Witches Abroad
Page 24

'You be a-comin' here for Fat Lunchtime, then?' said Mrs Pleasant.
'Helping a friend with a bit of business,' said Nanny. 'My, these biscuits are tasty.'
'I means, I see by your eye,' said Mrs Pleasant, pushing the plate nearer to her, 'that you are of a magical persuasion.'
'Then you sees a lot further than most people in these parts,' said Nanny. 'Y'know, what'd improve these biscuits no end'd be something to dip 'em in, what d'you think?'
'How "bout something with bananas in it?'
'Bananas would be just the thing,' said Nanny happily. Mrs Pleasant waved imperiously at one of the maids, who set to work.
Nanny sat on her chair, swinging her stumpy legs and looking around the kitchen with interest. A score of cooks were working with the single-mindedness of an artillery platoon laying down a barrage. Huge cakes were being constructed. In the fireplaces whole carcasses of animals were being roasted; turnspit dogs galloped in their treadmills. A huge man with a bald head and a scar right across his face was patiently inserting little sticks into sausages.
Nanny hadn't had any breakfast. Greebo had had some breakfast, but this didn't make any difference. They were both undergoing a sort of exquisite culinary torture.
They both turned, as if hypnotized, to watch two maids stagger by under a tray of canapes.
'I can see you is a very observant woman, Mrs Ogg,' said Mrs Pleasant.
'Just a slice,' said Nanny, without thinking.
'I also determines,' Mrs Pleasant said, after a while, 'that you have a cat of no usual breed upon your shoulder there.'
'You're right there.'
'I knows I'm right.'
A brimming glass of yellow foam was slid in front of Nanny. She looked at it reflectively and tried to get back to the matter in hand.
'So,' she said, 'where would I go, do you think, to find out about how you do magic in - '
'Would you like somethin' to eat?' said Mrs Pleasant.
'What? My word!'
Mrs Pleasant rolled her eyes.
'Not this stuff. I wouldn't eat this stuff,' she said bitterly.
Nanny's face fell.
'But you cook it,' she pointed out.
'Only 'cos I'm told to. The old Baron knew what good food was. This stuff? It's nothing but pork and beef and lamb and rubbish for them that never tasted anything better. The only thing on four legs that's worth eating is alligator. I mean real food.'
Mrs Pleasant looked around at the kitchen.
'Sara!' she shouted.
One of the sub-cooks turned around.
'Yes, 'm?'
'Me and this lady is just going out. Just you see to everything, okay?'
'Yes, 'm.'
Mrs Pleasant stood up and nodded meaningfully at Nanny Ogg.
'Walls have ears,' she said.
'Coo! Do they?'
'We goin' to go for a little stroll.'
There were, it now seemed to Nanny Ogg, two cities in Genua. There was the white one, all new houses and blue-roofed palaces, and around it and even under it was the old one. The new one might not like the presence of the old one, but it couldn't quite ever do without it. Someone, somewhere, has to do the cooking.
Nanny Ogg quite liked cooking, provided there were other people around to do things like chop up the vegetables and wash the dishes afterwards. She'd always reckoned that she could do things to a bit of beef that the bullock had never thought of. But now she realized that wasn't cooking. Not compared to cooking in Genua. It was just staying alive as pleasantly as possible. Cooking anywhere outside Genua was just heating up things like bits of animals and birds and fish and vegetables until they went brown.
And yet the weird thing was that the cooks in Genua had nothing edible to cook; at least, not what Nanny would have thought of as food. To her mind, food went around on four legs, or possibly one pair of legs and one pair of wings. Or at least it had fins on. The idea of food with more than four legs was an entirely new kettle of fi-of miscellaneous swimming things.
They didn't have much to cook in Genua. So they cooked everything. Nanny had never heard of prawns or crawfish or lobsters; it just looked to her as though the citizens of Genua dredged the river bottom and boiled whatever came up.
The point was that a good Genuan cook could more or less take the squeezings of a handful of mud, a few dead leaves and a pinch or two of some unpronounceable herbs and produce a meal to make a gourmet burst into tears of gratitude and swear to be a better person for the rest of their entire life if they could just have one more plateful.
Nanny Ogg ambled along as Mrs Pleasant led her through the market. She peered at cages of snakes, and racks of mysteriously tendrilled herbs. She prodded trays of bivalves. She stopped for a chat to the Nanny Ogg-shaped ladies who ran the little stalls that, for a couple of pennies, dispensed strange chowders and shellfish in a bun. She sampled everything. She was enjoying herself immensely. Genua, city of cooks, had found the appetite it deserved.
She finished a plate of fish and exchanged a nod and a grin with the little old woman who ran the fish stall.
'Well, all this is - ' she began, turning to Mrs Pleasant.
Mrs Pleasant had gone.
Some people would have bustled off to look for her in the crowds, but Nanny Ogg just stood and thought.
I asked about magic, she thought, and she brought me here and left me. Because of them walls with ears in, I expect. So maybe I got to do the rest myself.
She looked around her. There was a very rough tent a little way from the stalls, right by the river. There was no sign outside it, but there was a pot bubbling gently over a fire. Rough clay bowls were stacked beside the pot. Occasionally someone would step out of the crowd, help themselves to a bowlful of whatever was in the pot, and then throw a handful of coins into the plate in front of the tent.
Nanny wandered over and looked into the pot. Things came to the surface and sank again. The general colour was brown. Bubbles formed, grew, and burst stickily with an organic 'blop'. Anything could be happening in that pot. Life could be spontaneously creating.
Nanny Ogg would try anything once. Some things she'd try several thousand times.
She unhooked the ladle, picked up a bowl, and helped herself.
A moment later she pushed aside the tent flap and looked into the blackness of the interior.
A figure was seated cross-legged in the gloom, smoking a pipe.
'Mind if I step inside?' said Nanny.
The figure nodded.
Nanny sat down. After a decent interval she pulled out her own pipe.
'Mrs Pleasant's a friend of yours, I expect.'
'She knows me.'
'Ah.'
From outside, there was the occasional clink as customers helped themselves.
Blue smoke coiled from Nanny Ogg's pipe.
'I don't reckon,' she said, 'that many people goes away without paying.'
'No.'
After another pause Nanny Ogg said: 'I 'spects some of 'em tries to pay with gold and jewels and scented ungulants and stuff like that?'
'No.'
'Amazin'.'
Nanny Ogg sat in silence for a while, listening to the distant noises of the market and summoning her powers.
'What's it called?'
'Gumbo.'
'It's good.'
'I know.'
'I reckon anyone who could cook like that could do anything' - Nanny Ogg concentrated - 'Mrs . . . Gogol.'
She waited.
'Pretty near, Mrs Ogg.'
The two women stared at one another's shadowy outline, like plotters who had given the sign and countersign and were waiting to see what would happen next.
'Where I come from, we call it witchcraft,' said Nanny, under her breath.
'Where I come from, we call it voodoo,' said Mrs Gogol.
Nanny's wrinkled forehead wrinkled still further.
'Ain't that all messin' with dolls and dead people and stuff?' she said.
'Ain't witchcraft all runnin' around with no clothes on and stickin' pins in people?' said Mrs Gogol levelly.
'Ah,' said Nanny. 'I sees what you mean.'
She shifted uneasily. She was a fundamentally honest woman.
'I got to admit, though . . .' she added, 'sometimes . . . maybe just one pin . . .'
Mrs Gogol nodded gravely. 'Okay. Sometimes . . . maybe just one zombie,' she said.
'But only when there ain't no alternative.'
'Sure. When there ain't no alternative.'
'When . . . you know . . . people ain't showing respect, like.'
'When the house needs paintin'.'
Nanny grinned, toothily. Airs Gogol grinned, outnumbering her in teeth by a factor of thirty.
'My full name's Gytha Ogg,' she said. 'People calls me Nanny.'
'My full name's Erzulie Gogol,' said Mrs Gogol. 'People call me Mrs Gogol.'
"The way I saw it,' said Nanny, 'this is foreign parts, so maybe there's a different kind of magic. Stands to reason. The trees is different, the people is different, the drinks is different and has got banana in 'em, so the magic'd be different too. Then I thought . . . Gytha, my girl, you're never too old to learn.'
'Sure thing.'
'There's something wrong with this city. Felt it as soon as we set foot here.'
Mrs Gogol nodded.
There was no sound for a while but the occasional puffing of a pipe.
Then there was a clink from outside, followed by a thoughtful pause.
A voice said, 'Gytha Ogg? I know you're in there.'
The outline of Mrs Gogol took its pipe out of its mouth.
'That's good,' she said. 'Good sense of taste there.'
The tent flap opened.
'Hallo, Esme,' said Nanny Ogg.
'Blessings be on this . . . tent,' said Granny Weather-wax, peering into the gloom.
'This here's Mrs Gogol,' said Nanny. 'She's by way of bein' a voodoo lady. That's what witches are in these parts.'
'They ain't the only witches in these parts,' said Granny.
'Mrs Gogol was very impressed at you detecting me in here,' said Nanny.
'It wasn't hard,' said Granny. 'Once I'd spotted that Greebo washing himself outside, the rest was all deduction.'
In the gloom of the tent Nanny had formed a mental picture of Mrs Gogol as being old. What she hadn't expected, when the voodoo lady stepped out into the open air, was a handsome middle-aged woman taller than Granny. Mrs Gogol wore heavy gold earrings, a white blouse and a full red skirt with flounces. Nanny could feel Granny Weatherwax's disapproval. What they said about women with red skirts was even worse than whatever they said about women with red shoes, whatever that was.
Mrs Gogol stopped and raised an arm. There was a flurry of wings.
Greebo, who had been rubbing obsequiously against Nanny's leg, looked up and hissed. The largest and blackest cockerel Nanny had ever seen had settled on Mrs Gogol's shoulder. It turned on her the most intelligent stare she had ever seen on a bird.
'My word,' she said, taken aback. 'That's the biggest cock I've ever seen, and I've seen a few in my time.'
Mrs Gogol raised one disapproving eyebrow.
'She never had no proper upbringing,' said Granny.
'What with living next to a chicken farm and all, is what I was going to say next,' said Nanny.
'This is Legba, a dark and dangerous spirit,' said Mrs Gogol. She leaned closer and spoke out of the corner of
her mouth. 'Between you and me, he just a big black cockerel. But you know how it is.'
'It pays to advertise,' Nanny agreed. 'This is Greebo. Between you and me, he's a fiend from hell.'
'Well, he's a cat,' said Mrs Gogol, generously. 'It's only to be expected.'
Dear Jason and everyone,
Isn't it amazing the things what happen when you dont expect it, for example we met Mrs Gogol who works as a coke by day but is a Voodoo witch, you mustnt bekive all the stuff about black magic, exetra, this is a Blind, shes just like us only different. Its true about the zombies though but its not what you think . . .