‘Oook,’ he said.
Trymon took it gingerly.
The cover was scratched and very dog-eared, the gold of its lettering had long ago curled off, but he could just make out, in the old magic tongue of the Tsort Valley, the words: Iyt Gryet Teymple hyte Tsort, Y Hiystory Myistical.
‘Oook?’ said the librarian, anxiously.
Trymon turned the pages cautiously. He wasn’t very good at languages, he’d always found them highly inefficient things which by rights ought to be replaced by some sort of easily understood numerical system, but this seemed exactly what he was looking for. There were whole pages covered with meaningful hieroglyphs.
‘Is this the only book you’ve got about the pyramid of Tsort?’ he said slowly.
‘Oook.’
‘You’re quite sure?’
‘Oook.’
Trymon listened. He could hear, a long way off, the sound of approaching feet and arguing voices. But he had been prepared for that, too.
He reached into a pocket.
‘Would you like another banana?’ he said.
The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called – in the local language – Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.
The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly n a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.
Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod (‘Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain Is’) and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.
Twoflower and Rincewind were arguing. The person they were arguing about sat on his mushroom and watched them with interest. He looked like someone who smelled like someone who lived in a mushroom, and that bothered Twoflower.
‘Well, why hasn’t he got a red hat?’
Rincewind hesitated, desperately trying to imagine what Twoflower was getting at.
‘What?’ he said, giving in.
‘He should have a red hat,’ said Twoflower. ‘And he certainly ought to be cleaner and more, more sort of jolly. He doesn’t look like any sort of gnome to me.’
‘What are you going on about?’
‘Look at that beard,’ said Twoflower sternly. ‘I’ve seen better beards on a piece of cheese.’
‘Look, he’s six inches high and lives in a mushroom,’ snarled Rincewind. ‘Of course he’s a bloody gnome.’
‘We’ve only got his word for it.’
Rincewind looked down at the gnome.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. He took Twoflower to the other side of the clearing.
‘Listen,’ he said between his teeth. ‘If he was fifteen feet tall and said he was a giant we’d only have his word for that too, wouldn’t we?’
‘He could be a goblin,’ said Twoflower defiantly.
Rincewind looked back at the tiny figure, which was industriously picking its nose.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘So what? Gnome, goblin, pixie – so what?’
‘Not a pixie,’ said Twoflower firmly. ‘Pixies, they wear these sort of green combinations and they have pointy caps and little knobbly antenna thingies sticking out of their heads. I’ve seen pictures.’
‘Where?’
Twoflower hesitated, and looked at his feet. ‘I think it was called the “mutter, mutter, mutter.” ‘
‘The what? Called the what?’
The little man took a sudden interest in the backs of his hands.
‘The Little Folks’ Book of Flower Fairies,’ he muttered.
Rincewind looked blank.
‘It’s a book on how to avoid them?’ he said.
‘Oh no,’ said Twoflower hurriedly. It tells you where to look for them. I can remember the pictures now.’ A dreamy look came over his face, and Rincewind groaned inwardly. There was even a special fairy that came and took your teeth away.’
‘What, came and pulled out your actual teeth – ?’
‘No, no, you’re wrong, I mean after they’d fallen out, what you did was, you put the tooth under your pillow and the fairy came and took it away and left a rhinu piece.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why did it collect teeth?’
‘It just did.’
Rincewind formed a mental picture of some strange entity living in a castle made of teeth. It was the kind of mental picture you tried to forget. Unsuccessfully.
‘Urgh,’ he said.
Red hats! He wondered whether to enlighten the tourist about what life was really like when a frog was a good meal, a rabbit hole a useful place to shelter out of the rain, and an owl a drifting, silent terror in the night. Moleskin trousers sounded quaint unless you personally had to remove them from their original owner when the vicious little sod was cornered in his burrow. As for red hats, anyone who went around a forest looking bright nd conspicuous would only do so very, very briefly.
He wanted to say: look, the life of gnomes and goblins is nasty, brutish and short. So are they.
He wanted to say all this, and couldn’t. For a man with an itch to see the whole of infinity, Twoflower never actually moved outside his own head. Telling him the truth would be like kicking a spaniel.
‘Swee whee weedle wheet,’ said a voice by his foot. He looked down. The gnome, who had introduced himself as Swires, looked up. Rincewind had a very good ear for languages. The gnome had just said, ‘I’ve got some newt sorbet left over from yesterday.’
‘Sounds wonderful,’ said Rincewind.
Swires gave him another prod in the ankle.
‘The other bigger, is he all right?’ he said solicitously.
‘He’s just suffering from reality shock,’ said Rincewind. You haven’t got a red hat, by any chance?’
‘Wheet?’
‘Just a thought.’
‘I know where there’s some food for biggers,’ said the gnome, ‘and shelter, too. It’s not far.’
Rincewind looked at the lowering sky. The daylight was draining out of the landscape and the clouds looked as if they had heard about snow and were considering the idea. Of course, people who lived in mushrooms couldn’t necessarily be trusted, but right now a trap baited with a hot meal and clean sheets would have had the wizard hammering to get in.
They set off. After a few seconds the Luggage got carefully to its feet and started to follow.
‘Psst!’
It turned carefully, little legs moving in a complicated pattern, and appeared to look up.
‘Is it good, being joinery?’ said the tree, anxiously. ‘Did it hurt?’
The Luggage seemed to think about this. Every brass handle, every knothole, radiated extreme concentration.
Then it shrugged its lid and waddled away.
The tree sighed, and shook a few dead leaves out of its twigs.
The cottage was small, tumbledown and as ornate as a doily. Some mad whittler had got to work on it, Rincewind decided, and had created terrible havoc before he could be dragged away. Every door, every shutter had its clusters of wooden grapes and half-moon cutouts, and there were massed outbreaks of fretwork pinecones all over the walls. He half expected a giant cuckoo to come hurtling out of an upper window.
What he also noticed was the characteristic greasy feel in the air. Tiny green and purple sparks flashed from his fingernails.
‘Strong magical field,’ he muttered. ‘A hundred milli-thaums[2] at least.’
‘There’s magic all over the place,’ said Swires. ‘An old witch used to live around here. She went a long time ago but the magic still keeps the house going.’
‘Here, there’s something odd about that door,’ said Twoflower.
Why should a house need magic to keep it going?’ said Rincewind. Twoflower touched a wall gingerly.
‘It’s all sticky!’
‘Nougat,’ said Swires.
‘Good grief! A real gingerbread cottage! Rincewind, a real—’
Rincewind nodded glumly. Yeah, the Confectionary School of Architecture,’ he said. ‘It never caught on.’
He looked suspiciously at the liquorice doorknocker.
‘It sort of regenerates,’ said Swires. ‘Marvellous, really. You just don’t get this sort of place nowadays, you just an’t get the gingerbread.’
‘Really?’ said Rincewind, gloomily.
‘Come on in,’ said the gnome, ‘but mind the doormat.
‘Why?’
‘Candyfloss.’
The great Disc spun slowly under its toiling sun, and daylight pooled in hollows and finally drained away as night fell.
In his chilly room in Unseen University Trymon pored over the book, his lips moving as his finger traced the unfamiliar, ancient script. He read that the Great Pyramid of Tsort, now long vanished, was made of one million, three thousand and ten limestone blocks. He read that ten thousand slaves had been worked to death in its building. He learned that it was a maze of secret passages, their walls reputedly decorated with the distilled wisdom of ancient Tsort. He read that its height plus its length divided by half its width equalled exactly 1.67563, or precisely 1,237.98712567 times the difference between the distance to the sun and the weight of a small orange. He learned that sixty years had been devoted entirely to its construction.