Pyramids (34 page)

“No more pyramids,” said Dil, without rancor. “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 swiveled 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 minimum of fuss, dissolved.

T
HIS
I
S
M
OST
I
RREGULAR
.

We’re sorry. It’s not our fault
.

H
OW
M
ANY
O
F
Y
OU
A
RE
T
HERE
?

More than 1,300, I’m afraid
.

V
ERY
W
ELL
, T
HEN
. P
LEASE
F
ORM
A
N
O
RDERLY
Q
UEUE
.

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 onto 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 marvelous 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 colored. “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.

I
N 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 toward 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 afterward, certainly.

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

About the Author

Terry Pratchett
is one of the most popular living authors in the world. His first story was published when he was thirteen, and his first full-length book when he was twenty. He worked as a journalist to support the writing habit, but gave up the day job when the success of his books meant that it was costing him money to go to work.

Pratchett’s acclaimed novels are bestsellers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and have sold more than twenty-one million copies worldwide. He lives in England, where he writes all the time. (It’s his hobby as well.)

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

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