In which the mechanics of turning someone into a vampire could not possibly be more confusing…
Summary
Nanny, Agnes, and Magrat get back into the castle and Agnes goes to find the vampires, getting attacked by their family members (“by blood”) before Vlad intervenes and volunteers to have them tortured if she likes. He walks her around and shows her pictures of their ancestors, explains how his upbringing was different, and shows no adverse reaction to the holy water Agnes splashes him with. Agnes bring this information to Nanny, who drinks down some brandy, since Reverend Oats claimed that vampire hunters protected themselves against mind control by being drunk. Oats is in his tent, looking up information about vampires, and thinking how difficult it is to be a servant of Om when he’s of two minds about everything and the constant church schisms make that harder for him. The Count confronts the mob assembled outside, then the witches, and then Mightily Oats, making each of them feel pathetic in their attempts. He expects Granny to show up next, which she does. They have a showdown, but Granny is weak and the Count isn’t impressed by any of her usual tricks. He insists that he won’t kill her; she’ll live forever. Granny leaves her body and goes borrowing; Nanny grabs Magrat and leaves Agnes to handle the vampires. Agnes screams at a painful pitch, but the vampires plan to drink Granny’s blood and turn her into a vampire regardless.
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The Keeper’s Six
Agnes takes Oats and leaves as she’s told, in part because she thinks she hears a voice in her head that’s Granny telling her to. Shortly after, Granny’s body is thrown out into the rain. Oats and Agnes pick her up with some difficulty and try to figure out where they can take her, knowing that she’ll be a vampire when she wakes. The Nac Mac Feegle show up in King Verence’s room and abduct him from the castle. Agnes decides to bring Granny to Hodgesaargh while Nanny and Magrat are trying to escape the castle through the kitchens and run into a vampire. Nanny gets him to bite into a lemon, and they head into the stables to change baby Esme. They find Igor there, hold him up by pitchfork and demand the Magpyr carriage and his help in getting away—Nanny insists that their priority is saving Magrat’s baby to ensure the future. Igor is happy enough to go with them since he can’t stand these new age vampires. Granny wakes up and tells Agnes to get to Nanny and Magrat, dragging herself to the forge and laying her head against the iron anvil. She tells Oats to sharpen an ax and stakes in case she truly turns. Agnes sees the coach leave, but can’t catch it, and Vlad finds her. He tries to convince her to become a vampire, and when she’s not interested, he leaps with her into Lancre Gorge.
Granny talks to Death and tries to figure out her path, getting tempted by the darkness inside her, but she won’t bow to it. She wakes. Nanny and Magrat are force to head toward Uberwald because the road’s washed out below. Agnes finds herself flying and suggests that Vlad just let her fall, but then Lacrimosa appears and tells Vlad where the witches are headed, so she agrees to go with them on the chance that she could catch up to them. The Nac Mac Feegle (and the Kelda, Big Aggie) have Verence, and they fire a crossbow at his “shadow” to break the vampire control. In return, they only ask for his signature on a complicated document. Granny asks Hodgesaargh to bring some tea and to look at his firebird. She tells him that he’s missed something; the phoenix laid more than one egg. She then asks him to count his birds, which results in one more lappet-faced worrier than he should have. Granny reaches out to it and it hops onto her arm. She asks Hodgesaargh to hood it, knowing this is not truly a worrier. She finds out that the vampires have left and figures that Nanny has made for Uberwald, asking for a mount. Oats has a mule, so she decides to take that, but once away from the crowd, he finds she can barely stand. Oats insists on helping and traveling with her.
Big Aggie gives Verence a little something (with milk and herbs and brew in it) to help further break the vampires’ hold on him. Vlad decides to bring Agnes to Escrow, a town that he calls the future for vampires and humans. Granny and Oats are riding along and discussing religion and sin, with Oats getting more irate as Granny fails to be moved by religious ideas. She eventually falls off the mule and he kneels beside her, feeling something is gaining on them, and begins to pray frantically. Finally, he takes out the Book of Om and… makes light. The carriage crashes in the spot just in front of the castle (it’s been set up that way), so Nanny and Magrat have to go there to spend the night. Igor takes them to his quarters and Nanny starts to get the measure of the Count and his father before him. (Igor also seems to have a crush on her, which delights Magrat to no end.) They learn all about how Igor’s family stitch themselves together with other family parts, and meet his dog Scraps, who is also made of parts. Nanny finds out about all the vampire-killing items in the castle, and decides to arm up even though none of it should work on this crew… she’s decided to try things her way, and stop trying to be another Granny.
Commentary
Having thoughts on this go-around about which characters Pratchett tends to chose for key perspective and why he does it. Obviously there’s Death and then Susan, there’s Vimes (and Carrot to a certain extent), there’s Rincewind, and all the early Witch books are ultimately about Granny, even when we’re exploring Magrat’s thoughts, or Agnes’ dual personhood. Esme Weatherwax has the perspective we’re meant to be keying into for the long haul. And it’s always enjoyable with Discworld novels because Pratchett never sets up any person to be wholly right or wrong, wholly good or bad, because no author with a keen grasp on humanity would want to—in part because it’s inaccurate, but mostly because it’s boring.
So when we get these sections where Granny tries to talk down the Count, or fights off her own darkness, or gets into theological arguments with Oats, it’s always interesting to see the ways in which she’s wise, but also the ways in which her own stubbornness or inability to accommodate other modes of thinking get in the way. She’s right about so many things, but that doesn’t mean she’s unassailable, or that her bullheadedness is always a feature.
For example, Granny and Oats have a conversation about judging others, which Oats tries not to do (for religious purposes), but Granny says is alright because “judging is human”—she views it as part and parcel of how humans must spend their lives making choices. And on the one hand, it’s a little relieving to hear (or rather read) that because it’s true, isn’t it? Human beings can’t really get through a day without judging things in the plainest sense, and there’s also our desire to belong factored in there; we judge to more readily determine who and what we want to align ourselves with. But in this instance, it seems to me that judgment means something functionally different, or at least it does to Oats.
And Granny can’t rightly assimilate that idea because she’s firmly against complexity, against minutiae and overthinking, against shades of gray in morality. If you were to tell her that term and even the concept of “judgment” means different things to different people, she’d tell you that of course it doesn’t and you’re being ridiculous, and then she’d give you the “correct” definition and that would be the end of the conversation. She is the wrong person to try and start a philosophical debate with, which Oats isn’t really getting in that moment.
In some (many) ways, I envy Granny Weatherwax. She’s not always right, but she is certain. And, of course, when she is right, she tends to be right about very important things. I imagine I’ll have more thoughts about this before the end of the book, but I enjoy thinking about what specific types of characters offer up to a story, and Granny is a singular sort.
Reverend Oats’ earlier aside about the little sea creatures who make red tides is a reference to the more “scientific” theories people have come up with in order to explain miraculous Biblical events; specifically, there’s a fun set of explanations for the ten plagues of Egypt in Exodus, one of them being that the river turning to “blood” was caused by a sudden influx of red plankton, if I’m remembering correctly. I was fascinated by this sort of thing as a kid, so it’s tickling to see it get name-checked here. There’s also mention of stories in the Book of Om matching other Disc mythologies, which is another aspect that scholars love to pour over—Oats specifically notes the volume of “flood stories” of which our own world has its fair share.
And of course, this section also specifically calls out how other stories are only “folktales and myth” while Oat’s own Om texts are “holy truth,” which is a wonderfully blatant illustration of why I prefer to refer to all religious texts as mythology. I assume some people find it either superior or dismissive, but I genuinely don’t feel comfortable giving any cultural text that edge. I’d rather call them all myth, and let people have their own personal feelings about which ones are true.
Which is to say, when Oats asks Granny what she thinks religion is, and she replies “I gen’rally don’t think about it at all”… that’s one way in which we are on the same page.
As a side note, I have a special affection for Hodgesaargh (a character whose name is very difficult to remember how to spell, my brain keeps skipping over letters) and his insistence on being entirely rational and learned about his own area of expertise and not bothering with anyone else’s area at all. No vehemence, no attitude about it, just a certainty that he knows birds and no one else knows them like he does, so he’s gonna keep doing his bird stuff. Looking for eggs because of course phoenixes have them. They’re birds, not symbols. How could a bird be a symbol, it’s a bird.
Asides and little thoughts:
- I do love all the shoutouts to various old vampire stories via the Magpyr ancestors.
- The bit where Oats does not gird his loins because he doesn’t know how and won’t ask reminds me of the time I directed that phrase toward a friend and he was incredibly grossed out… because he did not have any idea what the term truly meant. (I would have asked what he assumed I was telling him to do, but the conversation had already gotten weird enough.)
- Verence shares with Magrat “the curious but unshakeable conviction that anything with herbs in it was safe and wholesome and nourishing,” and that pretty much describes my childhood in a nutshell. Herbs for everything, up to and including actual medicine. (Which isn’t to say that herbs have no medicinal properties, just that they aren’t a good replacement for ibuprofen.) Though brose does sound tasty and I would try it.
Pratchettisms:
They were dressed something like the young opera-goers she’d seen in Ankh-Morpork, except that their fancy waistcoats would have been considered far too fast by the staider members of the community, and they wore their hair long like a poet who hopes that romantically flowing locks will make up for a wretched inability to find a rhyme for “daffodil.”
He did not gird his loins, because he wasn’t certain how you did that and had never dared ask, but he adjusted his hat and stepped out into the wild night under the thick, uncommunicative clouds.
Granny had no romance in her soul, Agnes thought. But she did have a very good idea of how to manipulate the romance in other people.
You had to make choices. You never got told which ones were right. Oh, some of the priests said you got given marks afterward, but what was the point of that?
Her life had just flashed past her eyes and wasn’t it dull? Perdita added.
There was even a bit of sullen thunder now, not the outgoing sort that cracks the sky but the other sort, which hangs around the horizons and gossips nastily with other storms.
Next week we finish the book!
