Interesting Times d-17

by Terry Pratchett

  And now that his eyes were accustomed to the gloom he realized that there were shapes lying on slabs along both walls of an enormous room.

  They were snoring gently.

  They were, in fact, people. They might even have been humans, or at least had humans in their ancestry before someone, hundreds of years ago, had said, "Let's see how big and fat we can breed people. Let's try for really big bastards."

  Each giant frame was dressed in what looked like a nappy to Rincewind's eyes and was dozing happily alongside a bowl holding enough rice to explode twenty people, just in case it woke up in the night and felt like a light snack.

  A couple of his pursuers appeared in the doorway, and stopped. Then they advanced, but very cautiously, carefully watching the gently moving mounds.

  "Oi, oi, oi!" shouted Rincewind.

  The men stopped and stared at him.

  "Wakey wakey! Let's see the rising sons!" He grabbed a mighty ladle and banged it on the rice cauldron.

  "Up you get! Hands off — er — whatever you can find and on with socks!"

  The sleepers stirred.

  "Oooorrrrr?"

  "Ooooaaaoooooor!"

  The room shook as forty tree-trunk legs swung off the slabs. Flesh rearranged itself so that, in the gloom, Rincewind appeared to be being watched by twenty small pyramids.

  "Haaaroooooohhhh?"

  "Those men," said Rincewind, pointing desperately at his pursuers, who were slowly backing away, "those men have a pork sandwich!"

  "Oorrry orrraaah?"

  "Oooorrrr?"

  "With mustard!"

  "Oooorrrr!"

  Twenty very small heads turned. A total of eighty specialized neurones fired into life.

  And the floor shook. The wrestlers started to move hopefully towards the men, in a slow but deliberate run designed to be halted only by collision with another wrestler or a continent.

  "Oooorrr!"

  Rincewind dashed for the far door and burst through it. A couple of men were sitting in a small room drinking tea and playing shibo, watched by a third.

  "The wrestlers are wrestless!" he shouted. "I think you've got a stampede going on!"

  A man threw down his shibo tiles. "Blast! And it's been at least an hour since they were fed!"

  The men grabbed various nets and prods and items of protective clothing, leaving Rincewind alone.

  There was another door. He sashayed through it. He'd never essayed a sashay before, but he reckoned he was due a sashay for quick thinking.

  There was another passage. He ran down it, on the basis that absence of pursuit is no reason to stop running.

  Lord Hong was folding paper.

  He was an expert at it because when he did it he gave it his full attention. Lord Hong had a mind like a knife, although possibly a knife with a curved blade.

  The door slid aside. A guard, red in the face from running, threw himself on to the floor.

  "O Lord Hong, who is exalted—"

  "Yes, indeed," said Lord Hong distantly, essaying a taxing crease. "What has gone wrong this time?"

  "My lord?"

  "I asked you what has gone wrong."

  "Uh… we killed the Emperor as directed—"

  "By whom?"

  "My lord! You commanded it!"

  "Did I?" said Lord Hong, folding the paper lengthwise.

  The guard shut his eyes. He had a vision, a very short vision, of the future. There was a spike in it. He carried on.

  "But the… prisoners can't be found anywhere, lord! We heard someone approach and then… well, we saw two people, lord. We're chasing them. But the others have vanished."

  "No slogans? No revolutionary posters? No culprits?"

  "No, lord."

  "I see. Remain here."

  Lord Hong's hands continued with the folding as he looked at the room's other occupant.

  "You have something to say, Two Fire Herb?" he said pleasantly.

  The revolutionary leader looked sheepish.

  "The Red Army has been quite expensive," said Lord Hong. "The printing costs alone… And you cannot say I have not helped you. We unlocked the doors and killed the guards and gave your wretched people swords and a map, did we not? And now I can hardly claim that they killed the Emperor, may he stay dead for ten thousand years, when there is no sign of them. People will ask too many questions. I can hardly kill everyone. And we appear to have some barbarians in the building, too."

  "Something must have gone wrong, my lord." Herb was hypnotized by the moving hands as they caressed that paper.

  "What a pity. I do not like it when things go wrong. Guard? Redeem your miserable self. Take him away. I will have to try a different plan."

  "My lord!"

  "Yes, Two Fire Herb?"

  "When you… when we agreed… when it was agreed that the Red Army should be turned over to you, you did promise me indemnity."

  Lord Hong smiled.

  "Oh, yes. I recall. I said, did I not, that I would neither say nor write any order for your death? And I must keep my word, otherwise what am I?"

  He folded the last crease and opened his hands, putting the little paper decoration on the lacquered table beside him.

  Herb and the guard stared at it.

  "Guard… take him away," said Lord Hong.

  It was a marvellously constructed paper figure of a man.

  But there didn't seem to have been enough paper for a head.

  The immediate court turned out to be about eighty men, women and eunuchs, in various states of sleeplessness.

  They were astonished at what sat on the throne.

  The Horde were quite astonished at the court.

  "Who're all them vinegar-faced old baggages at the front?" whispered Cohen, who was idly tossing a throwing knife into the air and catching it again. "I wouldn't even set fire to them."

  "They're the wives of former Emperors," hissed Six Beneficent Winds.

  "We don't have to marry them, do we?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Why're their feet so small?" said Cohen. "I like to see big feet on a woman."

  Six Beneficent Winds told him. Cohen's expression hardened.

  "I'm learning a lot about civilization, I am," he said. "Long fingernails, crippled feet and servants running around without their family jewels. Huh."

  "What is going on here, pray?" said a middle-aged man. "Who are you? Who are these old eunuchs?"

  "Who're you?" said Cohen. He drew his sword. "I need to know so's it can be put on your gravestone—"

  "I wonder if I might effect some introductions at this point?" said Mr Saveloy. He stepped forward.

  "This," he said, "is Ghenghiz Cohen — put it away, Ghenghiz — who is technically a barbarian, and this is his Horde. They have overrun your city. And you are—?"

  "Barbarian invaders?" said the man haughtily, ignoring him. "Barbarian invaders come in their thousands! Big screaming men on little horses!"

  "I told you," said Truckle. "But would anyone listen?"

  "—and there is fire, terror, rapine, looting and blood in the streets!"

  "We haven't had breakfast yet," said Cohen, tossing his knife into the air again.

  "Hah! I would rather die than submit to such as you!"

  Cohen shrugged. "Why didn't you say earlier?"

  "Oops," said Six Beneficent Winds.

  It was a very accurate throw.

  "Who was he, anyway?" said Cohen, as the body folded up. "Anyone know who he was?"

  "Ghenghiz," said Mr Saveloy, "I've kept meaning to tell you: when people say they'd rather die, they don't really mean they'd rather die. Not always."

  "Why'd they say it, then?"

  "It's the done thing."

  "Is this civilization again?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  "Let's settle this once and for all, shall we?" said Cohen. He stood up. "Hands up those who'd rather die than have me as Emperor."

  "Anyone?" said Mr Saveloy.

  Rincewind tro
tted along another passage. Was there no outside to this place? Several times he thought he'd found an exit, but it led only to a courtyard within the huge building, filled with tinkling fountains and willow trees.

  And the place was waking up. There were—

  — running steps behind him.

  A voice shouted, "Hey—"

  He dived for the nearest door.

  The room beyond was full of steam. It roiled in great billowing clouds. He could dimly make out a figure toiling at the huge wheel and the words 'torture chamber' crossed his mind until the smell of soap replaced them with the word 'laundry'. Rather wan but incredibly clean figures looked up from their vats and watched him with barely a hint of interest.

  They did not look like people in close touch with current events.

  He half ran, half sauntered between the bubbling cauldrons.

  "Keep it up. Good man. That's it, scrub, scrub, scrub. Let me see those wringers wringing. Well done. Is there another door out of here? Good bubbles there, very good bubbles. Ah…"

  One of the laundry workers, who appeared to be in charge, gave him a suspicious glare and seemed to be about to say something.

  Rincewind dodged through a courtyard crisscrossed with washing lines and stopped, panting, with his back to a wall.

  Although it was against his general principles, it was perhaps time to stop and think.

  People were chasing him. That is to say, they were chasing a running figure in a faded red robe and a very charred pointy hat.

  It took a great effort for Rincewind to come to terms with the idea, but it was just possible that if he was wearing something else he might not be chased.

  On the line in front of him, shirts and trousers flapped in the breeze. Their construction was to tailoring in the same way that woodchopping is to carpentry. Someone had mastered the art of the tube, and left it at that. They looked just like the clothes nearly everyone wore in Hunghung.

  The palace was almost a city in its own right, said the voice of reason. It must be full of people on all sorts of errands, it added.

  It would mean… taking off our hat, it added.

  Rincewind hesitated. It would be hard for a non-wizard to grasp the enormity of the suggestion. A wizard would sooner go without his robe and trousers than forgo his hat. Without his hat, people might think he was an ordinary person.

  There was shouting in the distance.

  The voice of reason could see that if it wasn't careful it was going to end up as dead as the rest of Rincewind and added sarcastically: all right, keep our wretched hat. Our damn hat is why we're in this mess in the first place. Perhaps you think you're going to have a head left to wear it on?

  Rincewind's hands, also aware that times were going to be extremely interesting and very short unless they took matters into themselves, reached out slowly and removed a pair of pants and a shirt and rammed them inside his robe.

  The door burst open. There were still guards behind him, and a couple of the tsimo herders had joined in the chase. One of them waved a prod in Rincewind's direction.

  He plunged towards an archway and out into a garden.

  It had a little pagoda. It had willow trees, and a pretty lady on a bridge feeding the birds.

  And a man painting a plate.

  Cohen rubbed his hands together.

  "No-one? Good. That's all sorted, then."

  "Ahem."

  A small man at the front of the crowd made a great play of keeping his hands to himself, but said:

  "Excuse me, but… what would happen in the hypothetical situation of us calling the guards and denouncing you?"

  "We'd kill you all before they were halfway through the door," said Cohen, matter of factly. "Any more questions?" he added, to a chorus of gasps.

  "Er… the Emperor… that is to say, the last Emperor… had some very special guards…"

  There was a tinkling sound. Something small and multi-pointed rolled down the steps and spun round on the floor. It was a throwing star.

  "Met them," said Boy Willie.

  "Fine, fine," said the little man. "That all seems in order. Ten Thousand Years to the Emperor!"

  The shout was taken up, a little raggedly.

  "What's your name, young man?" said Mr Saveloy.

  "Four Big Horns, my lord."

  "Very good. Very good. I can see that you will go a long way. What is your job?"

  "I am Grand Assistant to the Lord Chamberlain, my lord."

  "Which one of you is the Lord Chamberlain?"

  Four Big Horns pointed to the man who had preferred to die.

  "There we are, you see," said Mr Saveloy. "Promotion comes fast to adaptable people, Lord Chamberlain. And now, the Emperor will breakfast."

  "And what-is his pleasure?" said the new Lord Chamberlain, endeavouring to look bright and adaptable.

  "All sorts of things. But right now, big lumps of meat and lots of beer. You will find the Emperor very easy to cater for." Mr Saveloy smiled the knowing little smile he sometimes smiled when he knew he was the only one seeing the joke. "The Emperor doesn't favour what he calls 'fiddly foreign muck full of eyeballs and suchlike' and much prefers simple, wholesome food like sausages, which are made of miscellaneous animal organs minced up in a length of intestine. Ahaha. But if you want to please him, just keep up the big lumps of meat. Isn't that so, my lord?"

  Cohen had been gazing at the assembled courtiers. When you've survived for ninety years all the attacks that can be thrown at you by men, women, trolls, dwarfs, giants, green things with lots of legs and, on one occasion, an enraged lobster, you can learn a lot by looking at faces.

  "Eh?" said Cohen. "Oh. Yep. Right enough. Big lumps. Here, Mr Taxman… what do these people do all day?"

  "What would you like them to do?"

  "I'd like them to bugger off."

  "Sorry, my lord?"

  "[Complicated pictogram]," said Mr Saveloy. The new Lord Chamberlain looked a little startled.

  "What, here?"

  "It's a figure of speech, lad. He just means he wants everyone to go away quickly."

  The court scurried out. A sufficiently complicated pictogram is worth a thousand words.

  After the stampede the artist Three Solid Frogs got to his feet, retrieved his brush from his nostril, pulled his easel out of a tree, and tried to think placid thoughts.

  The garden was not what it had been.

  The willow tree was bent. The pagoda had been demolished by an out-of-control wrestler, who had eaten the roof. The doves had flown. The little bridge had been broken. His model, the concubine Jade Fan, had run off crying after she'd managed to scramble out of the ornamental pond.

  And someone had stolen his straw hat.

  Three Solid Frogs adjusted what remained of his dress and endeavoured to compose himself.

  The plate with his sketch on had been smashed, of course.

  He pulled another one out of his bag and reached for his palette.

  There was a huge footprint in the middle of it…

  He wanted to cry. He'd had such a good feeling about this picture. He just knew it would be one that people would remember for a long time. And the colours? Did anyone understand how much vermilion cost these days?

  He pulled himself together. So there was only blue left. Well, he'd show them…

  He tried to ignore the devastation in front of him and concentrated on the picture in his mind.

  "Let me see, now," he thought. "Jade Fan being pursued over a bridge by man waving his arms and screaming, "Get out of the way!" followed by man with prod, three guards, five laundry men and a wrestler unable to stop."

  He had to simplify it a bit, of course.

  The pursuers rounded a corner, except for the wrestler, who wasn't built for such a difficult manoeuvre.

  "Where'd he go?"

  They were in a courtyard. There were pigsties on one side, and middens on the other.

  And, in the middle of the courtyard, a pointy hat.

 
One of the guards reached out and grabbed a colleague's arm before the man stepped forward.

  "Steady now," he said.

  "It's just a hat."

  "So where's the rest of him? He couldn't have just… disappeared… into…"

  They backed away.

  "You heard about him too?"

  "They said he blew a hole in the wall just by waving his hands!"

  "That's nothing! I heard he appeared on an invisible dragon up in the mountains!"

  "What shall we tell Lord Hong?"

  "I don't want to be blown to pieces!"

  "I don't want to tell Lord Hong we lost him. We're in enough trouble already. And I've only just paid for this helmet."

  "Well… we could take the hat. That'd be evidence."

  "Right. You pick it up."

  "Me? You pick it up!"

  "It might be surrounded by terrible spells."

  "Really? So it's all right for me to touch it? Thank you! Get one of them to pick it up!"

  The laundry men backed away, the Hunghungese habit of obedience evaporating like morning dew. The soldiers weren't the only ones to have heard rumours.

  "Not us!"

  "Got a rush order for socks!"

  The guard turned. A peasant was stumbling out of one of the pigsties, carrying a sack, his face covered by his big straw hat.

  "Hey, you!"

  The man dropped to his knees and banged his head on the ground.

  "Don't kill me!"

  The guards exchanged a glance.

  "We ain't going to kill you," said one of them. "We just want you to try and pick up that hat over there."

  "What hat, o mighty warrior?"

  "That hat there! Right now!"

  The man crawled crabwise across the cobbles.

  "This hat, o great lord?"

  "Yes!"

  The man's fingers crept over the stones and prodded the hat's ragged brim.

  Then he screamed.

  "Your wife is a big hippo! My face is melting! My face is meltinnnnggg!"

  Rincewind waited until the sound of fleeing sandals had quite faded, and then stood up, dusted off his hat, and put it in the sack.

  That had gone a lot better than he'd expected. So there was another valuable thing to know about the Empire: no-one looked at peasants. It must be the clothes and the hat. No-one but the common people dressed like that, so anyone dressed like that must be a common person. It was the advertising principle of a wizard's hat, but in reverse. You were careful and polite around people in a pointy hat, in case they took a very physical offence, whereas someone in a big straw hat was a suitable target for a 'Hey, you!' and a—