Equal Rites

The thought hadn't occurred to her at all. “No,” she said truthfully. “Why? Will you?”

“No. Not really. There's no need to be frightened.”

“I'm not.”

“Oh.” A brown arm appeared, attached to the head by the normal arrangements, and helped her out of her nest in the fleeces.

Esk stood on the deck of the barge and looked around. The sky was bluer than a biscuit barrel, fitting neatly over a broad valley through which the river ran as sluggishly as a planning inquiry.

Behind her the Ramtops still acted as a hitching rail for clouds, but they no longer dominated as they had done for as long as Esk had known them. Distance had eroded them.

“Where's this?” she said, sniffing the new smells of swamp and sedge.

“The Upper Valley of the River Ankh, ” said her captor. “What do you think of it?”

Esk looked up and down the river. It was already much wider than it had been at Ohulan.

“I don't know. There's certainly a lot of it. Is this your ship?”

“Boat,” he corrected. He was taller than her father, although not quite so old, and dressed like a gypsy. Most of his teeth had turned gold, but Esk decided it wasn't the time to ask why. He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day. His brow crinkled.

“Yes, it's mine,” he said, determined to regain the initiative. “And what are you doing on it, I would like to know? Running away from home, yesno? If you were a boy I'd say are you going to seek your fortune?”

“Can't girls seek their fortune?”

“I think they're supposed to seek a boy with a fortune,” said the man, and gave a Zoo-carat grin. He extended a brown hand, heavy with rings. “Come and have some breakfast.”

“I'd actually like to use your privy,” she said. His mouth dropped open.

“This is a barge, yesno?”

“Yes?”

“That means there's only the river.” He patted her hand. “Don't worry,” he added. “It's quite used to it.”

Granny stood on the wharf, her boot tap-tap-tapping on the wood. The little man who was the nearest thing Ohulan had to a dockmaster was being treated to the full force of one of her stares, and was visibly wilting. Her expression wasn't perhaps as vicious as thumbscrews, but it did seem to suggest that thumbscrews were a real possibility.

“They left before dawn, you say,” she said.

“Yes-ss,” he said. “Er. I didn't know they weren't supposed to.”

“Did you see a little girl on board?” Tap-tap went her boot.

“Um. No. I'm sorry.” He brightened. “They were Zoons,” he said; “If the child was with them she won't come to harm. You can always trust a Zoon, they say. Very keen on family life.”

Granny turned to Hilta, who was fluttering like a bewildered butterfly, and raised her eyebrows.

“Oh, yes,” Hilta trilled. “The Zoons have a very good name.”

“Mmph,” said Granny. She turned on her heel and stumped back towards the centre of the town. The dockmaster sagged as though a coathanger had just been removed from his shirt.

Hilta's lodgings were over a herbalist's and behind a tannery, and offered splendid views of the rooftops of Ohulan. She liked it because it offered privacy, always appreciated by, as she put it, “my more discerning clients who prefer to make their very special purchases in an atmosphere of calm where discretion is forever the watchword”.

Granny Weatherwax looked around the sitting room with barelyconcealed scorn. There were altogether too many tassels, bead curtains, astrological charts and black cats in the place. Granny couldn't abide cats. She sniffed.

“Is that the tannery?” she said accusingly.

“Incense,” said Hilta. She rallied bravely in the face of Granny's scorn. “The customers appreciate it,” she said. “It puts them in the right frame of mind. You know how it is.”

“I would have thought one could carry out a perfectly respectable business, Hilta, without resorting to parlour tricks,” said Granny, sitting down and beginning the long and tricky business of removing her hatpins.

“It's different in towns,” said Hilta. “One has to move with the times.”

“I'm sure I don't know why. Is the kettle on?” Granny reached across the table and took the velvet cover off Hilta's crystal ball, a sphere of quartz as big as her head.

“Never could get the hang of this damn silicon stuff,” she said. “A bowl of water with a drop of ink in it was good enough when I was a girl. Let's see, now . . . .”

She peered into the dancing heart of the ball, trying to use it to focus her mind on the whereabouts of Esk. A crystal was a tricky thing to use at the best of times, and usually staring into it meant that the one thing the future could be guaranteed to hold was a severe migraine. Granny distrusted them, considering them to smack of wizardry; for two pins, it always seemed to her, the wretched thing would suck your mind out like a whelk from a shell.

“Damn thing's all sparkly,” she said, huffing on it and wiping it with her sleeve. Hilta peered over her shoulder.

“That's not sparkle, that means something,” she said slowly.

“What?”

“I'm not sure. Can I try? It's used to me.” Hilta pushed a cat off the other chair and leaned forward to peer into the glass depths.

“Mnph. Feel free,” said Granny, “but you won't find -”

“Wait. Something's coming through.”

“Looks all sparkly from here,” Granny insisted. “Little silver lights all floating around, like in them little snowstorm-in-abottle toys. Quite pretty, really.”

“Yes, but look beyond the flakes . . . .”

Granny looked.

This was what she saw.

The viewpoint was very high up and a wide swathe of country lay below her, blue with distance, through which a broad river wriggled like a drunken snake. There were silver lights floating in the foreground but they were, in a manner of speaking, just a few flakes in the great storm of lights that turned in a great lazy spiral, like a geriatric tornado with a bad attack of snow, and funnelled down, down to the hazy landscape. By screwing up her eyes Granny could just make out some dots on the river.

Occasionally some sort of lighting would sparkle briefly inside the gently turning funnel of motes.

Granny blinked and looked up. The room seemed very dark.

“Odd sort of weather,” she said, because she couldn't really think of anything better. Even with her eyes shut the glittering motes still danced across her vision.

“I don't think it's weather,” said Hilta. “I don't actually think people can see it, but the crystal shows it. I think it's magic, condensing out of the air.”

“Into the staff?”

“Yes. That's what a wizard's staff does. It sort of distils magic.”

Granny risked another glance at the crystal.

“Into Esk,” she said, carefully.

“Yes.”

“There looks like quite a lot of it.”

“Yes.”

Not for the first time, Granny wished she knew more about how wizards worked their magic. She had a vision of Esk filling up with magic, until every tissue and pore was bloated with the stuff. Then it would start leaking - slowly at first, arcing to ground in little bursts, but then building up to a great discharge of occult potentiality. It could do all kinds of damage.

“Drat,” she said. “I never did like that staff.”

“At least she's heading towards the University place,” said Hilta. “They'll know what to do.”

“That's as may be. How far down river do you reckon they are?”

“Twenty miles or so. Those barges only go at walking pace. The Zoons aren't in any hurry.”

“Right.” Granny stood up, her jaw set defiantly. She reached for her hat and picked up her sack of possessions.

“Reckon I can walk faster than a barge,” she said. “The river's all bendy but I can go in straight lines.”

“You're going to walk after her?” said Hilta, aghast. “But there's forests and wild animals!”

“Good, I could do with getting back to civilisation. She needs me. That staff is taking over. I said it would, but did anyone listen?”

“Did they?” said Hilta, still trying to work out what Granny meant by getting back to civilisation.

“No,” said Granny coldly.

His name was Amschat B'hal Zoon. He lived on the raft with his three wives and three children. He was a Liar.

What always annoyed the enemies of the Zoon tribe was not simply their honesty, which was infuriatingly absolute, but their total directness of approach. The Zoons had never heard about a euphemism, and wouldn't understand what to do with it if they had one, except that they would certainly have called it “a nice way of saying something nasty”.

Their rigid adherence to the truth was apparently not enjoined on them by a god, as is usually the case, but appeared to have a genetic base. The average Zoon could no more tell a lie than breathe underwater and, in fact, the very concept was enough to upset them considerably; telling a Lie meant no less than totally altering the universe.

This was something of a drawback to a trading race and so, over the millennia, the elders of the Zoon studied this strange power that everyone else had in such abundance and decided that they should possess it too.

Young men who showed faint signs of having such a talent were encouraged, on special ceremonial occasions, to bend the Truth ever further on a competitive basis. The first recorded Zoon proto-lie was: “Actually my grandfather is quite tall,” but eventually they got the hang of it and the office of tribal Liar was instituted.

It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, which the average Zoon long ago gave up trying to understand. Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars.

Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer”. They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.

“Is all that true?” said Esk suspiciously, looking around the barge's crowded cabin.

“No,” said Amschat firmly. His junior wife, who was cooking porridge over a tiny ornate stove, giggled. His three children watched Esk solemnly over the edge of the table.

“Don't you ever tell the truth?”

“Do you?” Amschat grinned his goldmine grin, but his eyes were not smiling. “Why do I find you on my fleeces? Amschat is no kidnapper. There will be people at home who will worry, yesno?”

“I expect Granny will come looking for me,” said Esk, “but I don't think she will worry much. Just be angry, I expect. Anyway, I'm going to Ankh-Morpork. You can put me off the ship -”

“- boat -”