The Shepherd's Crown (Discworld #41)(7)

The lad’s foot was all but hanging off and his boot was full of blood. Granny gritted her teeth, and set to with everything in her armoury and all the knowledge accumulated over many years, quietly, gently, taking his pain away from him, drawing it into herself to hold until she could release it.

His face came alive and his eyes sparkled and he started chatting to the witch like an old friend. She cleaned and she stitched, all the while telling the lad what she was doing in a cheerful and calm voice before giving him what she called ‘a little tincture’. To the onlookers it looked like the boy was almost himself again when they brought to her a rather makeshift stretcher and found the lad dreamily telling Granny how to get to his home.

The habitations of the lumberjacks up in the mountains were often no better than sheds and it turned out the boy – a lad by the name of Jack Abbott – and his mother lived in one of these. It was a rickety little hut held together more with dirt than with anything else, and when Granny Weatherwax arrived outside with the stretcher lashed underneath her broomstick, she frowned, wondering how this lad’s injury could possibly be kept clean in such surroundings. The mother ran out to her boy and flapped around as the lad who had run down to her with the news helped Granny carry the stretcher inside and move the boy onto a pallet onto which the mother had heaped blankets to create a bed fit for an invalid.

Granny Weatherwax said quietly to the injured boy, ‘You lie right there and don’t get up.’ And to the distraught mother, who was wringing her hands and making noises about paying something, she said, ‘No payment necessary, mistress – that’s not how we witches work – and I’ll come back to see him in a few days, and if I can’t make it then send for Mrs Ogg. I know boys, and your son’ll want to be up and doing as soon as possible, but mark my words, bed rest is the thing for him now.’

The boy’s mother stared at Granny and said, ‘Thank you so much, Mrs . . . um . . . well, I ain’t never had need to call on a witch before, and I’ve heard some folks round here say witches do nasty things. But I can tell ’em now as I ain’t seen nothing of that sort.’

‘Really?’ said Granny, struggling to keep her temper. ‘Well, I would like to do some nasty things to the overseer for not keeping an eye on these lads, and don’t you let that man tell your boy to get up until I do. If he does, tell him that Granny Weatherwax will be after him for using these young men who don’t really know how to climb trees. I’m a good witch, as it happens, but if I find your boy working before that foot is healed there will be a reckoning.’

As the mother waved Granny away she said, ‘I will pray to Om for you, Mrs Weatherwax.’

‘Well, do tell me what he says,’ said Granny sharply. ‘And that’s Mistress Weatherwax, thank you. But if you’ve got some old clothing I could take back with me when I come again – well, that would help. I’ll see you in a day or so, along with your boy. And mind you keep that wound clean.’

You, Granny’s white cat, was waiting for her when she arrived back at her cottage, along with several people wanting potions and poultices. One or two were looking for advice but generally people were careful not to ask Granny Weatherwax, as she had a tendency to dish out advice whether wanted or not, such as the wisdom of not giving little Johnny hand-made soldiers until he was old enough to know not to stuff them up his nose.

She bustled around for another hour, dishing out medicaments to person after person, and it was only much later that she realized that although she had fed the cat, obviously, she herself had had nothing to eat or drink since the dawn. So she heated up some pottage – not a great meal, but it filled her up.

Then she lay on her bed for a while, even though sleeping in the daytime was something that only very grand ladies did, and so Granny Weatherwax allowed herself not forty winks but just the one. After all, there were always more people to see and things to do.

Then she pulled herself up, and despite it being now quite late she went out and cleaned the privy. And she scrubbed it. She scrubbed it so hard that she could see her face in it . . .

But somehow, in the shimmering water, her face could also see her, and she sighed and said, ‘Drat, and tomorrow was going to be a much better day.’

fn1 The Feegles believed to a man that they had to be dead, as the world they now lived in was grand, filled as it was with so many opportunities for stealin’ and fightin’ and boozin’. A land fit for dead heroes.

fn2 Sometimes literally, since a kelda usually gave birth to about seven Feegle babies at a time. Jeannie herself had produced a daughter in amongst her first brood.

fn3 Lord Swivel’s father reckoned it was no waste, and that he had thoroughly enjoyed drinking the family fortune. At least, he thought this until he drank so much he fell over and met a gentleman with a decided lack of flesh on his bones and the definitive addition of a scythe a good few years earlier than he should have done.

fn4 He knew, too, that gods could sometimes make inconvenient requests. He had an associate who had chosen to follow the crocodile god Offler and then found he had to keep an aviary of tooth-cleaning birds handy to fulfil his god’s dental whims.

fn5 Very true, but a lot of people came from Fourecks, as is often the case with a Place-That-Nobody-Has-Ever-Heard-Of. They just never bothered to go back again.

fn6 Thus proving that books can teach you much, if only to give you a good name for a devilish smart goat.