Equal Rites
Page 8

“That's as maybe. It's harder than it seems, is Borrowing, although I'll grant you've got a knack. That's enough for today, bring us in over ourselves and I'll show you how to Return.”
The eagle beat the air over the two recumbent forms and Esk saw, in her mind's eye, two channels open for them. Granny's mindshape vanished.
Now
Granny had been wrong. The eagle mind barely fought, and didn't have time to panic. Esk held it wrapped in her own mind It writhed for an instant, and then melted into leer.
Granny opened her eyes in time to see the bird give a hoarse cry of triumph, curve down low over the grass-grown scree, and skim away down the mountainside. For a moment it was a vanishing dot and then it had gone, leaving only another echoing shriek.
Granny looked down at Esk's silent form. The girl was light enough, but it was a long way home and the afternoon was dwindling.
“Drat,” she said, with no particular emphasis. She stood up, brushed herself down and, with a grunt of effort, hauled Esk's inert body over her shoulder.
High in the crystal sunset air above the mountains the eagle Esk sought more height, drunk with the sheer vitality of flight.
On the way home Granny met a hungry bear. Granny's back was giving her gyp, and she was in no mood to be growled at. She muttered a few words under her breath and the bear, to its brief amazement, walked heavily into a tree and didn't regain consciousness for several hours.
When she reached the cottage Granny put Esk's body to bed and drew up the fire. She brought the goats in and milked them, and finished the chores of the evening.
She made sure all the windows were open and, when it began to grow dark, lit a lantern and put it on the windowsill.
Granny Weatherwax didn't sleep more than a few hours a night, as a rule, and woke again at midnight. The room hadn't changed, although the lantern had its own little solar system of very stupid moths.
When she woke again at dawn the candle had long burned down and Esk was still sleeping the shallow, unwakable sleep of the Borrower.
When she took the goats out to their paddock she looked intently at the sky.
Noon came, and gradually the light drained out of another day. She paced the floor of the kitchen aimlessly. Occasionally she would throw herself into frantic bouts of housework; ancient crusts were unceremoniously dug out of the cracks in the flagstones, and the fireback was scraped free of the winter's soot and blackleaded to within an inch of its life. A nest of mice in the back of the dresser were kindly but firmly ejected into the goatshed.
Sunset came.
The light of the Discworld was old and slow and heavy. From the cottage door Granny watched as it drained off the mountains, flowing in golden rivers through the forest. Here and there it pooled in hollows until it faded and vanished.
She drummed her fingers sharply on the doorpost, humming a small and bitter little tune.
Dawn came, and the cottage was empty except for Esk's body, silent and unmoving on the bed.
But as the golden light flowed slowly across the Discworld like the first freshing of the tide over mudflats the eagle circled higher into the dome of heaven, beating the air down with slow and powerful wingbeats.
The whole of the world was spread out beneath Esk - all the continents, all the islands, all the rivers and especially the great ring of the Rim Ocean.
There was nothing else up here, not even sound.
Esk gloried in the feel of it, willing her flagging muscles into greater effort. But something was wrong. Her thoughts seemed to be chasing around beyond her control, and disappearing. Pain and exhilaration and weariness poured into her mind, but it was as if other things were spilling out at the same time. Memories dwindled away on the wind. As fast as she could latch on to a thought it evaporated, leaving nothing behind.
She was losing chunks of herself, and she couldn't remember. what she was losing. She panicked, burrowing back to the things she was sure of ....
I am Esk, and I have stolen the body of an eagle and the feel of wind in feathers, the hunger, the search of the not-sky below ....
She tried again. I am Esk and seeking the windpath, the pain of muscle, the cut of the air, the cold of it ....
I am Esk high over air-damp-wet-white, above everything, the sky is thin ....
I am I am.
Granny was in the garden, among the beehives, the early morning wind whipping at her skirts. She went from hive to hive, tapping on their roofs. Then, in the thickets of borage and beebalm that she had planted around them, she stood with her arms outstretched in front of her and sang something in tones so high that no normal person could have heard them.
But a roar went up from the hives, and then the air was suddenly thick with the heavy, big-eyed, deep-voiced shapes of drone bees. They circled over her head, adding their own bass humming to her chant.
Then they were gone, soaring into the growing light over the clearing and streaming away over the trees.
It is well known- at least, it is well known to witches - that all colonies of bees are, as it were, just one part of the creature called the Swarm, in the same way that individual bees are component cells of the hivemind. Granny didn't mingle her thoughts with the bees very often, partly because insect minds were strange, alien things that tasted of tin, but mostly because she suspected that the Swarm was a good deal more intelligent than she was.
She knew that the drones would soon reach the wild bee colonies in the deep forest, and within hours every corner of the mountain meadows would be under very close scrutiny indeed. All she could do was wait.
At noon the drones returned, and Granny read in the sharp acid thoughts of the hivemind that there was no sign of Esk.
She went back into the cool of the cottage and sat down in the rocking chair, staring at the doorway.
She knew what the next step was. She hated the very idea of it. But she fetched a short ladder, climbed up creakily on to the roof, and pulled the staff from its hiding place in the thatch.
It was icy cold. It steamed.
“Above the snowline, then,” said Granny.
She climbed down, and rammed the staff into a flowerbed. She glared at it. She had a nasty feeling that it was glaring back.
“Don't think you've won, because you haven't,” she snapped. “It's just that I haven't got the time to mess around. You must know where she is. I command you to take me to her!”
The staff regarded her woodenly.
“By -” Granny paused, her invocations were a little rusty, “- by stock and stone I order it!”
Activity, movement, liveliness - all these words would be completely inaccurate descriptions of the staff's response.
Granny scratched her chin. She remembered the little lesson all children get taught: what's the magic word?
“Please?” she suggested.
The staff trembled, rose a little way out of the ground, and turned in the air so that it hung invitingly at waist height.
Granny had heard that broomsticks were once again very much the fashion among younger witches, but she didn't hold with it. There was no way a body could look respectable while hurtling through the air aboard a household implement. Besides, it looked decidedly draughty.
But this was no time for respectability. Pausing only to snatch her hat from its hook behind the door she scrambled up on to the staff and perched as best she could, sidesaddle of course, and with her skirts firmly gripped between her knees.
“Right,” she said. “Now wha-aaaaaaaaa -”
Across the forest animals broke and scattered as the shadow passed overhead, crying and cursing. Granny clung on with whitened knuckles, her thin legs kicking wildly as, high above the treetops, she learned important lessons about centres of gravity and air turbulence. The staff shot onwards, heedless of her yells.
By the time it had come out over the upland meadows she had come to terms with it somewhat, which meant that she could just about hang on with knees and hands provided she didn't mind being upside down. Her hat, at least, was useful, being aerodynamically shaped.
The staff plunged between black cliffs and along high bare valleys where, it was said, rivers of ice had once flowed in the days of the ice Giants. The air became thin and sharp in the throat.
They came to an abrupt halt over a snowdrift. Granny fell off, and lay panting in the snow while she tried to remember why she was going through all this.
There was a bundle of feathers under an overhang a few feet away. As Granny approached it a head rose jerkily, and the eagle glared at her with fierce, frightened eyes. It tried to fly, and toppled over. When she reached out to touch it, it took a neat triangle of flesh out of her hand.
“I see,” said Granny quietly, to no one in particular. She looked around, and found a boulder of about the right size. She disappeared behind it for a few seconds, fox the sake of respectability, and reappeared with a petticoat in her hand. The bird thrashed around, ruining several weeks of meticulous petitpoint embroidery, but she managed to bundle it up and hold it so that she could avoid its sporadic lunges.
Granny turned to the staff, which was now upright in the snowdrift.
“I shall walk back,” she told it coldly.
It turned out that they were in a spur valley overlooking a drop of several hundred feet on to sharp black rocks.
“Very well, then,” she conceded, “but you're to fly slowly, d'you understand? And no going high.”
In fact, because she was slightly more experienced and perhaps because the staff was taking more care, too, the ride back was almost sedate. Granny was almost persuaded that, given time, she could come to merely dislike flying, instead of loathing it. What it needed was some way of stopping yourself from having to look at the ground.
The eagle sprawled on the rag rug in front of the empty hearth. It had drunk some water, over which Granny had mumbled a few of the charms she normally said to impress patients, but you never knew, there might be some power in them, and it had also gulped a few strips of raw meat.
What it had not done was display the least sign of intelligence.
She wondered whether she had the right bird. She risked another pecking and stared hard into its evil orange eyes, and tried to convince herself that way down in their depths, almost beyond sight, was a strange little flicker.
She probed around inside its head. The eagle mind was still there right enough, vivid and sharp, but there was something else. Mind, of course, has no colour, but nevertheless the strands of the eagle's mind seemed to be purple. Around them and tangled among them were faint strands of silver.
Esk had learned too late that mind shapes body, that Borrowing is one thing but that the dream of truly taking on another form had its built-in penalty.
Granny sat and rocked. She was at a loss, she knew that. Unravelling the tangled minds was beyond her power, beyond any power in the Ramtops, beyond even
There was no sound, but maybe there was a change in the texture of the air. She looked up at the staff, which had been suffered to come back into the cottage.
“No,” she said firmly.
Then she thought: whose benefit did I say that for? Mine? There's power there, but it's not my kind of power.
There isn't any other kind around, though. And even now I may be too late.
I might never have been early enough.
She reached out again into the bird's head to calm its fears and dispel its panic. It allowed her to pick it up and sat awkwardly on her wrist, its talons gripping tight enough to draw blood.