The Light Fantastic d-2

by Terry David John Pratchett

  Rincewind hesitated. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. ‘You want me to run around keeping the wizards from getting all the spells together?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That’s why one of you got into my head?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘You totally ruined my life, you know that?’ said Rincewind hotly. ‘I could have really made it as a wizard if you hadn’t decided to use me as a sort of portable spellbook. I can’t remember any other spells, they’re too frightened to stay in the same head as you!’

  ‘We’re sorry.’

  ‘I just want to go home! I want to go back to where—’ a trace of moisture appeared in Rincewind’s eye—‘to where there’s cobbles under your feet and some of the beer isn’t too bad and you can get quite a good piece of fried fish of an evening, with maybe a couple of big green gherkins, and even an eel pie and a dish of whelks, and there’s always a warm stable somewhere to sleep in and in the morning you are always in the same place as you were the night before and there wasn’t all this weather all over the place. I mean, I don’t mind about the magic, I’m probably not, you know, the right sort of material for a wizard, I just want to go home! —’

  ‘But you must—’ one of the spells began.

  It was too late. Homesickness, the little elastic band in the subconscious that can wind up a salmon and propel it three thousand miles through strange seas, or send a million lemmings running joyfully back to an ancestral homeland which, owing to a slight kink in the continental drift, isn’t there any more—homesickness rose up inside Rincewind like a late-night prawn biriani,{26} flowed along the tenuous thread linking his tortured soul to his body, dug its heels in and tugged…

  The spells were alone inside their Octavo.

  Alone, at any rate, apart from the Luggage.

  They looked at it, not with eyes, but with consciousness as old as the Discworld itself.

  ‘And you can bugger off too,’ they said.

  * * *

  ‘—bad.’

  Rincewind knew it was himself speaking, he recognised the voice. For a moment he was looking out through his eyes not in any normal way, but as a spy might peer through the cut-out eyes of a picture. Then he was back.

  ‘You okay, Rinshwind?’ said Cohen. ‘You looked a bit gone there.’

  ‘You did look a bit white,’ agreed Bethan. ‘Like someone had walked over your grave.’

  ‘Uh, yes, it was probably me,’ he said. He held up his fingers and counted them. There appeared to be the normal amount.

  ‘Um, have I moved at all?’ he said.

  ‘You just looked at the fire as if you had seen a ghost,’ said Bethan.

  There was a groan behind them. Twoflower was sitting up, holding his head in his hands.

  His eyes focused on them. His lips moved soundlessly.

  ‘That was a really strange… dream,’ he said. ‘What’s this place? Why am I here?’

  ‘Well,’ said Cohen, ‘shome shay the Creator of the Univershe took a handful of clay and—’

  ‘No, I mean here,’ said Twoflower. ‘Is that you, Rincewind?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rincewind, giving it the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘There was this… a clock that… and these people who…’ said Twoflower. He shook his head. ‘Why does everything smell of horses?’

  ‘You’ve been ill,’ said Rincewind. ‘Hallucinating.’

  ‘Yes… I suppose I was.’ Twoflower looked down at his chest. ‘But in that case, why have I—’ Rincewind jumped to his feet.

  ‘Sorry, very close in here, got to have a breath of fresh air,’ he said. He removed the picture box’s strap from Twoflower’s neck, and dashed for the tent flap.

  ‘I didn’t notice that when he came in,’ said Bethan. Cohen shrugged.

  Rincewind managed to get a few yards from the yurt before the ratchet of the picture box began to click. Very slowly, the box extruded the last picture that the imp had taken.

  Rincewind snatched at it.

  What it showed would have been quite horrible even in broad daylight. By freezing starlight, tinted red with the fires of the evil new star, it was a lot worse.

  ‘No,’ said Rincewind softly. ‘No, it wasn’t like that, there was a house, and this girl, and…’

  ‘You see what you see and I paint what I see,’ said the imp from its hatch. ‘What I see is real. I was bred for it. I only see what’s really there.’

  A dark shape crunched over the snowcrust towards Rincewind. It was the Luggage. Rincewind, who normally hated and distrusted it, suddenly felt it was the most refreshingly normal thing he had ever seen.

  ‘I see you made it, then,’ said Rincewind. The Luggage rattled its lid.

  ‘Okay, but what did you see?’ said Rincewind. ‘Did you look behind?’

  The Luggage said nothing. For a moment they were silent, like two warriors who have fled the field of carnage and have paused for a return of breath and sanity.

  Then Rincewind said, ‘Come on, there’s a fire inside.’ He reached out to pat the Luggage’s lid. It snapped irritably at him, nearly catching his fingers. Life was back to normal again.

  * * *

  The next day dawned bright and clear and cold. The sky became a blue dome stuck on the white sheet of the world, and the whole effect would have been as fresh and clean as a toothpaste advert if it wasn’t for the pink dot on the horizon.

  ‘You can shee it in daylight now,’ said Cohen. ‘What is it?’

  He looked hard at Rincewind, who reddened.

  ‘Why does everyone look at me?’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s a comet or something.’

  ‘Will we all be burned up?’ said Bethan.

  ‘How should I know? I’ve never been hit by a comet before.’

  They were riding in single file across the brilliant snow-field. The Horse people, who seemed to hold Cohen in high regard, had given them their mounts and directions to the River Smarl, a hundred miles rimward, where Cohen reckoned Rincewind and Twoflower could find a boat to take them to the Circle Sea. He had announced that he was coming with them, on account of his chilblains.

  Bethan had promptly announced that she was going to come too, in case Cohen wanted anything rubbed.

  Rincewind was vaguely aware of some sort of chemistry bubbling away. For one thing, Cohen had made an effort to comb his beard.

  ‘I think she’s rather taken with you,’ he said. Cohen sighed.

  ‘If I wash twenty yearsh younger,’ he said wistfully.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’d be shixty-sheven.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Well—how can I put it? When I wash a young man, carving my name in the world, well, then I liked my women red-haired and fiery.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And then I grew a little older and for preference I looked for a woman with blonde hair, and the glint of the world in her eye.’

  ‘Oh? Yes?’

  ‘But then I grew a little older again and I came to see the point of dark women of a sultry nature.’

  He paused. Rincewind waited.

  ‘And?’ he said. ‘Then what? What is it that you look for in a woman now?’

  Cohen turned one rheumy blue eye on him.

  ‘Patience,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ said a voice behind them. ‘Me riding with Cohen the Barbarian!’

  It was Twoflower. Since early morning he had been like a monkey with the key to the banana plantation after discovering he was breathing the same air as the greatest hero of all time.

  ‘Is he perhapsh being sharcashtic?’ said Cohen to Rincewind.

  ‘No. He’s always like that.’

  Cohen turned in his saddle. Twoflower beamed at him, and waved proudly. Cohen turned back, and grunted.

  ‘He’s got eyesh, hashn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, but they don’t work like other people’s. Take it from me. I mean—well, you know the Horse people’s yu
rt, where we were last night?’

  ‘Yesh.’

  ‘Would you say it was a bit dark and greasy and smelt like a very ill horse?’

  ‘Very accurate deshcription, I’d shay.’

  ‘He wouldn’t agree. He’d say it was a magnificent barbarian tent, hung with the pelts of the great beasts hunted by the lean-eyed warriors from the edge of civilisation, and smelt of the rare and curious resins plundered from the caravans as they crossed the trackless—well, and so on. I mean it,’ he added.

  ‘He’sh mad?’

  ‘Sort of mad. But mad with lots of money.’

  ‘Ah, then he can’t be mad. I’ve been around; if a man hash lotsh of money he’sh just ecshentric.’

  Cohen turned in his saddle again. Twoflower was telling Bethan how Cohen had single-handed defeated the snake warriors of the witch lord of S’belinde and stolen the sacred diamond from the giant statue of Offler the Crocodile God.

  A weird smile formed among the wrinkles of Cohen’s face.

  ‘I could tell him to shut up, if you like,’ said Rincewind.

  ‘Would he?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Let him babble,’ said Cohen. His hand fell to the handle of his sword, polished smooth by the grip of decades.

  ‘Anyway, I like his eyes,’ he said. ‘They can see for fifty years.’

  A hundred yards behind them, hopping rather awkwardly through the soft snow, came the Luggage. No-one ever asked its opinion about anything.

  * * *

  By evening they had come to the edge of the high plains, and rode down through gloomy pine forests that had only been lightly dusted by the snowstorm. It was a landscape of huge cracked rocks, and valleys so narrow and deep that the days only lasted about twenty minutes. A wild, windy country, the sort where you might expect to find—

  ‘Trollsh,’ said Cohen, sniffing the air.

  Rincewind stared around him in the red evening light. Suddenly rocks that had seemed perfectly normal looked suspiciously alive. Shadows that he wouldn’t have looked at twice now began to look horribly occupied.

  ‘I like trolls,’ said Twoflower.

  ‘No you don’t,’ said Rincewind firmly. ‘You can’t. They’re big and knobbly and they eat people.’

  ‘No they don’t,’ said Cohen, sliding awkwardly off his horse and massaging his knees. ‘Well-known mishapprehenshion, that ish. Trolls never ate anybody.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, they alwaysh spit the bitsh out. Can’t digesht people, see? Your average troll don’t want any more out of life than a nice lump of granite, maybe, with perhapsh a nice slab of limeshtone for aftersh. I heard someone shay it’s becosh they’re a shilicashe—a shillycaysheou—’ Cohen paused, and wiped his beard, ‘made out of rocks.’

  Rincewind nodded. Trolls were not unknown in Ankh-Morpork, of course, where they often got employment as bodyguards. They tended to be a bit expensive to keep until they learned about doors and didn’t simply leave the house by walking aimlessly through the nearest wall.

  As they gathered firewood Cohen went on, ‘Trollsh teeth, that’sh the thingsh.’

  ‘Why?’ said Bethan.

  ‘Diamonds. Got to be, you shee. Only thing that can shtand the rocksh, and they shtill have to grow a new shet every year.’

  ‘Talking of teeth—’ said Twoflower.

  ‘Yesh?’

  ‘I can’t help noticing—’

  ‘Yesh?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Twoflower.

  ‘Yesh? Oh. Let’sh get thish fire going before we loshe the light. And then,’ Cohen’s face fell, ‘I supposhe we’d better make some shoop.’

  ‘Rincewind’s good at that,’ said Twoflower enthusiastically. ‘He knows all about herbs and roots and things.’

  Cohen gave Rincewind a look which suggested that he, Cohen, didn’t believe that.

  ‘Well, the Horshe people gave us shome horse jerky,’ he said. ‘If you can find shome wild onionsh and stuff, it might make it tashte better.’

  ‘But I—’ Rincewind began, and gave up. Anyway, he reasoned, I know what an onion looks like, it’s a sort of saggy white thing with a green bit sticking out of the top, should be fairly conspicuous.

  ‘I’ll just go and have a look, shall I?’ he said.

  ‘Yesh.’

  ‘Over there in all that thick, shadowy undergrowth?’

  ‘Very good playshe, yesh.’

  ‘Where all the deep gullies and things are, you mean?’

  ‘Ideal shpot, I’d shay.’

  ‘Yes, I thought so,’ said Rincewind bitterly. He set off, wondering how you attracted onions. After all, he thought, although you see them hanging in ropes on market stalls they probably don’t grow like that, perhaps peasants or whatever use onions hounds or something, or sing songs to attract onions.

  There were a few early stars out as he started to poke aimlessly among the leaves and grass. Luminous fungi, unpleasantly organic and looking like marital aids for gnomes, squished under his feet. Small flying things bit him. Other things, fortunately invisible, hopped or slithered away under the bushes and croaked reproachfully at him.

  ‘Onions?’ whispered Rincewind. ‘Any onions here?’

  ‘There’s a patch of them by that old yew tree,’ said a voice beside him.

  ‘Ah,’ said Rincewind. ‘Good.’

  There was a long silence, except for the buzzing of the mosquitoes around Rincewind’s ears.

  He was standing perfectly still. He hadn’t even moved his eyes.

  Eventually he said, ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Which one’s the yew?’

  ‘Small gnarly one with the little dark green needles.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I see it. Thanks again.’

  He didn’t move. Eventually the voice said conversationally, ‘Anything more I can do for you?’

  ‘You’re not a tree, are you?’ said Rincewind, still staring straight ahead.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Trees can’t talk.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s just that I’ve been having a bit of difficulty with trees lately, you know how it is.’

  ‘Not really. I’m a rock.’

  Rincewind’s voice hardly changed.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ he said slowly. ‘Well, I’ll just be getting those onions, then.’

  ‘Enjoy them.’

  He walked forward in a careful and dignified fashion, spotted a clump of stringy white things huddling in the undergrowth, uprooted them carefully, and turned around.

  There was a rock a little way away. But there were rocks everywhere, the very bones of the Disc were near he surface here.

  He looked hard at the yew tree, just in case it had been speaking. But the yew, being a fairly solitary tree, hadn’t heard about Rincewind the arborial saviour, and in any case was asleep.

  ‘If that was you, Twoflower, I knew it was you all along,’ said Rincewind. His voice sounded suddenly clear and very alone in the gathering dusk.

  Rincewind remembered the only fact he knew for sure about trolls, which was that they turned to stone when exposed to sunlight, so that anyone who employed trolls to work during daylight had to spend a fortune in barrier cream.

  But now that he came to think about it, it didn’t say anywhere what happened to them after the sun had gone down again…

  The last of the daylight trickled out of the landscape. And there suddenly seemed to be a great many rocks about.

  * * *

  ‘He’s an awful long time with those onions,’ said Twoflower. ‘Do you think we’d better go and look for him?’

  ‘Wishards know how to look after themshelves,’ said Cohen. ‘Don’t worry.’ He winced. Bethan was cutting his toenails.

  ‘He’s not a terribly good wizard, actually,’ said Twoflower, drawing nearer the fire. ‘I wouldn’t say this to his face, but’—he leaned towards Cohen—‘I’ve never actually seen him do any magic.’

  ‘Right, let’s have the other one,’ said Bet
han.

  ‘Thish is very kind of you.’

  ‘You’d have quite nice feet if only you’d look after them.’

  ‘Can’t sheem to bend down like I used to,’ said Cohen, sheepishly. ‘Of courshe, you don’t get to meet many chiropodishts in my line of work. Funny, really. I’ve met any amount of snake prieshts, mad godsh, warlordsh, never any chiropodishts. I shupposhe it wouldn’t look right, really—Cohen Against the Chiropodishts…’

  ‘Or Cohen And The Chiropractors of Doom,’ suggested Bethan. Cohen cackled.

  ‘Or Cohen And The Mad Dentists!’ laughed Twoflower.

  Cohen’s mouth snapped shut.

  ‘What’sh sho funny about that?’ he asked, and his voice had knuckles in it.

  ‘Oh, er, well,’ said Twoflower. ‘Your teeth, you see…’

  ‘What about them?’ snapped Cohen.

  Twoflower swallowed. ‘I can’t help noticing that they’re, um, not in the same geographical location as your mouth.’

  Cohen glared at him. Then he sagged, and looked very small and old.

  ‘True, of corsh,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t blame you. It’sh hard to be a hero with no teethsh. It don’t matter what elsh you loosh, you can get by with one eye even, but you show ‘em a mouth full of gumsh and no-one hash any reshpect.’

  ‘I do,’ said Bethan loyally.

  ‘Why don’t you get some more?’ said Twoflower brightly.

  ‘Yesh, well, if I wash a shark or something, yesh, I’d grow shome,’ said Cohen sarcastically.

  ‘Oh, no, you buy them,’ said Twoflower. ‘Look, I’ll show you—er, Bethan, do you mind looking the other way?’ He waited until she had turned around and then put his hand to his mouth.

  ‘You shee?’ he said.

  Bethan heard Cohen gasp.

  ‘You can take yoursh out?’

  ‘Oh yesh. I’ve got sheveral shets. Excushe me—’ there was a swallowing noise, and then in a more normal voice Twoflower said, ‘It’s very convenient, of course.’

  Cohen’s very voice radiated awe, or as much awe as is possible without teeth, which is about the same amount as with teeth but sounds a great deal less impressive.

  ‘I should think show,’ he said. ‘When they ache, you jusht take them out and let them get on with it, yesh? Teach the little buggersh a lesshon, shee how they like being left to ache all by themshelvesh!’