The Turtle Moves! (10 page)

We proceed from an explanation of how the only place that the
Morris
⁹²
is danced properly is a village in the Ramtops to the first appearance of the celestial Auditors of Reality, and the vast, cosmic (and cosmically bored) being Azrael, the ultimate keeper of time and death.

The Auditors will be back; Azrael only appears in this one novel. I sometimes find it disconcerting how Mr. Pratchett will introduce a big chunk of cosmology, or a whole family of characters, and then only reuse the bits he finds amusing, without their original context.

At any rate, the Auditors like the universe to be orderly and bland, and have decided that Death—the being that represents death on the Disc, our old friend from lo these eleven novels to date—has become excessively eccentric and must be retired in favor of a new, less individual anthropomorphic personification.

Death is not happy with this decision, but there is no appeal. He is removed from his role.

Remember Windle Poons, the oldest member of the faculty of Unseen University?

Well, perhaps you don't, if you're reading this by following one series at a time and you're only looking at the books about Death at this point, but if you've been reading straight through, you really ought to have noticed the mention of him in the discussion of
Moving Pictures
. If you want to flip back and read it, you can, though you won't find it very interesting, as all I said was that he's the oldest member of the faculty and a part of the permanent cast of characters at the University.

I lied about one part of that, though. He's not exactly permanent. After all, he's a hundred and thirty years old, and in
Reaper Man
, he does exactly what you would expect of someone that age—he dies.

Unfortunately, he does so during the period between the forced retirement of the old Death and the arrival of his replacement. No scythe-wielding being appears to usher his spirit into the next world; instead he finds himself hanging around the University, and so he reinhabits his remains, becoming a zombie.

This turns out in many ways to not be what he expected, and much of the plot follows his adventures among the undead. It seems that Death's absence does not mean that nothing dies, it only means that the spirits of the dead do not depart, and the Discworld begins to experience a
serious excess of life-force. Ghosts start complaining of crowding; poltergeist activity reaches heretofore unheard-of levels.

So far, that all makes a certain amount of sense, and is entirely in keeping with what we know of the Discworld, but midway through the book, the story takes a bizarre left turn with the discovery that this excess life-force has triggered the breeding cycle of something that initially appears to be cities, but then turns out to be instead a parasite that preys on cities.
⁹³

While that's happening, the retired Death has taken up an ordinary life as a farmhand named Bill Door—a good man with a scythe, our Bill Door.

So we have two separate but related plots—the story of undead Windle Poons dealing with his new existence and defending Ankh-Morpork and Unseen University from a ferocious predator, and the story of Bill Door learning about life, death, and humanity.

It's traditional in such cases for the two plots to eventually merge, but these two don't, really. They remain distinct, to the point of being set in different typefaces. Ah, well; it happens.

At any rate, Bill Door finds his replacement unsatisfactory and takes his old job back, while Poons and company defeat the predatory hive creature, and the plots do sort of merge, after a fashion, when the restored Death belatedly shows up in Ankh-Morpork, but that's really after everything's over.

Along the way we have had a great deal of silly fun, and hints of things to come, though we might not have recognized them as such. There are references to the Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, who appeared to be a throwaway gag back in 1991, but reappeared ten years later in a book with the curious title
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
.

They aren't a throwaway gag in the latter.

We meet Reg Shoe, the militant undead-rights activist zombie; he'll be back, more than once. As will his landlady, Mrs. Cake—a medium, verging on small—though generally not in as large a role.

The Death of Rats and the Death of Fleas appear for the first time in
Reaper Man
.

It's established here that the Discworld has the full panoply of undead available—the story includes not just zombies, but vampires, werewolves (honorary undead), a bogeyman, a banshee, and although no
golem appears
in propria persona
, Reg Shoe reports having known one at some point. (We'll see lots of golems in
Feet of Clay
, as described in Chapter 23, and in various places thereafter.)

The first mention of the University's High Energy Magic building, the only building on campus less than a thousand years old, is made. It will be back in later stories.

We discover that just as New York is the Big Apple, Ankh-Morpork is the Big Wahooni, a wahooni being a Discworld vegetable we've seen mentioned now and again.

There are, by the way, direct contradictions of previous events. We are told flat-out that Death has never killed, that he's only taken life when its user was finished with it—but in
The Colour of Magic
we saw Death fatally dispose of a nuisance or two.

Furthermore, it's stated that until the appointment of Mustrum Ridcully, the average term in office of an Archchancellor of Unseen University was eleven months, and that Unseen University has existed for thousands of years, which would mean thousands of Archchancellors, but we were told back in
The Light Fantastic
that Galder Weatherwax was only (“only,” he says; ha!) the 304
^th
Chancellor of Unseen University.

It really does seem as if those first two volumes weren't actually part of the series at all, but a sort of warm-up, a trial period. The inconsistencies keep piling up.

At any rate, by
Reaper Man
the series very definitely
is
a series, with cross-references and in-jokes and foreshadowings of stories to come. Not only do perennials like the Librarian and the Patrician have their usual roles, but Sergeant Colon makes a couple of brief appearances. Everything's becoming consistent.

Sort of.

We've come a long way from parodies of Fritz Leiber and Anne McCaffrey. Instead we have parodies of self-help groups and shopping malls and weekend warriors and spiritualists and any number of other real-world phenomena. How much of this is reality leakage, Discworld as “world and mirror of worlds,”
⁹⁴
and how much is just human nature,
⁹⁴
is hard to say.

At any rate,
Reaper Man
is a good one, and we'll have more about Death five volumes later in
Soul Music
, as seen in Chapter 20, but first we return to Mistress Esmerelda Weatherwax and her covenmates.

T
HIS IS ANOTHER TALE of the witches of Lancre, but before we get back to Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick, we get a little lecture (as we so often do) on the nature of the Discworld, including a mention that “. . . the Discworld exists right on the edge of reality. The least little things can break through to the other side.”

Reality leakage.

And narrativium—except here we're told, “This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started,
takes a shape
. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.”

Or, “. . . if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.”

Narrativium is presumably the element these parasitic stories are based on, just as we are based on carbon (well, me and my family and everyone I know; I don't know who
you
are, reading this, and for all I know you're a blob of ionized gas from somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy that found this book in ancient ruins somewhere).

You know, Mr. Pratchett is rather fond of parasitical life forms—previously he's described ideas as parasites, here it's stories, in
Reaper Man
we saw a parasite that preyed on cities, and in later volumes we'll see parasitic elves and parasitic vampires. It's clearly an idea that resonates with him.

At any rate, the story does eventually get started, and Desiderata Hollow dies, leaving her duties as someone's fairy godmother to Magrat
Garlick, who we discover has not yet married King Verence as it appeared she would at the end of
Wyrd Sisters
.

Desiderata, it seems, opposed the schemes of someone named Lilith, who is using mirror magic to
encourage
stories. Which we have just been told are parasitic. This is clearly a bad thing.

So Magrat sets out for the distant and wondrous city of Genua, accompanied by Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax, and after many amusing adventures they arrive there and deal with Lilith Tempscire.
⁹⁵

Genua, despite its Italianate name and instances in later books where Italian is the language spoken there, is remarkably like New Orleans in a good many ways, and is generously supplied with voodoo women, swamps, alligators, Carnival, and the like. Fittingly, our three witches get there partly by riding a grand paddle-wheel-driven riverboat, complete with crooked gamblers.

Various things appear along the way that we'll be seeing again in later volumes—dwarf bread, to name one, and Casanunda, the dwarf seducer and the Discworld's second-greatest lover,
⁹⁶
for another. Something we probably won't see again is a cameo appearance by what appears very much to be Gollum—it would seem that bits can leak over from
lots
of different realities, not just our own. There are obvious references to Oz, too, though we are by no means back in the parodic territory mined by
The Colour of Magic
; these little details are more in the nature of brief and loving tributes than parodies.

We learn a great deal more about Gytha Ogg,
⁹⁷
who comes across here as the absolute quintessence of the crass English matriarch. Esme Weatherwax, previously established as a determined and powerful witch with very strong opinions as to what's proper, is shown here as downright indomitable and on her way to becoming a force of nature.

Magrat Garlick is depicted as something of a wet hen, and even though she's nominally the fairy godmother, the other two have far more to do in the course of the story.

Lilith, by the way, is working not with just
one
story, but several twined together, with Cinderella at the core.

Although it's hard to explain exactly why, I would point to this novel as the one where the Discworld series really attains its mature form. It developed plots back around
Mort
, and various elements fell into place thereafter, but this is where it all really begins working together smoothly. The story is complete and consistent and entirely within the Discworld milieu, while still having obvious reference to the real world and offering insights into human nature. Narrativium is not yet named, but the story is built around it. Where
The Colour of Magic
was about other stories,
Witches Abroad
is about the concept of story itself. It's not about the content of stories, but about how stories are used. There are stories within stories, stories about stories, stories played out and stories defeated, from the stories that Lilith uses to control Genua to the stories Nanny Ogg writes home to her son Jason, from the role Granny acts out with the riverboat gamblers to the role Ella rejects. The stories are mirrors, and the mirrors both reflect and shape reality.

Damn, I wish I could construct a story like that!

The Discworld series is all about stories, as I've said before, but this novel is where it becomes obvious and explicit.

And we'll be seeing more of the witches very soon, in
Lords and Ladies
, as seen in Chapter 17, but first there's another dose of Gods and Philosophers.

O
MNIA IS A THEOCRACY ruled by the priests of the Great God Om, where Brutha is a novice who helps tend the gardens in the Citadel of the ruling priesthood. There are a few odd things about Brutha, though: He has an absolutely perfect memory, he never dreams, and he really, truly believes in Om.

This last, it turns out, is very unusual indeed. Most Omnians believe in the Church, in rules, in order, in Omnia, but not in the god himself; he just isn't very relevant. His Church has everything so firmly controlled that there's no call for divine intervention. (Later we'll see a similar but less extreme situation regarding the god Nuggan in
Monstrous Regiment
.)

Gods in Discworld
need
belief; it's their source of power. Om is therefore not quite the great and powerful god he used to be.

He is, in fact, a one-eyed tortoise, and his once-mighty lightnings are reduced to sparks that can barely singe a heretic's hair. He took that shape a few years back, and didn't have the strength to get out of it again. Finding a true believer in Brutha, though, has given him renewed hope.

And hearing his god talk to him has disturbed Brutha's placid existence, getting him caught up in the preparations for war between Omnia and Ephebe.

Ephebe, you will recall, is the land of philosophers we saw in
Pyramids
. It's basically a parody of ancient Athens. Here we get a much more extensive look at it, largely to contrast its rather easy-going ways and general flexibility with the rigid authoritarianism of Omnia.