On a patch of slightly higher ground by the river, bought by Vitoller for a ruinous sum, a new building was rising. It was growing even by night, like a mushroom – Hwel could see the cressets burning all along the scaffolding as the hired craftsmen and even some of the players themselves refused to let the mere shade of the sky interrupt their labours.
New buildings were rare in Morpork, but this was even a new type of building.
The Dysk.
Vitoller had been aghast at the idea at first, but young Tomjon had kept at him. And everyone knew that once the lad had got the feel of it he could persuade water to flow uphill.
'But we've always moved around, laddie,' said Vitoller, in the desperate voice of one who knows that, at the end of it all, he's going to lose the argument. 'I can't go around settling down at my time of life.'
'It's not doing you any good,' said Tomjon firmly. 'All these cold nights and frosty mornings. You're not getting any younger. We should stay put somewhere, and let people come to us. And they will, too. You know the crowds we're getting now. Hwel's plays are famous.'
'It's not my plays,' Hwel had said. 'It's the players.'
'I can't see me sitting by a fire in a stuffy room and sleeping on feather beds and all that nonsense,' said Vitoller, but he'd seen the look on his wife's face and had given in.
And then there had been the theatre itself. Making water run uphill was a parlour trick compared to getting the cash out of Vitoller but, it was a fact, they had been doing well these days. Ever since Tomjon had been big enough to wear a ruff and say two words without his voice cracking.
Hwel and Vitoller had watched the first few beams of the wooden framework go up.
'It's against nature,' Vitoller had complained, leaning on his stick. 'Capturing the spirit of the theatre, putting it in a cage. It'll kill it.'
'Oh, I don't know,' said Hwel diffidently. Tomjon had laid his plans well, he'd devoted an entire evening to Hwel before even broaching the subject to his father, and now the dwarfs mind was on fire with the possibilities of backdrops and scenery changes and wings and flies and magnificent engines that could lower gods from the heavens and trapdoors that could raise demons from hell. Hwel was no more capable of objecting to the new theatre than a monkey was of resenting a banana plantation.
'
'But you've got to complete the spell, mind.'
Granny Weatherwax nodded. She turned to face the dawn, raised her arms, and completed the spell.
It is almost impossible to convey the sudden passage of fifteen years and two months in words.
It's a lot easier in pictures, when you just use a calendar with lots of pages blowing off, or a clock with hands moving faster and faster until they blur, or trees bursting into blossom and fruiting in a matter of seconds . . .
Well, you know. Or the sun becomes a fiery streak across the sky, and days and nights flicker past jerkily like a bad zoetrope, and the fashions visible in the clothes shop across the road whip on and off faster than a lunchtime stripper with five pubs to do.
There are any amount of ways, but they won't be required because, in fact, none of this happened.
The sun did jerk sideways a bit, and it seemed that the trees on the rimward side of the gorge were rather taller, and Nanny couldn't shake off the sensation that someone had just sat down heavily on her, squashed her flat, and then opened her out again.
This was because the kingdom did not, in so many words, move through time in the normal flickering sky, high-speed photography sense of the word. It moved around it, which is much cleaner, considerably easier to achieve, and saves all that travelling around trying to find a laboratory opposite a dress shop that will keep the same dummy in the window for sixty years, which has traditionally been the most time-consuming and expensive bit of the whole business.
The kiss lasted more than fifteen years.
Not even frogs can manage that.
The Fool drew back, his eyes glazed, his expression one of puzzlement.
'Did you feel the world move?' he said.
Magrat peered over his shoulder at the forest.
'I think she's done it,' she said.
'Done what?'
Magrat hesitated. 'Oh. Nothing. Nothing much, really.'
'Shall we have another try? I don't think we got it quite right that time.'