Soul Music (44 page)

The teacher rallied. ‘Do you know it's gone midnight? For shame! And you're out of bed! And that is
certainly
not the school uniform!'

Susan looked down. It was always hard to get every little detail right. She was still wearing the black dress with the lace.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘that's right.' She gave Miss Butts a bright friendly smile.

‘Well, there
are
school rules, you know,' said Miss Butts, but her tone was hesitant.

Susan patted her on the arm. ‘I think they're probably more like guidelines, don't you? Eulalie?'

Miss Butts's mouth opened and shut. And Susan realized that the woman was actually quite short. She had a tall bearing and a tall voice and a tall manner, and was tall in every respect except height. Amazingly, she'd apparently been able to keep this a secret from people.

‘But I'd better be off to bed,' said Susan, her mind dancing on adrenalin. ‘And you, too. It's far too late to be wandering around draughty corridors at your age, don't you think? Last day tomorrow, too. You don't want to look tired when the parents arrive.'

‘Er . . . yes. Yes. Thank you, Susan.'

Susan gave the forlorn teacher another warm smile and headed for the dormitory, where she undressed in the dark and got between the sheets.

The room was silent except for the sound of nine girls breathing quietly and the rhythmic muffled avalanche that was Princess Jade asleep.

And, after a while, the sound of someone sobbing and trying not to be heard. It went on for a long time. There was a lot of catching up to do.

Far above the world, Death nodded. You could choose immortality, or you could choose humanity.

You had to do it for yourself.

It was the last day of the term, and therefore chaotic. Some girls were leaving early, there was a stream of parents of various races, and there was no question of there being any teaching. It was generally accepted all round that the rules were relaxed.

Susan, Gloria and Princess Jade wandered down to the floral clock. It was a quarter to Daisy.

Susan felt empty, but also stretched like a string. She was surprised sparks weren't coming from her fingertips.

Gloria had bought a bag of fried fish from the shop in Three Roses. The smell of hot vinegar and solid cholesterol rose from the paper, without the taint of fried rot that normally gave the shop's produce its familiar edge.

‘My father says I've got to go home and marry some troll,' said Jade. ‘Hey, if there's any good fish bones in there I'll have them.'

‘Have you met him?' said Susan.

‘No. But my father says he's got a great big mountain.'

‘I wouldn't put up with that, if I was you,' said Gloria, through a mouthful of fish. ‘This
is
the Century of the Fruitbat, after all. I'd put my foot down right now and say no. Eh, Susan?'

‘What?' said Susan, who'd been thinking of something else; then, when everything had been repeated, she said, ‘No. I'd see what he was like first. Perhaps he's quite nice. And then the mountain is a bonus.'

‘Yes. That's logical. Didn't your dad send you a picture?' said Gloria.

‘Oh, yes,' said Jade.

‘Well . . . ?'

‘Um . . . it had some nice crevasses,' said Jade thoughtfully. ‘And a glacier that my father says is permanent even at midsummer.'

Gloria nodded approvingly.

‘He sounds a nice boy.'

‘But I've always liked Crag from the next valley. Father hates him. But he's working very hard and saving up and he's nearly got enough for his own bridge.'

Gloria sighed. ‘Sometimes it's hard to be a woman,' she said. She nudged Susan. ‘Want some fish?'

‘I'm not hungry, thanks.'

‘It's really good. Not stale old stuff like it used to be.'

‘No, thanks.'

Gloria gave her another nudge.

‘Want to go and get your own, then?' she said, leering behind her beard.

‘Why should I do that?'

‘Oh, quite a few girls have gone down there today,' said the dwarf. She leaned closer. ‘It's the new boy working there,' she said. ‘I'd
swear
he's elvish.'

Something inside Susan was plucked and went twang.

She stood up.

‘So
that's
what he meant! Things that
haven't happened yet
.'

‘What? Who?' said Gloria.

‘The shop in Three Roses Alley?'

‘That's right.'

The door to the wizard's house was open. The wizard had put a rocking chair in the doorway and was asleep in the sun.

A raven was perched on his hat. Susan stopped and glared at it.

‘And have you got any comment to make?'

‘Croak croak,' said the raven, and ruffled its feathers.

‘Good,' said Susan.

She walked on, aware that she was blushing. Behind her a voice said, ‘Hah!' She ignored it.

There was a blur of movement among the debris in the gutter.

Something hidden by a fish wrapper went:

‘Oh yes, very funny,' said Susan.

She walked on.

And then broke into a run.

Death smiled and pushed aside the magnifying lens and turned away from the Discworld to find Albert watching him.

JUST CHECKING,
he said.

‘That's right, Master,' said Albert. ‘I've saddled up Binky.'

‘Right you are, Master.'

‘Fine, Master.'

‘Yes, Master.' It was on the shelf in Albert's bedroom.

He followed Death out into the stable-yard, helped him into the saddle, and passed up the scythe.

AND NOW I MUST BE GOING OUT,
said Death.

‘That's the ticket, Master.'

‘Yes, Master.'

Death rode out, but found himself guiding the white horse down the track to the orchard.

He stopped in front of one particular tree, and stared at it for some time. Eventually he said:

LOOKS PERFECTLY LOGICAL TO
ME
.

Binky turned obediently away and trotted into the world.

The lands and cities of it lay before him. Blue light flamed along the blade of the scythe.

Death felt attention on him. He looked up at the universe, which was watching him with puzzled interest.

A voice which only he heard said: So you're a rebel, little Death? Against what?

Death thought about it. If there was a snappy answer, he couldn't think of one.

So he ignored it, and rode towards the lives of humanity.

They
needed
him

Somewhere, in some other world far away from the Discworld, someone tentatively picked up a musical instrument that echoed to the rhythm in their soul.

It will never die.

It's here to stay.

¹
Because of quantum.

²
The question seldom addressed is
where
Medusa had snakes. Underarm hair is an even more embarrassing problem when it keeps biting the top of the deodorant bottle.

³
Cabbages.

⁴
Cabbages.

⁵
Anything that ate cabbages and didn't mind not having any friends.

⁶
Until an unfortunate axe incident, Gloria had been captain of the school basketball team. Dwarfs don't have height but they
do
have acceleration, and many a visiting team member got a nasty shock when Gloria appeared rising vertically out of the depths.

⁷
Or methane crystals. Or sea anemones. The principle is the same. In any case, it soon fills up with whatever is the local equivalent of fast-food boxes and derelict lager cans.

⁸
According to rural legend – at least in those areas where pigs are a vital part of the household economy – the Hogfather is a winter myth figure who, on Hogswatchnight, gallops from house to house on a crude sledge drawn by four tusked wild boars to deliver presents of sausages, black puddings, pork scratchings and ham to all children who have been good. He says ‘Ho ho ho' a lot. Children who have been bad get a bag full of bloody bones (it's these little details which tell you it's a tale for the little folk). There is a song about him. It begins:
You'd Better Watch Out
 . . .

The Hogfather is said to have originated in the legend of a local king who, one winter's night, happened to be passing, or so he said, the home of three young women and heard them sobbing because they had no food to celebrate the midwinter feast. He took pity on them and threw a packet of sausages through the window.
^*1

⁹
Wizards did not have balls. There was a popular song about it. But they did hold their annual Excuse Me, or free-for-all dance, which was one of the highlights of the Ankh-Morpork social calendar. The Librarian in particular always looked forward to it, and used an
amazing
amount of hair cream.

¹⁰
Well, except for Unseen University once, but that was just a student prank.

¹¹
The smallest room in Unseen University is in fact a broom cupboard on the fourth floor. He
really
meant the privy. The Reader had a theory that all the really good books in any building – at least, all the really funny ones
^*2
– gravitate to a pile in the privy but no one ever has time to read all of them,
or even knows how they came to be there
. His research was causing extreme constipation and a queue outside the door every morning.

¹²
And didn't appear to do anything to the enemy
at all
.

¹³
He was a wizard. Trick shots for a wizard aren't the old three-times-round-the-table jobs. His best one was once off the cushion, once off a seagull, once off the back of the head of the Bursar who'd been walking along the corridor outside
last Tuesday
(a bit of temporal spin there) and a tricky rebound off the ceiling. He'd missed sinking the actual shot by a whisker, but it had been pretty tricky, even so.

¹⁴
And this was true. Nature can adapt to practically anything. There were
fish
evolved to live in the river. They looked like a cross between a soft-shelled crab and an industrial vacuum cleaner, and tended to explode in fresh water, and what you had to use for bait was nobody's business, but they were
fish
and a sportsman like Ridcully never cared about what the quarry tasted like.

¹⁵
The Senior Wrangler had a theory that
long
food – beans, celery and rhubarb – made you taller, because of the famous Doctrine of Signatures. It certainly made him lighter.

¹⁶
And, of course, one that misfires. Deafness doesn't prevent composers hearing the music. It prevents them hearing the distractions.

¹⁷
It wasn't the taste. Plenty of hot dogs taste bad. But Dibbler had now actually managed to produce sausages that didn't taste of anything. It was weird. No matter how much mustard, ketchup and pickle people put on them, they still didn't taste of
anything
. Not even the midnight dogs they sell to drunks in Helsinki can quite manage that.

¹⁸
Troll beer is ammonium sulphide dissolved in alcohol and tastes like drinking fermented batteries.

¹⁹
Not with very good results, however. Stibbons spent weeks grinding lenses and blowing glassware and had finally produced a device which showed the tremendous amount of tiny animals there were in one drop of water from the river Ankh.

The Archchancellor had taken a look and then remarked that anything in which that much life could exist
had
to be healthy.

²⁰
All right –
all
dwarf songs. Except the one about Hiho.

²¹
Troll gambling is even simpler than Australian gambling. One of the most popular games is One Up, which consists of throwing a coin in the air and betting on whether it will come down again.

²²
Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats – and then people were suddenly queuing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there
still
seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: ‘Tax the rat farms.'

²³
From the Old
wys-ars
, lit.: one who, at bottom, is very smart.

²⁴
Or, at least, on to the river.

²⁵
A very
grammatical
half an hour, however.

²⁶
Old shoes always turn up in the bottom of every wardrobe. If a
mermaid
had a wardrobe old shoes would turn up in the bottom of it.