The Turtle Moves! (11 page)

Actually, as I said in Chapter 9, it's not a parody of ancient Athens; it's a parody of the popular conception of ancient Athens. Discworld is all about stories, not history, and about beliefs, not facts. Ephebe is a collection of all the stories told about ancient Athens, cranked up to the absurd—elected tyrants, labyrinths, philosophers arguing about tortoises, and leaping naked from the bath shouting “Eureka!”

Ancient Athens is often depicted in stories as a bastion of freedom in contrast to the military dictatorship of Sparta, or sometimes in contrast to the Oriental despotism of the Persian Empire, so it would be nice to be able to say that Omnia is standing in for Sparta or Persia, but alas, that doesn't work. Neither of those states was as theocratic, nor as fond of torture and as abhorrent of heresy, as Omnia; it just doesn't match either model even loosely enough for a Discworld parody. No, Omnia is more general than that, a depiction of a land where the need for certainty, for clarity, for rules and order, has superceded everything else, including evidence and sanity. The willingness of the Ephebians to say that they don't know, that they could be wrong, that circumstances might change, disgusts and horrifies the Omnians, who don't tolerate doubt.

The name “Omnia” obviously means “land of Om,” but it's surely not a coincidence that it's also Latin for “everything.” The Omnians want to control everything. They say they act in the name of their god, but it's clear that they want control for the sake of control, not for the sake of Om.

They want to be gods themselves, in a way—able to control everything around them. While the actual small gods do appear in the story, the title can also be taken to apply to the Omnian priests. They're determined to make reality conform to their beliefs, rather than adjusting their beliefs to conform to reality.

The Omnian church is a satire on every religion gone wrong, every church that's become obsessed with its own power and glory rather than the god it allegedly serves. You could draw parallels to the medieval church, the Spanish Inquisition, the Islamic theocrats—it's a bit depressing, actually, just how many real-world faiths match up.

Small Gods
is one of the most
focused
of all the Discworld novels, with very few of the digressions and side-plots that usually complicate matters and provide much of the amusement. Brutha and Om are only rarely offstage for even a page or two, and when they are it's because some essential bit of plot is playing out.

Still, the novel manages to bring in the Librarian for a cameo, Death has a few scenes, and it does introduce us to the History Monks, the absurdly long-lived caretakers of the proper course of events. One of them, Lu-Tze, is sent to observe events in Omnia, and intervenes at a crucial point.

We'll see those fellows again, in time.

There's also the introduction of Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah. Previously, when discussing Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Mr. Pratchett told us that such people can be found everywhere; well, he's demonstrating the truth of this assertion by showing us Dhblah, the Omnian equivalent and probable distant relative of Dibbler.

Small Gods
is also the source of my title. One doctrine of the Omnian church is that they live on a globe, and this talk of a disc-shaped world supported by elephants atop a gigantic turtle is nonsense—heretical, blasphemous nonsense that can get you executed.

The Omnians who dare to rebel against the church hierarchy take part of their inspiration from stories about people who have seen the edge of the world that the church says doesn't exist; they believe that the Disc
does
rest on Great A'tuin's back, as described by travelers and in an Ephebian book entitled
De Chelonian Mobile
—“The Turtle Moves.”

The rebels adopt that as their slogan and rallying cry. After all, if the church is demonstrably wrong about a basic fact like that, how can anything they teach be trusted?

This is clearly based on the famous report that after Galileo had formally renounced his heretical view that the Earth moves around the sun, he muttered, “
E pur si muove
”—“And yet it moves.” The Omnian church is more drastic than the Catholic church of Galileo's time, but the similarities are obvious—as I said, lots of real-world religions match up with it.

And the rebels, like Galileo, may pay lip service to the Omnian faith in public, but among themselves they remind one another, “The Turtle moves!” As John Morley said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” The truth will out in time. When the stories people live by become too far distanced from reality, they break down. Regardless of what anyone may teach, regardless of what anyone may want, the Disc
does
rest atop four elephants, who
are
standing on Great A'tuin's back.

And the Turtle moves!

If you think about it, it doesn't really matter to your ordinary Omnian in the street that the Turtle moves, but it's a short, catchy phrase that sums up the extent of the church's lies. It works.

And I'm hoping it works as a catchy book title, too.

Anyway,
Small Gods
is mildly unusual in that Ankh-Morpork and the wizards of Unseen University play almost no role whatsoever in the story; they're barely mentioned, other than as a place Brutha might want to flee to.
Pyramids
included an extended depiction of Teppic's training as an assassin in Ankh-Morpork, even
Witches Abroad
had several passing references to wizards and the Big Wahooni, but in
Small Gods
there's almost nothing—basically just Om's suggestion of taking refuge in Ankh-Morpork, and the Librarian's brief appearance from L-space.

But there's plenty to say here about human nature, religious belief, ways of thinking, and the like. If the Discworld series as a whole is about stories,
Small Gods
is about stories used to oppress and destroy, stories that cannot be questioned.

Pretty heavy stuff for a bunch of funny fantasy.

Which may be why we don't see any more of the Gods and Philosophers series until
Thief of Time
, more than a dozen volumes later—if then;
Thief of Time
is one of those hard-to-classify ones, as described in Chapter 32.

Instead, there's a brief interruption in the form of a short story, and then it's back to Lancre and the three witches.

Y
ES, THERE ARE SHORT STORIES about Discworld. The earliest is “Troll Bridge,” written in 1992 for
After the King
, an anthology of stories paying tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien.

Obviously, if it's set on the Disc it's not set in Middle Earth; in his introduction, Mr. Pratchett explains that he didn't want to trespass in Prof. Tolkien's world, and instead tried to reflect something of the
feel
of
The Lord of the Rings
—great things passing out of the world and leaving it poorer in some ways, even though it's safer and saner.

He had an obvious character to star in such a story: Cohen the Barbarian. Who I've arbitrarily decided isn't the hero of a series, largely because he's a secondary character in all his appearances up through
Interesting Times
and never has a full-length novel to himself, but who is the protagonist of this story, and arguably of
The Last Hero
, though the latter is really more of an ensemble piece where Cohen could equally well be considered the villain.

At any rate, in “Troll Bridge” Cohen is looking under bridges for a troll to slay, and finally finds one, but matters do not proceed as expected.

The story does exactly what Mr. Pratchett says he set out to do—to show a world that's changing, that no longer has a place for warriors even though some of the old heroes are still around. It doesn't really add much of anything to the Discworld as a whole, and it doesn't add to any of the sub-series except perhaps “Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat,” but it's a good little story all the same.

And like all Discworld stories, it's about stories—Cohen and the troll
swap stories of the old days, and find common ground in their shared stories. They know the story they want to play out, and the roles the story expects of them, but in the end they don't follow it. The time for that story is past.

They don't make 'em like that anymore.

We'll see Cohen again in Chapter 20, but for now it's back to Lancre.

T
HIS IS THE FIRST DISCWORLD NOVEL to start with an acknowledgment that it's a sequel to previous stories and may not stand on its own. The Author's Note at the front says, “I can't ignore the history of what has gone before,” specifically the events of
Wyrd Sisters
and
Witches Abroad
. This story begins, once the preliminaries are out of the way, with the return of Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick to the kingdom of Lancre, after their wanderings in foreign parts.

They aren't the only ones returning, unfortunately. It seems that beings generally referred to by euphemisms, because to use their true name is to summon them—the Gentry, the Lords and Ladies, the Fair Folk—are trying to get back through an opening barred to them long ago by a ring of meteoric iron. The barrier is wearing thin, and the elves are able to influence events, and lure people to open the door for them.

This gets tangled up with the preparations for a royal wedding—Magrat is to marry King Verence II—but Granny and Nanny do their best to prevent disaster, and partially succeed.

Matters are further complicated by the arrival of certain wedding guests, including Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University; the Librarian; the Bursar (whose nerves have now cracked completely); young Ponder Stibbons, who now holds the title Reader in Invisible Writings; and Giamo Casanunda, the womanizing dwarf who took an interest in Nanny Ogg in
Witches Abroad
. We learn that Ridcully and Mistress Weatherwax have some unexpected history, and the coincidence of Unseen University having had an Archchancellor named Weatherwax is finally addressed.

There's more about Morris dancing—quite a bit more, actually. There's more about high-energy magic, more about quantum universes, and the first appearance of a Discworld unicorn.

One tidbit, trivial but amusing, is that in one of the Bursar's fits of madness, he says, “Millennium hand and shrimp.” This phrase will be seen again.

And at the heart of the story are the elves, who are not at all the benevolent creatures of Tolkien or his many imitators, but more like the terrifying creatures of old folklore. Not the cleaned-up nursery version the Victorians wrote about, not even the stronger but still sanitized version Shakespeare gave us, but the
real
old stories about baby-snatching monsters under the hill, all glamour, illusion, and cold-hearted whim.

Not that Mr. Pratchett ignores the Shakespearean approach; his Queen and King are not totally unrelated to Titania and Oberon, and there are at least two direct references to
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. That's not even counting the fact that the elves get loose on a Midsummer Eve.

Story and belief—the elves lure their prey with stories created by editing what's remembered, and defeat their foes by manipulating their beliefs. They're parasites using stories to control their hosts.

And as always, the witches stand up for the right of people to run their own lives—or at least, to
mostly
run their own lives, since of course it's different when it's witches doing the meddling.

Other than establishing elves as villains, and providing firm connections between the witches and the wizards (and on the witches' home ground, unlike the earlier meeting in
Equal Rites
), this novel does not really represent any real change in Discworld as a whole. It's a fine, funny story, with some good scary moments, but it doesn't really stand out from the crowd, so I find myself without much to say about it.

That's the last we'll see of the witches of Lancre as the stars of a book until
Carpe Jugulum
, nine volumes later; for now it's back to Ankh-Morpork for another look at the resurgent Night Watch under the command of Samuel Vimes.

T
HE SECOND DISCWORLD SHORT STORY, originally written for a bookstore giveaway, was published after
Men at Arms
, but from internal evidence is very clearly set between
Guards! Guards!
and
Men at Arms
, so I'm inserting it here, one place out of publication order.

The story opens with Sgt. Colon and Nobby investigating a suspicious death. They report to Captain Vimes, and tell him they've sent Corporal Carrot to find a witness.

Carrot being Carrot, he finds the one witness there is to
every
death on the Disc, and the investigation proceeds from there.

How it is that Carrot can see Death, when Carrot is neither a wizard nor a cat nor otherwise psychically advantaged, is not explained; perhaps heirs to thrones get special privileges, or perhaps he has the same sort of knack for seeing what's really there that witches do.

“Theatre of Cruelty” is quite short, and although it has some good funny bits, its real impact as a story depends on being familiar with
Punch and Judy
, which many people these days are not. Its major contributions to the Discworld canon are to provide another example of Carrot's curiously simple way of thinking, to establish the existence of gnomes, and to provide a sort of origin for
Punch and Judy
shows. It can be read online, on
Lspace.org
, if you're really interested, but if you can't find it or can't be bothered, I don't think you're really missing much.