“Well, now,” said the troll, “seems to me that-” He spotted Casanunda.
“Oh-ho,” he said, “dwarf smuggling, eh?”
“Don't be ridiculous, man,” said Ridcully, “there's no such thing as dwarf smuggling.”
“Yeah? Then what's that you've got there?”
“I'm a giant,” said Casanunda.
“Giants are a lot bigger.”
“I've been ill.”
The troll looked perplexed. This was post-graduate thinking for a troll. But he was looking for trouble. He found it on the roof of the coach, where the Librarian had been sunbathing.
“What's in that sack up there?”
“That's not a sack. That's the Librarian.”
The troll prodded the large mass of red hair.
“Ook. . .”
“What? A monkey?”
“Oook?”
Several minutes later, the travellers leaned on the parapet, looking down reflectively at the river far below.
“Happen often, does it?” said Casanunda.
“Not so much these days,” said Ridcully. “It's like - what's that word, Stibbons? About breedin' and passin' on stuff to yer kids?”
“Evolution,” said Ponder. The ripples were still sloshing against the banks.
“Right. Like, my father had a waistcoat with embroidered peacocks on it, and he left it to me, and now I've got it. They call it hereditarery-”
“No, that's not-” Ponder began, with no hope whatsoever that Ridcully would listen.
“-so anyway, most people left back home know the difference between apes and monkeys now,” said Ridcully. “Evolution, that is. It's hard to breed when you've got a headache from being bounced up and down on the pavement.”
The ripples had stopped now.
“Do you think trolls can swim?” said Casanunda.
“No. They just sink and walk ashore,” said Ridcully He turned, and leaned back on his elbows. “This really takes me back, you know. The old Lancre River. There's trout down there that'd take your arm off.”
“Not just trout,” said Ponder, watching a helmet emerge from the water.
“And limpid pools further up,” said Ridcully. “Full of, of, of . . . limpids, stuff like that. And you can bathe naked and no one'd see. And water meadows full of . . . water, don'tyerknow, and flowers and stuff.” He sighed. “You know, it was on this very bridge that she told me she-”
“He's got out of the river,” said Ponder. But the troll wasn't moving very fast, because the Librarian was nonchalantly levering one of the big stones out of the parapet.
“On this very bridge I asked-”
“That's a big club he's got,” said Casanunda.
“This bridge, I may say, was where I nearly-”