Terry Pratchett - Unseen Academicals

Those had been good days. Everywhere he went, men stopped work to show him how to plane and carve and mould and fettle and smelt iron and make horseshoes–but not how to fit them, because any horse went mad when he entered the stables. One once kicked the boards out of the rear wall.

That particular afternoon he went up to the library, where Miss Healstether found him a book on scent. He read it so fast that his eyes should have left trails on the paper. He certainly left a trail in the library: the twenty-two volumes of Brakefast’s Compendium of Odours were soon stacked on the long lectern, followed by Spout’s Trumpet of Equestrianism, and then, via a detour through the history section, Nutt plunged into the folklore section, with Miss Healstether pedalling after him on the mobile library steps.

She watched him with a kind of gratified awe. He’d been barely able to read when he’d arrived, but the goblin boy had set out to improve his reading as a boxer trains for a fight. And he was fighting something, but she wasn’t sure in her own mind what it was and, of course, Ladyship never explained. He would sit all night under the lamp, book of the moment in front of him, dictionary and thesaurus on either side, wringing the meaning out of every word, punching ceaselessly at his own ignorance.

When she came in the next morning there was a dictionary of Dwarfish and a copy of Postalume’s The Speech of Trolls on the lectern too.

Surely it’s not right to learn like this, she told herself. It can’t be settling properly. You can’t just fork it into your head. Learning has to be digested. You don’t just have to know, you have to comprehend.

She mentioned this to Fassel, the smith, who said, ‘Look, miss, he came up to me the other day and said he’d watched a smith before, and could he have a go? Well, you know her ladyship’s orders, so I gave him a bit of bar stock and showed him the hammer and tongs and next minute he was going at it like–well, hammer and tongs! Turned out a nice little knife, very nice indeed. He thinks about things. You can see his ugly little mush working it all out. Have you ever met a goblin before?’

‘Strange you should ask,’ she told him. ‘Our catalogue says we’ve got one of the very few copies of J. P. Bunderbell’s Five Hours and Sixteen Minutes Among the Goblins of Far Uberwald, but I can’t find it anywhere. It’s priceless.’

‘Five hours and sixteen minutes doesn’t sound very long,’ said the smith.

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But according to a lecture Mr Blunderbell gave to the Ankh-Morpork Trespassers’ Society,’ [6] Originally the Explorers’ Society until Lord Vetinari forcibly insisted that most of the places ‘discovered’ by the society’s members already had people living in them, who were already trying to sell snakes to the newcomers. said Miss Healstether, ‘it was about five hours too long. He said they ranged in size from unpleasantly large to disgustingly small, had about the same level of culture as yogurt and spent their time picking their own noses and missing. A complete waste of space, he said. It caused quite a stir. Anthropologists are not supposed to write that sort of thing.’

‘And young Nutt is one of them?’

‘Yes, that puzzled me, too. Did you see him yesterday? There’s something about him that frightens horses, so he came to the library and found some old book about the Horseman’s Word. They were a kind of secret society, which knew how to make special oils that would make horses obey them. Then he spent the afternoon down in Igor’s crypt, brewing up gods know what, and this morning he was riding a horse around the yard! It wasn’t happy, mind you, but he was winning.’

‘I’m surprised his ugly little head doesn’t explode,’ said Fassel.

‘Ha!’ Miss Healstether sounded bitter. ‘Stand by, then, because he’s discovered the Bonk School.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Not that, them. Philosophers. Well, I say philosophers, but, well… ’

‘Oh, the mucky ones,’ said Fassel cheerfully.

‘I wouldn’t say mucky,’ said Miss Healstether, and this was true. A ladylike librarian would not employ that word in the presence of a smith, especially one who was grinning. ‘Let’s say “indelicate”, shall we?’

There is not a lot of call for delicacy on an anvil, so the smith continued unabashed: ‘They are the ones who go on about what happens if ladies don’t get enough mutton, and they say cigars are—’

‘That is a fallacy!’

‘That’s right, that’s what I read.’ The smith was clearly enjoying this. ‘And Ladyship lets him read this stuff?’

‘Indeed, she very nearly insists. I can’t imagine what she’s thinking.’ Or him, come to that, she thought to herself.

There was a limit to how many candles he should make, Trev had told Nutt. It looked bad if he made too many, Trev explained. The pointy hats might decide that they didn’t need all the people. That made sense to Nutt. What would No Face and Concrete and Weepy Mukko do? They would have nowhere else to go. They had to live in a simple world; they too easily got knocked down by life in this one.

He’d tried wandering around the other cellars, but there was nothing much happening at night, and people gave him funny looks. Ladyship did not rule here. But wizards are a messy lot and nobody tidied up much and lived to tell the tale, so all sorts of old storerooms and junk-filled workshops became his for the use of. And there was so much for a lad with keen night vision to find. He had already seen some luminous spoon ants carrying a fork, and, to his surprise, the forgotten mazes were home to that very rare indoorovore, the Uncommon Sock Eater. There were some things living up in the pipes, too, which periodically murmured, ‘Awk! Awk!’ Who knew what strange monsters made their home here?

He cleaned the pie plates very carefully indeed. Glenda had been kind to him. He must show that he was kind, too. It was important to be kind. And he knew where to find some acid.

Lord Vetinari’s personal secretary stepped into the Oblong Office with barely a disturbance in the air. His lordship glanced up. ‘Ah, Drumknott. I think I shall have to write to the Times again. I am certain that one down, six across and nine down appeared in that same combination three months ago. On a Friday, I believe.’ He dropped the crossword page on to the desk with a look of disdain. ‘So much for a Free Press.’

‘Well done, my lord. The Archchancellor has just entered the palace.’

Vetinari smiled. ‘He must have looked at the calendar at last. Thank goodness they have Ponder Stibbons. Show him straight in after the customary wait.’

Five minutes later, Mustrum Ridcully was ushered in.

‘Archchancellor! To what urgent matter do I owe this visit? Our usual meeting is not until the day after tomorrow, I believe.’

‘Er, yes,’ said Ridcully. As he sat down, a very large sherry was placed in front of him [7] There are those who say that sherry should not be drunk early in the morning. They are wrong. . ‘Well, Havelock, the fact of the matter is—’

‘But it is in fact quite providential that you have arrived just now,’ Vetinari went on, ignoring him, ‘because a problem has arisen on which I would like your advice.’

‘Oh? Really?’

‘Yes, indeed. It concerns this wretched game called foot-the-ball… ’

‘It does?’

The glass, now in Ridcully’s hand, trembled not a fraction. He’d held his job for a long time, right back to the days when a wizard who blinked died.

‘One has to move with the times, of course,’ said the Patrician, shaking his head.

‘We tend not to, over the road,’ said Ridcully. ‘It only encourages them.’