The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld Read online

  *

  Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.

  *

  ‘But,’ Smith said, ‘if it’s wizard magic she’s got, learning witchery won’t be any good, will it? You said they’re different.’

  ‘They’re both magic. If you can’t learn to ride an elephant, you can at least learn to ride a horse.’

  ‘What’s an elephant?’

  ‘A kind of badger,’ said Granny. She hadn’t maintained forest-credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance.

  *

  Granny grinned. ‘That’s one form of magic, of course.’

  ‘What, just knowing things?’

  ‘Knowing things that other people don’t know.’

  *

  ‘Hoki’s a nature god,’ Granny said. ‘Sometimes he manifests himself as an oak tree, or half a man and half a goat, but mainly I see him in his aspect as a bloody nuisance.’

  *

  A boxful of marzipan ducks on a nearby stall came to life and whirred past the stallholder to land, quacking happily, in the river (where, by dawn, they had all melted: that’s natural selection for you).

  No one can out-stare a witch, ’cept a goat, of course.

  Granny meanwhile, was two streets away. She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn’t.

  *

  He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays andbits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day.

  *

  A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.

  If women were as good as men they’d be a lot better!

  The air around them reeked of incense and grain and spices and beer, but mainly of the sort of smell that was caused by a high water-table, thousands of people, and a robust approach to drainage.

  *

  The Shades: an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never enquired about one another’s business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet.

  *

  The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbours.

  *

  At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colours are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colours always smell slightly of boiled cabbage - even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.

  *

  It wasn’t that Granny could make herself invisible, it was just that she had this talent for being able to fade into the foreground so that she wasn’t noticed.

  *

  Books tend to react with one another, creating randomized magic with a mind of its own …

  One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he had resisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orang-utan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from. Anyway, long arms and prehensile feet were ideal for dealing with high shelves.

  *

  ‘You’re wizards!’ Esk screamed. ‘Bloody well wizz!’

  *

  Cutangle stood with legs planted wide apart, arms akimbo and stomach giving an impression of a beginners’ ski slope, the whole of him therefore adopting a pose usually associated with Henry VIII but with an option on Henry IX and X as well.

  *

  ‘Million-to-one chances,’ Granny said, ‘crop up nine times out often.’

  *

  She hit one, which had a face like a small family of squid, and it deflated into a pile of twitching bones and bits of fur and odd ends of tentacle, very much like a Greek meal.

  *

  But this was a storm of the Circle Sea plains, and its main ambition was to hit the ground with as much rain as possible. It was the kind of storm that suggests that the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic. The thunder and lightning hung around in the background, supplying a sort of chorus, but the rain was the star of the show. It tap-danced across the land.

  *

  ‘I was born up in the mountains. I get seasick on damp grass, if you must know.’

  *

  ‘You can’t cross the same river twice, I always say,’ [said Granny.]

  Cutangle gave this some thought.

  ‘I think you’re wrong there,’ he said. ‘I must have crossed the same river, oh, thousands of times.’

  ‘Ah, but it wasn’t the same river.’

  ‘It wasn’t?’

  ‘No.’

  Cutangle shrugged. ‘It looked like the same bloody river.’

  *

  … the endless rooftops of the University, which by comparison made Gormenghast look like a tool-shed on a railway allotment…

  *

  One thing the water couldn’t do was gurgle out of the ornamental gargoyles ranged around the roofs. This was because the gargoyles wandered off and sheltered in the attics at the first sign of rain. They held that just because you were ugly it didn’t mean you were stupid.

  *

  ‘I don’t think there’s ever been a lady wizard before,’ said Cutangle. ‘I rather think it might be against the lore.’

  DEATH comes to us all. When he came to Mort, he offered him a job. After being assured that being dead was not compulsory, Mort accepted. However, he soon found out that romantic longings did not mix easily with the responsibilities of being Death’s apprentice…

  Reannuals are plants that grow backwards in time. You sow the seeds this year and they grow last year.

  A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment.

  *

  Then there was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night when the light would come in useful.

  *

  THANK YOU, BOY, said the skull. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

  ‘Uh,’ said Mort, ‘Mortimer … sir. They call me Mort.’

  WHAT A COINCIDENCE.

  *

  ‘I suppose we were all young once.’

  Death considered this.

  No, he said, I DON’T THINK SO.

  *

  Death leaned over the saddle and looked down at the kingdoms of the world.

  I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, he said, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.

  *

  ‘Sir?’

  YES?

  ‘What’s a curry?’

  The blue fires flared deep in the eyes of Death.

  HAVE YOU EVER BITTEN A RED-HOT ICE CUBE?

  ‘No, sir,’ said Mort.

  CURRY’S LIKE THAT.

  *

  Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound.

  *

  ‘What are we going to do now?’

  BUY YOU SOME NEW CLOTHES.

  ‘These were new today’

  REALLY? IT CERTAINLY
ADDS A NEW TERROR TO POVERTY.

  *

  They turned into a wider street leading into a more affluent part of the city (the torches were closer together and the middens further apart).

  *

  Although the Death of the Discworld is, in his own words, an ANTHROPOMORPHIC personification, he long ago gave up using the traditional skeletal horses, because of the bother of having to stop all the time to wire bits back on.

  *

  Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map.

  YOU HAVEN’T HEARD OF THE BAY OF MANTE, HAVE YOU? he said.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Mort.

  FAMOUS SHIPWRECK THERE.

  ‘Was there?’

  THERE WILL BE, said Death, IF I CAN FIND THE DAMN PLACE.

  *

  Albert grunted. ‘Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?’

  Mort thought for a moment.

  ‘No,’ he said eventually, ‘what?’

  There was silence.

  Then Albert straightened up and said, ‘Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve ‘em right.’

  *

  Mort remembered the woodcut in his grandmother’s almanack, between the page on planting times and the phases of the moon section, showing Dethe thee Great Levyller Comes To Alle Menne. He’d stared at it hundreds of times when learning his letters. It wouldn’t have been half so impressive if it had been generally known that the flame-breathing horse the spectre rode was called Binky

  *

  WHY IS THERE A CHERRY ON A STICK IN THIS DRINK? … IT’S NOT AS IF IT DOES ANYTHING FOR THE FLAVOUR. WHY DOES ANYONE TAKE A PERFECTLY GOOD DRINK AND THEN PUT IN A CHERRY ON A POLE? … TAKE THESE THINGS, NOW, said Death, fingering a passing canape. I MEAN, MUSHROOMS YES, CHICKEN YES, CREAM YES, I’VE NOTHING AGAINST ANY OF THEM, BUT WHY IN THE NAME OF SANITY MINCE THEM ALL UP AND PUT THEM IN LITTLE PASTRY CASES? …

  THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. FASCINATING.

  *

  ‘He doesn’t look a bad king,’ said Mort. ‘Why would anyone want to kill him?’

  SEE THE MAN NEXT TO HIM? WITH THE LITTLE MOUSTACHE AND THE GRIN LIKE A LIZARD? … HIS COUSIN, THE DUKE OF STO HELIT. NOT THE NICEST OF PEOPLE, said Death. A HANDY MAN WITH A BOTTLE OF POISON. FIFTH IN LINE TO THE THRONE LAST YEAR, NOW SECOND IN LINE. BLT OF A SOCIAL CLIMBER, YOU MIGHT SAY.

  ‘My granny says that dying is like going to sleep,’ Mort added, a shade hopefully.

  I WOULDN’T KNOW. I HAVE DONE NEITHER.

  This part of Ankh-Morpork was known as The Shades, an inner-city area sorely in need either of governmental help or, for preference, a flamethrower. It couldn’t be called squalid because that would be stretching the word to breaking point. It was beyond squalor and out the other side, where by a sort of Einsteinian reversal it achieved a magnificent horribleness that it wore like an architectural award. It was noisy and sultry and smelled like a cowshed floor.

  *

  Even before it entered the city [the River Ankh] was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.

  *

  ‘Why do you trouble Igneous Cutwell, Holder of the Eight Keys, Traveller in the Dungeon Dimensions, Supreme Mage of—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mort, ‘are you really?’

  ‘Really what?’

  ‘Master of the thingy, Lord High Wossname of the Sacred Dungeons?’

  ‘In a figurative sense.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, it means no,’ said Cutwell.

  *

  ‘Is it possible to walk through walls?’ said Mort desperately.

  ‘Using magic?’

  ‘Um,’ said Mort, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then pick very thin walls,’ said Cutwell.

  ‘What time’s sunset around here?’

  ‘We normally manage to fit it in between night and day.’

  He felt as if he’d been shipwrecked on the Titanic but in the nick of time had been rescued. By the Lusitania.

  *

  ‘… and the princesses were beautiful as the day is long and so noble they, they could pee through a dozen mattresses—’

  ‘What?’

  Albert hesitated. ‘Something like that, anyway’

  *

  She looked around slowly and met the impertinent gaze of the doorknocker. It waggled its metal eyebrows at her and spoke indistinctly through its wrought-iron ring.

  ‘I am Princess Keli, heir to the throne of Sto Lat,’ she said haughtily … ‘And I don’t talk to door furniture.’

  ‘Fwell, I’m just a doorknocker and I can talk to fwhoever I please,’ said the gargoyle pleasantly. ‘And I can ftell you the fmaster iff having a trying day and duff fnot fwant to be disturbed. But you could ftry to use the magic word,’ it added. ‘Coming from an attractiff fwoman it works nine times out of eight.’

  ‘Magic word? What’s the magic word?’

  The knocker perceptibly sneered. ‘Haff you been taught nothing, miss?’

  She drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t really worth the effort.

  ‘I have been educated,’ she informed it with icy precision, ‘by some of the finest scholars in the land.’

  The doorknocker did not appear to be impressed.

  ‘Iff they didn’t teach you the magic word,’ it said calmly, ‘they couldn’t haff fbeen all that fine.’

  Keli reached out, grabbed the heavy ring, and pounded it on the door. The knocker leered at her.

  ‘Ftreat me rough,’ it lisped. ‘That’f the way I like it!’

  ‘You’re disgusting!’

  ‘Yeff. Ooo, that waff nife, do it again …’

  The door opened a crack. There was a shadowy glimpse of curly hair.

  ‘Madam, I said we’re cl—’

  Keli sagged.

  ‘Please help me,’ she said. ‘Please!’

  ‘See?’ said the doorknocker triumphantly. ‘Sooner or later everyone remembers the magic word!’

  *

  ‘The first thing you learn when you enroll at Unseen University, I’m afraid, is that people don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing. It’s what their minds tell them that’s important.’ …

  ‘Actually it’s not the first thing you learn when you enroll,’ he added. ‘I mean, you learn where the lavatories are and all that sort of thing before that. But after all that, it’s the first thing.’

  *

  Keli drummed her fingers on the table, or tried to. It turned out to be difficult. She stared down in vague horror.

  Cutwell hurried forward and wiped the table with his sleeve.

  ‘Sorry’ he muttered, T had treacle sandwiches for supper last night.’

  *

  You can tell from the following exchange that these two are made for each other.

  ‘I don’t want to get married to anyone yet,’ Mort added. ‘And certainly not to you, no offence meant.’

  ‘I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on the Disc,’ Ysabell said sweetly.

  At least I don’t look like I’ve been eating doughnuts in a wardrobe for years,’ he said, as they stepped out on to Death’s black lawn.

  At least I walk as if my legs only had one knee each,’ she said.

  ‘My eyes aren’t two juugly poached eggs.’

  Ysabell nodded. ‘On the other hand, my ears don’t look like something growing on a dead tree. What does juugly mean?’

  ‘You know, eggs like Albert does them.’

  ‘With the white all sticky and runny and full of slimy bits?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A good word,’ she conceded thoughtfully. ‘But my hair, I put it to you, doesn’t look like something you clean a privy with.’

  ‘Certainly but neither
does mine look like a wet hedgehog.’

  ‘Pray note that my chest does not appear to be a toast rack in a wet paper bag.’

  Mort glanced sideways at the top of Ysabell’s dress, which contained enough puppy fat for two litters of Rottweilers, and forbore to comment.

  ‘My eyebrows don’t look like a pair of mating caterpillars,’ he hazarded.

  ‘True. But my legs, I suggest, could at least stop a pig in a passageway’

  ‘Sorry—?’

  ‘They’re not bandy’ she explained.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Enough?’ she said.

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘Good. Obviously we shouldn’t get married, if only for the sake of the children.’

  *

  History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time.

  ‘Would you like a strawberry?’

  Mort glanced at the small wooden punnet in the wizard’s hands.

  ‘In mid-winter?’

  ‘Actually they’re sprouts with a dash of enchantment.’

  ‘They taste like strawberries?’

  Cutwell sighed. ‘No, like sprouts.’

  ‘I shall die nobly, like Queen Ezeriel,’ [said Keli.]

  Mort’s forehead wrinkled. History was a closed book to him.

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘She lived in Klatch and she had a lot of lovers and she sat on a snake,’ said Cutwell.

  ‘She meant to! She was crossed in love!’

  ‘All I can remember was that she used to take baths in asses’ milk. Funny thing, history,’ said Cutwell reflectively. ‘You become a queen, reign for thirty years, make laws, declare war on people and then the only thing you get remembered for is that you smelled like yoghurt and were bitten in the—’

  *

  The most famous inn on Discworld used to be called the Broken Drum (Broken Drum -You Can’t Beat It!). Renamed after a particularly bad fire.