Wyrd Sisters

1

Quaffing is like drinking, but you spill more.

2

Whatever that was. He’d never found anyone prepared to explain it to him. But it was definitely something a feudal lord ought to have and, he was pretty sure, it needed regular exercise. He imagined it was some kind of large hairy dog. He was definitely going to get one, and damn well exercise it.

3

Written by wizards, who are celibate and get some pretty funny ideas around four o’clock in the morning.

4

She did nothing, although sometimes when she saw him in the village she’d smile in a faint, puzzled way. After three weeks of this the suspense was too much for him and he took his own life; in fact he took it all the way across the continent, where he became a reformed character and never went home again.

5

All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.

6

The vermine is a small black and white furry creature, much famed for its pelt. It is a more careful relative of the lemming; it only throws itself over small pebbles.

7

They worked. Witches’ remedies generally did, regardless of the actual form of delivery.

8

A killing insult in Dwarfish, but here used as a term of endearment. It means ‘lawn ornament’.

9

In a manner of speaking.

10

Someone has to do it. It’s all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested?^{*} Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out of the cauldron? Goodie Whemper’s curiosity about such things was huge and insatiable.^{**}

* Eye of Newt is one of the ingredients used by the witches in Macbeth, act 4, scene 1.

This scene also resonates very faintly with the famous running gag in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

** Nearly insatiable. It was probably satiated in her last flight to test whether a broomstick could survive having its bristles pulled out one by one in mid-air. According to the small black raven she had trained as a flight recorder, the answer was almost certainly no.

11

Witches never curtsy.

12

No-one knows why men say things like this. Any minute now he is probably going to say he likes a girl with spirit.

13

They always do, everywhere. No-one sees them arrive. The logical explanation is that the franchise includes the stall, the paper hat and a small gas-powered time machine.

14

Involving a red hot poker, a privy, ten pounds of live eels, a three mile stretch of frozen river, a butt of wine, a couple of tulip bulbs, a number of poisoned eardrops, an oyster and a large man with a mallet. King Murune didn’t make friends easily.

15

Possibly the first attempt at the in-flight refuelling of a broomstick.

16

An explanation may be needed at this point. The Librarian of the magic library at Unseen University, the Disc’s premier college of wizardry, had been turned into an orang-utan some years previously by a magical accident in that accident-prone academy, and since then had strenuously resisted all well-meaning efforts to turn him back. For one thing, longer arms and prehensile toes made getting around the higher shelves a whole lot easier, and being an ape meant you didn’t have to bother with all this angst business. He had also been rather pleased to find that his new body, although looking deceptively like a rubber sack full of water, gave him three times the strength and twice the reach of his old one.

17

The Shades is an ancient part of Ankh-Morpork considered considerably more unpleasant and disreputable than the rest of the city. This always amazes visitors.

18

Ankh-Morpork’s enviable system of licensed criminals owes much to the current Patrician, Lord Vetinari. He reasoned that the only way to police a city of a million inhabitants was to recognize the various gangs and robber guilds, give them professional status, invite the leaders to large dinners, allow an acceptable level of street crime and then make the guild leaders responsible for enforcing it, on pain of being stripped of their new civic honours along with large areas of their skins. It worked. Criminals, it turned out, made a very good police force; unauthorized robbers soon found, for example, that instead of a night in the cells they could now expect an eternity at the bottom of the river.

However, there was the problem of apportioning the crime statistics, and so there arose a complex system of annual budgeting, chits and allowances to see that a) the members could make a reasonable living and b) no citizen was robbed or assaulted more than an agreed number of times. Many foresighted citizens in fact arranged to get an acceptable minimum of theft, assault, etc, over at the beginning of the financial year, often in the privacy and comfort of their own homes, and thus be able to walk the streets quite safely for the rest of the year. It all ticked over extremely peacefully and efficiently, demonstrating once again that compared to the Patrician of Ankh, Machiavelli could not have run a whelk stall.

19

Because of the way time was recorded among the various states, kingdoms and cities. After all, when over an area of a hundred square miles the same year is variously the Year of the Small Bat, and Anticipated Monkey, the Hunting Cloud, Fat Cows, Three Bright Stallions and at least nine numbers recording the time since^{*} assorted kings, prophets, and strange events were either crowned, born or happened, and each year has a different number of months, and some of them don’t have weeks, and one of them refuses to accept the day as a measure of time, the only thing it is possible to be sure of is that good sex doesn’t last long enough.^{**}

* The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.

** Except for the Zabingo tribe of the Great Nef, of course.

20

The observant will realize that this was because the king was already seated there. It was not because the man had used the phrase ‘commence to start’ in cold blood. But it ought to have been.

21

Like Bognor.^{*}

* Bognor Regis is a town on the south coast of England, between Brighton and Portsmouth. A sleepy seaside resort, it is best-known for King George V’s attributed last words, supposedly said after his physician told him he would soon be brought to Bognor to convalesce: “Bugger Bognor!”.

22

At least, of supervising the loading. Actual physical assistance was a little difficult because he had, the day before, slipped on something and broken his leg.

23

There is a school of thought that says that witches and wizards can never go home. They went, though, just the same.