Whistle, and he'll come to thee, my lad….
A Discworld short. Inspired by incidental detail in Unseen Academicals.
One of the lesser-remarked features of Unseen University is that it used to have its own School. Not a School of Study, as in higher-level university departments. A real School.
Back in the day when a trainee Wizard could be identified as young as three or four, a typical member of the new intake might arrive at the University in an over-large and ill-fitting robe it was hoped he would grow into, whilst sucking his thumb and clutching a teddybear.(1)
Consequently, the University was forced to maintain its own School, operating at all levels from Nursery to Upper Sixth, as a matter of practical necessity. For like any school child, the magically gifted still had to be taught to read, write and do arithmetic. As however gifted a prospect might be, they were still no bloody good as a Wizard if they couldn't read a spell book. They had to know their Geography of the Disc, so as to be able to tell their Arszt(2) from their Elbow(3). They had to know at least the rudiments of alchemy, so as to be able to deal with all that tricky calculation and precise weighing of abstract ingredients for arcane spells.
They also had to be taught, of course, to bloody well behave like young gentlemen and respect their elders.
Mustrum Ridcully, himself a product of this sort of education, had been through the University's Prep School, Remove and Higher School from the age of seven onwards, like the majority of Faculty members, all of whom were in their late sixties or seventies and had known each other since very early childhood.(4) Ridcully had not liked the early experience very much – his House Master had been Windle Poons, who, much later, had noted that the little boy with the big sticky-out ears who had cried for his mum in the dorm every night could not possibly be Arch-chancellor. Huh, they must think he was daft…(5)
Mustrum Ridcully was not a fan of the University's school system. Indeed, he hoped that by the time he stopped being Arch-Chancellor, he would have ended it completely. Accepting, with a sort of grim happiness, that his own childhood experiences had prejudiced him, Ridcully preferred a far more humane way of dealing with a four-year-old who was showing signs of magic. Rather than uproot the blasted infant from home and family and drag them off to a cold dorm, Ridcully advocated leaving the child with its parents, but making sure a locally based Wizard had been alerted to act as magical monitor. Lancre presented a problem, yes, but the Witches kept an eye out and did the pastoral thing with the bemused parents of young gels who were suffering from the onset of magic. If he knew Esme, she'd bloody well know the instant any child in her parish, male or female, displayed signs of magic and she'd deal with it. Besides, she'd sent promising pupils to the University before.(6)
No, keep 'em with the family and have a wizard on call. Besides, you hardly get four year old naturals these days. Tends not to come out till seven or thirteen. So no call for the old Prep school, and we can shut it down. Plenty of places give a general education these days. Pupil there shows signs of magic, no need to disrupt their education, we provide the expertise to help them deal with it in situ, and bring the lad to the University when he's eighteen.
Besides, a school for wizards? Dangerous idea, to my way of thinkin'. Give adolescents access to spellbooks and magic wands and things, and there's no tellin' what the little sods'll get up to. It'll all be School Houses with peculiar names, or just dam' silly ones, in competition with each other. We'll need to borrow teachers from the Assassins' School, just to keep order!
Besides, somewhere out there, some clever bugger's likely to have thought of it and copyrighted the idea. Don't want a lawsuit. Once lawyers are involved, it's as bad as inviting vampires into yer house, you don't get rid of 'em till all the blood's sucked.
Ridcully thought back forty or fifty years.
And there have been some pranks played under the existing system.
Silly little sod called Barry Spotter, or somesuch, got positively Messianic and thought he was last line of defence against the rising of a Dark Lord. Hmmmph, it was damned funny, but Henry played along with it and persuaded Loathesome Gary Dread(7) to give Spotter a few scares. We all had a whip-round to pay off that particular Dark Lord to fuel Spotter's paranoia. Although Gary, good man, well, evil man, but the sort of evil you can set yer watch by, he appreciated the joke and was prepared to do it for next to nothin' just to keep his hand in. Henry put that mark on his forehead in indelible magical pencil, I recall, and kidded him on it was a Mark of Destiny, and oh, those nights we spent workin' out the next challenge Loathesome Gary was going to give Spotter…. How nobody sniggered and gave the game away, I don't know.
It all went well until Loathesome Gary got over-enthusiastic and teleported Spotter to that place where all the old-time monsters guard the approaches to Cori Celesti… ah well, wizardry is a dangerous profession.
He doffed his pointy hat for a moment, in silent memory of a fellow student who hadn't even got to be a wizard.
These days, somebody like Spotter would be banged up in the mental ward at the Lady Sybil, feet wouldn't touch.
Ridcully permitted himself a faraway long-ago smile.
And then there was Hix, although he was after my time. I was a postgrad wizard then, as I recall… got a small stipend for elementary teachin' at the School.
Being a locally resident student with his home in Dolly Sisters, John Hicks was permitted to be a day boy at the Wizards' School. His parents needed no persuading, after a native talent for necromancy coupled with the usual five-year old haziness about the dying process for beloved pets had led to the regrettable incident of the zombie cat, the one the family had thought safely buried under the flowerbed, lurching into the house and bounding, albeit jerkily, into the lap of the parish priest of Blind Io. All cats have a talent for discerning the lap of the cat-hater, whilst taking satisfaction in scornfully spurning the desperate affections of the person in the room who actually wants to be cat-sat.
This instinct does not die after death, and maximum points are obtained, for a several-weeks-deceased zombie cat, unfresh from the grave, in choosing the most ornate priestly robes to leap onto.
Young John had got into trouble about that.
Despite his protestations that the reverend should have been glad to see evidence of life after death, he talks about it so much from the pulpit on Octeday, Wizards were called. Tiffles the zombie cat was induced into a decidedly terminal final sleep and re-interred. As were several zombie guinea-pigs and an undead rabbit.
John was interviewed by a ring of benignly smiling robes and pointy hats. And ended up at the University, age five and a bit.
His greatest triumph came, age approximately fourteen.
Now read on….
Graduate wizard Mustrum Ridcully, twenty-three, accepted that part of the price he paid for being allowed to continue his postgraduate studies at the University was teaching duties. In the first flush of graduating as a Bachelor of Eldrich Lacemaking , in the pursuit of learning for learning's sake, his native energy and intellect had propelled him to the Fifth Level within two years. He had also belatedly learnt something of how University politics played out. Ridcully had realised that his upward progress through the Levels had attracted the unwelcome attention of Sixth, Seventh and Eighth level Mages. He had realised that they did not intend to shake his hand and congratulate him for his achievement. Rather, they were paranoid about a clever young upstart who was too clever by half and who clearly intended not to stop at the Fifth.
Mustrum Ridcully realised that he had escaped notice as he passed up through the Second and Third, perhaps even into the Fifth. But the thing about Wizard grades is that every graduate passes into the First. The Second and Third are progressively less well populated, although still so numerous that a talented young Wizard may safely pass through them in anonymity. Besides, it's beneath the dignity of the most senior Mages to consort with the lowly grades. They are too far downscale to be any sort of direct threat to the lofty ones of the sixth and above.
But by the time the Magus has ascended into the greatly diminished number of those who survive to attain the fourth, and passed still further on into the rarefied atmosphere of the Fifth, the anonymity has gone, if only because there are so relatively few left - and they are within reach of the summit.
As the Mages of the Sixth and above well know, there are only a limited number of places, and as far as they're concerned, that's us, and we don't like company.
A wizard in Ridcully's position therefore needs allies and protectors. One of the few shining ones who can threaten and ultimately replace the Great, he is now fully aware the Great are aware of him and are preparing fireballs.
And to think I thought it was only about disinterested objective academia, he thought, glumly. He wondered how he could ever have been that naïve.
Mustrum Ridcully had a certain amount of protection through being a member of the Last Order(8), the youngest of the eight Great Orders of Wizardry. At least, leading members of the other seven Orders would think twice about killing him - unless they'd first made sure it was OK by the Last Order's Eighth-level Head. Protocol and good manners dictated. But if the leadership of his own Order, including its increasingly nervous Sixth Level Mages, ever wanted to remove a threat…
Ridcully had looked for extra insurance against a "magical accident" or a scorpion setting up home in his boots.
Told he could discount some of the cost of his higher education against working for the university as a teaching assistant, Ridcully had inquired further. He had remembered the existence of the School, having been a pupil there. He had discovered practically no teaching Wizards wanted to brave its classrooms, and the Bursar was seriously thinking of luring teachers from the Assassins' School, as let's face it, only those evil buggers could keep order in a place like this..
He had grinned and said "perfect." No Senior Wizard was now going to risk killing off a rare asset to the university, a Teaching Assistant who had actually volunteered for the School… the University Council would not be happy. He could hide in the School, and clandestinely study for the Sixth Level in his own time. And they'd lose interest, seeing only a Wizard who had been warned off and who was going to stay at the Fifth Level and teach school. Couldn't be better!
John Hicks, aged thirteen, wondered who they were going to get next. His class had so far driven one member of staff to early retirement, one supply teacher had quit the profession, and a second had joined the Klatchian Foreign Legion to forget he'd ever been a teacher. The next should be a pushover as well, he thought.
And then Mustrum Ridcully walked in. The tall, broad, young wizard with the full red-brown beard and the ridiculous sticky-out ears looked comical at first. But Hicks had developed self-preservation and was looking behind the comical. He looks like he could crack a walnut in his fists…
He watched as 3B ignored the new teacher and carried on with what it was doing, which had largely involved being noisy, disruptive, and badly behaved.
They ignored him when he rapped his staff loudly on the floorboards.
They did not ignore him when he roared
"YOU WILL BLOODY WELL SHUT UP! RIGHT NOW!"
There was a dead silence as teacher and pupils regarded each other. Ridcully nodded.
"Now I've established I can shout louder than the whole damn lot of you put together, we can begin." he said. "My name is Mustrum Ridcully, I am your new form teacher, and these are me ground rules. Which are not open for negotiation."
Mustrum regarded his class, twenty or so young pupil wizards still too young for the university proper, but still its wards.
High-spirited. Stupid but saveable. Let's get savin'.
But even then, he wondered. Is there an alternative to taking us in at four and institutionalising us? There must be!
And so Form 3B was redeemed. Under Ridcully's firm hand, the rogues and rebels reformed themselves. They learned to like and respect him; he enjoyed schoolteaching, something he found light relief compared to preparation for attempting the Sixth Level.
For their part, the pupils realised a lesson from Ridcully could go anywhere, depending on what was on his mind that day. For instance, one hot summer day, a lesson on Natural History mutated into a lesson on How To Hunt, Shoot and Fish – or as Ridcully put it, How to Make Nature History. As the bell rang and the class made to go, he shouted
"Make haste, you fellows! Your next lesson is Mr Evans for Sport, and you know he doesn't like to be kept waiting!"
The class groaned. Ridcully smiled, knowing he now had an hour's free time to read Sixth Level Sortilege in peace and quiet.
For Hicks and 3b, it meant something else.
(1) OK, so eighteen year old undergraduates at any university also tend to do this as well.
(2) A small town in Borogravia
(3) A river in Überwald.
(4) And they hadn't been able to escape from each other since. Ponder Stibbons sometimes suspected the older wizards were descending into a second childhood together.
(5) Refer to Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett.
(6) Refer to Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett.
(7) Father of Evil Harry Dread, seen in The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett.
(8) Some explanation. Seven of the eight Orders of Discworld wizardry take their names from the sort of high-falutin' highblown ritual societies common during the resurgence of Magic on the Roundworld, circa 1880-1936. Think of the Order of the Silver Star and Borthers of the order of Midnight (Aleistar Crowley) or their parodies in the works of Shea and Wilson (Brothers of the Hoodwink, the Sages of the Unknown Shadow, the Venerable Council of Seers). The Last Order, however, most probably originated like this:-
The name evokes the time-honoured cry of the British publican at closing time: "Last orders, please!", which, as anyone familiar with British pubs will know, provokes a rush to the bar for several drinks each, closely followed by a desperate period of binge-drinking, trying to get it all down your neck in the half-hour or so while "Time, gentlemen, please!" inevitably becomes "Have you got no homes to go to?".
it is possible that this Order started out as nothing more sinister than a student drinking club (given the affinity between students and pubs).
In the manner of these things, people who have been drinking together as undergraduates for over three years will see no reason to cease just because they have passed their final exams and become fully-fledged wizards.
As the group of socially-drinking wizards grew in power and experience, the thought many well have occurred, round about the tenth pint of Winkles Old Peculiar or Turbot's Really Odd, "Hey, why don't we form an Order of Wizards? That'll REALLY show those stuck-up miserable buggers in the Order of the Silver Star!" et c, et c.
One could see a young Ridcully being drawn to this sort of Order.