YOUR NEW DISCWORLD HOROSCOPE
by Lady Anaemia Asterisk
THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO ARRGH ARRGH ARRGH
Many people wonder about why they have such difficulty dealing with certain household objects, machinery and the like, but that's because not many people know that inanimate objects can have horoscopes too! But milady Asterisk, I hear you ask, how can a "made thing" be born under the Sign of a constellation? Simple, my dear astropossums: Made Things are born when their inventors are first struck by the Inspiration Particles that inspire them - you know, those sub-resonic particles that sleet through the multiverse looking for suitable brains to inhabit. This explains much about why some people have so much trouble with certain objects; quite simply, they have incompatible Signs! So this month, I shall reveal some arcane and useful secrets about which Made Things to avoid and why avoiding them can enrich, or even prolong, your star-struck lives. "Careful with that axe..."
The Adamant Hedgehog 21 Mar - 20 Apr
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Carts; Dis-organisers
O Hoggers, never a cart-driver nor a cartwright be. In fact, you'd do best to even avoid travelling in carts, coaches, caissons, parade floats... hmm, looking at your chart, I think your problem lies in wheels. You should check your family tree for possible Tezuman herrydeterryness, and also avoid roller skates, couches on castors, and those eldritch shopping trolleys with the snow globes in them. Stick to sedan chairs and good honest footwear.
It's not at all clear that anyone can get along productively with a Dis-organiser, but you certainly don't want to touch one even with a ten-foot pearwood staff! If you don't believe me, just look at all the grief Commander Vimes of the A-M City Watch has had with them, and he's a Hogger born. The only "software" you can safely use the like of tablecloths, Sonkies and bouncy castles. If you need reminders or a calendar or alarm clock, delegate to your underlings. Hoggers are Life's collectors of underlings, so you'll have no problem there. Remember to shout at them - shouting works well on underlings but has no effect on Dis-organisers, which is why so many Hoggers who bought one inevitably smash it against the nearest wall or toss it out on the night-soil cart (though the former is a better idea, since it doesn't involve carts).
Gahoolie, the Vase of Tulips 21 Apr - 21 May
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Furniture; the Clacks
Typical Gahooligans have scarred lower legs from barking their shins on furniture, scarred arms from barking their elbows on furniture, facial scars from falling over furniture, and often an ever-growing collection of plaster casts from limbs, hands, feet and whatnot broken as a result from contretemps with furniture. This is in no way a series of coincidences or even ordinary accident-proneness; no, furniture doesn't like you. If you ever thought an occasional table was more than occasionally lying in wait to cause you pain of the wood-on-soft-flesh variety, you were absolutely right! - and likewise if you thought that drawers were deliberately sticking just so that they could suddenly unstick, causing you to go posterior over hedgehog when you pulled hard on them. And kitchen tables? - don't talk to me about kitchen tables. I know your pain. Massive, frequent sacrifices to the Goddess Anoia are a partial solution, but for a less hazardous life you should give up furniture altogether, sleep and eat on the floor, and pile your clothes in assorted corners of the room like you always wanted to anyway.
The Clacks is your other nemesis. While it won't cause immediate injury, you Gahooligans will most often be the ones who suffer as a result of missing, endlessly and mysteriously (and expensively) reduplicated, or confusingly - and sometimes dangerously - garbled messages: you know, when you send MUM SAID ALL FORGIVEN HOME IS BEST and it arrives as MOTHER DIED ALL FORSAKEN HOME IS LOST, or your pre-paid order for 6 bowls from Quirm gets you 60 owls from Wurmz (just be glad it wasn't 60 bowels; there's a branch of We R Igors in Wurmz). Stick with good old-fashioned Post Office letters or trained carrier pigeons!
Herne the Hunted 22 May - 21 Jun
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Ploughs; Swords
Between you and me, I'd say you have a bit of a problem here. There's a good reason why most Hernians are shy, peaceful foragers, and these are it! Hernian farmers always find that their ploughs turn on them, that their furrows have more twists and turns than Empirical Crescent and that clods of earth (and ox or horse doings) unfailingly seem to hit them in the face when they're attempting to plough, even if their plough isn't connected to any beast of burden. Your best bet, if you insist on growing your own food, is to use a collection of large pots and be sure to sacrifice generously to the Summer Lady.
As for swords, they'll break at inconvenient times (e.g. in the middle of defending yourself from barbarian hordes sacking your peaceful village), and you'll find you can never get a sharp edge on them except when they fall out of their scabbards onto your foot. And there's no point trying to turn your swords into ploughshares, either, because they'll bend when the tempering process is nearly complete (and put the blacksmith in a foul temper in the process). Sensible smiths always ask the Sign of any meek-looking customer bringing in a sword for recycling.
The Wizard's Staff and Knob 22 Jun - 22 Jul
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Roasting-spits; Laundry-mangles; Spellbooks
For a Sign so noted for its love of fine food (and plenty of it), the practice of the art of cooking is surprisingly ill-starred. Staffies may love their hot roast dinners but actually trying to make them is an exercise in culinary disaster - Staffies plus roasting spits plus sizzling suckling pigs (or sheep, or sides of beef or yak or camel or...you get the idea) equal kitchen fires, the urgent need of skin grafts, and worst of all, roasts that are overcooked and underdone at the same time. If you must muck about in the kitchen, stick to jellies. Or those little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Or salads.
You also don't want to contemplate washing your own grease-and-BCBs-drenched clothing. If you're lucky, the laundry-mangle will chew your best apparel to pieces; if you're not so lucky, your arms will get the same treatment. According to the A-M Office of Counting Things, persons born under the sign of the Wizard's Staff and Knob are disproportionately susceptible to death by drowning in laundry tubs. Now you know why. Send you clothes out for washing, or take up Naturism.
Spellbooks are not your friends. Even simple conjuring primers or household grimoires have a natural magickal ability to create discord in the fabric of the universe and must be used with care, but in your case using with care just means that that simple sock-washing spell (see? I told you to send your laundry out!) probably won't cause the Sun to explode. As the Wizard's Staff and Knob is the most prevalent Sign of those born to become high-level mages, this goes a long way towards explaining why senior wizards often seem so, um, differently abled when it comes to spellcasting.
Bilious, God of Hangovers 23 Jul - 23 Aug
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Stills; Glassware
You just knew I was going to tell you that, didn't you? Being born under the Sign of Bilious, God of Hangovers, means you're destined to spend your life as an end user if you know what's good for you! Not that Bilians are known for knowing what's good for them - although they know volumes - yards - Nebuchadnezzars about what's bad for them, and do what's bad for them anyway. Trust me, your hung-over lives are already miserable enough without adding the miseries of trying to distil your own potable poisons. Operate a still and you'll experience more explosions than the average Alchemist's apprentice, more poisonous fumes than are seen in Unseen University's Potions class, more corroded metal than is normally found in Copperhead mine tailings...and if you get any results that produce alcohol rather than disaster, you can be sure that they're best used only for paint stripping. Play it safe and give your custom to the local wineshop, or at least to a home brewer born under a different Sign.
Most people think Bilians make bad barmen because they drink more merchandise than they sell, but the real reason is that glassware doesn't like them. You Bilians know to your sorrow that beer glasses, whisky glasses, port glasses, brandy balloons, champagne flutes, cognac snifters, steins, tankards, shotglasses, Klatchian coffee thimbles and scumble tumblers have a habit of jumping off shelves and falling off bars and slipping out of hands whenever you're nearby. Optics crack, bottles fall over and even earthenware jars develop sudden tectonic instability (because earthenware is just glass that didn't make it to graduation). For that matter, more bar mirrors are shattered by the presence of Bilians than ever get broken in barfights. Wineskins all around for you lot!
Mubbo the Hyena 24 Aug - 23 Sept
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Iconographs; Brooms
The famous tourist Twoflower of Bes Pelargic took a lot of iconograph pictures on his travels. Most of them were terrible! The reason any of them came out at all well is because Twoflower is Agatean and his Agatean Sign takes precedence, or so the TingLingese astrologer Hung-Wan On tells me. As for the rest of you, your attempts at iconography will deliver little but hours of mirth and a huge bill for wasted ink. Unless you like decapitated family portraits, landscapes in the blurry style of the Genuan Impressionists, distorted noses, sheets of paper covered in black ink because you forgot to take the porthole-cover off, scary red eyes that belong to your nearest and dearest rather than to creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, or beautiful, microscopically-detailed, crystal-clear pictures of your own thumb, you belong strictly on the other side of the imp.
Brooms hate Mubboons. Mubboons do not make ept witches, or ept History Monks, or even ept charladies. Just inept ones. Nuff said!
The Small Boring Group of Faint Stars 24 Sept - 23 Oct
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Chopsticks; Socks
Admit it, you Boring'uns thought it was just that nothing likes you! But in reality your greatest threats come from chopsticks and socks. Chopsticks are dangerous: 200 million Agateans can be wrong. Consider what the word is made from - "chop" and "sticks"; things that can chop are potentially lethal, and things that are sticks can do all sorts of damage, from spearing an eye to being used for bamboo foot torture to being the dry tinder that starts a city-wide fire. What sort of foolishly brave lunatic wants to eat supper with a glorified pair of tweezers anyway, when there are so many nice safe rounded spoons sitting around completely failing to feature sharp pointy bits? They say a master of chopstickery can pick up a single grain of rice with them; bloody show-offs - everyone knows that a single grain of rice is more likely to get stuck in your windpipe and choke you to death! Never mind the chopsticks, you need spoons. Lots of spoons.
And what could be less dangerous than a soft, warm, fluffy pair of hand-knitted socks? Quite a few things, actually, for Boring'uns. Not only are socks well known for causing fatal slippages, but they also have a natural attraction for half-bricks, and a simple sock in a half-brick can change the fate of the world. Doffed socks lie in wait at night, seeking their opportunity to trip their feckless barefoot owners on a midnight trip to the garderobe. Dirty socks collect germs that could cause terrible infections. Woolly socks tickle and itch, causing their wearers to reach down to scratch at inopportune moments and invite lethal loss of balance; it's statistically proven that woolly socks cause more deaths by misadventure than woolly mammoths, and when you compare the weight and size of a quiescent sock to the weight and size of an angry woolly mammoth, socks are gramme for gramme unthinkably more dangerous. Go barefoot whenever possible and sacrifice frequently to the Small Gods of household woollens.
Androgyna Majestis 24 Oct - 22 Nov
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Projectile Weaponry; Mushrooms
Projectile weaponry, which includes gonnes, crossbows, javelins, throwing knives, slings, blowguns, longbows, boomerangs, Piecemakers, bolas, tea services and siege engines, are Not Your Thing. Just as Hernians make poor ploughmen, Andies make poor infantrymen - the only enemy you're likely to successfully attack will be yourselves, as the term "friendly fire" might as well have been invented just for you! Stay away from anything spring-loaded, since anything spring-loaded can technically be classed as a projectile weapon, even music boxes or those newfangled imp-free chronographs. Face it, you're cut out for gentler pursuits; put the gonne down and back away slowly...
Mushrooms... no, not the edible ones, but the needleperson's darning gadget... actually, any and all sewing accoutrements are on your "don't go there" list. Andies who attempt the tailor's life soon find that needles prick and stab, scissors slice and puncture, drawing pins have a penchant for missing the fabric and finding the soft tissue with the greatest number of nerve endings, embroidery hoops pinch fingertips...and do remember that a needleperson's mushroom is, after all, a blunt instrument. As are those cute little porcelain thimbles with A SOUVENIR OF STO LAT and rustic doodles on them; it's all fun and fingertip protection until some/one bruises an eye.
Great T'Phon's Foot 23 Nov - 21 Dec
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Butter Churns; Forges; the Post Office
Sorting Machine
It is possible to overcome a strong cosmological handicap, to triumph over the influence of the Heavens, but it doesn't happen often. The celebrated cheesemaker Seldom Bucket overcame his inherent Footy butter-churn disharmony to become five-time winner of the Prix du Lat Excellence in Medium Fat Cheese award, but for most Footies faced with butter churns and related dairy machinery, only nightmares and rancid yoghurt will come of it (particularly disturbing nightmares, as this is, really, a form of lactose intolerance). If life deals you the card of farm worker, you'll be happier and safer mucking out the ox byre or tidying the slurry pits - or doing the ploughing for an unfortunate Hernian. Honest muck can be washed off (eventually), but the smell of soured milk is forever.
The village smithy is not for the like of you Footys. Nor is the urban smithy. Forges are big, hot, fiery things that exist for the purpose of smelting metals - that's "melting" with an S at the front - to turn them into swords and ploughshares and thimbles and stills. The shaping of hot metals is known as plastic deformation - that's plastic with a "deformation" at the back - which requires nerves of steel, white heat, muscles of steel, white heat, and did I mention the white heat? Melting, fiery, deformation... I don't think I need to say anything more. You should also avoid B.S. Johnson's infamous Post Office Sorting Machine for similar reasons. Then again, everyone should avoid the Post Office Sorting Machine. And any other machines designed by B.S. Johnson. If ever an inventor of Made Things was born under a bad Sign, he's the one.
Hoki the Jokester 22 Dec - 20 Jan
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Looms; Printing Presses
For Hokians, "loom in the room" spells doom and gloom. Your happy times it will consume; you'll feel you've played both sides at Koom. Given your exit-date from womb, you mustn't tangle with a loom! Your shuttle will scuttle, for which there's no rebuttal; if you meddle with a treadle, you'll suffer from your rigid heddle, whilst your warp and weft leave you bereft and you'll truly be knackered by your jacquard - I believe if you weave you'll wax wroth at your cloth. Raise you not a weaver's banner; heed your stars - become a tanner!
I must confess, a printing press sticks Hokians in a pretty mess; the - hold on an astrolabe-tossing minute! Why is this Horoscope entry rhyming at every turn? How strange. Now, where was I... there are up to 3,026 moving parts in a printing press, and for Hokians, any (or every) one of these exists in a state of imminent breakdown. Since the natural state of a printing press is one of imminent breakdown, mixing Hokians and printing presses is a non-starter. Most often, literally. And "literally" has to do with letters, and letters are the reason for the existence of printing presses. Stick with quills and paper; they have no moving parts.
The Rather Large Gazunda 21 Jan - 18 Feb
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Stringed Instruments; Sonkies
The course of true love rarely runs smooth, especially for Gazundians, and certain Made Things are the reason why. Where would romance be without the lute or the lyre? (...or for that matter the liar, but that's another story.) Many a young swain has wooed the latest (in a long line) of his true loves by melodiously plucking the strings of a mandolin, dulcimer or bouzouki, but pity the poor Gazundians who, when fighting for the hand of a maiden fair, have to fight not just other suitors, fathers, brothers and sometimes husbands but also their own stringed instruments.
And it's not just male Gazundians who suffer badly in the lists of love. The ladies do, too - and I don't mean because they have to listen to the discordant caterwauling of a lovestruck amateur musician. What happens after the music stops is, after all, the important bit, and for those ladies who don't wish to be seeking the services of a midwife some nine months after the walking-out that follows the caterwauling, Wallace Sonky's Best Rubber Preventatives are a Gods-send. But those of you born under the Sign of the Gazunda can expect more than your fair share of splits, holes, spills and diverf shall-we-say accidents. Plan ahead by stocking up on some of the more... unlabelled... herbal remedies - a dollar wisely spent beforehand can save you a fortune in nappy-laundering bills. It could be not you!
Lesser Umbrage 19 Feb - 20 Mar
THINGS THAT DON'T LIKE YOU: Knives and Forks; Tin-openers; Writs
It isn't the lack of hand-eye coordination or manual dexterity that causes Umbragians to accidentally poke a forkful of hot cabbage into their ears or spread butter over half the tablecloth - it's the astro-illogical antipathy of cutlery to those born under the Sign of Lesser Umbrage. Not all cutlery, mind you: just table knives and forks. An Umbragian who is all thumbs - and as Igors have long known, there's surprisingly little you can do with all thumbs - when cutting a baked potato or stabbing a sausage with a fork can turn into a virtuoso with a carving knife, oyster spear... or even chopsticks.
Tin-openers are one of those devices that emit a low-level maliciousness field even at the best of times. Trying to open a tin is an experience not to be repeated if at all avoidable! You run the gauntlet of stabbing yourself with the blade, pinching your skin in the hinge, and, if the tin holds beetroot, you will surely end up spilling indelible red liquid over yourself. So have a moment of sympathy for the poor Umbragian, who not only has to deal with the usual maliciousness of the tin-opener but also with its horoscopical contrariness.
Feegles have been known to run for three days straight at the mere mention of the word "writ", stopping only to empty any glasses of booze they come across. And Feegles (Umbragians all, or nearly all, and those of you who've been paying attention know why) are not alone in this, oh no: all Umbragians have terrible trouble with writs, whether they (the Umbragian, not the writ) be plaintiff, defendant, witness or even just the poor functionary stuck with serving 'em. The best you can hope for is a nasty paper cut, but a more typical experience is that of the Senior Alchemist Sincere Rampart (younger brother to Frank), who was called as a technical witness in a legal dispute over the meat content of C.M.O.T. Dibbler's Named Meat pies but ended up hanging upside-down in the Patrician's dungeon for Public Miming after a mix-up with the writ. Sic transit gloria Umbragii, which is Latatian for "you're hedgehogged!"
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Clog Post 3 with What's Blood Got To Do With It?
THE CLACKS LOG OF WEIRD ALICE LANCREVIC
Clog Post 3 -- LANDS OF MY EIGHTFATHERS (Part Two)
First Clog: "We wuz robbed"
The journey so far:
Breakdowns 7
Beers consumed 133
Substandard lodgings 2
Highway robberies 1 (if you don't count what we were charged for our overnight stay in Burnt Hedge)
We got rid of Rudney! Not until almost at Slake, but I wanted to start this post on an up-note. Naturally, the multiverse has its way of, well, let's say there seems to be a law of conservation of unpleasantness everywhere, so we were delivered as a replacement one Certainty Niblik, a third-year technomancer who's almost as obnoxious as the late unlamented Urch. Young Master Niblik, who prefers to be known as "Cert", is an improvement in one sense -- at least he likes to get his hands dirty. Unlike Rudney, whose idea of springing into action always consisted of standing just out of working range and spouting nonstop monologues about wheel things and suspension things and harness things and tool things and methodology things ("...and the crenellating wheelbrace, which as we know was invented in 1610 by Stirrup Likely, late of Quirm, at the Wayside Forge in Much Mucking at four twenty-five on Spune fourteenth..."), our Cert rolls up the sleeves of his robe and gets stuck in. Less happily, what he gets stuck in to -- apart from clotted road-dung -- is testing his pre-diploma research theories of magickal reconfigurations of machinery. This means repairs now take twice as long, but the good side is that we now have a suspension that suspends (!!!) and our progress is much faster between breakdowns. Yesterday we reached 34mph on an uphill slope! Burk and Dennis have been strangely glassy-eyed and quiet since then. So have the horses.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, even without Cert's assistance. Continuity, that's the thing... after we left Burnt Hedge, we struck out across the Middling Wastes, a desolate mountainous borderland -- have you ever noticed how the inner parts of the continent seem to be made up of nothing but desolate mountainous borderlands? -- that includes the fiercely independent Un-Confederation of Litigia. Litigia is a proud and ancient land (lots of those around here, too; why is it that countries and tribes are never modest and ancient, hmm?) traditionally ruled by a Bandit King -- the tradition being that the most successful bandit gets to be King; rather like ordinary royalty, except with no messy family genealogies to clutter up the line of succession. Litigian bandits are notable for their high standard of legal education (I suppose it balances their low standard of legal behaviour) -- they may rob and pillage like other bandits, but they're the only wandering highway robbers outside Ankh-Morpork who present you with itemised receipts (capital acquisitions, pillage depreciation allowance, crossbow maintenance deductions...) and who resort to legal harassment of uncooperative victims. Travellers offering armed resistance, or publicly claiming ill-treatment, are liable to be served at the next border town with a summons for a Defamation of Character suit!
The current Bandit King of Litigia (yes, of course we met the Bandit King. At swordpoint. Litigian kings believe in the hands-on approach to reigning. And much brandishing of swords. You can't beat Litigian bandits for a good brandish) is an imposing (well, he certainly imposed on us) gentleman (note careful lawsuit-avoiding phrasing here) by the name of Hans Sallow. Big in all directions, with an even bigger moustache and old-fashioned courtly turns of speech (think of an amorous walrus) and an accent that even my accent-sensitive ear can't quite place, he came to power only a few years ago but has a lot of influence on the local style of banditing... apparently he used to be a smuggler and is converting the Litigians to non-violent fraud, but still leads raiding parties to, you know, keep his image up (I later discovered that Hans Sallow may not be his real name -- some say he used to call himself Mudd. That sounds Morporkian, but the accent...hmm...Cert -- after we told him the story of our mishap and described King Hans -- said it sounds like he drifted in from some other reality through a wormhole in the space-time continuinuinuum. All I can say is, it must have been a really big worm).
We were ambushed only a few hours out of Burnt Hedge. Right after a breakdown, too -- if only the bandits had come along thirty minutes earlier, they wouldn't have had to chase us, bad luck for them. So after they did the surrounding-the-cart thing and the stand-and-deliver thing (I've always thought that "stand and deliver!" sounds like a rather curious midwifing method, dreadfully intimidating one at that) and the show-us-your-valuables thing, and after we'd done the meekly complying thing, and after Rumbustia had done the "ooh-you-bandits-are-so-firm-and-manly" thing (and yes, King Hans actually said the "Oi-loikes-a-girl-with-spirit" thing) and Papa Verdant had to physically restrain her from running off with the bandits, they decided our valuables weren't valuable enough and that we had to also hand over one of our party to be trained up as a slave-cum-apprentice-bandit. We went into a huddle, held the shortest consultation in the history of besieged travelling companions, and offered him Rudney by unanimous vote (Rudney voted no, but his vote doesn't count). They would've probably taken my lute, but that's the nice thing about having a sapient pearwood travelling-case -- it hops out and runs off to safety at the first sign of danger and doesn't come back until the all-clear.
Honour and tradition satisfied, receipt issued, we were allowed to go on our way, safe in the knowledge that we were "the best behaved victims in months". And so it was farewell Rudders -- the last we heard of him, as he faded into the distance, was an ever fainter lecture about how the mountain ambush was invented by General Tacticus during the War of the Lost Kebab. I hope those bandits suffer as much as we have.
Here endeth this post.
Second Clog: "Untitled"
V. stressed. Hurried. Dictating in shortmouth again. In U'wald now, turns out Elena should've taken mountain air for longer. We were chased by werewolves. V. angry werewolves. Also chased by wolf-type wolves, poss. yennorks. Also chased by flock of angry bats. Also chased by angry villagers w/ flaming pitchforks & some angry baron's angry mercenaries. Escaped, thx to Cert's cart mods, 1 mod last-second w/him hanging on back of cart tweaking stuff, nearly ended up w/dead Cert. Haha, dead Cert. Tired. Made inn in Bonk suburbs, not chased by barmaids. Sleep now!
Third Clog: "They did not drink...vine..."
So much to write about Uberwald! Unfortunately, no time right now, as we're finished with Burk and Dennis for now - packing to transfer to a Zoon barge heading down the River of Blut. Hopefully I'll get a chance later, but for now, just one highlight and one quick song. Ask me later about DownTown and the kinky Dwarf cobbler and what became of Elena...
I couldn't possibly have done my tour of Uberwald without attending the traditional yearly Sleilidh (that's pronounced "slay-lee"), a celebration of storytelling, booze, song, dance - and vampirism. This year's Sleilidh was held in Bad Schuschein on the banks of the Blut and featured, for the first time ever, International Tag Team Vampire Staking. There was also the first-ever Dry Pride March, featuring a huge presence of Black Ribboners, and lots of Blut Best blutwurst and Blut blood sausage and fatsup that probably had Blut in it. There was also Blut Best Vino Sanguino. I passed on that, even though I was told it was an especially good vintage, and stuck with various beers, none of which had the slightest reddish tint. There was also an open-air market, first I've seen that sold no garlic and no silver jewellery. One stall, run by a Mr von Dibblerov, had a good selection of slightly shop-soiled Sleilidh merchandise; I got a souvenir smock embroidered with I WENT TO THE UBERWALD SLEILIDH AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY THROAT PUNCTURE.
I also joined in the busking competition and got a non-garlic non-silver rosette and badge, awarded by the famous Lady Margolotta herself. This was my winning song, What's Blood Got to Do with It?:
All the Black Ribboners bought me drinks and made me write down the words of my song!
I decided not to go back to visit Borogravia after all. Things are ... uncomfortable there since the Slovenian Entente Barely Cordiale, and what with my maternal great-uncle having been a major player in the Battle of Braz Kneck and the Rout of Shear Kneck, and what with our strong family resemblance, my plan of travelling to Brindisi via the River Kneck and the Sea of Landlock has lost some of its appeal. Instead, I'll be heading next for Genua; the River of Blut connects with the Vieux River somewhere in the (yes, again) desolate mountainous borderlands, so that's my new plan.
Anyway, they say you can't go home again. So I'm going to Genua instead.
-- Alice.
Note for Roundworlders (with apologies to Tina Turner): What's Love Got to Do with It? original lyrics can be found at:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tinaturner/whatslovegottodowithit.html
Clog Post 3 -- LANDS OF MY EIGHTFATHERS (Part Two)
First Clog: "We wuz robbed"
The journey so far:
Breakdowns 7
Beers consumed 133
Substandard lodgings 2
Highway robberies 1 (if you don't count what we were charged for our overnight stay in Burnt Hedge)
We got rid of Rudney! Not until almost at Slake, but I wanted to start this post on an up-note. Naturally, the multiverse has its way of, well, let's say there seems to be a law of conservation of unpleasantness everywhere, so we were delivered as a replacement one Certainty Niblik, a third-year technomancer who's almost as obnoxious as the late unlamented Urch. Young Master Niblik, who prefers to be known as "Cert", is an improvement in one sense -- at least he likes to get his hands dirty. Unlike Rudney, whose idea of springing into action always consisted of standing just out of working range and spouting nonstop monologues about wheel things and suspension things and harness things and tool things and methodology things ("...and the crenellating wheelbrace, which as we know was invented in 1610 by Stirrup Likely, late of Quirm, at the Wayside Forge in Much Mucking at four twenty-five on Spune fourteenth..."), our Cert rolls up the sleeves of his robe and gets stuck in. Less happily, what he gets stuck in to -- apart from clotted road-dung -- is testing his pre-diploma research theories of magickal reconfigurations of machinery. This means repairs now take twice as long, but the good side is that we now have a suspension that suspends (!!!) and our progress is much faster between breakdowns. Yesterday we reached 34mph on an uphill slope! Burk and Dennis have been strangely glassy-eyed and quiet since then. So have the horses.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, even without Cert's assistance. Continuity, that's the thing... after we left Burnt Hedge, we struck out across the Middling Wastes, a desolate mountainous borderland -- have you ever noticed how the inner parts of the continent seem to be made up of nothing but desolate mountainous borderlands? -- that includes the fiercely independent Un-Confederation of Litigia. Litigia is a proud and ancient land (lots of those around here, too; why is it that countries and tribes are never modest and ancient, hmm?) traditionally ruled by a Bandit King -- the tradition being that the most successful bandit gets to be King; rather like ordinary royalty, except with no messy family genealogies to clutter up the line of succession. Litigian bandits are notable for their high standard of legal education (I suppose it balances their low standard of legal behaviour) -- they may rob and pillage like other bandits, but they're the only wandering highway robbers outside Ankh-Morpork who present you with itemised receipts (capital acquisitions, pillage depreciation allowance, crossbow maintenance deductions...) and who resort to legal harassment of uncooperative victims. Travellers offering armed resistance, or publicly claiming ill-treatment, are liable to be served at the next border town with a summons for a Defamation of Character suit!
The current Bandit King of Litigia (yes, of course we met the Bandit King. At swordpoint. Litigian kings believe in the hands-on approach to reigning. And much brandishing of swords. You can't beat Litigian bandits for a good brandish) is an imposing (well, he certainly imposed on us) gentleman (note careful lawsuit-avoiding phrasing here) by the name of Hans Sallow. Big in all directions, with an even bigger moustache and old-fashioned courtly turns of speech (think of an amorous walrus) and an accent that even my accent-sensitive ear can't quite place, he came to power only a few years ago but has a lot of influence on the local style of banditing... apparently he used to be a smuggler and is converting the Litigians to non-violent fraud, but still leads raiding parties to, you know, keep his image up (I later discovered that Hans Sallow may not be his real name -- some say he used to call himself Mudd. That sounds Morporkian, but the accent...hmm...Cert -- after we told him the story of our mishap and described King Hans -- said it sounds like he drifted in from some other reality through a wormhole in the space-time continuinuinuum. All I can say is, it must have been a really big worm).
We were ambushed only a few hours out of Burnt Hedge. Right after a breakdown, too -- if only the bandits had come along thirty minutes earlier, they wouldn't have had to chase us, bad luck for them. So after they did the surrounding-the-cart thing and the stand-and-deliver thing (I've always thought that "stand and deliver!" sounds like a rather curious midwifing method, dreadfully intimidating one at that) and the show-us-your-valuables thing, and after we'd done the meekly complying thing, and after Rumbustia had done the "ooh-you-bandits-are-so-firm-and-manly" thing (and yes, King Hans actually said the "Oi-loikes-a-girl-with-spirit" thing) and Papa Verdant had to physically restrain her from running off with the bandits, they decided our valuables weren't valuable enough and that we had to also hand over one of our party to be trained up as a slave-cum-apprentice-bandit. We went into a huddle, held the shortest consultation in the history of besieged travelling companions, and offered him Rudney by unanimous vote (Rudney voted no, but his vote doesn't count). They would've probably taken my lute, but that's the nice thing about having a sapient pearwood travelling-case -- it hops out and runs off to safety at the first sign of danger and doesn't come back until the all-clear.
Honour and tradition satisfied, receipt issued, we were allowed to go on our way, safe in the knowledge that we were "the best behaved victims in months". And so it was farewell Rudders -- the last we heard of him, as he faded into the distance, was an ever fainter lecture about how the mountain ambush was invented by General Tacticus during the War of the Lost Kebab. I hope those bandits suffer as much as we have.
Here endeth this post.
***
Second Clog: "Untitled"
V. stressed. Hurried. Dictating in shortmouth again. In U'wald now, turns out Elena should've taken mountain air for longer. We were chased by werewolves. V. angry werewolves. Also chased by wolf-type wolves, poss. yennorks. Also chased by flock of angry bats. Also chased by angry villagers w/ flaming pitchforks & some angry baron's angry mercenaries. Escaped, thx to Cert's cart mods, 1 mod last-second w/him hanging on back of cart tweaking stuff, nearly ended up w/dead Cert. Haha, dead Cert. Tired. Made inn in Bonk suburbs, not chased by barmaids. Sleep now!
***
Third Clog: "They did not drink...vine..."
So much to write about Uberwald! Unfortunately, no time right now, as we're finished with Burk and Dennis for now - packing to transfer to a Zoon barge heading down the River of Blut. Hopefully I'll get a chance later, but for now, just one highlight and one quick song. Ask me later about DownTown and the kinky Dwarf cobbler and what became of Elena...
I couldn't possibly have done my tour of Uberwald without attending the traditional yearly Sleilidh (that's pronounced "slay-lee"), a celebration of storytelling, booze, song, dance - and vampirism. This year's Sleilidh was held in Bad Schuschein on the banks of the Blut and featured, for the first time ever, International Tag Team Vampire Staking. There was also the first-ever Dry Pride March, featuring a huge presence of Black Ribboners, and lots of Blut Best blutwurst and Blut blood sausage and fatsup that probably had Blut in it. There was also Blut Best Vino Sanguino. I passed on that, even though I was told it was an especially good vintage, and stuck with various beers, none of which had the slightest reddish tint. There was also an open-air market, first I've seen that sold no garlic and no silver jewellery. One stall, run by a Mr von Dibblerov, had a good selection of slightly shop-soiled Sleilidh merchandise; I got a souvenir smock embroidered with I WENT TO THE UBERWALD SLEILIDH AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY THROAT PUNCTURE.
I also joined in the busking competition and got a non-garlic non-silver rosette and badge, awarded by the famous Lady Margolotta herself. This was my winning song, What's Blood Got to Do with It?:
- You must feel the pangs
When the touch of my fangs
Makes your heart attack
But it's only the thrill
Of drinking my fill
You're my favourite snack
It's mystical... haemo-physical
You'd deny me my gore?
Then you're dins for a bat, ohhh
What's blood got to do, got to do with it?
What's blood but a slick and handy ocean?
What's blood got to do, got to do with it?
Who could refrain when a vein can be opened?
It may seem to you
There's an excess of grue
When you're thrall'd by me
If I tend to drink deep
And put you to sleep
It's sanguinary
There's a cure for it
Til you're truly bit
And whatever the season, your fluid's for me, ohhh
What's blood got to do, got to do with it?
What's blood but a slick and handy ocean?
What's blood got to do, got to do with it?
Why stop at pecks when a neck's there for broachin'?
I've been thinking 'bout some vivisection
For amusement's sake
Hold the garlic for my own protection
It scares me to see that stake, ohhh
What's blood got to do, got to do with it?
What's blood but a sweet sustaining potion?
What's blood got to do, got to do with it?
I need a slug of that jugular motion...
All the Black Ribboners bought me drinks and made me write down the words of my song!
***
I decided not to go back to visit Borogravia after all. Things are ... uncomfortable there since the Slovenian Entente Barely Cordiale, and what with my maternal great-uncle having been a major player in the Battle of Braz Kneck and the Rout of Shear Kneck, and what with our strong family resemblance, my plan of travelling to Brindisi via the River Kneck and the Sea of Landlock has lost some of its appeal. Instead, I'll be heading next for Genua; the River of Blut connects with the Vieux River somewhere in the (yes, again) desolate mountainous borderlands, so that's my new plan.
Anyway, they say you can't go home again. So I'm going to Genua instead.
-- Alice.
Note for Roundworlders (with apologies to Tina Turner): What's Love Got to Do with It? original lyrics can be found at:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tinaturner/whatslovegottodowithit.html
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