Weird time for Death to show up, but then I supposed he’s always around…
Summary
The Silver Horde try to corner a tax collector into giving them a tour of the Forbidden City. Rincewind and Twoflower talk about the beliefs of the Red Army and Twoflower explains that this is about their myths on how history is cyclical. The original Great Wizard of the story supposedly flew a kite that captured lightning and animated an army of clay. Someone unlocks Rincewind’s cell and the guard on the other side is dead. Rincewind releases Twoflower and the other prisoners, two of whom turn out to be Butterfly and Lotus Blossom—who turn out to be Twoflower’s daughters. Rincewind tries to bring up who their mother might be, but the thought makes Twoflower angry. Butterfly decides that since they have been freed, they should try to storm the city, even if it gets them all killed. The taxman, Six Beneficent Winds, leads the horde to a spot where they’re ambushed by ninjas. The Silver Horde handily defeats them because they’re quite old; they’ve made a career of not dying, so they’re rather good at it by now. Saveloy recruits Winds to their cause as an accountant. The Silver Horde becomes irate when they learn that Saveloy dressed them as eunuchs to smuggle them in.
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Seasonal Fears
Rincewind wants to know exactly what the Red Army plans to do once they’ve deposed the Emperor and had their revolution. Butterfly insists that there will be people’s governance, and Rincewind guesses that means that peasants won’t really be allowed to govern themselves. He wants to lead the group out because the situation is too convenient—the guards are all dead, weapons are lying around, there’s a map to the Emperor’s chambers. He tries to get them to go back to their cells while he scouts around, but Butterfly insists on coming with him because she doesn’t trust him. The horde bathes and then makes their way to the throne room as Rincewind and Butterfly continue their investigation and things get more suspicious. He tries to explain that they’re being set up, and when they finally come upon the Emperor’s room, this bears out—he’s already dead. But there are also a lot of guards, so he has to run for it, but someone is catching up to him. In the meantime, the Silver Horde makes it to the throne room and reveals their true plan: to steal the kingdom by installing Cohen as the new Emperor, since most people have no idea what the man looks like anyway.
The person keeping pace with Rincewind’s running turns out to be Butterfly. They split up and Rincewind continues on, waking up a room full of wrestlers and other folks on the way. It turns out that Two Fire Herb is a traitor who has been working with Lord Hong this whole time—the plan was to frame the Red Army for the Emperor’s death, but things are not going to plan as none of the Red Army is currently wandering to the Emperor’s chambers as planned. The Horde meets with the court and asks whomst among them would be fool enough to say that Cohen isn’t the Emperor (and die). They all agree to the new state of things. Rincewind finally realizes that he can hide better if he changes, and pulls on peasant garb to fool the guards chasing him. The Silver Horde starts planning to loot the place and make off, but Cohen wonders if they shouldn’t stay like Saveloy intended. Meanwhile, Lord Hong goes to the kitchen and poisons the meat meant to be served to the Horde. Thankfully, Rincewind is posing as a kitchen worker and sees the whole thing, so he warns Cohen, and lets him know who did it. This starts a fight wherein the barbarians finally decide that they don’t much like civilization (Cohen included, who had originally been in on Saveloy’s plan) and don’t want any part of this scheme. Saveloy is deeply disappointed in their throwing away the chance to accomplish something “real.”
The Silver Horde aren’t concerned about odds and plan to fight their way out. Lord Hong comes under a flag of parley. He insists that they give up and take the blame for the Emperor’s death, but Rincewind calls him out of his plan to frame them. He also notices that Lord Hong doesn’t know how many barbarians there actually are, so he makes up armies of ghosts and whatnot. Lord Hong insists that he is unbothered and now they will battle at dawn. Rincewind has the idea to go to Dibhala and create a terrible rumor about the size of their vampire ghost army. It begins to spread wildly through the Agatean army. Rincewind then runs into Death and War (and War’s kids). Death won’t tell him the outcome of the battle, however, because even he’s not sure. Lord Hong is talking with the other War Lords about the upcoming fight and insists that the old legend about the Red Army is just a folktale; he instructs their people to create a rumor that they have their own army of ghosts to counter the barbarians. In private, he dons Ankh-Morporkian clothes. Back at the University, Ridcully and the wizards are discussing how to bring Rincewind back without the journey killing him, and put Hex to work on it.
Commentary
It’s a lot of running about in this section, and honestly, I miss Twoflower? He goes back down below with all the other prisoners, and I know why it’s less useful to have him about… It’s just fun when Rincewind and Twoflower are together, is all. And I want to know what the deal with his wife is. I imagine we’ll get to that before the end.
The themes of this book aren’t quite as focused as Pratchett’s usual, and it’s too bad because the things he does bother to say are poignant as ever. For instance, Butterfly believes there are causes worth dying for, to which Rincewind replies, “No, there aren’t! Because you’ve only got one life but you can pick up another five causes on any street corner!” And he’s certainly not wrong, particularly when you take into account what an absolute mess this whole affair is turning out to be. But also, more to the point, what’s genuinely upsetting is that plenty of causes don’t seem to get the momentum they deserve unless someone does die, which is probably more what Rincewind is instinctively railing against.
On the other side, we’ve got the Silver Horde being slowly introduced to the thought of perhaps running an empire by stealing it, which they’re not particularly keen on. I’m not sure that I agree with Saveloy’s summation of the horde’s need to do something real (what is real anyhow in this context, nope, maybe let’s not go down that road), but he’s generally pretty sharp about how civilization works with comments like: “… you might not yet be civilized but at least you’re nice and clean, and many people think this is identical.” Ouch.
We haven’t come to the full reveal on Lord Hong’s plan, but the Ankh-Morporkian clothes are kind of big flag to where this whole thing might be leading… We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, we’ve got the work of rumor and misinformation helping Rincewind along, and even Death has no clue where this is headed.
Asides and little thoughts:
- I do appreciate that it finally occurs to Rincewind that if he would just change his damn clothes people might stop chasing him. Took a while, but you know, running was probably using up a lot of his brain power. In fairness.
- The bit where Three Solid Frogs is painting on a plate, then has to change the whole thing because Rincewind runs by, is meant to be a sendup of the Willow Pattern Plate. The irony of this is that it’s an 18th century design created by English ceramic artists who were looking at works from China. So it would’ve been more accurate to find someone in Ankh-Morpork ripping off the image to slap on pottery. Dibbler could sell tons of them.
Pratchettisms:
Cohen came into people’s lives like a rogue planet into a peaceful solar system, and you felt yourself being dragged along simply because nothing like that would ever happen to you again.
A teacher to the core, Mr. Saveloy couldn’t help correcting them, even at swordpoint.
When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity.
The floors screamed under him, and behind him someone screamed Rincewind’s nickname, which was: ‘Don’t let him get away!”
He’d never essayed a sashay before, but he reckoned he was due a sashay for quick thinking.
A sufficiently complicated pictogram is worth a thousand words.
ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS, said Death, THE ONLY CERTAIN THING IS UNCERTAINTY. TRITE, I KNOW, BUT TRUE.
The soothsayer’s precognitive abilities, which were considerably more powerful than he believed, told him: this is not a good time to be clairvoyant.
Next week we finish the book!
I assumed that TwoFlower’s wife was executed by the government- leading him to rebellion. Perhaps he really was just a tourist in Ankh-Morpork, but realized that showing what other places were like could help others rebel.
@1 You’ll have to wait until next week to find out about his wife.
I think Rincewind’s default response to things is Runaway! Runaway! It seems to work more often than not.
All of a sudden, after all that maneuvering, things start happening. At least the stars aren’t going out.
We also see more of the deliberate mashing together of east Asian cultures; the masses of bureaucracy and the unmapped Forbidden City sound Chinese, while the sumo wrestlers and the ninja sound Japanese (to these Western eyes — which aren’t certain how many cultures had paper walls even in the important buildings).
I’m amused by Lord Hong having no idea what would happen to him (“‘Eave arf a brick at him!”) if he … walked … into Ankh Morpork in what he thinks notables wear; cultural misunderstandings are not unidirectional.
More Pratchettisms:
“There’s only thirty of you,” said Rincewind. “You’re not a storm! You’re a shower!” (But it still takes the revolutionaries quite a while to figure out how thoroughly they’ve been played.)
Six swords had become interlaced around his neck as though he’d taken part in a rather energetic folk dance. Pratchett claimed never to have waved a hanky in anger (or Morrised in any other way), but he might have ~Yorkshire longsword dancing in mind. (See also the pictures at the bottom of the article this is copied from for an alternate ending.) I’ve never seen it done that fast….
@3: Now we learn there are flavors to “Run away!”, or at least a preferred order.
I have a couple questions about the book so far:
How is the Horde able to speak Hunghungese? They seem to be able to speak it with at least intermediate fluency, at the level it would take many months if not years of dedicated study to learn. But they’re not exactly bookish sorts…
Is there anything special about the number 2,300,009? Or just a random large number?
Is there any speculation as to how a Lord McSweeney, presumably a foreigner, managed to get to his position?
Near the beginning of the book: “After six months on the island, in fact, there was only one thing Rincewind lacked. He’d never really thought about it before. Now he thought about it – or, more correctly, them – all the time.” What is this referencing? It doesn’t seem to be identified in the text.
@@@@@ 5 -The McSweeneys are a very old established family.
Rincewind lacks potatoes.
@5. The McSweeney’s are a running joke through the book, and likely also a reference to the various Scottish families of James Clavell’s Asian Saga which was well known at the time.
2,300,009 – as is shortly commented on by the enemy – is both worryingly large and oddly specific. If it was false, why the 9. If it isn’t … that’s 2.3 million ghosts. It has no other significance.
@1: Twoflower had no ulterior motive other than being a tourist. Judging from this book, he never actually realised that spreading word of Ankh-Morpork would foment rebellion on his home continent, and is completely astonished at what his book has led to.
@5: as Muswell points out, it’s potatoes. It comes up when he asks the Amazon leader “can I have them mashed?” (the joke being that he’s craving potatoes more than relations with beautiful, scantily-dressed Amazonian women), and then the first thing he does after being teleported to Ankh-Morpork is to rush out in the street trying to get a potato.
Potatoes being his favourite food first appears in this book, but it will crop up in future ones, though never to the same extent (presumably because he’s more easily able to get them at that point, and thus doesn’t need to obsess over them quite so much).
Rincewind’s attitude towards causes and revolutions is so true. As far as death versus causes, a few deaths doesn’t elevate lost causes and even in popular causes they tend to be a one day news item. For all the drama, the Buddhist monks who burned themselves to protest the Vietnam War didn’t have any affect.
His view of revolution rings true as well. Too many people want to help those people that they aren’t a part of and don’t really understand. And People’s Committees without the common people are a fraud. Rincewind would agree with Saveloy that reading and learning are the key to change.
The comment on Lord Hong – that he may be a rival of the other Lords and is recognized as a bastard but when the war comes he’s their bastard – is the basis for so many bad alliances.
Forget everything else, I want to learn about War’s daughter Clancy.
Minor notes
The Blue Willow Pattern actually originated in Chinese Export Porcelain but the English took it over.
@@.-@ Sumo is definitely Japanese, Chinese wrestling was a martial art, not an exhibition. Ditto ninjas. Chinese martial arts tend not to rely on weapons. It could be argued that Butterfly was a Chinese martial artist.
Pratchettisms
Guards were not eunuchs, of course, and people got around this by classifying them as furniture.
“I’ll always remember the taste of Mr. Dibbler’s sausages.” “People do.” “A once in a lifetime experience.” “Frequently.”
From the look of him he’d been beaten up, but this might just have been someone’s attempt to attract his attention.
“I’ve never been at large. I’ve always been at hunched.”
“How can you smell anything after eating those?” “You can’t,” said Mr. Saveloy happily.
“They’ve had a lifetime’s experience at not dying. They’ve become very good at it.”
“About how big a mountain? Skulls don’t pile up that well.”
“WITH HIM HERE, EVEN UNCERTAINTY IS UNCERTAIN. AND I’M NOT SURE EVEN ABOUT THAT.”
“Weird time for Death to show up”? I don’t think so. This book has far more on-page slaughter than most Discworld books. That’s generally something I don’t like about it. But I kinda *love* the scene where Saveloy and Six Beneficent Winds discuss the Horde in a room of lethal chaos.
Rincewind’s argument with the Cadre is interesting because neither of them are wrong and it’s not a simple matter of idealism vs. realism. It’s a clash of different struggles to survive, on individual and cultural levels. Rincewind will fight monsters to save the world, but only when he has nothing to lose and nowhere to run. He doesn’t believe in laying down one’s life ‘merely’ to fight a government, but he hasn’t spent a lifetime *trapped* in a place of conformity and fear where anyone can be killed or tortured at any time for breaking a rule — or at the whim of someone more powerful, such as an emperor who, as Twoflower says, is a scaled-up version of a child pulling wings off of flies. I don’t think he cares much about the frequency of causes losing momentum, contrary to Emmet’s thought, but he’s unhappy about being dragged into one.
The Cadre get more worrisome when Rincewind goads them into saying they have notions of improving life for peasant farmers who they know nothing about. It’s a clear allusion to the Great Leap Forward where forced implementation of disastrous new agricultural practices became a major contributing factor to the Great Chinese Famine. It’s also a little weird as the thing a small bunch of city kids to reach for when pressed about how their revolution could help other people.
We’re told that tax collectors aren’t eunuchs, because they need all of their ‘faculties’ to deal with resistance from peasants. I would’ve thought they might be *better* at the job without wossnames to get kicked.
Oh, I forgot that the “nightingale floor” mentioned in the last section was a thing. I thought it was one of those convoluted mixed mettyphors that crop up in these books.
“Life before death? People will get really excited when they hear about that.” On Roshar, they did. :-p #stormlightarchive
“I’ve often had this thought that fresh air was all too readily available, at far below the cost of production.” That’s the stuff of dystopias. It’s also the stuff of reality in places where comparatively-clean air (and/or water) is a luxury for people who can afford to not reside amid sources of concentrated pollution.
This book mostly continues better than its Agatean portion started, but takes a sharp turn for the offensive with its portrayal of sumo tsimo wrestlers as nonverbal humanoid beasts whose minds allegedly consist of two brain cells fixated on eating.
I always laugh at “You killed this and you stole that and you defeated the giant man-eating avocados of somewhere else”
Pratchettisms:
‘[The Horde] had a wiry look to them, rather like natural bonsai trees that had managed to flourish on a windswept cliff’
“The wrestlers are wrestless!”
‘[Lord Hong’s] gaze swept the kitchen. It was certainly the only housework he had ever done.’
‘Because Rincewind knew very well that when the four rather small and nasty Horsemen of Panic ride out, there’s a good job done by Misinformation, Rumor, and Gossip, but they are as nothing compared to the fourth Horseman, whose name is Denial.’
Looking ahead:
‘A wizard would sooner forgo his robe and trousers than go without his hat.’ Indeed on multiple occasions, there will be wizards wearing only their hats.
“When you die, no one will know because they’ll think you’re already dead.” Cohen will take that one to heart, in the near and more-distant futures.
Cohen tries to explain logically why seven people could defeat an army of seven hundred thousand (before Rincewind invokes the Million-to-One Chance). He doesn’t take this opportunity to explain that it’s a rule of the Hero’s Code, the narrative by which his kind live and die.
Night Watch always seemed to me to be a reprise of the theme that revolutions uselessly get people killed; change only happens at the top and doesn’t really change much. But the Mark Reads commenters have discussed the difference. And the rest of the series, particularly the parts involving Ankh-Morpork, portray social change by other means, a set of processes that occasionally involve deaths but are ultimately beneficial.
I found it interesting that the naming scheme of this book is like that of A Memory Called Empire – both have a number first followed by a noun. Though, of course, Pratchett was first. But it makes me wonder, was this a real naming convention somewhere in the world?
@10 The poking fun of the sumo/tsimo wrestlers might be a bit offensive but it seems to me that they are serve the same purpose as the elephants of Moving Pictures. Besides, as you point out, “the wrestlers are wrestless” is a funny turn of phrase. Also, to be fair, the rest of the world, East as well as West, views sumo as somewhat silly and it has never caught on outside of Japan.
@11 The concept of people being given numbers by an authoritarian state is a staple of SFF but other than a number at the end of a name (like popes) it doesn’t exist in Roundworld as far as I can find.
It’s also not regularly used in the Agatean Empire.
I suspect it’s less social commentary and more an excuse for the ‘One Big Mother’ joke.
@11, 12 – The book “Bridge of Birds” by Barry Hughart was published in 1984 and features Number Ten Ox as it’s protaganist. And it was certainly a trope of western popular media depictions of Chinese families to refer to “Number One Son/Daughter” and the like. Pterry may well have been riffing off this to enable the jokes.
There’s also the thing that literal translations of names can result in an over-literal reading of them which can sound reidiculous. Many names used in English have meanings which are not really relevant to their use as names, even before you include things used for names which are words with meanings in other languages but not in English.
@13 Regarding over translation of names I looked up the derivation and meaning of Terrence David John Pratchett. It’s People-Ruler, Beloved, Graced by God, Son of Brave Ruler (Germanic, Hebrew, Hebrew, Welsh plus Germanic).
I suspect our People-Ruler would have found the concept silly, if he ever thought about it. Although, curiously, Vimes does mean observed or noticed in French.
@11 A Memory Called Empire is likely riffing on Mixtec naming conventions, where the day of birth is (part of?) the personal name. The calendar cycle of 20 named days with 13 numbers yields 260 unique identifiers. Those living in larger communities presumably used nicknames, or added extra identifiers for significant life experiences – see
https://mesoamericanstudiesonline.blog/2019/09/15/what-would-your-mixtec-name-be/
Customs in an urbanized empire seem to have relaxed a bit to allow more arbitrary number-object combinations. This may however leave people shaking their heads at the astrological implications of less felicitous combinations – just what were the parents of ’88 Tungsten Carbide Drill’ thinking?
@11, 12, et seq.: Of course, the ancient Romans used to number their children, at least after the first few. Think Sextus, Septimus. Octavian, Decimus. I suppose that a direct translation into English of those names would be Six, Seven, etc.
I am no authority on Chinese or other Asian nomenclature, but it might be reasonable for a culture with a tradition of large families to put numbers into names. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could weigh in here?
@14 davep1 – my surname translates as “Son of the Most High”. Try living up to that.
@16 – Those names directly translate as “Sixth, Seventh, Eighth (though the name is actually “Octavius”; “Octavian” refers specifically to Augustus Caesar, who was born Gaius Octavius Thurinus and modified the Octavius part when he changed his name after being adopted by Gaius Julius Caesar, becoming Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus), Tenth”.
There’s probably only a brief period in Roman history when those names were actually used to number children; the names became popular within certain families and were given to sons regardless of the order of birth. An eldest son named Quintus (“Fifth”) or Sextus (“Sixth”) was entirely normal within some Roman families. Sextus Tarquinius (notable to history as the man who raped Lucretia), son of the last King of Rome, was probably not his father’s sixth son; the historian Livy describes him as the third son and Dionysius of Halicarnassus as the eldest son of three, and that’s going back to before the establishment of the Roman Republic (i.e. to the 6th century BCE).
Thus you get the same break between a name’s literal meaning and its usage that you get in many modern Western cultures.
@11 et seq: This gets mentioned in the Annotated Pratchett File:
Terry has this to say about the name ‘Twoflower’: “[…] there’s no joke in Twoflower. I just wanted a coherent way of making up ‘foreign’ names and I think I pinched the Mayan construction (Nine Turning Mirrors, Three Rabbits, etc.).”
@12: Even if the plot truly needed Rincewind to cause a stampede of huge people, he’s good enough at creating chaos that he might have also been able to do it without them being voiceless, mindless, greedy animals that have nothing in common with actual sumo wrestlers except size. “Considered a silly cultural thing” doesn’t equal inhuman, and neither does “fat.” As demonstrated in Maskerade, which is blessedly coming up next.
Japanese has names like 一次郎 (first son) or 三郎 (third son).
I do appreciate that it finally occurs to Rincewind that if he would just change his damn clothes people might stop chasing him.
Being a “wizzard” is pretty important to Rincewind, even if he’s terrible at it, and the outfit is a large part of his identity, so i give him a pass here. Plus all the running.