Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion ... So Far

by Terry Pratchett

  Reet. A lady of the streets rescued from some robbers by CARROT. She was apparently a girlfriend of his for a while, but the relationship foundered quite quickly because Carrot’s idea of an exciting time was to walk to some distant part of the city to view an interesting example of iron bollard. [GG]

  Reforgule (of Krull). A scientist who theorised that the Disc revolves once in every 800 days in order to distribute the weight fairly upon its supportive pachyderms. [COM]

  Remitt. An armourer in Ankh-Morpork. Generally used by the Night Watch when their armour needs repairing. [MAA]

  Rerpf. Ran the Groaning Platter, down by the Brass Bridge, Ankh-Morpork. A short, fat man, very richly dressed. With beringed hands. He was a founder member of the Merchants’ Guild. [COM]

  Research witchcraft (or whichcraft). A small but very valuable side of the Craft. Eye of what kind of toad? Maw of which sea-ravin’d shark? The Granny Weatherwax view of whichcraft is that it simply doesn’t matter, but many witches of an enquiring mind have, down the centuries, experimented with thousands of different ingredients. One of the results is the – presumably – penicillin-encrusted mouldy bread poultice used by Magrat in Lords and Ladies. The patient was quite lucky. Stretching down the ages must have been considerable experimentation with the antibiotic effects of mouldy cheese, mouldy apples, mouldy sheep, and so on.

  Retrophrenology. Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore – according to the kind of logical thinking that characterises the Ankh-Morporkian mind – it should be possible to mould someone’s character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different sized mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing. [MAA]

  Rham-ap-efan. Admiral of the Djelibeybian navy. [SG]

  Rhoxie, The. Palace of the Seriph of AL KHALI. Famed in myth and legend for its splendour. Said to have been built in one night by a genie, and therefore known colloquially as the Djinn Palace. [P]

  Rhysson, Rhys. The new Low King of the Überwald dwarfs. He is a dwarf with vision, an astute politician, a new thinker, although he doesn’t like Ankh-Morpork very much (he visited the city when he was much younger), and he is considered to be pretty clever. People have described him (though not to his face) as a ‘fairytale dwarf with a Hogfather beard’. He is short, even by dwarf standards and he wears leather and home-forged chain mail. He looks quite old, as dwarfs do, and he speaks with the musical cadences of those from Llamedos – he comes from a little coal-mining clan near there. [TFE]

  Ribobe, Deccan. The last Keeper of the Door in Holy Wood. He took over from old Tento, who himself had taken over from Meggelin – people known only from their entries in the logbook kept by the keepers. He wore a frayed ceremonial robe of dark red plush with gold frogging. [MP]

  Ridcully, Hughnon. Chief Priest of Blind Io and brother of Mustrum. He is married, but otherwise sensible and solid. Solid as a rock and, sometimes, as sensible. [TT, TLH]

  Ridcully, Mustrum. Ridcully the Brown. ARCHCHANCELLOR of Unseen University.

  He became a seventh-level mage at the incredibly young age of twenty-seven. He then quit the University in order to look after his family’s estates deep in the country.

  He had not set foot in Unseen University for forty years when he was made Archchancellor, and his surprising elevation came only because the faculty wanted a bit of a breather after several rather hectic years in which Archchancellors (never a job with long-term prospects) were dying off so fast that they were getting buried with their inaugural dinner only half-eaten. What was needed was someone quiet and easy to manipulate. It was known that Ridcully was an inveterate countryman and it was assumed that a wizard so close to nature would fit the bill and, if he became a nuisance, could easily be disposed of.

  Ridcully in the flesh therefore came as a breath of fresh air in a wind-chime factory.

  He has a huge personality. He is quite capable of getting drunk and playing darts all night, but then he’ll leave at five in the morning to swim, or at least clamber, in the frozen Ankh or to go duck hunting; at one time he had a pack of hunting dogs installed in the butler’s pantry at UU.

  He likes beer with his breakfast of kidneys and black pudding and especially likes those sausages, you know the ones, with a transparent skin through which can be seen the occasional green fleck which you can only hope is sage; he is a shameless AUTOCONDIMENTOR and makes his own version of the infamous WOW-WOW SAUCE.

  Intellectually, Ridcully maintains his position for two reasons. One is that he never, ever, changes his mind about anything. The other is that it takes him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him – this is an invaluable 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. By the same token, he never reads any paperwork put on his desk, reasoning that he’ll find out about anything really important when the shouting starts.

  Nevertheless, Ridcully isn’t stupid; he has quite a powerful intellect but it is powerful like a locomotive, and runs on rails and is therefore almost impossible to steer. He shouts at people and tries to jolly them along. He is brusque and rude to absolutely everyone and he never wastes time on small talk. It’s always large talk or nothing. Economy of emotion is one of his strong points.

  A key to understanding him is that, like Granny Weatherwax, he sees himself as quite outside the rules which he nevertheless imposes on everyone else. He is quite incapable of understanding any reasonably intelligent joke and therefore frowns upon them; nevertheless he prides himself on his sense of humour, which is rudimentary, and he himself often tells jokes – long, dull ones, often with the punch line incorrectly remembered. And, while he is a stickler for his staff to be dressed in proper wizarding robes, he himself avoids wearing them on all but the most formal occasions, although he does of course retain the wizarding hat.

  Mrs WHITLOW has made him up a sort of baggy trouser suit in garish blue and red, which he wears for his early morning jog with his pointy hat tied on to his head with string.

  The hat is quite a work of art, and he made it himself. It has fishing flies stuck in it. A very small pistol crossbow is shoved in the hatband and a small bottle of Bentinck’s Very Peculiar Old Brandy is stored in the pointy bit. The very tip unscrews to become a cup. It also has small cupboards in it. Four telescopic legs and a roll of oiled silk in the brim extend downwards to make a small but serviceable tent, with a patent spirit stove just above it and inner pockets containing three days’ iron rations.

  His study is dominated by a full-sized snooker table, piled high with papers. Stuffed heads of a number of surprised animals hang on the walls. From one of the antlers hang a pair of corroded boots worn by Ridcully as a Rowing Brown. In one corner of the room is a large model of the Discworld on four wooden elephants.

  He is now about seventy. About fifty or more years ago he had a romantic fling with young Esmerelda Weatherwax.

  His brother, Hughnon, is the Chief Priest of BLIND IO in Ankh-Morpork, and his uncle lives near LANCRE.

  Depending on your point of view, Ridcully is either the best or the worst Archchancellor that UU has had for a hundred years. He is certainly the most long-lived, having survived dragons, monsters, rogue shopping trolleys and, most importantly, his fellow wizards. The unkillability of Mustrum Ridcully has had an amazing knock-on effect through University wizardry, because it has effectively slowed to a halt the practice of rising through the magical ranks by killing wizards of a superior grade.

  Some of the fun goes out of this when the man at the top is not only very goo
d at the game, but tends to creep up behind ambitious would-be murderers, shout at them very loudly, and then slam their heads repeatedly in the door.

  Riktor. ‘Numbers’ Riktor. Riktor the Tinkerer. A wizard at Unseen University. A man with a one-track mind; he was convinced that the universe could be entirely understood in terms of numbers and, indeed, was numbers. He invented the reso-graph (a ‘thingness-writer’), a device for detecting and measuring disturbances in the fabric of reality. Also the Star Enumerator, Mouse Counter, Swamp Meter and Rev Counter for Use in Ecclesiastical Areas. [MP]

  Rimbow. The eight-coloured, world-girdling rainbow that hovers in the mist-laden air over the RIMFALL. A double rainbow. Close to the lip of the Rimfall are the seven lesser colours, sparkling and dancing in the spray of the dying seas. But they are pale in comparison to the wider band that floats beyond them, not deigning to share the same spectrum.

  The Rimbow hangs in the mists just beyond the edge of the world, appearing only at morning and evening when the light of the Disc’s little orbiting sun shines past the massive bulk of the Great A’TUIN and strikes the Disc’s magical field at exactly the right angle.

  Rimfall. The long waterfall at the vast circumference of the Discworld, where the seas of the Disc boil ceaselessly over the Edge into space.

  People ask how the water gets back on to the Disc.

  Arrangements are made.

  Rimfisher. A small bird with a tuft of blue and green feathers, iridescent as jewels. It lives on the Rim, feeding off whatever raw fish plummet past its perch. [COM]

  Rincewind. A wizard. At least, generally referred to as a wizard. Strange to tell, it is also the name of the Archchancellor of BUGARUP UNIVERSITY (Bill Rincewind).

  Our Rincewind is tall, thin and scrawny, with a raggedy beard that looks like the kind of beard worn by people who aren’t cut out by Nature to be beard-wearers. He is a non-smoker (unusual in a wizard). He is a survivor. There are scars all over him. Mostly on his back.

  He traditionally wears a dark red, hooded, frayed plush robe on which a few mystic sigils are embroidered in tarnished sequins. The robe has been made darker by constant wear and irregular washings. Under his robe he wears britches and sandals. Around his neck is a chain bearing the bronze octagon which marks him as an alumnus of Unseen University (quite wrongly, it must be pointed out, since he has never passed any kind of magical exam). Indeed, he never scored more than 2 per cent in his exams (and that was for spelling his name almost right). On his head is a battered pointy hat with a floppy brim, which has the word ‘WIZZARD’ embroidered on it in big, silver letters by someone whose needlework is even worse than their spelling. There’s a star on top. It has lost most of its sequins.

  Unseen University alumnus medallion

  He was born under the sign of the Small Boring Group of Faint Stars – a sign associated with chess board makers, sellers of onions, manufacturers of plaster images of small religious significance and people allergic to pewter. His mother ran away before he was born, and the young Rincewind grew up in Morpork.

  He does have an innate gift for languages, which enables him to shout ‘Don’t kill me!’ and be understood in a hundred different countries. He is also good at practical geography, which means that he always knows exactly where it is he is running away from. He has a razor-sharp instinct for survival equalled only by an uncanny ability to end up in situations where every bit of it is required.

  Rincewind’s room number as a student at UU was 7a (wizards avoid the number eight). Later, during his spell as Deputy Librarian (an ape’s Number Two, as the Dean nastily remarked), he lived in a room close to the LIBRARY used mainly to store old furniture. It contained a large wardrobe (on top of which the LUGGAGE hibernated) and a banana crate which he used as a dressing table. It also housed a wicker chair with no bottom and three legs and a mattress so full of life that it occasionally moved sluggishly around the floor, bumping into things. The rest of the room was a litter of objects dragged from the street – old crates, bits of planking, sacks, etc.

  There are eight levels of wizardry on the Disc; after all these years, Rincewind has failed to even achieve level one. It was in fact the opinion of some of his tutors that he was incapable of even achieving level zero, which most normal people are born at. It has been contended that when Rincewind dies the average occult ability of the human race will actually go up a fraction.

  ‘To call his understanding of magical theory “abysmal” is to leave no suitable word to describe his grasp of its practice,’ said one of his tutors. He is also not very good at precognition: he can scarcely see into the present.

  Some of this is unfair. For a bet, the young Rincewind dared to open the pages of the last remaining copy of the CREATOR’S own grimoire, the OCTAVO. A spell leapt out of the page and instantly burrowed deeply into his mind, whence even the combined talents of the Faculty of Medicine were unable to coax it. No one knew which spell it was, except that it was one of the Eight Great Spells that were intricately interwoven with the very fabric of time and space itself. Since then, no other spell dared stay in the same head. For that prank, he was expelled from UU.

  Subsequently, he has been an unwilling travel guide, has been through Hell, has visited most of the countries of the Disc, has travelled extensively in time as well as in space, has been present at the creation of the Discworld where he caused the origin of life by dropping an egg-and-cress sandwich into the sea, has defeated the greatest magic-user on the Disc while armed with nothing more than a half-brick in a sock,13 aided the rebels in the Counterweight Continent, visited Xxxx (where he was called Rinso) and flown to the Moon. He is believed to have been one of only nine people to have visited the country of DEATH while mortal.

  But what Rincewind has always sought is some secure, safe position somewhere, and he seemed to get this when he was appointed as Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography (even though the previous incumbent was probably eaten by a giant lizard) The post has no salary and total insecurity of tenure, but he does get his laundry done for free, a place at mealtimes and, because of a quirk of the coal porter, seven bucketfuls of coal every day. He also gets his own (superheated) office, and no one chases him much. Despite the fact that he is the least senior member of the UU faculty he is also, now, Chair of Experimental Serendipity, Reader in Slood Dynamics, Fretwork Teacher, Chair for the Public Misunderstanding of Magic, Professor of Virtual Anthropology and Lecturer in Approximate Accuracy. He has in fact accumulated all those jobs that require absolutely nothing more than that something in theory is doing them.

  Rinpo. A HISTORY MONK. Chief acolyte to the ABBOT at the Monastery of Oi Dong. [TOT]

  Rjinswand, Dr. This is the name assumed by RINCEWIND when he and TWOFLOWER appeared briefly on an aircraft in COM. He was then thirty-three, a bachelor, born in Sweden, raised in New Jersey, a specialist in the breakaway oxidation phenomena of certain nuclear reactors. It is believed that, while falling off a dragon in a field of high magical energy, he desperately wished to remain airborne – and was re-arranged in the nearest available dimension where this could be possible. [COM]

  Rock. (See GALENA.) Rock is a perfectly good name for a silicaceous troll, but it has also become a term of abuse used by the more speciesist humans in Ankh-Morpork.

  Rocksmacker, Minty. CARROT’S childhood sweetheart. A dwarf. It was partly in order to get him out of her life that Carrot was originally sent to Ankh-Morpork. After all, as his parents pointed out, when he was 6' 6" she would still be only 4' 2". [GG]

  Rodley, Lady Brenda. The Dowager Duchess of Quirm. A small, white-haired, wiry woman with a face like old saddle leather. She owns Treebite Brightscale (a swamp dragon) and is a friend of Sybil Ramkin. She lives at the Dower House, Quirm Castle, Quirm. [GG]

  Rodley, Lord (of Quirm). Heir to the fabulous Quirm estates. A rather stupid and fat young man who once danced with Death at a party. [M]

  Rodney. Brother-in-law to Brother WATCHTOWER. It was his undeserved success
(in the view of his brother-in-law) which was one of the motives behind the Elucidated Brethren’s search for a better social order, i.e., one where they got more of the cake. [GG]

  Roland. Roland de Chumsfanleigh (pronounced chuffley – it’s not his fault). He is now the Baron of the area around the Chalk. He is handsome, in his way, but also so stiff in his way that you could iron sheets on him. His encounters with Tiffany Aching have helped to make him a less starchy person.

  Ron, Foul Ole. A member of the BEGGARS’ GUILD and of the Canting Crew. He is a Mutterer – he seems unable to move without a sort of low-key, random mumbling, and is capable of keeping a pretty good conversation going all by himself. He walks behind people muttering in his own private language until they give him money not to. His familiar phrases included ‘Bug’r’em’, ‘Bugrit’ and ‘Millennium hand and shrimp’. People assume that Foul Ole Ron has no grasp on reality but this is not true. He holds very tightly indeed on to reality, but it is not the one shared by most of the rest of the world.

  Ron wears a huge overcoat several sizes too big and a felt hat that has been reshaped by time and weather into a soft cone that overhangs the wearer’s head. The grubby coat stretches from the pavement almost to the brim of the hat above it. There is a suggestion of grey hair around the join.

  Foul Ole Ron is often but not always accompanied by his Smell, which has become so powerful over the years that it has developed a life of its own and often goes about its own occasions in the city without its theoretical owner. It is in fact rather more socially aware than Ron, and has been known to attend the opera while Ron is enjoying a meal of old boiled boots several streets away.

  Ronald the Third. A past king of LANCRE. He is believed to have been an extremely unpleasant monarch, and is remembered by posterity only in an obscure bit of rhyming slang. Ronald the Third = . . . er . . . manure. [WA]