The Turtle Moves! (8 page)

There's a great deal of entertaining nonsense about time and energy, which are grotesquely distorted by the pyramids; once again, I have a suspicion that Mr. Pratchett's work in the power industry contributed something to the descriptions.

All in all, though, this really doesn't do much to change the series as a whole. We don't see the major characters again hereafter, nor do any of the regular Discworld cast appear (except Death, of course). While Ephebe will turn up again, Djelibeybi will never again get more than a brief mention.
Pyramids
is a lovely novel, but it doesn't really
connect
much of anywhere.

Teppic does not return in any later stories—or at any rate, he hasn't reappeared yet—but we see more of gods and philosophers six books later, in
Small Gods
—see Chapter 15. The next to be written, though, launched yet another series, one that's probably the most successful of the bunch. . . .

M
ANY PEOPLE (which in this case means, as it so often does, “people I agree with, even if it's really just me and everyone else thinks I'm a loon”) consider the stories of

Ankh-Morpork's City Watch to be the best, on average, of the various Discworld series, and
Guards! Guards!
starts the series off well. Our tale opens (after a brief introductory note about dragons)
⁸³
with Captain Samuel Vimes lying drunk in a gutter, a practice he's clearly well-accustomed to.

Vimes, we learn, is the commanding officer of the Night Watch, which consists of himself, Sergeant Colon, and Corporal Nobby Nobbs, and until very recently included someone named Gaskin, whose death is the excuse for Vimes's latest round of inebriation. These fine—no, skip the adjective—these men are responsible for keeping the peace in Ankh-Morpork.

The book is dedicated to all those faceless guards and watchmen in countless fantasy novels whose basic function is to die pointlessly; this is apparently exactly the sort of watchmen the people of Ankh-Morpork want. This is not what Vimes and company want to
be
, however.

I'll have more to say about that when I discuss the series as a whole in Chapter 56.

At any rate, a new Watchman by the name of Carrot
⁸⁴
arrives fairly
quickly after Gaskin's death. These four—Vimes, Colon, Nobby, and Carrot—will remain at the heart of the cast in all the subsequent Watch stories.One might wonder how a staff of four can hope to patrol a city the size of Ankh-Morpork, which is described in this book as having a population of about a million.

Well, obviously, they can't. No one expects them to. It's been well established in previous volumes that law enforcement in Ankh-Morpork is largely the responsibility of the Thieves' Guild, which has an elaborate system of quotas and receipts, and which vigorously (often fatally) discourages freelancers. Once the Patrician had this system in place, the traditional City Watch was allowed to wither away to almost nothing.

A feeling that this system, however effective it may be, just isn't
right
is a major reason Captain Vimes is so familiar with finding himself drunk in the gutter.

At any rate, someone has devised a scheme to take over the city government by conjuring up a dragon, having a handsome young man with a shiny sword dispatch it, and then declaring this fellow to be the rightful heir to the ancient kings of Ankh-Morpork. The mastermind would then become the power behind the throne, guiding the malleable youth.

The plot hits a few snags, however. One is that the Night Watch, under the direction of Vimes, insists on actually investigating what's going on and treating it as a crime. Another is that the dragon, once conjured, turns out to have some ideas of its own.

This idea of acting out a classic story everyone knows, and turning it to one's own ends, is the Discworld's excess of narrativium at work again. The story of the rightful heir returning to save the city from a dragon is so very obviously how things
should
play out that it takes someone exceptional like Vimes to resist its appeal. The story
wants
to happen. Everyone expects it to, and knows how it should go.

And then there's the power of cliché. At one point in the plot, some of our heroes know they're attempting something very unlikely, and they make a concerted effort to make it even
less
likely, because as everyone knows, if it's a million-to-one chance, then it's just
got
to work, because it always does in the stories.

If it's only 999,943 to one, though, it just isn't gonna happen.

Because this is the Discworld, some of this works. Million-to-one shots do come in. There really is a rightful heir to the ancient kings.

But because Mr. Pratchett is a very clever man, things never work out in the obvious fashion. The heir does not slay the dragon; in fact, the dragon isn't slain at all, really. It's dealt with, but not in any of the traditional ways.

What really makes the whole story work, though, is the character of Vimes. This is a man full of rage and despair who sees all too well the sordid realities of his situation, but who refuses to give up. He
knows
he's attempting the impossible, that nobody really wants him to succeed, that even if he
does
succeed it won't really help, but he refuses to quit, because to do so would be untrue to who and what he is.

He is, as we are told, someone who had the misfortune of being born knurd.

“Knurd” is drunk spelled backward, and it's the opposite of drunk. Sobriety is merely the absence of drunkenness; knurd is its
opposite
. Where alcohol can provide a warm glow and pleasant haze that obscures life's little difficulties, being knurd throws them into sharp focus.

Samuel Vimes was born knurd, and needs two drinks just to get to sober.

This has not made for a pleasant life. Commanding the Watch in a city that doesn't want a Watch and only has one because no one has gotten
around to eliminating it yet doesn't help. And really
caring
about his job and his city makes it all even worse.

Everyone knows that a hero needs problems to overcome, but Vimes has more than his share.

Fortunately he has the brains and the sheer tenacity to handle most of them. Mere dragons and Patricians do not intimidate him.

Lady Sybil Ramkin does, but that's rather different.

There are some things that crop up in this story that aren't entirely consistent with what's gone before or what's to come. For example, Vimes initially doesn't even remember that Ankh-Morpork ever
had
a king, while in later books he's well aware that one of his own ancestors killed the last of those kings.

Just how long ago the last king reigned also seems to be a variable.

It is established in
Guards! Guards!
, though, that there
was
a king, and there
is
a rightful heir, and that that heir is a handsome and upright young man who was raised as a dwarf, but who has a crown-shaped birthmark, an ancient sword, and the other appropriate indicators of his status.

Even his name is a tremendously obscure indication. After all, why would a couple of respectable dwarfs name their child “Carrot”? Why did Mr. Pratchett name his
character
Carrot? Apparently even he found it unlikely, as it emerges many years later, in
Thud!
, that Carrot's dwarfish name actually translates not as Carrot, but as “Head Banger.”

So why is he called Carrot?

Yes, fine, he's ginger-haired, narrow-hipped, and broad-shouldered, and therefore vaguely carrot-shaped, but is that all?

Well, there's this comic opera first performed in 1872, composed by Jacques Offenbach, called
Le Roi Carotte
—“King Carrot.” The title role calls for a comic tenor, and is a carrot who becomes a human being and deposes a tyrant.

The resemblance surely isn't a coincidence.

As for other developments, the Librarian appears in
Guards! Guards!
, of course, and is temporarily deputized into the Watch, but even he isn't completely consistent with other books. While he's always objected violently (and with good reason) to being called a monkey, his reaction here is presented as involuntary and uncontrollable, when elsewhere it's been presented as a natural reaction to an unforgivable display of rude stupidity.

On the other hand, this is also where we see the first real explanation
of L-space, which became a basic recurring concept in later volumes. L-space is where libraries and the better sort of bookshop exist, you see. They aren't in normal space at all, and they all interconnect.

The explanation is simple. Books represent knowledge. Knowledge is power. Power is energy. Energy, as Einstein told us, equals matter. Matter has mass. Mass warps space.

Therefore, anywhere enough books are gathered together, space is warped, and a connection to L-space forms. A skilled librarian—and the Librarian is
very
skilled—can navigate through L-space from any one library to any other, anywhere in time or space. This will prove very useful in later books.

Guards! Guards!
is where a great many things really start to fall together. The whole idea of monarchy was addressed in
Wyrd Sisters
, but here it is again, seen from rather a different angle. The Patrician's methods, heretofore only mentioned in passing, are examined in more detail, though Lord Vetinari's personality has still not reached its final forbidding form. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler is introduced, as is the troll Detritus. The magical power of books is refined into the concept of L-space.

Certain details from earlier books reappear in new forms. “Inn-sewer-ants,” introduced by Twoflower back in
The Colour of Magic
, is back, but in the form of protection money paid to the Thieves' Guild.

We get a look at dwarf society, and that's a bit different. Up until now, the only dwarf who had any time on stage was Hwel, in
Wyrd Sisters
, and the dwarfs in
Guards! Guards!
aren't much like him—but he did say that he wasn't much like his father, or he'd have been a hundred feet underground digging rocks, so it's pretty clear Hwel wasn't a typical dwarf.

But back in
Equal Rites
, we encountered the gypsy-like Zoons, who had trouble with the concept of lying; the Zoons are never seen again, and their literal-minded honesty has now been transferred to the dwarfs.

We won't see the Watch featured again until
Men at Arms
, seven volumes later, as described in Chapter 19; first it's back to tie up some loose ends regarding Rincewind.

T
HE ACTUAL TITLE IS
FAUST ERIC
. This was originally an illustrated volume, with nifty pictures by Josh Kirby, and is a good deal shorter than the average Discworld novel—in fact, it was originally labeled a Discworld
story
, rather than the usual “a novel of Discworld.”

Unlike all the other short stories and illustrated volumes, though, it's an essential part of the series, because this is where we learn how Rincewind escaped from the Dungeon Dimensions, where we left him at the end of
Sourcery
—he was summoned by an amateur demonologist named Eric Thursley.

Eric wasn't
trying
for Rincewind; he wanted a proper demon who would grant him three wishes. He got Rincewind instead.

And to Rincewind's own astonishment, Eric gets his three wishes—mastery of the kingdoms of the world, to meet the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, and to live forever.

(If these sound familiar, well, there's a reason the title has Faust's name crossed out and Eric's substituted.)

Naturally, they didn't work out as expected. They never do, do they? One wonders why anyone tries the whole “three wishes” thing; really, why not try for, oh,
five
wishes? Maybe that would turn out more pleasantly. Three, though, that's always a disaster, and especially getting them from a demon. It's just
asking
for it—to borrow Mr. Pratchett's evocative phrase, it's like standing on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shouting, “All gods are bastards!”

I mean, all the stories warn you that three wishes will turn out badly, and the Disc
runs
on stories.

As the author points out, if summoning demons was a way to get power, wizards would do it. They don't. This should serve as a warning.

But Eric refuses to be warned, and he and Rincewind (and Eric's parrot) get swept off to the Tezuman Empire, where Eric is indeed recognized as the master of the kingdoms of the world. Had Sir James Frazer's
The Golden Bough
been published in Ankh-Morpork, Eric might have seen the flaw in this particular prize.

When they manage to escape that particular nasty fate, it's off to the ancient war between Tsort and Ephebe that was described in
Pyramids
, the one that's the Discworld equivalent of the Trojan War.
⁸⁵
Here Eric does indeed meet the woman generally acknowledged to be the most beautiful who has ever lived on the Disc. He failed to specify meeting her while she was still beautiful, however. Or meeting her not in the middle of a bloody great war.