Highlights from Mort by Terry Prachett Last read on May 27, 2024
Highlights from this book
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There was no doubt that there was something magical in the soil of that hilly, broken area which—because of the strange tint that it gave to the local flora—was known as the octarine grass country. For example, it was one of the few places on the Disc where plants produced reannual varieties.
Reannuals are plants that grow backwards in time. You sow the seed this year and they grow last year.
Mort’s family specialized in distilling the wine from reannual grapes. These were very powerful and much sought after by fortune-tellers, since of course they enabled them to see the future. The only snag was that you got the hangover the morning before, and had to drink a lot to get over it.
Reannual growers tended to be big, serious men, much given to introspection and close examination of the calendar. A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment.
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Mort was interested in lots of things. Why people’s teeth fitted together so neatly, for example. He’d given that one a lot of thought. Then there was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night when the light would come in useful. He knew the standard explanation, which somehow didn’t seem satisfying.
In short, Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn’t been one of them.
-
The boys seeking apprenticeships were clustered on the Hub side of the square.
“You just go and stand there, and someone comes and offers you an apprenticeship,” said Lezek, his voice trimmed with uncertainty. “If they like the look of you, that is.”
“How do they do that?” said Mort.
“Well,” said Lezek, and paused. Hamesh hadn’t explained about this bit. He drew on his limited knowledge of the marketplace, which was restricted to livestock sales, and ventured, “I suppose they count your teeth and that. And make sure you don’t wheeze and your feet are all right. I shouldn’t let on about the reading, it unsettles people.”
-
Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles — kingons, or possibly queons — that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.
-
The Klatchian waiter arrived with the bill, and placed it in front of Death...
Death reached into the depths of his robe and brought out a large leather bag full of assorted copper coinage, most of it blue and green with age. He inspected the bill carefully. Then he counted out a dozen coins...
“How do you get all those coins?” asked Mort.
IN PAIRS.
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Death was seated behind a desk, peering intently into a vast leather book almost bigger than the desk itself. He looked up as Mort came in, keeping one calcareous finger marking his place, and grinned. There wasn’t much of an alternative.
AH, he said, and then paused. Then he scratched his chin, with a noise like a fingernail being pulled across a comb.
WHO ARE YOU, BOY?
“Mort, sir,” said Mort. “Your apprentice. You remember?”
Death stared at him for some time. Then the pinpoint blue eyes turned back to the book.
OH YES, he said, MORT. WELL, BOY, DO YOU SINCERELY WISH TO LEARN THE UTTERMOST SECRETS OF TIME AND SPACE?
“Yes, sir. I think so, sir.”
GOOD. THE STABLES ARE AROUND THE BACK. THE SHOVEL HANGS JUST INSIDE THE DOOR.
“Yes, sir. I think so, sir.”
GOOD. THE STABLES ARE AROUND THE BACK. THE SHOVEL HANGS JUST INSIDE THE DOOR.
He looked down. He looked up. Mort hadn’t moved.
IS IT BY ANY CHANCE POSSIBLE THAT YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND ME?
“Not fully, sir,” said Mort.
DUNG, BOY. DUNG. ALBERT HAS A COMPOST HEAP IN THE GARDEN. I IMAGINE THERE’S A WHEELBARROW SOMEWHERE ON THE PREMISES. GET ON WITH IT.
Mort nodded mournfully. “Yes, sir. I see, sir. Sir?”
YES?
“Sir, I don’t see what this has to do with the secrets of time and space.”
Death did not look up from his book.
THAT, he said, IS BECAUSE YOU ARE HERE TO LEARN.
It is a fact that although the Death of the Discworld is, in his own words, an ANTHROPOMORPHIC PERSONIFICATION, he long ago gave up using the traditional skeletal horses, because of the bother of having to stop all the time to wire bits back on. Now his horses were always flesh-and-blood beasts, from the finest stock.
And, Mort learned, very well fed.
Some jobs offer increments. This one offered—well, quite the reverse, but at least it was in the warm and fairly easy to get the hang of. After a while he got into the rhythm of it, and started playing the private little quantity-surveying game that everyone plays in these circumstances. Let’s see, he thought, I’ve done nearly a quarter, let’s call it a third, so when I’ve done that corner by the hayrack it’ll be more than half, call it five-eighths, which means three more wheelbarrow loads…. It doesn’t prove anything very much except that the awesome splendor of the universe is much easier to deal with if you think of it as a series of small chunks.
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And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city, it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.
-
it was later still that Mort turned up outside a peeling plaster house which announced itself on a blackened brass plaque to be the abode of Igneous Cutwell, DM (Unseen), Marster of the Infinit, Illuminartus, Wyzard to Princes, Gardian of the Sacred Portalls, If Out leave Maile with Mrs. Nugent Next Door...
“Why do you trouble Igneous Cutwell, Holder of the Eight Keys, Traveler in the Dungeon Dimensions, Supreme Mage of—” “Excuse me,” said Mort, “are you really?” “Really what?” “Master of the thingy, Lord High Wossname of the Sacred Dungeons?” Cutwell pushed back his hood with an annoyed flourish. Instead of the gray-bearded mystic Mort had expected he saw a round, rather plump face, pink and white like a pork pie, which it somewhat resembled in other respects. For example, like most pork pies, it didn’t have a beard and, like most pork pies, it looked basically good- humored. “In a figurative sense,” he said. “What does that mean?” “Well, it means no,” said Cutwell. “But you said—” “That was advertising,” said the wizard. “It’s a kind of magic I’ve been working on.
-
Great silent streamers of blue and green flame hung from the roof of the world. Curtains of octarine glow danced slowly and majestically over the Disc as the fire of the Aurora Coriolis, the vast discharge of magic from the Disc’s standing field, earthed itself in the green ice mountains of the. Hub. The central spire of Cori Celesti, home of the gods, was a ten-mile- high column of cold coruscating fire. It was a sight seen by few people, and Mort wasn’t one of them, because he lay low over Binky’s neck and clung on for his life as they pounded through the night sky ahead of a comet trail of steam. There were other mountains clustered around Cori. By comparison they were no more than termite mounds, although in reality each one was a majestic assortment of cols, ridges, faces, cliffs, screes and glaciers that any normal mountain range would be happy to associate with. Among the highest of them, at the end of a funnel-shaped valley, dwelt the Listeners. They were one of the oldest of the Disc’s religious sects, although even the gods themselves were divided as to whether Listening was really a proper religion, and all that prevented their temple being wiped out by a few well-aimed avalanches was the fact that even the gods were curious as to what it was that the Listeners might Hear. If there’s one thing that really annoys a god, it’s not knowing something. It’ll take Mort several minutes to arrive. A row of dots would fill in the time nicely, but the reader will already be noticing the strange shape of the temple—curled like a great white ammonite at the end of the valley—and will probably want an explanation. The fact is that the Listeners are trying to work out precisely what it was that the Creator said when He made the universe. The theory is quite straightforward. Clearly, nothing that the Creator makes could ever be destroyed, which means that the echoes of those first syllables must still be around somewhere, bouncing and rebounding off all the matter in the cosmos but still audible to a really good listener. Eons ago the Listeners had found that ice and chance had carved this one valley into the perfect acoustic opposite of an echo valley, and had built their multi-chambered temple in the exact position that the one comfy chair always occupies in the home of a rabid hi-fi fanatic. Complex baffles caught and amplified the sound that was funneled up the chilly valley, steering it ever inwards to the central chamber where, at any hour of the day or night, three monks always sat. Listening. There were certain problems caused by the fact that they didn’t hear only the subtle echoes of the first words, but every other sound made on the Disc. In order to recognize the sound of the Words, they had to learn to recognize all the other noises. This called for a certain talent, and a novice was only accepted for training if he could distinguish by sound alone, at a distance of a thousand yards, which side a dropped coin landed. He wasn’t actually accepted into the order until he could tell what color it was. And although the Holy Listeners were so remote, many people took the extremely long and dangerous path to their temple, traveling through frozen, troll-haunted lands, fording swift icy rivers, climbing forbidding mountains, trekking across inhospitable tundra, in order to climb the narrow stairway that led into the hidden valley and seek with an open heart the secrets of being. And the monks would cry unto them, “Keep the bloody noise down!”
-
“You see, everything’s fixed. History is all worked out, from start to finish. What the facts actually are is beside the point; history just rolls straight over the top of them. You can’t change anything because the changes are already part of it. You’re dead. It’s fated. You’ll just have to accept it.” He gave an apologetic grin. “You’re a lot luckier than most dead people, if you look at it objectively,” he said. “You’re alive to enjoy it.” “I don’t want to accept it. Why should I accept it? It’s not my fault!” “You don’t understand. History is moving on. You can’t get involved in it any more. There isn’t a part in it for you, don’t you see? Best to let things take their course.”
-
The Disc's greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents. However, the gods took pity on them and turned him into an ironing board* and her into a small brass bollard.
When you're a god, you don't have to have reasons.
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Keli stood up. Five generations ago one of her ancestors had halted his band of nomadic cutthroats a few miles from the mound of Sto Lat and had regarded the sleeping city with a peculiarly determined expression that said: This’ll do. Just because you’re born in the saddle doesn’t mean you have to die in the bloody thing. Strangely enough, many of his distinctive features had, by a trick of heredity, been bequeathed to his descendant*, accounting for her rather idiosyncratic attractiveness. They were never more apparent than now. Even Cutwell was impressed. When it came to determination, you could have cracked rocks on her jaw. In exactly the same tone of voice that her ancestor had used when he addressed his weary, sweaty followers before the attack†, she said: “No. No, I’m not going to accept it. I’m not going to dwindle into some sort of ghost. You’re going to help me, wizard.” Cutwell’s subconscious recognized that tone. It had harmonics in it that made even the woodworms in the floorboards stop what they were doing and stand to attention. It wasn’t voicing an opinion, it was saying: things will be thus.
-
“There was a noise like—
It made Mort recall the old yard at home, with a pang of homesickness. During the harsh Ramtop winters the family kept hardy mountain tharga beasts in the yard, chucking in straw as necessary. After the spring thaw the yard was several feet deep and had quite a solid crust on it. You could walk across it if you were careful. If you weren’t, and sank knee deep in the concentrated gyppo, then the sound your boot made as it came out, green and steaming, was as much the sound of the turning year as birdsong and beebuzz.
It was that noise. Mort instinctively examined his shoes.
Ysabell was crying, not in little ladylike sobs, but in great yawning gulps, like bubbles from an underwater volcano, fighting one another to be the first to the surface. They were sobs escaping under pressure, matured in humdrum misery.
-
Mort thought that history was thrashing around like a steel hawser with the tension off, twanging backwards and forwards across reality in great destructive sweeps.
History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always—eventually—manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time.
This is what was happening:
The misplaced stroke of Mort’s scythe had cut history into two separate realities. In the city of Sto Lat Princess Keli still ruled, with a certain amount of difficulty and with the full time aid of the Royal Recognizer, who was put on the court payroll and charged with the duty of remembering that she existed. In the lands outside, though— beyond the plain, in the Ramtops, around the Circle Sea and all the way to the Rim—the traditional reality still held sway and she was quite definitely dead, the duke was king and the world was proceeding sedately according to plan, whatever that was.
The point is that both realities were true.
The sort of historical event horizon was currently about twenty miles away from the city, and wasn’t yet very noticeable. That’s because the—well, call it the difference in historical pressures—wasn’t yet very great. But it was growing. Out in the damp cabbage fields there was a shimmer in the air and a faint sizzle, like frying grasshoppers. People don’t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it. Inch by inch, implacable as a glacier and far colder, the real reality was grinding back towards Sto Lat.
-
“Evening, your lordship,” he said. “What’s your pleasure this cold and frosty night?”
“What?” said Mort, blinking in the light.
“What he means is, what d’you want to drink?” said a small ferret- faced man sitting by the fire, who was giving Mort the kind of look a butcher gives a field full of lambs.
“Um. I don’t know,” said Mort. “Do you sell stardrip?”
“Never heard of it, lordship.”
Mort looked around at the faces watching him, illuminated by the firelight. They were the sort of people generally called the salt of the earth. In other words, they were hard, square and bad for your health, but Mort was too preoccupied to notice.
“What do people like to drink here, then?”
The landlord looked sideways at his customers, a clever trick given that they were directly in front of him.
“Why, lordship, we drink scumble, for preference.”
“Scumble?” said Mort, failing to notice the muffled sniggers.
“Aye, lordship. Made from apples. Well, mainly apples.” This seemed healthy enough to Mort. “Oh, right,” he said. “A pint of scumble, then.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew the bag of gold that Death had given him. It was still quite full. In the sudden hush of the inn the faint clink of the coins sounded like the legendary Brass Gongs of Leshp, which can be heard far out to sea on stormy nights as the currents stir them in their drowned towers three hundred fathoms below.
“And please serve these gentlemen with whatever they want,” he added.
He was so overwhelmed by the chorus of thanks that he didn’t take much notice of the fact that his new friends were served their drinks in tiny, thimble-sized glasses, while his alone turned up in a large wooden mug.
A lot of stories are told about scumble, and how it is made out on the damp marshes according to ancient recipes handed down rather unsteadily from father to son. It’s not true about the rats, or the snake heads, or the lead shot. The one about the dead sheep is a complete fabrication. We can lay to rest all the variations of the one about the trouser button. But the one about not letting it come into contact with metal is absolutely true, because when the landlord flagrantly shortchanged Mort and plonked the small heap of copper in a puddle of the stuff it immediately began to froth.
Mort sniffed his drink, and then took a sip. It tasted something like apples, something like autumn mornings, and quite a lot like the bottom of a logpile. Not wishing to appear disrespectful, however, he took a swig.
The crowd watched him, counting under its breath.
Mort felt something was being demanded of him.
“Nice,” he said, “very refreshing.” He took another sip. “Bit of an acquired taste,” he added, “but well worth the effort, I’m sure.” There were one or two mutters of discontent from the back of the crowd.
“He’s been watering the scumble, that’s what ’tis.”
“Nay, thou knows what happens if you lets a drop of water touch scumble.”
The landlord tried to ignore this. “You like it?” he said to Mort, in pretty much the same tone of voice people used when they said to St. George, “You killed a what?”
“It’s quite tangy,” said Mort. “And sort of nutty.”
“Excuse me,” said the landlord, and gently took the mug out of Mort’s hand. He sniffed at it, then wiped his eyes.
“Uuunnyag,” he said. “It’s the right stuff all right.”
He looked at the boy with something verging on admiration. It wasn’t that he’d drunk a third of a pint of scumble in itself, it was that he was still vertical and apparently alive. He handed the pot back again: it was as if Mort was being given a trophy after some incredible contest. When the boy took another mouthful several of the watchers winced. The landlord wondered what Mort’s teeth were made of, and decided it must be the same stuff as his stomach.
-
Mort merely went on pointing and said, in a trembling voice, “Can’t you see it? It’s coming through the wall! It’s coming right through the wall!”
“A lot of things come through the wall after your first drink of scumble. Green hairy things, usually.”
“It’s the mist! Can’t you hear it sizzling?”
“A sizzling mist, is it?” The landlord looked at the wall, which was quite empty and unmysterious except for a few cobwebs. The urgency in Mort’s voice unsettled him. He would have preferred the normal scaly monsters. A man knew where he stood with them.
“It’s coming right across the room! Can’t you feel it?”
The customers looked at one another. Mort was making them uneasy. One or two of them admitted later that they did feel something, rather like an icy tingle, but it could have been indigestion. Mort backed away, and then gripped the bar. He shivered for a moment.
“Look,” said the landlord, “a joke’s a joke, but—”
“You had a green shirt on before!”
The landlord looked down. There was an edge of terror in his voice. “Before what?” he quavered. To his astonishment, and before his hand could complete its surreptitious journey towards the blackthorn stick, Mort lunged across the bar and grabbed him by the apron.
“You’ve got a green shirt, haven’t you?” he said. “I saw it, it had little yellow buttons!”
“Well, yes. I’ve got two shirts.” The landlord tried to draw himself up a little. “I’m a man of means,” he added. “I just didn’t wear it today.” He didn’t want to know how Mort knew about the buttons.
Mort let him go and spun round.
“They’re all sitting in different places! Where’s the man who was sitting by the fire? It’s all changed!”
He ran out through the door and there was a muffled cry from outside. He dashed back, wild-eyed, and confronted the horrified crowd.
“Who changed the sign? Someone changed the sign!”
The landlord nervously ran his tongue across his lips.
“After the old king died, you mean?” he said. Mort’s look chilled him, the boy’s eyes were two black pools of terror.
“It’s the name I mean!”
“We’ve—it’s always been the same name,” said the man, looking desperately at his customers for support. “Isn’t that so, lads? The Duke’s Head.”
There was a murmured chorus of agreement. Mort stared at everyone, visibly shaking. Then he turned and ran outside again.
-
FOR YOU AND YOUR LADY. A WEDDING PRESENT. A DOWRY.
“It’s beautiful! We thought the silver toast rack was from you.”
THAT WAS ALBERT. I’M AFRAID HE DOESN’T HAVE MUCH IMAGINATION.
Mort turned the globe over and over in his hands. The shapes boiling inside it seemed to respond to his touch, sending little streamers of light arching across the surface towards his fingers.
“Is it a pearl?” he said.
YES. WHEN SOMETHING IRRITATES AN OYSTER AND CAN’T BE REMOVED, THE POOR THING COATS IT WITH MUCUS AND TURNS IT INTO A PEARL. THIS IS A PEARL OF A DIFFERENT COLOR. A PEARL OF REALITY. ALL THAT SHINY STUFF IS CONGEALED ACTUALITY. YOU OUGHT TO RECOGNIZE IT—YOU CREATED IT, AFTER ALL.
Mort tossed it gently from hand to hand.
“We will put it with the castle jewels,” he said. “We haven’t got that many.”
ONE DAY IT WILL BE THE SEED OF A NEW UNIVERSE.
Mort fumbled the catch, but reached down with lightning reflexes and caught it before it hit the flagstones.
“What?”
THE PRESSURE OF THIS REALITY KEEPS IT COMPRESSED. THERE MAY COME A TIME WHEN THE UNIVERSE ENDS AND REALITY DIES, AND THEN THIS ONE WILL EXPLODE AND…WHO KNOWS? KEEP IT SAFE. IT’S A FUTURE AS WELL AS A PRESENT.