Men At Arms

1

But no gentleman would dream of being trained as a Thief.

2

Often with discreet plaques under them modestly recording the name of the person who’d killed them. This was the Assassins’ portrait gallery, after all.

3

From the point of view of the species as a whole. Not from the point of view of the dragon now landing in small pieces around the landscape.

4

Fingers-Mazda^{*}, the first thief in the world, stole fire from the gods. But he was unable to fence it. It was too hot.^[*]

^[*] He got really burned on that deal.

^{*} The name ‘Fingers-Mazda’ puns on Ahura-Mazda, or Ormuzd, the Zoroastrian equivalent of God.

5

The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.

6

There’s always one.

7

This is another survival trait.

8

Because he was an early form of free-thinking scientist, and did not believe that human beings had been created by some sort of divine being. Dissecting people when they were still alive tended to be a priestly preoccupation; they thought mankind had been created by some sort of divine being and wanted to have a closer look at His handiwork.

9

Suicide, for example. Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying ‘Got rocks in your head?’ to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren’t careful.

10

A survey by the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Merchants of tradespeople in the dock areas of Morpork found 987 women who gave their profession as ‘seamstress’. Oh … and two needles.

11

In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three … many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don’t realize that many can be a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS.

12

More usually a landlady would ask ‘Are you decent?’, but Mrs Cake knew her lodgers.

13

Brown.

14

And brown.

15

It works like this. Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore — according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes the Ankh-Morpork mind — it should be possible to mould someone’s character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing.

16

Rat and cream cheese is only one of the famous Discworld dishes available in cosmopolitan Ankh-Morpork. According to the Guild of Merchants’ publication Wellcome to Ankh-Morpork, Citie of One Thousand Surprises: ‘Also to be bought in its well-stuffed emporia are Slumpie, Jammy Devils, Fikkun haddock, Distressed Pudding, Clooty Dumplings^[*] and, not to be forgotten, the Knuckle Sandwich, made from finest pig knuckles. Not for something is it said, For a True Taste of Ankh-Morpork, Try a Knuckle Sandwich.’

* Not to be confused with the Scottish Clootie Dumpling, which is a kind of suet pudding full of fruit. The Ankh-Morpork version sits on the tongue like finest meringue, and on the stomach like a concrete bowling ball.

17

Wrong. Vimes didn’t travel much except on foot, and knew little of the Lancre Suicide Thrush, for example, or the Shadowing Lemma, which exists in only two dimensions and eats mathematicians, or the quantum weather butterfly. But it is possible that the strangest, and possibly saddest, species on Discworld is the hermit elephant.^{*} This creature, lacking the thick hide of its near relatives, lives in huts, moving up and building extensions as its size increases. It’s not unknown for a traveller on the plains of Howondaland to wake up in the morning in the middle of a village that wasn’t there the night before.

^{*} Our real world’s hermit crab (which can be found on islands like Bermuda) behaves similarly: it has no protective shell of its own, so it utilises the shells of dead land snails. The reason why the hermit crab is one of the sadder species in our world as well is given in Stephen Jay Gould’s essay ‘Nature’s Odd Couples’ (published in his collection The Panda’s Thumb): the shells that form the crabs’ natural habitat are from a species of snail that has been extinct since the 19th century. The hermit crabs on Bermuda are only surviving by recycling old fossil shells, of which there are fewer and fewer as time goes on, thus causing the hermit crab to become, slowly but surely, just as extinct as the snails.

18

The axiom ‘Honest men have nothing to fear from the police’ is currently under review by the Axioms Appeal Board.

19

Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things which only exist in potentia, but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-Morpork is a product of the Patrician’s rules about baseless metaphors, the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality around Ankh, which is so thin that it’s as thin as a very thin thing. The net result is that trading in pork futures — in pork that doesn’t exist yet — led to the building of the warehouse to store it in until it does. The extremely low temperatures are caused by the imbalance in the temporal energy flow. At least, that’s what the wizards in the High Energy Magic building say. And they’ve got proper pointy hats and letters after their name, so they know what they’re talking about.

20

It has probably been gathered that although Leonard da Quirm was absolutely the greatest technological genius of all time, he was a bit of a Detritus when it came to thinking up names.

21

It didn’t need to. Cuddy, belonging to a race that worked underground for preference, and Detritus, a member of a race notoriously nocturnal, had excellent vision in the dark. But mysterious caves and tunnels always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in and needs to see in the dark. Strange but true.

22

Rather like British Rail.

23

Which can mean … well … meanings include: ‘Pardon me, you’re hanging from my rubber ring, thank you so very much’, ‘It may be just vital biomass oxygenating the planet to you, but it’s home to me’ and ‘I’m sure there was a rain forest around here a moment ago’.

24

Who stoked the boiler.

25

Five more embraced it as a holy weapon and instructed that it be used on all infidels, heretics, gnostics and people who fidgeted during the sermon.

26

It runs: ‘He who chains down a troll, especially taking advantage of the situation to put the boot in a few times, had better not be the one who unchains it again.’

27

And was the origin, long after the events chronicled here were over, of an Ankh-Morpork folk song scored for tin whistle and nasal passage:

It never really caught on.

^{*} Terry says: “While there are 789456000340 songs beginning “As I was a-walking…”, and I’ve probably heard all of them, the one I had in mind was ‘Ratcliffe Highway’.”

‘Ratcliffe Highway’ (a version which can be found on the album Liege & Lief by Fairport Convention) starts out:

28

To trolls, heaven is below.