Magnificent, I thought!' Ridcully beamed. Around him, the inn hummed with life.
Will tried to focus. 'Which one was that, good sir?' he said.
Ridcully's smile remained fixed, but began to unravel around the edges. He was never one for unnecessary reading.
'The one with the king in it,' he said, aiming for safety.
On the other side of the table Rincewind did some desperate pantomime.
'The rabbit,' said Ridcully. 'The rat. The ferret. Sounds like ... hat. Rat. Rodent. Thing with teeth.'
Rincewind gave up, leaned across and whispered.
'Something about the shrew,' said Ridcully. Rincewind whispered a little harder.
'The one about the tame shrew. The man married a shrew. A shrewish woman. Not a real shrew, obviously, haha. No one would marry a real shrew. It would be a completely foolish idea.'
Will blinked. He was not, as an actor and a writer, averse to alcohol bought by other people, and these people were being very good hosts. It was just that they seemed to be completely deranged.
'Er ... I thank you,' he said. He was aware of being stared at, and also of a strange but not unpleasant animal smell. He turned on the bench and was rewarded with a grin. It occupied all the space between a deep hood and a jerkin. There were a couple of brown eyes, too, but it was the grin his gaze kept coming back to.
The Librarian raised his tankard and gave Will a friendly nod. This caused the grin to get bigger.
'Now I'm sure you hear this all the time,' said Ridcully, slapping Will so hard on the back that his drink slopped, 'but we've got an idea for you. Dean, more ale all round, eh? It really is very weak stuff. Yes, an idea.' He poked Will in the chest. 'Too many kings, that's the trouble. What the public wants now, what puts bums on seats—'
'Feet,' said Rincewind.
'What?'
'Bums on feet, Archchancellor. It's mostly standing room in the theatre.'
'Feet, then. Bums, anyway. Thank you, Dean. Cheers.' Ridcully wiped his mouth delicately and turned his attention again to Will, who tried to avoid the prodding finger.
'Bums on, haha, feets,' he said, and blinked. 'Funny thing, funny thing, something similar happened to us, 'smatterofact, few years ago, Midsummer's Eve, these chaps were going to put on a play thingy for the king, next thing, elves all over the place, haha. Why, yes, Runes, I'll have another if you're paying, it's far too sweet to be a serious drink. Where was I? Ah. Elves. What you've got to do, what you've gotta do ... is ... why aren't you writing this down?'
In the morning Rincewind opened his eyes at the fourth attempt and with the assistance of both hands. There was a moment of brain lag, where the little wheels spun happily with no work to do, and then big horrible machinery cut in.
'Whg d'hl der ...' he said, and then got control of his mouth as well.
Bits of last night crept out of hiding to do their treacherous dance before his eyes. He groaned.
'We couldn't have done that, could we?' he muttered.
And memory said: that was only the start ...
Rincewind sat up and waited until the world stopped moving.
He'd been on the floor in the library. The other wizards lay scattered around the room or sprawled across piles of books. The air smelled of beer.
A veil will be drawn over the following half an hour, and lifted to find the wizards sitting around the table.
'It must've been the pork scratchings,' said the Dean.
T don't remember any pork scratchings,' muttered Ponder.
'Something crunchy, anyway. They may have been moving about.'
'There's no doubt in my mind that it was caused by all this travelling we've been doing,' said Ridcully. 'That sort of thing must take a terrible toll on the system. We've been concentrating so hard, d'yer see, that the moment we relaxed the strain we just unwound, like a big spring.'
The wizards brightened up. Rascally drunkenness was too much of an embarrassment to men who could sit through an entire meal at the UU high table, but time sickness ... yes, that had a certain cachet. They could live with time sickness although, at the moment, they were wishing they didn't have to.
'That's right!' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'It wasn't the fight!'
'And it couldn't possibly have been the carousing, which was really quite moderate by our standards,' said the Dean.
'In fact we didn't get drunk at all!' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, brightly.
Unfortunately, Rincewind's memory was literally treacherous. It worked perfectly.
'So, then,' he said, wishing that he didn't have to, 'we didn't tell Will all that stuff?'
'What stuff?' said Ridcully.
'All about our magical library, for one thing. And you kept saying "Here's a good one, I bet you can use this" and you told him about those witches up in Lancre and how they got the new king on the throne, and that time the elves broke through, and how the Selachii and the Venturi families are always fighting—'
'We did?' said Ridcully.
'Yes. And about the countries we've visited. Lots of things.'
'Why didn't someone stop me?'
'The Dean did try. That's when you hit him with the Chair of Indefinite Studies, I think.'
The wizards sat in ale-smelling gloom.
'Should we have another try?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
'What, and tell him to forget it all?' said Ridcully. 'Talk sense, man.'
'Perhaps we could go back in time and stop ourselves telling—'
'Don't say that! No more of that!' snapped the Archchancellor.
Rincewind pulled a copy of the play towards him. The wizards froze.
'Go on,' said Ridcully. 'Tell us the worst. What did he write?'
Rincewind opened the book and read a couple of lines at random:
'You spotted snakes, with double tongue; Thorny hedgehogs, be not—'
'No, no, no,' muttered the Dean, his head in his hands. 'Please tell me no one sang him the Hedgehog Song!'
Rincewind's lips moved as he read on. He turned over a few pages.
He flicked back to the beginning.
'It's all here,' he said. 'Same rather bad jokes, same unbelievable confusions, everything! Just as it was before! But it's going to happen here!'
The wizards looked at one another and dared to share a smug expression.
'Ah well, there we are then,' said Ridcully, sitting back. 'Job done.'
Rincewind turned some more pages. His recollections of the night were not coherent, but even a genius couldn't have made sense out of a bunch of drunken wizards all talking at once.
'Hex?' he said.
The crystal ball said: 'Yes?'
'Will this play be performed in this world?'
'That is the intention,' said the voice of Hex.
'And then what will happen?'
Hex told them, and added: 'That is one outcome.'
'Just a moment,' said Ponder Stibbons. 'There's more than one outcome?'
'Certainly. The play may not take place. Phase space contains a broadsheet account of a disruption of the first performance, followed by a fire in which a number of people died.
Subsequently the theatres were closed and the playwright died during a riot. He was struck by a pike.'
'You mean a halberd, of course,' said Ridcully.
'A pike,' Hex repeated. 'A fishmonger was involved.'
'What happened to civilisation?'
Hex was silent for a moment, and then said: 'Humanity failed by three years to leave the planet.'
LIES TO HUMANS
Please tell me no one sang him the Hedgehog Song ...
The Hedgehog Song, a Discworld ditty in the general tradition of Eskimo Nell, first made its appearance in Wyrd Sisters with its haunting refrain 'The hedgehog can never be buggered at all'.
The wizards have wielded the power of story with a vengeance. They have used it to prime their secret weapon, Shakespeare, and are convinced that he will prove more effective than a MIRVed ICBM. But before he's launched, they've very properly started to worry about collateral damage: possible cultural contamination by the Hedgehog Song.