“That isn’t exactly what I meant,” said Cutangle, adding quickly, “although I’m sure that could be arranged. No, I mean, would you come and lecture the students? Once in a while?”
“What on?”
Cutangle groped for a subject.
“Herbs?” he hazarded. “We’re not very good on herbs here. And headology. Esk told me a lot about headology. It sounds fascinating.”
The sugar lump disappeared through a crack in a nearby wall with a final jerk. Cutangle nodded towards it.
“They’re very heavy on the sugar,” he said, “but we haven’t got the heart to do anything about it.”
Granny frowned, and then nodded across the haze over the city to the distant glitter of the snow on the Ramtops.
“It’s a long way,” she said. “I can’t be keeping on going backwards and forwards at my time of life.”
“We could buy you a much better broomstick,” said Cutangle. “One you don’t have to bump start. And you, you could have a flat here. And all the old clothes you can carry,” he added, using the secret weapon. He had wisely invested in some conversation with Mrs Whitlow.
“Mmph,” said Granny, “Silk?”
“Black and red,” said Cutangle. An image of Granny in black and red silk trotted across his mind, and he bit heavily into his scone.
“And maybe we can bring some students out to your cottage in the summer,” Cutangle went on, “for extra-mural studies.”
“Who’s Extra Muriel?”
“I mean, there’s lots they can learn, I’m sure.”
Granny considered this. Certainly the privy needed a good seeing-to before the weather got too warm, and the goat shed was ripe for the mucking-out by spring. Digging over the Herb bed was a chore, too. The bedroom ceiling was a disgrace, and some of the tiles needed fixing.
“Practical things?” she said, thoughtfully.
“Absolutely,” said Cutangle.
“Mmph. Well, I’ll think about it,” said Granny, dimly aware that one should never go too far on a first date.
“Perhaps you would care to dine with me this evening and let me know?” said Cutangle, his eyes agleam.
“What’s to eat?”
“Cold meat and potatoes.” Mrs Whitlow had done her work well.
There was.
* * *
Esk and Simon went on to develop a whole new type of magic that no one could exactly understand but which nevertheless everyone considered very worthwhile and somehow comforting.
Perhaps more importantly, the ants used all the sugar lumps they could steal to build a small sugar pyramid in one of the hollow walls, in which, with great ceremony, they entombed the mummified body of a dead queen. On the wall of one tiny hidden chamber they inscribed, in insect hieroglyphs, the true secret of longevity.
They got it absolutely right and it would probably have important implications for the universe if it hadn’t, next time the University flooded, been completely washed away.
Notes
1
very respectable body which in fact represented the major law enforcement agency in the city. The reason for this is as follows: the Guild was given an annual quota which represented a socially acceptable level of thefts, muggings and assassinations, and in return saw to it in very definite and final ways that unofficial crime was not only rapidly stamped out but knifed, garrotted, dismembered and left around the city in an assortment of paper bags as well. This was held to be a cheap and enlightened arrangement, except by those malcontents who were actually mugged or assassinated and refused to see it as their social duty, and it enabled the city’s thieves to plan a decent career structure, entrance examinations and codes of conduct similar to those adopted by the city’s other professions—which, the gap not being very wide in any case, they rapidly came to resemble.
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Annotations
1
Neil Gaiman is the author of the acclaimed Sandman comics series, as well as Terry’s co-author on Good Omens.
Liber Paginarum Fulvarum is a dog-Latin title that translates to Book of Yellow Pages, i.e. not the Book of the Dead, but rather the Phonebook of the Dead. The book appears in Good Omens as well as in Sandman, where it is used in an attempt to summon Death (although the colourist didn’t get the joke and simply coloured the pages brown). Terry said (when questioned about it in a Good Omens context):
"Liber Paginarum Fulvarum is a kind of shared gag. It’s in the dedication of Equal Rites, too. Although I think we’ve got the shade of yellow wrong—I think there’s another Latin word for a kind of yellow which is closer to the Yellow Pages colour."
The other word for yellow Terry is thinking of may possibly be ‘gilvus’, or ‘croceus’, or ‘luteus’.
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2
Refers to Lucille Ball from I Love Lucy fame.
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3
A central theme of this book (as well as of the other Discworld witch novels) is the contrast between on one side the (female) witches or wiccans, who are in touch with nature, herbs and headology, and on the other side the (male) wizards who are very ceremonial and use elaborate, mathematics-like tools and rituals. This conflict rather closely mirrors a long-standing feud between occult practitioners in our real world. (And all the infighting within each camp occurs in real life, as well.)
My source for this also mentions that Pratchett’s witches, especially, are obvious stereotypes of the kinds of people one can run into at wiccan festivals.
One of my correspondents recalls that he interviewed Terry in 1987 for a university magazine. In that interview Terry said that one thing which had tickled him about Josh Kirby’s artwork for the Equal Rites cover was that it subliminally (accidentally?) reflected the Freudian overtones of the book (references to “hot dreams”, the angst of adolescence, things that might be called “magic” envy)… Kirby’s artwork “coincidentally” draws Esk with the broom handle where a penis would be (traditionally supposed to be the basis of the “witches flying around on broomsticks” myth).
Kirby caricatures himself as the pointy-eared wizard on the back cover—anyone who has seen his picture in The Josh Kirby Posterbook can confirm this.
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4
RAMTOP was the name of a system variable in the old Sinclair Spectrum computers.
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5
The name Hoki derives from ‘hokey’ in combination with the Norse god Loki. The description of Hoki is pure Pan, however.
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6
These instructions stem in fact from a folk song called ‘She Moved Through the Fair’, which has been recorded by (amongst others) Fairport Convention, Van Morrison and All About Eve:
My young love said to me, ‘My mother won’t mind
And my father won’t slight you for your lack of kine’.
And she stepped away from me and this she did say,
‘It will not be long now till our wedding day’
She stepped away from me and she moved through the fair
And fondly I watched her move here and move there
And she made her way homeward with one star awake
As the swan in the evening moves over the lake
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7
A proprietary name for electrical apparatus concerned with sound reproduction and amplification. Now used generally, esp. to denote a form of public address system.
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8
i. e. a ‘non-witch’ person. ‘Cowan’ is a commonly used word by Wiccans. A cowan is one who does not follow the religion of Wicca, in other words, they are not Wiccan. Another option would be a misspelled word ‘coward’, of course.
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9
Someone on alt.fan.pratchett pointed out that in our world, Gypsies were named because people thought they were Egyptians. Since the Discworld equivalent of Egypt is Djelibeybi, shouldn’t Hilta Goatfounder have been talking a
bout, say, ‘Jellybabes’? Terry answered:
“Okay. Almost every word in the English language has a whole slew of historic associations. People on the Disc can’t possibly speak ‘English’ but I have to write in English. Some carefully-positioned ‘translations’ like ‘It’s all Klatchian to me’ can work, but if I went the whole hog and ‘discworlded’ every name and term, then the books would be even more impenetrable and would probably only be read by people who like learning Klingon. I do my best—French fries can’t exist on Discworld, for example—but I think ‘gypsies’ is allowable.”
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10
A Morris Minor is a British car that non-Brits might be familiar with either through the video clip for Madness’ song ‘Driving in my car’, or through the TV series Lovejoy. In that series, Lovejoy’s car ‘Miriam’ is a Morris Minor. For the rest of you, here’s a description:
Imagine a curvaceous jelly-mould in the shape of a crouching rabbit, like Granny used to use. Turn it open-side-down and fit four wheels, near the corners. On the rabbit’s back build a cabin, with picture windows and a windscreen in two parts at an angle to each other. Add turn indicators consisting of little arms which flip out of the body at roof level, just behind the doors. Furnish the cabin in a post-War austerity style, and power the result with a 1935 vintage 850cc straight four engine pulling about 30bhp. In its day, in 1948, this was the height of desirability—so much so that for its first few years it was only available for export.
Even in the Nineties, a fair number of Moggies are still going, er, strong. You can actually pay a couple of thousand pounds for a good one which works, because they’re so easy to maintain. And the split-screen ones are very definitely collectors’ items.
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11
The Necrotelicomnicom is another reference to the Phonebook of the Dead (see the annotation for the dedication of Equal Rites), but is also a pun on the evil book of the dead Necronomicon, used by H. P. Lovecraft in his Cthulhu stories.
Bel-Shamharoth is an Elder God of the Discworld we already met in ‘The Sending of Eight’ in The Colour of Magic. C’hulagen is obviously made up out of the same ingredients as C’thulhu, and the Insider refers to the unnamed narrator of Lovecraft’s The Outsider.
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12
Terry’s having fun with a familiar saying that originated with Robert Frost’s poem Mending a Wall:
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’.
And since people keep pointing it out to me I suppose it might as well be mentioned here that ‘fence’ is also the English word for a dealer in stolen goods.
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13
“Mrs Palm(er) and her daughters” is a euphemism for male masturbation.
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14
Treatle refers here to the old student’s (drinking) song ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’, written in 1781 by Christian Wilhelm Kindleben, a priest in Leipzig who got kicked out because of his student songs. The song is still in use at many universities and schools, where it gets sung during graduation ceremonies. The actual lyrics are:
Gaudeamus igitur, iuvenes dum sumus.
Post iucundam iuventutem,
Post molestam senectutem,
Nos habebit humus, nos habebit humus.
Which roughly translates to:
Let us be merry, therefore, whilst we are young men.
After the joys of youth,
After the pain of old age,
The ground will have us, the ground will have us.
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15
You really have to read Tolkien in order to understand why this is so funny. Sure, I can explain that in the The Lord of the Rings a big deal is made of the transformation of wizards from one ‘colour’ to another (and in particular Gandalf the Grey becoming Gandalf the White), but that just doesn’t do justice to the real atmosphere of the thing.
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16
The maid at Unseen University is called Ksandra, which puns on Troy’s Cassandra; but might also refer to Sandra being yet another typical ‘Tracey/Sharon’ sort of name in England.
Perhaps the fact that nobody can understand Ksandra (because she talks with her mouth full of clothes-pegs) is also an obscure reference to the classical Cassandra, daughter of Priam of Troy, whom the Gods gave the gift of prophecy and the curse of no-one believing a word she said.
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17
Refers to the Pleistocene geological era (a few dozen million years or so ago), but also to Plasticine, a brand name that has become (at least in Britain, Australia and New Zealand) a generic name for the modeling clay children play with.
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18
Some folks thought they recognised the duel between Granny Weatherwax and Archchancellor Cutangle from T. H. White’s description of a similar duel in his Arthur, The Once and Future King (also depicted as a very funny fragment in Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, which was an animation film based on this book). However, Terry says:
“The magical duel in Equal Rites is certainly not lifted from T. H. White. Beware of secondary sources. Said duel (usually between a man and a woman, and often with nice Freudian touches to the things they turn into) has a much longer history; folkies out there will probably know it as the song ‘The Two Magicians’.”
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19
The first mention of this particular running gag in the Discworld canon (to be featured most prominently in Guards! Guards!). It is not quite the earliest appearance in Terry’s work, though: he also uses it on p. 46/55 of The Dark Side of the Sun.
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20
Gormenghast is the ancient, decaying castle from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy.
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21
Plays on the folk saying: “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning”.
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FB2 document info
Document ID: 1bf792c5-d738-42fb-b5c5-9a6ce3916406
Document version: 2
Document creation date: 2005-02-04
Created using: vim, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
quiritius
Document history:
2.0 — text replaced, annotations. q
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Equal Rites d-3 Page 22
