thought it was possible to have so much fun in his own university.
‘Right, ‘ he said. ‘Let’s get those heaps !’
‘Yo!’
‘Yo!’
‘Yo!’
‘Yo-yo.’
Ridcully sighed. ‘Bursar?’
‘Yes, Archchancellor?’
‘Just try to understand, all right?’
Clouds piled up over the mountains. Bill Door strode up and down the first field, using one of the ordinary farm scythes; the sharpest one had been temporarily stored at the back of the barn, in case it was blunted by air convection. Some of Miss Flitworth’s tenants followed behind him, binding the sheaves and stacking them. Miss Flitworth had never employed more than one man full time, Bill Door learned; she bought in other help as she needed it, to save pennies.
‘Never seen a man cut corn with a scythe before,’ said one of them.‘It’s a sickle job.’
They stopped for lunch. and ate it under the hedge.
Bill Door had never paid a great deal of attention to the names and faces of people, beyond that necessary for business. Corn stretched over the hillside; it was made up of individual stalks. and to the eye of one stalk another stalk might be quite an impressive stalk, with a dozen amusing and distinctive little mannerisms that set it apart from all other stalks. But to the reaper man, all stalks start off as … just stalks.
Now he was beginning to recognise the little differences.
There was William Spigot and Gabby Wheels and Duke Bottomley. All old men, as far as Bill Door could judge, with skins like leather. There were young men and women in the village, but at a certain age they seemed to flip straight over to being old, without passing through any intermediate stage. And then they stayed old for a long time. Miss Flitworth had said that before they could start a graveyard in
these parts they’d had to hit someone over the head with the shovel.
William Spigot was the one that sang when he worked, breaking into that long nasal whine which meant that folk song was about to be perpetrated. Gabby Wheels never said anything; this, Spigot had said. was why he had been called Gabby. Bill Door had failed to understand the logic of this, although it seemed transparent to the others.
And Duke Bottomley had been named by parents with upwardly-mobile if rather simplistic ideas about class structure; his brothers were Squire, Earl and King.
Now they sat in a row under the hedge, putting off the moment when they’d need to start work again. A glugging noise came from the end of the row.
‘It’s not been a bad old summer, then,’ said Spigot. ‘And good harvest weather for a change.’
‘Ah … many a slip ‘twixt dress and drawers,’ said Duke.‘Last night I saw a spider spinnin’ its web backwards. That’s a sure sign there’s going to be a dretful storm.’
‘Don’t see how spiders know things like that.’
Gabby Wheels passed a big earthenware jug to Bill Door. Something sloshed.
WHAT IS THIS?
‘Apple juice,’ said Spigot. The others laughed.
AH, said Bill Door. STRONG DISTILLED SPIRITS, GIVEN HUMOROUSLY TO THE UNSUSPECTING NEWCOMER, THUS TO AFFORD SIMPLE AMUSEMENT WHEN HE BECOMES INADVERTENTLY INEBRIATED.
‘Cor,’ said Spigot. Bill Door took a long swig.
‘And I saw swallows flying low,’ said Duke.‘And partridges are heading for the woods. And there’s a lot of big snails about. And -‘
‘I don’t reckon any of them buggers knows the first thing about meteorology,’ said Spigot. ‘l reckon you goes around telling ‘em. Eh, lads? Big storm comin’, Mr Spider, so get on and do somethin’ folklorish.’
Bill Door took another drink.
WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE BLACKSMITH IN THE VILLAGE?
Spigot nodded. ‘That’s Ned Simnel, down by the green. O’course, he’s real busy about now, what with the harvest and all.’
I HAVE SOME WORK FOR HIM.
Bill Door got up and strode away towards the gate.
He stopped. YES?
‘You can leave the brandy behind, then.’
The village forge was dark and stifling in the heat. But Bill Door had very good eyesight.
Something moved among a complicated heap of metal. It turned out to be the lower half of a man. His upper body was somewhere in the machinery, from which came the occasional grunt.
A hand shot out as Bill Door approached.
‘Right. Give me three-eighths Gripley.’
Bill looked around. A variety of tools were strewn around the forge.‘Come on, come on,’ said a voice from somewhere in the machine.
Bill Door selected a piece of shaped metal at random, and placed it in the hand. It was drawn inside. There was metallic noise, and a grunt.
‘I said a Gripley. This isn’t a’ – there was the scringeing noise of a piece of metal giving way – ‘my thumb, my thumb, you made me’ – there was a clang – ‘aargh. That was my head. Now look what you’ve made me do. And the ratchet spring’s snapped off the trunnion armature again, do you realise?’
NO. I AM SORRY.
There was a pause.
‘Is that you, young Egbert?’
NO. IT IS ME, OLD BILL DOOR.
There was a series of thumps and twanging noises as the top half of the human extricated itself from the machinery, and turned out to belong to a young man with black curly hair, a black face, black shirt, and black apron. He wiped a
cloth across his face, leaving a pink smear, and blinked the sweat out of his eyes.
‘Who’re you?’
GOOD OLD BILL DOOR? WORKING FOR MISS FLITWORTH?
‘Oh, yes. The man in the fire? Hero of the hour, I heard. Put it there.’
He extended a black hand. Bill Door looked at it blankly.
I AM SORRY. I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHAT A THREE-EIGHTHS GRIPLEY IS.
‘I mean your hand, Mr Door.’
Bill Door hesitated, and then put his hand in the young man’s palm. The oil-rimmed eyes glazed for a moment. as the brain overruled the sense of touch, and then the smith smiled.
‘The name’s Simnel. What do you think, eh?’
IT’S A GOOD NAME.
‘No, I mean the machine. Pretty ingenious, eh?’
Bill Door ?regiy~,ded? it with polite incomprehension. It looked, at first sight, like a portable windmill that had been attacked by an enormous insect, and at second sight like a touring torture chamber for an Inquisition that wanted to get out and about a bit and enjoy the fresh air. Mysterious jointed arms stuck out at various angles. There were belts, and long springs. The whole thing was mounted on spiked metal wheels.
‘Of course, you’re not seeing it at its best when it’s standing still,’ said Simnel.‘It needs a horse to pull it. At the moment, anyway. I’ve got one or two rather radical ideas in that direction.’ he added dreamily.
IT’S A DEVICE OF SOME SORT?
Simnel looked mildly affronted.
‘I prefer the term machine,’ he said.‘It will revolutionise farming methods, and drag them kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat. My folk have had this forge for three hundred years, but Ned Simnel doesn’t intend to spend the rest of his life nailing bits of bent metal on to horses, I call tell you.’
Bill looked at him blankly. Then he bent down and
glanced under the machine. A dozen sickles were bolted to a big horizontal wheel. Ingenious linkages took power from the wheels, via a selection of pulleys, to a whirligig arrangement of metal arms.
He began to experience a horrible feeling about the thing in front of him, but he asked anyway.
‘Well, the heart of it all is this cam shaft,’ said Simnel, gratified at the interest. ‘The power comes up via the pulley here, and the cams move the swaging arms – that’s these things – and the combing gate, which is operated by the reciprocating mechanism, comes down just as the gripping shutter drops in this slot here, and of course at the same time the two brass balls go round and round and the flatting sheets carry off the straw while the grain drops with the aid of gravity down the riffling screw and into the hopper. Simple.’
AND THE THREE-EIGHTHS GRIPLEY?
‘Good job you reminded me.’ Simnel fished around among the debris on the floor, picked up a small knurled object, and screwed it on to a protruding piece of the mechanism.‘Very important job. It stops the elliptical cam gradually sliding up the beam shaft and catching on the flange rebate, with disastrous results as you can no doubt imagine.’
Simnel stood back and wiped his hands on a cloth, making them slightly more oily.
‘I’m calling it the Combination Harvester,’ he said.
Bill Door felt very old. In fact he was very old. But he’d never felt it as much as this. Somewhere in the shadow of his soul he felt he knew, without the blacksmith explaining, what it was that the Combination Harvester was supposed to do.
OH.