Discworld 16 - Soul Music

by Terry Pratchett

  After a while she realized that this was an unintelligent reaction. But she left them where they were, anyway.

  She dreamed of horses and coaches and a clock without hands.

  “D’you think we could have handled that better?”

  SQUEAK? ‘Dah dah dah DAH’ SQUEAK?

  “How did you expect me to put it? ‘Your grandfather is Death?’ Just like that? Where’s the sense of occasion? Humans like drama.”

  SQUEAK, the Death of Rats pointed out.

  “Rats is different.”

  SQUEAK.

  “I reckon I ought to call it a night,” said the raven. “Ravens are not generally nocturnal, you know.” It scratched at its bill with a foot. “Do you just do rats, or mice and hamsters and weasels and stuff like that as well?”

  SQUEAK.

  “Gerbils? How about gerbils?”

  SQUEAK.

  “Fancy that. I never knew that. Death of Gerbils too? Amazing how you can catch up with them on those treadmills—”

  SQUEAK.

  “Please yourself.”

  There are the people of the day, and the creatures of the night.

  And it’s important to remember that the creatures of the night aren’t simply the people of the day staying up late because they think that makes them cool and interesting. It takes a lot more than heavy mascara and a pale complexion to cross the divide.

  Heredity can help, of course.

  The raven had grown up in the forever-crumbling, ivy-clad Tower of Art, overlooking Unseen University in far Ankh-Morpork. Ravens are naturally intelligent birds and magical leakage, which has a tendency to exaggerate things, had done the rest.

  It didn’t have a name. Animals don’t normally bother with them. The wizard who thought he owned him called him Quoth, but that was only because he didn’t have a sense of humor and, like most people without a sense of humor, prided himself on the sense of humor he hadn’t, in fact, got.

  The raven flew back to the wizard’s house, skimmed in through the open window, and took up his roost on the skull.

  “Poor kid,” he said.

  “That’s destiny for you,” said the skull.

  “I don’t blame her for trying to be normal. Considering.”

  “Yes,” said the skull. “Quit while you’re a head, that’s what I say.”

  The owner of a grain silo in Ankh-Morpork was having a bit of a crackdown. The Death of Rats could hear the distant yapping of the terriers. It was going to be a busy night.

  It would be too hard to describe the Death of Rats’s thought processes, or even be certain that he had any. He had a feeling that he shouldn’t have involved the raven, but humans set a great store by words.

  Rats don’t think very far ahead, except in general terms. In general terms, he was very, very worried. He hadn’t expected education.

  Susan got through the next morning without having to go nonexistent. Geography consisted of the flora of the Sto Plains*, chief exports of the Sto Plains**, and the fauna of the Sto Plains***. Once you mastered the common denominator, it was straightforward. The gels had to color in a map. This involved a lot of green. Lunch was Dead Man’s Fingers and Eyeball Pudding, a healthy ballast for the afternoon’s occupation, which was Sport.

  This was the province of Iron Lily, who was rumored to shave and lift weights with her teeth, and whose shouts of encouragement as she thundered up and down the touchline tended toward the nature of “Get some ball, you bunch of soft nellies!”

  Miss Butts and Miss Delcross kept their windows closed on games afternoon. Miss Butts ferociously read logic and Miss Delcross, in her idea of a toga, practiced eurythmics in the gym.

  Susan surprised people by being good at Sport. Some sport, anyway. Hockey, lacrosse, and rounders, certainly. Any game that involved putting a stick of some sort in her hands and asking her to swing it, definitely. The sight of Susan advancing toward goal with a calculating look made any goalie lose all faith in her protective padding and throw herself flat as the ball flashed past at waist height, making a humming noise.

  It was only evidence of the general stupidity of the rest of humanity, Susan considered, that although she was manifestly one of the best players in the school, she never got picked for teams. Even fat girls with spots got picked before her. It was so infuriatingly unreasonable, and she could never understand why.

  She’d explained to other girls how good she was, and demonstrated her skill, and pointed out just how stupid they were in not picking her. For some exasperating reason it didn’t seem to have any effect.

  This afternoon she went for an official walk instead. This was an acceptable alternative, provided girls went in company. Usually they went into town and bought stale fish and chips from an unfragrant shop in Three Roses Alley; fried food was considered unhealthy by Miss Butts, and, therefore, bought out of school at every opportunity.

  Girls had to walk in groups of three or more. Peril, in Miss Butts’s conjectural experience, couldn’t happen to units of more than one.

  It was certainly unlikely in any case to happen to any group that contained Princess Jade and Gloria Thogsdaughter.

  The school’s owners had been a bit bothered about taking a troll, but Jade’s father was king of an entire mountain and it always looked good to have royalty on the roll. And besides, Miss Butts had remarked to Miss Delcross, it’s our duty to encourage them if they show any inclination to become real people and the king is actually quite charming and assures me he can’t even remember when he last ate anyone. Jade had bad eyesight, a note excusing her from unnecessary sunshine, and knitted chain mail in handicraft class.

  Whereas Gloria was banned from Sport because of her tendency to use her ax in a threatening manner. Miss Butts had suggested that an ax wasn’t a ladylike weapon, even for a dwarf, but Gloria had pointed out that, on the contrary, it had been left to her by her grandmother, who had owned it all her life and polished it every Saturday, even if she hadn’t used it at all that week. There was something about the way she gripped it that made even Miss Butts give in. To show willing, Gloria left off her iron helmet and, while not shaving off her beard—there was no actual rule about girls not having beards a foot long—at least plaited it. And tied in it ribbons in the school colors.

  Susan felt strangely at home in their company, and this had earned guarded praise from Miss Butts. It was nice of her to be such chums, she said. Susan had been surprised. It had never occurred to her that anyone actually said a word like chums.

  The three of them trailed back along the beech drive by the playing field.

  “I’ve don’t understand Sport,” said Gloria, watching the gaggle of panting young women stampeding across the pitch.

  “There’s a troll game,” said Jade. “It’s called aargrooha.”

  “How’s it played?” said Susan.

  “Er…you rip off a human’s head and kick it around with special boots made of obsidian until you score a goal or it bursts. But it’s not played anymore, of course,” she added quickly.

  “I should think not,” said Susan.

  “No one knows how to make the boots, I expect,” said Gloria.

  “I expect if it was played now, someone like Iron Lily would go running up and down the touchline shouting ‘Get some head, you soft nellies,’” said Jade.

  They walked in silence for a while.

  “I think,” said Gloria, cautiously, “that she probably wouldn’t, actually.”

  “I say, you two haven’t noticed anything…odd lately, have you?” said Susan.

  “Odd like what?” said Gloria.

  “Well, like…rats…” said Susan.

  “Haven’t seen any rats in the school,” said Gloria. “And I’ve had a good look.”

  “I mean…strange rats,” said Susan.

  They were even with the stables. These were normally the home of the two horses that pulled the school coach, and the term time residence of a few horses belonging to gels who couldn’t be parted from t
hem.

  There is a type of girl who, while incapable of cleaning her bedroom even at knife point, will fight for the privilege of being allowed to spend the day shoveling manure in a stable. It was a magic that hadn’t rubbed off on Susan. She had nothing against horses, but couldn’t understand all the snaffles, bridles, and fetlocks business. And she couldn’t see why they had to be measured in “hands” when there were perfectly sensible inches around to do the job. Having watched the jodhpured girls who bustled around the stables, she decided it was because they couldn’t understand complicated machines like rulers. She’d said so, too.

  “All right,” said Susan, “how about ravens?”

  Something blew in her ear.

  She spun around.

  The white horse stood in the middle of the yard like a bad special effect. He was too bright. He glowed. He seemed like the only real thing in a world of pale shapes. Compared to the bulbous ponies that normally occupied the loose boxes, he was a giant.

  A couple of the jodhpured girls were fussing around him. Susan recognized Cassandra Fox and Lady Sara Grateful, almost identical in their love of anything on four legs that went “neigh” and their disdain for anything else, their ability to apparently look at the world with their teeth, and their expertise in putting at least four vowels in the word oh.

  The white horse neighed gently at Susan, and began to nuzzle her hand.

  You’re Binky, she thought. I know you. I’ve ridden on you. You’re…mine. I think.

  “I say,” said Lady Sara, “who does he belong to?”

  Susan looked around.

  “What? Me?” she said. “Yes. Me…I suppose.”

  “Oeuwa? He was in the loose box next to Browny. I didn’t knoeuwa you had a horse here. You have to get permission from Miss Butts, you knoeuwa.”

  “He’s a present,” said Susan. “From…someone…?”

  The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind. She wondered why she’d said that. She hadn’t thought of her grandfather for years. Until last night.

  I remember the stable, she thought. So big you couldn’t see the walls. And I was given a ride on you once. Someone held me so I wouldn’t fall off. But you couldn’t fall off this horse. Not if he didn’t want you to.

  “Oeuwa. I didn’t know you rode.”

  “I…used to.”

  “There’s extra fees, you knoewa. For keeping a horse,” said Lady Sara.

  Susan said nothing. She strongly suspected they’d be paid.

  “And you’ve got noeuwa tack,” said Lady Sara.

  And Susan rose to it.

  “I don’t need any,” she said.

  “Oeuwa, bareback riding,” said Lady Sarah. “And you steer by the ears, ya?”

  Cassandra Fox said: “Probably can’t afford them, out in the sticks. And stop that dwarf looking at my pony. She’s looking at my pony!”

  “I’m only looking,” said Gloria.

  “You were…salivating,” said Cassandra.

  There was a pattering across the cobbles and Susan swung herself up and onto the horse’s back.

  She looked down at the astonished girls, and then at the paddock beyond the stables. There were a few jumps there, just poles balanced on barrels.

  Without her moving a muscle, the horse turned and trotted into the paddock and turned toward the highest jump. There was a sensation of bunched energy, a moment of acceleration, and the jump passed underneath…

  Binky turned and halted, prancing from one hoof to the other.

  The girls were watching. The two humans had an expression of total amazement.

  “Should it do that?” said Jade.

  “What’s the matter?” said Susan. “Have none of you seen a horse jump before?”

  “Yes. The interesting point is…” Gloria began, in that slow, deliberate tone of voice people use when they don’t want the universe to shatter, “is that, usually, they come down again.”

  Susan looked.

  The horse was standing on the air.

  What sort of command was necessary to make a horse resume contact with the ground? It was an instruction that the equestrian sorority had not hitherto required.

  As if understanding her thoughts, the horse trotted forward and down. For a moment the hooves dipped below the field, as if the surface were no more substantial than mist. Then Binky appeared to determine where the ground level should be, and decided to stand on it.

  Lady Sarah was the first one to find her voice.

  “We’ll tell Miss Butts on youewa,” she managed.

  Susan was almost bewildered with unfamiliar fright, but the petty-mindedness in the tones slapped her back to something approaching sanity.

  “Oh yes?” she said. “And what will you tell her?”

  “You made the horse jump up and…” The girl stopped, aware of what she was about to say.

  “Quite so,” said Susan. “I expect that seeing horses float in the air is silly, don’t you?”

  She slipped off the horse’s back, and gave the watchers a bright smile.

  “It’s against school rules, anyway,” muttered Lady Sarah.

  Susan led the white horse back into the stables, rubbed him down, and put him in a spare loose box.

  There was a rustling in the hayrack for a moment. Susan thought she caught a glimpse of ivory white bone.

  “Those wretched rats,” said Cassandra, struggling back to reality. “I heard Miss Butts tell the gardener to put poison down.”

  “Shame,” said Gloria.

  Lady Sarah seemed to have something boiling in her mind.

  “Look, that horse didn’t really stand in midair, did it?” she demanded. “Horses can’t do that!”

  “Then it couldn’t have done it,” said Susan.

  “Hang time,” said Gloria. “That’s all it was. Hang time. Like in basketball.* Bound to be something like that.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all it was.”

  “Yes.”

  The human mind has a remarkable ability to heal. So have the trollish and dwarfish minds. Susan looked at them in frank amazement. They’d all seen a horse stand on the air. And now they had carefully pushed it somewhere in their memories and broken off the key in the lock.

  “Just out of interest,” she said, still eyeing the hayrack, “I don’t suppose any of you know where there’s a wizard in this town, do you?”

  “I’ve found us somewhere to play!” said Glod.

  “Where?” said Lias.

  Glod told them.

  “The Mended Drum?” said Lias. “Dey throw axes!”

  “We’d be safe there. The Guild won’t play in there,” said Glod.

  “Well, yah, Dey lose members in dere. Dere members lose members,” said Lias.

  “We’ll get five dollars,” said Glod. The troll hesitated.

  “I could use five dollars,” he conceded.

  “One-third of five dollars,” said Glod.

  Lias’s brow creased.

  “Is that more or less than five dollars?” he said.

  “Look, it’ll get us exposure,” said Glod.

  “I don’t want exposure in der Drum,” said Lias. “Exposure’s the last thing I want in der Drum. In der Drum, I want something to hide behind.”

  “All we have to do is play something,” said Glod. “Anything. The new landlord is dead keen on pub entertainment.”

  “I thought they had a one-arm bandit.”

  “Yes, but he got arrested.”

  There’s a floral clock in Quirm. It’s quite a tourist attraction.

  It turns out to be not what they expect.

  Unimaginative municipal authorities throughout the multiverse had made floral clocks, which turn out to be a large clock mechanism buried in a civic flower bed with the face and numbers picked out in bedding plants.*

  But the Quirm clock is simply a round flower bed, filled with twenty-four different types of flower, carefully chosen for the regularity of the opening a
nd closing of their petals…

  As Susan ran past, the Purple Bindweed was opening and Love-in-a-Spin was closing. This meant that it was about half past ten.

  The streets were deserted. Quirm wasn’t a night town. People who came to Quirm looking for a good time went somewhere else. Quirm was so respectable that even dogs asked permission before going to the lavatory.

  At least, the streets were almost deserted. Susan fancied she could hear something following her, fast and pattering, moving and dodging across the cobbles so quickly that it was never more than a suspicion of a shape.

  Susan slowed down as she reached Three Roses Alley.

  Somewhere in Three Roses near the fish shop, Gloria had said. The gels were not encouraged to know about wizards. They did not figure in Miss Butts’s universe.

  The alley looked alien in the darkness. A torch burned in a bracket at one end. It merely made the shadows darker.

  And, halfway along in the gloom, there was a ladder leaning against the wall and a young woman just preparing to climb it. There was something familiar about her.

  She looked around as Susan approached, and seemed quite pleased to see her.

  “Hi,” she said. “Got change of a dollar, miss?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Couple of half-dollars’d do. Half a dollar is the rate. Or I’ll take copper. Anything, really.”

  “Um. Sorry. No. I only get fifty pence a week allowance anyway.”

  “Blast. Oh, well, nothing for it.”

  Insofar as Susan could see, the girl did not appear to be the usual sort of young woman who made her living in alleys. She had a kind of well-scrubbed beefiness about her; she looked like a nurse of the sort who assist doctors whose patients occasionally get a bit confused and declare they’re a bedspread.

  She looked familiar, though.

  The girl took a pair of pliers from a pocket in her dress, shinned up the ladder, and climbed in through an upper window.

  Susan hesitated. The girl had seemed quite businesslike about it all, but in her limited experience people who climbed ladders to get into houses at night were Miscreants whom Plucky Gels should Apprehend. And she might at least have gone to look for a watchman, had it not been for the opening of a door farther up the alley.