Soul Music - Terry Pratchett [4]
For example, when she lectured to the school, pointed chin trembling, on the perils to be found outside in the town, three hundred healthy inquiring minds decided that 1) they should be sampled at the earliest opportunity, and logical thought wondered 2) exactly how Miss Butts knew about them. And the high, spike-topped walls around the college grounds looked simple enough to anyone with a fresh mind full of trigonometry and a body honed by healthy fencing, calisthenics, and cold baths. Miss Butts could make peril seem really interesting.
Anyway, that was the incident of the midnight visitor. After a while, Susan considered that she must have imagined it. That was the only logical explanation. And Susan was good at those.
Everyone, they say, is looking for something.
Imp was looking for somewhere to go.
The farm cart that had brought him the last stretch of the way was rumbling off across the fields.
He looked at the signpost. One arm pointed to Quirm, the other to Ankh-Morpork. He knew just enough to know that Ankh-Morpork was a big city, but built on loam, and, therefore, of no interest to the druids in his family. He had three Ankh-Morpork dollars and some change. It probably wasn’t very much in Ankh-Morpork.
He didn’t know anything about Quirm, except that it was on the coast. The road to Quirm didn’t look very worn, while the one to Ankh-Morpork was heavily rutted.
It’d be sensible to go to Quirm to get the feel of city life. It’d be sensible to learn a bit about how city people thought before heading for Ankh-Morpork, which they said was the largest city in the world. It’d be sensible to get some kind of job in Quirm and raise a bit of extra cash. It’d be sensible to learn to walk before he started to run.
Common sense told Imp all these things, so he marched off firmly toward Ankh-Morpork.
As far as looks were concerned, Susan had always put people in mind of a dandelion on the point of telling the time. The College dressed its gels in a loose navy blue woolen smock that stretched from neck to just above the ankle—practical, healthy, and as attractive as a plank. The waistline was somewhere around knee level. Susan was beginning to fill it out, however, in accordance with the ancient rules hesitantly and erratically alluded to by Miss Delcross in Biology and Hygiene. Gels left her class with the vague feeling that they were supposed to marry a rabbit. (Susan had left with the feeling that the cardboard skeleton on the hook in the corner looked like someone she’d known…)
It was her hair that made people stop and turn to watch her. It was pure white, except for a black streak. School regulations required that it be in two plaits, but it had an uncanny tendency to unravel itself and spring back into its preferred shape, like Medusa’s snakes.*
And then there was the birthmark, if that’s what it was. It only showed up if she blushed, when three faint pale lines appeared up across her cheek and made it look exactly as though she’d been slapped. On the occasions when she was angry—and she was quite often angry, at the sheer stupidity of the world—they glowed.
In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book. Currently she had Wold’s Logic and Paradox open on her desk and was reading it with her chin in her hands.
She listened with half an ear to what the rest of the class was doing.
It was a poem about daffodils.
Apparently the poet had liked them very much.
Susan was quite stoic about this. It was a free country. People could like daffodils if they wanted to. They just should not, in Susan’s very definite and precise opinion, be allowed to take up more than a page to say so.
She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it.
Around her, the poet’s vision was taken apart with inexpert tools.
The kitchen was built on the same gargantuan lines as the rest of the house. An army of cooks could get lost in it. The far walls