The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

by The Wit

  SERGEANT?

  ‘Right,’ said the corporal, with relief. ‘What’s your name, soldier?’

  ER…

  You don’t have to say, actually. That’s what the … the …’

  KLATCHIAN FOREIGN LEGION?

  ‘… what it’s all about. People join to … to … with your mind, you know, when you can’t… things that happened …’

  FORGET?

  ‘Right. I’m …’ The man’s face went blank. ‘Wait a minute, would you?’

  He looked down at his sleeve. ‘Corporal …’ he said. He hesitated, looking worried. Then an idea struck him and he pulled at the collar of his vest and twisted his neck until he could squint, with considerable difficulty, at the label thus revealed.

  ‘Corporal … Medium? Does that sound right?’

  I DON’T THINK SO.

  ‘Corporal … Hand Wash Only?’

  PROBABLY NOT.

  ‘Corporal … Cotton?’

  IT’S A POSSIBILITY.

  ‘Right. Well, welcome to the … er …’

  KLATCHIAN FOREIGN LEGION …

  ‘Right. The pay is three dollars a week and all the sand you can eat.’

  *

  The tradition of promotion in the University by filling dead men’s shoes, sometimes by firstly ensuring the death of the man in those shoes, had lately ceased. This was largely because of Ridcully himself, who was big and kept himself in trim and, as three late-night aspirants to the Archchancellorship had found, also had very good hearing. They had been variously hung out of the window by their ankles, knocked unconscious with a shovel, and had their arm broken in two places. Besides, Ridcully was known to sleep with two loaded crossbows by his bed. He was a kind man and probably wouldn’t shoot you in both ears.

  *

  There was an Ankh-Morpork legend about some old drum in the Palace that was supposed to bang itself if an enemy fleet was seen sailing up the Ankh. The legend had died out in recent centuries, partly because this was the Age of Reason and also because no enemy fleet could sail up the Ankh without a gang of men with shovels going in front.

  *

  Unseen University was used to eccentricity among the faculty. After all, humans derive their notions of what it means to be a normal human being by constant reference to the humans around them, and when those humans are other wizards the spiral can only wiggle downwards. The Librarian was an orang-utan, and no one thought that was at all odd. The Reader in Esoteric Studies spent so much time reading in what the Bursar referred to as ‘the smallest room’ that he was generally referred to as the Reader in The Lavatory, even on official documents.† The Bursar himself in any normal society would have been considered more unglued than a used stamp in a downpour. The Archchancellor, who regularly used the long gallery above the Great Hall for archery practice and had accidentally shot the Bursar twice, thought the whole faculty was as crazy as loons, whatever a loon was. ‘Not enough fresh air,’ he’d say. ‘Too much sittin’ around indoors. Rots the brain.’ More often he’d say, ‘Duck!’

  *

  Leonard of Quirm: skilled artist and certified genius with a mind that wandered so much it came back with souvenirs.

  Leonard’s books were full of sketches - of kittens, of the way water flows, of the wives of influential Ankh-Morporkian merchants whose portraits had provided his means of making a living. But Leonard had been a genius and was deeply sensitive to the wonders of the world, so the margins were full of detailed doodles of whatever was on his mind at that moment - vast water-powered engines for bringing down city walls on the heads of the enemy, new types of siege guns for pumping flaming oil over the enemy, gunpowder rockets that showered the enemy with burning phosphorus, and other manufactures of the Age of Reason.

  *

  ‘Proper footwear for a wizard is pointy shoes or good stout boots,’ said Ridcully. ‘When one’s footwear turns creepy, something’s amiss.’

  ‘It’s crêpe,’ said the Dean. ‘It’s got a little pointy thingy over the—’

  Ridcully breathed heavily. ‘When your boots change by themselves—’ he growled.

  ‘There’s magic afoot?’

  *

  Susan … it wasn’t a good name, was it? It wasn’t a truly bad name, it wasn’t like poor Iodine in the fourth form, or Nigella, a name which means ‘oops, we wanted a boy’. But it was dull. Susan. Sue. Good old Sue. It was a name that made sandwiches, kept its head in difficult circumstances and could reliably look after other people’s children.

  It was a name used by no queens or goddesses anywhere.

  And you couldn’t do much even with the spelling. You could turn it into Suzi, and it sounded as though you danced on tables for a living. You could put in a Z and a couple of Ns and an E, but it still looked like a name with extensions built on. It was as bad as Sara, a name that cried out for a prosthetic H.

  Dwarfs respected learning, provided they didn’t have to experience it.

  The Patrician leaned back in an attitude that suggested attentive listening. He was extremely good at listening. He created a kind of mental suction. People told him things just to avoid the silence.

  *

  ‘mumblemumblemumble,’ said the Dean defiantly, a rebel without a pause.

  *

  Chrysoprase had been a very quick learner when he arrived in Ankh-Morpork. He began with an important lesson: hitting people was thuggery. Paying other people to do the hitting on your behalf was good business.

  *

  There is something very sad about an empty dressing room. It’s like a discarded pair of underpants, which it resembles in a number of respects. It’s seen a lot of activity. It may even have witnessed excitement and a whole gamut of human passions. And now there’s nothing much left but a faint smell.

  *

  Foul Ole Ron was a physical schizophrenic. There was Foul Ole Ron, and there was the smell of Foul Ole Ron, which had obviously developed over the years to such an extent that it had a distinct personality. Anyone could have a smell that lingered long after they’d gone somewhere else, but the smell of Foul Ole Ron could actually arrive somewhere several minutes before he did, in order to spread out and get comfortable before he arrived. It had evolved into something so striking that it was no longer perceived with the nose, which shut down instantly in self-defence; people could tell that Foul Ole Ron was approaching by the way their ear wax started to melt.

  *

  ‘Ah, Drumknott,’ said Lord Vetinari, ‘just go and tell the head of the Musicians’ Guild he wants a word with me, will you?’

  *

  Glod the dwarf looked up at a blank wall.

  ‘I knew it!’ he said. ‘Didn’t I say? Magic! How many times have we heard this story? There’s a mysterious shop no one’s ever seen before, and someone goes in and buys some rusty old curio, and it turns out to—’

  ‘Glod—’

  ‘—be some kind of talisman or a bottle full of genie, and then when there’s trouble they go back and the shop—’

  ‘Glod—?’

  ‘—has mysteriously disappeared and gone back to whatever dimension it came from— yes, what is it?’

  ‘You’re on the wrong side of the road. It’s over here.’

  *

  Senior wizards developed a distinctive 50” waist, 25” leg shape that suggested someone who sat on a wall and required royal assistance to be put together again.

  *

  The Patrician was a pragmatist. He never tried to fix things that worked. Things that didn’t work, however, got broken.

  *

  The question seldom addressed is where Medusa had snakes. Underarm hair is an even more embarrassing problem when it keeps biting the top of the deodorant bottle.

  *

  According to rural legend - at least in those areas where pigs are a vital part of the household economy - the Hogfather is a winter myth figure who, on Hogswatchnight, gallops from house to house on a crude sledge drawn by four tusked wild boars to deliv
er presents of sausages, black puddings, pork scratchings and ham to all children who have been good. He says ‘Ho ho ho’ a lot. Children who have been bad get a bag full of bloody bones (it’s these little details which tell you it’s a tale for the little folk). There is a song about him. It begins: You’d Better Watch Out.. .

  The Hogfather is said to have originated in the legend of a local king who, one winter’s night, happened to be passing, or so he said, the home of three young women and heard them sobbing because they had no food to celebrate the midwinter feast. He took pity on them and threw a packet of sausages through the window.†

  *

  Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats - and then people were suddenly queuing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: ‘Tax the rat farms.’

  Old shoes always turn up in the bottom of every wardrobe.

  If a mermaid had a wardrobe old shoes would turn up in the bottom of it.

  † The Reader had a theory that all the really good books in any building - at least, all the really funny ones - gravitate to a pile in the privy but no one ever has time to read all of them, or even knows how they came to be there. X The ones with cartoons about cows and dogs. And captions like: ‘As soon as he saw the duck, Elmer knew it was going to be a bad day.’

  † Badly concussing one of them, but there’s no point in spoiling a good legend.

  MIGHTY battles! Revolution! Death! War! (and his sons Terror and Panic, and daughter Glancy).

  The oldest and most inscrutable empire on the Discworld is in turmoil, brought about by the revolutionary treatise What I Did On My Holidays. Workers are uniting, with nothing to lose but their water buffaloes. War (and Clancy) are spreading throughout the ancient cities.

  And all that stands in the way of terrible doom for everyone is:

  Rincewind the Wizzard, who can’t even spell the word ‘wizard’…

  Cohen the barbarian hero, five foot tall in his surgical sandals, who has a lifetime’s experience of not dying…

  … and a very special butterfly.

  It was, as always, a matter of protocol …

  Lord Vetinari, as supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, could in theory summon the Archchancellor of Unseen University to his presence and, indeed, have him executed if he failed to obey.

  On the other hand Mustrum Ridcully, as head of the college of wizards, had made it clear in polite but firm ways that he could turn him into a small amphibian and, indeed, start jumping around the room on a pogo stick.

  Alcohol bridged the diplomatic gap nicely. Sometimes Lord Vetinari invited the Archchancellor to the Palace for a convivial drink. And of course the Archchancellor went, because it would be bad manners not to. And everyone understood the position, and everyone was on their best behaviour, and thus civil unrest and slime on the carpet were averted.

  *

  Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.

  The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of a tradition. Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no one attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued that lectures had taken place in essence, so that was all right, too.

  And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

  *

  ‘Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes,’ said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to.

  *

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. ‘Not that. That’s meddling with things you don’t understand.’

  ‘Well we are wizards,’ said Ridcully. ‘We’re supposed to meddle with things we don’t understand. If we hung around waitin’ till we understood things we’d never get anything done.’

  *

  Lord Hong had risen to the leadership of one of the most influential families in the Empire by relentless application, total focusing of his mental powers, and six well-executed deaths. The last one had been that of his father, who’d died happy in the knowledge that his son was maintaining an old family tradition. The senior families venerated their ancestors, and saw no harm in prematurely adding to their number.

  *

  ‘Comrades, we must strike at the very heart of the rottenness. We must storm the Winter Palace!’ ‘Excuse me, but it is June.’ ‘Then we can storm the Summer Palace!’

  *

  Lord Hong was playing chess, against himself. It was the only way he could find an opponent of his calibre but, currently, things were stalemated because both sides were adopting a defensive strategy which was, admittedly, brilliant.

  *

  There was this to be said about Cohen. If there was no reason for him to kill you, such as you having any large amount of treasure or being between him and somewhere he wanted to get to, then he was good company.

  *

  ‘You know their big dish down on the coast?’ [said Cohen.]

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pig’s ear soup. Now, what’s that tell you about a place, eh?’

  Rincewind shrugged. ‘Very provident people?’

  ‘Some other bugger pinches the pig … There’s men here who can push a wheelbarrow for thirty miles on a bowl of millet with a bit of scum in it. What does that tell you? It tells me someone’s porking all the beef

  *

  Self-doubt was not something regularly entertained within the Cohen cranium. When you’re trying to carry a struggling temple maiden and a sack of looted temple goods in one hand and fight off half a dozen angry priests with the other there is little time for reflection. Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like ‘What is my purpose in life?’ very quickly lacked both.

  *

  Cohen’s father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a lad, and explained to him the hero’s creed and told him that there was no greater joy than to die in battle.

  Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime’s experience had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the other bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your horse.

  *

  ‘We are a travelling theatre,’ she said. ‘It is convenient. Noh actors are allowed to move around.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’ said Rincewind.

  ‘You do not understand. We are Noh actors.’

  ‘Oh, you weren’t too bad.’

  *

  Merchants always had money. But it seemed wrong to think of it as belonging to them; it belonged to whoever took it off them. Merchants didn’t actually own it, they were just looking after it until it was needed.

  *

  The Silver Horde were h
onest (from their specialized point of view) and decent (from their specialized point of view) and saw the world as hugely simple. They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn’t steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.

  And although they didn’t set out to give the money away to the poor, that was nevertheless what they did (if you accepted that the poor consisted of innkeepers, ladies of negotiable virtue, pickpockets, gamblers and general hangers-on), because although they would go to great lengths to steal money they then had as much control over it as a man trying to herd cats. It was there to be spent and lost. So they kept the money in circulation, always a praiseworthy thing in any society.

  *

  Eventually an officious voice said, ‘What do you have to say for yourself, miserable louse?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘Silence!’

  Ah. So it was going to be that kind of interview.

  *

  Six Beneficent Winds had the same sense of humour as a chicken casserole. True, he played the accordion for amusement, and disliked cats intensely, and had a habit of dabbing his upper lip with his napkin after his tea ceremony in a way that had made Mrs Beneficent Winds commit murder in her mind on a regular basis over the years. And he kept his money in a small leather shovel purse, and counted it out very thoroughly whenever he made a purchase, especially if there was a queue behind him.

  *

  Rincewind and Twoflower lay in their separate cells and talked about the good old days. At least, Twoflower talked about the good old days. Rincewind worked at a crack in the stone with a piece of straw, it being all he had to hand. It would take several thousand years to make any kind of impression, but that was no reason to give up …

  A little piece of mortar fell away. Not bad for ten minutes’ work, thought Rincewind. Come the next Ice Age, we’re out of here …

  *

  ‘But there are causes worth dying for,’ said Butterfly.

  ‘No, there aren’t! Because you’ve only got one life but you can pick up another five causes on any street corner!’