Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion ... So Far Read online

  It was named when a donkey stopped in the middle of the river and wouldn’t go backwards or forwards. It could have been called Disobedient Donkey.

  The valley occupied by Bad Ass overlooks a panorama of lesser mountains and foothills. From there, you can see to the edge of the world. In the long winter snows, the roads out of the village are lined with boards to reduce drifting and to stop travellers from straying. Markers are also carved into the bark of every tenth tree, out to a distance of nearly two miles. Many a life has been saved by the pattern of notches found by probing fingers under the clinging snow.

  A narrow bridge over a stream leads to the village smithy, birthplace of Eskarina Smith (ESK).

  Baker. A weaver in LANCRE, and a member of the Lancre Morris Men. [LL]

  Band With Rocks In, The. A musical group formed by IMP Y ‘BUDDY’ CELYN, Glod GLODSSON, Lias ‘Cliff’ BLUESTONE and, for a brief period when they needed a keyboard player, the LIBRARIAN. [SM]

  Bands, Musical (names of).

  &U (‘And You’)

  BAND WITH ROCKS IN, THE

  Bertie the Balladeer & His Troubadour Rascals

  Big Troll & Some Other Trolls, A

  Blots, The

  Boyz From the Wood

  Dwarfs with Altitude

  Grisham Frord Close Harmony Singers

  Insanity

  Lead Balloon

  Snori Snoriscousin & His Brass Idiots

  Suck

  Surreptitious Fabric, The

  We’re Certainly Dwarfs

  Whom, The

  Quite a large number of these are various names briefly assumed and quickly discarded by the band that eventually performed in the famous Free Festival as ‘Ande Supporting Bands’.

  Bank, Royal, Ankh-Morpork. The facade of the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork looks, as major public buildings often do, like a temple. This can seem strange since several major religions are a) canonically against what they do inside and b) bank there.

  The architect at least knew how to design a decent column, and also knew when to stop. He had set his face like flint against any prospect of cherubs, although above the columns was a high-minded frieze showing something allegorical involving maidens and urns. Most of the urns and some of the young women, have birds nesting in them.

  In fact, it was originally built, by a previous King of Ankh, as a temple around 900 years ago. He had no particular god in mind. It was more a speculative venture – a sort of celestial bird box, awaiting a god to turn up. It then got used for storage in case of a siege, then an indoor market, until Jocatello La Vice got it when the city defaulted on a loan.

  Inside, one notices the hush – mostly because the ceiling is so high that sounds are just lost, but partly because people lower their voices in the presence of large sums of money. Red velvet and brass is much in evidence. There are pictures everywhere, of serious men in frock coats. Sometimes footsteps echo briefly on the white marble floor and are suddenly swallowed when their owner steps onto an island of carpet. And the big desks are covered with sage-green leather. Red leather? Pah! That is parvenus and wannabees. Sage green means that you’ve got there, and that your ancestors got there too. On the wall above the counter a big clock, supported by cherubs, ticks away.

  In the Undercroft, a grand, vaulted, cellar, is THE GLOOPER. [MM]

  Barbarian Invaders Machine, the. A device apparently invented by Leonard of Quirm. Weight: two tons. Construction: big blocks of wood, and lots of cogwheels. Motive power: weights on a pulley and twisted rubber bands. Purpose: on the insertion of one penny in the slot, the player has the opportunity to fire little spears at the ranks of wooden barbarian invaders as they wobble across the little proscenium. Occasional a badly-carved horseman jerks pasts and will score extra points if hit. A device ahead of its time.

  Basilica, Enrico, Bashfullsson, Bashfull, Grag. See SLUGG, HENRY. An enlightened ‘deep down’ dwarf – a little young and modern for many dwarfs. He was born in Ankh-Morpork and one of his novel beliefs is that you don’t have to be physically deep down to be a dwarf. He lodges in a subdivided cellar in Cheap Street. [T!]

  Battle Bread of B’hrian Bloodaxe, the. This, like the equally famous Scone of Stone, is testimony to the pivotal role of bread products in dwarfish history. The semi-legendary round loaf would, says legend, return to B’hrian’s hand after decapitating his enemies like so many hard-boiled eggs and played a major role (or, possibly, roll) in the battle with the trolls at Koom Valley. Whoever wields it, tradition says, will be invincible in battle and also not short of a meal if really pushed. It is currently in the DWARF BREAD MUSEUM in Ankh-Morpork.

  Battye, Miss Sandra. Miss Sandra Battye first arrived in Ankh-Morpork many years ago to earn her fortune as a seamstress. No, a seamstress. The ones with the needle and thread. Sandra specialises, in fact, in crochet, and made her first fortune out of people’s natural confusion. Since the word ‘seamstress’ had, as everyone knows, been hijacked by the ladies of negotiable affection, very few actual needlewomen cared to work in the city. She made a good living from those poor souls who arrive at the Guild of SEAMSTRESSES actually looking for someone to darn a sock, or mend a ripped pair of trousers. Having spotted the gap in the market, she stitched it up. [NW]

  Beano. A clown, murdered by Edward D’EATH. His only crime – apart, it could be argued, from being a clown – was that he was about the right height and had a room in the right place. [MAA]

  Bearhugger, Jimkin. Owner of a distillery in Ankh-Morpork. Manufacturer of Bearhugger’s Very Fine Whiskey, Bearhugger’s Old Persnickety and Jimkin Bearhugger’s Old Selected Dragon’s Blood Whiskey – on the bottle of which it says: ‘Every bottle matured for up to seven minutes’ and ‘Ha’ a drop afore ye go’. It is cheap and powerful; you could also light fires or clean spoons with it. And probably fuel aircraft.

  A recent but short-lived line, which never caught on despite the best scientific recommendation, was Bearhugger’s Homeopathic Sipping Whiskey. It is a founding fact of homeopathy that the effectiveness of a remedy increases with dilution. Jimkin decided, therefore, that this idea could profitably be applied to his own product. Strangely enough, the slogan ‘Every drop diluted 1 Million Times!’ failed to attract custom even though, in theory, merely being in the same room as an uncorked bottle of the stuff should make the purchaser riotously drunk.

  Beavis, Gammer. Witch from Lancre. She is, by Nanny OGG’S standards, a bit too educated, so that sometimes it overflows out of her mouth. But, she does her own shoe repairs and she takes snuff and that counts her as all right in Nanny Ogg’s small world. She wears a hat with a very flat brim and a point you could clean your ear with.

  Beedle, Miss Felicity. Actually a Mrs; her husband was killed in the Klatchian War. She lives near Ramkin Hall in Apple Tree Cottage, a house which has a direct tunnel into the goblins’ hall. She spends some time helping to educate the local goblins and she also finances scholarships for the Quirm College for Young Ladies. She is a small woman with the strange aspect that you see in some people that causes them to appear to be subtly vibrating even when standing perfectly still. You feel that if some interior restraint suddenly broke, the pent-up energy released would catapult her through the nearest window.

  She has written many, many books for children, with titles as varied as The World of Poo, The Little Duckling Who Thought He Was an Elephant, Melvin and the Enormous Boil and The War With the Snot Goblins. [SN]

  Beggars’ Guild. Motto: MONETA SVPERVACANEA, MAGISTER? Coat of arms: a shield, quartered. In the top-right quarter, three dragons, courant et or, on a field, gules. In the bottom-left quarter a dragon, gardant et or on a field, gules. In the top-left and bottom-right quarters a pattern of caltraps, argent, on a field, azure.

  The question asked most frequently by visitors to Ankh-Morpork is ‘Why haven’t I got any money left?’ The next most frequently asked question, at least by those who already know their way to the areas of the SHADES generally associated with female companions
hip of the professional kind, is ‘What has that coat of arms got to do with begging? Dragons on a field of gools? Doesn’t sound like beggary to me.’ These people have failed, of course, to understand the very essence of beggary. This is a worn-out, much-patched second-hand coat of arms.

  This is the oldest Guild in Ankh-Morpork. And also the richest, since the beggars never buy anything they can beg.

  The Beggars’ Guild predates the formalised Guild system of Ankh-Morpork by hundreds if not thousands of years, and it has a strict class structure and hierarchy all of its own. While all the Guilds are to some extent separate societies within society, this is particularly true of the Beggars.

  The first mention of the Guild’s classes of membership is some six hundred years before the present and says that the Guild includes: ‘Rufflers, Uprightmen, Rogues, Wild rogues, Priggers or pransers, People calling you Jimmy, Palliards, Fraters, Mutterers, Mumblers, Freshwater mariners or whipjacks, Drummerers, Drunken tinkers, Swaddlers or Peddlers, Jarkemen or patricoes, Demanders for glimmer or fire, Bawdy baskets, Mortes Autem-mortem, Walking mortes, Doxies, Dells, Kinching mortes and Kinchin cooes.’ (This list has a certain coincidence with the beggars found in Elizabethan England.)

  In fact, however, most of these classes were more correctly various low grades of thief or conman and their descendants have long since decamped to the newer Guilds. Classes of beggars in the city now include: Twitchers, Droolers, Dribblers, Mumblers, Mutterers, Walking-Along-Shouters, Demanders of a Chip, People who call other people Jimmy, People who need Tuppence for a Cup of Tea, People who need Eightpence for a Meal, People with placards saying ‘Why lie? I need a beer’ and Foul Ole RON, agreed by his fellow beggars to be in a class by himself if only because no one will share it with him.

  While the classes may appear interchangeable to the unpractised eye, their duties are carefully compartmentalised and the demarcation lines enforced. While a Mumbler in good standing might risk an occasional Mutter, he’d be very unwise to try Walking-Along-Shouting until the Guild judged him senior and ready enough to do so. Equally, he would be within his rights to report a mere Dribbler he saw attempting to sneak a Mumble. Especially a mumble in the wrong place; one of the important functions of the Guild is to arrange patrols and shifts so that beggary is properly distributed among the streets.

  Pavement artists, people with harmonicas and people who make money by standing still in interesting ways are not beggars. No beggar would dream of providing any kind of service for reward, except to the extent that the donor may feel themselves to be a better person for donating. Doing anything for the money except asking for it is against the tenets of true beggary. Such money as the beggars do make, it must be stressed, is entirely obtained by 1) begging and 2) not begging.

  1) is self-explanatory. 2) owes a lot to what might be called the Ankh-Morpork view of social economics. You clearly don’t want a lot of beggars hanging around at your wedding or other salubrious occasions, so the accepted thing to do is send the Guild a small sum of money and a kind of anti-invitation, which sees to it that men with interesting running sores and a body odour you could split wood with do not turn up. You’d be amazed at how many will turn up should this small precaution not be taken. This is very similar to the scheme run by the THIEVES’ GUILD, whereby a small payment every year ensures the safety of person and property.

  The Guild offers a highly specialised schooling and other social benefits for its members. It is ruled by a council under the chairmanship of the current King or Queen of the Beggars (current incumbent: Queen MOLLY of the Beggars).

  Beginning, The. There are various theories about the beginning of the universe. These include the Egg, a theory based upon the Great Egg of the Universe, and the Clearing of the Throat, followed by the Word. Others have also propounded the ‘Drawing of the Breath’ and the ‘Scratching of the Head and Trying to Remember It, It Was On the Tip of My Tongue’. One of the objects of The LISTENERS – or Listening Monks – is to determine, by careful analysis of the very faint echoes, what the Word was. By definition, all theories about the beginning of the universe are true. [LF]

  Belafon. A young druid, who delivers rocks for stone circles. When RINCEWIND and TWOFLOWER landed on the 30'x10' bluish rock on which Belafon was flying, he was carrying a sickle and wearing a long, wet nightshirt and a square of oilskin tied across his head and knotted under his chin. [LF]

  Bellyster. Warder at the Tanty. Bellyster is a real old-school screw, a craftsman of small evils, the kind of bully that would take every opportunity to make a prisoner’s life a misery. It wasn’t just that he’d gob in your bowl of greasy skilly, but he wouldn’t even have the common decency to do it where you couldn’t see him. He picked on the weak and frightened, too. He hates the Watch, and the feeling is mutual. [MM]

  Bel-Shamharoth. The Soul-Eater, the Soul-Render, the Sender of Eight. Not Evil, for even Evil has a certain vitality. Bel-Shamharoth is the flip side of the coin of which Good and Evil are one side. One of the old, dark gods of the NECROTELICOMNICON. Although it has never been explicitly said, it is likely that he is one of the creatures of the DUNGEON DIMENSIONS who has managed to survive in this world.

  The inner dimensions of his eight-sided temple disobey a fairly basic rule of architecture by being bigger than the outside. It is full of corridors, of tunnels full of unpleasant carvings and occasional disjointed skeletons, hell-lit by a light so violet that it is almost black. The eight-sided crystals set at intervals in the walls and ceiling shed a rather unpleasant glow that doesn’t so much illuminate as outline the darkness. The floor is a continuous mosaic of eight-sided tiles, and the corridor walls and ceilings are angled to give the corridors eight sides. In those places where part of the masonry has fallen in, even the stones have eight sides. All routes lead to the centre, where there is an intense violet light, illuminating a wide room with eight walls and eight passages radiating off it. There is a low, eight-sided altar but in the centre of the room is a huge stone slab, eight-sided (of course) and slightly tilted. Under that is a black tentacled creature with an enormous eye – Bel-Shamharoth – all suckers and tentacles and mandibles. [COM, ER]

  Bent, Malvolio. Chief Cashier ($41/month) at the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork. Mr Bent is in every way smooth and uncreased. Instead of a traditional banker’s frock coat, he wears was a very well cut black jacket above pinstripe trousers. Mr Bent’s feet are soundless even on the marble floors of the Bank. They are also unsually large for such a dapper man, but the shoes, black and polished, mirror-shiny, were very well made. He is tall and dark and walks like a dressage horse, lifting each foot very deliberately off the ground before setting it on the ground again. Apart from that incongruity, Mr Bent has the air about him of one who stands quietly in a cupboard when not in use.

  When he first appeared in the story, Mavolio Bent had a definition of ‘silly’ that most people would have considered a touch on the broad side. Laughter was silly. Theatricals, poetry and music were silly. Clothes that weren’t grey, black or at least of un-dyed cloth were silly. Pictures of things that weren’t real were silly (pictures of things that were real were unnecessary.) The ground state of being was silliness, which had to be overcome with every mortal fibre. Missionaries from the stricter religions would have found in Malvolio Bent an ideal convert, except that religion was extremely silly. Bent arrived in Ankh-Morpork as a child, on a cart owned by some travelling accountants. He had been with the bank for thirty-nine years and he got a job when he was thirteen by sitting on the steps all night until the chairman came to work and impressing him with his command of numbers. He went from messenger boy to Chief Cashier in twenty years. Never had a day off for illness, either. It seems he may have been born Charlie Benito. [MM]

  Bentzen. Captain of Duke FELMET’S personal bodyguard. [WS]

  Berilia. One of four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the world rests. [COM]

  Bertie. Leader of Bertie the Balladeer and His T
roubadour Rascals, a traditional musical group. Wears a gold lamé doublet. [SM]

  Beryl. Wife of MICA the Bridge Troll. [TB] There’s also a Beryl married to Kwartz in LF. It is a common enough name for female trolls, who are generally named after precious or semi-precious stones.

  Bes Pelargic. Major seaport of the AGATEAN EMPIRE. The city includes a Red Triangle District. Little more is known, owing to the Empire’s emphatic lack of interest in the outside world, at least until recently.

  Bethan. Seventeen-year-old virgin rescued from druidical sacrifice by COHEN the Barbarian. An attractive but pale young lady, she was first encountered wearing a long white robe, with a gold torc around her neck. She subsequently married Cohen. Well, we say married . . . It is clear that Cohen ‘married’ many women during the course of a long and adventurous life, but none of them seems to have been any the worse for the experience and they often ended up richer, since he never mastered the art of spending money. [LF]

  Biers. An undead bar in the Shades of Ankh-Morpork, exact location unspecified; it may well be that you can only find your way to it if you would be acceptable as clientele. ‘Undead’ in this case is taken to include werewolves, bogeymen, ghouls, banshees and other foster children of the Night. Basically, if you don’t need to wear a mask to frighten the kiddies, you can drink at Biers.

  Igor the barman serves drinks you tend not to get in other bars. But since he is a barman, and every barman likes to put a bit of panache in his act, he’ll put in cocktail sticks with things stuck on the end. What things, of course, you may not find out until too late. Therefore it is wise not to order a drink that isn’t transparent. And don’t order a Bloody Mary unless you are really, really sure of yourself.