He turned the book over. There was no author's name. There was simply a little message: Increased Luck! Make Copies! Extended Duration And Happiness To The Endeavour!
Ankh-Morpork had had the occasional rebellion, too, over the years. But no-one went around organizing things. They just grabbed themselves a weapon and took to the streets. No-one bothered with a formal battlecry, relying instead on the well-tried 'There 'e goes! Get 'im! Got 'im? Now kick 'im inna fork!'
The point was… whatever caused that sort of thing wasn't usually the reason for it. When Mad Lord Snapcase had been hung up by his figgin[18] it hadn't really been because he'd made poor old Spooner Boggis eat his own nose, it had been because years of inventive nastiness had piled on one another until the grievances reached—
There was a terrible scream from the far side of the room. Rincewind was half out of his seat before he noticed the little stage, and the actors.
A trio of musicians had squatted down on the floor. The inn's customers turned to watch.
It was, in a way, quite enjoyable. Rincewind didn't quite follow the plot, but it went something like: man gets girl, man loses girl to other man, man cuts couple in half, man falls on own sword, all come up front for a bow to what might be the Agatean equivalent of 'Happy Days Are Here Again'. It was a little hard to make out the fine detail because the actors shouted 'Hoorrrrrraa!' a lot and spent much of their time talking to the audience and their masks all looked the same to Rincewind. The musicians were in a world of their own or, by the sound of it, three different worlds.
"Fortune cookie?"
"Huh?"
Rincewind re-emerged from the thickets of thespianism to see the landlord beside him.
A dish of vaguely bivalvular biscuits was thrust under his nose.
"Fortune cookie?"
Rincewind reached out. Just as his fingers were about to close on one, the plate was jerked sideways an inch or two, bringing another under his hand.
Oh, well. He took it.
The thing was — his thoughts resumed, as the play screamed on — at least in Ankh-Morpork you could lay your hands on real weapons.
Poor devils. It took more than well-turned slogans and a lot of enthusiasm to run a good rebellion. You needed well-trained fighters and, above all, a good leader. He hoped they found one when he was well away.
He unrolled the fortune and read it idly, oblivious to the landlord walking around behind him.
Instead of the usual 'You have just enjoyed an inferior meal' it was quite a complicated pictogram.
Rincewind's fingers traced the brush strokes.
"'Many… many… apologies…' What kind—"
The musician with the cymbals clashed them together sharply.
The wooden cosh bounced off Rincewind's head.
The old men playing shibo nodded happily to themselves and turned back to their game.
It was a fine morning. The hideout echoed to the sounds of the Silver Horde getting up, groaning, adjusting various home-made surgical supports, complaining that they couldn't find their spectacles, and mistakenly gumming one another's dentures.
Cohen sat with his feet in a bath of warm water, enjoying the sunshine.
"Teach?"
The former geography teacher concentrated on a cap he was making.
"Yes, Ghenghiz?"
"What's Mad Hamish going on about?"
"He says the bread's stale and he can't find his teeth."
"Tell him if things go right for us he can have a dozen young women just to chew his bread for him," said Cohen.
"That is not very hygienic, Ghenghiz," said Mr Saveloy, without bothering to look up. "Remember, I explained about hygiene."
Cohen didn't bother to answer. He was thinking: six old men. And you can't really count Teach, he's a thinker, not a fighter…
Self-doubt was not something regularly entertained within the Cohen cranium. When you're trying to carry a struggling temple maiden and a sack of looted temple goods in one hand and fight off half a dozen angry priests with the other there is little time for reflection. Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.
But: six old men… and the Empire had almost a million men under arms.
When you looked at the odds in the cold light of dawn, or even this rather pleasant warm light of dawn, they made you stop and do the arithmetic of death. If the Plan went wrong…
Cohen bit his lip thoughtfully. If the Plan went wrong, it'd take weeks to kill all of them. Maybe he should have let old Thog the Butcher come along too, even though he had to stop fighting every ten minutes to go to the lavatory.
Oh, well. He was committed now, so he might as well make the best of it.
Cohen's father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a lad, and explained to him the hero's creed and told him that there was no greater joy than to die in battle.
Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime's experience had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the other bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your horse. It was an observation that had served him well.
He stood up and stretched in the sunshine.
"It's a lovely morning, lads," he said. "I feel like a million dollars. Don't you?"
There was a murmur of reluctant agreement.
"Good," said Cohen. "Let's go and get some."
The Great Wall completely surrounds the Agatean Empire. The word is completely.
It is usually about twenty feet high and sheer on its inner side. It is built along beaches and across howling deserts and even on the lip of sheer cliffs where the possibility of attack from outside is remote. On subject islands like Bhangbhangduc and Tingling there are similar walls, all metaphorically the same wall, and that seems strange to those of an unthinking military disposition who do not realize what its function really is.
It is more than just a wall, it is a marker. On one side is the Empire, which in the Agatean language is a word identical with 'universe'. On the other side is — nothing. After all, the universe is everything there is.
Oh, there may appear to be things, like sea, islands, other continents and so on. They may even appear solid, it may be possible to conquer them, walk on them… but they are not ultimately real. The Agatean word for foreigner is the same as the word for ghost, and only one brush stroke away from the word for victim.
The walls are sheer in order to discourage those boring people who persist in believing that there might be anything interesting on the other side. Amazingly enough there are people who simply won't take the hint, even after thousands of years. The ones near the coast build rafts and head out across lonely seas to lands that are a fable. The ones inland resort to man-carrying kites and chairs propelled by fireworks. Many of them die in the attempt, of course. Most of the others are soon caught, and made to live in interesting times.
But some did make it to the great melting pot called Ankh-Morpork. They arrived with no money — sailors charged what the market would bear, which was everything — but they had a mad gleam in their eye and they opened shops and restaurants and worked twenty-four hours a day. People called this the Ankh-Morpork Dream (of making piles of cash in a place where your death was unlikely to be a matter of public policy). And it was dreamed all the stronger by people who didn't sleep.
Rincewind sometimes thought that his life was punctuated by awakenings. They were not always rude ones. Sometimes they were merely impolite. A very few — one or two, perhaps — had been quite nice, especially on the island. The sun had come up in its humdrum fashion, the waves had washed the beach in quite a boring way, and on several occasions he'd managed to erupt from unconsciousness without his habitual small scream.
This one wasn't just rude. It was downright insolent. He was being bumped about and someone had tied his hands together. It was dark, a fact occasioned b
y the sack over his head.
Rincewind did some calculation, and reached a conclusion.
"This is the seventeenth worst day of my life so far," he thought.
Being knocked unconscious in pubs was quite commonplace. If it happened in Ankh-Morpork then you'd likely as not wake up lying on the Ankh with all your money gone or, if a ship was due out on a long and unpopular voyage, chained up in some scupper somewhere with no option for the next two years but to plough the ocean wave.[19] But generally the knocker wanted to keep you alive. The Thieves' Guild were punctilious about that. As they said: 'Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week."
If he was in what felt like a cart then someone had some purpose in keeping him alive.
He wished he hadn't thought of that.
Someone pulled the sack off. A terrifying visage stared down at him.
"'I would like to eat your foot!'" said Rincewind.
"Don't worry. I am a friend."
The mask was lifted away. There was a young woman behind it — round faced, snub nosed and quite different from any other citizen Rincewind had met hitherto. That was, he realized, because she was looking straight at him. Her clothes, if not her face, had last been seen on the stage.
"Don't cry out," she said.
"Why? What are you going to do?"
"We would have welcomed you properly but there was no time." She sat down among the bundles in the back of the swaying cart and regarded him critically.
"Four Big Sandal said you arrived on a dragon and slaughtered a regiment of soldiers," she said.
"I did?"
"And then you worked magic on a venerable old man and he became a great fighter."
"He did?"
"And you gave him whole meat, even though Four Big Sandal is only of the pung class."
"I did?"
"And you have your hat."
"Yes, yes, got my hat."
"And yet," said the girl, "you don't look like a Great Wizard."
"Ah. Well, the fact is—"
The girl looked as fragile as a flower. But she had just pulled out, from somewhere in the folds of her costume, a small but perfectly serviceable knife.
Rincewind had picked up an instinct for this sort or thing. This was probably not the time to deny Great Wizardry.
"The fact is…" he repeated, "that….ow do I know I can trust you?"
The girl looked indignant. "Do you not have amazing wizardly powers?"
"Oh, yes. Yes! Certainly! But—"
"Say something in wizard language!"
"Er. Stercus, stercus, stercus, moriturus sum," said Rincewind, his eye on the knife.
"'O excrement, I am about to die?'"
"It's… er… a special mantra I say to raise the magical fluxes."
The girl subsided a little.
"But it takes it out of you, wizarding," said Rincewind. "Flying on dragons, magically turning old men into warriors… I can only do so much of that sort of thing before it's time for a rest. Right now I'm very weak on account of the tremendous amounts of magic I've just used, you see."
She looked at him with doubt still in her eyes.
"All the peasants believe in the imminent arrival of the Great Wizard," she said. "But, in the words of the great philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, 'When many expect a mighty stallion they will find hooves on an ant.'"
She gave him another calculating look.
"When you were on the road," she said, "you grovelled in front of District Commissioner Kee. You could have blasted him with terrible fire."
"Biding my time, spying out the land, not wanting to break my cover," Rincewind gabbled. "Er. No good revealing myself straight away, is there?"
"You are maintaining a disguise?"
"Yes."
"It is a very good one."
"Thank you, because—"
"Only a great wizard would dare to look like such a pathetic piece of humanity."
"Thank you. Er… how did you know I was on the road?"
"They would have killed you there and then if I had not told you what to do."
"You were the guard?"
"We had to catch up with you quickly. It was sheer luck you were seen by Four Big Sandal."
"We?"
She ignored the question. "They are only provincial soldiers. I would not have got away with it in Hunghung. But I can play many roles." She put away the knife, but Rincewind had a feeling that he hadn't talked her into believing him, only into not killing him.
He groped for a straw.
"I've got a magic box on legs," he said, with a touch of pride. "It follows me around. It seems to have got itself mislaid right now, but it's quite an amazing thing."
The girl gave him a wooden look. Then she reached down with a delicate hand and hauled him upright.
"Is it," she said, "something like this?"
She twitched aside the curtains at the rear of the cart.
Two boxes were trundling along in the dust. They were more battered and cheaper looking than the Luggage, but recognizably the same general species, if you could apply the word to travel accessories.
"Er. Yes."
She let go. Rincewind's head hit the floor.
"Listen to me," she said. "A lot of bad things are happening. I don't believe in great wizards, but other people do, and sometimes people need something to believe in. And if these other people die because we've got a wizard who is not so very great, then he will be a very unlucky wizard indeed. You may be the Great Wizard. If you are not, then I suggest you study very hard to be great. Do I make myself clear?"
"Er. Yes."
Rincewind had been faced with death on numerous occasions. Often there was armour and swords involved. This occasion just involved a pretty girl and a knife, but somehow managed to be among the worst. She sat back.
"We are a travelling theatre," she said. "It is convenient. Noh actors are allowed to move around."
"Aren't they?" said Rincewind.
"You do not understand. We are Noh actors."
"Oh, you weren't too bad."
"Great Wizard, 'Noh' is a non-realist symbolic form of theatre employing archaic language, stylized gestures and an accompaniment of flutes and drums. Your pretence of stupidity is masterly. So much so that I could even believe that you are no actor."
"Excuse me, what is your name?" Rincewind said.
"Pretty Butterfly."
"Er. Yes?"
She glared at him and slipped away towards the front of the cart.
It rumbled on. Rincewind lay with his head in a sack smelling of onions and methodically cursed things. He cursed women with knives, and history generally, and the entire faculty of Unseen University, and his absent Luggage, and the population of the Agatean Empire. But right now, at the top of the list, was whoever had designed this cart. By the feel of it, whoever had thought that rough, splintery wood was the right surface for a floor was also the person who thought 'triangular' was a nice shape for a wheel.
The Luggage lurked in a ditch, watched without much interest by a man holding a water buffalo on the end of a piece of string.
It was feeling ashamed, and baffled, and lost. It was lost because everywhere around it was… familiar. The light, the smells, the feel of the soil… But it didn't feel owned.
It was made of wood. Wood is sensitive to these things.
One of its many feet idly traced an outline in the mud. It was a random, wretched pattern familiar to anyone who's had to stand in front of the class and be scolded.
Finally, it reached something that was probably as close as timber can get to a decision.
It had been given away. It had spent many years trailing through strange lands, meeting exotic creatures and jumping up and down on them. Now it was back in the country where it had once been a tree. Therefore, it was free.
It was not the most logical chain of thought, but pretty good when all you've got to think with are knotholes.
&nb
sp; And there was something it very much wanted to do.
"When you're ready, Teach?"
"Sorry, Ghenghiz. I'm just finishing…" Cohen sighed. The Horde were taking advantage of the rest to sit in the shade of a tree and tell one another lies about their exploits, while Mr Saveloy stood on top of a boulder squinting through some kind of home-made device and doodling on his maps.
Bits of paper ruled the world now, Cohen told himself. It certainly ruled this part of it. And Teach… well, Teach ruled bits of paper. He might not be traditional barbarian hero material, despite his deeply held belief that all headmasters should be riveted to a cowshed door, but the man was amazing with bits of paper.
And he could speak Agatean. Well, speak it better than Cohen, who'd picked it up in a rough and ready way. He said he'd learned it out of some old book. He said it was amazing how much interesting stuff was in old books.
Cohen struggled up alongside him.
"What exactly you plannin', Teach?" he said.
Mr Saveloy squinted at Hunghung, just visible on the dusty horizon.
"Do you see that hill behind the city?" he said. "The huge round mound?"
"Looks like my dad's burial mound to me," said Cohen.
"No, it must be a natural formation. It's far too big. There's some kind of pagoda on top, I see. Interesting. Perhaps, later, I shall take a closer look."
Cohen peered at the big round hill. It was a big round hill. It wasn't threatening him and it didn't look valuable. End of saga as far as he was concerned. There were more pressing matters.
"People appear to be entering and leaving the outer city," Mr Saveloy continued. "The siege is more a threat than a reality. So getting inside should not be a problem. Of course, getting into the Forbidden City itself will be a lot more difficult."
"How about if we kill everyone?" said Cohen.
"A good idea, but impractical," said Mr Saveloy. "And liable to cause comment. No, my current methodology is predicated on the fact that Hunghung is some considerable way from the river yet has almost a million inhabitants."
"Predicated, yeah," said Cohen.
"And the local geography is quite wrong for artesian wells."
Interesting Times d-17 Page 10