The Light Fantastic - Terry Pratchett [11]
“Oook.”
Trymon listened. He could hear, a long way off, the sound of approaching feet and arguing voices. But he had been prepared for that, too.
He reached into a pocket.
“Would you like another banana?” he said.
The Forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called—in the local language—Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.
The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea traveled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalized in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just a Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.
Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod (“Who Is This Fool Who Does Not Know What a Mountain Is”) and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.
Twoflower and Rincewind were arguing. The person they were arguing about sat on his mushroom and watched them with interest. He looked like someone who smelled like someone who lived in a mushroom, and that bothered Twoflower.
“Well, why hasn’t he got a red hat?”
Rincewind hesitated, desperately trying to imagine what Twoflower was getting at.
“What?” he said, giving in.
“He should have a red hat,” said Twoflower. “And he certainly ought to be cleaner and more, more sort of jolly. He doesn’t look like any sort of gnome to me.”
“What are you going on about?”
“Look at that beard,” said Twoflower sternly. “I’ve seen better beards on a piece of cheese.”
“Look, he’s six inches high and lives in a mushroom,” snarled Rincewind. “Of course he’s a bloody gnome.”
“We’ve only got his word for it.”
Rincewind looked down at the gnome.
“Excuse me,” he said. He took Twoflower to the other side of the clearing.
“Listen,” he said between his teeth. “If he was fifteen feet tall and said he was a giant we’d only have his word for that too, wouldn’t we?”
“He could be a goblin,” said Twoflower defiantly.
Rincewind looked back at the tiny figure, which was industriously picking its nose.
“Well?” he said. “So what? Gnome, goblin, pixie—so what?”
“Not a pixie,” said Twoflower firmly. “Pixies, they wear these sort of green combinations and they have pointy caps and little knobbly antenna thingies sticking out of their heads. I’ve seen pictures.”
“Where?”
Twoflower hesitated, and looked at his feet. “I think it was called the ‘mutter, mutter, mutter.’”
“The what? Called the what?”
The little man took a sudden interest in the backs of his hands.
“The Little Folks’ Book of Flower Fairies,” he muttered.
Rincewind looked blank.
“It’s a book on how to avoid them?” he said.
“Oh no,” said Twoflower hurriedly. “It tells you where to look for them. I can remember the pictures now.” A dreamy look came over his face, and Rincewind groaned inwardly. “There was even a special fairy that came and took your teeth away.”
“What, came and pulled out your actual teeth—?”
“No, no, you’re wrong, I mean after they’d fallen out, what you did was, you put the tooth under your pillow and the fairy came and took it away and left a rhinu piece.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did it collect teeth?”
“It just did.”
Rincewind formed a mental picture of some strange entity living in a castle made of teeth. It was the kind of mental picture you tried to forget. Unsuccessfully.
“Urgh,” he said.
Red hats! He wondered whether to enlighten the tourist about what life was really like when a frog was a good meal, a rabbit hole a useful place to shelter out of the rain, and an owl a drifting, silent terror in the night. Moleskin trousers sounded quaint unless you personally had to remove them from their original owner when the vicious little sod