Wyrd Sisters (Discworld 6)

The Fool and Magrat sat on a log on a small outcrop that looked out across the forest. The lights of Lancre town were in fact not very far away, but neither of them had suggested leaving.

The air between them crackled with unspoken thoughts and wild surmisings.

'You've been a Fool long?' said Magrat, politely. She blushed in the darkness. In that atmosphere it sounded the most impolite of questions.

'All my life,' said the Fool bitterly. 'I cut my teeth on a set of bells.'

'I suppose it gets handed on, from father to son?' said Magrat.

'I never saw much of my father. He went off to be Fool for the Lords of Quirm when I was small,' said the Fool. 'Had a row with my grandad. He comes back from time to time, to see my mam.'

'That's terrible.'

There was a sad jingle as the Fool shrugged. He vaguely recalled his father as a short, friendly little man, with eyes like a couple of oysters. Doing something as brave as standing up to the old boy must have been quite outside his nature. The sound of two suits of bells shaken in anger still haunted his memory, which was full enough of bad scenes as it was.

'Still,' said Magrat, her voice higher than usual and with a vibrato of uncertainty, 'it must be a happy life. Making people laugh, I mean.'

When there was no reply she turned to look at the man. His face was like stone. In a low voice, talking as though she was not there, the Fool spoke.

He spoke of the Guild of Fools and Joculators in Ankh-Morpork.

Most visitors mistook it at first sight for the offices of the Guild of Assassins, which in fact was the rather pleasant,- airy collection of buildings next door (the Assassins always had plenty of money); sometimes the young Fools, slaving at their rote in rooms that were always freezing, even in high summer, heard the young Assassins at play over the wall and envied them, even though, of course, the number of piping voices grew noticeably fewer towards the end of term (the Assassins also believed in competitive examination).

In fact all sorts of sounds managed to breach the high grim windowless walls, and from keen questioning of servants the younger Fools picked up a vision of the city beyond. There were taverns out there, and parks. There was a whole bustling world, in which the students and apprentices of the various Guilds and Colleges took a full ripe part, either by playing tricks on it, running through it shouting, or throwing parts of it up. There was laughter which paid no attention to the Five Cadences or Twelve Inflections. And – although the students debated this news in the dormitories at night – there was apparently unauthorised humour, delivered freestyle, with no reference to the Monster Fun Book or the Council or anyone.

Out there, beyond the stained stonework, people were telling jokes without reference to the Lords of Misrule.

It was a sobering thought. Well, not a sobering thought in actual fact, because alcohol wasn't allowed in the Guild. But if it was, it would have been.

There was nowhere more sober than the Guild.

The Fool spoke bitterly of the huge, redfaced Brother Prankster, of evenings learning the Merry Jests, of long mornings in the freezing gymnasium learning the Eighteen Pratfalls and the accepted trajectory for a custard pie. And juggling. Juggling! Brother Jape, a man with a soul like cold boiled string, taught juggling. It wasn't that the Fool was bad at juggling that reduced him to incoherent fury. Fools were expected to be bad at juggling, especially if juggling inherently funny items like custard pies, flaming torches or extremely sharp cleavers. What had Brother Jape laying about him in red-hot, clanging rage was the fact that the Fool was bad at juggling because he wasn 't any good at it.

'Didn't you want to be anything else?' said Magrat.

'What else is there?' said the Fool. 'I haven't seen anything else I could be.'

Student Fools were allowed out, in the last year of training, but under a fearsome set of restrictions. Capering miserably through the streets he'd seen wizards for the first time, moving like dignified carnival floats. He'd seen the surviving assassins, foppish, giggling young men in black silk, as sharp as knives underneath; he'd seen priests, their fantastic costumes only slightly marred by the long rubber sacrificial aprons they wore for major services. Every trade and profession had its costume, he saw, and he realised for the first time that the uniform he was wearing had been carefully and meticulously designed for no other purpose than making its wearer look like a complete and utter pillock.

Even so, he'd persevered. He'd spent his whole life persevering.

He persevered precisely because he had absolutely no talent, and because grandfather would have flayed him alive if he didn't. He memorised the authorised jokes until his head rang, and got up even earlier in the morning to juggle until his elbows creaked. He had perfected his grasp of the comic vocabulary until only the very senior Lords could understand him. He'd capered and clowned with an impenetrable grim determination and he'd graduated top of his year and had been awarded the Bladder of Honour. He'd dropped it down the privy when he came home.

Magrat was silent.

The Fool said, 'How did you get to be a witch?'

'Um?'

'I mean, did you go to a school or something?'

'Oh. No. Goodie Whemper just walked down to the village one day, got all us girls lined up, and chose me. You don't choose the Craft, you see. It chooses you.'

'Yes, but when do you actually become a witch?'

'When the other witches treat you as one, I suppose.' Magrat sighed. 'If they ever do,' she added. 'I thought they would after I did that spell in the corridor. It was pretty good, after all.'

'Marry, t'was a rite of passage,' said the Fool, unable to stop himself. Magrat gave him a blank look. He coughed.