Death
DEATH in the Tarot appears to be a very final card. The mediaeval origins of Tarot are underscored by the appearance of DEATH in his mediaeval guise, as a cloaked and crowned skeleton wielding the scythe. He stalks a barren dying winter landscape – everything dies in its turn – with representatives of the human race, of all ages, sexes and social classes, fleeing in his wake. The severed heads of a King and Queen who couldn't dodge the scythe lie at his feet - proof that all die and nobody is immune. Images associated with death as a process might be strewn about the card – ravens, lilies, the ibis, et c. The astrological association is Scorpio and the planet Pluto – the sign of sudden endings and new starts, and the planet ruled by the Lord of the Underworld. The Hebrew letter "nun נ " – the fish – associates here (as with the crayfish in the Moon, the fish symbolises the lower mind and the potential for evolution, transition and change into something else operating on a higher level). Well, the cliché is that this card very rarely symbolises or heralds actual physical death. 98% of the time this is true, but just every so often, depending on what falls around it…
The card is generally about the inevitability of change, the need to be positive about it and to welcome it. Like Death, change can often come out of the blue. Do you feel threatened or excited by this?
Although every so often, it might be a waste of effort to make any really long-term plans….
The Story:- I worked something out at long last. It involves a Discworld character I don't think I've ever properly done before. Here seen interacting with a cast of OC's and canonical characters.
Doctor Davinia Bellamy walked the aisles of the Animal Management Unit, humming a cheerful tune. While the buiiding was called the Animal Management Unit, the vision was that those animals of value and worth to the Guild of Assassins should be reared and nurtured in conditions as close as possible to those in their home environments. Thus, the Red-Bellied Tarantulas and the Monkey-Eating Spiders normally found in jungles in deep Paraquat and Tezuman lived their lives perfectly happily in jungle trees in a sealed habitat, also inhabited by prey species and a wide selection of native flora. Several species of the famous Tree Frogs lived in a bromeliad paradise which simulated the conditions to be found in the canopy of a rain forest: to reproduce this at ground level in Ankh-Morpork had been one of the initial challenges for the Guild School's Natural History Department. Davinia's expertise was in botany and the cultivation of rare and difficult plants. She had helped design and refine many of the habitats, and her responsibility was the ongoing viability of the exotic flora. She was particularly pleased with the vivariums and herpetology tanks established for the impressive range of snakes and serpents kept by the Guild. She felt these were masterpieces of collaboration between herself and her colleague, Miss Smith-Rhodes, who nurtured the animals. She was just jolly glad she didn't have to feed the snakes, although this duty was routinely delegated to young student Assassins as an additional grading exercise. As the snakes, whether venomous or constrictors, required live food, the teaching Assassins monitored their students for signs of undue squeamishness, over-enthusiasm (1), or worst of all in the presence of dangerous animals, over-confidence.
Although students – generally girls, but with the occasional boy – could sometimes stand there dithering, often in tears, saying "Please, Miss, I just can't do it!" It was known, although it meant a fail mark for the pupil. Davinia usually sent them to the quiet room to recover, with a few kind words, until they were ready to try again. No, she knew it was necessary, but she had to steel herself to do it. It wasn't a duty she liked. Assassins had to learn how to kill and had to harden themselves to death. Feeding the snakes and other carnivorous life-forms, initiating and observing the process of death, was held to be a neatly expedient way of getting this point across to students.
It was dark in here. Airless. Smelly. And constricted. A traumatised small rat was shuddering out the last of its life under the incessant squeezing of the muscular walls around it. The venom had paralysed it, but it was still clinging to the last shreds of life and it was still capable of feeling some pain. Although the pain had ebbed and receded and now felt more distant… the lack of air was the most crucial thing as its consciousness faded.
SQUEAK, said a compassionate voice. It sounded like the voice of a rat, slowed down, stretched out, weighted with lead and then speeded up again.
{Squeak}}?said the soul of the hapless rat. With eyes that were not physical, it saw the scythe swing and a blue cord sever and spring free.
As freedom to move returned, it saw the bones, the remains of a long-dead rat… but in a hood and cowl? Holding a scythe?
SQUEAK. It said again, not unkindly so. The dead rat sighed. It had wondered what the catch was. Rat lore said that humans were the enemy, bent on killing and exterminating the Rat nations at every opportunity. Even the wild ones who sometimes scuttled carefully over the lab floors at night said so. So why were these humans, some adults, but mainly juveniles, in black, though some wore white overcoats, so friendly? Ever since birth, the humans had provided ample food and water, cleaned their spacious and luxurious cages, tended them if any were sick, even provided supervised breeding rights to some. Alright, so every so often rats he'd known had gone missing, taken away never to be seen again, but it had never been him, so he had not worried about it. Till earlier. And then, when the juvenile human had put him in the glass tank with the… with the…
…THEN he had seen the catch.
SQUEAK. Said the Death of Rats again, not unkindly, as he ushered the soul of the late lab-rat to its new world. And as one tiny hourglass blinked out of existence, another appeared. He looked at it. Not far to travel in space, then. Same building, in fact. He scuttled a pace or two forward, kicked the dozing mamba just out of principle and solidarity, making it jump and recoil, , and disappeared…
Davinia walked on, observing her plants for occasional signs of wilt or leaf discoloration or other ill-being, until she got to the part of the building complex that was entirely hers: the hothouses, greenhouses and herbariums.
A group of students were working on picking weeds out from the soil around valued plants. They got in even here, dandelion and cow-parsley and nettles and rosebay willowherb, the verge and hedgerow weeds of the City. As the valued plants were of botanical and ultimately pharmaceutical interest to the Guild, the students were wearing thick gardening gloves and face protection. Davinia nodded, and found her own protective clothing for dealing with the maximum-security plants, the ones that only senior students were allowed to tend.
She heard a rustling in the undergrowth, and frowned. Wild rats and mice were a problem here. But show me a part of Ankh-Morpork that doesn't have rats. At least in here, it tends to be self-regulating. If they get into some of the habitats, they never get out again. Although Johanna doesn't like the snakes and reptiles taking feral rodents. In this city, she says, that's like feeding them turdburgers. How did she phrase it? "like throwing kakburgers on the braii", she said.
Rats and mice could also be a nuisance to some of her plants. Which was why Mr Mericet from Poisons and Miss Sanderson-Reeves the domestic science mistress had been collaborating on the perfect rat poison and the perfect delivery system. It was funny how nobody had ever studied this before and they'd always taken it for granted that rodents loved cheese. Joan Sanderson-Reeves had asked for experimental time with some of the lab rats, to discover what they really liked to eat, and concluded that the old wives' tale was wrong: they largely left cheese untouched. But they really loved chocolate.(2)
So these days the mousetraps were baited with chocolate cake prepared by Miss Sanderson-Reeves and her DomSci students, laced heavily with Mr Mericet's experimental tasteless and odourless rat poisons. As Joan pointed out, it gives the gels invaluable practical poisoning experience, even if it's only rats! (3)
And under the deepest cellar of the Animal Management Unit, the Alpha Rat, the Boss Rat, the undisputed master of all rats for several city blocks in either direction, the first to mate with the choicest females, the first to the tastiest food, the rat who could force any other lesser male into bleeding submission, was dying.
Ruefully, the alpha rat wondered if accepting the gift of food from an ambitious Number Two in the Rat hierarchy had been quite a good idea. The humans poisoned everything, after all, in their incessant war on the Race. And this had smelt like heaven. Looked like heaven. Tasted like heaven with no taint of the usual poisons. And yet the food of the Rat Gods had led to…
SQUEAK.
The cowled and robed almost-a – rat which had, in some indefiniable way walked straight through the wall, bowed.
SQUEAK. ("It was the chocolate sponge, your majesty. They used an undetectable poison. The humans here are skilled in poisons.")
The Rat King nodded. It had been a good life. He was ready to go.
{{Squeak!}} he commanded, weakly. ("Make an end!")
The Death of Rats nodded, and laid his scythe aside. Pushing his robe aside, he drew a sword from somewhere.
SQUEAK ("The sword, for a Rat King.")
The sword swung.
{{Squeak!}} ("well, that was easy! Where to next?")
SQUEAK! ("It's up to you now. It always has been.")
As the shade of the dead Rat King faded, and his Number Two moved in to assume the title and commence the feast, rather than to let all that suddenly-available protein be wasted, the Death Of Rats contemplated his next hourglass, and shook his head. Picking up his scythe, he thought "Sooner or later I'll get a change of scene…" and winked out. Just before he went, he admonished the former Number Two Rat not to even think of eating the wobbly purple bit that goes "gloing".
Davinia set about pruning her Pyramid Strangler Vine.
Bonsai work is just a matter of scale, she thought, as she ascended the tall stepladder. At ground level, a student assisted in holding the ladder steady. She appreciated this, eight feet up a restive plant.
This is a plant that can grow three hundred feet tall and take over a whole step pyramid. They're more manageable bonsai'd back to a more practical eight feet or so. And you can't just leave them, they're like Lancrastria trees.(4)
Mindful of the carnivorous nature of the Strangler Vine, she moved with speed and caution, noting that this one had been doing its bit to resolve the feral rodent problem: at least one of the large bell-shaped flowers, fatter than the rest, had a ratty tail sticking out of its closed petals.
Good, it's eaten. It'll be docile.
Soon, she and her student were finished and were sweeping up the feebly-struggling lopped tendrils.
SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats, performing his work of mercy on a rat that was already being attacked by the Strangler Vine's digestive juices. Strictly speaking, Death of Rats should have waited and come back in a few days: but he was keen to see the back of the Animal Managment Unit and the rodentine holocaust it represented. Releasing a rat from what would have been an agonizing slow death over a period of days – well, it was all a matter of time, anyway, as the end was pretty much inevitable. If the Duty allowed for mercy, and it better bloody well had to, it was at times like this, and bugger causality.
The Death of Rats consulted his next hourglass, and nodded with satisfaction. At last. His next Duty would be a bourbon refinery in Genua, where no doubt there was a blissed-out rat suffering terminal alcohol poisoning from the fermenting grain mash. He winked out, seeking his companion and steed, Quoth the Raven.(5) The place changes, but the Duty is always there.
(1) Students who actively enjoyed tormenting or ill-treating the live bait were weeded out of animal-care duties. Indeed, knowing cruelty to animals is one of the early indicators of the sort of serious mental disorder that could get the Guild a bad name, the Assassins took quiet decisive action with such pupils. It didn't want another Teatime, or De'ath, or Cruces, if it could help it. Davinia and Johanna used this test as a means of detecting such problem cases early.
(2) Dead true: pest control firm Rentokil recommend baiting your mousetrap with cheap chocolate. Rats and mice will literally die for it.
(3) The Guild of Ratcatchers had complained, pointing out the demarcation issue of the Assassins doing their job. The Assassins had replied with, OK then, send a man round who is comfortable at working around several hundred lethal species of animal and at least as many of plants. The Ratcatchers have not pressed the point. Although they are interested in the new rat poisons being developed at the Guild and are humbly asking if they can buy some.
(4) On Roundworld, Leylandii bushes planted as perfectly reasonable twelve-foot high hedges have erupted into eighty-foot trees. This is a problem if allowed to grow too much without regular pruning. The Discworld version of this fast-growing bloody-minded plant must be Lancrastria…
(5) Quoth was passing time in the AMU's aviary, among the semi-tame ravens kept there and tended by Raven House students as their tutelory animal. He was enjoying the down-time offered by Death of Rats attending to a series of inevitable and oft-repeated duty calls, and was paying court to a particularly interesting female raven with a view to sharing a romantic dinner over an eyeball or two, folowed by, who knows, a session of making eggs happen. Meanwhile, Miss Alexandra Ouizlette de Cramptone Lacroix (student Assassin and heiress to the multi-million dollar Whizzla cigarette paper business(6)), of Form ThreeRaven, was blinking with disbelief as she tended the ravens, wondering why that one which only occasionally seened to be there, the bigger one that seemed more intelligent than the rest, appeared to be wearing a saddle and reins. She would write a report about it for Johanna Smith-Rhodes. Who, as she also had a supervisory responsibility at the City Zoo, which kept forty-seven species of rodent, and as a good naturalist knew the Secret, would send back with a note reading Very good observation. you are not seeing things. You are in fact seeing what is really there. Now consult the literature on para and quasizooloogy, and write an essay on what is happening and most importantly why. On my desk by one on Saturday, if you please. JS-R.
(6) On Roundworld, 16th century French nobleman Alexandro Rizlette de Cramptone Lacroix is credited with being the first to invent the pre-gummed cigarette paper as providing an alternative means to a pipe of smoking tobacco. Hence "Rizla".