The king tried to hunker down, and found he was sinking slightly into the floor. He pulled himself together and drifted upwards. Once a man allowed himself to go native in the ethereal world there would be no hope for him, he felt.
Only close relatives and the psychically inclined, Death had said. There weren’t many of either in the castle. The duke qualified under the first heading, but his relentless self-interest made him about as psychically useful as a carrot. As for the rest, only the cook and the Fool seemed to qualify, but the cook spent a lot of his time weeping in the pantry because he wasn’t being allowed to roast anything more bloody than a parsnip and the Fool was already such a bundle of nerves that Verence had given up his attempts to get through.
A witch, now. If a witch wasn’t psychically inclined, then he, King Verence, was a puff of wind. He had to get a witch into the castle. And then . . .
He’d got a plan. In fact, it was more than that; it was a Plan. He spent months over it. He hadn’t got anything else to do, except think. Death had been right about that. All that ghosts had were thoughts, and although thoughts in general had always been alien to the king the absence of any body to distract him with its assorted humours had actually given him the chance to savour the joys of cerebration. He’d never had a Plan before, or at least one that went much further than ‘Let’s find something and kill it’. And here, sitting in front of him washing itself, was the key.
‘Here, pussy,’ he ventured. Greebo gave him a penetrating yellow stare.
‘Cat,’ the king amended hastily, and backed away, beckoning. For a moment it seemed that the cat wouldn’t follow and then, to his relief, Greebo stood up, yawned, and padded towards him. Greebo didn’t often see ghosts, and was vaguely interested in this tall, bearded man with the see-through body.
The king led him along a dusty side corridor and towards a lumber room crammed with crumbling tapestries and portraits of long-dead kings. Greebo examined it critically, and then sat down in the middle of the dusty floor, looking at the king expectantly.
‘There’s plenty of mice and things in here, d’you see,’ said Verence. ‘And the rain blows in through the broken window. Plus there’s all these tapestries to sleep on.’
‘Sorry,’ the king added, and turned to the door.
This was what he had been working on all these months. When he was alive he had always taken a lot of care of his body, and since being dead he had taken care to preserve its shape. It was too easy to let yourself go and become all fuzzy around the edges; there were ghosts in the castle who were mere pale blobs. But Verence had wielded iron self-control and exercised – well, had thought hard about exercise – and fairly bulged with spectral muscles. Months of pumping ectoplasm had left him in better shape than he had ever been, apart from being dead.
Then he’d started out small, with dust motes. The first one had nearly killed him[9], but he’d persevered and progressed to sand grains, then whole dried peas; he still didn’t dare venture into the kitchens, but he had amused himself by oversalting Felmet’s food a pinch at a time until he pulled himself together and told himself that poisoning wasn’t honourable, even against vermin.
Now he leaned all his weight on the door, and with every microgramme of his being forced himself to become as heavy as possible. The sweat of auto-suggestion dripped off his nose and vanished before it hit the floor. Greebo watched with interest as ghostly muscles moved on the king’s arms like footballs mating.
The door began to move, creaked, then accelerated and hit the doorway with a thump. The latch clicked into place.
It bloody well had to work now, Verence told himself. He’d never be able to lift the latch by himself. But a witch would certainly come looking for her cat – wouldn’t she?
In the hills beyond the castle the Fool lay on his stomach and stared into the depths of a little lake. A couple of trout stared back at him.
Somewhere on the Disc, reason told him, there must be someone more miserable than he was. He wondered who it was.
He hadn’t asked to be a Fool, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had, because he couldn’t recall anyone in his family ever listening to anything he said after Dad ran away.
Certainly not Grandad. His earliest memory was of Grandad standing over him making him repeat the jokes by rote, and hammering home every punchline with his belt; it was thick leather, and the fact that it had bells on didn’t improve things much.
Grandad was credited with seven official new jokes. He’d won the honorary cap and bells of the Grand Prix des Idiots Blithering at Ankh-Morpork four years in a row, which no-one else had ever done, and presumably they made him the funniest man who ever lived. He had worked hard at it, you had to give him that.
The Fool recalled with a shudder how, at the age of six.
he’d timidly approached the old man after supper with a joke he’d made up. It was about a duck.
It had earned him the biggest thrashing of his life, which even then must have presented the old joker with a bit of a challenge.
‘You will learn, my lad—’ he recalled, with every sentence punctuated by jingling cracks – ‘that there is nothing more serious than jesting. From now on you will never—’ the old man paused to change hands – ‘never, never, ever utter a joke that has not been approved by the Guild. Who are you to decide what is amusing? Marry, let the untutored giggle at unskilled banter; it is the laughter of the ignorant. Never. Never. Never let me catch you joculating again.’
After that he’d gone back to learning the three hundred and eighty-three Guild-approved jokes, which was bad enough, and the glossary, which was a lot bigger and much worse.
And then he’d been sent to Ankh, and there, in the bare, severe rooms, he’d found there were books other than the great heavy brass-bound Monster Fun Book. There was a whole circular world out there, full of weird places and people doing interesting things, like . . .
Singing. He could hear singing.
He raised his head cautiously, and jumped at the tinkle of the bells on his cap. He gripped the hated things hurriedly.
The singing went on. The Fool peeped cautiously through the drift of meadowsweet that was providing him with perfect concealment.
The singing wasn’t particularly good. The only word the singer appeared to know was ‘la’, but she was making it work hard. The general tune gave the impression that the singer believed that people were supposed to sing ‘lalala’ in certain circumstances, and was determined to do what the world expected of her.
The Fool risked raising his head a little further, and saw Magrat for the first time.
She had stopped dancing rather self-consciously through the narrow meadow and was trying to plait some daisies in her hair, without much success.
The Fool held his breath. On long nights on the hard flagstones he had dreamed of women like her. Although, if he really thought about it, not much like her; they were better endowed around the chest, their noses weren’t so red and pointed, and their hair tended to flow more. But the Fool’s libido was bright enough to tell the difference between the impossible and the conceivably attainable, and hurriedly cut in some filter circuits.
Magrat was picking flowers and talking to them. The Fool strained to hear.
‘Here’s Woolly Fellwort,’ she said. ‘And Treacle Worm-seed, which is for inflammation of the ears . . .’
Even Nanny Ogg, who took a fairly cheerful view of the world, would have been hard put to say anything complimentary about Magrat’s voice. But it fell on the Fool’s ears like blossom.
‘. . . and Five-leaved False Mandrake, sovereign against fluxes of the bladder. Ah, and here’s Old Man’s Frogbit. That’s for constipation.’
The Fool stood up sheepishly, in a carillon of jingles. To Magrat it was as if the meadow, hitherto supporting nothing more hazardous than clouds of pale blue butterflies and a few self-employed bumblebees, had sprouted a large red-and-yellow demon.
It was opening and shutting its mouth. It had three menacing horns.
An urgent voice at the back of her mind said: You should run away now, like a timid gazelle; this is the accepted action in these circumstances.
Common sense intervened. In her most optimistic moments Magrat would not have compared herself to a gazelle, timid or otherwise. Besides, it added, the basic snag about running away like a timid gazelle was that in all probability she would easily outdistance him.