The Folklore of Discworld by Terry Pratchett; Jacqueline Simpson

Author:Terry Pratchett; Jacqueline Simpson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Discworld (Imaginary place), Folk Tales, Folklore in literature, Fiction, Fantasy, Fairy Tales, Legends & Mythology, General
ISBN: 9780385611008
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2008-10-06T10:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

THE WITCHES

OF THE CHALK

HOSTILITY TOWARDS WITCHES

IN THE LOWLANDS and in the Chalk country, witches do not receive the same respect as in Lancre. There have been times when they were systematically persecuted, even burned, and though that no longer happens many of the Chalk people still distrust them, and are quick to blame them when there is trouble. So witches who go there are wary, and try not to attract attention. They wear ordinary clothes, and disguise their true craft behind a slightly more socially acceptable calling, such as teaching. That is why, when Miss Perspicacia Tick visits the Chalk, or surrounding villages, she wears what looks like a simple black straw hat smothered in paper flowers, but is actually a collapsible stealth model. Press a spring, and it unfolds into the classic pointy shape. Among the paper flowers lurks a talking toad which she refers to as her familiar, though so far it has not displayed any magical powers – unlike the toad-familiars of English witches in Wessex, which are so dangerous that the worst threat their mistress can utter is, ‘I’ll set my toads on ’ee!’

Miss Tick’s equipment too looks far from witchy. She does her scrying by pouring a few drops of ink into rainwater in a cracked saucer which she carries about in one of her many pockets. Also in her pockets are other insignificant objects – twigs, loose beads, string, a reel of cotton, a holed stone, a few feathers, scraps of coloured paper. These she can thread together to make a ‘shamble’, a powerful magic-detector and projector which looks a bit like a particularly complicated cat’s cradle, a bit like a broken set of puppet-strings, and a bit like a very untidy dream-catcher. To do this requires high skill in making string-figures, an art practised in various parts of the multiverse, and often linked to myths and magic. On Earth, Germans call it das Hexenspiel, ‘the Witch’s Game’.

A shamble won’t work if you buy it ready-made. You have to make your own, fresh every time, out of whatever there happens to be in your pockets. In the centre you put something alive – an egg, say, or a beetle or small worm – and pull the strings, and as the objects twirl past or even through one another, the device works. In the presence of really powerful magic, it may explode. But if you pull the right bit of string, it all falls apart in a moment and becomes just a small pile of harmless rubbish. Nothing suspicious. Nothing that makes people say ‘witch’.

Because once people think you’re a witch, things can go terribly, terribly wrong, as they did for poor old Mrs Snapperly, who died in the snow one winter, but who probably wasn’t a witch at all. As Tiffany Aching tells Miss Tick, Mrs Snapperly used to live alone in a strange cottage in the woods, and had no teeth, and talked to herself. And she had a cat, and she squinted.

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