Witches Abroad (Discworld 12)

'Coo! Do they?'

'We goin' to go for a little stroll.'

There were, it now seemed to Nanny Ogg, two cities in Genua. There was the white one, all new houses and blue-roofed palaces, and around it and even under it was the old one. The new one might not like the presence of the old one, but it couldn't quite ever do without it. Someone, somewhere, has to do the cooking.

Nanny Ogg quite liked cooking, provided there were other people around to do things like chop up the vegetables and wash the dishes afterwards. She'd always reckoned that she could do things to a bit of beef that the bullock had never thought of. But now she realized that wasn't cooking. Not compared to cooking in Genua. It was just staying alive as pleasantly as possible. Cooking anywhere outside Genua was just heating up things like bits of animals and birds and fish and vegetables until they went brown.

And yet the weird thing was that the cooks in Genua had nothing edible to cook; at least, not what Nanny would have thought of as food. To her mind, food went around on four legs, or possibly one pair of legs and one pair of wings. Or at least it had fins on. The idea of food with more than four legs was an entirely new kettle of fi-of miscellaneous swimming things.

They didn't have much to cook in Genua. So they cooked everything. Nanny had never heard of prawns or crawfish or lobsters; it just looked to her as though the citizens of Genua dredged the river bottom and boiled whatever came up.

The point was that a good Genuan cook could more or less take the squeezings of a handful of mud, a few dead leaves and a pinch or two of some unpronounceable herbs and produce a meal to make a gourmet burst into tears of gratitude and swear to be a better person for the rest of their entire life if they could just have one more plateful.

Nanny Ogg ambled along as Mrs Pleasant led her through the market. She peered at cages of snakes, and racks of mysteriously tendrilled herbs. She prodded trays of bivalves. She stopped for a chat to the Nanny Ogg-shaped ladies who ran the little stalls that, for a couple of pennies, dispensed strange chowders and shellfish in a bun. She sampled everything. She was enjoying herself immensely. Genua, city of cooks, had found the appetite it deserved.

She finished a plate of fish and exchanged a nod and a grin with the little old woman who ran the fish stall.

'Well, all this is - ' she began, turning to Mrs Pleasant.

Mrs Pleasant had gone.

Some people would have bustled off to look for her in the crowds, but Nanny Ogg just stood and thought.

I asked about magic, she thought, and she brought me here and left me. Because of them walls with ears in, I expect. So maybe I got to do the rest myself.

She looked around her. There was a very rough tent a little way from the stalls, right by the river. There was no sign outside it, but there was a pot bubbling gently over a fire. Rough clay bowls were stacked beside the pot. Occasionally someone would step out of the crowd, help themselves to a bowlful of whatever was in the pot, and then throw a handful of coins into the plate in front of the tent.

Nanny wandered over and looked into the pot. Things came to the surface and sank again. The general colour was brown. Bubbles formed, grew, and burst stickily with an organic 'blop'. Anything could be happening in that pot. Life could be spontaneously creating.

Nanny Ogg would try anything once. Some things she'd try several thousand times.

She unhooked the ladle, picked up a bowl, and helped herself.

A moment later she pushed aside the tent flap and looked into the blackness of the interior.

A figure was seated cross-legged in the gloom, smoking a pipe.

'Mind if I step inside?' said Nanny.

The figure nodded.

Nanny sat down. After a decent interval she pulled out her own pipe.

'Mrs Pleasant's a friend of yours, I expect.'

'She knows me.'

'Ah.'

From outside, there was the occasional clink as customers helped themselves.

Blue smoke coiled from Nanny Ogg's pipe.

'I don't reckon,' she said, 'that many people goes away without paying.'

'No.'

After another pause Nanny Ogg said: 'I 'spects some of 'em tries to pay with gold and jewels and scented ungulants and stuff like that?'