Discworld 03 - Equal Rites

by Terry Pratchett

  “Very well,” he said. “If you can make yourself useful you can stay. And can you play a musical instrument?”

  Esk returned his steady gaze, not batting an eyelid. “Probably.”

  And so Esk, with the minimum of difficulty and only a little regret, left the Ramtops and their weather and joined the Zoons on their great trading journey down the Ankh.

  There were at least thirty barges with at least one sprawling Zoon family on each, and no two vessels appeared to be carrying the same cargo; most of them were strung together, and the Zoons simply hauled on the cable and stepped on to the next deck if they fancied a bit of socializing.

  Esk set up home in the fleeces. It was warm, smelled slightly of Granny’s cottage and, much more important, meant that she was undisturbed.

  She was getting a bit worried about magic.

  It was definitely getting out of control. She wasn’t doing magic, it was just happening around her. And she sensed that people probably wouldn’t be too happy if they knew.

  It meant that if she washed up she had to clatter and splash at length to conceal the fact that the dishes were cleaning themselves. If she did some darning she had to do it on some private part of the deck to conceal the fact that the edges of the hole raveled themselves together as if…as if by magic. Then she woke up on the second day of her voyage to find that several of the fleeces around the spot where she had hidden the staff had combed, carded and spun themselves into neat skeins during the night.

  She put all thoughts of lighting fires out of her head.

  There were compensations, though. Every sluggish turn of the great brown river brought new scenes. There were dark stretches hemmed in with deep forest, through which the barges traveled in the dead center of the river with the men armed and the women below—except for Esk, who sat listening with interest to the snortings and sneezings that followed them through the bushes on the banks. There were stretches of farmland. There were several towns much larger than Ohulan. There were even some mountains, although they were old and flat and not young and frisky like her mountains. Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.

  The barges stopped at some of the towns. By tradition only the men went ashore, and only Amschat, wearing his ceremonial Lying hat, spoke to non-Zoons. Esk usually went with him. He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.

  Anyway, it seemed to Amschat that when Esk was with him he always got a very good price. There was something about a small child squinting determinedly at them from behind his legs that made even market-hardened merchants hastily conclude their business.

  In fact, it began to worry him. When a market broker in the walled town of Zemphis offered him a bag of ultramarines in exchange for a hundred fleeces a voice from the level of his pockets said: “They’re not ultramarines.”

  “Listen to the child!” said the broker, grinning. Amschat solemnly held one of the stones to his eye.

  “I am listening,” he said, “and they do indeed look like ultramarines. They have the glit and shimmy.”

  Esk shook her head. “They’re just spircles,” she said. She said it without thinking, and regretted it immediately as both men turned to stare at her.

  Amschat turned the stone over in his palm. Putting the chameleon spircle stones into a box with some real gems so that they appeared to change their hue was a traditional trick, but these had the true inner blue fire. He looked up sharply at the broker. Amschat had been finely trained in the art of the Lie. He recognized the subtle signs, now that he came to think about it.

  “There seems to be a doubt,” he said, “but ’tis easily resolved, we need only take them to the assayer in Pine Street because the world knows that spircles will dissolve in hypactic fluid, yesno?”

  The broker hesitated. Amschat had changed position slightly, and the set of his muscles suggested that any sudden movement on the broker’s part would see him flat in the dust. And that damn child was squinting at him as though she could see through to the back of his mind. His nerve broke.

  “I regret this unfortunate dispute,” he said. “I had accepted the stones as ultramarines in good faith but rather than cause disharmony between us I will ask you to accept them as—as a gift, and for the fleeces may I offer this roseatte of the first sorting?”

  He took a small red stone from a tiny velvet pouch. Amschat hardly looked at it but, without taking his eyes off the man, passed it down to Esk. She nodded.

  When the merchant had hurried off Amschat took Esk’s hand and half-dragged her to the assayer’s stall, which was little more than a niche in the wall. The old man took the smallest of the blue stones, listened to Amschat’s hurried explanation, poured out a saucerful of hypactic fluid and dropped the stone in. It frothed into nothingness.

  “Very interesting,” he said. He took another stone in a tweezer and examined it under a glass.

  “They are indeed spircles, but remarkably fine specimens in their own right,” he concluded. “They are by no means worthless, and I for example would be prepared to offer you—is there something wrong with the little girl’s eyes?”

  Amschat nudged Esk, who stopped trying out another Look.

  “—I would offer you, shall we say, two zats of silver?”

  “Shall we say five?” said Amschat pleasantly.

  “And I would like to keep one of the stones,” said Esk. The old man threw up his hands.

  “But they are mere curios!” he said. “Of value only to a collector!”

  “A collector may yet sell them to an unsuspecting purchaser as finest roseattes or ultramarines,” said Amschat, “especially if he was the only assayer in town.”

  The assayer grumbled a bit at this, but at last they settled on three zats and one of the spircles on a thin silver chain for Esk.

  When they were out of earshot Amschat handed her the tiny silver coins and said: “These are yours. You have earned them. But—” he hunkered down so that his eyes were on a level with hers, “—you must tell me how you knew the stones were false.”

  He looked worried, but Esk sensed that he wouldn’t really like the truth. Magic made people uncomfortable. He wouldn’t like it if she said simply: spircles are spircles and ultramarines are ultramarines, and though you may think they look the same that is because most people don’t use their eyes in the right way. Nothing can entirely disguise its true nature.

  Instead she said: “The dwarves mine spircles near the village where I was born, and you soon learn to see how they blend light in a funny way.”

  Amschat looked into her eyes for some time. Then he shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said. “Fine. Well, I have some further business here. Why don’t you buy yourself some new clothes, or something? I’d warn you against unscrupulous traders but, somehow, I don’t know, I don’t think you will have any trouble.”

  Esk nodded. Amschat strode off through the market place. At the first corner he turned, looked at her thoughtfully, and then disappeared among the crowds.

  Well, that’s the end of sailing, Esk told herself. He’s not quite sure but he’s going to be watching me now and before I know what’s happening the staff will be taken away and there’ll be all sorts of trouble. Why does everyone get so upset about magic?

  She gave a philosophical sigh and set about exploring the possibilities of the town.

  There was the question of the staff, though. Esk had rammed it deep among the fleeces, which were not going to be unloaded yet. If she went back for it people would start asking questions, and she didn’t know the answers.

  She found a convenient alleyway and scuttled down it until a deep doorway gave her the privacy she required.

 
If going back was out of the question then only one thing remained. She held out a hand and closed her eyes.

  She knew exactly what she wanted to do—it lay in front of her eyes. The staff mustn’t come flying through the air, wrecking the barge and drawing attention to itself. All she wanted, she told herself, was for there to be a slight change in the way the world was organized. It shouldn’t be a world where the staff was in the fleeces, it should be a world where it was in her hand. A tiny change, an infinitesimal alteration to the Way Things Were.

  If Esk had been properly trained in wizardry she would have known that this was impossible. All wizards knew how to move things about, starting with protons and working upward, but the important thing about moving something from A to Z, according to basic physics, was that at some point it should pass through the rest of the alphabet. The only way one could cause something to vanish at A and appear at Z would be to shuffle the whole of Reality sideways. The problems this would cause didn’t bear thinking about.

  Esk, of course, had not been trained, and it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.

  As Esk tried to work out how to move the staff the ripples spread out in the magical ether, changing the Discworld in thousands of tiny ways. Most went entirely unnoticed. Perhaps a few grains of sand lay on their beaches in a slightly different position, or the occasional leaf hung on its tree in a marginally different way. But then the wavefront of probability struck the edge of Reality and rebounded like the slosh off the side of the pond which, meeting the laggard ripples coming the other way, caused small but important whirlpools in the very fabric of existence. You can have whirlpools in the fabric of existence, because it is a very strange fabric.

  Esk was completely ignorant of all this, of course, but was quite satisfied when the staff dropped out of thin air into her hand.

  It felt warm.

  She looked at it for some time. She felt that she ought to do something about it; it was too big, too distinctive, too inconvenient. It attracted attention.

  “If I’m taking you to Ankh-Morpork,” she said thoughtfully, “You’ve got to go in disguise.”

  A few late flickers of magic played around the staff, and then it went dark.

  Eventually Esk solved the immediate problem by finding a stall in the main Zemphis marketplace that sold broomsticks, buying the largest, carrying it back to her doorway, removing the handle and ramming the staff deep into the birch twigs. It didn’t seem right to treat a noble object in this way, and she silently apologized to it.

  It made a difference, anyway. No one looked twice at a small girl carrying a broom.

  She bought a spice pasty to eat while exploring (the stallholder carelessly shortchanged her, and only realized later that he had inexplicably handed over two silver pieces; also, rats mysteriously got in and ate all his stock during the night, and his grandmother was struck by lightning).

  The town was smaller than Ohulan, and very different because it lay on the junction of three trade routes quite apart from the river itself. It was built around one enormous square which was a cross between a permanent exotic traffic jam and a tent village. Camels kicked mules, mules kicked horses, horses kicked camels and they all kicked humans; there was a riot of colors, a din of noise, a nasal orchestration of smells and the steady, heady sound of hundreds of people working hard at making money.

  One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.

  Strangely enough these often involved considerable effort. Rolling heavy rocks to the top of cliffs for a decent ambush, cutting down trees to block the road, and digging a pit lined with spikes while still keeping a wicked edge on a dagger probably involved a much greater expenditure of thought and muscle than more socially acceptable professions but, nevertheless, there were still people misguided enough to endure all this, plus long nights in uncomfortable surroundings, merely to get their hands on perfectly ordinary large boxes of jewels.

  So a town like Zemphis was the place where caravans split, mingled and came together again, as dozens of merchants and travelers banded together for protection against the socially disadvantaged on the trails ahead. Esk, wandering unregarded amidst the bustle, learned all this by the simple method of finding someone who looked important and tugging on the hem of his coat.

  This particular man was counting bales of tobacco and would have succeeded but for the interruption.

  “What?”

  “I said, what happening here?”

  The man meant to say: “Push off and bother someone else.” He meant to give her a light cuff about the head. So he was astonished to find himself bending down and talking seriously to a small, grubby-faced child holding a large broomstick (which also, it seemed to him later, was in some indefinable way paying attention).

  He explained about the caravans. The child nodded.

  “People all get together to travel?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Where to?”

  “All sorts of places. Sto Lat, Pseudopolis…Ankh-Morpork, of course…”

  “But the river goes there,” said Esk, reasonably. “Barges. The Zoons.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the merchant, “but they charge high prices and they can’t carry everything and, anyway, no one trusts them much.”

  “But they’re very honest!”

  “Huh, yes,” he said. “But you know what they say: never trust an honest man.” He smiled knowingly.

  “Who says that?”

  “They do. You know. People,” he said, a certain uneasiness entering his voice.

  “Oh,” said Esk. She thought about it. “They must be very silly,” she said primly. “Thank you, anyway.”

  He watched her wander off and got back to his counting. A moment later there was another tug at his coat.

  “Fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftysevenwell?” he said, trying not to lose his place.

  “Sorry to bother you again,” said Esk, “but those bale things…”

  “What about them fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftyseven?”

  “Well, are they supposed to have little white worm things in them?”

  “Fiftysev—What?” The merchant lowered his slate and stared at Esk, “What little worms?”

  “Wriggly ones. White,” added Esk, helpfully. “All sort of burrowing about in the middle of the bales.”

  “You mean tobacco threadworm?” He looked wild-eyed at the stack of bales being unloaded by, now he came to think about it, a vendor with the nervous look of a midnight sprite who wants to get away before you find out what fairy gold turns into in the morning. “But he told me these had been well stored and—how do you know, anyway?”

  The child had disappeared among the crowds. The merchant looked hard at the spot where she had been. He looked hard at the vendor, who was grinning nervously. He looked hard at the sky. Then took his sampling knife out of his pocket, stared at it for a moment, appeared to reach a decision, and sidled toward the nearest bale.

  Esk, meanwhile, had by random eavesdropping found the caravan being assembled for Ankh-Morpork. The trail boss was sitting at a table made up of a plank across two barrels.

  He was busy.

  He was talking to a wizard.

  Seasoned travelers know that a party setting out to cross possibly hostile country should have a fair number of swords in it but should definitely have a wizard in case there is any need for magic arts and, even if these do not become necessary, for lighting fires. A wizard of the third rank or above does not expect to pay for the privilege of joining the party. Rather, he expects to be paid. Delicate negotiations were even now coming to a conclusion.

  “Fair enough, Master Treatle, but wh
at of the young man?” said the trail boss, one Adab Gander, an impressive figure in a trollhide jerkin, rakishly floppy hat and a leather kilt. “He’s no wizard, I can see.”

  “He is in training,” said Treatle—a tall skinny wizard whose robes declared him to be a mage of the Ancient and Truly Original Brothers of the Silver Star, one of the eight orders of wizardry.

  “Then no wizard he,” said Gander. “I know the rules, and you’re not a wizard unless you’ve got a staff. And he hasn’t.”

  “Even now he travels to the Unseen University for that small detail,” said Treatle loftily. Wizards parted with money slightly less readily than tigers parted with their teeth.

  Gander looked at the lad in question. He had met a good many wizards in his time and considered himself a good judge and he had to admit that this boy looked like good wizard material. In other words, he was thin, gangling, pale from reading disturbing books in unhealthy rooms, and had watery eyes like two lightly poached eggs. It crossed Gander’s mind that one must speculate in order to accumulate.

  All he needs to get right to the top, he thought, is a bit of a handicap. Wizards are martyrs to things like asthma and flat feet, it somehow seems to give them their drive.

  “What’s your name, lad?” he said, as kindly as possible.

  “Sssssssssssssss” said the boy. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a captive balloon. He turned to his companion, full of mute appeal.

  “Simon,” said Treatle.

  “—imon,” agreed Simon, thankfully.

  “Can you cast fireballs or whirling spells, such as might be hurled against an enemy?”

  Simon looked sideways at Treatle.

  “Nnnnnnnnnn,” he ventured.

  “My young friend follows higher magic than the mere hurling of sorceries,” said the wizard.

  “—o,” said Simon.

  Gander nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “maybe you will indeed be a wizard, lad. Maybe when you have your fine staff you’ll consent to travel with me one time, yes? I will make an investment in you, yes?”

  “Y—”

  “Just nod,” said Gander, who was not naturally a cruel man.