Truth

by Pratchett, Terry

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’ he said. ‘Boil it?’

  ‘Bless you, no. The variety’s far too floury. No, this one’s going to be chips.’

  ‘Chips, eh?’ said William. And it seemed, strangely, exactly the right thing to do.

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s a good idea. Let it fry, Mr Wintler. Let it fry.’

  The clock moved on.

  One of the reporters came in to say that the Alchemists’ Guild had exploded, and did this count as news? Otto was summoned from his crypt and sent out to get a picture. William finished his piece about yesterday’s events and passed it over to the dwarfs. Someone came in and said there was a big crowd in Sator Square because the Bursar (71) was sitting on a roof seven floors up, looking puzzled. Sacharissa, wielding her pencil with care, crossed out every adjective in a report of the Ankh-Morpork Floral Arranging Society, reducing its length by half.

  William went out to find out about the Bursar (71), then wrote a few short paragraphs. Wizards doing odd things wasn’t news. Wizards doing odd things was wizards.

  He threw the piece into the Out tray, and looked at the press.

  It was black, and big, and complex. Without eyes, without a face, without life … It looked back at him.

  He thought: you don’t need old sacrificial stones. Lord Vetinari was wrong about that. He touched his forehead. The bruise had long ago faded.

  You put your mark on me. Well, I’m wise to you.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  Sacharissa looked up, still preoccupied. ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s go. Out. Now. For a walk, or tea, or shopping,’ said William. ‘Let’s not be here. Don’t argue, please. Coat on. Now. Before it realizes. Before it finds a way to stop us.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He pulled her coat off the peg and grabbed her arm. ‘No time to explain!’

  She allowed herself to be dragged out into the street, where William took a deep breath and relaxed.

  ‘Now would you mind telling me what that was all about?’ said Sacharissa. ‘I’ve got a pile of work in there, you know.’

  ‘I know. Come on. We’re probably not far enough away. There’s a new noodle place opened in Elm Street. Everyone says it’s pretty good. How about it?’

  ‘But there’s all that work to do!’

  ‘So? It’ll still be there tomorrow, won’t it?’

  She hesitated. ‘Well, an hour or two won’t hurt, probably,’ she admitted.

  ‘Good. Let’s go.’

  They’d reached the junction of Treacle Mine Road and Elm Street when it caught up with them.

  There were cries further along the street. William swivelled his head, saw the four-horse brewer’s dray thundering out of control. He saw the people diving and scuttling out of the way. He saw the soup-plate hooves throw up mud and ice. He saw the brasses on the harness, the gleam, the steam …

  His head swivelled the other way. He saw the old woman with two sticks crossing the street, quite oblivious of the onrushing death. He saw the shawl, the white hair …

  A blur went past him. The man twisted in the air, landed on his shoulder in the centre of the street, rolled upright, grabbed the woman, and leapt—

  The wayward wagon went by in a rush of steam and slush. The team tried to corner at the crossroads. The dray behind them did not. A mêlée of hooves and horses and wheels and sleet and screams whirled onwards and took the windows out of several shops before the cart rammed up against a stone pillar and stopped dead.

  In obedience to the laws of physics and the narrative of such things, its load did not. The barrels burst their bonds, crashed down on to the street and rolled onwards. A few smashed, filling the gutter with suds. The others, thumping and banging into one another, became the focus of attention of every upright citizen who could recognize a hundred gallons of beer which suddenly didn’t belong to anyone any more and was heading for freedom.

  William and Sacharissa looked at one another.

  ‘Okay – I’ll get the story, you go and find Otto!’

  They said that at the same time, and then stared defiantly at each other.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said William. ‘Find some kid, bribe him to get Otto, I’ll talk to that Plucky Watchman who grabbed the old lady in A Mercy Dash, you cover the Big Smash, okay?’

  ‘I’ll find the kid,’ said Sacharissa, pulling out her own notebook, ‘but you cover the accident and the Beer Barrel Bonanza and I’ll talk to the White-Haired Granny. Human interest, right?’

  ‘All right!’ William conceded. ‘That was Captain Carrot who did the rescue. Make sure Otto gets a picture, and get his age!’

  ‘Of course!’

  William headed towards the crowd around the smashed wagon. Many people were in distant pursuit of the barrels, and the odd scream suggested that thirsty people seldom realize how hard it is to stop a hundred gallons of beer in a big oak cask when it’s on a roll.

  He dutifully noted down the name on the side of the dray. A couple of men were helping the horses up, but they did not appear to have much to do with beer delivery. They appeared to be men who simply wanted to help lost horses, and take them home and make them better. If this had to mean dyeing areas of their coats and swearing blind they’d owned them for the past two years, then so be it.

  He approached a bystander not obviously engaged in any felonious activity.

  ‘Exc—’ he began. But the citizen’s eyes had already detected the notebook.

  ‘I saw it all,’ he said.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘It was a ter-ri-ble scene,’ said the man, at dictation speed. ‘But the watch-man made a death-defying plunge to res-cue the old lady and he de-serves a med-al.’

  ‘Really?’ said William, scribbling fast. ‘And you are—’

  ‘Sa-muel Arblaster (43), stone-mason, of 11b The Scours,’ said the man.

  ‘I saw it too,’ said a woman next to him, urgently. ‘Mrs Florrie Perry, blonde mother of three, from Dolly Sisters. It was a scene of car-nage.’

  William risked a glance at his pencil. It was a kind of magic wand.

  ‘Where’s the iconographer?’ said Mrs Perry, looking around hopefully.

  ‘Er … not here yet,’ said William.

  ‘Oh.’ She looked disappointed. ‘Shame about the poor woman with the snake, wasn’t it? I expect he’s off taking pictures of her.’

  ‘Er … I hope not,’ said William.

  It was a long afternoon. One barrel had rolled into a barber shop and exploded. Some of the brewer’s men turned up, and there was a fight with several of the barrels’ new owners, who claimed rights of salvage. One enterprising man tapped a barrel by the roadside and set up a temporary pub. Otto arrived. He took pictures of barrel rescuers. He took a picture of the fight. He took pictures of the Watch arriving to arrest everyone still standing. He took pictures of the white-haired old lady and the proud Captain Carrot and, in his excitement, of his thumb.

  It was a good story all round. And William was halfway through writing his part of it back at the Times when he remembered.

  He’d watched it happening. And he’d reached for his notebook. That was a worrying thought, he told Sacharissa.

  ‘So?’ she said, from her side of the desk. ‘How many ls in “gallant”?’

  ‘Two,’ said William. ‘I mean, I didn’t try to do anything. I thought: this is a Story, and I have to tell it.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Sacharissa, still bowed over her writing. ‘We’ve been press-ganged.’

  ‘But it’s not—’

  ‘Look at it like this,’ said Sacharissa, starting a fresh page. ‘Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not very—’

  Sacharissa glanced up and flashed him a smile. ‘Sometimes they’re the same person,’ she said.

  This time it was William who looked down, modestly.

  ‘You think that’s really true?’ he said.

 
She shrugged. ‘Really true? Who knows? This is a newspaper, isn’t it? It just has to be true until tomorrow.’

  William felt the temperature rise. Her smile had really been attractive. ‘Are you … sure?’

  ‘Oh, yes. True until tomorrow is good enough for me.’

  And behind her the big black vampire of a printing press waited to be fed, and to be brought alive in the dark of the night for the light of the morning. It chopped the complexities of the world into little stories, and it was always hungry.

  And it needed a double-column story for page two, William remembered.

  And, a few inches under his hand, a woodworm chewed its way contentedly through the ancient timber. Reincarnation enjoys a joke as much as the next philosophical hypothesis. As it chewed, the woodworm thought: ‘This is —ing good wood!’

  Because nothing has to be true for ever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth.

  THE END

  1 This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.

  2 The world’s rarest and most evil-smelling vegetable, and consequently much prized by connoisseurs (who seldom prize anything cheap and common). Also a slang name for Ankh-Morpork, although it does not smell as bad as that.

  3 Your Brain On Drugs is a terrible sight, but Mr Tulip was living proof of the fact that so was Your Brain on a cocktail of horse liniment, sherbet and powdered water-retention pills.

  4 Words resemble fish in that some specialist ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea. ‘Rumpus’ and ‘fracas’ are found only in certain newspapers (in much the same way that ‘beverages’ are found only in certain menus). They are never used in normal conversation.

  5 Which was not hard, as unkind people pointed out.

  6 In any case, anyone eating raw steak from an Ankh-Morpork slaughterhouse was embarking on a life of danger and excitement that should satisfy anyone.

  7 In many ways William de Worde had quite a graphic imagination.

  8 William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.

  9 At this point Bingo had not been introduced to Ankh-Morpork.

  10 Those, that is, who weren’t gathered around the harmonium at the Temperance Mission nervously singing songs about how much they liked cocoa.

  11 Most dwarfs were still referred to as ‘he’ as well, even when they were getting married. It was generally assumed that somewhere under all that chain mail one of them was female and that both of them knew which one this was. But the whole subject of sex was one that traditionally minded dwarfs did not discuss, perhaps out of modesty, possibly because it didn’t interest them very much and certainly because they took the view that what two dwarfs decided to do together was entirely their own business.

  12 The best way to describe Mr Windling would be like this: you are at a meeting. You’d like to be away early. So would everyone else. There really isn’t very much to discuss, anyway. And just as everyone can see Any Other Business coming over the horizon and is already putting their papers neatly together, a voice says, ‘If I can raise a minor matter, Mr Chairman …’ and with a horrible wooden feeling in your stomach you know, now, that the evening will go on for twice as long with much referring back to the minutes of earlier meetings. The man who has just said that, and is now sitting there with a smug smile of dedication to the committee process, is as near Mr Windling as makes no difference. And something that distinguishes the Mr Windlings of the universe is the term ‘in my humble opinion’, which they think adds weight to their statements rather than indicating, in reality, ‘these are the mean little views of someone with the social grace of duckweed’.

  13 In other circumstances it would have been as likely as cows singing ‘Let Me Be Covered In Rapturous Gravy’.

  14 Classically, very few people have considered that cleanliness is next to godliness, apart from in a very sternly abridged dictionary. A rank loincloth and hair in an advanced state of matted entanglement have generally been the badges of office of prophets whose injunction to disdain earthly things starts with soap.