The Folklore of Discworld

are keeping quiet about it too. (Well. Not that quiet. Terry is occasionally informed of a sighting, and once saw it danced in Chicago.)

 
Chapter 10
THE WITCHES
OF THE CHALK

     
H OSTILITY TOWARDS W ITCHES
    I N 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. So when a young boy went riding in those woods one summer day and never came back, people said she’d killed him, and maybe cooked him in her oven too.
    ‘And so after he vanished they went to her cottage and they looked in the oven and they dug up her garden and they threw stones at her old cat until it died and they turned her out of her cottage and piled up all her old books in the middle of the room and set fire to them and burned the place to the ground and everyone said she was an old witch.’ [ The Wee Free Men ]
    To make matters worse, this lost boy was the Baron’s son, andthe Baron (whose family had held the Chalk for generations without ever changing their minds about anything) was full of taken-for-granted prejudices. He too blamed Mrs Snapperly, and gave orders that nobody was to have anything to do with her, and that any witch found in the country should be tied up and thrown in a pond. The old woman managed to live through the autumn, begging and stealing food here and there and sleeping where she could, but there came a cold night when no one would open their doors to her, and it snowed, and by morning she was dead.
    Thankfully, such small rural tragedies are now rare on Discworld, but they were common on Earth until modern times. As late as the 1920s, in one Sussex village there was an old widow called Betsey Shadlow who was forced into isolation by the fears and suspicions of her neighbours. She was