Secrets of the Wee Free Men and Discworld (16 page)

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Authors: Linda Washington

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Isn't it funny how there's always a stooge for hire whenever a megalomaniac seeks to take over the world? Unlike the Three
Stooges from the old TV show (and countless movies—okay, they really can be counted), these stooges are usually tireless wreckers of humanity or just out for the money, like the pirates of the
Black Pearl
. But the ways of stooges make for entertaining reading.
Don't you wonder what goes through the stooge's mind when the plan comes up?
 
Megalomaniac:
I'm going to use this virus to kill billions of people. You will assist me.
Stooge:
Cool!
Megalomaniac:
We'll
all
perish! Every single one of us! Even you! Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Stooge:
Yeah! Woo hoo!
 
Obviously a screw is loose somewhere. You don't have to have intelligence to be a criminal stooge. Having brawn and a willingness to hurt others are two good prerequisites. That's why Teatime uses Chickenwire, Banjo Lilywhite, Medium Dave Lilywhite, Peachy, and Catseye to help carry out the plan to off the Hogfather. (When we think of Banjo and Medium Dave, we can't help thinking of the counting song “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” which has the lines “Two, two, the lily-white boys,/Clothèd all in green, Ho.”
115
)
Although he doesn't fit the stooge mold (i.e., unintelligent), student-wizard Sideney helps with the Hogfather plan, to make extra money. But those who follow Dark Lord Harry Dread (
The Last Hero
)—namely, such henchmen as Slime, Armpit, Butcher, Gak, and a troll that continually says, “Dat's me”—do.
For Lupine Wonse, there are the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, who include Brother Fingers, Brother Doorkeeper, Brother Plasterer, and others. For Lily Weather-wax, there's the Duc, who's
really a frog, and the snake women, who are really snakes, to help her carry out her nefarious plans. (For more about the Duc and the snake women, see
chapter 13
.)
Even if the stooges have some intelligence (like the board members of the Grand Trunk Company in
Going Postal
), the villain has to be able to outthink them and even dispose of them when they become a nuisance. He or she wouldn't be a villain if he/she was sentimental, even about a stooge.
Greed, misplaced nationalism, or religious ideals is also a motivator for the stooge. That's why in
The Fifth Elephant,
we find that Dee, the king's “ideas taster,” is used by the werewolves, rather than the originator of the plan. That's why Deacon Cusp helps Deacon Vorbis.
Another sort of stooge can be found in
The Wee Free Men
—the dromes. They are the dreamweavers, and we don't mean the 1975 song by Gary Wright nor do we mean the Dreamweavers of Trudi Canavan's
Priestess of the White
—although Canavan's dreamweavers can send dreams. They're golems of a sort—gray, walking gingerbread men much larger than the tiny gingerbread man of the
Shrek
movies (but smaller than the big gingerbread man in
Shrek 2
) and certainly malevolent. Dromes are akin to Morpheus (see
chapter 9
), in that they provide dreams. But the Feegles compare dromes to spiders for their ability to weave dreams like webs to trap their next meal. In a way, they're like big, bloated Shelob in
The Two Towers
and the other giant spiders in
The Hobbit.
As for your thugs, well, there's Chrysophrase, the extortionist troll thug (Coalface is the right-hand stooge of Chrysophrase). Although Chrysophrase is an employer and a club owner akin to a mob boss, he's still a thug. Who else but a thug would try to bribe Vimes (see
Thud!
)?
And who could forget the “fun-loving,” elves in
Lords and Ladies
—the full-size models—or the wasp-size ones (see
chapter 10
)? These aren't your happy Keebler elves, who sing and make cookies, or the beautiful, wise
Lord of the Rings
or Obsidian Trilogy elves. Like
Teatime, these elves are predatory and vicious, the kind who smile as they kill like the werewolves who like to play “the game” in
The Fifth Elephant.
They love to hunt others for sport—a plot element seen in other stories as well.
And then there are the thugs for hire: art appreciator Mr. Tulip and the brains of the outfit—Mr. Pin in
The Truth
—figure heavily in the plot to get rid of Vetinari (plot #6,000; everyone tries to get rid of Vetinari or Vimes). You can't help but think of Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, the polite thugs in
Diamonds Are Forever.
And of course, there's Mr. Gryle, the banshee thug employed by Reacher Gilt in
Going Postal.
And let us not forget the thugs in uniform—corrupt watchmen, a term that's almost a redundancy in Ankh-Morpork. There's Captain “Mayonnaise” Quirke (
Men at Arms
,
Night Watch
), Sergeant Knock (
Night Watch
), and the rest of Captain Swing's sadistic Unmentionables—the SS of Ankh-Morpork.
Like the villains, thugs and stooges usually come to a bad end unless they agree to betray their bosses, in which case they probably will come to an end anyway … just like this chapter.
Les Animaux
Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp … . The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
—Equal Rites
116
M
aybe we won't catch you ordering
Charlotte's Web
or any other cute animal story (
Flicka
or
Lassie,
anyone?) through Netflix. Maybe
Animal Farm,
George Orwell's searing indictment of Russian-style communism, or Brian Jacques's Redwall series with its
Lord of the Rings
–epic style of animals is more your speed. You know—where animals behave as people and even wield a sword and other weapons.
While a series like Artemis Fowl may be “
Die Hard
with fairies” (according to its author),
Animal Farm
is
Doctor Zhivago
with animals. So, what is Discworld? We consider it
Les Misérables
with animals.
Les Animaux,
if you will.
Victor Hugo's classic story of poverty and redemption might seem like a far cry from the daily life of a talking dog named Gaspode or an extremely smelly, old wirehaired terrier named Wuffles—the pride and joy of Lord Vetinari. But think of Gaspode as Jean Valjean, the beleaguered hero of
Les Misérables,
whose crime of stealing bread to feed his family nets him the unwavering persecution of Inspector Javert. Think of Wuffles as Gavroche, the kid who rats out Javert. (Remember, Wuffles is the one who exposes Charlie as the fake Vetinari, thus helping foil the plan of Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin.)
Think of Gavin, the wolf who runs with a pack of wolves in
The Fifth Elephant,
as Eponine Thénardier, a young girl in love with Marius Pontmercy, a revolutionary, and dies to save him. We thought of Eponine because of the love triangle. If you saw the play
Les Mis,
you know that Marius loves Cosette, Jean Valjean's daughter. Well, there's the Angua-Carrot-Gavin triangle. What Gavin's relationship is to Angua before she arrives in Ankh-Morpork, we can only guess. (And we try not to think too deeply about that.)
Consider also, the tragic life of Chubby, the stolen dragon in
Men at Arms
who … well … explodes. Can't you see echoes of the ill-used Fantine who tragically dies in
Les Mis
?
Now think of Dangerous Beans, Peaches, and especially Darktan of
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
as the students at the barrier fighting in the revolution. Darktan, of course, is Enjolras—the leader of the student rebels. Can't you just hear the music swelling? (“Do You Hear the People Sing?”)
Okay. Maybe we're full of hot air and you would prefer us to get to stuff like
Pet Sematary,
the 1983 Stephen King book turned into a movie, where buried pets and people come back to life and turn evil. (All right, all right. Maybe you didn't see that one.) Greebo, Nanny Ogg's pet cat, would probably have a starring role. Or how about Amazonian strawberry poison dart frogs? They're not in Discworld. We're just mentioning them because we think they're cool.
Maybe you won't think a comparison to
Les Mis
so far-fetched if you recall the barricades built all over Ankh-Morpork in
Night Watch
and the songs the flag-waving rebels sing, an allusion to the song of the rebel students in
Les Mis
—“Do You Hear the People Sing?”
But we digress. Getting back to Pratchett's Animal Kingdom, the closest animal you'll find to the heroic Lassie (the famous collie) or Rin Tin Tin (a series of trained German shepherds who acted in the movies during the 1920s and 1930s—a time when maybe your grandmother wasn't even alive) ideal is a dog named Laddie the Wonder Dog in
Moving Pictures.
He's like Lassie and Rin Tin Tin except he was almost designed by Nature to be in moving pictures—he even barks photogenically! But while he helps save the day (Good boy!), he has an almost pathological need to be affirmed.
In Discworld, you won't find a load of heroic animals that seem as if they're self-cleaning. Instead, you find animals full of hot, smelly air, such as the swamp dragons at the Ankh-Morpork Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons started by Sybil Ramkin Vimes. Pratchett talks all about swamp dragons in
The Last Hero
and other places, so we won't go into that much. What we can tell you is that they're not like the dragons you find in the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey (and Todd McCaffrey, her coauthor son), the Dragon Jousters series by Mercedes Lackey, the Inheritance series by Christopher Paolini, or any of the hundreds of other series with dragons.
And Gaspode is sort of an anti-Lassie—tough talking and street-wise; not a puppet of “the Man” like Laddie. (If Joe Pesci could play a dog, he could probably play Gaspode.) Oh, sure, he helps save the day in
Men at Arms, The Truth, Moving Pictures,
and
The Fifth Elephant
. And he's briefly known as Gaspode the Wonder Dog in
Moving Pictures.
But you've probably never seen Lassie as filthy as Gaspode. And Lassie, alas, only barks, no matter how many times Timmy asks, “What is it, girl?” (And the gender thing is another issue.)
And then there's the matter of Wuffles—a sixteen-year-old dog who likes to bite people. Not exactly Rin Tin Tin. Yet Wuffles is a beloved pet just as Greebo is and Gaspode was briefly. But in Discworld, pets are no more “owned” than people are—at least the smart ones aren't.
Of Rats and Men
Martin and his father, Luke (guess Luke can't use the Darth Vader line, “Luke, I am your father”), are your epic-style heroes of Redwall. No question about that. You don't get a name like Martin the Warrior or Luke the Warrior for knitting sweaters. They're part of the tradition of heroic mice, one you find in the Newbery award-winning book,
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
by Robert C. O'Brien and
The Rescuers
by Margery Sharp. And then there are rats like Ripfang, the pirate, who are the opposite—nasty, mean—the manner of many rats in fiction. (Many, but not all.)
Discworld is rat, rather than mice, country. There are the Death of Rats (see
chapter 8
), Dangerous Beans, Darktan, and Hamnpork. (And there's the ratlike Nobby.) They're in the Justin sphere of heroic animals, Justin being the kindly, heroic rat in
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.
They're proof that the most unlikely being (e.g., hobbits) can save the day.
Like the rats of NIMH, the Discworld rats suddenly discover that they're cleverer than others of their species, thanks to eating
garbage at Unseen University (also the site of Gaspode's change). The NIMH rats gained their intelligence through being experimented upon. Maurice gained his through, well, eating a magically enhanced rat. You are what you eat.
Running with the Wolves
Down through the ages, wolves have gotten the shaft in literature, what with Aesop's fables, Maugrim in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
and all. Pratchett only partially rectifies that with his inclusion of wolves and werewolves. Some are good, like Lupine the “mostly” wolf werewolf in
Reaper Man.
Some are bad—werewolf-movie bad. We talked about them in
chapter 4
. These aren't your “gender-confused” wolves à la the
Shrek
movies.
Gavin—all wolf, not a werewolf—is the typical alpha male—reeking of “competent power,” as Pratchett describes in
The Fifth Elephant.
(As opposed to the wolf Eats Wrong Meat, who probably just reeks.) The wolves of Gavin's pack in
The Fifth Elephant
have a social order akin to that of the wolves that raised Mowgli in
The Jungle Book
by Rudyard Kipling, or the wolves in Jean Craighead George's award-winning series about an Inuit girl who lives with a pack of wolves. Although the Discworld wolves probably wouldn't raise a human child, they're willing to tolerate humans and even snack on them, as Angua warns Carrot in
The Fifth Elephant
when he threatens to underestimate them. They're very intelligent animals and even have a system of passing on information that's just as effective as the clacks.
Cats “You” Later
Whether or not you're a cat lover, you can find plenty of cats in fantasy—at least in kids' fantasy; for example, Erin Hunter's Warriors series featuring warring factions of cats.
In Discworld, you'll find cats with a Pratchett twist. In the
Carnegie medal-winning book
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents,
Maurice is a street-smart cat with a plan. He's the Discworld version of Thomas O'Malley, the alley cat in Disney's
The Aristocats.
Maurice could probably out-con Moist von Lipwig, who is a con artist supreme. He subscribes to the talking animal school of which Gaspode is a charter member, thanks to the influence of Unseen University (and on Maurice's part, a judicious diet of rats).
In many fiction stories, cats are the province of witches. Some are used as familiars. Nanny's battle-scarred cat Greebo is a little too familiar. He's not like Hermione's cat Crookshanks in the Harry Potter series, being of a pillaging personality. But even he gets a comeuppance when Granny gains a kitten (You) in
Wintersmith.
Even Death has a soft spot for cats, as we mentioned in
chapter 8
. But it's doubtful that even he would like Ratbag, the family cat of the Achings. We're introduced to Ratbag in
The Wee Free Men.
He belongs to the nasty pet cats school of which Si and Am, the sinuous Siamese cats owned (if a cat can be owned) by Aunt Sarah in
Lady and the Tramp
, are members. (Even Greebo, as nefarious as he seems, is more lovable.)
Sisterhood of the Snakes
What fictional wild kingdom could be complete without snakes? But like the wolves, snakes have a bad rep, thanks to a certain snake in the Garden of Eden. In the Harry Potter series, you know that Voldemort, who can talk to snakes, has a huge snake named Nagini. And, of course, there's the python Kaa in Rudyard Kipling's
The Jungle Book.
Even though Kaa helps rescue Mowgli at one point (mainly so he can have a few monkeys for a snack), he's still viewed as sneaky. Not content with just one snake, Kipling adds three more—Nag and Nagaina, two nasty cobras, and Karait, another poisonous snake, all of which encounter the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (in the short story of the same name in
The Jungle Book
).
In Discworld you find the “iridescent women”
117
also known as the Sisters in
Witches Abroad
. Granny Weatherwax spots them as the snakes they really are. You might call them a Sisterhood of the Snakes, like the
Brotherhood of the Wolf.
With the pair of them, we couldn't help thinking of Si and Am, who created havoc in their household. But unlike those cats, these sisters meet the “mongoose” that is Magrat, who goes all “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” on them (if you'll pardon our Rudyard Kipling).
A talking snake makes an appearance in
Sourcery,
when Rincewind is cast into a snake pit—usually the fate of fantasy heroes, even would-be ones like Rincewind. (Think of the snake pit into which Indiana Jones falls in
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
) And lastly, there's a rumor that Vetinari has a snake pit in which prisoners are thrown. But that's-s-s probably just a rumor.
Hungry, Hungry Hippos
If you saw
Fantasia
(the first one, from 1940), you know that Disney's “Dance of the Hours” (composed by Amilcare Ponchielli) featured dancing hippos. Très chic. In Discworld, hippos play an important part as well, thanks to Roderick and Keith (
Feet of Clay
) —heraldic hippos of Ankh-Morpork who also appear on a stamp (
Going Postal
). Only in Discworld … . And to think some people prefer lions or dragons on their coats of arms.
Quoth the Raven, Nevermore
The
Corvidae
species of birds, of which ravens and crows figure prominently, are seldom birds people in stories want to have around. Isn't it always the evil wizards who have a crow hanging from their shoulders or use crows to do their bidding (Saruman)? Even in Edgar
Allan Poe's most famous poem, the raven is a figure of mystery. But Pratchett, as usual, takes even an archetypal harbinger of doom and has fun with it. Quoth does come with death, since he is the self-proclaimed mouthpiece and noble steed of the Death of Rats and seems fixated on eyeballs. But at least he works for the heroes (the Death of Rats, Susan).
If you happen to read
The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss, you read of another Quoth—Kvothe to be exact. But he isn't a raven.
The Dogs of War
By this we mean the grimhounds from
The Wee Free Men,
rather than the 1981 flick directed by John Irvin (based on the book by Frederick Forsyth). This makes the huge phosphorous-dusted hound in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(Arthur Conan Doyle) look like something out of
Scooby-Doo.
Come to think of it, that hound business was a precursor to the unmaskings in
Scooby-Doo.
But we digress … . Getting back to the grimhounds, maybe in your mind you picture the most vicious dog you can ever imagine—massive, snarling, a super-size junkyard dog with a hangover. The grimhounds have a resemblance to the hound in Doyle's masterwork, with their “eyes of fire,”
118
massive build, and black fur. But the ghostly grimhounds' flaming eyes are the real thing, unlike those of the hound in Doyle's book. And their orange eyebrows? To die for.
The grimhounds are so fearsome, they get an honorable mention in
Going Postal
as one of the items you shouldn't ask about. Don't believe us? Look at
chapter 2
of that book.
Amped-up Amphibians
In many fairy tales, frogs or toads talk and turn out to be princes or some other titled person in disguise. There's “The Frog Prince” (major clue there) of
Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales,
“The Princess and the Frog” in
The Door in the Hedge
(Robin McKinley), and Gogu the faithful frog friend (guess what he really is?) in
Wildwood Dancing
(Juliet Marillier). Unlike the master of Toad Hall in
The Wind in the Willows,
the toad in
The Wee Free Men
wasn't always a toad. He isn't a prince, however—he's a lawyer. Well, we won't touch that one. You can insert your own joke. But another amphibian hits the royalty circuit—the frog Duc of
Witches Abroad.
Too bad he's a pawn of Lily Weatherwax and meets up with a zombie on a quest for revenge.
Staggering About
The hunting of the white stag has been the key to an adventure in or out of Faerie in many a story. Think of the ethereal White Stag the Pevensies discover in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
which leads them out of Narnia. Pwyll, son of Dyyed, a prince in one of the stories of the
Mabinogion,
tries to steal a stag from Arawn, a King of Annwvyn—one of the kings of the Otherworld—and winds up having to serve him as punishment for his impertinence. Robin McKinley carries on the tradition in her short story “The Hunting of the Hind,” in
The Door in the Hedge,
by showing a hunt that nearly kills a prince.
The stag Tiffany sees in
The Wee Free Men
isn't graceful or ethereal. It's a wild animal that happens to be part of the nightmarish, wintry landscape of Fairyland like the Bumblebee women (the big women with the little wings). It's also a signal to Tiffany that she's not in Kansas anymore.

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