Thief of Time tds-26

by Terry Pratchett

  “Lobsang, ven—uh, Sweeper.”

  “Lobsang Ludd?”

  “Er… yes, Sweeper.”

  “Amazing. So, Lobsang Ludd, you tried to count my surprises, did you? Everybody does. Surprise is the nature of Time, and five is the number of Surprise.”

  “Yes, Sweeper. I found the little bridge that tilts and throws you into the carp pool…”

  “Good. Good.”

  “…and I have found the bronze sculpture of a butterfly that flaps its wings when you breathe on it…”

  “That's two.”

  “There's the surprising way those little daisies spray you with venomous pollen…”

  “Ah, yes. Many people find them extremely surprising.”

  “And I believe the fourth surprise is the yodelling stick insect.”

  “Well done,” said Lu-Tze, beaming. “It's very good, isn't it?”

  “But I can't find the fifth surprise.”

  “Really? Let me know when you find it,” said Lu-Tze.

  Lobsang Ludd thought about this as he trailed after the sweeper.

  “The Garden of Five Surprises is a test,” he said, at last.

  “Oh, yes. Nearly everything is.”

  Lobsang nodded. It was like the Garden of the Four Elements. Every novice found the bronze symbols of three of them—in the carp pond, under a rock, painted on a kite—but none of Lobsang's classmates found Fire. There didn't appear to be a fire anywhere in the garden.

  After a while Lobsang had reasoned thus: there were in fact five elements, as they had been taught. Four made up the universe, and the fifth, Surprise, allowed it to keep on happening. No one had said that the four in the garden were the material four, so the fourth element in the Garden could be Surprise at the fact that Fire wasn't there. Besides, fire was not generally found in a garden, and the other signs were, truly, in their element. So he'd gone down to the bakeries and opened one of the ovens, and there, glowing red hot below the loaves, was Fire.

  “Then… I expect that the fifth surprise is: there is no fifth surprise,” he said.

  “Nice try, but no cylindrical smoking thing,” said Lu-Tze. “And is it not written, ‘Oo, you are so sharp you'll cut yourself one of these days’?”

  “Um, I haven't read that in the sacred texts yet, Sweeper,” said Lobsang uncertainly.

  “No, you wouldn't have,” said Lu-Tze.

  They stepped out of the brittle sunlight into the deep cold of the temple, and walked on through ancient halls and down stairways cut into the rock. The sound of distant chanting followed them. Lu-Tze, who was not holy and therefore could think unholy thoughts, occasionally wondered whether the chanting monks were chanting anything, or were just going “aahaaahahah”. You could never tell with all that echo.

  He turned off the main passage and reached for the handles of a pair of large, red-lacquered doors. Then he looked behind him. Lobsang had stopped dead, some yards away.

  “Coming?”

  “But not even dongs are allowed in there!” said Lobsang. “You have to be a Third Djim ting at least!”

  “Yeah, right. It's a short-cut. Come on, it's draughty out here.” With extreme reluctance, expecting at any moment the outraged scream of authority, Lobsang trailed after the sweeper.

  And he was just a sweeper! One of the people who swept the floors and washed the clothes and cleaned the privies! No one had ever mentioned it! Novices heard about Lu-Tze from their very first day—how he'd gone into some of the most tangled knots of time and unravelled them, how he'd constantly dodged the traffic on the crossroads of history, how he could divert time with a word and used this to develop the most subtle arts of battle…

  …and here was a skinny little man who was sort of generically ethnic, so that he looked as if he could have come from anywhere, in a robe that had once been white before it fell to all those stains and patches, and the sandals repaired with string. And the friendly grin, as if he was constantly waiting for something amusing to happen. And no belt at all, just another piece of string to hold his robe closed. Even some novices got to the level of grey dong in their first year!

  The dojo was busy with senior monks at practice. Lobsang had to dodge aside as a pair of fighters whirled past, arms and legs blurring as each sought an opening, paring time into thinner and thinner slivers—

  “You! Sweeper!”

  Lobsang looked round, but the shout had been directed at Lu-Tze. A ting, only just elevated to the Third Djim by the fresh look of his belt, was advancing on the little man, his face red with fury.

  “What for are you coming in here, cleaner of filth? This is forbidden!”

  Lu-Tze's little smile didn't change. But he reached in his robe and brought out a small bag.

  “'s a short-cut,” he said. He pulled a pinch of tobacco and, while the ting loomed over him, began to roll a cigarette. “And there's dirt everywhere, too. I'll certainly have a word with the man who does this floor.”

  “How dare you insult!” screamed the monk. “Back to the kitchens with you, sweeper!”

  Cowering behind Lu-Tze, Lobsang realized that the entire dojo had stopped to watch this. One or two of the monks were whispering to one another. The man in the brown robe of the dojo master was watching impassively from his chair, with his chin on his hand.

  With great and patient and infuriating delicacy, like a samurai arranging flowers, Lu-Tze marshalled the shreds of tobacco in the flimsy cigarette paper.

  “No, I reckon I'll go out of that door over there, if you don't mind,” he said.

  “Impudence! Then you are ready to fight, enemy of dust?” The man leapt back and raised his hands to form the Combat of the Hake. He spun round and planted a kick on a heavy leather sack, hitting it so hard that its supporting chain broke. Then he was back to face Lu-Tze, hands held in the Advancement of the Snake.

  “Ai! Shao! Hai-eee—” he began.

  The dojo master stood up. “Hold!” he commanded. “Do you not want to know the name of the man you are about to destroy?”

  The fighter held his stance, glaring at Lu-Tze. “I don't need to know name of sweeper,” he said.

  Lu-Tze rolled the cigarette into a skinny cylinder and winked at the angry man, which only stoked the anger.

  “It is always wise to know the name of a sweeper, boy,” said the dojo master. “And my question was not addressed to you.”

  Tick

  Jeremy stared at his bed sheets.

  They were covered in writing. His own writing.

  It trailed across the pillow and onto the wall. There were sketches, too, scored deeply into the plaster.

  He found his pencil under the bed. He'd even sharpened it. In his sleep, he'd sharpened a pencil! And by the look of it he'd been writing and drawing for hours. Trying to draw a dream.

  With, down one side of his eiderdown, a list of parts.

  It had all made absolute sense when he'd seen it, like a hammer or a stick or Wheelbright's Gravity Escapement. It had been like meeting an old friend. And now… He stared at the scrawled lines. He had been writing so fast he'd ignored punctuation and some of the letters, too. But he could see some sense in there.

  He'd heard of this sort of thing. Great inventions sometimes did arise from dreams and daydreams. Didn't Hepzibah Whitlow have the idea of the adjustable pendulum clock as a result of his work as the public hangman? Didn't Wilframe Balderton always say that the idea for the Fish Tail Escapement came after he'd eaten too much lobster?

  Yes, it had all been so clear in the dream. By daylight, it needed a bit more work.

  There was a clatter of dishes from the little kitchen behind his workshop. He hurried down, dragging the sheet behind him.

  “I usually have—” he began.

  “Toatht, thur,” said Igor, turning away from the range. “Lightly browned, I thuthpect.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “An Igor learnth to antithipate, thur,” said Igor. “What a wonderful little kitchen, thur. I've never
theen a drawer marked ‘Thpoonth’ which jutht hath thpoonth in it.”

  “Are you any good at working with glass, Igor?” said Jeremy, ignoring this.

  “No, thur,” said Igor, buttering the toast.

  “You're not?”

  “No, thur. I am bloody amathing at it, thur. Many marthterth have needed… thpethial apparatuth not obtainable elthewhere, thur. What wath it you wanted?”

  “How would we go about building this?” Jeremy spread the sheet on the table.

  The slice of toast dropped from Igors black-nailed fingers.

  “Is there something wrong?” said Jeremy.

  “I thought thomeone wath walking over my grave, thur,” said Igor, still looking shocked.

  “Er, you haven't actually ever had a grave, have you?” said Jeremy.

  “Jutht a figure of thpeech, thur, jutht a figure of thpeech,” said Igor, looking hurt.

  “This is an idea I've…I've had for a clock…”

  “The Glath Clock,” said Igor. “Yeth. I know about it. My grandfather Igor helped build the firtht one.”

  “The first one? But it's just a story for children! And I dreamed about it, and—”

  “Grandfather Igor alwayth thaid there wath thomething very thtrange about all that,” said Igor. “The ecthplothion and everything.”

  “It exploded? Because of the metal spring?”

  “Not ecthactly an ecthplothion,” said Igor. “We're no thtrangerth to ecthplothionth, uth Igorth. It wath… very odd. And we're no thtrangerth to odd, either.”

  “Are you telling me it really existed?”

  Igor seemed embarrassed about this. “Yeth,” he said, “and then again, no.”

  “Things either exist or they don't,” said Jeremy. “I am very clear about that. I have medicine.”

  “It ecthithted,” said Igor, “and then, after it did, it never had. Thith ith what my grandfather told me, and he built that clock with thethe very handth!”

  Jeremy looked down. Igor's hands were gnarled, and, now he came to look at them, had a lot of scar tissue around the wrists. “We really believe in heirloomth in our family,” said Igor, catching his gaze.

  “Sort of… hand-me-downs, ahahaha,” said Jeremy. He wondered where his medicine was.

  “Very droll, thur,” said Igor. “But Grandfather Igor alwayth thaid that afterwardth it wath like… a dream, thur.”

  “A dream…”

  “The workthop wath different. The clock wathn't there. Demented Doctor Wingle, that wath hith marthter at the time, wathn't working on the glath clock at all but on a way of ecthtracting thunthine from orangeth. Thingth were different and they alwayth had been, thur. Like it had never happened.”

  “But it turned up in a book for children!”

  “Yeth, thur. Bit of a conundrum, thur.”

  Jeremy stared at the sheet with its burden of scribbles. An accurate clock. That's all it was. A clock that'd make all other clocks unnecessary, Lady LeJean had said. Building a clock like that would mean the clockmaker went down in timekeeping history. True, the book had said that Time had got trapped in the clock, but Jeremy had no interest whatsoever in things that were Made Up. Anyway, a clock just measured. Distance didn't get tangled up in a tape measure. All a clock did was count teeth on a wheel. Or… light…

  Light with teeth. He'd seen that in the dream. Light not as something bright in the sky, but as an excited line, going up and down like a wave.

  “Could you… build something like this?” he said.

  Igor looked at the drawings again. “Yeth,” he said, nodding. Then he pointed to several large glass containers around the drawing of the central column of the clock. “And I know what thethe are,” he said.

  “In my dr—I mean, I imagined them as fizzing,” said Jeremy.

  “Very, very thecret knowledge, thothe jarth,” said Igor, carefully ignoring the question. “Can you get copper rodth here, thur?”

  “In Ankh-Morpork? Easily.”

  “And thinc?”

  “Lots of it, yes.”

  “Thulphuric athid?”

  “By the carboy, yes.”

  “I mutht have died and gone to heaven,” said Igor. “Jutht put me near enough copper and thinc and athid, thur,” he said, “and then we thall thee thparkth.”

  Tick

  “My name,” said Lu-Tze, leaning on his broom as the irate ting raised a hand, “is Lu-Tze.”

  The dojo went silent. The attacker paused in mid-bellow.

  “—Ai! Hao–gng! Gnh? Ohsheeeeeeohsheeeeeee…”

  The man did not move but seemed instead to turn in on himself, sagging from the martial stance into a kind of horrified, penitent crouch.

  Lu-Tze bent over and struck a match on his unprotesting chin.

  “What's your name, lad?” he said, lighting his ragged cigarette.

  “His name is mud, Lu-Tze,” said the dojo master, striding forward. He gave the unmoving challenger a kick. “Well, Mud, you know the rules. Face the man you have challenged, or give up the belt.”

  The figure remained very still for a moment, and then cautiously, in a manner almost theatrically designed not to give offence, started to fumble with his belt.

  “No, no, we don't need that” said Lu-Tze kindly. “It was a good challenge. A decent ‘Ai!’ and a very passable ‘Hai-eee!’, I thought. Good martial gibberish all round, such as you don't often hear these days. And we would not want his trousers falling down at a time like this, would we?” He sniffed and added, “Especially at a time like this.”

  He patted the shrinking man on the shoulder. “Just you recall the rule your teacher here taught you on day one, eh? And… why don't you go and clean yourself up? I mean, some of us have to tidy up in here.”

  Then he turned and nodded to the dojo master.

  “While I am here, master, I should like to show young Lobsang the Device of Erratic Balls.”

  The dojo master bowed deeply. “It is yours, Lu-Tze the Sweeper.”

  As Lobsang followed the ambling Lu-Tze he heard the dojo master, who like all teachers never missed an opportunity to drive home a lesson, say: “Dojo! What is Rule One?”

  Even the cowering challenger mumbled along to the chorus:

  “Do not act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling men!”

  “Good rule, Rule One,” said Lu-Tze, leading his new acolyte into the next room. “I have met many people who could have heeded it to good advantage.”

  He stopped, without looking at Lobsang Ludd, and held out his hand.

  “And now, if you please, you will return the little shovel you stole from me when first we met.”

  “But I came nowhere near you, master!”

  Lu-Tze's smile did not flicker. “Oh. Yes. That is true. My apologies. The ramblings of an old man. Is it not written, ‘I'd forget my own head if it wasn't nailed on’? Let us proceed.”

  The floor in here was wood, but the walls were high and padded. There were reddish-brown stains here and there.

  “Er, we have one of these in the novices' dojo, Sweeper,” said Lobsang.

  “But the balls in that are made of soft leather, yes?” said the old man, approaching a tall wooden cube. A row of holes ran halfway up the side that faced down the length of the room. “And they travel quite slowly, I recall.”

  “Er, yes,” said Lobsang, watching him pull on a very large lever. Down below there was the sound of metal on metal, and then of urgent gushing water. Air began to wheeze from joints in the box. “These are wooden,” said Lu-Tze calmly. “Catch one.”

  Something touched Lobsang's ear and behind him the padding shook as a ball buried itself deeply and then dropped to the floor. “Perhaps a shade slower…” said Lu-Tze, turning a knob.

  After fifteen random balls, Lobsang caught one in his stomach. Lu-Tze sighed and pushed the big lever back.

  “Well done,” he said.

  “Sweeper, I'm not used to—” said the boy, picking himself up.

  “Oh
, I knew you wouldn't catch one,” said Lu-Tze. “Even our boisterous friend out there in the dojo wouldn't catch one at that speed.”

  “But you said you had slowed it down!”

  “Only so that it wouldn't kill you. Just a test, see. Everything's a test. Let's go, lad. Can't keep the abbot waiting.”

  Trailing cigarette smoke, Lu-Tze ambled away.

  Lobsang followed, getting more and more nervous. This was Lu-Tze, the dojo had proved that. And he knew it, anyway. He'd looked at the little round face as it gazed amicably at the angry fighter and known it. But… just a sweeper? No insignia? No status? Well, obviously status, because the dojo master couldn't have bowed lower for the abbot, but…

  And now he was following the man along passages where even a monk was not allowed to go, on pain of death. Sooner or later, there was surely going to be trouble.

  “Sweeper, I really ought to be back at my duties in the kitchens—” he began.

  “Oh, yes. Kitchen duties,” said Lu-Tze. “To teach you the virtues of obedience and hard work, right?”

  “Yes, Sweeper.”

  “Are they working?”

  “Oh… yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Well… no.”

  “They're not all they're cracked up to be, I have to tell you,” said Lu-Tze. “Whereas, my lad, what we have here,” he stepped through an archway, “is an education!”

  It was the biggest room Lobsang had ever seen. Shafts of light speared down from glazed holes in the roof. And below, more than a hundred yards across and tended by senior monks who walked above it on delicate wire walkways…

  Lobsang had heard about the Mandala.

  It was as if someone had taken tons of coloured sands and thrown them across the floor in a great swirl of coloured chaos. But there was order fighting for survival in the chaos, rising and falling and spreading. Millions of randomly tumbling sand grains would nevertheless make a piece of pattern, which would replicate and spread across the circle, rebounding or merging with other patterns and eventually dissolving into the general disorder. It happened again and again, turning the Mandala into a silent raging war of colour.