by The Wit
*
‘Well, of course,’ said Silverfish, ‘a lot of very talented people want to be in moving pictures. Can you sing?’
‘A bit. In the bath. But not very well,’ Victor conceded.
‘Can you dance?’
‘No.’
‘Swords? Do you know how to handle a sword?’
A little,’ said Victor.
‘I see,’ said Silverfish gloomily. ‘Can’t sing. Can’t dance. Can handle a sword a little.’
You would have to go a long way to find air that was realer than Ankh-Morpork air.
You could tell just by breathing it that other people had been doing the same thing for thousands of years.
‘I don’t understand her,’ he said. ‘Yesterday she was quite normal, today it’s all gone to her head.’
‘Bitches!’ said Gaspode, sympathetically.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Victor. ‘She’s just aloof
‘Loofs!’ said Gaspode.
*
The Necrotelicomnicon was written by a Klatchian necromancer known to the world as Achmed the Mad, although he preferred to be called Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches.
It contained forbidden knowledge.
Well, not actually forbidden. No one had ever gone so far as forbidding it. Apart from anything else, in order to forbid it you’d have to know what it was, which was forbidden. But it definitely contained the sort of information which, once you knew it, you wished you didn’t.
‘Come on,’ said Gaspode. ‘It’s not right, you being alone in a lady’s boodwah.’
‘I’m not alone,’ Victor said. ‘She’s with me.’
‘That’s the point,’ said Gaspode.
‘Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?’ said Dibbler.
‘He says he can’t,’ said Victor.
Dibbler hesitated. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose he should know.’
*
The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog’s wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It’s like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.
*
As the magic of the movies infects everyone, there are spillages from our own roundworld.
‘I don’t know what it’s called, but we’re doing one about going to see a wizard. Something about following a yellow sick toad,’ a man in one half of a lion suit explained to a companion in the queue.
*
A Man and A Woman Aflame With Passione in A Citie Riven by Sivil War!
Brother against brother! Women in crinoline dresses slapping people’s faces! A mighty dynasty brought low!
A great city aflame!
All it needed was a title. Something with a ring to it. Something that people would remember. Something – Dibbler scratched his chin with the pen – that said that the affairs of ordinary people were so much chaff in the great storms of history. Storms, that was it. Good imagery, a storm. You got thunder. Lightning. Rain. Wind.
Wind. That was it!
He crawled up to the top of the sheet and, with great care, wrote:
BLOWN AWAY.
*
Soll was standing over the artist who lettered the cards …
The lettering artist tugged at his sleeve.
‘I was just wondering, Mr Soll, what you wanted me to put in the big scene now—’
‘Don’t worry me now, man!’
‘But if you could just give me an idea—’
Soll firmly unhooked the man’s hand from his sleeve. ‘Frankly’ he said, ‘I don’t give a damn,’ and he strode off towards the set.
The artist was left alone. He picked up his paintbrush. His lips moved silently, shaping themselves around the words.
Then he said, ‘Hmm. Nice one.’
*
According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles.
*
The real city had been burned down many times in its long history - out of revenge, or carelessness, or spite, or even just for the insurance. Most of the big stone buildings that actually made it a city, as opposed simply to a load of hovels all in one place, survived them intact and many people considered that a good fire every hundred years or so was essential to the health of the city since it helped to keep down the rats, roaches, fleas and, of course, people not rich enough to live in stone houses.
Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.
There’s a bar like it in every town. It’s dimly lit and the drinkers, although they talk, don’t address their words to one another and they don’t listen, either. They just talk the hurt inside. It’s a bar for the derelict and the unlucky and all of those people who have been temporarily flagged off the racetrack of life and into the pits.
*
Yetis are a high-altitude species of troll, and quite unaware that eating people is out of fashion. Their view is: if it moves, eat it. If it doesn’t, then wait for it to move. And then eat it.
*
An inviolable rule about buildings for the showing of moving pictures, applicable throughout the multi-verse, is that the ghastliness of the architecture around the back is inversely proportional to the glori-ousness of the architecture in the front. At the front: pillars, arches, gold leaf, lights. At the back: weird ducts, mysterious prolapses of pipework, blank walls, fetid alleys.
And the window to the lavatories.
*
‘Fascinating,’ said the Patrician. He had not got where he was today by bothering how things worked. It was how people worked that intrigued him.
*
“Twas beauty killed the beast,’ said the Dean, who liked to say things like that.
‘No it wasn’t,’ said the Chair. ‘It was it splatting into the ground like that.’
All dwarfs have beards and wear many layers of clothing.
Their courtships are largely concerned with finding out, in delicate and circumspect ways, what sex the other dwarf is.
The flooded stairs lay in front of them.
‘Can you swim?’ said Victor.
‘Not very well,’ said Ginger.
‘Me neither,’ he said …
‘Still,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘We could look on this as a great opportunity to improve really quickly.’
†She was right about that, but only by coincidence.
DEATH is missing – presumed … er… gone. Which leads to the kind of chaos you always get when an important public service is withdrawn.
Meanwhile, on a little farm, far, far away, a tall dark stranger is turning out to be really good with a scythe. There’s a harvest to be gathered in …
Not a muscle moved on Death’s face, because he hadn’t got any.
The shortest-lived creatures on the Disc were mayflies, which barely make it through twenty-four hours. Two of the oldest zigzagged aimlessly over the waters of a trout stream, discussing history with some younger members of the evening hatching.
‘You don’t get the kind of sun now that you used to get,’ said one of them.
‘You’re right there. We had proper sun in the good old hours. It were all yellow. None of this red stuff.’
‘It were higher, too.’
‘It was. You’re right.’
‘And nymphs and larvae showed you a bit of respect.’
‘They did. They did,’ said the other mayfly vehemently.
‘I reckon, if mayflies these hours behaved a bit better, we
’d still be having proper sun.’
The younger mayflies listened politely.
‘I remember,’ said one of the oldest mayflies, ‘when all this was fields, as far as you could see.’
The younger mayflies looked around.
‘It’s still fields,’ one of them ventured, after a polite interval.
‘I remember when it was better fields,’ said the old mayfly sharply.
‘Yeah,’ said his colleague. ‘And there was a cow.’
‘That’s right! You’re right! I remember that cow! Stood right over there for, oh, forty, fifty minutes. It was brown, as I recall.’
You don’t get cows like that these hours.’ …
‘What were we doing before we were talking about the sun?’
‘Zigzagging aimlessly over the water,’ said one of the young flies. This was a fair bet in any case.
‘No, before that.’
‘Er … you were telling us about the Great Trout.’
‘Ah. Yes. Right. The Trout. Well, you see, if you’ve been a good mayfly, zigzagging up and down properly—’
‘—taking heed of your elders and betters—’
‘—then eventually the Great Trout—’
Clop
Clop
‘Yes?’ said one of the younger mayflies.
There was no reply.
‘The Great Trout what?’ said another mayfly, nervously.
They looked down at a series of expanding concentric rings on the water.
‘The holy sign!’ said a mayfly. ‘I remember being told about that! A Great Circle in the water! Thus shall be the sign of the Great Trout!’
*
Whereas the oldest things on the Discworld were the famous Counting Pines.
The six Counting Pines in this clump were listening to the oldest, whose gnarled trunk declared it to be thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-four years old. The conversation took seventeen years, but has been speeded up.
‘I remember when all this wasn’t fields.’
‘What was it, then?’ said the nearest pine.
‘Ice. If you can call it ice. We had proper glaciers in those days. Not like the ice you get now, here one season and gone the next. It hung around for ages.’
‘Wow. That was a sharp one.’
‘What was?’
‘That winter just then.’
‘Call that a winter? When I was a sapling we had winters—’
Then the tree vanished.
After a shocked pause for a couple of years, one of the clump said: ‘He just went! Just like that! One day he was here, next he was gone!’
Since the trees were unable even to sense any event that took place in less than a day, they never heard the sound of axes.
*
Death’s pale horse’s name was Binky He was a real horse. Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarrassed.
Killing off a wizard of a higher grade was a recognized way of getting advancement in the orders.
Wizards don’t believe in gods in the same way that most people don’t find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn’t see the point of believing, of going around saying, ‘O great table, without whom we are as naught’. Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or they exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
*
The Bursar … didn’t eat much, but lived on his nerves. He was certain he was anorectic, because every time he looked in a mirror he saw a fat man. It was the Archchancellor, standing behind him and shouting at him.
*
Mustrum Ridcully was, depending on your point of view, either the worst or the best Archchancellor that Unseen University had had for a hundred years.
There was too much of him, for one thing. It wasn’t that he was particularly big, it was just that he had the kind of huge personality that fits any available space. He’d get roaring drunk at supper and that was fine and acceptable wizardly behaviour. But then he’d go back to his room and play darts all night and leave at five in the morning to go duck hunting. He shouted at people. He tried to jolly them along. And he hardly ever wore proper robes. He’d persuaded Mrs Whitlow, the University’s dreaded housekeeper, to make him a sort of baggy trouser suit in garish blue and red; twice a day the wizards stood in bemusement and watched him jog purposefully around the University buildings, his pointy wizarding hat tied firmly on his head with string. He’d shout cheerfully up at them, because fundamental to the make-up of people like Mustrum Ridcully is an iron belief that everyone else would like it, too, if only they tried it.
*
Intellectually, Ridcully maintained his position for two reasons. One was that he never, ever, changed his mind about anything. The other was that it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place.
*
Although not common on the Discworld there are, indeed, such things as anti-crimes, in accordance with the fundamental law that everything in the multiverse has an opposite. They are, obviously, rare. Merely giving someone something is not the opposite of robbery; to be an anti-crime, it has to be done in such a way as to cause outrage and/or humiliation to the victim. So there is breaking-and-decorating, proffering-with-embarrassment (as in most retirement presentations) and whitemailing (as in threatening to reveal to his enemies a mobster’s secret donations, for example, to charity). Anti-crimes have never really caught on.
*
For more than a century Windle Poons had lived inside the walls of Unseen University. In terms of accumulated years, he may have lived a long time. In terms of experience, he was about thirteen.
*
The Shades was the oldest part of the city. If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-round immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork The Shades would be represented by a shaft.
*
‘If anyone’s going to bury a wizard at a crossroads with a stake hammered through him, then wizards ought to do it. After all, we’re his friends.’
*
Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, was a shameless autocondimentor.†
*
‘All right, you fellows,’ Ridcully said.
‘No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who’s playing silly buggers?’
The other senior wizards stared at him.
‘I, I, I don’t think we can play it any more,’ said the Bursar, ‘I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces …’
*
The relationship between the University and the Patrician, absolute ruler and nearly benevolent dictator of Ankh-Morpork, was a complex and subtle one.
The wizards held that, as servants of a higher truth, they were not subject to the mundane laws of the city.
The Patrician said that, indeed, this was the case, but they would bloody well pay their taxes like everyone else.
The wizards said that, as followers of the light of wisdom, they owed allegiance to no mortal man.
The Patrician said that this may well be true but they also owed a city tax of two hundred dollars per head per annum, payable quarterly.
The wizards said that the University stood on magical ground and was therefore exempt from taxation and anyway you couldn’t put a tax on knowledge.
The Patrician said you could. It w
as two hundred dollars per capita; if per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged.
The wizards said that the University had never paid taxes to the civil authority.
The Patrician said he was not proposing to remain civil for long.
The wizards said, what about easy terms?
The Patrician said he was talking about easy terms. They wouldn’t want to know about the hard terms.
The wizards said that there was a ruler back in, oh, it would be the Century of the Dragonfly, who had tried to tell the University what to do. The Patrician could come and have a look at him if he liked.
The Patrician said that he would. He truly would.
In the end it was agreed that while the wizards of course paid no taxes, they would nevertheless make an entirely voluntary donation of, oh, let’s say two hundred dollars per head, without prejudice, mutatis mutandis, no strings attached, to be used strictly for non-militaristic and environmentally acceptable purposes.
Thin, pale, and clad all in dusty black,
the Patrician always put Ridcully in mind of a predatory flamingo, if you could find a flamingo that was black and had the patience of a rock.
People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the sequence is, first object, then belief. In fact, it works the other way.
Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter’s wheel. That’s how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn’t be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.
*
‘And you’re a vampire too, Countess Notfaroutoe?’ Windle Poons enquired politely.