'Of course they were, you four-eyed little git!' shouted Rincewind. 'That was because it was all happening to me!'
'. . . a city where all men are free . . .'
'Free? Free? Well, yes, free to starve, get robbed by the Thieves' Guild . . . ' said Rincewind to the book. He fumbled through to another page. ' . . . my companion was the Great Wizard [complicated pictogram, but now that Rincewind studied it he realized with a plummeting heart it had a few lines that looked like the Agatean for 'wind'], the most prominent and powerful wizard in the entire country . . .'
'I never said that! I—' Rincewind stopped. Memory treacherously dredged up a few phrases, such as Oh, the Archchancellor listens to everything I say and That place would just fall down without me around. But that was just the sort of thing you said after a few beers, surely no-one would be so gullible as to write . . . A picture focused itself in Rincewind's memory It was of a happy, smiling little man with huge spectacles and a trusting, innocent approach to life which brought terror and destruction everywhere he wandered. Twoflower had been quite unable to believe that the world was a bad place and that was largely because, to him, it wasn't. It saved it all up for Rincewind. Rincewind's life had been quite uneventful before he'd met Twoflower. Since then, as far as he could remember, it had contained events in huge amounts. And the little man had gone back home, hadn't he? To Bes Pelargic - the Empire's only proper seaport. Surely no-one would be so gullible as to write this sort of thing?
Surely no-one apart from one person would be so gullible. Rincewind was not politically minded but there were some things he could work out not because they were to do with politics but because they had a lot to do with human nature. Nasty images moved into place like bad scenery. The Empire had a wall around it. If you lived in the Empire then you learned how to make soup out of pig squeals and swallow spit because that's how it was done, and you were bullied by soldiers all the time because that was how the world worked. But if someone wrote a cheerful little book about . . . . . . what I did on my holidays . . . . . . in a place where the world worked quite differently . . . . . . then however fossilized the society there would always be some people who asked themselves danger-ous questions like 'Where's the pork?' Rincewind stared glumly at the wall. Peasants of the Empire, Rebel! You have nothing to lose but your heads and hands and feet and there's this thing they do with a wire waistcoat and a cheesegrater . . . He turned the book over. There was no author's name. There was simply a little message: Increased Luck! Make Copies! Extended Duration And Happiness To The Endeavour! Ankh-Morpork had had the occasional rebellion, too, over the years. But no-one went around organizing things. They just grabbed themselves a weapon and took to the streets. No-one bothered with a formal battlecry, relying instead on the well-tried 'There 'e goes! Get 'im! Got 'im? Now kick 'im inna fork!' The point was . . . whatever caused that sort of thing wasn't usually the reason for it. When Mad Lord Snapcase had been hung up by his figgin[18] it hadn't really been because he'd made poor old Spooner Boggis eat his own nose, it had been because years of inventive nastiness had piled on one another until the grievances reached— There was a terrible scream from the far side of the room. Rincewind was half out of his seat before he noticed the little stage, and the actors. A trio of musicians had squatted down on the floor. The inn's customers turned to watch. It was, in a way, quite enjoyable. Rincewind didn't quite follow the plot, but it went something like: man gets girl, man loses girl to other man, man cuts couple in half, man falls on own sword, all come up front for a bow to what might be the Agatean equivalent of 'Happy Days Are Here Again'. It was a little hard to make out the fine detail because the actors shouted 'Hoorrrrrraa!' a lot and spent much of their time talking to the audience and their masks all looked the same to Rincewind. The musicians were in a world or their own or, by the sound of it, three different worlds. 'Fortune cookie?'
'Huh?' Rincewind re-emerged from the thickets of thespi-anism to see the landlord beside him. A dish of vaguely bivalvular biscuits was thrust under his nose. 'Fortune cookie?' Rincewind reached out. Just as his fingers were about to close on one, the plate was jerked sideways an inch or two, bringing another under his hand. Oh, well. He took it. The thing was - his thoughts resumed, as the play screamed on - at least in Ankh-Morpork you could lay your hands on real weapons. Poor devils. It took more than well-turned slogans and a lot of enthusiasm to run a good rebellion. You needed well-trained fighters and, above all, a good leader. He hoped they found one when he was well away. He unrolled the fortune and read it idly, oblivious to the landlord walking around behind him. Instead of the usual 'You have just enjoyed an inferior meal' it was quite a complicated pictogram. Rincewind's fingers traced the brush strokes. ' “Many . . . many . . . apologies . . .” What kind—' The musician with the cymbals clashed them together sharply. The wooden cosh bounced off Rincewind's head. The old men playing shibo nodded happily to themselves and turned back to their game. It was a fine morning. The hideout echoed to the sounds of the Silver Horde getting up, groaning, adjusting various home-made surgical supports, com-plaining that they couldn't find their spectacles, and mistakenly gumming one another's dentures. Cohen sat with his feet in a bath of warm water, enjoying the sunshine. 'Teach?' The former geography teacher concentrated on a cap he was making. 'Yes, Ghenghiz?'
'What's Mad Hamish going on about?'
'He says the bread's stale and he can't find his teeth.'
'Tell him if things go right for us he can have a dozen young women just to chew his bread for him,' said Cohen. 'That is not very hygienic, Ghenghiz,' said Mr Saveloy, without bothering to look up. 'Remember, I explained about hygiene.' Cohen didn't bother to answer. He was thinking: six old men. And you can't really count Teach, he's a thinker, not a fighter . . . Self-doubt was not something regularly entertained within the Cohen cranium. When you're trying to carry a struggling temple maiden and a sack of looted temple goods in one hand and fight off half a dozen angry priests with the other there is little time for reflection. Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both. But: six old men . . . and the Empire had almost a million men under arms. When you looked at the odds in the cold light of dawn, or even this rather pleasant warm light of dawn, they made you stop and do the arithmetic of death. If the Plan went wrong . . . Cohen bit his lip thoughtfully. If the Plan went wrong, it'd take weeks to kill all of them. Maybe he should have let old Thog the Butcher come along too, even though he had to stop fighting every ten minutes to go to the lavatory. Oh, well. He was committed now, so he might as well make the best of it. Cohen's father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a lad, and explained to him the hero's creed and told him that there was no greater joy than to die in battle. Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime's experience had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the other bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your horse. It was an observation that had served him well. He stood up and stretched in the sunshine. 'It's a lovely morning, lads,' he said. 'I feel like a million dollars. Don't you?' There was a murmur of reluctant agreement. 'Good,' said Cohen. 'Let's go and get some.' The Great Wall completely surrounds the Agatean Empire. The word is completely. It is usually about twenty feet high and sheer on its inner side. It is built along beaches and across howling deserts and even on the lip of sheer cliffs where the possibility of attack from
outside is remote. On subject islands like Bhangbhangduc and Tingling there are similar walls, all metaphorically the same wall, and tnat seems strange to those of an unthinking military disposition who do not realize what its function really is. It is more than just a wall, it is a marker. On one side is the Empire, which in the Agatean language is a word identical with 'universe'. On the other side is - nothing. After all, the universe is everything there is. Oh, there may appear to be things, like sea, islands, other continents and so on. They may even appear solid, it may be possible to conquer them, walk on them . . . but they are not ultimately real. The Agatean word for foreigner is the same as the word for ghost, and only one brush stroke away from the word for victim. The walls are sheer in order to discourage those boring people who persist in believing that there might be anything interesting on the other side. Amaz-ingly enough there are people who simply won't take the hint, even after thousands of years. The ones near the coast build rafts and head out across lonely seas to lands that are a fable. The ones inland resort to man- carrying kites and chairs propelled by fireworks. Many of them die in the attempt, of course. Most of the others are soon caught, and made to live in interesting times. But some did make it to the great melting pot called Ankh-Morpork. They arrived with no money - sailors charged what the market would bear, which was everything - but they had a mad gleam in their eye and they opened shops and restaurants and worked twenty-four hours a day. People called this the Ankh-Morpork Dream (of making piles of cash in a place where your death was unlikely to be a matter of public policy). And it was dreamed all the stronger by people who didn't sleep. Rincewind sometimes thought that his life was punctuated by awakenings. They were not always rude ones. Sometimes they were merely impolite. A very few - one or two, perhaps - had been quite nice, especially on the island. The sun had come up in its humdrum fashion, the waves had washed the beach in quite a boring way, and on several occasions he'd managed to erupt from unconsciousness without his habitual small scream. This one wasn't just rude. It was downright insolent. He was being bumped about and someone had tied his hands together. It was dark, a fact occasioned by the sack over his head. Rincewind did some calculation, and reached a conclusion. 'This is the seventeenth worst day of my life so far,' he thought. Being knocked unconscious in pubs was quite commonplace. If it happened in Ankh- Morpork then you'd likely as not wake up lying on the Ankh with all your money gone or, if a ship was due out on a long and unpopular voyage, chained up in some scupper somewhere with no option for the next two years but to plough the ocean wave.[19] But generally the knocker wanted to keep you alive. The Thieves' Guild were punctilious about that. As they said: 'Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.'
If he was in what felt like a cart then someone had some purpose in keeping him alive. He wished he hadn't thought of that. Someone pulled the sack off. A terrifying visage stared down at him. ' “I would like to eat your foot!” ' said Rincewind. 'Don't worry. I am a friend.' The mask was lifted away. There was a young woman behind it - round faced, snub nosed and quite different from any other citizen Rincewind had met hitherto. That was, he realized, because she was looking straight at him. Her clothes, if not her face, had last been seen on the stage. 'Don't cry out,' she said. 'Why? What are you going to do?'
'We would have welcomed you properly but there was no time.' She sat down among the bundles in the back of the swaying cart and regarded him critically. 'Four Big Sandal said you arrived on a dragon and slaughtered a regiment of soldiers,' she said. 'I did?'
'And then you worked magic on a venerable old man and he became a great fighter.'
'He did?'
'And you gave him whole meat, even though Four Big Sandal is only of the pung class.'
'I did?'
'And you have your hat.'
'Yes, yes, got my hat.'
'And yet,' said the girl, 'you don't look like a Great Wizard.'
'Ah. Well, the fact is—' The girl looked as fragile as a flower. But she had just pulled out, from somewhere in the folds of her costume, a small but perfectly serviceable knife. Rincewind had picked up an instinct for this sort or thing. This was probably not the time to deny Great Wizardry. 'The fact is . . .' he repeated, 'that.. . how do I know I can trust you?'
The girl looked indignant. 'Do you not have amazing wizardly powers?'
'Oh, yes. Yes! Certainly! But—'
'Say something in wizard language!'
'Er. Stercus, stercus, stercus, moriturus sum,' said Rincewind, his eye on the knife. ' “O excrement, I am about to die?” '
'It's . . . er . . . a special mantra I say to raise the magical fluxes.' The girl subsided a little. 'But it takes it out of you, wizarding,' said Rincewind. 'Flying on dragons, magically turning old mer into warriors . . . I can only do so much of that sort of thing before it's time for a rest. Right now I'm very weak on account of the tremendous amounts of magic I've just used, you see.' She looked at him with doubt still in her eyes. 'All the peasants believe in the imminent arrival of the Great Wizard,' she said. 'But, in the words of the great philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, “When many expect a mighty stallion they will find hooves on an ant.” ' She gave him another calculating look. 'When you were on the road,' she said, 'you grovelled in front of District Commissioner Kee. You could have blasted him with terrible fire.' Biding my time, spying out the land, not wanting to break my cover,' Rincewind gabbled. 'Er. No good revealing myself straight away, is there?'
'You are maintaining a disguise?'
'Yes.'
'It is a very good one.'
'Thank you, because—'
'Only a great wizard would dare to look like such a pathetic piece of humanity.'