Wyrd Sisters

Mended Drum who came into category C.
    What Tomjon had thought was an old sack hunched over the bar was extending arms and—other arms, except that they were its legs. A sad, rubbery face turned toward the speaker, its expression as melancholy as the mists of evolution. Its funny lips curled back. There was absolutely nothing funny about its teeth.
    “Er,” said the barman again, his voice frightening even him in that terrible simian silence. “I don’t think you meant that, did you? Not about monkeys, eh? You didn’t really, did you?”
    “What the hell’s that?” hissed Tomjon.
    “I think it’s an orangutan,” said Hwel. “An ape.”
    “A monkey’s a monkey,” said the bearded man, at which several of the Drum’s more percipient customers started to edge for the door. “I mean, so what? But these bloody lawn ornaments—”
    Hwel’s fist struck out at groin height.
    Dwarfs have a reputation as fearsome fighters. Any race of three-foot tall people who favor axes and go into battle as into a championship tree-felling competition soon get talked about. But years of wielding a pen instead of a hammer had relieved Hwel’s punches of some of their stopping power, and it could have been the end of him when the big man yelled and drew his sword if a pair of delicate, leathery hands hadn’t instantly jerked the thing from his grip and, with only a small amount of effort, bent it double. *
    When the giant growled, and turned around, an arm like a couple of broom handles strung together with elastic and covered with red fur unfolded itself in a complicated motion and smacked him across the jaw so hard that he rose several inches in the air and landed on a table.
    By the time that the table had slid into another table and overturned a couple of benches there was enough impetus to start the night’s overdue brawl, especially since the big man had a few friends with him. Since no one felt like attacking the ape, who had dreamily pulled a bottle from the shelf and smashed the bottom off on the counter, they hit whoever happened to be nearest, on general principles. This is absolutely correct etiquette for a tavern brawl.
    Hwel walked under a table and dragged Tomjon, who was watching all this with interest, after him.
    “So this is roistering. I always wondered.”
    “I think perhaps it would be a good idea to leave,” said the dwarf firmly. “Before there’s, you know, any trouble.”
    There was a thump as someone landed on the table above them, and a tinkle of broken glass.
    “Is it real roistering, do you suppose, or merely rollicking?” said Tomjon, grinning.
    “It’s going to be bloody murder in a minute, my lad!”
    Tomjon nodded, and crawled back out into the fray. Hwel heard him thump on the bar counter with something and call for silence.
    Hwel put his arms over his head in panic.
    “I didn’t mean—” he began.
    In fact calling for silence was a sufficiently rare event in the middle of a tavern brawl that silence was what Tomjon got. And silence was what he filled.
    Hwel started as he heard the boy’s voice ring out, full of confidence and absolutely first-class projection.
    “ Brothers! And yet may I call all men brother, for on this night —”
    The dwarf craned up to see Tomjon standing on a chair, one hand raised in the prescribed declamatory fashion. Around him men were frozen in the act of giving one another a right seeing-to, their faces turned to his.
    Down at tabletop height Hwel’s lips moved in perfect synchronization with the words as Tomjon went through the familiar speech. He risked another look.
    The fighters straightened up, pulled themselves together, adjusted the hang of their tunics, glanced apologetically at one another. Many of them were in fact standing to attention.
    Even Hwel felt a fizz in his blood, and he’d written those words. He’d slaved half a night over them, years ago, when Vitoller had declared that they needed another five minutes in Act III of The King of Ankh .
    “Scribble us something with a bit of spirit in it,” he’d said. “A bit of zip and sizzle, y’know. Something to summon up the blood and put a bit of backbone in our friends in the ha’penny seats. And just long enough to give us time to change the set.”
    He’d been a bit ashamed of that play at the time. The famous Battle of Morpork, he strongly suspected, had consisted of about two thousand men lost in a swamp on a cold, wet day, hacking one another into oblivion with