Wyrd Sisters

something thin and crown shaped, which no one had ever wanted to wear because it looked so uncrownly.
    It would be nice to say it tingled under his hand. Perhaps it did.

    Granny was sitting as still as a statue, and almost as cold. The horror of realization was stealing over her.
    “That’s us,” she said. “Round that silly cauldron. That’s meant to be us, Gytha.”
    Nanny Ogg paused with a walnut halfway to her gums. She listened to the words.
    “I never shipwrecked anybody!” she said. “They just said they shipwreck people! I never did!”
    Up in the tower Magrat elbowed the Fool in the ribs.
    “Green blusher,” she said, staring at the 3rd Witche. “I don’t look like that. I don’t, do I?”
    “Absolutely not,” said the Fool.
    “And that hair!”
    The Fool peered through the crenellations like an over-eager gargoyle.
    “It looks like straw,” he said. “Not very clean, either.”
    He hesitated, picking at the lichened stonework with his fingers. Before he’d left the city he’d asked Hwel for a few suitable words to say to a young lady, and he had been memorizing them on the way home. It was now or never.
    “I’d like to know if I could compare you to a summer’s day. Because—well, June 12th was quite nice, and…Oh. You’ve gone…”

    King Verence gripped the edge of his seat; his fingers went through it. Tomjon had strutted onto the stage.
    “That’s him, isn’t it? That’s my son?”
    The uncracked walnut fell from Nanny Ogg’s fingers and rolled onto the floor. She nodded.
    Verence turned a haggard, transparent face toward her.
    “But what is he doing? What is he saying?”
    Nanny shook her head. The king listened with his mouth open as Tomjon, lurching crabwise across the stage, launched into his major speech.
    “I think he’s meant to be you,” said Nanny, distantly.
    “But I never walked like that! Why’s he got a hump on his back? What’s happened to his leg?” He listened some more, and added, in horrified tones, “And I certainly never did that ! Or that. Why is he saying I did that?”
    The look he gave Nanny was full of pleading. She shrugged.
    The king reached up, lifted off his spectral crown, and examined it.
    “And it’s my crown he’s wearing! Look, this is it! And he’s saying I did all those—” He paused for a minute, to listen to the latest couplet, and added, “All right. Maybe I did that . So I set fire to a few cottages. But everyone does that. It’s good for the building industry, anyway.”
    He put the ghostly crown back on his head.
    “Why’s he saying all this about me?” he pleaded.
    “It’s art,” said Nanny. “It wossname, holds a mirror up to life.”
    Granny turned slowly in her seat to look at the audience. They were staring at the performance, their faces rapt. The words washed over them in the breathless air. This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.
    Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.
    That’s us down there, she thought. Everyone knows who we really are, but the things down there are what they’ll remember—three gibbering old baggages in pointy hats. All we’ve ever done, all we’ve ever been, won’t exist anymore.
    She looked at the ghost of the king. Well, he’d been no worse than any other king. Oh, he might burn down the odd cottage every now and again, in a sort of absent-minded way, but only when he was really angry about something, and he could give it up any time he liked. Where he wounded the world, he left the kind of wounds that healed.
    Whoever wrote this Theater knew about the uses of magic. Even I believe what’s happening, and I know there’s no truth in it.
    This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.
    We’ve lost. There is nothing we can do against this without becoming exactly what we aren’t.
    Nanny Ogg gave her a violent nudge in the ribs.
    “Did you hear that?” she said. “One of ’em said we put babbies in the cauldron! They’ve done a slander on me! I’m not sitting here and have’em say we put babbies in a cauldron!”
    Granny grabbed her shawl as she