Witches Abroad

swinging her stumpy legs and looking around the kitchen with interest. A score of cooks were working with the single-mindedness of an artillery platoon laying down a barrage. Huge cakes were being constructed. In the fireplaces whole carcasses of animals were being roasted; turnspit dogs galloped in their treadmills. A huge man with a bald head and a scar right across his face was patiently inserting little sticks into sausages.
    Nanny hadn’t had any breakfast. Greebo had had some breakfast, but this didn’t make any difference. They were both undergoing a sort of exquisite culinary torture.
    They both turned, as if hypnotized, to watch two maids stagger by under a tray of canapés.
    “I can see you is a very observant woman, Mrs. Ogg,” said Mrs. Pleasant.
    “Just a slice,” said Nanny, without thinking.
    “I also determines,” Mrs. Pleasant said, after a while, “that you have a cat of no usual breed upon your shoulder there.”
    “You’re right there.”
    “I knows I’m right.”
    A brimming glass of yellow foam was slid in front of Nanny. She looked at it reflectively and tried to get back to the matter in hand.
    “So,” she said, “where would I go, do you think, to find out about how you do magic in—”
    “Would you like somethin’ to eat?” said Mrs. Pleasant.
    “What? My word!”
    Mrs. Pleasant rolled her eyes.
    “Not this stuff. I wouldn’t eat this stuff,” she said bitterly.
    Nanny’s face fell.
    “But you cook it,” she pointed out.
    “Only ’cos I’m told to. The old Baron knew what good food was. This stuff? It’s nothing but pork and beef and lamb and rubbish for them that never tasted anything better. The only thing on four legs that’s worth eating is alligator. I mean real food.”
    Mrs. Pleasant looked around at the kitchen.
    “Sara!” she shouted.
    One of the sub-cooks turned around.
    “Yes, ’m?”
    “Me and this lady is just going out. Just you see to everything, okay?”
    “Yes, ’m.”
    Mrs. Pleasant stood up and nodded meaningfully at Nanny Ogg.
    “Walls have ears,” she said.
    “Coo! Do they?”
    “We goin’ to go for a little stroll.”

    There were, it now seemed to Nanny Ogg, two cities in Genua. There was the white one, all new houses and blue-roofed palaces, and around it and even under it was the old one. The new one might not like the presence of the old one, but it couldn’t quite ever do without it. Someone, somewhere, has to do the cooking.
    Nanny Ogg quite liked cooking, provided there were other people around to do things like chop up the vegetables and wash the dishes afterward. She’d always reckoned that she could do things to a bit of beef that the bullock had never thought of. But now she realized that wasn’t cooking. Not compared to cooking in Genua. It was just staying alive as pleasantly as possible. Cooking anywhere outside Genua was just heating up things like bits of animals and birds and fish and vegetables until they went brown.
    And yet the weird thing was that the cooks in Genua had nothing edible to cook; at least, not what Nanny would have thought of as food. To her mind, food went around on four legs, or possibly one pair of legs and one pair of wings. Or at least it had fins on. The idea of food with more than four legs was an entirely new kettle of fi—of miscellaneous swimming things.
    They didn’t have much to cook in Genua. So they cooked everything . Nanny had never heard of prawns or crawfish or lobsters; it just looked to her as though the citizens of Genua dredged the river bottom and boiled whatever came up.
    The point was that a good German cook could more or less take the squeezings of a handful of mud, a few dead leaves and a pinch or two of some unpronounceable herbs and produce a meal to make a gourmet burst into tears of gratitude and swear to be a better person for the rest of their entire life if they could just have one more plateful.
    Nanny Ogg ambled along as Mrs. Pleasant led her through the market. She peered at cages of snakes, and racks of mysteriously tendrilled herbs. She prodded trays of bivalves. She stopped for a chat to the Nanny Ogg-shaped ladies who ran the little stalls that, for a couple of pennies, dispensed strange chowders and shellfish in a bun. She sampled everything. She was enjoying herself immensely. Genua, city of cooks, had found the appetite it deserved.
    She finished a plate of fish and exchanged a nod and a grin with the little old woman who ran the fish