The Turtle Moves! (18 page)

This Queen, while clearly an elf of the usual parasitic sort, is not quite what we've seen in
Lords and Ladies
or
The Science of Discworld II
, but instead leans a little more toward the version presented in traditional fairy tales, or the Queen of Faerie described by T.H. White in
The Once and Future King
, or even the Goblin King in the movie
Labyrinth
.

In fact, the plot is similar to
Labyrinth
in its most basic outlines, though very different in its particulars.

Tiffany is a very likeable character, though the people around her mostly don't find her very likeable. That's because they aren't inside
her head, as we're privileged to be. She, like other Discworld witches, has the knack of seeing what's really there, rather than what
ought
to be there, and of thinking about it rationally, rather than just following rules, traditions, habits, and patterns. She's a thoroughly grounded character, with roots deep in her ancestral home.

At the end of the book, Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax make a brief appearance, and it's no surprise that Granny approves of Tiffany's no-nonsense approach.

In outline, this is one of the most traditional plots in any of the Discworld stories—a girl's baby brother is stolen by the fairies, and with the help of magical allies but mostly by means of her own determination, wits, and courage, she's able to rescue him from the Queen of the Fairies, and return home, a stronger person than when she left. There's no parodic or satirical twist, just the story as it is. If not for the appearance of Mrs. Ogg and Mistress Weatherwax, and the fact that we've seen the Nac Mac Feegle before, this wouldn't need to be a Discworld story at all—there's no mention at all of Ankh-Morpork or any of the other familiar lands, nothing involving cosmic turtles or gigantic elephants, no trolls or dwarfs. This could have been set in Sussex, or Terry Pratchett's adopted home county of Wiltshire, with only the most trivial of changes.

Of course, then it couldn't have cashed in on the immense popularity of the Discworld series, and these
are
unquestionably the same sort of witches we've seen in Lancre, and the same Nac Mac Feegle we met in
Carpe Jugulum
, and the links do become somewhat stronger in the subsequent Tiffany Aching stories, so it's just as well that it's on the Disc.

And it's a very fine story, no matter how traditional it may be. I was
very pleased, after reading it, to learn that we would see more of Tiffany Aching, who returns in
A Hat Full of Sky
, as described in Chapter 40, and in
Wintersmith
, as described in Chapter 45—and we're promised a fourth and final Tiffany Aching story,
I Shall Wear Midnight
, to be out in a year or two.

But first, it' s off to the mountains of Borogravia. . . .

T
HIS IS ONLY BY AN EXTREME STRETCH of the definition a part of the Vimes sub-series; our protagonist is a Borogravian girl named Polly Perks, an innkeeper's daughter who disguises herself as a boy and joins the army. Sam Vimes does appear, though, as the representative of Ankh-Morpork and the voice of reason, and since I prefer not to acknowledge the existence of singleton novels that don't fit into the eight categories I listed initially, I'm declaring this an honorary Vimes novel.

He
is
in it, after all.

One might argue that it fits in the “Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat” series because it's partly about social change, but I think that's stretching it even more than calling it a Vimes novel, so I won't say that.

We've seen Vimes as an envoy before, in
The Fifth Elephant
, and in the early chapters of
Night Watch
he was being kept informed on the conflict between Borogravia and Mouldavia, so it's not a surprise to see him sent out there to represent Ankh-Morpork's interests. It's mildly amusing, though, to see what the Borogravians think of him—they call him “Vimes the Butcher,” correctly acknowledging him as the second most powerful man in Ankh-Morpork.

William de Worde and Otto Chriek also put in appearances, as does Sergeant Angua, but none of the other established characters show up—unless you count Death, but his only visible or audible manifestation here is apparently a hallucination.

One rather interesting detail is that there's no overt magic in this story at all—well, unless you count vampires, werewolves, Igor's surgery,
divine intervention, or other normal Discworld phenomena. There's no wizardry or witchcraft, as such.

At any rate, most of the story closely follows Polly Perks as she and her fellow recruits are flung into Borogravia's current war—which is not, despite what I said above and what Vimes was hearing in
Night Watch
, primarily with Mouldavia. So far as Polly knows, the war is against those vile Zlobenians, who have dared to trespass on the sacred soil of Borogravia.

Borogravia is not a happy place. The state religion is the worship of Nuggan, a god who has taken to pronouncing any number of ordinary objects and activities to be Abominations.
¹³⁷
The ruler is a Duchess no one has seen for years, who is rumored to be dead; her generals actually run things. The war is not going well. Most of the young men have gone to be soldiers, and haven't come back.

One of those young men is Polly's brother Paul, and she intends to find him and bring him home. She has it all planned out.

Naturally, events don't follow her plans. It seems that matters are far worse than she had realized—Borogravia is at war with
all
its neighbors, and (thanks to Nuggan declaring the clacks towers to be an Abomination) Ankh-Morpork is backing the Alliance.

It also seems that she's not the only girl who's signed up to fight, for one reason or another.

Way back in
Equal Rites
, as I said in Chapter 5, it looked as if Mr. Pratchett intended to mock either feminism or sexism, but he didn't really do either one. Here, though, sixteen years later, he finally does take up the subject of sexism and really consider it. In the interim, the Discworld series has transformed itself from light parody to serious satire, if one can use such a phrase, so instead of mere mockery he gives us an insightful, funny, and sometimes bitter look at the relationships between the sexes, the perception of women, and the roles forced upon them. And perhaps some commentary on the effects of testosterone, though it's never described in those terms.
¹³⁸

He also gives us a look at soldiering, and the proper roles of officers and NCOs. This is a subject he's touched on before, notably in
Jingo
, but he tackles it in more depth here.

He also takes a look at war in general, and plainly does not like what he sees.
¹³⁹
There's not much light-hearted humor here; the subject isn't one where that would be appropriate. He presents us with a character who seems to pretty much sum everything up: Sergeant Jackrum, a red-coated blend of mother hen and murderous fiend. Jackrum has been at war for decades, and has absorbed all the lessons war can teach: Rules don't matter. Laws don't matter. Chains of command, nationality, age, sex—none of that matters. What matters is staying alive, protecting your own, and killing anything that threatens you. Jackrum has gotten very good at what matters. Compared to Jackrum, the vampire Maledict is a harmless nothing.

But Sergeant Jackrum isn't cruel or sadistic or evil, just horribly, monstrously pragmatic—which is what's needed in war.

There's a lot of red in
Monstrous Regiment
, reflecting the bloody nature of the enterprise—red faces, red skies, and the Borogravian uniforms include red coats, just as the old English ones did for centuries. It's probably for much the same reasons: a red coat looks grand on parade, it stands out on the street, and it doesn't show the blood when someone gets shot.

Pragmatic, that. Very English. Like Mr. Pratchett.

While everyone knows that historically, there have been women who disguised themselves as men in order to serve in the military, there may be some who find it unlikely that any could do as well as some of the women in this story. I would suggest that these doubters look into the life of, say, Nadezhda Durova. I suspect Mr. Pratchett was familiar with her history.

In a Usenet post on the subject, he said, “. . . I do know a little about Colonel Gauntlett Bligh Barker who was, believe me, only one of thousands if not tens of thousands of women who fought as men during the past few centuries—I've seen estimates of as many as 1,100 in the American Civil War alone. She was probably one of the last to be able to get away with it.” So he had certainly read up on the subject.

Stories and belief are behind much of the trouble in this book, just as they are in so many Discworld novels. The Borogravian rulers have been relying on propaganda to keep the fight going long past the point where a sane government would have quit, and the people's belief in Nuggan and the Duchess has let them get away with it. It's only when Polly and
company can bring the truth to light that the war can be brought to an end.

Sergeant Jackrum uses stories as weapons; the mere mention of Jackrum's name is enough to cow most foes because of the stories everyone's heard about the fearsome Jackrum.

And of course, the enlisted women all have their own stories driving them. No one here is fighting for truth, or ideals, or wealth, or power; they're all playing out their individual stories.

This novel is noteworthy for its lack of outright magicians, as I mentioned, and also for its intermittent failure to pretend that Discworld is distinct from our own world. Over the course of the series, there has been a gradual shift from the use of fantasy-novel details to real-world details—names such as Bravd have given way to the likes of Susan, for example—and in
Monstrous Regiment
this progresses to citing actual songs from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, such as “The World Turned Upside Down” and “Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier,” rather than inventing their Discworld equivalents.
¹⁴⁰

I mentioned in the last chapter that
The Wee Free Men
could almost have been set in Sussex; well,
Monstrous Regiment
could have been set in seventeenth-century Germany or Napoleonic Europe with only slight modification. Mr. Pratchett long ago stopped writing about fantasy in favor of writing about humanity; now even the fantasy trappings are wearing thin in spots, letting some very dark things show through.

Monstrous Regiment
is a low point in that regard. Not in quality, as it's a good (if sometimes depressing in its view of our species) story, but in its fantasyness. The fantastic elements are back in subsequent volumes.

Sam Vimes will return in
Thud!
, as seen in Chapter 44.

Next, though, Tiffany Aching and the Nac Mac Feegle are back.

T
HE EDUCATION OF TIFFANY ACHING, hereditary witch of the Chalk, continues into a second volume. This time she's leaving home at age eleven to learn witchcraft properly, apprenticed to a Miss Level, whom we have not encountered previously and who happens to be a rather remarkable person in ways beyond merely being a witch.

The first “young adult” Discworld novel,
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
, was complete in itself and did not lend itself to sequels; the story of Tiffany Aching, though, was clearly still just starting at the end of
The Wee Free Men
. She remains only a girl, with much to learn.

In
A Hat Full of Sky
, she sets out to learn some of it.

Alas, she's attracted the attention of a creature called a hiver, an intangible thing that takes over the mind and body of its victim. Rob Anybody, Big Man of the Chalk clan of the Nac Mac Feegle, follows her, along with several of his men, hoping to protect her from this monster. He isn't terribly successful at this, though he does help.

This novel is obviously a direct sequel to
The Wee Free Men
, but rather oddly, it's also a direct sequel to “The Sea and Little Fishes” in some ways. Letice Earwig and her apprentice Annagramma are among the new acquaintances Tiffany encounters during her stay with Miss Level, and there are important scenes at the Witch Trials.

And of course, Granny Weatherwax is back. Her appearance at the end of
The Wee Free Men
was brief, and she didn't really do much beyond acknowledging Tiffany's successes, but in
A Hat Full of Sky
she
plays a major role throughout the second half of the book, and teaches Tiffany a good bit about being a witch—and about being human.

There's an interesting semi-inconsistency in that in “The Sea and Little Fishes,” Granny has traditionally always won the Witch Trials, while in
A Hat Full of Sky
, she doesn't really compete at all—but then, she doesn't compete because she's accepted as being so good that she no longer has anything to prove to anyone, so it could easily be argued that she' s simply moved up to the next level between stories. Or perhaps in the course of “The Sea and Little Fishes.”