"Make-up? "
"Yeah, and your wig," said Tailor the other weaver. "He's right, though," said Weaver. "If we're going to make fools of ourselves, I don't want no one to see me until we're good at it."
"Somewhere off the beaten track, like," said Thatcher the carter.
"Out in the country," said Tinker the tinker.
"Where no one goes," said Carter.
Jason scratched his cheese-grater chin. He was bound to
think of somewhere.
"And who's going to play Exeunt Omnes?" said Weaver.
"He doesn't have much to say, does he?"
The coach rattled across the featureless plains. The land between Ankh-Morpork and the Ramtops was fertile, well-cultivated and dull, dull, dull. Travel broadens the mind. This landscape broadened the mind because the mind just flowed out from the ears like porridge. It was the kind of landscape where, if you saw a distant figure cutting cabbages, you'd watch him until he was out of sight because there was simply nothing else for the eye to do.
"I spy," said the Bursar, "with my little eye, something beginning with . . . H."
"Oook."
"No."
"Horizon," said Ponder.
"You guessed!"
"Of course I guessed. I'm supposed to guess. We've had S for Sky, C for Cabbage, 0 for . . . for Ook, and there's nothing else ."
"I'm not going to play anymore if you're going to guess." The Bursar pulled his hat down over his ears and tried to curl up on the hard seat.
"There'll be lots to see in Lancre," said the Archchancellor. "The only piece of flat land they've got up there is in a museum."
Ponder said nothing.
"Used to spend whole summers up there," said Ridcully. He sighed. "You know . . . things could have been very different."
Ridcully looked around. If you're going to relate an intimate piece of personal history, you want to be sure it's going to be heard.
The Librarian looked out at the jolting scenery. He was sulking. This had a lot to do with the new bright blue collar around his neck with the word "PONGO' on it. Someone was going to suffer for this.
The Bursar was trying to use his hat like a limpet uses its shell.
"There was this girl."
Ponder Stibbons, chosen by a cruel fate to be the only one listening, looked surprised. He was aware that, technically, even the Archchancellor had been young once. After all, it was just a matter of time. Common sense suggested that wizards didn't flash into existence aged seventy and weighing nineteen stone. But common sense needed reminding.
He felt he ought to say something.
"Pretty, was she, sir?" he said.
"No. No, I can't say she was. Striking . That's the word. Tall. Hair so blond it was nearly white. And eyes like gimlets, I tell you."
Ponder tried to work this out.
"You don't mean that dwarf who runs the delicatessen in-" he began.
"I mean you always got the impression she could see right through you," said Ridcully, slightly more sharply than he had intended. "And she could run . . ."
He lapsed into silence again, staring at the newsreels of memory.
"I would've married her, you know," he said.
Ponder said nothing. When you're a cork in someone else's stream of consciousness, all you can do is spin and bob in the eddies.
"What a summer," murmured Ridcully. "Very like this one, really. Crop circles were bursting like raindrops. And . . . well, I was having doubts, you know. Magic didn't seem to be enough. I was a bit . . . lost. I'd have given it all up for her. Every blasted octogram and magic spell. Without a second thought. You know when they say things like 'she had a laugh like a mountain stream'?"
"I'm not personally familiar with it," said Ponder, "but I have read poetry that-"
"Load of cobblers, poetry," said Ridcully. "I've listened to mountain streams and they just go trickle, trickle, gurgle.
And you get them things in them, you know, insect things with little . . . anyway. Doesn't sound like laughter at all, is my point. Poets always get it wrong. 'S'like 'she had lips like cherries.' Small, round, and got a stone in the middle? Hah!"