Unseen Academicals

her up by throwing gravel at her window. He wanted her to come and look at his father, described as ‘poorly’, and the day began. She had never needed to buy an alarm clock.

    Why did other people need so much sleep? It was a permanent puzzle for Nutt. It got boring by himself.
    Back in the castle in Uberwald there had always been someone around to talk to. Ladyship liked the night-time and wouldn’t go out in bright sunshine at all, so a lot of visitors came then. He had to stay out of sight, of course, but he knew all the passages in the walls and all the secret spy-holes. He saw the fine gentlemen, always in black, and the dwarfs with iron armour that gleamed like gold (later, down in his cellar that smelled of salt and thunderstorms, Igor showed him how it was made). There were trolls, too, looking a bit more polished than the ones he’d learned to run away from in the forests. He especially remembered the troll that shone like a jewel (Igor said his skin was made of living diamond). That alone would have been enough to glue him into Nutt’s memory, but there had been that moment, one day when the diamond troll was seated at the big table with other trolls and dwarfs, when the diamond eyes had looked up and had seen Nutt, looking through a tiny, hidden spy-hole at the other end of the room. Nutt was convinced of it. He’d jerked away from the hole so quickly that he’d banged his head on the wall opposite.
    He’d grown to know his way around all the cellars and workshops in Ladyship’s castle. Go anywhere you wish, talk to everyone. Ask any questions; you will be given answers. When you want to learn, you will be taught. Use the library. Open any book.
    Those had been good days. Everywhere he went, men stopped work to show him how to plane and carve and mould and fettle and smelt iron and make horseshoes–but not how to fit them, because any horse went mad when he entered the stables. One once kicked the boards out of the rear wall.
    That particular afternoon he went up to the library, where Miss Healstether found him a book on scent. He read it so fast that his eyes should have left trails on the paper. He certainly left a trail in the library: the twenty-two volumes of Brakefast’s Compendium of Odours were soon stacked on the long lectern, followed by Spout’s Trumpet of Equestrianism , and then, via a detour through the history section, Nutt plunged into the folklore section, with Miss Healstether pedalling after him on the mobile library steps.
    She watched him with a kind of gratified awe. He’d been barely able to read when he’d arrived, but the goblin boy had set out to improve his reading as a boxer trains for a fight. And he was fighting something, but she wasn’t sure in her own mind what it was and, of course, Ladyship never explained. He would sit all night under the lamp, book of the moment in front of him, dictionary and thesaurus on either side, wringing the meaning out of every word, 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