The tall man gave Teppic a nod.
'Take no notice of him, boy,' he said. 'He's just covering himself because of the accident last week.'
'The tortoise did beat the hare,' said Xeno sulkily.
'The hare was dead, Xeno,' said the tall man patiently.
'Because you shot it.'
'I was aiming at the tortoise. You know, trying to combine two experiments, cut down on expensive research time, make full use of available-' Xeno gestured with the bow, which now had another arrow in it.
'Excuse me,' said Teppic. 'Could you put it down a minute? Me and my friend have come a long way and it would be nice not to be shot at again.'
These two seem harmless, he thought, and almost believed it.
He whistled. On cue, Ptraci came around the dune, leading You Bastard. Teppic doubted the capability of her costume to hold any pockets whatsoever, but she seemed to have been able to repair her make-up, re-kohl her eyes and put up her hair. She undulated towards the group like a snake in a skid, determined to hit the strangers with the full force of her personality. She was also holding something in her other hand.
'She's found the tortoise!' said Xeno. 'Well done!'
The reptile shot back into its shell. Ptraci glared. She didn't have much in the world except herself, and didn't like to be hailed as a mere holder of testudinoids.
The tall man sighed. 'You know, Xeno,' he said, 'I can't help thinking you've got the wrong end of the stick with this whole tortoise-and-arrow business.'
The little man glared at him.
'The trouble with you, Ibid,' he said, 'is that you think you're the biggest bloody authority on everything.'
The Gods of the Old Kingdom were awakening.
Belief is a force. It's a weak force, by comparison with gravity; when it comes to moving mountains, gravity wins every time. But it still exists, and now that the Old Kingdom was enclosed upon itself, floating free of the rest of the universe, drifting away from the general consensus that is dignified by the name of reality, the power of belief was making itself felt.
For seven thousand years the people of Djelibeybi had believed in their gods.
Now their gods existed. They had, as it were, the complete Set.
And the people of the Old Kingdom were learning that, for example, Vut the Dog-Headed God of the Evening looks a lot better painted on a pot than he does when all seventy feet of him, growling and stinking, is lurching down the Street outside.
Dios sat in the throne room, the gold mask of the king on his knees, staring out across the sombre air. The cluster of lesser priests around the door finally plucked up the courage to approach him, in the same general frame of mind as you would approach a growling lion. No-one is more worried by the actual physical manifestation of a god than his priests; it's like having the auditors in unexpectedly.
Only Koomi stood a little aside from the others. He was thinking hard. Strange and original thoughts were crowding along rarely-trodden neural pathways, heading in unthinkable directions. He wanted to see where they led.
'O Dios,' murmured the high priest of Ket, the This-Headed God of Justice. 'What is the king's command? The gods are striding the land, and they are fighting and breaking houses, O Dios. Where is the king? What would he have us do?'
'Yea,' said the high priest of Scrab, the Pusher of the Ball of the Sun. He felt something more was expected of him. 'And verily,' he added. 'Your lordship will have noticed that the sun is wobbling, because all the Gods of the Sun are fighting for it and-' he shuffled his feet — 'the blessed Scrab made a strategic withdrawal and has, er, made an unscheduled landing on the town of Hort. A number of buildings broke his fall.'
'And rightly so,' said the high priest of Thrrp, the Charioteer of the Sun. 'For, as all know, my master is the true god of the-'
His words tailed off.
Dios was trembling, his body rocking slowly back and forth. His eyes stared at nothing. His hands gripped the mask almost hard enough to leave fingerprints in the gold, and his lips soundlessly shaped the words of the Ritual of the Second Hour, which had been said at this time for thousands of years.
'I think it's the shock,' said one of the priests. 'You know, he's always been so set in his ways.'
The others hastened to show that there was at least something they could advise on.
'Fetch him a glass of water.'
'Put a paper bag over his head.'
'Sacrifice a chicken under his nose.'
There was a high-pitched whistling noise, the distant crump of an explosion, and a long hissing. A few tendrils of steam curled into the room.
The priests rushed to the balcony, leaving Dios in his unnerving pool of trauma, and found that the crowds around the palace were staring at the sky.
'It would appear,' said the high priest of Cephut, God of Cutlery, who felt that he could take a more relaxed view of the immediate situation, 'that Thrrp has fumbled it and has fallen to a surprise tackle from Jeht, Boatman of the Solar Orb.'
There was a distant buzzing, as of several billion bluebottles taking off in a panic, and a huge dark shape passed over the palace.
'But,' said the high priest of Cephut, 'here comes Scrab again . . . yes, he's gaining height . . . Jeht hasn't seen him yet, he's progressing confidently towards the meridian, and here comes Sessifet, Goddess of the Afternoon! This is a surprise! What a surprise this is! A young goddess, yet to make her mark, but my word, what a lot of promise there, this is an astonishing bid, eunuchs and gentlemen, and . . yes . . . Scrab has fumbled it! He's fumbled it! . . .'
The shadows danced and spun on the stones of the balcony.
'. . . and . . . what's this? The elder gods are, there's no other word for it, they're co-operating against these brash newcomers! But plucky young Sessifet is hanging in there, she's exploiting the weakness. . . she's in! . . . and pulling away now, pulling away, Gil and Scrab appear to be fighting, she's got a clear sky and, yes, yes . . . yes! . . . it's noon! It's noon! It's noon!'
Silence. The priest was aware that everyone was staring at him.
Then someone said, 'Why are you shouting into that bulrush?'
'Sorry. Don't know what came over me there.'
The priestess of Sarduk, Goddess of Caves, snorted at him.
'Suppose one of them had dropped it?' she snapped.
'But . . . but . . .' He swallowed. 'It's not possible, is it? Not really? We all must have eaten something, or been out in the sun too long, or something. Because, I mean, everyone knows that the gods aren't . . . I mean, the sun is a big flaming ball of gas, isn't it, that goes around the whole world every day, and, and, and the gods… well, you know, there's a very real need in people to believe, don't get me wrong here-'
Koomi, even with his head buzzing with thoughts of perfidy, was quicker on the uptake than his colleagues.
'Get him, lads!' he shouted.
Four priests grabbed the luckless cutlery worshipper by his arms and legs and gave him a high-speed run across the stones to the edge of the balcony, over the parapet and into the mud— coloured waters of the Djel.
He surfaced, spluttering.
'What did you go and do that for?' he demanded. 'You all know I'm right. None of you really-'
The waters of the Djel opened a lazy jaw, and he vanished, just as the huge winged shape of Scrab buzzed threateningly over the palace and whirred off towards the mountains.
Koomi mopped his forehead.
'Bit of a close shave there,' he said. His colleagues nodded, staring at the fading ripples. Suddenly, Djeibeybi was no place for honest doubt. Honest doubt could get you seriously picked up and your arms and legs torn off.
'Er,.' said one of them. 'Cephut's going to be a bit upset, though, isn't he?'
'All hail Cephut,' they chorused. Just in case.
'Don't see why,' grumbled an elderly priest at the back of the crowd. 'Bloody knife and fork artist.'
They grabbed him, still protesting, and hurled him into the river.
'All hail-' They paused. 'Who was he high priest of, anyway?'
'Bunu, the Goat-headed God of Goats? Wasn't he?'
'All hail Bunu, probably,' they chorused, as the sacred crocodiles homed in like submarines.
Koomi raised his hands, imploring. It is said that the hour brings forth the man. He was the kind of man that is brought forth by devious and unpleasant hours, and underneath his bald head certain conclusions were beginning to unfold, like things imprisoned for years inside stones. He wasn't yet sure what they were, but they were broadly on the subject of gods, the new age, the need for a firm hand on the helm, and possibly the inserting of Dios into the nearest crocodile. The mere thought filled him with forbidden delight.
'Brethren!' he cried.
'Excuse me,' said the priestess of Sarduk.
'And sistren-'
'Thank you.'
'-let us rejoice!' The assembled priests stood in total silence. This was a radical approach which had not hitherto occurred to them. And Koomi looked at their upturned faces and felt a thrill the like of which he had never experienced before. They were frightened out of their wits, and they were expecting him — him — to tell them what to do.
'Yea!' he said. 'And, indeed, verily, the hour of the gods-'
'-and goddesses-'
'-yes, and goddesses, is at hand. Er.'
What next? What, when you got right down to it, was he going to tell them to do? And then he thought: it doesn't matter. Provided I sound confident enough. Old Dios always drove them, he never tried to lead them. Without him they're wandering around like sheep.
'And, brethren — and sistren, of course — we must ask ourselves, we must ask ourselves, we, er, yes.' His voice waxed again with new confidence. 'Yes, we must ask ourselves why the gods are at hand. And without doubt it is because we have not been assiduous enough in our worship, we have, er, we have lusted after graven idols.'
The priests exchanged glances. Had they? How did you do it, actually?
'And, yes, and what about sacrifices? Time was when a sacrifice was a sacrifice, not some messing around with a chicken and flowers.'
This caused some coughing in the audience.
'Are we talking maidens here?' said one of the priests uncertainly.
'Ahem.'
'And inexperienced young men too, certainly,' he said quickly. Sarduk was one of the older goddesses, whose female worshippers got up to no good in sacred groves; the thought of her wandering around the landscape somewhere, bloody to the elbows, made the eyes water.
Koomi's heart thumped. 'Well, why not?' he said. 'Things were better then, weren't they?'
'But, er, I thought we stopped all that sort of thing. Population decline and so forth.'
There was a monstrous splash out in the river. Tzut, the Snake-Headed God of the Upper Djel, surfaced and regarded the assembled priesthood solemnly. Then Fhez, the Crocodile-Headed God of the Lower Djel, erupted beside him and made a spirited attempt at biting his head off. The two submerged in a column of spray and a minor tidal wave which slopped over the balcony.
'Ah, but maybe the population declined because we stopped sacrificing virgins — of both sexes, of course,' said Koomi, hurriedly. 'Have you ever thought of it like that?' They thought of it. Then they thought of it again.
'I don't think the king would approve-' said one of the priests cautiously.
'The king?' shouted Koomi. 'Where is the king? Show me the king! Ask Dios where the king is!'
There was a thud by his feet. He looked down in horror as the gold mask bounced, and rolled towards the priests. They scattered hurriedly, like skittles.
Dios strode out into the light of the disputed sun, his face grey with fury.
'The king is dead,' he said.
Koomi swayed under the sheer pressure of anger, but rallied magnificently.
'Then his successor-' he began.
'There is no successor,' said Dios. He stared up at the sky. Few people can look directly at the sun, but under the venom of Dios's gaze the sun itself might have flinched and looked away. Dios's eyes sighted down that fearsome nose like twin range finders.
To the air in general he said: 'Coming here as if they own the place. How dare they?'
Koomi's mouth dropped open. He started to protest, and a kilowatt stare silenced him.
Koomi sought support from the crowd of priests, who were busily inspecting their nails or staring intently into the middle distance. The message was clear. He was on his own. Although, if by some chance he won the battle of wills, he'd be surrounded by people assuring him that they had been behind him all along.
'Anyway, they do own the place,' he mumbled.
'What?'
'They, er, they do own the place, Dios,' Koomi repeated. His temper gave out. 'They're the sodding gods, Dios!'
'They're our gods,' Dios hissed. 'We're not their people. They're my gods and they will learn to do as they are instructed!'
Koomi gave up the frontal assault. You couldn't outstare that sapphire stare, you couldn't stand the war-axe nose and, most of all, no man could be expected to dent the surface of Dios's terrifying righteousness.
'But-' he managed.
Dios waved him into silence with a trembling hand.
'They've no right! ' he said. 'I did not give any orders! They have no right!'
'Then what are you going to do?' said Koomi.
Dios's hands opened and closed fitfully. He felt like a royalist might feel — a good royalist, a royalist who cut out pictures of all the Royals and stuck them in a scrapbook, a royalist who wouldn't hear a word said about them, they did such a good job and they can't answer back — if suddenly all the Royals turned up in his living room and started rearranging the furniture. He longed for the necropolis, and the cool silence among his old friends, and a quick sleep after which he'd be able to think so much more clearly . . .
Koomi's heart leapt. Dios's discomfort was a crack which, with due care and attention, could take a wedge. But you couldn't use a hammer. Head on, Dios could outfight the world.
The old man was shaking again. 'I do not presume to tell them how to run affairs in the Hereunder,' he said. 'They shall not presume to instruct me in how to run my kingdom.'
Koomi salted this treasonable statement away for further study and patted him gently on the back.
'You're right, of course,' he said. Dios's eyes swivelled.
'I am?' he said, suspiciously.
'I'm sure that, as the king's minister, you will find a way. You have our full support, O Dios.' Koomi waved an uplifted hand at the priests, who chorused wholehearted agreement. If you couldn't depend on kings and gods, you could always rely on old Dios. There wasn't one of them that wouldn't prefer the uncertain wrath of the gods to a rebuke from Dios. Dios terrified them in a very positive, human way that no supernatural entity ever could. Dios would sort it out.
'And we take no heed to these mad rumours about the king's disappearance. They are undoubtedly wild exaggerations, with no foundation,' said Koomi.
The priests nodded while, in each mind, a tiny rumour uncurled the length of its tail.
'What rumours?' said Dios out of the corner of his mouth.
'So enlighten us, master, as to the path we must now take,' said Koomi.
Dios wavered.
He did not know what to do. For him, this was a new experience. This was Change.
All he could think of, all that was pressing forward in his mind, were the words of the Ritual of the Third Hour, which he had said at this time for — how long? Too long, too long! — And he should have gone to his rest long before, but the time had never been right, there was never anyone capable, they would have been lost without him, the kingdom would founder, he would be letting everyone down, and so he'd crossed the river. . . he swore every time that it was the last, but it never was, not when the chill fetched his limbs, and the decades had become — longer. And now, when his kingdom needed him, the words of a Ritual had scored themselves into the pathways of his brain and bewildered all attempts at thought.
'Er,' he said.
You Bastard chewed happily. Teppic had tethered him too near an olive tree, which was getting a terminal pruning. Sometimes the camel would stop, gaze up briefly at the seagulls that circled everywhere above Ephebe city, and subject them to a short, deadly burst of olive stones.
He was turning over in his mind an interesting new concept in Thau-dimensional physics which unified time, space, magnetism, gravity and, for some reason, broccoli. Periodically he would make noises like distant quarry blasting, but which merely indicated that all stomachs were functioning perfectly.
Ptraci sat under the tree, feeding the tortoise on vine leaves.
Heat crackled off the white walls of the tavern but, Teppic thought, how different it was from the Old Kingdom. There even the heat was old; the air was musty and lifeless, it pressed like a vice, you felt it was made of boiled centuries. Here it was leavened by the breeze from the sea. It was edged with salt crystals. It carried exciting hints of wine; more than a hint in fact, because Xeno was already on his second amphora. This was the kind of place where things rolled up their sleeves and started.
'But I still don't understand about the tortoise,' he said, with some difficulty. He'd just taken his first mouthful of Ephebian wine, and it had apparently varnished the back of his throat.
''S quite simple,' said Xeno. 'Look, let's say this olive stone is the arrow and this, and this-' he cast around aimlessly — 'and this stunned seagull is the tortoise, right? Now, when you fire the arrow it goes from here to the seag — the tortoise, am I right?'
'I suppose so, but-'
'But, by this time, the seagu — the tortoise has moved on a bit, hasn't he? Am I right?'
'I suppose so,' said Teppic, helplessly. Xeno gave him a look of triumph.
'So the arrow has to go a bit further, doesn't it, to where the tortoise is now. Meanwhile the tortoise has flow — moved on, not much, I'll grant you, but it doesn't have to be much. Am I right? So the arrow has a bit further to go, but the point is that by the time it gets to where the tortoise is now the tortoise isn't there. So, if the tortoise keeps moving, the arrow will never hit it. It'll keep getting closer and closer but never hit it. QED.'
'Are you right?' said Teppic automatically.
'No,' said Ibid coldly. 'There's a dozen tortoise kebabs to prove him wrong. The trouble with my friend here is that he doesn't know the difference between a postulate and a metaphor of human existence. Or a hole in the ground.'
'It didn't hit it yesterday,' snapped Xeno.
'Yes, I was watching. You hardly pulled the string back. I saw you,' said Ibid.
They started to argue again.
Teppic stared into his wine mug. These men are philosophers, he thought. They had told him so. So their brains must be so big that they have room for ideas that no-one else would consider for five seconds. On the way to the tavern Xeno had explained to him, for example, why it was logically impossible to fall out of a tree.
Teppic had described the vanishing of the kingdom, but he hadn't revealed his position in it. He hadn't a lot of experience of these matters, but he had a very clear feeling that kings who hadn't got a kingdom any more were not likely to be very popular in neighbouring countries. There had been one or two like that in Ankh-Morpork — deposed royalty, who had fled their suddenly— dangerous kingdoms for Ankh's hospitable bosom carrying nothing but the clothes they stood up in and a few wagonloads of jewels. The city, of course, welcomed anyone — regardless of race, colour, class or creed — who had spending money in incredible amounts, but nevertheless the inhumation of surplus monarchs was a regular source of work for the Assassins' Guild. There was always someone back home who wanted to be certain that deposed monarchs stayed that way. It was usually a case of heir today, gone tomorrow.
'I think it got caught up in geometry,' he said, hopefully. 'I heard you were very good at geometry here,' he added, 'and perhaps you could tell me how to get back.'
'Geometry is not my forte,' said Ibid. 'As you probably know.'
'Sorry?'
'Haven't you read my Principles of Ideal Government?'
'I'm afraid not.'
'Or my Discourse on Historical Inevitability?'
'No.'
Ibid looked crestfallen. 'Oh,' he said.
'Ibid is a well-known authority on everything,' said Xeno. 'Except for geometry. And interior decorating. And elementary logic.' Ibid glared at him.
'What about you, then?' said Teppic.
Xeno drained his mug. 'I'm more into the destruct testing of axioms,' he said. 'The chap you need is Pthagonal. A very acute man with an angle.'
He was interrupted by the clatter of hooves. Several horsemen galloped with reckless speed past the tavern and on up the winding, cobbled streets of the city. They seemed very excited about something.
Ibid picked a stunned seagull out of his wine cup and laid it on the table. He was looking thoughtful.
'If the Old Kingdom has really disappeared-' he said.
'It has,' said Teppic firmly. 'It's not something you can be mistaken about, really.'
'Then that means our border is concurrent with that of Tsort,' said Ibid ponderously.
'Pardon?' said Teppic.
'There's nothing between us,' explained the philosopher.
'Oh, dear. That means we shall be forced to make war.'
'Why?'
Ibid opened his mouth, stopped, and turned to Xeno.
'Why does it mean we'll be forced to make war?' he said.
'Historical imperative,' said Xeno.
'Ah, yes. I knew it was something like that. I am afraid it is inevitable. It's a shame, but there you are.'
There was another clatter as another party of horsemen rounded the corner, heading downhill this time. They wore the high plumed helmets of Ephebian soldiery, and were shouting enthusiastically.
Ibid settled himself more comfortably on the bench and folded his bands.
'That'll be the Tyrant's men,' he said, as the troop galloped through the city gates and out on to the desert. 'He's sending them to check, you may depend upon it.'
Teppic knew about the enmity between Ephebe and Tsort, of course. The Old Kingdom had profited mightily by it, by seeing that the merchants of both sides had somewhere discreet in which to trade with one another. He drummed his fingers on the table.
'You haven't fought each other for thousands of years,' he said. 'You were tiny countries in those days. It was just a scrap. Now you're huge. People could get hurt. Doesn't that worry you?'
'It's a matter of pride,' said Ibid, but his voice was tinged with uncertainty. 'I don't think there's much choice.'
'It was that bloody wooden cow or whatever,' said Xeno. 'They've never forgiven us for it.'
'If we don't attack them, they'll attack us first,' said Ibid.
''S'right,' said Xeno. 'So we'd better retaliate before they have a chance to strike.'
The two philosophers stared uncomfortably at one another.
'On the other hand,' said Thid, 'war makes it very difficult to think straight.'
'There is that,' Xeno agreed. 'Especially for dead people.' There was an embarrassed silence, broken only by Ptraci's voice singing to the tortoise and the occasional squeak of stricken seagulls.
'What day is it?' said Ibid.
'Tuesday,' said Teppic.
'I think,' said Thid, 'that it might be a good idea if you came to the symposium. We have one every Tuesday,' he added. 'All the greatest minds in Ephebe will be there. All this needs thinking about.'
He glanced at Ptraci.
'However,' he said, 'your young woman cannot attend, naturally. Females are absolutely forbidden. Their brains overheat.'
King Teppicymon XXVII opened his eyes. It's bloody dark in here, he thought.
And he realised that he could hear his own heart beating, but muffled, and some way off.
And then he remembered.
He was alive. He was alive again. And, this time, he was in bits.
Somehow, he'd assumed that you got assembled again once you got to the netherworld, like one of Grinjer's kits.
Get a grip on yourself, man, he thought.
It's up to you to pull yourself together.
Right, he thought. There were at least six jars. So my eyes are in one of them. Getting the lid off would be favourite, so we can see what we're at.
That's going to involve arms and legs and fingers.
This is going to be really tricky.
He reached out, tentatively, with stiff joints, and located something heavy. It felt as though it might give, so he moved his other arm into position, with a great deal of awkwardness, and pushed.
There was a distant thump, and a definite feeling of openness above him. He sat up, creaking all the way.
The sides of the ceremonial casket still hemmed him in, but to his surprise he found that one slow arm movement brushed them out of the way like paper. Must be all the pickle and stuffing, he thought. Gives you a bit of weight.
He felt his way to the edge of the slab, lowered his heavy legs to the ground and, after a pause out of habit to wheeze a bit, took the first tottering lurch of the newly undead.
It is astonishingly difficult to walk with legs full of straw when the brain doing the directing is in a pot ten feet away, but he made it as far as the wall and felt his way along it until a crash indicated that he'd reached the shelf of jars. He fumbled the lids of the first one and dipped his hand gently inside.
It must be brains, he thought maniacally, because semolina doesn't squidge like that. I've collected my own thoughts, haha.
He tried one or two more jars until an explosion of daylight told him he'd found the one with his eyes in. He watched his own bandaged hand reach down, growing gigantic, and scoop them up carefully.
That seems to be the important bits, he thought. The rest can wait until later. Maybe when I need to eat something, and so forth.
He turned around, and realised that he was not alone. Dil and Gern were watching him. To squeeze any further into the far corner of the room, they would have needed triangular backbones.
'Ah. Ho there, good people,' said the king, aware that his voice was a little hollow. 'I know so much about you, I'd like to shake you by the hand.' He looked down. 'Only they're rather full at the moment,' he added.
'Gkkk,' said Gern.
'You couldn't do a bit of reassembly, could you?' said the king, turning to Dil. 'Your stitches seem to be holding up nicely, by the way. Well done, that man.'
Professional pride broke through the barrier of Dil's terror.
'You're alive?' he said.
'That was the general idea, wasn't it?' said the king.
Dil nodded. Certainly it was. He'd always believed it to be true. He'd just never expected it ever actually to happen. But it had, and the first words, well, nearly the first words that had been said were in praise of his needlework. His chest swelled. No— one else in the Guild had ever been congratulated on their work by a recipient.
'There,' he said to Gern, whose shoulderblades were making a spirited attempt to dig their way through the wall. 'Hear what has been said to your master.
The king paused. It was beginning to dawn on him that things weren't quite right here. Of course the netherworld was like this world, only better, and no doubt there were plenty of servants and so forth. But it seemed altogether far too much like this world. He was pretty sure that Dil and Gern shouldn't be in it yet. Anyway, he'd always understood that the common people had their own netherworld, where they would be more at ease and could mingle with their own kind and wouldn't feel awkward and socially out of place.
'I say,' he said. 'I may have missed a bit here. You're not dead, are you?'
Dil didn't answer immediately. Some of the things he'd seen so far today had made him a bit uncertain on the subject. In the end, though, he was forced to admit that he probably was alive.
'Then what's happening?' said the king.
'We don't know, O king,' said Dil. 'Really we don't. It's all come true, O fount of waters!'
'What has?'
'Everything!'
'Everything?'
'The sun, O lord. And the gods! Oh, the gods! They're everywhere, O master of heaven!'
'We come in through the back way,' said Gern, who had dropped to his knees. 'Forgive us, O lord of justice, who has come back to deliver his mighty wisdom and that. I am sorry about me and Glwenda, it was a moment of wossname, mad passion, we couldn't control ourselves. Also, it was me-'
Dil waved him into a devout silence.
'Excuse me,' he said to the king's mummy. 'But could we have a word away from the lad? Man to-'
'Corpse?' said the king, trying to make it easy for him. 'Certainly.'
They wandered over to the other side of the room.
'The fact is, O gracious king of-' Dil began, in a conspiratorial whisper.
'I think we can dispense with all that,' said the king briskly. 'The dead don't stand on ceremony. «King» will be quite sufficient.'
'The fact is, then — king,' said Dil, experiencing a slight thrill at this equitable treatment, 'young Gern thinks it's all his fault. I've told him over and over again that the gods wouldn't go to all this trouble just because of one growing lad with urges, if you catch my drift.' He paused, and added carefully, 'They wouldn't, would they?'
'Shouldn't think so for one minute,' said the king briskly. 'We'd never see the back of them, otherwise.'
'That's what I told him,' said Dil, immensely relieved. 'He's a good boy, sir, it's just that his mum is a bit funny about religion. We'd never see the back of them, those were my very words. I'd be very grateful if you could have a word with him, sir, you know, set his mind at rest-'
'Be happy to,' said the king graciously.
Dil sidled closer.
'The fact is, sir, these gods, sir, they aren't right. We've been watching, sir. At least, I have. I climbed on the roof. Gern didn't, he hid under the bench. They're not right, sir!'
'What's wrong with them?'
'Well, they're here, sir! That's not right, is it? I mean, not to be really here. And they're just striding around and fighting amongst themselves and shouting at people.' He looked both ways before continuing. 'Between you and me, sir,' he said, 'they don't seem too bright.'
The king nodded. 'What are the priests doing about this?' he said.
'I saw them throwing one another in the river, sir.'
The king nodded again. 'That sounds about right,' he said. 'They've come to their senses at last.'
'You know what I think, sir?' said Dil earnestly. 'Everything we believe is coming true. And I heard something else, sir. This morning, if it was this morning, you understand, because the sun's all over the place, sir, and it's not the right sort of sun, but this morning some of the soldiers tried to get out along the Ephebe road, sir, and do you know what they found?'
'What did they find?'
'The road out, sir, leads in!' Dil took a step backwards the better to illustrate the seriousness of the revelations. 'They got up into the rocks and then suddenly they were walking down the Tsort road. It all sort of curves back on itself. We're shut in, sir. Shut in with our gods.'
And I'm shut in my body, thought the king. Everything we believe is true? And what we believe isn't what we think we believe.
I mean, we think we believe that the gods are wise and just and powerful, but what we really believe is that they are like our father after a long day. And we think we believe the netherworld is a sort of paradise, but we really believe it's right here and you go to it in your body and I'm in it and I'm never going to get away. Never, ever.
'What's my son got to say about all this?' he said. Dil coughed. It was the ominous cough. The Spanish use an upside-down question mark to tell you what you're about to hear is a question; this was the kind of cough that tells you what you're about to hear is a dirge.
'Don't know how to tell you this, sir,' he said.
'Out with it, man.'
'Sir, they say he's dead, sir. They say he killed himself and ran away.
'Killed himself?'
'Sorry, sir.'
'And ran away afterwards?'
'On a camel, they say.'
'We lead an active afterlife in our family, don't we?' observed the king dryly.
'Beg pardon, sir?'
'I mean, the two statements could be held to be mutually exclusive.'
Dil's face became a well-meaning blank.
'That is to say, they can't both be true,' supplied the king, helpfully.
'Ahem,' said Dil.
'Yes, but I'm a special case,' said the king testily. 'In this kingdom we believe you live after death only if you've been mumm-'
He stopped.
It was too horrible to think about. He thought about it, nevertheless, for some time.
Then he said, 'We must do something about it.'
Dil said, 'Your son, sir?'
'Never mind about my son, he's not dead, I'd know about it,' snapped the king. 'He can look after himself, he's my son. It's my ancestors I'm worried about.'
'But they're dead-' Dil began.
It has already been remarked that Dil had a very poor imagination. In a job like his a poor imagination was essential. But his mind's eye opened on a panorama of pyramids, stretching along the river, and his mind's ear swooped and curved through solid doors that no thief could penetrate.
And it heard the scrabbling.
And it heard the hammering.
And it heard the muffled shouting.
The king put a bandaged arm over his trembling shoulders.
'I know you're a good man with a needle, Dil,' he said. 'Tell me — how are you with a sledgehammer?'
Copolymer, the greatest storyteller in the history of the world, sat back and beamed at the greatest minds in the world, assembled at the dining table.
Teppic had added another iota to his store of new knowledge. 'Symposium' meant a knife-and-fork tea.
'Well,' said Copolymer, and launched into the story of the Tsortean Wars.
'You see, what happened was, he'd taken her back home, and her father — this wasn't the old king, this was the one before, the one with the wossname, he married some girl from over Elharib way, she had a squint, what was her name now, began with a P. Or an L. One of them letters, anyway. Her father owned an island out on the bay there, Papylos I think it was. No, I tell a lie, it was Crinix. Anyway, the king, the other king, he raised an army and they . . . Elenor, that was her name. She had a squint, you know. But quite attractive, they say. When I say married, I trust I do not have to spell it out for you. I mean, it was a bit unofficial. Er. Anyway, there was this wooden horse and after they'd got in . . . Did I tell you about this horse? It was a horse. I'm pretty sure it was a horse. Or maybe it was a chicken. Forget my own name next! It was wossname's idea, the one with the limp. Yes. The limp in his leg, I mean. Did I mention him? There'd been this fight. No, that was the other one, I think. Yes. Anyway, this wooden pig, damn clever idea, they made it out of thing. Tip of my tongue. Wood. But that was later, you know. The fight! Nearly forgot the fight. Yes. Damn good fight. Everyone banging on their shields and yelling. Wossname's armour shone like shining armour. Fight and a half, that fight. Between thingy, not the one with the limp, the other one, wossname, had red hair. You know. Tall fellow, talked with a lisp. Hold on, just remembered, he was from some other island. Not him. The other one, with the limp. Didn't want to go, he said he was mad. Of course, he was bloody mad, definitely. I mean, a wooden cow! Like wossname said, the king, no, not that king, the other one, he saw the goat, he said, «I fear the Ephebians, especially when they're mad enough to leave bloody great wooden livestock on the doorstep, talk about nerve, they must think we was born yesterday, set fire to it,» and, of course, wossname had nipped in round the back and put everyone to the sword, talk about laugh. Did I say she had a squint? They said she was pretty, but it takes all sorts. Yes. Anyway, that's how it happened. Now, of course, wossname — I think he was called Melycanus, had a limp — he wanted to go home, well, you would, they'd been there for years, he wasn't getting any younger. That's why he dreamt up the thing about the wooden wossname. Yes. I tell a lie, Lavaelous was the one with the knee. Pretty good fight, that fight, take it from me.'
He lapsed into self-satisfied silence.
'Pretty good fight,' he mumbled and, smiling faintly, dropped off to sleep.
Teppic was aware that his own mouth was hanging open. He shut it. Along the table several of the diners were wiping their eyes.
'Magic,' said Xeno. 'Sheer magic. Every word a tassel on the canopy of Time.'
'It's the way he remembers every tiny detail. Pin-sharp,' murmured Ibid.
Teppic looked down the length of the table, and then nudged Xeno beside him. 'Who is everyone?' he said.
'Well, Ibid you already know. And Copolymer. Over there, that's Iesope, the greatest teller of fables in the world. And that's Antiphon, the greatest writer of comic plays in the world.'
'Where is Pthagonal?' said Teppic. Xeno pointed to the far end of the table, where a glum-looking, heavy-drinking man was trying to determine the angle between two bread rolls. 'I'll introduce you to him afterwards,' he said.
Teppic looked around at the bald heads and long white beards, which seemed to be a badge of office. If you had a bald head and a long white beard, they seemed to indicate, whatever lay between them must be bursting with wisdom. The only exception was Antiphon, who looked as though he was built of pork.
They are great minds, he told himself. These are men who are trying to work out how the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion, but just by inserting their brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart.
Ibid rapped on the table for silence.
'The Tyrant has called for war on Tsort,' he said. 'Now, let us consider the place of war in the ideal republic,' he said. 'We would require-'
'Excuse me, could you just pass me the celery?' said Iesope. 'Thank you.'
'-the ideal republic, as I was saying, based on the fundamental laws that govern-'
'And the salt. It's just by your elbow.'
'-the fundamental laws, that is, which govern all men. Now, it is without doubt true that war. . . could you stop that, please?'
'It's celery,' said Iesope, crunching cheerfully. 'You can't help it with celery.'
Xeno peered suspiciously at what was on his fork.
'Here, this is squid,' he said. 'I didn't ask for squid. Who ordered squid?'
'-without doubt,' repeated Thid, raising his voice, 'without doubt, I put it to you— 'I think this is the lamb couscous,' said Antiphon.
'Was yours the squid?'
'I asked for marida and dolmades.'
'I ordered the lamb. Just pass it along, will you?'
'I don't remember anyone asking for all this garlic bread,' said Xeno.
'Look, some of us are trying to float a philosophical concept here,' said Ibid sarcastically. 'Don't let us interrupt you, will you?'
Someone threw a breadstick at him.
Teppic looked at what was on his fork. Seafood was unknown in the kingdom, and what was on his fork had too many valves and suckers to be reassuring. He lifted a boiled vine leaf with extreme care, and was sure he saw something scuttle behind an olive.
Ah. Something else to remember, then. The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate anything that couldn't climb out of one.
He pushed the food around on his plate. Some of it pushed back.
And philosophers didn't listen to one another. And they don't stick to the point. This probably is mocracy at work.
A bread roll bounced past him. Oh, and they get over-excited.
He noticed a skinny little man sitting opposite him, chewing primly on some anonymous tentacle. Apart from Pthagonal the geometrician, who was now gloomily calculating the radius of his plate, he was the only person not speaking his mind at the top of his voice. Sometimes he'd make little notes on a piece of parchment and slip it into his toga.
Teppic leaned across. Further down the table Iesope, encouraged by occasional olive stones and bread rolls, started a long fable about a fox, a turkey, a goose and a wolf, who had a wager to see who could stay longest underwater with heavy weights tied to their feet.
'Excuse me,' said Teppic, raising his voice above the din. 'Who are you?'
The little man gave him a shy look. He had extremely large ears. In a certain light, he could have been mistaken for a very thin jug.
'I'm Endos,' he said.
'Why aren't you philosophising?'
Endos sliced a strange mollusc.
'I'm not a philosopher, actually,' he said.
'Or a humorous playwright or something?' said Teppic.
'I'm afraid not. I'm a Listener. Endos the Listener, I'm known as.'
'That's fascinating,' said Teppic automatically. 'What does that involve?'
'Listening.'
'Just listening?'
'That's what they pay me for,' said Endos. 'Sometimes I nod. Or smile. Or nod and smile at the same time. Encouragingly, you know. They like that.'
Teppic felt he was called upon to comment at this point. 'Gosh,' he said.
Endos gave him an encouraging nod, and a smile that suggested that of all the things Endos could be doing in the world right at this minute there was nothing so basically riveting as listening to Teppic. It was something about his ears. They appeared to be a vast aural black hole, begging to be filled up with words. Teppic felt an overpowering urge to tell him all about his life and hopes and dreams…
'I bet,' he said, 'that they pay you an awful lot of money.
Endos gave him a heartening smile.
'Have you listened to Copolymer tell his story lots of times?'
Endos nodded and smiled, although there was a faint trace of pain right behind his eyes.
'I expect,' said Teppic, 'that your ears develop protective rough surfaces after a while?'
Endos nodded. 'Do go on,' he urged.
Teppic glanced across at Pthagonal, who was moodily drawing right angles in his taramasalata.
'I'd love to stay and listen to you listening to me all day,' he said. 'But there's a man over there I'd like to see.'
'That's amazing,' said Endos, making a short note and turning his attention to a conversation further along the table. A philosopher had averred that although truth was beauty, beauty was not necessarily truth, and a fight was breaking out. Endos listened carefully24. Teppic wandered along the table to where Pthagonal was sitting in unrelieved misery, and currently peering suspiciously over the crust of a pie.
Teppic looked over his shoulder.
'I think I saw something moving in there,' he said.
'Take no notice of him, boy,' he said. 'He's just covering himself because of the accident last week.'
'The tortoise did beat the hare,' said Xeno sulkily.
'The hare was dead, Xeno,' said the tall man patiently.
'Because you shot it.'
'I was aiming at the tortoise. You know, trying to combine two experiments, cut down on expensive research time, make full use of available-' Xeno gestured with the bow, which now had another arrow in it.
'Excuse me,' said Teppic. 'Could you put it down a minute? Me and my friend have come a long way and it would be nice not to be shot at again.'
These two seem harmless, he thought, and almost believed it.
He whistled. On cue, Ptraci came around the dune, leading You Bastard. Teppic doubted the capability of her costume to hold any pockets whatsoever, but she seemed to have been able to repair her make-up, re-kohl her eyes and put up her hair. She undulated towards the group like a snake in a skid, determined to hit the strangers with the full force of her personality. She was also holding something in her other hand.
'She's found the tortoise!' said Xeno. 'Well done!'
The reptile shot back into its shell. Ptraci glared. She didn't have much in the world except herself, and didn't like to be hailed as a mere holder of testudinoids.
The tall man sighed. 'You know, Xeno,' he said, 'I can't help thinking you've got the wrong end of the stick with this whole tortoise-and-arrow business.'
The little man glared at him.
'The trouble with you, Ibid,' he said, 'is that you think you're the biggest bloody authority on everything.'
The Gods of the Old Kingdom were awakening.
Belief is a force. It's a weak force, by comparison with gravity; when it comes to moving mountains, gravity wins every time. But it still exists, and now that the Old Kingdom was enclosed upon itself, floating free of the rest of the universe, drifting away from the general consensus that is dignified by the name of reality, the power of belief was making itself felt.
For seven thousand years the people of Djelibeybi had believed in their gods.
Now their gods existed. They had, as it were, the complete Set.
And the people of the Old Kingdom were learning that, for example, Vut the Dog-Headed God of the Evening looks a lot better painted on a pot than he does when all seventy feet of him, growling and stinking, is lurching down the Street outside.
Dios sat in the throne room, the gold mask of the king on his knees, staring out across the sombre air. The cluster of lesser priests around the door finally plucked up the courage to approach him, in the same general frame of mind as you would approach a growling lion. No-one is more worried by the actual physical manifestation of a god than his priests; it's like having the auditors in unexpectedly.
Only Koomi stood a little aside from the others. He was thinking hard. Strange and original thoughts were crowding along rarely-trodden neural pathways, heading in unthinkable directions. He wanted to see where they led.
'O Dios,' murmured the high priest of Ket, the This-Headed God of Justice. 'What is the king's command? The gods are striding the land, and they are fighting and breaking houses, O Dios. Where is the king? What would he have us do?'
'Yea,' said the high priest of Scrab, the Pusher of the Ball of the Sun. He felt something more was expected of him. 'And verily,' he added. 'Your lordship will have noticed that the sun is wobbling, because all the Gods of the Sun are fighting for it and-' he shuffled his feet — 'the blessed Scrab made a strategic withdrawal and has, er, made an unscheduled landing on the town of Hort. A number of buildings broke his fall.'
'And rightly so,' said the high priest of Thrrp, the Charioteer of the Sun. 'For, as all know, my master is the true god of the-'
His words tailed off.
Dios was trembling, his body rocking slowly back and forth. His eyes stared at nothing. His hands gripped the mask almost hard enough to leave fingerprints in the gold, and his lips soundlessly shaped the words of the Ritual of the Second Hour, which had been said at this time for thousands of years.
'I think it's the shock,' said one of the priests. 'You know, he's always been so set in his ways.'
The others hastened to show that there was at least something they could advise on.
'Fetch him a glass of water.'
'Put a paper bag over his head.'
'Sacrifice a chicken under his nose.'
There was a high-pitched whistling noise, the distant crump of an explosion, and a long hissing. A few tendrils of steam curled into the room.
The priests rushed to the balcony, leaving Dios in his unnerving pool of trauma, and found that the crowds around the palace were staring at the sky.
'It would appear,' said the high priest of Cephut, God of Cutlery, who felt that he could take a more relaxed view of the immediate situation, 'that Thrrp has fumbled it and has fallen to a surprise tackle from Jeht, Boatman of the Solar Orb.'
There was a distant buzzing, as of several billion bluebottles taking off in a panic, and a huge dark shape passed over the palace.
'But,' said the high priest of Cephut, 'here comes Scrab again . . . yes, he's gaining height . . . Jeht hasn't seen him yet, he's progressing confidently towards the meridian, and here comes Sessifet, Goddess of the Afternoon! This is a surprise! What a surprise this is! A young goddess, yet to make her mark, but my word, what a lot of promise there, this is an astonishing bid, eunuchs and gentlemen, and . . yes . . . Scrab has fumbled it! He's fumbled it! . . .'
The shadows danced and spun on the stones of the balcony.
'. . . and . . . what's this? The elder gods are, there's no other word for it, they're co-operating against these brash newcomers! But plucky young Sessifet is hanging in there, she's exploiting the weakness. . . she's in! . . . and pulling away now, pulling away, Gil and Scrab appear to be fighting, she's got a clear sky and, yes, yes . . . yes! . . . it's noon! It's noon! It's noon!'
Silence. The priest was aware that everyone was staring at him.
Then someone said, 'Why are you shouting into that bulrush?'
'Sorry. Don't know what came over me there.'
The priestess of Sarduk, Goddess of Caves, snorted at him.
'Suppose one of them had dropped it?' she snapped.
'But . . . but . . .' He swallowed. 'It's not possible, is it? Not really? We all must have eaten something, or been out in the sun too long, or something. Because, I mean, everyone knows that the gods aren't . . . I mean, the sun is a big flaming ball of gas, isn't it, that goes around the whole world every day, and, and, and the gods… well, you know, there's a very real need in people to believe, don't get me wrong here-'
Koomi, even with his head buzzing with thoughts of perfidy, was quicker on the uptake than his colleagues.
'Get him, lads!' he shouted.
Four priests grabbed the luckless cutlery worshipper by his arms and legs and gave him a high-speed run across the stones to the edge of the balcony, over the parapet and into the mud— coloured waters of the Djel.
He surfaced, spluttering.
'What did you go and do that for?' he demanded. 'You all know I'm right. None of you really-'
The waters of the Djel opened a lazy jaw, and he vanished, just as the huge winged shape of Scrab buzzed threateningly over the palace and whirred off towards the mountains.
Koomi mopped his forehead.
'Bit of a close shave there,' he said. His colleagues nodded, staring at the fading ripples. Suddenly, Djeibeybi was no place for honest doubt. Honest doubt could get you seriously picked up and your arms and legs torn off.
'Er,.' said one of them. 'Cephut's going to be a bit upset, though, isn't he?'
'All hail Cephut,' they chorused. Just in case.
'Don't see why,' grumbled an elderly priest at the back of the crowd. 'Bloody knife and fork artist.'
They grabbed him, still protesting, and hurled him into the river.
'All hail-' They paused. 'Who was he high priest of, anyway?'
'Bunu, the Goat-headed God of Goats? Wasn't he?'
'All hail Bunu, probably,' they chorused, as the sacred crocodiles homed in like submarines.
Koomi raised his hands, imploring. It is said that the hour brings forth the man. He was the kind of man that is brought forth by devious and unpleasant hours, and underneath his bald head certain conclusions were beginning to unfold, like things imprisoned for years inside stones. He wasn't yet sure what they were, but they were broadly on the subject of gods, the new age, the need for a firm hand on the helm, and possibly the inserting of Dios into the nearest crocodile. The mere thought filled him with forbidden delight.
'Brethren!' he cried.
'Excuse me,' said the priestess of Sarduk.
'And sistren-'
'Thank you.'
'-let us rejoice!' The assembled priests stood in total silence. This was a radical approach which had not hitherto occurred to them. And Koomi looked at their upturned faces and felt a thrill the like of which he had never experienced before. They were frightened out of their wits, and they were expecting him — him — to tell them what to do.
'Yea!' he said. 'And, indeed, verily, the hour of the gods-'
'-and goddesses-'
'-yes, and goddesses, is at hand. Er.'
What next? What, when you got right down to it, was he going to tell them to do? And then he thought: it doesn't matter. Provided I sound confident enough. Old Dios always drove them, he never tried to lead them. Without him they're wandering around like sheep.
'And, brethren — and sistren, of course — we must ask ourselves, we must ask ourselves, we, er, yes.' His voice waxed again with new confidence. 'Yes, we must ask ourselves why the gods are at hand. And without doubt it is because we have not been assiduous enough in our worship, we have, er, we have lusted after graven idols.'
The priests exchanged glances. Had they? How did you do it, actually?
'And, yes, and what about sacrifices? Time was when a sacrifice was a sacrifice, not some messing around with a chicken and flowers.'
This caused some coughing in the audience.
'Are we talking maidens here?' said one of the priests uncertainly.
'Ahem.'
'And inexperienced young men too, certainly,' he said quickly. Sarduk was one of the older goddesses, whose female worshippers got up to no good in sacred groves; the thought of her wandering around the landscape somewhere, bloody to the elbows, made the eyes water.
Koomi's heart thumped. 'Well, why not?' he said. 'Things were better then, weren't they?'
'But, er, I thought we stopped all that sort of thing. Population decline and so forth.'
There was a monstrous splash out in the river. Tzut, the Snake-Headed God of the Upper Djel, surfaced and regarded the assembled priesthood solemnly. Then Fhez, the Crocodile-Headed God of the Lower Djel, erupted beside him and made a spirited attempt at biting his head off. The two submerged in a column of spray and a minor tidal wave which slopped over the balcony.
'Ah, but maybe the population declined because we stopped sacrificing virgins — of both sexes, of course,' said Koomi, hurriedly. 'Have you ever thought of it like that?' They thought of it. Then they thought of it again.
'I don't think the king would approve-' said one of the priests cautiously.
'The king?' shouted Koomi. 'Where is the king? Show me the king! Ask Dios where the king is!'
There was a thud by his feet. He looked down in horror as the gold mask bounced, and rolled towards the priests. They scattered hurriedly, like skittles.
Dios strode out into the light of the disputed sun, his face grey with fury.
'The king is dead,' he said.
Koomi swayed under the sheer pressure of anger, but rallied magnificently.
'Then his successor-' he began.
'There is no successor,' said Dios. He stared up at the sky. Few people can look directly at the sun, but under the venom of Dios's gaze the sun itself might have flinched and looked away. Dios's eyes sighted down that fearsome nose like twin range finders.
To the air in general he said: 'Coming here as if they own the place. How dare they?'
Koomi's mouth dropped open. He started to protest, and a kilowatt stare silenced him.
Koomi sought support from the crowd of priests, who were busily inspecting their nails or staring intently into the middle distance. The message was clear. He was on his own. Although, if by some chance he won the battle of wills, he'd be surrounded by people assuring him that they had been behind him all along.
'Anyway, they do own the place,' he mumbled.
'What?'
'They, er, they do own the place, Dios,' Koomi repeated. His temper gave out. 'They're the sodding gods, Dios!'
'They're our gods,' Dios hissed. 'We're not their people. They're my gods and they will learn to do as they are instructed!'
Koomi gave up the frontal assault. You couldn't outstare that sapphire stare, you couldn't stand the war-axe nose and, most of all, no man could be expected to dent the surface of Dios's terrifying righteousness.
'But-' he managed.
Dios waved him into silence with a trembling hand.
'They've no right! ' he said. 'I did not give any orders! They have no right!'
'Then what are you going to do?' said Koomi.
Dios's hands opened and closed fitfully. He felt like a royalist might feel — a good royalist, a royalist who cut out pictures of all the Royals and stuck them in a scrapbook, a royalist who wouldn't hear a word said about them, they did such a good job and they can't answer back — if suddenly all the Royals turned up in his living room and started rearranging the furniture. He longed for the necropolis, and the cool silence among his old friends, and a quick sleep after which he'd be able to think so much more clearly . . .
Koomi's heart leapt. Dios's discomfort was a crack which, with due care and attention, could take a wedge. But you couldn't use a hammer. Head on, Dios could outfight the world.
The old man was shaking again. 'I do not presume to tell them how to run affairs in the Hereunder,' he said. 'They shall not presume to instruct me in how to run my kingdom.'
Koomi salted this treasonable statement away for further study and patted him gently on the back.
'You're right, of course,' he said. Dios's eyes swivelled.
'I am?' he said, suspiciously.
'I'm sure that, as the king's minister, you will find a way. You have our full support, O Dios.' Koomi waved an uplifted hand at the priests, who chorused wholehearted agreement. If you couldn't depend on kings and gods, you could always rely on old Dios. There wasn't one of them that wouldn't prefer the uncertain wrath of the gods to a rebuke from Dios. Dios terrified them in a very positive, human way that no supernatural entity ever could. Dios would sort it out.
'And we take no heed to these mad rumours about the king's disappearance. They are undoubtedly wild exaggerations, with no foundation,' said Koomi.
The priests nodded while, in each mind, a tiny rumour uncurled the length of its tail.
'What rumours?' said Dios out of the corner of his mouth.
'So enlighten us, master, as to the path we must now take,' said Koomi.
Dios wavered.
He did not know what to do. For him, this was a new experience. This was Change.
All he could think of, all that was pressing forward in his mind, were the words of the Ritual of the Third Hour, which he had said at this time for — how long? Too long, too long! — And he should have gone to his rest long before, but the time had never been right, there was never anyone capable, they would have been lost without him, the kingdom would founder, he would be letting everyone down, and so he'd crossed the river. . . he swore every time that it was the last, but it never was, not when the chill fetched his limbs, and the decades had become — longer. And now, when his kingdom needed him, the words of a Ritual had scored themselves into the pathways of his brain and bewildered all attempts at thought.
'Er,' he said.
You Bastard chewed happily. Teppic had tethered him too near an olive tree, which was getting a terminal pruning. Sometimes the camel would stop, gaze up briefly at the seagulls that circled everywhere above Ephebe city, and subject them to a short, deadly burst of olive stones.
He was turning over in his mind an interesting new concept in Thau-dimensional physics which unified time, space, magnetism, gravity and, for some reason, broccoli. Periodically he would make noises like distant quarry blasting, but which merely indicated that all stomachs were functioning perfectly.
Ptraci sat under the tree, feeding the tortoise on vine leaves.
Heat crackled off the white walls of the tavern but, Teppic thought, how different it was from the Old Kingdom. There even the heat was old; the air was musty and lifeless, it pressed like a vice, you felt it was made of boiled centuries. Here it was leavened by the breeze from the sea. It was edged with salt crystals. It carried exciting hints of wine; more than a hint in fact, because Xeno was already on his second amphora. This was the kind of place where things rolled up their sleeves and started.
'But I still don't understand about the tortoise,' he said, with some difficulty. He'd just taken his first mouthful of Ephebian wine, and it had apparently varnished the back of his throat.
''S quite simple,' said Xeno. 'Look, let's say this olive stone is the arrow and this, and this-' he cast around aimlessly — 'and this stunned seagull is the tortoise, right? Now, when you fire the arrow it goes from here to the seag — the tortoise, am I right?'
'I suppose so, but-'
'But, by this time, the seagu — the tortoise has moved on a bit, hasn't he? Am I right?'
'I suppose so,' said Teppic, helplessly. Xeno gave him a look of triumph.
'So the arrow has to go a bit further, doesn't it, to where the tortoise is now. Meanwhile the tortoise has flow — moved on, not much, I'll grant you, but it doesn't have to be much. Am I right? So the arrow has a bit further to go, but the point is that by the time it gets to where the tortoise is now the tortoise isn't there. So, if the tortoise keeps moving, the arrow will never hit it. It'll keep getting closer and closer but never hit it. QED.'
'Are you right?' said Teppic automatically.
'No,' said Ibid coldly. 'There's a dozen tortoise kebabs to prove him wrong. The trouble with my friend here is that he doesn't know the difference between a postulate and a metaphor of human existence. Or a hole in the ground.'
'It didn't hit it yesterday,' snapped Xeno.
'Yes, I was watching. You hardly pulled the string back. I saw you,' said Ibid.
They started to argue again.
Teppic stared into his wine mug. These men are philosophers, he thought. They had told him so. So their brains must be so big that they have room for ideas that no-one else would consider for five seconds. On the way to the tavern Xeno had explained to him, for example, why it was logically impossible to fall out of a tree.
Teppic had described the vanishing of the kingdom, but he hadn't revealed his position in it. He hadn't a lot of experience of these matters, but he had a very clear feeling that kings who hadn't got a kingdom any more were not likely to be very popular in neighbouring countries. There had been one or two like that in Ankh-Morpork — deposed royalty, who had fled their suddenly— dangerous kingdoms for Ankh's hospitable bosom carrying nothing but the clothes they stood up in and a few wagonloads of jewels. The city, of course, welcomed anyone — regardless of race, colour, class or creed — who had spending money in incredible amounts, but nevertheless the inhumation of surplus monarchs was a regular source of work for the Assassins' Guild. There was always someone back home who wanted to be certain that deposed monarchs stayed that way. It was usually a case of heir today, gone tomorrow.
'I think it got caught up in geometry,' he said, hopefully. 'I heard you were very good at geometry here,' he added, 'and perhaps you could tell me how to get back.'
'Geometry is not my forte,' said Ibid. 'As you probably know.'
'Sorry?'
'Haven't you read my Principles of Ideal Government?'
'I'm afraid not.'
'Or my Discourse on Historical Inevitability?'
'No.'
Ibid looked crestfallen. 'Oh,' he said.
'Ibid is a well-known authority on everything,' said Xeno. 'Except for geometry. And interior decorating. And elementary logic.' Ibid glared at him.
'What about you, then?' said Teppic.
Xeno drained his mug. 'I'm more into the destruct testing of axioms,' he said. 'The chap you need is Pthagonal. A very acute man with an angle.'
He was interrupted by the clatter of hooves. Several horsemen galloped with reckless speed past the tavern and on up the winding, cobbled streets of the city. They seemed very excited about something.
Ibid picked a stunned seagull out of his wine cup and laid it on the table. He was looking thoughtful.
'If the Old Kingdom has really disappeared-' he said.
'It has,' said Teppic firmly. 'It's not something you can be mistaken about, really.'
'Then that means our border is concurrent with that of Tsort,' said Ibid ponderously.
'Pardon?' said Teppic.
'There's nothing between us,' explained the philosopher.
'Oh, dear. That means we shall be forced to make war.'
'Why?'
Ibid opened his mouth, stopped, and turned to Xeno.
'Why does it mean we'll be forced to make war?' he said.
'Historical imperative,' said Xeno.
'Ah, yes. I knew it was something like that. I am afraid it is inevitable. It's a shame, but there you are.'
There was another clatter as another party of horsemen rounded the corner, heading downhill this time. They wore the high plumed helmets of Ephebian soldiery, and were shouting enthusiastically.
Ibid settled himself more comfortably on the bench and folded his bands.
'That'll be the Tyrant's men,' he said, as the troop galloped through the city gates and out on to the desert. 'He's sending them to check, you may depend upon it.'
Teppic knew about the enmity between Ephebe and Tsort, of course. The Old Kingdom had profited mightily by it, by seeing that the merchants of both sides had somewhere discreet in which to trade with one another. He drummed his fingers on the table.
'You haven't fought each other for thousands of years,' he said. 'You were tiny countries in those days. It was just a scrap. Now you're huge. People could get hurt. Doesn't that worry you?'
'It's a matter of pride,' said Ibid, but his voice was tinged with uncertainty. 'I don't think there's much choice.'
'It was that bloody wooden cow or whatever,' said Xeno. 'They've never forgiven us for it.'
'If we don't attack them, they'll attack us first,' said Ibid.
''S'right,' said Xeno. 'So we'd better retaliate before they have a chance to strike.'
The two philosophers stared uncomfortably at one another.
'On the other hand,' said Thid, 'war makes it very difficult to think straight.'
'There is that,' Xeno agreed. 'Especially for dead people.' There was an embarrassed silence, broken only by Ptraci's voice singing to the tortoise and the occasional squeak of stricken seagulls.
'What day is it?' said Ibid.
'Tuesday,' said Teppic.
'I think,' said Thid, 'that it might be a good idea if you came to the symposium. We have one every Tuesday,' he added. 'All the greatest minds in Ephebe will be there. All this needs thinking about.'
He glanced at Ptraci.
'However,' he said, 'your young woman cannot attend, naturally. Females are absolutely forbidden. Their brains overheat.'
King Teppicymon XXVII opened his eyes. It's bloody dark in here, he thought.
And he realised that he could hear his own heart beating, but muffled, and some way off.
And then he remembered.
He was alive. He was alive again. And, this time, he was in bits.
Somehow, he'd assumed that you got assembled again once you got to the netherworld, like one of Grinjer's kits.
Get a grip on yourself, man, he thought.
It's up to you to pull yourself together.
Right, he thought. There were at least six jars. So my eyes are in one of them. Getting the lid off would be favourite, so we can see what we're at.
That's going to involve arms and legs and fingers.
This is going to be really tricky.
He reached out, tentatively, with stiff joints, and located something heavy. It felt as though it might give, so he moved his other arm into position, with a great deal of awkwardness, and pushed.
There was a distant thump, and a definite feeling of openness above him. He sat up, creaking all the way.
The sides of the ceremonial casket still hemmed him in, but to his surprise he found that one slow arm movement brushed them out of the way like paper. Must be all the pickle and stuffing, he thought. Gives you a bit of weight.
He felt his way to the edge of the slab, lowered his heavy legs to the ground and, after a pause out of habit to wheeze a bit, took the first tottering lurch of the newly undead.
It is astonishingly difficult to walk with legs full of straw when the brain doing the directing is in a pot ten feet away, but he made it as far as the wall and felt his way along it until a crash indicated that he'd reached the shelf of jars. He fumbled the lids of the first one and dipped his hand gently inside.
It must be brains, he thought maniacally, because semolina doesn't squidge like that. I've collected my own thoughts, haha.
He tried one or two more jars until an explosion of daylight told him he'd found the one with his eyes in. He watched his own bandaged hand reach down, growing gigantic, and scoop them up carefully.
That seems to be the important bits, he thought. The rest can wait until later. Maybe when I need to eat something, and so forth.
He turned around, and realised that he was not alone. Dil and Gern were watching him. To squeeze any further into the far corner of the room, they would have needed triangular backbones.
'Ah. Ho there, good people,' said the king, aware that his voice was a little hollow. 'I know so much about you, I'd like to shake you by the hand.' He looked down. 'Only they're rather full at the moment,' he added.
'Gkkk,' said Gern.
'You couldn't do a bit of reassembly, could you?' said the king, turning to Dil. 'Your stitches seem to be holding up nicely, by the way. Well done, that man.'
Professional pride broke through the barrier of Dil's terror.
'You're alive?' he said.
'That was the general idea, wasn't it?' said the king.
Dil nodded. Certainly it was. He'd always believed it to be true. He'd just never expected it ever actually to happen. But it had, and the first words, well, nearly the first words that had been said were in praise of his needlework. His chest swelled. No— one else in the Guild had ever been congratulated on their work by a recipient.
'There,' he said to Gern, whose shoulderblades were making a spirited attempt to dig their way through the wall. 'Hear what has been said to your master.
The king paused. It was beginning to dawn on him that things weren't quite right here. Of course the netherworld was like this world, only better, and no doubt there were plenty of servants and so forth. But it seemed altogether far too much like this world. He was pretty sure that Dil and Gern shouldn't be in it yet. Anyway, he'd always understood that the common people had their own netherworld, where they would be more at ease and could mingle with their own kind and wouldn't feel awkward and socially out of place.
'I say,' he said. 'I may have missed a bit here. You're not dead, are you?'
Dil didn't answer immediately. Some of the things he'd seen so far today had made him a bit uncertain on the subject. In the end, though, he was forced to admit that he probably was alive.
'Then what's happening?' said the king.
'We don't know, O king,' said Dil. 'Really we don't. It's all come true, O fount of waters!'
'What has?'
'Everything!'
'Everything?'
'The sun, O lord. And the gods! Oh, the gods! They're everywhere, O master of heaven!'
'We come in through the back way,' said Gern, who had dropped to his knees. 'Forgive us, O lord of justice, who has come back to deliver his mighty wisdom and that. I am sorry about me and Glwenda, it was a moment of wossname, mad passion, we couldn't control ourselves. Also, it was me-'
Dil waved him into a devout silence.
'Excuse me,' he said to the king's mummy. 'But could we have a word away from the lad? Man to-'
'Corpse?' said the king, trying to make it easy for him. 'Certainly.'
They wandered over to the other side of the room.
'The fact is, O gracious king of-' Dil began, in a conspiratorial whisper.
'I think we can dispense with all that,' said the king briskly. 'The dead don't stand on ceremony. «King» will be quite sufficient.'
'The fact is, then — king,' said Dil, experiencing a slight thrill at this equitable treatment, 'young Gern thinks it's all his fault. I've told him over and over again that the gods wouldn't go to all this trouble just because of one growing lad with urges, if you catch my drift.' He paused, and added carefully, 'They wouldn't, would they?'
'Shouldn't think so for one minute,' said the king briskly. 'We'd never see the back of them, otherwise.'
'That's what I told him,' said Dil, immensely relieved. 'He's a good boy, sir, it's just that his mum is a bit funny about religion. We'd never see the back of them, those were my very words. I'd be very grateful if you could have a word with him, sir, you know, set his mind at rest-'
'Be happy to,' said the king graciously.
Dil sidled closer.
'The fact is, sir, these gods, sir, they aren't right. We've been watching, sir. At least, I have. I climbed on the roof. Gern didn't, he hid under the bench. They're not right, sir!'
'What's wrong with them?'
'Well, they're here, sir! That's not right, is it? I mean, not to be really here. And they're just striding around and fighting amongst themselves and shouting at people.' He looked both ways before continuing. 'Between you and me, sir,' he said, 'they don't seem too bright.'
The king nodded. 'What are the priests doing about this?' he said.
'I saw them throwing one another in the river, sir.'
The king nodded again. 'That sounds about right,' he said. 'They've come to their senses at last.'
'You know what I think, sir?' said Dil earnestly. 'Everything we believe is coming true. And I heard something else, sir. This morning, if it was this morning, you understand, because the sun's all over the place, sir, and it's not the right sort of sun, but this morning some of the soldiers tried to get out along the Ephebe road, sir, and do you know what they found?'
'What did they find?'
'The road out, sir, leads in!' Dil took a step backwards the better to illustrate the seriousness of the revelations. 'They got up into the rocks and then suddenly they were walking down the Tsort road. It all sort of curves back on itself. We're shut in, sir. Shut in with our gods.'
And I'm shut in my body, thought the king. Everything we believe is true? And what we believe isn't what we think we believe.
I mean, we think we believe that the gods are wise and just and powerful, but what we really believe is that they are like our father after a long day. And we think we believe the netherworld is a sort of paradise, but we really believe it's right here and you go to it in your body and I'm in it and I'm never going to get away. Never, ever.
'What's my son got to say about all this?' he said. Dil coughed. It was the ominous cough. The Spanish use an upside-down question mark to tell you what you're about to hear is a question; this was the kind of cough that tells you what you're about to hear is a dirge.
'Don't know how to tell you this, sir,' he said.
'Out with it, man.'
'Sir, they say he's dead, sir. They say he killed himself and ran away.
'Killed himself?'
'Sorry, sir.'
'And ran away afterwards?'
'On a camel, they say.'
'We lead an active afterlife in our family, don't we?' observed the king dryly.
'Beg pardon, sir?'
'I mean, the two statements could be held to be mutually exclusive.'
Dil's face became a well-meaning blank.
'That is to say, they can't both be true,' supplied the king, helpfully.
'Ahem,' said Dil.
'Yes, but I'm a special case,' said the king testily. 'In this kingdom we believe you live after death only if you've been mumm-'
He stopped.
It was too horrible to think about. He thought about it, nevertheless, for some time.
Then he said, 'We must do something about it.'
Dil said, 'Your son, sir?'
'Never mind about my son, he's not dead, I'd know about it,' snapped the king. 'He can look after himself, he's my son. It's my ancestors I'm worried about.'
'But they're dead-' Dil began.
It has already been remarked that Dil had a very poor imagination. In a job like his a poor imagination was essential. But his mind's eye opened on a panorama of pyramids, stretching along the river, and his mind's ear swooped and curved through solid doors that no thief could penetrate.
And it heard the scrabbling.
And it heard the hammering.
And it heard the muffled shouting.
The king put a bandaged arm over his trembling shoulders.
'I know you're a good man with a needle, Dil,' he said. 'Tell me — how are you with a sledgehammer?'
Copolymer, the greatest storyteller in the history of the world, sat back and beamed at the greatest minds in the world, assembled at the dining table.
Teppic had added another iota to his store of new knowledge. 'Symposium' meant a knife-and-fork tea.
'Well,' said Copolymer, and launched into the story of the Tsortean Wars.
'You see, what happened was, he'd taken her back home, and her father — this wasn't the old king, this was the one before, the one with the wossname, he married some girl from over Elharib way, she had a squint, what was her name now, began with a P. Or an L. One of them letters, anyway. Her father owned an island out on the bay there, Papylos I think it was. No, I tell a lie, it was Crinix. Anyway, the king, the other king, he raised an army and they . . . Elenor, that was her name. She had a squint, you know. But quite attractive, they say. When I say married, I trust I do not have to spell it out for you. I mean, it was a bit unofficial. Er. Anyway, there was this wooden horse and after they'd got in . . . Did I tell you about this horse? It was a horse. I'm pretty sure it was a horse. Or maybe it was a chicken. Forget my own name next! It was wossname's idea, the one with the limp. Yes. The limp in his leg, I mean. Did I mention him? There'd been this fight. No, that was the other one, I think. Yes. Anyway, this wooden pig, damn clever idea, they made it out of thing. Tip of my tongue. Wood. But that was later, you know. The fight! Nearly forgot the fight. Yes. Damn good fight. Everyone banging on their shields and yelling. Wossname's armour shone like shining armour. Fight and a half, that fight. Between thingy, not the one with the limp, the other one, wossname, had red hair. You know. Tall fellow, talked with a lisp. Hold on, just remembered, he was from some other island. Not him. The other one, with the limp. Didn't want to go, he said he was mad. Of course, he was bloody mad, definitely. I mean, a wooden cow! Like wossname said, the king, no, not that king, the other one, he saw the goat, he said, «I fear the Ephebians, especially when they're mad enough to leave bloody great wooden livestock on the doorstep, talk about nerve, they must think we was born yesterday, set fire to it,» and, of course, wossname had nipped in round the back and put everyone to the sword, talk about laugh. Did I say she had a squint? They said she was pretty, but it takes all sorts. Yes. Anyway, that's how it happened. Now, of course, wossname — I think he was called Melycanus, had a limp — he wanted to go home, well, you would, they'd been there for years, he wasn't getting any younger. That's why he dreamt up the thing about the wooden wossname. Yes. I tell a lie, Lavaelous was the one with the knee. Pretty good fight, that fight, take it from me.'
He lapsed into self-satisfied silence.
'Pretty good fight,' he mumbled and, smiling faintly, dropped off to sleep.
Teppic was aware that his own mouth was hanging open. He shut it. Along the table several of the diners were wiping their eyes.
'Magic,' said Xeno. 'Sheer magic. Every word a tassel on the canopy of Time.'
'It's the way he remembers every tiny detail. Pin-sharp,' murmured Ibid.
Teppic looked down the length of the table, and then nudged Xeno beside him. 'Who is everyone?' he said.
'Well, Ibid you already know. And Copolymer. Over there, that's Iesope, the greatest teller of fables in the world. And that's Antiphon, the greatest writer of comic plays in the world.'
'Where is Pthagonal?' said Teppic. Xeno pointed to the far end of the table, where a glum-looking, heavy-drinking man was trying to determine the angle between two bread rolls. 'I'll introduce you to him afterwards,' he said.
Teppic looked around at the bald heads and long white beards, which seemed to be a badge of office. If you had a bald head and a long white beard, they seemed to indicate, whatever lay between them must be bursting with wisdom. The only exception was Antiphon, who looked as though he was built of pork.
They are great minds, he told himself. These are men who are trying to work out how the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion, but just by inserting their brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart.
Ibid rapped on the table for silence.
'The Tyrant has called for war on Tsort,' he said. 'Now, let us consider the place of war in the ideal republic,' he said. 'We would require-'
'Excuse me, could you just pass me the celery?' said Iesope. 'Thank you.'
'-the ideal republic, as I was saying, based on the fundamental laws that govern-'
'And the salt. It's just by your elbow.'
'-the fundamental laws, that is, which govern all men. Now, it is without doubt true that war. . . could you stop that, please?'
'It's celery,' said Iesope, crunching cheerfully. 'You can't help it with celery.'
Xeno peered suspiciously at what was on his fork.
'Here, this is squid,' he said. 'I didn't ask for squid. Who ordered squid?'
'-without doubt,' repeated Thid, raising his voice, 'without doubt, I put it to you— 'I think this is the lamb couscous,' said Antiphon.
'Was yours the squid?'
'I asked for marida and dolmades.'
'I ordered the lamb. Just pass it along, will you?'
'I don't remember anyone asking for all this garlic bread,' said Xeno.
'Look, some of us are trying to float a philosophical concept here,' said Ibid sarcastically. 'Don't let us interrupt you, will you?'
Someone threw a breadstick at him.
Teppic looked at what was on his fork. Seafood was unknown in the kingdom, and what was on his fork had too many valves and suckers to be reassuring. He lifted a boiled vine leaf with extreme care, and was sure he saw something scuttle behind an olive.
Ah. Something else to remember, then. The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate anything that couldn't climb out of one.
He pushed the food around on his plate. Some of it pushed back.
And philosophers didn't listen to one another. And they don't stick to the point. This probably is mocracy at work.
A bread roll bounced past him. Oh, and they get over-excited.
He noticed a skinny little man sitting opposite him, chewing primly on some anonymous tentacle. Apart from Pthagonal the geometrician, who was now gloomily calculating the radius of his plate, he was the only person not speaking his mind at the top of his voice. Sometimes he'd make little notes on a piece of parchment and slip it into his toga.
Teppic leaned across. Further down the table Iesope, encouraged by occasional olive stones and bread rolls, started a long fable about a fox, a turkey, a goose and a wolf, who had a wager to see who could stay longest underwater with heavy weights tied to their feet.
'Excuse me,' said Teppic, raising his voice above the din. 'Who are you?'
The little man gave him a shy look. He had extremely large ears. In a certain light, he could have been mistaken for a very thin jug.
'I'm Endos,' he said.
'Why aren't you philosophising?'
Endos sliced a strange mollusc.
'I'm not a philosopher, actually,' he said.
'Or a humorous playwright or something?' said Teppic.
'I'm afraid not. I'm a Listener. Endos the Listener, I'm known as.'
'That's fascinating,' said Teppic automatically. 'What does that involve?'
'Listening.'
'Just listening?'
'That's what they pay me for,' said Endos. 'Sometimes I nod. Or smile. Or nod and smile at the same time. Encouragingly, you know. They like that.'
Teppic felt he was called upon to comment at this point. 'Gosh,' he said.
Endos gave him an encouraging nod, and a smile that suggested that of all the things Endos could be doing in the world right at this minute there was nothing so basically riveting as listening to Teppic. It was something about his ears. They appeared to be a vast aural black hole, begging to be filled up with words. Teppic felt an overpowering urge to tell him all about his life and hopes and dreams…
'I bet,' he said, 'that they pay you an awful lot of money.
Endos gave him a heartening smile.
'Have you listened to Copolymer tell his story lots of times?'
Endos nodded and smiled, although there was a faint trace of pain right behind his eyes.
'I expect,' said Teppic, 'that your ears develop protective rough surfaces after a while?'
Endos nodded. 'Do go on,' he urged.
Teppic glanced across at Pthagonal, who was moodily drawing right angles in his taramasalata.
'I'd love to stay and listen to you listening to me all day,' he said. 'But there's a man over there I'd like to see.'
'That's amazing,' said Endos, making a short note and turning his attention to a conversation further along the table. A philosopher had averred that although truth was beauty, beauty was not necessarily truth, and a fight was breaking out. Endos listened carefully24. Teppic wandered along the table to where Pthagonal was sitting in unrelieved misery, and currently peering suspiciously over the crust of a pie.
Teppic looked over his shoulder.
'I think I saw something moving in there,' he said.