Interesting Times (16 page)

“They’ll pay with notes at least as good as that,” he said. “Probably even better. I’ll put in a good word for you. And now,” he added hurriedly, “which way is out?”

Dibhala scratched his head.

“Could be a bit tricky,” he said. “There’s armies outside. You look a bit foreign with that hat. Could be tricky—”

There was a commotion further along the alley or, rather, a general increase in the commotion. The crowd parted in that hurried way common to unarmed crowds in the presence of weaponry, and a group of guards hurried towards Disembowel-Meself-Honorably.

He stepped back and gave them the friendly grin of one happy to sell at a discount to anyone with a knife.

A limp figure was being dragged between two of the guards. As it went past it raised a slightly bloodstained head and said, “Extended Duration to the—” before a gloved fist smacked across its mouth.

And then the guards were heading down the street. The crowd flowed back.

“Tch, tch,” said D. M. H. “Seems to be—Hello? Where’d you go?”

Rincewind reappeared from around a corner. D. M. H. looked impressed. There had actually been a small thunderclap when Rincewind moved.

“See they got another of ’em,” he said. “Putting up wall posters again, I expect.”

“Another one of who?” said Rincewind.

“Red Army. Huh!”

“Oh.”

“I don’t pay much attention,” said D. M. H. “They say some old legend’s going to come true about emperors and stuff. Can’t see it myself.”

“He didn’t look very legendary,” said Rincewind.

“Ach, some people will believe anything.”

“What’ll happen to him?”

“Difficult to say, with the Emperor about to die. Hands and feet cut off, probably.”

“What? Why?”

“’Cos he’s young. That’s leniency. A bit older and it’s his head on a spike over one of the gates.”

“That’s punishment for putting up a
poster?
”

“Stops ’em doing it again, see,” said D. M. H. Rincewind backed away.

“Thank you,” he said, and hurried off.

“Oh, no,” he said, pushing his way through the crowds. “I’m
not
getting mixed up in people’s heads getting chopped off—”

And then someone hit him again. But politely.

As he sank to his knees, and then to his chin, he wondered what had happened to the good old-fashioned “Hey, you!”

The Silver Horde wandered through the alleys of Hunghung.

“I don’t call
this
bloody well sweeping through a city, slaughtering every bugger,” muttered Truckle. “When I was riding with Bruce the Hoon, we
never
walked in through a front gate like a bunch of soppy mother—”

“Mr. Uncivil,” said Mr. Saveloy hurriedly, “I wonder if this might be a good time to refer you to that list I drew up for you?”

“What bloody list?” said Truckle, sticking out his jaw belligerently.

“The list of acceptable
civilized
words, yes?” He turned to the others. “Remember I was telling you about civ-il-ized be-hav-ior. Civilized behavior is vital to our long-term strategy.”

“What’s a long-term strategy?” said Caleb the Ripper.

“It’s what we’re going to do later,” said Cohen.

“And what’s that, then?”

“It’s the Plan,” said Cohen.

“Well, I’ll be f—” Truckle began.

“The list, Mr. Uncivil, only the words on the
list
,” snapped Mr. Saveloy. “Listen, I bow to your expertise when it comes to crossing wilderness, but this is civilization and you must use the right words. Please?”

“Better do what he says, Truckle,” said Cohen.

With bad grace, Truckle fished a grubby piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it.

“‘Dang’?” he said. “Wassat mean? And what’s this ‘darn’ and ‘heck’?”

“They are…
civilized
swearwords,” said Mr. Saveloy.

“Well, you can take ’em and—”

“Ah?” said Mr. Saveloy, raising a cautionary finger.

“You can shove them up—”

“Ah?”

“You can—”

“Ah?”

Truckle shut his eyes and clenched his fists.

“Dang it all to heck!” he shouted.

“Good,” said Mr. Saveloy. “That’s much better.”

He turned to Cohen, who was grinning happily at Truckle’s discomfort.

“Cohen,” he said, “there’s an apple stall over there. Do you fancy an apple?”

“Yeah, might do,” Cohen conceded, in the cautious manner of someone giving a conjuror his watch while remaining aware that the man is grinning and holding a hammer.

“Right. Now, then, cla—I mean, gentlemen. Ghenghiz wants an apple. There’s a stall over there selling fruit and nuts. What does he do?” Mr. Saveloy looked hopefully at his charges. “Anyone? Yes?”

“Easy. You kill that little”—there was a rustle of unfolding paper again—“
chap
behind the stall, then—”

“No, Mr. Uncivil. Anyone else?”

“Whut?”

“You set fire to—”

“No, Mr. Vincent. Anyone else…?”

“You rape—”

“No, no, Mr. Ripper,” said Mr. Saveloy. “We take out some muh—muh—?” He looked at them expectantly.

“—money—” chorused the Horde.

“—and we…What do we do? Now, we’ve gone through this hundreds of times. We…”

This was the difficult bit. The Horde’s lined faces creased and puckered still further as they tried to force their minds out of the chasms of habit.

“Gi…?” said Cohen hesitantly. Mr. Saveloy gave him a big smile and a nod of encouragement.

“Give?…it…to…” Cohen’s lips tensed around the word “…him?”

“Yes! Well done. In
exchange
for the apple. We’ll talk about making change and saying ‘thank you’ later on, when you’re ready for it. Now then, Cohen, here’s the coin. Off you go.”

Cohen wiped his forehead. He was beginning to sweat.

“How about if I just cut him up a bit—”

“No! This is
civilization
.”

Cohen nodded uncomfortably. He threw back his shoulders and walked over to the stall, where the apple merchant, who had been eying the group suspiciously, nodded at him.

Cohen’s eyes glazed and his lips moved silently, as if he were rehearsing a script. Then he said:

“Ho, fat merchant, give me all your…one apple…and I will give you…this coin…”

He looked around. Mr. Saveloy had his thumb up.

“You want an apple, is that it?” said the apple merchant.

“Yes!”

The apple merchant selected one. Cohen’s sword had been hidden in the wheelchair again but the merchant, in response to some buried acknowledgement, made sure it was a
good
apple. Then he took the coin. This proved a little difficult, since his customer seemed loath to let go of it.

“Come on, hand it over, venerable one,” he said.

Seven crowded seconds passed.

Then, when they were safely around the corner, Mr. Saveloy said, “Now, everyone: who can tell me what Ghenghiz did wrong?”

“Didn’t say please?”

“Whut?”

“No.”

“Didn’t say thank you?”

“Whut?”

“No.”

“Hit the man over the head with a melon and thumped him into the strawberries and kicked him in the nuts and set fire to his stall and stole all the money?”

“Whut?”

“Correct!” Mr. Saveloy sighed. “Ghenghiz, you were doing
so
well up to then.”

“He didn’t ort to have called me what he did!”

“But ‘venerable’ means old and wise, Ghenghiz.”

“Oh. Does it?”

“Yes.”

“We-ell…I did leave him the money for the apple.”

“Yes, but, you see, I do believe you took all his other money.”

“But I
paid
for the apple,” said Cohen, rather testily.

Mr. Saveloy sighed. “Ghenghiz, I do rather get the impression that several thousand years of the patient development of fiscal propriety have somewhat passed you by.”

“Come again?”

“It is possible sometimes for money to legitimately belong to other people,” said Mr. Saveloy patiently.

The Horde paused to wrap their minds around this, too. It was, of course, something they knew to be true in theory. Merchants always had money. But it seemed wrong to think of it as
belonging
to them; it
belonged
to whoever took it off them. Merchants didn’t actually
own
it, they were just looking after it until it was needed.

“Now, there is an elderly lady over there selling ducks,” said Mr. Saveloy. “I think the next stage—Mr. Willie, I am not over there, I am sure whatever you are looking at is very interesting, but please pay attention—is to practice our grasp of social intercourse.”

“Hur, hur, hur,” said Caleb the Ripper.

“I mean, Mr. Ripper, that you should go and enquire how much it would be for a duck,” said Mr. Saveloy.

“Hur, hur, hur—What?”

“And you are not to rip all her clothes off. That’s not civilized.”

Caleb scratched his head. Flakes fell out.

“Well, what else am I supposed to do?”

“Er…engage her in conversation.”

“Eh? What’s there to talk about with a woman?”

Mr. Saveloy hesitated again. To some extent this was unknown territory to him as well. His experience with women at his last school had been limited to an occasional chat with the housekeeper, and on one occasion the matron had let him put his hand on her knee. He had been forty before he found out that oral sex didn’t mean talking about it. Women had always been to him strange and distant and wonderful creatures rather than, as the Horde to a man believed, something to do. He was struggling a little.

“The weather?” he hazarded. His memory threw in vague recollections of the staple conversation of the maiden aunt who had brought him up. “Her health? The trouble with young people today?”

“And then I rip her clothes off?”

“Possibly. Eventually. If she wants you to. I might draw your attention to the discussion we had the other day about taking regular baths”—or even
a
bath, he added to himself—“and attention to fingernails and hair and changing your clothes more often.”

“This is leather,” said Caleb. “You don’t have to change it, it don’t rot for
years
.”

Once again Mr. Saveloy readjusted his sights. He’d thought that Civilization could be overlaid on the Horde like a veneer. He had been mistaken.

But the funny thing—he mused, as the Horde watched Caleb’s painful attempts at conversation with a representative of half the world’s humanity—was that although they were as far away as possible from the kind of people he normally mixed with in staffrooms, or possibly because they were as far away as possible from the kind of people he normally mixed with in staffrooms, he actually
liked
them. Every one of them saw a book as either a lavatorial accessory or a set of portable firefighters and thought that hygiene was a greeting. Yet they were honest (from their specialized point of view) and decent (from their specialized point of view) and saw the world as hugely simple. They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn’t steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.

And although they didn’t set out to give the money
away
to the poor, that was nevertheless what they did (if you accepted that the poor consisted of innkeepers, ladies of negotiable virtue, pickpockets, gamblers, and general hangers-on), because although they would go to great lengths to steal money they then had as much control over it as a man trying to herd cats. It was there to be spent and lost. So they kept the money in circulation, always a praiseworthy thing in any society.

They never worried about what other people thought. Mr. Saveloy, who’d spent his whole life worrying about what other people thought and had been passed over for promotion and generally treated as a piece of furniture as a result, found this strangely attractive. And they never agonized about anything, or wondered if they were doing the right thing. And they enjoyed themselves immensely. They had a kind of honor. He
liked
the Horde. They weren’t his kind of people.

Caleb returned, looking unusually thoughtful.

“Congratulations, Mr. Ripper!” said Mr. Saveloy, a great believer in positive reinforcement. “She still appears to be fully clothed.”

“Yeah, what’d she say?” said Boy Willie.

“She smiled at me,” said Caleb. He scratched his crusty beard uneasily. “A bit, anyway,” he added.

“Good,” said Mr. Saveloy.

“She, er…she said she’d…she wouldn’t mind seein’ me…later…”

“Well done!”

“Er…Teach? What’s a
shave?
”

Saveloy explained.

Caleb listened carefully, grimacing occasionally. He turned round occasionally to look at the duck seller, who gave him a little wave.

“Cor,” he said. “Er. I dunno…” He looked around again. “Never seen a woman who wasn’t running away before.”

“Oh, women are like deer,” said Cohen loftily. “You can’t just charge in, you gotta stalk ’em—”

“Hur, hur, h—Sorry,” said Caleb, catching Mr. Saveloy’s stern eye.

“I think perhaps we should end the lesson here,” said Mr. Saveloy. “We don’t want to get you
too
civilized, do we…? I suggest we take a stroll around the Forbidden City, yes?”

They’d all seen it. It dominated the center of Hunghung. Its walls were forty feet high.

“There’s a lot of soldiers guarding the gates,” said Cohen.

“So they should. A great treasure lies within,” said Mr. Saveloy. He didn’t raise his eyes, though. He seemed to be staring intently at the ground, as though searching for something he’d lost.

“Why don’t we just rush up and kill the guards?” Caleb demanded. He was still feeling a bit shaken.

“Whut?”

“Don’t be daft,” said Cohen. “It’d take all day. Anyway,” he added, feeling a little proud despite himself, “Teach here is goin’ to get us in on an invisible duck, ain’t that so, Teach?”

Mr. Saveloy stopped.

“Ah. Eureka,” he said.

“That’s Ephebian, that is,” Cohen told the Horde. “It means ‘Give me a towel.’”