Episode The First:
Foiled!
In which the Lady Grapeseed has a Guest; Thaddeus Townsend hurts his head; and Nikephoros does not appear
Part Three
Thaddeus dangled ten metres above the ground. His feet were pedaling thin air in a way that he would have found comically had it been, say, one of Fizz's more politically biting cartoons, but which in this case only made Thaddeus squeak nervously in the back of his throat.
The climb had been reasonably easy up until now. There were lots of handily situated footholds in the stone walls of the tower. A pity he'd missed that last one.
The rope wasn't too good, either. It was slippery, and smelled of flowers.
"Hello?"
Thaddeus looked up. There was the girl again, hanging out of the window that was still at least another ten metres above him.
"Hello! Er, I say, no chance of, um-"
"What?" The girl leaned further out. "I can't hear you, it's the wind, sorry!"
"I said-" Thaddeus drew in a deep breath and slipped a few inches down the rope. "Bloody hell! I'm hanging from a bloody rope! I'm going to fall off and die! Is this your idea of a joke? Why won't you let me in the door like a civilized person!"
"Wouldn't work! You'd just knock, and then she'd come back! Wait there!" The girl disappeared.
"Wait here? Where the he- heck," Thaddeus caught himself, "am I going to go?"
As it turned out, the only place he went was about six inches downwards before he heard the girl's voice again.
"Are you there?" Thaddeus heard a faint knocking sound somewhere above his head.
"Yes, still here, strangely enough," Thaddeus grunted.
"Good." A groaning, scraping sort of noise started up above Thaddeus, in the general area that the knocking had come from. He watched as a piece of the wall sank inwards, and then stopped watching as mortar dust fell down into his eyes.
"Ouch. . ."
"There!" panted the girl inside the tower. A pair of arms appeared out of the hole, waving somewhat frantically. "Come on, then! Wind's going to come back in a minute! Hurry!"
Thaddeus performed a near-miraculous sort of vertical leap up to grasp the girl's outstretched hand. A lucky side-effect of the rising wind was that his previously sweaty, and therefore slippery, hands were now completely dry. This made being dragged through the gap in the wall relatively easy. Not to mention quite painful.
"Oof!" Thaddeus fell through onto the staircase. Or, rather, fell onto his arm, which was then squashed between his body and the stone stairs. Painfully. A small moan escaped Thaddeus' lips. The brochures hadn't said anything about this.
"Come on," barked the girl unsympathetically. "The next lull in the wind's in half an hour, and I've still to get packed and changed."
One of the more interesting aspects of the wind in this particular area of the Ramtops was its perfect punctuality. It blew continuously from six forty-eight in the evening until six-o-five in the morning, then stopped until seven. From seven until eleven thirty, it blew in half-hour periods separated by half-hours of calm. At eleven thirty started the longest break: three hours for lunch and rescuing the washing, then windy again until five before having a break for tea and starting all over again at six forty-eight. Exactly. You could set your watch by it, if you could be bothered.
It was just one of those things. Thaddeus could remember reading about a man from Sto Helit who had once traveled over to find out why the wind acted this way. He'd been blown off the mountain, and it had remained a mystery.
"Packing? But-" started Thaddeus.
The girl shot him a withering glance. "I'm not going to Ankh Morpork empty handed, boy. I know what the rent's like down there."
"Ankh Morpork? But-" Thaddeus gulped nervously. "I mean, um, I rather thought we could get a house out in the country, you know? With the reward money? Um?"
"Don't be silly," replied the girl over her shoulder as she strode away up the stairs. "I'm not going to marry you. . ."
"What? But- look, wait a minute-" Thaddeus almost had to jog to keep up, despite being over a head taller than the red-headed girl. "It's all in the brochure! And the letter! I, I rescue you from the adamant tower and, um, clutches of evil-" he looked around nervously in case there were any clutches hiding just out of sight "- and I win your hand in marriage! And a, a ring! Look, see here, it's all official, there's a stamp and everything!" They had reached the top of the stairs. Thaddeus stopped to catch his breath. "See? One Quest to rescue the lovely Lady Grapeseed from the Tower of the Bone Witch, success fee two thousand Ankh Morpork dollars."
"One problem, though."
"Pardon?"
"I'm not Lady Grapeseed."
Thaddeus gaped. Surely it was the same girl? She had the same long fire-gold hair- well, it was a little more ginger than fire in this light, but nevertheless- the same wide grey eyes, even the same dark blue dress.
What did she mean, not the Lady Grapeseed?
"Well, er, where is she, then?"
Not-Lady-Grapeseed grinned and spread her arms wide. "Gone! Wonderful, isn't it? And she'll stay gone until some other damn fool walks the windy path. First damn fool being you, of course- oh, don't scowl- first this week, anyway. She's a bit of a snob, ran the rest off before they remembered the post scriptum."
Thaddeus gaped a bit more.
"Good work remembering that, by the way. Thank the Bones and Book you remembered, I swear I was going to go mad if I had to stay up here another week. . ."
"Er. . ."
"Yes?"
"What is your name, then, please?"
"Magatha Gammins," Magatha replied, pulling a wheeled chest out from under the tall bed at the end of the room. "Help me pack, will you? I've done food and such, that's downstairs already, and you're not touching my clothes but there are some books on that shelf you could wrap. Oh, and grab those sacks from behind the dresser, will you? Curtains, too, I suppose. . ."
Thaddeus never ended up asking Magatha why he should be taking her to Ankh Morpork in any case. The topic never seemed to come up. Conversation instead revolved around such subjects as how to properly pack shoes, and if you packed glass bottles into the shoes, whether they would still break or not. Eventually, the tower room was stripped bare.
Obviously this is something of an exaggeration. The shelves and dresser were still there, and Magatha had decided eventually that it just wasn't worth carrying the mattress down the mountain- she could buy one once she found a room in the city. Some of the rugs were staying, too. Well, one of them. The one with the hole worn in it. So the room wasn't completely bare.
"Good." Magatha surveyed the room with a smirk. "Just one thing left, then," she said, and hurled The Damsel's Guide to Etiquette, Presentation and Twoo Wuv through the window.
It was a heavy book. The window-pane had no chance.
Magatha turned back to Thaddeus, rubbing her hands together happily. "Well, then. Shall we go?"
Thaddeus thought for a bit and Magatha strapped her smaller cases to the top of the chest. "Er, yes, I suppose so," he said as she pushed it out the door.
There was rather a racket as it rolled down the stairs. Thaddeus winced with every thud, and hoped they had packed everything safely enough. Then something occurred to him:
"Ah, Magatha?"
"Yes?"
"How exactly are we going to get all this down the mountain?"
"Oh, easily enough," replied Magatha. "There's the chair-stair the Queen had put in last year, after all."
Technically speaking, the Queen of Lancre had not had much to do with the chair-stair at all, other than be heartily encouraged by a certain acquaintance to fund the project. The stair had been designed and built by the dwarfs and was used for the most part by only one person, who used to visit her favourite mountain springs, groves, and stills. It was much more comfortable than taking a broomstick.
Handily, the chair-stair passed only a few hundred metres away from Magatha's tower. She had often lain awake at night, listening to the creak of rope and timber as it shifted in the wind, and the occasional CRRRRRACK and scream when the wind blew too hard.
As they left the tower Thaddeus saw, out of the corner of his eye, the Damsel's Guide lying forlornly in the horizontal grass. He almost picked it up before remembering the venom in his traveling companion's eyes as she had thrown it away. His stomach twitched a little at leaving a book out for the elements to enjoy, but stayed firm. They really didn't need the extra weight, anyway.
Later, when he saw the book strapped carefully under a hatbox, the knot in his gut subsided. Miss Gammins must have changed her mind.
He didn't mention it, though.
- - - - -
Here is the end of Episode One, as two of our three heroes venture out, down and across a few hundred miles of cabbages to the bustling metropolis of Ankh Morpork. As nothing much out of the ordinary occurs during the trip, save Thaddeus worrying a great deal about his failed Quest and Magatha getting increasingly annoyed with his worrying up until the point where she threw a cabbage at him and he stopped.
- - - - -
AN: Thank you Jenn J, LandUnderWave and WargishBoromirFan for your reviews. They are much appreciated, and, yes, whatsisface appears next episode. I'm not sure yet for how long, though.
