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Magrat glanced up. All along the street people were craning out of every second-storey window. A jostle of horns and hooves and steaming bodies was approaching rapidly.
'There's people up there laughing at us,' she said accusingly.
Under the table Greebo stirred and rolled over. He opened his good eye, focused on the approaching bulls, and sat up. This looked like being fun.
'Laughin'?' said Granny. She looked up. The people aloft did indeed appear to be enjoying a joke.
Her eyes narrowed.
'We're just goin' to carry on as if nothin' is happening,' she declared.
'But they're quite big bulls,' said Magrat nervously.
'They're nothing to do with us,' said Granny. 'It's nothin' to do with us if a lot of foreigners want to get excited about things. Now pass me the herbal wine.'
As far as Lagro te Kabona, innkeeper, could remember the events of that day, they seemed to happen like this:
It was the time of the Thing with the Bulls. And the mad women just sat there, drinking absinthe as if it was water! He tried to get them to come indoors, but the old one, the skinny one, just shouted at him. So he let them bide, but left the door open - people soon got the message when the bulls came down the street with the young men of the village after them. Whoever snatched the big red rosette from between the horns of the biggest bull got the seat of honour at that night's feast plus - Lagro smiled a smile of forty years' remembrance - a certain informal but highly enjoyable relationship with the young women of the town for quite some time after . . .
And the mad women just sat there.
The leading bull had been a bit uncertain about this.
Its normal course of action would be to roar and paw the ground a bit to get the targets running in an interesting way and its mind wasn't able to cope with this lack of attention, but that hadn't been its major problem, because its major problem had been twenty other bulls right behind it.
And even that ceased to be its major problem, because the terrible old woman, the one all in black, had stood up, muttered something at it and smacked it between the eyes. Then the horrible dumpy one whose stomach had the resilience and capacity of a galvanized water tank fell backwards off her chair, laughing, and the young one - that is, the one who was younger than the other two - started flapping at the bulls as if they were ducks.
And then the street was full of angry, bewildered bulls, and a lot of shouting, terrified young men. It's one thing to chase a lot of panicking bulls, and quite another to find that they're suddenly trying to run the other way.
The innkeeper, from the safety of his bedroom window, could hear the horrible women shouting things to one another. The dumpy one kept laughing and shouting some sort of battle cry- 'TrytheHorsemanswordEsme!' and then the younger one, who was pushing her way through the animals as if being gored to death was something that only happened to other people, found the lead bull and took the rosette off it, with the same air of concern as an old woman may take a thorn out of her cat's paw. She held it as if she didn't know what it was or what she should do with it...
The sudden silence affected even the bulls. Their tiny little bloodshot brains sensed something wrong. The bulls were embarrassed.
Fortunately, the horrible women left on a riverboat that afternoon, after one of them rescued her cat which had cornered twenty-five stone of confused bull and was trying to toss it in the air and play with it.
That evening Lagro te Kabona made a point of being very, very kind to his old mother.
And the village held a flower festival next year, and no-one ever talked about the Thing with the Bulls ever, ever again.
At least, not in front of the men.
The big paddlewheel sloshed through the thick brown soup of the river. The motive power was several dozen trolls under a sun-shade, trudging along an endless belt. Birds sang in the trees on the distant banks. The scent of hibiscus wafted across the water, almost but unfortunately not quite overpowering the scent of the river itself.
'Now this,' said Nanny Ogg, 'is more like it.'
She stretched out on the deckchair and turned to look at Granny Weatherwax, whose brows were knitted in the intense concentration of reading.
Nanny's mouth spread in an evil grin.
'You know what this river's called?' she said.
'No.'
' 'S called the Vieux River.'
'Yes?'
'Know what that means?'
