Wyrd Sisters

years ago? There is only recollection, and stories. And plays, of course.”
    “Ah, yes. I saw a play once,” said Felmet. “Bunch of funny fellows in tights. A lot of shouting. The people liked it.”
    “You tell me history is what people are told?” said the duchess.
    The Fool looked around the throne room and found King Gruneberry the Good (906-967).
    “ Was he?” he said, pointing. “Who knows, now? What was he good at ? But he will be Gruneberry the Good until the end of the world.”
    The duke was leaning forward in his throne, his eyes gleaming.
    “I want to be a good ruler,” he said. “I want people to like me. I would like people to remember me fondly.”
    “Let us assume,” said the duchess, “that there were other matters, subject to controversy. Matters of historical record that had…been clouded.”
    “I didn’t do it, you know,” said the duke, quickly. “He slipped and fell. That was it. Slipped and fell. I wasn’t even there. He attacked me. It was self-defense.” His voice fell to a mumble. “I have no recollection of it at this time,” he murmured. He rubbed his dagger hand, although the word was becoming inappropriate.
    “Be quiet, husband,” snapped the duchess. “I know you didn’t do it. I wasn’t there with you, you may recall. It was I who didn’t hand you the dagger.” The duke shuddered again.
    “And now, Fool,” said Lady Felmet. “I was saying, I believe, that perhaps there are matters that should be properly recorded .”
    “Marry, that you were not there at the time?” said the Fool, brightly.
    It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them. If words were sweet little lambs, then the Fool watched them bound cheerfully away into the flame-thrower of the duchess’s glare.
    “Not where ?” she said.
    “Anywhere,” said the Fool hastily.
    “Stupid man! Everyone is somewhere.”
    “I mean, you were everywhere but at the top of the stairs,” said the Fool.
    “Which stairs?”
    “Any stairs,” said the Fool, who was beginning to sweat. “I distinctly remember not seeing you!”
    The duchess eyed him for a while.
    “So long as you remember it,” she said. The duchess rubbed her chin, which made an audible rasping noise.
    “Reality is only weak words, you say. Therefore, words are reality. But how can words become history?”
    “It was a very good play, the play that I saw,” said Felmet dreamily. “There were fights, and no one really died. Some very good speeches, I thought.”
    There was another sandpapery sound from the duchess.
    “Fool?” she said.
    “Lady?”
    “Can you write a play? A play that will go around the world, a play that will be remembered long after rumor has died?”
    “No, lady. It is a special talent.”
    “But can you find someone who has it?”
    “There are such people, lady.”
    “Find one,” murmured the duke. “Find the best. Find the best. The truth will out. Find one.”

    The storm was resting. It didn’t want to be, but it was. It had spent a fortnight understudying a famous anticyclone over the Circle Sea, turning up every day, hanging around in the cold front, grateful for a chance to uproot the occasional tree or whirl a farmhouse to any available emerald city of its choice. But the big break in the weather had never come.
    It consoled itself with the thought that even the really great storms of the past—the Great Gale of 1789, for example, of Hurricane Zelda and Her Amazing Raining Frogs—had gone through this sort of thing at some stage in their career. It was just part of the great tradition of the weather.
    Besides, it had had a good stretch in the equivalent of pantomime down on the plains, bringing seasonal snow and terminal frostbite to millions. It just had to be philosophical about being back up here now with nothing much to do except wave the heather about. If weather was people, this storm would be filling in time wearing a cardboard hat in a hamburger hell.
    Currently it was observing three figures moving slowly over the moor, converging with some determination on a bare patch where the standing stone stood, or usually stood, though just at the moment it wasn’t visible.
    It recognized them as old friends and connoisseurs, and conjured up a brief unseasonal roll of thunder as a form of greeting. This was totally ignored.
    “The bloody stone’s gone,” said Granny Weatherwax.