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'What happened to it?' said Nanny.
Greebo was having a lot of trouble with Legba the cockerel.
For one thing, the bird refused to be terrorized. Greebo could terrorize most things that moved upon the face of the Discworld, even creatures nominally much bigger and tougher than he was. Yet somehow none of his well-tried tactics - the yawn, the stare and above all the slow grin -seemed to work. Legba merely looked down his beak at him, and pretended to scratch at the ground in a way that brought his two-inch spurs into even greater prominence.
That only left the flying leap. This worked on nearly every creature. Very few animals remained calm in the face of an enraged ball of whirring claws in the face. In the case of this bird, Greebo suspected, it might well result in his becoming a furry kebab.
But this had to be resolved. Otherwise generations of cats would laugh at him.
Cat and bird circled through the swamp, each apparently paying the other no attention whatsoever.
Things gibbered in the trees. Small iridescent birds barrelled through the air. Greebo glared up at them. He would sort them out later.
And the cockerel had vanished.
Greebo's ears flattened against his head.
There was still the birdsong and the whine of insects, but they were elsewhere. Here there was silence - hot, dark and oppressive - and trees that were somehow much closer together than he remembered.
Greebo looked around.
He was in a clearing. Around its sides, hanging from bushes or tied to trees, were things. Bits of ribbon. White bones. Tin pots. Perfectly ordinary things, anywhere else.
And in die centre of the clearing, something like a scarecrow. An upright pole with a crosspiece, on which someone had put an old black coat. Above the coat, on the tip of the pole, was a top hat. On top of the hat, watching him thoughtfully, was Legba.
A breeze blew through the stifling air, causing the coat to flap gently.
Greebo remembered a day when he'd chased a rat into the village windmill and had suddenly found that what had seemed merely a room with odd furniture in it was a great big machine which would, if he put a paw wrong, crush him utterly.
The air sizzled gently. He could feel his fur standing on end.
Greebo turned and stalked away haughtily, until he judged himself out of sight, whereupon his legs spun so fast that his paws skidded.
Then he went and grinned at some alligators, but his heart wasn't in it.
In the clearing, the coat moved gently again and then was still. Somehow, that was worse.
Legba watched. The air grew heavier, just as it does before a storm.
was a strange city, Nanny decided. You got off the main streets, walked along a side road, went through a little gate and suddenly there were trees everywhere, with moss and them llamas hanging from them, and the ground began to wobble underfoot and become swamp. On either side of the track there were dark pools in which, here and there, among the lilies, were the kind of logs the witches had never seen before.
'Them's bloody big newts,' she said.
'They're alligators.'
'By gods. They must get good grub.'
'Yeah!'
Mrs Gogol's house itself looked a simple affair of driftwood from the river, roofed with moss and built out over the swamp itself on four stout poles. It was close enough to the centre of the city that Nanny could hear street cries and the clip-clop of hooves, but the shack in its little swamp was wreathed in silence.
'Don't people bother you here?' said Nanny.
'Not them as I don't want to meet.' The lily pads moved. A v-shaped ripple drifted across the nearest pool.
'Self-reliance,' said Granny approvingly. 'That's always very important.'
Nanny regarded the reptiles with a calculating stare. They tried to match it, and gave up when their eyes started watering.
