After a shocked pause for a couple of years, one of the clump said: “He just went! Just like that! One day he was here, next he was gone!”
If the other trees had been humans, they would have shuffled their feet.
“It happens, lad,” said one of them, carefully. “He’s been taken to a Better Place,* you can be sure of that. He was a good tree.”
The young tree, which was a mere five thousand, one hundred and eleven years old, said: “What sort of Better Place?”
“We’re not sure,” said one of the clump. It trembled uneasily in a week-long gale. “But we think it involves…sawdust.”
Since the trees were unable even to sense any event that took place in less than a day, they never heard the sound of axes.
Windle Poons, oldest wizard in the entire faculty of Unseen University—
—home of magic, wizardry and big dinners—
—was also going to die.
He knew it, in a frail and shaky sort of way.
Of course, he mused, as he wheeled his wheelchair over the flagstones toward his ground-floor study, in a general sort of way everyone knew they were going to die, even the common people. No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn’t long before you found you’d arrived with your return ticket already punched.
But wizards really knew. Not if death involved violence or murder, of course, but if the cause of death was simply a case of running out of life then…well, you knew. You generally got the premonition in time to return your library books and make sure your best suit was clean and borrow quite large sums of money from your friends.
He was one hundred and thirty. It occurred to
him that for most of his life he’d been an old man. Didn’t seem fair, really.
And no one had said anything. He’d mentioned it in the Uncommon Room last week, and no one had taken the hint. And at lunch today they’d hardly spoken to him. Even his old so-called friends seemed to be avoiding him, and he wasn’t even trying to borrow money.
It was like not having your birthday remembered, only worse.
He was going to die all alone, and no one cared.
He bumped the door open with the wheel of the chair and fumbled on the table by the door for the tinder box.
That was another thing. Hardly anyone used tinder boxes these days. They bought the big smelly yellow matches the alchemists made. Windle disapproved. Fire was important. You shouldn’t be able to switch it on just like that, it didn’t show any respect. That was people these days, always rushing around and…fires. Yes, it had been a lot warmer in the old days, too. The kind of fires they had these days didn’t warm you up unless you were nearly on top of them. It was something in the wood…it was the wrong sort of wood. Everything was wrong these days. More thin. More fuzzy. No real life in anything. And the days were shorter. Mmm. Something had gone wrong with the days. They were shorter days. Mmm. Everyday took an age to go by, which was odd, because days plural went past like a stampede. There weren’t many things people wanted a 130-year-old wizard to do, and Windle had got into the habit of arriving at the dining-table up to two hours before each meal, simply to pass the time.
Endless days, going by fast. Didn’t make sense. Mmm. Mind you, you didn’t get the sense now that you used to get in the old days.
And they let the University be run by mere boys now. In the old days it had been run by proper wizards, great big men built like barges, the kinds of wizards you could look up to. Then suddenly they’d all gone off somewhere and Windle was being patronized by these boys who still had some of their own teeth. Like that Ridcully lad. Windle remembered him clearly. Thin lad, sticking-out ears, never wiped his nose properly, cried for his mother in the dorm on the first night. Always up to mischief. Someone had tried to tell Windle that Ridcully was Archchancellor now. Mmm. They must think he was daft.
Where was that damn tinder box? Fingers…you used to get proper fingers in the old days…
Someone pulled the covers off a lantern. Someone else pushed a drink into his groping hand.
“Surprise!”
In the hall of the house of Death is a clock with a pendulum like a blade but with no hands, because in the house of Death there is no time but the present. (There was, of course, a present before the present now, but that was also the present. It was just an older one.)
The pendulum is a blade that would have made Edgar Allan Poe give it all up and start again as a stand-up comedian on the scampi-in-a-casket circuit. It swings with a faint whum-whum noise, gently slicing thin rashers of interval from the bacon of eternity.
Death stalked past the clock and into the somber gloom of his study. Albert, his servant, was waiting for him with the towel and dusters.
“Good morning, master.”
Death sat down silently in his big chair. Albert draped the towel over the angular shoulders.
“Another nice day,” he said, conversationally.