Wyrd Sisters

well. It always did. The apprentices excelled themselves. They forget lines, and played jokes; in Sto Lat the whole third act of Gretalina and Mellias was performed against the backdrop for the second act of The Mage Wars , but no one seemed to notice that the greatest love scene in history was played on a set depicting a tidal wave sweeping across a continent. That was possibly because Tomjon was playing Gretalina. The effect was so disconcertingly riveting that Hwel made him swap roles for the next house, if you could apply the term to a barn hired for the day, and the effect still had more rivets than a suit of plate armor, including the helmet, and even though Gretalina in this case was now young Wimsloe, who was a bit simple and tended to stutter and whose spots might eventually clear up.
    The following day, in some nameless village in the middle of an endless sea of cabbages, he let Tomjon play Old Miskin in Please Yourself , a role that Vitoller always excelled in. You couldn’t let anyone play it who was under the age of forty, not unless you wanted an Old Miskin with a cushion up his jerkin and greasepaint wrinkles.
    Hwel didn’t consider himself old. His father had still been digging three tons of ore a day at the age of two hundred.
    Now , he felt old. He watched Tomjon hobble off the stage, and for a fleeting instant knew what it was to be a fat old man, pickled in wine, fighting old wars that no one cared about anymore, hanging grimly onto the precipice of late middle-age for fear of dropping off into antiquity, but only with one hand, because with the other he was giving the finger to Death. Of course, he’d known that when he wrote the part. But he hadn’t known it.
    The same magic didn’t seem to infuse the new play. They tried it a few times, just to see how it went. The audience watched attentively, and went home. They didn’t even bother to throw anything. It wasn’t that they thought it was bad. They didn’t think it was anything.
    But all the right ingredients were there, weren’t they? Tradition was full of people giving evil rulers a well-justified seeing to. Witches were always a draw. The apparition of Death was particularly good, with some lovely lines. Mix them all together…and they seemed to cancel out, become a mere humdrum way of filling the stage for a couple of hours.
    Late at night, when the cast was asleep, Hwel would sit up in one of the carts and feverishly rewrite. He rearranged scenes, cut lines, added lines, introduced a clown, included another fight, and tuned up the special effects. It didn’t seem to have any effect. The play was like some marvelous intricate painting, a feast of impressions close to, a mere blur from the distance.
    When the inspirations were sleeting fast he even tried changing the style. In the morning the early risers grew accustomed to finding discarded experiments decorating the grass around the carts, like extremely literate mushrooms.
    Tomjon kept one of the strangest:
1 ST W ITCHE : He’s late.
( Pause )
2 ND W ITCHE : He said he would come.
( Pause )
3 RD W ITCHE : He said he would come but he hasn’t. This is my last newt. I saved it for him. And he hasn’t come.
( Pause )
    “I think,” said Tomjon, later, “you ought to slow down a bit. You’ve done what was ordered. No one said it had to sparkle .”
    “It could, you know. If I could just get it right.”
    “You’re absolutely sure about the ghost, are you?” said Tomjon. The way he threw the line away made it clear that he wasn’t.
    “There’s nothing wrong with the ghost,” snapped Hwel. “The scene with the ghost is the best I’ve done.”
    “I was just wondering if this is the right play for it, that’s all.”
    “The ghost stays. Now let’s get on, boy.”

    Two days later, with the Ramtops a blue and white wall that was beginning to dominate the Hubward horizon, the company was attacked. There wasn’t much drama; they had just manhandled the lattys across a ford and were resting in the shade of a grove of trees, which suddenly fruited robbers.
    Hwel looked along the line of half a dozen stained and rusty blades. Their owners seemed slightly uncertain about what to do next.
    “We’ve got a receipt somewhere—” he began.
    Tomjon nudged him. “These don’t look like Guild thieves,” he hissed. “They definitely look freelance to me.”
    It would be nice to say that the leader of the robbers was a black-bearded, swaggering brute, with a red headscarf