"Could you perhaps not shout quite so loud? I think my eardrum has just exploded."
The guard subsided, possibly only because he had run out of breath. Rincewind had a moment to look at the scenery.
There were two carts on the road. One of them seemed to be a cage on wheels; he made out faces watching him in terror. The other was an ornate palanquin carried by eight peasants; rich curtains covered the sides but he could see where they had been twitched aside so that someone within could look at him.
The guards were aware of this. It seemed to make them awkward.
"If I could just expl—"
"Silence, mouth of—" The guard hesitated.
"You've used turtle, goldfish and what you probably meant to be cheese," said Rincewind.
"Mouth of chicken gizzards!"
A long thin hand emerged from the curtains and beckoned, just once.
Rincewind was hustled forward. The hand had the longest fingernails he'd ever seen on something that didn't purr.
"Kowtow!"
"Sorry?" said Rincewind.
"Kowtow!"
Swords were produced.
"I don't know what you mean!" Rincewind wailed.
"Kowtow, please," whispered a voice by his ear. It was not a particularly friendly voice but compared to all the other voices it was positively affectionate. It sounded as though it belonged to quite a young man. And it was speaking very good Morporkian.
"How?"
"You don't know that? Kneel down, press your forehead on the ground. That's if you want to be able to wear a hat again."
Rincewind hesitated. He was a free-born Morporkian, and on the list of things a citizen didn't do was bow down to any, not to put too fine a point on it, foreigner.
On the other hand, right at the top of the list of things a citizen didn't do was get their head chopped off.
"That's better. That's good. How did you know you ought to tremble?"
"Oh, I thought up that bit myself."
The hand beckoned with a finger.
A guard slapped Rincewind in the face with the mud-encrusted What I Did… Rincewind clutched it guiltily as the guard scurried towards his master's digit.
"Voice?" said Rincewind.
"Yes?"
"What happens if I claim immunity because I'm a foreigner?"
"There's a special thing they do with a wire-mesh waistcoat and a cheesegrater."
"Oh."
"And there are torturers in Hunghung who can keep a man alive for years."
"I suppose you're not talking about healthy early morning runs and a high-fibre diet?"
"No. So keep quiet and with any luck you'll be sent to be a slave in the palace."
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad."
"Remember to gibber and grovel."
"I'll do my very best."
The white hand emerged bearing a scrap of paper. The guard took it, turned towards Rincewind and cleared his throat.
"Harken to the wisdom and justice of District Commissioner Kee, ball of swamp emanations! Not him, I mean you!"
He cleared his throat again and peered closer at the paper in the manner of one who learned to read by saying the name of each letter very carefully to himself.
"'The white pony runs through the… the…'"
The guard turned and held a whispered conversation with the curtains, and turned back again.
"… chrysanthemum… mumum blossoms, The cold wind stirs the Apricot trees. Send him to The palace to slave Until all appendages drop Off."
Several of the other guards applauded.
"Look up and clap," said the Voice.
"I'm afraid my appendages will drop off."
"It's a big cheesegrater."
"Encore! Wow! Superb! That bit about the chrysanthemumums? Wonderful!"
"Good. Listen. You're from Bes Pelargic. You've got the right accent, damned if I know why. It's a seaport and people there are a little strange. You were robbed by bandits and escaped on one of their horses. That's why you haven't got your papers. You need pieces of paper for everything here, including being anybody. And pretend you don't know me."
"I don't know you."
"Good. Long Live The Changing Things To A More Equitable State While Retaining Due Respect For The Traditions Of Our Forebears And Of Course Not Harming The August Personage Of The Emperor Endeavour!"
"Good. Yes. What?"
A guard kicked Rincewind in the region of the kidneys. This suggested, in the universal language of the boot, that he should get up.
He managed to get up on one knee, and saw the Luggage.
It wasn't his, and there were three of them.
The Luggage trotted to the crest of a low hill and stopped so fast that it left a lot of little grooves in the dirt.
In addition to not having any equipment with which to think or feel, the Luggage also had no means of seeing. The manner in which it perceived events was a complete mystery.
It perceived the other Luggages.
The three of them stood patiently in a line behind the palanquin. They were big. They were black.
The Luggage's legs disappeared inside its body.
After a while it very cautiously opened its lid, just a fraction.
Of the three things that most people know about the horse, the third is that, over a short distance, it can't run as fast as a man. As Rincewind had learned to his advantage, it has more legs to sort out.
There are additional advantages if a) the people on horseback aren't expecting you to run and b) you happen to be, very conveniently, in an athletic starting position.
Rincewind rose like a boomerang curry from a sensitive stomach.
There was a lot of shouting but the comforting thing, the important thing, was that it was all behind him. It would soon try to catch him up but that was a problem for the future. He could also consider where he was running to as well, but an experienced coward never bothered with the to when the from held such fascination.
A less practised runner would have risked a glance behind, but Rincewind instinctively knew all about wind drag and the tendency of inconvenient rocks to position themselves under the unwary foot. Besides, why look behind? He was already running as fast as he could. Nothing he could see would make him run any faster.
There was a large shapeless village ahead, a construction apparently of mud and dung. In the fields in front of it a dozen peasants looked up from their toil at the accelerating wizard.
Perhaps it was Rincewind's imagination, but as he passed them he could have sworn that he heard the cry:
"Necessarily Extended Duration To The Red Army! Regrettable Decease Without Undue Suffering To The Forces of Oppression!"
Rincewind dived through the huts as the soldiers charged at the peasants.
Cohen had been right. There seemed to be a revolution. But the Empire had been in unchanged existence for thousands of years, courtesy and a respect for protocol were part of its very fabric, and by the sound of it the revolutionaries had yet to master the art of impolite slogans.
Rincewind preferred running to hiding. Hiding was all very well, but if you were found then you were stuck. But the village was the only cover for miles around, and some of the soldiers had horses. A man might be faster than a horse over a short distance, but over this panorama of flat, open fields a horse had a running man bang to rights.
So he ducked into a building at random and pushed aside the first door he came to.
It had, pasted on it, the words: Examination. Silence!
Forty expectant and slightly worried faces looked up at him from their writing stools. They weren't children, but full-grown adults.
There was a lectern at the end of the room and, on it, a pile of papers sealed with string and wax.
Rincewind felt the atmosphere was familiar. He'd breathed it before, even if it had been a world away. It was full of those cold sweaty odours created by the sudden realization that it was pr
obably too late to do that revision you'd kept on putting off. Rincewind had faced many horrors in his time, but none held quite the same place in the lexicon of dread as those few seconds after someone said, "Turn over your papers now."
The candidates were watching him.
There was shouting somewhere outside.
He hurried up to the lectern, tore at the string and distributed the papers as fast as he could. Then he dived back to the safety of the lectern, removed his hat, and was bent low when the door opened slowly.
"Go away!" he screamed. "Examination in progress!"
The unseen figure behind the door murmured something to someone else. The door was closed again.
The candidates were still staring at him.
"Er. Very well. Turn over your papers."
There was a rustle, a few moments of that dreadful silence, and then much activity with brushes.
Competitive examinations. Oh, yes. That was another thing people knew about the Empire. They were the only way to get any kind of public post and the security that brought. People had said that this must be a very good system, because it opened up opportunities for people of merit.
Rincewind picked up a spare paper and read it.
It was headed: Examination for the post of Assistant Night-Soil Operative for the District of W'ung.
He read question one. It required candidates to write a sixteen-line poem on evening mist over the reed beds.
Question two seemed to be about the use of metaphor in some book Rincewind had never heard of.
Then there was a question about music…
Rincewind turned the paper over a couple of times. There didn't seem to be any mention, anywhere, of words like 'compost' or 'bucket' or 'wheelbarrow'. But presumably all this produced a better class of person than the Ankh-Morpork system, which asked just one question: 'Got your own shovel, have you?'
The shouting outside seemed to have died away; Rincewind risked poking his head out of the door. There was a commotion near the road but it no longer seemed Rincewind-orientated.
He ran for it.
The students got on with their examination. One of the more enterprising, however, rolled up his trouser leg and copied down a poem about mist he'd composed, at great effort, some time previously. After a while you got to know what kind of questions the examiners asked.
Rincewind trotted onwards, trying to keep to ditches wherever these weren't knee deep in sucking mud. It wasn't a landscape built for concealment. The Agateans grew crops on any piece of ground the seeds wouldn't roll off. Apart from the occasional rocky outcrop there was a distinct lack of places in which to lurk.
No-one paid him much attention once he'd left the village far behind. The occasional water buffalo operative would turn to watch him until he was out of sight, but displayed no special curiosity; it was merely that Rincewind was marginally more interesting than watching a water buffalo defecate.
He kept the road just in sight and, by evening, reached a crossroads.
There was an inn.
Rincewind hadn't eaten since the leopard. The inn meant food, but food meant money. He was hungry, and he had no money.
He chided himself for this kind of negative thinking. That was not the right approach. What he should do was go in and order a large, nourishing meal. Then instead of being hungry with no money he'd be well fed with no money, a net gain on his current position. Of course, the world was likely to raise some objections, but in Rincewind's experience there were few problems that couldn't be solved with a scream and a good ten yards' start. And, of course, he would just have had a strengthening meal.
Besides, he liked Hunghungese food. A few refugees had opened restaurants in Ankh-Morpork and Rincewind considered himself something of an expert on the dishes.[17]
The one huge room was thick with smoke and, insofar as this could be determined through the swirls and coils, quite busy. A couple of old men were sitting in front of a complicated pile of ivory tiles, playing Shibo Yangcong-san. He wasn't sure what they were smoking but, by the looks on their faces, they were happy they'd chosen it.
Rincewind made his way to the fireplace, where a skinny man was tending a cauldron.
He gave him a cheery smile. "Good morning! Can I partake of your famous delicacy 'Meal A for two People with extra Prawn Cracker'?"
"Never heard of it."
"Um. Then… could I see a painful ear… a croak of a frog… a menu?"
"What's a menu, friend?"
Rincewind nodded. He knew what it meant when a stranger called you 'friend' like that. No-one who called someone else 'friend' was feeling very kindly disposed.
"What is there to eat, I meant."
"Noodles, boiled cabbage and pork whiskers."
"Is that all?"
"Pork whiskers don't grow on trees, san."
"I've been seeing water buffalo all day," Rincewind said. "Don't you people ever eat beef?"
The ladle splashed into the cauldron. Somewhere behind him a shibo tile dropped on to the floor. The back of Rincewind's head prickled under the stares.
"We don't serve rebels in this place," said the landlord loudly.
Probably too meaty, Rincewind thought. But it seemed to him that the words had been addressed to the world in general rather than to him.
"Glad to hear it," he said, "because—"
"Yes indeed," said the landlord, a little louder. "No rebels welcome here."
"That's fine by me, because—"
"If I knew of any rebels I would be certain to alert the authorities," the landlord bellowed.
"I'm not a rebel, I'm just hungry," said Rincewind. "I'd, er, like a bowlful, please."
A bowl was filled. Rainbow patterns shimmered on its oily surface.
"That'll be half a rhinu," said the landlord.
"You mean you want me to pay before I eat it?" said Rincewind.
"You might not want to afterwards, friend."
A rhinu was more gold than Rincewind had ever owned. He patted his pockets theatrically.
"In fact, it seems that—" he began. There was a small thump beside him. What I Did On My Holidays had fallen on to the floor.
"Yes, thank you, that will do nicely," said the landlord to the room at large. He pushed the bowl into Rincewind's hand and, in one movement, scooped up the booklet and crammed it back into the wizard's pocket.
"Go and sit down in the corner!" he hissed. "And you'll be told what to do!"
"But I'm sure I know what to do. Dip spoon in bowl, raise spoon to mouth—"
"Sit down!"
Rincewind found the darkest corner and sat down. People were still watching him.
To avoid the group gaze he pulled out What I Did and opened it at random, in an effort to find out why it had a magical effect on the landlord.
'… sold me a bun containing what was called a [complicated pictogram] made entirely of the inside of pigs [urinating dog]' he read. 'And such as these could be bought for small coin at any time, and so replete were the citizens that hardly any bought these [complicated pictogram] from the stall of [complicated pictogram, but it seemed to involve a razor]-san."
Sausages filled with pig parts, thought Rincewind. Well, perhaps they might be amazing if, up until then, a bowl of dishwater with something congealing on the top of it had been your idea of a hearty meal.
Hah! Mister What-I-Did-On-My-Holidays should try coming to Ankh-Morpork next time, and see how much he liked one of old… Dibbler's sausages…ull of genuine… pig product…
The spoon splashed into the bowl.
Rincewind turned the pages hurriedly.
'… peaceful streets, along which I walked, were quite free of crime and brigandage…'
"Of course they were, you four-eyed little git!" shouted Rincewind. "That was because it was all happening to me!"
'… a city where all men are free…'
"Free? Free? Well, yes, free to starve, get robbed by the Thieves' Guild… " said Rincewind to the book.
&
nbsp; He fumbled through to another page.
'… my companion was the Great Wizard [complicated pictogram, but now that Rincewind studied it he realized with a plummeting heart it had a few lines that looked like the Agatean for 'wind'], the most prominent and powerful wizard in the entire country…'
"I never said that! I—" Rincewind stopped. Memory treacherously dredged up a few phrases, such as Oh, the Archchancellor listens to everything I say and That place would just fall down without me around. But that was just the sort of thing you said after a few beers, surely no-one would be so gullible as to write…
A picture focused itself in Rincewind's memory. It was of a happy, smiling little man with huge spectacles and a trusting, innocent approach to life which brought terror and destruction everywhere he wandered. Twoflower had been quite unable to believe that the world was a bad place and that was largely because, to him, it wasn't. It saved it all up for Rincewind.
Rincewind's life had been quite uneventful before he'd met Twoflower. Since then, as far as he could remember, it had contained events in huge amounts.
And the little man had gone back home, hadn't he? To Bes Pelargic — the Empire's only proper seaport.
Surely no-one would be so gullible as to write this sort of thing?
Surely no-one apart from one person would be so gullible.
Rincewind was not politically minded but there were some things he could work out not because they were to do with politics but because they had a lot to do with human nature. Nasty images moved into place like bad scenery.
The Empire had a wall around it. If you lived in the Empire then you learned how to make soup out of pig squeals and swallow spit because that's how it was done, and you were bullied by soldiers all the time because that was how the world worked. But if someone wrote a cheerful little book about…
… what I did on my holidays…
… in a place where the world worked quite differently…
… then however fossilized the society there would always be some people who asked themselves dangerous questions like 'Where's the pork?'
Rincewind stared glumly at the wall. Peasants of the Empire, Rebel! You have nothing to lose but your heads and hands and feet and there's this thing they do with a wire waistcoat and a cheesegrater…
Interesting Times d-17 Page 9
