THE LAND
THE REGION KNOWN TO ITS PEOPLE simply as ‘the Chalk’ lies on the Sto Plains about fifty miles from Lancre. It is a land of gentle, rolling, turf-covered hills with occasional patches of woodland, small villages and scattered farmsteads. Above all, it is good land for sheep.
No other place on Discworld is so patently a thinly disguised part of Earth. The Tiffany Aching/Wee Free Men books are, whatever other splendid things they may be, a hymn to a time and a landscape. And here it’s found as it was in the time of our great-grandfathers – open country, unfenced, unploughed, turf-covered, a land fit for sheep.
Green downlands roll under the hot midsummer sun … the flocks of sheep, moving slowly, drift over the short turf like clouds on a green sky. Here and there sheepdogs speed over the turf like comets.
And then, as the eyes pull back, it is a long green mound, lying like a great whale on the world … [The Wee Free Men]
In both worlds, these lands are full of memories of distant times:
Men had been everywhere on the Chalk. There were stone circles, half fallen down, and burial mounds like green pimples where, it was said, chieftains of the olden days had been buried with their treasure. No one fancied digging into them to find out.
There were odd carvings in the chalk, too, which the shepherds sometimes weeded when they were out on the downs with the flocks and there was not a lot to do. The chalk was only a few inches under the turf. Hoofprints could last a season, but the carvings had lasted for thousands of years. They were pictures of horses and giants, but the strange thing was that you couldn’t see them properly from anywhere on the ground. They looked as if they’d been made for viewers in the sky.
The oldest and most magical of the carvings on the Chalk is the White Horse, on a steep hillside at the head of a little valley (on Earth, the place is called Uffington, in Berkshire, and it is on the north slopes of the Berkshire Downs). It was cut out of the turf way back in the earliest times, perhaps by the same folk who raised the stone circles and buried their dead in the mounds, and for generation after generation people have kept it clear of grass and weeds. It doesn’t look much like a horse, not unless you look at it in the right way. It’s just lines – long, flowing lines that don’t even join up – but, as Granny Aching told Tiffany’s father when he was only a little boy, ‘’Tain’t what a horse looks like, it’s what a horse be.’ And if the Chalk has a guardian spirit, this is it.
The landscape is full of stories. A hill near Tiffany’s home, for instance:
There was a flat place at the top where nothing ever grew, and Tiffany knew there was a story that a hero had once fought a dragon up there and its blood had burned the ground where it fell. There was another story that said there was a heap of treasure under the hill, defended by the dragon, and another story that said a king was buried there in armour of solid gold. There were lots of stories about the hill; it was surprising it hadn’t sunk under the weight of them.
In our world, there is just such a Dragon Hill, with just such a flat, bare top where a dragon’s blood was spilled – in that case, by St George. It is at Uffington, alongside the White Horse. Elsewhere, on the South Downs, there are many hills and burial mounds in which, according to local tales, there are pots of gold, or dead men lying in their golden armour.
Interesting things can be found in or on the Chalk. There are small sharp flint arrowheads, made by men thousands of years before (on the Discworld, though alas not on our Chalk, shepherds still have the skill of chipping flints into very sharp little knives, for their own amusement; it is said that a good flint is sharper than a scalpel). Occasionally, one can pick up a stone with a hole in it; these are called ‘dobby stones’, just as they are in the Yorkshire Dales, and are said to be lucky. Tiffany keeps one in her pocket, though she is unsure what use it is; if she lived in Yorkshire, she would know you can hang them at your door or window to keep evil spirits out, and over your bed to prevent nightmares. She also keeps a fossilized sea urchin, which she once used as part of a shamble; it is the sort which looks like a bun with grooves on it making a five-pointed star, which on the Sussex Downs is called a ‘shepherd’s crown’. It’s said that if you put them on the kitchen windowsill they will keep thunderstorms away and prevent milk from going sour.
THE SHEPHERDS’ LIFE
Iron-wheeled shepherding huts like the one Granny Aching used were once common all along the South Downs, and indeed in other sheep-rearing regions too. Shepherds lived in them at lambing time, when it was essential to stay near the ewes day and night; they were also used at other times of year, but less regularly. They were sturdy wooden structures, warmed by a small stove, with a chair, a table, a simple bunk bed, and plenty of shelves, boxes and hooks to hold the shepherd’s gear – a horn lantern, crooks, shears, knives, a hay fork, a feeding bottle for sickly lambs and a saucepan to warm the milk for them, tins and bottles of sheep medicines, one or two spare sheep bells, and so on. The huts would be set up close to the lambing-fold; farm horses could draw them from place to place, if need be. The stove made the hut very cosy indeed, though sheep tended to creep under it on cold nights, their stomachs gurgling and rumbling till the dawn – but the shepherd would probably snooze in his chair at busy times, and be too tired to notice.
To count their flocks, Discworld shepherds have special words and a special way of reckoning, known only to them (and to the Nac Mac Feegle). It begins with ‘yan tan tethera’ for ‘one two three’, and goes up as far as ‘jiggit’ for twenty. There it stops. The same system was used by English shepherds, and sometimes also by fishermen reckoning their catch and women counting the stitches of their knitting. Bits of it are still remembered by children when they are ‘counting out’ to start a game. The names of the numbers vary a bit, but they are always grouped in fives and make a kind of rhyme; for instance:
Yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pimp;
Sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera, dick;
Yaner-dick, taner-dick, tether-dick, pether-dick, bumfit;
Yaner-bumfit, taner-bumfit, tether-bumfit, pether-bumfit, jiggit.
Maybe one reason children have remembered this ditty is that some of the words do sound a bit rude.
When he reached ‘jiggit’, the shepherd would cut a notch on a stick, or put a stone in his pocket, and start over again. When all the sheep were counted, he would reckon up his notches or stones; suppose there were 123 sheep, this would mean six notches, plus three extra beasts – ‘six score sheep and three’.
It sounds cumbersome, but in fact comes easily to any creature that has two hands, with five fingers on each hand. The idea of reckoning by twenties has left traces on the English language even where the special words are not used, as when a psalm says: ‘The days of our age are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength but labour and sorrow.’ In French too, the word for ‘eighty’, quatrevingts, means literally ‘four twenties’. Come to that, in English currency there used to be twenty shillings to the pound.
At lambing time, shepherds are extremely busy, too busy to come down off the hills. And so they are at sheep-dipping time, sheep-washing time, sheep-shearing time, and in the run-up to sheep fairs. This rather gets in the way of regular religion, and may cause offence to some of the more touchy gods, who dislike being neglected. To make sure there were no unwelcome consequences in the afterlife, precautions were taken at the funerals of Discworld shepherds:
Granny Aching had been wrapped in a woollen blanket, with a tuft of raw wool pinned to it. That was a special shepherd thing. It was there to tell any gods who might get involved that the person being buried there was a shepherd, and spent a lot of time on the hills, and what with lambing and one thing and another couldn’t always take much time out for religion, there being no churches or temples up there, and so it was generally hoped that the gods would understand and look kindly on them. [The Wee Free Men]
This was done on Earth, too: in some villages of the South Downs up to the 1930s shepherds were buried with a lock of wool in their hands, so that at the Last Judgement they could prove what their work had been, and why they had so often missed church on Sundays. Occasionally, a crook, shears and a sheep-bell were also put in the coffin. It all added up to the same thing: a hope and also perhaps a belief that one Good Shepherd would recognize another.
Granny Aching’s grave was dug on the hill, alongside her hut, and after the funeral there was an additional and very unusual ceremony – the hut was burned. There wasn’t any shepherd, anywhere on the Chalk, who would use it after her. This was a mark of respect, almost unparalleled on Earth, where only Gypsies would think of making such a gesture.
THE WATCHING OF THE DEAD
A newly dead corpse must be carefully prepared, watched over, protected – and treated with caution, for it might become dangerous.
People died. It was sad, but they did. What did you do next? People expected the local witch to know. So you washed the body and did a few secret and squelchy things and dressed them in their best clothes and laid them out with bowls of earth and salt beside them (no one knew why you did this bit, but it had always been done) and you put two pennies on their eyes ‘for the ferryman’ and you sat with them the night before they were buried, because they shouldn’t be left alone.
Exactly why was never properly explained, although everyone had been told the story of the old man who was slightly less dead than everyone thought and rose up off the spare bed in the middle of the night and got back into bed with his wife. [Wintersmith]
Things were done in much the same way on Earth, in the days when people died at home (not in a hospital) and were laid out at home (not in an undertaker’s parlour). Laying out the corpse was both a practical necessity and a social duty; it was a woman’s task, and was often done by the local midwife. It involved washing the body, plugging its orifices, and closing the eyes and mouth – and ensuring that they remained closed, by laying a penny on each eye, and tying up the jaws with a bandage under the chin which was knotted on top of the head. A man would be shaved, a woman would have her hair braided. Then the body would either be dressed in good clothes or wrapped tightly in a winding-sheet, with its legs straightened and tied at the ankles and its arms crossed over the chest. The face would not be covered. That way, everything looked clean and decent when family and neighbours came to ‘view the body’ before it was coffined.
These actions were not just practical. Washing the body could be seen as a purification which echoes baptism, like the Catholic custom of sprinkling a corpse with holy water; a Suffolk woman who used to lay out the dead told the social historian Ruth Richardson in 1980 that ‘the washing is so you’re spotless to meet the Lamb of God’.
The pennies had once had a mythical meaning too. In England in the seventeenth century, the antiquarian John Aubrey reported that some old-fashioned people still put a coin in the mouth of the dead ‘to give to St Peter’ at the gates of Heaven. Way back in Ancient Greek and Roman times people used to put a coin into the dead person’s mouth ‘to pay the ferryman’; his name was Charon, and he would row the dead across the river Styx, which was the boundary of the Underworld. And so too in the Discworld there is also (sometimes) a Styx to be crossed, and a cowled ferryman to be paid.
‘I have the money,’ Roland repeated. ‘Two pennies is the rate to cross the River of the Dead. It’s an old tradition. Two pennies to put on the eyes of the dead, to pay the ferryman.’ [Wintersmith]
Nobody had given Tiffany any explanation for the bowls of salt and earth which she had to set down beside the corpse. In many countries on Earth the same thing was done, and various reasons were offered. The most common was that it prevents the body swelling – which might well work, if the dishes were heavy enough and were laid actually on the chest or belly, as they generally were. As one Welsh woman said, ‘There’s no weight so heavy as salt gets when it is on the dead.’ Other people gave a religious explanation. In Highland Scotland in the mid eighteenth century, people said the earth was an emblem of the corruptible body, and the salt of the immortal spirit. In nineteenth-century Sussex, they said that to sprinkle a good handful of salt over the body would prevent the Devil flying away with it. It is common for salt to be used in religion and magic to drive away evil spirits; this may be because it resists decay – salted meat and fish last much longer. (Western people now, who worry that too much salt is bad for one’s health, might find it hard to believe how important the getting and keeping of salt was to their ancestors.)
The unspoken reason behind much of the ritual, on the Disc and on Earth too, is the need to prevent any demons who might be around from getting at the corpse before it is safely buried, and to stop the corpse itself from reviving as a malevolent zombie or vampire. So the dead must never be left alone; someone should sit with them, night and day, and there must always be candles or lamps burning. These keep the evil spirits and ghosts away, and light up the deceased’s journey to the otherworld. And they keep the watcher safe.
Because sitting up with the dead is – well, just a little strange. Sometimes the body makes little noises in the night, or moves just a bit, and you have to remind yourself firmly that it’s simply because it’s cooling down. And there are so many stories of worse things. Suppose the candle goes out, and the corpse sits up, saying, ‘Isn’t it fun in the dark?’ They say that happened once in Iceland; luckily the watcher was a strong man, who flung himself on the corpse, forced it on to its back, and held it down till daybreak. Or suppose the Devil gets into the house and tries to carry off the body? Or suppose that, as Petunia tells Tiffany, a thousand vampire demons arrive, each with enormous teeth? (Never chronicled, as far as we know.)
All things considered, it’s not surprising that in many parts of the multiverse people prefer to do their corpse-watching in groups and make a proper wake of it, with cards, tobacco, and a nip of whisky to get them through the night. And a prayer or two doesn’t come amiss.
AN INCURSION OF MONSTERS
All regions of the Discworld are at risk of invasion by predatory races from elsewhere in the multiverse, since one universe quite often collides with another. When this happens, the roaming predators may well find some weak or ‘thin’ place, where people are off their guard, and where they can open a door between the worlds. In the case of the Chalk, as we learn from The Wee Free Men, it is the Queen of the Fairies who finds a way through from her own small and icy world, where nothing grows and no sun shines, and everything has to be stolen from elsewhere. And with her come the monsters.
‘D’you know what’ll be turning up?’ asked Miss Tick. ‘All the things they locked away in those old stories. All those reasons why you shouldn’t stray off the path, or open the forbidden door, or say the wrong word, or spill salt. All the stories that give children nightmares. All the monsters from under the biggest bed in the world.’
The first to arrive is Jenny Greenteeth, erupting out of a shallow stream, and trying to snatch Tiffany’s little brother. She has long skinny arms, a thin face with long sharp teeth, huge eyes, and dripping green hair like waterweed. She is, as Miss Tick explains, nothing more than a Grade One Prohibitory Monster – that is to say, a creature deliberately invented by adults to scare children away from dangerous places. But though the adults don’t believe they’re real, the children do, and so they become real. (This also happens in Ankh-Morpork, as we shall see later.)
On Earth too, adults have invented many Prohibitory Monsters (also called Nursery Bogeys), including a Jenny or Ginny Greenteeth who lurks in deep pools of stagnant water, hiding under the duckweed. She was well known in Lancashire, Cheshire and Shropshire. Even in the 1980s, elderly people remembered being warned against her as children. In his Plant Lore (1995) the botanist and folklorist Roy Vickery records what one Merseyside woman told him:
‘As I recall, Ginny only lived in ponds which were covered in a green weed of the type that has tiny leaves, and covers the entire surface of the pond. The theory was that Ginny enticed little children into the pools by making them look like grass and safe to walk upon. As soon as the child stepped on to the green, it of course parted, and the child fell through into Ginny’s clutches and drowned. The green weed then closed over, hiding all traces of the child ever having been there. This last point was the one which really terrified me and kept me well away from ponds. As far as I know Ginny had no known form, due to the fact that she never appeared above the surface of the pond.’
But another Merseyside woman knew exactly what the Jenny Greenteeth who inhabited two pools in Fazakerley looked like: ‘pale green skin, green teeth, very long green locks of hair, long green fingers with long nails, and she was very thin with a pointed chin and very big eyes’. Jenny was not the only creature of this species in England. In Leicester there was a Polly Long Arms hiding in the green murky water of the canal, waiting to drag in any child that came near the edge.
The next menacing creature to arrive in the Chalk country is a dark rider, a horseman who has no face – since he has no head to hang a face on. Now, ghosts that appear as headless horsemen are quite common in the Earthly world, but this creature might be something worse than a mere ghost. Especially as it breathes through the windpipe it hasn’t got, making a wheezy whistling noise which one really would rather not be hearing. Earthbound headless horsemen tend to be more spectral.
Later, the Queen sends three of her grimhounds – big heavy-built black dogs with orange eyebrows, eyes of red fire, and teeth like razor blades. They are said to haunt churchyards. This would imply a connection with the Church Grim, a sinister animal which, according to Earthly tradition, patrols graveyards and is an omen of death for anyone who sees it. In Britain the Grim is a Black Dog; in Scandinavia, there are also Grims which are lame grey horses, three-legged lambs or black pigs. They are said to be the ghosts of real animals deliberately killed when a churchyard was established and buried on the north side, to be its guardian. If this wasn’t done, people thought that the first person buried there would not enter Heaven but would have to remain on duty as a ghostly sentinel till the end of the world.
Most of the Black Dogs of our world are grim creatures, in nature if not in name; some are ghosts (of humans or of dogs), but the majority are demons and devils in animal form. Indeed, the Black Dog or Hell Hound is a universally recognized image of evil in European and American folklore. They are generally large, shaggy creatures with huge fiery eyes (unless they happen to be headless); they may wear collars of flame, or drag heavy clanking chains. However, their eyebrows are never mentioned. Only in the folklore of Estonia is it said that a dog (a real flesh-and-blood one, not a demon) which has patches of different colour on its eyebrows has ‘four eyes’, and can detect and attack beings that are invisible to humans. This would appear to be a good thing. Nevertheless, the principle ‘Never trust a dog with orange eyebrows’, discovered on the Discworld, is so self-evidently true and useful that it will surely spread.
FOUND IN A FISH
And then there was that odd business with the fish, as told in Wintersmith. You would really think that if someone drops or throws into deep water something small but too heavy to float (a ring, say, or a key), that’s the last he or she will ever see of it.
In fact you probably wouldn’t, depending on your childhood reading. You might already know that a powerful narrative drive decrees that it will be swallowed by a fish, and one day that fish will be caught, and when it’s being gutted something glittery will be found in its belly, and will be brought to the very person who lost it in the first place. Which is precisely how Tiffany’s precious silver horse pendant returned to her, although she had thrown it into a river.
Here on Earth, such things have been happening, off and on, for many centuries. Polycrates, who ruled in Samos some two-and-a-half thousand years ago, was so rich and had such constant good luck that they say a friend warned him that the gods would soon be jealous, and advised him to create some deliberate bad luck by losing something he really valued. So Polycrates took a magnificent seal-ring, the finest of his jewels, and threw it into the sea. But a few days later someone sent a beautiful big fish as a gift for the king’s table, and in its belly … It was not long before Polycrates was treacherously captured and killed.
Or again, in Ireland in St Patrick’s time, there was a robber called Macaldus who tried to trick the saint and make a fool of him, but then repented, and promised to do whatever penance was fitting. St Patrick wrapped a chain round him and padlocked it and threw the key in a river, and then set Macaldus adrift in a small boat, telling him to go wherever God sent him, and to wear the chain until the key was returned to him. The boat floated out to sea, and finally came to the Isle of Man, where Macaldus was taken into the Bishop’s household and led a holy life. One day the Bishop’s cook was puzzled to find a key inside a fish he was cleaning … so Macaldus was able to take the chain off. He eventually became Bishop of Man himself, and is reckoned to be a saint. There was also St Egwin, founder of Evesham Abbey and Bishop of Worcester from 692 till his death in 711. Falsely accused of crimes, he put fetters on his legs, threw the key into the Avon, and set off on pilgrimage to Rome to convince the Pope of his innocence. And there, in the market, he happened to buy a fish … The Pope duly cleared him of all charges and restored him to his diocese.
It is particularly striking that the fish which swallowed Tiffany’s pendant should be a pike, for in the Yorkshire town of Pickering people say it got its name because Pendirus, a legendary king of the Britons who is alleged to have reigned there about 270 BC, lost his ring while bathing in the river Costa, but later recovered it from the belly of a pike. Everyone knows pikes will swallow just about anything. So will some people. Nevertheless, there is a comfort in these stories, even for the godless. They suggest a kind of cosmic rightness. And they still turn up, every few years.
PS: An odd thing happened to Terry once. He bought a ring in a small shop in Pike Place Market, Seattle. It was slightly over-sized and he soon lost it, and couldn’t find it anywhere. A year later he was back in the city, went to the same shop to buy a replacement, and in reaching into his jacket pocket (a jacket which, of course, he’d worn many times during the year) for some loose change, he put a finger through the very same ring. How could it have been otherwise? Rings try to find their way back to their owner. Someone ought to write a book about it.
THE DANCE OF WINTER AND SUMMER
It has long been believed, and may very well be true, that the whole multiverse moves in one perpetual dance, though almost all its motions are either too swift or too slow for the human mind to grasp. Whirling electrons, wheeling galaxies, cycles of time, cycles of energy, the pulsations of the blood, angels in the skies or on the head of a pin – all make patterns in the cosmic dance. This is not a matter of couples moving independently (like a waltz), nor of a group simply dancing hand-in-hand in a ring; it involves complicated figures in which dancers change places and partners, advance and retreat, meet and part and meet again.
Many poets have written about this. Sir John Davies in his Orchestra (1596) declared that everything in heaven and earth dances:
Kind nature first doth cause all things to love,
Love makes them dance, and in just order move.
And so the sun dances with the earth, flowers with the wind, the tides with the moon:
And lo the sea, that fleets about the land
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
Music and measure both doth understand;
For his great crystal eye is ever cast
Up to the moon and on her fixèd fast.
And as she danceth in her pallid sphere,
So danceth he about his centre here.
In John Milton’s Comus (1637), a magician boasts that by dancing while others sleep, he and his companions are echoing the dance of time and nature:
We that are of purer fire
Imitate the starry choir,
Who, in their nightly watchful spheres
Lead in swift round the months and years.
Oceans and seas, with all their finny drove,
Now to the moon in wavering morrice move …
Others too have sensed that the Morris has a particular affinity with the cycles of nature. T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker (1940) of glimpsing ghostly Morris Men round a bonfire on a summer midnight, with their ‘music of the weak pipe and the little drum’,
Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
In Wintersmith we learn more about the Dark Morris, first brought to our attention in Reaper Man, when Tiffany is taken one icy midnight to a clearing in a leafless wood, where six men, their faces blacked and wearing black clothes, dance to the powerful beat of a silent drum, while shadowy forms look on. She already knows the white-clad Morris teams that dance on the village green to bring Summer in, but what is this? Unable to resist the beat, she runs forward and jumps into the dance, weaving to and fro in the space where a team’s Fool should go, and becoming aware for a few seconds that someone other than human is dancing with her.
What she has seen is part of the never-ending Dance of the Seasons, in which the Wintersmith and the Summer Lady meet and change places in spring and autumn. Explaining this, Miss Treason shows her a picture in Chaffinch’s Ancient and Classical Mythology of a tall, blonde, beautiful Summer, carrying a cornucopia and dancing with old grey Winter, who has icicles in his beard.
‘The year is round! The wheel of the world must spin! That is why up here they dance the Dark Morris, to balance it. They welcome the winter because of the new summer deep inside it!’
The spring and autumn Morris dances are a way of marking the moment when the season of ice and the season of fire meet briefly to exchange their dominion over the world. In our world, other ways have been found of bringing Summer in – a young man dressed in leaves and flowers fights and defeats an older man dressed in furs; girls carry an ugly straw figure called Winter or Death out of the village, tear it to bits or throw it into a river, and come back carrying leafy branches; people bring in the maypole. Frazer’s The Golden Bough has much to say about all this. At the other end of the year, the secrets are better kept, yet even so one can guess that in the season of bonfires and fireworks, nuts and apples, beer, beef, and new wine, there is an underlying celebration that Winter is taking over the power that is rightfully his – for a while. And at midwinter, there is guising, feasting, mummers’ plays, and yes, Morris dancing again. The wheel spins.
But Tiffany has made a serious mistake by entering the dance herself. She has taken the place of the Summer Lady, attracting the attention of the Wintersmith, and now is trapped in her role. She is turning into a goddess, or at least an avatar, or an anthropomorphic personification.
The first symptom is that she develops ‘Fertile Feet’ – wherever she treads with bare feet, flowers spring up. Even the floorboards in Nanny Ogg’s cottage, being wood, start sprouting leaves. Much the same thing happened to Prince Teppic of Djelibeybi as soon as the spirit of his father, a recently deceased pharaoh, entered into him, as is told in Pyramids. Even on the cobbled streets of Ankh-Morpork grass appeared where he put his feet, and in the bakers’ shops loaves cracked open and grew wheat.
On Earth too, avatars of Spring or Summer are, very understandably, credited with the gift of Fertile Feet. In the medieval Welsh tale of ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ in the Mabinogion, it is said of the lovely young heroine that ‘four white trefoils sprang up behind her wherever she went, and for that reason was she called Olwen’ – which means ‘white track’. The Italian painter Botticelli represents Primavera (Spring) as a beautiful woman walking across a flower-filled glade, throwing down more flowers as she goes, which is the closest a painter can get to the idea that they spring up as she passes. And then there are four famous lines from a poem written by Alexander Pope in 1704, when he was only sixteen:
Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
Where’er you tread, the blushing flowers shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.
The poem is one of a set of four seasonal love-poems, and is entitled ‘Summer’. These particular lines are so famous because Handel set them to music in his opera Semele, as a song addressed by the god Jupiter to the human girl he loves. They are so appropriate to Tiffany’s situation that they cross over into the Discworld and into the mind of the schoolmistressy witch, Miss Tick:
‘The myth of the Summer Lady says that flowers grow wherever she walks,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
‘Where e’er,’ said Miss Tick primly.
‘What?’ snapped Granny, who was now pacing up and down in front of the fire.
‘It’s where e’er she walks, in fact,’ said Miss Tick. ‘It’s more … poetical.’
‘Hah,’ Granny said. ‘Poetry!’ [Wintersmith]
The next sign of Tiffany’s new status is that a Cornucopia (aka Horn of Plenty) crash-lands in the garden. It is a curly shell-like object, of magically variable size, containing every kind of fruit, vegetable and grain – in fact, it turns out, anything and everything one can eat or drink. These things it produces on request, in lavish quantities. It is a definitely mythological object:
‘According to Chaffinch,’ [Tiffany] said, with the Mythology open on her lap … , ‘the god Blind Io created the Cornucopia from a horn of the magical goat Almeg to feed his two children by the Goddess Bisonomy, who was later turned into a shower of oysters by Epidity, god of things shaped like potatoes, after insulting Resonata, goddess of weasels, by throwing a mole at her shadow. It is now the badge of office of the Summer Goddess.’
The corresponding myth in Ancient Greece is not quite so complicated. As a baby, the god Zeus had to be hidden from his murderous father in a cave in Crete, where he fed on the milk of a nanny-goat called Amalthea (unless this was the name of the nymph who owned her). Later, when he became ruler of the gods, he showed his gratitude by placing the goat among the stars as the constellation Capricorn. But first he broke off one of her horns; it became the Cornucopia, which supplies whatever food or drink one desires. This horn later belonged to Demeter, also called Ceres, goddess of the harvest, and was sometimes carried by Flora, the flower goddess, who scattered corn and wine and fruit and flowers from it. Painters and sculptors are very fond of it, it’s such a pretty shape.
Tiffany struggles to cope with these rather embarrassing attributes, and the even more embarrassing compliments lavished on her by the Wintersmith. But where, meanwhile, is the real Summer Lady? It turns out that, like many a goddess before her, she is trapped in the Underworld, powerless to return. Without her presence, the Disc will suffer permanent and catastrophic discal cooling, with incalculable environmental repercussions. It is, in short, time for a Hero and a Descent into the Underworld.
This Descent is one of the most powerful stories in the multiverse. On Earth, for example, it can be found in one form or another in at least a dozen mythologies from ancient Babylonia onwards. Sometimes it is a god or goddess who descends, sometimes a human. Sometimes the purpose is to gain foreknowledge by questioning the dead; sometimes it is to learn the secret of immortality, or to carry off a magical object; but most often, it is to rescue a captive. There have been missions that were entirely successful, as when Odysseus went down to consult the dead seer Tiresias or when Herakles (Hercules) brought Queen Alkmene back from the dead; and others that failed, most famously when Orpheus lost his beloved Eurydice when they had very nearly reached the land of the living, because he looked back at her.
And some myths tell of partial successes – and these, curiously, are linked to the cycle of the seasons, just like the rescue of the Disc’s Summer Lady. The oldest comes from ancient Sumeria, about 2000 BC, and tells how the great goddess Ishtar went into the Underworld,
To the Land of No Return, the realm of Ereshkigal,
To the house which none leaves who has entered it,
To the road from which there is no way back,
To the house wherein the entrants are bereft of life,
Where dust is their fare and clay their food,
Where they see no light, residing in darkness,
Where they are clothed like birds, with wings for garments,
And where over door and bolt is spread dust.
[Ishtar’s Descent, transl. John Gray]
She was seeking her human lover Tammuz, who had apparently been kidnapped by Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, and was now among the dead. Ishtar fought Ereshkigal, but was defeated, tortured, and held captive in a corpse-like condition. Without her, there was nothing but famine and sterility on earth, so the High Gods forced Ereshkigal to sprinkle Ishtar with the water of life and let her go free. Tammuz too was revived and freed, but not entirely; every year he died again during the long sterile drought season, and the people wept for him. But then, with the coming of the rains, he returned to life.
Similarly in Classical Greece and Rome, myths told how Demeter (Ceres), the goddess of fertile crops and harvest, was distraught with grief when her daughter Persephone (Proserpina) was kidnapped. Neglecting her divine duties, Demeter went searching everywhere for Persephone, until she found her girdle floating in a pool near a great crevice which was known to be an entrance to the Underworld. This remarkably fortuitous clue proved that it was Hades (Pluto), god of death, who had carried her off. Demeter did not descend into the Underworld herself, but appealed to Zeus for justice. Zeus knew that without Demeter’s care all crops would fail, so he decreed that Persephone could return to earth, provided she had eaten nothing while in the realm of Hades. But, alas, she had eaten – a mere trifle, just six pomegranate seeds – but because of this Zeus ruled that she must spend six months of the year in the Underworld, though she could come back to earth for the other six. Which is why there are six months of summer and six of winter.
‘They are ancient stories. They have a life of their own. They long to be repeated. Summer rescued from a cave? Very old,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
So Tiffany’s friend Roland de Chumsfanleigh (pronounced Chuffley) makes the Descent, accompanied by Feegles, and passes through a cave into a gloomy land of shadows and mindless people whose memories have been stolen by bogles. There is a dark river and a dark ferryman who as we have seen has to be paid with two pennies from the eyes of the dead, just as in Earthly myth there is the river Styx and Charon the ferryman who takes coins from the mouths of the dead. And then:
There was a big pile of bones on the path. They were certainly animal bones, and the rotting collars and lengths of rusted chain were another clue.
‘Three big dogs?’ said Roland.
‘One verrae big dog wi’ three heids,’ said Rob Anybody. ‘Verrae popular in underworlds, that breed. Can bite right through a man’s throat. Three times!’ he added, with relish. ‘But put three doggy biscuits in a row on the groound and the puir wee thing sits there strainin’ and whinin’ all day. It’s a wee laff, I’m tellin’ ye!’
In the classical myths of Earth, the representative of this three-headed breed is called Cerberus. It is his task to guard the entrance of the Underworld so that no one alive may enter, nor may any of the dead escape – but his attention can be distracted by throwing him soft cakes sweetened with honey (and, preferably, also laced with poppy juice). He was also once lulled by the music of Orpheus, and once he was overwhelmed by the physical strength of Herakles. But mostly he is just sitting there, on guard.
Despite all perils, Roland brings the Summer Lady back to the upper world, and Tiffany finds a way to dismiss the Wintersmith. The Dance of the Seasons resumes, in which Summer and Winter must each die and sleep and wake again, year after year. No one should meddle with it.
‘Here is the heart of the summer,’ hissed the voice of the Summer Lady. ‘Fear me as much as the wintersmith. We are not yours, though you give us shapes and names. Fire and ice we are, in balance. Do not come between us again …’