In obedience to the laws of physics and the narrative of such things, its load did not. The barrels burst their bonds, crashed down onto the street, and rolled onwards.
A few smashed, filling the gutter with suds. The others, thumping and banging into one another, became the focus of attention of every upright citizen who could recognize a hundred gallons of beer which suddenly didn’t belong to anyone anymore and was heading for freedom.
William and Sacharissa looked at one another.
“Okay—I’ll get the story, you go and find Otto!”
They said that at the same time, and then stared defiantly at each other.
“All right, all right,” said William. “Find some kid, bribe him to get Otto, I’ll talk to that Plucky Watchman who grabbed the old lady in A Mercy Dash, you cover the Big Smash, okay?”
“I’ll find the kid,” said Sacharissa, pulling out her own notebook, “but you cover the accident and the Beer Barrel Bonanza and I’ll talk to the White-Haired Granny. Human interest, right?”
“All right!” William conceded. “That was Captain Carrot who did the rescue. Make sure Otto gets a picture and get his age!”
“Of course!”
William headed towards the crowd around the smashed wagon. Many people were in distant pursuit of the barrels, and the odd scream suggested that thirsty people seldom realize how hard it is to stop a hundred gallons of beer in a big oak cask when it’s on a roll.
He dutifully noted down the name on the side of the dray. A couple of men were helping the horses up, but they did not appear to have much to do with beer delivery. They simply appeared to be men who wanted to help lost horses, and take them home and make them better. If this meant dyeing areas of their coat and swearing blind they’d owned them for the past two years, then so be it.
He approached a bystander not obviously engaged in any felonious activity.
“Exc—” he began. But the citizen’s eyes had already detected the notebook.
“I saw it all,” he said.
“Did you?”
“It was a ter-ri-ble scene,” said the man, at dictation speed. “But the watch-man made a death-defying plunge to res-cue the old lady and he de-serves a med-al.”
“Really?” said William, scribbling fast. “And you are—”
“Sa-muel Arblaster (forty-three) stone-mason, of eleven-b The Scours,” said the man.
“I saw it too,” said a woman next to him, urgently, “Mrs. Florrie Perry, blond mother of three, from Dolly Sisters. It was a scene of car-nage.”
William risked a glance at his pencil. It was a kind of magic wand.
“Where’s the iconographer?” said Mrs. Perry, looking around hopefully.
“Er…not here yet,” said William.
“Oh.” She looked disappointed. “Shame about the poor woman with the snake, wasn’t it? I expect he’s off taking pictures of her.”
“Er…I hope not,” said William.
It was a long afternoon. One barrel had rolled into a barber shop and exploded. Some of the brewer’s men turned up, and there was a fight with several of the barrels’ new owners, who claimed rights of salvage. One enterprising man tapped a barrel by the roadside and set up a temporary pub. Otto arrived. He took pictures of barrel rescuers. He took a picture of the fight. He took pictures of the Watch arriving to arrest everyone still standing. He took pictures of the white-haired old lady and the proud Captain Carrot and, in his excitement, of his thumb.
It was a good story all round. And William was halfway through writing his part of it back at the Times when he remembered.
He’d watched it happening. And he’d reached for his notebook. That was a worrying thought, he said.
“So?” said Sacharissa, from her side of the desk. “How many L’s in ‘gallant’?”
“Two,” said William. “I mean, I didn’t try to do anything. I thought: This is a Story, and I have to tell it.”
“Yep,” said Sacharissa, still bowed over her writing. “We’ve been press-ganged.”
“But it’s not—”
“Look at it like this,” said Sacharissa, starting a fresh page. “Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes.”
“Yes, but that’s not very—”
Sacharissa glanced up, and flashed him a smile.
“Sometimes they’re the same person,” she said.
This time it was William who looked down modestly.
“You think that’s really true?” he said.
She shrugged. “Really true? Who knows? This is a newspaper, isn’t it? It just has to be true until tomorrow.”
William felt the temperature rise. Her smile had really been attractive.
“Are you…sure?”
“Oh, yes. True until tomorrow is good enough for me.”
And behind her the big black vampire of a printing press waited to be fed, and to be brought alive in the dark of the night for the light of the morning. It chopped the complexities of the world into little stories, and it was always hungry.
And it needed a double-column story for page 2, William remembered.
And, a few inches under his hand, a woodworm chewed its way contentedly through the ancient timber. Reincarnation enjoys a joke as much as the next philosophical hypothesis. As it chewed, the woodworm thought: This is —ing good wood!
Because nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth.
Author’s Note
Sometimes a fantasy author has to point out the strangeness of reality. The way Ankh-Morpork dealt with its flood problems (see page 249 and onward) is curiously similar to that adopted by the city of Seattle, Washington, toward the end of the nineteenth century. Really. Go and see. Try the clam chowder while you’re there.
About the Author
Terry Pratchett's novels have sold more than thirty million (give or take a few million) copies worldwide. He lives in England.
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A bestselling sensation in America and around the globe, Terry Pratchett’s profoundly irreverent novels are consistent number one bestsellers in England, and have been translated into twenty-seven languages.
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Outstanding Acclaim for
The Truth
“Pratchett’s witty reach is even longer than usual here, from Pulp Fiction to His Girl Friday. Readers who’ve never visited Discworld before may find themselves laughing out loud, even as they cheer on the good guys, while longtime fans are sure to call this Pratchett’s best one yet.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“An engaging, surreal satire…Pratchett’s Monty Python-like plots are almost impossible to describe. His talent for characterization and dialogue and his pop-culture allusions steal the show.”
Chicago Tribune
“Offers more entertainment per page than anything this side of Wodehouse.”
Washington Post Book World
“With his humor and endless invention, Terry Pratchett has rightly dominated the fantasy genre. The Truth shows that he is still the master. Twenty-five novels into the Discworld series, and Terry Pratchett’s imagination shows no signs of flagging. On the contrary, The Truth is an unmitigated delight and very, very funny.”
The Times, London
and Terry Pratchett
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Barbara Mertz
“Superb popular entertainment.”
Washington Post Book World
“Pratchett has now moved beyond the limits of humorous fantasy, and should be recognized as one of the more significant contemporary English-language satirists.”
Publishers Weekly
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�Think J.R.R. Tolkien with a sharper, more satiric edge.”
Houston Chronicle
“Discworld takes the classic fantasy universe through its logical, and comic evolution.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Truly original…Discworld is more complicated and satisfactory than Oz…Has the energy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the inventiveness of Alice in Wonderland…Brilliant!”
A. S. Byatt
“Humorously entertaining…subtly thought-provoking…Pratchett’s Discworld books are filled with humor and with magic, but they’re rooted in—of all things—real life and cold, hard reason.”
Chicago Tribune
“Simply the best humorous writer of the twentieth century.”
Oxford Times
“A brilliant storyteller with a sense of humor…The Dickens of the twentieth century.”
Mail on Sunday (London)
“As always he is head and shoulders above the best of the rest. He is screamingly funny. He is wise. He has style.”
Daily Telegraph (London)
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Today (Great Britain)
“What makes Terry Pratchett’s fantasies so entertaining is that their humor depends on the characters first, on the plot second, rather than the other way around. The story isn’t there simply to lead from one slapstick pratfall to another pun. Its humor is genuine and unforced.”
Ottawa Citizen
BOOKS BY TERRY PRATCHETT
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata
Truckers
Diggers
Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)
THE DISCWORLD SERIES
The Color of Magic*
The Light Fantastic*
Equal Rites*
Mort*
Sourcery*
Wyrd Sisters*
Pyramids*
Guards! Guards!*
Eric (with Josh Kirby)
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
Witches Abroad
Small Gods*
Lords and Ladies*
Men at Arms*
Soul Music*
Feet of Clay*
Interesting Times*
Maskerade*
Hogfather*
Jingo*
The Last Continent*
Carpe Jugulum*
The Fifth Elephant*
The Truth*
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic (with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs)
AND IN HARDCOVER
Thief of Time
*Published by HarperCollins
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE TRUTH. Copyright © 2000 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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*This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.
*The world’s rarest and most evil-smelling vegetable, and consequently much prized by connoisseurs (who seldom prize anything cheap and common). Also a slang name for Ankh-Morpork, although it does not smell as bad as that.
*Your Brain on Drugs is a terrible sight, but Mr. Tulip was living proof of the fact that so was Your Brain on a cocktail of horse liniment, sherbet, and powdered water-retention pills.
*Words resemble fish in that some specialized ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea. “Rumpus” and “fracas” are found only in certain newspapers (in much the same way that “beverages” are only found in certain menus). They are never used in normal conversation.
*Which was not hard, as unkind people pointed out.
†In any case anyone eating raw steak from an Ankh-Morpork slaughterhouse was embarking on a life of danger and excitement that should satisfy anyone.
*In many ways, William de Worde had quite a graphic imagination.
*William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.
*At this point Bingo had not been introduced to nkh-Morpork.
*Most dwarfs were still referred to as “he” as well, even when they were getting married. It was generally assumed that somewhere under all that chain mail one of them was female and that both of them knew which one this was. But the whole subject of sex was one that traditionally minded dwarfs did not discuss, perhaps out of modesty, possibly because it didn’t interest them very much, and certainly because they took the view that what two dwarfs decided to do together was entirely their own business.
*The best way to describe Mr. Windling would be like this: You are at a meeting. You’d like to be away early. So would everyone else. There really isn’t very much to discuss, anyway. And just as everyone can see Any Other Business coming over the horizon and is already putting their papers neatly together, a voice says “If I can raise a minor matter, Mr. Chairman…” and with a horrible wooden feeling in your stomach you know, now, that the evening will go on for twice as long with much referring back to the minutes of earlier meetings. The man who has just said that, and is now sitting there with a smug smile of dedication to the committee process, is as near Mr. Windling as makes no difference. And something that distinguishes the Mr. Windlings of the universe is the term “in my humble opinion,” which they think adds weight to their statements rather than indicating, in reality, “these are the mean little views of someone with the social grace of duckweed.”
*In other circumstances it would have been as likely as cows singing “Let Me Be Covered in Rapturous Gravy.”
*Classically, very few people have considered that cleanliness was next to godliness, apart from in a very sternly abridged dictionary. A rank loincloth and hair in an advanced state of matted entanglement have generally been the badges of office of pr
ophets whose injunction to disdain earthly things starts with soap.
The Truth Page 35