The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett [47]
In short, Rincewind had the feeling he wasn’t looking at animals at all. He took another sip of the beer.
He couldn’t raise the subject with Crocodile Dongo. There was a philosophical wrongness about drawing a crocodile’s attention to the fact that there were a couple of kangaroos in the bar.
“Youse wanta nother beer?” said Dongo.
“Yeah, right,” said Rincewind.
He looked at the sign on the beer pump. It was a picture of a grinning kangaroo. The label said: Roo Beer.
He raised his eyes to a torn poster on the wall. It also advertised Roo Beer. There was the same kangaroo, holding a pint of said beer and wearing the same knowing grin.
It looked familiar, for some reason.
“I can’t help nossisting…” He tried again. “I can’t help noticing,” he said, “that some people in this barrardifferentshap from other p’ple.”
“Well, old Hollowlog Joe over there’f put on a bit of weight lately,” said Dongo, polishing a glass.
Rincewind looked down at his legs. “Whose legsare dese?”
“You okay, mifter?”
“Prob’ly been bitten by so’thing,” said Rincewind. A sudden urgent need gripped him.
“It’f out the back,” said Dongo.
“Out back in the outback,” said Rincewind, staggering forward. “Hahahaha—”
He walked into an iron pillar, which picked him up in a fist and held him at arm’s length. He looked along the arm to a large angry face and an expression that said a lot of beer was looking for a fight and the rest of the body was happy to go along with it.
Rincewind was muzzily aware that in his case a lot of beer wanted to run away. And at a time like this, it’s always the beer talking.
“I bin lisnin’ to you. Where’re you from, mister?” said the giant’s beer.
“Ankh-M’pork…” At a time like this, why lie?
The bar went quiet.
“An’ you’re gonna come here and make a lot of cracks about us all drinkin’ beer and fightin’ and talkin’ funny, right?”
Some of Rincewind’s beer said, “No worries.”
His captor pulled him so they were face to face. Rincewind had never seen such a huge nose.
“An’ I expect you don’t even know that we happen to produce some partic’ly fine wines, our Chardonnays bein’ ’specially worthy of attention and compet’tively priced, not to mention the rich, firmly structur’d Rusted Dunny Valley Semillons, which are a tangily refreshin’ discovery for the connesewer…yew bastard?”
“Jolly good, I’ll have a pint of Chardonnay, please.”
“You takin’ the piss?”
“No, I’d like to leave it here—”
“How about you putting my mate down?” said a voice.
Mad was in the doorway. There was a general scuffle to get out of the way.
“Oh, you looking for a fight too, stubby?” Rincewind was dropped as the huge creature turned to face the dwarf, fists clenching.
“I don’t look for them. I just walk into pubs and there they are,” said Mad, pulling out a knife. “Now, you going to leave him alone, Wally?”
“You call that a knife?” The giant unsheathed one that’d be called a sword if it had been held in a normal-sized hand. “This is what I call a knife!”
Mad looked at it. Then he reached his hand around behind his back, and it came back holding something.
“Really? No worries. This,” he said, “is what I call a crossbow.”
“It’s a log,” said Ridcully, inspecting the boat-building committee’s work to date.
“Rather more than a log—” the Dean began.
“Oh, you’ve made a mast and tied the Bursar’s bathrobe to it, I can see that. It’s a log, Dean. There’s roots on one end and bits of branch at the other. You haven’t even hollowed it out. It’s a log.”
“It took us all hours,” said the Senior Wrangler.
“And it does float,” the Dean pointed out.
“I think the term is more like wallows,” said Ridcully. “And we’d all get on it, would we?”
“This is the one-man version,” said the Dean. “We thought we’d test it out and then try it with a lot of them together…”
“Like a raft, you mean?”
“I suppose so,” said the Dean, with considerable reluctance. He would have preferred a more dynamic name for it. “Obviously these things take time.”
The Archchancellor nodded. He was