Hogfather (15 page)

The oh god stopped trying to glare at the raven. “I don’t know, where was
there
exactly?”

Susan looked back at where the castle had been. It was entirely gone.

“There was a very important building there a moment ago,” she said.

The oh god nodded carefully.

“I often see things that weren’t there a moment ago,” he said. “And they often aren’t there a moment later. Which is a blessing in most cases, let me tell you. So I don’t usually take a lot of notice.”

He folded up and landed in the snow again.

There’s just snow now, Susan thought. Nothing but snow and the wind. There’s not even a ruin.

The certainty stole over her again that the Hogfather’s castle wasn’t
simply
not there any more. No…it had never been there. There was no ruin, no trace.

It had been an odd enough place. It was where the Hogfather lived, according to the legends. Which was odd, when you thought about it. It
didn’t
look like the kind of place a cheery old toy maker would live in.

The wind soughed in the trees behind them. Snow slid off branches. Somewhere in the dark there was a flurry of hooves.

A spidery little figure leapt off a snowdrift and landed on the oh god’s head. It turned a beady eye up toward Susan.

“All right by you, is it?” said the imp, producing its huge hammer. “Some of us have a job to do, you know, even if we are of a metaphorical, nay, folkloric persuasion.”

“Oh, go
away
.”

“If you think
I’m
bad, wait until you see the little pink elephants,” said the imp.

“I don’t believe you.”

“They come out of his ears and fly around his head making tweeting noises.”

“Ah,” said the raven, sagely. “That sounds more like robins. I wouldn’t put anything past
them
.”

The oh god grunted.

Susan suddenly felt that she didn’t want to leave him. He was human. Well, human shaped. Well, at least he had two arms and legs. He’d freeze to death here. Of course, gods, or even oh gods, probably couldn’t, but humans didn’t think like that. You couldn’t just
leave
someone. She prided herself on this bit of normal thinking.

Besides, he might have some answers, if she could make him stay awake enough to understand the questions.

From the edge of the frozen forest, animal eyes watched them go.

Mr. Crumley sat on the damp stairs and sobbed. He couldn’t get any nearer to the toy department. Every time he tried he got lifted off his feet by the mob and dumped at the edge of the crowd by the current of people.

Someone said, “Top of the evenin’, squire,” and he looked up blearily at the small yet irregularly formed figure that had addressed him thusly.

“Are you one of the pixies?” he said, after mentally exhausting all the other possibilities.

“No, sir. I am not in fact a pixie, sir, I am in fact Corporal Nobbs of the Watch. And this is Constable Visit, sir.” The creature looked at a piece of paper in its paw. “You Mr. Crummy?”

“Crumley!”

“Yeah, right. You sent a runner to the Watch House and we have hereby responded with commendable speed, sir,” said Corporal Nobbs. “Despite it being Hogswatchnight and there being a lot of strange things happening and most importantly it being the occasion of our Hogswatchly piss-up, sir. But this is all right because Washpot, that’s Constable Visit here, he doesn’t drink, sir, it being against his religion, and although I
do
drink, sir, I volunteered to come because it is my civic duty, sir.” Nobby tore off a salute, or what he liked to believe was a salute. He did
not
add, “And turning out for a rich bugger such as your good self is bound to put the officer concerned in the way of a seasonal bottle or two or some other tangible evidence of gratitude,” because his entire stance said it for him. Even Nobby’s ears could look suggestive.

Unfortunately, Mr. Crumley wasn’t in the right receptive frame of mind. He stood up and waved a shaking finger toward the top of the stairs.

“I want you to go up there,” he said, “and arrest him!”

“Arrest who, sir?” said Corporal Nobbs.

“The Hogfather!”

“What for, sir?”

“Because he’s sitting up there as bold as brass in his Grotto, giving away presents!”

Corporal Nobbs thought about this.

“You haven’t been having a festive drink, have you, sir?” he said hopefully.

“I do not drink!”

“Very wise, sir,” said Constable Visit. “Alcohol is the tarnish of the soul. Ossory, Book Two, Verse Twenty-four.”

“Not quite up to speed here, sir,” said Corporal Nobbs, looking perplexed. “I thought the Hogfather is
s’posed
to give away stuff, isn’t he?”

This time Mr. Crumley had to stop and think. Up until now he hadn’t quite sorted things out in his head, other than recognizing their essential wrongness.

“This one is an Impostor!” he declared. “Yes, that’s right! He smashed his way into here!”

“Y’know, I always thought that,” said Nobby. “I thought, every year, the Hogfather spends a fortnight sitting in a wooden grotto in a shop in Ankh-Morpork? At his busy time, too? Hah! Not likely! Probably just some old man in a beard, I thought.”

“I meant…he’s not the Hogfather we usually have,” said Crumley, struggling for firmer ground. “He just barged in here!”

“Oh, a
different
impostor? Not the real impostor at all?”

“Well…yes…no…”

“And started giving stuff away?” said Corporal Nobbs.

“That’s what I said! That’s got to be a Crime, hasn’t it?”

Corporal Nobbs rubbed his nose.

“Well,
nearly
,” he conceded, not wishing to totally relinquish the chance of any festive remuneration. Realization dawned. “He’s giving away
your
stuff, sir?”

“No! No, he brought it in with him!”

“Ah? Giving away
your
stuff, now, if he was doing that, yes, I could see the problem. That’s a sure sign of crime, stuff going missing. Stuff turning up, weerlll, that’s a tricky one. Unless it’s stuff like arms and legs, o’ course. We’d be on safer ground if he was nicking stuff, sir, to tell you the truth.”

“This is a
shop
,” said Mr. Crumley, finally getting to the root of the problem. “We do
not
give Merchandise
away
. How can we expect people to buy things if some Person is
giving
them away? Now please go and get him out of here.”

“Arrest the Hogfather, style of thing?”

“Yes!”

“On Hogswatchnight?”

“Yes!”

“In your shop?”

“
Yes
!”

“In front of all those kiddies?”

“Y—” Mr. Crumley hesitated. To his horror, he realized that Corporal Nobbs, against all expectation, had a point. “You think that will look bad?” he said.

“Hard to see how it could look good, sir.”

“Could you not do it surreptitiously?” he said.

“Ah, well, surreptition, yes, we could give that a try,” said Corporal Nobbs. The sentence hung in the air with its hand out.

“You won’t find me ungrateful,” said Mr. Crumley, at last.

“Just you leave it to us,” said Corporal Nobbs, magnanimous in victory. “You just nip down to your office and treat yourself to a nice cup of tea and we’ll sort this out in no time. You’ll be ever so grateful.”

Crumley gave him a look of a man in the grip of serious doubt, but staggered away nonetheless. Corporal Nobbs rubbed his hands together.

“You don’t have Hogswatch back where you come from, do you, Washpot?” he said, as they climbed the stairs to the first floor. “Look at this carpet, you’d think a pig’d pissed on it…”

“We call it the Fast of St. Ossory,” said Visit, who was from Omnia. “But it is not an occasion for superstition and crass commercialism. We simply get together in family groups for a prayer meeting and a fast.”

“What, turkey and chicken and that?”

“A
fast
, Corporal Nobbs. We don’t eat
anything
.”

“Oh, right. Well, each to his own, I s’pose. And at least you don’t have to get up early in the morning and find that the nothing you’ve got is too big to fit in the oven. No presents neither?”

They stood aside hurriedly as two children scuttled down the stairs carrying a large toy boat between them.

“It is sometimes appropriate to exchange new religious pamphlets, and of course there are usually copies of the
Book of Ossory
for the children,” said Constable Visit. “Sometimes with
illustrations
,” he added, in the guarded way of a man hinting at licentious pleasures.

A small girl went past carrying a teddy bear larger than herself. It was pink.

“They always gives
me
bath salts,” complained Nobby. “And bath soap and bubble bath and herbal bath lumps and tons of bath stuff and I can’t think why, ’cos it’s not as if I hardly ever
has
a bath. You’d think they’d take the hint, wouldn’t you?”

“Abominable, I call it,” said Constable Visit.

The first floor was a mob.

“Huh, look at them. Mr. Hogfather never brought
me
anything when I was a kid,” said Corporal Nobbs, eyeing the children gloomily. “I used to hang up my stocking every Hogswatch, regular. All that ever happened was my dad was sick in it once.” He removed his helmet.

Nobby was not by any measure a hero, but there was the sudden gleam in his eye of someone who’d seen altogether too many empty stockings plus one rather full and dripping one. A scab had been knocked off some wound in the corrugated little organ of his soul.

“I’m going in,” he said.

In between the University’s Great Hall and its main door is a rather smaller circular hall or vestibule known as Archchancellor Bowell’s Remembrance, although no one now knows why, or why an extant bequest pays for one small currant bun and one copper penny to be placed on a high stone shelf on one wall every second Wednesday.
*
Ridcully stood in the middle of the floor, looking upward.

“Tell me, Senior Wrangler, we never invited any
women
to the Hogswatchnight Feast, did we?”

“Of course not, Archchancellor,” said the Senior Wrangler. He looked up in the dust-covered rafters, wondering what had caught Ridcully’s eye. “Good heavens, no. They’d spoil everything. I’ve always said so.”

“And all the maids have got the evening off until midnight?”

“A very generous custom, I’ve always said,” said the Senior Wrangler, feeling his neck crick.

“So why, every year, do we hang a damn great bunch of mistletoe up there?”

The Senior Wrangler turned in a circle, still staring upward.

“Well, er…it’s…well, it’s…it’s symbolic, Archchancellor.”

“Ah?”

The Senior Wrangler felt that something more was expected. He groped around in the dusty attics of his education.

“Of…the leaves, d’y’see…they’re symbolic of…of green, d’y’see, whereas the berries, in fact, yes, the berries symbolize…symbolize white. Yes. White and green. Very…symbolic.”

He waited. He was not, unfortunately, disappointed.

“What of?”

The Senior Wrangler coughed.

“I’m not sure there
has
to
be
an
of
,” he said.

“Ah? So,” said the Archchancellor, thoughtfully, “it could be said that the white and green symbolize a small parasitic plant?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the Senior Wrangler.

“So mistletoe, in fact, symbolizes mistletoe?”

“Exactly, Archchancellor,” said the Senior Wrangler, who was now just hanging on.

“Funny thing, that,” said Ridcully, in the same thoughtful tone of voice. “That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?”

“It could be both,” said the Senior Wrangler desperately.

“And
that
comment,” said Ridcully, “is either very perceptive, or very trite.”

“It might be bo—”

“Don’t push it, Senior Wrangler.”

There was a hammering on the outer door.

“Ah, that’ll be the wassailers,” said the Senior Wrangler, happy for the distraction. “They call on us first every year. I personally have always liked ‘The Lilywhite Boys,’ you know.”

The Archchancellor glanced up at the mistletoe, gave the beaming man a sharp look, and opened the little hatch in the door.

“Well, now, wassailing you fellows—” he began. “Oh. Well, I must say you might’ve picked a better time…”

A hooded figure stepped through the wood of the door, carrying a limp bundle over its shoulder.

The Senior Wrangler stepped backward quickly.

“Oh…no, not
tonight
…”

And then he noticed that what he had taken for a robe had lace around the bottom, and the hood, while quite definitely a hood, was nevertheless rather more stylish than the one he had first mistaken it for.

“Putting down or taking away?” said Ridcully.

Susan pushed back her hood.

“I need your help, Mr. Ridcully,” she said.

“You’re…aren’t you Death’s granddaughter?” said Ridcully. “Didn’t I meet you a few—”

“Yes,” sighed Susan.

“And…are you helping out?” said Ridcully. His waggling eyebrows indicated the slumbering figure over her shoulder.

“I need you to wake him up,” said Susan.

“Some sort of miracle, you mean?” said the Senior Wrangler, who was a little behind.

“He’s not dead,” said Susan. “He’s just resting.”

“That’s what they all say,” the Senior Wrangler quavered.

Ridcully, who was somewhat more practical, lifted the oh god’s head. There was a groan.

“Looks a bit under the weather,” he said.

“He’s the God of Hangovers,” said Susan. “The
Oh
God of Hangovers.”

“Really?” said Ridcully. “Never had one of those myself. Funny thing, I can drink all night and feel as fresh as a daisy in the morning.”

The oh god’s eyes opened. Then he soared toward Ridcully and started beating him on the chest with both fists.