The broomstick swerved around a tree and ploughed through some bracken. Then it swung out on to an overgrown path.
“They aren't following us anymore,” said Casanunda, after a while. “We've frightened them off, yes?”
“Not us. They're nervy of going close to the Long Man. It's not their turf. Huh, look at the state of this path. There's trees growing in it now. When I was a girl, you wouldn't find a blade of grass growing on the path.” She smiled at a distant memory. “Very popular place on a summer night, the Long Man was.”
There was a change in the texture of the forest now. It was old even by the standards of Lancre forestry. Beards of moss hung from gnarled low branches. Ancient leaves crackled underfoot as the witch and the dwarf flew between the trees. Something heard them and crashed away through the thick undergrowth. By the sound of it, it was something with horns.
Nanny let the broomstick glide to a halt.
“There,” she said, pushing aside a bracken frond, 'the Long Man.'"
Casanunda peered under her elbow.
“Is that all? It's just an old burial mound.”
“Three old burial mounds,” said Nanny
Casanunda took in the overgrown landscape.
“Yes, I see them,” he said. “Two round ones and a long one. Well?”
“The first time I saw 'em from the air,” said Nanny, “I nearly fell off the bloody broomstick for laughin'.”
There was one of those pauses known as the delayed drop while the dwarf worked out the topography of the situation.
Then:
“Blimey,” said Casanunda. “I thought the people who built burial mounds and earthworks and things were serious druids and people like that, not. . . not people who drew on privy walls with 200,000 tons of earth, in a manner of speaking.”
“Doesn't sound like you to be shocked by that sort of thing.”
She could have sworn the dwarf was blushing under his wig.
“Well, there's such a thing as style,” said Casanunda. “There's such a thing as subtlety. You don't just shout: I've got a great big tonker.”
“It's a bit more complicated than that,” said Nanny, pushing through the bushes. "Here it's the landscape saying:
I've got a great big tonker. That's a dwarf word, is it?"
“Yes.”
“It's a good word.”
Casanunda tried to untangle himself from a briar.
“Esme doesn't ever come up here,” said Nanny, from somewhere up ahead. “She says it's bad enough about folksongs and maypoles and suchlike, without the whole scenery getting suggestive. 'Course,” she went on, “this was never intended as a women's place. My great-gran said in the real old days the men used to come up for strange rites what no women ever saw.”
“Except your great-grandmother, who hid in the bushes,” said Casanunda.
Nanny stopped dead.
“How did you know that?”
“Let's just say I'm developing a bit of an insight into Ogg womanhood as well, Mrs. Ogg,” said the dwarf. A thorn bush had ripped his coat.
“She said they just used to build sweat lodges and smell like a blacksmith's armpit and drink scumble and dance around the fire with horns on and piss in the trees any old how,” said Nanny. “She said it was a bit sissy, to be honest. But I always reckon a man's got to be a man, even if it is sissy. What happened to your wig?”
“I think it's on that tree back there.”