The Sea And Little Fishes - Short Story, książki, po angielsku, p
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The Sea and Little Fishes
BY TERRY PRATCHETT
Trouble began, and not for the first time, with an apple.
There was a bag of them on Granny Weatherwax’s bleached and spotless table. Red and
round, shiny and fruity, if they’d known the future they should have ticked like bombs.
‘Keep the lot, old Hopcroft said I could have as many as I wanted,’ said Nanny Ogg. She
gave her sister witch a sidelong glance.
‘Tasty, a bit wrinkled, but a damn good keeper.’
‘He named an apple after you?’ said Granny. Each word was an acid drop on the air.
“Cos of my rosy cheeks,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘An’ I cured his leg for him after he fell off that
ladder last year. An’ I made him up some jollop for his bald head.’
‘It didn’t work, though,’ said Granny. ‘That wig he wears, that’s a terrible thing to see on a
man still alive.’
‘But he was pleased I took an interest.’
Granny Weatherwax didn’t take her eyes off the bag. Fruit and vegetables grew famously
in the mountains’ hot summers and cold winters.
Percy Hopcroft was the premier grower and definitely a keen man when it came to sexual
antics among the horticulture with a camel-hair brush.
‘He sells his apple trees all over the place,’ Nanny Ogg went on. ‘Funny, eh, to think that
pretty soon thousands of people will be having a bite of Nanny Ogg.’
‘Thousands more,’ said Granny, tartly. Nanny’s wild youth was an open book, although
only available in plain covers.
‘Thank you, Esme.’ Nanny Ogg looked wistful for a moment, and then opened her mouth
in mock concern. ‘Oh, you ain’t jealous, are you, Esme?
You ain’t begrudging me my little moment in the sun?’
‘Me? Jealous? Why should I be jealous? It’s only an apple. It’s not as if it’s anything
important.’
‘That’s what I thought. It’s just a little frippery to humor an old lady,’ said Nanny. ‘So how
are things with you, then?’
‘Fine. Fine.’
‘Got your winter wood in, have you?’
‘Mostly.’
‘Good,’ said Nanny. ‘Good.’
They sat in silence. On the windowpane a butterfly, awoken by the unseasonable warmth,
beat a little tattoo in an effort to reach the September sun.
‘Your potatoes ... got them dug, then?’ said Nanny.
‘Yes.’
‘We got a good crop off ours this year.’
‘Good.’
‘Salted your beans, have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I expect you’re looking forward to the Trials next week?’
‘Yes.’
‘I expect you’ve been practicing?’
‘No.’
It seemed to Nanny that, despite the sunlight, the shadows were deepening in the corners
of the room. The very air itself was growing dark. A witch’s cottage gets sensitive to the
moods of its occupant. But she plunged on. Fools rush in, but they are laggards compared
to little old ladies with nothing left to fear.
‘You coming over to dinner on Sunday?’
‘What’re you havin’?’
‘Pork.’
‘With apple sauce?’
‘Ye -,
‘No,’ said Granny.
There was a creaking behind Nanny. The door had swung open.
Someone who wasn’t a witch would have rationalized this, would have said that of course
it was only the wind. And Nanny Ogg was quite prepared to go along with this, but would
have added: why was it only the wind, and how come the wind had managed to lift the
latch?
‘Oh, well, can’t sit here chatting all day,’ she said, standing up quickly.
‘Always busy at this time of year, ain’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So I’ll be off, then.’
‘Goodbye.’
The wind blew the door shut again as Nanny hurried off down the path.
It occurred to her that, just possibly, she may have gone a bit too far.
But only a bit.
The trouble with being a witch - at least, the trouble with being a witch as far as some
people were concerned - was that you got stuck out here in the country. But that was fine
by Nanny. Everything she wanted was out here. Everything she’d ever wanted was here,
although in her youth she’d run out of men a few times. Foreign parts were all right to visit
but they weren’t really serious. They had interestin’ new drinks and the grub was fun, but
foreign parts was where you went to do what might need to be done and then you came
back here, a place that was real.
Nanny Ogg was happy in small places.
Of course, she reflected as she crossed the lawn, she didn’t have this view out of her
window. Nanny lived down in the town, but Granny could look out across the forest and
over the plains and all the way to the great round horizon of the Discworld.
A view like that, Nanny reasoned, could probably suck your mind right out of your head.
They’d told her the world was round and flat, which was common sense, and went through
space on the back of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle, which didn’t have to
make sense. It was all happening Out There somewhere, and it could continue to do so
with Nanny’s blessing and disinterest so long as she could live in a personal world about
ten miles across, which she carried around with her.
But Esme Weatherwax needed more than this little kingdom could contain. She was the
other kind of witch.
And Nanny saw it as her job to stop Granny Weatherwax getting bored.
The business with the apples was petty enough, a spiteful little triumph when you got
down to it, but Esme needed something to make every day worthwhile and if it had to be
anger and jealousy then so be it. Granny would now scheme for some little victory, some
tiny humiliation that only the two of them would ever know about, and that’d be that.
Nanny was confident that she could deal with her friend in a bad mood, but not when she
was bored. A witch who is bored might do anything.
People said things like ‘we had to make our own amusements in those days’ as if this
signaled some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a
witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches
sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing. And Esme was
undoubtedly the most powerful witch the mountains had seen for generations.
Still, the Trials were coming up, and they always set Esme Weatherwax all right for a few
weeks. She rose to competition like a trout to a fly.
Nanny Ogg always looked forward to the Witch Trials. You got a good day out and of
course there was a big bonfire. Whoever heard of a Witch Trial without a good bonfire
afterwards?
And afterwards you could roast potatoes in the ashes.
The afternoon melted into the evening, and the shadows in corners and under stools and
tables crept out and ran together.
Granny rocked gently in her chair as the darkness wrapped itself around her. She had a
look of deep concentration.
The logs in the fireplace collapsed into the embers, which winked out one by one.
The night thickened.
The old clock ticked on the mantelpiece and, for some length of time, there was no other
sound.
There came a faint rustling. The paper bag on the table moved and then began to crinkle
like a deflating balloon. Slowly, the still air filled with a heavy smell of decay.
After a while the first maggot crawled out.
Nanny Ogg was back home and just pouring a pint of beer when there was a knock. She
put down the jug with a sigh, and went and opened the door.
‘Oh, hello, ladies. What’re you doing in these parts? And on such a chilly evening, too?’
Nanny backed into the room, ahead of three more witches. They wore the black cloaks
and pointy hats traditionally associated with their craft, although this served to make each
one look different. There is nothing like a uniform for allowing one to express one’s
individuality.
A tweak here and a tuck there are little details that scream all the louder in the apparent,
well, uniformity.
Gammer Beavis’s hat, for example, had a very flat brim and a point you could clean your
ear with. Nanny liked Gammer Beavis. She might be a bit too educated, so that
sometimes it overflowed out of her mouth, but she did her own shoe repairs and took snuff
and, in Nanny Ogg’s small world view, things like this meant that someone was All Right.
Old Mother Dismass’s clothes had that disarray of someone who, because of a detached
retina in her second sight, was living in a variety of times all at once. Mental confusion is
bad enough in normal people, but much worse when the mind has an occult twist. You just
had to hope it was only her underwear she was wearing on the outside.
It was getting worse, Nanny knew. Sometimes her knock would be heard on the door a
few hours before she arrived. Her footprints would turn up several days later.
Nanny’s heart sank at the sight of the third witch, and it wasn’t because Letice Earwig was
a bad woman. Quite the reverse, in fact.
She was considered to be decent, well-meaning and kind, at least to less-aggressive
animals and the cleaner sort of children. And she would always do you a good turn. The
trouble was, though, that she would do you a good turn for your own good even if a good
turn wasn’t what was good for you. You ended up mentally turned the other way, and that
wasn’t good.
And she was married. Nanny had nothing against witches being married. It wasn’t as if
there were rules. She herself had had many husbands, and had even been married to
three of them. But Mr. Earwig was a retired wizard with a suspiciously large amount of
gold, and Nanny suspected that Letice did witchcraft as something to keep herself
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