Carpe Jugulum (11 page)

Agnes’s hair snagged in the twigs. She managed to get one boot on a branch while holding on for dear life to the branch above, but that left her other foot standing on the broomstick, which was beginning to drift sideways and causing her to do what even ballerinas can’t do without some training.

“Can you see it yet?” Nanny cried, from far too far below.

“I think this is an old nest as well—Oh no…”

“What’s happened?”

“I think my drawers have split…”

“I always go for roomy, myself,” said Nanny.

Agnes got the other leg onto the branch, which creaked.

Lump,
said Perdita.
I could have climbed this like a gazelle!

“Gazelles don’t climb!” said Agnes.

“What’s that?” said the voice from below.

“Oh, nothing…”

Agnes inched her way along, and suddenly her vision was full of black and white wings. A magpie landed on a twig a foot from her face and screamed at her. Five others swooped in from the other trees and joined in the chorus.

She didn’t like birds in any case. They were fine when they were flying, and their songs were nice, but up close they were mad little balls of needles with the intelligence of a house fly.

She tried to swat the nearest one, and it fluttered onto a higher branch while she struggled to get her balance back. When the branch stopped rocking she moved further along, gingerly, trying to ignore the enraged birds, and looked at the nest.

It was hard to tell if it was the remains of an old one or the start of a new one, but it did contain a piece of tinsel, a shard of broken glass and, gleaming even under this sullen sky, something white…with a gleaming edge.

“‘Five for silver…
six for gold
…’” she said, half to herself.

“It’s ‘five for heaven, six for hell,’” Nanny called up.

“I can just reach it, anyway…”

The bough broke. There were plenty of others up.below it, but they just served as points of interest on the way down. The last one flipped Agnes into a holly bush.

Nanny took the invitation from her outflung hand. Rain had made the ink run, but the word “Weatherwax” was still very readable. She scratched at the gold edging with her thumb.

“Too
much
gold,” she said. “Well, that explains the invite. I
told
you them birds will steal anything that glitters.”

“I’m not hurt at all,” said Agnes pointedly. “The holly quite cushioned my fall.”

“I’ll wring their necks,” said Nanny. The magpies in the trees around the cottage screamed at her.

“I think I may have dislocated my hat, however,” said Agnes, pulling herself to her feet. But it was useless angling for sympathy in a puddle, so she gave up. “All right, we’ve found the invitation. It was all a terrible mistake. No one’s fault. Now let’s find Granny.”

“Not if she don’t want to be found,” said Nanny, rubbing the edge of the card thoughtfully.

“You can do Borrowing. Even if she left early, some creatures will have seen her—”

“I don’t Borrow, as a rule,” said Nanny firmly. “I ain’t got Esme’s self-discipline. I gets…involved. I was a rabbit for three whole days until our Jason went and fetched Esme and she brought me back. Much longer and there wouldn’t have been a me to
come
back.”

“Rabbits sound dull.”

“They have their ups and downs.”

“All right, then, have a look in the buoy’s glass ball,” said Agnes. “You’re good at that, Magrat told me.” Across the clearing a crumbling brick fell out of the cottage’s chimney.

“Not here, then,” said Nanny, with some reluctance. “It’s giving me the willies—Oh no, as if we didn’t have enough…What’s
he
doing here?”

Mightily Oats was advancing through the wood. He walked awkwardly, as city people do when traversing real, rutted, leaf-moldy, twig-strewn soil, and had the concerned look of someone who was expecting to be attacked at any moment by owls or beetles.

In his strange black and white clothing he looked like a human magpie himself.

The magpies screamed from the trees.

“‘Seven for a secret never to be told,’” said Agnes.

“‘Seven’s a devil, his own sel’,’” said Nanny, darkly. “You’ve got your rhyme, I’ve got mine.”

When Oats saw the witches he brightened up very slightly and blew his nose at them.

“What a waste of skin,” muttered Nanny.

“Ah, Mrs. Ogg…and Miss Nitt,” said Oats, inching around some mud. “Er…I trust I find you well?”

“Up till now,” said Nanny.

“I had, er, hoped to see Mrs. Weatherwax.”

For a moment the only sound was the chattering of the ravens.

“Hoped?”
said Agnes.

“
Mrs.
Weatherwax?” said Nanny.

“Er, yes. It is part of my…I’m supposed to…one of the things we…Well, I heard she might be ill, and visiting the elderly and infirm is part, er, of our pastoral duties…Of course, I realize that
technically
I have no pastoral duties, but still, while I’m here…”

Nanny’s face was a picture, possibly one painted by an artist with a very strange sense of humor.

“I’m really sorry she ain’t here,” she said, and Agnes knew she was being altogether honest and absolutely nasty.

“Oh dear. I was, er, going to give her some…I was going…er…Is she well, then?”

“I’m sure she’d be all the better for a visit from you,” said Nanny, and once again there was a strange, curvy sort of truth to this. “It’d be the sort of thing she’d talk about for days. You can come back any time you want.”

Oats looked helpless. “Then I suppose I’d better, er, be getting back to my, er, tent,” he said. “May I accompany you ladies down to the town? There are, er, some dangerous things in the woods…”

“We got broomsticks,” said Nanny firmly. The priest looked crestfallen, and Agnes made a decision.

“
A
broomstick,” she said. “I’ll walk you—I mean, you can walk
me
back. If you like.”

The priest looked relieved. Nanny sniffed. There was a certain Weatherwax quality to the sniff.

“Back at my place, then. An’ no dilly-dallyin’,” she said.

“I don’t dilly-dally,” said Agnes.

“Just see you don’t start,” said Nanny, and went to find her broomstick.

Agnes and the priest walked in embarrassed silence for a while. At last Agnes said: “How’s the headache?”

“Oh, much better, thank you. It went away. But her majesty was kind enough to give me some pills anyway.”

“That’s nice,” said Agnes.
She ought to have given him a needle! Look at the size of that boil!
said Perdita, one of nature’s born squeezers.
Why doesn’t he do something about it?

“Er…you don’t like me very much, do you,” said Oats.

“I’ve hardly met you.” She was becoming aware of an embarrassing draftiness in the nether regions.

“A lot of people don’t like me as soon as they’ve met me,” said Oats.

“I suppose that saves time,” said Agnes, and cursed. Perdita had got through on that one, but Oats didn’t seem to have noticed. He sighed.

“I’m afraid I have a bit of a difficulty with people,” he went on. “I fear I’m just not cut out for pastoral work.”

Don’t get involved with this twerp,
said Perdita. But Agnes said, “You mean sheep and so on?”

“It all seemed a lot clearer at college,” said Oats, who like many people seldom paid much attention to what others said when he was unrolling his miseries, “but here, when I tell people some of the more
accessible
stories from the
Book of Om
they say things like, ‘That’s not right, mushrooms wouldn’t grow in the desert,’ or ‘That’s a stupid way to run a vineyard.’ Everyone here is so very…literal.”

Oats coughed. There seemed to be something preying on his mind. “Unfortunately, the
Old Book of Om
is rather unyielding on the subject of witches,” he said.

“Really.”

“Although having studied the passage in question in the original Second Omnian IV text, I have advanced the rather daring theory that the actual word in question translates more accurately as ‘cockroaches.’”

“Yes?”

“Especially since it goes on to say that they can be killed by fire or in ‘traps of treacle.’ It also says later on that they bring lascivious dreams.”

“Don’t look at me,” said Agnes. “All you’re getting is a walk home.”

To her amazement, and Perdita’s crowing delight, he blushed as red as she ever did.

“Er, er, the word in question in that passage might just as easily be read in context as ‘boiled lobsters,’” he said hurriedly.

“Nanny Ogg says Omnians used to burn witches,” said Agnes.

“We used to burn practically everybody,” said Oats gloomily. “Although some witches did get pushed into big barrels of treacle, I believe.”

He had a boring voice, too. He did appear, she had to admit, to be a boring person. It was almost too perfect a presentation, as if he was trying to
make
himself seem boring. But one thing had piqued Agnes’s curiosity.

“Why did you come to visit Granny Weatherwax?”

“Well, everyone speaks very…highly of her,” said Oats, suddenly picking his words like a man pulling plums from a boiling pot. “And they said she hadn’t turned up last night, which was very strange. And I thought it must be hard for an old lady living by herself. And…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I understand she’s quite old and it’s never too late to consider the state of your immortal soul,” said Oats. “Which she must have, of course.”

Agnes gave him a sideways look. “She’s never mentioned it,” she said.

“You probably think I’m foolish.”

“I just think you are an amazingly lucky man, Mr. Oats.”

On the other hand…here was someone who’d been
told
about Granny Weatherwax, and had
still
walked through these woods that scared him stiff to see her,
even though
she was possibly a cockroach or a boiled lobster. No one in Lancre ever came to see Granny unless they wanted something. Oh, sometimes they came with little presents (because one day they’d want something again), but they generally made sure she was out first. There was more to Mr. Oats than met the eye. There had to be.

A couple of centaurs burst out of the bushes ahead of them and cantered away down the path. Oats grabbed a tree.

“They were running around when I came up!” he said. “Are they
usual
?”

“I’ve never seen them before,” said Agnes. “I think they’re from Uberwald.”

“And the horrible little blue goblins? One of them made a
very
unpleasant gesture at me!”

“Don’t know about them at all.”

“And the vampires? I mean, I knew that things were
different
here, but really—”

“Vampires?!” shouted Agnes. “You saw the vampires? Last night?”

“Well, I mean,
yes
, I studied them at length at the seminary, but I never thought I’d see them standing around talking about drinking blood and things, really, I’m surprised the King allows it—”

“And they didn’t…affect your mind?”

“I did have that terrible migraine. Does that count? I thought it was the prawns.”

A cry rang through the woods. It seemed to have many components, but mostly it soundly as though a turkey was being throttled at the other end of a tin tube.

“And what the heck was that?”
shouted Oats.

Agnes looked around, bewildered. She’d grown up in the Lancre woods. Oh, you got strange things sometimes, passing through, but generally they contained nothing more dangerous than other people. Now, in this tarnished light, even the trees were starting to look suspicious.

“Let’s at least get down to Bad Ass,” she said, tugging at Oats’s hand.

“You what?”

Agnes sighed. “It’s the nearest village.”

“Bad Ass?”

“Look, there was a donkey, and it stopped in the middle of the river, and it wouldn’t go backward or forward,” said Agnes, as patiently as possible. Lancre people got used to explaining this. “Bad Ass. See? Yes, I know that ‘Disobedient Donkey’ might have been more…
acceptable
, but—”

The horrible cry echoed around the woods again. Agnes thought of all the things that were rumored to be in the mountains, and dragged Oats after her like a badly hitched cart.

Then the sound was right in front of them and, at a turn in the lane, a head emerged from a bush.

Agnes had seen pictures of an ostrich.

So…start with one of them, but make the head and neck in violent yellow, and give the head a huge ruff of red and purple feathers and two big round eyes, the pupils of which jiggled drunkenly as the head moved back and forth…

“Is that some sort of local chicken?” warbled Oats.

“I doubt it,” said Agnes. One of the long feathers had a tartan pattern.

The cry started again, but was strangled halfway through when Agnes stepped forward, grabbed the thing’s neck, and pulled.

A figure rose from the undergrowth, dragged up by his arm.

“Hodgesaargh?”

He quacked at her.

“Take that thing out of your mouth,” said Agnes. “You sound like Mr. Punch.”

He removed the whistle. “Sorry, Miss Nitt.”

“Hodgesaargh, why—and I realize I might not like the answer—why are you hiding in the woods with your arm dressed up like Hetty the Hen and making horrible noises through a tube?”

“Trying to lure the phoenix, miss.”

“The phoenix? That’s a mythical bird, Hodgesaargh.”

“That’s right, miss. There’s one in Lancre, miss. It’s very young, miss. So I thought I might be able to attract it.”

She looked at the brightly colored glove. Oh yes—if you raised chicks, you had to let them know what kind of bird they were, so you used a sort of glove-puppet. But…

“Hodgesaargh?”

“Yes, miss?”

“I’m not an expert, of course, but I seem to recall that according to the commonly accepted legend of the phoenix it would never
see
its parent. You can only have one phoenix at a time. It’s automatically an orphan. You see?”