Interesting Times (31 page)

“And you got us safely out of prison,” said Lotus Blossom.

“There were just a lot of coinci—
Will you go away!
”

A butterfly skittered away from his flailing hand.

“Damn things,” he mumbled. And added: “Well, that’s it. I’m off. I can’t watch. I’ve got things to do. Besides, afterwards I think nasty people are going to be looking for me.”

And then he realized there were tears in Lotus Blossom’s eyes.

“We…we thought you would do something,” she said.

“Me? I can’t do anything! Especially not magic! I’m famous for it! Don’t go around believing that Great Wizards solve all your problems, because there aren’t any and they don’t and I should know because I’m not one!”

He backed away. “This is always happening to me! I’m just minding my own business and everything goes wrong and suddenly everyone’s relying on me and saying, ‘Oh, Rincewind, what are you going to do about it?’ Well, what Mrs. Rincewind’s little boy, if she was a Mrs. Rincewind of course, what he’s going to do about it is nothing, right? You have to sort it all out yourselves! No mysterious magical armies are going to—Will you stop looking at me like that? I don’t see why it’s
my
fault! I’ve got other things to do! It’s not my business!”

And then he turned and ran.

The crowds didn’t take much notice of him.

The streets were deserted by Hunghung standards, which meant you could quite often see the cobbles. Rincewind pushed and shoved his way along the alleys nearest the Wall, looking for another gateway with guards too busy to ask questions.

There were footsteps behind him.

“Look,” he said, spinning round, “I told you, you can all—”

It was the Luggage. It contrived to look a little ashamed of itself.

“Oh, turned up at last, have we?” said Rincewind savagely. “What happened to the following-master-everywhere thing?”

The Luggage shuffled its feet. From out of an alleyway came a slightly larger and far more ornate version of itself. Its lid was inset with decorative wood and, it seemed to Rincewind, its feet were rather more dainty than the horny-nailed, calloused ones of the Luggage. Besides, the toenails had been painted.

“Oh,” he said. “Well. Good grief. Fair enough, I suppose. Really? I mean…yes. Well. Come on, then.”

He reached the end of the alley and turned round. The Luggage was gently bumping the larger chest, urging it to follow him.

Rincewind’s own sexual experiences were not excessive although he had seen diagrams. He hadn’t the faintest idea about how it applied to travel accessories. Did they say things like “What a chest!” or “Get a load of the hinges on that one!”?

If it came to that, he had no real reason for considering that the Luggage was male. Admittedly it had a homicidal nature, but so had a lot of the women that Rincewind had met, and they had often become a little more homicidal as a result of meeting him. Capacity for violence, Rincewind had heard, was unisexual. He wasn’t certain what unisex was, but expected that it was what he normally experienced.

There was a small gate ahead. It seemed to be unguarded.

Despite his fear he walked through it, and refrained from running. Authority always noticed a running man. The time to start running was around about the “e” in “Hey, you!”

No one paid him any attention. The attention of the people along the Wall was all on the armies.

“Look at them,” he said bitterly, to the generality of the universe. “
Stupid
. If it was seven against seventy, everyone’d
know
who’d lose. Just because it’s seven against 700,000, everyone’s not sure. As though suddenly numbers don’t mean anything any more. Huh! Why should
I
do anything? It’s not as if I even know the guy all that well. Admittedly he saved my life a couple of times, but that’s no reason to die horribly just because he can’t count. So you can stop looking at me like that!”

The Luggage backed away a little. The
other
Luggage…

…Rincewind supposed it just
looked
female. Women had bigger luggage than men, didn’t they? Because of the—he moved into unknown territory—extra frills and stuff. It was just one of those things, like the fact that they had smaller handkerchiefs than men even though their noses were generally the same size. The Luggage had always been
the
Luggage. Rincewind wasn’t mentally prepared for there to be more than one. There was the Luggage and…the
other
Luggage.

“Come on, both of you,” he said. “We’re getting out of here. I’ve done what I can. I just don’t care any more. It’s nothing to do with me. I don’t see why everyone depends on me. I’m not dependable. Even
I
don’t depend on me, and I’m me.”

Cohen looked at the horizon. Gray-blue clouds were piling up.

“There’s a storm coming,” he said.

“It’s a mercy that we won’t be alive to get wet, then,” said Boy Willie, cheerfully.

“Funny thing, though. It looks like it’s coming from every direction at once.”

“Filthy foreign weather. You can’t trust it.”

Cohen turned his attention to the armies of the five warlords.

There seemed to have been some agreement.

They’d arranged themselves around the position that Cohen had taken up. The tactic seemed quite clear. It was simply to advance. The Horde could see the commanders riding up and down in front of their legions.

“How’s it supposed to start?” said Cohen, the rising wind whipping at what remained of his hair. “Does someone blow a whistle or something? Or do we just scream and charge?”

“Commencement is generally by agreement,” said Mr. Saveloy.

“Oh.”

Cohen looked at the forest of lances and pennants. Hundreds of thousands of men looked like quite a lot of men when you saw them close to.

“I suppose,” he said, slowly, “that none of you has got some amazing plan you’ve been keeping quiet about?”

“We thought
you
had one,” said Truckle.

Several riders had now left each army and approached the Horde in a group. They stopped a little more than a spear’s throw away, and sat and watched.

“All right, then,” said Cohen. “I hate to say this, but perhaps we should talk about surrender.”

“No!” said Mr. Saveloy, and then stopped in embarrassment at the loudness of his own voice. “No,” he repeated, a little more quietly. “You won’t live if you surrender. You just won’t die immediately.”

Cohen scratched his nose. “What’s that flag…you know…when you want to talk to them without them killing you?”

“It’s got to be red,” said Mr. Saveloy. “But look, it’s no good you—”

“I don’t know, red for surrender, white for funerals…” muttered Cohen. “All right. Anyone got something red?”

“I’ve got a handkerchief,” said Mr. Saveloy, “but it’s white and anyway—”

“Give it here.”

The barbarian teacher very reluctantly handed it over.

Cohen pulled a small, worn knife from his belt.

“I don’t believe this!” said Mr. Saveloy. He was nearly in tears. “Cohen the Barbarian talking surrender with people like that!”

“Influence of civilization,” said Cohen. “’S probably made me go soft in the head.”

He pulled the knife over his arm, and then clamped the handkerchief over the cut.

“There we are,” he said. “Soon have a nice red flag.”

The Horde nodded approvingly. It was an amazingly symbolic, dramatic and above all stupid gesture, in the finest traditions of barbarian heroing. It didn’t seem to be lost on some of the nearer soldiers, either.

“Now,” Cohen went on, “I reckon you, Teach, and you, Truckle…you two come with me and we’ll go and talk to these people.”

“They’ll drag you off to their dungeons!” said Mr. Saveloy. “They’ve got torturers that can keep you alive for
years!
”

“Whut? Whutzeesay?”

“He said THEY CAN KEEP YOU ALIVE FOR YEARS IN THEIR DUNGEONS, Hamish.”

“Good! Fine by me!”

“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Saveloy.

He trailed after the other two towards the warlords.

Lord Hong raised his visor and stared down his nose at them as they approached.

“Red flag, look,” said Cohen, waving the rather damp object on the end of his sword.

“Yes,” said Lord Hong. “We saw that little show. It may impress the common soldiers but it does not impress me, barbarian.”

“Please yourself,” said Cohen. “We’ve come to talk about surrender.”

Mr. Saveloy noticed some of the lesser lords relax a little. Then he thought: a real soldier probably doesn’t like this sort of thing. You don’t want to go to soldier Heaven or wherever you go and say, I once led an army against seven old men. It wasn’t medal-winning material.

“Ah. Of course. So much for bravado,” said Lord Hong. “Then lay down your arms and you will be escorted back to the palace.”

Cohen and Truckle looked at one another.

“Sorry?” said Cohen.

“Lay down your arms.” Lord Hong snorted. “That means put down your weapons.”

Cohen gave him a puzzled look. “Why should we put down our weapons?”

“Are we not talking about your surrender?”

“
Our
surrender?”

Mr. Saveloy’s mouth opened in a mad, slow grin.

Lord Hong stared at Cohen.

“Hah! You can hardly expect me to believe that you have come to ask
us…
”

He leaned from the saddle and glared at them.

“You do, don’t you?” he said. “You mindless little barbarians. Is it true that you can only count up to five?”

“We just thought that it might save people getting hurt,” said Cohen.

“You thought it would save
you
getting hurt,” said the warlord.

“I daresay a few of yours might get hurt, too.”

“They’re peasants,” said the warlord.

“Oh, yes. I was forgetting that,” said Cohen. “And you’re their chief, right? It’s like your game of chess, right?”

“I am their lord,” said Lord Hong. “They will die at my bidding, if necessary.”

Cohen gave him a big, dangerous grin.

“When do we start?” he said.

“Return to your…band,” said Lord Hong. “And then I think we shall start…shortly.”

He glared at Truckle, who was unfolding his bit of paper. The barbarian’s lips moved awkwardly and he ran a horny finger across the page.

“Misbegotten…wretch, so you are,” he said.

“My word,” said Mr. Saveloy, who’d created the look-up table.

As the three returned to the Horde Mr. Saveloy was aware of a grinding sound. Cohen was wearing several carats off his teeth.

“‘Die at my bidding’,” he said. “The bugger doesn’t even know what a chief is meant to
be
, the bastard! Him and his horse!”

Mr. Saveloy looked around. There seemed to be some arguing among the warlords.

“You know,” he said, “they probably will try to take us alive. I used to have a headmaster like him. He liked to make people’s lives a misery.”

“You mean they’ll be trying not to kill us?” said Truckle.

“Yes.”

“Does that mean we have to try not to kill them?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Sounds okay to me.”

“What do we do now?” said Mr. Saveloy. “Do we do a battle chant or something?”

“We just wait,” said Cohen.

“There’s a lot of waiting in warfare,” said Boy Willie.

“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Saveloy. “I’ve heard people say that. They say there’s long periods of boredom followed by short periods of excitement.”

“Not really,” said Cohen. “It’s more like short periods of waiting followed by long periods of being dead.”

“Blast.”

The fields were crisscrossed with drainage ditches. There seemed to be no straight path anywhere. And the ditches were too wide to jump; they
looked
shallow enough to wade, but only because eighteen inches of water overlay a suffocating depth of rich thick mud. Mr. Saveloy said that the Empire owed its prosperity to the mud of the plains, and right now Rincewind was feeling extremely rich.

He was also quite close to the big hill that dominated the city. It really was rounded, with a precision apparently far too accurate for mere natural causes; Saveloy had said that hills like that were drumlins, great piles of topsoil left behind by glaciers. Trees covered the lower slopes of this one, and there was a small building on the top.

Cover. Now,
that
was a good word. It was a big plain and the armies weren’t too far away. The hill looked curiously peaceful, as if it belonged to a different world. It was strange that the Agateans, who otherwise seemed to farm absolutely everywhere a water buffalo could stand, had left it alone.

Someone was watching him.

It
was
a water buffalo.

It would be wrong to say it watched him with interest. It just watched him, because its eyes were open and had to be facing in some direction, and it had randomly chosen one which included Rincewind.

Its face held the completely serene expression of a creature that had long ago realized that it was, fundamentally, a tube on legs and had been installed in the universe to, broadly speaking, achieve throughput.

At the other end of the string was a man, ankle-deep in the mud of the field. He had a broad straw hat, like every other buffalo holder. He had the basic pyjama suit of the Agatean man-in-the-field. And he had an expression not of idiocy, but of preoccupation. He was looking at Rincewind. As with the buffalo, this was only because his eyes had to be doing something.

Despite the pressing dangers, Rincewind found himself overcome by a sudden curiosity.

“Er. Good morning,” he said.

The man gave him a nod. The water buffalo made the sound of regurgitating cud.

“Er. Sorry if this is a personal question,” said Rincewind, “but…I can’t help wondering…why do you stand out in the fields all day with the water buffalo?”

The man thought about it.

“Good for soil,” he said eventually.

“But doesn’t it waste a lot of time?” said Rincewind.

The man gave this due appraisal also.

“What’s time to a cow?” he said.