‘Sorry? I went through all that for a load of hay?’
Mad waggled his eyebrows conspiratorially. ‘And two sacks of oats in the secret compartment, mate.’ He slapped Rincewind on the back. ‘An’ to think I thought yew was some back-stabbin’ drongo I ort to toss over the rail! Turns out you’re as mad as me!’
There are times when it does not pay to declare one’s sanity, and Rincewind realized that he’d be mad to do so now. Anyway, he could talk to kangaroos and find cheese and chutney rolls in the desert. There were times when you had to look wobbly facts in the face.
‘Mental as anything,’ he said, with what he hoped was disarming modesty.
‘Good bloke! Let’s load up their weapons and grub and get goin’!’
‘What do we want their weapons for?’
‘Fetch a good price.’
‘And what about the bodies?’
‘Nah, worthless.’
While Mad was nailing salvaged bits of scrap metal to his cart, Rincewind sidled over to the green and yellow corpse . . . and, oh yes, large black areas now . . . and, using a stick, levered his hat from its head.
A small eight-legged ball of angry black fur sprang out and locked its fangs on to the stick, which began to smoulder. He put it down very carefully, grabbed the hat and ran.
Ponder sighed.
‘I wasn’t questioning your authority, Arch-chancellor,’ he said. ‘I just feel that if a huge monster evolves into a chicken right in front of you, the considered response should not be to eat the chicken.’
The Archchancellor licked his fingers. ‘What would you have done, then?’ he said.
‘Well . . . studied it,’ said Ponder.
‘So did we. Post-mortem examination,’ said the Dean.
‘Minutely,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, happily. He belched. ‘Pardon me, Mrs Whitlow. Will you have a little more br . . .’ He caught Ridcully’s steely glance, and went on, ‘. . . front part of the chicken, Mrs Whitlow?’
‘And we’ve discovered that it’ll no longer be any menace to visiting wizards,’ said Ridcully.
‘It’s just that I think proper research should involve more than having a look to see if you can find a sage-and-onion bush,’ said Ponder. ‘You saw how quickly it changed, didn’t you?’
‘Well?’ said the Dean.
That can’t be natural.’
‘You’re the one who says things naturally change into other things, Mister Stibbons.’
‘But not that fast!’
‘Have you ever seen any of this evolution happening?’
‘Well, of course not, no one has ever—’
‘There you are, then,’ said Ridcully, in a closing-the-argument voice. That might be the normal speed. As I said, it makes perfect sense. There’s no point in turning into a bird a bit at a time, is there? A feather here, a beak there . . . You’d see some damn stupid creatures wandering around, eh?’ The other wizards laughed. ‘Our monster probably simply thought, Oh, there’s too many of them, perhaps I’d better turn into something they’d like.’
‘Enjoy,’ said the Dean.
‘Sensible survival strategy,’ said Ridcully. ‘Up to a point.’
Ponder rolled his eyes. These things always sounded fine when he worked them out in his head. He’d read some of the old books, and sit and think for ages, and a little theory would put itself together in his head in a row of little shiny blocks, and then when he let it out it’d run straight into the Faculty and one of them, one of them, would always ask some bloody stupid question which he couldn’t quite answer at the moment. How could you ever make any progress against minds like that? If some god somewhere had said, ‘Let there be light,’ they’d be the ones to say things like ‘Why? The darkness has always been good enough for us.’
Old men, that was the trouble. Ponder was not totally enthusiastic about the old traditions, because he was well into his twenties and in a moderately important position and therefore, to some of the mere striplings in the University, a target. Or would have been, if they weren’t getting that boiled eyeball feeling by sitting up all night tinkering with Hex.
He wasn’t interested in promotion, anyway. He’d just be happy if people listened for five minutes, instead of saying, ‘Well done, Mister Stibbons, but we tried that once and it doesn’t work,’ or, ‘We probably haven’t got the funding,’ or, worst of all, ‘You don’t get proper fill-in-nouns these days – remember old “nickname” ancient-wizard-who-died-fifty-years-ago-who-Ponder-wouldn’t-possibly-be-able-to-remember? Now there was a chap who knew his fill-in-nouns.’
Above Ponder, he felt, were a lot of dead men’s shoes. And they had living men’s feet in them, and were stamping down hard.
They never bothered to learn anything, they never bothered to remember anything apart from how much better things used to be, they bickered like a lot of children and the only one who ever said anything sensible said it in orang-utan.
He prodded the fire viciously.
The wizards had made Mrs Whitlow a polite crude hut out of branches and big woven leaves. She bade them goodnight and demurely pulled some leaves across the entrance behind her.
‘A very respectable lady, Mrs Whitlow,’ said Ridcully. ‘I think I’ll turn in myself, too.’
There were already one or two sets of snores building up around the fire.
‘I think someone ought to stand guard,’ said Ponder.
‘Good man,’ muttered Ridcully, turning over.
Ponder gritted his teeth and turned to the Librarian, who was temporarily back in the land of the bipedal and was sitting gloomily wrapped in a blanket.
‘At least I expect this is a home from home for you, eh, sir?’
The Librarian shook his head.
‘Would you be interested in hearing what else is odd about this place?’ said Ponder.
‘Ook?’
‘The driftwood. No one listens to me, but it’s important. We must have dragged loads of stuff for the fire, and it’s all natural timber, do you notice that? No bits of plank, no old crates, no tatty old sandals. Just . . . ordinary wood.’
‘Ook?’
‘That means we must be a long way off the normal shipping . . . oh, no . . . don’t . . .’
The Librarian wrinkled his nose desperately.
‘Quickly! Concentrate on having arms and legs! I mean living ones!’
The Librarian nodded miserably, and sneezed.
‘Awk?’ he said, when his shape had settled down again.
‘Well,’ said Ponder sadly. ‘At least you’re animate. Possibly rather large for a penguin, though. I think it’s your body’s survival strategy. It keeps trying to find a stable shape that works.’
‘Awk?’
‘Funny it can’t seem to do anything about the red hair . . .’
The Librarian glared at him, shuffled a little way along the beach, and sagged into a heap.
Ponder looked around the fire. He seemed to be the man on watch, if only because no one else intended to do it. Well, wasn’t that a surprise.
Things twittered in the trees. Phosphorescence glimmered on the sea. The stars were coming out.
He looked up at the stars. At least you could depend—
And, suddenly, he saw what else was wrong.
‘Archchancellor!’
So how long have you been mad? No, not a good start, really . . . It was quite hard to know how to open the conversation.
‘So . . . I didn’t expect dwarfs here,’ Rincewind said.
‘Oh, the family blew in from NoThingfjord when I was a kid,’ said Mad. ‘Meant to go down the coast a bit, storm got up, next thing we’re shipwrecked and up to our knees in parrots. Best thing that could’ve happened. Back there I’d be down some freezing cold mine picking bits of rock out of the walls but, over here, a dwarf can stand tall.’
‘Really,’ said Rincewind, his face carefully blank.
‘But not too bloody tall!’ Mad went on.
‘Certainly not.’
‘So we settled down, and now my dad’s got a chain of bakeries in Bugarup.’
‘Dwarf bread?’ said Rincewind.
‘Too right! That’s what kept us going across thousands of miles of shark-infested ocean,’ said Mad. ‘If we hadn’t had that sack of dwarf bread we’d—’
‘—never have been able to club the sharks to death?’ said Rincewind.
‘Ah, you’re a man who knows your breads.’
‘Big place, Bugarup? Has it got a harbour?’
‘People say so. Never been back there. I like the outdoor life.’
The ground trembled. The trees by the track shook, even though there was no wind.
‘Sounds like a storm,’ said Rincewind.
‘What’s one of them?’
‘You know,’ said Rincewind. ‘Rain.’
‘Aw, strain the flaming cows, you don’t believe all that stuff, do you? My granddad used to go on about that when he’d been at the beer. It’s just an old story. Water falling out of the sky? Do me a favour!’
‘It never does that here?’
‘Course not!’
‘Happens quite a lot where I come from,’ said Rincewind.
‘Yeah? How’s it get up into the sky, then? Water’s heavy.’