The Discworld Series (№20) - Hogfather

ALBERT WILL BE VERY PLEASED. I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE HIS FACE. HO. HO. HO.

As the light of Hogswatch slid down the towers of Unseen University, the Librarian slipped into the Great Hall with some sheet music clenched firmly in his feet.

As the light of Hogswatch lit the towers of Unseen University, the Archchancellor sat down with a sigh in his study and pulled off his boots.

It had been a damn long night, no doubt about it. Lots of strange things. First time he'd ever seen the Senior Wrangler burst into tears, for one thing.

Ridcully glanced at the door to the new bathroom. Well, he'd sorted out the teething troubles, and a nice warm shower would be very refreshing. And then he could go along to the organ recital all nice and clean.

He removed his hat, and someone fell out of it with a tinkling sound. A small gnome rolled across the floor.

'Oh, another one. I thought we'd got rid of you fellows,' said Ridcully. 'And what are you?'

The gnome looked at him nervously.

'Er... you know whenever there was another magical appearance you heard the sound of, er, bells?' it said. Its expression suggested it was owning up to something it just knew was going to get it a smack.

.'Yes?'

The gnome held up some rather small handbells and waved them nervously. They went glingleglingleglingle, in a very sad way.

'Good, eh? That was me. Im the Glingleglingleglingle Fairy.'

`Get out.'

'I also do sparkly fairy dust effects that go twing too, if you like...

`Go away!'

'How about "The Bells of St Ungulant's"?' said the gnome desperately. 'Very seasonal. Very nice. Why not join in? It goes: ''The bells [clong] of St [clang]... " '

Ridcully scored a direct hit with the rubber duck, and the gnome escaped through the bath overflow. Cursing and spontaneous handbell ringing echoed away down the pipes.

In perfect peace at last, the Archchancellor pulled off his robe.

The organ's storage tanks were wheezing at the rivets by the time the Librarian had finished pumping. Satisfied, he knuckled his way up to the seat and paused to survey, with great satisfaction, the keyboards in front of him.

Bloody Stupid Johnson's approach to music was similar to his approach in every field that was caressed by his genius in the same way that a potato field is touched by a late frost. Make it loud, he said. Make it wide. Make it allembracing. And thus the Great Organ of Unseen University was the only one in the world where you could play an entire symphony scored for thunderstorm and squashed toad noises.

Warm water cascaded off Mustrum Ridcully's pointy bathing cap.

Mr Johnson had, surely not on purpose, designed a perfect bathroom — at least, perfect for singing in. Echoes and resonating pipeways smoothed out all those little imperfections and gave even the weediest singer a rolling, dark brown voice.

And so Ridcully sang.

' ...as I walked out one dadadadada for to something or other and to take the dadada, I did espy a fair pretty may-ay-den I think it was, and I...'

The organ pipes hummed with pent-up energy. The Librarian cracked his knuckles. This took some time. Then he pulled the pressure release valve.

The hum became an urgent thrumming.

Very carefully, he let in the clutch.

Ridcully stopped singing as the tones of the organ came through the wall.

Bathtime music, eh? he thought. Just the job.

It was a shame it was muffled by all the bathroom fixtures, though.

It was at this point he espied a small lever marked `Musical pipes.

Ridcully, never being a man to wonder what any kind of switch did when it was so much easier and quicker to find out by pulling it, did so. But instead of the music he was expecting he was rewarded simply with several large panels sliding silently aside, revealing row upon row of brass nozzles.

The Librarian was lost now, dreaming on the wings of music. His hands and feet danced over the keyboards, picking their way towards the crescendo which ended the first movement of Bubble's Catastrophe Suite.

One foot kicked the 'Afterburner' lever and the other spun the valve of the nitrous oxide cylinder.

Ridcully tapped the nozzles.

Nothing happened. He looked at the controls again, and realized that he'd never pulled the little brass lever marked 'Organ Interlock`.

He did so. This did not cause a torrent of pleasant bathtime accompaniment, however. There was merely a thud and a distant gurgling which grew in volume.

He gave up, and went back to soaping his chest.

'...running of the deer, the playing of... huh? What...'

Later that day he had the bathroom nailed up again and a notice placed on the door, on which was written:

'Not to be used in any circumstances. This is IMPORTANT.'

However, when Modo nailed the door up he didn't hammer the nails in all the way but left just a bit sticking up so that his pliers would grip later on, when he was told to remove them. He never presumed and he never complained, he just had a good working knowledge of the wizardly mind.

They never did find the soap.

Ponder and his fellow students watched Hex carefully.

'It can't just, you know, stop,' said Adrian 'Mad Drongo' Tumipseed.

'The ants are just standing still,' said Ponder. He sighed. 'All right, put the wretched thing back.'

Adrian carefully replaced the small fluffy teddy bear above Hex's keyboard. Things immediately began to whirr. The ants started to trot again. The mouse squeaked.

They'd tried this three times.

Ponder looked again at the single sentence Hex had written.

+++ Mine! Waaaah +++

'I don't actually think,' he said, gloomily, 'that I want to tell the Archchancellor that this machine stops working if we take its fluffy teddy bear away. I just don't think I want to live in that kind of world.'

'Er,' said Mad Drongo, 'you could always, you know, sort of say it needs to work with the FTB enabled...

'You think that's better?' said Ponder, reluctantly. It wasn't as if it was even a very realistic interpretation of a bear.

'You mean, better than "fluffy teddy bear"?'

Ponder nodded. 'It's better,' he said.

Of all the presents he got from the Hogfather, Gawain told Susan, the best of all was the marble.

And she'd said, what marble?

And he'd said, the glass marble I found in the fireplace. It wins all the games. It seems to move in a different way.

The beggars walked their erratic and occasionally backward walk along the city streets, while fresh morning snow began to fall.

Occasionally one of them belched happily. They all wore paper hats, except for Foul Ole Ron, who'd eaten his.

A tin can was passed from hand to hand. It contained a mixture of fine wines and spirits and something in a can that Arnold Sideways had stolen from behind a paint factory in Phedre Road.

'The goose was good,' said the Duck Man, picking his teeth.

'I'm surprised you et it, what with that duck on your head,' said Coffin Henry, picking his nose.

'What duck?' said the Duck Man.

'What were that greasy stuff?' said Arnold Sideways.

'That, my dear fellow, was pвtй de foie gras. All the way from Genua, I'll wager. And very good, too.'

'Dun' arf make you fart, don't it?'

'Ah, the world of haute cuisine,' said the Duck Man happily.

They reached, by fits and starts, the back door of their favourite restaurant. The Duck Man looked at it dreamily, eyes filmy with recollection.

'I used to dine here almost every night,' he said.

'Why'd you stop?' said Coffin Henry.

'I... I don't really know,' said the Duck Man. 'It's... rather a blur, I'm afraid. Back in the days when I... think I was someone else. But still,' he said, patting Arnold's head, 'as they say, "Better a meal of old boots where friendship is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith." Forward, please, Ron.'

They positioned Foul Ole Ron in front of the back door and then knocked on it. When a waiter opened it Foul Ole Ron grinned at him, exposing what remained of his teeth and his famous halitosis, which was still all there.

'Millennium hand and shrimp!' he said, touching his forelock.

' "Compliments of the season",' the Duck Man translated.

The man went to shut the door but Arnold Sideways was ready for him and had wedged his boot in the crack.[25]

'We thought you might like us to come round at lunchtime and sing a merry Hogswatch glee for your customers,' said the Duck Man. Beside him, Coffin Henry began one of his volcanic bouts of coughing, which even sounded green. ' No charge, of course.'

'It being Hogswatch,' said Arnold.

The beggars, despite being too disreputable even to belong to the Beggars' Guild, lived quite well by their own low standards. This was generally by careful application of the Certainty Principle. People would give them all sorts of things if they were certain to go away.

A few minutes later they wandered off again, pushing a happy Arnold who was surrounded by hastily wrapped packages.

'People can be so kind,' said the Duck Man.

'Millennium hand and shrimp.'

Arnold started to investigate the charitable donations as they manoeuvred his trolley through the slush and drifts.

'Tastes... sort of familiar,' he said.

'Familiar like what?'

'Like mud and old boots.'

'Cam! That's posh grub, that is.'

'Yeah, yeah... ' Arnold chewed for a while. 'You don't think we've become posh all of a sudden?'

'Dunno. You posh, Ron?'

'Buggrit.'

'Yep. Sounds posh to me.'

The snow began to settle gently on the River Ankh.

'Still... Happy New Year, Arnold.'

'Happy New Year, Duck Man. And your duck.'

'What duck?'

'Happy New Year, Henry.'

'Happy New Year, Ron.'

'Buggrem!'

'And god bless us, every one,' said Arnold Sideways.

The curtain of snow hid them from view.

'Which god?'

'Dunno. What've you got?'

'Duck Man?'

'Yes, Henry?'

'You know that stalled ox you mentioned?'

'Yes, Henry?'

'How come it'd stalled? Run out of grass, or something?'

'Ah... it was more a figure of speech, Henry.'

'Not an ox?'

'Not exactly. What I meant was-'

And then there was only the snow.

After a while, it began to melt in the sun.

THE END

Notes

1

That is to say, those who deserve to shed blood. Or possibly not. You never quite know with some kids.

2

This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.

3

It's a sad and terrible thing that high-born folk really have thought that the servants would be totally fooled if spirits were put into decanters that were cunningly labelled backwards. And also throughout history the more politically conscious butler has taken it on trust, and with rather more justification, that his employers will not notice if the whisky is topped up with eniru.

4

Peachy was not someone you generally asked questions of, except the sort that go like: If-if-if-if I give you all my money could you possibly not break the other leg, thank you so much?'

5

Chickenwire had got his name from his own individual contribution to the science of this very specialized 'concrete overshoe' form of waste disposal. An unfortunate drawback of the process was the tendency for bits of the client to eventually detach and float to the surface, causing much comment in the general population. Enough chickenwire, he'd pointed out, would solve that, while also allowing the ingress of crabs and fish going about their vital recycling activities.

6

Ankh-Morpork's underworld, which was so big that the overworld floated around on top of it like a very small hen trying to mother a nest of ostrich chicks, already had Big Dave, Fat Dave, Mad Dave, Wee Davey, and Lanky Dai. Everyone had to find their niche.

7

This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, 'Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?' When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, 'We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts . . .'

8

He'd done his best. But black and purple and vomit yellow weren't a good colour combination for paperchains, and no Hogswatch fairy doll should be nailed up by its head

9

Such as the Electric Drill Chuck Key Fairy.

10

Who was (according to Sideney's mother) a bit of a catch since her father owned a half-share in an eel pie shop in Gleam Street, you must know her, got all her own teeth and a wooden leg you'd hardlynotice, got a sister called Continence, lovely girl, why didn't she invite her along for tea next time he was over, not that she hardly saw her son the big wizard at all these days, but you never knew and if the magic thing didn't work out then a quarter-share in a thriving eel pie business was not to be sneezed at ...

11

Not, that is, things that he wanted to do, or wanted done to him. Just things that he dreamed of, in the armpit of a bad night.

12

In fact, when she was eight she'd found a collection of animal skulls in an attic, relict of some former duke of an enquiring turn of mind. Her father had been a bit preoccupied with affairs of state and she'd made twenty— seven dollars before being found out. The hippopotamus molar had, with hindsight, been a mistake.

Skulls never frightened her, even then.

13

The CEH was always ready to fight for the rights of the differently tall, and was not put off by the fact that most pixies and gnomes weren't the least interested in dressing up in little pointy hats with bells on when there were other far more interesting things to do. All that tinkly— wee stuff was for the old folks back home in the forest — when a tiny man hit Ankh-Morpork he preferred to get drunk, kick some serious ankle, and search for tiny women. In fact the CEH now had to spend so much time explaining to people that they hadn't got enough rights that they barely had any time left to fight for them.

14

Often they lived to a timescale to suit themselves. Many of the senior ones, of course, lived entirely in the past, but several were like the Professor of Anthropics, who had invented an entire temporal system based on the belief that all the other ones were a mere illusion.

Many people are aware of the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles. The Weak One says, basically, that it was jolly amazing of the universe to be constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point where they make a living in, for example, universities, while the Strong One says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that humans should not only work in universities but also write for huge sums books with words like 'Cosmic' and 'Chaos' in the titles.

*) The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics. But this was only a formal statement of the theory which absolutely everyone, with only some minor details of a 'Fill in name here' nature, secretly believes to be true.

*)And they are correct. The universe dearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be readily seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.

15

The ceremony still carries on, of course. If you left off traditions because you didn't know why they started you'd be no better than a foreigner.

16

Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identicallooking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sagosago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago.

17

Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.

18

It's amazing how good governments are, given their track record in almost every other field, at hushing up things like alien encounters.

One reason may be that the aliens themselves are too embarrassed to talk about it.

It's not known why most of the space-going races of the universe want to undertake rummaging in Earthling underwear as a prelude to formal contact. But representatives of several hundred races have taken to hanging out, unsuspected by one another, in rural corners of the planet and, as a result of this, keep on abducting other would-be abductees. Some have been in fad abducted while waiting to carry out an abduction on a couple of other aliens trying to abduct the aliens who were, as a result of misunderstood instructions, trying to form cattle into circles and mutilate crops.

The planet Earth is now banned to an alien races until they can compare notes and find out how many, if any, real humans they have actually got. It is gloomily suspected that there is only one who is big, hairy and has very large feet.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

19

The red rosy hen greets the dawn of the day'. In fact the hen is not the bird traditionally associated with heralding a new sunrise, but Mrs Huggs, while collecting many old folk songs for posterity, has taken care to rewrite them where necessary to avoid, as she put it, 'offending those of a refined disposition with unwarranted coarseness'. Much to her surprise, people often couldn't spot the unwarranted coarseness until it had been pointed out to them.

Sometimes a chicken is nothing but a bird.

20

He'd have to admit that the answer would be 'five and a bit', but at least he could come up with it.

21

It had been Ma Lilywhite's dying wish, although she hadn't known it at the time. Her last words to her son were 'You try and get to the horses, I'll try to hold 'em off on the stairs, and if anything happens to me, take care of the dummy!'

22

They generally know in time to have their best robe cleaned, do some serious damage to the wine cellar and have a really good last meal. It's a nicer version of Death Row, with the bonus of no lawyers.

23

It was, in fact, a pleasant masculine scent. But only to female weasels.

24

Which had died in its sleep. Of natural causes. At a great age. After a long and happy life, insofar as a sheep can be happy. And would probably be quite pleased to know that it could help somebody as it passed away...

25

Arnold had no legs but, since there were many occasions when a boot was handy on the streets, Coffin Henry had affixed one to the end of a pole for him. He was deadly with it, and any muggers hardpressed enough to try to rob the beggars often found themselves kicked on the top of the head by a man three feet high.