Strandpiel Book Two
Chapter Five -
As always, this is V0.02.I'm sure the text does this to annoy me. Revising typos.
A continuing family saga charting the interlinked lives of family and friends on at least two continents, with a cast of characters both living and dead. Moving the tale on – it is roughly mapped out and the main incidents are sketched in, some are even already written to be slotted into the appropriate places in the timescale. The trick will be filling in the incidental stuff – I know if a particular idea takes my fancy, that's it, it gets written…. (for instance – even while setting this up, new ideas for continuing "The Price of Flight" popped into my head… a notion for a renewed Elf incursion into Lancre and a very definitive reason why they want to launch a raid. But will I find time to write it… )
Right now, there are locations written in as titles on the page, each of which will head a chapter section. That's the easy bit. Now I have to fill in the text!
Unseen University, Ankh-Morpork. At the Centre for Thaumotechnic Development and Magitek, the Thaumatalogical Park.(1)
Professor Sir Ponder Stibbons looked up from the work-bench. A line of lower-ranking Wizards in white lab-coats and sterile white pointy hats were engaged in construction and assembly work, trialling the fit of components into small rectangular boxes, intent on their work, occasionally reaching for files, screwdrivers, or other oddly configured tools which did not fit into any familiar category. Occasionally a wizard, satisfied with the fit, slotted a part into place and secured it.
Captain Olga Romanoff, watching the process, thought it put her in mind of hobby enthusiasts assembling construction kits, rather than a serious assembly line which she hoped would mass-produce a useful piece of kit for her Air Watch.
"We haven't been building them for that long, Olga." Ponder said, appearing to guess her thoughts. "The first prototypes were a great success when you trialled them. But they took ages to build, which is always the way with anything completely brand new. You came back with the suggestions for improvements, and we had to factor those into the Mark Twos, as well as rebuild the originals. That didn't take quite as long. Now we're on the third build. Errr."
Olga smiled.
"Da." she said. She touched the Real-Time Omniscope Conversation Device in her top left pocket. Or else the Universal Communicator. There wasn't an official name for them, yet. (2)
"The first ones went to command officers and selected NCO's. The Command Desk is working marvellously. I thank you. Even so, I wish for all officers in my command to carry one as standard. Also, Mr Vimes should be persuaded to carry one. Captain Carrot, and Captain Angua, really appreciate the ones I gave them, so that ground officers may also speak to Control. But. My Air Watch first. I have nine in service right now. You are assembling perhaps eight more. How soon can they be ready for issue?"
Ponder frowned.
"Well. As you can see, we're still trying to refine the manufacturing process so we can turn them out quickly, without compromising quality standards. The Air Watch alone might eventually require a hundred. And if the regular Watch are going to be persuaded this is a good idea, maybe fifty more for key officers and patrol commanders. We can't do that overnight, Olga. And we only have one broken Omniscope to use. It has to be done right."
"I understand, Ponder. Do the very best you can, but do not rush. I want this thing doing right."
Olga smiled again, and added:
"As yet, I haven't decided who should be first in priority. At present, for operational reasons, those full-time Air Watch pilots who patrol regularly and constantly over Ankh-Morpork. I want to keep them in close and immediate contact with Control all the time, so as to demonstrate to Mr Vimes that properly applied Magic can be beneficial to the Watch. He is suspicious just now."
"I understand that." Ponder said. "Magic as it was in the old days was a bit – well, erratic. You can't blame people for being suspicious of something that meant they woke up the next morning with no legs. Or worst, they woke up in the morning with twice as many legs. Getting it right with the Communicators is going to be a big step forward."
They considered this together. Olga had wanted to be absolutely sure that any Wizard-derived tech bolted onto her operational broomsticks was safe was completely safe and did not, for instance, cause a clash of magical fields that could short out the magic that powered the broom, leading to mid-air explosions, catastrophic loss of power, or the pilot suddenly discovering she had an extra arm that had appeared from nowhere. This was important: she remembered the dreadful day when Dorothy Culpclapper had died, a reminder that operational flying was hazardous, and demanded its price. And that wasn't down to Wizards, she thought, remembering. It was in the early days of the Air Watch when we were still unsure of so many things. There were only seven or eight of us then. The Teks were still working out how to quickly refuel a broom with a full magical charge, so that time spent on the ground was minimised. They just overcharged Dorothy's broom. It became unstable, and discharged the load all at once. It exploded in the air.
Professor Ponder Stibbons, among many other academic titles, was Emeritus Professor of Inadvisably Applied Magics. Olga had known him for a long time. She had known his wife for longer. She knew Ponder's approach was to treat any sort of magic as if it was unwise or inadvisable to apply it to actual real life. Therefore if he saw a possible application for magic in real life, he worked at it, until he was certain the inadvisability had been taken out, and it was a safe as it possibly could be. Olga appreciated this, and knew Ponder was therefore the go-to man at the University for tech support. One of the two go-to men, she reminded herself. I'm married to the other one. But he's at home looking after the children right now.
Ponder quickly conferred with a Wizard on the bench-line.
"We have another four which are pretty much ready for issue, sir." The Wizard said. "But they haven't yet had the final tests and quality-control protocols applied…"
Olga smiled at him.
"I appreciate they require final testing, Mr Goosegirdle. I thank you for your work. But at this point, I need the communicators. We can take it from here, I and my officers can do the final testing in field conditions, and if any are defective, we will return them to you. Again, I thank you."
She turned back to Ponder.
"Is there any advance on the other issues, Professor Stibbons?" she asked, politely. "At present we have no reliable means of judging when the charge of magic on a standard broomstick is used up. Once that goes, the pilot must land quickly or else crash."
Ponder reflected. Olga had walked away alive from two crash-landings caused by a catastrophic failure of magic. She had good personal reasons for pressing on this point. He remembered hearing that Queen Magrat of Lancre had also survived, by a fluke, after her broom was drained of all magical power.(3) One day a Witch would not be able to walk away.
"We're considering the dashboard idea." he said. "A display, just in front of the pilot, where mechanical and technomantic measuring devices offer a real-time read-out of key performance indicators. Airspeed and altitude, for instance, can be measured by a barometric gauge with a simple dial responding to air pressure and movement of the air across a monitoring device…"
He took in Olga Romanoff's unblinking look of complete understanding, the one that also said this is not quite the question I asked, Ponder. He smoothly changed key.
"Magical charge is a thaumomantic quality rather than merely mechanical, and requires a more sophisticated device which is expensive and time-consuming to manufacture. We could do it with a standard thaumometer with some modifications, but these are expensive and time-consuming to manufacture. At the moment, Olga, we estimate installation costs per broomstick would run at six thousand dollars. Each. How many brooms do you have at the moment?"
Olga tried not to wince.
"Sixty-three of all models, not including reserves. That's…"
"Three hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars." Ponder replied. "Although once we manufacture in bulk, we can get the unit price down."
Olga sighed. She had a very generous R&D budget. But it wasn't that generous.
"Ah well, nichevo. We can wait until a better and perhaps cheaper solution comes along." she said. "I have every confidence in you."
"How do you do it right now, Olga?" he asked.
"It depends on the individual Witch and the relationship she has with her broomstick." she replied. "Much of it is intuition backed by knowledge. In normal use, for instance, a standard ME109 has an endurance in the air of up to eight hours. But going to turbo speed in emergency eats that magic. Running the technomantic Syren, at need, consumes magic. Diversion of the charge to sustain other spells, such as fireballs in air combat, also uses the energy, three times faster. Flying into a headwind and climbing to higher altitudes consume magic. Most of my Witches know when they are running low. Experienced pilots who know their broomstick can make intelligent assumptions. But the younger girls coming straight out of training covens do not yet have this skill. A reliable measuring instrument would take guesswork, as well as the potential for accidents, out of the equation."
Olga smiled at him and delivered a courtesy hug and kiss on the cheek, a signal she wanted to get back to Air Watch duties after the technical briefing. It wasn't difficult; she liked Ponder.
"But we will find a solution in time, I am sure."
A little later, she took to the air again for the brief flight back to the Air Station, her bag containing four of the precious new communication devices for field testing in live conditions. She flew over rooftops with a light dusting of white and streets where the white had gone to dirty yellow, and watched the sky. To Turnwise and to Widdershins, it did not look good.
Also, some sort of reliable weather reporting, she thought. Perhaps distant clacks stations a long way away could send a routine report in at agreed times during the day, so a central office here can build a picture? Those clouds are black. Distant, but so dark as to be black. They do not look good. Soon be at least nine-tenths and low. Get Irena, Nadezhda and the senior pilots together.
Behind her, Ponder Stibbons smiled a relieved smile. It wasn't just that Olga and her husband Eddie were personal friends. The Air Watch was a big customer for the Technomantic Park, and it was backed with a deep purse for its Research and Development. Mustrum Ridcully was always happier to hear the HEM and the Park were generating good money for the University. As well as, Ponder admitted to himself, the prestige. It was all good.
Olga, five hundred feet up and gathering her cloak around her for convenience, tried to remember how it went as she reached to flick the communicator on. Quarter-turn counterclockwise switches it on and sets it to the default state. I can now speak to Control….
"Syren to Control. Am approaching Air Station at…." she frowned. "…at between half and three-quarter Angel. Requesting clearance to land. Over."
She remembered to take her finger off the transmit button. According to Ponder, this automatically opened the channel for a reply…
-Ynci Control to Syren. Read you, Syren. Approach to Air Station is clear for landing. Over.
Olga moved into the approach path. She was aware of the first flakes of snow descending, just for the moment a slight uncertain scattering. She hit Transmit again.
"Nottie, I need to talk to you for a few minutes. Try and grab Irena and Nadezhda, if you can? Thanks." She belatedly remembered to add "Syren out." then came in to land, her feet scrunching on snow.
Tegg's Nose, New Ankh, Ankh-Morpork.
Under the same lowering and darkening sky, a group of school-age pupils in sportswear stood and shivered, waiting for a PE teacher who they suspected was being deliberately late and taking sadistic pleasure in letting them shiver in the cold. This was on top of all the lesser indignities inflicted on the pupils, such as the cramped, underheated and frankly smelly changing rooms, which they knew full well had the suspect and not-fit-for-purpose shower rooms waiting for them later, as a discourtesy detail.(4)
"They do this deliberately, don't they?" Susie Metcalfe said. She stamped her feet in the snowy slush. Her breath hung in the air in a visible cloud.
"Can you be surprised?" Connie Mutheleze remarked. "It's them all over."
Connie's home was a generally clement and often warm country in Howondaland. Granted, there was a rainy season in Winter when it could get very wet and the temperature dropped and it sometimes became a bit uncomfortable. But that had come nowhere close to this. Coming to Ankh-Morpork to start school had been a huge shock. This snow stuff, for instance. And hail. Connie had heard the tales and fables from travellers in distant foreign lands, that sometimes it got so cold the very rain itself froze, in interesting and varied ways, and solid water dropped on you from above.
Connie had discounted this as the sort of thing people got told for a laugh, by people who liked to tell tall stories. Water was liquid, wasn't it? Always, except when you heated it up. If it ever got solid it wouldn't be a liquid any more. Well Known Fact.
And now, aged thirteen, she was in a place where against all reason and common sense, rain could come down in freezing cold solid chunks. She'd felt the cold bruising sting of it on her first winter in Ankh-Morpork. Her friend Famke Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons, who had shrugged as if it were no big thing and pulled her hood over her head, had explained it was called hail. Solid rain. Rain with ice-cubes in it. Famke had been sympathetic. She had explained that her mum had told her when she first arrived here from Howondaland, she'd been scared by the weather, then frozen solid by it.(5) "Me, I was brought up here." Famke had said. "Also, I'm just betting you haven't seen snow yet?"
It had been one of the things that had made them friends. Connie found herself alternately shivering and studying her friend's exposed skin. Redheads of Famke's type tended to have very white, almost translucent, skin, at least when you could see it for freckles. Connie was wondering if it really did go sort of blue in the cold, as Famke claimed it did.
"Can't tell with you." Famke had remarked, looking at Connie's very dark brown skin. "However bitterkoud it gets."
Connie grinned. Having Famke for a best friend gave her a few privileges. And it wasn't as if she was saying it with a Boer accent. Even if "bitterkoud" was a Vondalaans word. Almost Morporkian: "bitter cold." (6)
Thora Brittasdottir, who like the others was dressed in the standard one-size-fits-nobody-ever PE kit, seemed unaffected by the cold. Famke and Connie wondered if this was a genetic Dwarf thing. Maybe people who found snowdrifts to be a real problem had hardened to it over the generations, or something. Natural selection. Dwarfs venturing out of doors in winter into snow that came up over their heads had to get tough. Or something.
Thora grinned.
"Watch out. Here they come." she said.
They were Mr Bradlifrudd, the PE master, and a teaching assistant. Nobody anyone recognised. But this was a teaching assistant in PE. Not just any old piece of new meat who could be baited.
Bill Bradlifrudd grinned a genially sadistic PE-teacher grin at the shivering girls, which was just on the right side of sadistic.
"Good afternoon, ladies! I hope you are all properly warmed up. Today we are going to be doing some cross-country running. Isn't that nice?"
Mr Bradlifrudd said he had a lot of classes to tour and couldn't stay around. "However, you will be supervised by my colleague here, who while she is new to teaching, is a graduate of this School and spent seven happy years in Tump House under the supervision of Miss Band. So you will find she knows all the tricks and dodges, having in her time here tried a lot of them out on me."
Mr Bradlifrudd grinned genially.
"Not that it got her anywhere. So don't try anything on."
Famke found his eyes resting on her for a moment. He nodded at her. The look suggested that something had been decided earlier and that she, Famke Cornelia Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons, was going to be singled out for special attention. This was not, to Famke, an attractive proposition.
"All yours." he said to the new teacher. "Two Raven. I believe they're a lively bunch."
He patted her on the shoulder and jogged on down the track. The Tegg's Nose Sports Fields And Outdoor Education Centre was a big place, and on any Wednesday afternoon, there were a lot of classes for the Head of PE to cover.
The new woman teacher studied them appraisingly. Famke registered a disconcertingly intelligent face, and graded her as one it might be wisest not to mess around. Well, not too much. Famke took in the official black tracksuit, trimmed in teaching purple, with the whistle of office around her neck secured by a purple silk ribbon. It was on what looked like a well-honed body, tallish and broad about shoulders and hips.
Famke considered the big surgical neck brace detracted slightly from the look, and decided that as the school already had a deaf music teacher, a disabled PE mistress should not be too much of a surprise. Then she reflected. Graduate Assassin. Seven years being trained by Miss Band. What sort of a Guild mission had she been on, to get injured like that? The fact she was here and still alive even after getting an injury like that suggested the client, whoever it had been , had come off worst.
Famke decided that, one, she was going to find out, and (most immediately and pressingly) for two, she was not going to annoy this woman. Well, not much, anyway. Test her out a bit. Just to see. General principles.
Connie took in the very black skin, the thick, rather frizzy, Howondalandian hair, and the distinctive facial features that meant there was only one nation on the Disc that she could have come from. She sensed the woman looking at her, then giving the briefest acknowledging nod.
"Two Raven." the woman said, after studying the class. Her accent was Morporkian with a hint of somewhere else. She consulted a clipboard, glancing at it briefly. "Eighteen of you are present. I understand the other twelve are on teams or squads elsewhere."
She nodded at Famke again. Famke steeled herself.
"My name is Sisimina N'Kima. I was a student here for seven years. I graduated and went on to do… other things. I'm in this city to receive treatment for an injury I got in a fight."
She let this sink in. The neck-brace spoke for itself.
"The Guild is paying for my treatment and has suggested I take a post-graduate training course while I'm here. I asked if there is anything useful I can do to repay the Guild and give something back. It was suggested I help out as a Teaching Assistant where I can, so you'll be seeing me pop up in various places over the next two or three months."
She smiled again.
"My friends call me Sissi. At home in the Zulu Empire I am a commoner with no rank or privileges of birth. I'm not nobility, therefore you will call me Miss N'Kima."
She grinned again.
"Second year pupils. Who's thirteen? Hands up. Thank you, stand over there. Who's still only twelve? You, stand over there."
She addressed the pupils again.
"We are going to do the six-mile running course this afternoon. Don't moan, it'll keep you warm! Now let me advise you. Once you finish one full circuit of the paved main oval, the going will be rough country. Follow the markers for Course C which will – eventually – return you to the paved running oval. Another full circuit and the course is completed. For under-fourteen girls we expect you to complete the course in no longer than one hour and ten minutes. Under-thirteen girls are allowed one hour and eighteen minutes. Take any longer than this and you will do the course again until you meet the accepted standard."
Miss N'Kima beamed at them.
"Achievable. You all look capable."
She glanced at the class-list again. Then gave Famke a longer and more searching look. Famke thought it was almost as if she was recognising somebody she knew. There was familiarity and recognition in that smile. But I've never met this woman before?
Miss N'Kima looked away.
"Miss Constance Muthelezi?"
Connie reluctantly raised a hand.
"You're a Zulu. Like me. I expect a lot better from you than one hour and ten. Even in the snow. No pressure, of course."
The teacher added a few remarks in the Zulu language. Connie replied with something that tried to sound confident.
Miss N'Kima smiled and then said
"The School Record for under-thirteen girls on this course is thirty-seven minutes and twelve seconds. Set quite a few years ago by Miss Mariella Smith-Rhodes of Black Widow House. Never even been equalled. "
The teacher nodded pleasantly at Famke. Famke felt uncomfortable. She had a suspicion as to what was going to happen here.
"The School Record for under-fourteen girls was set, in the same year, by Miss Sisimina N'Kima of Tump House, who managed to complete the course in thirty-one minutes and fifty-four seconds. Again, a few people have come close but that record still stands."
She nodded pleasantly at Connie.
"Those are your targets for today, ladies. If anyone manages to beat my record I'll personally stand you dinner somewhere. If anyone manages to beat Mariella's record, then I'll stand you dinner, and be your best friend for life. I hope somebody does, as I'd quite like to tell her personally. Now line up and get ready… Miss Famke Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons?"
"Here, miss." Famke said, reluctantly.
Her new teacher smiled a contented smile.
"Thirty-seven minutes and twelve seconds. That's your target. Keep it in the family. I'll be watching. Your aunt will want to know, too."
There was no escape. Famke gritted her teeth and started running. Flakes of snow, few and scattered, began falling. They didn't stop falling.
Bitterfontein, the Turnwise Caarp, Rimwards Howondaland.
"It's easy, when you think about it." Aunt Mariella said, encouragingly.
"A little over a week ago, you arrived here. You didn't take the time difference into account, so you forgot Rimwards Howondaland, at this time of year, is about three hours ahead of Ankh-Morpork. You left there just before ten, you arrived here at one in the morning. Therefore. Ankh-Morpork is three hours behind Howondaland."
She nodded down at Bekki's written orders from the Air Watch.
"Olga Romanoff has made it clear she wants you to muster for Watch duties at seven o'clock in the morning by Ankh-Morpork time. So you get into your uniform, ensure Boetjie is saddled up and ready, make sure that Feegle of yours hasn't run off anywhere, and you leave here by, at latest, nine o'clock according to our time. Which means you can have breakfast with us and still be at work by seven."
Bekki nodded. It was easy when you looked at it like that. The possibility of getting it wrong and being marked absent without leave had worried her.
"And you can get me that stuff from Pairs that I just can't get anywhere here." her aunt added. "Horst's asked if you can bring him back a few things, too. I'm pretty sure the bliksem's worn out his fifteen-a-side boots. Again. Hendricka might have a wants list, I'll see her and ask. I know she likes the chocolate truffles Higgs and Meakin's make. If I give you a few extra dollars, could you drop by Weinrich and Boettcher?"
Bekki had a feeling this was now going to be a regular part of her commute between continents. Older hands in the Pegasus Service had said this sort of thing was both a perk and a pain in the arse. A perk because you could bypass customs duties and import controls; and because little favours like this built Obs. A pain in the arse because you could end up with a shopping list the size of a Rodinian novel, if you didn't watch out. Everybody who knew you flew to Ankh-Morpork every week was going to want something.
She sighed. This was her life now. Then went to press her uniform and polish her boots and armour. (7)
The Air Station, the Watch House, Pseudopolis Yard, Ankh-Morpork. January (Well. Ick-Offle).
The available senior ranks of the Air Watch gathered around the Control Desk. With only six Real-Time Omniscope Conversation Devices out there at the moment, there wasn't a great deal of Controlling to be done. Sergeant Nottie Garlick fielded such as there was, while participating in the command discussion. (8)
"Hanna's taking over control later." Irena Politek said. "We can brief her when she signs in. It's only going to get worse."
"Da." Olga agreed. At least eight-tenths cloud right now. We can surmise that it's several thousand feet thick, so no getting above it. The bristles will ice long before you get up top."
"The cloud is getting lower." Nottie agreed. "And the weather-wizards, for what they are worth, are predicting heavy snow."
The four witches contemplated the erratic nature of meteorology on the Disc, which locally was a preserve of Unseen University. With all that implied for reliability and accuracy. They agreed there had to be a better way of finding out what the weather was doing and what it was going to do.
"We got a Clacks back from the Forward Air Station in Lancre." Nottie said. "Stacey Matlock is the duty NCO there. She says the snow is really picking up there and it feels like it's blowing from around the Hub. Wind direction suggests it'll be over us in three or four hours."
"Any news from the Comms flight to Chirm?" Olga asked. The Air Watch also had a Forward Air Station in the Chirm hills. Olga wanted to know what the weather was doing out there, too. If necessary, to evacuate Penguin and the skeleton staff there, bring them back to safety and temporarily abandon the makeshift temporary base.
"Nothing, yet." Nadezhda Popova said. "If weather is too bad to fly, pilot is instructed to land at Clacks tower and send report. But Clacks is not good in a blizzard."
Nadezhda's attitude suggested impatience with people who could not operate in snowy conditions. To a degree, Olga and Irena sympathised. But if the weather got so bad that one clacks tower could not see the next, then even the Clacks was down. No argument.
"It's going to get to ten-tenths with cloud nearly on the deck." Olga said. "This will mean we have no choice but to suspend flying. And yes, Nadezhda, I know you believe we can still fly in extreme snow. But I do have to put it to you that while three of us are Rodinian, only one of us comes from Siber'ya."
Nadezhda smiled. From the Vortex Plains, Siber'ya in Rodinian, she had come to understand not everybody shared her opinion of what constituted a manageable winter. She privately thought if it got colder and snowier, she night even need to button her coat up to the collar and contemplate wearing a scarf.(9) But not just yet. She also had ideas as to how the Air Watch could function in deep winter and really wanted to test them out. But the right sort of winter hadn't happened yet in this soft Turnwise city. Olga had reluctantly given permission, but only if certain safety protocols were applied.
"So we tell Mr Vimes, then. If it gets really bad, as it promises to become, all flying is suspended. Hanna, who is on night command, is to make the decision, and is to inform me." Olga decided.
"We redeploy our people to ground duties." Irena agreed. "And we ensure the safety of the detachment in Chirm."
"Da. We get Gertrude and the others back here. Abandon Chirm, for the moment." Olga decided.
The three others nodded agreement.
"I can fly the evacuation mission to Chirm." Nadezhda said. "We have three people there who were surveying the camp area for the planned improvements. I will require two pilots and three two-seaters."
"Do it." Olga decided. "Take three Navigators who can craw-step you most of the way. Pick up the comms flight on the way. Begin when this conference is over."
Irena looked thoughtful for the moment.
"Tomorrow morning." she said. "Two part-time pilots are mustering for duty. Sneguroshka and Firebird. Both are due at seven. They may be arriving in seriously bad weather, so we need to ensure they arrive safely. A Pegasus is hardy, but I do not wish to lose any."
They discussed this problem for a while, and made several contingency plans.
Decisions having been made, Olga went to locate Mr Vimes to alert him.
The following morning, two Pegasus Service pilots would arrive in the middle of a blizzard.
To be continued.
More soon!
(1) the Wizards here were looking for snappier names for marketing purposes. Macrosoft had been mooted. As had Wahoonie Technomancies.
(2) Because every time a new and truly original technical innovation is pretty much perfected, an element of Leonard of Quirm inevitably slips into its naming. Olga and Ponder were relaxed about this, as they both knew the right name would emerge, in time.
(3) See Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett.
(4) This is multiversal. Juvenile larva on a water planet populated by sentient prawn-like life forms probably get a similar experience when undergoing the physical optimisation phases of their mandatory period of socialisation into adult forms. After physical exercise their school-masters direct them to the ventral jets that blow slightly too cold, or slightly too hot, or else alternate between the extremes of discomfort in a random and unpredictable manner.
(5) Connie had digested this. "We are talking about the same Doctor Johanna Smith-Rhodes here?" Connie had asked. "She was scared by the weather here?" Famke had nodded, seriously. "She's from Howondaland too." Famke had reminded her. "You think the weather's different in the country next door, just because people have got white skins? My Uncle Danie came over to stay, it started snowing, and he's going "Ag man, hey, fokke, hey, what the bleddy hell is this bleddy stuff?"" Famke had grinned and added "You can tell when a redhead gets cold, her skin goes blue. Truth."
(6) Famke still refrained from calling her Dwarf friend Thora Brittasdottir a "lawn ornament" or "shortarse". She wasn't sure if she could push things THAT far and she simply wasn't inclined to try.
(7) doing her own Watch uniform didn't last long. Once Mevrou Hendricka got to hear of this, she assigned a maid to do this for her, arguing this is what the house servants were for. Bekki agonised over this, then decided to roll with it. It saved a chore.
(8) They knew this wasn't going to last. When every pilot had a communicator, there would be a lot of Comms traffic to marshal. The nominated Controllers were using the time to build experience and hone the Control system, while things were relatively quiet.
(9) Solzhenitzyn drily presented the old Russian idiom that a true Russian never does up the top button of their coat and certainly wouldn't wear any sort of scarf in winter. Although he did say that only holds true for Siberians, who make it a point of honour even in the fiercest winter. Apparently people from Siberia are thought of by other Russians as being on the crazy side.
Notes Dump: a Township, exiled by statute to the very edge of the main story, where surplus ideas, observations and concepts go into a pool of reserve labour but – very strictly – are not allowed to interact with the main story more than is absolutely necessary.
On The Shires:
From a discussion on the Facebook "Ankh-Morpork Times – News Of The Disc" page, where we were talking about how Britain, specifically England, is represented in the Discworld. This is my piece – wanted to keep it somewhere before the discussion on FB starts sinking to the depths of a very active page. Hard to retrieve when that happens.
I loved the introduction of The Shires in "Snuff". It's true that when Terry moved on from purely "generic fantasy sci-fi" locations like Krull, the Wyrmberg, Khan-Li, et c and began to map one-for-one Fantasy Counterpart Cultures of Real Earth locations (Quirm, Überwald, Fourecks), he went Up To Eleven on the funny foreigners. (as seen from Britain). He also does the same for the British ourselves and provides a very big not-London in the form of Ankh-Morpork. (rotate the river Ankh through ninety degrees. Looks familiar?) A-M takes all the tropes about London, the place and its people, way past eleven.
Then he added Lancre, a generic North of England - although when you consider the famous-in-history Witches of Pendle in Lancashire - Lancre - then you can see where he's going. The rural strangeness of Alan Garner's Cheshire, set in the hilly bits of the Pennine end of the county, is in the mix too: the one where Tiffany Aching is possessed by the Hiver is a deliberate shout-out to Garner's novel "The Moon of Gomrath", in which a young pre-teen witch-like girl in Cheshire is possessed by a very similar spirit. (Garner returned the compliment by homaging Pratchett in his last book, "Bonelands")
The Chalk is tribute to Terry's own part of England, Buckinghamshire and the Chilterns. People from Lancre even deride the Chalk as a sort of "soft Southern buggers".
The Shires are a largely blank canvas to fill in the rest of England with - having lived there for ten years, I really want a Norfolk to be in there. As for Kent - well, there's no body of water separating Ankh-Morpork's rural hegemony from Quirm. But in Mrs Bradshaw's, there is a town where the border runs right down the middle where there is a jointly manned customs post/duanier. Just wish there was a symbolic tunnel in between!
A comment suggested that Terry's childhood England in the Beaconsfield area was augmented for the creation of the Chalk by Wiltshire, the region he chose to live in as an adult. Good add: Wiltshire is due West and a little South of Terry's birthplace(10), on the other side of the Downs. Still classable as a Chalk-like place with lots of similarities.
Also. In the border-post town of Little Green/Petit Chou where Ankh-Morpork meets Quirm, I have decided to add some sort of tunnel symbolically marking the border, that the traveller is leaving Ankh-Morpork and entering Quirm. Little Green will be the last town in the Morporkian-speaking Shires; Petit Chou will be the landfall in Quirmian-speaking Quirm. Thinking Dover/Folkestone in Kent (in better and saner times, the incoming-outgoing port of entry/exit to France) with Calais on the other side. And without 21 miles of English Channel/35 kilometres de la Manche in between.
I know it isn't canonical, but there must be an actual tunnel of some sort in between the Discworld's "England" and "France". The illogic demands this.
(10) Terry's birthplace is a spit away from the world-famous White Horse, which he transfers to the Chalk in the tales: the ancient White Horse carved in the English Chalk is practically in his childhood back garden.