Moving Pictures (Discworld 10)

He'd been strictly brought up and he could dimly remember the lecture he'd been given by his father when he was a young troll. If you saw a girl you liked, you didn't just rush at her. There were proper ways to go about things.

He'd gone down to the beach and found a rock. But not any old rock. He'd searched carefully, and found a large sea-smoothed one with veins of pink and white quartz. Girls liked that sort of thing. Now he waited, shyly, for her to finish work.

He tried to think of what he would say. No-one had ever told him what to say. It wasn't as if he was a smart troll like Rock or Morry, who had a way with words. Basically, he'd never needed much of what you might call a vocabulary. He kicked despondently at the sand. What chance did he have with a smart lady like her?

There was a thump of heavy feet, and the door opened. The object of desire stepped out into the night and took a deep breath, which had the same effect on Detritus as an ice cube down the neck. He gave his rock a panicky look. It didn't seem anything like big enough now, when you saw the size of her. But maybe it was what you did with it that mattered.

Well, this was it. They said you never forgot your first time . . .

He wound up his arm with the rock in it and hit her squarely between the eyes. That's when it all started to go wrong.

Tradition said that the girl, when she was able to focus again, and if the rock was of an acceptable standard, should immediately be amenable to whatever the troll suggested, i.e., a candle-lit human for two, although of course that sort of thing wasn't done any more now, at least if there was any chance of being caught.

She shouldn't narrow her eyes and catch him a ding across the ear that made his eyeballs rattle.

'You stupid troll!' she shouted, as Detritus staggered around in a circle. 'What you do that for? You think I unsophisticated girl just off mountain? Why you not do it right?'

'But, but,' Detritus began, in terror at her rage, 'I not able to ask father permission to hit you, not know where he living-'

Ruby drew herself up haughtily.

'All that old-fashioned stuff very uncultured now,' she sniffed. 'It's not the modern way. I not interested in any troll', she added, 'that not up-to-date. A rock on the head may be quite sentimental,' she went on, the certainty draining out of her voice as she surveyed the sentence ahead of her, 'but diamonds are a girl's best friend.' She hesitated. That didn't sound right, even to her.

It certainly puzzled Detritus.

'What? You want I should knock my teeth out?' he said.

'Well, all right, not diamonds,' Ruby conceded. 'But there proper modern ways now. You got to court a girl.'

Detritus brightened. 'Ah, but I-' he began.

'That's court, not caught,' said Ruby wearily. 'You got to, to, to-' She paused.

She wasn't all that sure what you had to do. But Ruby had spent some weeks in Holy Wood, and if Holy Wood did anything, it changed things; in Holy Wood she'd plugged into a vast cross-species female freemasonry she hadn't suspected existed, and she was learning fast. She'd talked at length to sympathetic human girls. And dwarfs. Even dwarfs had better courtship rituals, for gods' sake.[16] And what humans got up to was amazing.

Whereas all a female troll had to look forward to was a quick thump on the head and the rest of her life subduing and cooking anything the male dragged back to the cave.

Well, there were going to be changes. Next time Ruby went home the troll mountains were going to receive their biggest shake-up since the last continental collision. In the meantime, she was going to start with her own life.

She waved a massive hand in a vague way.

'You got to, to sing outside a girl's window,' she said, 'and, and you got to give her oograah.'

'Oograah?'

'Yeah. Pretty oograah.'[17]

Detritus scratched his head.

'Why?' he said.

Ruby looked panicky for a moment. She also couldn't for the life of her imagine why the handing over of inedible vegetation was so important, but she wasn't about to admit it.

'Fancy you not knowing that,' she said scathingly.

The sarcasm was lost on Detritus. Most things were.

'Right,' he said. 'I not so uncultured as you think,' he added. 'I bang up to date. You wait and see.'