Pyramids (20 page)
Let legs equal four…
He lumbered into a run. Camels apparently have more knees than any other creature and You Bastard ran like a steam engine, with lots of extraneous movement at right angles to the direction of motion accompanied by a thunderous barrage of digestive noises.
“Bloody stupid animal,” muttered Ptraci, as they jolted away from the palace, “but it looks like it finally got the idea.”
…gauge-invariant repetition rate of 3.5lz. What’s she talking about, Bloody Stupid lives over in Tsort…
Though they swung through the air as though jointed with bad elastic You Bastard’s legs covered a lot of ground, and already they were bouncing through the sleeping packed-earth streets of the city.
“It’s starting again, isn’t it?” said Ptraci. “I’m going to shut my eyes.”
Teppic nodded. The firebrick-hot houses around them were doing their slow motion mirror dance again, and the road was rising and falling in a way that solid land had no right to adopt.
“It’s like the sea,” he said.
“I can’t see anything,” said Ptraci firmly.
“I mean the sea. The ocean. You know. Waves.”
“I’ve heard about it. Is anyone chasing us?” Teppic turned in the saddle. “Not that I can make out,” he said. “It looks as—”
From here he could see past the long, low bulk of the palace and across the river to the Great Pyramid itself. It was almost hidden in dark clouds, but what he could see of it was definitely wrong. He knew it had four sides, and he could see all eight of them.
It seemed to be moving in and out of focus, which he felt instinctively was a dangerous thing for several million tons of rock to do. He felt a pressing urge to be a long way away from it. Even a dumb creature like the camel seemed to have the same idea.
You Bastard was thinking:…Delta squared. Thus, dimensional pressure
k
will result in a ninety-degree transformation in
Chi
(16/x/pu)t for a K-bundle of any three invariables. Or four minutes, plus or minus ten seconds…
The camel looked down at the great pads of his feet.
Let speed equal
gallop
.
“How did you make it do that?” said Teppic.
“I didn’t! It’s doing it by itself! Hang on!”
This wasn’t easy. Teppic had saddled the camel but neglected the harness. Ptraci had handfuls of camel hair to hang on to. All he had was handfuls of Ptraci. No matter where he tried to put his hands, they encountered warm, yielding flesh. Nothing in his long education had prepared him for this, whereas everything in Ptraci’s obviously had. Her long hair whipped his face and smelled beguilingly of rare perfume.
*
“Are you all right?” he shouted above the wind.
“I’m hanging on with my knees!”
“That must be very hard!”
“You get special training!”
Camels gallop by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to keep up. Knee joints clicking like chilly castanets, You Bastard thrashed up the sloping road out of the valley and windmilled along the narrow gorge that led, under towering limestone cliffs, to the high desert beyond.
And behind them, tormented beyond measure by the inexorable tide of geometry, unable to discharge its burden of Time, the Great Pyramid screamed, lifted itself off its base and, its bulk swishing through the air as unstoppable as something completely unstoppable, ground around precisely ninety degrees and did something perverted to the fabric of time and space.
You Bastard sped along the gorge, his neck stretched out to its full extent, his mighty nostrils flaring like jet intakes.
“It’s terrified!” Ptraci yelled. “Animals always know about this sort of thing!”
“What sort of thing!”
“Forest fires and things!”
“We haven’t got any trees!”
“Well, floods and—and things! They’ve got some strange natural instinct!”
…
Phi
1700[u/v]. Lateral e/v. Equals a tranche of seven to twelve…
The sound hit them. It was as silent as a dandelion clock striking midnight, but it had
pressure
. It rolled over them, suffocating as velvet, nauseating as a battered saveloy.
And was gone.
You Bastard slowed to a walk, a complicated procedure that involved precise instructions to each leg in turn.
There was a feeling of release, a sense of stress withdrawn.
You Bastard stopped. In the pre-dawn glow he’d spotted a clump of thorned syphacia bushes growing in the rocks by the track.
…angle left, x equals 37. y equals 19. z equals 43.
Bite
…
Peace descended. There was no sound except for the eructations of the camel’s digestive tract and the distant warbling of a desert owl.
Ptraci slid off her perch and landed awkwardly.
“My bottom,” she announced, to the desert in general, “is one huge blister.”
Teppic jumped down and half-ran, half-staggered up the scree by the roadside, then jogged across the cracked limestone plateau until he could get a good look at the valley.
It wasn’t there anymore.
It was still dark when Dil the master embalmer woke up, his body twanging with the sensation that something was wrong. He slipped out of bed, dressed hurriedly, and pulled aside the curtain that did duty as a door.
The night was soft and velvety. Behind the chirrup of the insects there was another sound, a frying noise, a faint sizzling on the edge of hearing.
Perhaps that was what had woken him up.
The air was warm and damp. Curls of mist rose from the river, and—
The pyramids weren’t flaring.
He’d grown up in this house: it had been in the family of the master embalmers for thousands of years, and he’d seen the pyramids flare so often that he didn’t notice them, any more than he noticed his own breathing. But now they were dark and silent, and the silence cried out and the darkness glared.
But that wasn’t the worst part. As his horrified eyes stared up at the empty sky over the necropolis they saw the stars, and what the stars were stuck to.
Dil was terrified. And then, when he had time to think about it, he was ashamed of himself. After all, he thought, it’s what I’ve always been told is there. It stands to reason. I’m just seeing it properly for the first time.
There. Does that make me feel any better?
No.
He turned and ran down the street, sandals flapping, until he reached the house that held Gern and his numerous family. He dragged the protesting apprentice from the communal sleeping mat and pulled him into the street, turned his face to the sky and hissed, “Tell me what you can see!”
Gern squinted.
“I can see the stars, master,” he said.
“What are they on, boy?”
Gern relaxed slightly. “That’s easy, master. Everyone knows the stars are on the body of the goddess Nept who arches herself from…oh, bloody hell.”
“You can see her, too?”
“Oh, mummy,” whispered Gern, and slid to his knees.
Dil nodded. He was a religious man. It was a great comfort knowing that the gods were there. It was knowing they were
here
that was the terrible part.
Because the body of a woman arched over the heavens, faintly blue, faintly shadowy in the light of the watery stars.
She was enormous, her statistics interstellar. The shadow between her galactic breasts was a dark nebula, the curve of her stomach a vast wash of glowing gas, her navel the seething, dark incandescence in which new stars were being born. She wasn’t supporting the sky. She
was
the sky.
Her huge sad face, upside down on the turnwise horizon, stared directly at Dil. And Dil was realizing that there are few things that so shake belief as seeing, clearly and precisely, the object of that belief. Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed anymore.
“Oh, Sod,” moaned Gern.
Dil struck him across the arm.
“Stop that,” he said. “And come with me.”
“Oh, master, whatever shall we do?”
Dil looked around at the sleeping city. He hadn’t the faintest idea.
“We’ll go to the palace,” he said firmly. “It’s probably a trick of the, of the, of the dark. Anyway, the sun will be up presently.”
He strode off, wishing he could change places with Gern and show just a hint of gibbering terror. The apprentice followed him at a sort of galloping creep.
“I can see shadows against the stars, master! Can you see them, master? Around the edge of the world, master!”
“Just mists, boy,” said Dil, resolutely keeping his eyes fixed in front of him and maintaining a dignified posture as appropriate to the Keeper of the Left Hand Door of the Natron Lodge and holder of several medals for needlework.
“There,” he said. “See, Gern, the sun is coming up!”
They stood and watched it.
Then Gern whimpered, very quietly.
Rising up the sky, very slowly, was a great flaming ball. And it was being pushed by a dung beetle bigger than worlds.
The sun rose and, because this wasn’t the Old Kingdom out here, it was a mere ball of flaming gas. The purple night of the high desert evaporated under its blowlamp glare. Lizards scuttled into cracks in the rocks. You Bastard settled himself down in the sparse shadow of what was left of the syphacia bushes, peered haughtily at the landscape, and began to chew cud and calculate square roots in base seven.
Teppic and Ptraci eventually found the shade of a limestone overhang, and sat glumly staring out at the waves of heat wobbling off the rocks.
“I don’t understand,” said Ptraci. “Have you looked everywhere?”
“It’s a country! It can’t just bloody well fall through a hole in the ground!”
“Where is it, then?” said Ptraci evenly.
Teppic growled. The heat struck like a hammer, but he strode out over the rocks as though three hundred square miles could perhaps have been hiding under a pebble or behind a bush.
The fact was that the track dipped between the cliffs, but almost immediately rose again and continued across the dunes into what was quite clearly Tsort. He’d recognized a wind-eroded sphinx that had been set up as a boundary marker; legend said it prowled the borders in times of dire national need, although legend wasn’t sure why.
He knew they had galloped into Ephebe. He should be looking across the fertile, pyramid-speckled valley of the Djel that lay between the two countries.
He’d spent an hour looking for it.
It was inexplicable. It was uncanny. It was also extremely embarrassing.
He shaded his eyes and stared around for the thousandth time at the silent, baking landscape. And moved his head. And saw Djelibeybi.
It flashed across his vision in an instant. He jerked his eyes back and saw it again, a brief flash of misty color that vanished as soon as he concentrated on it.
Some minutes later Ptraci peered out of the shade and saw him get down on his hands and knees. When he started turning over rocks she decided it was time he should come back in out of the sun.
He shook her hand off his shoulder, and gestured impatiently.
“I’ve found it!” He pulled a knife from his boot and started poking at the stones.
“Where?”
“Here!”
She laid a ringed hand on his forehead.
“Oh yes,” she said. “I see. Yes. Good. Now I think you’d better come into the shade.”
“No, I mean it! Here! Look!”
She hunkered down and stared at the rock, to humor him.
“There’s a crack,” she said, doubtfully.
“Look at it, will you? You have to turn your head and sort of look out of the corner of your eye.” Teppic’s dagger smacked into the crack, which was no more than a faint line on the rock.
“Well, it goes on a long way,” said Ptraci, staring along the burning pavement.
“All the way from the Second Cataract to the Delta,” said Teppic. “Covering your eye with one hand helps. Please give it a try. Please!”
She put one hesitant hand over her eye and squinted obediently at the rock.
Eventually she said, “It’s no good, I can’t—
seeee
—”
She stayed motionless for a moment and then flung herself sideways onto the rocks. Teppic stopped trying to hammer the knife into the crack and crawled over to her.
“I was right on the edge!” she wailed.
“You saw it?” he said hopefully.
She nodded and, with great care, got to her feet and backed away.
“Did your eyes feel as though they were being turned inside out?” said Teppic.
“Yes,” said Ptraci coldly. “Can I have my bangles, please?”
“What?”
“My bangles. You put them in your pocket. I want them, please.”
Teppic shrugged, and fished in his pouch. The bangles were mostly copper, with a few bits of chipped enamel. Here and there the craftsman had tried, without much success, to do something interesting with twisted bits of wire and lumps of colored glass. She took them and slipped them on.
“Do they have some occult significance?” he said.
“What’s occult mean?” she said vaguely.
“Oh. What do you need them for, then?”
“I told you. I don’t feel properly dressed without them on.”
Teppic shrugged, and went back to rocking his knife in the crack.
“Why are you doing that?” she said. He stopped and thought about it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But you did see the valley, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then?”
“Well what?”
Teppic rolled his eyes. “Didn’t you think it was a bit, well, odd? A whole country just more or less vanishing? It’s something you don’t bloody well see every day, for gods’ sake!”
“How should I know? I’ve never been out of the valley before. I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like from outside. And don’t swear.”
Teppic shook his head. “I think I
will
go and lie down in the shade,” he said. “What’s left of it,” he added, for the brass light of the sun was burning away the shadows. He staggered over to the rocks and stared at her.
“The whole valley has just closed up,” he managed at last. “All those people…”
“I saw cooking fires,” said Ptraci, slumping down beside him.
“It’s something to do with the pyramid,” he said. “It looked very strange just before we left. It’s magic, or geometry, or one of those things. How do you think we can get back?”
“I don’t want to go back. Why should I want to go back? It’s the crocodiles for me. I’m not going back, not just for crocodiles.”
“Um. Perhaps I could pardon you, or something,” said Teppic.
“Oh yes,” said Ptraci, looking at her nails. “You said you were the king, didn’t you.”
“I
am
the king! That’s my kingdom over—” Teppic hesitated, not knowing in which direction to point his finger—“somewhere. I’m king of it.”
“You don’t look like the king,” said Ptraci.
“Why not?”
“He had a golden mask on.”
“That was me!”
“So you ordered me thrown to the crocodiles?”
“Yes! I mean, no.” Teppic hesitated. “I mean, the king did. I didn’t. In a way. Anyway, I was the one who rescued you,” he added gallantly.
“There you are, then. Anyway, if you were the king, you’d be a god, too. You aren’t acting very god-like at the moment.”
“Yes? Well. Er.” Teppic hesitated again. Ptraci’s literal-mindedness meant that innocent sentences had to be carefully examined before being sent out into the world.
“I’m basically good at making the sun rise,” he said. “I don’t know how, though. And rivers. You want any rivers flooding, I’m your man. God, I mean.”
He lapsed into silence as a thought struck him.
“I wonder what’s happening in there without me?” he said.
Ptraci stood up and set off down to the gorge.
“Where are you going?”
She turned. “Well, Mr. King or God or assassin, or whatever, can you make water?”
“What, here?”
“I mean to drink. There may be a river hidden in that crack or there may not, but we can’t get at it, can we? So we have to go somewhere where we can. It’s so simple I should think even kings could understand it.”
He hurried after her, down the scree to where You Bastard was lying with his head and neck flat on the ground, flicking his ears in the heat and idly applying You Vicious Brute’s Theory of Transient Integrals to a succession of promising cissoid numbers. Ptraci kicked him irritably.
“Do you know where there is water, then?” said Teppic.
…e/27. Eleven miles…
Ptraci glared at him from kohl-ringed eyes. “You mean
you
don’t know? You were going to take me into the desert and you don’t know where the water is?”
“Well, I rather expected I was going to be able to take some with me!”
“You didn’t even think about it!”
“Listen, you can’t talk to me like that! I’m a king!” Teppic stopped.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I never thought about it. Where I come from it rains nearly every day. I’m sorry.”
Ptraci’s brows furrowed. “Who reigns nearly every day?” she said.
“No, I mean rain. You know. Very thin water coming out of the sky?”
“What a silly idea. Where
do
you come from?”
Teppic looked miserable. “Where I come from is Ankh-Morpork. Where I started from is here.” He stared down the track. From here, if you knew what you were looking for, you could just see a faint crack running across the rocks. It climbed the cliffs on either side, a new vertical fault the thickness of a line that just happened to contain a complete river kingdom and 7,000 years of history.
He’d hated every minute of his time there. And now it had shut him out. And now, because he couldn’t, he wanted to go back.
He wandered down to it and put his hand over one eye. If you jerked your head just right…
It flashed past his vision briefly, and was gone. He tried a few times more, and couldn’t see it again.
If I hacked the rocks away? No, he thought, that’s silly. It’s a line. You can’t get into a line. A line has no thickness. Well-known fact of geometry.
He heard Ptraci come up behind him, and the next moment her hands were on his neck. For a second he wondered how she knew the Catharti Death Grip, and then her fingers were gently massaging his muscles, stresses melting under their expert caress like fat under a hot knife. He shivered as the tension relaxed.
“That’s nice,” he said.
“We’re trained for it. Your tendons are knotted up like ping-pong balls on a string,” said Ptraci.
Teppic gratefully subsided onto one of the boulders that littered the base of the cliff and let the rhythm of her fingers unwind the problems of the night.
“I don’t know what to do,” he murmured. “That feels
good
.”
“It’s not all peeling grapes, being a handmaiden,” said Ptraci. “The first lesson we learn is, when the master has had a long hard day it is not the best time to suggest the Congress of the Fox and the Persimmon. Who says you have to do anything?”
“I feel responsible.” Teppic shifted position like a cat.
“If you know where there is a dulcimer I could play you something soothing,” said Ptraci. “I’ve got as far as ‘Goblins Picnic’ in Book I.”
“I mean, a king shouldn’t let his kingdom just vanish like that.”
“All the other girls can do chords and everything,” said Ptraci wistfully, massaging his shoulders. “But the old king always said he’d rather hear me. He said it used to cheer him up.”
“I mean, it’ll be called the Lost Kingdom,” said Teppic drowsily. “How will I feel then, I ask you?”
“He said he liked my singing, too. Everyone else said it sounded like a flock of vultures who’ve just found a dead donkey.”
“I mean, king of a Lost Kingdom. It’d be dreadful. I’ve got to get it back.”
You Bastard slowly turned his massive head to follow the flight of an errant blowfly; deep in his brain little columns of red numbers flickered, detailing vectors and speed and elevation. The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying. It was much simpler with camels.
Teppic stared at the line in the rock. Geometry. That was it.
“We’ll go to Ephebe,” he said. “They know all about geometry and they have some very unsound ideas. Unsound ideas are what I could do with right now.”
“Why do you carry all these knives and things? I mean,
really?
”
“Hmm? Sorry?”
“All these knives. Why?”
Teppic thought about it. “I suppose I don’t feel properly dressed without them,” he said.
“Oh.”
Ptraci dutifully cast around for a new topic of conversation. Introducing Topics of Amusing Discourse was also part of a handmaiden’s duties. She’d never been particularly good at it. The other girls had come up with an astonishing assortment: everything from the mating habits of crocodiles to speculation about life in the Netherworld. She’d found it heavy going after talking about the weather.
“So,” she said. “You’ve killed a lot of people, I expect?”
“Mm?”
“As an assassin, I mean. You get paid to kill people. Have you killed lots? Do you know you tense your back muscles a lot?”
“I don’t think I ought to talk about it,” he said.
“I ought to know. If we’ve got to cross the desert together and everything. More than a hundred?”
“Good heavens, no.”
“Well, less than fifty?”
Teppic rolled over.
“Look, even the most famous assassins never killed more than thirty people in all their lives,” he said.
“Less than twenty, then?”
“Yes.”
“Less than ten?”
“I think,” said Teppic, “it would be best to say a number between zero and ten.”
“Just so long as I know. These things are important.”
They strolled back to You Bastard. But now it was Teppic who seemed to have something on his mind.
“All this senate…” he said.
“Congress,” corrected Ptraci.
“You…er…more than fifty people?”
“There’s a
different
name for that sort of woman,” said Ptraci, but without much rancor.
“Sorry. Less than ten?”
“Let’s say,” said Ptraci, “a number between zero and ten.”
You Bastard spat. Twenty feet away the blowfly was picked cleanly out of the air and glued to the rock behind it.
“Amazing how they do it, isn’t it,” said Teppic. “Animal instinct, I suppose.”
You Bastard gave him a haughty glare from under his sweep-the-desert eyelashes and thought:
…Let z = ei0.
cudcudcud
Then dz = ie[i0]d0 = izd0 or d0 = dz/iz…
Ptaclusp, still in his nightshirt, wandered aimlessly among the wreckage at the foot of the pyramid.
It was humming like a turbine. Ptaclusp didn’t know why, knew nothing about the vast expenditure of power that had twisted the dimensions by ninety degrees and was holding them there against terrible pressures, but at least the disturbing temporal changes seemed to have stopped. There were fewer sons around than there used to be; in truth, he could have done with finding one or two.