Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett Page B

punching ceaselessly at his own ignorance.
    When she came in the next morning there was a dictionary of Dwarfish and a copy of Postalume’s The Speech of Trolls on the lectern too.
    Surely it’s not right to learn like this, she told herself. It can’t be settling properly. You can’t just fork it into your head. Learning has to be digested. You don’t just have to know, you have to comprehend.
    She mentioned this to Fassel, the smith, who said, ‘Look, miss, he came up to me the other day and said he’d watched a smith before, and could he have a go? Well, you know her ladyship’s orders, so I gave him a bit of bar stock and showed him the hammer and tongs and next minute he was going at it like–well, hammer and tongs! Turned out a nice little knife, very nice indeed. He thinks about things. You can see his ugly little mush working it all out. Have you ever met a goblin before?’
    ‘Strange you should ask,’ she told him. ‘Our catalogue says we’ve got one of the very few copies of J. P. Bunderbell’s Five Hours and Sixteen Minutes Among the Goblins of Far Uberwald , but I can’t find it anywhere. It’s priceless.’
    ‘Five hours and sixteen minutes doesn’t sound very long,’ said the smith.
    ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But according to a lecture Mr Blunderbell gave to the Ankh-Morpork Trespassers’ Society,’ * said Miss Healstether, ‘it was about five hours too long. He said they ranged in size from unpleasantly large to disgustingly small, had about the same level of culture as yogurt and spent their time picking their own noses and missing. A complete waste of space, he said. It caused quite a stir. Anthropologists are not supposed to write that sort of thing.’
    ‘And young Nutt is one of them?’
    ‘Yes, that puzzled me, too. Did you see him yesterday? There’s something about him that frightens horses, so he came to the library and found some old book about the Horseman’s Word. They were a kind of secret society, which knew how to make special oils that would make horses obey them. Then he spent the afternoon down in Igor’s crypt, brewing up gods know what, and this morning he was riding a horse around the yard! It wasn’t happy, mind you, but he was winning.’
    ‘I’m surprised his ugly little head doesn’t explode,’ said Fassel.
    ‘Ha!’ Miss Healstether sounded bitter. ‘Stand by, then, because he’s discovered the Bonk School.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Not that, them. Philosophers. Well, I say philosophers, but, well…’
    ‘Oh, the mucky ones,’ said Fassel cheerfully.
    ‘I wouldn’t say mucky,’ said Miss Healstether, and this was true. A ladylike librarian would not employ that word in the presence of a smith, especially one who was grinning. ‘Let’s say “indelicate”, shall we?’
    There is not a lot of call for delicacy on an anvil, so the smith continued unabashed: ‘They are the ones who go on about what happens if ladies don’t get enough mutton, and they say cigars are—’
    ‘That is a fallacy!’
    ‘That’s right, that’s what I read.’ The smith was clearly enjoying this. ‘And Ladyship lets him read this stuff?’
    ‘Indeed, she very nearly insists. I can’t imagine what she’s thinking.’ Or him, come to that, she thought to herself.

    There was a limit to how many candles he should make, Trev had told Nutt. It looked bad if he made too many, Trev explained. The pointy hats might decide that they didn’t need all the people. That made sense to Nutt. What would No Face and Concrete and Weepy Mukko do? They would have nowhere else to go. They had to live in a simple world; they too easily got knocked down by life in this one.
    He’d tried wandering around the other cellars, but there was nothing much happening at night, and people gave him funny looks. Ladyship did not rule here. But wizards are a messy lot and nobody tidied up much and lived to tell the tale, so all sorts of old storerooms and junk-filled workshops