Agnes grabbed the priest again.
'Come on, let's get to the road and find Nanny-'
Hodgesaargh was left with his glove puppet and his lure and his knapsack and a deeply awkward feeling. He'd been brought up.to respect witches, and Miss Nitt was a witch. The man with her hadn't been a witch, but his manner fitted him into that class of people Hodgesaargh mentally pigeonholed as 'my betters', although in truth this was quite a large category. He wasn't about to disagree with his betters. Hodgesaargh was a one-man feudal system.
On the other hand, he thought, as he packed up and prepared to move on, books that were all about the world tended to be written by people who knew all about books rather than all about the world. All that stuff about birds hatching from ashes must have been written by someone who didn't know anything about birds. As for there only ever being one phoenix, well, that'd obviously been written down by a man who ought to get out in the fresh air more and meet some ladies. Birds came from eggs. Oh, the phoenix was one of those creatures that had learned to use magic, had built it right into its very existence, but magic was tricky stuff and nothing used any more of it than it needed to. So there'd be an egg, definitely. And eggs needed warmth, didn't they?
Hodgesaargh had been thinking about this a lot during the morning, as he tramped through damp bushes making the acquaintance of several disappointed ducks. He'd never bothered much about history, except the history of falconry, but he did know that there were once places - and in some cases still were - with a very high level of background magic, which made them rather exciting and not a good place to raise your young.
Maybe the phoenix, whatever it really looked like, was simply a bird who'd worked out a way of making incubation work very, very fast.
Hodgesaargh had actually got quite a long way, and if he'd had a bit more time he'd have worked out the next step, too.
It was well after noon before Granny Weatherwax came off the moor, and a watcher might have wondered why it took such a long time to cross a little patch of moorland.
They'd have wondered even more about the little stream. It had cut a rock-studded groove in the peat that a healthy woman could have leapt across, but someone had placed a broad stone across it for a bridge.
She looked at it for a while and then reached into her sack. She took out a long piece of black material and blindfolded herself. Then she walked out across the stone, taking tiny steps with her arms flung. out wide for balance. Halfway across she fell on to her hands and knees and stayed there, panting, for several minutes. Then she crawled forward again, by inches.
A few feet below, the peaty stream rattled happily over the stones.
The sky glinted. It was a sky with blue patches and bits of cloud, but it had a strange look, as though a picture painted on glass had been fractured and then the shards reassembled wrongly. A drifting cloud disappeared against some invisible line and began to emerge in another part of the sky altogether.
Things were not what they seemed. But then, as Granny always said, they never were.
Agnes practically had to pull Oats into Nanny Ogg's house, which was in fact so far away from the concept of a witch's cottage that it, as it were, approached it from the other side. It tended towards jolly clashing colours rather than black, and smelled of polish. There were no skulls or strange candles, apart from the pink novelty one that Nanny had once bought in Ankh-Morpork and only brought out to show to guests with the right sense of humour. There were lots of tables, mainly in order to display the vast number of drawings and iconographs of the huge Ogg clan. At first sight these looked randomly placed, until you worked out the code. In reality, pictures were advanced or retarded around the room as various family members temporarily fell in or out of favour, and anyone ending up on the small wobbly table near the cat's bowl had some serious spadework to do. What made it worse was that you could fall down the pecking order not because you'd done something bad, but because everyone else had done something better. This was why what space wasn't taken up with family pictures was occupied by ornaments, because no Ogg who travelled more than ten miles from Ankh-Morpork would dream of returning without a present. The Oggs loved Nanny Ogg and, well, there were even worse places than the wobbly table. A distant cousin had once ended up in the hall.
Most of the ornaments were cheapjack stuff bought from fairs, but Nanny Ogg never minded, provided they were colourful and shiny. So there were a lot of cross-eyed dogs, pink shepherdesses and mugs with badly spelled slogans like 'To the Wordl's Best Mum' and 'We Luove Our Nanny'. A huge gilded china beer stein that played 'Ich Bin Ein Rattarsedschwein' from The Student Horse was locked in a glass-fronted cabinet as a treasure too great for common display, and had earned Shirl Ogg's picture a permanent place on the dresser.
Nanny Ogg had already cleared a space on the table for the green ball. She looked up sharply when Agnes entered.
'You were a long time. Been dallyin'?' she said, in an armour-piercing voice.
'Nanny, Granny would have said that,' said Agnes reproachfully.
Nanny shivered. 'You're right, gel,' she said. 'Let's find her quickly, eh? I'm too cheerful to be a crone.'
'There's odd creatures everywhere!' said Agnes. 'There's loads of centaurs! We had to dive into the ditch!'
'Ah, I did notice you'd got grass and leaves on your dress,' said Nanny. 'But I was too polite to mention it.'
'Where're they all coming from?'
'Down out of the mountains, I suppose. Why did you bring Soapy Sam back with you?'
'Because he's covered in mud, Nanny,' said Agnes sharply, 'and I said he could have a wash down here.'
'Er... is this really a witch's cottage?' said Oats, staring at the assembled ranks of Oggery.
'Oh dear,' said Nanny.
'Pastor Melchio said they are sinks of depravity and sexual excess.' The young man took a nervous step backwards, knocking against a small table and causing a blue clockwork ballerina to begin a jerky pirouette to the tune of 'Three Blind Mice'.
'Well, we've got a sink all right,' said Nanny. 'What's your best offer?'
'I suppose we should be grateful that was a Nanny Ogg comment,' said Agnes. 'Don't wind him up, Nanny. It's been a busy morning.'
'Er, which way's the pump?' said Oats. Agnes pointed. He hurried out, gratefully.