He had been truly keen on anything involving words. At Hugglestones this had not counted for a great deal, since most of its graduates never expected to have to do much more with a pen than sign their names (a feat which most of them could manage after three or four years), but it had meant long mornings peacefully reading anything that took his fancy while around him the hulking front-row forwards who would one day be at least the deputy-leaders of the land learned how to hold a pen without crushing it.
William left with a good report, which tended to be the case with pupils that most of the teachers could only vaguely remember. Afterwards, his father had faced the problem of what to do with him.
He was the younger son, and family tradition sent youngest sons into some church or other, where they couldn’t do much harm on a physical level. But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.
Going into land management was just about acceptable, but it seemed to William that land managed itself pretty well, on the whole. He was all in favour of the countryside, provided that it was on the other side of a window.
A military career somewhere was unlikely. William had a rooted objection to killing people he didn’t know.
He enjoyed reading and writing. He liked words. Words didn’t shout or make loud noises, which pretty much defined the rest of his family. They didn’t involve getting muddy in the freezing cold. They didn’t hunt inoffensive animals, either. They did what he told them to. So, he’d said, he wanted to write.
His father had erupted. In his personal world a scribe was only one step higher than a teacher. Good gods, man, they didn’t even ride a horse! So there had been Words.
As a result, William had gone off to Ankh-Morpork, the usual destination for the lost and the aimless. There he’d made words his living, in a quiet sort of way, and considered that he’d got off easily compared to brother Rupert, who was big and good natured and a Hugglestones natural apart from the accident of birth.
And then there had been the war against Klatch …{7}
It was an insignificant war, which was over before it started, the kind of war that both sides pretended hadn’t really happened, but one of the things that did happen in the few confused days of wretched turmoil was the death of Rupert de Worde. He had died for his beliefs; chief among them was the very Hugglestonian one that bravery could replace armour, and that Klatchians would turn and run if you shouted loud enough.
William’s father, during their last meeting, had gone on at some length about the proud and noble traditions of the de Wordes. These had mostly involved unpleasant deaths, preferably of foreigners, but somehow, William gathered, the de Wordes had always considered that it was a decent second prize to die themselves. A de Worde was always to the fore when the city called. That was why they existed. Wasn’t the family motto Le Mot Juste? The Right Word In The Right Place, said Lord de Worde. He simply could not understand why William did not want to embrace this fine tradition and he dealt with it, in the manner of his kind, by not dealing with it.
And now a great frigid silence had descended between the de Wordes that made the winter chill seem like a sauna.
In this gloomy frame of mind it was positively cheering to wander into the print room to find the Bursar arguing the theory of words with Goodmountain.
‘Hold on, hold on,’ said the Bursar. ‘Yes, indeed, figuratively a word is made up of individual letters but they have only a,’ he waved his long fingers gracefully, ‘theoretical existence, if I may put it that way. They are, as it were, words partis in potentia, and it is, I am afraid, unsophisticated in the extreme to imagine that they have any real existence unis et separato. Indeed, the very concept of letters having their own physical existence is, philosophically, extremely worrying. Indeed, it would be like noses and fingers running around the world all by themselves—’
That’s three ‘indeeds’, thought William, who noticed things like that. Three indeeds used by a person in one brief speech generally meant an internal spring was about to break.
‘We got whole boxes of letters,’ said Goodmountain flatly. ‘We can make any words you want.’
‘That’s the trouble, you see,’ said the Bursar. ‘Supposing the metal remembers the words it has printed? At least engravers melt down their plates, and the cleansing effect of fire will—’
‘’scuse me, your reverence,’ said Goodmountain. One of the dwarfs had tapped him gently on the shoulder and handed him a square of paper. He passed it up to the Bursar.
‘Young Caslong here thought you might like this as a souvenir,’ he said. ‘He took it down directly from the case and pulled it off on the stone. He’s very quick like that.’
The Bursar tried to look the young dwarf sternly up and down, although this was a pretty pointless intimidatory tactic to use on dwarfs since they had very little up to look down from.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘How very …’ His eyes scanned the paper.
And then bulged.
‘But these are … when I said … I only just said … How did you know I was going to say … I mean, my actual words …’ he stuttered.
‘Of course they’re not properly justified,’ said Goodmountain.
‘Now just a moment—’ the Bursar began.
William left them to it. The stone he could work out — even the engravers used a big flat stone as a workbench. And he’d seen dwarfs pulling paper sheets off the metal letters, so that made sense, too. And what the Bursar said had been unjustified. It wasn’t as if metal had a soul.
He looked over the head of a dwarf who was busily assembling letters in a little metal hod, the stubby fingers darting from box to box in the big tray of type in front of him. Capital letters all in the top, small letters all in the bottom. It was even possible to get an idea of what the dwarf was assembling, just by watching the movements of his hands across the tray.
‘M-a-k-e-$-$-$-I-n-n-Y-o-u-r-e-S-p-a-r-e-T-y-m—’ he murmured.{8}
A certainty formed. He glanced down at the sheets of grubby paper beside the tray.
They were covered with the dense spiky handwriting that identified its owner as an anal-retentive with a poor grip.
There were no flies on C.M.O.T. Dibbler. He would have charged them rent.
With barely a conscious thought, William pulled out his notebook, licked his pencil and wrote, very carefully, in his private shorthand:
‘Amzg scenes hv ocrd in the Ct with the Openg o t Prntg Engn at the Sgn o t Bucket by G. Goodmountain, Dwf, which hs causd mch intereƒt amng all prts inc. chfs of commerƒe.’
He paused. The conversation at the other end of the room was definitely taking a more conciliatory turn.
‘How much a thousand?’ said the Bursar.