Reaper Man

by Terry Pratchett

  WHY?

  “Well, someone’s got to look after the food.”

  I MEANT WHY DON’T YOU DANCE?

  “’Cos I’m old, that’s why.”

  YOU ARE AS OLD AS YOU THINK YOU ARE.

  “Huh! Yeah? Really? That’s the kind of stupid thing people always say. They always say, My word, you’re looking well. They say, There’s life in the old dog yet. Many a good tune played on an old fiddle. That kind of stuff. It’s all stupid. As if being old was some kind of thing you should be glad about! As if being philosophical about it will earn you marks! My head knows how to think young, but my knees aren’t that good at it. Or my back. Or my teeth. Try telling my knees they’re as old as they think they are and see what good it does you. Or them.”

  IT MAY BE WORTH A TRY.

  More figures moved in front of the firelight. Death could see striped poles strung with bunting. “The lads usually bring a couple of barn doors down here and nail’em together for a proper floor,” observed Miss Flitworth. “Then everyone can join in.”

  FOLK DANCING? said Death, wearily.

  “No. We have some pride, you know.”

  SORRY.

  “Hey, it’s Bill Door, isn’t it?” said a figure looming out of the dusk.

  “It’s good old Bill!”

  “Hey, Bill!”

  Death looked at a circle of guileless faces.

  “HALLO, MY FRIENDS.

  “We heard you’d gone away,” said Duke Bottomley. He glanced at Miss Flitworth, as Death helped her down from the horse. His voice faltered a bit as he tried to analyze the situation.

  “You’re looking very…sparkly…tonight, Miss Flitworth,” he finished, gallantly.

  The air smelled of warm, damp grass. An amateur orchestra was still setting up under an awning.

  There were trestle tables covered with the kind of food that’s normally associated with the word “repast”—pork pies like varnished military fortifications, vats of demonical pickled onions, jacket potatoes wallowing in a cholesterol ocean of melted butter. Some of the local elders had already established themselves on the benches provided, and were chewing stoically if toothlessly through the food with the air of people determined to sit there all night, if necessary.

  “Nice to see the old people enjoying themselves,” said Miss Flitworth.

  Death looked at the eaters. Most of them were younger than Miss Flitworth.

  There was a giggle from somewhere in the scented darkness beyond the firelight.

  “And the young people” Miss Flitworth added, evenly. “We used to have a saying about this time of year. Let’s see…something like ‘Corn be ripe, nuts be brown, petticoats up…’ something.” She sighed. “Don’t time fly, eh?”

  YES.

  “You know, Bill Door, maybe you were right about the power of positive thinking. I feel a lot better tonight.”

  YES?

  Miss Flitworth looked speculatively at the dance floor. “I used to be a great dancer when I was a gel. I could dance anyone off their feet. I could dance down the moon. I could dance the sun up.”

  She reached up and removed the bands that held her hair in its tight bun, and shook it out in a waterfall of white.

  “I take it you do dance, Mr. Bill Door?”

  FAMED FOR IT, MISS FLITWORTH.

  Under the band’s awning, the lead fiddler nodded to his fellow musicians, stuck his fiddle under his chin, and pounded on the boards with his foot—

  “Hwun! Htwo! Hwun htwo three four…”

  Picture a landscape, with the orange light of a crescent moon drifting across it. And, down below, a circle of firelight in the night.

  There were the old favorites—the square dances, the reels, the whirling, intricate measures which, if the dancers had carried lights, would have traced out topological complexities beyond the reach of ordinary physics, and the sort of dances that lead perfectly sane people to shout out things like “Do-si-do!” and “Och-aye!” without feeling massively ashamed for quite a long time.

  When the casualties were cleared away the survivors went on to polka, mazurka, fox-trot, turkey-trot and trot a variety of other birds and beasts, and then to those dances where people form an arch and other people dance down it, which are incidentally generally based on folk memories of executions, and other dances where people form a circle, which are generally based on folk memories of plagues.

  Through it all two figures whirled as though there was no tomorrow.

  The lead fiddler was dimly aware that, when he paused for breath, a spinning figure tap-danced a storm out of the mêlée and a voice by his ear said:

  YOU WILL CONTINUE, I PROMISE YOU.

  When he flagged a second time a diamond as big as his fist landed on the boards in front of him. A smaller figure sashayed out of the dancers and said:

  “If you boys don’t go on playing, William Spigot, I will personally make sure your life becomes absolutely foul.”

  And it returned to the press of bodies.

  The fiddler looked down at the diamond. It could have ransomed any five kings the world would care to name. He kicked it hurriedly behind him.

  “More power to your elbow, eh?” said the drummer, grinning.

  “Shut up and play!”

  He was aware that tunes were turning up at the ends of his fingers that his brain had never known. The drummer and the piper felt it too. Music was pouring in from somewhere. They weren’t playing it. It was playing them.

  IT IS TIME FOR A NEW DANCE TO BEGIN. “Duurrrump-da-dum-dum,” hummed the fiddler, the sweat running off his chin as he was caught up in a different tune.

  The dancers milled around uncertainly, unsure about the steps. But one pair moved purposefully through them at a predatory crouch, arms clasped ahead of them like the bowsprit of a killer galleon. At the end of the floor they turned in a flurry of limbs that appeared to defy normal anatomy and began the angular advance back through the crowd.

  “What’s this one called?”

  TANGO.

  “Can you get put in prison for it?”

  I DON’T BELIEVE SO.

  “Amazing.”

  The music changed.

  “I know this one! It’s the Quirmish bullfight dance! Oh-lay!”

  “WITH MILK”?

  A high-speed fusillade of hollow snapping noises suddenly kept time with the music.

  “Who’s playing the maracas?”

  Death grinned.

  MARACAS? I DON’T NEED…MARACAS.

  And then it was now.

  The moon was a ghost of itself on one horizon. On the other there was already the distant glow of the advancing day.

  They left the dance floor.

  Whatever had been propelling the band through the hours of the night drained slowly away. They looked at one another. Spigot the fiddler glanced down at the jewel. It was still there.

  The drummer tried to massage some life back into his wrists.

  Spigot stared helplessly at the exhausted dancers.

  “Well, then…” he said, and raised the fiddle one more time.

  Miss Flitworth and her companion listened from the mists that were threading around the field in the dawn light.

  Death recognized the slow, insistent beat. It made him think of wooden figures, whirling through Time until the spring unwound.

  I DON’T KNOW THAT ONE.

  “It’s the last waltz.

  I SUSPECT THERE’S NO SUCH THING.

  “You know,” said Miss Flitworth, “I’ve been wondering all evening how it’s going to happen. How you’re going to do it. I mean, people have to die of something, don’t they? I thought maybe it was going to be of exhaustion, but I’ve never felt better. I’ve had the time of my life and I’m not even out of breath. In fact it’s been a real tonic, Bill Door. And I—”

  She stopped.

  “I’m not breathing, am I.” It wasn’t a question. She held a hand in front of her face and huffed on it.

  NO.


  “I see. I’ve never enjoyed myself so much in all my life…ha! So…when—?”

  YOU KNOW WHEN YOU SAID THAT SEEING ME GAVE YOU QUITE A START?

  “Yes?”

  IT GAVE YOU QUITE A STOP.

  Miss Flitworth didn’t appear to hear him. She kept turning her hand backward and forward, as if she’d never seen it before.

  “I see you made a few changes, Bill Door,” she said.

  NO. IT IS LIFE THAT MAKES MANY CHANGES.

  “I mean that I appear to be younger.”

  THAT’S WHAT I MEANT ALSO.

  He snapped his fingers. Binky stopped his grazing by the hedge and trotted over.

  “You know,” said Miss Flitworth, “I’ve often thought…I often thought that everyone has their, you know, natural age. You see children of ten who act as though they’re thirty-five. Some people are born middle-aged, even. It’d be nice to think I’ve been…” she looked down at herself, “oh, let’s say eighteen…all my life. Inside.”

  Death said nothing. He helped her up onto the horse.

  “When I see what life does to people, you know, you don’t seem so bad,” she said nervously.

  Death made a clicking noise with his teeth. Binky walked forward.

  “You’ve never met Life, have you?”

  I CAN SAY IN ALL HONESTY THAT I HAVE NOT.

  “Probably some great white crackling thing. Like an electric storm in trousers,” said Miss Flitworth.

  I THINK NOT.

  Binky rose up into the morning sky.

  “Anyway…death to all tyrants” said Miss Flitworth.

  YES.

  “Where are we going?”

  Binky was galloping, but the landscape did not move.

  “That’s a pretty good horse you’ve got there,” said Miss Flitworth, her voice shaking.

  YES.

  “But what is he doing?”

  GETTING UP SPEED.

  “But we’re not going anywhere—”

  They vanished.

  They reappeared.

  The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren’t old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow.

  The horse landed on a snowbank that should not, by rights, have been able to support it.

  Death dismounted and helped Miss Flitworth down.

  They walked over the snow to a frozen muddy track that hugged the mountain side.

  “Why are we here?” said the spirit of Miss Flitworth.

  I DO NOT SPECULATE ON COSMIC MATTERS.

  “I mean here on this mountain. Here on this geography,” said Miss Flitworth patiently.

  THIS IS NOT GEOGRAPHY.

  “What is it, then?”

  HISTORY.

  They rounded a bend in the track. There was a pony there, eating a bush, with a pack on its back. The track ended in a wall of suspiciously clean snow.

  Death removed a lifetimer from the recesses of his robe.

  NOW, he said, and stepped into the snow.

  She watched it for a moment, wondering if she could have done that too. Solidity was an awfully hard habit to give up.

  And then she didn’t have to.

  Someone came out.

  Death adjusted Binky’s bridle, and mounted up. He paused for a moment to watch the two figures by the avalanche. They had faded almost to invisibility, their voices no more than textured air.

  “All he said was ‘WHEREVER YOU GO, YOU GO TOGETHER.’ I said where? He said he didn’t know. What’s happened?”

  “Rufus—you’re going to find this very hard to believe, my love—”

  “And who was that masked man?”

  They both looked around.

  There was no one there.

  In the village in the Ramtops where they understand what the Morris dance is all about, they dance it just once, at dawn, on the first day of spring. They don’t dance it after that, all through the summer. After all, what would be the point? What use would it be?

  But on a certain day when the nights are drawing in, the dancers leave work early and take, from attics and cupboards, the other costume, the black one, and the other bells. And they go by separate ways to a valley among the leafless trees. They don’t speak. There is no music. It’s very hard to imagine what kind there could be.

  The bells don’t ring. They’re made of octiron, a magic metal. But they’re not, precisely, silent bells. Silence is merely the absence of noise. They make the opposite of noise, a sort of heavily textured silence.

  And in the cold afternoon, as the light drains from the sky, among the frosty leaves and in the damp air, they dance the other Morris. Because of the balance of things.

  You’ve got to dance both, they say. Otherwise you can’t dance either.

  Windle Poons wandered across the Brass Bridge. It was the time in Ankh-Morpork’s day when the night people were going to bed and the day people were waking up. For once, there weren’t many of either around.

  Windle had felt moved to be here, at this place, on this night, now. It wasn’t exactly the feeling he’d had when he knew he was going to die. It was more the feeling that a cogwheel gets inside a clock—things turn, the spring unwinds, and this is where you’ve got to be…

  He stopped, and leaned over. The dark water, or at least very runny mud, sucked at the stone supports. There was an old legend…what was it, now? If you threw a coin into the Ankh from the Brass Bridge you’d be sure to return? Or was it if you just threw up into the Ankh? Probably the former. Most of the citizens, if they dropped a coin into the river, would be sure to come back if only to look for the coin.

  A figure loomed out of the mist. He tensed.

  “Morning, Mr. Poons.”

  Windle let himself relax.

  “Oh. Sergeant Colon? I thought you were someone else.”

  “Just me, your lordship,” said the watchman cheerfully. “Turning up like a bad copper.”

  “I see the bridge has got through another night without being stolen, sergeant. Well done.”

  “You can’t be too careful, I always say.”

  “I’m sure we citizens can sleep safely in one another’s beds knowing that no one can make off with a five-thousand-ton bridge overnight,” said Windle.

  Unlike Modo the dwarf, Sergeant Colon did know the meaning of the word “irony.” He thought it meant “sort of like iron.” He gave Windle a respectful grin.

  “You have to think quick to keep ahead of today’s international criminal, Mr. Poons,” he said.

  “Good man. Er. You haven’t, er, seen anyone else around, have you?”

  “Dead quiet tonight,” said the sergeant. He remembered himself and added, “No offense meant.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll be moving along, then,” said the sergeant.

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “Are you all right, Mr. Poons?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “Not going to throw yourself in the river again?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Well. Good night, then.” He hesitated. “Forget my own head next,” he said. “Chap over there asked me to give this to you.” He held out a grubby envelope.

  Windle peered into the mists.

  “What chap?”

  “That ch—oh, he’s gone. Tall chap. Bit odd-looking.”

  Windle unfolded the scrap of paper, on which was written: OOoooEeeeOooEeeeOOOeee.

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Bad news?” said the sergeant.

  “That depends,” said Windle, “on your point of view.”

  “Oh. Right. Fine. Well…good night, then.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Sergeant Colon hesitated for a moment, and then shrugged and strolled on.

  As
he wandered away, the shadow behind him moved and grinned.

  WINDLE POONS?

  Windle didn’t look around.

  “Yes?”

  Out of the corner of his eye Windle saw a pair of bony arms rest themselves on the parapet. There was the faint sound of a figure trying to make itself comfortable, and then a restful silence.

  “Ah,” said Windle. “I suppose you’ll want to be getting along?”

  NO RUSH.

  “I thought you were always so punctual.”

  IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES, A FEW MINUTES MORE WILL NOT MAKE A LOT OF DIFFERENCE.

  Windle nodded. They stood side by side in silence, while around them was the muted roar of the city.

  “You know,” said Windle, “it’s a wonderful afterlife. Where were you?”

  I WAS BUSY.

  Windle wasn’t really listening. “I’ve met people I never even knew existed. I’ve done all sorts of things. I’ve really got to know who Windle Poons is.”

  WHO IS HE, THEN?

  “Windle Poons.”

  I CAN SEE WHERE THAT MUST HAVE COME AS A SHOCK.

  “Well, yes.”

  ALL THESE YEARS AND YOU NEVER SUSPECTED.

  Windle Poons did know exactly what irony meant, and he could spot sarcasm too.

  “It’s all very well for you,” he mumbled.

  PERHAPS.

  Windle looked down at the river again.

  “It’s been great,” he said. “After all this time. Being needed is important.”

  YES. BUT WHY?

  Windle looked surprised.

  “I don’t know. How should I know? Because we’re all in this together, I suppose. Because we don’t leave our people in there. Because you’re a long time dead. Because anything is better than being alone. Because humans are human.”

  AND SIXPENCE IS SIXPENCE. BUT CORN IS NOT JUST CORN.

  “It isn’t?”

  NO.

  Windle leaned back. The stone of the bridge was still warm from the day’s heat.

  To his surprise, Death leaned back as well.

  BECAUSE YOU’RE ALL YOU’VE GOT, said Death.

  “What? Oh. Yes. That as well. It’s a great big cold universe out there.”

  YOU’D BE AMAZED.

  “One lifetime just isn’t enough.”

  OH, I DON’T KNOW.

  “Hmm?”

  WINDLE POONS?