Equal Rites

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