Interesting Times d-17

by Terry Pratchett

  He had to get out.

  There was something else, though. At the foot of the statue, lying as if they'd just been dropped there, were a helmet, a pair of gauntlets, and two heavy-looking boots.

  Rincewind picked up the helmet. It didn't look very strong, but it did look quite light. Normally he didn't bother with protective clothing, reasoning that the best defence against threatening danger was to be on another continent, but right now the idea of armour had its attractions.

  He removed his hat, put the helmet on, pulled down the visor, and then wedged the hat on top of the helmet.

  There was a flicker in front of his eyes and Rincewind was staring at the back of his own head. It was a grainy picture, and it was in shades of green rather than proper colours, but it was definitely the back of his own head he was looking at. People had told him what it looked like.

  He raised the visor and blinked.

  The pool was still in front of him.

  He lowered the visor.

  There he was, about fifty feet away, with this helmet on his head.

  He waved a hand up and down.

  The figure in the visor waved a hand up and down.

  He turned around and faced himself. Yep. That was him.

  OK, he thought. A magic helmet. It lets you see yourself a long way away. Great. You can have fun watching yourself fall into holes you can't see because they're right up close.

  He turned around again, raised the visor and inspected the gloves. They seemed as light as the helmet but quite clumsy. You could hold a sword, but not much else.

  He tried one on. Immediately, with a faint sizzling noise, a row of little pictures lit up on the wide cuff. They showed soldiers. Soldiers digging, soldiers fighting, soldiers climbing…

  Ah. So… magic armour. Perfectly normal magic armour. It had never been very popular in Ankh-Morpork. Of course, it was light. You could make it as thin as cloth. But it tended to lose its magic without warning. Many an ancient lord's last words had been, "You can't kill me because I've got magic aaargh."

  Rincewind looked at the boots, with suspicious recollection of the trouble there had been with the University's prototype Seven League boots. Footwear which tried to make you take steps twenty-one miles long imposed unfortunate groinal strains; they'd got the things off the student just in time, but he'd still had to wear a special device for several months, and ate standing up.

  All right, but even old magic armour would be useful now. It wasn't as if it weighed much, and the mud of Hunghung hadn't improved what was left of his own boots. He put his feet into them.

  He thought: Well, so what is supposed to happen now?

  He straightened up.

  And behind him, with the sound of seven thousand flower pots smashing together, the lightning still crackling over them, the Red Army came to attention.

  Hex had grown a bit during the night. Adrian Turnip-seed, who had been on duty to feed the mice and rewind the clockwork and clean out the dead ants, had sworn that he'd done nothing else and that no-one had come in.

  But now, where there had been the big clumsy arrangement of blocks so that the results could be read, was a quill pen in the middle of a network of pulleys and levers.

  "Watch," said Adrian, nervously tapping out a very simple problem. "It's come up with this after doing all those spells at suppertime…"

  The ants scuttled. The clockwork spun. The springs and levers jerked so sharply that Ponder took a step back.

  The quill pen wobbled over to an inkwell, dipped, returned to the sheet of paper Adrian had put under the levers, and began to write.

  "It blots a bit," he said, in a helpless tone of voice. "What's happening?"

  Ponder had been thinking further about this. The latest conclusions hadn't been comforting.

  "Well… we know that books containing magic become a little bit… sapient…" he began. "And we've made a machine for…"

  "You mean it's alive?"

  "Come on, let's not get all occult about this," said Ponder, trying to sound jovial. "We're wizards, after all."

  "Listen, you know that long problem in thaumic fields you wanted me to put in?"

  "Yes. Well?"

  "It gave me the answer at midnight," said Adrian, his face pale.

  "Good."

  "Yes, good, except that I didn't actually give it the problem until half past one, Ponder."

  "You're telling me you got the answer before you asked the question?"

  "Yes!"

  "Why did you ask the question, then?"

  "I thought about it, and I thought maybe I had to. I mean, it couldn't have known what the answer was going to be if I didn't give it the problem, yes?"

  "Good point. Er. You waited ninety minutes, though."

  Adrian looked at his pointy boots.

  "I… was hiding in the privy. Well, Redo from Start could—"

  "All right, all right. Go and have something to eat."

  "Are we meddling with things we don't understand, Ponder?"

  Ponder looked up at the gnomic bulk of the machine. It didn't seem threatening, merely… other.

  He thought: meddle first, understand later. You had to meddle a bit before you had anything to try to understand. And the thing was never, ever, to go back and hide in the Lavatory of Unreason. You have to try to get your mind around the Universe before you can give it a twist.

  Perhaps we shouldn't have given you a name. We didn't think about that. It was a joke. But we should have remembered that names are important. A thing with a name is a bit more than a thing.

  "Off you go, Adrian," he said firmly.

  He sat down and carefully typed:

  Hello.

  Things whirred.

  The quill wrote:

  + + +?????? + + + Hello + + + Redo From Start + + +

  Far above, a butterfly — its wings an undistinguished yellow, with black markings — fluttered through an open window.

  Ponder began the calculations for the transfer between Hunghung and Ankh-Morpork.

  The butterfly alighted for a moment on the maze of glass pipes. When it rose again, it left behind a very small blob of nectar.

  Ponder typed carefully, far below.

  A small but significant ant, one of the scurrying thousands, emerged from a break in the tube and spent a few seconds sucking at the sweet liquid before going back to work.

  After a while, Hex gave an answer. Apart from one small but significant point, it was entirely correct.

  Rincewind turned around.

  With an echoing chorus of creaks and groans, the Red Army turned around too.

  And it was red. It was the same colour, Rincewind realized, as the soil.

  He'd bumped into a few statues in the darkness. He hadn't realized that there were this many. They stretched, rank on rank, into the distant shadows.

  Experimentally, he turned around. Behind him, there was another chorus of stampings.

  After a few false starts he found that the only way to end up facing them was to take off the boots, turn, and put the boots on again.

  He lowered the visor for a moment, and saw himself lowering the visor for a moment.

  He stuck up an arm. They stuck out their arms. He jumped up and down. They jumped up and down, with a crash that made the globes swing. Lightning sizzled from their boots.

  He felt a sudden hysterical urge to laugh.

  He touched his nose. They touched their noses. He made, with terrible glee, the traditional gesture for the dismissal of demons. Seven thousand terracotta middle fingers stabbed towards the ceiling.

  He tried to calm down.

  The word his mind had been groping for finally surfaced, and it was golem.

  There were one or two of them, even in Ankh-Morpork. You were bound to get them in any area where you had wizards or priests of an experimental turn of mind. They were usually just figures made out of clay and animated with some suitable spell or prayer. They pottered about doing simple odd jobs, but they were not
very fashionable these days. The problem was not putting them to work but stopping them from working; if you set a golem to digging the garden and then forgot about it, you'd come back to find it'd planted a row of beans 1500 miles long.

  Rincewind looked down at one of the gloves.

  He cautiously touched the little picture of a fighting soldier.

  The sound of seven thousand swords being simultaneously unsheathed was like the tearing of a thick sheet of steel. Seven thousand points were pointed right at Rincewind.

  He took a step back. So did the army.

  He was in a place with thousands of artificial soldiers wearing swords. The fact that he appeared to have control of them was no great comfort. He'd theoretically had control of Rincewind for the whole of his life, and look what had happened to him.

  He looked at the little pictures again. One of them showed a soldier with two heads. When he touched it, the army turned about smartly. Ah.

  Now to get out of here…

  The Horde watched the bustle among Lord Hong's men. Objects were being dragged to the front line.

  "They don't look like archers to me," said Boy Willie.

  "Those things are Barking Dogs," said Cohen. "I should know. Seen 'em before. They're like a barrel full of fireworks, and when the fireworks are lit a big stone comes rushing out of the other end."

  "Why?"

  "Well, would you hang around if someone had just lit a firework by your arse?"

  "Here, Teach, he said 'arse'," complained Truckle. "Look, on my bit of paper here it says you mustn't say—"

  "We've got shields, haven't we?" said Mr Saveloy. "I'm sure if we keep close together and put the shields over our heads we'll be as right as rain."

  "The stone's about a foot across and going very fast and it's red hot."

  "Not shields, then?"

  "No," said Cohen. "Truckle, you push Hamish—"

  "We won't get fifty yards, Ghenghiz," said Caleb.

  "Better fifty yards now than six feet in a minute, yes?" said Cohen.

  "Bravo!" said Mr Saveloy.

  "Whut?"

  Lord Hong watched them. He saw the Horde hang their shields around the wheelchair to form a crude travelling wall, and saw the wheels begin to turn.

  He raised his sword.

  "Fire!"

  "Still tamping the charges, o lord!"

  "I said fire!"

  "Got to prime the Dogs, o lord.!"

  The bombardiers worked feverishly, spurred on less by terror of Lord Hong than by the onrushing Horde.

  Mr Saveloy's hair streamed in the wind. He bounded through the dust, waving his sword and screaming.

  He'd never been so happy in all his life.

  So this was the secret at the heart of it all: to look death right in the face and charge… It made everything so utterly simple.

  Lord Hong threw down his helmet. "Fire, you wretched peasants! You scum of the earth! Why must I ask twice! Give me that torch!"

  He pushed a bombardier aside, crouched down beside a Dog, heaved on it so that the barrel was pointing at the oncoming Cohen, lifted the torch—

  The earth heaved. The Dog reared and rolled sideways.

  A round red head, smiling faintly, rose out of the ground.

  There were screams in the ranks as the soldiers looked down at the moving dirt under their boots, tried to run on a surface that was just shifting soil, and disappeared in the rising cloud of dust.

  The ground caved in.

  Then it caved out again as stricken soldiers climbed up one another to escape because, rising gently through the turmoil, was the soil in human shape.

  The Horde skidded to a halt.

  "What're they? Trolls?" said Cohen. Ten of the figures were visible now, industriously digging at the air.

  Then they stopped. One of them turned its gently smiling head this way and that.

  A sergeant must have screamed a handful of archers into line, because a few arrows shattered on the terracotta armour, with absolutely no effect.

  Other red warriors were climbing up behind the former diggers. They collided with them, with a sound of crockery. Then, as one man — or troll, or demon — they drew their swords, turned around, and headed towards Lord Hong's army.

  A few soldiers tried to fight them simply because there was too great a crowd behind them to run away. They died.

  It wasn't that the red guards were good fighters. They were very mechanical, each one performing the same thrust, parry, slash, regardless of what their opponent was doing. But they were simply unstoppable. If their opponent escaped one of the blows but didn't get out of the way then he was just trodden on — and by the looks of things, the warriors were extremely heavy.

  And it was the way the things smiled all the time that added to the terror.

  "Well, now, there's a thing," Cohen said, feeling for his tobacco pouch.

  "Never seen trolls fight like that," said Truckle. Rank after rank was walking up out of the hole, stabbing happily at the air.

  The front row were moving in a cloud of dust and screams. It is hard for a big army to do anything quickly, and divisions trying to move forward to see what the trouble was were getting in the way of fleeing individuals seeking a hole to hide in and permanent civilian status. Gongs were banging and men were trying to shout orders, but no-one knew what the gongs were meant to mean or how the orders should be obeyed, because there didn't seem to be enough time.

  Cohen finished rolling his cigarette, and struck a match on his chin.

  "Right," he said, to the world in general. "Let's get that bloody Hong."

  The clouds overhead were less fearsome now. There was less lightning. But there were still a lot of them, greeny-black, heavy with rain.

  "But this is amazing!" said Mr Saveloy.

  A few drops hit the ground, leaving wide craters in the dirt.

  "Yeah, right," said Cohen.

  "A most strange phenomenon! Warriors rising out of the ground!"

  The craters joined up. It felt as though the drops were joining up as well. The rain began to pour down.

  "Dunno," said Cohen, watching a ragged platoon flee past. "Never been here before. Praps this happens a lot."

  "I mean, it's just like that myth about the man who sowed dragons' teeth and terrible fighting skeletons came up!"

  "I don't believe that," said Caleb, as they jogged after Cohen.

  "Why not?"

  "If you sow dragons' teeth, you should get dragons. Noot fighting skeletons. What did it say on the packet?"

  "I don't know! The myth never said anything about them coming in a packet!"

  "Should've said "Comes up Dragons" on the packet."

  "You can't believe myths," said Cohen. "I should know. Right… there he is…" he added, pointing to a distant horseman.

  The whole plain was in turmoil now. The red warriors were only the start. The alliance of the five warlords was glass fragile in any case, and panicky flight was instantly interpreted as sneak attack. No-one paid any attention to the Horde. They didn't have any coloured pennants or gongs. They weren't traditional enemies. And, besides, the soil was now mud, and the mud flew, and everyone from the waist down was the same colour and this was rising.

  "What're we doing, Ghenghiz?" said Mr Saveloy.

  "We're heading back for the palace."

  "Why?"

  "'Cos that's where Hong's gone."

  "But there's this astonishing—"

  "Look, Teach, I've seen walking trees and spider gods and big green things with teeth," said Cohen. "It's no good goin' around saying 'astonishing' all the time, ain't that so, Truckle?"

  "Right. D'you know, when I went after that Five-Headed Vampire Goat over in Skund they said I shouldn't on account of it being an endangered species? I said, yes, that was down to me. Were they grateful?"

  "Huh," said Caleb. "Should've thanked you, giving them all those endangered species to worry about. Turn around and go home right now, soldier boy!"

 
A group of soldiers, fighting to get away from the red warriors, skidded in the mud, stared in terror at the Horde, and headed off in a new direction.

  Truckle stopped for breath, rain streaming off his beard.

  "I can't be having with this running, though," he said. "Not and push Hamish's wheelchair in all this mud. Let's have a breather."

  "Whut?"

  "Stopping for a breather?" said Cohen. "My gods! I never thought I'd see the day! A hero having a rest? Did Voltan the Indestructible have a bit of a rest?"

  "He's having one now. He's dead, Ghenghiz," said Caleb.

  Cohen hesitated.

  "What, old Voltan?"

  "Didn't you know? And the Immortal Jenkins."

  "Jenkins isn't dead, I saw him only last year."

  "But he's dead now. All the heroes are dead, 'cept us. And I ain't too sure about me, too."

  Cohen splashed forward and snatched Caleb upright by his shirt.

  "What about Hrun? He can't be dead. He's half our age!"

  "Last I heard he got a job. Sergeant of the Guard somewhere."

  "Sergeant of the Guard?" said Cohen. "What, for pay?"

  "Yep."

  "But… what, like, for pay?"

  "He told me he might make Captain next year. He said… he said it's a job with a pension."

  Cohen released his grip.

  "There's not many of us now, Cohen," said Truckle.

  Cohen spun around.

  "All right, but there's never been many of us! And I ain't dyin'! Not if it means the world's taken over by bastards like Hong, who don't know what a chieftain is. Scum. That's what he called his soldiers. Scum. It's like that bloody civilized game you showed us, Teach!"

  "Chess?"

  "Right. The prawns are just there to be slaughtered by the other side! While the king just hangs around at the back."

  "Yeah, but the other side's you, Cohen."

  "Right! Right… well, yes, that's fine when I'm the enemy. But I don't shove men in front of me to get killed instead of me. And I never use bows and them dog things. When I kill someone it's up close and personal. Armies? Bloody tactics? There's only one way to fight, and that's everyone charging all at once, waving their swords and shouting! Now on your feet and let's get after him!"

  "It's been a long morning, Ghenghiz," said Boy Willie.

  "Don't give me that!"