Tomjon and Hwel watched it spilling out into the street. The door burst open and a man came through backwards, not actually touching the ground until he hit the wall on the opposite side of the street.
An enormous troll, employed by the owners to keep a measure of order in the place, came out dragging two more limp bodies which he deposited on the cobbles, kicking them once or twice in soft places.
‘I reckon they’re roistering in there, don’t you?’ said Tomjon.
‘It looks like it,’ said Hwel. He shivered. He hated taverns. People always put their drinks down on his head.
They scurried in quickly while the troll was holding one unconscious drinker up by one leg and banging his head on the cobbles in a search for concealed valuables.
Drinking in the Drum has been likened to diving in a swamp, except that in a swamp the alligators don’t pick your pockets first. Two hundred eyes watched the pair as they pushed their way through the crowd to the bar, a hundred mouths paused in the act of drinking, cursing or pleading, and ninety-nine brows crinkled with the effort of working out whether the newcomers fell into category A, people to be frightened of or B, people to frighten.
Tomjon walked through the crowd as though it was his property and, with the impetuosity of youth, rapped on the bar. Impetuosity was not a survival trait in the Mended Drum.
‘Two pints of your finest ale, landlord,’ he said, in tones so carefully judged that the barman was astonished to find himself obediently filling the first mug before the echoes had died away.
Hwel looked up. There was an extremely big man on his right, wearing the outside of several large bulls and more chains than necessary to moor a warship. A face that looked like a building site with hair on it glared down at him.
‘Bloody hell,’ it said. ‘It’s a bloody lawn ornament.’
Hwel went cold. Cosmopolitan as they were, the people of Morpork had a breezy, no-nonsense approach to the non-human races, i.e., hit them over the head with a brick and throw them in the river. This did not apply to trolls, naturally, because it is very difficult to be racially prejudiced against creatures seven feet tall who can bite through walls, at least for very long. But people three feet high were absolutely designed to be discriminated against.
The giant prodded Hwel on the top of his head.
‘Where’s your fishing rod, lawn ornament?’ he said.
The barman pushed the mugs across the puddled counter.
‘Here you are,’ he said, leering. ‘One pint. And one half pint.’
Tomjon opened his mouth to speak, but Hwel nudged him sharply in the knee. Put up with it, put up with it, slip out as soon as possible, it was the only way . . .
‘Where’s your little pointy hat, then?’ said the bearded man.
The room had gone quiet. This looked like being cabaret time.
‘I said, where’s your pointy hat, dopey?’
The barman got a grip of the blackthorn stick with nails in which lived under the counter, just in case, and said, ‘Er—’
‘I was talking to the lawn ornament here.’
The man took the dregs of his own drink and poured them carefully over the silent dwarfs head.
‘I ain’t drinking here again,’ he muttered, when even this tailed to have any effect. ‘It’s bad enough they let monkeys drink here, but pygmies—’
Now the silence in the bar took on a whole new intensity in which the sound of a stool being slowly pushed back was like the creak of doom. All eyes swivelled to the other end of the room, where sat the one drinker in the Mended Drum who came into category C.
What Tomjon had thought was an old sack hunched over the bar was extending arms and – other arms, except that they were its legs. A sad, rubbery face turned towards the speaker, its expression as melancholy as the mists of evolution. Its funny lips curled back. There was abolutely nothing funny about its teeth.
‘Er,’ said the barman again, his voice frightening even him in that terrible simian silence. ‘I don’t think you meant that, did you? Not about monkeys, eh? You didn’t really, did you?’
‘What the hell’s that?’ hissed Tomjon.
‘I think it’s an orang-utan,’ said Hwel. ‘An ape.’
‘A monkey’s a monkey,’ said the bearded man, at which several of the Drum’s more percipient customers started to edge for the door. ‘I mean, so what? But these bloody lawn ornaments—’
Hwel’s fist struck out at groin height.
Dwarfs have a reputation as fearsome fighters. Any race of three-foot tall people who favour axes and go into battle as into a championship tree-felling competition soon get talked about. But years of wielding a pen instead of a hammer had relieved Hwel’s punches of some of their stopping power, and it could have been the end of him when the big man yelled and drew his sword if a pair of delicate, leathery hands hadn’t instantly jerked the thing from his grip and, with only a small amount of effort, bent it double.[16]
When the giant growled, and turned around, an arm like a couple of broom handles strung together with elastic and covered with red fur unfolded itself in a complicated motion and smacked him across the jaw so hard that he rose several inches in the air and landed on a table.
By the time that the table had slid into another table and overturned a couple of benches there was enough impetus to start the night’s overdue brawl, especially since the big man had a few friends with him. Since no-one felt like attacking the ape, who had dreamily pulled a bottle from the shelf and smashed the bottom off on the counter, they hit whoever happened to be nearest, on general principles. This is absolutely correct etiquette for a tavern brawl.
Hwel walked under a table and dragged Tomjon, who was watching all this with interest, after him.
‘So this is roistering. I always wondered.’
‘I think perhaps it would be a good idea to leave,’ said the dwarf firmly. ‘Before there’s, you know, any trouble.’
There was a thump as someone landed on the table above them, and a tinkle of broken glass.
‘Is it real roistering, do you suppose, or merely rollicking?’ said Tomjon, grinning.
‘It’s going to be bloody murder in a minute, my lad!’
Tomjon nodded, and crawled back out into the fray. Hwel heard him thump on the bar counter with something and call for silence.
Hwel put his arms over his head in panic.
‘I didn’t mean—’ he began.
In fact calling for silence was a sufficiently rare event in the middle of a tavern brawl that silence was what Tomjon got. And silence was what he filled.
Hwel started as he heard the boy’s voice ring out, full of confidence and absolutely first-class projection.
‘Brothers! And yet may I call all men brother, for on this night—’
The dwarf craned up to see Tomjon standing on a chair, one hand raised in the prescribed declamatory fashion. Around him men were frozen in the act of giving one another a right seeing-to, their faces turned to his.
Down at tabletop height Hwel’s lips moved in perfect synchronisation with the words as Tomjon went through the familiar speech. He risked another look.
The fighters straightened up, pulled themselves together, adjusted the hang of their tunics, glanced apologetically at one another. Many of them were in fact standing to attention.
Even Hwel felt a fizz in his blood, and he’d written those words. He’d slaved half a night over them, years ago, when Vitoller had declared that they needed another five minutes in Act III of The King of Ankh.
‘Scribble us something with a bit of spirit in it,’ he’d said. ‘A bit of zip and sizzle, y’know. Something to summon up the blood and put a bit of backbone in our friends in the ha’penny seats. And just long enough to give us time to change the set.’
He’d been a bit ashamed of that play at the time. The famous Battle of Morpork, he strongly suspected, had consisted of about two thousand men lost in a swamp on a cold, wet day, hacking one another into oblivion with rusty swords. What would the last King of Ankh have said to a pack of ragged men who knew they were outnumbered, outflanked and outgeneralled? Something with bite, something with edge, something like a drink of brandy to a dying man; no logic, no explanation, just words that would reach right down through a tired man’s brain and pull him to his feet by his testicles.
Now he was seeing its effect.
He began to think the walls had fallen away, and there was a cold mist blowing over the marshes, its choking silence broken only by the impatient cries of the carrion birds . . .