Lords And Ladies

Granny Weatherwax lay on her bed, still and cold. In her blue-veined hands, the words: I AM NOT DEAD . . .

Her mind drifted across the forest, searching, searching. . .

The trouble was, she could not go where there were no eyes to see or ears to hear.

So she never noticed the hollow near the stones, where eight men slept.

And dreamed . . .

Lancre is cut off from the rest of the lands of mankind by a bridge over Lancre Gorge, above the shallow but poisonously fast and treacherous Lancre River[24].

The coach pulled up at the far end.

There was a badly painted red, black, and white post across the road.

The coachman sounded his horn.

'What's up?' said Ridcully, leaning out of the window.

'Troll bridge.'

'Whoops.'

After a while there was a booming sound under the bridge, and a troll clambered over the parapet. It was quite overdressed, for a troll. In addition to the statutory loincloth, it was wearing a helmet. Admittedly it had been designed for a human head, and was attached to the much larger troll head by string, but there probably wasn't a better word than 'wearing.'

'What's up?' said the Bursar, waking up.

'There's a troll on the bridge,' said Ridcully, 'but it's underneath a helmet, so it's probably official and will get into serious trouble if it eats people[25]. Nothing to worry about.'

The Bursar giggled, because he was on the upcurve of whatever switchback his mind was currently riding.

The troll appeared at the coach window.

'Afternoon, your lordships,' it said. 'Customs inspection.'

'I don't think we have any,' babbled the Bursar happily. 'I mean, we used to have a tradition of rolling boiled eggs downhill on Soul Cake Tuesday, but-'

'I means,' said the troll, 'do you have any beer, spirits, wines, liquors, hallucinogenic herbage, or books of a lewd or licentious nature?'

Ridcully pulled the Bursar back from the window.

'No,' he said.

'No?'

'No.'

'Sure?'

'Yes.'

'Would you like some?'

'We haven't even got,' said the Bursar, despite Ridcully's efforts to sit on his head, 'any billygoats.'

There are some people that would whistle 'Yankee Doodle' in a crowded bar in Atlanta.

Even these people would consider it tactless to mention the word 'billygoat' to a troll.

The troll's expression changed very slowly, like a glacier eroding half a mountain. Ponder tried to get under the seat.

'So we'll just trit-trot along, shall we?' said the Bursar, his voice by now slightly muffled.

'He doesn't mean it,' said the Archchancellor quickly. 'It's the dried frog talking.'

'You don't want to eat me,' said the Bursar. 'You want to eat my brother, he's much mfmfph mfmfph . . .'

'Well, now,' said the troll, 'seems to me that-' He spotted Casanunda.

'Oh-ho,' he said, 'dwarf smuggling, eh?'

'Don't be ridiculous, man,' said Ridcully, 'there's no such thing as dwarf smuggling.'

'Yeah? Then what's that you've got there?'

'I'm a giant,' said Casanunda.

'Giants are a lot bigger.'

'I've been ill.'

The troll looked perplexed. This was post-graduate thinking for a troll. But he was looking for trouble. He found it on the roof of the coach, where the Librarian had been sunbathing.

'What's in that sack up there?'

'That's not a sack. That's the Librarian.'

The troll prodded the large mass of red hair.

'Ook. . .'

'What? A monkey?'

'Oook?'

Several minutes later, the travellers leaned on the parapet, looking down reflectively at the river far below.

'Happen often, does it?' said Casanunda.

'Not so much these days,' said Ridcully. 'It's like — what's that word, Stibbons? About breedin' and passin' on stuff to yer kids?'

'Evolution,' said Ponder. The ripples were still sloshing against the banks.

'Right. Like, my father had a waistcoat with embroidered peacocks on it, and he left it to me, and now I've got it. They call it hereditarery-'

'No, that's not-' Ponder began, with no hope whatsoever that Ridcully would listen.

'-so anyway, most people left back home know the difference between apes and monkeys now,' said Ridcully. 'Evolution, that is. It's hard to breed when you've got a headache from being bounced up and down on the pavement.'

The ripples had stopped now.

'Do you think trolls can swim?' said Casanunda.

'No. They just sink and walk ashore,' said Ridcully He turned, and leaned back on his elbows. 'This really takes me back, you know. The old Lancre River. There's trout down there that'd take your arm off.'

'Not just trout,' said Ponder, watching a helmet emerge from the water.

'And limpid pools further up,' said Ridcully. 'Full of, of, of . . . limpids, stuff like that. And you can bathe naked and no one'd see. And water meadows full of . . . water, don'tyerknow, and flowers and stuff.' He sighed. 'You know, it was on this very bridge that she told me she-'

'He's got out of the river,' said Ponder. But the troll wasn't moving very fast, because the Librarian was nonchalantly levering one of the big stones out of the parapet.

'On this very bridge I asked-'

'That's a big club he's got,' said Casanunda.

'This bridge, I may say, was where I nearly-'

'Could you stop holding that rock in such a provocative way?' said Ponder.

'Oook.'

'It'd be a help.'

'The actual bridge, if anyone's interested, is where my whole life took a diff-'

'Why don't we just go on?' said Ponder. 'He's got a steep climb.'

'Good thing for him he hasn't got up here, eh?' said Casanunda. Ponder swiveled the Librarian around and pushed him toward the coach.

'This is the bridge, in fact, where-'

Ridcully turned around.

'Are you coming or not?' said Casanunda, with the reins in his hand.

'I was actually having a quality moment of misty nostalgic remembrance,' said Ridcully. 'Not that any of