Unseen Academicals d-37 Read online

  Unseen Academicals

  ( Discworld - 37 )

  Terry Pratchett

  Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork — not the old fashioned, grubby pushing and shoving, but the new, fast football with pointy hats for goalposts and balls that go gloing when you drop them. And now, the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they’re in the mood for trying everything else. The prospect of the Big Match draws in a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might just turn out to be the greatest fashion model there has ever been, and the mysterious Mr Nutt (and no one knows anything much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt, which worries him, too). As the match approaches, four lives are entangled and changed for ever. Because the thing about football — the important thing about football — is that it is not just about football. Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!

  Acknowledgements

  This book is dedicated to Rob Wilkins, who typed most of it and had the good sense to laugh occasionally. And to Colin Smythe for his encouragement.

  The chant of the goddess Pedestriana is a parody of the wonderful poem ‘Brahma’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson, but of course you knew that anyway.

  It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork’s Royal Art Museum[1].

  It occurred to new employee Rudolph Scattering about once every minute that on the whole it might have been a good idea to tell the Curator about his nyctophobia, his fear of strange noises and, he now knew, his fear of absolutely every thing he could see (and, come to that, not see), hear, smell and feel crawling up his back during the endless hours on guard during the night. It was no use telling himself that everything in here was dead. That didn’t help at all. It meant that he stood out.

  And then he heard the sob. A scream might have been better. At least you are certain when you’ve heard a scream. A faint sob is something you have to wait to hear again, because you can’t be sure.

  He raised his lantern in a shaking hand. There shouldn’t be anyone in here. The place was securely locked; no one could get in. Or, now he came to think about it, out. He wished he hadn’t thought about it.

  He was in the basement, which was not among the most scary places on his round. It was mostly just old shelves and drawers, full of the things that were almost, but very definitely not entirely, thrown away. Museums don’t like things to be thrown away, in case they turn out to be very important later on.

  Another sob, and a sound like the scraping of… pottery?

  A rat, then, somewhere on the rear shelves? Rats didn’t sob, did they?

  ‘Look, I don’t want to have to come in there and get you!’ said Scattering with heartfelt accuracy.

  And the shelves exploded. It seemed to him to happen in slow motion, bits of pottery and statues spreading out as they drifted towards him. He went over backwards and the expanding cloud passing overhead crashed into the shelves on the other side of the room, which were demolished.

  Scattering lay on the floor in the dark, unable to move, expecting at any moment to be torn apart by the phantoms bubbling up from his imagination…

  The day staff found him there in the morning, deeply asleep and covered in dust. They listened to his garbled explanation, treated him kindly, and agreed that a different career might suit his temperament. They wondered for a while about what he had been up to, night watchmen being rather puzzling people at the best of times, but put it out of their heads… because of the find.

  Mr Scattering then got a job in a pet shop in Pellicool Steps, but left after three days because the way the kittens stared at him gave him nightmares. The world can be very cruel to some people. But he never told anyone about the gloriously glittering lady holding a large ball over her head who smiled at him before she vanished. He did not want people to think he was strange.

  But perhaps it is time to talk about beds.

  Lectrology, the study of the bed and its associated surroundings, can be extremely useful and tell you a great deal about the owner, even if it’s only that they are a very knowing and savvy installations artist.

  The bed of Archchancellor Ridcully of Unseen University, for example, is at the very least a bed and a half, being an eight-poster. It encompasses a small library and a bar, and artfully includes a shut-away privy, of mahogany and brass throughout, to save those long cold nocturnal excursions with their concomitant risk of tripping over slippers, empty bottles, shoes and all the other barriers presented to a man in the dark who is praying that the next thing that stubs his toe will be porcelain, or at least easy to clean.

  The bed of Trevor Likely is anywhere: a friend’s floor, in the hayloft of any stable that has been left unlocked (which is usually a much more fragrant option), or in a room of an empty house (though there are precious few of those these days); or he sleeps at work (but he is always careful about that, because old man Smeems never seems to sleep at all and might catch him at any time). Trev can sleep anywhere, and does.

  Glenda sleeps in an ancient iron bed[2], whose springs and mattress have gently and kindly shaped themselves around her over the years, leaving a generous depression. The bottom of this catenary couch is held off the floor by a mulch of very cheap, yellowing romantic novels of the kind to which the word ‘bodice’ comes naturally. She would die if anyone found out, or possibly they will die if she finds out that they have found out. Usually there is, on the pillow, a very elderly teddy bear called Mr Wobble.

  Traditionally, in the lexicon of pathos, such a bear should have only one eye, but as the result of a childhood error in Glenda’s sewing, he has three, and is more enlightened than the average bear.

  Juliet Stollop’s bed was marketed to her mother as fit for a princess, and is more or less like the Archchancellor’s bed, although almost all less, since it consists of some gauze curtains surrounding a very narrow, very cheap bed. Her mother is now dead. This can be inferred from the fact that when the bed collapsed under the weight of a growing girl, someone raised it up on beer crates. A mother would have made sure that at least they were, like everything else in the room, painted pink with little crowns on.

  Mr Nutt was seven years old before he found out that sleeping, for some people, involved a special piece of furniture.

  Now it was two o’clock in the morning. A cloying silence reigned along the ancient corridors and cloisters of Unseen University. There was silence in the Library; there was silence in the halls. There was so much silence you could hear it. Everywhere it went, it stuffed the ears with invisible fluff.

  Gloing!

  The tiny sound flew past, a moment of liquid gold in the stygian silence.

  Silence ruled again above stairs, until it was interrupted by the shuffling of the official thick-soled carpet slippers of Smeems, the Candle Knave, as he made his rounds throughout the long night from one candlestick to another, refilling them from his official basket. He was assisted tonight (although, to judge from his occasional grumbling, not assisted enough) by a dribbler.

  He was called the Candle Knave because that was how the post had been described in the university records when it was created, almost two thousand years before. Keeping the candlesticks, sconces and, not least, the candelabra of the university filled was a never-ending job. It was, in fact, the most important job in the place, in the mind of the Candle Knave. Oh, Smeems would admit under pressure that there were men in pointy hats around, but they came and went and mostly just got in the way. Unseen University was not rich in windows, and without the Candle Knave it would be in darkness within a day. That the wizards would simply step outside and from the teeming crowds hire another man capable of climbing ladders with pockets
full of candles had never featured in his thoughts. He was irreplaceable, just like every other Candle Knave before him.

  And now, behind him, there was a clatter as the official folding stepladder unfolded.

  He spun around. ‘Hold the damn thing right!’ he hissed.

  ‘Sorry, master!’ said his temporary apprentice, trying to control the sliding, finger-crushing monster that every stepladder becomes at the first opportunity, and often without any opportunity at all.

  ‘And keep the noise down!’ Smeems bellowed. ‘Do you want to be a dribbler for the rest of your life?’

  ‘Actually, I quite like being a dribbler, sir—’

  ‘Ha! Want of ambition is the curse of the labouring class! Here, give me that thing!’

  The Candle Knave snatched at the ladder just as his luckless assistant closed it.

  ‘Sorry about that, sir… ’

  ‘There’s always room for one more on the wick-dipping tank, you know,’ said Smeems, blowing on his knuckles.

  ‘Fair enough, sir.’

  The Candle Knave stared at the grey, round, guileless face. There was an unshakeably amiable look about it that was very disconcerting, especially when you knew what it was you were looking at. And he knew what it was, oh yes, but not what it was called.

  ‘What’s your name again? I can’t remember everybody’s name.’

  ‘Nutt, Mister Smeems. With two t’s.’

  ‘Do you think the second one helps matters, Nutt?’

  ‘Not really, sir.’

  ‘Where is Trev? He should be on tonight.’

  ‘Been very ill, sir. Asked me to do it.’

  The Candle Knave grunted. ‘You have to look smart to work above stairs, Nutts!’

  ‘Nutt, sir. Sorry, sir. Was born not looking smart, sir.’

  ‘Well, at least there’s no one to see you now,’ Smeems conceded. ‘All right, follow me, and try to look less… well, just try not to look.’

  ‘Yes, master, but I think—’

  ‘You are not paid to think, young… man.’

  ‘Will try not to do so, master.’

  Two minutes later Smeems was standing in front of the Emperor, watched by a suitably amazed Nutt.

  A mountain of silvery-grey tallow almost filled the isolated junction of stone corridors. The flame of this candle, which could just be made out to be a mega-candle aggregated from the stubs of many, many thousands of candles that had gone before, all dribbled and runnelled into one great whole, was a glow near the ceiling, too high to illuminate anything very much.

  Smeems’s chest swelled. He was in the presence of History.

  ‘Behold, Nutts!’

  ‘Yes, sir. Beholding, sir. It’s Nutt, sir.’

  ‘Two thousand years look down on us from the top of this candle, Nutts. Of course, they look further down on you than on me.’

  ‘Absolutely, sir. Well done, sir.’

  Smeems glared at the round, amiable face, and saw nothing there but a slicked-down keenness that was very nearly frightening.

  He grunted, then unfolded his ladder without much more than a pinched thumb, and climbed it carefully until it would take him no further. From this base camp generations of Candle Knaves had carved and maintained steps up the hubward face of the giant.

  ‘Feast your eyes on this, lad,’ he called down, his ground-state bad temper somewhat moderated by this contact with greatness. ‘One day you might be the… man to climb this hallowed tallow!’

  For a moment, Nutt looked like someone trying hard to disguise the expression of a person who seriously hopes that his future holds more than a big candle. Nutt was young and as such did not have that reverence for age that is had by, mostly, the aged. But the cheerful not-quite-smile came back. It never went away for long.

  ‘Yessir,’ he said, on the basis that this generally worked.

  Some people claimed that the Emperor had been lit on the very night that UU was founded, and had never gone out since. Certainly the Emperor was huge, and was what you got when, every night for maybe two thousand years, you lit a new fat candle from the guttering remains of the last one and pressed it firmly into the warm wax. There was no visible candlestick now, of course. That was somewhere in the vast accumulation of waxy dribbles on the next floor down.

  Around a thousand years ago, the university had had a large hole made in the ceiling of the corridor below, and already the Emperor was seventeen feet high up here. There was thirty-eight feet in total of pure, natural, dribbled candle. It made Smeems proud. He was keeper of the candle that never went out. It was an example to everyone, a light that never failed, a flame in the dark, a beacon of tradition. And Unseen University took tradition very seriously, at least when it remembered to.

  As now, in fact…

  From somewhere in the distance came a sound like a large duck being trodden on, followed by a cry of ‘Ho, the Megapode!’ And then all hell eventuated.

  A… creature plunged out of the gloom.

  There is a phrase ‘neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring’. This thing was all of them, plus some other bits of beasts unknown to science or nightmare or even kebab. There was certainly some red, and a lot of flapping, and Nutt was sure he caught a glimpse of an enormous sandal, but there were the mad, rolling, bouncing eyes, the huge yellow and red beak and then the thing disappeared down another gloomy corridor, incessantly making that flat honking noise of the sort duck hunters make just before they are shot by other duck hunters.

  ‘Aho! The Megapode!’ It wasn’t clear where the cry came from. It seemed to be coming from everywhere. ‘There she bumps! Ho, the Megapode!’

  The cry was taken up on every side, and from the dark shadows of every corridor, bar the one down which the beast had fled, galloped curious shapes, which turned out to be, by the flickering light of the Emperor, the senior faculty of the university. Each wizard was being carried piggy-back by a stout bowler-hatted university porter, whom he was urging onward by means of a bottle of beer on a string held, as tradition demanded, ahead of the porter’s grasp on a long stick.

  The doleful quack rang out again, some distance away, and a wizard waved his staff in the air and yelled: ‘Bird is Flown! Ho, the Megapode!’

  The colliding wizardry, who’d already crushed Smeems’s rickety ladder under the hobnailed boots of their steeds, set off at once, butting and barging for position.

  For a little while ‘Aho! The Megapode!’ echoed in the distance. When he was certain they had gone, Nutt crept out from his refuge behind the Emperor, picked up what remained of the ladder, and looked around.

  ‘Master?’ he ventured.

  There was a grunt from above. He looked up. ‘Are you all right, master?’

  ‘I have been better, Nutts. Can you see my feet?’

  Nutt raised his lantern. ‘Yes, master. I’m sorry to say the ladder is broken.’

  ‘Well, do something about it. I’m having to concentrate on my handholds here.’

  ‘I thought I wasn’t paid to think, master.’

  ‘Don’t you try to be smart!’

  ‘Can I try to be smart enough to get you down safely, master?’

  No answer was the stern reply. Nutt sighed, and opened up the big canvas tool bag.

  Smeems clung to the vertiginous candle as he heard, down below, mysterious scrapings and clinking noises. Then, with a silence and suddenness that made him gasp, a spiky shape rose up beside him, swaying slightly.

  ‘I’ve screwed together three of the big snuffer poles, master,’ said Nutt from below. ‘And you’ll see there’s a chandelier hook stuck in the top, yes? And there’s a rope. Can you see it? I think that if you can make a loop around the Emperor it won’t slip much and you ought to be able to let yourself down slowly. Oh, and there’s a box of matches, too.’

  ‘What for?’ said Smeems, reaching out for the hook.

  ‘Can’t help noticing that the Emperor has gone out, sir,’ said the voice from below, cheerfully.

  ‘No
it hasn’t!’

  ‘I think you’ll find it has, sir, because I can’t see the—’

  ‘There is no room in this university’s most important department for people with bad eyesight, Nutts!’

  ‘I beg your pardon, master. I don’t know what came over me. Suddenly I can see the flame!’

  From above came the sound of a match being struck, and a circle of yellow light expanded on the ceiling as the candle that never went out was lit. Shortly afterwards Smeems very gingerly lowered himself to the floor.

  ‘Well done, sir,’ said Nutt.

  The Candle Knave flicked a length of congealed candle dribble off his equally greasy shirt.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have to come back in the morning to recover the—’ But Nutt was already going up the rope like a spider. There was a clanging on the other side of the great candle as the lengths of snuffer pole were dropped, and then the boy abseiled back down to his master with the hook under his arm. And now he stood there all eagerness and scrubbed (if somewhat badly dressed) efficiency. There was something almost offensive about it. And the Candle Knave wasn’t used to this. He felt obliged to take the lad down a peg, for his own good.

  ‘All candles in this university must be lit by long taper from a candle that still burns, boy,’ he said sternly. ‘Where did you get those matches?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to say, sir.’

  ‘I dare say you wouldn’t, indeed! Now tell me, boy!’

  ‘I don’t want to get anyone into trouble, master.’

  ‘Your reluctance does you credit, but I insist,’ said the Candle Knave.

  ‘Er, they fell out of your jacket when you were climbing up, master.’

  Off in the distance was one last cry: ‘The Megapode is catched!’ But around the Emperor silence listened with its mouth open.

  ‘You are mistaken, Nutts,’ said Smeems slowly. ‘I think you will find that one of the gentlemen must have dropped them.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that’s certainly what must have happened, sir. I must learn not to jump to conclusions.’