The sheets on Magrat's bed were just beginning to turn brown. She pulled out the warming pan and dropped it out of the window.
She glared at the garderobe.
Magrat was probably the only person in Lancre who worried about things being biodegradable. Everyone else just hoped things would last and knew that damn near everything went rotten if you left it long enough.
At home - correction, at the cottage where she used to live - there had been a privy at the bottom of the garden.
She'd approved of it. With a regular bucket of ashes and a copy of last year's Almanack on a nail and a bunch-of-grapes cut out on the door it functioned quite effectively. About once every few months she'd have to dig a big hole and get someone to help her move the shed itself.
The garderobe was this: a sort of small roofed-in room inside the wall, with a wooden seat positioned over a large square hole that went down all the way to the foot of the castle wall far below, where there was an opening from which biodegradability took place once a week by means of an organodynamic process known as Shawn Ogg and his wheelbarrow. That much Magrat understood. It kind of fitted in with the whole idea of royalty and commonality. What shocked her were the hooks.
They were for storing clothes in the garderobe. Millie had explained that the more expensive furs and things were hung there. Moths were kept away by the draught from the hole and . . . the smell.[23]
Magrat had put her foot down about that, at least.
Now she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.
Of course she wanted to marry Verence, even with his weak chin and slightly runny eyes. In the pit of the night Magrat knew that she was in no position to be choosy, and getting a king in the circumstances was a stroke of luck.
It was just that she had preferred him when he'd been a Fool. There's something about a man who tinkles gently as he moves.
It was just that she could see a future of bad tapestry and sitting looking wistfully out of the window.
It was just that she was fed up with books of etiquette and lineage and Twurp's Peerage of the Fifteen Mountains and the Sto Plains.
You had to know this kind of thing, to be a queen. There were books full of the stuff in the Long Gallery, and she hadn't even explored the far end. How to address the third cousin of an earl. What the pictures on shields meant, all those lions passant and regardant. And the clothes weren't getting any better. Magrat had drawn the line at a wimple, and she wasn't at all happy about the big pointy hat with the scarf dangling from it. It probably looked beautiful on the Lady of Shallot, but on Magrat it looked as though someone had dropped a big ice cream on her neck.
Nanny Ogg sat in front of her fire in her dressing gown, smoking her pipe and idly cutting her toenails. There was the occasional ping and ricochet from distant parts of the room, and a small tinkle as an oil lamp was smashed.
Granny Weatherwax lay on her bed, still and cold. In her blue-veined hands, the words: I ATE'NT DEAD . . .
Her mind drifted across the forest, searching, searching. . .
The trouble was, she could not go where there were no eyes to see or ears to hear.
So she never noticed the hollow near the stones, where eight men slept.
And dreamed . . .
Lancre is cut off from the rest of the lands of mankind by a bridge over Lancre Gorge, above the shallow but poisonously fast and treacherous Lancre River.[24]
The coach pulled up at the far end.
r winked at the others.
“Listen,” he said, “I'm telling you she meant . . . well, where the monkey put his nut.”
Carter shook his head.
“No monkeys in Slice,” he said. His face became suffused with a slow grin. “Oh, I get it! She was daft!”
“Them playwriters down in Ankh,” said Baker, “boy, they certainly know about us. Pass me the jug.”
Jason turned his head again. He was getting more and more uneasy. His hands, which were always in daily contact with iron, were itching.
“Reckon we ought to be getting along home now, lads,” he managed.
“'S'nice night,” said Baker, staying put. “Look at them stars a-twinklin'.”