The Discworld Series (№7) - Pyramids

'I can't just hang around until someone happens to mention it, can I? Be reasonable,' he snapped. 'How many people are likely to say, hey, I had this funny dream about cows last night? Apart from you, I mean.'

They stared at one another.

'And she's my sister?' said Teppic.

The priests nodded. It was left to Koomi to put it into words. He'd just spent ten minutes going through the files with the Mistress of the Women.

'Her mother was, er, your late father's favourite,' he said.

'He took a great deal of interest in her upbringing, as you know, and, er, it would appear that . . . yes. She may be your aunt, of course. The concubines are never very good at paperwork. But most likely your sister.'

She looked at him with tear-filled eyes.

'That doesn't make any difference, does it?' she whispered.

Teppic stared at his feet.

'Yes,' he said. 'I think it does, really.' He looked up at her. 'But you can be queen,' he added. He glared at the priests. 'Can't she,' he stated firmly.

The high priests looked at one another. Then they looked at Ptraci, who stood alone, her shoulders shaking. Small, palace trained, used to taking orders . . . They looked at Koomi.

'She would be ideal,' he said. There was a murmur of suddenly— confident agreement.

'There you are then,' said Teppic, consolingly.

She glared at him. He backed away.

'So I'll be off,' he said, 'I don't need to pack anything, it's all right.'

'Just like that?' she said. 'Is that all? Isn't there anything you're going to say?'

He hesitated, halfway to the door. You could stay, he told himself. It wouldn't work, though. It'd end up a terrible mess; you'd probably end up splitting the kingdom between you. Just because fate throws you together doesn't mean fate's got it right. Anyway, you've been forth.

'Camels are more important than pyramids,' he said slowly. 'It's something we should always remember.'

He ran for it while she was looking for something to throw.

The sun reached the peak of noon without beetles, and Koomi hovered by the throne like Hat, the Vulture-Headed God.

'It will please your majesty to confirm my succession as high priest,' he said.

'What?' Ptraci was sitting with her chin cupped in one hand. She waved the other hand at him. 'Oh. Yes. All right. Fine.'

'No trace has, alas, been found of Dios. We believe he was very close to the Great Pyramid when it . . . flared.'

Ptraci stared into space. 'You carry on,' she said. Koomi preened.

'The formal coronation will take some time to arrange,' he said, taking the golden mask. 'However, your graciousness will be pleased to wear the mask of authority now, for there is much formal business to be concluded.'

She looked at the mask.

'I'm not wearing that,' she said flatly.

Koomi smiled. 'Your majesty will be pleased to wear the mask of authority,' he said.

'No,' said Ptraci.

Koomi's smile crazed a little around the edges as he attempted to get to grips with this new concept. He was sure Dios had never had this trouble.

He got over the problem by sidling round it. Sidling had stood him in good stead all his life; he wasn't going to desert it now. He put the mask down very carefully on a stool.

'It is the First Hour,' he said. 'Your majesty will wish to conduct the Ritual of the Ibis, and then graciously grant an audience to the military commanders of the Tsortean and Ephebian armies. Both are seeking permission to cross the kingdom. Your majesty will forbid this. At the Second Hour, there will-'

Ptraci sat drumming her fingers on the arms of the throne. Then she took a deep breath. 'I'm going to have a bath,' she said.

Koomi rocked back and forth a bit.

'It is the First Hour,' he repeated, unable to think of anything else. 'Your majesty will wish to conduct-'

'Koomi?'

'Yes, O noble queen?'

'Shut up.'

'The Ritual of the Ibis-' Koomi moaned.

'I'm sure you're capable of doing it yourself. You look like a man who does things himself, if ever I saw one,' she added sourly.

'The commanders of the Tsortean-'

'Tell them,' Ptraci began, and then paused. 'Tell them,' she repeated, 'that they may both cross. Not one or the other, you understand? Both.'

'But-' Koomi 's understanding managed at last to catch up with his ears — 'that means they'll end up on opposite sides.'

'Good. And after that you can order some camels. There's a merchant in Ephebe with a good stock. Check their teeth first. Oh, and then you can ask the captain of the Unnamed to come and see me. He was explaining to me what a «free port» is.'

'In your bath, O queen?' said Koomi weakly. He couldn't help noticing, now, how her voice was changing with each sentence as the veneer of upbringing burned away under the blowlamp of heredity.

'Nothing wrong with that,' she snapped. 'And see about plumbing. Apparently pipes are the thing.'

'For the asses' milk?' said Koomi, who was now totally lost in the desert.

'Shut up, Koomi.'

'Yes, O queen,' said Koomi, miserably.

He'd wanted changes. It was just that he'd wanted things to stay the same, as well.

The sun dropped to the horizon, entirely unaided. For some people, it was turning out to be quite a good day. The reddened light lit up the three male members of the Ptaclusp dynasty, as they pored over plans for— 'It's called a bridge,' said IIb.

'Is that like an aqueduct?' said Ptaclusp.

'In reverse, sort of thing,' said IIb. 'The water goes underneath, we go over the top.'

'Oh. The k— the queen won't like that,' said Ptaclusp.

'The royal family's always been against chaining the holy river with dams and weirs and suchlike.'

IIb gave a triumphant grin. 'She suggested it,' he said. 'And she graciously went on to say, could we see to it there's places for people to stand and drop rocks on the crocodiles.'

'She said that?'

'Large pointy rocks, she said.'

'My word,' said Ptaclusp. He turned to his other son.

'You sure you're all right?' he said.

'Feeling fine, dad,' said IIa.

'No-' Ptaclusp groped 'headaches or anything?'

'Never felt better,' said IIa.

'Only you haven't asked about the cost,' said Ptaclusp. 'I thought perhaps you were still feeling fl— ill.'

'The queen has been pleased to ask me to have a look at the royal finances,' said IIa. 'She said priests can't add up.' His recent experiences had left him with no ill effects other than a profitable tendency to think at right angles to everyone else, and he sat wreathed in smiles while his mind constructed tariff rates, docking fees and a complex system of value added tax which would shortly give the merchant venturers of Ankh-Morpork a nasty shock.

Ptaclusp thought about all the miles of the virgin Djel, totally unbridged. And there was plenty of dressed stone around now, millions of tons of the stuff. And you never knew, perhaps on some of those bridges there'd be room for a statue or two. He had the very thing.

He put his arms around his sons' shoulders.

'Lads,' he said proudly. 'It's looking really quantum.'

The setting sun also shone on Dil and Gern, although in this case it was by a roundabout route through the lightwell of the palace kitchens. They'd ended up there for no very obvious reason. It was just that it was so depressing in the embalming room, all alone.

The kitchen staff worked around them, recognising the air of impenetrable gloom that surrounded the two embalmers. It was never a very sociable job at the best of times and embalmers didn't make friends easily. Anyway, there was a coronation feast to prepare.

They sat amid the bustle, observing the future over a jug of beer.

'I expect,' said Gern, 'that Gwlenda can have a word with her dad.'

'That's it, boy,' said Dil wearily. 'There's a future there. People will always want garlic.'

'Bloody boring stuff, garlic,' said Gern, with unusual ferocity. 'And you don't get to meet people. That's what I liked about our job. Always new faces.'

'No more pyramids,' said Dil, without rancour. 'That's what she said. You've done a good job, Master Dil, she said, but I'm going to drag this country kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat.'

'Cobra,' said Gern.

'What?'

'It's the Century of the Cobra. Not the Fruitbat.'

'Whatever,' said Dil irritably. He stared miserably into his mug. That was the trouble now, he reflected. You had to start remembering what century it was.

He glared at a tray of canapes. That was the thing these days. Everyone fiddling about .

He picked up an olive and turned it over and over in his fingers.

'Can't say I'd feel the same about the old job, mind,' said Gern, draining the jug, 'but I bet you were proud, master — Dil, I mean. You know, when all your stitching held up like that.'

Dil, his eyes not leaving the olive, reached dreamily down to his belt and grasped one of his smaller knives for intricate jobs.

'I said, you must have felt very sorry it was all over,' said Gern.

Dil swivelled around to get more light, and breathed heavily as he concentrated.

'Still, you'll get over it,' said Gern. 'The important thing is not to let it prey on your mind-'

'Put this stone somewhere,' said Dil.

'Sorry?'

'Put this stone somewhere,' said Dil.

Gern shrugged, and took it out of his fingers.

'Right,' said Dil, his voice suddenly vibrant with purpose.

'Now pass me a piece of red pepper .

And the sun shone on the delta, that little infinity of reed beds and mud banks where the Djel was laying down the silt of the continent. Wading birds bobbed for food in the green maze of stems, and billions of zig-zag midges danced over the brackish water. Here at least time had always passed, as the delta breathed twice daily the cold, fresh water of the tide.

It was coming in now, the foam-crested cusp of it trickling between the reeds.

Here and there soaked and ancient bandages unwound, wriggled for a while like incredibly old snakes and then, with the mininum of fuss, dissolved.

THIS IS MOST IRREGULAR.

We 're sorry. It's not our fault.

HOW MANY OF YOU ARE THERE?

More than 1,300, I'm afraid.

VERY WELL, THEN. PLEASE FORM AN ORDERLY QUEUE.

You Bastard was regarding his empty hay rack.

It represented a sub-array in the general cluster 'hay', containing arbitrary values between zero and K.

It didn't have any hay in it. It might in fact have a negative value of hay in it, but to the hungry stomach the difference between no hay and minus-hay was not of particular interest.

It didn't matter how he worked it out, the answer was always the same. It was an equation of classical simplicity. It had a certain clean elegance which he was not, currently, in a position to admire.

You Bastard felt ill-used and hard done by. There was nothing particularly unusual about this, however, since that is the normal state of mind for a camel. He knelt patiently while Teppic packed the saddlebags.

'We'll avoid Ephebe,' Teppic said, ostensibly to the camel. 'We'll go up the end of the Circle Sea, perhaps to Quirm or over the Ramtops. There's all sorts of places. Maybe we'll even look for a few of those cities, eh? I expect you'd like that.'

It's a mistake trying to cheer up camels. You may as well drop meringues into a black hole.

The door at the far end of the stable swung open. It was a priest. He looked rather flustered. The priests had been doing a lot of unaccustomed running around today.

'Er,' he began. 'Her majesty commands you not to leave the kingdom.'

He coughed.

He said, 'Is there a reply?'

Teppic considered. 'No,' he said, 'I don't think so.'

'So I shall tell her that you will be attending on her presently, shall I?' said the priest hopefully.

'No.'

'It's all very well for you to say,' said the priest sourly, and slunk off.

He was replaced a few minutes later by Koomi, very red in the face.

'Her majesty requests that you do not leave the kingdom,' he said.

Teppic climbed on to You Bastard's back, and tapped the camel lightly, with a prod.

'She really means it,' said Koomi.

'I'm sure she does.'

'She could have you thrown to the sacred crocodiles, you know.'

'I haven't seen many of them around today. How are they?' said Teppic, and gave the camel another thump.

He rode out into the knife-edged daylight and along the packed-earth streets, which time had turned into a surface harder than stone. They were thronged with people. And every single person ignored him.

It was a marvellous feeling.

He rode gently along the road to the border and did not stop until he was up in the escarpment, the valley spreading out behind him. A hot wind off the desert rattled the syphacia bushes as he tethered You Bastard in the shade, climbed a little further up the rocks, and looked back.

The valley was old, so old that you could believe it had existed first and had watched the rest of the world form around it. Teppic lay with his head on his arms.

Of course, it had made itself old. It had been gently stripping itself of futures for thousands of years. Now change was hitting it like the ground hitting an egg.

Dimensions were probably more complicated than people thought. Probably so was time. Probably so were people, although people could be more predictable.

He watched the column of dust rise outside the palace and work its way through the city, across the narrow patchwork of fields, disappear for a minute in a group of palm trees near the escarpment, and reappear at the foot of the slope. Long before he could see it he knew there'd be a chariot somewhere in the cloud of sand.

He slid back down the rocks and squatted patiently by the roadside. The chariot rattled by eventually, halted some way on, turned awkwardly in the narrow space, and trundled back.

'What will you do?' shouted Ptraci, leaning over the rail.

Teppic bowed.

'And none of that,' she snapped.

'Don't you like being king?'

She hesitated. 'Yes,' she said. 'I do-'

'Of course you do,' said Teppic. 'It's in the blood. In the old days people would fight like tigers. Brothers against sisters, cousins against uncles. Dreadful.'

'But you don't have to go! I need you!'

'You've got advisers,' said Teppic mildly.

'I didn't mean that,' she snapped. 'Anyway, there's only Koomi, and he's no good.'

'You're lucky. I had Dios, and he was good. Koomi will be much better, you can learn a lot by not listening to what he has to say. You can go a long way with incompetent advisers. Besides, Chidder will help, I'm sure. He's full of ideas.'

She coloured. 'He advanced a few when we were on the ship.'

'There you are, then. I knew the two of you would get along like a house on fire.' Screams, flames, people running for safety .

'And you're going back to be an Assassin, are you?' she sneered.

'I don't think so. I've inhumed a pyramid, a pantheon and the entire old kingdom. It may be worth trying something else. By the way, you haven't been finding little green shoots springing up wherever you walk, have you?'

'No. What a stupid idea.'

Teppic relaxed. It really was all over, then. 'Don't let the grass grow under your feet, that's the important thing,' he said. 'And you haven't seen any seagulls around?'

'There's lots of them today, or didn't you notice?'

'Yes. That's good, I think.'

You Bastard watched them talk a little more, that peculiar trailing-off, desultory kind of conversation that two people of opposite sexes engage in when they have something else on their minds. It was much easier with camels, when the female merely had to check the male's methodology.

Then they kissed in a fairly chaste fashion, insofar as camels are any judge. A decision was reached.

You Bastard lost interest at this point, and decided to eat his lunch again.

IN THE BEGINNING…

It was peaceful in the valley. The river, its banks as yet untamed, wandered languidly through thickets of rush and papyrus. Ibises waded in the shallows; in the deeps, hippos rose and sank slowly, like pickled eggs.

The only sound in the damp silence was the occasional plop of a fish or hiss of a crocodile.

Dios lay in the mud for some time. He wasn't sure how he'd got there, or why half his robes were torn off and the other half scorched black. He dimly recalled a loud noise and a sensation of extreme speed while, at the same time, he'd been standing still. Right at this moment, he didn't want any answers. Answers implied questions, and questions never got anyone anywhere. Questions only spoiled things. The mud was cool and soothing, and he didn't need to know anything else for a while.

The sun went down. Various nocturnal prowlers wandered near to Dios, and by some animal instinct decided that he certainly wasn't going to be worth all the trouble that would accrue from biting his leg off.

The sun rose again. Herons honked. Mist unspooled between the pools, was burned up as the sky turned from blue to new bronze.

And time unrolled in glorious uneventfulness for Dios until an alien noise took the silence and did the equivalent of cutting it into small pieces with a rusty breadknife.

It was a noise, in fact, like a donkey being chainsawed. As sounds went, it was to melody what a boxful of dates is to high— performance motocross. Nevertheless, as other voices joined it, similar but different, in a variety of fractured keys and broken tones, the overall effect was curiously attractive. It had lure. It had pull. It had a strange suction.

The noise reached a plateau, one pure note made of a succession of discordances, and then, for just the fraction of a second, the voices split away, each along a vector .

There was a stirring of the air, a flickering of the sun.

And a dozen camels appeared over the distant hills, skinny and dusty, running towards the water. Birds erupted from the reeds. Leftover saurians slid smoothly off the sandbanks. Within a minute the shore was a mass of churned mud as the knobbly-kneed creatures jostled, nose deep in the water.

Dios sat up, and saw his staff lying in the mud. It was a little scorched, but still intact, and he noticed what somehow had never been apparent before. Before? Had there been a before? There had certainly been a dream, something like a dream .

Each snake had its tail in its mouth.

Down the slope after the camels, his ragged family trailing behind him, was a small brown figure waving a camel prod. He looked hot and very bewildered.

He looked, in fact, like someone in need of good advice and careful guidance.

Dios's eyes turned back to the staff. It meant something very important, he knew. He couldn't remember what, though. All he could remember was that it was very heavy, yet at the same time hard to put down. Very hard to put down. Better not to pick it up, he thought.

Perhaps just pick it up for a while, and go and explain about gods and why pyramids were so important. And then he could put it down afterwards, certainly.

Sighing, pulling the remnants of his robes around him to give himself dignity, using the staff to steady himself, Dios went forth.

THE END

Notes

1

Such as being buried in the sand and having eggs laid in it.

2

Breathing, for a start.

3

Lit. 'Child of the Djel'

4

It was quite a big frog, however, and got into the air ducts and kept everyone awake for weeks

5

It was said that life was cheap in Ankh— Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free

6

Bloat is extracted from the deep sea blowfish, Singularis minutia gigantica, which protects itself from enemies by inflating itself to many times its normal size. If taken by humans the effect is to make every cell in the body instantaneously try to swell some 2,000 times. This is invariably fatal, and very loud.

7

The gates of the Assasins' Guild were never shut. This was said to be because Death was open for business all the time, but it was really because the hinges had rusted centuries before and no-one had got around to doing anything about it

8

Counterwise wine is made from grapes belonging to that class of flora — reannuals — that grow only in excessively high magic fields. Normal plants grow after the seeds have been planted, with reannuals it's the other way round. Although reannual wine causes inebriation in the normal way, the action of the digestive system on its molecules causes an unusual reaction whose net effect is to thrust the ensuing hangover backwards in time, to a point some hours before the wine is drunk. Hence the saying: have a hair of the dog that's going to bite you.

9

When the Thieves' Guild declared a General Strike in the Year of the Engaging Sloth, the actual level of crime doubled.

10

One of the two** legends about the founding of Ankh-Morpork relates that the two orphaned brothers who built the city were in fact found and suckled by a hippopotamus (lit. orijeple, although some historians hold that this is a mistranslation of orejaple, a type of glass-fronted drinks cabinet). Eight heraldic hippos line the bridge facing out to sea,. It is said that if danger ever threatens the city, they will run away.

** The other legend, not normally recounted by the citizens, is that at an even earlier time a group of wise men survived a flood sent by the gods by building a huge boat, and on this boat they took two of every type of animal then existing on the Disc. After some weeks the combined manure was beginning to weigh the boat low in the water so — the story runs — they tipped it over the side, and called it Ankh-Morpork.

11

Like many river valley cultures the Kingdom has no truck with such trivia as summer, springtime and winter, and bases its calendar squarely on the great heartbeat of the Djel; hence the three seasons. Seedtime, Inundation and Sog. This is logical, straightforward and practical, and only disapproved of by barbershop quartets. **

** Because you feel an idiot singing 'In the Good Old Inundation', that's why.

12

Lit. 'Dhar-ret-kar-mon', or 'clipping of the foot'. But some scholars say that it should be 'Dar-rhet-kare— mhun'. lit. 'hot-air paint stripper'.

13

Dunnikindiver: a builder and cleaner of cesspits. A particularly busy profession in Ankh— Morpork, where the water table is generally at ground level, and one which attracts considerable respect. At least, everyone passes by on the other side of the street when a dunnikindiver walks by.

14

Hoarse whispers are not suitable for a desert environment.

15

Lit: 'I am going to be here again.'

16

Some translation is needed here. If a foreign ambassador to the Court of St James wore (out of a genuine desire to flatter) a bowler hat, a claymore, a Civil War breastplate, Saxon trousers and a Jacobean haircut, he'd create pretty much the same impression.

17

Younger assassins, who are usually very poor, have very clear ideas about the morality of wealth until they become older assassins, who are usually very rich, when they begin to take the view that injustice has its good points.

18

The carvers had to use quite a lot of imagination. The late king had had many fine attributes, but doing mighty deeds wasn't among them. The score was: Number of enemies ground as dust under his chariot wheels = 0. Number of thrones crushed beneath his sandalled feet = 0. Number of times world bestrode like colossus = 0. On the other hand: Reigns of terror = 0 Number of times own throne crushed beneath enemy sandals = 0. Faces of poor ground = 0. Expensive crusades embarked upon = 0. His life had, basically, been a no-score win.

19

Never trust a species that grins all the time. It's up to something.

20

Renowned as the greatest camel mathematician of all time, who invented a math of eight— dimensional space while lying down with his nostrils closed in a violent sandstorm.

21

An effect achieved by distilling the testicles of a small tree-dwelling species of bear with the vomit of a whale, and adding a handful of rose petals. Teppic probably would have felt no better for knowing this.

22

This is of course a loose translation, since Ptaclusp did not know the words for 'ice', 'windscreens' or 'hotel bedrooms'; interestingly, however, Squiggle Eagle Eagle Vase Wavyline Duck translates directly as 'a press for barbarian leg coverings'.

23

To everyone without such a logical frame of reference the fastest animal** on the Disc is the extremely neurotic Ambiguous Puzuma, which moves so fast that it can actually achieve near light-speed in the Disc's magical field. This means that if you can see a puzuma, it isn't there. Most male puzumas die young of acute ankle failure caused by running very fast after females which aren't there and, of course, achieving suicidal mass in accordance with relativistic theory. The rest of them die of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, since it is impossible for them to know who they are and where they are at the same time, and the see-sawing loss of concentration this engenders means that the puzuma only achieves a sense of identity when it is at rest — usually about fifty feet into the rubble of what remains of the mountain it just ran into at near light-speed. The puzuma is rumoured to be about the size of a leopard with a rather unique black and white check coat, although those specimens discovered by the Disc's sages and philosophers have inclined them to declare that in its natural state the puzuma is flat, very thin, and dead.

** The fastest insect is the .303 bookworm. It evolved in magical libraries, where it is necessary to eat extremely quickly to avoid being affected by the thaumic radiations. An adult .303 bookworm can eat through a shelf of books so fast that it ricochets off the wall.

24

The role of listeners has never been fully appreciated. However, it is well known that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice.

25

He was wrong. Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don't upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste, and the chuck keys for electric drills.

26

It was, therefore, colloquially known as the Djinn palace.

27

You know. The bit you can't reach with the straw.

28

But not immediately, of course, because messages change in the telling and some ancestors were not capable of perfect enunciation and others were trying to be helpful and supplying what they thought were lost words. The message received by Teppicymon originally began, 'Handcuffed to the bed, the aunt thirsted.'