The Last Hero (the discworld series)

by Terry Pratchett

  Cohen grinned at him. It wasn't often Mad Hamish volunteered anything.

  ‘They say every one of 'em's a world,’ said Evil Harry.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cohen. ‘How many, bard?’

  ‘I don't know. Thousands. Millions,’ said the minstrel.

  ‘Millions of worlds, and we get… what? How old are you, Hamish?’

  ‘Whut? I were born the day the old thane died,’ said Hamish.

  ‘When was that? Which old thane?’ said Cohen patiently.

  ‘Whut? I ain't a scholar! I canna remember that kinda stuff!’

  ‘A hundred years, maybe,’ said Cohen. ‘One hundred years. And there's millions o' worlds.’ He took a pull of his cigarette and rubbed his forehead with the back of his thumb. ‘It's a bugger.’

  He nodded at the minstrel. ‘What did your mate Carelinus do after he'd blown his nose?’

  ‘Look, you really shouldn't think of him like that,’ said the minstrel hotly. ‘He built a huge empire… too big, really. And in many ways he was a lot like you. Haven't you heard of the Tsortean Knot?’

  ‘Sounds dirty,’ said Truckle. ‘Hur, hur, hur… sorry.’

  The minstrel sighed. ‘It was a huge, complicated knot that tied two beams together in the Temple of Offler in Tsort, and it was said that whoever untied it would reign over the whole of the continent,’ he said.

  ‘They can be very tricky, knots,’ said Mrs McGarry.

  ‘Carelinus sliced right through it with his sword!’ said the minstrel. The revelation of this dramatic gesture did not get the applause he expected.

  ‘So he was a cheat as well as a cry-baby?’ said Boy Willie.

  ‘No! It was a dramatic, nay, portentous gesture!’ snapped the minstrel.

  ‘Yeah, okay, but it's not exactly untying it, is it? I mean, if the rules said “untying”, I don't see why he should—’

  ‘Nah, nah, the lad's got a point,’ said Cohen, who seemed to have been turning this one over in his mind. ‘It wasn't cheating, because it was a good story. Yeah. I can understand that.’ He chuckled. ‘I can just imagine it, too. A load of whey-faced priests and suchlike standin' around and thinkin', “that's cheating, but he's got a really big sword so I won't be the first to point this out, plus this damn great army is just outside”. Hah. Yeah. Hmm. What did he do next?’

  ‘Conquered most of the known world.’

  ‘Good lad. And after that?’

  ‘He… er… went home, reigned for a few years, then he died and his sons squabbled and there were a few wars… and that was the end of the empire.’

  ‘Children can be a problem,’ said Vena, without looking up from carefully embroidering forget-me-nots around BURN THIS HOUSE.

  ‘Some people say you achieve immortality through your children,’ said the minstrel.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Cohen. ‘Name one of your great-granddads, then.’

  ‘Well… er…’

  ‘See? Now, I got lots of kids,’ said Cohen. ‘Haven't seen most of 'em… you know how it is. But they had fine strong mothers and I hope like hell they're all living for themselves, not for me. Fat lot of good they did your Carelinus, losin' his empire for him.’

  ‘But there's lots more a proper historian could tell you—’ said the minstrel.

  ‘Hah!’ said Cohen. ‘It's what ordin'ry people remember that matters. It's songs and sayin's. It doesn't matter how you live and die, it's how the bards wrote it down.’

  The minstrel felt their joint gaze fix on him.

  ‘Um… I'm making lots of notes,’ he said.

  ‘Ook,’ said the Librarian, by way of explanation.

  ‘And then he says something fell on his head,’ Rincewind translated. ‘It must have been when we dived.’

  ‘Can we throw some of this stuff out of the ship to lighten it?’ said Carrot. ‘We don't need most of it.’

  ‘Alas, no,’ said Leonard. ‘We will lose all our air if we open the door.’

  ‘But we've got these breathing helmets,’ Rincewind pointed out.

  ‘Three helmets,’ said Leonard.

  The omniscope crackled. They ignored it. The Kite was still passing under the elephants, and the thing showed mostly a kind of magical snow.

  But Rincewind did glance up, and saw that someone in the storm was holding a card on which had been scrawled, in large letters: STAND BY.

  Ponder shook his head.

  ‘Thank you, Archchancellor, but I'm far too busy for you to help me,’ he said.

  ‘But will it work?’

  ‘It has to, sir. It's a million-to-one chance.’

  ‘Oh, then we don't have to worry. Everyone knows million-to-one chances always work.’

  ‘Yes, sir. So all I have to do is work out if there's still enough air outside the ship for Leonard to steer it, or how many dragons he will need to fire for how long, and if there will be enough power left to get them off again. I think he's travelling at nearly the right speed, but I'm not sure how much flame the dragons will have left, and I don't know what kind of surface he'll land on or anything they'll find there. I can adapt a few spells, but they were never devised for this sort of thing.’

  ‘Good man,’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Is there anything we can do to help?’ said the Dean.

  Ponder gave the other wizards a desperate look. How would Lord Vetinari have handled this?

  ‘Why, yes,’ he said brightly. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to find a cabin somewhere and come up with a list of all the various ways I could solve this? And I will just sit here and toy with a few ideas?’

  ‘That's what I like to see,’ said the Dean. ‘A lad with enough sense to make use of the wisdom of his elders.’

  Lord Vetinari gave Ponder a faint smile as they left the cabin.

  In the sudden silence Ponder… pondered. He stared at the orrery, walked around it, enlarged sections of it, peered at them, pored over the notes he had made about the power of dragon flight, stared at a model of the Kite, and spent a lot of time looking at the ceiling.

  This wasn't the normal way of working for a wizard. A wizard evolved the wish, and then devised the command. He didn't bother much with observing the universe; rocks and trees and clouds could not have anything very intelligent to impart. They didn't even have writing on them, after all.

  Ponder looked at the numbers he had scribbled. As a calculation, it was like balancing a feather on a soap bubble which wasn't there.

  So he guessed.

  On the Kite, the situation was being ‘workshopped’. This is the means by which people who don't know anything get together to pool their ignorance.

  ‘Could we all hold our breath for a quarter of the time?’ said Carrot.

  ‘No. Breath doesn't work like that, alas,’ said Leonard.

  ‘Perhaps we should all stop talking?’ said Rincewind.

  ‘Ook,’ said the Librarian, pointing to the fuzzy screen of the omniscope.

  Someone was holding up another placard. The huge words could just be made out:

  THIS IS WHAT YOU DO.

  Leonard snatched a pencil and began to scribble in the corner of a drawing of a machine for undermining city walls.

  Five minutes later he put it down again.

  ‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘He wants us to point the Kite in a different direction and go faster.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘He doesn't say. But… ah, yes. He wants us to fly directly towards the sun.’

  Leonard gave them one of his bright smiles. It faced three blank stares.

  ‘It will mean allowing one or two individual dragons to flare for a few seconds, to bring us around, and then—’

  ‘The sun,’ said Rincewind.

  ‘It's hot,’ said Carrot.

  ‘Yes, and I am sure we're all very glad of that,’ said Leonard, unrolling a plan of the Kite.

  ‘Ook!’

  ‘I'm sorry?’

  ‘He said, “And this boat is made of wood!”’ said Rincewind.

 
; ‘All that in one syllable?’

  ‘He's a very concise thinker! Look, Stibbons must have made a mistake. I wouldn't trust a wizard to give me directions to the other side of a very small room!’

  ‘He does seem to be a bright young man, though,’ said Carrot.

  ‘You'll be bright, too, if you're in this thing when it hits the sun,’ said Rincewind. ‘Incandescent, I expect.’

  ‘We can point the Kite if we're very careful how we operate the port and starboard mirrors,’ said Leonard thoughtfully. ‘There may be a little trial and error…’

  ‘Ah, we seem to have the hang of it,’ said Leonard. He turned over a small eggtimer. ‘And now, all dragons for two minutes…’

  ‘I ssuppose he'll ttell uss ssoon wwhat happens nnext?’ shouted Carrot, while behind them things tinkled and creaked.

  ‘Mmr Sstibbonss hhas ttwo ththousand yyears of uuniversity eexpertise bbehind hhim!’ yelled Leonard, above the din.

  ‘Hhow mmuch of ththat hhas iinvolved ssteering fflying sships wwith ddragons?’ screamed Rincewind.

  Leonard leaned against the tug of home-made gravity and looked at the eggtimer.

  ‘Aabout wwwwwone hhundred sseconds!’

  ‘Ah! Iiit'ss ppractically aaa ttradition, tthenn!’

  Erratically, the dragons stopped flaming. Once again, things filled the air.

  And there was the sun. But no longer circular. Something had clipped its edge.

  ‘Ah,’ said Leonard. ‘How clever. Gentlemen, behold the moon!’

  ‘We're going to hit the moon instead?’ said Carrot. ‘Is that better?’

  ‘My feelings exactly,’ said Rincewind.

  ‘Ook!’

  ‘I don't think we're going so very fast,’ said Leonard. ‘We're only just catching it up. I think Mr Stibbons intends that we land on it.’

  He flexed his fingers.

  ‘There's some air there, I'm sure of it,’ he went on. ‘Which means there is probably something we can feed to the dragons. And then, and this is very clever thinking, we ride on the moon until it rises over the Disc, and all we need to do is drop down lightly.’

  He kicked the release on the wing levers. The cabin rattled to the spinning of the flywheels. On either side, the Kite spread its wings.

  ‘Any questions?’ he said.

  ‘I'm trying to think of all the things that could go wrong,’ said Carrot.

  ‘I've got to nine so far,’ said Rincewind. ‘And I haven't started on the fine detail.’

  The moon was getting bigger, a dark sphere eclipsing the light of the distant sun.

  ‘As I understand it,’ said Leonard, as it began to loom in the windows, ‘the moon, being much smaller and lighter than the Disc, can only hold on to light things, like air. Heavier things, like the Kite, should hardly be able to stay on the ground.’

  ‘And that means…?’ said Carrot.

  ‘Er… we should just float down,’ said Leonard. ‘But holding on to something might be a good idea…’

  They landed. It's a short sentence, but contains a lot of incident.

  There was silence on the boat, apart from the sound of the sea and Ponder Stibbons's urgent muttering as he tried to adjust the omniscope.

  ‘The screams…’ murmured Mustrum Ridcully, after a while.

  ‘But then they screamed a second time, a few seconds later,’ said Lord Vetinari.

  ‘And a few seconds after that,’ said the Dean.

  ‘I thought the omniscope could see anywhere,’ said the Patrician, watching the sweat pour off Ponder.

  ‘The shards, er, don't seem stable when they're too far apart, sir,’ said Ponder. ‘Uh… and there's still a couple of thousand miles of world and elephant between them… ah…’

  The omniscope flickered, and then went blank again.

  ‘A good wizard, Rincewind,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘Not particularly bright, but, frankly, I've never been quite happy with intelligence. An overrated talent, in my humble opinion.’

  Ponder's ears went red.

  ‘Perhaps we should put a small plaque up somewhere in the University,’ said Ridcully. ‘Nothing garish, of course.’

  ‘Gentlemen, are you forgetting?’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘Soon there will be no University.’

  ‘Ah. Well, a small saving there, then.’

  ‘Hello? Hello? Is there anyone there?’

  And there was, fuzzy but recognisable, a face peering out of the omniscope.

  ‘Captain Carrot?’ Ridcully roared. ‘How did you get that damn thing to work?’

  ‘I just stopped sitting on it, sir.’

  ‘Are you all right? We heard screams!’ said Ponder.

  ‘That was when we hit the ground, sir.’

  ‘But then we heard screams again?’

  ‘That was probably when we hit the ground for the second time, sir.’

  ‘And the third time?’

  ‘Ground again, sir. You could say the landing was a bit… tentative… for a while there.’

  Lord Vetinari leaned forward. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Here, sir. On the moon. Mr Stibbons was right. There is air here. It's a bit thin, but it's fine if your plans for the day include breathing.’

  ‘Mr Stibbons was right, was he?’ said Ridcully, staring at Ponder. ‘How did you work that out so exactly, Mr Stibbons?’

  ‘I, er…’ Ponder felt the eyes of the wizards on him. ‘I—’ He stopped. ‘It was a lucky guess, sir.’

  The wizards relaxed. They were extremely uneasy with cleverness, but lucky guessing was what being a wizard was all about.

  ‘Well done, that man,’ said Ridcully, nodding. ‘Wipe your forehead, Mr Stibbons, you've got away with it again.’

  ‘I've taken the liberty of asking Rincewind to take a picture of me planting the flag of Ankh-Morpork and claiming the moon on behalf of all the nations of the Disc, your lordship,’ Carrot went on.

  ‘Very… patriotic,’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘I may even tell them.’

  ‘However, I can't show you this on the omniscope because, shortly afterwards, something ate the flag. Things here… aren't entirely what you'd expect, sir.’

  They were definitely dragons. Rincewind could see that. But they resembled swamp dragons in the same way that greyhounds resembled those odd yappy little dogs with lots of Zs and Xs in their name.

  They were all nose and sleek body, with longer arms and legs than the swamp variety, and they were so silvery that they looked like moonlight hammered into shape.

  And… they flamed. But it was not from the end that Rincewind had, hitherto, associated with dragons.

  The strange thing was, as Leonard said, that once you stopped sniggering about the whole idea it made a lot of sense. It was so stupid for a flying creature to have a weapon which stopped it dead in midair, for example.

  Dragons of all sizes surrounded the Kite, watching it with deer-like curiosity. Occasionally one or two would leap into the air and roar away, but others would land to join the throng. They stared at the crew of the Kite as if they were expecting them to do tricks, or make an important announcement.

  There was greenery, too, except that it was silvery. Lunar vegetation covered most of the surface. The Kite's third bounce and long slide had left a trail through it. The leaves were—

  ‘Hold still, will you?’ Rincewind's attention was drawn to his patient as the Librarian struggled; the problem with bandaging an orangutan's head is knowing when to stop. ‘It's your own fault,’ he said. ‘I told you. Small steps, I said. Not giant leaps.’

  Carrot and Leonard bounced around the side of the Kite.

  ‘Hardly any damage at all,’ said the inventor as he drifted down. ‘The whole thing took the shock remarkably well. And we're pointing slightly upwards. In this… general lightness, that should be quite sufficient to allow us to take off again, although there is one minor problem – Shoo, will you?’

  He waved away a small silver dragon that was sniffing at the Kite, and it took of
f vertically on a needle of blue flame.

  ‘We're out of food for our dragons,’ said Rincewind. ‘I've looked. The fuel bunker broke open when we landed for the first time.’

  ‘But we can feed them some of the silver plants, can't we?’ said Carrot. ‘The ones here seem to do very well on them.’

  ‘Aren't they magnificent creatures?’ said Leonard as a squadron of the creatures sailed overhead.

  They turned to watch the flight, and then stared beyond it. There was possibly no limit to how often the view could amaze you.

  The moon was rising over the world, and elephant's head filled half the sky.

  It was… simply big. Too big to describe.

  Wordlessly, all four voyagers climbed a small mound to get a clear view, and they stood in silence for some time. Dark eyes the size of oceans stared at them. Great crescents of ivory obscured the stars.

  There was no sound but the occasional click and swish as the iconograph imp painted picture after picture.

  Space wasn't big. It wasn't there. It was just nothing and therefore, in Rincewind's view, nothing to get humble about. But the world was big, and the elephant was huge.

  ‘Which one is it?’ said Leonard, after a while.

  ‘I don't know,’ said Carrot. ‘You know, I'm not sure I ever really believed it before. You know… about the turtle and the elephants and everything. Seeing it all like this makes me feel very… very…’

  ‘Scared?’ suggested Rincewind.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Upset?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Easily intimidated?’

  ‘No.’

  Beyond the Rimfall, the continents of the world were coming into view under swirls of white cloud.

  ‘You know… from up here… you can't see the boundaries between nations,’ said Carrot, almost wistfully.

  ‘Is that a problem?’ said Leonard. ‘Possibly something could be done.’

  ‘Maybe huge, really huge buildings in lines, along the frontiers,’ said Rincewind. ‘Or… or very wide roads. You could paint them different colours to save confusion.’

  ‘Should aerial travel become widespread,’ said Leonard, ‘it would be a useful idea to grow forests in the shape of the name of the country, or of other areas of note. I will bear this in mind.’