Equal Rites

dreaming!”
    “It’s the magic,” said Granny. “It’s trying to find a way out. The witch magic and the wizard magic are, I don’t know, sort of feeding off each other. I think.”
    Esk bit her lip.
    “What can I do?” she asked. “I dream of all sorts of things!”
    “Well, for a start we’re going straight to the University,” decided Granny. “They must be used to apprentices not being able to control magic and having hot dreams, else the place would have burned down years ago.”
    She glanced toward the Rim, and then down at the broomstick beside her.

    We will pass over the running up and down, the tightening of the broomstick’s bindings, the muttered curses against dwarves, the brief moments of hope as the magic flickered fitfully, the horrible black feelings as it died, the tightening of the bindings again, the running again, the sudden catching of the spell, the scrambling aboard, the yelling, the takeoff…
    Esk clung to Granny with one hand and held her staff in the other as they, frankly, pottered along a few hundred feet above the ground. A few birds flew alongside them, interested in this new flying tree.
    “Bugger off!” screamed Granny, taking off her hat and flapping it.
    “We’re not going very fast, Granny,” said Esk meekly.
    “We’re going quite fast enough for me!”
    Esk looked around. Behind them the Rim was a blaze of gold, barred with cloud.
    “I think we ought to go lower, Granny,” she said urgently. “You said the broomstick won’t fly in sunlight.” She glanced down at the landscape below them. It looked sharp and inhospitable. It also looked expectant.
    “I know what I’m doing, Miss,” snapped Granny, gripping the broomstick hard and trying to make herself as light as possible.
    It has already been revealed that light on the Discworld travels slowly, the result of its passage through the Disc’s vast and ancient magical field.
    So dawn isn’t the sudden affair that it is on other worlds. The new day doesn’t erupt, it sort of sloshes gently across the sleeping landscape in the same way that the tide sneaks in across the beach, melting the sandcastles of the night. It tends to flow around mountains. If the trees are close together it comes out of woods cut to ribbons and sliced with shadows.
    An observer on some suitable high point, let’s say for the sake of argument a wisp of cirro-stratus on the edge of space, would remark on how lovingly the light spreads across the land, how it leaps forward on the plains and slows down when it encounters high ground, how beautifully it…
    Actually, there are some kinds of observers who, faced with all this beauty, will whine that you can’t have heavy light and certainly wouldn’t be able to see it, even if you could. To which one can only reply, so how come you’re standing on a cloud?
    So much for cynicism. But down on the Disc itself the broomstick barreled forward on the cusp of dawn, dropping ever backward in the shadow of night.
    “Granny!”
    Day burst upon them. Ahead of the broomstick the rocks seemed to flash into flame as the light washed over them. Granny felt the stick lurch and stared with horrified fascination at the little scudding shadow below them. It was getting closer.
    “What will happen when we hit the ground?”
    “That depends if I can find some soft rocks,” said Granny in a preoccupied voice.
    “The broomstick’s going to crash! Can’t we do anything?”
    “Well, I suppose we could get off.”
    “Granny,” said Esk, in the exasperated and remarkably adult voice children use to berate their wayward elders. “I don’t think you quite understand. I don’t want to hit the ground. It’s never done anything to me.”
    Granny was trying to think of a suitable spell and regretting that headology didn’t work on rocks, and had she detected the diamond edge to Esk’s tone perhaps she wouldn’t have said: “Tell the broomstick that, then.”
    And they would indeed have crashed. But she remembered in time to grab her hat and brace herself. The broomstick gave a shudder, tilted—
    —and the landscape blurred.

    It was really quite a short trip but one that Granny knew she would always remember, generally around three o’clock in the morning after eating rich food. She would remember the rainbow colors that hummed in the rushing air, the horrible heavy feeling, the impression that something very big and heavy was sitting on the universe.
    She would remember Esk’s laughter.