The Last Continent

of weight lately,” said Dongo, polishing a glass.
    Rincewind looked down at his legs. “Whose legsare dese?”
    “You okay, mifter?”
    “Prob’ly been bitten by so’thing,” said Rincewind. A sudden urgent need gripped him.
    “It’f out the back,” said Dongo.
    “Out back in the outback,” said Rincewind, staggering forward. “Hahahaha—”
    He walked into an iron pillar, which picked him up in a fist and held him at arm’s length. He looked along the arm to a large angry face and an expression that said a lot of beer was looking for a fight and the rest of the body was happy to go along with it.
    Rincewind was muzzily aware that in his case a lot of beer wanted to run away. And at a time like this, it’s always the beer talking.
    “I bin lisnin ’ to you. Where’re you from, mister?” said the giant’s beer.
    “Ankh-M’pork…” At a time like this, why lie?
    The bar went quiet.
    “An’ you’re gonna come here and make a lot of cracks about us all drinkin’ beer and fightin’ and talkin’ funny, right?”
    Some of Rincewind’s beer said, “No worries.”
    His captor pulled him so they were face to face. Rincewind had never seen such a huge nose.
    “An’ I expect you don’t even know that we happen to produce some partic’ly fine wines, our Chardonnays bein’ ’specially worthy of attention and compet’tively priced, not to mention the rich, firmly structur’d Rusted Dunny Valley Semillons, which are a tangily refreshin’ discovery for the connesewer… yew bastard ?”
    “Jolly good, I’ll have a pint of Chardonnay, please.”
    “You takin’ the piss?”
    “No, I’d like to leave it here—”
    “How about you putting my mate down?” said a voice.
    Mad was in the doorway. There was a general scuffle to get out of the way.
    “Oh, you looking for a fight too, stubby?” Rincewind was dropped as the huge creature turned to face the dwarf, fists clenching.
    “I don’t look for them. I just walk into pubs and there they are,” said Mad, pulling out a knife. “Now, you going to leave him alone, Wally?”
    “You call that a knife?” The giant unsheathed one that’d be called a sword if it had been held in a normal-sized hand. “ This is what I call a knife!”
    Mad looked at it. Then he reached his hand around behind his back, and it came back holding something.
    “Really? No worries. This ,” he said, “is what I call a crossbow.”

    “It’s a log,” said Ridcully, inspecting the boat-building committee’s work to date.
    “Rather more than a log—” the Dean began.
    “Oh, you’ve made a mast and tied the Bursar’s bathrobe to it, I can see that. It’s a log, Dean. There’s roots on one end and bits of branch at the other. You haven’t even hollowed it out. It’s a log.”
    “It took us all hours ,” said the Senior Wrangler.
    “And it does float,” the Dean pointed out.
    “I think the term is more like wallows,” said Ridcully. “And we’d all get on it, would we?”
    “This is the one-man version,” said the Dean. “We thought we’d test it out and then try it with a lot of them together…”
    “Like a raft, you mean?”
    “I suppose so,” said the Dean, with considerable reluctance. He would have preferred a more dynamic name for it. “Obviously these things take time.”
    The Archchancellor nodded. He was impressed, in a strange way. The wizards had succeeded in recapitulating, in a mere day, a technological development that had probably taken mankind several hundred years. They might be up to coracles by Tuesday.
    “Which of you is going to test it?” he said.
    “We thought perhaps the Bursar could assist at this point in the development program.”
    “Volunteered, has he?”
    “We’re sure he will.”
    In fact the Bursar was some distance away, wandering aimlessly but happily through the beetle-filled jungle.
    The Bursar was, as he would probably be the first to admit, not the most mentally stable of people. He would probably be the first to admit that he was a tea-strainer.
    But he was, as it were, only insane on the outside. He’d never been very interested in magic as a boy, but he had been good at numbers, and even somewhere like Unseen University needed someone who could add up. And he had indeed survived many otherwise exciting years by locking himself in a room somewhere and conscientiously adding up, while some very serious division and subtraction was going on outside.
    Those were still the days when magical