IT IS ONE OF THE MYSTERIES of the multiverse that animals which exist as normal flesh-and-blood creatures in one world are regarded as imaginary, legendary or folkloric in another – and yet, in many cases, the descriptions tally almost perfectly. Whether this is due to the perpetual drifting of particles of knowledge through cosmic space, or whether such species did once inhabit all worlds and have regrettably become extinct in some of them, is a matter of debate.
But nobody can deny that the fauna of the Discworld is particularly rich in species which other worlds have dreamed of. Not for nothing does the old song run:
All beasts bright and beautiful,
All monsters big and small,
All things weird and wonderful,
The Discworld has them all.
DRAGONS
On our world, the image of the dragon is so widespread and so deep-rooted that it can truly be said that its origins are lost in those famous mists of time. It’s a persistent image, too. Even after the last land masses had been explored, and map-makers were forced to admit that ‘Here be no dragons’, people still reported seeing sea-serpents, and huge scaly things in lakes. And to this day there are innumerable storytellers and artists, still eagerly creating and re-creating dragons in their works. There must be a powerful flow of draconicons still pouring into the Earth from some other universe. It seems likely that the source is the Discworld, which can boast of two flourishing species and has some awareness of a third.
(a) Draco vulgaris
Visitors to Ankh-Morpork and other Discworld cities have often commented on the charming fashion for society ladies to wear small, colourful dragons on their shoulders; in the winter months, they are also popular as muffs and foot-warmers. These are miniature specimens of Draco vulgaris, the Common Swamp Dragon, which probably no longer exists in the wild but has been bred in captivity for many generations. The basic type is the Common Smut, familiar to all, from which numerous distinct varieties have been developed; some three dozen are recognized for show purposes (details obtainable from the Cavern Club Exhibitions Committee). Most are of amiable disposition, but it should be noted that the Golden Deceiver retains some characteristics of its wild ancestors; it makes a good watch dragon but should not be allowed near children.
To own a pedigree Swamp Dragon is a mark of taste and refinement, but also requires a degree of patience which, alas, all too few would-be owners possess. Where dragons are kept, damage to furniture and clothing is inevitable, and chemical effluvia are frequently emitted which some persons of delicate constitution may find offensive. Most dragons are highly strung, excitable little creatures, so great care must be taken in approaching and handling them, if the owner wishes to avoid scratches, bites, and unsightly loss of hair through sudden flaming at close range. The owner can also expect much expense on vets’ bills, since dragons suffer from a multitude of ills – Slab Throat, Skiplets, The Black Tups, Storge and Staggers, to name but a few (see Diseases of the Dragon, by Sybil Deirdre Olgivanna Ramkin). Their digestive systems are liable to catastrophic malfunctions, notably Blowback, which is invariably fatal. Needless to say, all varieties readily explode under stress.
There has been much debate as to how so delicate and vulnerable a species can have evolved and survived. True, their native habitat in the swamps of Genua was fairly inaccessible, and they had no natural predators; the only external danger was from callous young men who had worked out that the simplest way to set yourself up as a hero was (in the words of Sir Samuel Vimes) ‘to come plodding into the swamp to stick a sword into a bag of guts that was only one step away from self-destruction anyway’. Yet their entire metabolism seems radically unsuited to Discworld conditions. Leonard of Quirm has proposed the bold theory that swamp dragons did not originate on the Disc but are descended from the non-discly species Draco nobilis (see below), showing adaptations for a heavy-air environment. The difference in size would thus be an example of evolutionary dwarfism, a process well attested in isolated populations.
(b) Draco nobilis
Everyone on the Discworld and on Earth has heard of the Noble or Great Dragon – a creature many times larger than the Swamp Dragon, fierce, untameable, with scales and claws and breath like a blast furnace, coiled up in its secret lair on top of a great hoard of gold. In traditional tales, such dragons fed on virgins and could only be slain by heroes (preferably the long-lost heirs of kingdoms), and we shall have more to say on this in a later chapter. But were they myth, or were they real?
At the time of the events recounted in Guards! Guards! the most that could be said was that they were a great mystery. Lady Sybil Ramkin knew that they used to turn up from time to time, full of vim and vigour, but had ceased coming. She believed they had migrated to somewhere where gravity wasn’t so strong, where they could fulfil their potential and be all that a dragon should be. Lord Vetinari was positive that they were extinct, despite the fact that something large, hot and angry was incinerating portions of the city. The Unique and Supreme Lodge of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night were using rituals to summon and control a Great Dragon. They discovered that if summoning is hard, control is much, much harder. But at least nobody could still argue that Draco nobilis was a myth. Ensuing events confirmed that Draco vulgaris and Draco nobilis are indeed related, but gave no clue as to the latter’s current habitat.
The wizard Rincewind claimed to have learned, in the course of a very alarming early experience of his own, that most of the time they do not exist as people generally understand ‘existence’, but only potentially:
The true dragon is a creature of such refinement of spirit that they can only take on form in this world if they are conceived by the most skilled imagination. And even then the said imagination must be in some place heavily impregnated with magic, which helps to weaken the walls between the world of the seen and unseen. Then the dragons pop through, as it were, and impress their form upon this world’s possibility matrix. [The Colour of Magic]
Some years later, Rincewind revised his views on the mystery in the light of fresh discoveries. When the intrepid voyagers on Leonard of Quirm’s flying machine landed briefly on the Disc’s moon (as recounted in The Last Hero), they found a population of magnificent silver dragons of all sizes, feeding on moon-plants with metallic silver leaves. They were completely unafraid of humans; indeed, the little ones would swarm all over people, like kittens. It is plausible to assume that these superb creatures are a variety of Draco nobilis. How we yearn to know more about them! But it seems the gods have decreed that no more flying machines shall be built. Probably this is for the best. Let the Moon Dragons enjoy their serene life, safe from the deplorable impact of humanity. The true dragon-lover must rejoice for them.
(c) Draco maritimus immensis
No other dragon species has actually been observed on or near the Disc, but according to Scandinavian mythology there was (or is) a third one on Earth, the aquatic Midgardsorm or Middle-Earth Worm (Draco maritimus immensis). It is written that it lies on the seabed, encircling the whole Earth, where it will remain till the end of the world, when it will emerge, and a particularly stupid Norse god named Thor will clobber it with a hammer. It is some comfort that it is also written that its dying breath will poison him.
This myth is hard to believe. The distribution of land masses on the Earth is so untidy that no dragon could encircle the whole planet while lying on the seabed without suffering painful and possibly fatal dislocations of its spine. However, somewhere there exists another universe which was once briefly summoned into a prism by the gifted young wizard Simon, and this one does appear to contain a Middle-Earth Worm.
A prism … held another slowly turning disc, surrounded by little stars. But there were no ice walls around this one, just a red-gold thread that turned out on closer inspection to be a snake – a snake big enough to encircle a world. For reasons best known to itself it was biting its own tail. [Equal Rites]
This is confirmed by something the sea-troll Tethis told Rincewind (see The Colour of Magic). While tumbling through space after being swept off the edge of his own world, Tethis passed within a few leagues of a world with a strange ring of mountains round it – mountains that turned out to be ‘the biggest dragon you could ever imagine, covered in snow and glaciers and holding its tail in its mouth’. A dim awareness of this universe may explain the Earth myth of Draco maritimus immensis, and also the image of the ouroboros or tail-biting serpent known to alchemists and hermetic philosophers as the symbol of the ever-circling eternity of time and space.
THE BASILISK AND THE CHIMERA
The basilisk is a particularly dangerous species of serpent, which can kill any other animal merely by glancing at it with its fierce, fell and fiery eyes; its breath destroys all vegetation, so it is necessarily a desert-dweller; its blood is said to be of great value to magicians. On Earth, it was first identified by the Ancient Greeks, who gave it a name meaning ‘little king’, because (as the Roman naturalist Pliny explained) it has a golden mark like a crown on its head.
Later, during the Middle Ages of western Europe, people believed that it wore an actual coronet of pure gold, and some described it as a snake with four pairs of legs. They gave it a second name, ‘cockatrice’, and said it was a mortal enemy of crocodiles. They also claimed to know how it is born: when a farmyard cock lives longer than is normal for his species, in the last stage of his life he starts to lay eggs, and if, in the hottest days of summer, some venomous serpent or toad coils itself round such an egg and hatches it, what comes out is the cockatrice or basilisk. It has the head and legs of a cockerel, but its body tapers down to a snake’s tail, ending in a dart. It was much feared for its death-dealing glance, until a method of destroying it was devised. Writing a Historie of Serpents in 1608, the naturalist Edward Topsell mocked the legend:
I cannot without laughing remember the old wives’ tales of the vulgar cockatrices that have been in England, for I have often-times heard it confidently related, that once our nation was full of cockatrices, and that a certain man did destroy them by going up and down in glasse, whereby their own shapes were reflected upon their own faces, and so they died.
Topsell was wrong to laugh. The method is perfectly valid. It exploits an instinct which can also be seen in young male swamp dragons in the breeding season, when they are so eager to drive off a rival that they will attack their own reflections (as Chubby did in Men at Arms).
On the Discworld, the basilisk inhabits the burning deserts of Klatch. On one occasion, as we read in Sourcery, a hungry basilisk which lay panting in the baking shade of a rock, dribbling corrosive yellow slime, heard the thumping of hundreds of little feet. This, the creature thought, must mean that its dinner was on the way. But what was approaching was the wizard Rincewind’s fearsome Luggage, which was in a particularly foul mood because it had become separated from its master and had recently had to fight its way across a river infested with alligators.
The basilisk blinked its legendary eyes and uncoiled twenty feet of hungry body, winding out and on to the sand like fluid death.
The Luggage staggered to a halt and raised its lid threateningly. The basilisk hissed, but a little uncertainly, because it had never seen a walking box before, and certainly never one with lots of alligator teeth stuck in its lid. There were also scraps of leathery hide adhering to it, as though it had been involved in a fight in a handbag factory, and in a way that the basilisk wouldn’t have been able to describe even if it could talk, it appeared to be glaring.
Right, the reptile thought, if that’s the way you want to play it.
It turned on the Luggage a stare like a diamond drill, a stare that nipped in via the staree’s eyeballs and flayed the brain from the inside, a stare that tore the frail net curtains on the windows of the soul, a stare that—
The basilisk realized something was very wrong. An entirely new and unwelcome sensation started to arise just behind its saucer-shaped eyes. It started small, like the little itch in those few square inches of back that no amount of writhing will allow you to scratch, and grew until it became a second, redhot, internal sun.
The basilisk was feeling a terrible, overpowering and irresistible urge to blink …
It did something incredibly unwise.
It blinked. [Sourcery]
The Luggage went on its way, with a few traces of yellow slime rapidly drying on its lid. What a tragic misunderstanding! If only the basilisk had been less hungry that day, and the Luggage less ill-tempered, they would have seen how much they had in common – a domineering gaze, a dislike of alligators and crocodiles, perhaps even a multiplicity of feet, if some pictures of basilisks can be trusted. A beautiful friendship might have been born. But it was not to be.
Pursuing its erratic course across the dunes of Klatch, the Luggage next encountered a Chimera, which was sitting on a stone pinnacle the shape and temperature of a firebrick. Before recounting the outcome, it will be useful to see what books from our own world can tell about this monster – legendary here, but real enough on the Discworld.
According to John Milton, a chimera is just about the worst thing you could meet on a guided tour of Hell. In Book 2 of his Paradise Lost he lists the horrors in the infernal landscape at some length, and caps them all with the assertion that Hell is a place
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds (Perverse) all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived, Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras dire.
After which it comes as a bit of a let-down to find that, according to Ancient Greek poets, the Chimera was a rather muddled female monster, consisting of a fire-breathing nanny-goat with a lion’s head and a snake’s body. An alternative view, supported by Ancient Greek artists who had to draw the damn thing, was that she had two heads at the front end, one leonine and one capriform, and a long scaly tail at the back end, terminating in a snake’s head. The Greek Chimera’s family was an unpleasant one. Her father Typhon, the god of storms at sea, was nothing but a writhing mass of serpents from the waist down, and had snakes instead of fingers, while his wings darkened the whole sky; her mother was a sea-monster, half woman and half snake, who ate humans raw; her siblings included Cerberus, the three-headed Hound of Hell, and the hundred-headed Hydra.
The Greek Chimera did her best to be dire; she tried to look as abominable and inutterable as she could, but the goat component undermined the effect. Her biggest asset was her fiery breath, yet even this turned out to be unhelpful when the hero Bellerophon was sent to kill her, on the orders of an enemy of his, who assumed this was a mission impossible – indeed, fatal. But Bellerophon was as canny as he was good-looking, and devised a cunning plan. Mounted on his good flying horse Pegasus, he swooped over the Chimera, firing arrows at her, and when she opened her lion’s jaws to puff flame at him he dropped a lump of lead down her throat. The heat of her stomach melted the lead, sealing her doom from the inside.
The chimera of the Discworld may be related, but separate evolution has brought about several differences, including some unexpected wings. According to Broomfog’s bestiary Anima Unnaturale,
It have thee legges of an mermade, the hair of an tortoise, the teeth of an fowel, and the winges of an snake. Of course, I have only my worde for it, the beast having the breathe of an furnace and the temperament of an rubber balloon in a hurricane. [Sourcery]
Such was the creature which attacked Rincewind’s Luggage.
The chimera’s technique was to swoop low over the prey, lightly boiling it with its fiery breath, and then turn and rend its dinner with its teeth. It managed the fire part but then, at the point where experience told the creature it should be facing a stricken and terrified victim, found itself on the ground in the path of a scorched and furious Luggage.
The only thing incandescent about the Luggage was its rage. It had spent several hours with a headache, during which it seemed the whole world had tried to attack it. It had had enough.
When it had stamped the unfortunate chimera into a greasy puddle on the sand, it paused for a moment, apparently considering its future … [Sourcery]
There is a distinct possibility that the Discworld chimera, always an endangered species, is now extinct.
THE SPHINX
Though there can be no doubt that Prince Teppic of Djelibeybi once met a Sphinx, there has been much argument over whether the creature is truly part of the Discworld’s fauna. Teppic himself was unclear as to where he was when he encountered it. Space and time had been behaving strangely. A spokesman for Unseen University expressed the view that:
The Sphinx is an unreal creature. It exists solely because it has been imagined. It is well known that in an infinite universe anything that can be imagined must exist somewhere, and since many of them are not things that ought to exist in a well-ordered space-time frame they get shoved into a side dimension. [Pyramids]
To which Teppic replied that that’s as may be, but he was in no doubt that either he broke into the Sphinx’s dimension or it broke into his, and that what has happened once may happen again. Provisionally, therefore, the Sphinx has been listed as a potential (if unwelcome) denizen of the Discworld.
On Earth, its existence is better documented. According to ancient writers, a Sphinx is a creature with the body of a lion or lioness and a human head; one subspecies has wings and human female breasts; another has a serpent’s tail; yet another exists only in the form of conjoined twins. The name means ‘throttler’ in Greek. They were native to Egypt, where they guarded the borders of the kingdom, the entrances to temples, and the approaches to important pyramids and tombs. They were not normally dangerous to humans. Many statues of them were made, and can be seen to this day.
The Egyptians themselves had no generic word for sphinxes, each one (and there were hundreds of them) having a name of its own. Tourists visiting the Great Sphinx of Giza should address it, cautiously, as Horemakhet Khepri-Ra-Atum. If they get the pronunciation right, it may choose to reveal some of the hidden treasures which it guards. If they get it wrong, it may choose to reveal its claws.
The Great Sphinx of Giza has two aims in its existence. The first is to guard the royal tombs at Memphis, which it has successfully done for some 4,500 years; the second is to keep itself, and the town of Giza, free from drifting sand, because sand makes it ache in all its limbs. This has been a sorry failure. After a mere eleven hundred years it was buried in dunes right up to the neck, until it was dug clear by Prince Thutmose, whom it gratefully made Pharaoh. Other people have had to dig it out again since then, but they don’t now get to be made Pharaoh. In fact, the Great Sphinx seems to have pretty well given up on its sand-repelling duties, allowing Giza to be engulfed, and relying on humans to give it the occasional brush-up. The Arabs say it is sulking because a holy man smashed its nose.
According to Greek mythology, the goddess Hera brought a single female sphinx from Egypt to Greece, for vindictive reasons; she must have hoped that, as so often, the introduction of a foreign species would seriously damage the local ecology, but since she neglected to provide it with a mate it did not breed, and the devastation it caused ended with its life.
This Greek Sphinx was more active, more malevolent, than her Egyptian relatives. She perched herself on a rock overlooking the main road into Thebes, where she forced every traveller to try to guess her utterly perplexing Riddle: ‘What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday, and three in the evening, and is at its weakest when it has most legs?’ If they couldn’t answer, she throttled them, and ate them. And so it went on, until one day Oedipus came along, and replied, ‘That animal is Man. As a feeble baby, he crawls on all fours; as an adult, he walks upright; as an old man, he uses a stick.’ The Sphinx was so furious that she beat her brains out against the rock.
Prince Teppic’s Sphinx, like the Egyptian one, guarded a border – in this case, a fold in the space-time continuum which was a border between dimensions. Like the Greek one, it relied upon The Riddle to provide it with entertainment and with innumerable meals. Now Teppic, despite being a fully qualified Assassin, was not a man of violence, and had a proper concern for wildlife, even in its more alarming forms. He tried polite conversation (‘We’ve got any amount of statues to you at home’), but the Sphinx, though flattered, could not be sidetracked for long, and challenged him with its Riddle. Teppic admitted defeat, so the gloating Sphinx itself gave him the explanation.
Now, Teppic had been born into a culture profoundly distrustful of metaphors, symbolism, allegories, and figures of speech of every sort. The people of Djelibeybi took all religious, poetic, and metaphysical statements as literal physical truths; to them, a metaphor was a lie. Furthermore, Teppic had recently visited Ephebe, where he had heard the philosopher Xeno expounding his famous logical proof that if you shoot an arrow at a tortoise you cannot possibly hit it.
So Teppic launched an attack, not on the Sphinx, but on its metaphor. Combining the deadly literalism of Djelibeybi with the debating skills and logic of Ephebe, he demanded clarifications. Did all this actually happen in one day, to one individual? Well, no, the Sphinx admitted, it is a figure of speech, but what’s wrong with that? ‘An element of dramatic analogy is present in all riddles,’ it claimed. ‘Yes, but,’ said Teppic, ‘is there internal consistency within the metaphor?’ Step by step, the hapless Sphinx was forced to concede that in an analogy where the human lifespan of seventy years is represented by twenty-four hours, the crawling stage only lasts for about twenty minutes, and can’t be called ‘morning’, as it comes just after midnight. There are other problems too. Since some old folk need no sticks while others use two, would it not be more accurate to say that after supper-time ‘it continues to walk on two legs or with any prosthetic aids of its choice’?
When everything had been settled to their mutual satisfaction, the Sphinx repeated its challenge. But of course Prince Teppic already knew the answer. The Sphinx itself had told him, earlier on. He now gave it, and the Sphinx had to let him go free. He got away just in time as an angry bellow erupted behind him, when the Sphinx finally worked out what had happened.
Should the creature ever reappear on the Discworld or in our own universe, people will now know how to deal with it.
THE PHOENIX
Everyone agrees that the phoenix, also known as the firebird, is extremely beautiful, and that it is the rarest bird that has ever existed, or could ever exist, anywhere in the multiverse. It’s said, both on the Discworld and on Earth, that you only get one phoenix at a time, that it lives to be five hundred years old, and that when it feels its death approaching it builds a nest, in which it lays a single egg. Then it bursts into flame and burns itself up, so that the warmth will hatch out the new bird from the ashes. This way of life, and death, makes it extremely useful as an allegory or metaphor. It also makes some people think that it is only a mythical creature.
However, there are people in Lancre who, having observed nature closely, think the commonly accepted story cannot be accurate. Both Hodgesaargh the falconer and Granny Weatherwax have found the occasional phoenix feather, a small flickering flame-like thing which nothing can quench. Granny keeps hers in a little glass bottle. One day the other witches are examining it:
‘I saw her pick that thing up years ago,’ said Magrat. ‘It was around this time of year, too. We were walking back through the woods and there was a shooting star and this sort of light fell off it and we went to look and there it was. It looked like a flame but she was able to pick it up.’
‘Sounds like a firebird feather,’ said Nanny. ‘There used to be old stories about them. They pass through here. But if you touch their feathers you’d better be damn sure of yourself, because the old stories say they burn in the presence of evil—’
‘Firebird? You mean a phoenix?’ said Agnes.
‘Haven’t seen one go over for years,’ said Nanny. ‘Sometimes you’d see two or three at a time when I was a girl, just lights flying high up in the sky.’
‘No, no, the phoenix … there’s only one of it, that’s the whole point,’ said Agnes.
‘One of anything’s no bloody use,’ said Nanny. [Carpe Jugulum]
On the Discworld, the firebird is said to have its main home in the hot deserts of Klatch, even though its seasonal migrations take it over Lancre. So, the best place to look for its equivalent on Earth would be in the hot deserts of Ancient Egypt. And there, sure enough, it is – not yet called the phoenix, but the Benu Bird. The name probably means ‘rise-and-shine’. According to one Egyptian myth it is the oldest of all creatures; its cry was the first sound ever heard, when it perched, glowing, on the first mound of earth to rise up out of the primeval sea – or, others said, on the first sacred obelisk, the Benben stone at Heliopolis. It was usually described as a heron, or as a huge golden hawk with a heron’s beak.
Many generations later, in the fifth century BC, the Greek writer Herodotus visited Heliopolis, where he was told about a marvellous red-gold bird which would come to the temple of the sun there once every five hundred years. He called it ‘phoenix’, meaning that its brilliant colouring was as fine as the richest Phoenician purple dye. This bird, he was told, would arrive carrying an egg which it had formed from the ashes of its parent mixed with myrrh; the next phoenix would be born from this egg.
Later writers changed the bird’s homeland from Egypt to Arabia, and gave a different explanation of its death and rebirth. An aged phoenix, they said, would build itself a nest full of spices, and settling there would sing a last sad song. Then it would burst into flame and burn itself to ashes. But from the ashes a new young bird would arise.
Thanks to this story, the phoenix is famous in poetry and folklore as a symbol of indestructible life. As Will Shakespeare put it:
Thus when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir,
As much to be admired as she herself.
The witches of Lancre would not entirely agree. ‘Bird of wonder’, yes; ‘maiden’, no. For, as Granny Weatherwax pointed out, ‘One of anything ain’t going to last for very long, is it?’
THE SALAMANDER
Salamanders are a species of lizard, pinkish in colour, sluggish in behaviour, and in no way dangerous. The only interesting thing about them is that they do not eat in the normal sense of the word; instead, they subsist entirely on the nourishing quality of octarine, the eighth colour in the Discworld’s sunlight, which they absorb through their skins. Since the wavelengths corresponding to the other colours have no food value for them, they store this surplus light in a special sac and discharge it when the sac is full, or when they are alarmed, causing a vivid flash. A cage of salamanders is a very useful piece of equipment for anyone who wants to keep a pictorial record of events (such as Twoflower the tourist, or Otto Chriek the journalistic iconographer), for the flash enables the imp in the picture-box to function even in the dark.
On Earth the name was applied, in the days of the Ancient Greeks, to what must be a related species – a lizard that lives in the midst of fire, remaining unharmed because its body is so intensely cold that it extinguishes the flames around it. Centuries later, the alchemist Paracelsus taught that each of the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) had its own elemental spirit, and that of fire was a salamander. These dramatic creatures are now regarded on Earth as mere myths, useful only in poetry and heraldry. Confusingly, however, there are also on that world several species of flesh-and-blood lizards which are called ‘salamanders’. Throwing them into a fire as an experiment is not considered an environmentally friendly act.
THE UNICORN
This elegant but sometimes ferocious beast is an elvish creature, not native to the Discworld. The one which appeared in Lancre (as told in Lords and Ladies) came from an alternative universe where it was the Elf Queen’s pet; it had crossed accidentally, at one of those places where worlds come too close together, and the wall between them is thinner than one would wish. It could not return. Terrified and enraged, it became a danger – for a large stallion with a twelve-inch razor-sharp horn growing from its forehead is not to be treated lightly.
Yet Granny Weatherwax was able to cope. When the unicorn charged at her, she created an invisible wall into which it crashed, and as it writhed on the ground she let down her hair, and broke off a single hair at the root.
Granny Weatherwax’s hands made a complicated motion in the air as she made a noose out of something almost too thin to see. She ignored the thrashing horn and dropped it over the unicorn’s neck. Then she pulled.
Struggling, its unshod hooves kicking up great clods of mud, the unicorn struggled to its feet.
‘That’ll never hold it,’ said Nanny, sidling around the tree.
‘I could hold it with a cobweb, Gytha Ogg. With a cobweb.’
And so indeed she does, dragging the unicorn to Jason Ogg’s forge, where its hooves are shod – not with iron, of course, since that would kill an elvish animal, but with silver horseshoes made from Granny’s own best tea-set. Her ability to control the beast should not surprise anybody, for, as Nanny Ogg says, there are some things which everybody knows about trapping unicorns – ‘who is qualified to trap ’em is what I’m delicately hintin’ at.’ It takes a maiden to do it, in any universe. And Granny may be old, but she is qualified.
Granny emerged from the forge, leading the unicorn … It walked politely alongside the witch until she reached the centre of the square. Then she turned it loose, and gave it a slight slap on the rump.
It whinnied softly, turned, and galloped down the street, towards the forest …
‘She’ll never get it back, though she calls for it for a thousand years,’ said Granny, speaking to the world in general …
The unicorn reached the forest, and galloped onwards.
There are clear affinities here with what people on Earth have long been saying, though, regrettably, in that world the fate of the captured unicorn is more cruel. As early as the seventh century, the Spaniard Isidore of Seville described the unicorn, and how to hunt it:
The unicorn is a most savage beast. It has this name because in the middle of its forehead it has a horn, four foot long. And that horn is so sharp and so strong that it knocks down or pierces everything it strikes. This beast often fights against the elephant and pierces him in the belly and throws him to the ground. And the unicorn is so strong that he cannot be taken by the might of hunters. But men who write about the nature of animals say that a maiden is brought where the unicorn may come; and she opens her lap and the unicorn lays his head on it, and abandons all his fierceness, and falls asleep there. And thus the beast is caught, and slain by the huntsmen’s spears.
Granny’s device of using a hair as a noose and leash is a remarkable piece of magical skill, and very rare. In Earthly legends one occasionally reads about a maiden tying a defeated dragon with the girdle of her robe and leading it away – St Martha did this, at Tarascon in southern France, and so did the girl St George rescued – but a hair, no. However, a few malevolent hags in the Scottish Highlands did know the trick. If one of these hags found a huntsman sheltering in a mountain bothy, she would kill him, provided she was safe from his dog. So she would ask him to tie the dog up with one of her own long hairs. When she cried, ‘Tighten and choke, hair!’ the dog died.
But that is an unpleasant thought. Instead, let us turn to what the poet Alexander Pope has to say about a girl’s charming ringlets:
Love in these labyrinths his slaves detains,
And mighty hearts are held in slender chains.
Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.
THE LUGGAGE
Perhaps the strangest of all life-forms on the Disc is the Luggage. It is certainly made of wood, yet its multiple legs and strong aggressive instincts are equally certainly proof that it is no mere plant or plant-product. And very, very certainly it has a mind of its own. ‘Vegetable with animal connections’ is a fair summary. Yet much mystery remains, even after careful study of various Earthly traditions which help to throw light on its possible evolution.
On Earth, there was a time when travelling was truly Travelling, not just a matter of hopping on to a jet for a five-day break on the Costa del Sol. People said, ‘I go south in the winter’, meaning they made a habit of spending a couple of months on the Riviera every year; they went off for half their lives to govern a chunk of far-flung Empire; in extreme cases, they went round the world in eighty days. En route, they tended to acquire pterodactyls, mummies, and bits of old temples. So when an English gentleman travelled, a whole host of trunks, crates, chests, portmanteaux, packing cases, suitcases, dressing-cases, shoe-cases, hatboxes, bandboxes, Gladstone bags, carpet bags, and pistol cases travelled with him. Arriving at his destination, he would leave most of them at the quayside or station and enter his hotel with a mere smattering of hand baggage (say, as much as two porters could carry), telling the manager, ‘My luggage will follow’. And so it would, pushed on handcarts, or carried on the backs or heads of porters.
But as time rolled on, the race of porters became mysteriously extinct, and evolutionary pressures caused luggage itself to develop mechanisms enabling it to obey its instinct to follow. The first scientific record of this phenomenon was by Terry himself, when he wrote in 1988:
Many years ago I saw, in Bath, a very large American lady towing a huge tartan suitcase very fast on little rattly wheels which caught in the pavement cracks and generally gave it a life of its own. At that moment the Luggage was born. Many thanks to that lady … [Dedication of Sourcery]
The Discworld environment is hostile to things with little rattly wheels, as we learn in Reaper Man, when it is menaced by an incursion of alien supermarket trolleys. Therefore on the Disc evolution has produced a more elegant solution: the Luggage hurtles across the landscape (and, if need be, through space, time, and dimensions) on several hundred energetic but retractable little legs, always following the person it has adopted as its owner.
If that were all, one could reasonably claim to understand the origins and characteristics of the Luggage. But it has more mysterious properties, whose equivalents on Earth are obscure, though not beyond all conjecture. Outwardly it looks like a pirate’s treasure-chest, the kind one expects to find brim full of ill-gotten gold and jewels, but its interior is larger than its exterior, and probably does not occupy the same space-time framework. Sometimes it does indeed contain bags of gold, at other times food and drink, or its owner’s neatly folded clothes, smelling of lavender; but when it is in fighting mode it opens its lid menacingly to reveal rows and rows of large square teeth, as white as bleached sycamore or tombstones, and a red, pulsating, mahogany tongue. It is wholly impervious to magic, being itself made of sapient pearwood from the Counterweight Continent, possibly the most concentrated magical substance on the Disc. When angry (as it so often is) it is a fearsome enemy, as was amply demonstrated during a fight in the Broken Drum.
The door burst open. Two trolls hurried through it, slammed it behind them, dropped the heavy bar across it and fled down the stairs.
Outside there was a sudden crescendo of running feet. And, for the last time, the door opened. In fact it exploded, the great wooden bar being hurled far across the room and the frame itself giving way.
Door and frame landed on a table, which flew into splinters. It was then that the frozen fighters noticed that there was something else in the pile of wood. It was a box, shaking itself madly to rid itself of the smashed timber around it …
A raven swooped down from its perch in the rafters and dived at the wizard [Rincewind], talons open and gleaming.
It didn’t make it. At about the half-way point the Luggage leapt from its bed of splinters, gaped briefly in mid air, and snapped shut.
It landed lightly. Rincewind saw its lid open again, slightly. Just far enough for a tongue, large as a palm leaf, red as mahogany, to lick up a few errant feathers. [The Colour of Magic]
It would be reassuring to think that no such devastating piece of carpentry exists, ever has existed, or ever could exist elsewhere in the multiverse. But the myths of olden time and the inspirational insights of modern authors both show that a race of deadly chests has evolved on Earth, with all the destructive power of the Luggage, and none of its usefulness and charm.
The first hint of their existence comes from Plutarch, a Greek writer living in Rome who died in AD 126; he visited Egypt, whose ancient religion fascinated him, and wrote a book Concerning Isis and Osiris based on the legends current there in his time. He recounts in detail how the virtuous king Osiris was murdered by his evil brother Seth. Seth secretly obtained the exact measurements of Osiris, and had a magnificent chest made; he then displayed it during a feast, promising to give it to whoever could fit inside it exactly. Many tried, but in vain. Finally Osiris laid himself in the chest, which immediately became a perfect fit for him; Seth promptly bolted it shut, sealed it with lead, and threw it into the Nile. It floated magically for many miles, and when it washed ashore in the Lebanon it grew at once into a marvellous tree, still containing the dead body of Osiris; then it was cut down and made into a pillar in a king’s palace. Isis, wife of Osiris, claimed the pillar and had it opened, revealing the chest/coffin, which held the wonderfully preserved corpse; it thus became the prototype for all Egyptian mummy-cases.
Another death-dealing chest is recorded in Norse tradition as the property of the legendary goldsmith Volund (or, in English, Wayland). A cruel king held him captive on an island, forcing him to work at making golden treasures; his sword had been taken from him, and he had been deliberately lamed to prevent any escape. The king had two young sons, who one day went hunting on that island and came to Volund’s forge. There they saw a great chest, and asked Volund for the key. He opened it, and they looked in. It held great evil, but to the boys it seemed filled with gold rings and fine jewels. ‘Come back tomorrow,’ said Volund, ‘and all this will be yours. But tell no one that you are visiting me.’ And so they did, and, as the Old Icelandic poem Völundarkvid–a says:
They came to where the great chest stood,
Asked Volund for the key;
When they looked in, there was revealed
Evil and enmity.
He struck off the heads of those two boys
As they bent down to gaze,
And under the pit of the anvil there
He buried their bodies.
‘He struck off the heads’ … but how, as he had no sword? One has a nasty suspicion that the chest did the deed itself, using its lid as a weapon.
Suspicion also surrounds a tragic event chronicled by Thomas Haynes Bayly in his poem ‘The Mistletoe Bough’ in the 1820s. It was in the times of Merrie England that one of our typical Merrie barons was holding a typically Merrie Christmas dance in his typically Merrie castle, together with his retainers (who all were blithe and gay), his newly married daughter, and the latter’s bridegroom, young Lovell. Seized by a sudden Merrie whim, the bride decided to play hide-and-seek, challenging Lovell to find her secret lurking place. But it all went horribly wrong:
They sought her that night! They sought her next day!
And they sought her in vain when a week passed away!
In the highest – the lowest – the loneliest spot,>
Young Lovell sought wildly – but found her not.
Many, many years passed by, and then:
At length an oak chest, that had long lain hid,
Was found in the castle – they raised the lid –
And a skeleton form lay mouldering there,
In the bridal wreath of that lady fair!
Oh! Sad was her fate! In sportive jest
She hid from her lord in the old oak chest.
It closed with a spring! – and, dreadful doom,
The bride lay clasp’d in her living tomb!
Sheer accident? The corresponding tragedy in the history of Lancre does indeed seem so, judging by Nanny Ogg’s account:
‘I remember years ago my granny telling me about Queen Amonia, well, I say queen, but she never was queen except for about three hours because of what I’m about to unfold, on account of them playing hide-and-seek at the wedding party and her hiding in a big heavy old chest in some attic and the lid slamming shut and no one finding her for seven months, by which time you could definitely say the wedding cake was getting a bit stale.’ [Lords and Ladies]
Yet over in our own world, suspicion lingers. Did the chest Bayly speaks of have some rudimentary capacity for bloody-minded malevolence? And how exactly had it managed to lie hidden while everybody was searching the castle from turret to dungeon? There is a sinister mystery here.
A later generation glimpsed what may be a related phenomenon in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). Jim Hawkins, looking back on the adventure of his boyhood, recalled how it began on the day the ‘brown old seaman with the sabre cut’ arrived, followed by his sea-chest, and took lodgings at the inn which Jim’s parents owned.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding up to the inn-door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow … I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song he sang so often afterwards:–
‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest –
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest –
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!’
This ill-omened shanty echoes again and again through the story, and is never completed, or explained. Jim writes that ‘At first I had supposed the “dead man’s chest” to be that identical big box of his upstairs in the front room’, the great sea-chest which none of them had ever seen opened. The thought gave him nightmares, as well it might. For how could fifteen men be on one chest? Knowing what we now know of the Luggage, we must query the correctness of the preposition. Not on but in, perhaps? Let us recall Rincewind’s conversation with Conina, on an occasion when the Luggage had just emerged from the Shades with several arrowheads and broken swords sticking in it. She asks him if it is dangerous.
‘There’s two schools of thought about that,’ said Rincewind.
‘There’s some people who say it’s dangerous, and others who say it’s very dangerous. What do you think?’
The Luggage raised its lid a fraction …
Conina stared at that lid. It looked very like a mouth.
‘I think I’d vote for “terminally dangerous”,’ she said.
‘It likes crisps,’ volunteered Rincewind, and then added, ‘Well, that’s a bit strong. It eats crisps.’
‘What about people?’
‘Oh, and people. About fifteen so far, I think.’ [Sourcery]
Fifteen, eh?
But it would be unfair to take leave of the Luggage without any mention of the gentler, more domestic side of its nature. During a brief return to its native country, described in Interesting Times, it gallantly rescued a rather charming trunk with inlaid lid and dainty feet (with red toenails) from the unwelcome attentions of three big, coarse cases covered in studded leather. Romance blossomed. Mysterious sounds of sawing and hammering were heard by night on a hillside where pear trees grew. And when the Luggage reappeared it – or shall we say he? – was followed by the dainty-footed Luggage, and then, in descending order of size, four little chests, the smallest being about the size of a lady’s handbag. But the Luggage could not deny its inner calling. After one or two sad backward glances, or what might have been glances if it had had eyes, it cantered away through the dimensions, still following Rincewind.