescent.

"Thank you, miss!" he said, and then, a little belatedly, "Can I make you a cup of tea, miss?"

"Thank you, Ollie, but I need to get home and have a proper wash-up," Beth sighed, brushing back a stray lock of hair from her face. She moved to dry her hands on her skirts, but, realising what a stiff, sticky mess of rapidly-drying blood they'd become, opted to shake her hands dry as best she could instead. "May I ask you, why the sudden interest in witchcraft?"

Oliver Beetham took so long to answer that at first, Beth thought he wasn't going to.

" 'tain't sudden, miss," he said, in a very small voice. "I seen you deliver our Charlotte, miss. We still got our ma - and now our da's still got his hand - because of you, miss."

"But why not medicine, then? Or wizardry, if you've got an interest in magic? Why witchcraft?"

Ollie bobbed his head from side to side. "What doctor's going to bother with us out here, miss? And what's a wizard going to do, miss, poof it all better? What's all that going to cost us, miss?"

When Beth didn't answer right away, Ollie turned beetroot-red to the tips of his ears and turned his gaze back onto the ground. "Pardon me if I spoke outta line, miss."

"No-o-o," Beth said, slowly. "You've just given me something to think about, that's all. Thank you, Ollie."

Oliver Beetham nodded, and then, as if finally sensing that this might not be the time or place, turned and scarpered, leaving Beth standing alone with blood drying in her skirts and her hands dripping.

_____

Dusk was gathering over the mountains as Beth dragged herself up the garden path to the cottage, only a few last glimmers of purple light trapped between the peaks. Her big black bag felt like it was stuffed with lead, her boots even more so.

The cottage seemed somehow smaller and darker than usual in the fading light, the moss covering the roof like a huge, lumpy beast hunched over the building. It was not the most inviting thing to come home to at the end of a day like the one she’d just had.

The big black bag hit the floor as soon as she crossed the threshold, landing back in its place beside the umbrella stand. She’d replace the needle and thread in the morning. She’d just have to hope that nobody else needed emergency surgery in the middle of the night.

Beth shuffled down the hall and turned left into the kitchen, taking the matches from their place above the fireplace. She knelt, reaching for the kindling - and then froze.

Somewhere in the darkness of the parlour, something had just moved.

Beth straightened, slowly, grabbing a piece of wood off the pile she kept in the basket by the fireplace. As weapons went, it wasn’t a particularly good one, but she’d never felt the need to have anything better on hand. Most people weren’t big enough idiots enough to break into a witch’s cottage.

“You were cursed the moment you stepped across the threshold,” she said, weighing the split log in her hand. At least it was heavy enough to do some damage, if whoever was in there got within reach. “I’m the only person who can remove it -”

“Do - do you feed that line of bullshit to all your visitors?” a familiar voice sawed out of the parlour, and Beth dropped the log out of sheer surprise. It clattered against the flagstones, the only sound in the sudden silence.

“Dad?”

Beth’s father unfolded himself from one of the two mismatched chairs, sauntering into the kitchen with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his white wizard’s robes. “Hey, uh, Beth. Long time no see.”

“I haven’t seen you since Quirm,” Beth agreed. It took her a minute to gather up her wits, to remember how cold and dark the cottage around her was. She crouched down and grabbed a handful of kindling, tossing it into the fireplace. “Sorry, this place is a mess - if I’d known you were coming -”

Before she could even reach for the matches, a fire burst to life in the hearth, green flames licking up around her battered tin kettle. Beth straightened up again, looking over at her father, who still had both hands in his pockets.

“Thought you were a witch,” he said, and Beth felt the tips of her ears burn.

“Tea?” she asked, rather than respond to that, crossing the kitchen to light the gas lamp in the window. She pulled the pot and two chipped cups from the cupboard beside the window, turning towards the icebox for the milk.

“Nahhh,” her dad said, and Beth returned the teapot and one of the mugs directly back into the cupboard without breaking stride. “Do you - don’t you keep any - any booze in this dump?”

Beth drew in a deep breath.

“I do not,” she admitted, turning back towards the fireplace, and her father. “What, uh, what brings you all the way up here? I thought it was too far to visit.”

“Oh, yeah, it is,” her dad agreed. “This place is in the middle of - of - of nowhere. Hate to see you wasting your potential in a shithole like this.” He pulled a hand out of his pocket, waving what at first glance Beth thought was a handkerchief, and then realised was an envelope. “Which is why I’m here.”

Beth managed to stifle her questions before she started blithering. Either the letter her father handed over to her would answer them all, or it wouldn’t. Regardless, she would look stupid asking questions if she literally had the answers in her hands. And if there was one thing her father had neither time nor patience for, it was stupidity.

There was nothing written on the front of the envelope, but the heavy purple wax seal on the back was stamped with two interlocking “U”s. For a moment, Beth felt as though she’d been frozen, fixed in a solid block of ice, unable to move or even breathe.

“You planning to open that sometime tonight?” her dad demanded, and Beth breathed out.

Her fingers shook as she broke the seal. Beth tried to tell herself it was simply because she hadn’t eaten dinner yet, because of how long and tiring her day had been, but she knew better.

“It’s a - a - a full scholarship,” her dad interrupted, clearly growing bored with how long the letter was taking Beth to unfold. “Those pricks wanted me, they had to take you too. That’s what you wurrpanted, right?”

The letter was printed in elegant hand on soft, creamy paper, crisp and white, stamped with the University’s crest. The first few sentences were welcoming, positive, almost unctuous. The rest glazed over into a blur of grey as Beth stared at it, uncomprehending.

“This is...” she started, and then stopped. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You could start with ‘thank you’,” her father suggested.

“Thank you,” Beth repeated. “This is...a lot. Too much.” The creamy, soft paper was crumpling under her thumb. She hadn’t touched anything like it since she’d left Quirm College. The inhabitants of Lower Bottom thought the semi-gloss paper the mail-order catalogue was printed on was fancy. “I need to think about it.”

“What - what’s there to think about?” her dad sneered, feeding a log into the fire absently and grinning when it threw up a rainbow of sparks. “You can come back with me, live out your little dream of whatever you wanted to do at the University, and have everything you ever wanted. Or, you can stay here, in this garbage pit of a house, picking up after a pack of idiot hicks whose idea of a good time is - is - is taking their half-sister on a romantic date to a lynching.” He glanced over at Beth with a shrug. “Your call.”

Beth looked into the fire, into the leaping green flames, and then past the fireplace, out into the hall, to the shadowy shape of her big black bag.

“I need to think about it,” she repeated. And then, feeling as though she was waking from a dream, “You’re welcome to stay the night, though I’ve only got the one bedroom. I hope you won’t mind there’s a draught from the roof. Steven Gidding keeps saying he’ll come fix it, but he’s always got some excuse -”

“I literally could not care less about your small-town problems,” her dad interrupted, and Beth managed a smile.

“Good. Then, if you don’t mind, I need to change.” She gestured down at her skirt, at the dried blood the green light turned almost black, before starting in the direction of the bedroom. “Make yourself at home.”

“I won’t,” her father called after her. “And you shouldn’t either.”

Beth hummed, low in her throat, but she didn’t turn around.

The letter in her hand crackled much like the fire in the hearth behind her.

#rick and morty #discworld #this is mary's fic tag #I am so so sorry for this thing what I made #but I think I finally solved The Problem Of The Footnotes #sir terry would have made all of the additional names and place names clever Latin or Greek puns but I am not clever #I couldn't fit it in but jerry is definitely mightily oats in this scenario

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redorblue · 7 years

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Book 30/2017 - Witches abroad by Terry Pratchett

One might think this book was a classic fairytale with a clear-cut set of obviously good and bad characters because there are so many elements out of fairytales in this book - fairy godmothers, Dracula entering through a window, a wolf in the woods out to eat the grandmother, a handsome prince and a beautiful, poor servant girl etc. Except that this isn’t a fairytale but rather a subversion of one where the guy better not get the girl, and since everybody and their dog keeps insisting that they’re the good guys, someone must be wrong. And it takes the entire book to find out whose actions have the best outcomes, if not necessarily the best intentions.

I’ve already talked about two other novels by Terry Pratchett this year, so I’m going to skip the part where I gush about his gorgeous writing and refer interested someones to the posts about Hogfather and Guards! Guards! (except for one thing. Why do these books always have to be so confusing in the beginning? I always need to reread the first few pages once I’m done because I stumbled through them like a Neanderthal through Cairo, and I don’t want to be reminded of my bad memory for names. The first few times I thought I was just too unfamiliar with the discworld, but I’m beginning to sense a pattern. He’s out to confuse me.) Sorry, back to business. But what this book did was introduce me to someone who has the potential to become one of my favourite characters in existence: the glorious witch Esme Weatherwax. She’s absolutely perfect for me, she has everything I could ever want in a character: she’s very capable (and sometimes scary), she can be funny in her own salty way, she’s very proud and collected and pretty hard to know, but once she likes you she’s incredibly loyal, she’s a pragmatist who gets things done and doesn’t waste her (and my) time complaining how things should be, and (here comes the slightly problematic part) she can get pretty ruthless and manipulative to get what she wants. I adore her. I love Death and Lord Vetinari, too, but I think she might just have stolen the top spot.

Now that I’m at it... I love how he writes his characters in general. They could all be such clichés: the dashing prince, the lovely servant girl, the fairy godmother who wants to get them their happily ever after and the evil old witch who tries to keep them apart... But they’re not. They’re clichés turned on their heads and given a personality and wishes and fears. And not just the few main characters, but also the secondary ones, and even for those who just show up for a couple pages he somehow manages to squeeze in a few hints of their personality. This way, as with all well-written characters, there is no purely evil villain and no saintly hero/ine. And I think this is the issue that this book is pondering (one of them anyway): the nature of good and evil, how to distinguish the two sides, and how to assign people to one or the other (Spoiler: you can’t, not conclusively. But the book puts it a lot more eloquently). In this book, there’s three sides claiming to be the good guys, and not one to laugh villainously off stage about the heroes’ stupidity and be happy about their own evilness. There’s the classic candidate for the good side - the fairy godmother - who unfortunately doesn’t care much whether your own wishes for your life match those of the people in fairytales or not. As long as everybody lives life as in the fairytales, they have to be happy by default, which is a good thing, and if a bit of extra personal power for her comes out of it, too, even better. So although her motives might be mostly good and she honestly just thinks that she’s working toward the greater good, hers is the proverbial way to hell that is paved with good intentions. Then there’s the alternative, the adversary to the fairy godmother, who acts admirably (if only with slightly dubious methods) to save the city from the fairy godmother’s meddling, but who does it mainly out of hatred for her enemy and not because of a genuine desire to save lives. So there we have it: candidates 1 and 2 for the good side have (mainly) good intentions, but bad methods, or (mainly) good methods, but bad intentions. Difficult, huh?

And if that wasn’t bad enough, candidate no. 3 for the good side, three witches, just appears so... ill-suited at first glance. There’s the grumpy old one who hates people (sorry, dearest Esme), the silly old one who drinks a lot, and the naive young one who’s so insecure and unexperienced that it hurts to watch. But once you’re in a few pages more, they start to reveal things about their characters that you didn’t expect, they form these really sweet bonds of friendship (Esme and Nanny Ogg) and mentoring (both with Magrat) and they show what makes them the best-suited contenders for the good side against all odds. Esme, for example, really doesn’t seem to care at all for the good of an individual or the community, and in the end we learn that she has a lot of bad urges that would make her a very scary villain if she ever acted on them. But then she has this very moving scene where she empathizes deeply with an abused wolf who was made to think he was human, and then fiercely defends an old woman who is left in the woods all alone... And in the end she does put everything to rights and saves the city without even killing anyone because she thinks it’s the right thing to do (fortunately, she’s right). So... even the most reluctant, unlikely and grumpiest people can be the heroes, and no one is ever exclusively good or evil. Intentions, methods and outcomes all come into it, and in the end it’s very subjective anyway.

The other thing I want to remark on in this novel is the way it both uses and makes a point about stories, in particular fairytales. It has many elements taken directly from European fairytales, but it asks how the characters who actually live them feel about them, and what effect fairytales have on people’s personality and actions. It states a causality between these stories and people’s actions, explaining that people make fairytale-like stories come true because they act how characters in fairytales should and thereby reinforce the grip these stories have on shaping reality. Because people in fairytales are always happy in the end, right? So the fairytale has to come true, no matter what. No matter if it’s not in the wolf’s nature to behave like a human being, eat the grandmother whole and then put on her nightgown. No matter if the frog-turned-prince is really just a frog with a pond and flies in his room and the social graces of... well, a frog. And no matter if the girl actually wants to marry the prince, ascend to the throne at his side and make him babies. With the greater good in mind, namely universal happiness waving at the end of the story, people who believe in the innate goodness of these stories tend to lose focus of what the other actors actually want as individuals - ending up like the fairy godmother in this one, destroying the lives of the inhabitants of an entire country in pursuit of happiness. I think the point this book is trying to make is that stories might be good as inspirations, but as soon as they are taken too seriously and projected onto real life, they become very, very dangerous.

#2017 #books #terry pratchett #witches abroad #book review #esme weatherwax

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webbygraphic001 · 5 years

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The Witches’ Guide to Design

No, no. I didn’t go researching modern-day witchcraft or anything like I did with Taoism. No, I’m taking web design lessons from a set of entirely fictional witches who live on a flat, circular world which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of the Great A’Tuin, a turtle that swims through space.

It’s called the Discworld, and it is the subject of forty-one of the best darned books I’ve ever read in my life. The witches of the kingdom of Lancre are the protagonists of several of these books. They’re a cross between village doctors, local magistrates, and (on relatively rare occasions) magical troubleshooters.

If they were designers, they’d be the scariest and probably the best designers in the business. Here’s what I’ve learned from them:

[Note: All illustrations are by Paul Kidby.]

Trust Yourself

If you want to change the world around you, you first have to know who you are. And then, you have to have absolute confidence in who you are, knowing both your capabilities and your limits. Esmeralda Weatherwax defines this trait. It is her nearly unshakable confidence and her will, which make her the most powerful witch known. Officially, the witches don’t have leaders, and Granny Weatherwax is the leader that they definitely don’t have.

Designers, of course, have to learn how to be wrong, and then deal with it. Granny does, too. The problem is, if you get too used to thinking you’re wrong all the time, it can become a hard habit to break. You can’t do your best work by second-guessing yourself at every turn. You have to see if you’re actually right or wrong first, and go from there.

Granny trusts her knowledge and experience, and when she is proven wrong, she trusts the new knowledge and experience. Eventually.

Granny Weatherwax

Enjoy Yourself

What’s the point of any of this if you can’t enjoy yourself? Looking after a whole community isn’t easy, but Gytha “Nanny” Ogg finds the time to eat and drink rather heavily, dance whenever she feels like it, and sing loudly enough to send her entire village literally running for cover. She’s been married three times, has fifteen children, and still she checks under her bed for strange men at night because “you never know your luck”. She takes full advantage of everything she can get from being the village witch, and matriarch to half the people in the village besides.

In learning about (and selling) the importance of our work as designers, it’s easy to get lost in all of the grand ideas. We’re trying to make sites that are accessible, usable, beautiful, and hopefully profitable, and each of these is almost a discipline unto itself. It’s worth taking the time to just sit there and marvel at all the cool stuff the web can do, and enjoy being a part of it.

Nanny Ogg

People Want Magic…

The witches of the Discworld very rarely use “actual” magic, beyond their flying brooms. They can. Granny Weatherwax in particular is terrifyingly powerful. Mostly, though, they practice a generalist sort of medicine, and a whole lot of what they call “Headology”. People are always coming and asking for magical solutions to things that can be fixed by far more practical means. Headology is mostly a means of making people think something magical is going on, leaving the witches free to do what’s necessary in peace.

For most users, everything we do seems magical. The very act of making a static web page seems mystical to them, especially if you do it with [gasp] a text editor. And the simple truth is that like the villagers in Lancre, they don’t want that illusion broken most of the time. They want something to magically fix their problem. If you can help them to solve their problems, but make it feel like them was magic, you’ve got a winning formula.

… But People Have to Work Things Out For Themselves

The younger witches often ask questions like, “But why can’t we just use magic to solve all of these problems?” The answer, of course, is that magic can cause as many problems as it solves. Magic is a blunt instrument, and most situations with people need something more like a scalpel, a screwdriver, or even a small paintbrush.

Ask any therapist. Lasting change comes when you guide people to the solutions, and let them do the rest. Trying to force your solutions on them basically always backfires. For example, I could point at the many ways algorithms are going horribly wrong in the world of social media. You can do your best as a designer to make things easier for your users, but you can’t do everything for them, and you shouldn’t try.

Know When to Go For Help

Over the course of the books, there are a few witches in training, including Magrat Garlick, Agnes Knitt, and Tiffany Aching. While they all have amazing story arcs that I just don’t have space for in this article, there was one thing they all had to learn: when to ask for help. The witches of Lancre are fiercely independent, and they are mostly expected to handle problems—even the big ones—for themselves, but occasionally they run into problems too big for any one witch.

Designers are going to run into those sorts of problems a lot more often, frankly. There’s so much to learn out there, and it’s rare that any one designer will come up with perfect solutions all on their own. Everything we do is built on the work of thousands who came before, and keeping all of that in one head just isn’t going to happen. You have to stand on your own as a designer, and take responsibility for what you build, but you can’t do everything alone.

When in doubt, try to get at least two outside opinions. Remember: you need three witches for a coven; two witches is just an argument.

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