'I'm not dead,' she said. 'I'm sure I would have remembered. Besides, this isn't my idea of paradise.' She looked critically at the reclining figures, and added, 'I wonder who does their hair?'
A sword point prodded her in the small of the back, and the two of them set out along the ornate path towards a small domed pavilion surrounded by olive trees. She scowled.
'Anyway, I don't like sherbet.'
Rincewind didn't comment. He was busily examining the state of his own mind, and wasn't happy at the sight of it. He had a horrible feeling that he was falling in love.
He was sure he had all the symptoms. There were the sweaty palms, the hot sensation in the stomach, the general feeling that the skin of his chest was made of tight elastic. There was the feeling every time Conina spoke, that someone was running hot steel into his spine.
He glanced down at the Luggage, tramping stoically alongside him, and recognised the symptoms.
'Not you, too?' he said.
Possibly it was only the play of sunlight on the Luggage's battered lid, but it was just possible that for an instant it looked redder than usual.
Of course, sapient pearwood has this sort of weird mental link with its owner ... Rincewind shook his head. Still, it'd explain why the thing wasn't its normal malignant self.
'It'd never work,' he said. 'I mean, she's a female and you're a, well, you're a-’ He paused. 'Well, whatever you are, you're of the wooden persuasion. It'd never work. People would talk.'
He turned and glared at the black-robed guards behind him.
'I don't know what you're looking at,' he said severely.
The Luggage sidled over to Conina, following her so closely that she banged an ankle on it.
'Push off,' she snapped, and kicked it again, this time on purpose.
Insofar as the Luggage ever had an expression, it looked at her in shocked betrayal.
The pavilion ahead of them was an ornate onion-shaped dome, studded with precious stones and supported on four pillars. Its interior was a mass of cushions on which lay a rather fat, middle-aged man surrounded by three young women. He wore a purple robe interwoven with gold thread; they, as far as Rincewind could see, demonstrated that you could make six small saucepan lids and a few yards of curtain netting go a long way although - he shivered - not really far enough.
The man appeared to be writing. He glanced up at them.
'I suppose you don't know a good rhyme for "thou"?' he said peevishly.
Rincewind and Conina exchanged glances.
'Plough?' said Rincewind. 'Bough?'
'Cow?' suggested Conina, with forced brightness.
The man hesitated. 'Cow I quite like,' he said, 'Cow has got possibilities. Cow might, in fact, do. Do pull up a cushion, by the way. Have some sherbet. Why are you standing there like that?'
'It's these ropes,' said Conina.
'I have this allergy to cold steel,' Rincewind added.
'Really, how tiresome,' said the fat man, and clapped a pair of hands so heavy with rings that the sound was more of a clang. Two guards stepped forward smartly and cut the bonds, and then the whole battalion melted away, although Rincewind was acutely conscious of dozens of dark eyes watching them from the surrounding foliage. Animal instinct told him that, while he now appeared to be alone with the man and Conina, any aggressive moves on his part would suddenly make the world a sharp and painful place. He tried to radiate tranquillity and total friendliness. He tried to think of something to say.
'Well,' he ventured, looking around at the brocaded hangings, the ruby-studded pillars and the gold filigree cushions, 'you've done this place up nicely. It's-’ he sought for something suitably descriptive - 'well, pretty much of a miracle of rare device.'
'One aims for simplicity,' sighed the man, still scribbling busily. 'Why are you here? Not that it isn't always a pleasure to meet fellow students of the poetic muse.'
'We were brought here,' said Conina.
'Men with swords,' added Rincewind.
'Dear fellows, they do so like to keep in practice. Would you like one of these?'
He snapped his fingers at one of the girls.
'Not, er, right now,' Rincewind began, but she'd picked up a plate of golden-brown sticks and demurely passed it towards him. He tried one. It was delicious, a sort of sweet crunchy flavour with a hint of honey. He took two more.
'Excuse me,' said Conina, 'but who are you? And where is this?'
'My name is Creosote, Seriph of Al Khali,’ said the fat man, 'and this is my Wilderness. One does one's best.'
Rincewind coughed on his honey stick.
'Not Creosote as in "As rich as Creosote"?' he said.
'That was my dear father. I am, in fact, rather richer. When one has a great deal of money, I am afraid, it is hard to achieve simplicity. One does one's best.' He sighed.
'You could try giving it away,' said Conina.
He sighed again. 'That isn't easy, you know. No, one just has to try to do a little with a lot.'
'No, no, but look', said Rincewind, spluttering bits of stick, 'they say, I mean, everything you touch turns into gold, for goodness sake.'
'That could make going to the lavatory a bit tricky,' said Conina brightly. 'Sorry.'
'One hears such stories about oneself,' said Creosote, affecting not to have heard. 'So tiresome. As if wealth mattered. True riches lie in the treasure houses of literature.'
'The Creosote I heard of,' said Conina slowly, 'was head of this band of, well, mad killers. The original Assassins, feared throughout hubward Klatch. No offence meant.'
'Ah yes, dear father,' said Creosote junior. 'The hashishim. Such a novel idea.[15] But not really very efficient. So we hired Thugs instead.'
'Ah. Named after a religious sect,' said Conina knowingly.
Creosote gave her a long look. 'No,' he said slowly, 'I don't think so. I think we named them after the way they push people's faces through the back of their heads. Dreadful, really.'
He picked up the parchment he had been writing on, and continued, 'I seek a more cerebral life, which is why I had the city centre converted into a Wilderness. So much better for the mental flow. One does one's best. May I read you my latest oeuvre?'
'Egg?' said Rincewind, who wasn't following this.
Creosote thrust out one pudgy hand and declaimed as follows:
'A summer palace underneath the bough,
A flask of wine, a loaf of bread, some lamb couscous
with courgettes, roast peacock tongues, kebabs, iced
sherbet, selection of sweets from the trolley and
choice of Thou,
Singing beside me in the Wilderness,
And Wilderness is-’
He paused, and picked up his pen thoughtfully.
'Maybe cow isn't such a good idea,' he said. 'Now that I come to look at it-’
Rincewind glanced at the manicured greenery, carefully arranged rocks and high surrounding walls. One of the Thous winked at him.
'This is a Wilderness?' he said.
'My landscape gardeners incorporated all the essential features, I believe. They spent simply ages getting the rills sufficiently sinuous. I am reliably informed that they contain prospects of rugged grandeur and astonishing natural beauty.'
'And scorpions,' said Rincewind, helping himself to another honey stick.
'I don't know about that,' said the poet. 'Scorpions sound unpoetic to me. Wild honey and locusts seem more appropriate, according to the standard poetic instructions, although I've never really developed the taste for insects.'
'I always understood that the kind of locust people ate in wildernesses was the fruit of a kind of tree,' said Conina. 'Father always said it was quite tasty.'
'Not insects?' said Creosote.
'I don't think so.'
The Seriph nodded at Rincewind. 'You might as well finish them up, then,' he said. 'Nasty crunchy things, I couldn't see the point.'
'I don't wish to sound ungrateful,' said Con
ina, over the sound of Rincewind's frantic coughing. 'But why did you have us brought here?'
'Good question.' Creosote looked at her blankly for a few seconds, as if trying to remember why they were there.
'You really are a most attractive young woman,' he said. 'You can't play a dulcimer, by any chance?'
'How many blades has it got?' said Conina.
'Pity,' said the Seriph, 'I had one specially imported.'
'My father taught me to play the harmonica,' she volunteered.
Creosote's lips moved soundlessly as he tried out the idea.
'No good,' he said. 'Doesn't scan. Thanks all the same, though.' He gave her another thoughtful look. 'You know, you really are most becoming. Has anyone ever told you your neck is as a tower of ivory?'
'Never,' said Conina.
'Pity,' said Creosote again. He rummaged among his cushions and produced a small bell, which he rang.
After a while a tall, saturnine figure appeared from behind the pavilion. He had the look of someone who could think his way through a corkscrew without bending, and a certain something about the eyes which would have made the average rabid rodent tiptoe away, discouraged.
That man, you would have said, has got Grand Vizier written all over him. No-one can tell him anything about defrauding widows and imprisoning impressionable young men in alleged jewel caves. When it comes to dirty work he probably wrote the book or, more probably, stole it from someone else.
He wore a turban with a pointy hat sticking out of it. He had a long thin moustache, of course.
'Ah, Abrim,' said Creosote.
'Highness?'
'My Grand Vizier,' said the Seriph.
- thought so -, said Rincewind to himself.
'These people, why did we have them brought here?'
The vizier twirled his moustache, probably foreclosing another dozen mortgages.
'The hat, highness,' he said. 'The hat, if you remember.'
'Ah, yes. Fascinating. Where did we put it?'
'Hold on,' said Rincewind urgently. 'This hat ... it wouldn't be a sort of battered pointy one, with lots of stuff on it? Sort of lace and stuff, and, and-’ he hesitated-’no-one's tried to put it on, have they?'
'It specifically warned us not to,' said Creosote, 'so Abrim got a slave to try it on, of course. He said it gave him a headache.'
'It also told us that you would shortly be arriving,' said the vizier, bowing slightly at Rincewind, 'and therefore I - that is to say, the Seriph felt that you might be able to tell us more about this wonderful artifact?'
There is a tone of voice known as interrogative, and the vizier was using it; a slight edge to his words suggested that, if he didn't learn more about the hat very quickly, he had various activities in mind in which further words like 'red hot' and 'knives' would appear. Of course, all Grand Viziers talk like that all the time. There's probably a school somewhere.
'Gosh, I'm glad you've found it,' said Rincewind, 'That hat is gngngnh-’
'I beg your pardon?' said Abrim, signalling a couple of lurking guards to step forward. 'I missed the bit after the young lady-’ he bowed at Conina-’elbowed you in the ear.'
'I think,' said Conina, politely but firmly, 'you'd better take us to see it.'
Five minutes later, from its resting place on a table in the Seriph's treasury, the hat said, At last. What kept you?
It is at a time like this, with Rincewind and Conina probably about to be the victims of a murderous attack, and Coin about to address the assembled cowering wizards on the subject of treachery, and the Disc about to fall under a magical dictatorship, that it is worth mentioning the subject of poetry and inspiration.
For example, the Seriph, in his bijou wildernessette, has just riffled back through his pages of verse to revise the lines which begin:
'Get up! For morning in the cup of day,
Has dropped the spoon that scares the stars away'
- and he has sighed, because the white-hot lines searing across his imagination never seem to come out exactly as he wants them.
It is, in fact, impossible that they ever will.
Sadly, this sort of thing happens all the time.
It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slopping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist's mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the lift, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.[16]
This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time travelling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.
Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target hit the wrong one.
For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.
By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of white horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succour and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration therefore fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contribution to the field of tone poetry.
Many civilisations have recognised this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.
And so Creosote, who had dreamt the inspiration for a rather fine poem about life and philosophy and how they both look much better through the bottom of a wine glass, was totally unable to do anything about it because he had as much poetic ability as a hyena.
Why the gods allow this sort of thing to continue is a mystery.
Actually, the flash of inspiration needed to explain it clearly and precisely has taken place, but the creature who received it -a small female bluetit - has never been able to make the position clear, even after some really strenuous coded messages on the tops of milk bottles. By a strange coincidence, a philosopher who had been devoting some sleepless nights to the same mystery woke up that morning with a wonderful new idea for getting peanuts out of bird tables.
Which brings us rather neatly on to the subject of magic.
A long way out in the dark gulfs of interstellar space, one single inspiration particle is clipping along unaware of its destiny, which is just as well, because its destiny is to strike, in a matter of hours, a tiny area of Rincewind's mind.
It would be a tough destiny even if Rincewind's creative node was a reasonable size, but the particle's karma had handed it the problem of hitting a moving target the size of a small raisin over a distance of several hundred lightyears. Life can be very difficult for a little subatomic particle in a great big universe.
If it pulls it off, however, Rincewind will have a serious philosophic idea. If it doesn't, a nearby brick will have an important insight which it will be totally unequipped to deal with.
The Seriph's palace, known to legend as the Rhoxie, occupied most of the centre of Al Khali that wasn't occupied by the wilderness. Most things connected with Creosote were famed in mythology and the arched, domed, many-pil
lared palace was said to have more rooms than any man had been able to count. Rincewind didn't know which number he was in.
'It's magic, isn't it?' said Abrim the vizier.
He prodded Rincewind in the ribs.
'You're a wizard,' he said. 'Tell me what it does.'
'How do you know I'm a wizard?' said Rincewind desperately.
'It's written on your hat,' said the vizier.
'Ah.'
'And you were on the boat with it. My men saw you.'
'The Seriph employs slavers?' snapped Conina. 'That doesn't sound very simple!'
'Oh, I employ the slavers. I am the vizier, after all,' said Abrim. 'It is rather expected of me.'
He gazed thoughtfully at the girl, and then nodded at a couple of the guards.
'The current Seriph is rather literary in his views,' he said. 'I, on the other hand, am not. Take her to the seraglio, although,' he rolled his eyes and gave an irritable sigh, 'I'm sure the only fate that awaits her there is boredom, and possibly a sore throat.'
He turned to Rincewind.
'Don't say anything,' he said. 'Don't move your hands. Don't try any sudden feats of magic. I am protected by strange and powerful amulets.'
'Now just hold on a minute-’ Rincewind began, and Conina said, 'All right. I've always wondered what a harem looked like.'
Rincewind's mouth went on opening and shutting, but no sounds came out. Finally he managed, 'Have you?'
She waggled an eyebrow at him. It was probably a signal of some sort. Rincewind felt he ought to have understood it, but peculiar passions were stirring in the depths of his being. They weren't actually going to make him brave, but they were making him angry. Speeded up, the dialogue behind his eyes was going something like this:
Ugh.
Who's that?
Your conscience. I feel terrible. Look, they're marching her off to the harem.
Rather her than me, thought Rincewind, but without much conviction.
Do something!
There's too many guards! They'll kill me!
So they'll kill you, it's not the end of the world.
It will be for me, thought Rincewind grimly.
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