The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett [58]
It waited a decent while after it had been put down, and then took in its surroundings. It had been stacked up by a lot of other boxes and suitcases, which was comforting. After five minutes spent being underground for millions of years the Luggage felt that it was due some quality time.
And it didn’t even resist when someone opened its lid and filled it up with shoes. Quite large shoes, the Luggage noticed, and many of them with interesting heels and inventive ways with silk and sequins. They were clearly ladies’ shoes. That was good, the Luggage thought (or emoted, or reacted). Ladies tended to lead quieter lives.
The purple cart rumbled off. Painted crudely on the back were the words: Petunia, The Desert Princess.
Rincewind looked hard at the shears that the head shearer was waving. They looked sharp.
“You know what we do to people who go back on a bet round here?” said Daggy, the gang boss.
“Er…but I was drunk.”
“So were we. So what?”
Rincewind looked out across the sheep pens. He knew what sheep were, of course, and had come into contact with them on many occasions, although normally in the company of mixed vegetables. He’d even had a toy stuffed lamb as a child. But there is something hugely unlovable about sheep, a kind of mad, eyerolling brainlessness smelling of damp wool and panic. Many religions extol the virtues of the meek, but Rincewind had never trusted them. The meek could turn very nasty at times.
On the other hand…they were covered in wool, and the shears looked pretty keen. How hard could it be? His radar told him that trying and failing was probably a lot less of a crime than not trying at all.
“Can I have a trial run?” he said.
A sheep was dragged out of the pens and flung down in front of him.
Rincewind gave Daggy what he hoped was the smile of one craftsman to another, but smiling at Daggy was like throwing meringues against a cliff.
“Er, can I have a chair and a towel and two mirrors and a comb?” he said.
Daggy’s look of intense suspicion deepened. “What’s this? What d’you want all that for?”
“Got to do it properly, haven’t I?”
Away out of sight at the back of the shearing shed, on the sun-bleached boards, the outline of a kangaroo began to form. And then, the white lines drifting across the wood like wisps of cloud across a clear sky, it began to change shape…
Rincewind hadn’t had a proper haircut in a long time, but he knew how it was done.
“So…have you had your holidays this year, then?” he said, clipping away.
“Mnaaarrrhh!”
“What about this weather, eh?” Rincewind said, desperately.
“Mnaaarrrhh!”
The sheep wasn’t even trying to struggle. It was an old one, with fewer teeth than feet, and even in the very limited depths of its extremely shallow mind it knew that this wasn’t how shearing was supposed to go. Shearing was supposed to be a brief struggle followed by glorious cool freedom back in the paddock. It wasn’t supposed to include searching questions about what it thought of this weather or enquiries as to whether it required something for the weekend, especially since the sheep had no concept of the connotations of the term “weekend” or, if it came to that, of the word “something” either. People weren’t supposed to splash lavender water in its ear.
The shearers watched in silence. There was quite a crowd of them, because they’d gone and fetched everyone else on the station. They knew in their souls that here was something to tell their grandchildren.
Rincewind stood back, looked critically at his handiwork, and then showed the sheep the back of its head in the mirror, at which point the creature cracked, managed to get its feet under it and made a run for the paddock.
“Hey, wait till I take the curlers out!” Rincewind shouted after it.
He became aware of the shearers watching him. Finally one of them said, in a stunned