Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion ... So Far

by Terry Pratchett

  Bunty. A friend of Sybil Vimes’ in Quirm. Berenice Waynesbury, née Mouse-father. She has a daughter who lives outside Quirm and a son who had to go to Fourecks in a hurry. [T!]

  Burleigh. President of the Guild of Armourers and proprietor of Burleigh and Stronginthearm, crossbowmakers to the nobility.

  Bustle, Simplicity. Sensibility Bustle, D.M. Phil.,B.El L.,Patricius Professor of Magic, Author of Hivers: A Dissertation Upon A Device Of Amazing Cunning. All that could be found of Professor Bustle was buried in a jar in the old Rose Garden at UU. UU advises all research students to spend some time there, and reflect upon the manner of his death. [HFOS]

  Butch. A dog in Ankh-Morpork. His top and bottom set of fangs have grown so large that he appears to be looking at the world through bars, and he is bow-legged; this is what calling a dog ‘Butch’ does to it. A member of the DOG GUILD. [MAA]

  Butterfly, Quantum Weather. Papilio Tempestae. So called because of its ability to create weather. The Quantum Weather Butterfly is an undistinguished yellow colour, with mandelbrot patterns on its wings. The wings are slightly more ragged than those of the common fritillary; the ragged edges are infinite – therefore, if their edges are infinitely long, the wings must be infinitely big. They only look about the right size because human beings have always preferred common sense to logic. [IT]

  Butts, Eulalie. Miss Butts co-founded and runs the QUIRM COLLEGE FOR YOUNG LADIES, a large boarding school which is single-sex although she would probably prefer it to be no sex whatsoever. She is short, but with a bearing and manner that make people think she is tall even while they’re looking down at her. She is not unkind, despite a lifetime of being gently dried out on the stove of education. She is conscientious and a stickler for propriety, and did not deserve to have SUSAN Sto Helit as a pupil. [SM]

  B’zugda-Hiara. Dwarfish insult. Means ‘Lawn Ornament’. [WA]

  Cable Street Particulars. A plain-clothes branch of the police force re-introduced by Commander VIMES, although in practice it is merely a front for the occasional training and employment of specialists who have skills, talents or knowledge unavailable to the average copper. In old Ankh-Morpork, it was an unpleasant force, working for the then Patricians, using torture, coercion and subterfuge to manipulate the city. It almost certainly led to the young Sam Vimes’s deep distrust of plain-clothes policemen. Unfortunately, though, secret crimes sometimes need secret policemen. [M!!!!!, NW]

  Cake, Mrs Evadne. A small medium, living in Elm Street, Ankh-Morpork. Squat and short-sighted, she is almost perfectly circular; in spite of this she looms tremendously, largely because of her hat, which she wears at all times. It is huge and black and covered with stuffed birds, wax fruit and other assorted decorative items, all painted black. Carrying an enormous handbag, she travels under her hat like a basket travels under a balloon, grumbling away to herself – her mouth is constantly moving.

  Mrs Cake is a very religious woman: there isn’t a temple, church, mosque or small group of standing stones anywhere in the city that she hasn’t attended at one time or another. Strait-laced and intolerant in most respects she is, in fact, exactly the kind of person who disapproves of people like her. Apart from church work, her main hobby is dress-making.

  She is not a bead curtain and incense medium. She is actually very good at her profession, with a lifetime of involvement in the spirit world, an involvement which – it must be said – the spirits feel they could well have done without. With her precognition switched on, she has a disconcerting tendency to respond to questions before they’re asked.

  Mrs Cake has a daughter, Ludmilla, who is a werewolf. It is because of this that she has a surprisingly understanding attitude to the undead and morphically challenged, and by the time of Men At Arms (when Ludmilla had left home) she had opened her home as a lodging house for those of a nocturnal and fur-growing persuasion.

  It is very clear that Mrs Cake is, at least in practical terms, a witch.

  Cake, Ludmilla. Daughter of Mrs Evadne CAKE. A werewolf. When in human form, Ludmilla is still built to a scale slightly larger than normal: she is the sort of person who goes through life crouching slightly and looking apologetic in case she inadvertently looms. She has magnificent hair, which crowns her head and flows out behind her like a cloak. She also has slightly pointed ears and teeth which, while white and beautiful, catch the light in a disturbing way. Like all werewolves, her habit of staring at people’s throats while she talks to them tends to put a damper on conversation. [RM]

  Cakebread. Person once cursed by Nanny OGG for kicking her cat. Since her cat is GREEBO, it is amazing that Cakebread survived long enough to be cursed. [WS]

  Caleb (the Ripper). A member of the Silver Horde of COHEN the Barbarian. He killed more than 400 men with his bare hands, and two with their bare hands. Caleb was known to be over 85 years old at his death if, indeed, he died. [IT, TLH]

  Calendars:

  THE DISCWORLD YEAR:

  The calendar on a planet which is flat and revolves on the back of four giants elephants is always difficult to establish.

  It can be derived, though, by starting with the fact that the spin year – defined by the time taken for a point on the Rim to turn one full circle – is about 800 days long. The tiny sun orbits in a fairly flat ellipse, being rather closer to the surface of the disc at the rim than at the Hub (thus making the Hub rather cooler than the rim). This ellipse is stable and stationary with respect to the Turtle – the sun passes between two of the elephants.

  The effect of all this is that the ‘spin year’ contains two of each season – two summers, two winters and so on. The winters occur when our theoretical point is at 90° to the orbit of the sun, and the summers when it is directly under the orbit.

  In theory this should mean that the point on the rim should be extremely cold during the ‘winters’, whereas it has been established that the climate on the Rim is quite mild all year round. It has been suggested by wizards at UU that this is caused by the scatter effect of the very high magical flux around the edge of the disc, which tends to equalise temperatures all around the circumference.

  In the days of the Ankh-Morpork Empire this was fully understood and the Great Year was divided into eight seasons – Winterprime, Spring Prime, Summer Prime, Autumn Prime, Winter Secundus, Spring Secundus and so on. But this was always a purist’s view of the calendar, of interest only to wizards and astrologers. Most people – and certainly most rural areas – really dealt quite sensibly in what were technically half-years, a little longer than a terrestrial year, but noted that some years the sun rose on your left as you faced the Hub, and on others it rose on your right. Apart from that, they follow the natural year. You plough, you sow, it grows, you harvest – that’s a year, no matter what some daft old man in Ankh-Morpork says.

  This has caused some confusion over the naming of various festivals. Hogswatchnight and Crueltide are, from the farmer’s point of view, the ‘same’ festival, although in fact they are the middle and end of the year. Midsummer Eve and Small Gods Eve are also ‘the same’ for practical purposes. In rural areas Hogwatchnight and Midsummer Eve tend to be used to refer to both festivals, since they refer to natural, homely things (the beginning of summer and the killing of animals).

  There are thirteen months in the year – Offle, February, March, April, May, June, Grune, August, Spune, Sektober, Ember, December and Ick. There are eight days in a week, Octeday being the eighth.

  Centuries and years are given names, usually chosen by astrologers. The action in most of the books is set in the final years of the Century of the Fruitbat, and the early years of the Century of the Anchovy.

  Ankh-Morpork also numbers its years for governmental purposes, although the numbering system has been tinkered with as the fortunes of the city have changed. Initially, they dated from the founding of the city, but Ankh-Morpork has been burned, razed, rebuilt – lost and founded, as it were – many times, and various rulers with more pride than sense have started
the numbering from 1 all over again, usually from some vitally important event such as their accession to power. But the recent calendar can be deduced as follows.

  Unseen University is known to be two thousand years old in its present form (although in one form or another there has been some kind of magical presence on the site since the creation of Discworld). It was founded in what was then known as AM 1282 by Alberto Malich, during the closing days of the Ankh-Morpork Empire (This lasted from AM 1, the building of one of the first cities in what is now the Shades area, until shortly after the founding of UU).

  The wizards began numbering their years from that date, since it didn’t matter much to them what the year was called on the other side of the walls. And, as the civil calendar was tinkered with, and revised when people lost count, or found nineteen days that shouldn’t have been there, or mislaid the whole of Grune, the city eventually took to using the University’s Ankh-Morpork Years, which at least were reliable and happened one after the other, apart from 1256, which for some reason happened twice.

  The fact that there are therefore at least two ‘counts’ has not really caused confusion – historians know their history and don’t get confused, and most other people don’t need to think much outside the present century.

  The Century of the Fruitbat was therefore the twentieth century. The Ankh-Morpork Civil War, which took place in 432 by the city count at the time, took place in AM 1688 by the more reliable University calendar. Students should in any case be wary of references to ‘the civil war’; there have been at least seven in the city’s recorded history, besides a large number of uncivil or even downright impolite ones. That was, however, the last one, and marked the end of the lengthy monarchical period in the city’s history. Since then the city has been ruled by a succession of oligarchies and self-elected dictators of varying degrees of sanity (see PATRICIANS, etc).

  Cambric, Miss. Long Tall Short Fat Sally (she suffers from tides). She is being trained as a witch, in Ankh-Morpork, by old Mrs Happenstance. [ISWM]

  Camels, Joe. Mayor of Sto Lat. A short, bird-like man in an outsize robe and chain. By trade he is a parasol-maker. [GP]

  Carbonaceous. A troll in LANCRE who climbed the Copperhead mountain with the young RIDCULLY. [LL]

  Carborundum. (Jade) A troll. Looks like a boulder that has spent centuries in the damp pine forests. Covered in lichen – with stringy grey moss hanging in curtains from its head and chin. A bird’s nest in one ear – and carries a genuine troll club made from an uprooted sapling. [MR]

  Carcer. A psychopath. A complete nut job, yet quite intelligent in many ways; he’d simply worked out that if you kill people who stand in your way, you move forward. Carcer smiled all the time, in a cheerful, chirpy sort of way, apparently convinced that he’d never done anything really wrong even while the blood was dripping from his hand. When he laughed, according to Sam VIMES, it was a sort of modulation to the voice, an irritatingly patronising chortle that suggested that all this was somehow funny, but you hadn’t got the joke. He also ate one hard-boiled egg too many. That was his undoing. [NW]

  Carding, Marmaric. An eighth-level wizard. Head of the Hoodwinkers. This seventeen stone wizard, with his beringed fingers and vein-crazed jowls, was killed by COIN’S staff. [S]

  Carlton, Alex. (Sane Alex). He has a beard a dwarf would be proud of – no, one that two dwarfs would be proud of. When we first meet him, he is, with a couple of friends (Adrian Emery and Al Winton), renting an old pigeon loft on the roof of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office. He, and his friends, are members of the Smoking Gnu – a group of outlaw clacks signallers. [GP]

  Carney, Ronald. Slight young man, not as cunning as he thought. Founder of the Ankh-Morpork Inquirer and Chairman of the Guild of ENGRAVERS and Printers. [TT]

  Caroc cards. Distilled wisdom of the Ancients. Deck of cards used on the Discworld for fortune telling and for card games (see CRIPPLE MR ONION). Cards named in the Discworld canon include The Star, The Importance of Washing the Hands (Temperance), The Moon, The Dome of the Sky, The Pool of Night (the Moon), Death, the Eight of Octograms, the Four of Elephants, the Ace of Turtles. [LF, M, LL]

  Carpenter, Obidiah. Tailor in LANCRE. Also a general poacher, cess-pit cleaner and approximate carpenter (as in ‘with a couple of nails it’ll stay up all right’ ). A member of the Lancre Morris Men. [LL]

  Carrot (Carrot Ironfoundersson). A dwarf (by adoption). His adoptive dwarf parents found him in the woods as a toddler, wandering near the bodies of his real parents, who had been victims of a bandit attack. Also in the wreckage of the cart was a sword, and a ring that was very similar to one recorded as having once been a part of the royal jewellery of Ankh.

  When first encountered in the chronicles he was 6' 6" tall (6' 3" in his stockinged feet) and nearly sixteen years old with a big, honest forehead, mighty neck and impressively pink skin, due to scrubbing. He became known as Carrot not because of his red hair, kept short for reasons of hygiene, but because of his shape – the kind of tapering shape a boy gets through clean living, healthy eating and good mountain air in huge lungfuls. His dwarfish name is Kzad-blat (Head Banger). When Carrot flexes his muscles, other muscles have to move out of the way first. He has a punch that even trolls have learned to respect. He walks with a habitual stoop, which comes from being six feet tall while living with dwarfs. Like all dwarfs, when he’s away he writes home at least once a week.

  His adoptive parents, embarrassed at his size and by the fact that he reached puberty at what in dwarf terms is about playgroup age, realised that he needed to be among his own kind. They arranged for him to join the Night WATCH in Ankh-Morpork because, they had been told, it would make a man of him.

  Being very literal-minded is a dwarfish trait. It is one which Carrot shares. In the whole of his life (prior to his arrival in Ankh-Morpork) no one ever really lied to him or gave him an instruction that he wasn’t meant to take literally.

  He is direct, honest, good-natured and honourable in all his dealings. Despite several years in the WATCH, where, as Captain, he is effectively the second-in-command, he still thinks everyone is decent underneath and would get along just fine if only they made the effort. He is genuinely, almost supernaturally likeable. And he is astonishingly simple – which is not at all the same as ‘stupid’. It is just that he sees the world shorn of all the little lies and prevarications that other people erect in order to sleep at night.

  After a few initial setbacks, Carrot has had an exemplary career as a policeman, often helped by the fact that people confuse his simplicity with idiocy. In fact there are vast depths to Carrot, and many have wondered at what currents may run there; Carrot has a Destiny, and sometimes Destiny doesn’t worry about the innocent bystanders.

  For he has a crown-shaped birthmark at the top of his left arm. Coupled with his sword, his charisma, his natural leadership, and his deep and almost embarrassing love of Ankh-Morpork, this rather suggests that he is the long-lost rightful heir to the throne of the city. It is a subject that he avoids, to the point – it has been hinted – of destroying any written evidence to the fact. He seriously believes that to be a policeman is to be the guardian of civilisation. He is, in fact, very happy in his job. Or so, without plumbing those depths, it appears.

  This is just as well for Ankh-Morpork. Few civilisations can survive long under an honest, just and strong leader, which is why they generally take care never to elect them.

  Carry, Arthur. A very successful candlemaker in Ankh-Morpork who, like a number of other craftsmen, paid to have a coat of arms created for them. His motto was ART BROUGHT FORTH THE CANDLE and was rather more than it seemed. [FOC]

  Carter, Bestiality. LANCRE’S only baker. Married to Eva. A member of the Lancre Morris Men. His parents, though of a logical turn of mind, got the wrong end of the stick when it came to naming their children. Their first four children (all girls) were called Hope, Chastity, Prudence and Charity; then the boys were, with a sort of misplaced recognition of the need for bala
nce, called Anger, Jealousy, Bestiality and Covetousness. [LL]

  Casanunda, Count Giamo. A dwarf. The most enthusiastic lover in the history of the Disc. He also claims to be the Disc’s greatest liar – his card says ‘World’s 2nd Greatest Lover. Finest Swordsman. Outrageous Liar. Soldier of Fortune. Stepladders Repaired’. However, all this may be a lie.

  Casanunda is 3' 9" tall, with a typically dwarfish bullet head. But he eschews dwarfish clothing and goes in for periwigs, satins and lace, being aware that big iron boots and great prickly beards attract only ladies of a specialised taste.

  Everything his fellow dwarfs do very occasionally as nature demands he does all the time, sometimes in the back of a sedan chair and once upside down in a tree – but with care and attention to detail that is typically dwarfish. He received his title after performing a small service for Queen AGANTIA of Skund (details unknown). He has done some service also as a highwayman . . . well, lowwayman, really. He has a natural attraction for Nanny OGG, who is probably his female equivalent. [RM, WA, LL]

  Catroaster. Disc philosopher. Found floating face down in the Ankh within hours of uttering the famous line ‘When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep slurry.’ [M]

  Catseye. One of a number of freelance criminals employed by Mr TEATIME. He could see very well in the dark but, as it turned out, this was no help. [H]